One Last Star Turn

In case you're interested, here's a page on Clarice Lispector. Here's the Wikipedia entry, informative as almost always. This is for those of you who read Portuguese. Apparently, someone maintains a blog about her, as well. It's in Portuguese too.

Here's an introduction to The Hour of the Star. It was made into a film, and here's its IMDB page. Here's a 3:00 scene from YouTube, again in Portuguese (with subtitles). It has Caruso:



If you want more, there's always Google.

Ur-story: Quid Pro Quo, Clarice

[This continues our look at Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star]

The question raised in our initial post comes down to something like this: Why does Lispector feel the need to distance herself from Macabea? Why does she need the intermediary Rodrigo? According to the translator, Giovanni Pontiero (yet another intermediary):

"As Macabea stumbles from one embarrassing exposure to another, one can virtually hear the author muse: 'there but for the grace of God go I'. This diary of a nobody gains in strength and meaning as a game of counter-reflections develops between the author and her protagonist. For, while it is true that Lispector would have us believe in a male narrator, she does not relinquish involvement. The advantage she claims to derive from this masculine alias is one of emotional detachment. Its validity and necessity, however, is debatable." (91-92)

I will not speculate on the author's motives and intentions. They are lost to us now; the author is long dead; we cannot ask her. I will, however, look to the text.

The central fact in the life of Macabea is her anonymity, her blankness, She is truly a nobody. Everyone in the novella itself seems to be competing to control her, to define her. Her boss in the typing pool at the pulley equipment manufacturer threatens to fire her because she makes so many errors as a typist. It is only her politeness and docility that saves her. The sadistic old aunt who raised her in the absence of her parents beats her. Her situation living in the crowded slums of Rio, the heat of the summer, the economics of Brazil all threaten to take her over. Olimpico, the boy with whom she has a brief affair, is narcissistic and abusive to the point of cruelty. At one point, after Macabea asserts that she is happy inside, he claims he can lift her off the ground with one hand:

"They walked to the corner of the street. Macabea was overjoyed. He really could lift her up above his head. She shouted gaily:

—This is like flying in an airplane.

That's right! Suddenly he couldn't support her weight on one arm any longer and she fell on her face in the mud, blood spurting from her nostrils. She was tactful, however, and quickly reassured him:

—Don't worry, it's nothing serious.

Having no handkerchief to wipe the mud and blood off her face, Macabea rubbed her face with the hem of her skirt. She pleaded with him: Please don't look while I'm cleaning my face. No decent girl ever lifts her skirt when there are people watching.

Olimpico was becoming extremely impatient but made no reply. After this little episode, he didn't make any attempt to see her again for days: his pride had been injured." (52-53)

Gloria, Macabea's femme fatale co-worker, steals Olimpico from her. She is a large-breasted, maternal figure in Macabea's life and makes some pretense to look after her well-being, though it is rarely from kindness. The doctor, whom Macabea sees on a suggestion from Gloria, diagnoses her with TB and summarily dismisses her from his office because of her hopelessness. Madame Carlota, the fortune-teller Macabea goes to see (again on suggestion from Gloria), gives her false hope and a bogus reading. It bears mentioning in this context that the images of Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo likewise control Macabea's self-image, Monroe being the 'star' of the title—at least until the very end.

This battle for control goes on in Macabea's relationship with the author and her alias as well, giving us an insight to the authorial relationship with character. At times, Rodrigo professes to care about her. At others, he grows bored, impatient with this story. It is a battle of control—determinism vs. free will—over the carcass of poor Macabea. By distancing herself from her character, Lispector lets her live. Perhaps Lispector was trying not to leave her own fingerprints on all the manipulations of poor Macabea. No matter.

Yet, amidst all this skirmishing over her anonymous existence, Macabea in all her ugliness and brokenness and anonymity persists. She has, we are told, a certain freedom in her inner life that none of these combatants can ever touch—not even the words of the story. That, it seems, is what it means to be alive. To be an Other.

So, some thirty years later, into the fray we ride, boasting our own reading. Attempting to exert control over poor Macabea. Will the text bear up under a social reading, a cultural critique? Yes. Is there a critique of colonialism here? Yes. Are there class clashes? Yes. Is there false consciousness? Yes. Will the text support a gender-based critique? Yes. Is there a post-modern component? Yes. Yes. Yes.

As the writer emphasizes in the first and last sentences, the text is radically open.

Yet, when we cut through the onion-skin layers of complexity, there is a certain tragical realism to the story. A certain humanity.

Macabea is a typist who cannot type: she is barely equipped to survive in the modern world of mechanical devices and grammar/language. Her life is squalid. The one joy she finds (short of death) comes from the solitude she achieves by skipping work one day and listening to music on the radio and dancing around her shared flat alone.

Love and fellow-felling are illusions, as mythical as Mt. Olympus. Macabea suffers abasement, abuse, betrayal, and, finally, a fall into the mud as a result of her one 'love' affair. Her one 'friend' at work, Gloria, cynically uses her.

Medicine fails her as well. She is equipped to survive, but nothing much more.

Ultimately, it is Macabea's superstitions that kill her. She is musing on the charlatan fortune teller's prognostications as she steps dreamily into the path of the oncoming Mercedes—a symbol of what? reality? European colonialization? industrialization? modernity? It matters not. She dies.

And, in dying, Macabea experiences:

"A sensation as pleasurable, tender, horrifying, chilling and penetrating as love. Could this be the grace you call God? Yes? Were she about to die, she would pass from being a virgin to being a woman. No, this wasn't death. Death is not what I want for this girl: a mere collision that amounted to nothing serious. Her struggle to live resembled something that she had never experienced before, virgin that she was, yet had grasped by intuition. For only now did she understand that a woman is born a woman from that first wail at birth. A woman's destiny is to be a woman. Macabea had perceived the almost painful and vertiginous moment of overwhelming love. A painful and difficult reflowering that she enacted with her body and that other thing you call a soul and I call—what?

At that instant, Macabea came out with a phrase that no one among the onlookers could understand. She said in a clear, distinct voice:

—As for the future.

Did she crave a future? I hear the ancient music of words upon words. Yes, it is so. At this very moment Macabea felt nausea well up in the pit of her stomach and almost vomited. She felt like vomiting something that was not matter but luminous. Star with a thousand pointed rays.

What do I see now, that is so terrifying? I see that she has vomited a little blood, a great spasm, essence finally touching essence: victory!

And then—then suddenly the anguished cry of a seagull, suddenly the voracious eagle soaring on high with the tender lamb in its beak, the sleek cat mangling vermin, life devouring life." (83-84)

Macabea dies with the text, in its last pages. Obversely, she lives only in its pages. In this, she is like Ivan Ilych—though without the moral insight. In this she is like Malone, as well—though less of a raconteur. She does not tell her own stories; she hasn't the power. She merely 'exists'. Macabea is an empty signifier (to borrow Saussure's structuralist term), and it is for us to supply the meaning—much as that is our task in our own lives.

So much meaning. Such a short book.

Yes.

Ur-story: Strawberry Fields for a While

I have a confession to make. Before the holidays, I read a novella I picked up at my local second-hand bookstore and planned to post a brief review of it. Last week, I started my review, thinking it would be a fairly quick and easy post, and soon found myself stymied. Reading back through the book brought out new layers of meaning, and what I once thought was a simple, little book took on a whole new aspect. I couldn't do justice to this book in a single post.

The book? The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (trans. Giovanni Pontiero) (1977).

This is a beautiful, surprising little book. Here's how it begins (sort of):

"Everything in 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. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? If before the pre-prehistory there already existed apocalyptic monsters? If this history does not exist, it will come to exist. To think is an act. To feel is a fact. Put the two together—it is me who is writing what I am writing. God is the world. The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. My heart has shed every desire and reduced itself to one final or initial beat. The toothache that passes through this narrative has given me a sharp twinge right in the mouth. I break out into a strident, high-pitched, syncopated melody. It is the sound of my own pain, of someone who carries this world where there is so little happiness. Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish word, invented by all those unfortunate girls from north-eastern Brazil." (11-12)

And here's how it ends:

"Should God descend on earth one day there would be a great silence.

The silence is such, that thought no longer thinks.

Was the ending of my story as grand as you expected? Dying, Macabea became air. Vigorous air? I cannot say. She died instantaneously. An instant is that particle of time in which the tyre of a car going at full speed touches the ground, touches it no longer, then touches it again. Etc., etc., etc. At heart, Macabea was little better than a music box sadly out of tune.

I ask you:

—What is the weight of light?

* * *

And now—now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me?

Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes." (85-86)

Does this pique our interest? Does this pertain precisely to what we've been calling the Ur-story? Yes and yes.

The main character, as it were, is named Macabea. She is an imagined girl from the impoverished, rural northeastern coastal region of Brazil. The narrator, who calls himself Rodrigo S.M., invents the story of her squalid life around the face of such a girl he sees one day in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. He claims authority to indulge in this fantasy because he, too, is from that region and because he knows "about certain things simply by living. Anyone who lives, knows, even without knowing that he or she knows." (13) He feels it is his "duty, however unrewarding, to confront her with her own existence." (13) Lispector (who apparently also grew up in that region) uses Rodrigo, a male persona, to tell this story because, as he tells us, "what I am writing could be written by another. Another writer, of course, but it would have to be a man for a woman would weep her heart out." (14)

Identity, authenticity, and authority are problematized from the get-go. The simple tale of an otherwise anonymous girl's brute existence is, though clearly at the heart of the tale, not the essence of the story—no matter what Rodrigo claims. Sympathy, or any sort of sentimentality, is not on the plate, for it tends to obscure the truth the writing is seeking to convey. The text seems to be telling us how to read it—though we are in no wise so obligated.

"Remember that, no matter what I write, my basic material is the word. So this story will consists of words that form phrases from which there emanates a secret meaning that exceeds both words and phrases. Like every writer, I am clearly tempted to use succulent terms: I have at my command magnificent adjectives, robust nouns, and verbs so agile that they glide through the atmosphere as they move into action. For surely words are actions? Yet I have no intention of adorning the word, for were I to touch the girl's bread, that bread would turn to gold—and the girl (she is nineteen years old) the girl would be unable to bite into it, and consequently die of hunger." (15)

Reality itself is likewise implicated.

The first question we are led to ask then: Who is this novel really about? Macabea, Rodrigo, or Lispector. In the usual case, we might ignore the author in attempting to analyze the book, but Lispector specifically injects her authorial self into the novel. She begins the text with "The Author's Dedication (alias Clarice Lispector)" In this introit, she cites the sources of her inspiration (mostly musical, but clearly implicating Macabea or any of the thousands of similarly-situated, anonymous girls from the sticks teeming the slums of Rio), asserting "What troubles my existence is writing." The next page lists a number of other titles for the book—each of which captures a crucial aspect of the text. Tellingly, Lispector's own cursive signature appears in their midst: "Clarice Lispector" is necessarily, then, a character present by virtue of her absence,

Macabea, the ostensible protagonist, is barely more sophisticated than an animal—merely existing, barely conscious of her self: she is human degree zero. Her diet consists of hot dogs and Coca-Cola; she has never tasted spaghetti and meatballs or a beer. Rodrigo takes it as his purpose to confront her with her own life. He is the bringer of consciousness: a Prometheus. This device, the construction of an 'other' is not new.

"But the idea of transcending my own limits suddenly appealed to me. This happened when I decided to write about reality, since reality exceeds me. Whatever one understands by reality." (17)

Rodrigo is Lispector's Nick Carraway, though with a modicum of imagination and practically no empathy. Macabea is his (anti-)Gatsby. Which is all fine for Rodrigo, but here certain recorded facts of Lispector's own life are mirrored in those of the fictional Macabea. Macabea represents the poor girls Lispector apparently grew up with and presents a generalized vision of their fortunes in the slums of Rio. Perhaps she sympathizes with their plight. Perhaps she identifies with them. It does not matter. But, assuming so, it would be safe to assert that she uses the device of Rodrigo as an alter ego to turn the mechanism of fiction on some aspect of herself, i.e., to catch an objective glimpse of herself, yet another alter ego. This is all very interesting, but doesn't really tell us much. It is tautological.

Rodrigo arrogates to himself the right to speak for Macabea. This has long been the privilege of the writer, the intellectual, the bourgeois over the peasant. The man over the woman. Yet, because of the dual, mirroring relationships of the triad, Lispector turns the table and has Rodrigo speaking both for her and of her at once, yet at one fictional remove. (more to follow)