An Introduction to Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star

©Jane Anderson Jones

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The Hour of the Star was first published in Brazil as A hora da estrela in 1977, the year of Clarice Lispector's death. The English translation by Giovanni Pontiero was published in 1986 by New Directions Books.

         The first quarter of the book is taken up with Rodrigo's ruminations on why and how he is writing the story of this young girl. He declares that her story must be told by a man, for a woman would feel too much sympathy and end up in tears. The story must be told simply and with humility, for it is about the unremarkable adventures and the shadowy existence of a young girl trying to survive in a hostile city. Rodrigo feels the need to identify with his subject, so he decides to share her condition as closely as possible by wearing threadbare clothes, suffering from lack of sleep, neglecting to shave, giving up sex and football, avoiding human contact and immersing himself in nothingness. He envisions this identification with his protagonist as a quest for transfiguration and his "ultimate materialization into an object. Perhaps I might even acquire the sweet tones of the flute and become entwined in a creeper vine."

          After describing the disastrous physical appearance of the girl, Rodrigo briefly rehearses her early history. She was born, suffering from rickets, in the backwoods of Alagoas where her parents died of typhoid when she was two years old. Later she was sent to Maceio to live with her maiden aunt. The aunt, determined to keep the girl from becoming a prostitute, enjoyed thrashing her niece at the slightest provocation or no provocation at all. The child never knew exactly why she was being punished. The only education she experienced beyond three years of primary school was a short typing course, which gave her enough confidence to seek a position as a typist in Rio de Janeiro.

         At the moment Rodrigo's story intrudes into her life, the girl's employer is about to fire her; her work is hopeless -- full of typing errors and blotched with dirty spots. But her polite apology for the trouble she has caused inspires her boss to modify his dismissal into a warning. The girl retreats to the lavatory to try to recover her composure. When she looks into the tarnished mirror, her reflection seems to have disappeared -- her connection to even her own existence is as fragile and tenuous as is Rodrigo's commitment to identifying her. It is nearly half way through the text before he even allows her a name.

        One day the girl garners enough courage to take time off from work. She exults in her freedom: the luxury of having the room to herself, of indulging in a cup of instant coffee borrowed from her landlady. She dances around the room and contemplates herself in the mirror. It is moment of sheer happiness and contentment. On the next day, the seventh of May, a rainy day, she meets her first boyfriend; they immediately recognize each other as North-easterners, and he asks her to go for a walk. He also inquires her name, and for the first time in the text the girl is identified.

--Macabéa.

--Maca -- what?

--Béa, she was forced to repeat.

--Gosh, it sounds like the name of a disease...a skin disease.

Macabéa explains that her name was a result of a vow her mother had made to the Virgin of Sorrows.

         Although the meetings of Macabéa and Olímpico are rain-drenched, their relationship is parched. Conversation is tightly strained, for what little Macabéa has to offer is scorned as foolish or nonsensical by Olímpico. She costs him nothing; the only thing he has treated her to is a cup of coffee to which he allows her to add milk if it doesn't cost extra. The one kindness he has shown her is an offer to get her a job in the metal factory if she is fired. The high point of the relationship occurs one day when Olímpico decides to show off his strength to Macabéa by lifting her above his head with one hand. Macabéa feels she is flying -- until Olímpico's strength gives way, and he drops her into the mud. Not long after, he drops her entirely. Olímpico has become enamoured of Macabéa's workmate, Glória.

          Maternally sympathetic to Macabéa, Glória recommends a doctor to her when she is feeling unwell and lends her money to consult a fortune-teller who has the power to break bad spells. The doctor diagnoses Macabéa as suffering the preliminary stages of pulmonary tuberculosis, but the words mean nothing to her. He is appalled by her diet of hot dogs and Coca-Cola and advises that she eat Italian spaghetti whenever possible. Macabéa has never heard of the dish. As for the fortune-teller, Macabéa accepts the loan, asks for time off her job, and takes a taxi to see Madame Carlota.

         The fortune-teller cuts the cards to read Macabéa's fortune and immediately exclaims over the terrible life that Macabéa has led; then she sees a further misfortune -- the loss of her job. But turning another card brings a life change. All of Macabéa's misfortunes will be reversed: her boyfriend will return and ask her to marry him and her employer will change his mind about firing her. A handsome foreigner named Hans will fall madly in love with her and shower her with unimagined luxuries. Macabéa is astounded as she embraces Madame Carlota and kisses her on the cheek. She leaves the fortune-teller's house in a daze. When she steps off the curb, she is struck by a hit-and-run driver in a yellow Mercedes.

         The narrator observes Macabéa, lying on the pavement, bleeding and wonders about her death. "Was she suffering? I believe she was....I shall do everything possible to see that she doesn't die. But I feel such an urge to put her to sleep and then go off to sleep myself....Is Macabéa about to die? How can I tell?" Macabéa gathers herself into a fetal embrace and utters her final words: "As for the future." The narrator lights a cigarette and goes home, remembering that people die.

         Rodrigo S.M., the self-declared narrator of the novel, is the voice of self-consciousness in counterpoint to Macabéa's almost total un-self-consciousness. He observes the oblivion of his protagonist, and by writing her story goads her into a kind of self-knowledge. The question of the narrative voice in this novel is complex, for Clarice Lispector's own voice is also heard -- at times the reader hears her directly as in "The Author's Dedication (alias Clarice Lispector);" at times she is detected behind or through Rodrigo's words; at times she seems to be speaking through Macabéa and at times her silence is as expressive as her voice.

         In the naming of Macabéa and Olímpico, Lispector reveals her ironic playfulness. The Maccabees were a family of Jewish patriots and rulers in the Second and First Centuries b.c. who led the Jewish people in their struggle for freedom against Syrian rule. Their recapture of the Temple in Jerusalem is marked by the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. The triumphs, power, and fame of the Maccabees are in direct contrast to their namesake's poverty, vulnerability and obscurity. Olímpico, of course, suggests Mt. Olympus and the Olympic games -- the classical spirit of Greek competition. Olímpico competes, but he does it furtively and criminally. He is an accomplished petty thief and is proud of his secret murder of a rival.

         Lispector seems to have created Macabéa as a primitive alter ego. Like Lispector, Macabéa comes from the North-east, and like Lispector, she is a creature of spirit. But Lispector was a highly educated woman of the world, wife of a diplomat, recipient of a law degree, a journalist, and a highly regarded writer of experimental fiction. Macabéa is an empty vessel, so devoid of a place in the world, destitute even of a guardian angel, that the only fortune that she can experience is the divine bestowal of a fleeting state of grace.

         Olímpico embodies masculine worldliness and ambition. He is concerned with "important things," while Macabéa only notices "unimportant things." She is impressionable where he is impervious to anything he does not understand. What he does understand is the power of blood and the life-force which are embodied for him in the figure of Glória.

         Glória represents the survivor. While she lacks any higher self-awareness, she has mastered all the skills for survival. She knows how to use her sexual charms, is capable of handling a clerical position, and while she is not troubled by the finer points of conscience, she is capable of a kind of maternal compassion.

          Clarice Lispector begins and ends The Hour of the Star with the word "yes." The "yes" at the beginning of the book is acquiescence to life: "Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born." The "yes" at the close of the book is an acceptance of death: "Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me? Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes."

         But even this acceptance of death is interrupted with the insistence that one enjoy life as long as it offers itself. Lispector died of cancer the same year that The Hour of the Star was published. She characterizes Death, "my favorite character in this story," as the ultimate encounter with oneself. Death and rebirth and metamorphoses are intimately linked in this twisted fairy tale of a Cinderella whose only transformation into the princess happens at the moment of her death. Lispector hangs Macabéa's story on the frame of the fairy tale with a wicked step-mother (the aunt), an uncaring father (the boss), a traitorous step-sister (Glória), a false suitor (Olímpico), and a fairy godmother (Madame Carlota). But the prince that Madame Carlota promises is only an illusion -- at most he is the driver of the Mercedes who runs Macabéa down. The story-teller, Rodrigo/Clarice, cannot conjure a happy ending for this poor girl from the North-east.

         Reality intrudes. On one level of this story Lispector is exposing the cruelty and difficulties faced by those who have been forced to emigrate from the hinterlands of Brazil into the cities. North-east Brazil is the poorest region of a country, blessed with natural resources, that has not been able to devise a system in which the wealth can be distributed in any equitable way. Macabéa and Olímpico, products of the impoverished North-east, present the faces of the victim and the violent -- both are devoid of any "civilizing" culture. Olímpico will fight his way into a marginally bourgeois existence, probably by marrying Glória, joining her father in the butchery business and moving into their house on the street named after a general. Macabéa hungers for bits of knowledge -- she collects advertisements and listens to the culture capsules presented on Radio Clock -- but the bits only seem to alienate her even further from the urban pathways of modern Rio de Janeiro. Her instinctual being does not accord with official reality.

        The Hour of the Star was the last book that Clarice Lispector published during her lifetime. She wrote it at the same time as she was writing Um sopra de vida (1978; A breath of life -- not yet translated into English), a confessional novel bordering on lyrical poetry. The Hour of the Star is unique among Lispector's novels in that it deals with contemporary social and political problems in Brazil.

         Lispector is best known for moving Brazilian fiction away from regional preoccupations. Like her Argentine contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, she was more concerned as a writer with such major twentieth-century literary preoccupations as Existentialism, the nouveau roman and linguistic experimentation. Her prose is highly imagistic, and her protagonists develop more through their interaction with everyday objects than through the action of the plot. In rhythmically developed epiphanies, reminiscent of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, her characters gradually come to an awareness of the isolation and ephemerality of their individual existences. Lispector is one of the early voices of female consciousness in Latin American literature; her protagonists are generally middle-class urban women attempting to find a place in the contemporary world.

         The Hour of the Star shares many of these themes and stylistic qualities with such earlier works as Lacos de família (1960, Family Ties, 1972) and A maça no escuro (1961, The Apple in the Dark), but Lispector's focus on the devastating effects of poverty in contemporary Brazil is the first time that her very real social concerns (as revealed in her newspaper columns and elsewhere) are addressed in her fiction. Lispector's early death, a day before her fifty-second birthday, silenced one of Latin America's most experimental and original voices.

Parts of this essay were originally published in a different form in Masterpieces of Latino Literature, HarperCollins, 1994.