The Work of Perpetual Metamorphosis: The Hysterical Body in Clarice Lispector

Abstract

This article, with a essayistic form, proposes a different way of thinking about the processes of destabilization of the body and language in some of Clarice Lispector's books and characters, starting from the indomitable and plastic body that stole the show in the context of what became known, especially in the 19th century, as a quintessential feminine issue: hysteria. Freud's studies at the Salpêtrière in Paris, with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, revolutionized the perception of hysteria by understanding that its causes were psychic, not physical. “Hysterics suffered from memories”, wrote Freud, and their “possessed”, inapprehensible bodies, struggling to the rhythm of their “contradictory simultaneities”, remained as an open body, in constant metamorphosis, in which the  shock of desire, pain, violence, and death produced a disturbing “visual fascination, feminine fascination”. This same fascination seems to permeate the wild, enigmatic, unfinished Clarice's characters, overwhelmed by a difficult joy, submerged in a hell of pain and pleasure in the face of the twisted, that is, hysterical, experience of touching death to intensify life. In this sense, Clarice's work can perhaps be seen as a singular praise of the hysterical impulse in art, in all that the latter has of subversive, unstable and ecstatic, imploding from inside the genres and aesthetic categories and pointing to what the still unnamed character-flow of Água Viva called a “convulsion of language”, that is, its permanent and radical estrangement (which is also its astonishment).