The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
"The Hour of the Star" is a novel by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, featuring a male narrator named Rodrigo S. M., who recounts the life of a young girl named Macabéa. Recently arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Macabéa embodies the struggles of the lower class, often feeling invisible amidst the bustling city. The novel explores her bleak existence, marked by hardship and a series of unremarkable events, as Rodrigo reflects on the story he is compelled to tell, which he believes must be conveyed through a man's perspective.
As Macabéa navigates her mundane life, she endures a series of misfortunes, including a strained relationship with her boyfriend, Olímpico, who ultimately dismisses her for another woman. The narrative juxtaposes Rodrigo's self-awareness with Macabéa's lack of self-perception, highlighting themes of identity, poverty, and existential despair. The story culminates tragically when Macabéa is struck by a car, leaving readers to contemplate her fleeting moments of happiness and the harsh realities of her life.
Published as Lispector's last work during her lifetime, "The Hour of the Star" addresses social and political issues in Brazil, marking a significant departure from her earlier focus on middle-class urban experiences. Through its poignant and lyrical prose, the novel resonates with themes of isolation and the search for meaning in a challenging world.
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
First published:A Hora da Estrela, 1977 (English translation, 1986)
Type of plot: Social realism
Time of work: The 1970’s
Locale: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Principal Characters:
Rodrigo S. M. , the narrator, who struggles to write the story of MacabéaMacabéa , a young girl from the northeast of Brazil who has migrated to Rio de Janeiro, where she works as a typistOlímpico de Jesus Moreira Chaves , Macabéa’s boyfriend, a thug from the northeastGlória , Macabéa’s office mateMadame Carlota , a fortune-teller whom Macabéa visits
The Novel
In The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector creates a male narrator, Rodrigo S. M., to write the story of a young Brazilian girl who has recently moved to Rio de Janeiro. The narrator has caught sight of this young girl on the street. She is nothing special; the slums of Rio de Janeiro are filled with thousands like her, shopgirls and office workers sharing one-room flats, invisible and superfluous, silent in the clamor of the city.
The first quarter of the book is taken up with Rodrigo’s ruminations on why and how he is writing the story of this young girl. He declares that her story must be told by a man, for a woman would feel too much sympathy and end up in tears. The story must be told simply and with humility, for it is about the unremarkable adventures and the shadowy existence of a young girl trying to survive in a hostile city. Rodrigo feels the need to identify with his subject, so he decides to share her condition as closely as possible by wearing threadbare clothes, suffering from lack of sleep, neglecting to shave, giving up sex and football, avoiding human contact, and immersing himself in nothingness. He envisions this identification with his protagonist as a quest for transfiguration and his “ultimate materialization into an object. Perhaps I might even acquire the sweet tones of the flute and become entwined in a creeper vine.”
After describing the disastrous physical appearance of the girl, Rodrigo briefly rehearses her early history. She was born, suffering from rickets, in the backwoods of Alagoas, where her parents died of typhoid when she was two years old. Later she was sent to Maceio to live with her maiden aunt. The aunt, determined to keep the girl from becoming a prostitute, enjoyed thrashing her niece at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all. The child never knew exactly why she was being punished. The only education she experienced beyond three years of primary school was a short typing course, which gave her enough confidence to seek a position as a typist in Rio de Janeiro.
At the moment Rodrigo’s story intrudes into her life, the girl is about to be fired. Her work is hopeless—full of typing errors and blotched with dirty spots. Yet her polite apology for the trouble she has caused inspires her boss to modify his dismissal into a warning. The girl retreats to the lavatory to try to recover her composure. When she looks into the tarnished mirror, her reflection seems to have disappeared; her connection to even her own existence is as fragile and tenuous as is Rodrigo’s commitment to identifying her. It is nearly halfway through the text before he even allows her a name.
One day, the girl garners enough courage to take time off from work. She exults in her freedom: the luxury of having the room to herself, of indulging in a cup of instant coffee borrowed from her landlady. She dances around the room and contemplates herself in the mirror. It is a moment of sheer happiness and contentment. On the next day, the seventh of May, a rainy day, she meets her first boyfriend; they immediately recognize each other as northeasterners, and he asks her to go for a walk. He also inquires her name, and for the first time in the text the girl is identified:
—Maca — what?
Macabéa explains that her name was a result of a vow her mother had made to the Virgin of Sorrows.
Although the meetings of Macabéa and Olímpico are rain-drenched, their relationship is parched. Conversation is strained, for what little Macabéa has to offer is scorned as foolish or nonsensical by Olímpico. She costs him nothing; the only thing he treats her to is a cup of coffee, to which he allows her to add milk if it does not cost extra. The one kindness he has shown her is an offer to get her a job in the metal factory if she is fired. The high point of the relationship occurs one day when Olímpico decides to show off his strength to Macabéa by lifting her above his head with one hand. Macabéa feels that she is flying—until Olímpico’s strength gives way, and he drops her into the mud. Not long after, he drops her entirely. Olímpico has become enamored of Macabéa’s workmate, Glória.
Maternally sympathetic to Macabéa, Glória recommends a doctor to her when she is feeling unwell and lends her money to consult a fortune-teller who has the power to break bad spells. The doctor diagnoses Macabéa as suffering the preliminary stages of pulmonary tuberculosis, but the words mean nothing to her. He is appalled by her diet of hot dogs and cola and advises her to eat spaghetti whenever possible. Macabéa has never heard of the dish. As for the fortune-teller, Macabéa accepts the loan, asks for time off from her job, and takes a taxi to see Madame Carlota.
The fortune-teller cuts the cards to read Macabéa’s fortune and immediately exclaims over the terrible life that Macabéa has led; then she sees a further misfortune—the loss of her job. Turning another card, though, brings a life change. All of Macabéa’s misfortunes will be reversed: her boyfriend will return and ask her to marry him, and her employer will change his mind about firing her. A handsome foreigner named Hans will fall madly in love with her and shower her with unimagined luxuries. Macabéa is astounded; she embraces Madame Carlota and kisses her on the cheek. She leaves the fortune-teller’s house in a daze. When she steps off the curb, she is struck by a hit-and-run driver in a yellow Mercedes.
The narrator observes Macabéa, who is lying on the pavement bleeding, and wonders about her death. Macabéa gathers herself into a fetal embrace and utters her final words: “As for the future.” The narrator lights a cigarette and goes home, remembering that people die.
The Characters
Rodrigo S. M., the self-declared narrator of the novel, is the voice of self-consciousness, in counterpoint to Macabéa’s almost total lack of self-consciousness. He observes the oblivion of his protagonist, and by writing her story goads her into a kind of self-knowledge. The question of the narrative voice in this novel is complex, for Clarice Lispector’s own voice is also heard. At times, the reader hears her directly; at times, she can be detected behind or through Rodrigo’s words; at times, she seems to be speaking through Macabéa; and at times, her silence is as expressive as her voice.
In the naming of Macabéa and Olímpico, Lispector reveals her ironic playfulness. The Maccabees were a family of Jewish patriots and rulers in the second and first centuries b.c.e. who led the Jewish people in their struggle for freedom against Syrian rule. Their recapture of the Temple in Jerusalem is marked by the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. The triumphs, power, and fame of the Maccabees are in direct contrast to their namesake’s poverty, vulnerability, and obscurity. Olímpico, of course, suggests Mount Olympus and the Olympic Games—the classical spirit of Greek competition. Olímpico competes, but he does it furtively and criminally. He is an accomplished petty thief and is proud of his secret murder of a rival.
Lispector seems to have created Macabéa as a primitive alter-ego. Like Lispector, Macabéa comes from the northeast of Brazil, and like Lispector, she is a creature of spirit. Lispector, though, was a highly educated woman of the world, the wife of a diplomat, the recipient of a law degree, a journalist, and a highly regarded writer of experimental fiction. Macabéa is an empty vessel, so devoid of a place in the world that the only fortune that she can experience is the divine bestowal of a fleeting state of grace.
Olímpico embodies masculine worldliness and ambition. He is concerned with “important things,” while Macabéa only notices “unimportant things.” She is impressionable where he is impervious to anything he does not understand. What he does understand is the power of blood and the life force, which are embodied for him in the figure of Glória.
Glória represents the survivor. While she lacks any higher self-awareness, she has mastered the skills of survival. She knows how to use her sexual charms and is capable of handling a clerical position. While she is not troubled by the finer points of conscience, she is capable of a kind of maternal compassion.
Critical Context
The Hour of the Star was the last book that Clarice Lispector published during her lifetime. She wrote it at the same time as she was writing Um Sopra de Vida (1978; a breath of life), a confessional novel bordering on lyrical poetry. The Hour of the Star is unique among Lispector’s novels in that it deals with contemporary social and political problems in Brazil.
Lispector is best known for moving Brazilian fiction away from regional preoccupations. Like her Argentine contemporary Jorge Luis Borges, she was more concerned as a writer with such major twentieth century literary preoccupations as existentialism, the nouveau roman, and linguistic experimentation. Her prose is highly imagistic, and her protagonists develop more through their interaction with everyday objects than through the action of the plot. In rhythmically developed epiphanies reminiscent of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, her characters gradually come to an awareness of the isolation and ephemerality of their individual existences. Lispector is one of the early voices of female consciousness in Latin American literature; her protagonists are generally middle-class urban women attempting to find a place in the contemporary world.
The Hour of the Star shares many of these themes and stylistic qualities with such earlier works as Lacos de Família (1960; Family Ties, 1972) and Maçã no Escuro (1961; The Apple in the Dark, 1967), but Lispector’s focus on the devastating effects of poverty in contemporary Brazil marked the first time that her very real social concerns (as revealed in her newspaper columns and elsewhere) were addressed in her fiction. Lispector’s early death, a day before her fifty-second birthday, silenced one of Latin America’s most experimental and original voices.
Bibliography
Cixous, Helene. 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 critical approach to Lispector. Recommended for advanced students.
Coutinho, Afranio. An Introduction to Literature in Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960. A major Brazilian critic assesses Lispector’s achievement, emphasizing her place in Brazilian literature and her powerful metaphorical and atmospheric fiction.
Fitz, Earl F. Clarice Lispector. Boston: Twayne, 1985. A useful introduction that includes a chapter of biography, a discussion of Lispector’s place in Brazilian literature; a study of her style, structure, and point of view in her novels and short stories; and her nonfiction work. Includes chronology, detailed notes, and a well-annotated bibliography.
Lowe, Elizabeth. The City in Brazilian Literature. Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Discusses Lispector as an urban writer, focusing mainly on A cidade sitiada, The Passion According to G. H., and The Stream of Life.
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.