“A home in the uncanny” or “an uncanny home

a reading of Clarice Lispector’s Family Ties and Love

Abstract

In several works by Clarice Lispector, a narrative pattern can be identified that consists of the presence of a constant and growing tension, which culminates in an epiphanic experience on the part of the protagonists. The present analysis argues that, in the case of the short stories Family ties and Love, both from 1960, the epiphanic revelation experienced by Catarina and Ana, respectively, takes place not only through the phenomenological gaze of the protagonists on everyday elements, as is common in Lispector's work, but it will be triggered by a critical component to these narratives, namely, the Freudian sense of the uncanny awakened by the (frightening) possibility of returning to the mother's womb, whether metaphorical or symbolic. In other words, the epiphany occurs when the protagonists witness the transmutation of the feeling of being protected, at home (heimish), in the uncanny (unheimlichen) and finding themselves in the uncanny home (das unheimliche Heim). In the case of Family ties, and drawing on Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic studies, I contend that the involuntary physical contact between mother and daughter constitutes the trigger for the experience of the uncanny, revealing the conflictual relationship between the selfish mother and the envious daughter and the tardy realization of the oneness of the "good breast" and the "bad breast". In Love, adopting the Freudian Oedipal paradigm and its association with the paternal, masculine logic and the hegemonic monotheistic religion, I argue that the sight of the blind man chewing gum - who represents the pre-Oedipal subject who will reintroduce Ana to the realm that predates Culture and its taboos - unfolds the epiphanic experience by symbolizing a possible return to the origins and, simultaneously, to death, with beginning and end being merged together and pointing to the ideal prenatal unit, experienced in the mother's womb.