Clarice Lispector is an author who is famous for her capricious dance between the actual and the abstraction. Through her story The Hour of the Star providing the semblance of a plot, she is able to cover the meaning of existence, or in her least complex, simply dive into the everyday meanderings of a disillusioned boy in his contemplation of the mundane. The title page, with its various alternate titles, suggests anxiety and flightiness on the part of the narrator who is made the author. Additionally, the gender swap of the author from girl to boy suggests a yearning to break free from established gender roles, and in fact “bend” them in a similar fashion to the established rules surrounding narrative plot, structure and content. “I’ll try contrary to my normal habits to write a story with a beginning, middle and ‘grand finale’ followed by silence and falling rain,” the narrator states, revealing his breaking away from convention. At another point, he expresses his preference for “a male writer…because a woman would make it [the story] all weepy and maudlin.” It is a thinly veiled critique of how females are viewed in literary society which is offered from, of all voices, a male constructed to espouse the sentiment. In this direct communication of intent to the reader, Lispector breaks the fourth wall and the illusion of story, and can therefore be viewed as postmodern in her approach.
Another layer to the onion is added when you consider that the author creates the man for the express purpose of having him write into existence the story of a “northeastern girl.” Regardless, with the rest of the text revolving around the man, the Marshall-McLuhan medium represents him as trapped by the world around him and its manifold of bombarding messages. It is in this sense the protagonist is not completely caricaturised, instead being painted as a victim of society. “Happiness? I never saw a dumber word, invented by all those northeastern girls out there” is a sentiment which best represents the narrator’s misogyny, yet also displays his sadness which draws from the reader some degree of sympathy. “I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men,” he states once more, further showcasing an age-old desire for writing as a form of escapism. The story is postmodern in the sense that the stand-in for the author—another author—is creating the story for the same purpose. Ironically, he only cures his writer’s block on writing the girl when adding in male side characters of the young and old men—I take this to reflect Lispector’s belief that writing is a transmission of the self onto the page, rather than a complete fabrication.
My question for the class is: What do you believe Lispector hopes to capture in her decision to shift perspective on the opposite gender? Do you believe Clarice Lispector values honesty in her writing above all—the reason for her rebuking of established norms—or does she still enjoy the trickery and fooling readers a la Jorge Luis Borges? S
It is very difficult to know what goes through the minds of authors when they are writing a novel, short story or poem. If you remember the conversation with Sonia Roncador, Lispector already has a history of works with a genealogy similar to this text, scattered in chronicles and short stories. What I find interesting about your question is that it leads me to wonder about the topic of writing as a job. Borges leaves us at the entrance to the labyrinth in his stories: Lispector begins to tell us the story from the moment he plans it, and he seems to be more transparent by showing us the doubts of Rodrigo, the narrator. In that sense, Lispector is more complex than Borges. But I would like to know the opinion of others on this topic…
I think that Borges and Lispector both walk an ambiguous line between sincerity and irony; everything both of them say operates on multiple levels in which none can be taken as definitive. While Borges draws attention to this multilayered intent through metatextual references and the blending of reality with fiction, Lispector chooses to write in a male voice for a similar reason. I don’t think the Rodrigo in this story was supposed to be entirely antithetical to Lispector and it does seem like she identifies with him at times, even while distancing herself from him through passages like the one about female writers. He can neither be understood entirely as a satirical portrait of a male writer nor a simple stand-in for Lispector, but rather a complex blend of the two that destabilizes the identies of both.