: Writing as medusa

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2016v21n2p118

In this paper I’ll offer a personal reading of the short novel Água viva (medusa, or “living water”, in Portuguese) from Clarice Lispector, through Helène Cixous statements about the creative process which she explains in her book Three steps in the ladder or writing. Cixous creates the image of a descendent ladder that has three steps: death, dreams and roots. Lispector does the same movement searching her “it”, and composes a radical practice with language that is also an investigation. In order to follow this path of the descendent ladder and analyze the “it” through comparative reading, I’ll bring some of Hilda Hilst’s poems, from her book Poemas malditos, gozozos e devotos and also Sylvia Plath’s, from Ariel, namely “Lady Lazarus”. Hilst constructs a game between obedience and subversion, faith and poetic creation, proposing a complexity of images from the idea of God, transfigured. Plath already brings to the reflection the cyclic recurrence, which is also a kind of all fear letting go. The readings of Hilst and Plath give light, in its own way, to the route undertaken in Cixous trail and enrich the search of the Lispector`s "it".