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    A Discourse of Silence: The Postmodernism of Clarice LispectorAuthor(s): Earl E. FitzSource: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 28, No. 4, After the Boom: Recent Latin AmericanFiction (Winter, 1987), pp. 420-436Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208309

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    A DISCOURSE OF SILENCE:THE POSTMODERNISM OF CLARICE LISPECTOREarl E. Fitz

    Critics have long recognized silence as one of the chief distinguishingcharacteristics of Clarice Lispector's prose fiction. Taking many formsand playing many roles, it permeates her work. Summing up themajority view on this fundamental issue, Elizabeth Lowe notes, "Theheart of Clarice Lispector's world is silence, the quiet glow beyondaction and beyond words that she, as her own greatest protagonist,tirelessly sought."' Pervaded by a sense of blockage, of isolation andfrustration, however, Lispector's fiction can be revealingly read as adiscourse of silence,2 a lyrically rendered yet ironically self-consciouscommentary on the evanescent relationships among language, humancognition, and reality. In focusing on these metafictional issues, thenovels and stories of Clarice Lispector exemplify the kind of writingdescribed as "postmodernist," writing that takes as a primary subjectthe nature of fiction itself, the processes through which it makes itsstatements.3But while in Lispector's work are several key aspects of post-modernist literature,4 none is more representative of this particular

    "'The Passion According to C.L." (Interview), Review 24 (1979): 35. Two otherimportant critics who address this key issue are Benedito Nunes (O Mundo de ClariceLispector [Manaus:EdiqoesGoverno do Estado do Amazonas, 1966])and Assis Brasil(Clarice Lispector [Rio de Janeiro: Organizacao Simoes, 1969]).2Oneof the first critics to use this term in regardto Lispector's fiction was BellaJozef. The term was not explained, however. See "Chronology: Clarice Lispector,"trans. Elizabeth Lowe, Review 24 (1979): 24.3See Charles Newman, The Post-Modern Aura (Evanston: Northwestern UP,1985),and Postmodernismin American Literature:A CriticalAnthology, ed. ManfredPutz and Peter Freese (Darmstadt: Thesen-Verlag, 1984).4Her fiction is typically phenomenological in its structuring, ironically self-con-scious about its own creation and questioning about its own epistemological validity.See Earl E. Fitz, Clarice Lispector (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985) 35-40 and passim.Contemporary iteratureXXVIII,4 0010-7484/87/0004-04201.50/0?1987 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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    mode of writing than her use of silence, an omnipresent feature ofher fiction that she develops both metaphorically and metonymicallyto describeand embody the isolation of the modern human condition.Becausesilenceplays such a central role in Lispector'swork, her fictionoffers the reader a comprehensiveview of how one of postmodernism'smost distinctive attributes functions as the primary shaping force ina fictive universe. As a function of language, it is silence, moreover,that shows how illustrative Lispector's work is of the critical investi-gations done by such narrative theoreticians as Roland Barthes (LeDegre zero de l'ecriture),Maurice Blanchot(Le Livre a venir), JacquesLacan(Ecrits),and GeorgeSteiner(Languageand Silence),all of whomfocus on the phenomenon of muteness in the literature of the post-World War II era.Also germaneto Lispector's iction is an issue raisedby Ihab Hassan,the author of another major study concerning the nature of postmod-ernist literature.5 Hassan has shown how the term "silence"can beused as a trope to characterize the new kind of writing that began toflourish in numerous Western cultures during the 1960s and 1970s.He makes the point that while postmodernist writers often seemobsessed with language, the actual language their charactersuse pro-duces very little meaningful communication. The result, which Hassanfinds typical of postmodernist fiction, is a state of "silence,"one pro-duced, ironically, by a torrential rain of words. This same preoccupa-tion with words and their communicative reliability is endemic to thestories and novels of Clarice Lispector, a writer for whom words areboth "concreteobjects" and elusive "fourth dimensions."6It is in thiscontext that Lispector's postmodernism can most clearly be seen.Arguing a point similar to Hassan's is Susan Sontag, who says,in "The Aesthetics of Silence" (Styles of Radical Will), thatAs theactivityof themysticmust endin a vianegativa,a theologyof God'sabsence,a craving or the cloudof unknowingbeyondknowledgeand forthesilencebeyondspeech,so artmust tendtowardanti-art, heeliminationof the"subject".. the substitution f chance or intention,and thepursuitof silence.7Sontag's references to the "activity of the mystic" and the "cravingfor the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silencebeyond speech" are also apt in the case of Clarice Lispector, whose

    5The Dismemberment of Orpheus, 2nd ed. (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982).6Lowe 34.7Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, 1969) 4-5.

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    most memorablecharactersundergo mysticalquests for self-awarenessand authenticityof being. In undertakingthese quests they find them-selves mysteriously impelled by the anarchy of language toward aNirvanalike state of inner awareness beyond knowledge and towardthe silence that lies forever beyond the speech act. Because Lispectorsees the natureand function of language as inseparablefrom her mostbasic theme, the human impulsetoward self-realizationand awareness,virtually all of her narrativesfeature a character who struggles againstthe silence of language failure, one whose ontological anxieties bothderive from and reflect the unstable ebb and flow of language.Relating directly to structure as well as to characterization, lan-guage use in Lispector's fiction falls into two distinct categories: itsexpressionof a character'sprivateidentity and its expressionof a char-acter'spublic identity. This structuralistduality producesthe binary-and dialectical- tension that characterizesher work and, at the sametime, functions as the very mechanism that generates the discourseof silence so typical of her fiction. The silence, then, that Hassan,Sontag, Steiner, and others see as distinguishing postmodernist fictionis preeminently he kind of silence that Lispectorcultivatesin her work.For the Brazilian writersilence becomes a metaphor for noncommuni-cation, for the failure of language, just as it is for other, better knownpostmodernists like Borges, Barthelme, Nabokov, and Beckett.This public/private polarity providesLispectorwith a structurallycontrastive framework on which she can develop her characters.Among the most famous of these, Martim (of TheApple in the Dark,1961), becomes known to the readerprimarilythrough his silent, innerruminations about the role language plays in the shapingand reshapingof his identity. The function of language as a vital yet enigmatic forcein humanexistence,in fact, graduallyemergesas the realsubjectmatterof the novel. In the course of this open-ended and mysterious narra-tive, Lispector develops two separate but closely interrelated move-ments from out of her ontologically oriented subject matter: in one,Martim, the protagonist, physically rejects the bourgeois society ofwhich he has been a part; in the other, he rejects language, which hecomes to perceive as being as meretricious as the society that he hasfled. The problem, as GregoryRabassapoints out, is that Martimdoesnot understand any of this very well.8 As a postmodernist antihero,Martim is overwhelmed by the wave of words that engulfs him. Be-fuddled by the endless semantic possibilities inherent in these signs,

    8Introduction to The Apple in the Dark, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York:Knopf, 1967) ix-xvi.

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    he graduallyreduceshimself to a primitiveconsciousness, one in whichthe confident, secure speech-act is beyond his ability to generate.Strugglingto comprehend the unstable relationship between languageand reality, Martim falls silent. Although his mind blazes with an in-tensely poetic language use, Martim fails to break out of his state ofsolitude and noncommunication. Dimly sensing that he has becomea prisoner of words, Martim can neither articulate what bothers himnor verbalize a plan to control the confusion, anxiety, and trepidationhe feels:Onlyafterwards id he seemto understandwhat he hadsaid,andthenhe looked the sun in the eye. "Ihave lost the speechof otherpeople,"hethenrepeated lowly,as if the wordsweremoreobscure hantheywere...... At some unidentifiable oint, thatman had becomeprisonerof aringof words...For honesty'ssake, he wantedto make clear to them that he knewitwas the sunthatwasinflatinghiswords andmaking hem so overdoneandso grandiloquent, nd that it was the insistentsun along with his insistentsilencethat madehim want to speak.9It is not that Martim does not use language, for, like Beckett'sMolloy, he talks-or thinks-obsessively. What Martim cannot dois control language; indeed, it is his unsettling discovery that languagecontrols him. Reflecting his strugglewith language and being, the text,narrating from within, tells us:

    What did he want?Whatevert was thathe wantedhad been born farawayinside of him, and it was not easyto bringthe stammeringmurmur o thesurface ...His obscure ask wouldhave been easier f he had allowed himselftheuse of wordsthat had alreadybeen created. But his reconstruction ad tobeginwith his own words becausewordswerethe voice of a man .... Themomenthe acceptedalien words he would automaticallybe accepting heword"crime,"nd he wouldbecomenothingbut a commoncriminaln flight.It was still too earlyfor him to give himself a name-and give a name towhat he wanted.(The Apple 134)Unnerved by the existential responsibility his realization about lan-guage and being entails, Martim, like other postmodernist heroes,becomes anxious and passive, a confused and willing victim ready to

    9ClariceLispector, TheApple in the Dark, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York:Knopf, 1967) 23, 37. All further references to this edition appear parenthetically inthe text.

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    be led back to a society that he will want to punish him for his trans-gressions, both real and imagined.At the conclusion of the novel, when Martimmeekly allows him-self to be arrested for a crime he had committed, he shows his ownontological insecurity by insisting that the authorities know what theyare doing by taking him back to society for punishment:"Let'sgo," he saidthen, goinguncertainly verto the four smallandconfusedmen. "Let's o,"hesaid.Because heymusthave knownwhattheyweredoing. Theycertainlyknewwhattheyweredoing.Inthe nameof God,I commandyou to be sure.Becausea wholepreciousandputrescentweightwas being giveninto theirhands,a weightto be throwninto the sea, anda very heavyone too. And it was not a simplething-because there had tobe mercywhenthat burdenof guiltwasthrownoverboard oo. Becauseweare not so guiltyafter all; we aremorestupidthan guilty. So with mercytoo, then. "In he nameof God,I'monlywaiting oryouto knowwhatyou'redoing. BecauseI, my son, I am only hungry.And I have thatclumsy wayof reaching or anapple n thedark-and tryingnot to dropit"(TheApple361)

    Martim'sstrugglewith language, which embodies Steiner'sbasic pointin "Retreat rom the World" Languageand Silence), ends in the silenceof indecision and failure.Although he senseshe can create an authenticexistence if he can put his feeling into words, Martim is fatallyenervated by the anarchical force of language. He discovers that helacks the courage and the will to make it yield to him a firmly de-lineated sense of his own identity. The easierway is to let society, withits authority figures and its emphasis on cliched and superficial think-ing, simply issue him an identity, one based on conformity and con-ventionality. Exhausted and frustratedby his effort to think for him-self, Martim collapses into a state of intellectual and psychologicalsilence, one reinforced, ironically, by its encouragement of noncriti-cal and trivializingverbalexchange. The narrativeends in a veryuncer-tain way because Martim, by now both unable and unwilling to takeresponsibility for his identity, simply gives up and hopes, in a desul-tory fashion, that someone will tell him who he is. The reader under-stands what Martim does not, however: that the authority figures hehopes will do this for him are just as confused and as inauthentic ashe is. Language has failed Martim in his quest for self-awareness andknowledge. Silence prevails.A Lispectorcharacterwho responds quite differently to the prob-lem of the capacity of languageto define and control human existenceis G. H., from The Passion According to G. H. (1964). Structured424 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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    in the form of an unbroken interior monologue, this intense novelalso tells the story of a mystic quest for self-realization, one under-taken by a woman known to the reader only by her initials, G. H.Speaking to her narratee,10 G. H. declares:an entirelynew and latentpowerthrobbed n me, and I was in possessionof a certaingrandeur: he grandeurof courage,as if my very fear had atlast invested me with daring...An entire life of civilizedrefinement for fifteen centuriesI had notfoughtback, for fifteen centuries had not killed,for fifteen centuries hadnot died anentire ife trapped n proprietynowcoalesced n meandrever-berated ike a silent bell whose vibrationsI did not require o hear...... What had I done? ...

    ... I had killed. I had killed!1Unlike Martim, G. H. chooses to confront the chaos of existence bystrugglingwith language until it yields to her the authenticity of beingthat she demands. But like Martim, G. H. also ends up engulfed ina state of silence, though in her case it is the silence of a private soli-tude achieved through articulated self-liberation. For her, as for mostof Lispector's characters, this is the silence of isolation, the silenceborn of the realization that whether we know it or not and whetherwe like it or not, in this world we are alone. The postmodernisticallyself-conscious text of this novel comes, as Bella Jozef says, "face toface with itself, creates itself with each step, in a dialectic of speakingand saying, which leads from silence to silence."12As G. H. relatesher experience:

    Thereopenedin me, with the heavinessof greatstonedoors, the vastlife of silence,the same ife of silencewithinwhichdweltthe stock-still un,that same life of silence n which dwelt the immobilized oach. And wouldit no doubt be the same life of silencein me, if I but had the couragetoabandon ... to abandon my feelings? . . .This is madness, I thought with my eyes closed. ... It was, my God,a worsetruth,theterrible ruth. Butwhyterrible?Simplybecause t contra-dictedwithoutwordseverythinghat I had formerly hought,also withoutwords ...

    '?See Gerald Prince, "Notes Toward a Categorization of Fictional 'Narratees,'"Genre 4 (1971): 100-6."Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., trans. Jack E. Tomlins,The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, vol. 2, ed. Emir RodriguezMonegal with Thomas Colchie (New York: Knopf, 1977) 780. All further referencesto this edition appear parenthetically in the text.'2Jozef 25.

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    How can I explainit to you? (ThePassion 782-83; firstellipsisin original)To achieve her state of authentic being, G. H. realizes that a pricehas to be paid, that to be free means ultimately to be isolated fromnonfree beings (like Martim), people who refuse to assume responsi-bility for who and what they are. Laboring to understand the natureof her essentially religious experience, G. H. declares:

    Now I understand that what I had begun to feel was joy, what I hadnot yet recognizedor understood. In my mute outcry for help, I was strugglingagainst a vague primevaljoy that I did not wish to discern in myself because,althoughit was vague, nonetheless it was terrible: t was a joy without redemp-tion. I do not know how to explain it to you, but it was a joy without hope.(The Passion 789)G. H.'s discourse of silence, then, is like that of the actor who haslines full of meaningful words to speak but no one to speak them to.As Gerald Prince describes it, G. H. is really her own narratee;13sheis speaking to herself. Martim, by way of contrast, ultimately rejectsany further effort to strugglewith the problemsof languageand being.He capitulates, electing to reintegrate himself into society, which heknows to be based on nonauthentic, nonvital language use. At theend of her story, G. H. gains a new awareness of the loneliness ofher battle, and she realizes that because of her intensely private mysti-cal experience she has been irrevocably changed. Her choice, whichexemplifiesSontag'scomment about the function of the mystic in post-modernist literature, is between accepting her newly free but painfulstate of freedom or disavowing this condition, which would amountto the reestablishment of a conventional, inauthentic social being.Though both derive from a state of silence, the choices of Martimand G. H. are radically different.G. H., the protagonist of one of the most important LatinAmeri-can novels of the 1960s,14 s similar to Catherine, the main characterof the short story "FamilyTies"(Family Ties, 1960). Catherine'scon-flict, like G. H.'s, arises because she must choose between continuinga materiallycomfortablebut intellectuallyvacuous existence or embark-ing on a new life, one that is intellectually meaningful but both de-manding and perilous. The language used in Catherine's story serves

    13"Introduction o the Study of the Narratee," Reader-Response Criticism, ed.Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980) 7-25.'4EmirRodriguezMonegal,TheBorzoiAnthology of Latin AmericanLitera-ture, vol. 2, 779.

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    to underscore the tension that exists in Lispector's work between thepublic and private identities of her characters. When Catherine, anurban middle-class wife and mother, is struggling to come to gripswith her nascent sense of self-awareness, the text assumes the formof an indirect interior monologue. We read:Relievedof hermother'scompany,she had recoveredher briskmannerofwalking;aloneit was mucheasier .... Andthingshaddisposed hemselvesin sucha waythat thesorrowof love seemed o her to be happiness every-thingaroundherwas so tenderandalive,the dirtystreet,theold tramcars,orangepeelon thepavements strength lowedto and fro in her heartwitha heavyrichness.'5

    When Catherinespeaks, however, she presentsherpublic or socialself, a self that is utterly commonplace in word and deed. Yet thoughshe is a character in a conventional social context, Catherine oftenengages her husband and her child in strikingly crypticdialogue, usingwords that function as transmitters of what all involved assume tobe a commonly sharedbody of knowledge.As a deconstructionistcriticwould note, however, the story'sbasic tension - which stems from thefailure of language to communicate- derives from the fact that themain charactersdo not share a common body of knowledge, that theyall operate in a state of nearly total isolation and conflict. In starkcontrast to the flatness and inexpressiveness of her spoken dialogues(which constitute her social discourse), Catherine's silent inner mono-logues are chargedwith lyrical nuance, semiotic ambiguity, and philo-sophic intensity. While her spoken language representsessentially thelowest possible common denominator of human linguistic interaction,Catherine'srichlypolysemous unspoken language represents he powerand energyof the humanmind in agitatedand simultaneouscontempla-tion of self and of others in the world:

    "Ihaven't orgottenanything?" er motherasked.Catherine, oo, hadtheimpressionomething ad beenforgotten,andthey ookedapprehensivelyat eachother-because, if somethinghadreallybeenforgotten,it was toolate now...."Mother," aid the woman. What had they forgottento say to eachother?But nowit was too late. It seemed o herthat the olderwomanshouldhave said oneday,"Iamyourmother,Catherine," nd that she shouldhavereplied,"AndI am your daughter."'5Clarice Lispector, Family Ties, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Austin: U of TexasP, 1972) 119. All further references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text.

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    "Don'tgo sittingin a draught!"Catherine alled out."Nowdear,I am not a child,"her mothershoutedback,stillobviouslyworrying about her appearance .... and Catherine felt a sudden urge to askher if she had been happy livingwith her father."Givemy love to Auntie!"she shouted."Yes,yes.""Mother," aid Catherine ...."Catherine!"aid theolderwomanwith a gapingmouthandfrightenedeyes. ... The train was already moving. (Family Ties 118-19)

    By imbuing her narrativewith a sharply interiorized and phenomeno-logical cast,'6 one vacillating between depictions of her character'spublic and private worlds, Lispector succeeds in showing howCatherine, too, becomes enveloped in silence. We see her unable tosay what she wants to say, to break out of her solipsism and com-municate meaningfully with others. Failing to achieve with languagewhat she wants to achieve, Catherine progressively becomes the iso-lated and frustrated postmodern protagonist.The basic irony of this condition is that the reader comes to under-stand and empathize with Lispector's characters even while realizingthat they are both trappedand trappingthemselvesin their own verballabyrinths. One graduallysees that characters ike Catherine, Martim,G. H., and a host of others either succumb to truncation as intellec-tuallyvalid humanbeingsor arealreadytruncatedand battlingto reani-mate theirexistences.In either case- and this is where the unique powerof Lispector's fiction lies-they are reduced to a state of frustratedsilence, of inexpressionand isolation. The spoken language of Lispec-tor'scharacterscan neithergeneratenor receivethe messagesand codesthat they want, and they areacutelyaware of both this linguisticfailureand the psychological trauma that stems from it.But their unspoken and interiorized language, the cultivation ofwhich is Lispector'sspecial strength,also makes them feel the treacheryof language. Although these characters can sense the emotive expres-siveness of their silent, inner ruminations, they cannot-with rareex-ceptions- transmit the power and vitalityof these arcanesigns to otherbeings. They can intuit and divine the importance of their self-dis-coveries, but they cannot express this crucial knowledge to others.Realizing their inability to control language, to make it be what theywant it to be (a truthful and expressive medium) and to do what they

    6SeeGeorgesPoulet, "Criticismand the Experienceof Interiority"and WolfgangIser, "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," both from Reader-Response Criticism 41-49 and 50-69, respectively.

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    want it to do (to signal clearly who and what they are), Lispector'scharactersbecome frustrated, anxious mutes, desperate to communi-cate but keenly aware that they are unable to do so. They may, asin the cases of Catherine and G. H., discover who they are but thenfind themselves unable to make other people understand. Or, as withMartim, they may simply give up, finding the struggleto establishandmaintain an identity too much to endure. Anna, the hausfrau pro-tagonist of "Love"(Family Ties), is of this latter sort, a prototypicalLispectoriancharacter who sees how she might be a very different sortof person but who lacks the resolve to bring the change about.Although Lispector's characters are typically developed more as "dif-ferent states of mind"17 than as physical or even psychological entities,their pain is viscerally human. We know them well, for their anxietiesare shared by a great many people in the post-World War II era, anera poignantly depicted in the epistemologically insecure and painfullyself-conscious literature of postmodernism.A singular exception to the muted silence of Clarice Lispector'spostmodernist fiction is An Apprenticeship or TheBook of Delights,a controversial novel published in 1969. The primary difference be-tween this work and her other efforts is that here dialogue plays amore decisive role in the development of the characters than doesmonologue. This dialogue, moreover, is significant for the two majorcharacters involved because it succeeds in bridging the existential gapthat isolates people. An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights isalso less concernedper se with the ontological dimensions of language.It focuses, as do nearly all of Lispector's texts, on a quest forself-knowledge and identity, but unlike most of her other work it doesso by concentrating on the verbal and physical interchange of twopeople, a man and a woman who seek honestly to overcome the lone-liness of their separateexistences. Because this novel develops primarilyon the denotative strengthof its language, it is considerablyless poeticthan her other work. Yet even here, in a narrative that depicts thegrowth and ultimate unification of two beings, the language succeedsin recreating the private, inner worlds of the characters. A key dif-ference is that in An Apprenticeship or TheBook of Delights the tex-tual balance shifts away from a representation of the inner world andtoward the creation of an external and social one.

    The smothering silence that characterizesLispector's other workis much less conspicuous in this novel, where it functions as a featureof the human condition that can be overcome. Because for Clarice17Pontiero, introduction to Family Ties 19.

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    Lispector silence is closely associated with isolation and linguisticfailure, the man and woman in An Apprenticeship or The Book ofDelights gain authentic"voices," hat is, achievemeaningfulcommuni-cation, only by using love to overcome their solitude. A bit of dia-logue coming late in the novel illustrates this point:"Doyouthink ove is makinga mutualgift of one's solitude?Afterall,it's the greatest hingthat one can give of oneself,"said Ulysses."Idon't know.... but I do know thatmy searchhas come to an end.What I mean is I'vecome to the edge of a new beginning."'8

    To accomplish this, Lori and Ulysses do what all other ClariceLispec-tor characters do: they confront the realities of their existences.Unhappy and dissatisfied with what they find, the two main charactersof this sixth novel find in each other what is missing in their lives.Lori and Ulysses succeed because, unlike most of Lispector's othercharacters, each is able to make language encode a system of feelingand thought and to transmit this code to another human being, onewho has overcome his (or her) own isolation enough to receive themessage and respond to it in a meaningful fashion.But while Lori and Ulysses areunique among Lispector'sfictionalbeings because they do communicate with each other, they do so byfirst engaging in a typical Lispectorian quest, the lonely and solitarypursuitof self, of self-awarenessand knowledge. By findingthemselvesfirst, they are then able to attain a voice of guileless self-expression,and this gives each of them a chance to establish contact with anotherperson. As the narrator tells it:And withsudden,unexpectedoy shenoticednotonlythat she wasopeningher hands andheart,but that she could do it withoutrisk!"I'mnot losinganything!I'mfinallygiving myselfand whathappenswhenI give is that Ireceive,I receive... .". . . she realized hat it was in herveryact of relinquishmenthat laythe still dangerous pleasure of existing. (An Apprenticeship 108-9)The drama and pathos of Lispector's characters arise from the factthat while they may gain a voice through self-inquisition, they oftenfail to find anyone able or willing to respond to their signals. Thus,in Lispector'shard, uncompromising world, it is not enough to estab-lish a linguisticallysecure sense of personal identityand self-awareness.

    IClarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights, trans. RichardMazzara and Lorri Parris (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986) 116. All further referencesto this edition appear parenthetically in the text.430 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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    One must also be lucky, and there is no guaranteethat a similarlyfreeand responsive person will be found.Lori and Ulysses succeed in breaking through the psychological,linguistic, and social barriers that imprison each of them because theydiscover they can each develop as human beings only by overcomingthe hitherto insurmountable solitude of the other. The silence of theirrespectiveworlds is not the ignorance, fear, and confusion that bedevilso many of Lispector's characters, however. For Lori and Ulysses itis the silence of knowing who and what you wish to be while also beingfearful you will fail to achieve what you desire. Their fear of failingto attain and articulate an authentic identity stunts each of them until,paradoxically, they learn to use the silence of language to break downthe social and psycholinguistic walls that have been erected betweenthem:Lorithoughtthatthat was perhapsone of the most importantexperiencesfor humansand animalsalike:silentlyaskingfor helpand that helpbeinggivensilently.For despitethe exchangeof words, it had been silentlythathe had helped her. (An Apprenticeship 87)In doing this, Lori and Ulysses recoverwhat Hassan calls the "ancientconnection" between love and silence, 9 a connection generated by aquiet contemplation of self. Only then, Lispector tells us, can a manor a woman hope to use the positive force of love and language forpersonal growth and fulfillment, as Lori and Ulysses do:"The ruthis, Lori, that deepinsideI'vesearchedmy wholelife for divinerapture.I had neverthoughtthat, instead,I woulddiscover he divinityofthe body."

    As for her, shehadstruggledherwholelife againsthertendency o becarriedaway,neverallowingherself o getin over herhead .... Nowin thesilence hatenveloped hem,sheopened hefloodgates,surrendered ersoulandbody and did not knowhow much time hadpassed,for she had aban-doned herselfto a deep, carefreeplunge. (An Apprenticeship111)The words of love that Lori and Ulysses declare to each otherareparalleledby physicallovemaking, a structuraland thematicfeatureof the novel that demonstrates Norman O. Brown's observation in

    Love's Body:'9IhabHassan, "TheLiterature of Silence,"Innovations: Essays on Art &Ideas,ed. Bernard Bergonzi (London: Macmillan, 1968) 93-108.

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    The true meanings of words are bodily meanings, carnal knowledge; and thebodily meaningsare the unspoken meanings. What is always speaking silentlyis the body.The matrix in which the word is sown is silence. Silence is the mother tongue.20Epitomizing Brown's point, the voice of Lispector's novel says:

    He kissed her slowly until finally they could break apart, and theyremained there looking unashamedly into each other's eyes. They both knewthat they had already gone too far. And they were still afraid to surrendercompletely. They kept silent. It was then, lying on the floor, that they madesuch great love that they were afraid of their own greatness. (An Appren-ticeship 109)In their verbal and physical lovemaking, Lori and Ulysses reanimatethe ancient and sacred connection between word and deed, betweensignifier and signified, and it is this feature that gives their story itsguardedsense of optimism about the human condition. A philosophi-cally serious love story in the most complete and unifying sense ofthe term, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights shows howlove - unselfish, nurturing love - can overcome the crippling silenceand isolation of humanexistence.Love, one of Lispector'smost funda-mental thematic concerns, is everywherepresent in her fiction. Play-ing diverse but decisive roles, it appears prominently in such worksas Close to the SavageHeart (1944), "Love"and "TheBuffalo"(FamilyTies), "The Disasters of Sophia" (The Foreign Legion, 1964), "BetterThan to Burn," "The Body," and "MissAlgrave" (The Via Crucis ofthe Flesh, 1974), The Time of the Star (1977), and A Breath of Life(1978). Nowhere, however, does it receive as positive a presentationas it does in An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights, a novel thatsuggests how although language failure is a great human problem, itmay not be an utterly intractable one.No discussion of Lispector's discourse of silence would be com-plete without some commentary on Agua viva (1973), a lyrical novelpar excellence2' hat expressespostmodernism'sphenomenologicalcon-ception of life, its textual self-awareness, and its ironic interplay oflanguage and reality in creating an atmosphere of silence for its char-acters. In addition, however, and in a way that also connects it to thecritical writings of Hassan and Brown, Agua viva implies that love-self-affirming love - can be a redemptive force in human affairs. De-

    20Love's Body (New York: Random, 1966) 265, 264.21See Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963).432 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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    veloping this key point further, and linking it to the uniquely femaleways in which Lispector'sbest characters relate to the world of objectsaround them, Helene Cixous, in Vivre l'orange (1979), argues thatLispector'spersonagesderive this strengthfrom the fact that they workto nurturerather than dominate objects, including people. This is pre-cisely what happensin Agua viva, a novel in which one person's growthdoes not stem from another person's destruction. Even though thenarrator of Agua viva struggles to free herself from a narrow andinhibiting relationship, she is clearly interested not in wounding hererstwhile lover but in helping him to help himself. Read in this way,as a sequel to An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights, Agua vivaalso shows us, however, that although love may overcome the isola-tion of our existences, it may also fail us, leaving us wounded andmore deeply enmeshed than ever in the darkness and silence of oursolitude. For Lispector, love is a potent force, but like any force itcan be used constructively or destructively; that is, it can be used toliberate or imprison. As she shows us repeatedlyin her fiction, in "TheBuffalo," for example, the power of love in human affairs is oftenindistinguishablefrom hate. Both can be used to entrap and subjugateand both can lead to the ruinous self-imprisonment of silence, bitter-ness, and noncommunication.Agua viva develops all of these postmodernistthemes in an arrest-ing fashion, however, combining them in a way that tellingly probesboth the fragility of the love relationshipand the nature of art'sepiste-mological relationship to life. As the text's feminist narrator22says:I'll write now as my head guides me ... and I won't meddle in what it writes... I feel that I know some truths ... that I already anticipate them. Buttruths do not have words. Truths or truth? . . . It's so difficult to say thingsthat cannot be said. How does one translate the silence of our realencounter?23Then, referringto the elusive relationship between words, the text sheis creating and the flux of her consciousness, the voice declares:

    22Helene Cixous has raised some interesting issues regarding the nature of"women'swriting"and, specifically, about the "feminism" of Lispector's voice. See,for example, "TheLaugh of the Medusa,"trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs1 (1976): 875-93; "L'approchede ClariceLispector:Se laisser lire (par)ClariceLispec-tor-A Paixao segundo C. L.," Poetique 40 (1979):408-19; La Jeune n&e Paris:UnionGenerale d'Editions, 1975); and Vivre l'orange (Paris: des Femmes, 1979).23ClariceLispector, Agua viva (White Water), trans. Elizabeth Lowe and EarlE. Fitz, a manuscript soon to be published by the University of Minnesota Press asThe Flow of Life, 42-43. All further referencesto this manuscript appear parentheti-cally in the text.LISPECTOR 433

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    Whenyou readmeyou willaskwhyI do not restrictmyselfto paintingandto my exhibitions,sinceI writeroughlyand without order. The answer sthatnow I feel the need for words,and whatI write s new for mebecausemytrue wordwas,untilnow,untouched.Theword s myfourthdimension.(Agua viva2)Termed not a novel but a "fiction" by the author,24Agua viva takesthe form of a long letter narratedby a woman who feels it necessaryto terminate an unsatisfactory love affair. Using words to emancipateherself, the woman's discourse, which holds the text together, amountsto an uninterrupted interior monologue in which she explores thepotency and meaning of love, the efficacy of language (versus paint-ing) as a medium of communication, and the extent of the solitudethat characterizes our lives. The most complete lyrical novel Lispec-tor ever wrote, Agua viva also typifies the way a postmodernist textself-consciously questions both its own creation and the capacity oflanguage to aid in the quest for knowledge and self-awareness. Domi-nated by interrelated images of birth, darkness, silence, and water,Agua viva is neitherdespairingnor nihilistic,however. Indeed, throughthe strengthof the narrator'saffirmation of self, the text makes a posi-tive statement about how we might better understandand conduct ourlives:

    Whatwillstillbe, afterwards,s now ... now is thereignof now. Andwhile improvisationasts, I am beingborn.Andthisway,afteranafternoonof asking"WhoamI?"and of wakingat one o'clockin the morningstill in despair-this way, at three o'clockinthe morning, I awoke and found myself. I went to my encounterwithmyself-calm, happy,plenitudewithoutexplosion.I amsimplymyself.Andyou are you. It'svast, it will last.What I writeyou is a this. It won'tstop, it will continue.Look at me and love me ... no, look at yourself and love yourself,yes, that'sthe way it should be.What I writeyou continues,and I am bewitched.(Agua viva 81-82)The silence of Agua viva'snarrator, then, stems from her realiza-tion that though she is free she is also alone in the world, "bewitched"

    by the momentousness of her liberating self-affirmation. She is silentbecause she courageously accepts her necessary and willingly self-imposed isolation, not because she lacks the ability, courage, or will24Jozef 26.

    434 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

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    to confront the truth of her condition. Her outward or social silenceis overcome privately, however, because the narrator ultimately suc-ceeds, by dint of intellectualand emotional honesty, in coming to termswith herself, in communicatingwith the innermostaspectsof herbeing.She, too, is her own narratee. This private use of language to firstestablish and then sustain an authentic sense of personal identity iswhat links the voice of Agua viva to what Lori, Ulysses, and G. H.do in their novels, but it is also what Martim and Anna cannot do.Their silenceis complete, both privateand public, while the other char-acters at least grapple with the entwined problems of language andbeing, the problems that form the thematic bedrock of Lispector'sfiction.As such writersand critics as Raymond Federman, Ronald Suke-nick, John Barth, Ihab Hassan, George Steiner, and Susan Sontagdescribe it, literary postmodernism aspires to silence, to the kind ofnonexpression and noncommunication that occurs when, living in aBabel of verbalnoise, words come to lose the meaningswe expectthemto have. Turning against itself, the literatureof postmodernism showsus that the more we talk, the less we communicate,that silence,becauseit leads to a pure, uncontaminated preverbal state, ironically begins

    to do what we want language to do. The self-conscious and reductivenature of this condition has led many critics to cite silence as beingone of the key metaphors for postmodernist literature. Just as writerslike Beckett, Burroughs,and Milleruse the frustratedsilenceproducedby failed language, so, too, does ClariceLispector focus on the decep-tive linkagesbetweenlanguageand humanconsciousness,on our abilityto know what we are doing when we use words to discard or createidentities for ourselves. Yet Lispector'sfiction is also built on a realiza-tion that while the silence that derives from a failure to communicateterrifies and intimidates people, it can also regenerate them, urgingthem toward the attainment of a more honest and personally satisfy-ing existence. Characters ike Martim, G. H., Catherine, Lori, Ulysses,the nameless voice in Agua viva, and a host of others show us thatwhile the silence of confusion, fear, and isolation may be "demonic,"it is also "holy,"25capable of freeing us from our ontological terrorsby forcing us to confront the truth of our arbitrary, linguisticallydefined existences.ClariceLispector,one of Brazil'smost importanttwentieth-centurynarrativists, is gaining an international following because of her fic-

    25Hassan, "The Literature of Silence" 108.

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    tionalplumbingsof the psycholinguistic ndphilosophicaldepthsofsuchissues.Too often studied n isolation,as a brilliantbut curiousliteraryphenomenon,ClariceLispector s a writerwhose work fitssquarelynto thethematicand structuralmainstream f Western ost-modernism.Deservingmuchmoreattention romthisperspective, erlyricallywrought"literature f silence"offers us much to consider.The Pennsylvania State University

    436 | CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE


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