“Hopeful Despair: The Enigma of Clarice Lispector”
The short stories of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) earned the writer a reputation as the only Brazilian modernist operating within a global literary discourse. Though identifiably modernist in form, with an emphasis on the introspective and epiphanic, the experimental stories have collected a variety of labels through the years— existentialist, feminist, esoteric, post-structural, to name a few. But the ongoing critical attempt at definition speaks more to the elusive nature of the texts than to their clarification. The Lispector story is riddled with striking contradictions, where the cruel decay of the world is tranquil, compassion is a voracious lion, and faith is a demon.
Within a variety of circumstances, ages, and backgrounds, her protagonists undergo an encounter with an other that offers a moment of seeing that is accompanied by both despair and ecstasy. The moment is an invitation, a chance at conversion where one can choose to remain awake to the paradoxical violent beauty of the world, or to remain behind in an illusory safety.
Distinguishing Lispector’s revelatory narrative from that of her modernist and existential peers is that the ‘choice’ is not a matter of will, but a surrender of control to the mystic sensibility with which her world is endowed. An unmistakable religious vocabulary accompanies the characters on their path, and yet any religious allegiance or solution is evaded.
In our discussion, we will focus on this entanglement of paradoxes in three short stories, asking what it means to accept or deny a reality that escapes our understanding, and yet demands our conscious awareness.
Facilitated by Jane Potthast, MAR Candidate in Religion and Literature | Yale Divinity School
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