Água Viva Capitulo 5

Without time, without names, without actions, Clarice Lispector's novel Água Viva recalls the style of her other novels—a woman's interior monologue. Here she is trying to articulate something: the thing. Loosely framed as the first attempt of a painter to use to the written medium, the impetus for turning to writing is to grasp at what is “beyond thought,” the thing, which she must do in spite of the procedure and limits of thought: “I see the fury of the visceral impulses: tortured viscera guide me. I don't like what I just wrote—but I'm duty-bound to accept the whole section because it happened to me” (22). Here she enacts what might be considered a deconstructive meditation on the word and the reality that exceeds words, the “instant-now” of time, the breath as flesh, and the eruptions that underlie stillness. While New Directions has published this posthumous work as a novel, it merits a more comprehensive and inclusive descriptor. Her prose encompasses poetry, truth as much as fiction, feeling and description. A hybrid text, to be sure. She writes: