The novel "The Hour of the Star" by Clarice Lispector was published by Francisco Alves Editora, 17th edition, from which the quotes used in the analysis were extracted.
Rodrigo S.M., an omniscient narrator, tells the story of Macabéa, the protagonist, who comes from Alagoas to Rio de Janeiro, where she lives with four other roommates and works as a typist (a very bad one, by the way).
Macabéa is an ordinary woman, whom no one would look at, or rather, whom anyone would despise: frail, sick, ugly, with poor hygiene habits. Furthermore, she was an easy target for advertising and the cultural industry (for example, her greatest desire was to be like Marilyn Monroe, the sex symbol of the time). Our character doesn't know who she is, which makes her incapable of asserting herself in front of anyone.
She starts dating Olímpico de Jesus, an ambitious Northeasterner who sees no chance of social ascent for her. Therefore, he abandons her to be with Glória, Macabéa's co-worker; after all, her father was a butcher, which suggested the possibility of
financial improvement.
Sad, our character seeks solace in a fortune teller, who predicts that she will finally be happy... happiness will come from "abroad."
In a way, that's what happens: as she leaves the fortune teller's house, Macabéa is run over by Hans, who was driving a luxurious Mercedes-Benz. This is her "hour of the star," a moment of liberation for someone who, after all, "lived in a city entirely made against her."
"As long as I have questions and no answers, I will continue to write. (...) Thinking is an act. Feeling is a fact."
There is a constant need to discover the beginning, but man, limited as he is, does not know the answer to all questions. The narrator character is no different from other men, however, even without knowing these answers, she is sure of one thing and, therefore, she
states: "Everything in the world began with a yes." One must say yes for something to begin, which is why she says "yes" to Macabéa. Someone who forced her birth, her emergence from within the narrator, becoming the Northeasterner, the protagonist of her novel.
It is the narrator's cry that appears in Macabéa's body: "But the person I will speak ill of has no body to sell, no one wants her, she is a virgin and harmless, she is not missed by anyone. Besides - I realize now - I am not missed either, and even what I write someone else would write. Another writer yes, but he would have to be a man because a woman writer can shed sentimental tears."
Thus, she is one among many, for who would look at someone with a "decayed body," frail, with dirty clothes, ovaries unable to reproduce? The narrator identifies with her, as she herself has done nothing special (anyone could write what she writes); she would have to be a writer, but never a female writer; on the other hand, one cannot forget that the one writing is Clarice Lispector, as stated in the dedication.
In this way, in the first part of the book, a whole process of metalanguage is unleashed, which will interweave the narrative until its conclusion. The male narrator - Rodrigo S. M. - will reflect on the position the writer occupies in society, their role in it, and, especially, on the process of creating their work:
"I am writing at this moment with prior modesty, for invading you with such an explicit and external narrative. From where, however, even a panting blood so alive with life may flow and coagulate into cubes of trembling jelly. Will this story one day be my clot?
What do I know. If there is truth in it - and of course the story is true, although invented - let everyone recognize themselves in it, because we are all one and whoever lacks money lacks poverty of spirit or longs for something more precious than gold - there are those who lack the delicate essential.
I intend for what I will write not to be complex, although I am forced to use the words that sustain you. The story - I decide with false free will - will have about seven characters, and I am one of the most important, of course. I, Rodrigo S. M. An old tale, this one, for I don't want to be modern and invent fads as a guise of originality. Thus, I will experiment, against my habits, with a story with a beginning, a middle, and a grand finale followed by silence and falling rain."
Ironically, repeatedly, the desire readers have for traditional narrative, Clarice Lispector (here transfigured into the narrator Rodrigo S. M.), in contrast, does not give up her most striking characteristics, that is, reflection, the element above the plot, the "silence and falling rain," which will mark the protagonist character.
How to tell a life without lying about it? For this, the narrator ponders, the narrative must be simple, without artifice. The narrator is tired of literature. He will not use "succulent terms," "splendid adjectives," "fleshy nouns," verbs "slender that pierce the air sharply in the act of action." The language must be unadorned to be precise and to reach the whole and living body of reality.
How does the narrator write? "I find that I write by ear, just as I learned English and French by ear. My writing background? I am a man who has more money than those who are hungry, which makes me somewhat dishonest. (...) What else? Yes, I
have no social class, being marginalized. The upper class considers me a strange monster, the middle class is suspicious that I might unbalance them, the lower class never comes to me."
We arrive here at the most important point of this metalanguage work: the writer's consciousness as a marginalized person. This is where the narrator merges with his character: both are marginalized, in a space that does not accept them. This fusion occurs on all levels - not
only in the desire for simplicity of unadorned language; to speak of Macabéa, the writer becomes a manual laborer, becomes poor, sleeps little, acquires deep, dark circles under his eyes, lets his beard grow, dealing with a character who insists, at nineteen
years old, despite having a "decayed body," compared to a "stray dog," "in a city entirely made against her," on living. Thus, character and narrator give their cry of resistance in search of life.
Macabéa's resistance can be represented, for example, in the moments when she smiles on the street at people who don't even see her; the narrator's resistance, in the search for the word, full of secret meanings... the "thing," which, when it doesn't exist, must be invented (the writer-narrator as lord of creation).
Both Macabéa and the word are raw stones to be worked. The word will be the mediator between the narrator and the reader, and between the reader and Macabéa, because it is through it that we will know the character's story, the facts, and, especially, their birth. The narrator, by telling Macabéa, tells himself, not only through successive identifications with the character, but because she comes from within him, being immanent to him ("because the typist does not want to leave my shoulders.").
From this union, a Northeastern woman from Alagoas to Rio de Janeiro is born. A typist, "which gave her some dignity," making her believe that such a profession indicated that she "was someone in life" (here, it doesn't occur to her that she is a terrible professional, semi-illiterate... she has no awareness of any of this).
Someone with a coarse appearance, capable of disgusting her four roommates (at the boarding house where she lived), workers at Lojas Americanas:
"... she slept in a denim slip, with rather suspicious pale bloodstains (...) She slept with her mouth open due to a stuffy nose.
She was born with a bad background and now looked like the daughter of I-don't-know-what, with an apologetic air for taking up space. In the mirror, she distractedly examined the spots on her face. In Alagoas, they were called 'cloths,' they said they came from the liver. She disguised the spots with a thick
layer of white powder, and if she ended up somewhat chalky, it was better than sallow. She was all a bit grubby as she rarely washed. During the day, she wore a skirt and blouse; at night, she slept in a slip. A roommate didn't know how to tell her that she smelled musty. And since she didn't know, it remained that way, for she was afraid of offending her. Nothing about her was iridescent, although the skin of her face between the spots had a slight opal sheen. But it didn't matter. No one looked at her on the street; she was cold coffee.
She blew her nose on the hem of her slip. She didn't have that delicate thing called charm. Only I see her as charming. Only I, her author, love her. I suffer for her."
Her lack of physical perception is accompanied by the psychological. It begins with the fact that she is an easy target for consumer society and the cultural industry: she likes to collect advertisements; her meager knowledge is extracted from Rádio Relógio (information heard, but never understood); she likes hot dogs and Coca-Cola. She accepts all of this without question, for she fears the conclusions she might reach (she repents in Christ for everything, even not understanding what it means; she didn't take revenge because they told her it was "an infernal thing"; she falls in love with the unknown, as with the word "ephemeris," but never actually seeks to know the unknowable, because it was easier to accept its existence and admire it from afar).
Consequently, she becomes a "crooked" character, from so much fitting into an environment that repels her so much. The very use of the typist profession is revealing: she was one because she believed it gave her some dignity. She sought dignity as if she didn't have the right to it. Another revealing detail is her relationship with Olímpico, constantly apologizing to him, even telling him that she isn't much of a person, that she only knows how to be impossible. She doesn't defend herself based on her own values but tries to adapt to her boyfriend's values, never questioning their validity.
Olímpico represents the counterpoint to Macabéa. His values have nothing to do with hers: a metallurgist, he wants to be a congressman, distance himself from Macabéa, and be with Glória, the bleached blonde, Macabéa's co-worker; after all, her father was a butcher, which gave him
greater life prospects.
And all of this is literally swallowed, so digested that she doesn't admit the idea of vomiting; after all, that would be a waste.
At the same time, she is sensual in her thoughts, or in moments of solitude, like when she saw the handsome man at the bar, or when she stayed home - instead of going to work - experiencing a sense of freedom. Pleasure in Macabéa is something that is always linked to pain. When she sees the
man, for example, despite the pleasure such a sight gives her, there is suffering from not possessing him and from being certain that someone like that is only for looking at. Macabéa had already experienced these contradictory sensations with another person, her aunt, who, when she hit the girl, felt pleasure watching her suffer: "... and she was solely herself," immune to life, a life that was death, due to so much acceptance.
The instinct for life, which is linked to pleasure, sustains her. The narrator says: "I think about Macabéa's sex (...) her sex was the only vehement mark of her existence."
And further on, linking pleasure to death: "She could do nothing, but her sex demanded, like a sunflower born in a tomb."
What "sexual relationship" can be spoken of in Macabéa's case? The relationship with life itself, which she insists on maintaining, in her very particular concept of beauty: she wore red lipstick, wanted to be a movie actress like Marilyn Monroe, appreciated noises, for they were life.
These sensations intensify when she goes to the fortune teller Carlota (on Glória's recommendation), at the moment when she reveals to her: happiness would come from outside, from abroad. The fortune teller shows her the tragedy that is her life (something she hadn't realized until then), but at the same time, she gives her hope to believe that things could be different... possible happiness.
When she leaves the fortune teller's house, she is run over by Hans, who was driving a Mercedes-Benz. This is when life becomes "a punch in the stomach":
"For now Macabéa was just a vague feeling on the dirty cobblestones. (...)
She was so alive that she moved slowly and adjusted her body into a fetal position. Grotesque as she had always been. That reluctance to yield, but that desire for the great embrace. She embraced herself with a desire for sweet nothingness. She was a damned soul and didn't know it. (...)"
Her death is the moment when Eros (Love) unites with Thanatos (Death), life and death, in a sweet, sensual moment:
"Then - lying there - she had a supreme, wet happiness, for she was born for the embrace of death. (...) And there was a certain sensuality in the way she curled up. Or is it that pre-death resembles intense sensual longing? It's that her face resembled a grimace of desire. (...)
If she were to die, in death she would pass from virgin to woman. No, it was not death, for I do not want it for the girl; only an accident that did not even signify a disaster. Her effort to live seemed like something she had never experienced, a virgin as she was, at least intuited, for only now
did she understand that a woman is born a woman from the first cry. A woman's destiny is to be a woman. She intuited the almost painful and effervescent moment of love's swoon. Yes, a painful reflowering so difficult that she employed her body and that other thing you call
soul in it. (...)
At this exact moment, Macabéa feels a deep stomach ache and almost vomits, she wants to vomit what is not body, vomit something luminous. A star of a thousand points.
What am I seeing now and what scares me? I see that she vomited some blood, a vast spasm, finally the core touching the core: victory!"
Her mouth, now red like Marilyn Monroe's, in the orgasmic apogee of death, screams, for the first time, after vomiting, to life:
"And then - then the sudden, gasping cry of a seagull, suddenly the voracious eagle lifting the tender lamb to the high heavens, the soft cat tearing apart a dirty, random rat, life eats life."
We finally arrive at the moment of the narrator's epiphany, merged with Macabéa: it is life itself crying out for itself, independent of social oppression and marginalization. The moment, interspersed with silence, of consciousness reached through the act of writing:
"(...) The moment is that instant of time when the car tire running at high speed touches the ground and then does not touch anymore and then touches again. Etc., etc., etc. In the end, she was nothing more than a slightly out-of-tune music box.
I ask you:
- What is the weight of light?
And now - now all that's left is for me to light a cigarette and go home. My God, I only just remembered that we die. But - me too?!
Don't forget that for now it's strawberry season.
Yes."
In the end, we discover now that everything begins and ends with a yes. It also takes courage
to die, silence to hear the cry of life.
The novel "The Hour of the Star" by Clarice Lispector was published by Francisco Alves Editora, 17th edition, from which the quotes used in the analysis were extracted.
Rodrigo S.M., an omniscient narrator, tells the story of Macabéa, the protagonist, who comes from Alagoas to Rio de Janeiro, where she lives with four other roommates and works as a typist (a very bad one, by the way).
Macabéa is an ordinary woman, whom no one would look at, or rather, whom anyone would despise: frail, sick, ugly, with poor hygiene habits. Furthermore, she was an easy target for advertising and the cultural industry (for example, her greatest desire was to be like Marilyn Monroe, the sex symbol of the time). Our character doesn't know who she is, which makes her incapable of asserting herself in front of anyone.
She starts dating Olímpico de Jesus, an ambitious Northeasterner who sees no chance of social ascent for her. Therefore, he abandons her to be with Glória, Macabéa's co-worker; after all, her father was a butcher, which suggested the possibility of
financial improvement.
Sad, our character seeks solace in a fortune teller, who predicts that she will finally be happy... happiness will come from "abroad."
In a way, that's what happens: as she leaves the fortune teller's house, Macabéa is run over by Hans, who was driving a luxurious Mercedes-Benz. This is her "hour of the star," a moment of liberation for someone who, after all, "lived in a city entirely made against her."
"As long as I have questions and no answers, I will continue to write. (...) Thinking is an act. Feeling is a fact."
There is a constant need to discover the beginning, but man, limited as he is, does not know the answer to all questions. The narrator character is no different from other men, however, even without knowing these answers, she is sure of one thing and, therefore, she
states: "Everything in the world began with a yes." One must say yes for something to begin, which is why she says "yes" to Macabéa. Someone who forced her birth, her emergence from within the narrator, becoming the Northeasterner, the protagonist of her novel.
It is the narrator's cry that appears in Macabéa's body: "But the person I will speak ill of has no body to sell, no one wants her, she is a virgin and harmless, she is not missed by anyone. Besides - I realize now - I am not missed either, and even what I write someone else would write. Another writer yes, but he would have to be a man because a woman writer can shed sentimental tears."
Thus, she is one among many, for who would look at someone with a "decayed body," frail, with dirty clothes, ovaries unable to reproduce? The narrator identifies with her, as she herself has done nothing special (anyone could write what she writes); she would have to be a writer, but never a female writer; on the other hand, one cannot forget that the one writing is Clarice Lispector, as stated in the dedication.
In this way, in the first part of the book, a whole process of metalanguage is unleashed, which will interweave the narrative until its conclusion. The male narrator - Rodrigo S. M. - will reflect on the position the writer occupies in society, their role in it, and, especially, on the process of creating their work:
"I am writing at this moment with prior modesty, for invading you with such an explicit and external narrative. From where, however, even a panting blood so alive with life may flow and coagulate into cubes of trembling jelly. Will this story one day be my clot?
What do I know. If there is truth in it - and of course the story is true, although invented - let everyone recognize themselves in it, because we are all one and whoever lacks money lacks poverty of spirit or longs for something more precious than gold - there are those who lack the delicate essential.
I intend for what I will write not to be complex, although I am forced to use the words that sustain you. The story - I decide with false free will - will have about seven characters, and I am one of the most important, of course. I, Rodrigo S. M. An old tale, this one, for I don't want to be modern and invent fads as a guise of originality. Thus, I will experiment, against my habits, with a story with a beginning, a middle, and a grand finale followed by silence and falling rain."
Ironically, repeatedly, the desire readers have for traditional narrative, Clarice Lispector (here transfigured into the narrator Rodrigo S. M.), in contrast, does not give up her most striking characteristics, that is, reflection, the element above the plot, the "silence and falling rain," which will mark the protagonist character.
How to tell a life without lying about it? For this, the narrator ponders, the narrative must be simple, without artifice. The narrator is tired of literature. He will not use "succulent terms," "splendid adjectives," "fleshy nouns," verbs "slender that pierce the air sharply in the act of action." The language must be unadorned to be precise and to reach the whole and living body of reality.
How does the narrator write? "I find that I write by ear, just as I learned English and French by ear. My writing background? I am a man who has more money than those who are hungry, which makes me somewhat dishonest. (...) What else? Yes, I
have no social class, being marginalized. The upper class considers me a strange monster, the middle class is suspicious that I might unbalance them, the lower class never comes to me."
We arrive here at the most important point of this metalanguage work: the writer's consciousness as a marginalized person. This is where the narrator merges with his character: both are marginalized, in a space that does not accept them. This fusion occurs on all levels - not
only in the desire for simplicity of unadorned language; to speak of Macabéa, the writer becomes a manual laborer, becomes poor, sleeps little, acquires deep, dark circles under his eyes, lets his beard grow, dealing with a character who insists, at nineteen
years old, despite having a "decayed body," compared to a "stray dog," "in a city entirely made against her," on living. Thus, character and narrator give their cry of resistance in search of life.
Macabéa's resistance can be represented, for example, in the moments when she smiles on the street at people who don't even see her; the narrator's resistance, in the search for the word, full of secret meanings... the "thing," which, when it doesn't exist, must be invented (the writer-narrator as lord of creation).
Both Macabéa and the word are raw stones to be worked. The word will be the mediator between the narrator and the reader, and between the reader and Macabéa, because it is through it that we will know the character's story, the facts, and, especially, their birth. The narrator, by telling Macabéa, tells himself, not only through successive identifications with the character, but because she comes from within him, being immanent to him ("because the typist does not want to leave my shoulders.").
From this union, a Northeastern woman from Alagoas to Rio de Janeiro is born. A typist, "which gave her some dignity," making her believe that such a profession indicated that she "was someone in life" (here, it doesn't occur to her that she is a terrible professional, semi-illiterate... she has no awareness of any of this).
Someone with a coarse appearance, capable of disgusting her four roommates (at the boarding house where she lived), workers at Lojas Americanas:
"... she slept in a denim slip, with rather suspicious pale bloodstains (...) She slept with her mouth open due to a stuffy nose.
She was born with a bad background and now looked like the daughter of I-don't-know-what, with an apologetic air for taking up space. In the mirror, she distractedly examined the spots on her face. In Alagoas, they were called 'cloths,' they said they came from the liver. She disguised the spots with a thick
layer of white powder, and if she ended up somewhat chalky, it was better than sallow. She was all a bit grubby as she rarely washed. During the day, she wore a skirt and blouse; at night, she slept in a slip. A roommate didn't know how to tell her that she smelled musty. And since she didn't know, it remained that way, for she was afraid of offending her. Nothing about her was iridescent, although the skin of her face between the spots had a slight opal sheen. But it didn't matter. No one looked at her on the street; she was cold coffee.
She blew her nose on the hem of her slip. She didn't have that delicate thing called charm. Only I see her as charming. Only I, her author, love her. I suffer for her."
Her lack of physical perception is accompanied by the psychological. It begins with the fact that she is an easy target for consumer society and the cultural industry: she likes to collect advertisements; her meager knowledge is extracted from Rádio Relógio (information heard, but never understood); she likes hot dogs and Coca-Cola. She accepts all of this without question, for she fears the conclusions she might reach (she repents in Christ for everything, even not understanding what it means; she didn't take revenge because they told her it was "an infernal thing"; she falls in love with the unknown, as with the word "ephemeris," but never actually seeks to know the unknowable, because it was easier to accept its existence and admire it from afar).
Consequently, she becomes a "crooked" character, from so much fitting into an environment that repels her so much. The very use of the typist profession is revealing: she was one because she believed it gave her some dignity. She sought dignity as if she didn't have the right to it. Another revealing detail is her relationship with Olímpico, constantly apologizing to him, even telling him that she isn't much of a person, that she only knows how to be impossible. She doesn't defend herself based on her own values but tries to adapt to her boyfriend's values, never questioning their validity.
Olímpico represents the counterpoint to Macabéa. His values have nothing to do with hers: a metallurgist, he wants to be a congressman, distance himself from Macabéa, and be with Glória, the bleached blonde, Macabéa's co-worker; after all, her father was a butcher, which gave him
greater life prospects.
And all of this is literally swallowed, so digested that she doesn't admit the idea of vomiting; after all, that would be a waste.
At the same time, she is sensual in her thoughts, or in moments of solitude, like when she saw the handsome man at the bar, or when she stayed home - instead of going to work - experiencing a sense of freedom. Pleasure in Macabéa is something that is always linked to pain. When she sees the
man, for example, despite the pleasure such a sight gives her, there is suffering from not possessing him and from being certain that someone like that is only for looking at. Macabéa had already experienced these contradictory sensations with another person, her aunt, who, when she hit the girl, felt pleasure watching her suffer: "... and she was solely herself," immune to life, a life that was death, due to so much acceptance.
The instinct for life, which is linked to pleasure, sustains her. The narrator says: "I think about Macabéa's sex (...) her sex was the only vehement mark of her existence."
And further on, linking pleasure to death: "She could do nothing, but her sex demanded, like a sunflower born in a tomb."
What "sexual relationship" can be spoken of in Macabéa's case? The relationship with life itself, which she insists on maintaining, in her very particular concept of beauty: she wore red lipstick, wanted to be a movie actress like Marilyn Monroe, appreciated noises, for they were life.
These sensations intensify when she goes to the fortune teller Carlota (on Glória's recommendation), at the moment when she reveals to her: happiness would come from outside, from abroad. The fortune teller shows her the tragedy that is her life (something she hadn't realized until then), but at the same time, she gives her hope to believe that things could be different... possible happiness.
When she leaves the fortune teller's house, she is run over by Hans, who was driving a Mercedes-Benz. This is when life becomes "a punch in the stomach":
"For now Macabéa was just a vague feeling on the dirty cobblestones. (...)
She was so alive that she moved slowly and adjusted her body into a fetal position. Grotesque as she had always been. That reluctance to yield, but that desire for the great embrace. She embraced herself with a desire for sweet nothingness. She was a damned soul and didn't know it. (...)"
Her death is the moment when Eros (Love) unites with Thanatos (Death), life and death, in a sweet, sensual moment:
"Then - lying there - she had a supreme, wet happiness, for she was born for the embrace of death. (...) And there was a certain sensuality in the way she curled up. Or is it that pre-death resembles intense sensual longing? It's that her face resembled a grimace of desire. (...)
If she were to die, in death she would pass from virgin to woman. No, it was not death, for I do not want it for the girl; only an accident that did not even signify a disaster. Her effort to live seemed like something she had never experienced, a virgin as she was, at least intuited, for only now
did she understand that a woman is born a woman from the first cry. A woman's destiny is to be a woman. She intuited the almost painful and effervescent moment of love's swoon. Yes, a painful reflowering so difficult that she employed her body and that other thing you call
soul in it. (...)
At this exact moment, Macabéa feels a deep stomach ache and almost vomits, she wants to vomit what is not body, vomit something luminous. A star of a thousand points.
What am I seeing now and what scares me? I see that she vomited some blood, a vast spasm, finally the core touching the core: victory!"
Her mouth, now red like Marilyn Monroe's, in the orgasmic apogee of death, screams, for the first time, after vomiting, to life:
"And then - then the sudden, gasping cry of a seagull, suddenly the voracious eagle lifting the tender lamb to the high heavens, the soft cat tearing apart a dirty, random rat, life eats life."
We finally arrive at the moment of the narrator's epiphany, merged with Macabéa: it is life itself crying out for itself, independent of social oppression and marginalization. The moment, interspersed with silence, of consciousness reached through the act of writing:
"(...) The moment is that instant of time when the car tire running at high speed touches the ground and then does not touch anymore and then touches again. Etc., etc., etc. In the end, she was nothing more than a slightly out-of-tune music box.
I ask you:
- What is the weight of light?
And now - now all that's left is for me to light a cigarette and go home. My God, I only just remembered that we die. But - me too?!
Don't forget that for now it's strawberry season.
Yes."
In the end, we discover now that everything begins and ends with a yes. It also takes courage
to die, silence to hear the cry of life.
