The Hour of the Star
Clarice Lispector
New Directions Publishing, 2020
Review by Rachel Gerry
Brazilian journalist José Castello tells a bizarre anecdote about a run-in with Clarice Lispector on the streets of Rio, shortly before her death:
Clarice is standing still in front of a shop window on Avenida Copacabana and seems to be looking at a dress. Embarrassed, I approach her. “How are you?” I say. It takes her a long time to turn around. At first she doesn’t move, as if she hadn’t heard a thing, but then, before I get the nerve to say hello again, she turns slowly, as if searching for the source of something frightening, and says, “So it’s you.” In that moment, horrified, I realize that the shop window contains nothing but undressed mannequins. But then my horror, so ridiculous, gives way to a conclusion: Clarice has a passion for the void.
Castello’s story is an apt introduction to Lispector—a writer bewitched by the farthest reaches of reality. She is consumed by the question of how we might position ourselves outside of strictly human categories in order to perceive a greater being, a higher truth—whatever inscrutable substance links human to cockroach, sky to earth, word to object. Some critics call it “God,” others “the void,” and still others, “the thing itself.” Taking a cue from Lispector’s novella Agua Viva, we might call it “life seen by life.”
The Hour of the Star, Lispector’s final work, was recently republished by New Directions in Fall of 2020 in celebration of the writer’s centennial year. It is a joy to see this strange and lively book commemorated; a sign that Lispector––long beloved in Brazil, where she is known simply as “Clarice”––has finally found her place in the North American canon. The Hour of the Star is often considered to be her finest work. It not only provides a sample of spiritual freedom through the life of its protagonist, but also takes into mind the writer, and the literary mechanics necessary for putting said freedom onto the page.
The novel revolves around two central characters: Macabéa, a young typist living in poverty in the slums of Rio, and Rodrigo S.M., the author who writes her into being. Macabéa is a nod to Lispector’s past—to her years growing up poor in Northeastern Brazil—and Rodrigo a tribute to her present, to the author-composer looking to write her way out of the limits of language.
At first glance, Macabéa has the aura of a girl condemned. A “feeling of perdition” circulates in the air around her—an overwhelming nothing. Exceedingly shy, she is called “dumb,” an “idiot.” She eats only hotdogs and lives aimlessly. Even when it seems her luck might change, when love is on the verge of finding her, she is swiftly relieved of hope. Her rat of a boyfriend Olímpico leaves her for Glória, a well-fed typist who better approximates middle class values.
And yet, it’s not long before we realize that a “first glance” isn’t sufficient (is it ever?) for understanding a character who exists beyond a system that devalues her, and others at the lowest rungs of social caste. Macabéa lacks cultural knowledge and the finishings of a privileged education, but she possesses a keen ability to see beyond the structures that everyone else lives by. Excluded from bourgeois worlds, Macabéa rejects the exploitative capitalist structures of knowing, owning, and producing that give them shape. Her rejection (which comes so naturally there is something almost spooky in it) takes her into another kind of world—that amorphous terrane of being crossed by other Lispector heroines.
By abandoning the social fabric for spiritual truth, Lispector’s characters leave behind notions of success, beauty, morality, even time, to access a deeper, more essential reality, anchored in the present moment—”the instant,” or rather “the is of the instant” (again, Agua Viva). And their sacrifices are always worth it. The view from this other world, which dispassionately estranges them from things as they are, permits radical freedom. Freedom to exist in accordance with the sheer fact of being (and its corollary, aliveness), not merely human fate—a move which both expands and distorts the scope of what makes a life “meaningful.”
Macabéa’s route towards “the void” is paved by a commitment to uncertainty. Never expecting or presuming, entitled to nothing, she takes pleasure in insignificance. She is open to the unlikely blessings of the everyday: the rust on a gate, the sun on cobblestones. She listens to noises instead of speaking over them. She wakes up early on Sunday mornings to have more time to do nothing. “‘Love’ she didn’t call love, she instead called it ‘I-don’t-know-what.’” Refusing to conquer anyone, or anything, or any subject, her soul remains secluded, an end in itself: “She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails.” As she moves aimlessly through the novel, we come to understand that she has what Rodrigo terms “the delicate essential,” the glamour of a soul that finds glory in simply being.
It is no small thing to exist so freely, so for oneself and also for nothing. If hell is other people, Macabéa has created a heaven wherein the root of being has nothing to do with identity or the perceptions of others, their judgments, their timelines, their content. Independent of regulating bodies, Macabéa makes contact with a formless cosmos; “vagueness was her earthly world, vagueness was the insides of nature.” In time, she’d become “mere living matter in its primary form.”
But all of this emphasis on Macabéa ultimately leads us to Roderigo, her creator. At heart, The Hour of the Star is a novel about writing a novel—a reflection on Lispector’s own lifelong project of using words to get at something beyond language. She writes to provoke her readers into a confrontation with being at its lowest frequencies.
If Roderigo is the writer then Macabéa is the ultimate word. Her language of existence is “vague,” in harmony with “the nothing.” Vagueness is, for Lispector, a language of truth. It is not enough to simply show characters experiencing epiphany, the words themselves must incite it in readers—make them feel it; give them a taste. Philosophy is only useful when it can be lived. Facts are “hard stones,” flat and dead, until they can be transformed into feelings. And so, Roderigo struggles to write in a form commensurate to the language of his subject. “This isn’t just a narrative,” he promises, “it’s primary life.” We feel his desperation to make it so.
The result is a winding stream-of-consciousness, “a strident and syncopated melody.” Rodrigo wavers between awkward asides and reflections on the creative process as he paces through his tale of Macabéa. His weapon of choice is the tangent, where he spends time musing on himself, his characters, and his fears over the powerlessness of language. The point of view alternates without distinction between first and third person; the reader is always technically in Roderigo’s world, but the division between his and Macabéa’s stories is non-existent–porous as the division between the world of human structure and the world of being. Just as he writes Macabéa into existence, she escapes him. He makes bets on her that never come true and wishes for futures she never ends up living. “Will things happen?” he asks, “They will. But what things?” He lands on the question, never the answer. There is a pervasive sense of improvisation—a desire to follow impulse instead of logic.
Like any attempt to use language to reach beyond it, failure is preordained. Rodrigo is over-confident and self-involved in a way that precludes immersion in metaphysical depths. He has none of the enlightened indifference of Macabéa. And his reliance on the reader, and on language as a medium, makes him insecure—though he remains likeable in his own way. Ultimately, the project must fail: “I am absolutely tired of literature,” he says, “only muteness keeps me company.” But not all is lost. Avoiding rigid narrative structures and total authority over his creation, he too refuses to know, own, and produce. Through Rodrigo, Lispector invents a form of telling which embraces something of the openness, curiosity, and faith personified by Macabéa. The Hour of the Star leaves the reader with an intimation, however slight, of that “thing” beyond character or the paragraph.
Putting down the book, the reader takes a breath. She repeats Rodrigo’s words: “Things that can be defined are starting to fatigue me a bit. I prefer the truth that is in the foreboding.”
Rachel Gerry is a Toronto-based writer of reviews, essays, and short fiction. She holds an M.A. in English from the University of Toronto and her work has appeared in Novella Magazine and Upstairs Literary Journal. You can find her on Instagram (@rac.chel_) and Twitter (@rachel_gerry).