The Animal Catalyst by MacCormack Patricia;

Author:MacCormack, Patricia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Taste of Living

Chrysanthi Nigianni

Prelude: The riddle of writing

The riddle of writing, the riddle of reading, is similar to the riddle of the Sphinx. It consists of all kinds of entrances: material (doorways/words/sensations), mental (ideas/concepts), spiritual (higher planes of wisdom), esoteric. It entails anticipation and a certain level of risk-taking, anguish and doubt (either we get in, or we get devoured). We are standing at the entrance of the gate. We cannot make the Sphinx say anything, we have to let it speak. She appeals to the ear. We need to be able to listen and we need to approach words with nobility and cautiousness: slowly (Regier 2004). It is within the words and their function that some truth will reveal itself, if only for a moment, and we need to be ready for that moment. The Sphinx is a man-eater: half-animal, half-woman, she questions the notion of a transcendent hu-Man knowledge and truth; she appears the moment a certainty of victory is reached only to turn it into a defeat.

The riddle called Clarice Lispector is the Sphinx of Rio De Janeiro (Moser 2009): a woman whose sight was a shock,1 and whose work has often been dismissed as incomprehensible, enigmatic, hermetic, in the past. In today’s Brazil, Clarice Lispector has become an icon with her face adorning postage stamps and her books being sold in vending machines in subway stations, whereas simply her first name is sufficient to identify Brazilian intelligentsia (Moser 2009). Her work – similar to her life – is a fascinating mystery and to contextualize it within the logic of genre or in a literary period would do little to solve the riddle of her writing. Literary theorists situate her work into the modernist tradition and more precisely, the third generation of modernism in Brazil, the ‘generation of 1945’ (Armstrong 1999: 62); a generation, which clearly broke away from a ‘certain instinct of nationality’ (Moser 2009: 126) that characterized the predecessors of the Brazilian modernist movement. Her stylistic experimentation of language, the highly subjective individualism and introspective mood that characterize her work, situate her within modernism’s framework of experiments of consciousness and she has been compared to ‘Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Gide, and Charles Morgan’ (Moser 2009: 127).

Clarice’s work, like the Sphinx, is a man-eater: the immediacy and force of her enigmatic writing, the exhaustive phenomenological and existential crisis of her female characters, dismantle conceptual and cultural categories of the self, gender, subjectivity. For, these categories are based on concealments and exclusions of substantial and essential elements of living: dynamic matter, forces and sense-impressions that resist conceptual reduction, and ontological modelling. She opens the gate to a different understanding and perceiving that emerge from an excess of experience, an a-subjective, impersonal experience. Her texts always entail interpersonal struggles with ‘impersonal cosmic forces termed “reality” or “God” (although not in any conventional religious sense)’ (Peixoto 1994: 82), usually triggered by a violent encounter. In one of her best known novels, The Passion According to G.

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