The Hour of the Star () Read online

  THE HOUR

  OF THE STAR

  Clarice Lispector

  Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser

  Introduction by Colm Tóibín

  A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

  Copyright © 1977 The Heirs of Clarice Lispector

  Translation copyright © 2011 Benjamin Moser

  Introduction copyright © 2011 Colm Tóibín

  Originally published as A hora da estrela. Published by arrangement with the Heirs of Clarice Lispector and Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, Barcelona.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  First published as New Directions Paperbook 733 in 1992

  Published in this new translation as New Directions Paperbook 1212 in 2011

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lispector, Clarice.

  [Hora da estrela. English]

  The hour of the star / Clarice Lispector ; a new translation by Ben Moser ; introduction by Colm Tóibín.

  p. cm.

  “Translated from the Portuguese A Hora da Estrela.”

  ISBN 978-0-8112-1949-5 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

  1. Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction.

  I. Moser, Benjamin. II. Title.

  pq9697.l585h6713 2011

  869.3—dc23

  2011025482

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue. New York 10011

  Contents

  A Passion for the Void by Colm Tóibín

  Dedication by the Author

  The Hour of the Star

  Translator’s Afterword

  A Passion for the Void

  In January 1963, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell from Rio de Janeiro about the stories of Clarice Lispector. “I have translated five of Clarice’s stories,” she wrote, “all the short ones & one longer one. The New Yorker is interested — I think she needs money, so that would be good, the $ being what it is . . . But at the moment — just when I was ready to send off the batch, except for one, she has vanished on me — completely — and for about six weeks! . . . I am mystified . . . It is ‘temperament,’ maybe, or more likely just the usual “massive inertia” that one runs into at every turn . . . in the stories she has awfully good things and they do sound pretty good in English, and I was quite pleased with them.”

  In June 1963, Bishop wrote again about Lispector: “Clarice has been asked to another literary congress, at the University of Texas, and is being very coy & complicated — but I think is secretly very proud — and is going, of course. I’ll help her with her speech. I suppose we are going to be ‘friends’ — but she’s the most non-literary writer I’ve ever known, and ‘never cracks a book’ as we used to say. She’s never read anything that I can discover — I think she’s a ‘self-taught’ writer, like a primitive painter.”

  In Bishop’s Poems, Prose, and Letters, published by the Library of America, there are three translations from Lispector, including the astonishing story “The Smallest Woman in the World,” which has both the primitive power which Bishop noted, but also a real and artful knowingness, a sense of what can be done with tone, with paragraph endings, with dialogue, that could only belong to someone deeply literary. Lispector had, in common with Borges in his fiction, an ability to write as though no one had ever written before, as though the work’s originality and freshness arrived in the world quite unexpected, like the egg laid in Lispector’s story “A Hen,” which Bishop also translated.

  The idea of Lispector as fleeting, oddly unreliable, complicated, someone who could vanish, as Bishop would have it, is essential to her work and her reputation. Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was born in the Ukraine but arrived as a child in Brazil. Her background in the Ukraine and her Jewish family’s escape from there are described in harrowing detail by Benjamin Moser in his brilliant biography Why This World. What Moser calls “her inflexible individuality” made Lispector a subject of fascination to those around her, and to readers, but there was always a sense that she was deeply mystified by the world, and uncomfortable with life itself, as indeed with narrative.

  In October 1977, shortly before her death, she published the novella The Hour of the Star in which all her talents and eccentricities merged and folded in a densely self-conscious narrative dealing with the difficulty and odd pleasures of storytelling and then proceeding, when it could, to tell the story of Macabéa, a woman who, Lispector told an interviewer, “was so poor that all she ate were hot dogs.” But she made clear that this was “not the story, though. The story is about a crushed innocence, about an anonymous misery.”

  The story is also about a woman from the state of Alagoas in the northeast of Brazil — the Lispectors first lived there when they came to the country — who then goes to live in Rio de Janeiro, as Clarice Lispector did. In a scene toward the end of the book, the heroine goes to a fortune-teller, Madame Carlota, just as Lispector herself went to a fortune-teller. Lispector told a TV interviewer: “I went to a fortune-teller who told me about all kinds of good things that were about to happen to me, and on the way home in the taxi I thought it’d be really funny if a taxi hit me and ran me over and I died after hearing all those good things.”

  This is not to suggest that the story is autobiographical; rather it is an exploration of a self that is sometimes glimpsed, but barely known. At the time when Lispector was writing the book, she was herself glimpsed by the writer José Castello on Avenida Copacabana in Rio looking into a shop window. When he greeted her, he wrote, “it takes her a while to turn around. She doesn’t move at first, but then, before I dare repeat the greeting, she turns slowly, as if to see where something frightening had come from, and says ‘So it’s you.’ At that moment, horrified, I notice that there is nothing in the shop window but undressed mannequins. But then my silly horror becomes a conclusion: Clarice had a passion for the void.”

  The self re-created in a form of radical uncertainty is not merely the young woman from the northeast who is, ostensibly, the subject of the novel, but the narrator too is also a self re-created. He is capable of awkward asides, over-confidence in his own method, pure fear in the face of the power and powerlessness of words, and then sudden passages of soaring beauty and stark definition. He is capable of a paragraph such as: “Meanwhile the clouds are white and the sky is all blue. Why so much God. Why not a little for men.” or “Meanwhile — the silent constellations and the space which is time which has nothing to do with her and with us.”

  The Hour of the Star is like being brought backstage during the performance of a play and allowed
odd glimpses of the actors and the audience, and further and more intense glimpses of the mechanics of the theater — the scene and costume changes, the creation of artifice — with many interruptions by the backstage staff. It is to be told in ironic, maybe mocking, whispers by the box office on the way out that those glimpses were in fact the whole performance, plotted out with care and attention by a writer who is still nervously watching from somewhere close, or somewhere in the distance, who may or may not even exist.

  Nothing is stable in the text. The voice of the narrator moves from the darkest wondering about existence and God to almost comic wandering around in his character; he is watching her, entering her mind, listening to her and then standing back. He is filled with pity and sympathy for her case — her poverty, her innocence, her body, how much she does not know and cannot imagine — but he is also alert to the writing of fiction itself as an activity which demands tricks that he, the poor narrator, simply does not possess, or does not find useful. At times, on the other hand, he is in possession of too many of them. It is hard to decide who to feel more sorry for, Macabéa or the narrator, the innocent victim of life, or the highly self-conscious victim of his own failure. The one who knows too little, or the one who knows too much.

  The narrative moves from a set of broad strokes about character and scene, with throwaway moments and casual statements which sum up and analyze, to aphorisms about life and death and the mystery of time and God. It moves from a deep awareness about the tragedy of being alive to a sly allowance for the fact that existence is a comedy. The story is set both in a Brazil that is almost too real in the limits it sets on the characters’ lives and a Brazil of the mind and the imagination, made vast by the way in which words and images, and shifts of tone and texture, are deployed by Lispector in her mysterious swan song.

  As the French critic Hélène Cixous has written, The Hour of the Star and mysterious, garrulous and oddly refined. It withholds and it tells too much. It makes sweeping judgments and tiny observations. It is a meditation on two types of powerlessness, each one stark and distinct. The first is the powerlessness of the narrator, someone who has words at his disposal but who feels that words, in all their uncertainty and shiftiness, will dispose of him. He is not sure whether this should make him laugh or cry; instead he remains in an odd, frightened state with strange bursts of pure determination. And then there is the powerlessness of the character he has imagined, or seen, or allowed the words, in all their frailty and foolishness, to conjure up.

  But there are times when the narrator forgets himself, as Beckett often does, and finds something too interesting or too grotesquely funny to be bothered about questioning its role in the narrative, its truth or its fictiveness. The memory, for example, that the protagonist had once eaten “fried cat,” or the sights and sounds of the street in Rio, or certain memories. Or Macabéa’s pronouncement: “I’ll miss myself so bad when I die.”

  Most late work has a spectral beauty, a sense of form and content dancing a slow and skillful waltz with each other. Lispector, on the other hand, as she came to the end of her life, wrote as though her life was beginning, with a sense of a need to stir and shake narrative itself to see where it might take her, as the bewildered and original writer that she was, and us, her bewildered and excited readers.

  Colm Tóibín

  Dedication by the Author

  (actually Clarice Lispector)

  So I dedicate this thing here to old Schumann and his sweet Clara who today alas are bones. I dedicate it to the very crimson color scarlet like my blood of a man in his prime and so I dedicate it to my blood. I dedicate it above all to the gnomes, dwarfs, sylphs, and nymphs who inhabit my life. I dedicate it to the memory of my former poverty, when everything was more sober and dignified and I had never eaten lobster. I dedicate it to the tempest of Beethoven. To the vibrations of the neutral colors of Bach. To Chopin who makes me swoon. To Stravinsky who frightened me and with whom I soared in fire. To Death and Transfiguration in which Richard Strauss reveals to me a destiny? Most of all I dedicate it to the yesterdays of today and to today, to the transparent veil of Debussy, to Marlos Nobre, to Prokofiev, to Carl Orff and Schoenberg, to the twelve-tone composers, to the strident cries of the electronic generation — to all those who reached the most alarmingly unsuspected regions within me, all those prophets of the present and who have foretold me to myself until in that instant I exploded into: I. This I that is all of you since I can’t stand being just me, I need others in order to get by, fool that I am, I all askew, anyway what can you do besides meditate to fall into that full void you can only reach through meditation. Meditation doesn’t need results: meditation can be an end in itself. I meditate wordlessly and upon the nothing. What trips up my life is writing.

  And — and don’t forget that the structure of the atom cannot be seen but is nonetheless known. I know about lots of things I’ve never seen. And so do you. You can’t show proof of the truest thing of all, all you can do is believe. Weep and believe.

  This story takes place during a state of emergency and a public calamity. It's an unfinished book because it’s still waiting for an answer. An answer I hope someone in the world can give me. You? It’s a story in Technicolor to add a little luxury which, by God, I need too. Amen for all of us.

  THE HOUR

  OF THE STAR

  it’s all my fault

  or

  the hour of the star

  or

  let her deal with it

  or

  the right to scream

  . as for the future .

  or

  singing the blues

  or

  she doesn’t know how to scream

  or

  a sense of loss

  or

  whistling in the dark wind

  or

  i can’t do anything

  or

  account of the preceding facts

  or

  cheap tearjerker

  or

  discreet exit through the back door

  All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

  Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

  As long as I have questions and no answers I’ll keep on writing. How do you start at the beginning, if things happen before they happen? If before the pre-prehistory there were already the apocalyptic monsters? If this story doesn’t exist now, it will. Thinking is an act. Feeling is a fact. Put the two together — I am the one writing what I am writing. God is the world. Truth is always an interior and inexplicable contact. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it. My heart has emptied itself of every desire and been reduced to its own final or primary beat. The toothache that runs through this story has given me a sharp stab in the middle of our mouth. So high-pitched I sing a strident and syncopated melody — it’s my own pain, I who carry the world and there is a lack of happiness. Happiness? I never saw a dumber word, invented by all those northeastern girls out there.

  As I’ll now explain, this story will be the result of a gradual vision — for the last two and a half years I’ve been slowly discovering the whys. It’s the vision of
the imminence of. Of what? Maybe I’ll figure it out later. Just as I’m writing at the very same time I’m being read. I only don’t start with the end that would justify the beginning — as death seems to comment on life — because I have to record the preceding facts.

  I’m writing in this instant with a bit of previous modesty because I’m invading you with such an exterior and explicit narrative. Out of which however blood so pantingly full of life might ooze and instantly congeal in cubes of trembling jelly. Will this story someday become my own congealing? How do I know. If there’s any truth in it — and of course the story is true though invented — may everyone recognize it inside himself because all of us are one and he who is not poor in money is poor in spirit or longing because he lacks something more precious than gold — there are those who lack the delicate essential.

  How do I know everything that’s about to come and that I myself still don’t know, since I never lived it? Because on a street in Rio de Janeiro I glimpsed in the air the feeling of perdition on the face of a northeastern girl. Not to mention that I as a boy grew up in the northeast. I also know about things because I’m alive. Everyone alive knows, even if they don’t know they know. So you gentlemen know more than you think and are just pretending not to.

  I do not intend for what I’m about to write to be complex, though I’ll have to use the words that sustain you. The story — I determine with false free will — will have around seven characters and I’m obviously one of the more important. I, Rodrigo S. M. An old tale, this, since I don’t want to be all modern and invent trendy words to make myself look original. So that’s why I’ll try contrary to my normal habits to write a story with a beginning, middle and “grand finale” followed by silence and falling rain.

  An exterior and explicit story, yes, but which contains secrets — starting with one of the titles, “As For The Future," which is preceded by a period and followed by another period. This isn’t just a notion of mine — at the end perhaps you’ll understand the need to delimit. (I’m barely starting to make out the ending which, my poverty permitting, I’d like to be grandiose.) If instead of a period it were followed by ellipses, the title would be open to possible imaginings of yours, perhaps even depraved and pitiless. Anyway, it’s true that I too have no pity for my main character, the northeastern girl: it’s a story I want to be cold. But I have the right to be sadly cold, and you don’t. So that’s why I won’t let you. This isn’t just a narrative, it’s above all primary life that breathes, breathes, breathes. Porous material, one day I shall live here the life of a molecule with its possible bang of atoms. What I write is more than mere invention, it’s my obligation to tell about this one girl out of the thousands like her. And my duty, however artlessly, to reveal her life.