Clarice Lispector’s Marrano Literature

Life Devours Life

Abstract

The objective of this study is, from fragments of literary texts by Clarice Lispector, to demonstrate a marrano diction writing. To this end, the themes on Kabbalah, food and the act of eating, addressed by Brillat Savarin and Nilton Bonder, are used as theoretical-critical references. And, beyond physiological semantics, situate them analogously to the spheres of language and aesthetic-literary creation from Massimo Montanari, Maria José de Queiroz, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, among others, as well as biographical-critical discussions about the writer and her works. The hypothesis is that Lispector, whose ancestry is Jewish, absorbs this and other cultures in her literature, transcontextualizing them in a writing contaminated by intertexts and interdiscourses arising from numerous sources. Like the new Christians, which were unfaithful to the laws of Moses, Lispector transgressively devours the real moment, as well as diverse texts, (un)reading them, and recycles them, producing an impure literature of taste and in (ex)tradition, but owing nothing to the sources of origin. In her art, she takes language to its semantic limit as if she’s swallowing a forbidden fruit, simulating an autophagic performance of writing that degrades and recycles senses, including that of being itself, all cooked with aesthetic, cultural and mystical-religious spices.