In the Shadows of the Cosmos

Abstract

Clarice Lispector’s texts are a peculiar combination of socio-political analysis and cosmological excess. Commentators on her works have explored either of these two dimensions but have not yet brought them into a singular dialogue. I argue that Lispector insists upon an ethical responsibility in her refusal to disregard the microcosm of a “marginal” life even within a cosmos of her own creation. For this reason, her critique is inextricable from these excesses. The displacement of narrative authority in a method of literary production that refuses conquest opens upon an underlying, and not yet “pre-coded,” primordial cosmology characterized by night, incompleteness, and (sensory) impression, rather than self-assertive knowledge. I focus on The Hour of the Star and The Besieged City, two works that illustrate this dynamic, to capture how the interstices of social marginalization is the site from which a cosmo-political vision takes shape. Lispector’s works do not promote supra-territorial community over a privileged nationalist singularity, but rather the vertiginous excess of open possibility.