In the Shadows of the Cosmos

Abstract

Clarice Lispector’s texts are a peculiar combination of socio-political analysis and cosmological excess. Commentators on her works have explored either of these two dimensions but have not yet brought them into a singular dialogue. I argue that Lispector insists upon an ethical responsibility in her refusal to disregard the microcosm of a “marginal” life even within a cosmos of her own creation. For this reason, her critique is inextricable from these excesses. The displacement of narrative authority in a method of literary production that refuses conquest opens upon an underlying, and not yet “pre-coded,” primordial cosmology characterized by night, incompleteness, and (sensory) impression, rather than self-assertive knowledge. I focus on The Hour of the Star and The Besieged City, two works that illustrate this dynamic, to capture how the interstices of social marginalization is the site from which a cosmo-political vision takes shape. Lispector’s works do not promote supra-territorial community over a privileged nationalist singularity, but rather the vertiginous excess of open possibility.

Keywords:

• Clarice Lispector
• cosmopolitanism
• cosmology
• excess
• marginality

disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 “Por enquanto eu estou morta. Estou falando do meu túmulo” (Lispector, “A última entrevista”). This interview was conducted on 1 February 1977, after the publication of The Hour of the Star and ten months before her death on 9 December 1977.

2 Lispector’s positionality is complex. As a Jewish refugee fleeing from the Ukrainian pogroms, her striking appearance was oft-commented upon by Brazilian and international critics. This forced her to justify her Brazilian identity, which she insisted upon (Moser). Additionally, her law scholarship (Pichon-Rivière) and bourgeois background (Torres; Cixous 153; Peixoto 52), complicate straightforward reading.

3 Depictions include the claim that she was “the great witch of Brazil” (Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna, in Moser 352), and those that emphasize her “allure” (Wolff 60), her “glamour” or “legendary beauty” (Moser, “Glamour and Grammar” in Lispector, Complete Stories).

4 Commenting on the protagonist of The Besieged City, Benjamin Moser states, “Lucrécia is vain and pretentious, content to remain on the surface” (in Lispector, Besieged City xvi). In a talk for the Library of Congress, Vivaldo Santos describes Macabéa as an “idiot,” “stupid,” and “ignorant” (Moser and Santos). Such a characterization does not escape academic research. In her discussion of textual violence in The Hour of the Star, Marta Peixoto offers a deeply sensitive reading of the conditions of Macabéa’s victimization, but also describes her as “a barely literate typist who has joined the urban poor of Rio” (89–99). Even Hélène Cixous opens her account of Macabéa by describing her as “a little working girl, tubercular, illiterate [ … ]” (143) before a brilliant discussion of wealth and poverty (143–63).

5 Marta Peixoto offers an expansive discussion of gendered violence. Others include Antonio Ladeira, Kristin E. Pitt, and Lucia Villares. Earl E. Fitz’ account of phallogocentrism is also a valuable study (Sexuality and Being), and companion to that of Hélène Cixous. Claire Williams and Rocío Pichon-Rivière’s respective accounts focus on practices of representation as a gendered disciplinary mechanism.

6

Me criei no Nordeste. E depois, no Rio de Janeiro tem uma feira de nordestinos no Campo de São Cristóvão e uma vez eu fui lá. E peguei o ar meio perdido do nordestino no Rio de Janeiro [ … ] Depois eu fui a uma cartomante e ela disse várias coisas boas que iam acontecer e imaginei, quando tomei o táxi de volta, que seria muito engraçado se um táxi me atropelasse e eu morresse depois de ter ouvido todas aquelas coisas boas. (Lispector, “A última entrevista”)

7 See Mariela E. Méndez on the (strategic) modesty Lispector deployed to navigate patriarchal literary and publishing institutions. See also Patricia López-Gay’s work on Lispector’s diaries.

8 Fernanda Negrete captures such a dynamic between specific embodiment and its provision of a site for Being at large. Other articulations include Kelli Zaytoun’s reading of Lispector through the posthumanist shapeshifter figure, as well as Dejan Lukić’s spell-casting and “emanation.”

9 The Besieged City is perhaps Lispector’s most overlooked text, with the exception of Lucia Villares’ article on phantasmagoric commodification. Earl E. Fitz offers an early account of “darkness” in this text, but it is rather short (“Leitmotif of Darkness” 22).

10 Both Sandra I. Sousa and Earl E. Fitz (Sexuality and Being) offer convincing readings of the dissolution of gendered boundaries in Lispector’s works.

11 Fitz advances this reading in light of a post-structuralist account of writing (Sexuality and Being). Fernanda Negrete’s “writing out of bounds” is also a generative way of opening possibilities beyond individual subjectivization. As a corollary, I mark out how writing is crossed with death as much as life (see Derrida).

12 The opening of The Hour of the Star, “All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes” (3). Like Macabéa’s non-birth, the universe recursively announces histories outside of history.

13 During the same trip to the zoo with Olímpico, she says, “Look, the Emperor Charlemagne was called Carolus in his own land! And did you know that flies travel so fast that if they flew in a straight line they could go around the whole world in 28 days?” (Lispector, Hour 47).

14 Maurice Blanchot distinguishes between a night of “pure” darkness in opposition to the day, from a second “impure” night as the neutral space beyond (163–70).

15 “Citizen” captures the lack of depth that the new identity of residents of São Geraldo take on. James Holston explains that the term “citizen” (cidadão) is used across Brazilian social classes to refer to a person with whom a speaker has no meaningful relation outside of anonymous national affiliation (4).