Hélène Cixous and the Hour of Clarice LispectorAuthor(s): Anna KlobuckaReviewed work(s):Source: SubStance, Vol. 23, No. 1, Issue 73 (1994), pp. 41-62Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684792 .Accessed: 03/05/2012 10:08

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Helene Cixous and the Hour of Clarice Lispector

Anna Klobucka

Quando eu fico muito sozinha, eu ndo existo. Eu so existo no didlogo. Clarice Lispector

Nao deixar personne me dando des ordres. Clarice Lispector1

Une Belle Love Affaire

It all began on the twelfth of October 1978, the day Helene fell in love with Clarice. That day, less than a year after Clarice Lispector's untimely death at the age of 52, Helene Cixous discovered in the work of the Brazilian writer a wealth of inspiration that brought her out of a creative

impasse, and was to become a guiding light for her own writing in years to come. As she wrote:

A writing came, with gleaming hands in the darkness, when I no longer dared to help myself, my writing so far away in pure solitude... I spoke no more, I feared my voice, I feared the birds' voices, and all of the calls that look outside, and there is no outside except nothingness, and are extin- guished-a writing found me when I was unfindable to myself. (1989a, 12)2

If the moment love strikes is ultimately unsayable, the abundant flow of writing which this textual coup de foudre has since engendered clearly allows and merits attentive scrutiny. It is, however, a difficult and ungrate- ful task to approach passion in a spirit of cold-hearted analysis: a lover's discourse must not be spoken of, "it admits no description, only simula- tion." The above definition comes from Roland Barthes's own memorable

simulation, which "offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone

speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved ob-

ject), who does not speak" (4). Portraying the lover as "someone speaking within himself," Barthes's characterization seems perfectly designed to

highlight the differently outlined discursive space in which Helene Cixous

places her own reading and writing of/with/through Clarice Lispector.

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42 Anna Klobucka

For if the Barthean (male) lover's discourse is one of "extreme solitude" (1), of "absence of the other" (17), a discourse poignantly external to its object which it can at best envelop like "a very gentle glove" (28), Cixous in her role of a (female) lover of Lispector's text stages a relationship calling for a

quite distinct set of interpretive metaphors. Speaking of Vivre l'orange (1979), one of the earliest and most successful enactments of this intertex- tual liaison, Jean Larose describes its way of communicating with

Lispector's works as one dependent not on a closeness

... semblable A celle des bandelettes qui emaillottent une momie, mais A la maniere-musicale-dont une fenetre n'est plus un miroir; avec la simplicite de la grace, toujours distraite de soi, d'une distraction propre a la presence gracieuse et innocente de l'enfance, du paradis ou de l'orange... (88)

Cixous's "lover's discourse" is thus presented as no longer merely encir-

cling its desired (textual) other, be it tenderly (like a soft glove) or with the morbid possessiveness of a mummy's wrappings, nor does it merely reflect

upon itself in front of a Narcissus's (or Lacan's) mirror-instead it produces a true possibility of communication through the window of prelapsarian innocence.

Most importantly, Cixous's "loved object"-the text of Clarice Lispec- tor-is credited with the power to speak for itself within the discursive

space engendered by the loving subject (Cixous's metatext). For according to Cixous, successful loving as well as reading demands a faithful recogni- tion of the Other's autonomous meaning. Such an approach is stressed, for instance, by the participants in her seminars at the Universite de Paris VIII-Vincennes and at the College International de Philosophie, where

Lispector's texts are a constant and prominent presence. As one of the seminar members remarks,

this faithfulness to the other requires a very close reading of the text, a word by word reading. Each word, each alinea, each comma assumes its mean- ing. In fact, it is this combination of faithfulness and rigor which I find so valuable in the seminar-a combination which truly enables a reading to bring a text alive. (Sellers 148)

No longer a wrapped-up mummy, the dead text is brought alive, made to speak its own meaning, its own true desire. And so, presumably, is the dead writer, in this case Clarice Lispector. It should be acknowledged that the Brazilian writer, few of whose works had been translated into French and/or English before the fateful year of 1978, has come to achieve considerable prominence on the Franco-American literary and academic

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Cixous and Lispector 43

circuit due precisely to Helene Cixous's passionately personal involvement in the propagation of Lispector's writings. Although hailed by Brazilian critics and scholars as one of the most remarkable literary figures of this

century, equalled in her stature only by Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Lispector would likely remain more or less unknown on the international scene were it not for her sudden stardom, triggered by Cixous's recognition in her work of an "outstanding illustration of 'feminine writing"' (Sellers 6). Thus, particularly in American academia, Lispector's growing prominence has become closely associated with the dissemination of the theories and

practices of the French literary and critical current of ecriture feminine. The

following fragment of a scholarly article neatly, if somewhat drastically, exemplifies this situation:

American readers have recently started to look critically at what proponents of ecriture fmninine have to say about theory, women's writing, and women's causes-social, political and economic. Cixous's texts and statements are receiving greater and greater dissemination here. Given her current enthusiasm for Lispector, we should look at Lispector's texts, as well-first, in order to understand Cixous's enthusiasm for them; second, to see an example of the ecriture feminine that Cixous called for in the "Rire de la Meduse." We might also see in Lispector's texts... an indication of the further development of Cixous's own texts. (Armbruster 155)

Some others are clearly more equal than other others. The interest

Lispector's works might hold for feminist literary critics is reduced by Armbruster to their providing an interesting gloss of Cixous's own ideas, and Lispector herself is seen as a successful (if unconscious) apprentice of ecriture fminine:

Lispector responds well to a number of Cixous's exhortations, for example, for women to write, to write about women, to liberate the New Woman from the Old, to inscribe the breath of the whole woman, to bring women to writing. Cixous has thus found in Lispector something of a soul mate. (152-3).

Whether as master and apprentice or as soul mates, Cixous and Lispector are clearly seen as almost one and the same. Another critic terms Lispector a "Cixousian" writer and asserts that while "Clarice Lispector's writing appears different from Cixous'. . . it is one and the same, by the com-

monality of their vision" (Fisher 25). Even a critic like Susan Suleiman, who is careful and suspicious enough to inquire whether such "finding the

'unhoped-for other' [is not] but a way of finding one's other self," ultimate-

ly declares the two authors to be

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44 Anna Kiobucka

... not one, but... very close, very close; so cose that in rereading Clarice's texts in order to understand the last work she wrote before she died (The Hour of the Star), H.C. is brought to reread, and rewrite, several of her own. (1991, xiii-xv)

There can certainly be no doubt that Lispector's work has been enor-

mously influential on Cixous's literary and critical development. What is

striking about the above assessments, however, stems from their not-so- subtle reversal of this intertextual relationship, Lispector becoming in ef- fect more "Cixousian" than Cixous herself has been "Lispectorian." The

unquestioning ease with which this interpretive turnabout is performed might be attributed to a reliance on specifically feminine models of inter-

subjective communication, as articulated, for instance, in Luce Irigaray's celebrated essay "Quand nos lvres se parlent" (1977). This textual enact- ment of an all-female amorous and discursive relationship is based on a

premise of absolute reciprocity, in which "there is no place for an economy of exchange, or of opposition between contraries. The lovers are neither two nor one, neither different nor the same, but un-different (indifferentes)" (Suleiman 1986, 13). Yet, while Cixous's "dialogue" with Lispector in its most intensely lyrical moments appears to call for a complete meltdown of boundaries between (foreign) bodies, languages and texts, it also declares itself respectful of the ultimately irreducible otherness of its counterpart: "II faut que l'autre reste etrangissime dans la plus grande proximite" (Cixous 1989a, 157). It is the tension between the two terms of this irresis- tible paradox that I would like to explore here. Rather than rely on the theories of ecriture feminine, I will instead highlight precisely those

categories which Cixous herself has been emphasizing in her most recent

writings, both literary and critical: the categories belonging to "the scene of

History," to borrow an expression from the title of one of her articles

(1989b). Is Lispector's (Brazilian) foreignness respected or assimilated by

Cixous and her commentators? Is her (Portuguese) literary voice trans- mitted or silenced by the metadiscursive maze with which it has been surrounded? In the following section, I will attempt to identify those sites on the map of the meta-Lispectorian discourse where, geopolitically speak- ing, the noble principle of non-intervention clashes with the pervasive practice of (post-)colonial invasion and domestication of (non-Western

European) cultural otherness.

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Cixous and Lispector 45

A Geopoetics of (Mis)Translation

An Algerian Jew with a German mother and a father whose Sephardic family used to speak Spanish at home; a woman living in a country and

writing in a language that had to become, instead of simply being, her own; a survivor who had the great luck to be born in 1937 not in Germany, but in Oran, Algeria (Suleiman 1991, xviii-xix): by virtue of her multicultural

identity and a life story powerfully molded by historical circumstance, Helene Cixous has never been unaware of the linguistic and geopolitical contingencies of one's subject position. It is no wonder, too, that she should be driven by a passion for "breaking down the wall" (ibid, ix), not only the one between herself and writing, between "man" and "woman," "self" and "other," but also those multiple Berlin walls that are constantly being erected and brought down through successes and failures of transcultural (mis)translations.

One of Cixous's favorite mottos is Kafka's seductively enigmatic sen-

tence, "Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos," which in her French transla- tion becomes "Limonade tout etait si infini." In Susan Suleiman's introduction to an English translation of Cixous's essays, the German word

"grenzenlos" is rendered as both "infinite" and "boundless," at the same time following the French version and departing from it to produce a translation more accurately mirroring the original. I choose to see the twist of meaning between, on the one hand, grenzenlos/boundless and, on the other, infini/infinite, as symptomatic of Cixous's contradictory shifts of ap- proach to cultural otherness, which often occur in her poetic voyages across foreign lands, bodies and texts. As Suleiman emphasizes in her

introduction, for Cixous, "breaking down walls does not necessarily-not desirably-lead to oneness," but instead "to the recognition of composite selves, composite tongues" (xii). This is, in a word, the "geopoetics" of a mosaic rather than of a melting pot. While walls disappear, their traces must remain, as in a mosaic where the nonexistent line marks the dif- ference between green and blue, between red and yellow. And yet, in

"infini," boundaries ("die Grenze") are erased without a trace even as the

plurality inscribed in the composite wor(l)d ("grenzen-los," "bound-less") is preserved in the apparent oneness of the equally composite "in-finity." Thus "grenzenlos" and "infini" share with other complex signs of our times-such as "postmodern," "decentered" or "indeterminacy"-the characteristic of paradoxically incorporating what they aim to contest (Hutcheon 3), displaying their memory of walls being brought down, or, as some would argue, their stigma of complicity. But the boundaries being

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Cixous and Lispector 45

46 Anna Klobucka

preserved/contested in "infinity" are no longer the same ones as those of

"grenzenlos," just as "limits" are different from "borders": a poetic fantasy of bound-less, limit-less expansion supplants the geopolitical concreteness of creation and erasure of borders (a timely issue in Kafka's Europe, by the

way-and in Cixous's). In addition, while "borders" tend to be, almost by definition, plural, "infinity" evokes an undifferentiated oneness-can there be several infinities?

In Cixous's reading and writing of Clarice Lispector, the delights and

perils of translation inevitably constitute a prominent, self-consciously highlighted theme. The imperative of faithfulness toward the Other (text) is frequently mentioned, and so is the risk of betrayal, of becoming a translator-traitor ("traduttore tradittore"). And yet, for all their self-aware-

ness, Cixous's Lispectorian writings often display a sort of slip similar to that which, as I have argued, occurs between "grenzenlos" and "infini":

Lispector's text's cultural and individual Otherness disappears without a

trace, leaving behind only such a pale reflection of itself as can, in effect, be labeled "Cixousian." In order to venture a possible explanation for this

tendency, we might look at Cixous's first piece of writing on Lispector, an article published in the French journal Poetique (1979): there, as Toril Moi

observes, Cixous stresses the Brazilian writer's "capacity to endow words with their essential meaning" (115):

En ces temps violents et paresseux, ou nous ne vivons pas ce que nous vivons ... nous n'entendons plus ce que les choses veulent nous dire encore, nous traduisons, nous traduisons, tout est traduction et reduction, il ne reste presque plus rien de la mer qu'un mot sans eaux: car nous avons aussi traduit les mots, nous les avons vides de leurs paroles, seches, reduits, embaumes, et ils ne peuvent plus nous rappeler comment ils surgissaient des choses autrefois comme l'eclat de leur rire essentiel, quand, de joie, elles

s'appelaient, elles exultaient leur nom-parfum; et "mer", "mer" sentait al- gues, bruissait sel, et nous goutions l'aimee infinie, nous lechions l'etrang,re, le sel de sa parole sur nos lMvres.

Mais il suffit qu'une voix clarice dise: la mer, la mer, pour que ma coquille eclate, la mer s'appelle, mer! m'appelle, eaux! me rappelle, et j'y vais, vague, je me rappelle A elle. (412-13)

It is impossible to overlook the fact that the last sentences vibrate with the one word which never appears in the quoted passage, even as it is spoken by it, again and again: la mre.3 Phonetically indistinguishable from la mer, it is the French mother that the "voice clarice" has the power to bring into existence. And then the walls go down, "[la] coquille eclate," and the

memory returns of the time when "nous gouftions l'aimee infinie, nous lechions l'etrangere, le sel de sa parole sur nos levres." But the taste is salty

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Cixous and Lispector 47

like tears, not sweet like mother's milk; the sea/mother is an "etrang&re," yet she can only be mother in French. Am I being outrageously far-fetched in suggesting that Lispector as well, while remaining "foreign," must be reinvented as French in order to truly become mother for Cixous? And that the violent distaste for the constant need to "translate and reduce" might perhaps betray a wandering Jewoman's fatigue and frustration, as well as a nostalgic desire for a mother/land of her own?

There is, however, one more reason why I have chosen to quote the above passage. If, in Cixous's interpretation, the "voix clarice" brings out the true essence of things, if it sings out the sea, and the sea becomes mother, and mother gives rebirth to Helene (la coquille eclate)-this entire, beautifully woven, poetic web would fall apart, were we to pay attention to what the voice of Clarice Lispector actually says when it speaks the sea. For, in Portuguese, the sea is no longer mother; it is, in fact, "o mar," a masculine noun. Bringing in a mark of an otherness truly foreign, carried by a doubly alien-Portuguese and masculine-intruder, would surely shat- ter the blissful balance in which la mer and la mre co-exist in the French

sign, allowing Helene to be reborn. Which is probably why Cixous herself doesn't mention the Portuguese noun, even though it is her frequent habit to comment on the grammatical gender of key words, both in her own works and in Lispector's.

The most striking exercise in multilingual ecriture, which Lispector's foreignness, interwoven with her own, prompted Cixous to produce, is the

essay Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orange, first published by des femmes in 1977, and reprinted in the volume L'Heure de Clarice Lispector (8-113).4 The

linguistic backbone of the essay is a side-by-side English-French transla- tion; however, it also incorporates words from a number of other lan-

guages: Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Latin, German. Furthermore, the two sides of the essay do not mirror each other with the conventional accuracy of a translation. While it is true that every translation has no choice but to be, to some degree, a mis-translation, this one self-consciously and defiant-

ly exhibits its faultiness. To illustrate, let me quote a particularly dazzling passage:

Juis-je juive ou fuis-je femme? Jouis-je judia ou suis-je mulher? Joy I donna? ou fruo en filha? Fuis-je femme ou est-ce que je me rejuive? (35).

Am I enjewing myself? Or woe I woman? Win I woman, or wont I jew-ich? Joy I donna? Gioia jew? Or gioi am femme? Fruo. (34)

A very "Cixousian" text, Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orange is neverthe- less also both a paean to Clarice Lispector's coming into Cixous's life, and,

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ostensibly, a reading of the Brazilian writer's novel A paixao segundo G.H.,

published shortly before in French translation by des femmes (as La Passion selon G.H.). And here's where the trouble starts. In order to articulate what it is that I find so troublesome about Vivre l'orange, let me first quote another inquisitive reader of Cixous's essay, Sharon Willis:

How can I read this text? Is it, in its originary bilingualness, accessible only to the bilingual reader, since one is constantly suspended between the two languages? How can I read it? Where does it address me, in my English or in my French? .... Who is its reader? Possibly the one who inhabits and is inhabited by both languages, at the border between them. (77)

The network of communication generated by Vivre l'orange (communica- tion between the text and its reader, as well as between the two sides of the text) is here subordinated to the originary premise of its French-English bilingualness, both the speaking subject(s) and the implied reader being "inhabited by both languages," and balancing their writing/reading "at the border between them." While gaining access to the text requires the

sophistication of a bilingual competence, Vivre l'orange stops short of

moving beyond its self-contained French/English di-versity and of fulfill-

ing its Utopian potential of becoming a "nonsite inhabited by so many languages that it is anchored in none" (Willis 81). Such a textual mosaic, were it possible to compose, would echo Cixous's recollection of her grow- ing up in the midst of a linguistic melange:

And the tongue that was singing in my ears? It was languages: Spanish, Arabic, German, French. Everything on this earth comes from far off, even what is very near. I listened to all the languages. I sang in German. I also cackled with the hens. (1989b, 2)

A memory of such vertiginous multi-versity is indeed reflected in Vivre

l'orange, through its copious use of "foreign" (that is, foreign to both

English and French) linguistic elements. Given this polyglot quality of the text, what am I still complaining about? A closer look at the treatment accorded to one such intrusion might help explain my continuing dissatis- faction with the status of those not-fully-resident aliens in the apparently egalitarian geopoetic fantasy of Vivre l'orange.

There can be no doubt that the key word in the essay is the one

incorporated in its title and displaced throughout its texture, a transla- tion/stand-in for its every sign and theme, be it women, Jews, writing, or the body: the orange, I'orange, laranja (Willis 77). The orange is also the

symbolic point of (mis-)communication between Lispector and Cixous, translating, as it does, Lispector's "apple" (from her novel The Apple in the

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Cixous and Lispector 49

Dark) into the fruit whose name carries, for Cixous, an infinite potential for

poetic and interpretive transformations, beginning with "Oran-je," an ad- dition of Cixous's (French) "I" to the name of her native (Algerian) city, Oran (1989b, 2).

In Vivre l'orange, however, the orange is, above all, the Gift which Helene receives from Clarice, the gift of rebirth, of blissful rediscovery of the lost wor(l)ds:

It was a mere nothing,-that seized me absolutely. The Gift. At once taken. She showed me a face and I saw it, I had the sight of this face. Then she showed me a fruit, which had become foreign to me, and she gave me back the sight of this fruit. She read it to me, with her humid and tender voice, she called it naranja, she translated it, into my tongue, and I rediscovered the taste of the lost orange, I re-knew the orange. (52)

C'etait un rien,-qui m'a saisie absolument. Le Don. Aussitot prise. Elle m'a montre un visage et je l'ai vu, j'ai eu la vue de ce visage. Ensuite elle m'a montre un fruit, qui m'etait devenu etranger, et elle m'a rendu la vue de ce fruit. Elle me l'a lu, avec sa voix humide et tendre, elle l'a appele: laranja, elle l'a traduit, jusqu'A ma langue, et j'ai retrouve le goft de l'orange perdue, j'ai recompris l'orange. (53)

In the above passage, there is only one instance of deliberate mistranslation: the Portuguese laranja is, as Sharon Willis puts it, further "differed/deferred" in Spanish naranja. There would be nothing remark- able about it, except for the fact that, although similarly spelled, the two words differ phonetically to a quite significant degree as, respectively, [lara3a] and [naranxa]. This is hardly a shocker, a disappointed reader

might justifiably say, but in a text where "the significance of the voice cannot be overemphasized," a text which "abounds in references to the

tongue, the voice, ears, and hearing," whose "organs of speech and of

listening are turned inwards and outwards, while the voice of the muse- mother Clarice becomes the milk-ink of the daughter's writing" (Aneja 199), is it not, in such a text, a rather telling fact that the Spanish/Por- tuguese interplay is made to rely on a mirroring of dead (written) signs, which no longer communicate so closely when they are spoken? Once

again, Portuguese, the language of Lispector's writings, comes to life only when it is juxtaposed with French (as in laranja/l'orange, or

[lara3a]/[lora3e]), but does not receive a fully autonomous standing: its

dialogue with Spanish is (from a Cixousian standpoint, which privileges orality) an exchange between corpses.5

Why should it matter that the Cixous-Lispector French/Portuguese textual communication is assimilated, in Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orange,

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into a French/English dialogue, Lispector's language retaining only a token presence in what purports to be a praise and interpretation of her works? What rules of fairness or accuracy can be evoked in addressing this text, so happily insolent, so defiantly un-Law-ful? What about poetic license, about being "carried off by the poetic word" (Conley 152)? To these doubts I can only respond by evoking another text which, like a faithful

apprentice, follows the interlinguistic pattern established by Cixous's

essay, even though it speaks in a very different voice: a voice belonging to academic discourse, relying on a system that pays close attention to no- tions of property and propriety, as exemplified by copyright, manuals of

style, or the obligation to accurately credit one's sources. Carol Armbruster's article "Helene-Clarice: nouvelle voix" in two im-

portant respects can be said to resemble Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orange. First, it is a reading of two novels by Lispector, A paixao segundo G.H. and

Agua viva, through the prism of ideas about ecriture feminine espoused by Cixous. Second, as its title already indicates, it retains throughout a bilin-

gual, French-English identity, in which Lispector's works are quoted from

exclusively in French (with accompanying English translations), while the critic's own discourse is carried out in English.6 Armbruster never com- ments on her privileging of French in those quotations, over either the

Portuguese original or the English translations of Lispector (whose

availability she mentions in a footnote). In another footnote she does, how-

ever, emphasize that "there has been some questioning of the accuracy of the French translations from the Portuguese. In Cixous's seminars, dis-

crepancies are corrected." (She also adds that, as a guest in some of the seminars, she has benefitted from those corrections, and has relied on them in her article [148n7]). We are thus given to understand that Cixous's French translations and interpretations of Lispector are perhaps even closer to the "original" than the original is to itself (similarly, Lispector as a writer comes through as more "Cixousian" than "Lispectorian"). This

perception is reinforced by the close attention Armbruster pays to the nuances of meaning that the French versions display, never even bothering to refer to the Portuguese: "She [the narrator of Agua viva] claims only to

'parler de la force du corps dans les eaux du monde', and she asks us to

'capte[r] cette autre chose dont en verit6 je parle, car moi-meme je ne le

peux"'; in the accompanying footnote, Armbruster explains that "capter in French implies obtaining things through underhanded methods. In refer- ence to water it implies collecting water at the source, at the head-springs" (150).

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Cixous and Lispector 51

In the context of such disregard for Lispector's non-Cixousian linguis- tic and substantive autonomy, it is highly ironic that Armbruster should

praise the Brazilian writer's ability to approach Otherness in a spirit of cautious and respectful inquiry: "Her writing receives the other in its living totality and attempts to relate its life and fullness through a language that calls and names it without possessing or dominating it, without transform-

ing it in any way, and without denying its difference" (151; my emphasis). By contrast, Ambruster's reading of Lispector, modelling itself implicitly on the French-English duality of Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orange, ends up perpetuating what Nancy K. Miller has termed "the old Franco-American

game of binary oppositions" (18). While reaching out to Lispector's work seems to respond to Miller's exhortation "to look elsewhere, beyond the inevitable metropolitan references, for different location and material, beyond the exclusions of another, feminist 'already read"' (21), the treat- ment accorded to her writing makes that inclusion contingent on the Brazilian writer's becoming assimilated to the models created by the very "metropolitan" voice which finds in her a source of its own renewal.

How to Write the Other: Lispector's The Hour of the Star

As I have already implied, the main point of thematic correspondence between Lispector and Cixous is the almost obsessively explored dilemma of approaching, relating to, and interpreting the Other. Lispector's most

extraordinary achievement in this respect is her penultimate novel (and the last one published before her death), A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star). In this metafictional work, a male writer/narrator named Rodrigo S.M. discusses his creation of a female protagonist, Macabea.7 The writer Clarice

Lispector also includes "herself" in the discourse of the novel: "The Author's Dedication" carries a parenthetical subtitle "(in truth Clarice

Lispector)." This is a very "Lispectorian" touch; as Marta Peixoto notes, "from the midsixties on, autobiographical references frequently intrude in

Lispector's fictional narratives, disrupting systematically the fictional

pretense with what we might call autobiographical pretense." Peixoto then

goes on to comment on "the equivocal cross-gender connection between

Lispector and her male narrator":

She gives him a masculine identity; he gives her male blood: 'my blood of a man in his prime'. The author is a woman who assumes a male mask and the narrator the mask of a female author. (193)

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We might add that the male narrator appears to remain unaware of being written (by a woman, no less), and is often made the object of ironic

manipulation by the implied author. However, this is no conclusive evidence as to who, in the end, gets to be on top: the narrator, in his turn, ridicules women writers, saying that Macabea's story has to be written by a man, since "a woman would just melt into tears" (14). As Peixoto com- ments, "with irony, Lispector at once curiously rejects and endorses the cultural myth of the sentimental woman writer" (194). In addition, Rodrigo S.M.'s self-conscious asides often seem to allude to a cliche view of "feminine literature," as when this sophisticated writer condescends to

"attempt, contrary to my normal method, to write a story with a beginning, a middle, and a 'grand finale' followed by silence and falling rain" (13); or when he announces that the story will be "accompanied throughout by the

plangent tones of a violin" (23). To complicate matters even further, most of those asides are pronounced by Rodrigo S.M. without a clear ironic intent, but rather as an indication of his earnest endeavor to succeed in

compassionately telling the story of an utterly victimized female

protagonist: "In writing this story, I shall become more sensitive... I'm not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a humid mist" (16). The ironic wink arrives here from the point of view of the

implied author ("in truth, Clarice Lispector"), as it does again when the narrator declares that in order to become fully absorbed in the creation of his protagonist, he "had to give up sex and soccer" (22). Further, some of the narrator's comments are clear parodic references to earlier novels by Lispector and to their female narrators. Works like Agua viva and A paixao segundo G.H. appear, for example, to be the object of the following self-

parody:

A acqao desta hist6ria terd como resultado minha transfiguraqao em outrem e minha materializaqao enfim em objeto. Sim, e talvez alcance a flauta doce em que eu me enovelarei em macio cip6 (26).

The action of this story will result in my transfiguration into an other and in my ultimate materialization into an object. Yes, and perhaps I'll even achieve the sweet flute music and become entwined in a soft creeper vine (20).

Rodrigo S.M.'s expectations seem to model themselves here on the mystical quests undertaken by the narrators of Lispector's novels: G.H.'s book-

length close encounter with otherness, as represented by a dead cockroach, or the intensely lyrical meditation of the nameless voice narrating Agua viva. The epiphanies of self-fulfilment, in which both novels climax, be-

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come ironically (and tragically) mirrored in the conclusion of The Hour of the Star, where such self-fulfilment (or a self-conscious realization of its

impossibility) is achieved through the protagonist's death-and the narrator's remaining alive:

Death is an encounter with self. Laid out and dead, Macabea looked as imposing as a dead horse. The best thing is still the following: not to die, for to die is not enough. It fails to achieve my greatest need: self-fulfilment... (85)8

In short, Lispector appears to ask her readers (as well as herself) the

following question: What happens when a lyrically self-centered explora- tion of "Otherness" no longer refers itself to a disembodied "you" (as in

Agua viva), or to the objectified reality of a squashed bug's remains, but rather is made to depend on its complicitous involvement in the narrative victimization of a fully developed human protagonist?

It is easy for a reader to become so engrossed in the mapping of the metafictional patterns at work in The Hour of the Star, as to deny attention to the true star of this slim, ninety-page novella. And that is why Rodrigo S.M. reminds us that, while he, as Macabea's author, has the right to remain "devastatingly cold" (13), the reader is denied this privilege, and is made to become personally-and painfully-involved in the story of Macabea's life and death: "Let my readers take a punch in the stomach to see how they enjoy it. Life is a punch in the stomach" (82-3). The reader is forced to assume complicity with the narrator's class-determined point of view ("I am a man who has more money than those who go hungry, which in a certain way makes me dishonest" [18]), and to share in the guilty conscience with which he confronts Macabea and other have-nots:

Se o leitor possui alguma riqueza e vida bem acomodada, saira de si para ver como 6 as vezes o outro. Se e pobre, nao estara me lendo porque ler-me e superfluo para quem tem uma leve fome permanente. Faqo aqui o papel de vossa valvula de escape e da vida massacrante da media burguesia. Bem sei que e assustador sair de si mesmo, mas tudo o que e novo assusta. Embora a moqa an6nima da hist6ria seja tao antiga que podia ser uma figura blblica. (38)

If the reader is financially secure and enjoys the comforts of life, he can be expected to step out of himself sometimes, and see what the others are like. If he is poor, he will not be reading this, because reading me is superfluous for anyone who is permanently possessed by a mild sensation of hunger. I am acting here as an escape valve for your stupefying middle class exist- ence. Of course it is scary to step out of oneself, but then, all that is new can be scary. Although, in fact, the anonymous girl of this story is so ancient she could even be a biblical figure (30).9

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The reader's involvement is thus achieved both through the narrator's

direct appeal and through irony, a powerful device "for excluding as well as for including," as Wayne Booth puts it:

Whenever an author conveys to his reader an unspoken point, he creates a sense of collusion against all those, whether in the story or out of it, who do not get that point. ( . .) The author and reader are secretly in collusion, behind the speaker's back, agreeing upon the standard by which he is found wanting. (304)

While, in The Hour of the Star, the one thus excluded gets to be, by turns, the

empirical woman writer and the male narrator, the reader is always in-

volved, since the ironical shots from both sides demand her involvement in order to be properly appreciated. And, should the point be missed and the

irony fail to elicit response, direct prompting from Rodrigo S.M. does not allow the reader to bypass "providing mature moral judgement" which,

again according to Booth, can be "one of the most rewarding of all reading experiences" (307).10

So who is Macabea, and how is her story to be judged? While the second question may well be ultimately impossible to answer in an un-

equivocal manner, the first one seems almost too easy. Macabea, to quote her one and only self-definition, is "a typist and a virgin" who likes coca- cola (35). She is a native of the Brazilian Northeastern sertao, or interior, "a

region that in its tortured landscape and harsh reality of droughts and severe economic ills, has attracted the imagination of many Brazilian writers" (Peixoto 191). Her arrival in Rio de Janeiro is an epitome of the

convergence of two distinct social realities, two different human currents: the "privileged Southerners" (59) and the "resistant and stubborn race of dwarfs who would one day vindicate the right to cry out in protest" (79). This is how Rodrigo S.M. defines Macabea's stock, even as the protagonist herself is, by his own narrative design, being knocked down and killed by a luxurious yellow Mercedes. Clearly, The Hour of the Star is no place for facile socialist realism, as proven, at another point, by Macabea's reaction to the title of Dostoevski's The Insulted and the Injured:

Ficou pensativa. Talvez tivesse pela primeira vez se definido numa classe social. Pensou, pensou e pensou! Chegou a conclusao que na verdade ninguem jamais a ofendera, tudo que acontecia era porque as coisas sao assim mesmo e nao havia luta possivel, para que lutar? (50).

She remained pensive. Perhaps for the very first time she had established her social cass. She thought, and thought, and thought! She decided that no one had ever really insulted her, things were the way they were, and there was no point in struggling, why should she struggle? (40).

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Macab6a is treated with unremitting cruelty by almost everybody in the book (even those who also pity her), including her boyfriend Olimpico and the narrator. Olimpico's distaste for Macabea (at one point he says she is "like a hair in one's soup" [60]) can at least be more or less easily motivated and accounted for (after all he is only a character); the narrator's own

disgust is more difficult to handle, provoking much anxious soul-searching and numerous troubled comments:

Ha os que tem. E ha os que nao ter. E muito simples: a moca nao tinha. Nao tinha o qua? E apenas isso mesmo: nao tinha. Se der para me entenderem, esta bem. Se nao, tambem esta bem. Mas porque trato dessa moqa quando o que mais desejo e trigo puramente maduro e ouro no estio? (32).

There are those who have. And there are those who have not. It's very simple: the girl had not. Hadn't what? Just this: she had not. If you get my meaning, fine. If not, fine as well. But why am I bothering with this girl when what I really yearn for is the wheat turning pure, ripe and golden in summer? (25)

The above confession of Rodrigo S.M.'s true desire allows me to finally bring in again the by-now almost forgotten Cixous. For the ripe, golden wheat that Macabea's creator would rather dream and write about, instead of being stuck with his unwholesome protagonist, also plays the role of yet another of those threads of semantic and symbolic meaning which guide and support Cixous's approach to Lispector. Its origin can be traced to a

passage in a short story "Tanta mansidao" ("Such gentleness") more than once quoted by Cixous in her writings. It also appears in the essay "L'- Auteur en verit6," a commentary at once brilliantly insightful and distress-

ingly fallacious on The Hour of the Star (included in the volume L'Heure de Clarice Lispector):

Apenas isto: chove e estou vendo a chuva. Que simplicidade. Nunca pensei que o mundo e eu chegassemos a esse ponto de trigo. A chuva cai nao porque esta precisando de mim, e eu olho a chuva nao porque preciso dela. Mas n6s estamos tao juntas como agua da chuva esta ligada a chuva. (154)

Only this: it rains, and I watch the rain. What simplicity. I never thought that the world and I would reach this point of wheat. The rain falls, not because it needs me, and I look at the rain not because I need it. But we are as united as the water of the rain is to the rain. (161)11

The "point of wheat" (in Cixous's French, "ce point de ble") is the site of joyous union between the female speaker of Lispector's text and the

equally female rain (a chuva/la pluie), the site where a dialogue is indistin-

guishable from a monologue, and where, in fact, the very need for such a distinction is denied: it is where "our lips speak together" (Irigaray).

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Lispector's capacity for creating such discourse in turn becomes the "point of wheat" between her work and Cixous's own, and is the theme most often dealt with and emphasized in the French writer's commentaries of

Lispector. Yet, in The Hour of the Star, there is no place for the unques- tioned, pure bliss of such communion, a fact which Cixous duly notes and, in doing so, comes to an interesting conclusion:

Comme il doit etre poignant le reve de l'auteur qui veut aimer une femme d'extremement pres, aimer en elle son essence, jouir en elle de sa feminite, qui veut lire le livre de la chair qui ne ment pas, ne se garde pas, n'a pas commence a raconter une histoire. Ce qu'un auteur femme peut faire plus facilement qu'un auteur homme.

Oui, mais il peut arriver qu'un auteur, une femme, soit trop proche d'une femme pour en faire la connaissance, c'est-a-dire pour la decouvrir incon- nue. Et que, par familiarite, elle la manque. Que faire? Le tour de monde pour refaire une entree de l'autre cote en tant qu'etranger.

Rentre Rodrigo S.M. pour mieux ne pas connaitre et puis connaitre Macabra. (162)

According to Cixous, Rodrigo S.M. is thus brought in as something of a

prop, meant to enliven the somewhat stale atmosphere of the gynaeceum, to make once again excitingly unfamiliar and provocative that which has become all too familiar and hence, paradoxically, unknowable. This ap- pears to be a rather shocking misreading of the narrative dynamic at work in The Hour of the Star. Whatever psychological reasons could have

prompted Lispector's invention of Rodrigo S.M., it is clear that the role his character plays in the novel greatly surpasses the accessory function ac- corded to him in Cixous's reading. Rodrigo never relinquishes narrative control; it is his voice that speaks in the autobiographical preface (Peixoto 193); and he also declares himself to be the author of the novel's thirteen alternative titles ("I blame myself, as I explained in one of my titles for this book" [38]). "Clarice Lispector," on the other hand, on just two occasions

discreetly intervenes in The Hour of the Star: once, when her handwritten

signature appears among the said titles, and again, in the parenthetical subtitle to the "Author's Dedication"-"in truth Clarice Lispector." While this double gesture, as powerful as it is discreet, suffices to undermine

Rodrigo S.M.'s exclusive claim to the authorial sovereignty, thus providing an explicit basis for the implied author's frequent ironical interventions, it does nothing to change the narrator's (and hence also Clarice Lispector's) relationship to Macabea. The story of the hapless protagonist's life and death is Rodrigo's uncontested monopoly, never impinged upon by any other narrative agent, and it is difficult to accept that their cat-and-mouse

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textual game might be interpreted (the way it is by H6lMne Cixous) as a mere self-distancing ploy on Lispector's part, a device safeguarding against potential excesses of inherently "feminine" compassion and em-

pathy. Cixous's reading could, however, suggest an interpretation of her per-

sonal view of The Hour of the Star in the larger context of her intertextual

dialogue with Lispector. If, as Suleiman tells us, Cixous's discovery of this novel made her not only reread once again Lispector's previous works, but also reread, and rewrite, several of her own (xv), it becomes possible to see in The Hour of the Star precisely the kind of defamiliarizing device that Cixous finds in Rodrigo S.M.'s disrupting of the potentially excessive close- ness between Lispector and her protagonist Macabea. And so the window once again turns into a mirror, the radical otherness of Lispector's narrative

experiment in The Hour of the Star becoming assimilated into the mosaic (or is it a melting pot?) of Cixousian poetic imagination. The one who is

virtually excluded from such a reading of the novel is Macabea herself, the inassimilable other, and, in Cixous's essay, the object of perhaps the most

troubling misreading of all:

Quand elle decouvre un desir ou un appetit, ou quand elle goute, pour la premiere fois de sa vie, un aliment qui pour nous est devenu le moins allechant, le plus ordinaire des mets, c'est pour elle d6couverte et merveille extraordinaires. Et son emerveillement nous rend les delicatesses perdues. Et ne pas jeter la bouteille de plastique, c'est precieux (130).

What Cixous fails to notice here is that Macabea is presented as having no access at all to gustatory pleasures; as the narrator tells us, she "lost her

appetite, she only felt a great hunger" (39). Her daily fare consists of hot

dogs and coca-cola; her one luxury are a few sips of cold coffee before

going to bed which give her heartburn in the morning. She also becomes ill whenever she decides to treat herself to a hard-boiled egg in a snack bar: that happens because she is then reminded of her late aunt who "had

always insisted that eggs were bad for the liver" (33). In short, Macabea "suffers from permanent hunger and equally permanent nausea, indexes of her position in a world she cannot incorporate and which refuses to accept her" (Peixoto 196).

By contrast, Rodrigo S.M. aliments himself with fresh fruit and chilled white wine, pointing out (in one of his particularly unselfconscious mo- ments) that he has to adopt such frugal eating habits in order to be able to

"capture [Macabea's] soul" (22). As if fulfilling the chilling promise con- tained in his initials, he is the one who appears to regain a new appreciation of life's "simple pleasures" through his sadistic denial of them to his crea-

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ture Macabea. Given this disparity-fruit and white wine on the one hand, hot dogs and coke on the other-how are we supposed to read the novel's final sentences, when Rodrigo S.M., having killed off his protagonist and

experiencing discomfort at the thought of his own mortality, tells himself (and, presumably, the reader as well): "Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes" (86). This cruelly forgetful, final

"yes," which erases the memory of Macabea and supplants it with a crav-

ing for strawberries, seems disturbingly reminiscent of Molly Bloom's "Yes" in Joyce's Ulysses, the very word which, according to Cixous, is "in the beginning of the women's bible" (by the way, The Hour of the Star also starts with a "yes" [1987, 4]). Cixous's "yes" is similarly spoken to/by a fruit: as Anu Aneja puts it, "Substituting the female voice for the male's, the narrators of Cixous's texts watched the nom/non of the male transform itself into the luscious oui of the orange" (190). In such perverse fashion Cixous ends up paradoxically, or perhaps appropriately, siding with

Rodrigo S.M. against the irredeemable loser Macabea, her idealization of the protagonist's "original innocence" (she even collects plastic bottles!)

representing yet another misreading of Lispector's complexity. This reading appears to contradict qualities most praised by Cixous's

admirers-her theoretical acuteness in dealing with the question of Other-

ness, and a respectful openness in approaching foreign texts and realities. As V.A. Conley writes,

With oriental echoes, she tries-especially through affinities with Lispec- tor-to act less on a milieu or an object, a particularly Western obsession, but to be in harmony-or in a moment of grace, perhaps-with a person or a milieu. This implies a necessary passivity in activity, something that, a decade ago, might have been called femininity in contrast to a more Western, phallic masculinity that proposes change through violent action. (13)

Let me express my dissent by quoting one last fragment from a Cixousian

"passive" reading of a novel by Lispector, a fragment exemplifying an

interpretive strategy that I would not hesitate to describe as textual violence-however we might decide to gender it:

This is the path I take in my reading of Agua viva. I could have taken it in any other text by Clarice Lispector. She says the same thing everywhere. The question of the law comes up everywhere. (1990,12; my emphasis)

Failing to open her readings to Lispector's literary diversity, Cixous, whose poetic/critical voice, for all its self-proclaimed marginality, does, after all, enjoy a privileged position (through its easily translatable French-

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ness, its Parisian centrality, through the appeal it holds for American academic feminists), in effect exercises mastery over Lispector's text and name and, instead of looking out to her through the ecriture-fenetre of their

writings, more often than not turns the window into a mirror filled with the French writer's own reflection. This is, of course, a pattern underlying many different situations of mastery and assimilation, be it the sexual

politics of phallic sameness, symmetrically reflected in the pseudo-dif- ference of its feminine other, or the (post-)colonial exercise of cultural and

political dominance. In addition to establishing such a power relation within the Cixous-Lispector duo, Helene Cixous's dialogue with the texts of Clarice Lispector fails to reach beyond the self-absorption of an "egoisme a deux," what Patricia Williams, in a different context, labels the "limited

bipolarity of relationship that characterizes so much of western civiliza- tion" (160).2 By contrast, Lispector's novel The Hour of the Star, with its

triangle of textual agents-the implied (female) author, the narrator

Rodrigo S.M., and the star protagonist Macabea-and through its metafic- tional foregrounding of subject position, appears as a brilliant enactment of the paradox of postmodern ambivalent critique, self-consciously engaging in the exercise of (textual) power, even as it unmasks its own guilt-ridden complicity.

The Ohio State University

NOTES

1. "When I am left quite alone, I cease to exist. I only exist in dialogue" (Borelli, 48); "Ne pas laisser anyone qui me donne orders" (Borelli 33). These are handwritten notes from Lispector's notebooks, transcribed by her friend and secretary in a biographical account published after the writer's death (my translation).

2. Cixous's own account of her encounter with Lispector's texts can be found in the bilingual essay, "Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orange" in L'Heure de Clarice Lispector (Paris: des femmes, 1989). Since 1978, Cixous has constantly dealt with the Brazilian writer, both in her writings and in her activity as teacher and lecturer. Many English translations of her work on Lispector are available, including two volumes of selected transcripts from Cixous's seminars at the Universite de Paris VII and at the College International de Philosophie (Readings and Reading with Clarice Lispector; both selec- tions were edited, translated and introduced by Verena Aldermatt Conley), as well as several pieces in "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991).

3. Cf. Cixous, commenting on "the mother who obviously for all French writing is the sea, la mer. In my language we have the good fortune to be able to say that the mother is the sea, this makes up a part of our imagination, it tells us something" (189b, 4).

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4. Lispector's life story in many ways parallels Cixous's own: she was born in the Ukranian village of Chechelnik to Jewish parents who emigrated to Brazil when she was barely two months old. Throughout her life, Lispector was always con- sidered somewhat exotic by the Brazilian admirers of her work and persona, critics and journalists waxing lyrical about the mysterious appeal of her Slavic cheekbones and slanted "Asiatic" eyes. As for Lispector herself, she always took pains to dismiss such comments, insisting on her Brazilianness and agreeing to give interviews chiefly in order to explain that she was "not a myth," but a "person like any other" (Varin 51, 35).

5. If I may venture another far-fetched remark, I would like to indicate here a possible link to Cixous's personal network of geolinguistic correspondences: since Spanish relates to her father's side of the family, it would make sense that Lispector's Portuguese laranja translates orally (phonetically) into the the French l'orange, but only visually (as a "dead," written sign) into the Spanish naranja. Says Cixous: "My writing was born in Algeria out of a lost country, of the dead father and the foreign mother." And, soon afterwards, "'The mother sings, the father dictates" (189b, 2-4).

6. For example: 'The opening lines of [La Passion selon G.H.]: '-Je cherche, je cherche, j'essaie de comprendre. J'essaie de donner ce que j'ai vcu .. .' reflect the difficulty of both inscribing [the narrator's] experience in a a comprehensible form and sharing that experience through language so that others may relive it" (148). Or: 'The language of Agua viva is not one of logical, rational discourse. As the narrator tells us on the first page, 'Je suis encore capable de raisonnement-j'ai dejA etudie les mathematiques qui sont la folie du raisonnement-mais maintenant je veux le plas- ma-je veux me nourrir directement du placenta" (149).

7. My quotations from the novel will generally follow the English translation by Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986). I have, however, modified it substan- tially for the sake of accuracy. In quoting longer passages, I have chosen to retain both the Portuguese original and the translation.

8. It should be noted here that Rogrigo S.M. comes very cose to saying, "Macabea, c'est moi": "Death is instantaneous and passes in a flash. I know, for I have just died with the girl" (85).

9. It is interesting to observe that, when the "anonymous girl" is finally given a name by the narrator, it is that of a "biblical figure." As Nelson Vieira proposes, The Hour of the Star can be read as "an adaptation of the apocryphal story of the Maccabees to the contemporary world, represented by the city of Rio de Janeiro, where its protagonist Macabea, a poor Northeasterner, becomes the symbol of the biblical zealots" (207; my translation). Curiously enough, Helene Cixous, interested as she has been in developing the theme of the "Jewoman," has never, to my knowledge, remarked upon this fascinating detail of Lispector's novel. The significance of Macabea's name is particularly emphasized by its being contrasted with the names of her boyfriend and of the woman for whom he ultimately dumps Macabea: respective- ly, Olimpico de Jesus and Gloria.

10. I will follow here the example set by The Hour of the Star, and back up my own ironical manipulation of gendered personal pronouns with an explicit comment. Since Wayne Booth's all-male assembly of authors, readers and speakers can be said to perform an exclusionary gesture toward female readers, speakers, or authors, my positing of the actual reader as female (while not necessarily called for by Lispector's text) is meant to expose and undermine Booth's bias without denying the substantive usefulness of his argumentation.

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11. I am quoting the English translation from the volume Soulstorm (New York: New Directions, 1989). It is curious to note that the translator, Alexis Levitin, omits the word "wheat" from his version of the respective sentence, which becomes simply "I never thought that the world and I would reach this point."

12. In Williams's analysis, concerning the distribution of legal rights and struc- ture of contracts, "egoisme a deux" refers to the exclusionary effects of "linear, dual- istically reciprocal encounters," such as, in my interpretation, the relationship between Cixous and Lispector (as construed by Cixous), or the presumed closeness between Clarice and Macabea at the basis of the narrative design of The Hour of the Star. An alternative structure would be that of a "gift relationship," involving a larger community whose wealth circulates in a constant process of give-and-take ("So all have it, even though they do not possess it and even though they do not own it"). Such a relationship, with all its difficulties and potential pitfalls, appears to have been tentatively staged in Lispector's novel, within its discursive "community" of fictional and metafictional characters (including the encoded readers).

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