The Poetics of Mortality in Lispector’s The Hour of the Star

Abstract

Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (A Hora da Estrela) was her finalnovel and was published one month before her death. One couldwrite a great deal about ‘terminovels’, those novels which becomethe last living testament of the author and the author’s ‘purpose’but that would be beyond the scope of this testament. Obviously,Lispector was well aware of the fact she was dying of cancer whichmay, in fact, account for what Giovanni Pontiero has written that’Clarice Lispector began to experience an almost obsessive nostalgiafor Recife in the North-eastern State of Pernambuco, where shehad spent her childhood’ (Lispector, p. 89). Certainly the mainprotagonist of the novel, Macabea, a ‘nordestina’ whose quest fora better life takes her from provincial squalor to a more metropolitansqualor is much like Lispector herself who knew what it waslike to journey from a venue of abject safety to one of abjectmystery and ‘knew, too, what it meant to be immediately bombardedwith a plethora of utterly new sights, sounds and ideas. Sheknew what it meant to find herself suddenly among strangers andto have to make up her life as she went along’ (Fitz, p. 202);however, even though the prevailing social conditions are importantin The Hour of the Star, what is patently clear about the novel isthat it functions on two distinct levels: 1) as a quasi-biographicalnovel and implicit in that autobiography, a testament to her life;and 2) as a novel about the act of novel-writing.In one of her more insightful comments, Helene Cixous haswritten ‘In Clarice, happiness is always secret. Perhaps at a certainlevel the beautiful, which belongs to aesthetics, is replaced by truth.The beautiful is annulled in a kind of neutralization of the beautifuland the ugly. At the limit, instead of the too beautiful, we havewhat is too much alive, even mortally alive. Something is so muchalive that one can die of it, or it can die’ (Cixous, p. 83).