VIDA VAGA-LUME: RESISTÊNCIA E PRODUÇÃO DE VIDA EM CLARICE LISPECTOR

Abstract

Turning to Clarice Lispector's writing, the study focuses on the author's last novel. Since its publication, in 1977, A hora da estrela defied the literary criticism, which tended to highlight, in the protagonist Macabéa – a poor northeastern woman who migrates to Rio de Janeiro – signs of suffering and helplessness. With the aim of displacing this vision, another perspective is presented here that sets, alongside the undeniable oppression, a vital force asserting itself, insisting on resisting, without letting itself be slaughtered or co-opted. Taking a distance from the readings carried out by most of Lispector's critical fortune, this study highlights the small escapes that lead Macabéa to frequently meet joy, despite any oppression. The analysis is concentrated on the character's actions, a strategy still little explored in Clarice studies. They are dialogues between the fiction of Clarice Lispector and the considerations that Georges Didi-Huberman (2011) made about the reflection constructed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, for whom, human beings, when they resist the coercion that operate as attacks on vitality, can be called of fireflies. In the speeches of the Italian thinker and the French philosopher, the small insect serves as an image for a certain type of resistance, because, although minimal, it does not fail to produce its brightness, even when threatened by large lights. Macabéa, as shown in this study, has the same power of resistance attributed to the firefly.