Clarice Lispector at the Wikipedia: click here
Family Ties (Laços de familia) (where we can find our short story): click here
The Smallest Woman in the World: review
The Smallest...: another review
The Smallest...: a quiz
The Smallest...: a power point and a summary / analisis
The Smallest...: a debate
Presentation, by Roser Gelabert
Clarice Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920 as Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in a Jewish family. It was a time of chaos, famine, and racial war. Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped; her father was exiled, penniless, to the other side of the world. They fled first to Moldavia and Romania and finally to Brazil in 1922, where they adapted their names to the Portuguese. Since then, Chaya received the name Clarice.
Her mother died when she was 10 years old. She continued her education and entered the Law School in Rio de Janeiro, but she followed her dream in the newsrooms, where her beauty and her brilliance made a dazzling impression. In 1940, she published her first novel “The Triumph””. Three months later his father died at 55 years old.
As a student she met her future husband, the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente, whom she married in 1943 and whom she accompanied to many different countries, and she didn't only leave her family and country, but her job as a journalist in which she already had a reputation. For 15 years Clarice led a boring life as a perfect wife, but she never stopped writing and always missed Brazil.
On her first trip to Europe, in Naples in 1944, during the Second World War, she was a volunteer in the infirmary assisting Brazilian soldiers. There she confessed “I don't really know how to write travel letters, I really don't even know how to travel”.
In 1946, she published her second novel “O Lustre” before they settled in Bern where her first child Paulo was born.
Back to Rio de Janeiro in 1949 she returned to her journalistic activity under the pseudonym of Tereza Quadros, but in 1952 she left Brazil again moving with her husband to Washington D.C., where her second son Pedro was born. In 1954, she published the translation of her book “Near to the wild heart” into French, with a cover by Henri Matisse.
In 1959, she separated from her husband and returned to Rio de Janeiro. There she resumed her journalistic activity in order to get the necessary money to become independent. A year after, she published “Lazos de familia”, which had some success, and the next year “La manzana en la oscuridad”; in 1963 she published “The Passion according G.H.”, which is considered her masterpiece.
In 1966, the writer fell asleep with a lit cigarette, which started a fire in her room and burned much of her body. She spent months in hospital. Her right hand would never regain its mobility. This had a big impact on his state of mind and caused frequent depressions.
Clarice made many translations due to her command of Portuguese, English, French and Spanish, and Hebrew and Yiddish with some fluency. The only translation into Spanish was “Historia de los dos que soñaron” de Jorge Luís Borges in the Jornal do Brazil.
Between the late sixties and the early seventies she published children’s books, translations and adaptations of foreign works, getting great recognition.
She died in 1977, victim of ovarian cancer in Rio de Janeiro, some months after the publication of her last novel “La hora de la estrella”, at the age of 56.
STYLE:
Clarice developed a unique literary style marked by singularities and linguistic innovations. She does not adopt the normative grammar standard, the sentences are not made with coherent rigour, but with a chaotic syntactic structure. Nevertheless, they are full of beauty and freshness of artistic expression.
Her fiction focuses on the deepest regions of the unconscious, she centres her work on the individual and her most intimate afflictions, reproducing the thoughts of the characters. In this way she tried to make the readers to analyse her works on their own. Therefore, the common denominator of her texts is the idea of knowledge in itself. So, it is the spontaneity of the representation of thought of the characters what characterizes the chaos of such a literary mark.
Currently, the work of Clarice Lispector continues arousing interest, which leads her to be considered one of the most widely read and recognized Latin-American authors in the world.
THE SMALLEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD:
This story is part of a collection of thirteen short stories called “Family Ties”. It was published in 1960 after the Lispector’s permanent return to Brazil from the United States.
This short story begins in the depths of Equatorial Africa. The French explorer and hunter, Marcel Pretre, comes across a tribe of surprising small pygmies. He was even more surprised when, among the smallest of these, in the Eastern Congo, Marcel found himself facing a woman no more than forty-five centimetres tall, adult, black, silent and pregnant. “Black as a monkey” he informed the press.
He called her “Little Flower”.
Her race will soon be exterminated. Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, the great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes that hunt them with nets and eat them.
For strategic defence they live in the highest trees. The Likoualas use only a very limited language and their members communicate primarily by gestures.
The explorer is amazed by this unique creature, considering her the rarest and most extraordinary creature on the earth because of her minute size.
A photograph of Little Flower was published in the colour supplement of the Sunday papers, life-size. She was wrapped in a cloth, her belly already very big. She had a flat nose, a black face, splay feet. She looked like a dog.
When readers of the Sunday newspaper see the photograph, they react in different ways:
A woman said “It gives me the creeps”.
Little Flower made a little girl feel that “Sorrow is endless”.
A mother said to her daughter “Poor little thing! How sad she is! It’s the sadness of an animal. It isn't human sadness”.
A clever little boy had a clever idea: “She would be our toy!”
In the meanwhile, in Africa, methodically the explorer studied the little belly of the smallest human being. It was at this moment that the smallest woman in the world began laughing warm, warm. Little Flower was enjoying life. She was experiencing the sensation of not having been eaten yet. So she was laughing. The rare thing herself felt in her breast a warmth that might be called love. She loved that sallow explorer and also the explorer’s ring and the explorer’s boots. In the jungle, love is not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange colour of a man who isn’t black, love is to laugh for love of a shiny ring.
The explorer tried to smile back, and then he was embarrassed. He coloured, prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour.
The explorer getting control of himself, severely recaptured the discipline of his work, and went on with his note-taking. He had learned how to understand some of the tribe’s few articulate words, and to interpret their signs. By now he could ask questions.
Little Flower answered “Yes. It’s very nice to have a tree of her own to live in.”
Marcel Pretre had some difficult moments with himself. But at least he kept busy taking notes.
“Well”, declared an old lady, folding up the newspaper decisively, “Well, as I always say: God knows what He's doing”.
COMMENTS:
In my opinion, Clarice Lispector tells the reader a beautiful story, which serves as an excuse for us to reflect on some topics.
One of them is how people around the world react to the image of “Little Flower”. Without knowledge or cause, these people express fear of what the “civilized world” doesn’t know. This image evokes highly emotional responses. Lispector calls attention to many individual reactions.
In two cases she noted the emptiness of love and silence of Little Flower.
In a home, a girl about to be married felt an ecstasy of pity: “Mamma, look at her little picture, poor little thing! Look how sad she is!” “But”, said the mother, “It’s the sadness of an animal. It isn’t human sadness”. Here we can see the sympathy and subsequent dehumanization of Little Flower.
In another house, a boy asked his mother if Little Flower would howl and if she would be their toy.
Her child’s reaction makes her have a lot of thoughts about her own feelings and the superficiality of their life.
In another house, in each member of the family was born the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for itself. “Imagine her serving our table”.
Meanwhile, in Africa, the explorer studied the little belly of the smallest woman in the world, and for the first time he felt sick, because for the first time she was laughing. She was enjoying life because she wasn’t being devoured. This is the secret goal of a whole life. The explorer was baffled.
She loved that sallow explorer and his ring and his boots too.
The explorer had some thoughts about the difference of the meaning of love in his world and in the humidity of the forest where love is not to be eaten.
The explorer tried to smile back, and then he was embarrassed; he coloured prudishly. He was undoubtedly sour.
Severely he recaptures the discipline of his work. He has learned how understand some of the tribe’s few articulate words. By now he could ask questions.
Little Flower's answer “Yes. That is very nice to have a tree of her own to live in” maybe could be interpreted as an invitation from her to the explorer… At the end of the story, there is a lady who declared “God knows what He’s doing”.
In my opinion, with this end, Lispector wanted to express that everything in our life can serve to reflect and to improve in our feelings.
Flores Man at the Wikipedia: click here
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| Kivu Island |
👉Do you remember other novels or narratives with a similar struture?
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👉How much is it, in centimetres, seventeen and three-quarters inches?
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The story is about a pigmy woman. Pigmies exist now, and they live in the Congo basin. But some years ago an ancient race of small people was discovered in Indonesia, in Flores Island. They don’t exist anymore, but this people coexisted for a long period of time with the humans as we know them now. Some people say some specimens of this race were hiding in the jungle of their island... in the last century! But our question is the “otherness”, the fact that, when we meet someone different from us, we become some more aware of our identity. And there is a debate about what is better for us people: to try to avoid or reject what is different from us, or to try to get mixed with this alterity.
👉What is your opinion about this?
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The explorer called the woman “Little Flower”. This is a kind of compliment, but it’s also a evidence that somebody have power upon another somebody. The explorer acts as if he was God: he gives names to unknown things.
👉Why didn’t he ask her name? Why didn’t he introduce himself?
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In the story, two tribes are mentioned, the Likoualas, whom Little Flower belongs to, and the Bahundes, that hunt, kill and eat Likoualas.
👉But, which is the worst danger for the Likoualas, the Bahundes or the explorer? That is: is the ecosystem as good as we usually think for some species?
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The Bahundes are cannibals. Do you think that when we eat meat we are a kind of cannibals? There’s a sentence in the story that begins “The sadness of an animal...” Can an animal be sad as a human being? Animalists say animals have feelings, and so we cannot kill or eat them.
👉But, when in a documentary you see a frog being eaten by a snake, can you see horror on the frog's face?
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The story talks about a woman belonging to a tribe, but no other member of the tribe appears in the tale, not a man, not even the woman’s child’s father, not even the chief of the tribe.
👉Why do you think is that?
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In “The Smallest...” we have again (remember Conrad) a western man that compares the non western being with a dog.
👉Do you think this comparison is a good one (the dog is the man’s best friend) or, the other way round, a negative one (it compares a person with an animal)?
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Another topic we mentioned when we talked about Zweig (his novel The Heart’s Impatience) is the “perverted tenderness”, the confusion between love and pity. I think it happens something similar with philanthropy.
👉Is philanthropy a positive useful thing or a perverted one?
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“The woman [the one who saw the picture in the paper] was upset all day, almost as she was missing something. Besides, it was spring and there was a dangerous leniency in the air.”
“And she had a horror of her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being, adept at life and happiness. [...] ‘I’m going to buy him a new suit’, she decided.”
You can see here a mixture of deep thoughts combined with ordinary observations or common desires. This is a reminiscence of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialism: we are transcendental beings, but, notwithstanding this, we have to eat, breathe, walk..., the commonest of actions, because we live in the material world. We are free spirits in a world that isn’t free, that is compact. They say Clarice Lispector was an existentialist writer.
👉Can you tell us a bit more about this existentialist thinking?
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The woman loved the explorer, loved his boots, his ring..., and because these material objects, she loved him from head to toes, body and soul.
👉What is love, real love? Can we say "love = love + its circumstances"?
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SOME VOCABULARY
lukewarm, outdoing, wavered, insane, splay, leniency, enthralling, sallow