Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity by Marques Irene;

Author:Marques, Irene;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity
ISBN: 3119190
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Published: 2012-02-29T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

The Deeper Politics of Agency

Chapter Three

Authenticity of Being as the Politics of Agency in Lispector

Being political on her own terms

Perhaps not surprisingly, Clarice Lispector has earned the reputation of being an introverted, self-centred, difficult, romantic, and apolitical writer. When she published her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart), in 1944, Lispector received some negative criticism from important critics of the time. Álvaro Lins situated her book in the category of “feminine literature” (“literatura feminine”) and qualified it as a text full of “lyricism” (“lirismo”) and “narcissism” (“narcisismo”) (qtd. in Guidin 14) and lacking in structure. Although such comments might not be interpreted as totally negative, they carry a pejorative connotation, especially if we take into account that factual and explicitly and socially committed literature was so much in vogue during this time and was seen as the type of literature needed in Brazil if social change for the better were to occur. However, Lins also praised Lispector’s book for its originality, comparing her with avantgarde writers such as Joyce and Woolf. Sérgio Millet, another important critic of the time, said that when he first read Lispector he thought of her as a “little girl who would die of an attack when faced with the most serious critique” (“mocinha que morreria de ataque diante da crítica mais séria”[qtd. in Guidin 14]), a condescending and patriarchal comment, to say the least. On the other hand, Millet also praised her book for its aesthetic quality. Several other critics would say that Lispector’s style was “difficult” (see Scott-Buccleuch and Teles de Oliveira 328) and would thus be rejected by and impossible to understand for a large number of readers, or that her work was “separated from the social context” (“desliga[do] do contexto social” [Lucas 32]).

Lispector was a contemporary of the so-called regionalist writers such as Raquel de Queiroz (1910-2003) and Jorge Amado (1912-2002), who were concerned with social justice issues and the development of a national identity, and who sought to found a national literature reflecting themes, forms, and modes of expression that would be “truly Brazilian.” The prose fiction of these writers, commonly referred to as the Romance Regionalista (“Regionalist Novel”) tended to be documentary, often addressing the issues of poverty, drought, illiteracy, and isolation faced by the northeasterners of the “Back Lands” (“Sertão”), and denouncing the bribery and corrupting systems of “clientelism” (“compadrismo”) and “patronage” (“coronelismo”) regulating Brazilian society. Such fiction was considered to be openly committed literature, putting the social in the forefront, and realistically and openly describing the sociopolitical mechanisms that were perceived as responsible for the oppression and exploitation of the Brazilian people. This type of committed literature was well accepted by most Brazilian intellectuals, who were conscious of the multitude of problems affecting their country, problems which they felt they needed to address so that a better and more egalitarian society could be engendered. As Márcia Guidin explains, “The celebrated regionalist novel (cf. Pécaut, 1990) was for the Brazilian intellectuals, a precise instrument to understand the country.

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