Family Ties by Clarice Lispector

First published:Laços de Família, 1960 (English translation, 1972)

Type of work: Short stories

Form and Content

Clarice Lispector’s Family Ties is a collection of thirteen stories, six of which had been published in a previous collection, Alguns Contos, in 1952. Like much of Lispector’s fiction, and particularly her early stories, these tales are intense and sharply focused narratives in which a single character (almost always female) is suddenly and dramatically forced to deal with a question concerning an integral part of her existence. Save for a single act that prompts each story’s character to look inward, there is little action in the stories, as the author seeks not to develop a traditional, action-filled plot but instead to capture a moment in the character’s life and, much more important, the character’s reaction to that moment, as she (and occasionally he) is shocked out of complacency and forced into a situation that will lead her to self-examination and, in most cases, self-discovery. The epiphany-centered content of the stories, combined with Lispector’s subjective, highly metaphorical, even lyrical prose, produces a collection of stories that read and communicate to the reader more like poetry than prose.

Arranged in no apparent particular order within the collection, the stories that make up Family Ties are “The Daydreams of a Drunken Woman,” “Love,” “The Chicken,” “The Imitation of the Rose,” “Happy Birthday,” “The Smallest Women in the World,” “The Dinner,” “Preciousness,” “Family Ties,” “The Beginnings of a Fortune,” “Mystery in São Cristóvão,” “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor,” and “The Buffalo.”

Perhaps the most representative of them is “Love,” which is also one of Lispector’s most famous and most anthologized stories (one critic, Earl Fitz, has called it prototypical of all Lispector’s short fiction). Its protagonist, Anna, is a contented middle-class wife whose world is stable, controlled, predictable, happily based on order. Taking the tram home from shopping one afternoon, however, she spots a blind man chewing gum. Inexplicably, Anna’s ordered world is shaken by the sight of the man. Disoriented, she gets off the tram well past her stop and finds herself in the relatively primitive and hostile setting of a botanical garden, where the inauthenticity of her world is stripped away. She makes her way home and attempts to resume her normal patterns, but though she is back in the security of her predictable domestic lifestyle, she has been profoundly affected by her epiphany and wonders if “the experience unleashed by the blind man [will] fill her days” or if the stable, controlled, predictable, ordered routine of her domestic world will protect her from “the danger of living.”

Another notable story in Family Ties that follows much the same pattern is “Preciousness,” in which a girl going through puberty experiences fear, confusion, and, most important, an altered sense of self after an ambiguous encounter with some boys. In “Happy Birthday,” an eighty-nine-year-old woman, surrounded by her family on her birthday, observes the offspring she has produced and, much to the shock of those in attendance, spits on the floor to show her lack of respect. Other stories of note include “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor,” whose protagonist buries (and later exhumes) a stray dog he has found dead in a desperate attempt to relieve himself of the guilt he feels for having once abandoned his own dog; “Family Ties,” in which a woman struggles with both positive and negative aspects of the love that binds families together; and “The Buffalo,” in which a woman whose love has been rejected by a man roams a zoo in search of an animal that will show her how to hate.

Context

Clarice Lispector was the first of a number of important and critically acclaimed women writers (among them Isabel Allende, Luisa Valenzuela, and Elena Poniatowska) to come on the scene in Latin American literature during the second half of the twentieth century. Family Ties (and particularly the stories that deal with female protagonists) clearly stands as the first important collection of short fiction of this group of writers, who have in common gender and, to one degree or another, gender-based concerns.

There is no question that most of the stories in Family Ties deal either with women’s issues or with more genderless issues from a woman’s perspective. Many of them, for example, at least touch on the female protagonist’s role as wife (“Love”), daughter (“Family Ties”), young woman (“Preciousness”), mother (“Love,” “Family Ties,” “Happy Birthday”), or lover (“The Buffalo”), and the lives of the characters as defined in large part by their relationships with men, including husbands (“Love”), sons (“Family Ties”), and lovers (“The Buffalo”). Often the epiphanies the female characters experience make them see their lives, including these relationships (and the men in them), more clearly. As mentioned above, however, most of the characters return to their everyday existence without, it seems, making any permanent change, either because it would not be socially acceptable to do so or because it would simply be too frightening.

Though many of the stories in Family Ties do indeed deal, to one degree or another, with women and women’s issues, not all of them do so (“The Crime of the Mathematics Professor” and “The Dinner,” for example). In fact, a more common thread in the collection than the treatment and situation of women is the experience of epiphany and self-discovery, which is common to the protagonists of virtually all the stories, regardless of gender. This fact does not diminish the role of women and women’s issues in Family Ties, but if one focuses only on the woman’s angle in the collection, one runs the risk of classifying the stories, at least with respect to theme and content, only according to that category. To do so would be unfortunate, since even though many stories in Family Ties clearly speak to the situation of women, these same stories, as well as the others in the collection, also speak to the human condition in general and to the very question of existence.

Finally, just as it would be unjust to view stories such as “Love” and “Preciousness” only as stories about women, it would be equally unjust to view Lispector and Family Ties only within the context of women’s literature. Lispector is not only a major Latin American woman writer; but also a major Latin American writer, period, without regard to gender. Family Ties is almost universally hailed as a masterpiece of Brazilian literature. Its stories did much to revolutionize the short-story genre in Brazilian literature, not simply for the women writers who followed Lispector but for all writers in this genre. Lispector’s place and that of Family Ties, then, are secure and deserved not only in the context of women’s literature but also within the broader scope of Brazilian literature and Latin American literature.

Bibliography

Fitz, Earl E. Clarice Lispector. Boston: Twayne, 1985. The foremost authority on Lispector’s fiction devotes roughly eleven pages of his chapter “Novels and Stories” to Family Ties (and Alguns Contos, in which six of the stories were published earlier). Fitz provides an excellent overview of the stories that make up the collection, which he calls “one of the most original and powerful books of its time in Latin America.” The critic concentrates his discussion on the internal nature of Lispector’s stories and the skill with which she renders it. “Love” receives almost seven pages of meticulous analysis. Titles and most quotations appear in Portuguese with English translation.

Herman, Rita. “Existence in Laços de Família.” Luso-Brazilian Review 4 (June, 1967): 69-74. Herman discusses what she views as the “essential paradox” in Family Ties: “In spite of the fact that existence is viewed as totally negative, conditioned by interior disunity, according to the author, this very situation must be maintained in order for one to be a human being.” This, Herman implies, is why Lispector’s protagonists achieve a new state of awareness only to return to their everyday existence instead of “making any sort of metaphysical leap.” Their limitedness is what makes them human. Titles and quotations in Portuguese.

Lastinger, Valérie C. “Humor in a New Reading of Clarice Lispector.” Hispania 72 (March, 1989): 130-137. Lastinger contends that while much attention has been paid to Lispector’s existentialist leanings and her use of epiphany, the presence and function of humor in her work has been overlooked. The critic examines humor in several stories in Family Ties before concluding, in part, that humor in Lispector’s works is “a very effective way for her to mark her idiosyncrasy and independence from the authors to whom she owes so much, allowing her to introduce the feminine presence in philosophical discourse.” Titles and quotations in English.

Nunes, Maria Luisa. “Narrative Modes in Clarice Lispector’s Laços de Família: The Rendering of Consciousness.” Luso-Brazilian Review 14 (Winter, 1977): 174-184. Using the examples provided by several stories in Family Ties, Nunes examines how Lispector renders the consciousness of her protagonists. She contends that the Brazilian writer employs “certain traditional techniques,” these being “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 shows how each is deftly used by Lispector to convey the inner workings of her characters. Titles and quotations are in Portuguese.

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 concentrates on the female protagonists of the stories in Family Ties, which she 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 shows how the protagonists, through an epiphany, usually break out of “metaphoric prisons formed by their eager compliance with conforming social roles,” only to return to the roles that imprison them. She views “The Smallest Women in the World” as an ironic exception to this pattern of a “predominantly bleak view of female possibilities.” Titles and quotations in English.