You are on page 1of 23

Hlne Cixous and the Hour of Clarice Lispector Author(s): Anna Klobucka Reviewed work(s): Source: SubStance, Vol.

23, No. 1, Issue 73 (1994), pp. 41-62 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684792 . Accessed: 03/05/2012 10:08
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to SubStance.

http://www.jstor.org

Helene Cixous and the Hour of Clarice Lispector


Anna Klobucka

no eu eu existo. soexisto didlogo. Eu sozinha, ndo Quando ficomuito Clarice Lispector me des Naodeixar personne dando 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 writingcame,with gleaminghandsin the darkness, when I no longer daredto help myself,my writingso farawayin puresolitude... I spokeno more,I fearedmy voice, I fearedthe birds'voices,and all of the calls that look outside, and thereis no outside exceptnothingness, and are extinto 12)2 guished-a writingfoundme whenI was unfindable myself.(1989a, 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 ungrateful 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 simulation." 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 object), who does not speak" (4). Portraying the lover as "someone speaking within himself," Barthes's characterization seems perfectly designed to highlight the differentlyoutlined discursive space in which Helene Cixous places her own reading and writing of/with/through Clarice Lispector.

SubStance#73, 1994

41

42

Anna Klobucka AnnaKlobucka

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 intertextual liaison, Jean Larose describes its way of communicating with Lispector's works as one dependent not on a closeness ... semblable celledes bandelettes emaillottent momie,maisAla A une qui maniere-musicale-dont une fenetre n'est plus un miroir; avec la de distraite soi, d'unedistraction de a simplicite la grace,toujours propre la et de du presencegracieuse innocente l'enfance, paradisou de l'orange... (88) Cixous's "lover's discourse" is thus presented as no longer merely encircling 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 Lispector-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 recognition 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, thisfaithfulness theotherrequires veryclosereading thetext,a word to a of by word reading.Eachword,eachalinea,eachcommaassumesits meanof and ing. In fact,it is this combination faithfulness rigorwhichI find so valuablein the seminar-a combination which trulyenablesa readingto 148) bringa textalive.(Sellers 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

SubStance#73, 1994

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 ecriturefeminine.The following fragment of a scholarly article neatly, if somewhat drastically, exemplifies this situation: American readers have recently started to look critically at what of have fmninine to say abouttheory,women'swriting, proponents ecriture and women's causes-social, politicaland economic.Cixous'stexts and are statements receivinggreater greater and dissemination here.Givenher currententhusiasmfor Lispector, should look at Lispector's we texts, as Cixous's enthusiasm them;second,to for well-first, in orderto understand see an exampleof the ecriture de femininethatCixouscalledforin the "Rire la Meduse." mightalso see in Lispector's We texts... an indication the of further of own texts.(Armbruster 155) development Cixous's 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: of for exhortations, example, Lispector respondswell to a number Cixous's for women to write, to write aboutwomen,to liberatethe New Woman fromtheOld,to inscribe breath the wholewoman,to bringwomento the of writing.Cixous has thus found in Lispector somethingof 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 commonality 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," ultimately declares the two authors to be

SubStance#73, 1994

44 44

AnnaKiobucka Anna Klobucka


... not one, but... veryclose,veryclose;so cose thatin rereading Clarice's texts in orderto understand last work she wrotebeforeshe died (The the Hour theStar), H.C.is broughtto reread, rewrite, severalof herown. and of (1991, xiii-xv)

There can certainly be no doubt that Lispector's work has been enormously influential on Cixous's literary and critical development. What is striking about the above assessments, however, stems from their not-sosubtle reversal of this intertextual relationship, Lispector becoming in effect 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 intersubjective communication, as articulated, for instance, in Luce Irigaray's celebrated essay "Quand nos lvres se parlent" (1977). This textual enactment 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 irresistible 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 transmitted 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 speaking, the noble principle of non-intervention clashes with the pervasive practice of (post-)colonial invasion and domestication of (non-Western European) cultural otherness.

SubStance#73,1994

Cixous and Lispector Cixous and Lispector


A Geopoetics of (Mis)Translation

45

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 instead of simply being, her own; writing in a language that had to become, 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 "breakingdown 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 sentence, "Limonade es war alles so grenzenlos," which in her French translation 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 approach 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 difference between green and blue, between red and yellow. And yet, in "infini," boundaries ("die Grenze") are erased without a traceeven 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

SubStance 1994 #73,

46 46

Anna Klobucka AnnaKlobucka

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 severalinfinities? 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-awareness, 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): vivons ...
En ces temps violents et paresseux, ou nous ne vivons pas ce que nous

encore, nous traduisons, nous traduisons, tout est traductionet reduction, il

nous n'entendonsplus ce que les choses veulent nous dire

ne restepresqueplus rien de la mer qu'unmot sans eaux:carnous avons aussitraduit mots,nousles avonsvidesde leursparoles, les 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 algues, 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 the quoted passage, even as it is spoken in by it, again and again: la mre.3 Phonetically indistinguishable from la mer, it is the French motherthat 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
SubStance#73, 1994

Cixous and Lispector Cixous and Lispector

47

like tears, not sweet like mother's milk; the sea/mother is an "etrang&re," yet she can only be motherin 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 coquilleeclate)-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 masculinenoun. Bringing in a mark of an otherness truly foreign, carried by a doubly alien-Portuguese and masculine-intruder, would surely shatter 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/ToLive the Orange, first published by des femmes in 1977, and reprinted in the volume L'Heurede ClariceLispector (8-113).4The backbone of the essay is a side-by-side English-French translalinguistic tion; however, it also incorporates words from a number of other languages: 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 defiantly 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 fruoen filha?Fuis-je femmeou est-cequeje me rejuive?(35).

Am I enjewing WinI woman,or wontI jew-ich? myself?Orwoe I woman? Fruo.(34) JoyI donna?Gioiajew?Orgioi am femme? A very "Cixousian" text, Vivre l'orange/To Live the Orangeis nevertheless also both a paean to Clarice Lispector's coming into Cixous's life, and,

SubStance#73,1994

48

Anna Klobucka AnnaKiobucka

ostensibly, a reading of the Brazilian writer's novel A paixaosegundo G.H., published shortly before in French translation by desfemmes(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 canI readthistext?Is it, in its originary accessible only bilingualness, to the bilingualreader, sinceone is constantly suspendedbetweenthe two How can I readit?Wheredoes it addressme, in my Englishor languages? in my French? Whois its reader? .... and Possiblythe one who inhabits is inhabited bothlanguages, theborder at betweenthem.(77) by The network of communication generated by Vivre l'orange(communication 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 fulfilling 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 growing up in the midst of a linguistic melange: And the tonguethat was singingin my ears?It was languages: Spanish, French. on Arabic, German, Everything thisearthcomesfromfaroff, even what is very near.I listenedto all the languages. sang in German. also I I cackledwith 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 dissatisfaction with the status of those not-fully-resident aliens in the apparently egalitarian geopoetic fantasy of Vivrel'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 translation/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 TheApple in the

SubStance#73, 1994

Cixous and Lispector Lispector

49

Dark)into the fruit whose name carries, for Cixous, an infinite potential for poetic and interpretive transformations, beginning with "Oran-je,"an addition 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 merenothing,-that seizedme absolutely. Gift.At oncetaken. The She showed me a face and I saw it, I had the sight of this face.Thenshe showedme a fruit,whichhadbecomeforeignto me, and she gaveme back the sight of this fruit.She readit to me, with her humidand tendervoice, she calledit naranja, translated into my tongue,and I rediscovered she it, the tasteof the lost orange,I re-knewthe orange.(52) un C'etait rien,-qui m'asaisieabsolument. Don.Aussitotprise.Ellem'a Le montreun visage et je l'ai vu, j'aieu la vue de ce visage.Ensuiteelle m'a montreun fruit,qui m'etaitdevenuetranger, elle m'arendula vue de ce et fruit.Elleme l'alu, avecsa voixhumideet tendre, l'aappele: elle elle laranja, l'a traduit, ma le perdue,j'ai jusqu'A langue,et j'airetrouve goft de l'orange (53) recompris l'orange. In the above passage, there is only one instance of deliberate mistranslation: the Portuguese laranjais, as Sharon Willis puts it, further "differed/deferred" in Spanish naranja.There would be nothing remarkable 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 musemother 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/Portuguese 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/ToLive the Orange,

SubStance#73, 1994

50

Anna Klobucka AnnaKlobucka

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 "carriedoff 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 notions 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 important respects can be said to resemble Vivre l'orange/ToLive the Orange. First, it is a reading of two novels by Lispector, A paixaosegundoG.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 bilingual, 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 comments 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, however, emphasize that "there has been some questioning of the accuracy of the French translations from the Portuguese. In Cixous's seminars, discrepancies 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 in peux"'; in the accompanying footnote, Armbruster explains that "capter French implies obtaining things through underhanded methods. In reference to water it implies collecting water at the source, at the head-springs"

(150).

SubStance#73, 1994

Cixous and Lispector Lispector

51 51

In the context of such disregard for Lispector's non-Cixousian linguistic 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(151; my emphasis). By ing it in any way, and withoutdenying its difference" contrast, Ambruster's reading of Lispector, modelling itself implicitly on the French-English duality of Vivre l'orange/ToLive 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 treatment 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 horada estrela(TheHour of the Star). In this metafictional work, a male writer/narrator named Rodrigo S.M. discusses his creation of a female protagonist, Macabea.7The 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":
man in his prime'. The author is a woman who assumes a male mask and the narratorthe mask of a female author. (193)
She gives him a masculine identity; he gives her male blood: 'my blood of a

SubStance#73,1994

52

Anna Klobucka

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 comments, "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 selfparody: A acqao destahist6ria comoresultado em terd minhatransfiguraqao outrem e minhamaterializaqao a enfimem objeto. Sim,e talvezalcance flautadoce em que eu me enovelarei maciocip6 (26). em Theactionof thisstorywill resultin my transfiguration an otherandin into into an object.Yes, and perhapsI'll even my ultimate materialization achievethe sweet flute musicand becomeentwinedin a soft creepervine (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 booklength 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-

SubStance#73, 1994

Cixous and Lispector Lispector

53 53

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 encounterwith self. Laidout and dead, Macabea looked as not imposingas a deadhorse.Thebestthingis stillthefollowing: to die, for to die is not enough.It failsto achievemy 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 exploration 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 TheHour 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 leitorpossui algumariquezae vida bem acomodada, sairade 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. Faqoaqui o papel de vossa valvula de escape e da vida massacranteda 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

(38) figurablblica.

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 existence. 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

If the readeris financially of secureand enjoysthe comforts life, he can be

SubStance#73,1994

54

Anna Klobucka AnnaKlobucka

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: a an Whenever authorconveysto his reader unspoken an point,he creates in senseof collusionagainstall those,whether thestoryor out of it, who do
not get that point. ( . .) The author and reader are secretly in collusion,

behindthespeaker's back,agreeing by uponthestandard whichhe is found wanting.(304) While, in TheHour of the Star,the one thus excluded gets to be, by turns, the empirical woman writer and the male narrator, the reader is always involved, 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 unequivocal 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 cocacola (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 TheInsultedand the Injured: vez Ficoupensativa. Talveztivessepela primeira se definidonumaclasse social. Pensou, pensou e pensou! Chegou a conclusaoque na verdade era ninguemjamaisa ofendera,tudo que acontecia porqueas coisas sao assimmesmoe naohavialutapossivel,paraque lutar? (50). for She remainedpensive.Perhaps the very firsttimeshe had established She hersocialcass. Shethought, thought, thought! decidedthatno and and one had everreallyinsultedher,thingswere the way they were,and there was no pointin struggling, (40). why shouldshe struggle?

SubStance#73, 1994

Cixous and Lispector Lispector

55

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.Ehaos quenaoter. Emuitosimples: mocanaotinha.Nao a tinhao qua?E apenasisso mesmo:nao tinha.Se der parame entenderem, estabem.Se nao,tambem bem.Masporquetratodessamoqaquandoo esta maisdesejoe trigopuramente maduroe ourono estio?(32). que Thereare those who have. And thereare those who have not. It's very simple:the girl had not. Hadn'twhat?Justthis:she had not. If you get my meaning,fine. If not, fine as well. But why am I botheringwith this girl when whatI reallyyearnfor is the wheatturning pure,ripeand goldenin 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 "Tantamansidao" ("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 distressingly fallacious on TheHour of the Star (included in the volume L'Heurede ClariceLispector): Nuncapensei Apenasisto:chovee estouvendoa chuva.Quesimplicidade. que o mundo e eu chegassemosa esse ponto de trigo.A chuva cai nao de porqueestaprecisando mim,e eu olhoa chuvanaoporqueprecisodela. Masn6s estamostaojuntascomoaguada chuvaestaligadaa chuva.(154) Only this:it rains,and I watchthe rain.Whatsimplicity.I never thought that the world and I would reachthis point of wheat.The rain falls,not becauseit needsme, and I lookat therainnot becauseI need it. Butwe are as unitedas the waterof therainis to therain.(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/lapluie), the site where a dialogue is indistinguishable from a monologue, and where, in fact, the very need for such a distinction is denied: it is where "our lips speak together" (Irigaray).

SubStance#73, 1994

56

Klobucka Anna Kiobucka

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 unquestioned, pure bliss of such communion, a fact which Cixous duly notes and, in doing so, comes to an interesting conclusion: Commeil doit etrepoignantle revede l'auteur veut aimerune femme qui d'extremement pres,aimeren elle son essence,jouiren elle de sa feminite, qui veut lire le livre de la chairqui ne mentpas, ne se gardepas, n'a pas commence raconter histoire.Ce qu'unauteurfemmepeut faireplus a une facilement qu'unauteurhomme. Oui, mais il peut arriver qu'unauteur,une femme,soit tropproched'une femmepouren fairela connaissance, c'est-a-dire inconpourla decouvrir nue. Et que, par familiarite, la manque.Que faire?Le tourde monde elle une pourrefaire entreede l'autrecoteen tantqu'etranger. Rentre Rodrigo S.M. pour mieux ne pas connaitreet 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 appears 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 accorded 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

SubStance#73, 1994

Cixous and Lispector Cixous and Lispector

57

textual game might be interpreted (the way it is by H6lMneCixous) as a mere self-distancing ploy on Lispector's part, a device safeguarding against potential excesses of inherently "feminine" compassion and empathy. Cixous's reading could, however, suggest an interpretation of her personal 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 closeness 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 TheHour of the Starbecoming 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: Quandelle decouvreun desirou un appetit,ou quandelle goute,pourla premierefois de sa vie, un alimentqui pour nous est devenu le moins le et des allechant, plus ordinaire mets,c'estpourelle d6couverte merveille extraordinaires. son emerveillement Et nous rendles delicatesses perdues. Etne pas jeterla bouteillede plastique, c'estprecieux (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 moments) 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 contained 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 creaSubStance#73,1994

58

Anna Kiobucka Klobucka

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 craving 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, TheHour 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/nonof 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 Otherness, and a respectful openness in approaching foreign texts and realities. As V.A. Conley writes, Withorientalechoes,she tries-especially throughaffinitieswith Lispector-to act less on a milieuor an object, particularly a Western obsession, but to be in harmony-or in a momentof grace,perhaps-with a personor a milieu.This impliesa necessarypassivityin activity,somethingthat,a decade ago, might have been called femininityin contrastto a more that Western, phallicmasculinity proposeschangethroughviolentaction. (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: Thisis the path I takein my readingof Aguaviva.I couldhave takenit in The She any othertext by ClariceLispector. saysthesamethingeverywhere. (1990,12; emphasis) questionof the law comesup everywhere. my 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-

SubStance#73, 1994

Cixous and Lispector Lispector

59

ness, its Parisian centrality, through the appeal it holds for American academic feminists), in effect exercises mastery over Lispector's text and of name and, instead of looking out to her through the ecriture-fenetre 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-difference 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 civilization" (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 metafictional 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. TheOhioStateUniversity NOTES
1. "When I am left quite alone, I cease to exist. I only exist in dialogue" (Borelli,

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'stexts can be found in

33). (Borelli Thesearehandwritten 48);"Nepas laisseranyonequi me donneorders"

translations of her work on Lispectorare available, including two volumes of selected transcripts from Cixous's seminars at the Universite de Paris VII and at the College

thebilingual in LivetheOrange" L'Heure Clarice de Lispector essay,"Vivre l'orange/To des dealt with the Brazilian (Paris: femmes,1989).Since1978,Cixoushas constantly and writer,bothin herwritingsandin heractivityas teacher lecturer.ManyEnglish

International Philosophie de both and with Lispector; selec(Readings Reading Clarice tionswereedited,translated introduced Verena as and Aldermatt Conley), well as by
several pieces in "Comingto Writing"and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991).

is the sea, la mer.In my language we have the good fortune to be able to say that the 4).

3. Cf.Cixous,commenting "themotherwho obviouslyforall French on writing

motheris thesea,thismakesup a partof ourimagination, tellsus something" it (189b,

SubStance#73,1994

60

Anna Klobucka Anna Kiobucka

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 considered 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 Braziliannessand agreeing to give interviews chiefly in order to explain that she was "not a myth," but a "person like any other" (Varin51, 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'sside of the family, it would make sense that Lispector's but translatesorally (phonetically)into the the Frenchl'orange, only Portuguese laranja 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." mother sings, the father dictates" (189b,2-4). And, soon afterwards, "'The 6. For example: 'The opening lines of [La Passionselon 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, 'Jesuis encore capable de raisonnement-j'ai dejAetudie les mathematiques qui sont la folie du raisonnement-mais maintenant je veux le plasma-je veux me nourrir directement du placenta" (149). 7. My quotations from the novel will generally follow the English translationby Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester:Carcanet,1986).I have, however, modified it substantially 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": "Deathis 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 "biblicalfigure." As Nelson Vieira proposes, The Hourof theStarcan be read as "anadaptation 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'sname is particularlyemphasized by its being contrasted with the names of her boyfriend and of the woman for whom he ultimately dumps Macabea:respectively, 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.

SubStance#73, 1994

Cixous and Lispector Cixous and Lispector

61

11. I am quoting the English translationfrom 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 structure of contracts, "egoisme a deux" refers to the exclusionary effects of "linear,dualistically 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 structurewould 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'snovel, within its discursive "community"of fictional and metafictional characters(including the encoded readers). WORKSCITED

Literature Armbruster, Carol (1983). "Helene-Clarice:nouvelle voix." Contemporary XXIV:2,145-157. Aneja, Anu (1989). "The Mystic Aspect of L'Ecriture feminine:Helene Cixous' Vivre Qui l'Orange." parle,3:1 (Spring 1989), 189-201. New York:Farrar,Strauss and Giroux. Barthes,Roland (1978).A Lover'sDiscourse. Booth, Wayne (1983). The Rhetoricof Fiction.Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press (2nd. ed.). Borelli, Olga (1981). ClariceLispector. Esbocopara um possivelretrato.Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Cixous, Helene (1979). "L'approchede ClariceLispector."Poetique 40,408-19. - (1987). "Reaching the Point of Wheat, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Maturing Woman." New Literary History19:1 (Autumn 1987), 1-21. - (1989a). L'Heure ClariceLispector. de Paris:des femmes. - (1989b). "From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History." In Ralph New York & London: Routledge. Cohen, ed., TheFutureof Literary Theory. - (1990). Reading with ClariceLispector. Edited, translated and introduced by Verena Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. - (1991). Readings. Poeticsof Blanchot, The and Kleist,Lispector, Tsvetayeva. Joyce,Kafka, Edited, translated and introduced by Verena Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press. Conley, Verena Aldermatt (1991). HeleneCixous. Writingthe Feminine(expanded edition). Lincoln & London: Univ. of Nebraska Press. Fisher, Claudine (1987). "Helene Cixous's Window of Daring Through Clarice LatinLispector's Voice." In Eunice Myers and Ginette Adamson, eds., Continental, American Francophone and WomenWriters. Lanham,etc: University Press of America.

SubStance#73,1994

62

Anna Kiobucka Klobucka

New York & London: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda (1988).A Poeticsof Postmodernism. Irigaray,Luce (1977). Ce sexequi n'en est pas un. Paris:Editions de Minuit. 17:34,87-96. Larose,Jean (1981). "Letemps d'une voix." ELtudesfrangaises Lispector, Clarice (1964). A paixaosegundoG.H. Rio: Editora do Autor (Eng. transl. by Ronald W. Sousa, The Passion Accordingto G.H., Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988). - (1973)Agua viva. Rio: Artenova (Eng. transl.by ElizabethLowe and EarlFitz [with a foreword by Helene Cixous], The Streamof Life,Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989). - (1977) A horada estrela.Rio:Jose Olympio (Eng. transl. by Giovanni Pontiero, The Hourof the Star,Manchester:Carcanet,1986). To New York:Columbia UP. Miller, Nancy K. (1988). Subject Change. Politics.London & New York:Routledge. Moi, Toril (1985). Sexual/Textual Peixoto, Marta (1991). "Rape and Textual Violence in Clarice Lispector."In Lynn A. New York:Columbia UP. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver, eds., Rapeand Representation. Cixous. Sellers, Susan, ed. (1988). WritingDifferences. fromtheSeminar HeNlne of Readings Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Suleiman, Susan Rubin (1986). "(Re)writing the Body: the Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism." In Susan R. Suleiman, ed., The FemaleBody in WesternCulture. Cambridge & London: Harvard UP, 7-29. - (1991). "Writing Past the Wall, or the Passion According to H.C.." In Helene to and Cixous,"Coming Writing" OtherEssays,Cambridge & London: Harvard UP. Rencontres br6siliennes. Laval, Quebec: Editions Varin, Claire (1987). ClariceLispector. Trois. de Vieira, Nelson H. (1989). "A expressao judaicana obra de ClariceLispector."Remate Males9, 207-209. Williams, Patricia J. (1991). The Alchemyof Race and Rights. Cambridge & London: Harvard UP. Vivrel'orange." Substance 76-83. Willis, Sharon (1987). "Mis-translation: 52,

SubStance#73, 1994

You might also like