Listening and Legibility: Urban Surfaces Against ‘Overarching Meanings’ in Lispector’s The Besieged City

Abstract

Listening and Legibility: Urban Surfaces Against “Overarching Meanings” in Lispector’s The Besieged City. This paper looks into the literary dismantlement of projections of totality and objectified knowledge in women’s modern writing, focusing on Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novel The Besieged City. My central claim is that her writing opposes “geographies of reason,” indirectly arguing for an untranslatability of the self inside modernity’s model of legibility and communication. In this novel, Lispector’s alternative to the discoursing, male-dominant, rational public realm is not the introspective inner space of subjectivity, but an innovative world-making poiesis founded on the substitution of the individual self with “the wider life of the world” that remains always a-centric and anti-textual. I investigate the ways in which Lispector opposes opaqueness to legibility, seeking the uncharted territory outside the logic of historical time or the colonial gaze. Reading Lispector’s novel through the notion of “writing by ear” (bearing multiple meanings, mostly in relation to the re-negotiation of the voice-dominant Western perception about writing) will prove useful in understanding the intricate and tangled relation between Euro-American literature and the Global South in terms of complex forms of heritage hybridization and designs of global memory. Keywords: poiesis, totality, Global South, creolization, urban, listening, modernity