Remix'd: AHE & AV Juxtaposed
“But I protest. I denounce our weakness, I denounce the delirious horror of death—and I respond to all that infamy with—exactly what’s now going to be written down—and I respond to all that infamy with happiness. The purest, lightest happiness. My only salvation is happiness. The atonal happiness within the essential it. That doesn’t make sense? But it must” (AV, 77)
As Lispector concludes Água Viva with this explicit and vehement statement – that she does “protest” against the “horror of death” and the right to “salvation as happiness” – Lispector, in my interpretation, deliberately constructs a thematic transition, or a metaphoric bridge to be used in the near future when writing A hora da estrela, four years after the publication of água viva. This construction, I shall argue, is not simply uncanny or a peculiar coincidence, but is characteristic of Lispector’s oeuvre in general, in which she continually recycles and reappropriates her own themes, symbols and images developed in earlier fictions, and readdresses them within the novel parameters of her later texts.
Juxtaposing AV and AHE, it almost seems that Lispector purposefully addresses certain themes and concerns that she will seek to destruct (ironically vis-à-vis the male pseudonym of Rodrigo S.M.) in AHE.
With a notable degree of self-consciousness, Lispector characterizes her narrative within Agua Viva as an antipodal ontology when compared with AHE, asserting: “What is definitely is not is rationality…But at least I’m not imitating a movie actor and nobody needs to raise me to their mouth or become an airline stewardess” (AV, 24).
The parodied battle over narrative right to discourse – between the ideal “rational” male discourse and maudlin and “narcissistic” female psyche – constitute a seminal theme and concern within AHE. As Feracho writes in “Authorial Intervention, concerning AHE:
“The instability of language and subject results in a self-examination through the structural representation of hybridity in three areas: (1) the connection of authorial and narrative established in the ‘Dedicatoria’; (2) the interconnectedness of author/narrator/protagonist embodied in the title’s multiple perspectives; and (3) the textual subversion of masculine and feminine discourses as an authorial subversion of postfeminist critique of her own process of self-definition. (Feracho: 69).
Instead of taking a postfeminist interpretation of Lispector’s work, however, I propose to analyze Lispector’s voice as “that of a literary mystic,” as argued by Vieira – “am interpreter of sacred mysteries whos inspiration stems in part from other texts, including the Bible….[Lispector’s] spirituality, then, establishes a link between her openness to possibility and indeterminacy and her resistance to closure—a position emblematic of Hebraic hermeneutics” (pg 125, Vieira).
Vieira, referencing Midrash and literature by Hartmann and Budick, defines midrash as “to seek out or to inquire: a term in rabbinic literature for the interpretative study of the Bible. Describing the “waywardness of midrash,” they explain: ‘Midrash somehow engages in ever-new revelations of an originary text, while the question of origins is displaced into the living tradition of writing” (xiii). The authors comment on its sense of process, an unclassifiable aspect also present in Lispector’s narratives, especially, Um sopro de vida and Agua Viva: “in this emerging phase midrash is seen to affirm the integrity and authority of the text even while fragmenting it and sowing it endlessly. Seen in the terms of the latter-day midrashim which Derrida and Jabès offer, midrash is the open word, the open door, through which we are always just passing” (xiii). Vieira continues, espousing a Bakhtian sense of the “dialogical” in interpreting Lispector’s texts, and argues that “all of Lispector’s narratives are open doors, for they invite reception and inquiry instead of closure and reflect an element of trust. Her dialogical texts remain open to expressions within the self and among others” (pg. 125, Vieira).