Literary Devices as Masks in the Works of Clarice Lispector

Abstract

Literature which is concerned with social problems, especially those related to the poorest classes, has not always given them a voice. When the narrator uses the first person they are almost always in a social circumstance which permits them to write, whereas writing in the third person allows for an intertwining of the author's voice. Claire Lispector, often accused of avoiding social themes, recognizes the inherent paradox in socially-oriented literature in A hora da estrela. In this work, Lispector constructs an interesting literary mask from this paradox. She had already established how a mask makes it possible to speak about one’s own writing, most notably in Água viva, where the first person is used as a way to show oneself as a writer and narrator. This is an extreme exercise in self-reflexive literature, or can be seen as an assimilation of the author by the narrator. This irony constitutes a resource that the author uses not only to respond to those who have criticized her introspective aesthetic, but also to demonstrate the possibilities of masking which are raised by literary devices. Here, the voices of the narrator and the writer occasionally converge and diverge, but the character that motivates social critique remains silent.