“Romance sem romance”: the case of "Água Viva", by Clarice Lispector

Abstract

In the 20th century, modern art denies the bond with the temporal and spatial world which was taken as real and absolute by traditional realism and by the common sense. Anatol Rosenfeld defends that modern novel is born when Proust, Joyce, and others, begin to ‘a desfazer a ordem cronológica, fundindo passado, presente e futuro’ (1973, p. 80). He also affirms that modern novel, like painting, is no longer mimetic, ‘recusando a função de reproduzir ou copiar a realidade empírica’ (ibidem, p. 76). According to him, realism, in the broadest sense of the term of designating a tendency of reproducing the apprehended reality by our senses, in a stylized way or not, idealized or not, is denied by modern novel. Therefore, the chronology and temporal continuity were shaken. Água Viva, on the contrary of a realistic novel, seems fragmented and/or not structured. A realistic novel presents a story based on chronologies, events, well defined characters, etc. Nevertheless, this scheme is not possible in Água Viva. The text of Lispector presents the characteristics of modern novel proposed by Rosenfeld (1973), which can be attributed to the intense relation with painting; however, Lispector goes beyond, and her text is characterized as “novel without novel” by Lucia Helena, using a terminology proposed by Barthes. From these considerations results the proposal of this work, which does not have as objective an attempt of the classification of the text of Lispector, but present a brief study related to some characteristics of modern novel proposed by Rosenfeld and the case of Água Viva, in a way to understand how the representation of reality is in the “Lispectorian” text.