ABSTRACT
In her chapter “The Uncanny and the Beginning of Time”, Perelberg suggests that Freud’s “The Uncanny” raises questions about the primal scene, the maternal and the paternal and the sexual of the feminine and the masculine. There is, Perelberg suggests, in relation to Hoffman’s “The Sand Man”, a marked contrast between Nathanaël’s view of the “day” father, described as “mild and honest”, and his image of the “night”, sexual father, whose features are distorted into a repulsive and diabolical mask by some horrible, convulsive pain. In establishing a link between the uncanny and the incestuous phantasies about the mother and the father, desires are revealed that are frightening, forbidden and disgusting. Perelberg raises the following questions: Is it that the act of sex is, by definition, uncanny because of the experience that “one has, therefore, been there before”? Is incest at the core of the riddle of anxiety? The chapter examines these questions in relation to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and a detailed clinical example.
