Clarice Lispector

Brazilian novelist and short-story writer

• Born: December 10, 1925
• Birthplace: Chechelnik, Ukraine, Soviet Union (now in Ukraine)
• Died: December 9, 1977
• Place of death: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Biography

Clarice Lispector (leh-SPEHKT-ur) is considered not only one of Brazil’s most innovative writers but also one of the giants of twentieth century fiction. Born in 1925 in the Ukraine, she emigrated to Brazil with her parents and two older sisters when she was two months old. The family settled first in the Northeast of Brazil but moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1937. From the time she was a child, Lispector read widely, starting with Brazilian classics such as José de Alencar, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, and Graciliano Ramos, and gradually adding such foreign writers as Fyodor Dostoevski, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf. While attending the National Faculty of Law, she began a career in journalism, developed close friendships with several of Brazil’s leading writers, and started work on the novel Near to the Wild Heart, which was published in 1944 and was awarded the Brazilian PEN Club’s prestigious Graça Aranha Prize. A surprisingly mature first novel, this probing, anguished tale centering on a woman’s search for self-identity set the direction that the author’s fiction was to follow for the next thirty years.

In 1943, the year before she finished law school, Lispector married her classmate Mauri Gurgel Valente, who joined the Brazilian diplomatic corps upon their graduation. For the next fifteen years, Lispector accompanied her diplomat husband to posts in Europe and the United States. During that time, Lispector wrote two more novels and turned her attention increasingly to the short story, a genre in which she was to set new standards of excellence. After she was separated from her husband in 1959, Lispector returned with the couple’s children to Rio de Janeiro, her home for the rest of her life. The late 1950s and the early 1960s were extremely creative periods, during which Lispector produced perhaps her most accomplished work. Two thematically complex and stylistically innovative novels, The Apple in the Dark and The Passion According to G. H., date from these years. Written in a slow-moving, poetic prose, they are evidence that, by this time, Lispector had achieved a thorough command of narrative technique and had matured into one of the most sophisticated practitioners of the “lyrical novel.” It was also during this period that Lispector published what are arguably her two finest volumes of short fiction, Family Ties, which includes some of her most frequently anthologized pieces, such as “Love” and “The Imitation of the Rose,” and The Foreign Legion, a collection of short stories, chronicles, and several nonfiction pieces, including a few in which she discusses her ideas about what literature is and what writing means to her.

By the late 1960’s, Lispector’s reputation was firmly established in Brazil. As her works were translated into several languages, she quickly gained international recognition. Although in general her fiction grew more hermetic, some of her late work is quite accessible. Such is the case with Soulstorm, a collection of stories revolving around erotic themes and written in a subtly ironic and at times humorous style. Lispector’s novel The Hour of the Star, published shortly before her death from cancer in 1977, can be interpreted, at least in part, as an answer to those who accused the writer of being indifferent to Brazil’s social problems. Centering on the pathetic Macabéa, the novel alludes to the plight of migrants from the impoverished Northeast, who are attracted to the richer cities of the South. Nevertheless, even in this novel Lispector’s primary interest lies not in social issues at large but in the questions of human suffering and failure. An overtly self-conscious narrative, The Hour of the Star can be considered an example of metafiction and can be read as Lispector’s personal statement about the relationship between life and literature.

Influenced by the existentialist philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Lispector returned again and again to the question of human beings’ place in an indifferent, contingent, and absurd universe. Lispector’s work revolves around a relatively small number of obsessive themes, including the quest for self-identity, humankind’s ontological loneliness, human beings’ difficulty in establishing connections with one another, and the conflict between the inauthentic existence imposed by social constraints and the individual’s search for an authentic existence. Most of her protagonists are middle-class women living in an urban environment. Nevertheless, although Lispector displays great talent in depicting the specific situation of women, her fiction is not only about the female condition but about the human condition as well. It is not surprising, then, that the issues confronting her male protagonists, such as Martim in The Apple in the Dark, are not significantly different from those confronting her female protagonists.

Lispector developed an original narrative style that was perfectly suited to her themes. Lispector was not overly concerned with plot and character development; her novels have an open-ended quality and rely on a delicate, rhythmic pattern of images, designed to represent the fluidity of consciousness and to record an ineffable, deeper dimension of existence. Her best short stories evolve from an outwardly insignificant occurrence, which functions, nevertheless, as a catalyst for an existential crisis. Borrowing from Woolf and Joyce, Lispector makes consistent use of stream of consciousness and the epiphany. Together with her contemporary João Guimarães Rosa, Lispector is responsible for moving Brazilian fiction away from a somewhat parochial dependence on regionalism. Since the late 1970’s, Lispector has attracted much attention from feminist critics, particularly in Europe and the United States, who have hailed her texts as representing the best in “feminine writing.” Nevertheless, as the extensive bibliography on Lispector demonstrates, her work can be successfully approached from a variety of critical perspectives. A master of the modern narrative, Lispector possesses a well-deserved reputation as one of the most original writers in the twentieth century.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Perto do coração selvagem, 1944 (Near to the Wild Heart, 1990)

O lustre, 1946

A cidade sitiada, 1949 (The Besieged City, 1995)

A maçã no escuro, 1961 (The Apple in the Dark, 1967)

A paixão segundo G. H., 1964 (The Passion According to G. H., 1988)

Uma aprendizagem: Ou, O livro dos prazeres, 1969 (An Apprenticeship: Or, The Book of Delights, 1986)

Água viva, 1973 (The Stream of Life, 1989)

A hora da estrela, 1977 (The Hour of the Star, 1986)

Um sopro de vida: Pulsações, 1978 (A Breath of Life: Pulsations, 2012)

Short Fiction:

Alguns contos, 1952

Laços de família, 1960 (Family Ties, 1972)

A legião estrangeira, 1964 (The Foreign Legion, 1986)

Felicidade clandestina: Contos, 1971

A imitação da rosa, 1973

Onde estivestes de noite, 1974

A via crucis do corpo, 1974

Visão do esplendor: impressões leves, 1975

A bela e a fera, 1979

Soulstorm, 1989 (includes stories from Onde estivestes de noite and A via crucis do corpo)

Nonfiction:

Para não esquecer, 1978

A descoberta do mundo, 1984 (Discovering the World, 1992)

Só para mulheres : conselhos, receitas e segredos, 2006 (Aparecida Maria Nunes, editor)

Correio feminino, 2006 (Aparecida Maria Nunes, editor)

Children’s/Young Adult Literature:

O mistério do coelho pensante, 1967

A mulher que matou os peixes, 1968 (The Woman Who Killed the Fish, 1982)

A vida íntima de Laura, 1974

Miscellaneous:

Seleta de Clarice Lispector, 1975

Bibliography

Barbosa, Maria José Somerlate. Clarice Lispector: Spinning the Webs of Passion. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1997. A good study of Lispector’s works. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Cixous, Hélène. “Reaching the Point of Wheat: Or, A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman,” New Literary History 19 (1987). A comparison of James Joyce and Lispector written by one of Lispector’s foremost European critics.

Cixous, Hélène. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Chapters on The Stream of Life, The Apple in the Dark, “The Egg and the Chicken,” and The Hour of the Star. The book includes an introduction by Verena Andermatt Conley, carefully explaining Cixous’s playfully profound deconstructionist reading of Lispector. Recommended for advanced students.

Fitz, Earl E. Clarice Lispector. New York: Twayne, 1985. An excellent, book-length study of Lispector’s writings. Chapters include “Biography and Background,” “The Place of Clarice Lispector in the History of Brazilian Literature,” “Some Intrinsic Considerations: Style, Structure, and Point of View,” “Novels and Stories,” and “The Nonfiction Work.” Both descriptive and analytical. This insightful and extremely readable book is written by the foremost authority on Lispector’s works. A must-read for serious readers of the Brazilian writer’s fiction or for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of both Lispector and her works.

Lindstrom, Naomi. “Clarice Lispector: Articulating Woman’s Experience.” Chasqui 8 (November, 1978): 43–52. Lindstrom examines the narrative voice employed in the short story “Love” (from Family Ties) and said voice’s relationship to the emerging (and then fading) self-awareness of the protagonist, Ana. Lindstrom shows how the narrator first dominates the story, then allows Ana to speak more, before retaking the narrative in the end as the protagonist “finds no supportive response.” An interesting slant on an important story in Lispector’s body of work.

Marting, Diane E. “Clarice Lispector’s (Post)modernity and the Adolescence of the Girl-Colt.” MLN 113 (March, 1998): 433–444. Examines the story “Seco estudo de cavalos” in terms of poststructuralist theories; argues that Lispector configures the unrepresentable as the Feminine and valorizes words as an approach to the object more than as a designation.

Marting, Diane E, ed. Clarice Lispector: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. A full-length bibliographical resource.

Moisés, Massaud. “Clarice Lispector: Fiction and Cosmic Vision,” translated by Sara M. McCabe. Studies in Short Fiction 8 (Winter, 1971): 268–281. A study of how the thematics of Lispector’s short fiction reflect and support the author’s “cosmic vision.” Moisés discusses, for example, “the privileged moment,” in which “the ‘I’ and the universe meet as if for the first time, framed in a halo of original ‘purity,’ causing the mutual discovery to become suspended in time, a vision of the most intimate part of reality, without deformation of thought or prejudice.” An excellent article on the themes in Lispector’s short fiction.

Moser, Benjamin. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. An insightful and literary biography which illuminates the various influences on Lispector’s writing.

Nunes, Maria Luisa. “Narrative Modes in Clarice Lispector’s Laços de família: The Rendering of Consciousness.” Luso-Brazilian Review 14 (Winter, 1977): 174–184. Citing several stories in Family Ties, Nunes examines how Lispector renders the consciousness of her protagonists, stating that the Brazilian writer employs “style indirect libre or narrated monologue, interior monologue, internal analysis including sensory impressions, direct discourse in the form of ‘asides,’ and the mixture of many of the above techniques.” Nunes explains each technique and demonstrates how each is used by Lispector to reveal the inner workings of her characters. Insightful and very readable.

Peixoto, Marta. “Family Ties: Female Development in Clarice Lispector.” In The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983. Peixoto focuses on the protagonists of the stories in Family Ties, stories that the critic believes “can be read as versions of a single developmental tale that provides patterns of female possibilities, vulnerability, and power in Lispector’s world.” Peixoto examines the epiphanies experienced by the female protagonists of several stories, epiphanies that allow the characters, although only momentarily, to break out of their “metaphoric prisons formed by their eager compliance with conforming social roles.” An excellent piece.

Peixoto, Marta. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Written with a decidedly feminist bias, Passionate Fictions analyzes Lispector’s frequently violent subject matter, juxtaposing it with her strange and original use of language. Special attention is paid to the nexus with Helene Cixous and to the autobiographical elements of The Stream of Life and A via crucis do corpo.

Peixoto, Marta. “Rape and Textual Violence in Clarice Lispector.” In Rape and Representation, edited by Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. An analysis of three short narratives in terms of how Lispector distances and naturalizes violence against women. The three short narratives move in a progression from a mild symbolic representation to a literal and farcical plot event, yet all three minimize violence.

Rosenberg, Judith. “Taking Her Measurements: Clarice Lispector and ‘The Smallest Woman in the World.’” Critique 30 (Winter, 1989): 71–76. Claims that the core of “The Smallest Woman in the World” is sexual politics, a female fantasy of autonomy in competition with the male fantasy of domination. In the story, Little Flower is the object of male desire, the pure essence of femininity as refined, rare, valuable, and potent.