Ligiya Clark
Ligiya Clark
Charles
Stankievech
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The scope of literary styles in Lispector’s oeuvre ranges from
newspaper writing (crônica) to short stories, from experimental
novels to children’s books. Within this diverse corpus, one could
single out three major novels as a mystical trinity that progressively,
and fittingly, deconstructs itself: The Passion According to G.H (1964,
henceforth Passion), Água Viva (1973, henceforth Água) and A Breath
of Life (1977, posthumous, henceforth Breath).12 All three can be seen
as streams of consciousness (either in monologue or dialogue form),
and are perhaps amongst the most personal of Lispector’s works
as they purposefully blur the boundary between confessional and
fiction. In a sense, they are less a literary genre and more a chimera
of philosophical feminism, something akin to the newly celebrated
categories of ficto-criticism or autotheory – modes of writing that
subvert the citational practices of the Western, male-dominated
philosophical canon by drawing from a web of embedded, lived
experiences within a process-based methodology.13 Furthermore,
the artistic vocations of the three protagonists tie the novels
together, establishing a conscious working through a methodology
of creation. In Passion, the narrator is a sculptress who falls into a
mystical encounter with a painting left by her maid, culminating in
the act of ingesting a cockroach. In Água, the narrator becomes
a painter (after an earlier manuscript composes her as a writer).
In the final posthumous work Breath, the method cannot resist
becoming recursive: Clarice the writer creates the character of an
Author who in turn creates a character who is a painter, who claims:
‘My ideal would be to paint a picture of a picture.’14 A Möbius loop
is formed: ‘a snake swallowing its own tail.’15
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The Mirror of Simple Souls, whose full title ‘Souls Who Are
Annihilated’, anticipates the dissolving identity of the writer that
matches the ‘formlessness’ of Água: ‘I am a little scared: scared of
surrendering completely because the next instant is the unknown.
The next instant, do I make it? Or does it make itself? We make it
together with our breath.’18 The final novel in the trinity, A Breath
of Life propels this dialogue into a recursive relationship.19 It’s
uncertain whether a final draft of the novel would have recomposed
the character’s roles (as was the case in the final form of Água), but
it seems the content was too developed for Breath to deviate from
its strategy. One should also not underappreciate the fact that
Lispector knew this was her last work. Conflating further the planes
of fiction and life, the only posthumous editorial excision from the
manuscript – out of respect to the family – was a sentence by the
‘Author’ asking God to give her character cancer (the pathology
that concurrently took Clarice’s own life in 1977).20 The prologue
to Breath ends with the conventionalised retraction established
within medieval mystical texts.21 Recognising the limits of knowing,
Lispector humbly resigns: ‘May peace be upon us, upon you, and
upon me. Am I falling into discourse? may the temple’s faithful
forgive me: I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last
I can rest.’22 Her fall from silence into the profane act of speech
articulates the limits of our bodies, and her failure is our falling in
love. We dive into The Passion, float in Água Viva and drown in
A Breath of Life.
EXHALE
Propelled by constant crises, Lygia Clark continually pushed the
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loop and start cutting it in half along the grain of the surface as it turns
upon itself. In doing so, the reader-turned-participant proceeds to
iteratively cycle through the looping form never reaching the edge
of the paper, thus suggesting an infinite procedure. Composed by
a deceivingly simple gesture, Walking continues the avant-garde’s
spiritual obsession with the fourth dimension and non-Euclidian
geometry.30 It enacts diagrammatic thinking par excellence as
a response to Clark’s own proclaimed ‘Death of the Plane’ (1960):
In the morning in the kitchen on the table I see the egg . . . The
egg is a suspended thing. It has never landed. When it lands,
it is not what has landed. It was a thing under the egg. – I look
at the egg in the kitchen with superficial attention so as not to
break it. I take the utmost care not to understand it. Since it
is impossible to understand, I know that if I understand it this
is because I am making an error. Understanding is the proof
of making an error. Understanding it is not the way to see it.44
So much has been written about Clarice and Lygia, but each time
I return from an immersion in their actual words, their dark lucidity
and punctum make redundant any exegetical glossing. Their works
speak for themselves and my only desire is to put them into dialogue
with each other. I resign to silence with two last passages destined
to resonate with each other – and I hope with you the reader:
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L.C.: Every time I breathe, the rhythm comes out right, but
it’s almost an internal rhythm, totalized within the act. I have
become aware of my cosmic affective ‘lung.’ I’m entering
into the topological rhythm of the world . . . I feel the rockets
passed over my body without hurting me. My breath is the
cosmos, my lung is the cosmos.
1 The title is composed out of two titles of works by Clark (Breathe with Me,
1966) and Lispector (A Breath of Life, 1977). A version of this text was first
written in 2020 and published in Ala Roushan (ed.), BREATHLESS, Toronto:
Power Plant, 2021.
2 Note the structure of this essay follows a Möbius loop between body and
endnotes – self-intersecting.
3 Besides the very rare passing mention, footnote or association with larger
movements, like Neoconcretism, no direct comparison of the two biogra-
phies and bodies of work exists to my knowledge at the time of writing –
at least in English.
4 Sympathetic resonance is a phenomenon in physics when two bodies not
touching vibrate to the same frequency – one body’s vibration picked up by
the other due to a careful attunement, providing a feedback loop. Both Clark
and Lispector, while most known for their poetic vocabulary, were much
interested in mathematical and scientific language, such as the fourth dimen-
sion, the topology of Möbius loops and wireless communication.
5 In Água Viva, Lispector writes: ‘I am enchanted, seduced, transfixed by furtive
voices. The almost unintelligible cuneiform inscriptions speak of how to
conceive and give formulae about how to feed from the force of darkness.
They speak of naked and crawling females. And the solar eclipse causes
secret terror that nonetheless announces a splendor of heart.’ Clarice
Lispector, Água Viva (1973, trans. Stefan Tobler), New York: New Directions,
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William W. Hallo and J. J. A. van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1968.
6 For an account of thirteenth-century mystics Mary of Oignies’s and
Marguerite d’Oingt’s somatic theology, see Caroline Walker Bynum,
Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body
in Medieval Religion, New York: Zone Books, 1991. Marguerite Porete’s Le
Mirouer des simples âmes is one of Old French’s spiritual classics from
c.1300. Catherine of Siena, a saint from the fourteenth century, left us not
a Summa Theologica but a Dialogue between lover and Beloved. Teresa
of Ávila, who lived in the sixteenth century and is most popularly known, was
officially beatified and later memorialised in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Baroque
sculpture capturing the moment of her penetrating ecstasy (c.1647–52, and
who Lispector was directly compared to when alive).
7 When speaking of d’Oingt, Bynum observes ‘the experiencing of Christ is
to “turn on,” so to speak, the bodily sense of the receiving mystic’ (C. W.
Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, op. cit., p.192). Or as the poet and
mystic Hadewijch (c.1220) put it: ‘Then it was to me as if we were one without
difference’ (C. W. Bynum, ‘Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the
Thirteenth Century’, Women’s Studies, vol.11, no.1–2, 1984, p.180). And of
course, the much later and famous passage from St. Teresa: ‘In his hands
I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a
point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that
it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing
them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God.
The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive
was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to
lose it, now will one’s soul be content with anything less than God?’ (quoted in
both Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (trans. Mary Dalwood),
San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, p.224, and Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex (trans. H.M. Parshley), London: Jonathan Cape, 1953, p.635).
It is important to note that while Bynum sketches out a hagiography of
women mystics that resists any simple essentialising of gender for a more
fluid understanding, the facticity of the body remains important, as evidence
in projection across boundaries: nuns associating with the body of Christ,
men feminised by their love for Christ.
8 A recent biography by Benjamin Moser frames Lispector’s life from prebirth
to burial, perhaps a little too eagerly and reductively, within a Jewish mys-
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consummation between a typist and a being from Saturn named ‘Ixtlan’ (C.
Lispector, A via crucis do corpo, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Artenova, 1974, p.10).
There are of course early stories such as ‘Obsession’ (1941) and ‘The Imitation
of the Rose’ (1959–60), to name two, that directly engage religious and occult
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I want to end upon a note of farce, but I have been trying to talk a language
that equals zero, a language equivalent to nothing at all, a language that
returns to silence.’ G. Bataille, Erotism, op. cit., pp.263–64.
22 Ibid., p.12.
23 In a manner similar to the apophatic strategy of definition in the negative,
there are as many attempts to define Clark’s work through negation as much
as through naming, i.e. it’s not art, not performance, not a Happening, not
dematerialised, not an object, not-psychoanalysis, etc. Even Clark herself
– always looking for a breakthrough after crisis – explained that there were
regressive phases in her work, as she continually re-evaluated her production
to move forwards while constantly re-appropriating her own old works (see,
for instance, the ‘Sensorial Objects’ that become ‘Relational Objects’ in a new
context).
24 For the purpose of creating a dialogue between Lispector and Clark, I’m
restricting the discussion to works from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s.
Leading up to this period, Clark’s writing begins with an imaginary letter to
Piet Mondrian, whom she calls a ‘mystic’, followed by several years of intense
investigation into the purpose of art with a rhetoric usually reserved for theo-
logical writing, as can be observed in the titles, and even more so in the prose
at times verging on poetry. See, for instance, ‘On Ritual’ (1960), ‘The Death of
the Plane’ (1960), ‘The Empty-Full’ (1960), ‘Poetics in Art, Religion, and Space-
time’ (1963–65) and ‘Concerning the Magic of the Object’ (1965).
25 As her collaborator and main interlocutor, Suely Rolnik put it: ‘Actually,
it was the artist herself who best found words to conceptualize her work.’
S. Rolnik, ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’, in
The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz,
Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel, (ed. Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz), Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999, p.98.
26 The one common genre both Lispector and Clark worked on was the chil-
dren’s story. In 1975, Clark wrote the little discussed and untranslated story
‘Meu Doce Rio’ (‘My Sweet River’): a flowing, surrealist fairy-tale with mor-
phing animals, virgins and ogres roaming an anthropomorphised landscape,
and where if the children ‘joined hands unifying all their bodies, the sensa-
tions multiplied’. L. Clark, Meu Doce Rio (1975), Rio de Janeiro: Galeria Paulo
Klabin, 1984, p.11 (author’s translation). Perhaps less intended for children and
more a transgressive product of her psychanalytic sessions, the fiction used
literary tropes to articulate the research exercises she was developing with
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space creating a single surface. A Klein bottle is the analogue with a three-
dimensional volume twisted in fourth-dimensional space, but it’s difficult to
illustrate visually. One could argue Clark’s Stone and Air attempts to over-
come such an impossibility.
28 L. Clark, ‘1965: About the Act’, in L. Clark and Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Nostalgia of the
Body’, October, vol.69, Summer 1994, p.104.
29 It is unclear which one was created first – whether The Inside Is the Outside,
or Walking – as they are both dated 1963. I would posit the genesis of the two
works is intertwined: Walking resulting from the cutouts of paper templates
used in the series of Beasts (which included The Inside Is the Outside).
Temporality folds in on itself and we are left with the classic paradox of which
came first as expressed in the title of Lispector’s story: ‘The Egg [or] the
Chicken’ (1964).
30 For various avant-garde movements concerned with such scientific-math-
ematic theories, see Linda Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-
Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1983. The fourth dimension as understood by artists could be interpreted as
time in the relativistic space-time continuum or as a higher non-visible spatial
dimension. See also Lispector: ‘I studied mathematics, which is the madness
of reason – but now I want the plasma – I want to eat straight from the pla-
centa.’ C. Lispector, Água, op. cit., p.3.
31 L. Clark in L. Clark and Y.-A. Bois, ‘Nostalgia’, op. cit., pp.96–97.
32 The phrase is from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) Clark read as we know from her letters
to Mário Pedrosa.
33 C. Lispector, Água, op. cit., p.3. Lispector describes her process as ‘trying
to photograph perfume.’ Ibid., p.47. One thinks here of Marcel Duchamp and
his passion for the fourth dimension and the exploration of the undescribed
as collected under the term the ‘infra-mince’ (‘infra-thin’) – something one
cannot define but can only give examples of, such as: ‘When the tobacco
smoke also smells of the mouth which exhales it the two odors are married
by infra-thin.’ M. Duchamp, Collected Writings (ed. Michel Sanouillet and
Elmer Peterson), London: Thames & Hudson, 1975, p.194 (translation slightly
modified). Somewhat analogously, Clark recounts how she thought of the
interdimensional work Walking ‘while watching the smoke from my cigarette:
it was as though time itself were ceaselessly forging a path, annihilating itself,
remaking itself continuously… I already experienced that in love, in my ges-
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tures.’ L. Clark in L. Clark and Y.-A. Bois, ‘Nostalgia’, op. cit., p.100.
34 For a description of the genesis of the work (and other early pieces), see the
text by one of Clark’s earliest supporters Guy Brett: ‘Lygia Clark: The border-
line between art life’, Third Text, vol.1, no.1, 1987, p.79.
35 In the documentary Memória do Corpo (Memory of the Body, dir. Mario
Carneiro, 1984), Clark affectionally tells the viewer about Stone and Air:
‘I consider it the purest and best.’
36 Quoted in G. Brett, ‘Lygia Clark’, op. cit., p.79.
37 See Roland Barthes’s exhibition review ‘Plastic’, in Mythologies (1957, trans.
Richard Howard), New York: Hill and Wang, 2012, pp.97–99. Clark’s descriptor
‘valueless’ is mentioned in G. Brett, ‘Lygia Clark’, op. cit., p.79.
38 Letter from Clark to Hélio Oiticica, ‘26.10.1968’, in L. Clark and H. Oiticica,
Cartas, 1964–1974, Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 1996. Translation the author’s.
39 A few examples: Sensorial (1967), The I and the You (1967) and Abyssal Mask
(1968). While Clark’s masks created fantastical experiences, they were made
at the same time as the political revolts in Brazil and the student protests in
Paris, and out of the same material as the gas masks used by police forces
in both countries. Just as in the past Clark’s poetics resonated with the polit-
ical, today’s pandemic politics surrounding respiratory masks can be read
through her Sensorial Masks, mediating our personal interiors with the world’s
exterior.
40 I borrow the term ‘plasticité psychique’ from Georges Didi-Huberman’s
‘Breath and Hallucinations’ – which discusses Clark’s psychoanalysts, Daniel
Lagache and Pierre Fédida – in Gestes d’air et de pierre. Corps, parole,
souffle, image, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2005, p.27.
41 L. Clark, in Lygia Clark, Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Paris: Réunion des Musées
Nationaux, 1997, p.219. Thanks to Filipa Ramos for help translating passages
from Portuguese.
42 Nephesh [ ]ׁשֶפֶנis the Hebrew word that describes man as God breathed
life into him, Genesis 2:7: ‘God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’
In Vedic writing ‘breath of life’ or Prāna is not limited to animals but extends
to inanimate objects as well. See Arthur H. Ewing, ‘Hindu Conception of the
Functions of Breath – A Study in Early Hindu Psycho-Physics’, Journal of the
American Oriental Society, vol.22, 1901, pp.249–308.
43 C. Lispector, A Breath of Life, op. cit., pp.18 and 130.
44 C. Lispector, ‘The Egg and the Chicken’, op. cit., pp.276–77.
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