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A DISCOURSE OF SILENCE:
THE POSTMODERNISM OF CLARICE LISPECTOR
Earl E. Fitz
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mode of writing than her use of silence, an omnipresent feature of
her fiction that she develops both metaphorically and metonymically
to describe and embody the isolation of the modern human condition.
Because silence plays such a central role in Lispector'swork, her fiction
offers the readera comprehensiveview of how one of postmodernism's
most distinctive attributes functions as the primary shaping force in
a fictive universe. As a function of language, it is silence, moreover,
that shows how illustrative Lispector's work is of the critical investi-
gations done by such narrative theoreticians as Roland Barthes (Le
Degre'zero de l'criture), Maurice Blanchot (Le Livre a venir), Jacques
Lacan (Ecrits), and George Steiner(Languageand Silence), all of whom
focus on the phenomenon of muteness in the literature of the post-
World War II era.
Also germane to Lispector'sfiction is an issue raisedby Ihab Hassan,
the author of another major study concerning the nature of postmod-
ernist literature.5 Hassan has shown how the term "silence" can be
used as a trope to characterize the new kind of writing that began to
flourish in numerous Western cultures during the 1960s and 1970s.
He makes the point that while postmodernist writers often seem
obsessed with language, the actual language their characters use pro-
duces very little meaningful communication. The result, which Hassan
finds typical of postmodernist fiction, is a state of "silence," one pro-
duced, ironically, by a torrential rain of words. This same preoccupa-
tion with words and their communicative reliability is endemic to the
stories and novels of Clarice Lispector, a writer for whom words are
both "concrete objects" and elusive "fourth dimensions."6 It is in this
context that Lispector's postmodernism can most clearly be seen.
Arguing a point similar to Hassan's is Susan Sontag, who says,
in "The Aesthetics of Silence" (Styles of Radical Will), that
LISPECTOR 421
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most memorable charactersundergo mystical quests for self-awareness
and authenticity of being. In undertaking these quests they find them-
selves mysteriously impelled by the anarchy of language toward a
Nirvanalike state of inner awareness beyond knowledge and toward
the silence that lies forever beyond the speech act. Because Lispector
sees the nature and function of language as inseparable from her most
basic theme, the human impulse toward self-realizationand awareness,
virtually all of her narratives feature a character who struggles against
the silence of language failure, one whose ontological anxieties both
derive from and reflect the unstable ebb and flow of language.
Relating directly to structure as well as to characterization, lan-
guage use in Lispector's fiction falls into two distinct categories: its
expression of a character'sprivate identity and its expression of a char-
acter's public identity. This structuralistduality produces the binary-
and dialectical - tension that characterizes her work and, at the same
time, functions as the very mechanism that generates the discourse
of silence so typical of her fiction. The silence, then, that Hassan,
Sontag, Steiner, and others see as distinguishing postmodernist fiction
is preeminentlythe kind of silence that Lispector cultivatesin her work.
For the Brazilian writer silence becomes a metaphor for noncommuni-
cation, for the failure of language, just as it is for other, better known
postmodernists like Borges, Barthelme, Nabokov, and Beckett.
This public/private polarity provides Lispector with a structurally
contrastive framework on which she can develop her characters.
Among the most famous of these, Martim (of The Apple in the Dark,
1961), becomes known to the readerprimarilythrough his silent, inner
ruminations about the role language plays in the shaping and reshaping
of his identity. The function of language as a vital yet enigmatic force
in human existence, in fact, graduallyemergesas the real subject matter
of the novel. In the course of this open-ended and mysterious narra-
tive, Lispector develops two separate but closely interrelated move-
ments from out of her ontologically oriented subject matter: in one,
Martim, the protagonist, physically rejects the bourgeois society of
which he has been a part; in the other, he rejects language, which he
comes to perceive as being as meretricious as the society that he has
fled. The problem, as Gregory Rabassa points out, is that Martim does
not understand any of this very well.8 As a postmodernist antihero,
Martim is overwhelmed by the wave of words that engulfs him. Be-
fuddled by the endless semantic possibilities inherent in these signs,
sIntroduction to The Apple in the Dark, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York:
Knopf, 1967) ix-xvi.
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he gradually reduces himself to a primitive consciousness, one in which
the confident, secure speech-act is beyond his ability to generate.
Struggling to comprehend the unstable relationship between language
and reality, Martim falls silent. Although his mind blazes with an in-
tensely poetic language use, Martim fails to break out of his state of
solitude and noncommunication. Dimly sensing that he has become
a prisoner of words, Martim can neither articulate what bothers him
nor verbalize a plan to control the confusion, anxiety, and trepidation
he feels:
It is not that Martim does not use language, for, like Beckett's
Molloy, he talks - or thinks - obsessively. What Martim cannot do
is control language; indeed, it is his unsettling discovery that language
controls him. Reflecting his struggle with language and being, the text,
narrating from within, tells us:
Whatdid he want?Whateverit was that he wantedhad been born far away
inside of him, and it was not easy to bringthe stammeringmurmurto the
surface. ...
His obscuretask would have been easierif he had allowedhimselfthe
use of words that had alreadybeen created.But his reconstructionhad to
begin with his own words because words were the voice of a man. . . . The
moment he acceptedalien words he would automaticallybe acceptingthe
word"crime,"andhe wouldbecomenothingbut a commoncriminalin flight.
It was still too early for him to give himself a name- and give a name to
what he wanted. (The Apple 134)
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be led back to a society that he will want to punish him for his trans-
gressions, both real and imagined.
At the conclusion of the novel, when Martim meekly allows him-
self to be arrested for a crime he had committed, he shows his own
ontological insecurity by insisting that the authorities know what they
are doing by taking him back to society for punishment:
"Let'sgo," he said then, going uncertainlyover to the four small and
confusedmen. "Let'sgo," he said. Becausethey musthaveknownwhatthey
weredoing. Theycertainlyknewwhattheyweredoing. In the nameof God,
I commandyou to be sure. Becausea whole preciousand putrescentweight
was being given into their hands, a weightto be throwninto the sea, and
a very heavyone too. And it was not a simplething- becausetherehad to
be mercywhenthat burdenof guilt was thrownoverboardtoo. Becausewe
are not so guilty after all; we are more stupid than guilty. So with mercy
too, then. "Inthe nameof God, I'monlywaitingfor you to knowwhatyou're
doing. BecauseI, my son, I am only hungry.And I have that clumsyway
of reachingfor an applein the dark- and tryingnot to drop it"(TheApple
361)
Martim'sstruggle with language, which embodies Steiner'sbasic point
in "Retreatfrom the World"(Languageand Silence), ends in the silence
of indecision and failure. Although he senses he can create an authentic
existence if he can put his feeling into words, Martim is fatally
enervated by the anarchical force of language. He discovers that he
lacks the courage and the will to make it yield to him a firmly de-
lineated sense of his own identity. The easier way is to let society, with
its authority figures and its emphasis on clich6d and superficial think-
ing, simply issue him an identity, one based on conformity and con-
ventionality. Exhausted and frustrated by his effort to think for him-
self, Martim collapses into a state of intellectual and psychological
silence, one reinforced, ironically, by its encouragement of noncriti-
cal and trivializingverbal exchange. The narrativeends in a very uncer-
tain way because Martim, by now both unable and unwilling to take
responsibility for his identity, simply gives up and hopes, in a desul-
tory fashion, that someone will tell him who he is. The reader under-
stands what Martim does not, however: that the authority figures he
hopes will do this for him are just as confused and as inauthentic as
he is. Language has failed Martim in his quest for self-awareness and
knowledge. Silence prevails.
A Lispector characterwho responds quite differently to the prob-
lem of the capacity of language to define and control human existence
is G. H., from The Passion According to G. H. (1964). Structured
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in the form of an unbroken interior monologue, this intense novel
also tells the story of a mystic quest for self-realization, one under-
taken by a woman known to the reader only by her initials, G. H.
Speaking to her narratee,10 G. H. declares:
an entirelynew and latent powerthrobbedin me, and I was in possession
of a certaingrandeur:the grandeurof courage, as if my very fear had at
last investedme with daring. ...
An entire life of civilizedrefinement-for fifteen centuriesI had not
foughtback, for fifteencenturiesI had not killed,for fifteencenturiesI had
not died- an entirelife trappedin proprietynow coalescedin me and rever-
beratedlike a silent bell whose vibrationsI did not requireto hear. ...
... What had I done? ...
... I had killed. I had killed!"
LISPECTOR 425
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How can I explainit to you?(ThePassion782-83;firstellipsisin original)
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to underscore the tension that exists in Lispector's work between the
public and private identities of her characters. When Catherine, an
urban middle-class wife and mother, is struggling to come to grips
with her nascent sense of self-awareness, the text assumes the form
of an indirect interior monologue. We read:
Relievedof her mother'scompany,she had recoveredher brisk mannerof
walking; alone it was much easier. . . . And things had disposed themselves
in such a way that the sorrowof love seemedto herto be happiness- every-
thing aroundher was so tenderand alive, the dirtystreet,the old tramcars,
orangepeel on the pavements- strengthflowedto and fro in her heartwith
a heavy richness."5
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"Don'tgo sitting in a draught!"Catherinecalled out.
"Nowdear, I am not a child,"her mothershoutedback, still obviously
worryingaboutherappearance.. . . andCatherinefelt a suddenurgeto ask
her if she had been happy living with her father.
"Givemy love to Auntie!"she shouted.
"Yes,yes."
"Mother,"said Catherine....
"Catherine!"saidthe olderwomanwith a gapingmouthand frightened
eyes. .... The train was already moving. (Family Ties 118-19)
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want it to do (to signal clearly who and what they are), Lispector's
characters become frustrated, anxious mutes, desperate to communi-
cate but keenly aware that they are unable to do so. They may, as
in the cases of Catherine and G. H., discover who they are but then
find themselves unable to make other people understand. Or, as with
Martim, they may simply give up, finding the struggle to establish and
maintain an identity too much to endure. Anna, the hausfrau pro-
tagonist of "Love" (Family Ties), is of this latter sort, a prototypical
Lispectorian characterwho sees how she might be a very different sort
of person but who lacks the resolve to bring the change about.
Although Lispector's characters are typically developed more as "dif-
ferent states of mind"'7 than as physical or even psychological entities,
their pain is viscerally human. We know them well, for their anxieties
are shared by a great many people in the post-World War II era, an
era poignantly depicted in the epistemologically insecure and painfully
self-conscious literature of postmodernism.
A singular exception to the muted silence of Clarice Lispector's
postmodernist fiction is An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights,
a controversial novel published in 1969. The primary difference be-
tween this work and her other efforts is that here dialogue plays a
more decisive role in the development of the characters than does
monologue. This dialogue, moreover, is significant for the two major
characters involved because it succeeds in bridging the existential gap
that isolates people. An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights is
also less concerned per se with the ontological dimensions of language.
It focuses, as do nearly all of Lispector's texts, on a quest for
self-knowledge and identity, but unlike most of her other work it does
so by concentrating on the verbal and physical interchange of two
people, a man and a woman who seek honestly to overcome the lone-
liness of their separateexistences. Because this novel develops primarily
on the denotative strength of its language, it is considerably less poetic
than her other work. Yet even here, in a narrative that depicts the
growth and ultimate unification of two beings, the language succeeds
in recreating the private, inner worlds of the characters. A key dif-
ference is that in An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights the tex-
tual balance shifts away from a representation of the inner world and
toward the creation of an external and social one.
The smothering silence that characterizes Lispector's other work
is much less conspicuous in this novel, where it functions as a feature
of the human condition that can be overcome. Because for Clarice
LISPECTOR
I 429
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Lispector silence is closely associated with isolation and linguistic
failure, the man and woman in An Apprenticeship or The Book of
Delights gain authentic "voices,"that is, achieve meaningful communi-
cation, only by using love to overcome their solitude. A bit of dia-
logue coming late in the novel illustrates this point:
"Do you thinklove is makinga mutualgift of one'ssolitude?After all,
it's the greatestthing that one can give of oneself," said Ulysses.
"I don't know. ... but I do know that my searchhas come to an end.
What I mean is I've come to the edge of a new beginning."'8
To accomplish this, Lori and Ulysses do what all other Clarice Lispec-
tor characters do: they confront the realities of their existences.
Unhappy and dissatisfied with what they find, the two main characters
of this sixth novel find in each other what is missing in their lives.
Lori and Ulysses succeed because, unlike most of Lispector's other
characters, each is able to make language encode a system of feeling
and thought and to transmit this code to another human being, one
who has overcome his (or her) own isolation enough to receive the
message and respond to it in a meaningful fashion.
But while Lori and Ulysses are unique among Lispector'sfictional
beings because they do communicate with each other, they do so by
first engaging in a typical Lispectorian quest, the lonely and solitary
pursuit of self, of self-awarenessand knowledge. By finding themselves
first, they are then able to attain a voice of guileless self-expression,
and this gives each of them a chance to establish contact with another
person. As the narrator tells it:
And with sudden,unexpectedjoy she noticednot only that she was opening
her handsand heart, but that she could do it withoutrisk! "I'mnot losing
anything!I'm finally givingmyself and what happenswhen I give is that I
receive, I receive... ."
... she realizedthat it was in her very act of relinquishmentthat lay
the still dangerouspleasureof existing. (An Apprenticeship108-9)
The drama and pathos of Lispector's characters arise from the fact
that while they may gain a voice through self-inquisition, they often
fail to find anyone able or willing to respond to their signals. Thus,
in Lispector's hard, uncompromising world, it is not enough to estab-
lish a linguisticallysecure sense of personal identity and self-awareness.
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One must also be lucky, and there is no guarantee that a similarly free
and responsive person will be found.
Lori and Ulysses succeed in breaking through the psychological,
linguistic, and social barriersthat imprison each of them because they
discover they can each develop as human beings only by overcoming
the hitherto insurmountable solitude of the other. The silence of their
respective worlds is not the ignorance, fear, and confusion that bedevil
so many of Lispector's characters, however. For Lori and Ulysses it
is the silence of knowing who and what you wish to be while also being
fearful you will fail to achieve what you desire. Their fear of failing
to attain and articulate an authentic identity stunts each of them until,
paradoxically, they learn to use the silence of language to break down
the social and psycholinguistic walls that have been erected between
them:
In doing this, Lori and Ulysses recover what Hassan calls the "ancient
connection" between love and silence,19 a connection generated by a
quiet contemplation of self. Only then, Lispector tells us, can a man
or a woman hope to use the positive force of love and language for
personal growth and fulfillment, as Lori and Ulysses do:
"Thetruth is, Lori, that deep inside I've searchedmy whole life for divine
rapture.I had neverthoughtthat, instead, I would discoverthe divinityof
the body."
As for her, she had struggledher whole life againsther tendencyto be
carriedaway, neverallowingherselfto get in over herhead. . . . Now in the
silencethat envelopedthem, she openedthe floodgates,surrendered hersoul
and body and did not know how muchtime had passed, for she had aban-
doned herself to a deep, carefreeplunge. (An Apprenticeship111)
The words of love that Lori and Ulysses declare to each other
are paralleledby physical lovemaking, a structuraland thematic feature
of the novel that demonstrates Norman O. Brown's observation in
Love's Body:
LISPECTOR | 431
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The truemeaningsof wordsarebodilymeanings,carnalknowledge;andthe
bodilymeaningsarethe unspokenmeanings.Whatis alwaysspeakingsilently
is the body.
Thematrixin whichthe wordis sownis silence.Silenceis the mothertongue.20
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veloping this key point further, and linking it to the uniquely female
ways in which Lispector's best charactersrelate to the world of objects
around them, He61ne Cixous, in Vivre l'orange (1979), argues that
Lispector'spersonages derive this strength from the fact that they work
to nurture rather than dominate objects, including people. This is pre-
cisely what happens in Agua viva, a novel in which one person'sgrowth
does not stem from another person's destruction. Even though the
narrator of Agua viva struggles to free herself from a narrow and
inhibiting relationship, she is clearly interested not in wounding her
erstwhile lover but in helping him to help himself. Read in this way,
as a sequel to An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights, Agua viva
also shows us, however, that although love may overcome the isola-
tion of our existences, it may also fail us, leaving us wounded and
more deeply enmeshed than ever in the darkness and silence of our
solitude. For Lispector, love is a potent force, but like any force it
can be used constructively or destructively; that is, it can be used to
liberate or imprison. As she shows us repeatedly in her fiction, in "The
Buffalo," for example, the power of love in human affairs is often
indistinguishable from hate. Both can be used to entrap and subjugate
and both can lead to the ruinous self-imprisonment of silence, bitter-
ness, and noncommunication.
Agua viva develops all of these postmodernist themes in an arrest-
ing fashion, however, combining them in a way that tellingly probes
both the fragility of the love relationship and the nature of art's episte-
mological relationship to life. As the text's feminist narrator22says:
I'll writenow as my headguidesme ... and I won'tmeddlein whatit writes
S... I feel that I know some truths ... that I alreadyanticipatethem. But
truths do not have words. Truths or truth? . . . It's so difficult to say things
that cannot be said. How does one translate the silence of our real
encounter?23
Then, referring to the elusive relationship between words, the text she
is creating and the flux of her consciousness, the voice declares:
22H6lne Cixous has raised some interesting issues regarding the nature of
"women's writing" and, specifically, about the "feminism" of Lispector's voice. See,
for example, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs
1 (1976): 875-93; "L'approchede Clarice Lispector: Se laisser lire (par) Clarice Lispec-
tor-A Paixdo segundo C. L.," Podtique 40 (1979): 408-19; La Jeune nee (Paris: Union
G6nerale d'Editions, 1975); and Vivre l'orange (Paris: des Femmes, 1979).
23ClariceLispector, Agua viva (White Water), trans. Elizabeth Lowe and Earl
E. Fitz, a manuscript soon to be published by the University of Minnesota Press as
The Flow of Life, 42-43. All further references to this manuscript appear parentheti-
cally in the text.
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Whenyou readme you will ask why I do not restrictmyselfto paintingand
to my exhibitions,since I write roughlyand without order. The answeris
that now I feel the need for words, and what I writeis new for me because
my truewordwas, untilnow, untouched.The wordis my fourthdimension.
(Agua viva 2)
Termed not a novel but a "fiction" by the author,24 Agua viva takes
the form of a long letter narrated by a woman who feels it necessary
to terminate an unsatisfactory love affair. Using words to emancipate
herself, the woman's discourse, which holds the text together, amounts
to an uninterrupted interior monologue in which she explores the
potency and meaning of love, the efficacy of language (versus paint-
ing) as a medium of communication, and the extent of the solitude
that characterizes our lives. The most complete lyrical novel Lispec-
tor ever wrote, Agua viva also typifies the way a postmodernist text
self-consciously questions both its own creation and the capacity of
language to aid in the quest for knowledge and self-awareness. Domi-
nated by interrelated images of birth, darkness, silence, and water,
Agua viva is neither despairingnor nihilistic, however. Indeed, through
the strength of the narrator'saffirmation of self, the text makes a posi-
tive statement about how we might better understand and conduct our
lives:
Whatwill still be, afterwards,is now . .. now is the reignof now. And
while improvisationlasts, I am being born.
And this way, afteran afternoonof asking"Whoam I?"and of waking
at one o'clock in the morningstill in despair- this way, at threeo'clock in
the morning, I awoke and found myself. I went to my encounterwith
myself- calm, happy,plenitudewithoutexplosion.I am simplymyself.And
you are you. It's vast, it will last.
What I write you is a this. It won't stop, it will continue.
Look at me and love me ... no, look at yourself and love yourself,
yes, that's the way it should be.
What I write you continues, and I am bewitched.(Agua viva 81-82)
The silence of Agua viva's narrator, then, stems from her realiza-
tion that though she is free she is also alone in the world, "bewitched"
by the momentousness of her liberating self-affirmation. She is silent
because she courageously accepts her necessary and willingly self-
imposed isolation, not because she lacks the ability, courage, or will
24Jozef 26.
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to confront the truth of her condition. Her outward or social silence
is overcome privately, however, because the narrator ultimately suc-
ceeds, by dint of intellectualand emotional honesty, in coming to terms
with herself, in communicatingwith the innermost aspects of her being.
She, too, is her own narratee. This private use of language to first
establish and then sustain an authentic sense of personal identity is
what links the voice of Agua viva to what Lori, Ulysses, and G. H.
do in their novels, but it is also what Martim and Anna cannot do.
Their silence is complete, both private and public, while the other char-
acters at least grapple with the entwined problems of language and
being, the problems that form the thematic bedrock of Lispector's
fiction.
As such writers and critics as Raymond Federman, Ronald Suke-
nick, John Barth, Ihab Hassan, George Steiner, and Susan Sontag
describe it, literary postmodernism aspires to silence, to the kind of
nonexpression and noncommunication that occurs when, living in a
Babel of verbal noise, words come to lose the meanings we expect them
to have. Turning against itself, the literature of postmodernism shows
us that the more we talk, the less we communicate, that silence, because
it leads to a pure, uncontaminated preverbal state, ironically begins
to do what we want language to do. The self-conscious and reductive
nature of this condition has led many critics to cite silence as being
one of the key metaphors for postmodernist literature. Just as writers
like Beckett, Burroughs, and Miller use the frustratedsilence produced
by failed language, so, too, does Clarice Lispector focus on the decep-
tive linkages between language and human consciousness, on our ability
to know what we are doing when we use words to discard or create
identities for ourselves. Yet Lispector's fiction is also built on a realiza-
tion that while the silence that derives from a failure to communicate
terrifies and intimidates people, it can also regenerate them, urging
them toward the attainment of a more honest and personally satisfy-
ing existence. Characterslike Martim, G. H., Catherine, Lori, Ulysses,
the nameless voice in Agua viva, and a host of others show us that
while the silence of confusion, fear, and isolation may be "demonic,"
it is also "holy,"25capable of freeing us from our ontological terrors
by forcing us to confront the truth of our arbitrary, linguistically
defined existences.
ClariceLispector, one of Brazil'smost importanttwentieth-century
narrativists, is gaining an international following because of her fic-
LISPECTOR I 435
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tional plumbings of the psycholinguistic and philosophical depths of
such issues. Too often studied in isolation, as a brilliant but curious
literary phenomenon, Clarice Lispector is a writer whose work fits
squarely into the thematic and structuralmainstream of Westernpost-
modernism. Deserving much more attention from this perspective, her
lyrically wrought "literature of silence" offers us much to consider.
The Pennsylvania State University
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