Melissa Ann Castillo-Garsows
Fordham University
 
 

According to professor and critic Alvaro Lins, famed author Clarice Lispector represented for Brazil “nosso primeiro romance dentro do espírito e da técnia de Joyce e Virginia Woolf” [our first romance within the spirit and technique of Joyce and Virginia Woolf (my translation)]. To this noted literary critic Alfredo Bosi adds, “e poderia ter acrescentado o nome de Faulkner” [and he could have attached the name of Faulkner (my translation)] (Bosi 424). Yet Lispector and Faulkner have never been closely compared and in fact, the association is not obvious. Faulkner wrote about the US South, Lispector wrote mostly about middle class women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Faulkner was heavily concerned with themes of history and lineage while Lispector’s novels and stories conspicuously lack a sense of past. Thus, positioning William Faulkner with Clarice Lispector may seem an odd choice, for while it has been generally recognized that Faulkner played an important role in Spanish American literature, influencing most if not all of the region’s major “Boom” writers, in Brazil this connection is not only less studied, but much less clear cut (Fitz 439). Brazilian history and literary trajectories afforded a more dialogic and less didactic relationship with the American writer. In fact, Brazil was well into its own modernist movement after its groundbreaking “Semana de Arte Moderna” (Modern Art Week) in 1922, and its writers were influenced by many of the European thinkers that may have been important to Faulkner such as Balzac and Flaubert (Bosi 382). Additionally stream of consciousness, linguistic experimentation, and posthumous narration were already being used by Brazilian authors such as Machado de Assis well before Faulkner began writing.

As part of the Brazilian literary canon since the early 1940s, Faulkner has been translated in Brazil and Portugal with regularity. Even before the translations began to appear, Faulkner’s literary presence in Brazil was significant. According to one account in a newspaper article published in Sao Paulo one day before Faulkner left after a visit to that city in August 1954:

O Estado de Sao Paulo was one of the first newspapers outside the United States to call attention to William Faulkner’s work. At a time when in his own country–that is, around fifteen years ago–Faulkner was not yet sufficiently known and appreciated, this newspaper was already publishing articles calling attention to the extraordinary importance of this author, who a decade and a half later would be honored with a Nobel Prize for Literature (Monteiro, 98).

In this way, it may be even more fitting to thrust these two authors together into dialogue, where they can meet as contemporaries. Lispector’s poetic, psychological texts are reminiscent of Faulkner in many distinctive ways. Although both authors have used stream-of-consciousness in their first-person, often hypnotic narrations, as well as showing an affinity for gothic elements, it is their obsession with language that truly brings these two together. In his book The Différance of Desire: Sexuality and Being In the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector, Earl E. Fitz asserts this quality of Lispector’s work: “It is Lispector’s unique talent, however, not just to show how these structures inhibit personal freedom (as many writers have done), but by means of various and endlessly competing discourses within and among the texts themselves (the constantly evolving positions of the reader, the characters, and the involved) to draw the reader into actually experiencing (through her or his interpretation of the characters’ interpretations) the ever evolving ways language shapes and gives meaning to the world” (20). Likewise, in texts like As I Lay Dying, Faulkner shows how Addie Bundren’s haunting presence in death shapes the novel both giving meaning to and limiting the scope of language for both her family and the reader simultaneously. Through their evolving treatment of language, Faulkner and Lispector create new forms of discourse, making room for complex women who disrupt traditional patriarchal structures.

Faulkner’s strong female characters such as Rosa Coldfield, Eula Varner and Addie Bundren, destabilize the narration, moving beyond classic gender division of literal and figurative, semiotic and symbolic. They are powerful women who greatly affect the men around them. Lispector’s novels turn this exploration upside down, creating unconventional, strong women who must deal with the difficult situation of being female in a patriarchal society. Although they deal with similar themes of the mother as a creative source, the power of the body, and the blending of boundaries, Faulkner’s texts are ultimately about men’s reactions to these powerful women, while Lispector’s are about women.

Clarice Lispector’s texts are conflictive ones, in which a feminist happy ending rarely occurs. Her subjects – middle class women confined to distinct gender and social roles – are very clearly under strong patriarchal systems. Yet while her early texts such as Perto do Coração Selvagem (1944) and Laços de Familia(1960) largely find language and reason (associated with men) as the only escape, her later texts begin to explore women’s access to unique modes of power and forms of creativity. In this way, Àgua Viva (1973) marks a clear turning point in her writing. Described by Hélène Cixous as the “finest practice of her concept of ‘l’écriture feminine’,” Àgua Viva “writes the female body” (Fitz 22) in its incorporation of figurative contemplation of a woman’s move into language and culture. In its rejection of lacanian theories of women as lacking, here the female body works as a positive creative force, re-working cultural constructions of femininity. Written as a meditation on writing, the nameless female protagonist asserts: “Mas estou tentando escrever-te com o corpo, todo, enviando uma seta que se finca no ponto tenor e nevrálgico da palavra” (Àgua Viva 12).1 [“I am trying to write you with my whole body, shooting an arrow that firmly pierces the tender nerve ends of the world” (The Stream of Life 6)].

One of Lispector’s most experimental books, the only plot in Àgua Viva are moments of the protagonist’s daily routine, her thoughts, dreams and fantasies as she ponders art and life. The narrator both rejects her ex-lover and his allegiance to rationality while the text itself, composed of almost 80 pages without a single break, rejects the rules of logic. Addressing both the reader and her ex-lover simultaneously, the protagonist muses, “Sou em transe. Penetro no ar circundante. Que febre: não consigo parar de viver. Nesta densa selva de palavras que envolvem espessamente o que sinto e penso e vivo e transforma tudo o que sou em alguma coisa minha que no entanto fico inteiramente fora de mim” (Àgua Viva, 63). [“I’m in a trance. I penetrate the surrounding air. What fever: I can’t stop living. I’m this dense jungle of words that wrap themselves thickly around what I feel and think and experience and that transform all that I am into something outside myself.” (The Stream of Life 54-55, translation modified)]. Here the literal finds communion with the figurative in this dense poetic passage. The protagonist is both inside and outside her body and the body of words simultaneously as she transforms the sense of her body in space into an analogy for her feminine literary practice. Peixoto explains, “It appears as a treacherous medium to the narrator who yearns to convey the realm ‘behind thinking.’ Here, as often occurs in Lispector, the danger of words lies in their allegiance to the already codified, to logic and the rational intelligence” (62).

In her response to this “rational intelligence”, the narrator of Àgua Viva takes up one of the most intriguing themes of the novel – an association between a return to the womb and self-expression. There are at least five references to feeding from the placenta, which for the narrator represents her source of creative inspiration. In the first occurrence, the narrator makes clear her rejection of male discourse in favor of a new way of creating meaning. “Porque ninguém me prende mais. Continuo com capacidade de raciocínio – já estudei matemática que é a locura do raciocínio – mas agora quero o plasma – quero me alimentar diretamente da placenta” (Àgua Viva, 9) [“Because nobody holds me back anymore. I still have the ability to reason – I’ve studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason – but now I want plasma, I want to feed directly from the placenta” (The Stream of Life, 3)]. For the protagonist, the placenta becomes an alternate source of power, a source of self-nourishment. It is through this return to maternity that the narrator is able to enter into verbal discourse: “Entro lentamente na escrita assim como já entrei na pintura. É um mundo emaranhado de cipós, sílabas, madressilvas, cores e palavras – limiar de entrada de ancestral caverna que é o útero deo mundo e dele vou nascer” (Àgua Viva, 14). [“I slowly enter writing, just as I have entered painting. It’s a world entangled with vines, syllables, sunflowers, honeysuckle, colors and words – outlining the entrance of the ancestral cavern which is the uterus of the world and from which I will be born” (The Stream of Life, 8)].

The strength of the association between the female body and creativity is at its strongest in Àgua Viva, and is suggestive of Faulkner’s statement in Lion in the Garden that “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies” (Clarke 3). The distinction between the male and female writer is clear – while Faulkner’s writer sees the mother as a source sacrificed for creative expression, Lispector’s writer-artist protagonists view a communion with the mother as the ultimate end. Like Faulkner, Lispector explores throughout her prolific texts the challenge of the corporeal body to the dominance of language. Yet Faulkner explores mainly the effect of this conflict on men and Lispector’s work etches out a place within language for women (which her characters are not always able to successfully do). While characters like Eula Varner are able at times to exert power over men through their sexual potential and express themselves through their almost goddess-like bodies, their inability to express this power through language makes it fleeting. While the point of view is different, it is the inability to develop a language based on figurative discourse within a language-dominant society that so challenges the women in both authors. Cixous comments, “If you do not possess a language, you can be possessed by it” (23). Just as the brothers in The Sound and the Fury struggle linguistically to recreate their sister Caddy, Lispector’s protagonists struggle to linguistically recreate themselves within a male dominant society and language, especially in Brazil where the everyday language is markedly patriarchal. “That is to say, a hierarchy of sexual difference is inscribed onto language within which women are visibly associated with their bodies and sexuality and are ultimately repressed and punished for any transgression thereof,” writes Peixoto. “Ultimately, language becomes a construct that can socially control not only a woman’s self-expression but also censor her body and sexuality” (12).

Deborah Clarke in her book Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner takes up exactly this issue, investigating not only “the transformative power of the mother” (5) but also the conflictive and often dissolving boundaries between men and women, the semiotic and symbolic. “While ostensibly recognizing the gendering of literal and figurative language, he also challenges and collapses their respective valuations and even the division between them,” Clarke writes (10). In this way, Faulkner struggles with the ways in which gender is culturally constructed, Lispector’s very own thematic project. According to Santos: “It is a questioning that insinuates a re-defining of the socio-culturally prescribed roles forced upon women without losing sight that they are an intrinsic part of the very system they question” (7).

Clarke traces the growing impact of women’s physical bodies as well as their figurative and linguistic power in Faulkner, starting with the absent mother in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. According to Clarke, both these books examine the men’s attempts to deal with “maternal absence,” in the form of Caddy and Addie, though language. In this way, Lispector’s first novel Perto do Coração Selvagem, published in 1944, is an ideal comparison as well as being a similar early effort by the author to understand the construction of gender. Written when Lispector was in her early 20s, the novel follows the progression of Joana from childhood through various female roles including dutiful daughter, wife, mother, or lover and the stifling effect they have on her own artistic faculties, of feeling, thinking and saying. While the first section alternates between scenes from Joana’s childhood and her adulthood, the second presents moments of her life as a young women in a fairly chronological order. In the end, the novel’s conclusion is that conforming to these female roles is a liability which a young writer must suppress. Like Faulkner’s Caddy and Addie, Lispector’s protagonist is a powerful woman who from a very young age is defined by the men in her life, and who rebels against societal expectations. Yet while Caddy and Addie reject these male expectations through the control and use of their bodies, waif-like Joana achieves the greatest agency through developing storytelling.

Joana’s transgressions against these societal roles are not just conflictive but violent, and she is described as “evil” and a “cold-blooded viper” (Near to the Wild Heart, 47) and even views herself as an untamed animal. Yet, Joana takes pride in these transgressions as she sees them as her path to creativity: “O que seria então aquela sensação de fôrça contida, pronto para rebentar em violência, aquela sêde de empregá-la de olhos fechados, inteira, com a segurança irrefletida de um fera? Não era no mal apenas que alguém podia respirar sem mêdo, aceitando o ar e os pulmões?…Não, não, – repetia-se ela – é preciso não ter mêdo de criar” (Perto do Coração Selvagem, 14) [“What else could that feeling be of restrained force, ready to explode into violence, that urge to use it with her eyes shut, all of it, with the unbridled confidence of a wild beast? Was it in evil alone that one could breathe without fear, accepting the atmosphere and one’s lunges?… No, no – she repeated to herself – one mustn’t be afraid of being creative” (Near to the Wild Hear, 16)]. In Perto do Coração Selvagem, artistic creation for a woman is a ruthless, yet joyful refusal of gender roles. It is a violent breaking out of femininity in order to enter into culture.

Peixoto sees a series of odd triangular configurations or “threesomes” involving all of Joana’s relationships with men, first with father and dead mother, then with her teacher and his wife, and later with her husband and his mistress. There is always another woman. These relationships are also reminiscent of Faulkner’s threesomes of Quentin – Caddy – Dalton Ames in The Sound and The Fury and Judith – Charles Bon – Henry in Absalom, Absalom!, where there is always another man. Nevertheless, it is the existence of this other woman, in Lispector, that propels Joana out of the feminine position of passivity and subservience to men, leading her to break bonds and assert her artistic ambition, most notably in the relationship with her husband, Otávio. In Faulkner, the opposite occurs. Henry and Quentin’s ability to take on both the female and male roles in these threesomes leads to a crisis of identity and masculinity that leads to their self-destruction. Unlike Joana, they are unable to rid themselves of these devastating feminine identifications, and yet, as in Perto do Coracão Selvagem the feminine is dangerous.

Otávio’s pregnant mistress, Lídia is described purely in physical terms by Joana. “Sua imaginação corria em busca do sorriso da mulher, de seu corpo largo e quieto…E se ela era apenas a vida que corria em seur corpo sem cessar?” (70) [“She tried to recall the woman’s smile, her ample, lethargic body…And if she were merely the life that flowed constantly inside her body? (69)]. Despite this dismissal Joana spends a good deal of time musing on Lídia’s power, asking herself, “Why is she so powerful?” (137) yet having already answered, “Que mulher bela. Os lábias cheios mas pacíficos, sem estremeimentos, como de alguém que não tem receio do prazer, que o recebe sem remorsos” (135). [Such a beautiful woman. Her lips full but impassive, without the slightest tremor, the lips of someone who is not afraid of pleasure, who receives it without remorse” (130-131)]. Lídia is everything Joana is not – pregnant, sensual, corporal, while Joana is described as cold, and unfeeling, slender and unwomanly in her body. Otávio, as a law professor, inhabits the position of thinker as well as intellectual competitor in his relationship with his wife. For this reason, Joana leaves her husband, rejecting the role of wife and mother and leaving Lídia in her stead. For Joana there is no way to incorporate creativity into the role of wife or mother, and so she leaves before she be Faulknarianly “robbed.”

While in The Sound of the Fury, Quentin, Jason and Benjy rob Caddy of her voice and own identity as a mother to Miss Quentin, Joana refuses to let that happen to her. Once able to create stories, Joana can no longer come up with plots. Realizing her husband’s effect she concludes: “A culpa era dêle, a culpa era dêle. Sua presença, e mais que sua presença: sabe que êle existia, deixavam-na sem liberdade. Só raras vêzes agora, numa rápida fugida, conseguia sentir. Isso: a cupa era dêle. Como não descobrira antes? – pergunto-se vitoriosa. Êle roubava-lhe tudo, tudo”(104). [“He was to blame, he was to blame. His presence and more than his presence: the knowledge that he existed robbed her of any freedom. Only on rare occasions now, in some fleeting escape, was she able to feel anything. That’s right. He was to blame. How had she not discovered it before? – she asked herself in triumph. He was robbing her of everything, everything” (100)]. She also rejects motherhood, seeing it as a violation (like Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying): “E cuando meu filho me toca não me rouba pensamento como os outros. Mas depois quando lhe der leite como êstes seios frágeis e bonitos, meu filho crescerá da minha fôrça e me esmagará com sua vida. Êle se distanciará de mim e eu serei a velha mãe inútil” (152). [“And when my child touches me he doesn’t rob my thoughts like others. But after I’ve given him milk from these delicate and attractive breasts, my child will thrive on my strength and crush me with his life. He will distance himself from me and I shall become his useless old mother (144)]. Joana won’t let biology define her identity or become a “robbed” mother like those described by Clarke:

If one has to outdo one’s father, one also must essentially undo one’s mother, whom Faulkner casts not as an opponent but as a source. Still, she too must die, or at least disappear. What she has, what she embodies must be appropriated by any possible means; the writer lives off – and ultimately kills off – ‘his’ mother, as the initial robber rapidly becomes a murder (4).

Thus while the men in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying attempt to linguistically recreate their absent mother via Caddy or Addie Bundren’s corpse, Joana tries to create her own identity linguistically. Yet unlike the nameless narrator in Água Viva, Joana’s triumph from leaving Otávio is much more limited. While that protagonist, like Addie Bundren, blurs the boundaries between literal and figurative discourse, finding a new sort of power, Joana instead distances herself from the body in her embrace of language and culture. After Joana leaves Otávio she is able to return again to being a storyteller, but while she can feel and think, it is the men, her father and Otávio, who write. She fails to find what Cixous calls, “the language that women speak when no one is there to correct them” (21). As she explains in her essay “Coming to Writing”: “There is a language that I speak or that speaks (to) me in all tongues. A language at once unique and universal that resounds in each national tongue when a poet speaks it. In each tongue, there flows milk and honey. And this language I know, I don’t need to enter it, it surges from me, it flows, it is the milk of love, the honey of my unconscious” (21).

In this way, Joana has a lot more in common with the Compson men and characters like Darl Bundren who “find that the feminine within themselves leads to their own destruction” (Clarke, 35) than with the protagonist of Àgua Viva or Hélène Cixous. Like Quentin, Joana is an androgynous character who sees the contaminating and poisoning nature of women’s bodies. While Joana is described in very masculine terms, rejecting anything womanly, Quentin is feminized: “Calling Shreve my husband. Ah let him alone, Shreve said, if he’s got better sense than to chase after the little dirty sluts, whose business. In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men” (171). The troublesome relationship with masculinity for both comes from a need for an idealized female figure, such as Caddy for Quentin, or Lídia for Joana. As Joana tries to escape her corporality in favor of language, Quentin attempts to remove Caddy her from her body, describing her in ephemeral and ghostlike terms:

She ran out of the mirror like a cloud, her veil swirling in long glints her heels brittle and fast and clutching her dress onto her shoulder with the other hand, running out of the mirror the smells roses, roses the voice that breather o’er Eden. Then she was across the porch I couldn’t hear her heels then in the moonlight like a cloud, the floating shadow of the veil running across the grass, into the bellowing (81).

Both Quentin and Joana exhibit characteristics that suggest an artistic temperament without actively pursuing an artistic career. As Rosa suggests to Quentin in Absalom, Absalom!, “So maybe you will enter the literary profession… and maybe some day you will remember this and write about it.” Yet neither Joana nor Quentin actually does, both stunted in an androgyny that does not function properly. Rado explains, “By disrupting the intensely self-reflexive nature of their connection, Caddy’s promiscuity thus condemns her brother to a life of frustrated desire for his other half, a desire that prevents Quentin from functioning sexually, emotionally, and artistically” (122). They are both trapped in their feminine side but unable to find a communion with the masculine like in Àgua Viva or Cixous’s lyrical reading of Lispector. She writes:

I write ‘mother.’ What is the connection between mother and woman, daughter? I write ‘woman.’ What is the difference? This is what my body teaches me: first of all, be wary of names, they are nothing but social tools, rigid concepts, little cages of meaning assigned, as you know, to keep us from getting mixed up with each other…but, my friend, take the time to unname yourself for a moment. Haven’t you been the father of your sister? Haven’t you, as a wife, been the husband of your spouse and perhaps the brother of your brother… (49)

Resembling many of Faulkner’s characters, Joana grows up with an absent mother, Elza, who while already dead at the beginning of the book, continues to have a strong presence in the first sections. Joana’s mother is described as an unconventionally unfeminine woman while her father is patient and caretaking. Elza was “slender, disdainful”, “the devil” and very quick to judge (23). In fact, the description of Elza is very similar to the how people come to describe Joana later on. Like Joana, Elza is not maternal and in order to escape this role, she “died as soon as she could” (26). Although Joana seems to return to her mother later on, these gender transgressions were very unsettling and confusing in her childhood. Remembering her mother, Joana thinks, “Hoje então que ela estava como mêdo de Elza. Mas não se pode ter mêdo da mãe. A mãe era como um pai” (25). [“Especially now that she was frightened of Elza. But one cannot be frightened of one’s own mother. A mother was like a father” (26).] Her mother’s early death, described by her father as “she died as soon as possible” (26) can also be seen as a warning to Joana of breaking gender roles, a decision she makes as well. Barbosa comments: “Os textos aqui discutidos ilustram como as vozes femininas pagam um preço alto quando enfrentam as normas masculinas…No final, é sempre a linguagem como um sitema sócio-político e cultural que ameaça e leva as protagonistas a decifrarem os códigos dos sistemas culturais e das ideologias que eles carregam” (117). [The texts discussed here illustrate how feminine voices pay a high price when they confront masculine norms…In the end, it is always language as a socio-political and cultural system that threatens and leaves the female protagonists to decipher the codes of cultural systems and ideologies that weigh them down.” Joana’s price is to deny femininity, motherhood, and love, again rejecting the male (her father).

As a young woman, both before her marriage and during, Joana’s formation of a non-traditional gender identity isolates her. Like Faulkner, the text’s undercurrent is violent, a setting in which Joana must steal language. Already married to Otávio, she throws a book at an old man who had angered her for expressing sympathy over a small bruise. She retells this story to her husband, placing him in the old man’s place in her aggressive battle against male assumptions of her. It works. The narrator, now in Otávio’s thoughts, comments, “Êle interrompeu o que escrevia e olhou-a aterrizado, como ela lhe tivesse jogado alguma coisa” (104). [“He interrupted what he was writing and looked at her in terror, as if she had thrown something at him” (99)] The first instance, however, is after her father passes, when she goes to live with her aunt and uncle. There, Joana steals a book from a store. When her Aunt confronts her, she shows no remorse, explaining just that she stole the book “because I want to” (32). When her Aunt calls her a “cold-blooded viper” to her uncle, she accepts the characterization, rejecting suffering for a new agency. Like the men in Faulkner, she is the one who robs. And similarly to the situation with Lídia and Otávio, she flees from the sexualized body of her Aunt, characterized over and over again by her bosom. “Os seios da tia eram profundos, podia-se meter a mão como dentro de um sace e da lá retirar uma suprêsa, um bicho, uma caixa, quem sabe o quê. Aos soluços êles cresciam, cresciam e dentro da casa veio um cheiro de feijão misturado como alho. Em alguma parte, certamente, alguém beberia grandes goles de azeite. Os seios da tia podiam sepultar uma pessoa!” (33) is just one example of these many references. [Her breasts expanded with every sob, bulged out, and from the kitchen came the smell of beans cooked with garlic. Somewhere in the house, someone must be drinking great mouthfuls of olive oil. Those breasts could bury someone! (34)]. Instead, Joana runs to a complexly gendered ocean, acknowledging a woman’s figurative power and rejecting it: “O mar, além de ondas, olhava de longe, calado, sem chorar, sem seios. Grande, grande. Grande, sorriu ela.” (34). [“The sea, beyond the waves, watched from afar, silent, without tears, without breasts. Mighty, mighty. Mighty, she smiled (35)]. The word for sea (mar) carries a masculine gender marker in Portuguese, while signaling that it has no breasts points to a feminized absence. Trying to explain the division between the masculine and feminine as sources of creativity, Pontieri writes: “O que parece aluidar ao mar descrito pelo biologia como o berça da vida no planeta. A androginia como tentativa de ultrapassar a divisão sexual se manifesta ainda na concepção lispectoriana de natureza do artista” (97). [“It seems to allude to the sea described by biology as the planet’s cradle of life. Its androgyny is an attempt to overcome the gender division that also manifests itself in the lispectorian conception of the nature of an artist” (my translation)].

Although this breakdown of gender boundaries may have been Lispector’s ultimate aim, this first novel is still an inhibited attempt. By the end of the novel, Joana has left Otávio and taken on a lover, a nameless man who assumes a feminine role in their relationship. She has returned to language, to her story telling, a more traditionally masculine role. Their most thrilling interchange is not lovemaking, but narrating: “Ela contara-lhe certa vez que em pequena podia brincar uma tarde inteira com uma palavra. Êle pedia-lhe então para inventar novas. Nunca ela o queria tanto nesses momentos” (166). [“She had once told him that as a little girl she could spend a whole afternoon playing with one word. So he would ask her to invent some words. She had never loved him more than at such moments” (157)] Nonetheless, in this relationship which is the most supportive of Joana’s verbal creativity, Peixoto also sees a final triangle, one composed of the most debased woman in the novel (14). Joana’s lover lives with an older woman, who is described as “an affectionate and tiresome shadow” (157). Constantly dismissed and overlooked, she is a reminder of a female role of subordination, repressed sexuality and suffering.

In the end, Joana is alone – without her father, teacher, husband or lover – having reached beyond gender roles.

“Não era mulher, ela existia e o que havia dentro dela eram movimentos erguendo-a sempre em transição. Talvez tivesse alguma vez modificando com sua fôrça selvagem o ar ao seu redor e ninguém nunca o perceberia, talvez tivesse inventado com sua respiração uma nova matéria e não o sabia, apenas sentia o que jamais sua pequena cabeçå de mulher poderia compreender” (197). [“She was not a woman, she existed, and what was inside her were movements lifting her in constant transition. Perhaps at some time she might have altered with her savage strength the air around her and no one had noticed, perhaps she had invented without knowing a new substance with her breathing, she merely sensed what her small woman’s head could never understand” (185)]

Although Joana has been able to become both a woman and not a woman, her rejection of traditional gender roles leaves her little choice. She can either become like her Aunt or Lídia or embark on a solitary voyage that precludes loving and being loved. Like Quentin, Joana’s rejection of the figurative in favor of the literal is unsuccessful. It is an aggressive, violent act that leaves the reader jarred and dissatisfied.

In this way Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying serves in many ways as a stronger female figure than Joana. The inability of her children to separate themselves either physically or psychically not only demonstrates the power of the mother but the power of the figurative. She disrupts not only the patriarchal order by refusing to be erased; she also disrupts the text with another sort of language. For example, Addie thinks about her husband Anse’s “name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel … : a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a and I couldn’t think Anse, couldn’t remember Anse” (173). Unlike Joana, who rejects the figurative, Addie re-imagines the name into various non-literal meanings. According to Parker, “Addie’s alphabet scripts her anatomy both in relation to and in resistance to Anse’s body, both derivatively and independently. She at once erases Anse by her inability to think or remember his name, and italicizes the name that she cannot think or remember, and together these reactions and assertions write the feminine-masculine space that Anse’s world and its received alphabets would erase” (76). While Parker focuses on the erasure, it is also significant that both Addie and Joana point to a female’s ability to make the word a material presence. Yet, in comparison to Joana, Addie has a more powerful effect on everyone around her.

Still, in the existence of Joana’s sexuality another avenue seems possible, one which Lispector later develops in Àgua Viva. “Clarice Lispector not only explores the relations between sexuality and language, she grounds both sexuality and desire in language,” Fitz writes (62). “Though the sex act itself is described neither salaciously nor graphically (indeed, it barely exists in her novels and stories except in oblique metaphoric language), the sexual impulse, presented as being inseparable from the fecundity and seductiveness of language itself, functions as the chief animating force in a number of her greatest works” (63). Like Faulkner, Lispector’s work reminds us that we can’t ignore the body. Both authors feel the need to express sexuality while living in cultures whose codes of conduct send deeply conflicting messages. Similar to Eula Varner in The Hamlet, Joana starts to embrace and control her body, as she discovers masturbation, and satisfaction without a man.

In the final chapter on Absalom, Absalom!, Clarke demonstrates how Faulkner transcends the division of sexuality and maternity, finding an alternative, “not mother,” “whose creative power extends far beyond the reaches of any other novel” (18). Like Rosa Coldfield, Joana demonstrates the destabilizing nature of women. Joana is the “viper” who elicits fear in both her aunt and her husband and despite her lack of children, is still able to connect to her own creative power. If Rosa’s “mothering – or not mothering – is almost akin to fathering in its reliance on figurative creativity,” then Joana’s rejection of motherhood serves a similar purpose. While Rosa uses storytelling with Quentin, and Joana uses narration with her lover, both end up taking on a male role of teller. Yet Rosa’s voice is very different from the rest of the text narrated by males. Like Addie, she disrupts the male rationality, creating an interplay of narratives that undermines male storytelling. While the male characters attempt to tell the story of a passing of male lineage, Rosa tells her own story creating a bisexual tale. Here Faulkner seems to agree with Cixous that “You can’t just get rid of femininity. Femininity is inevitable.” She continues, “My writings really have no raison d’être. Folly, madness! In fact, I know nothing: I have nothing to write except what I don’t know. I am writing to you with my eyes closed. But I know how to read with my eyes closed. To you, who have eyes with which not to read, I have nothing to reveal” (35).

The narratives of both Joana and Rosa are nonlinear, not conforming to the traditional patriarchal system. In this way, both the authors and their protagonists refuse lacanian categorizations. But Rosa goes one step further, not just refusing to bear the Sutpen sons and rejecting motherhood like Joana, by incorporating both the symbolic and the semiotic into her language. In this way she is another strong androgynous figure. Describing her adolescence, Rosa recalls: “That was the miscast summer of my barren youth which… I lived out not as a woman, a girl, but rather as a man which I perhaps should have been” (116). When given such women as Rosa, as well as a supporting cast of Clytie and Judith, perhaps it is fitting that Sutpen, who so wanted a strong male lineage, ends up with a burnt down house run by women.

While Joana seems to move from one mode of discourse to the other, the protagonist of Àgua Viva, like Rosa, has developed even more, using both discourses simultaneously. Clarke writes, “As Faulkner recognized, the relation of body to language cannot always be classified or gendered, and while Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and symbolic is often a useful tool for discussing his work, it can also fall short” (139). Like Absalom, Absalom!, in Àgua Viva, Lispector gives the protagonist her own voice in the first person; moreover, her past storytelling evolves into writing. Lispector’s protagonist is both Rosa and Quentin. She is not a mother, and robs the mother.

As a member of the literary community of Rio de Janeiro in the 40s, it would be hard to believe that Lispector had no knowledge of Faulkner. In fact, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, Lispector left Brazil in 1944 for Europe and the United States, only returning to Brazil in 1959 (Peixoto, xvi). Lispector even quotes James Joyce in the pages prior to the text of Perto do Coração Selvagem, demonstrating her knowledge of English-language writers. Additionally, in her study of translations, Fayen also found the Brazilian versions to be most accurate. She writes, “The Spanish, the Spanish-speaking Latin Americans and the Portuguese all vacillate to some extent in their application of either their own or Faulkner’s norms. The Brazilians vacillate least of all” (134). Although Fayen writes that “an explanation for this consistency must wait for a project on Brazilian norms considered in isolation” (134), it may be Brazil’s distinct literary trajectory that is able to produce such a strong dialogue with Faulkner.

In the 30s and 40s when Lispector was developing as a young woman, Brazil as a literary community was struggling itself with questions of language and its limitations. Jorge Amado’s 1942 “Liberación lingüística de la literature brasileña”, in fact, was a culmination not only of Brazilian writers’ rejection of the highly artificial, grammatically correct language favored by Portuguese publishers, but a valorization of the language spoken by the Brazilian people (Fayen 71). At the same time, serious efforts were being made to establish a publishing industry in Rio and São Paulo and by 1936 the industry had experienced a rate of growth of 600 percent in São Paulo alone. (Johnson, 9). This development, along with the burgeoning modernist movement, opened possibilities for someone with experimental tendencies, such as Lispector, to question “real” meanings of language and knowledge. According to Albuquerque:

Nesse sentido, a escrita de Clarice é uma exploração da língua portuguesa, uma tentativa de levar, como disse Cândido, nossa língua a lugares não frequentados, fazendo-a atingir zonas inesperadas nas quais a sintaxe precisa ser desmontada para que a língua possa tocar essas zonas, quebrando os quadros rotineiros e torcendo a linguagem… Nesse sentido, revolucionar a linguagem, desfazer suas regras e produzir uma nova língua é maneira de se conquistar uma libertade em relação ao que somos, visando atingir novas maneiras de escrever e de viver (15). [In that sense, Clarice’s writing is an exploration of the Portuguese language, an attempt to take, as Cândido says, our language to unfrequented places, arriving to unexpected zones where the syntax can be dismantled so that the language can touch those zones, breaking down routine forms and twisting the language. In this sense, revolutionizing language, undoing its rules and producing a new language is the way to conquer a freedom in relation to who we are, in the aim of reaching new ways to write and live (my translation).]

It is this revolution in language that is the central conflict of Lispector’s novels. At first finding language as an escape from female roles, as with Faulkner’s women, Lispector’s later protagonists “recognize language’s limitations” (Clarke 8), returning to the body and the womb. At first unsure of a woman’s figurative power and sexuality, by Àgua Viva, Lispector comes to insist on the total experience of the body and the mind, both seeing a distinction between intellectual and bodily language and a way to combine the two. Like Faulkner, Lispector does not so much privilege the body as finding it as a locus of energy, a source of creative departure.

In commenting on Faulkner, Clarke writes: “I do not argue author intentionality; rather, I argue that as a product of white bourgeois society Faulkner himself is necessarily inscribed by our dominant ideology of gender and family. An artist, however, whether consciously or unconsciously, questions the beliefs which underlie his or her culture and analyzes both the power and the limitations of such paradigms” (17). Thus while Faulkner has been criticized as a misogynist, he must also be recognized as a writer who was responding to the patriarchal structures of his time (Carvill, 217). Clearly, Lispector is doing the same. Born to a Jewish family in what is now Ukraine in 1920, she immigrated to Brazil as an infant, where they settled in the small town of Maceió, in Northeast Brazil. They later moved to Recife, the capital city of another northeastern state (Pernambuco), before settling in Rio de Janeiro in her teens (Peixoto, xvii). Finding herself within these varied yet patriarchal settings, Lispector searches for the possibility of new meanings in which language is both essential to survival and yet inadequate to describe a woman’s condition. As Peixoto concludes, “Throughout her work, Lispector searches for alternate sources of power and organization. The intuitive and the improvisatory, which she associates with the feminine, replace rational construction and logical progression in the unfolding of her fictions; they also challenge the boundaries, separateness, and coherence of the subject” (xiv). Dissatisfied with the Brazilian society and its highly patriarchal language, Lispector breaks the pre-established limits in her culture, creating linguistically unstable texts. Yet these are not feminist novels, but instead one woman’s way to explain how the female individual exists within her environment.

Faulkner refuses to characterize women, giving us both women who make effective use of language and those who do not, both upholding and deconstructing a patriarchal Southern setting. Especially in his later texts, like Absalom, Absalom! but also in his earlier ones as well, Faulkner finds women who are not only unconventional but commanding storytellers. Because of the similarities between the female characters, reading Lispector alongside Faulkner gives us a greater insight into these powerful female characters. Despite their position in a society desperate to control women’s bodies, characters like Caddy, Addie, and Joana demonstrate how fragile and artificial this control is. Femininity in narrative fails flat both when women are reduced to the body and when the body is ignored. Polk argues: “In his late career, Faulkner seems to understand that men cannot claim their own histories until women can claim theirs, too, and tell their stories themselves: if they choose and in their own voices, their own language, without yielding to the cultural narrative that binds us all to a singular story…” (46). For both authors, these braided tales–the stories they tell and stories told about them—are the double helix of narrative life itself.

 
 
Note
 
1. Given that language, its limitations and opportunities, is the topic of this paper, I have chosen to include all quotes in Portuguese in their original language for accuracy. It is also important to note that Lispector, like Faulkner, “has a reputation for in fact being notoriously difficult to translate” (Hedrick 56). According to Hendrick, many translators of Lispector, especially the earlier ones, show a tendency to “normalize” Lispector’s texts in terms of syntax and gender. She explains: “If as Rosenberg maintains, Lispector’s ‘invention’ of language meant she was ‘discovering new ways to rewrite the feminine,’ this gendered otherness, effected through her transgressive writing strategies, is ‘domesticated’ and even erased by an andocentric posture on the part of some of her most important English-language translators toward the difficult rhetorical strategies and implications of her writing” (60).

 
 
References
 
Albuquerque, Germano Barrozo de. Mulheres Claricianas: Imagens Amorosas. Rio de Janeiro, 2002.

Barbosa, Maria José Somerlate. Clarice Lispector Des/Fiando As Teias de Paixão. Porto Alegre: University Press of the South, 1997.

Bosi, Alfredo. História Concisca da Literatura Brasileira. São Paulo: Editora Cultrix, 1994.

Cavill, Caroline. “Feminist and Gender Criticism.” A Companion to Faulkner Studies. Charles A Peek and Robert W. Hamblin, eds. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004, 215-232.

Cixous, Hélène. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Clarke, Deborah. Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

— . The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

— . The Hamlet. New York: Vintage International, 1991.

— . Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International, 1990.

Fayen, Tanya T. In Search of the Latin American Faulkner. Boston: University Press of America, 1995.

Fitz, Earl E. The Différance of Desire: Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Fitz, Earl E. “Wiliam Faulkner, James Agee, and Brazil: The American South in Latin American Literature’s ‘Other’ Tradition.” The U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 419-445.

Hedrick, Tace “Mão é para isso: Gender, Writing and English-Language Translation in Clarice Lispector.” Luso Brazilian Review. 41.2 (2005): 56-80.

Johnson, Randall. “The Dynamics of the Brazilian Literary Field, 1930-1945.” Luso Brazilian Review, 31:3 (Winter 1994). 5-22.

Lispector, Clarice. A Hora da Estrela. Rio de Janeiro, Rocco: 1977.

— . Àgua Viva. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1973.

— . Perto do Coracão Selvagem. Rio de Janeiro: Editôra Sabia, 1994

— . Near to the Wild Heart. New York: New Directions Books, 1986.

— . The Stream of Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

— . The Hour of The Star. New York: New Directions Books, 1992.

Monteiro, George. “Faulkner in Brazil.” Southen Literary Journal. 16.1 (1983): 96-104.

Parker, Robert Dale. “Sex and Gender, Feminine and Masculine: Faulkner and the Polymorphous Exchange of Cultural Binaries.” Faulkner and Gender: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1994. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1996. 73-96.

Peixoto, Marta. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lisepctor.” Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Pontieri, Regina. Clarice Lisepctor: Uma Poética de Olhar. Cotia: Ateliê Editorial, 1999.

Polk, Noel. “Faulkner: The Artist as Cuckold.” Faulkner and Gender: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1994. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1996. 20-47.

Rado, Lisa. The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Santos, Christina. Bending the Rules in the Quest for an Authentic Female Identity: Clarice Lispector and Carmen Boullosa. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2004.