post-colonial_translation

Cixous, Lispector and fidelity 149
What Cixous claims to find in Clarice Lispector is the ‘opening of a
window’, ‘an unveiling’, ‘a clariseeing’ that reaches the inside of things,
beyond their mere appearance (ibid., p. 74). The ‘clarice radiance’ leads
Cixous ‘outside. Outside of the walls. Outside of the ramparts of our
towns’, outside ‘the fortified castles that our demons and aberrations
have edified for themselves’. Away from ‘the dead who inhabit our own
homes’, ‘the Clarice hand gives back to us [the] spaces inhabited by the
sole living-ones. In the profound and humid inside of the outside’ (ibid.,
p. 102). And to this woman whose ‘orange-colored accents’ could ‘rub
the eyes of [Cixous’s] writing which were arid and covered with white
films’ (ibid., p. 14), Cixous declares her (apparently) unconditional love:
To have the fortune – little sister of joy – to have encountered the
joy clarice, or the joy gh or l or anna, and since then to live in joy,
in her infinitely great arms, her cosmic arms, dry and warm, tender,
slim – The too great fortune – to be in her arms, she holds me,
being in her space, for days and days, and summer nights, and
since then, to live, a little above myself, in a fever, a suspension,
an inner race.
(ibid., pp. 54–6)
This idyllic dialogue between reader and writer, far from the alleged
violence and inequalities of the masculine world, which also suggests
an ideal, homosexual union between soulmates, actually blurs the
distinction between Cixous and Lispector, particularly in the
international scenario in which the latter became known in the late
1970s. As Cixous’s readings have transformed Lispector into an
exemplary sample of feminine writing, most of the interest expressed
in Lispector – outside Brazil and the rather limited international circle
of specialists in Brazilian literature – has also dwelt on how Lispector
is ‘compatible’ with Cixous and, most of all, on how the Brazilian
author might be instrumental in illustrating ‘feminine’ ways of
spending. In such a narrative, Lispector has been literally ‘used’ by
Cixous as
a means to negotiate this difficulty: to push ‘women’ and ‘the
feminine’ together, and place them clearly within political struggle
and within history. [Cixous] is not talking about the real Clarice
Lispector, a Brazilian left-wing modernist writer who died in 1977,
but rather exploring the power of ‘Lispector’ as a symbol, and
seeing the sort of connections Lispector’s writing allows her to