A Discourse of Silence: The Postmodernism of Clarice Lispector Author(s): Earl E. Fitz Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 28, No.

4, After the Boom: Recent Latin American Fiction (Winter, 1987), pp. 420-436 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208309 Accessed: 23/07/2009 16:30
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A DISCOURSE OF SILENCE: THE POSTMODERNISM OF CLARICE LISPECTOR Earl E. Fitz

Critics have long recognized silence as one of the chief distinguishing characteristics of Clarice Lispector's prose fiction. Taking many forms and playing many roles, it permeates her work. Summing up the majority view on this fundamental issue, Elizabeth Lowe notes, "The heart of Clarice Lispector's world is silence, the quiet glow beyond action and beyond words that she, as her own greatest protagonist, tirelessly sought."' Pervaded by a sense of blockage, of isolation and frustration, however, Lispector's fiction can be revealingly read as a discourse of silence,2 a lyrically rendered yet ironically self-conscious commentary on the evanescent relationships among language, human cognition, and reality. In focusing on these metafictional issues, the novels and stories of Clarice Lispector exemplify the kind of writing described as "postmodernist," writing that takes as a primary subject the nature of fiction itself, the processes through which it makes its statements.3 But while in Lispector's work are several key aspects of postmodernist literature,4 none is more representative of this particular
"'The Passion According to C.L." (Interview), Review 24 (1979): 35. Two other important critics who address this key issue are Benedito Nunes (O Mundo de Clarice Lispector [Manaus:Ediqoes Governo do Estado do Amazonas, 1966]) and Assis Brasil (Clarice Lispector [Rio de Janeiro: Organizacao Simoes, 1969]). 2One of the first critics to use this term in regard to Lispector's fiction was Bella Jozef. The term was not explained, however. See "Chronology: Clarice Lispector," trans. Elizabeth Lowe, Review 24 (1979): 24. 3See Charles Newman, The Post-Modern Aura (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985), and Postmodernism in American Literature:A CriticalAnthology, ed. Manfred Putz and Peter Freese (Darmstadt: Thesen-Verlag, 1984). 4Her fiction is typically phenomenological in its structuring, ironically self-conscious about its own creation and questioning about its own epistemological validity. See Earl E. Fitz, Clarice Lispector (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985) 35-40 and passim. Literature XXVIII, 4 Contemporary 0010-7484/87/0004-0420 $1.50/0

?1987 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

mode of writing than her use of silence, an omnipresent feature of her fiction that she develops both metaphorically and metonymically to describe and embody the isolation of the modern human condition. Because silence plays such a central role in Lispector'swork, her fiction offers the readera comprehensiveview of how one of postmodernism's most distinctive attributes functions as the primary shaping force in a fictive universe. As a function of language, it is silence, moreover, that shows how illustrative Lispector's work is of the critical investigations done by such narrative theoreticians as Roland Barthes (Le Degre zero de l'ecriture),MauriceBlanchot (Le Livre a venir), Jacques Lacan (Ecrits), and George Steiner(Languageand Silence), all of whom focus on the phenomenon of muteness in the literature of the postWorld War II era. Also germaneto Lispector'sfiction is an issue raised by Ihab Hassan, the author of another major study concerning the nature of postmodernist literature.5 Hassan has shown how the term "silence" can be used as a trope to characterize the new kind of writing that began to flourish in numerous Western cultures during the 1960s and 1970s. He makes the point that while postmodernist writers often seem obsessed with language, the actual language their characters use produces very little meaningful communication. The result, which Hassan finds typical of postmodernist fiction, is a state of "silence," one produced, ironically, by a torrential rain of words. This same preoccupation with words and their communicative reliability is endemic to the stories and novels of Clarice Lispector, a writer for whom words are both "concrete objects" and elusive "fourth dimensions."6 It is in this context that Lispector's postmodernism can most clearly be seen. Arguing a point similar to Hassan's is Susan Sontag, who says, in "The Aesthetics of Silence" (Styles of Radical Will), that As the activityof the mysticmustend in a via negativa,a theologyof God's absence,a cravingfor the cloud of unknowingbeyond knowledgeand for the silencebeyondspeech,so art musttend towardanti-art,the elimination of the "subject" the substitution chancefor intention,and the pursuit ... of of silence.7 Sontag's references to the "activity of the mystic" and the "craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech" are also apt in the case of Clarice Lispector, whose
5 The Dismemberment of Orpheus, 2nd ed. (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982). 6Lowe 34. 7Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, 1969) 4-5.

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most memorable charactersundergo mystical quests for self-awareness and authenticity of being. In undertaking these quests they find themselves mysteriously impelled by the anarchy of language toward a Nirvanalike state of inner awareness beyond knowledge and toward the silence that lies forever beyond the speech act. Because Lispector sees the nature and function of language as inseparable from her most basic theme, the human impulse toward self-realizationand awareness, virtually all of her narratives feature a characterwho struggles against the silence of language failure, one whose ontological anxieties both derive from and reflect the unstable ebb and flow of language. Relating directly to structure as well as to characterization, language use in Lispector's fiction falls into two distinct categories: its expression of a character'sprivate identity and its expression of a character's public identity. This structuralistduality produces the binaryand dialectical - tension that characterizes her work and, at the same time, functions as the very mechanism that generates the discourse of silence so typical of her fiction. The silence, then, that Hassan, Sontag, Steiner, and others see as distinguishing postmodernist fiction is preeminentlythe kind of silence that Lispector cultivates in her work. For the Brazilian writer silence becomes a metaphor for noncommunication, for the failure of language, just as it is for other, better known postmodernists like Borges, Barthelme, Nabokov, and Beckett. This public/private polarity provides Lispector with a structurally contrastive framework on which she can develop her characters. Among the most famous of these, Martim (of The Apple in the Dark, 1961), becomes known to the reader primarilythrough his silent, inner ruminations about the role language plays in the shaping and reshaping of his identity. The function of language as a vital yet enigmatic force in human existence, in fact, graduallyemergesas the real subject matter of the novel. In the course of this open-ended and mysterious narrative, Lispector develops two separate but closely interrelated movements from out of her ontologically oriented subject matter: in one, Martim, the protagonist, physically rejects the bourgeois society of which he has been a part; in the other, he rejects language, which he comes to perceive as being as meretricious as the society that he has fled. The problem, as Gregory Rabassa points out, is that Martim does not understand any of this very well.8 As a postmodernist antihero, Martim is overwhelmed by the wave of words that engulfs him. Befuddled by the endless semantic possibilities inherent in these signs,
8Introduction to The Apple in the Dark, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1967) ix-xvi.

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he gradually reduces himself to a primitive consciousness, one in which the confident, secure speech-act is beyond his ability to generate. Struggling to comprehend the unstable relationship between language and reality, Martim falls silent. Although his mind blazes with an intensely poetic language use, Martim fails to break out of his state of solitude and noncommunication. Dimly sensing that he has become a prisoner of words, Martim can neither articulate what bothers him nor verbalize a plan to control the confusion, anxiety, and trepidation he feels: what he had said, and then did Only afterwards he seemto understand he looked the sun in the eye. "I have lost the speech of other people,"he then repeated slowly, as if the wordsweremoreobscurethanthey were... ... At some unidentifiable point, that man had becomeprisonerof a of words... ring For honesty'ssake, he wantedto make clear to them that he knew it was the sun that was inflatinghis wordsand makingthem so overdoneand and that it was the insistentsun along with his insistent so grandiloquent, silence that made him want to speak.9 It is not that Martim does not use language, for, like Beckett's Molloy, he talks-or thinks-obsessively. What Martim cannot do is control language; indeed, it is his unsettling discovery that language controls him. Reflecting his struggle with language and being, the text, narrating from within, tells us: it Whatdid he want?Whatever was that he wantedhad been born far away murmurto the inside of him, and it was not easy to bringthe stammering surface ... His obscuretask would have been easierif he had allowedhimselfthe had use of words that had alreadybeen created.But his reconstruction to the voice of a man .... The begin with his own wordsbecausewordswere be moment he acceptedalien words he would automatically acceptingthe in but a commoncriminal flight. and word"crime," he wouldbecomenothing for him to give himself a name-and give a name to It was still too early what he wanted. (The Apple 134) Unnerved by the existential responsibility his realization about language and being entails, Martim, like other postmodernist heroes, becomes anxious and passive, a confused and willing victim ready to
9Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1967) 23, 37. All further references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text.

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be led back to a society that he will want to punish him for his transgressions, both real and imagined. At the conclusion of the novel, when Martim meekly allows himself to be arrested for a crime he had committed, he shows his own ontological insecurity by insisting that the authorities know what they are doing by taking him back to society for punishment: "Let'sgo," he said then, going uncertainly over to the four small and confusedmen. "Let's go," he said. Becausethey musthaveknownwhatthey weredoing. Theycertainly knewwhatthey weredoing. In the nameof God, I commandyou to be sure. Becausea whole preciousand putrescent weight was being given into their hands, a weightto be throwninto the sea, and a very heavyone too. And it was not a simplething-because therehad to be mercywhenthat burdenof guilt was thrownoverboard too. Becausewe are not so guilty after all; we are more stupid than guilty. So with mercy too, then. "Inthe nameof God, I'monlywaitingfor you to knowwhatyou're doing. BecauseI, my son, I am only hungry.And I have that clumsyway of reachingfor an applein the dark-and tryingnot to drop it"(TheApple 361) Martim's struggle with language, which embodies Steiner'sbasic point in "Retreatfrom the World"(Language and Silence), ends in the silence of indecision and failure. Although he senses he can create an authentic existence if he can put his feeling into words, Martim is fatally enervated by the anarchical force of language. He discovers that he lacks the courage and the will to make it yield to him a firmly delineated sense of his own identity. The easier way is to let society, with its authority figures and its emphasis on cliched and superficial thinking, simply issue him an identity, one based on conformity and conventionality. Exhausted and frustrated by his effort to think for himself, Martim collapses into a state of intellectual and psychological silence, one reinforced, ironically, by its encouragement of noncritical and trivializingverbal exchange. The narrativeends in a very uncertain way because Martim, by now both unable and unwilling to take responsibility for his identity, simply gives up and hopes, in a desultory fashion, that someone will tell him who he is. The reader understands what Martim does not, however: that the authority figures he hopes will do this for him are just as confused and as inauthentic as he is. Language has failed Martim in his quest for self-awareness and knowledge. Silence prevails. A Lispector characterwho responds quite differently to the problem of the capacity of language to define and control human existence is G. H., from The Passion According to G. H. (1964). Structured
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in the form of an unbroken interior monologue, this intense novel also tells the story of a mystic quest for self-realization, one undertaken by a woman known to the reader only by her initials, G. H. Speaking to her narratee,10 G. H. declares: an entirelynew and latent powerthrobbedin me, and I was in possession of a certaingrandeur:the grandeurof courage, as if my very fear had at last investedme with daring... An entire life of civilizedrefinement for fifteen centuriesI had not I for fifteen centuriesI had not killed, for fifteencenturies had foughtback, now coalescedin me and revernot died- an entirelife trappedin propriety beratedlike a silent bell whose vibrationsI did not requireto hear...
... ... What had I done? ... I had killed. I had killed!1

Unlike Martim, G. H. chooses to confront the chaos of existence by struggling with language until it yields to her the authenticity of being that she demands. But like Martim, G. H. also ends up engulfed in a state of silence, though in her case it is the silence of a private solitude achieved through articulated self-liberation. For her, as for most of Lispector's characters, this is the silence of isolation, the silence born of the realization that whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not, in this world we are alone. The postmodernistically self-conscious text of this novel comes, as Bella Jozef says, "face to face with itself, creates itself with each step, in a dialectic of speaking and saying, which leads from silence to silence."12As G. H. relates her experience: Thereopened in me, with the heavinessof great stone doors, the vast life of silence,the samelife of silencewithinwhichdweltthe stock-stillsun, that same life of silencein which dweltthe immobilizedroach. And would it no doubt be the same life of silence in me, if I but had the courageto
abandon ... to abandon my feelings? . . . This is madness, I thought with my eyes closed. ... It was, my God,

a worsetruth,the terribletruth. But why terrible? Simplybecauseit contradictedwithoutwordseverything that I had formerlythought, also without words ...
'?See Gerald Prince, "Notes Toward a Categorization of Fictional 'Narratees,'" Genre 4 (1971): 100-6. "Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H., trans. Jack E. Tomlins, The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, vol. 2, ed. Emir Rodriguez Monegal with Thomas Colchie (New York: Knopf, 1977) 780. All further references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. '2Jozef 25.

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How can I explain it to you? (The Passion 782-83; first ellipsis in original)

To achieve her state of authentic being, G. H. realizes that a price has to be paid, that to be free means ultimately to be isolated from nonfree beings (like Martim), people who refuse to assume responsibility for who and what they are. Laboring to understand the nature of her essentially religious experience, G. H. declares:
Now I understand that what I had begun to feel was joy, what I had not yet recognizedor understood. In my mute outcry for help, I was struggling against a vague primeval joy that I did not wish to discern in myself because, although it was vague, nonetheless it was terrible:it was a joy without redemption. I do not know how to explain it to you, but it was a joy without hope. (The Passion 789)

G. H.'s discourse of silence, then, is like that of the actor who has lines full of meaningful words to speak but no one to speak them to. As Gerald Prince describes it, G. H. is really her own narratee;13she is speaking to herself. Martim, by way of contrast, ultimately rejects any further effort to struggle with the problems of language and being. He capitulates, electing to reintegrate himself into society, which he knows to be based on nonauthentic, nonvital language use. At the end of her story, G. H. gains a new awareness of the loneliness of her battle, and she realizes that because of her intensely private mystical experience she has been irrevocably changed. Her choice, which exemplifies Sontag's comment about the function of the mystic in postmodernist literature, is between accepting her newly free but painful state of freedom or disavowing this condition, which would amount to the reestablishment of a conventional, inauthentic social being. Though both derive from a state of silence, the choices of Martim and G. H. are radically different. G. H., the protagonist of one of the most important Latin American novels of the 1960s,14is similar to Catherine, the main character of the short story "Family Ties" (Family Ties, 1960). Catherine's conflict, like G. H.'s, arises because she must choose between continuing a materiallycomfortable but intellectuallyvacuous existenceor embarking on a new life, one that is intellectually meaningful but both demanding and perilous. The language used in Catherine's story serves
13"Introductionto the Study of the Narratee," Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980) 7-25.

'4EmirRodriguez Monegal, TheBorzoiAnthology of LatinAmericanLiterature, vol. 2, 779.

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to underscore the tension that exists in Lispector's work between the public and private identities of her characters. When Catherine, an urban middle-class wife and mother, is struggling to come to grips with her nascent sense of self-awareness, the text assumes the form of an indirect interior monologue. We read: Relievedof her mother'scompany,she had recoveredher briskmannerof walking;alone it was mucheasier .... And thingshad disposedthemselves in sucha way that the sorrowof love seemedto herto be happiness everyaroundher was so tenderand alive, the dirtystreet,the old tramcars, thing orangepeel on the pavements strengthflowedto and fro in her heartwith a heavy richness.'5 When Catherine speaks, however, she presents her public or social self, a self that is utterly commonplace in word and deed. Yet though she is a character in a conventional social context, Catherine often engages her husband and her child in strikingly cryptic dialogue, using words that function as transmitters of what all involved assume to be a commonly sharedbody of knowledge. As a deconstructionistcritic would note, however, the story's basic tension - which stems from the failure of language to communicate- derives from the fact that the main characters do not share a common body of knowledge, that they all operate in a state of nearly total isolation and conflict. In stark contrast to the flatness and inexpressiveness of her spoken dialogues (which constitute her social discourse), Catherine's silent inner monologues are charged with lyrical nuance, semiotic ambiguity, and philosophic intensity. While her spoken language represents essentially the lowest possible common denominator of human linguistic interaction, Catherine'srichly polysemous unspoken language representsthe power and energy of the human mind in agitated and simultaneouscontemplation of self and of others in the world: "I haven'tforgottenanything?" motherasked. Catherine,too, had her had the impression something beenforgotten,andtheylookedapprehensively at each other-because, if somethinghad reallybeen forgotten,it was too late now.... "Mother,"said the woman. What had they forgotten to say to each other?But now it was too late. It seemedto herthatthe olderwomanshould and have saidone day, "Iam yourmother,Catherine," that she shouldhave replied, "And I am your daughter."
'5Clarice Lispector, Family Ties, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Austin: U of Texas P, 1972) 119. All further references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text.

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"Don'tgo sitting in a draught!"Catherinecalled out. "Nowdear, I am not a child,"her mothershoutedback, still obviously
worrying about her appearance .... and Catherine felt a sudden urge to ask

her if she had been happy living with her father. "Givemy love to Auntie!"she shouted. "Yes,yes." said Catherine .... "Mother," "Catherine!" the olderwomanwith a gapingmouthand frightened said
eyes. ... The train was already moving. (Family Ties 118-19)

By imbuing her narrative with a sharply interiorized and phenomenological cast,'6 one vacillating between depictions of her character's public and private worlds, Lispector succeeds in showing how Catherine, too, becomes enveloped in silence. We see her unable to say what she wants to say, to break out of her solipsism and communicate meaningfully with others. Failing to achieve with language what she wants to achieve, Catherine progressively becomes the isolated and frustrated postmodern protagonist. The basic irony of this condition is that the readercomes to understand and empathize with Lispector's characters even while realizing that they are both trapped and trapping themselves in their own verbal labyrinths. One gradually sees that characterslike Catherine, Martim, G. H., and a host of others either succumb to truncation as intellectually valid human beings or are alreadytruncatedand battling to reanimate their existences. In either case - and this is where the unique power of Lispector's fiction lies-they are reduced to a state of frustrated silence, of inexpression and isolation. The spoken language of Lispector's characterscan neither generate nor receive the messages and codes that they want, and they are acutely aware of both this linguistic failure and the psychological trauma that stems from it. But their unspoken and interiorized language, the cultivation of which is Lispector'sspecial strength, also makes them feel the treachery of language. Although these characters can sense the emotive expressiveness of their silent, inner ruminations, they cannot-with rare exceptions - transmit the power and vitality of these arcane signs to other beings. They can intuit and divine the importance of their self-discoveries, but they cannot express this crucial knowledge to others. Realizing their inability to control language, to make it be what they want it to be (a truthful and expressive medium) and to do what they
6SeeGeorges Poulet, "Criticismand the Experienceof Interiority"and Wolfgang Iser, "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach," both from ReaderResponse Criticism 41-49 and 50-69, respectively.

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want it to do (to signal clearly who and what they are), Lispector's characters become frustrated, anxious mutes, desperate to communicate but keenly aware that they are unable to do so. They may, as in the cases of Catherine and G. H., discover who they are but then find themselves unable to make other people understand. Or, as with Martim, they may simply give up, finding the struggle to establish and maintain an identity too much to endure. Anna, the hausfrau protagonist of "Love" (Family Ties), is of this latter sort, a prototypical Lispectorian characterwho sees how she might be a very different sort of person but who lacks the resolve to bring the change about. Although Lispector's characters are typically developed more as "different states of mind"17 than as physical or even psychological entities, their pain is viscerally human. We know them well, for their anxieties are shared by a great many people in the post-World War II era, an era poignantly depicted in the epistemologically insecure and painfully self-conscious literature of postmodernism. A singular exception to the muted silence of Clarice Lispector's postmodernist fiction is An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights, a controversial novel published in 1969. The primary difference between this work and her other efforts is that here dialogue plays a more decisive role in the development of the characters than does monologue. This dialogue, moreover, is significant for the two major characters involved because it succeeds in bridging the existential gap that isolates people. An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights is also less concerned per se with the ontological dimensions of language. It focuses, as do nearly all of Lispector's texts, on a quest for self-knowledge and identity, but unlike most of her other work it does so by concentrating on the verbal and physical interchange of two people, a man and a woman who seek honestly to overcome the loneliness of their separateexistences. Because this novel develops primarily on the denotative strength of its language, it is considerably less poetic than her other work. Yet even here, in a narrative that depicts the growth and ultimate unification of two beings, the language succeeds in recreating the private, inner worlds of the characters. A key difference is that in An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights the textual balance shifts away from a representation of the inner world and toward the creation of an external and social one. The smothering silence that characterizes Lispector's other work is much less conspicuous in this novel, where it functions as a feature of the human condition that can be overcome. Because for Clarice
17Pontiero, introduction to Family Ties 19.

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Lispector silence is closely associated with isolation and linguistic failure, the man and woman in An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights gain authentic "voices,"that is, achieve meaningful communication, only by using love to overcome their solitude. A bit of dialogue coming late in the novel illustrates this point: "Do you thinklove is makinga mutualgift of one'ssolitude?After all, it's the greatestthing that one can give of oneself," said Ulysses. "I don't know.... but I do know that my searchhas come to an end. What I mean is I've come to the edge of a new beginning."'8 To accomplish this, Lori and Ulysses do what all other Clarice Lispector characters do: they confront the realities of their existences. Unhappy and dissatisfied with what they find, the two main characters of this sixth novel find in each other what is missing in their lives. Lori and Ulysses succeed because, unlike most of Lispector's other characters, each is able to make language encode a system of feeling and thought and to transmit this code to another human being, one who has overcome his (or her) own isolation enough to receive the message and respond to it in a meaningful fashion. But while Lori and Ulysses are unique among Lispector'sfictional beings because they do communicate with each other, they do so by first engaging in a typical Lispectorian quest, the lonely and solitary pursuit of self, of self-awarenessand knowledge. By finding themselves first, they are then able to attain a voice of guileless self-expression, and this gives each of them a chance to establish contact with another person. As the narrator tells it: And with sudden,unexpected she noticednot only that she was opening joy her handsand heart, but that she could do it withoutrisk! "I'mnot losing anything!I'm finally givingmyself and what happenswhen I give is that I receive, I receive... ." . . . she realizedthat it was in her very act of relinquishment lay that
the still dangerous pleasure of existing. (An Apprenticeship 108-9)

The drama and pathos of Lispector's characters arise from the fact that while they may gain a voice through self-inquisition, they often fail to find anyone able or willing to respond to their signals. Thus, in Lispector's hard, uncompromising world, it is not enough to establish a linguisticallysecure sense of personal identity and self-awareness.

I Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights, trans. Richard Mazzara and Lorri Parris (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986) 116. All further references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text.
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One must also be lucky, and there is no guarantee that a similarly free and responsive person will be found. Lori and Ulysses succeed in breaking through the psychological, linguistic, and social barriersthat imprison each of them because they discover they can each develop as human beings only by overcoming the hitherto insurmountable solitude of the other. The silence of their respective worlds is not the ignorance, fear, and confusion that bedevil so many of Lispector's characters, however. For Lori and Ulysses it is the silence of knowing who and what you wish to be while also being fearful you will fail to achieve what you desire. Their fear of failing to attain and articulate an authentic identity stunts each of them until, paradoxically, they learn to use the silence of language to break down the social and psycholinguistic walls that have been erected between them: Lori thoughtthat that was perhapsone of the most importantexperiences for humansand animalsalike: silentlyasking for help and that help being given silently. For despitethe exchangeof words, it had been silentlythat
he had helped her. (An Apprenticeship 87)

In doing this, Lori and Ulysses recover what Hassan calls the "ancient connection" between love and silence, 9 a connection generated by a quiet contemplation of self. Only then, Lispector tells us, can a man or a woman hope to use the positive force of love and language for personal growth and fulfillment, as Lori and Ulysses do: "Thetruth is, Lori, that deep inside I've searchedmy whole life for divine rapture.I had neverthoughtthat, instead, I would discoverthe divinityof the body." As for her, she had struggledher whole life againsther tendencyto be carriedaway, neverallowingherselfto get in over herhead .... Now in the silencethat envelopedthem, she openedthe floodgates,surrendered soul her and body and did not know how muchtime had passed, for she had abandoned herself to a deep, carefreeplunge. (An Apprenticeship111) The words of love that Lori and Ulysses declare to each other are paralleledby physical lovemaking, a structuraland thematic feature of the novel that demonstrates Norman O. Brown's observation in
Love's Body:
'9Ihab Hassan, "The Literature of Silence," Innovations: Essays on Art & Ideas, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (London: Macmillan, 1968) 93-108.

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The true meanings of words are bodily meanings, carnal knowledge; and the bodily meanings are the unspoken meanings. What is always speaking silently is the body. The matrix in which the word is sown is silence. Silence is the mother tongue.20

Epitomizing Brown's point, the voice of Lispector's novel says:

He kissed her slowly until finally they could break apart, and they remained there looking unashamedly into each other's eyes. They both knew that they had already gone too far. And they were still afraid to surrender completely. They kept silent. It was then, lying on the floor, that they made such great love that they were afraid of their own greatness. (An Apprenticeship 109)

In their verbal and physical lovemaking, Lori and Ulysses reanimate the ancient and sacred connection between word and deed, between signifier and signified, and it is this feature that gives their story its guarded sense of optimism about the human condition. A philosophically serious love story in the most complete and unifying sense of the term, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights shows how
love - unselfish, nurturing love - can overcome the crippling silence

and isolation of human existence. Love, one of Lispector'smost fundamental thematic concerns, is everywhere present in her fiction. Playing diverse but decisive roles, it appears prominently in such works as Close to the Savage Heart (1944), "Love"and "TheBuffalo" (Family Ties), "The Disasters of Sophia" (The Foreign Legion, 1964), "Better Than to Burn," "The Body," and "Miss Algrave" (The Via Crucis of the Flesh, 1974), The Time of the Star (1977), and A Breath of Life (1978). Nowhere, however, does it receive as positive a presentation as it does in An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights, a novel that suggests how although language failure is a great human problem, it may not be an utterly intractable one. No discussion of Lispector's discourse of silence would be complete without some commentary on Agua viva (1973), a lyrical novel par excellence2'that expressespostmodernism'sphenomenologicalconception of life, its textual self-awareness, and its ironic interplay of language and reality in creating an atmosphere of silence for its characters. In addition, however, and in a way that also connects it to the critical writings of Hassan and Brown, Agua viva implies that loveself-affirming love - can be a redemptive force in human affairs. De20Love's Body (New York: Random, 1966) 265, 264. 21See Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1963).

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veloping this key point further, and linking it to the uniquely female ways in which Lispector's best charactersrelate to the world of objects around them, Helene Cixous, in Vivre l'orange (1979), argues that Lispector'spersonages derive this strength from the fact that they work to nurture rather than dominate objects, including people. This is precisely what happens in Agua viva, a novel in which one person's growth does not stem from another person's destruction. Even though the narrator of Agua viva struggles to free herself from a narrow and inhibiting relationship, she is clearly interested not in wounding her erstwhile lover but in helping him to help himself. Read in this way, as a sequel to An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights, Agua viva also shows us, however, that although love may overcome the isolation of our existences, it may also fail us, leaving us wounded and more deeply enmeshed than ever in the darkness and silence of our solitude. For Lispector, love is a potent force, but like any force it can be used constructively or destructively; that is, it can be used to liberate or imprison. As she shows us repeatedly in her fiction, in "The Buffalo," for example, the power of love in human affairs is often indistinguishable from hate. Both can be used to entrap and subjugate and both can lead to the ruinous self-imprisonment of silence, bitterness, and noncommunication. Agua viva develops all of these postmodernist themes in an arresting fashion, however, combining them in a way that tellingly probes both the fragility of the love relationship and the nature of art's epistemological relationship to life. As the text's feminist narrator22says:
I'll write now as my head guides me ... and I won't meddle in what it writes ... I feel that I know some truths ... that I already anticipate them. But truths do not have words. Truths or truth? . . . It's so difficult to say things

that cannot be said. How does one translate the silence of our real
encounter?23

Then, referring to the elusive relationship between words, the text she is creating and the flux of her consciousness, the voice declares:
22Helene Cixous has raised some interesting issues regarding the nature of "women's writing" and, specifically, about the "feminism" of Lispector's voice. See, for example, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (1976): 875-93; "L'approchede Clarice Lispector: Se laisser lire (par) Clarice Lispector-A Paixao segundo C. L.," Poetique 40 (1979): 408-19; La Jeune n&e(Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1975); and Vivre l'orange (Paris: des Femmes, 1979). 23ClariceLispector, Agua viva (White Water), trans. Elizabeth Lowe and Earl E. Fitz, a manuscript soon to be published by the University of Minnesota Press as The Flow of Life, 42-43. All further references to this manuscript appear parenthetically in the text.
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Whenyou readme you will ask why I do not restrictmyselfto paintingand to my exhibitions,since I write roughlyand without order. The answeris that now I feel the need for words, and what I writeis new for me because my truewordwas, untilnow, untouched.The wordis my fourthdimension. (Agua viva 2) Termed not a novel but a "fiction" by the author,24 Agua viva takes the form of a long letter narrated by a woman who feels it necessary to terminate an unsatisfactory love affair. Using words to emancipate herself, the woman's discourse, which holds the text together, amounts to an uninterrupted interior monologue in which she explores the potency and meaning of love, the efficacy of language (versus painting) as a medium of communication, and the extent of the solitude that characterizes our lives. The most complete lyrical novel Lispector ever wrote, Agua viva also typifies the way a postmodernist text self-consciously questions both its own creation and the capacity of language to aid in the quest for knowledge and self-awareness. Dominated by interrelated images of birth, darkness, silence, and water, Agua viva is neither despairingnor nihilistic, however. Indeed, through the strength of the narrator'saffirmation of self, the text makes a positive statement about how we might better understand and conduct our lives: Whatwill still be, afterwards, now ... now is the reignof now. And is while improvisationlasts, I am being born. And this way, afteran afternoonof asking"Whoam I?"and of waking at one o'clock in the morningstill in despair-this way, at three o'clock in the morning, I awoke and found myself. I went to my encounterwith withoutexplosion.I am simplymyself.And myself-calm, happy,plenitude you are you. It's vast, it will last. What I write you is a this. It won't stop, it will continue.
Look at me and love me ... no, look at yourself and love yourself,

yes, that's the way it should be. What I write you continues, and I am bewitched.(Agua viva 81-82) The silence of Agua viva's narrator, then, stems from her realization that though she is free she is also alone in the world, "bewitched" by the momentousness of her liberating self-affirmation. She is silent because she courageously accepts her necessary and willingly selfimposed isolation, not because she lacks the ability, courage, or will
24Jozef 26.

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to confront the truth of her condition. Her outward or social silence is overcome privately, however, because the narrator ultimately succeeds, by dint of intellectualand emotional honesty, in coming to terms with herself, in communicatingwith the innermost aspects of her being. She, too, is her own narratee. This private use of language to first establish and then sustain an authentic sense of personal identity is what links the voice of Agua viva to what Lori, Ulysses, and G. H. do in their novels, but it is also what Martim and Anna cannot do. Their silence is complete, both private and public, while the other characters at least grapple with the entwined problems of language and being, the problems that form the thematic bedrock of Lispector's fiction. As such writers and critics as Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, John Barth, Ihab Hassan, George Steiner, and Susan Sontag describe it, literary postmodernism aspires to silence, to the kind of nonexpression and noncommunication that occurs when, living in a Babel of verbal noise, words come to lose the meanings we expect them to have. Turning against itself, the literature of postmodernism shows us that the more we talk, the less we communicate, that silence, because it leads to a pure, uncontaminated preverbal state, ironically begins to do what we want language to do. The self-conscious and reductive nature of this condition has led many critics to cite silence as being one of the key metaphors for postmodernist literature. Just as writers like Beckett, Burroughs, and Miller use the frustratedsilence produced by failed language, so, too, does Clarice Lispector focus on the deceptive linkages between language and human consciousness, on our ability to know what we are doing when we use words to discard or create identities for ourselves. Yet Lispector's fiction is also built on a realization that while the silence that derives from a failure to communicate terrifies and intimidates people, it can also regenerate them, urging them toward the attainment of a more honest and personally satisfying existence. Characterslike Martim, G. H., Catherine, Lori, Ulysses, the nameless voice in Agua viva, and a host of others show us that while the silence of confusion, fear, and isolation may be "demonic," it is also "holy,"25capable of freeing us from our ontological terrors by forcing us to confront the truth of our arbitrary, linguistically defined existences. ClariceLispector, one of Brazil'smost importanttwentieth-century narrativists, is gaining an international following because of her fic25Hassan, "The Literature of Silence" 108.

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tional plumbingsof the psycholinguistic philosophicaldepthsof and such issues. Too often studiedin isolation, as a brilliantbut curious literaryphenomenon,ClariceLispectoris a writerwhose work fits into mainstream Western of squarely the thematicand structural postmodernism. muchmoreattentionfromthis perspective, her Deserving "literature silence"offers us much to consider. of lyricallywrought
The Pennsylvania State University

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