The Passion of Logo(centrism), or, the Deconstructionist Universe of Clarice Lispector Author(s): Earl E.

Fitz Source: Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 1988), pp. 33-44 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3513257 Accessed: 23/07/2009 16:31
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The

Logo(centrism), or, the Deconstructionist Universe of Clarice Lispector

Passion of

Earl E. Fitz
For those critics who regard it as involving something more than mere nihilistic nonsense, the term "Deconstructionism" has come to refer to that view of literature in which a text--any text--can be shown to be undercutting, or "deconstructing," itself at the same instant that it is working to organize, or "construct," itself into a stable, coherent and verifiable system of meaning. As a literary theory, we know that Deconstructionism owes much to the linguistic model outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure in which all language use necessarily involves eternally fluid systems of arbitrarily connected "signifiers" and signifiedss' and in which there are no absolute references external to the language systems themselves. For Saussure, who held, in regard to linguistic signs, that, ". . . il n'y a que des differences sans termes positifs" (". . . there are only differences without positive terms''),l meaning, in language and therefore in literature, emerges as an entirely arbitrary function; or, to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty (who may be considered one of Western literature's earliest deconstructionist critics), "Words mean exactly what I want them to mean, nothing more and nothing less!" Yet in spite of its vast potential for abuse and obfuscation, Deconstructionism offers the literary critic a linguistically based way of explaining why texts generate different meanings and why they elicit different responses in readers. For certain texts, Clarice Lispector's opaque, lyrically meditative novels and stories figuring prominently among them, the question of meaning is not merely a thematic problem but a technical one, a feature of the work that relates to what the "New Critics" tended to describe as a texts "ambiguity," its artistically poised uncertainties. For the deconstructionist, however, this very "ambiguity" or "uncertainty't is shown to be a function not of a text's style or its "literariness" but of language itself, of language's endless self-reflexivity, its semantic instability and its ever-fluctuating relation to the various "realities" that it simultaneously describes, "constructs," and "deconstructs." This essentially poststructuralist sense of language and meaning, I believe, is the fundamental philosophical and psycholinguistic principle that Luso-Brazilian
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Review, XXV, 2 0024-7413/88/033 1988 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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Clarice Lispector develops so brilliantly, as I will now try to show, in the creation of Cuch extraordinary texts as Perto do coragao selvagem (1944), A masa no escuro (1961), A paixao segundo G. H. (1964), A legiao estrangeira (1964), Agua viva (1973), Um sopro de vida (1978) and "A quinta hist6ria." From her first novel, published in 1944, to her posthumous works, it is clear that Clarice Lispector was a writer whose primary thematic concern was the flickering, ephemeral relationship between words, reality and the ebb and flow of human cognition. Like Helene Cixous (whose Vivre ltorange, 1979, was based upon several of Clarice's texts), the later Barthes (particularly of S/Z), Jacques Derrida,2 Jonathan Culler, Julia Kristeva, and Lucy Irigaray, Clarice was a writer for whom the problem of meaning (how it is generated, how it is mentally processed and how it is reformulated as literary art) lies, restively, at the heart of the human condition. Consistent with these other "poststructuralist," or "deconstructionist" critics, Clarice and her characters view the human creature as being inescapably locked within a prison house of language, one in which words refer only to other words rather than to what Derrida has called a "metaphysical" referent, a substantiating "first principle" that exists beyond language and upon which a system of perfect and stable meaning can be built. In works like Perto do coragao selvagem, A paixao segundo G. H., Agua viva and "A quinta historia," to cite just four examples, Clarice has created not "novelst' and "stories" but "texts," a critical term used by poststructuralists to refer to the "web-like complexity of signs" in which the "back and forth, present and absent, forward and sideways movement of language in its actual processes"3 is highlighted. Joana, for example, the protagonist of Perto do coragao selvagem, develops as a character in direct relation to her gradual and disquieting discovery of the spurious nexus between language and its referents, between its conventionally understood signs and the supposedly reliable "first principles' of meaning they are believed to express. Gaining steadily in self-realization and strength, Joana, who comes to reject first the "logocentrism" and then the "phallogocentrism" that has entrapped her, eventually feels the need to create a new, private and, she hopes, authentic language system, one that will truthfully embody and express her as yet inchoate process of selfrealization.4 Her creation of a new, non-"phallogocentric" language system thereby mirrors and sustains her newly achieved sense of self. One of Clarice's later protagonists, Martim (of A maga no escuro), is also depicted as a human being whose identity is stunted by virtue of being trapped in language. As the omniscient voice of his "text" describes him: . . . o que fez Martim experimentar essa perfeicao foi o fato de suas palavras terem de algum modo ultrapassado o que ele quisera dizer. . . . Em algum ponto nao identificavel, aquele homem ficara preso num circulo de palavras.S

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Martim, like Joana, G. H. and the voices of Um sopro de vida and Agua viva, comes to discover that his quest for authenticity of being is inescapably bound up in the essence of language itself. The fluid, open poststructuralist "texts" that give form to the ontological struggles of these characters are, as they and the reader come to discover, composed of structures and patterns of words that refer, endlessly, to other structures and patterns of words. This explains why texts like Perto do coragao selvagem, A maga no escuro , A paixao segundo G. H. and Agua viva have no stable "first principles" of semantic reference and no structurally clear beginnings, no unambiguous lines of development and no decisive, conflict-resolving conclusions. Overwhelmingly, Clarice's texts--especially her longer, "novel" length narratives6--create fictive worlds in which words, Saussure's "signifiers," continuously reveal themselves to be only arbitrarily linked to their supposed "signifieds," and it is from this poetically rendered tangle of thought and sign that Clarice's famous lyricism and ambiguity derive. From the perspective of a deconstructionist critic, then, the "fictions"7 of Clarice Lispector are brilliant examples of what Derrida calls "inter" (as well as "intra") textuality," dense webs of semantically destabilized words that refer essentially to themselves8 and to their "differance," to the superfluities and slippages of meaning constantly generated by them. A second principle of Lispectorian deconstructionist theory, and one that, like the importance given the self-reflexive "intertextuality" of words, fully characterizes Clarice's writing, is her abolition of the orthodox distinctions between "criticism" and "creative writing." For Lispector, as for Helene Cixous, Lucy Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes (at least of S/Z) and Julia Kristeva (especially her la Rbvolution du langue pobtique , 1974), the concept of "criticism" as "evaluation" gives way to an often creative discourse on "text" or "writing" (what Derrida calls "ecriture"), on the interactive mental process that is involved in the writerly creation and readerly deconstruction of a "text." The feminist writer and critic Helene Cixous, has, in Vivre ltorange, called attention to precisely this key poststructuralist dimension of Clarice's work, one which, typified in such texts as A maga no escuro, A paixao segundo G. H. and Agua viva, she finds to be powerfully demonstrative not merely of Derrida's t'ecriture" but of "lecriture feminine," of a uniquely 'feminine" way of writing, one often described as the process of "writing the body."9 Merging her self-conscious preoccupation with words as a viable mechanism for self-creation and growth with this deconstructively hybrid concept of "text" as simultaneously "fiction" and "nonfiction," the voice of Agua viva lyrically declares: Nao sei sobre o que estou escrevendo: sou obscura para mim mesma. So tive inicialmente uma visao lunar e lucida, e entao prendi para mim o instante antes que ele morresse e que perpetuamente morre. Nao e um recado de ideias que te

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transmito e sim uma instintiva volupia daquilo que esta escondido na natureza e que adivinho. E esta e um festa de palavras. Escrevo em signos que sao mais um gesto que voz. . . . refaco-me nestas linhas. Tenho uma voz. Assim como me lanco no traco de meu desenho, este e um exercicio de vida sem planejamento. O mundo nao tem ordem visivel e eu so tenho a ordem da respirasao. Deixo-me acontecer.l In an earlier (1964) collection of ostensibly pieces entitled "No fundo de gaveta," Clarice templated the fluid nature of writing, here equating it to the act of fishing: Entao escrever e o modo palavra pescando o que nao morde a isca, alguma coisa a entrelinha, podia-se com cessa a analogia: a incorporou-a. O que salva "nonfiction't had also conmetaphorically

de quem tem a palavra como isca: a e palavra. Quando essa nao palavra se escreveu. Uma vez que se pescou alivio jogar a palavra fora. Mas ai nao palavra, ao morder a isca, entao e ler 'distraidamente'.ll reiterates concept what we can now see of writing as process

Later in this same work, Clarice as a fundamentally deconstructionist or flow, as "ecriture:"

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

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and figuration of tropes, systems on interrelated reliance relevance philosophical to Clarice's Calling attention etymology. have noted, as well as to Joyce which many critics to Heidegger, feature of her texts tends and Woolf, this key poststructuralist of so typical and nurture the "binary oppositions" to generate Within the context of Clarice's analysis. structural classical can also be seen as work, many of these "binary oppositions" a number of motifs and metaphors that are endemic to constitutinf light/darkness, speaking/thinking, language/silence, her work:l and, in a isolation/socialization, writing/speaking, love/hate, to name just a few. unique way, male/female, work can be said to be structured Yet for all that Clarice's there is also these "binary oppositions," around systems involving tendency her texts a powerful and often self-conscious present in of language and the toward the undermining or "deconstruction" systems and generative of its semantically supposed reliability A maga no as in Perto do coragao selvagem, Typically, structures. the sense texts generate precisely Clarice's or Agua viva, escuro Derrida that and unreliability destabilization of linguistic a neologism of his coinage in the term "differance," expresses that in language to the Saussurean concept ("difference") related and function of the arbitrary evolving "meaning" is an eternally At the and signifieds. between signifiers connection imperfect moment there is no known evidence to suggest that Clarice was ever Saussure or such poststructuralist by either influenced directly or Paul de Man, Derrida Barthes, as the later theoreticians such influences given the dates of their major studies, though, Benedito Nunes, Yet, as Assis Brasil, could have taken place. work contains have shown,14 Clarice's Olga de Sa and others deconof precursors seminal such of echoes unmistakable his concept of the (especially as Ernest Cassirer structionism between "relations" the of awareness one's versus "thing" Husserl and Heidegger (phenomethe phenomenologists, "things"), approach to Clarice's a revealing constituting itself nology emphasis on, work), Kenneth Burke (because of his "logological" organized rather than on logically "relations" Cassirer, like Wake and A Finnegans and texts like Joyce's Ulysses, substances) The point of all this is as a Young Man. of the Artist Portrait that in Clarice Lispector we have a writer who, though apparently by influenced verifiably, or, at least, without being directly, metafluid, began in 1944 to create the deconstructionists, self-conscious and linguistically self-referential fictionally of what a rejection evident in which there is clearly texts of metaphysic" as a "logocentric describe Derrida would later and in which there is a new stability structural and presence of language and on the unreliability emphasis on the ontological between "differance") (Derrida's differences of interplay As early as 1944, then, and for years hence, Clarice relations. "formthe kinds of ostensibly was engaged in writing Lispector some twenty years that, texts and metacritical lyrical less," Because writing. would be said to typify deconstructionist later, with the ambiguous but crucial preoccupation of their constant

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relationships between language, meaning, reality and human perception, Clarice's texts continuously undercut or "deconstruct" themselves even as they move toward new levels of knowledge and self-awareness. Thus, a kind of writing usually associated with poststructuralist and feminist narrative in Europe and the United States was actually being practiced in Brazil in the mid-1940s. In his analysis of Proust's Swann's Way, another deconstructivist critic, Paul de Man, has, without making any direct reference to Clarice, offered a discussion of another revolutionary text, one that clearly has some important parallels with Clarice's work. Focusing on what he takes to be the "grammatization" of Proust's rhetoric (which he defines in terms of Charles Sanders Peirce's distinction between "grammar," a stabilizing force, and "rhetoric," a destabilizing one), de Man argues (in terms easily applicable to Clarice's work) that the constant interplay of such "unresolvable opposites" as the perspectives of inner and outer landscapes, of language versus silence, of presence and absence and of speaking versus thinking (or writing) gradually come to reveal, via a fluid, often ambiguously interrelated system of metonymy, oxymoron and synecdoche, the essential superiority of metaphor as a vehicle for literarily artistic expression. Systematically advanced in even an early 1960s work like A Masa no escuro, this metaphoric, ironically selfinquisitional mode of writing thrives, as does deconstructive analysis itself, on precisely the kinds of unresolved and unresolvable psycholinguistic complexities that, especially in their philosophical context, defy the simplistic assumptions of logocentrism. The constant concern over words, their meanings and the various realities they create, describe and obscure all reflect Clarice's lifelong concern over Derrida's concept of "ecriture" ("writing"), the production of language as flowing mental process rather than as static conclusion. For Clarice, the act of writing (like the act of reading) springs from a mental and spiritual quest for identity and authenticity of being, one that in virtually every one of her texts is bound up in a narrator's (or a character's) artistic creativity and, ineluctably, in a reader's reaction to (or deconstruction of) a text. The quest motif, which, as we see in works like Perto do coragao selvagem, A maga no escuro, A paixao segundo G. H., Agua viva and even the posthumously published Um sopro de vida, is a constant in her longer texts, and can, perhaps, be best explained from a deconstructionist perspective. One feels this is so because in each of these cases the text--the "ecriture" or, as Cixous would have it, Clarice's "ecriture feminine"--is never a stable, closed and perfectly knowable construct; it is, to the contrary, an open, fluid and poetically rendered process, one involving the author and reader as well as the characters and one in which the elusiveness of language itself is the primary subject. Developed in a distinctly antilogocentric fashion, Clarice's texts deal with language in two major ways: as the all too flawed means by which our human quest for self-realization is undertaken and, in a less obvious way, as the ultimate end, or purpose, of

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that quest. As characters like Joana (from Perto do coragao selvagem), Martim (A maga no escuro), G. H. (A paixao segundo G. H.) and the voice of Agua viva struggle with language (with its maddeningly self-referential "differance") in their quests for a sense of ontological stability, they (and the reader) gradually come to suspect that control over language--and not physical existence--is what they must really seek, for as narratives like A maga no escuro and Agua viva imply, to control language is to control reality itself. Thus, the ultimate conflict in Clarice's texts, as for such better known deconstructionist writers and critics as Barthes, Cixous, Kristeva, Derrida, Cullers, Lacan and de Man, is over language: do we control it (as the conventional wisdom of logocentrism holds) or, as much poststructuralist theory argues, does it control us? For Clarice Lispector, a writer whose work has long exemplified the theories about language, meaning and human existence that the deconstructionists seek sometimes tortuously to elucidate, human existence is best defined in terms of this immensely frustrating struggle with language, with the problem of communication that derives from out of the ever unstable relationship between signifiers and signifieds, between what we say and what we mean (or want) to say, and between our speech acts and their receptions by other people. Relentlessly advanced and lyrically orchestrated, this is the thematic terrain for which Clarice is so renowned. Because they weave back and forth between the realms of the viscerally personal and the expansively theoretical, the stories of such figures as Joana, Martim, G. H. and the female presence in Agua viva all generate a sense of the socio-politically quotidian at the same time that they convey a powerful sense of the cosmic, of the ultimately mystical, even gnostic grounding of existence in language. Although this dialectic between the corporeal and the cosmic is endemic to Clarice's fiction, it perhaps can be best seen in two of her greatest works, the generically hybrid A paixao segundo G. H., one of the most powerful and overlooked texts to appear anywhere during the 1960s, and Agua viva, a lyrical t'fiction"l5 par excellence that, due in no small part to what Heline Cixous has lauded as its prototypical "ecriture feminine,t16 stands as one of the truly outstanding "new narratives" of the 1970s. In the case of A paixao segundo G. H. the self-conscious first-person narrator takes the reader from the vicissitudes of a woman's mundane middle-class existence to the harrowing throes of her psychic rebirth (birth and rebirth being motifs that appear throughout Clarice's work). Early in her story, G. H., placing herself in a particular socio-political context (one based on a male/female opposition) declares: Para uma mulher essa reputasao e socialmente muito, e situoume, tanto para os outros como para mim mesma, numa zona que socialmente fica entre mulher e homem.17 At the conclusion more cosmic sense of her uncertain tale, of self and of existence. G. H. possesses a much Referring to this new

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and unsettling mode of being (one that essentially paradoxical poststructuralist existence and language), G. H. declares: A realidade busca-la--e humano. . . fracasso de que obtenho
segundo G. g

strongly evinces the linkage between

e a materia-prima, a linguagem e o modo como vou como nao acho. . . . A linguagem e o meu esforco . O indizivel so me podera ser dado atraves do minha linguagem. So quando falta a construcao, e o que ela nao conseguiu (Lispector, A paixao . , 212-13).

Presented as a character, G. H., like most of Clarice's other characters, comes, via radically different modes of discourse, to view an understanding of language itself as the end of her quest at the same time that she begins to see it as the conundrum-like mechanism by which it is simultaneously found and lost, this realization reflecting the poststructuralist system by which, in terms of deconstructive analysis, the end of the quest is at the same time '|present" and "absent." As G. H. and the reader discover, it is only through language that "being" and "nonbein" can co-exist in the same space and in the same instant of time.l A similar focus on the nexus between language and existence animates Agua viva, a 1973 "fiction" in which the unnamed female narrator declares, ". . . e novo para mim o que escrevo porque minha verdadeira palavra foi ate intocada. A palavra e a minha quarta dimensao (Lispector, Agua viva, 10). Then, invoking an image that exemplifies both Derrida's elusive concept of "differance" and Saussure's belief in the radical discontinuity between the signifier and the signified, the voice of Agua viva says: Transmito-te nao uma historia mas apenas palavras que vivem do som. Digo-te assim: eTronco luxurioso'. E banho-me nele. Ele esta ligada a raiz que penetra em nos na terra. Tudo o que te escrevo e tenso. Uso palavras soltas que sao em si mesmas um dardo livre. (Lispector, Agua viva, 27). As we see in Agua viva, A paixao segundo G. H. and in Clarice's other works, the modes of her characters' discourses vary a great deal. This is especially apparent in the intensely lyrical Agua viva, where the style, always analytical and questioning (questing?), continuously vacillates between the sublimely poetic and the frustratingly inarticulate as the narrative voice ebbs and flows between the poles of brave self-affirmation and fearful hesitancy. Of all Clarice's "novels," only Uma aprendizagem ou o l ivro dos prazeres ( 1969 ) takes a more definitive stand, suggesting that, if they are able to understand, accept and communicate with each other (and themselves), men and women can (despite its semantic arbitrariness) learn to use language for purposes more

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liberating than entrapping, more supportive than divisive. This often overlooked work, along with Um sopro de vida, offers a guardedly optimistic alternative to the despair and nihilism that are often said to be the inevitable conclusions of a deconstructive view of language and literature. Although it seems true that, if pushed to its logical extremes, a deconstructive view of existence would indeed consign everything to a standard-less level of utter and total relativism, it is also true that, as thinking beings, we are not obliged to live out our lives according to such a bleak vision. And, in fact, we do not, for the supreme ironic truth of language is that for however much it undercuts our efforts to create stability and constancy in our existences, it also serves as the endlessly inventive mechanism by which our actions and moral choices are determined. Even though we may accept the deconstructionist argument that the concept of perfect, stable meaning is a myth, an impossibility, we can and do, through language, conduct our lives as if it were not. In forcing us to confront the confusion and anxiety that result from our discovery of language's self-referential arbitrariness, the questions asked by the deconstructionist critics--like those asked and lived out by Clarice's characters--lead us, as they lead Joana, Martim, G. H., L6ri and Ulysses (from Uma aprendizagem), to deal with ourselves and with each other in a more careful, more honest fashion. Thus, as Clarice suggests, the lasting--and surprisingly humanistic--contribution of Deconstructionism may finally be that it leads us to ask yet once again the ancient and still unresolved questions about the relationships between language, reality and being, the questions not merely about what we know (or think we know) but about how we know. As we see in texts like Perto do coragao selvagem, A maga no escuro, A paixao segundo G. H. and Agua viva, another fundamental characteristic of Clarice's open, fluid "ecriture" is her constant creation of what deconstructionist critics like Derrida, Kristeva and Barthes call "aporia," those inescapable impasses of meaning when, by both generating themselves a sense of "undecidability" and by calling for a description in similarly ambiguous terms, a text begins to dismantle or challenge itself, to call its own "meanings" into question. Although as Derrida makes clear, this semantic "dissemination" (". . . a continual flickering, spilling and defusing of meaning," Eagleton, Literary Theory, 134), occurs in all language use, it is most apparent in what is known as "literary" discourse. My point, however, is that these two decisive features of deconstructive criticism, the nature and function of aporia in a text and, as a corollary, its polysemy (its semantic "dissemination"), working in conjunction with the closely related issues of "l'ecriture feminine," logocentrism and intertextuality, do not merely apply to the work of Clarice Lispector but characterize it. By giving these moments of aporia, or impass, a central place in her work, Clarice makes us see that language inevitably turns back on itself, that for whatever "meaning" we may believe a linguistic sign may have, we must also confront the disturbing possibility that it is nothing more than

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an arbitrary and artificial construct, one that gets its "meaning" from still other signs and structures. Without knowing the terms themselves, Clarice, who has fomented a revolution in Brazilian literature, made a career out of writing precisely the kinds of linguistically self-conscious and philosophically charged texts that the later appearing deconstructive critics would prize so highly. Clarice, we might say, wrote deconstructive literature without ever knowing what Deconstructionism was; she was, in terms of her preoccupations with the phenomenologically unstable, ever evolving relationships between language, existence, human cognition and meaning, very much ahead of her time. Close readings of Clarice's novels, stories and "nonfiction" pieces reveal that, as a structuralist critic would note, she develops much of her best material around the tensions generated by certain recurring "binary oppositions," notable among which are conflicts between language and silence, male and female and a variety of ontological questions relating to presence ("logocentrism") and absence ("differance"), and to "authentic" being versus "nonauthentic" being. But, as a deconstructive commentator would rightly point out, what truly distinguishes Clarice's work, what identifies it as being uniquely hers, is the fact that these many motif-like "binary oppositions" are seldom, if ever, resolved. As we see in such works as, A maga no escuro, A paixao segundo G. H. and Agua viva, these oppositions simply go on, multiplying in their semantic possibilities, generating endless moments of aporia and defying all rationally logocentric efforts to control or even contrast them. For Clarice, as for Barthes, language (in its Saussurean sense of being an arbitrary system of signs based upon difference without positive terms) was the great theme, the one from which all other themes and questions of style and form would derive. Thus, a deconstructive reading of Clarice's texts helps explain why they are so full of aporia, so "vague," "amorphous" and "open ended." With language itself as her main subject, Clarice creates fictive worlds not of definitive results (which would reflect a "logocentric" world) but one of process, of flux, of "ecriture," of "differance." Though her texts ceaselessly generate questions about language, meaning and existence, they do not, with the possible exceptions of Uma aprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeres and Um sopro de vida, offer much in the way of substantive answers to the dilemmas and complexities of haman existence. Rather, they generate questions; they depict human beings as being caught up in a continuum of words, one that, never anchored in anything but other words, simultaneously tantalizes and maddens us. Given her basic themes and techniques, then, one can see that the narratives created by Clarice Lispector between 1944 and 1978 reveal themselves to us with dramatic intensity if approached from a deconstructivist perspective. Epitomizing the profoundly disturbing philosophical, psychological and sociolinguistic issues raised by this often misunderstood and maligned critical school, the powerful and compelling narratives of Clarice Lispector are

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beginning deserve.

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NOTES lSaussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de Linguistique Genbrale (Paris: Payot, 1931), 166. 2In "L'approche de Clarice Lispector,2' Poetique 40 (Novembre 1979): 408-419, Helene Cixous notes certain affinities between Clarice's work and that of Heidegger, Rilke and Derrida (409), while "Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman"in New Literary History 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 1-21, she compares Clarice to Joyce and declares that, for her, the Brazilian woman ". . . io the greatest writer in the twentieth century" (7). 3Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 132. 4Indicative of her (often clumsy) struggle to achieve this goal of authenticity of being via authentic language use is Joana's coinage of the term "lalande," a sign (defined, arbitrarily, by her) she hopes will spur on this crucial development. Cf. Perto do coragao selvagem, 4th ed. (Editora Sabia, 1944), 166. t'Phallogocentrism" is, of course, a variant on "Logocentrism," one that emphasizes the repressiveness of its masculinist ideologies. 5Clarice Lispector, A maga no escuro, 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Jose Alvaro, 1970), 34-35. 6Clarice wrote nine "novels" during her career. Clarice's longer, "novel" length narratives seem, on balance, to be considerably more lyrical and "deconstructively" oriented than her short fictions, or "stories," which, by contrast, seem somewhat less poetic and more mimetic. 7Clarice herself described Agua viva as a "fiction"; Cf. Bella Jozef, "Chronology: Clarice Lispector," Review 24 (1979): 26. 8A number of sections in Agua viva appear virtually verbatim in the "Fundo de Gaveta" portion of an earlier work, A legiao estrangeira (1964). These sections include: "A vingansa e a reconciliasao," "Lembranca de um verao dificil," "Porque eu quero," "Esbogo de um guarda-roupa," "Africa" and "Os espelhos de Vera Mindlin." 9Ann Rosalind Jones, "Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of L'ecriture Feminine," The New Feminist Criticism, Elaine Showalter, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 361-377; see also, Sharon Willis, "Mis-transtation," Substance, 52 (1987): 7683. Willis believes that Vivre ltorange ". . . is ostensibly a reading of . . . La passion selon G. H." (76). lClarice Lispector, Agua viva, 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1978), 24. llClarice Lispector, "A pesca milagrosa," from A legiao estrangeira (Rio de Janeiro: Editora do Autor, 1964), 143. 12Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Deplorable though it is, the recently discovered (1987-88)

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scandal allegedly linking de Man to Nazi propagandists and collaborators should not prevent us from considering seriously his theories on language and literature. See my "The Leitmotif of Darkness in Seven Novels by Clarice Lispector," Chasqui 7, no. 2 (Feb. 1978): 18-28, and "A Discourse of Silence: The Postmodernism of Clarice Lispector," Contemporary Literature 28, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 420-436; see also, in this regard, Naomi Lindstrom's "Clarice Lispector: Articulating Women's Experience," Chasqui 8, no. 1 (1978) 43-52, and Marta Peixoto's "Family Ties: Female Development in Clarice Lispector," in The Voyage In, Elizabeth Abel and Marianne Hirsch, eds. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1983), 287-355. 14Olga de Sa, A escritura de Clarice Lispector (Petropolis: Vozes, 1979); Assis Brasil, Clarice Lispector (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Organizacao, 1969); Benedito Nunes, O mundo de Clarice Lispector (Manaus: Edicoes Governo do Estado do Amazonas, 1966); and Earl E. Fitz, Clarice Lispector (Boston: Twayne Publishing C i 1985)5See, Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963). 16Helene Cixous, Vivre l'orange (Paris: Des Femmes, 1979); see also, Sharon Willis, "Mis-Transtation: Vivre L'orange," Substance 52 i1987): 76-83. 7Clarice Lispector, A paixao segundo G. H., 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Sabia, 1964), 27. 18The word "instante" occurs throughout Clarice's work and must be regarded as one of the essential motifs of her work. As a sign, its function is nearly always to suggest this basically deconstructionist sense of "presence" and "absence," of "being" and "nonbeing" and of confusion and understanding that co-exists in the act of human cognition at any moment of time. In trying to show this function, Clarice's texts undercut or destabilize themselves in a continuous process of "deconstruction."