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Art of Existence and the Care of the Self inFamily Ties
Clarice Lispector calls upon attention that should be brought to bear on oneself and she makes the reader conscious of the anxiety concerning all the disturbances of the body and the mind that must be prevented by means of austere regiment where the importance is attributed to self-respect, not just in so far as one’s status is concerned, but as concerns one’s rational nature- a self-respect that is exercised by depriving oneself of pleasure or by confining one’s indulgence to marriage or procreation. The cultivation of self can be briefly characterized by the fact that in this case the art of existence is dominated by the principle that says one must take care of oneself.This art refers more to universal principle of nature and reason, which everyone must observe in the same way, whatever their social status.Lispector’sexperiments on the themes of human suffering and failure, the disconcerting implications of humanity, human being’s total awareness of inevitable alienation and the pressing need to overcome its danger and most forcefully of all, the terror upon realizing the ultimate nothingness find its goal in her collection of thirteen short stories entitled Lacos de Familia (Family Ties) whichis “structured on the literary epiphany, or, more specifically, on a concentration of moments of insight. The privileged instant of cognition typically expands into interlocking patterns of illumination and reflection in the mind of the protagonist” (Fitz, 56). Family Ties depicts individual’s relation to the objects of the world, the sudden awake of consciousness in the characters, human being’s confrontation with the absolute freedom and solitariness, conflict between public and private self, and his or her terror upon realizing the failure of language to communicate.Lispector unties the family ties to let her characters walk through the path of crisis so that they become aware of their conscious existence, experience nothingness and face absolute freedom. While facing this absolute freedom and with an effortto avoid the anxiety,many of her characters impress us by their determination and resolve but some of them choose to retreat back into their comfortable shells rather than consciously bear the burden of responsibility for their actions. Family bonds, which are supposed to represent ties of closeness and tenderness, turn out to be nothing but chains of bondage and become so frustrating that these bonds can preclude people from trying out new experiences which might lead them to live a richer life. The tension in balancing mind and body or mind/body uplifts her heroines above the convention.
Maria Quiteria’s path to the existence of the conscious subject in “The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman” is by way of communion, by way of the self-discovery, which occurs at the moment of becoming one with a group at the party. On Saturday night after being drunk in Tiradentes Square at the invitation of a rich businessman, Maria is face-to-face with the nothingness and responsibility. She despises “the barren people in that restaurant. Not a real man among them. How sad it really all seemed . . . . . And everything in the restaurant seemed so remote, the one thing distant from the other, as if the one might never be able to converse with the other.”(12) Once she discovers that nothingness of life, she discovered different level of nausea. The ‘blonde’ ‘female in a hat and jewellery’ was ‘accompanied by a man’ and cared by others raised jealousy in her and she started detesting her. In the following morning, we find her mirror image is shaken. “Something heavy and hollow fell to the ground” still “her eyes did not take themselves off her image, her comb worked pensively, and her open dressing gown revealed in the mirrors the intersected breasts of several women.”(7) Is she searching her narcissistic perfect image? Did she come to understand that so far the visual identity given from the mirror supplied imaginary “wholeness” to the experience of a fragmentary real?
While the little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego which is both the counterpart or the other people in whom the subject perceives a visual likeness, and the specular image or the reflection of one's body in the mirror, the little other is entirely inscribed in The Imaginary order; on the other had, the big Other designates a radical alterity, an otherness transcending the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law: the big Other is inscribed in The Symbolic order, being in fact the Symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is then another subject and also the Symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject. “The Other must first of all be considered a locus, the locus in which speech is constituted”. We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense, only when a subject may occupy this position and thereby embody the Other for another subject. When he argues that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject, but in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond one’s conscious control; they come from another place, outside consciousness, and then ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the Other’.
Maria finds that words have no connection to the thing described when “she looked around her, patient and obedient” and said, “Ah, words, nothing but words, the objects in this room lined up in the order of words, to form those confused and irksome phrases that he who knows how, will read. (14)She understands that things, in their actual existence, have nothing to do with the names we give them, and that the existence of things has no connection with the essence which we assign them. She finds that she alone is the source of whatever meaning, truth, or value her world has. She alone absurdly, is responsible for giving meaning to her world. To handle this crisis, she started free association of words. Free association is the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. This involves allowing whatever comes to mind to be spoken, selecting nothing and omitting nothing, and giving up any critical attitude or direct forcing in the face of a problem. The analyst, in turn, must adopt a complementary stance of ‘evenly suspended attention’- that is, surrender his or her attention to the situation at hand. This is not to be taken as a statement of knowledge. The analyst does not check whether it is true or false. It opens a field of possibilities of sense rather than truth and falsity. Free association is akin to dreaming, for dreams are communicated through reports to which normal accounts of assertoric truth and falsity do not apply. We cannot point directly to the content of an occurring dream. What is reported is typically accepted, for there is no independent check. As dreams are often apparently nonsensical, they can force upon us the question as to how language represents and makes sense. We give birth to problems because we are unaware of the manner in which our thinking and use of language creates problems. We want to achieve a desired state and go straight for it, and this then becomes a problem. Instead of being aware of how the conflicts and contradictions created by confusions in the use of language create problems and despair, we try to force them into a particular pattern to achieve a desired result, to capture one kind of experience and avoid another. It is essential to find not merely what is to be said before a difficulty but how one must speak about it. How something is said determines what is said- it shows the thought. Free association encourages one to focus on the activity of speaking, the way we use words, our feeling for them. The tone and gestures of our words reveal more than they can say. In free association, a game of language is being played which shows language in use, but not being used for any particular purpose. The measure of its success is that all players can move on in their own way.
There is no fixed rule in free associating. It is a way of giving free rein and attention to the way our minds create meanings and make associations, bringing them in all sorts of ways. It helps to decentre our fixed identity that constitutes whom we believe we are. It is a struggle with oneself and the analyst in which there is no external witness, plaintiff and judge. Like psychoanalysis, it is a talking cure; but unlike psychoanalysis, there is no external authority, no ideal, to which it must correspond. The weight is put on the use of words, because this shows our approach to the problem, and it is this showing that lets us see the deformities that distort our thought. (Wittgenstein 2000)
Anna in “Love” is driven to the extreme limits of her potential and in her anguish she shows both her greatness and her misery. She is great because of her sudden discovered freedom and yet miserable because she is capable of every kind of weakness when she faces absolute responsibility. Anna’s status before utilizing the anxiety of life is she ‘anonymously nourishes life’. She has chosen to be a wife, a mother, and to possess a home:
She seemed to have discovered that everything was capable of being perfected, that each thing could be given a harmonious appearance; life itself could be created by man.
Through torturous paths she had achieved a woman’s destiny, with the surprise of conforming to it almost as if she had invented that destiny herself. The man whom she had married was a real man, the children she mothered were real children. Her previous youth now seemed alien to her, like one of life’s illness. She had gradually emerged to discover that life could be lived without happiness: by abolishing it she had found a legion of persons, previously invisible, who lived as one works- with perseverance, persistence, and contentment………This was what she had wanted and chosen. (18)
Anxiety is not an ego-defense mechanism but what the ego-defense mechanisms are designed to ameliorate. Her apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not lether to stand alone or to glorifyher individuality. On the contrary it contributes to her insecurity.
“Probing the way in which consciousness perceives objects, Lispector created a world of exciting and terrifying perfections. The Brazilian critic Benedito Nunes has defined the process as familiar situations and things which we know and can control, are suddenly transformed into something strange, unexpected, and uncontrollable” (Afterward 136). Anna enters into the totality of a new, higher level of awareness and being at the sight of the blind man’s chewing gum in the tram: she understands “something disquieting was happening” (19).After this she escapes momentarily from the psychological prison in which her conventionally used language and her social existence placed her, because a crisis is a happening which suddenly removes us from the ordinary routines of our life. In a situation of crisis one cannot react with one’s everyday, habitual responses and one is thrown back upon oneself. Anna explores that tortured ambiguity of our existence; the privilege and the curse of being human and of confronting both our absolute freedom and the world’s indifference.
The string bag felt rough between her fingers, not soft and familiar as when she had knitted it. The bag had lost its meaning; to find herself on the tram was a broken thread; she did not know what to do with the purchases on her lap: Like some strange music, the world started up again around her. The damage had been done……… it seemed to her that the people in the street were vulnerable, that they barely maintained their equilibrium on the surface of the darkness- and for a moment they appeared to lack any sense of direction. (20)
“Mysterious and quite unexpected moments of crisis propel characters along the paths of indecision to a crucial moment of self-discovery. At time the most trivial episode can produce the most profound and dramatic intuition- the vital moment when time stand still and our daily existence is stripped bare of its comfortable conventional surfaces, leaving man alone in the solitude of his conscience and personality. Man’s real problem is, however, is not that of imposing some meaning on his senseless existence, but of finding some escape from the meaning he has already discovered within himself and refuses to accept” (Afterword 136).“Through her compassion Anna felt that life was filled to the brim with a sickening nausea” (21). Entering the botanical garden Anna felt:
The trees were laden, and the world was so rich that it was rotting. When Anna reflected that there were children and grown men suffering hunger, the nausea reached her throat as if she were pregnant and abandoned. The moral of the garden was something different. Now that the blind man had guided her to it, she trembled on the threshold of a dark, fascinating world where monstrous water lilies floated (23).
“But when she remembered the children” (23), she hurries for home. Epiphany is a moment of revelation, of ecstasy one would like to hold but which escapes through one's fingers; it remains nevertheless as something valuable gained, the experience becomes an end in itself. Anna, even undergoing epiphanies, remained chained to her everyday routine. To her epiphanies serve only as conveyors of the awareness of the drabness of everyday existence. She went through an illumination and at the same time remained tied to family bonds.
The idea, that love has both a light and a dark side is an important concept that runs through all of Lispector’s work. She is very concerned with the complex, multi-layered relationships of people in love, with the tortured displays of selflessness and selfishness that love engenders. At home Anna with the contact of her child feels “Life was vulnerable. She loved the world, she loved all things created, she loved with loathing. . . . She had been touched by the demon of faith”(24). Her heart “filled with the worst will to live” (25). She is in dilemma of choice. She faces the most profound alienation of all when she becomes aware of the otherness of the object and seeks to overcome its alienation by mastering it. “She no longer knew if she was on the side of the blind man or of the thick plants…..With horror she discovered that she belonged to the strong part of the world” (25). And at the end of the story we see Anna is “combing her hair before the mirror, without any world for the moment in her heart”(27). She simply gives up, finding the struggle to establish and maintain an identity too much to endure.
“When Catherine in “Family Ties” speaks, she presents her public or social self, a self that is utterly commonplace in word and deed. Though she is a character in a conventional social context, Catherine often engages her husband and her child in strikingly cryptic dialogue, using words that function as transmitters of what all involved assume to be a commonly shared body of knowledge. As a deconstructionist critic would note, however, the story’s basic tension- which stems from the failure of language to communicate- derives from the fact that the main characters do not share a common body of language, and they all operate in a state of nearly total isolation and conflict” (Fitz, 427). While her spoken language represents essentially the lowest possible common denominator of human linguistic interaction, Catherine’s unspoken language represents the power and energy of the human mind in agitated and simultaneous contemplation of self and of others in the world:
“I haven’t forgotten anything?” her mother asked. Catherine, too, had the impression something had been forgotten, and they looked apprehensively at each other- because, if something had really forgotten, it was too late now. . . .
“Mother,” said the woman. What had they forgotten to say to each other? But now it was too late. It seemed to her that the older woman should have said one day, “I am your mother, Catherine.” And she should have replied, “And I am your daughter” (93-94).
“Catherine’s conflict arises because she must choose between continuing a materially comfortable but intellectually vacuous existence or embarking on a new life, one that is intellectually meaningful but both demanding and perilous. The language used in Catherine’s story serves to underscore the tension that exists in Lispector’s work between the public and private identities of her characters. When Catherine, an urban middle-class wife and mother, as struggling to come to grip with her nascent sense of self- awareness, the text assumes the form of an indirect interior monologue” (Fitz 426-427). We read:
Relieved of her mother’s company, she had recovered her brisk manner of walking; alone it was much easier. . . . And things had disposed themselves in such a way that the sorrow of love seemed to her to be happiness- everything around her was so tender and alive, the dirty street, the old tram cars, orange peel on the pavements- strength flowed to and fro in her heart with a heavy richness. (94)