“I am my perfume”

the ghosts of Surrealism and hysterical vapors in Clarice Lispector

Abstract

Starting from the presence, especially in the First Manifest of Surrealism, of female ghosts in movement, converted into a force or erotic pulse of poetic creation, and incarnated in wandering and inapprehensible figures such as Nadja or Elisa, from Arcano 17, passing through the inscription and, above all, the decomposition of the movement of these moving enigmas or flows of desire in the chronophotographs of the French inventor Étienne-Jules Marey, this article, with an essayistic profile, aims, using the method of montage and suggestion, to construct a relationship between the vaporous ghosts of Surrealism, and even those that escape from Marey’s curves and “visual tails”, and the perfume as a intensification of existence, as it appears in some texts by Clarice Lispector, guarding an inviolable secret linked to the feminine and its seduction of death. This relationship goes through the image of hysterics, rescued here, also called “vaporous” in the 18th century. The change of paradigm in relation to hysteria, seen no longer as a pathology, but as a “supreme means of expression”, as the surrealists and their commentators conceived it, moving it to the artistic and literary sphere, is decisive to draw, or better, to smoky the contours of our conclusion that recognizes in the ambiguous Lóri, and in other Clarice characters, a hysteric evoking the explosive-fixed beauty of Nadja, making herself a perfumed egyptian queen, an anachronistic vaporous confused with her perfume, numbing us with the mystery of her pain, but also of her flight beyond death.