XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

The Limits of Relational Affect: Singularity and Temporality in Clarice Lispector’s Writing

• In Event: Literatura feminina ou literatura feita por mulheres? A tradição literária brasileira e a disjuntiva de uma literatura social

Abstract

This essay delves into the Portuguese language and textual analysis to demonstrate how Clarice Lispector’s journey implicated a problem of expression. Enamored with the writings of Baruch de Spinoza, she was determined to harness her passion for the hidden depths, determining her own coming to being at every moment and with every breath. This yearning for the absolute in an instant, which she would come to call “instantes-já” (10) or “it” (Água viva 153), was nowhere more evident than in her late writings when narrative became progressively undone. A hora da estrela [The Hour of the Star] already marks her annoyance with the written word and its limitations through a surrogate male narrator. Both in Água viva [The Stream of Life] and in Um sopro de vida [A Breath of Life], her character(s) embrace the impersonal as part of an attempt to loosen the grip that reality has on our bodies. Nearing her death, story-telling gives way to Clarice in the nakedness of her thoughts, living without any pretension of selfhood. This vulnerability with which she exposed herself to the reader turned her stream of consciousness into a dubitative babbling of dramatic overtones. I will then examine her late creative work with the help of Giles Deleuze’s formation of time from Difference and Repetition (1968) and the concept of conceptual persona coined in What is Philosophy (1991), written in partnership with Félix Guattari.

Author

• Daniel Raso-Llarás, Wake Forest University