Lispector Logo Centrism

8/2/2019 Lispector Logo Centrism

1/13

The Passion of Logo(centrism), or, the Deconstructionist Universe of Clarice LispectorAuthor(s): Earl E. FitzSource: Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 1988), pp. 33-44Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3513257

Accessed: 23/07/2009 16:31

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwisc.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLuso-

Brazilian Review.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3513257?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwischttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uwischttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/3513257?origin=JSTOR-pdf


2/13

T h e P a s s i o n o f Logo(centrism), o r ,t h e Deconstructionist niverse o fC l a r i c e Li spec torEarl E. Fitz

For those critics who regard it as involving something morethan mere nihilistic nonsense, the term "Deconstructionism" hascome to refer to that view of literature in which a text--anytext--can be shown to be undercutting, or "deconstructing," itselfat the same instant that it is working to organize, or "con-struct," itself into a stable, coherent and verifiable system ofmeaning. As a literary theory, we know that Deconstructionismowes much to the linguistic model outlined by Ferdinand deSaussure in which all language use necessarily involves eternallyfluid systems of arbitrarily connected "signifiers" andsignifiedss' and in which there are no absolute references externalto the language systems themselves. For Saussure, who held, inregard to linguistic signs, that, ". . . il n'y a que desdifferences sans termes positifs" (". . . there are only dif-ferences without positive terms''),l meaning, in language andtherefore in literature, emerges as an entirely arbitraryfunction; or, to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty (who may be consideredone of Western literature's earliest deconstructionist critics),"Words mean exactly what I want them to mean, nothing more andnothing less!"Yet in spite of its vast potential for abuse and obfuscation,Deconstructionism offers the literary critic a linguisticallybased way of explaining why texts generate different meanings andwhy they elicit different responses in readers. For certaintexts, Clarice Lispector's opaque, lyrically meditative novels andstories figuring prominently among them, the question of meaningis not merely a thematic problem but a technical one, a feature ofthe work that relates to what the "New Critics" tended to describeas a texts "ambiguity," its artistically poised uncertainties.For the deconstructionist, however, this very "ambiguity" or"uncertainty't is shown to be a function not of a text's style orits "literariness" but of language itself, of language's endlessself-reflexivity, its semantic instability and its ever-fluctuat-ing relation to the various "realities" that it simultaneouslydescribes, "constructs," and "deconstructs." This essentiallypoststructuralist sense of language and meaning, I believe, is thefundamental philosophical and psycholinguistic principle that

Luso-Brazilian Review, XXV, 2 0024-7413/88/033 $1.50t 1988 by the Board of Regents of theUniversity of Wisconsin System


3/13

34 Luso -Brazi 1 ian Revi ew 25: 2Clarice Lispector develops so brilliantly, as I will now try toshow, in the creation of Cuch extraordinary texts as Perto docoragao selvagem (1944), A masa no escuro (1961), A paixao segundoG. H. (1964), A legiao estrangeira (1964), Agua viva (1973), Umsopro de vida (1978) and "A quinta hist6ria."From her first novel, published in 1944, to her posthumousworks, it is clear that Clarice Lispector was a writer whoseprimary thematic concern was the flickering, ephemeral relation-ship between words, reality and the ebb and flow of humancognition. Like Helene Cixous (whose Vivre ltorange, 1979, wasbased upon several of Clarice's texts), the later Barthes(particularly of S/Z), Jacques Derrida,2 Jonathan Culler, JuliaKristeva, and Lucy Irigaray, Clarice was a writer for whom theproblem of meaning (how it is generated, how it is mentallyprocessed and how it is reformulated as literary art) lies,restively, at the heart of the human condition.Consistent with these other "poststructuralist," or "decon-structionist" critics, Clarice and her characters view the humancreature as being inescapably locked within a prison house oflanguage, one in which words refer only to other words rather thanto what Derrida has called a "metaphysical" referent, a sub-stantiating "first principle" that exists beyond language and uponwhich a system of perfect and stable meaning can be built. Inworks like Perto do coragao selvagem, A paixao segundo G. H., Aguaviva and "A quinta historia," to cite just four examples, Claricehas created not "novelst' and "stories" but "texts," a criticalterm used by poststructuralists to refer to the "web-likecomplexity of signs" in which the "back and forth, present andabsent, forward and sideways movement of language in its actualprocesses"3 is highlighted. Joana, for example, the protagonistof Perto do coragao selvagem, develops as a character in directrelation to her gradual and disquieting discovery of the spuriousnexus between language and its referents, between its convention-ally understood signs and the supposedly reliable "firstprinciples' of meaning they are believed to express. Gainingsteadily in self-realization and strength, Joana, who comes toreject first the "logocentrism" and then the "phallogocentrism"that has entrapped her, eventually feels the need to create a new,private and, she hopes, authentic language system, one that willtruthfully embody and express her as yet inchoate process of self-realization.4 Her creation of a new, non-"phallogocentric"language system thereby mirrors and sustains her newly achievedsense of self.One of Clarice's later protagonists, Martim (of A maga noescuro), is also depicted as a human being whose identity isstunted by virtue of being trapped in language. As the omniscientvoice of his "text" describes him:

. . . o que fez Martim experimentar essa perfeicao foi o fatode suas palavras terem de algum modo ultrapassado o que elequisera dizer. . . . Em algum ponto nao identificavel, aquelehomem ficara preso num circulo de palavras.S


4/13

Fi tz 35Martim, like Joana, G. H. and the voices of Um sopro de vida andAgua viva, comes to discover that his quest for authenticity ofbeing is inescapably bound up in the essence of language itself.The fluid, open poststructuralist "texts" that give form to theontological struggles of these characters are, as they and thereader come to discover, composed of structures and patterns ofwords that refer, endlessly, to other structures and patterns ofwords. This explains why texts like Perto do coragao selvagem, Amaga no escuro , A paixao segundo G. H. and Agua viva have nostable "first principles" of semantic reference and no structur-ally clear beginnings, no unambiguous lines of development and nodecisive, conflict-resolving conclusions. Overwhelmingly,Clarice's texts--especially her longer, "novel" length nar-ratives6--create fictive worlds in which words, Saussure's"signifiers," continuously reveal themselves to be onlyarbitrarily linked to their supposed "signifieds," and it is fromthis poetically rendered tangle of thought and sign that Clarice'sfamous lyricism and ambiguity derive. From the perspective of adeconstructionist critic, then, the "fictions"7 of ClariceLispector are brilliant examples of what Derrida calls "inter" (aswell as "intra") textuality," dense webs of semantically de-stabilized words that refer essentially to themselves8 and totheir "differance," to the superfluities and slippages of meaningconstantly generated by them.A second principle of Lispectorian deconstructionist theory,and one that, like the importance given the self-reflexive"intertextuality" of words, fully characterizes Clarice's writing,is her abolition of the orthodox distinctions between "criticism"and "creative writing." For Lispector, as for Helene Cixous, LucyIrigaray, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes (at least of S/Z) andJulia Kristeva (especially her la Rbvolution du langue pobtique ,1974), the concept of "criticism" as "evaluation" gives way to anoften creative discourse on "text" or "writing" (what Derridacalls "ecriture"), on the interactive mental process that isinvolved in the writerly creation and readerly deconstruction of a"text." The feminist writer and critic Helene Cixous, has, inVivre ltorange, called attention to precisely this key post-structuralist dimension of Clarice's work, one which, typified insuch texts as A maga no escuro, A paixao segundo G. H. and Aguaviva, she finds to be powerfully demonstrative not merely ofDerrida's t'ecriture" but of "lecriture feminine," of a uniquely'feminine" way of writing, one often described as the process of"writing the body."9 Merging her self-conscious preoccupationwith words as a viable mechanism for self-creation and growth withthis deconstructively hybrid concept of "text" as simultaneously"fiction" and "nonfiction," the voice of Agua viva lyricallydeclares:

Nao sei sobre o que estou escrevendo: sou obscura para mimmesma. So tive inicialmente uma visao lunar e lucida, e entaoprendi para mim o instante antes que ele morresse e queperpetuamente morre. Nao e um recado de ideias que te


5/13

36 Luso-Brazil ian Review 25:2transmito e sim uma instintiva volupia daquilo que estaescondido na natureza e que adivinho. E esta e um festa depalavras. Escrevo em signos que sao mais um gesto quevoz. . . . refaco-me nestas linhas. Tenho uma voz. Assim comome lanco no traco de meu desenho, este e um exercicio de vidasem planejamento. O mundo nao tem ordem visivel e eu so tenhoa ordem da respirasao. Deixo-me acontecer.lIn an earlier (1964) collection of ostensibly "nonfiction'tpieces entitled "No fundo de gaveta," Clarice had also con-templated the fluid nature of writing, here metaphoricallyequating it to the act of fishing:

Entao escrever e o modo de quem tem a palavra como isca: apalavra pescando o que nao e palavra. Quando essa nao palavramorde a isca, alguma coisa se escreveu. Uma vez que se pescoua entrelinha, podia-se com alivio jogar a palavra fora. Mas aicessa a analogia: a nao palavra, ao morder a isca,incorporou-a. O que salva entao e ler 'distraidamente'.llLater in this same work, Clarice reiterates what we can now seeas a fundamentally deconstructionist concept of writing as processor flow, as "ecriture:"

Nao me lembro mais onde foi o come,co, foi por assim dizerescrito todo ao mesmo tempo. . . . Escrevi procurando com muitaatencao o que se estava organizando em mim. . . . Tinha aimpressao de que, mais tempo eu me desse, e a historia diriasem convulsao o que ela precisava dizer. . . . infelizmente naosei 'redigir', nao consigo 'relatar' uma ideia, nao sei 'vestiruma ideia com palavras'. O que vem a tona ja vem com ouatraves de palavras, ou nao existe. -- Ao escreve-lo, de novoa certeza so aparentemente paradoxal de que o que atrapalha aoescrever e ter de usar palavras. E incomodo (Lispector, Alegiao estrangeira, 251- 252) .Clarice's rejection of the old boundaries between "fiction" and"nonfiction" has been a constant in her writing ever since herfirst published work, the densely poetic, self-reflective andopen-ended "novel," Perto do coragao selvagem. This text, which,in retrospect, can now be seen as having initiated a revolution interms of the ways narrative would be written in Brazil, receivedits title from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,Joyce being a male writer much admired for his "anti-phallo-centric" texts by such critics as Helene Cixous and JuliaKristeva, whose own brand of feminist theory owes much todeconstructive analysis.Integrally related to this deliberate merging of nonfictiondiscourse and creative writing is a third characteristic ofdeconstructive "ecriture" that is also endemic to Clarice's work,her penchant for utilizing what, in Allegories of Reading, Paulde Man calls "rhetoric,t12 not the art of persuasion but a heavy


6/13

Fi tz 37reliance on interrelated systems of tropes, figuration andetymology. Calling attention to Clarice's philosophical relevanceto Heidegger, which many critics have noted, as well as to Joyceand Woolf, this key poststructuralist feature of her texts tendsto generate and nurture the "binary oppositions" so typical ofclassical structural analysis. Within the context of Clarice'swork, many of these "binary oppositions" can also be seen asconstitutinf a number of motifs and metaphors that are endemic toher work:l language/silence, speaking/thinking, light/darkness,love/hate, writing/speaking, isolation/socialization, and, in aunique way, male/female, to name just a few.Yet for all that Clarice's work can be said to be structuredaround systems involving these "binary oppositions," there is alsopresent in her texts a powerful and often self-conscious tendencytoward the undermining or "deconstruction" of language and thesupposed reliability of its semantically generative systems andstructures. Typically, as in Perto do coragao selvagem, A maga noescuro or Agua viva, Clarice's texts generate precisely the senseof linguistic destabilization and unreliability that Derridaexpresses in the term "differance," a neologism of his coinagerelated to the Saussurean concept ("difference") that in language"meaning" is an eternally evolving function of the arbitrary andimperfect connection between signifiers and signifieds. At themoment there is no known evidence to suggest that Clarice was everdirectly influenced by either Saussure or such poststructuralisttheoreticians as the later Barthes, Derrida or Paul de Man,though, given the dates of their major studies, such influencescould have taken place. Yet, as Assis Brasil, Benedito Nunes,Olga de Sa and others have shown,14 Clarice's work containsunmistakable echoes of such seminal precursors of decon-structionism as Ernest Cassirer (especially his concept of the"thing" versus one's awareness of the "relations" between"things"), the phenomenologists, Husserl and Heidegger (phenome-nology itself constituting a revealing approach to Clarice'swork), Kenneth Burke (because of his "logological" emphasis on,like Cassirer, "relations" rather than on logically organizedsubstances) and texts like Joyce's Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The point of all this isthat in Clarice Lispector we have a writer who, though apparentlywithout being directly, or, at least, verifiably, influenced bythe deconstructionists, began in 1944 to create fluid, meta-fictionally self-referential and linguistically self-conscioustexts in which there is clearly evident a rejection of whatDerrida would later describe as a "logocentric metaphysic" ofpresence and structural stability and in which there is a newemphasis on the ontological unreliability of language and on theinterplay of differences (Derrida's "differance") betweenrelations. As early as 1944, then, and for years hence, ClariceLispector was engaged in writing the kinds of ostensibly "form-less," lyrical and metacritical texts that, some twenty yearslater, would be said to typify deconstructionist writing. Becauseof their constant preoccupation with the ambiguous but crucial


7/13

38 Luso-Brazilian Review 25:2relationships between language, meaning, reality and humanperception, Clarice's texts continuously undercut or "deconstruct"themselves even as they move toward new levels of knowledge andself-awareness. Thus, a kind of writing usually associated withpoststructuralist and feminist narrative in Europe and the UnitedStates was actually being practiced in Brazil in the mid-1940s.In his analysis of Proust's Swann's Way, another decon-structivist critic, Paul de Man, has, without making any directreference to Clarice, offered a discussion of another revolution-ary text, one that clearly has some important parallels withClarice's work. Focusing on what he takes to be the "grammatiza-tion" of Proust's rhetoric (which he defines in terms of CharlesSanders Peirce's distinction between "grammar," a stabilizingforce, and "rhetoric," a destabilizing one), de Man argues (interms easily applicable to Clarice's work) that the constantinterplay of such "unresolvable opposites" as the perspectives ofinner and outer landscapes, of language versus silence, ofpresence and absence and of speaking versus thinking (or writing)gradually come to reveal, via a fluid, often ambiguously inter-related system of metonymy, oxymoron and synecdoche, the essentialsuperiority of metaphor as a vehicle for literarily artisticexpression. Systematically advanced in even an early 1960s worklike A Masa no escuro, this metaphoric, ironically self-inquisitional mode of writing thrives, as does deconstructiveanalysis itself, on precisely the kinds of unresolved andunresolvable psycholinguistic complexities that, especially intheir philosophical context, defy the simplistic assumptions oflogocentrism. The constant concern over words, their meanings andthe various realities they create, describe and obscure allreflect Clarice's lifelong concern over Derrida's concept of"ecriture" ("writing"), the production of language as flowingmental process rather than as static conclusion. For Clarice, theact of writing (like the act of reading) springs from a mental andspiritual quest for identity and authenticity of being, one thatin virtually every one of her texts is bound up in a narrator's(or a character's) artistic creativity and, ineluctably, in areader's reaction to (or deconstruction of) a text. The questmotif, which, as we see in works like Perto do coragao selvagem, Amaga no escuro, A paixao segundo G. H., Agua viva and even theposthumously published Um sopro de vida, is a constant in herlonger texts, and can, perhaps, be best explained from a decon-structionist perspective. One feels this is so because in each ofthese cases the text--the "ecriture" or, as Cixous would have it,Clarice's "ecriture feminine"--is never a stable, closed andperfectly knowable construct; it is, to the contrary, an open,fluid and poetically rendered process, one involving the authorand reader as well as the characters and one in which theelusiveness of language itself is the primary subject.Developed in a distinctly antilogocentric fashion, Clarice'stexts deal with language in two major ways: as the all too flawedmeans by which our human quest for self-realization is undertakenand, in a less obvious way, as the ultimate end, or purpose, of


8/13

Fi tz 39that quest. As characters like Joana (from Perto do coragaoselvagem), Martim (A maga no escuro), G. H. (A paixao segundoG. H.) and the voice of Agua viva struggle with language (with itsmaddeningly self-referential "differance") in their quests for asense of ontological stability, they (and the reader) graduallycome to suspect that control over language--and not physicalexistence--is what they must really seek, for as narratives like Amaga no escuro and Agua viva imply, to control language is tocontrol reality itself. Thus, the ultimate conflict in Clarice'stexts, as for such better known deconstructionist writers andcritics as Barthes, Cixous, Kristeva, Derrida, Cullers, Lacan andde Man, is over language: do we control it (as the conventionalwisdom of logocentrism holds) or, as much poststructuralist theoryargues, does it control us? For Clarice Lispector, a writer whosework has long exemplified the theories about language, meaning andhuman existence that the deconstructionists seek sometimestortuously to elucidate, human existence is best defined in termsof this immensely frustrating struggle with language, with theproblem of communication that derives from out of the everunstable relationship between signifiers and signifieds, betweenwhat we say and what we mean (or want) to say, and between ourspeech acts and their receptions by other people. Relentlesslyadvanced and lyrically orchestrated, this is the thematic terrainfor which Clarice is so renowned. Because they weave back andforth between the realms of the viscerally personal and theexpansively theoretical, the stories of such figures as Joana,Martim, G. H. and the female presence in Agua viva all generate asense of the socio-politically quotidian at the same time thatthey convey a powerful sense of the cosmic, of the ultimatelymystical, even gnostic grounding of existence in language.Although this dialectic between the corporeal and the cosmic isendemic to Clarice's fiction, it perhaps can be best seen in twoof her greatest works, the generically hybrid A paixao segundoG. H., one of the most powerful and overlooked texts to appearanywhere during the 1960s, and Agua viva, a lyrical t'fiction"l5par excellence that, due in no small part to what Heline Cixoushas lauded as its prototypical "ecriture feminine,t16 stands asone of the truly outstanding "new narratives" of the 1970s. Inthe case of A paixao segundo G. H. the self-conscious first-personnarrator takes the reader from the vicissitudes of a woman'smundane middle-class existence to the harrowing throes of herpsychic rebirth (birth and rebirth being motifs that appearthroughout Clarice's work). Early in her story, G. H., placingherself in a particular socio-political context (one based on amale/female opposition) declares:

Para uma mulher essa reputasao e socialmente muito, e situou-me, tanto para os outros como para mim mesma, numa zona quesocialmente fica entre mulher e homem.17At the conclusion of her uncertain tale, G. H. possesses a muchmore cosmic sense of self and of existence. Referring to this new


9/13

40 Luso-Brazil ian Review 25:2and unsettling mode of being (one that strongly evinces theessentially paradoxical poststructuralist linkage betweenexistence and language), G. H. declares:

A realidade e a materia-prima, a linguagem e o modo como voubusca-la--e como nao acho. . . . A linguagem e o meu esforcohumano. . . . O indizivel so me podera ser dado atraves dofracasso de minha linguagem. So quando falta a construcao, eque obtenho o que ela nao conseguiu (Lispector, A paixaosegundo G. g . , 212-13).Presented as a character, G. H., like most of Clarice's othercharacters, comes, via radically different modes of discourse, toview an understanding of language itself as the end of her questat the same time that she begins to see it as the conundrum-likemechanism by which it is simultaneously found and lost, thisrealization reflecting the poststructuralist system by which, interms of deconstructive analysis, the end of the quest is at thesame time '|present" and "absent." As G. H. and the readerdiscover, it is only through language that "being" and "nonbein"can co-exist in the same space and in the same instant of time.lA similar focus on the nexus between language and existenceanimates Agua viva, a 1973 "fiction" in which the unnamed femalenarrator declares, ". . . e novo para mim o que escrevo porqueminha verdadeira palavra foi ate intocada. A palavra e a minhaquarta dimensao (Lispector, Agua viva, 10). Then, invoking animage that exemplifies both Derrida's elusive concept of "dif-ferance" and Saussure's belief in the radical discontinuitybetween the signifier and the signified, the voice of Agua vivasays:

Transmito-te nao uma historia mas apenas palavras que vivem dosom.Digo-te assim:eTronco luxurioso'.E banho-me nele. Ele esta ligada a raiz que penetra emnos na terra. Tudo o que te escrevo e tenso. Uso palavrassoltas que sao em si mesmas um dardo livre. (Lispector, Aguaviva, 27).As we see in Agua viva, A paixao segundo G. H. and in Clarice'sother works, the modes of her characters' discourses vary a greatdeal. This is especially apparent in the intensely lyrical Aguaviva, where the style, always analytical and questioning (quest-ing?), continuously vacillates between the sublimely poetic andthe frustratingly inarticulate as the narrative voice ebbs andflows between the poles of brave self-affirmation and fearfulhesitancy. Of all Clarice's "novels," only Uma aprendizagem ou ol ivro dos prazeres ( 1969 ) takes a more definitive stand, suggest-ing that, if they are able to understand, accept and communicatewith each other (and themselves), men and women can (despite itssemantic arbitrariness) learn to use language for purposes more


10/13

Fi tz 41liberating than entrapping, more supportive than divisive. Thisoften overlooked work, along with Um sopro de vida, offers aguardedly optimistic alternative to the despair and nihilism thatare often said to be the inevitable conclusions of a decon-structive view of language and literature. Although it seems truethat, if pushed to its logical extremes, a deconstructive view ofexistence would indeed consign everything to a standard-less levelof utter and total relativism, it is also true that, as thinkingbeings, we are not obliged to live out our lives according to sucha bleak vision. And, in fact, we do not, for the supreme ironictruth of language is that for however much it undercuts ourefforts to create stability and constancy in our existences, italso serves as the endlessly inventive mechanism by which ouractions and moral choices are determined. Even though we mayaccept the deconstructionist argument that the concept of perfect,stable meaning is a myth, an impossibility, we can and do, throughlanguage, conduct our lives as if it were not. In forcing us toconfront the confusion and anxiety that result from our discoveryof language's self-referential arbitrariness, the questions askedby the deconstructionist critics--like those asked and lived outby Clarice's characters--lead us, as they lead Joana, Martim,G. H., L6ri and Ulysses (from Uma aprendizagem), to deal withourselves and with each other in a more careful, more honestfashion. Thus, as Clarice suggests, the lasting--and surprisinglyhumanistic--contribution of Deconstructionism may finally be thatit leads us to ask yet once again the ancient and still unresolvedquestions about the relationships between language, reality andbeing, the questions not merely about what we know (or think weknow) but about how we know.As we see in texts like Perto do coragao selvagem, A maga noescuro, A paixao segundo G. H. and Agua viva, another fundamentalcharacteristic of Clarice's open, fluid "ecriture" is her constantcreation of what deconstructionist critics like Derrida, Kristevaand Barthes call "aporia," those inescapable impasses of meaningwhen, by both generating themselves a sense of "undecidability"and by calling for a description in similarly ambiguous terms, atext begins to dismantle or challenge itself, to call its own"meanings" into question. Although as Derrida makes clear, thissemantic "dissemination" (". . . a continual flickering, spillingand defusing of meaning," Eagleton, Literary Theory, 134), occursin all language use, it is most apparent in what is known as"literary" discourse. My point, however, is that these twodecisive features of deconstructive criticism, the nature andfunction of aporia in a text and, as a corollary, its polysemy(its semantic "dissemination"), working in conjunction with theclosely related issues of "l'ecriture feminine," logocentrism andintertextuality, do not merely apply to the work of ClariceLispector but characterize it. By giving these moments of aporia,or impass, a central place in her work, Clarice makes us see thatlanguage inevitably turns back on itself, that for whatever"meaning" we may believe a linguistic sign may have, we must alsoconfront the disturbing possibility that it is nothing more than


11/13

42 Luso -Brazi 1 ian Revi ew 25: 2an arbitrary and artificial construct, one that gets its "meaning"from still other signs and structures.Without knowing the terms themselves, Clarice, who has fomenteda revolution in Brazilian literature, made a career out of writingprecisely the kinds of linguistically self-conscious and philo-sophically charged texts that the later appearing deconstructivecritics would prize so highly. Clarice, we might say, wrotedeconstructive literature without ever knowing what Decon-structionism was; she was, in terms of her preoccupations with thephenomenologically unstable, ever evolving relationships betweenlanguage, existence, human cognition and meaning, very much aheadof her time.Close readings of Clarice's novels, stories and "nonfiction"pieces reveal that, as a structuralist critic would note, shedevelops much of her best material around the tensions generatedby certain recurring "binary oppositions," notable among which areconflicts between language and silence, male and female and avariety of ontological questions relating to presence ("logo-centrism") and absence ("differance"), and to "authentic" beingversus "nonauthentic" being. But, as a deconstructive commentatorwould rightly point out, what truly distinguishes Clarice's work,what identifies it as being uniquely hers, is the fact that thesemany motif-like "binary oppositions" are seldom, if ever,resolved. As we see in such works as, A maga no escuro, A paixaosegundo G. H. and Agua viva, these oppositions simply go on,multiplying in their semantic possibilities, generating endlessmoments of aporia and defying all rationally logocentric effortsto control or even contrast them. For Clarice, as for Barthes,language (in its Saussurean sense of being an arbitrary system ofsigns based upon difference without positive terms) was the greattheme, the one from which all other themes and questions of styleand form would derive. Thus, a deconstructive reading ofClarice's texts helps explain why they are so full of aporia, so"vague," "amorphous" and "open ended."With language itself as her main subject, Clarice createsfictive worlds not of definitive results (which would reflect a"logocentric" world) but one of process, of flux, of "ecriture,"of "differance." Though her texts ceaselessly generate questionsabout language, meaning and existence, they do not, with thepossible exceptions of Uma aprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeresand Um sopro de vida, offer much in the way of substantive answersto the dilemmas and complexities of haman existence. Rather, theygenerate questions; they depict human beings as being caught up ina continuum of words, one that, never anchored in anything butother words, simultaneously tantalizes and maddens us. Given herbasic themes and techniques, then, one can see that the narrativescreated by Clarice Lispector between 1944 and 1978 revealthemselves to us with dramatic intensity if approached from adeconstructivist perspective. Epitomizing the profoundlydisturbing philosophical, psychological and sociolinguistic issuesraised by this often misunderstood and maligned critical school,the powerful and compelling narratives of Clarice Lispector are


12/13

Fi Cz 43beginning to receive the international acclaim they so richlydeserve.

NOTESlSaussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de Linguistique Genbrale (Paris:Payot, 1931), 166.2In "L'approche de Clarice Lispector,2' Poetique 40 (Novembre1979): 408-419, Helene Cixous notes certain affinities betweenClarice's work and that of Heidegger, Rilke and Derrida (409),while "Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist asa Maturing Woman" n New Literary History 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1987):1-21, she compares Clarice to Joyce and declares that, for her,the Brazilian woman ". . . io the greatest writer in the twentiethcentury" (7).3Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 132.4Indicative of her (often clumsy) struggle to achieve this goalof authenticity of being via authentic language use is Joana'scoinage of the term "lalande," a sign (defined, arbitrarily, byher) she hopes will spur on this crucial development. Cf. Pertodo coragao selvagem, 4th ed. (Editora Sabia, 1944), 166.t'Phallogocentrism" is, of course, a variant on "Logocentrism," onethat emphasizes the repressiveness of its masculinist ideologies.5Clarice Lispector, A maga no escuro, 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro:Jose Alvaro, 1970), 34-35.6Clarice wrote nine "novels" during her career. Clarice'slonger, "novel" length narratives seem, on balance, to beconsiderably more lyrical and "deconstructively" oriented than hershort fictions, or "stories," which, by contrast, seem somewhatless poetic and more mimetic.7Clarice herself described Agua viva as a "fiction"; Cf. BellaJozef, "Chronology: Clarice Lispector," Review 24 (1979): 26.8A number of sections in Agua viva appear virtually verbatim inthe "Fundo de Gaveta" portion of an earlier work, A legiaoestrangeira (1964). These sections include: "A vingansa e areconciliasao," "Lembranca de um verao dificil," "Porque euquero," "Esbogo de um guarda-roupa," "Africa" and "Os espelhos deVera Mindlin."9Ann Rosalind Jones, "Writing the Body: Toward an Understand-ing of L'ecriture Feminine," The New Feminist Criticism, ElaineShowalter, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 361-377; seealso, Sharon Willis, "Mis-transtation," Substance, 52 (1987): 76-83. Willis believes that Vivre ltorange ". . . is ostensibly areading of . . . La passion selon G. H." (76).lClarice Lispector, Agua viva, 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro:Editora Nova Fronteira, 1978), 24.llClarice Lispector, "A pesca milagrosa," from A legiaoestrangeira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, 1964), 143.12Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press,1979). Deplorable though it is, the recently discovered (1987-88)


13/13

44 Luso -Brazi 1ian Review 25 :2scandal allegedly linking de Man to Nazi propagandists andcollaborators should not prevent us from considering seriously histheories on language and literature.See my "The Leitmotif of Darkness in Seven Novels by ClariceLispector," Chasqui 7, no. 2 (Feb. 1978): 18-28, and "A Discourseof Silence: The Postmodernism of Clarice Lispector," ContemporaryLiterature 28, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 420-436; see also, in thisregard, Naomi Lindstrom's "Clarice Lispector: ArticulatingWomen's Experience," Chasqui 8, no. 1 (1978) 43-52, and MartaPeixoto's "Family Ties: Female Development in Clarice Lispector,"in The Voyage In, Elizabeth Abel and Marianne Hirsch, eds.(Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983), 287-355.14Olga de Sa, A escritura de Clarice Lispector (Petropolis:Vozes, 1979); Assis Brasil, Clarice Lispector (Rio de Janeiro:Editora Organizacao, 1969); Benedito Nunes, O mundo de ClariceLispector (Manaus: Edicoes Governo do Estado do Amazonas, 1966);and Earl E. Fitz, Clarice Lispector (Boston: Twayne Publishing i 1985)-5See, Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1963).16Helene Cixous, Vivre l'orange (Paris: Des Femmes, 1979); seealso, Sharon Willis, "Mis-Transtation: Vivre L'orange," Substance2 i1987): 76-83.

7Clarice Lispector, A paixao segundo G. H., 3rd ed. (Rio deJaneiro: Editora Sabia, 1964), 27.18The word "instante" occurs throughout Clarice's work and muste regarded as one of the essential motifs of her work. As asign, its function is nearly always to suggest this basicallydeconstructionist sense of "presence" and "absence," of "being"and "nonbeing" and of confusion and understanding that co-existsin the act of human cognition at any moment of time. In trying toshow this function, Clarice's texts undercut or destabilizethemselves in a continuous process of "deconstruction."

Date post:	06-Apr-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	phiblogsopho
View:	237 times
Download:	0 times

Lispector Logo Centrism

Documents