The Moreira Salles Institute, in partnership with the Humanities Department of Columbia University, held the international seminar The Clarice Factor: Aesthetics, Gender, and Diaspora in Brazil, which occurred in March, in New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With discussions dedicated to Clarice\u2019s writing as performance, form, sound, and matter, the panels included teacher-scholars from several universities, including Vilma Ar\u00eaas (UNICAMP), Yudith Rosenbaum (USP), and Carlos Mendes de Sousa, whose text is available here.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carlos Mendes de Sousa\u00b9<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today is Sunday in New York. In fulgent Bras\u00edlia, it is already Tuesday. Bras\u00edlia simply skips Monday. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Threshold 1 \u2013 A date outside the text, 1976<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Biographers are unanimous in relating Clarice Lispector\u2019s contentment when on her last trip to Bras\u00edlia, in 1976. Clarice had traveled to the city to receive the recognition award for her work granted by the Federal District Cultural Foundation. In the previous year, Bras\u00edlia had acquired some visibility in the author\u2019s work with the publication of a relatively extensive text about the city. Would this text be what led Clarice back to Bras\u00edlia? This last trip symbolically crowns the connection between the name of the writer and the name of the city. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Threshold 2 \u2013 Founding dates, approximations: The Apple in the Dark<\/em> and Bras\u00edlia<\/p>\n\n\n\n Does The Apple in the Dark<\/em> announce Bras\u00edlia? The approximate links would derive from the dates, from the vicinity of the times: the time of the conception and construction of Bras\u00edlia (1956\/1960) and the time of the creation and appearance of The Apple in the Dark<\/em>. At the end of this book, we find the note: \u201cWashington, May 1956;\u201d the novel was only published in 1961. With due consideration of that which cannot be compared, certain connections can be found: the architecture and the monumental; the estrangement and the astonishment; poetry and modernity. All of this unites these two works that bring with them a foundational difference. But the repercussions of the analogies go further. What Clarice says about Bras\u00edlia could perhaps be said of her own texts, especially The Apple in the Dark<\/em>, a fascinating book, without corners, where it is necessary to learn to inhabit it. And what Niemeyer says about the city could also be applied to Clarice: \u201cyou can like or detest Bras\u00edlia. But you cannot say that you have ever seen anything similar.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us approach Clarice\u2019s literature as we approached Bras\u00edlia. I experienced this in 1992, after an 18-hour trip, when I crossed Guimar\u00e3es Rosa\u2019s sert\u00e3o<\/em> backlands and arrived at Bras\u00edlia by Clarice\u2019s hand; and when I experienced the intermutation of the terms: Bras\u00edlia \u2013 new literature. Clarice \u2013 new city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right after the foundation of Bras\u00edlia, Clarice visited the city. Following this visit, she wrote a text with the title \u201cBras\u00edlia: Five Days,\u201d first published in the \u201cChildren\u2019s Corner\u201d column in Senhor <\/em>(1963) magazine, and collected in the following year in \u201cBack of the Drawer,\u201d the 2nd part of the book The Foreign Legion<\/em>. In 1974, Clarice returned to the city and wrote a more extensive text, \u201cBras\u00edlia: Splendor,\u201d published in the anthology Vision of Splendor<\/em> (1975), in which it appears as an afterword to the text written at the time of her first trip. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The combination of two texts, from different times, with explicit reference to the dates of writing, constitutes a singular situation within the work. As a transition between the two blocks, there is a small fragment in which the two moments are explained: \u201cI went to Bras\u00edlia in 1962. What I wrote about is what you have just read. And now I have returned twelve years later for two days. And I wrote about it too. So here is everything I vomited up. \/ Warning: I am about to begin. \/ This piece is accompanied by Strauss\u2019s \u201cVienna Blood\u201d waltz. It\u2019s 11:20 on the morning of the 13th.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is important to emphasize the fact that the two texts collected under the name \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d constitute a central piece in the book Vision of Splendor<\/em> (1975). The attention that the author grants to them is well known, starting with the reflection in the name chosen for a title of the anthology and due to the fact that the diptych opens the book. It seems as though Clarice designed a book that would include the text which resulted from the visit to the city in 1974. It may also appear as though such a choice likewise resulted from the desire to give emphasis to the first text, by naturally accompanying the selection of other already published chronicles (included in Vision of Splendor<\/em>). <\/p>\n\n\n\n The brevity of the two visits clearly contrasts with the long consideration of the city expressed in the texts that she dedicated to it. Does entering Bras\u00edlia by Clarice\u2019s hand allow one to see the construction of the city as a construction of a literature? <\/p>\n\n\n\n If the flyover metaphor can be reconsidered in texts related to the planning of the city of Bras\u00edlia, we also find it in Clarice. For example, in \u00c1gua Viva<\/em>, when there is a reference to the way of seeing the text as if viewed from an airplane. The metadiscursive moment (the \u201cexplanation\u201d about the image of the aerial view) becomes particularly relevant here. It is the distance that allows for the discernment of the difficult order: \u201cThis text I give you is not meant to be seen up close: it gains a secret roundness previously invisible when seen from a plane at cruising altitude. Then one can guess the set of islands and one sees channels and seas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it is necessary to clarify right away that if we find the metaphor in Clarice, she is not the one who proposes the flyover reading perspective. It is clearly the point-of-view of the critic\/reader that leads to this view. It is not difficult for us to place the work into perspective and find in it successive points of arrival that are constituted as points of departure. It is easy for us to find justifications when we think of the novels. In the beginning, the middle, or the last phase, the differences and similarities allow our arguments to be based on changes that involve new beginnings. I am thinking of The Besieged City<\/em>, The Passion According to G.H.<\/em>, and \u00c1gua Viva<\/em>, but I could also think of The Apple in the Dark<\/em>, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Delights<\/em>, etc. And the short story collections could also be viewed from this perspective of the path taken or of an inaugural meaning. I read \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d in this way, as a path to a revisitation, by pointing out a few connections, a few points that likewise allow for a look at the rest of the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the greatest implications of the combination of the two texts about Bras\u00edlia into a diptych results precisely from the possibility that is provided by a reading of the work in perspective, taking into account the dates in which the \u201cchronicles\u201d were written, the contexts in which they appear, and the dialogue established with other works by the author. The first text refers to the key period in which the writing of some of Clarice\u2019s most emblematic books is situated: between the novels The Apple in the Dark<\/em> and The Passion According to G.H.<\/em> and between the books of short stories Family Ties<\/em> and The<\/em> Foreign Legion<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The differences between the two blocks are eye-catching. The first, which is more compact, produces an effect of greater closure. Despite the existence of elements that provoke estrangement, it bears a marked sense of cohesion based, to a large extent, on its approach to storytelling, in the recreation of a very particular founding story. The second block is marked by the fragmentation that is immediately observable in the formal layout, through the presence of very short paragraphs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first text reflects the period in which it was written, very close to the inauguration, however, as one might expect, it reflects it in Clarice fashion. The amplitude and distance grow in the speaker who tells of the strangeness of the place. The writing of this first text alludes to chapters of The Passion According to G.H.<\/em> (such as Chapter 18), but also to fragmentary texts from the 2nd<\/sup> part of The<\/em> Foreign Legion<\/em>, where it appears, and even to other texts from the 1st<\/sup> part, such as \u201cThe Egg and the Chicken.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for the second text, we are immediately led to contextualize it in the framework of Clarice\u2019s production from the 1970s, which is particularly marked by the sign of the fragmentary. It is important to consider a reading perspective that relates the texts from the different phases, obviously taking into account the specificities of the moments. In this framework, I would like to highlight the book \u00c1gua Viva<\/em>, from 1973. Here one considers not only the book as we know it, but also what is represented by the tense moment that led to its concretization and that was visibly expressed in the evident transit in the copy of \u201cScreaming Object\u201d (a typescript that precedes this book), as well as in testimonies that allow us to accompany this process (like some letters exchanged with Jos\u00e9 Am\u00e9rico Motta Pessanha regarding the actual publication of this work). It is important above all to point out that a sort of distancing or a very expressive new direction will be performed in the texts published as of 1974. Incidentally, see how, right after the release of \u00c1gua Viva<\/em>, this work was analyzed with respect to its novelty, in its differences and also its similarities (in mode of concentration). In the beginning of 1974, in a review published in the Tribuna da Imprensa<\/em>, Reynaldo Bair\u00e3o highlighted the book\u2019s formal renovation, giving an account of the fact that, in it, there is simultaneously \u201ca sort of summary of all her previous fictional work.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n I intend to show that Clarice\u2019s \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d is a place where, as if distractedly, a thousand doors are opened. In this way of presenting the city, all of Clarice is right there in the end. As if she unwittingly placed, on the same plane, the high and the low, autobiographical and identitarian issues, literature and truth, life and death; but also play and humor, bewilderment and deflation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first block, Bras\u00edlia appears associated with light and blindness, with the gelidity of crystal. The incidence of raw light enhances the exile. One speaks of the buried city that rises from the rubble; it was nature that was charged with hiding it until it reappeared one day. This is the motif of the story. One may speak of a theory of strata (the past, the present, the future) that determine the layout and existence of the city. One represents a city that fulfills the attributes of circular mythical places: the concretization of an abstraction or idealization (\u201crounded streets \u2026 without corners\u201d). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Look at the implications of the founding story, in Clarice\u2019s writing, and the way that the writer herself will deconstruct this view. We find the return to a fantastic past that is reinvented based on real facts: \u201cI regard Bras\u00edlia as I regard Rome. Bras\u00edlia began with a final simplification of ruins.\u201d The elements that are referred to an empirical reality are anchored in a recognizable historicity, but the dominant movement is that of the amplification which overcomes these references. A flowering Antiquity (the 14th<\/sup> century A.D.) mixed with a timeless present returns us to the book The Besieged City<\/em>, one of the foundational novels (of her own name, of her writing). At a given moment, it is said of Lucr\u00e9cia that she is \u201cGreek in a city not yet erected,\u201d finding names for things, a resonance that will extraordinarily and sumptuously echo loudly in the aforementioned Chapter 18 of The Passion According to G.H.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first paragraph from the first block of \u201cBras\u00edlia,\u201d the author experiences, for a brief period, the impact of the new city. The account emphasizes this perspective. The invocation of the founding story (to take account of what is seen and felt) underscores the dawning moment (supported by the first analogy: the creation of the world), and the readers of Clarice Lispector, in turn, cannot avoid invoking the author\u2019s work (specifically the initial phase, where many revisitations of founding myths are found). The issue of the deterritorialization performed by her literature reverberates here. In this sense, the identification between Clarice and the city of Bras\u00edlia gains strength: she is Greek, Roman, and Brasiliarian, also. The confrontations with the place of estrangement are the estrangement from herself. The observer\u2019s focus unveils her alien condition, which sets in continuous motion her propulsive self-consciousness and otherness. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The view of Bras\u00edlia is a guest view based on the perspective of Rio de Janeiro. And nonetheless, Bras\u00edlia is the city that evoked a more extensively concentrated text. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The interrogations about Brazil, the attempts to understand the country based on this strange place, which is the new city, are recurrent in the 1960s. I recall different outside perspectives that are somewhat coincidental, such as that of the sociologist Max Bense, who dwells on its Cartesianism and its amalgam, or that of the poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, who speaks of the \u201clogical and lyrical\u201d city. In Brazil itself, there are recurring views that take account of the estrangement. One cites as an example the short film by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade \u2013 \u201cBras\u00edlia: contradi\u00e7\u00f5es de uma cidade nova\u201d (Bras\u00edlia: contradictions of a new city). <\/p>\n\n\n\n The interest in Bras\u00edlia is something that naturally involves all Brazilians. Even so, it is important to ask: why such an explicit and prolonged attention to a city? It is not difficult for one to make a very complete survey of Clarice\u2019s geography. By memory, whoever knows her work may present a chart that succinctly allows one to accede to a synthesis in which various places in the city of Rio de Janeiro are highlighted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One must not forget the founding meaning integrated into the arch that the construction of the work presents. The city, in the first books, is the city with minimal references to any connection of a locatable geographical order. In the 1949 book, in whose title generically appears the word \u201ccity,\u201d a certain atmosphere is asserted, with a landscape that is crudely extraterritorial, that is, prevailingly abstract. <\/p>\n\n\n\n From the mappable places and objectifiable impressions, in \u201cBras\u00edlia,\u201d we are quickly confronted with lines of flight. The reason for the dislocations reverberates in the texts: from the familiar resonances of the first trip (in the reference to her children) to the explanation of the reasons for the second dislocation (the lecture given). Since we cannot exhaustively present here the presence of the map, let us see examples from the beginning of the second block. We read in a paragraph, which refers to the visit to the Dom Bosco church, the admiration for the \u201csplendid\u201d stained glass, the contemplative stillness: \u201c[The church] has such splendid stained glass that I fell silent seated on the pew, not believing it was real.\u201d But soon a dissonance is mentioned and an action plan suggested: \u201cThe only flaw is the unusual circular chandelier that looks like some nouveau riche thing. The church would have been pure without the chandelier. But what can you do? go at night, in the dark, and steal it?\u201d. The text progresses alongside the map: \u201cThen I went to the National Library;\u201d it progresses with references to sensations, with references to that which marks the visiting writer\u2019s contact, and with her way of interacting with defining elements of the city; it progresses with precise references to the hunger that she feels, in the cold, in the light, in the dry air. Very quickly, the narration allows itself to be contaminated by that which is disconcerting, that which escapes the conventionalism of the travel account or the chronicle: \u201cWhat hunger, but what hunger. I asked if the city had a lot of crime. I was told that in the suburb of Grama (is that its name?) there are about three homicides per week. (I interrupted the crimes to eat).\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The visit to the city and the return presuppose a movement that is asserted in the account and that highlights the sign of accommodation. Two aspects are notable in relation to this question: the counterpoint with other cities, other places summoned in the text, and the Brazilian question. The sign of accommodation is particularly active in the second block (\u201cBras\u00edlia: Splendor\u201d), which is marked by the pendularity between Rio de Janeiro and Bras\u00edlia, a movement that paces the whole text. One observes, nonetheless, a mixture that at times seems to cause confusion and that involves the transit between the two cities \u2013 the location where one arrives and the place from where one has departed and to where one returns. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let us see the first four paragraphs of the second block. The length of the first two is similar. The third paragraph is smaller and the fourth is much shorter. Just one sentence: \u201cI pause for a moment to say that Bras\u00edlia is a tennis court.\u201d After this pause, the following paragraph begins like this: \u201cThere is a reinvigorating chill there.\u201d The adverb points to the place that is the object of attention. It is from here that a few contradictions occur from the speaker\u2019s perspective, which are pointed out by the author herself, about the times of writing and about the places. \u201cI\u2019m talking about Rio. Hello, Rio! Hello! Hello!\u201d; \u201cTomorrow I return to Rio, turbulent city of my loves;\u201d \u201cIn Rio, in my pantry, I killed a mosquito that was quivering in midair;\u201d \u201cIt is daybreak here in Rio;\u201d \u201cDoes Bras\u00edlia have gnomes? \/ My house in Rio is full of them.\u201d In Bras\u00edlia, Clarice finds a world in her own image and likeness, a land where she can tread. Paradoxically, the city allows for the return to the place where the exiled is recognized. The threatening angel of expulsion prowls, but is absent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The approach to Bras\u00edlia may take place through the political meaning of the new capital. In Clarice\u2019s chronicles in the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>, we sometimes come across her concern with the national question. Gilberto Figueiredo Martins, in the book Est\u00e1tuas Invis\u00edveis. Experi\u00eancias do espa\u00e7o p\u00fablico na fic\u00e7\u00e3o de Clarice Lispector<\/em> (Invisible Statues. Experiences of Public Space in the Fiction of Clarice Lispector; S\u00e3o Paulo, Edusp, 2010), presents a reading with this focus, taking account of a difference in the second text with regard to the first, which reflects the political moment. The law of the accommodating city is asserted in some moments and incites confrontation. We read there the reference to \u201cimplacable Bras\u00edlia\u201d and to the implacable green eye, to the city that \u201carrests\u201d and that deprives one of documents, identity, veracity, and intimate breath, and finally, to the city that leads to crime. But already in 1962, Clarice spoke of the \u201ctotalitarian state.\u201d When she interviewed Oscar Niemeyer, she confronted him with this judgment: \u201cI once wrote: \u2018The construction of Bras\u00edlia: that of a totalitarian state.\u2019 What do you think of my impression, Oscar?\u201d In the same interview, there arises a concern in relation to how the city could fulfill the concretization of the democratic ideal consonant with the architectural project. In 1972, when she interviewed Paulo and Gisela Magalh\u00e3es, architects who worked in Bras\u00edlia, she clearly affirmed: \u201cWhen I was there many years ago, it seemed to me a deserted city.\u201d And furthermore: \u201cMy primary impression, already very old [\u2026] and what I saw in the beginning of Bras\u00edlia, was that of a city from the Far West of films, with saloons and shootouts.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The dislocation is made to a place that stimulates reflection. The return to the point of departure is to be simultaneously inside and outside. In the return, as if it were an improvisation, there arises a torrent of memories, in a record of fleeting images. The acceleration projects multiplying mirrors, a way of escaping fixity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The counterpoints encounter, in opposition, precise references: New York, Capri, Bahia, Cear\u00e1, Recife, Lisbon\u2026 What time is it? How does one live? If Bras\u00edlia points to a trans-historical and trans-temporal dimension, the inhabitant of the land of Clarice Lispector also asks that there be room for the banalized terrain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The expected references in a chronicle text, the objective impressions and various referential notes (geographical, architectonic, climactic, social, etc.), everything that is in the factual domain is projected into another sphere. We are continually transported to the domain of overcoming and transmutation. The cold, the light, the color of the earth, the trees, the traffic, etc. are transformed into Clarice\u2019s signs. Everything becomes widely pulverized, surpasses the immediate. Factual data is continuously intertwined with fantastic allusions, such as when between parentheses the narrator affirms that she interrupted \u201cthe crimes to eat.\u201d Or when it is said that the rats of Bras\u00edlia eat human flesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the proposed view, the creative impulse permanently echoes: \u201cmy insomnia is me myself, it is lived, it is my astonishment;\u201d \u201cThey erected inexplicable astonishment. Creation is not a comprehension, it is a new mystery.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One may then affirm that Clarice\u2019s \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d is the mirror of the text: the author captures the city in its time, which is that of a recognized strangeness. Mirrored, the city encounters itself. By reading the places, we, the readers, recognize everywhere the topics of Lispector\u2019s universe. Places in perspective: the world is as many ways as Lispector tells us it can be seen and even more so as we, Lispectorized, come to see it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d is where genre no longer holds<\/em>, it has always been the whole work escaping labels. It is in \u00c1gua Viva<\/em> that we find the indicated gesture, the maxim \u201cgenre no longer holds with me.\u201d Actually, the gestation of this book accounts for the process and bears this explicit mark. On a page that follows the cover page of the typescript \u201cScreaming Object,\u201d consider what could be a draft for a proemial note similar to those that appear in The Passion According to G.H. <\/em>or An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights<\/em> (the previous two novels). Two texts intersect on this page; the ink color is different:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is an anti-book. The core is \u201cit\u201d.<\/p> If you consider this more than a letter, be aware that it is an anti-book.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n But the phrase \u201cgenre no longer holds with me\u201d could be placed as a subtitle to the beginning of the work, already in Near to the Wild Heart<\/em>. And the indication for \u201cScreaming Object\u201d dialogues especially with \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d if we think of the approximations with another text that is difficult to classify, \u201cReport on the Thing,\u201d which, when published in the Jornal do Brasil <\/em>column, received the name \u201cObjeto: anticonto\u201d (\u201cObject: antistory\u201d). There Clarice presented an explanatory note:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNote: this report-mystery, this geometrical anti-story was published in S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019 Senhor <\/em>magazine. In his introduction, N\u00e9lson Coelho says that I have killed the writer in me. He cites several writers who have attempted suicide of the written word. None succeeded. \u2018Just as Clarice shall not succeed\u2019, N\u00e9lson Coelho writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What did I attempt with this type of report?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think that I wanted to write an anti-story, an anti-literature. As if that way I might demystify fiction. It was a worthwhile experience for me. It doesn\u2019t matter that I have failed. It is called: OBJECT.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For this purpose, it is interesting to highlight the inclusion of \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d in the volume The Complete<\/em> Stories<\/em>, edited by Benjamin Moser. The plurivocity of registers (from short story to chronicle) embraces the opening on the plane of enunciation. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In opposition to the reinforced concrete, the monumental edifices, the solitude, the earthy, the solemnity of the opening of the new city born out of nothing, there arises the spectral city that vanishes, the city that levitates, the fluctuation, the diffuse: \u201cAm I being levitated? Bras\u00edlia suffers from levitation.\u201d What causes the loss? What phantasmatically disappears? What can be shown and what escapes the subject of perception is permanently at play. The inquisitive bent becomes evident, the enunciations associated with the idea of flight. Why put the questions? Why Bras\u00edlia? The text is rife with interrogations. And at every moment we come across the doubtful enunciation that results in double premises which always presuppose more than one path. Even the possibility of changing one\u2019s mind and leaving matters unresolved: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Could there be Bras\u00edlia? That settles it: what I\u2019ll do is buy a green hat to match my shawl. Or should I not buy one at all? I am so indecisive. Bras\u00edlia is decision. Bras\u00edlia is a man: And I, such a woman. I go bumbling along. I stumble into something here, I stumble into something there. And\u00a0 arrive at last.<\/p> I\u2019ve settled it: I don\u2019t need a hat at all. Or do I? My God, what shall become of me?<\/p> Did I say it or not [\u2026]?<\/p> Didn\u2019t I say that Bras\u00edlia is a tennis court? Because Bras\u00edlia is blood on a tennis court. And as for me? Where am I? Me? poor me, with my scarlet-stained handkerchief. Do I kill myself? No. I live in brute reply. I am right there for whoever wants me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The assumption of her own death is another marked sign of flight. One will see how the strange formulation \u201cdied\u201d presents an ontological impossibility in itself. Everything is quickly perceived \u2013 suddenly, everything is past, forgotten, and what the quickness leaves in our hands is a small emptied time. In the first block, the look of astonishment over the newborn city is projected in time travels, concretely in a future afterlife, and in a fabulously reinvented past: <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2013 When I died, one day I opened my eyes and there was Bras\u00edlia. I was alone in the world. There was a parked taxi. Without a driver. Oh how frightening.<\/p> \u2013 Momma, it\u2019s lovely to see you standing there in that fluttering white cape. (It\u2019s because I died, my son).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The disarming and obsessive enunciation of death itself opens up the places of flight, the phantasmatic places. In the second block, this appearance is reconsidered and expanded into more and more disconcerting formulations in which humor and an elevated tone are mixed: <\/p>\n\n\n\n I. The phantasmagoric one. My name does not exist. What exists is a picture faked from another picture of me. But the real one died already. I died on the ninth of June. Sunday. After lunch in the precious company of those I love. I had roast chicken. I am happy. But lack true death. I am in a hurry to see God. Pray for me. I died elegantly.<\/p> I am going to last a while yet. No one is immortal. Just see if you can find someone who doesn\u2019t die. I died. I died murdered by Bras\u00edlia. I died to pursue research. Pray for me because I died on my back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The encounter with the city of Bras\u00edlia causes an outbreak that stems from the anarchic energy of the voice. A flow, a manifesto against the programmed city. Look at the expressions, words, graphic resources \u2013 an explosive creativity (contrary to what is written about Bern or about other places, in the antipodes of Bras\u00edlia). Look at the strangeness of the formulations that account for the extraordinary inventiveness: \u201cI love you, oh extragantic one! Oh word that I invented and do not know the meaning of.\u201d The examples can be listed, among many others. Such as the paragraph with the highlighted sentence: \u201cBras\u00edlia is a wildly twinkling blue eye that burns in my heart.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The discourse progresses admirably at will. Bras\u00edlia is an image-making machine. The threads are untangled, dismantling (feinting and dribbling) the commonplace. The dualities and alternances dominate: from the exalted, glorified image, to the humiliated figure. Spontaneous perceptions are associated with the account of the unpredictable. Semantic constellations instigate perspectives on perspectives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bras\u00edlia allows for a series of crossings, games, interrelations. A crossroads-text: reference notes, fantastic accounts, autobiographical fragments, humorous and parodic tirades. In the whole text, this cosmophagic centering is greatly relevant: \u201cI call humbly for help. They\u2019re robbing me. Am I the whole world? General astonishment.\u201d One then immediately reads the following: \u201cThis isn\u2019t a high wind, sir, it\u2019s a tornado.\u201d Further ahead: \u201cThe monstrous typewriter. It\u2019s a telescope. Such wind. Is it a tornado? It is.\u201d The intensity is the degree to which Clarice invests herself. She is a cyclone. At the service of stylistic novelty, which marks the flight from and the shattering of the text, we encounter devices that wrap and unwrap the sentences: words with hyphens inside syllables or letters (a way of making them more audible?), incomplete sentences, different formulations (\u201cThere people have dinner and lunch together \u2013 it is to have people to populate them\u201d), the very marked repetitions: \u201cFeeling good, feeling good, feeling good. I\u2019m in a good mood.\u201d The experimentation, the renovation of language are not gratuitous. The speaker\u2019s perception is disconcerting and is supported by the segmentation, the accumulation, the impertinent chains, the hallucinatory rhythm, the strange similes, and the disturbing portrait. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d, as in \u201cReport on the Thing\u201d or even earlier in \u201cThe Egg and the Chicken,\u201d the brainstorming that Clarice will adopt in the texts from her last phase gains strength. In Where You Were at Night<\/em>, it really appears in \u201cSoul Storm.\u201d There are loose sentences that echo in Bras\u00edlia, intersecting thoughts, uncertain sayings, aphorisms, voices, echoes (we encounter a passage in which the narrator presents herself as a receptacle of voices that she records), wordplays (\u201cSeus\u201d [Yours] instead of Deus <\/em>[God]; and \u201ciulf\u201d instead of flui<\/em> [flows]). <\/p>\n\n\n\n I am the words that I hear; we are the voices that we hear. In the vortex of speech, the dreams erected before us, the minute (or infinite) questions in proliferation. In the whirlwind into which the account throws us, sometimes, a halt is imposed, an arrow or a flash, a sparkle or unexpected image, before the return to the maelstrom: <\/p>\n\n\n\n I am no more than phrases overheard by chance. On the street, while crossing through traffic, I heard: \u201cIt was out of necessity\u201d. And at the Roxy Cinema, in Rio de Janeiro, I heard two fat women saying: \u201cIn the morning she slept and at night she woke up\u201d. \u201cShe has no stamina\u201d. In Bras\u00edlia I have stamina, whereas in Rio I am rather languid, sort of sweet. And I heard the following phrase from the same fat women who were short: \u201cJust what does she have to go do over there?\u201d And that, my dears, is how I got expelled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The complexity of Clarice\u2019s brainstorming, which embraces a diversity of strata, settles into tense movements from a surprising mixture of registers: of the fantastic climate associated with critical humor and with constant autobiographical references, with the cohabitation of disparate literary references. As in the register of chronicles, but much more free. The strength of the telegraphic discourse and the spontaneous discourse, the transcription of registers into other languages (especially English), the transcription of the syllabled words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to return to Bras\u00edlia to room 700. So I can dot the \u201ci\u201d. But Bras\u00edlia does not flow. It goes in the opposite direction. Like this: wolf (flow).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Wolf backwards. How discourse flows! The denegation says the centrality. Clarice is not a turgid discourse, she is not a mouthful of hard stones. It is water that flows, dense water of stars and rare jewels, drinking water, life water. The narrator is caught up in the powerful impregnating force of the city. It is the disturbing effect (the inexplicability of the place) that, in part, unleashes the torrential discourse. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a criss-crossing of many axes in \u201cBras\u00edlia.\u201d More than any other text close to this one (think of \u201cThe Chicken and the Egg,\u201d \u201cReport on the Thing,\u201d or \u201cWhere You Were at Night\u201d), here is a path which is similar to that of the announcements in Hour of the Star<\/em>. One can also glimpse in \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d an evident twinning with A Breath of Life<\/em>: the dialogue and the interchanges between the \u201cAuthor\u201d and \u201c\u00c2ngela\u201d are on the same plane as the narrator\u2019s dialogue in \u201cBras\u00edlia: Splendor\u201d with the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almost at the end of the second block, we read: \u201cI am innocent and ignorant. And when I am in a state of writing, I don\u2019t read. It would be too much for me, I don\u2019t have the strength.\u201d Declarations of this sort anticipate the arrival of the alter ego Rodrigo S.M. (likewise present in The Via Crucis of the Body<\/em>, in the character Cl\u00e1udio Lemos). That which in the beginning of the first block of \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d was a reflection of mirrors (the author spoke of the mystery of the architect\u2019s creation, speaking of herself), is now an explained meta-literary inclination. The reversibilities are similar (\u201cso much we interchanged\u201d) and there are many similarities found in the domain of metadiscursive reflection. Look at the closeness in the formulations: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bras\u00edlia \u2013 It\u2019s an adventure: it brings me face to face with the unknown. I\u2019m going to speak words. Words have nothing to do with sensations. Words are hard stones and sensations are ever so delicate, fleeting, extreme.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n <\/em>The Hour of the Star <\/em>\u2013 \u201cIts rhythm is frequently discordant. It also contains facts. I have always been enthusiastic about facts without literature \u2013 facts are hard stones and I am much more interested in action than in meditation. There is no way of escaping facts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n No, it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n On the plane of enunciation, the relation of the narrator (the writer Clarice Lispector) with the city is very close to that which the narrator Rodrigo S.M. establishes with Macab\u00e9a: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bras\u00edlia is slim. And utterly elegant. It wears a wig and false eyelashes. It is a scroll inside a Pyramid. It does not age. It is Coca-Cola, my God, and will outlive me. Too bad. For Coca-Cola, of course.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Oh, what a pretty nose Bras\u00edlia has. So delicate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The text presents us with real and fictional characters (in the library, the airport, the airplane) and reveals Bras\u00edlia the character. With liberty, and in a register full of humor, the narrator interpellates the city, speaks to the city, to distantly better contemplate it. The unveiling results from the persecution and saturation of the figure, an obsessive procedure that is Lispectorian par excellence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The sign of privation is very marked: \u201ccity with no corners\/ Neither does it have any neighborhood bars for people to get a cup of coffee \/ It\u2019s true. I swear I didn\u2019t see any corners. \/ In Bras\u00edlia the everyday does not exist.\u201d In the aseptic city, errors have been eradicated. One demands a revision. Because inhabitability, the place for the human, presupposes the fundamental incorporation of error. At the end of a paragraph, one reads a sort of maxim: \u201cBras\u00edlia is a joke, strictly perfect and without error. And the only thing that saves me is error.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through play, from parody to humor, one continuously seeks to preserve mistakes. Here we are also led to approximations with many of Clarice\u2019s characters, especially Macab\u00e9a: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bras\u00edlia is a Wedding March. The groom is a northeasterner who eats up the whole wedding cake because he\u2019s gone hungry for several generations. The bride is a widowed old lady, rich and cranky. From this unusual wedding that I witnessed, forced by circumstances, I left defeated by the violence of the Wedding March that sounded like a Military March and commanded me to get married to and I don\u2019t want to. I left covered in Band-Aids, my ankle twisted, my neck aching and a big wound aching in my heart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And nonetheless, the challenge that the city provokes is up to the risk. Here one finds one of the strong traits identified with Clarice\u2019s universe: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bras\u00edlia is risky and I love risk. It\u2019s an adventure: it brings me face to face with the unknown. I\u2019m going to speak words. Words have nothing to do with sensations. Words are hard stones and sensations are ever so delicate, fleeting, extreme.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n One of the most expressive recurrences \u2013 the attempt to say by predication \u2013 translates an impossibility (\u201cBras\u00edlia is\u2026\u201d). What else might this insistence want to say? In the second block, the irruption of these attempts reinforces the impossibility of description: \u201cIt\u2019s becoming clear that I don\u2019t know how to describe Bras\u00edlia.\u201d As in the whole work, one goes around an object or person, one incessantly seeks to reach it without managing to arrive at the nucleus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the play of approximations, two elements are noticeable: the dentist\u2019s chair and the tennis court. The dentist\u2019s machine in Bras\u00edlia, a recurring motif, leads us to toothaches, to the \u201cexposed nerve\u201d in The Hour of the Star<\/em>. The reference to the tennis court appears in a short story from Where You Were at Night<\/em>, \u201cThe Departure of the Train,\u201d a text that occupies a marked role in the domain of interrelations established among texts from her last phase. In the dual structure that the short story presents, the figure of \u00c2ngela Pralini is speaking to Dona Maria Rita, but projecting a dialogue with the absent character, Eduardo. The meaning attributed to the characterization of the character is close to that which begins to be invoked to describe the city, in the first occurrence: \u201cI pause for a moment to say that Bras\u00edlia is a tennis court.\u201d The complexification is manifested as the text progresses: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Didn\u2019t I say that Bras\u00edlia is a tennis court? Because Bras\u00edlia is blood on a tennis court. And as for me? Where am I? Me? poor me, with my scarlet-stained handkerchief. Do I kill myself? No. I live in brute reply. I am right there for whoever wants me. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And further on: \u201cRemember how I mentioned the tennis court with blood? Well the blood was mine, the scarlet, the clotting was mine.\u201d The process of identification evident here is what we will read in the reversible statements made by Rodrigo S.M. to Macab\u00e9a. And if blood could have a political reading, in the dismantling of the oppressive scenario of the military dictatorship, as Gilberto Figueiredo Martins (cf. Est\u00e1tuas invis\u00edveis<\/em>) claims, this blood also means the return to the essence of being and to the experience of limits \u2013 the obsession for the heart<\/em>, for the nucleus of life<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n De onde no entanto at\u00e9 sangue arfante de t\u00e3o vivo de vida poder\u00e1 quem sabe escorrer e logo se coagular em cubos de geleia tr\u00eamula. Ser\u00e1 essa hist\u00f3ria o meu co\u00e1gulo? Que sei eu. (The Hour of the Star<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The speaker is the character Rodrigo S.M., who, in the \u201cDedicat\u00f3ria do Autor (na verdade Clarice Lispector)\u201d, writes: \u201cDedico-me \u00e0 cor rubra muito escarlate como o meu sangue de homem em plena idade e portanto dedico-me a meu sangue.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n We could continue to list examples. I will only recall the end of \u201cBras\u00edlia,\u201d which is so close to the ending of the last novel: <\/p>\n\n\n\n I know how to die. I have been dying since I was little. And it hurts but we pretend it doesn\u2019t. I miss God so badly. In \u201cBras\u00edlia,\u201d an avowedly autobiographical voice is assumed, even if these notes irrupt loosely here, often in unperceived fashion. The inquisitive procedures underscore the purpose of hiding and disclosing the writer figure and the writing processes. There are many references to the mother Clarice, to her dog Ulisses, who occupies a privileged space in this text, to Coca-Cola, to taxi drivers, to housemaids, to the fortuneteller Dom Nadir from M\u00e9ier\u2026 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Disclosures? Some. At other times the latency that incites us to interpret: \u201cOh, poor little me. So motherless […] It is a thing of nature. I am in favor of Bras\u00edlia.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the framework of explanations, one recalls for instance the direct appearance of topics with strong resonance in the Lispectorian universe: \u201cAs I may have said, I want a beloved hand to hold mine when it is time for me to go.\u201d And it is in \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d that polished self-characterizations arise that would serve as a theme for biographers. Olga Borelli portrays her as such: \u201cShe carried herself with both the humility of a peasant and the pride of a great lady.\u201d In Clarice\u2019s voice, we read here: \u201cCome on, I am a woman who\u2019s simple and a tiny bit sophisticated. A mix of peasant and a star in the sky\u201d Above all, what is sought in \u201cBras\u00edlia\u201d is what is sought in all her work: the self\u2019s encounter with the self. A search that encounters here its highest expression in the interrogation about the emblem-figure of Clarice\u2019s writing: \u201cBras\u00edlia is an orange construction crane fishing out something very delicate: a small white egg. Is that white egg me or a little child born today?\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00b9 Carlos Mendes de Sousa<\/strong> earned his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Minho. He is an associate professor in the Department of Portuguese and Lusophone Studies at the Institute of Arts and Humanities, University of Minho, Portugal, where he has dedicated himself to the study of Brazilian literature and modern and contemporary Portuguese poetry. He is the author of many books, including Clarice Lispector. Pinturas<\/em>\u00a0(Rocco, 2013);\u00a0Miguel Torga: o ch\u00e3o e o verbo<\/em>\u00a0(Sabrosa \/ Espa\u00e7o Miguel Torga, 2014);\u00a0Clarice Lispector. Figuras da Escrita<\/em>, (Instituto Moreira Salles, 2012), and\u00a0O Nascimento da M\u00fasica. A Met\u00e1fora em Eug\u00e9nio de Andrade<\/em>\u00a0(Almedina, 1992).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Moreira Salles Institute, in partnership with the Humanities Department of Columbia University, held the international seminar The Clarice Factor: Aesthetics, Gender, and Diaspora in Brazil, which occurred in March, in New York. With discussions dedicated to Clarice\u2019s writing as performance, form, sound, and matter, the panels included teacher-scholars from several universities, including Vilma Ar\u00eaas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4821,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[704,623],"class_list":["post-4627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","tag-brasilia-en","tag-carlos-mendes-de-sousa-en"],"yoast_head":"\nThe diptych<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Flyover (1)\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
In the beginning\u2026 the story\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The trip\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Transits, accommodation\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Writing, text: hybridities\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Signs of flight: spectral Bras\u00edlia, the interrogation, the assumption of one\u2019s own death\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Voices, rhythms, respirations, flows. The brainstorm.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Projections: the flyover (2)\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
And now I am going to die a little bit. I need to so much.
Yes. I accept, my Lord<\/em>. Under protest.
But Bras\u00edlia is splendo.
I am utterly afraid.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\u00a0<\/strong>Disclosure\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n