1920 – 1977 “I can’t sum myself up because it’s impossible to
add up a chair and two apples. I’m a chair and two apples. And I
don’t add up,” states the female narrator of Clarice Lispector’s
novel Agua Viva (The Stream of Life) as she pursues a narrative
quest of self-discovery only to realize that her identity is
compound and words cannot always convey what she actually feels.
If the apple symbolizes knowledge and the chair an aspect of
domesticity, this voice is affirming that she is greater than
her gender. Despite an intense struggle with words, Lispector’s
female protagonists nevertheless burst forth, sparked by
unexpected epiphanies which lead them to probe their existential
condition with a self-conscious awareness of the limitations of
language and of their beleaguered situations. These
narrator/protagonists also manifest experiences of displacement
and otherness which, rather than inducing alienation, expand the
knowledge of self, as exemplified by the words of another female
narrator, GH: “He who l