Art of Existence and the Care of the Self in Family Ties

Clarice Lispector calls upon attention that should be brought to bear on oneself

and she makes the reader conscious of the anxiety concerning all the disturbances of the

body and the mind that must be prevented by means of austere regiment where the

importance is attributed to self-respect, not just in so far as one’s status is concerned, but

as concerns one’s rational nature- a self-respect that is exercised by depriving oneself of

pleasure or by confining one’s indulgence to marriage or procreation. The cultivation of

self can be briefly characterized by the fact that in this case the art of existence is

dominated by the principle that says one must take care of oneself. This art refers more to

universal principle of nature and reason, which everyone must observe in the same way,

whatever their social status. Lispector’s experiments on the themes of human suffering

and failure, the disconcerting implications of humanity, human being’s total awareness of

inevitable alienation and the pressing need to overcome its danger and most forcefully of

all, the terror upon realizing the ultimate nothingness find its goal in her collection of

thirteen short stories entitled Lacos de Familia (Family Ties) which is “structured on the

literary epiphany, or, more specifically, on a concentration of moments of insight. The

privileged instant of cognition typically expands into interlocking patterns of illumination

and reflection in the mind of the protagonist” (Fitz, 56). Family Ties depicts individual’s

relation to the objects of the world, the sudden awake of consciousness in the characters,

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human being’s confrontation with the absolute freedom and solitariness, conflict between

public and private self, and his or her terror upon realizing the failure of language to

communicate. Lispector unties the family ties to let her characters walk through the path

of crisis so that they become aware of their conscious existence, experience nothingness

and face absolute freedom. While facing this absolute freedom and with an effort to avoid

the anxiety, many of her characters impress us by their determination and resolve but

some of them choose to retreat back into their comfortable shells rather than consciously

bear the burden of responsibility for their actions. Family bonds, which are supposed to

represent ties of closeness and tenderness, turn out to be nothing but chains of bondage

and become so frustrating that these bonds can preclude people from trying out new

experiences which might lead them to live a richer life. The tension in balancing mind

and body or mind/body uplifts her heroines above the convention.

Maria Quiteria’s path to the existence of the conscious subject in “The Daydreams of a

Drunk Woman” is by way of communion, by way of the self-discovery, which occurs at

the moment of becoming one with a group at the party. On Saturday night after being

drunk in Tiradentes Square at the invitation of a rich businessman, Maria is face-to-face

with the nothingness and responsibility. She despises “the barren people in that

restaurant. Not a real man among them. How sad it really all seemed . . . . . And

everything in the restaurant seemed so remote, the one thing distant from the other, as if

the one might never be able to converse with the other.”(12) Once she discovers that

nothingness of life, she discovered different level of nausea. The ‘blonde’ ‘female in a hat

and jewellery’ was ‘accompanied by a man’ and cared by others raised jealousy in her

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and she started detesting her. In the following morning, we find her mirror image is

shaken. “Something heavy and hollow fell to the ground” still “her eyes did not take

themselves off her image, her comb worked pensively, and her open dressing gown

revealed in the mirrors the intersected breasts of several women.”(7) Is she searching her

narcissistic perfect image? Did she come to understand that so far the visual identity

given from the mirror supplied imaginary “wholeness” to the experience of a fragmentary

real?

While the little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of

the Ego which is both the counterpart or the other people in whom the subject perceives a

visual likeness, and the specular image or the reflection of one's body in the mirror, the

little other is entirely inscribed in The Imaginary order; on the other had, the big Other

designates a radical alterity, an otherness transcending the illusory otherness of the

imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this

radical alterity with language and the law: the big Other is inscribed in The Symbolic

order, being in fact the Symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other

is then another subject and also the Symbolic order which mediates the relationship with

that other subject. “The Other must first of all be considered a locus, the locus in which

speech is constituted”. We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense, only

when a subject may occupy this position and thereby embody the Other for another

subject. When he argues that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject, but in

the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond one’s conscious control;

they come from another place, outside consciousness, and then ‘the unconscious is the

discourse of the Other’.

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Maria finds that words have no connection to the thing described when “she looked

around her, patient and obedient” and said, “Ah, words, nothing but words, the objects in

this room lined up in the order of words, to form those confused and irksome phrases that

he who knows how, will read. (14) She understands that things, in their actual existence,

have nothing to do with the names we give them, and that the existence of things has no

connection with the essence which we assign them. She finds that she alone is the source

of whatever meaning, truth, or value her world has. She alone absurdly, is responsible for

giving meaning to her world. To handle this crisis, she started free association of words.

Free association is the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. This involves allowing

whatever comes to mind to be spoken, selecting nothing and omitting nothing, and giving

up any critical attitude or direct forcing in the face of a problem. The analyst, in turn,

must adopt a complementary stance of ‘evenly suspended attention’- that is, surrender his

or her attention to the situation at hand. This is not to be taken as a statement of

knowledge. The analyst does not check whether it is true or false. It opens a field of

possibilities of sense rather than truth and falsity. Free association is akin to dreaming, for

dreams are communicated through reports to which normal accounts of assertoric truth

and falsity do not apply. We cannot point directly to the content of an occurring dream.

What is reported is typically accepted, for there is no independent check. As dreams are

often apparently nonsensical, they can force upon us the question as to how language

represents and makes sense. We give birth to problems because we are unaware of the

manner in which our thinking and use of language creates problems. We want to achieve

a desired state and go straight for it, and this then becomes a problem. Instead of being

aware of how the conflicts and contradictions created by confusions in the use of

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language create problems and despair, we try to force them into a particular pattern to

achieve a desired result, to capture one kind of experience and avoid another. It is

essential to find not merely what is to be said before a difficulty but how one must speak

about it. How something is said determines what is said- it shows the thought. Free

association encourages one to focus on the activity of speaking, the way we use words,

our feeling for them. The tone and gestures of our words reveal more than they can say.

In free association, a game of language is being played which shows language in use, but

not being used for any particular purpose. The measure of its success is that all players

can move on in their own way.

There is no fixed rule in free associating. It is a way of giving free rein and attention to

the way our minds create meanings and make associations, bringing them in all sorts of

ways. It helps to decentre our fixed identity that constitutes whom we believe we are. It is

a struggle with oneself and the analyst in which there is no external witness, plaintiff and

judge. Like psychoanalysis, it is a talking cure; but unlike psychoanalysis, there is no

external authority, no ideal, to which it must correspond. The weight is put on the use of

words, because this shows our approach to the problem, and it is this showing that lets us

see the deformities that distort our thought. (Wittgenstein 2000)

Anna in “Love” is driven to the extreme limits of her potential and in her anguish she

shows both her greatness and her misery. She is great because of her sudden discovered

freedom and yet miserable because she is capable of every kind of weakness when she

faces absolute responsibility. Anna’s status before utilizing the anxiety of life is she

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‘anonymously nourishes life’. She has chosen to be a wife, a mother, and to possess a

home:

She seemed to have discovered that everything was capable of being perfected, that each thing could be given a harmonious appearance; life itself could be created by man. Through torturous paths she had achieved a woman’s destiny, with the surprise of conforming to it almost as if she had invented that destiny herself. The man whom she had married was a real man, the children she mothered were real children. Her previous youth now seemed alien to her, like one of life’s illness. She had gradually emerged to discover that life could be lived without happiness: by abolishing it she had found a legion of persons, previously invisible, who lived as one works- with perseverance, persistence, and contentment………This was what she had wanted and chosen. (18)

Anxiety is not an ego-defense mechanism but what the ego-defense mechanisms are

designed to ameliorate. Her apparent freedom from family ties and institutional

constraints does not let her to stand alone or to glorify her individuality. On the contrary

it contributes to her insecurity.

“Probing the way in which consciousness perceives objects, Lispector created a world of

exciting and terrifying perfections. The Brazilian critic Benedito Nunes has defined the

process as familiar situations and things which we know and can control, are suddenly

transformed into something strange, unexpected, and uncontrollable” (Afterward 136).

Anna enters into the totality of a new, higher level of awareness and being at the sight of

the blind man’s chewing gum in the tram: she understands “something disquieting was

happening” (19). After this she escapes momentarily from the psychological prison in

which her conventionally used language and her social existence placed her, because a

crisis is a happening which suddenly removes us from the ordinary routines of our life. In

a situation of crisis one cannot react with one’s everyday, habitual responses and one is

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thrown back upon oneself. Anna explores that tortured ambiguity of our existence; the

privilege and the curse of being human and of confronting both our absolute freedom and

the world’s indifference.

The string bag felt rough between her fingers, not soft and familiar as when she had knitted it. The bag had lost its meaning; to find herself on the tram was a broken thread; she did not know what to do with the purchases on her lap: Like some strange music, the world started up again around her. The damage had been done……… it seemed to her that the people in the street were vulnerable, that they barely maintained their equilibrium on the surface of the darkness- and for a moment they appeared to lack any sense of direction. (20)

“Mysterious and quite unexpected moments of crisis propel characters along the paths of

indecision to a crucial moment of self-discovery. At time the most trivial episode can

produce the most profound and dramatic intuition- the vital moment when time stand still

and our daily existence is stripped bare of its comfortable conventional surfaces, leaving

man alone in the solitude of his conscience and personality. Man’s real problem is,

however, is not that of imposing some meaning on his senseless existence, but of finding

some escape from the meaning he has already discovered within himself and refuses to

accept” (Afterword 136). “Through her compassion Anna felt that life was filled to the

brim with a sickening nausea” (21). Entering the botanical garden Anna felt:

The trees were laden, and the world was so rich that it was rotting. When Anna reflected that there were children and grown men suffering hunger, the nausea reached her throat as if she were pregnant and abandoned. The moral of the garden was something different. Now that the blind man had guided her to it, she trembled on the threshold of a dark, fascinating world where monstrous water lilies floated (23).

“But when she remembered the children” (23), she hurries for home. Epiphany is a

moment of revelation, of ecstasy one would like to hold but which escapes through one's

fingers; it remains nevertheless as something valuable gained, the experience becomes an

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end in itself. Anna, even undergoing epiphanies, remained chained to her everyday

routine. To her epiphanies serve only as conveyors of the awareness of the drabness of

everyday existence. She went through an illumination and at the same time remained tied

to family bonds.

The idea, that love has both a light and a dark side is an important concept that runs

through all of Lispector’s work. She is very concerned with the complex, multi-layered

relationships of people in love, with the tortured displays of selflessness and selfishness

that love engenders. At home Anna with the contact of her child feels “Life was

vulnerable. She loved the world, she loved all things created, she loved with loathing. . . .

She had been touched by the demon of faith”(24). Her heart “filled with the worst will to

live” (25). She is in dilemma of choice. She faces the most profound alienation of all

when she becomes aware of the otherness of the object and seeks to overcome its

alienation by mastering it. “She no longer knew if she was on the side of the blind man or

of the thick plants…..With horror she discovered that she belonged to the strong part of

the world” (25). And at the end of the story we see Anna is “combing her hair before the

mirror, without any world for the moment in her heart” (27). She simply gives up, finding

the struggle to establish and maintain an identity too much to endure.

“When Catherine in “Family Ties” speaks, she presents her public or social self, a self

that is utterly commonplace in word and deed. Though she is a character in a

conventional social context, Catherine often engages her husband and her child in

strikingly cryptic dialogue, using words that function as transmitters of what all involved

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assume to be a commonly shared body of knowledge. As a deconstructionist critic would

note, however, the story’s basic tension- which stems from the failure of language to

communicate- derives from the fact that the main characters do not share a common body

of language, and they all operate in a state of nearly total isolation and conflict” (Fitz,

427). While her spoken language represents essentially the lowest possible common

denominator of human linguistic interaction, Catherine’s unspoken language represents

the power and energy of the human mind in agitated and simultaneous contemplation of

self and of others in the world:

“I haven’t forgotten anything?” her mother asked. Catherine, too, had the impression something had been forgotten, and they looked apprehensively at each other- because, if something had really forgotten, it was too late now. . . .“Mother,” said the woman. What had they forgotten to say to each other? But now it was too late. It seemed to her that the older woman should have said one day, “I am your mother, Catherine.” And she should have replied, “And I am your daughter” (93-94).

“Catherine’s conflict arises because she must choose between continuing a materially

comfortable but intellectually vacuous existence or embarking on a new life, one that is

intellectually meaningful but both demanding and perilous. The language used in

Catherine’s story serves to underscore the tension that exists in Lispector’s work between

the public and private identities of her characters. When Catherine, an urban middle-class

wife and mother, as struggling to come to grip with her nascent sense of self- awareness,

the text assumes the form of an indirect interior monologue” (Fitz 426-427). We read:

Relieved of her mother’s company, she had recovered her brisk manner of walking; alone it was much easier. . . . And things had disposed themselves in such a way that the sorrow of love seemed to her to be happiness- everything around her was so tender and alive, the dirty street, the old tram cars, orange peel on the pavements- strength flowed to and fro in her heart with a heavy richness. (94)

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Catherine discovers her self after the train departs with her mother. Her existence that she

has neglected so far now becomes vivid to her. Thinking of possibilities made her a

conscious being, a being for- itself1 that leads her think of what she lacks, and what her

possibilities are. Only as a conscious being one can be dissatisfied with oneself and desire

not-to-be what one is now, and desire to be what one is not. She decides in an instant to

leave her husband and she went out with her son. She understands that the relationship of

love is hopeless because what her husband wants is not merely the physical possession of

her- but to possess her freedom. For her husband Tony:

Saturdays were ‘his own’, but he liked his wife and child to be at home while he pursued his private occupations. (96)

Reaching home, Catherine hears her son calling her ‘Mummy’ and “It was the first time

he had said ’Mummy’ in that tone without asking for something. It was more than a

verification: ‘Mummy!’”(96). She tries to complete the sentence of the child and she

understands “The truth could only be captured in symbols, and only in symbols would

they receive it” (96).

“By imbuing her narrative with a sharply interiorized and phenomenological cast”2,

Lispector succeeds in showing how Catherine becomes enveloped in silence. We find her

unable to mean what she wants to mean. She fails to achieve with language what she

wants to achieve, and she progressively becomes the isolated and frustrated human being.

We see that characters like Catherine are battling to reanimate their existences. They are

1 Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Regions of Being: Being-for-Itself; Being-in-Itself”, Being and Nothingness, 1966.2 Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” Reader Response Criticism, 50-69.

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reduced to a state of frustrated silence, and isolation. The language that Lispector’s

characters are using can neither generate nor receive the messages and codes that they

want, and they are acutely aware of both this linguistic failure and psychological trauma

that stems from it. They become gradually frustrated, anxious mutes, desperate to

communicate but keenly aware that they are unable to do so. (Fitz 428)

Laura in “The Imitation of the Rose” just wants to be a good wife for Armando. She

escapes from her freedom as a person into becoming a mechanism from which she will

gain social approval for the perfection of the performance of the role. To be perfect she

develops an obsession for detail “What she must do was (1) wait until the maid was

ready; (2) give her the money so that she could bring the meat in the morning . . . . . (3) to

bring washing . . .” (38).

Laura feels after reading ‘The Imitation of Christ’, “anyone who imitated Christ would be

lost- lost in the light but dangerously lost. Christ was the worst temptation”(33) because it

requires the total surrender of the self to God. She falls in crisis when she discovers the

perfection of the roses. She imitates the roses which “stood in all their complete and

tranquil beauty” (40) “with parched lips, she tried for an instant, to imitate the roses deep

down inside herself” (47). Being unable to handle the gap between her and the world,

Laura becomes alienated from herself. She ends up in a relapse when betrayed by her

love of beauty and perfection. Laura breaks the ties but only through madness. It seems

that there are only two ways: either integration or disintegration.

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In contrast to the psychological conflicts of human being, Lispector placed the animals

that are free from psychological conflicts. Encounters with the animals are frequent in the

stories of Family Ties. Animal does not need to take care of itself; therefore it is not

rational and lives without any consciousness of existence. Thus the chicken, the dog, and

the buffalo are unable to form judgments about their existence. They are free from

psychological conflicts. For example in “The Chicken” “The chicken became the queen

of the household. Everybody except her, knew it.” (30) As Friedrich Nietzsche told in

Thoughts out of Season “The animal lives unhistorically: it hides nothing and coincides at

all moments with that which it is; it is bound to be truthful at all times, unable to be

anything else…we therefore have to consider the ability to experience life in a non-

historical way as the most important and original of experiences, as the foundation on

which right, health, greatness and anything truly human can be erected.”

Every scenery of the stories of Family Ties looks like an alienated world where the

solitary people are going through individual suffering. “Although Lispector’s characters

are typically developed more as “different states of mind”3 than as physical, their pain is

viscerally human. We all know them well, for their anxieties are shared by a great many

people in the post-World War II era, an era poignantly depicted in the epistemologically

insecure and painfully self-conscious literature of postmodernism” (Fitz 429). “The

various crises that emerge from the personal relationships that fill the stories of Family

Ties, become the catalyst that propel Lispector’s characters into painful and disorienting

3 Pontiero, Introduction to Family Ties 19

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sequences of self- inquisitional debate” (Fitz 54) . They are wild vacillations,

superficially stimulating but also meretricious, and prove, ultimately, to be symptoms of

alienation and lost innocence within that opaqueness and vastness of the human

condition. Lispector explored that tortured ambiguity of our existence; the privilege and

the curse of being human and of confronting both our absolute freedom and the world’s

indifference. Most of her characters, who become aware of emptiness, a gap that

separates them from the region of things, confront nothingness by being conscious of

their existence but some of her characters escape into bad faith because they are not

capable of taking the responsibility of being free in the world. The common wisdom

holds that only love has the restorative power to needed to overcome this isolation, but as

Lispector repeatedly shows us, love is a poison as well as tonic. It can be destructive,

even ruinous, and may become invisible from hate. Freedom and self-realization, the

opportunity to grow, to secure a sense of personal dignity, and to find the courage

necessary to act- these are the challenges that Lispector’s characters face while

cultivating their selves in Family Ties.

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WORKS CITED

Fitz, Earl E. “A Discourse of Silence: The Postmodernism of Clarice Lispector”. Cotemporary Literature, Vol. 28, No. 1. Winter (1987), pp. 420-436. < http: www. Jstor.org Sat Jul 21 06:57:38 2007>

----------------“Freedom and Self-Realization: Feminist Characterization in the Fiction of Clarice Lispector”. Modern Language Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3. Autumn, (1980), pp.51- 61. < http: www. Jstor.org Sat Jul 21 06:57:38 2007>

Lavin, T. Z. From Socrates to Sartre: the Philosophic Quest. USA: Bantam Books, 1984.

Lispector, Clarice. Laços de família (Family Ties) (1960). Trans. with an Afterword

Giovanni Pontiero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972.

Pontiero, Giovanni. Introduction to Family Ties. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972, pp. 13-23.

Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. New York: Washington Square Press, 1966.

Wilson, Colin. Introduction to the New Existentialism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. pp, 39-41

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