To write is to think [the - is] being

The present text is dedicated to Clarice Lispector’s thinking experience. To write about Clarice Lispector, on whatever subject, is impossible. Everything that could be said about her writing, her thoughts, her literature, is already much better written, thought, and said by herself. Maybe the only possibility left is to write to her. But who is Clarice to whom we could dare to write? The simplest answer might be: Clarice is literature. Thus, to write to Clarice would mean to write to literature and not about what literature is, about literary questions, themes, and techniques or about the relation between literature and other art and expressions of the human spirit. This would however imply knowing what literature is. Clarice did not identify herself with labels, not even the one of literature. In the sole lecture she gave about “literature,” which handled the topic of “avant-garde literature in Brazil,” she insisted that she has never thought in terms of “literature,” which, for her, was the designation of those who observe the writing from outside: “For me literature is the way other people call what we, writers, do” (Lispector, Outros escritos 96). ¹ It is not casual that this lecture, the only one where she disposed herself to “think in terms of literature” was proffered in Texas, abroad, that is, where one is outside oneself. In her works, especially the latest ones, those in which Clarice even quotes Clarice, it is possible to read sometimes the label “literature” as an object of reflection albeit refused. “I don’t make literature: I simply live in the passing of time” (Lispector, Breath 7). She considers that writing to literature is not really writing, but merely to make chronicles, which she considered a secondary activity, when commenting on her own chronicles, despite “the vertical of emotions” that they present, as Didi-Huberman aptly observed. A chronicle is a writing with purpose, in view of some finality and engagement with something, not least with survival. But “I write for nothing and for no one” (Lispector, Breath 7). Clarice is not literature. She is the writing, or more clearly, the act of writing. “I don’t make literature: I simply live in the passing of time. The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive” (ibid.). The Portuguese original more strongly says “The act of writing is the fatal result of the fact that I am alive” (Lispector, Breath 16).