ABSTRACT
An argument that the female protagonist in Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector’s 1977 work The Hour of the Star is a combatant would be counter-intuitive, if not downright ridiculous. After all, the character is obviously pathetic. Phrases like “quivering thinness” (11) and “calcium deficiency” (20) litter the narrator’s descriptions of her; she is compared to a “weed” (20) with a “drooping head” (21) or “the form of grass in the sewer” (71) and has trouble holding down her own food. As Hélène Cixous summarizes, “the ‘protagonist’ is so infinitely small that she is not even noticeable” (1990: 149). In addition, the plot is not replete with heroic exploits, hair-splitting action, cruel intrigue, or physical contest but rather with, well, nothing, or nearly so. “[T]his story is almost nothing” (16), the narrator admits, and then talks about beginning but can only continue with a dash. The main character lives, works (but badly), tries not to throw up, listens to the radio, nearly falls in love, visits a doctor who does not help her, and then, exiting from an appointment with a fortune-teller, gets crushed by a yellow Mercedes Benz in a hit-and-run and bleeds out on the sidewalk.
