Lispector Clarice - Reading with Clarice Lispector

For Cixous, in Agua viva Lispector insists on the effacement of the subject, which results in opening on a limitless perspective and undoing the frame of common or representable human experience. Lispector practices what Cixous has been looking for. It is the kind of affinity she feels, the kind of shock she receives at a first reading of Agua viva, that prompts her to take a long detour through much of Lispector's work, some of which is more thematically oriented and marked in its style by existentialism. Lispector's contact with the world is immediate: her language portrays the struggle that human beings engage in with their social milieus and with themselves. Yet the writing does not work through philosophical or dialectical terms that make up the heritage of Simone de Beau, voir or Jean,Paul Sartre. The will to encapsulate that world by writing it is now turned into a far more immediate relation of language and sensation. Cixous accounts for this difference by forging the concept of criture feminine, fraught with the existential and historical position of the female in the world that marginalizes the human subject, but that effectively redeems it through the ways it offers anyone, male or female, a living relation with language and experience.

Lispector's voice transforms Cixous. It comes to her by way of Brazil, in bilingual editions or in French translation. In fact, the work raises questions about the status of readings done from texts in translation, not unlike the problem of American readers of Cixous who face a poetic writing inspired at once by Hegelian philosophy and James Joyce. Phonic and graphic effects, so important for the ideological status of the text, are sometimes changed or even lost in translation. Cixous works through the difference of French and Portuguese, and in turn encounters what her own readers face when they follow her novels (at least from Angst to Limonade). Now Lispector's idiosyncratic use of punctuation is often modified by translators, thus affecting the meaning of the text. A comparison of French and English translations of Lispector for this volume also reveals numerous conceptual discrepancies, often inflecting interpretation and thus further complicating the translator's task. Wherever possible, I opted for the French translation of Lispector for the sake of holding to Cixous's reading as it is articulated in the seminars. All modifications of published English translations have been indicated.

On another level, Cixous's dialogue with Lispector is interspliced with other voices, especially that of Heidegger's essays on poetrysomething already evident in one of the first texts by Cixous on Lispector "Lapproche de Clarice Lispector," in Poetique 10 (October 1979). In no way are Cixous's readings of Lispector the work on a single author, of the type "the author and her work." Rather, they are a theoretical practice of Cixous as a writer whoin her own wordswants to go always farther in her readings (toujours plus loin), in keeping, perhaps, with a highly accessible relation to space and with a psychoanalytic notion of ongoing freeing, conceived as (re)birth or as a subject's perpetual rediscovery of himself or herself.

The chapters in this volume have been transcribed from audiotapes. The oral aspect of the readings has been purposely kept in order to retain the flavor of a style using simple sentences and a certain degree of repetition. A truly didactic type of diction is at work, and its syntax, the obverse of Cixous's other writings, evinces a litanic style, in which a pedagogical discourse is mixed with that of a poet. One of its most recurrent expressions is il y a, or "there is." It implies a theoretical position that refers to Heidegger's es gibt, "there is (to give)," an utterance that is charged with theological and philosophical undertones. It inaugurates an originary moment by calling to attention the positioning of an individual in the world. The words suggest that as a collectivity we have the great grace and privilege of being born into the world through an act of language, simply put, that comes with and is enclosed within all ... there is. Cixous uses the phrase adroitly and rhythmically, but in a style that cannot sustain the same force in written expression. A necessary rephrasing has sometimes made the implicit idea of the gift, which virtually goes without saying in the repetition of // y a, disappear in English. Adequate equivalents for the expression men re en question (to call into question) or // est question de (it is a question of), have been difficult to find. Cixous tries to avoid all statements that tend to closure or to authorize the speaker's mastery over what he or she is stating. Thus put. her observations call questions into question, and undo the speech of a "master's voice." Further, she repeats formulas so as to turn them into elements of oral poetry. For the sake of obtaining variety in the written translation, some of the expressions of questioning have been replaced by declarative sentences.