Public Transport

I've been interspersing reading The Man without Qualities with books better adapted for commuting, since toting a paper cinderblock has its disadvantages; so, with Clarisse being a major character in the foregoing, it seemed natural to turn to Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star (**spoilert**) as one of the intermezzi. (Not so geographically displaced, either, as I learned she was of Ukrainian extraction.) For those who prefer a sketch giving little away: a writer tackles the ultramundane existence of an inexperienced provincial woman lost in Rio. The NDP translator commits a critical error outside the text (that is, in the Afterword [the backcover is more incisive{link's geography's confused}]) in claiming the author's identification with the narrator; others have erred oppositely in seeing the author's personal travails represented by (rather than reflected in) the severely deprived protagonist (nearly a nonentity, nonetheless skillfully brought to life [if you call that living]) as a sort of ultimate anti-MarySue. But the novella breaks all the rules in order to achieve a style worthy of its subject, with a highly discontinuous flow, numerous 'authorial intrusions' by the narrator, and other such malfunctioning devices, left as an exercise to the reader; this deprivation, or insensitivity, places Lispector's last preposthumous delivery right alongside Poe's The Purloined Letter.

But what is uncanny is that in the very chapter to which I returned in TMw/oQ: V.II §22, I was pulled up by the following rumination, waiting between trams:

He suddenly realized that what he was getting at could best be defined, without much ado, as the futile actuality or the eternal momentariness of literature. Does it lead to anything? Literature is either a tremendous detour from experience to experience, ending back where it came from, or an epitome of sensations that leads to nothing at all definite. "A puddle," he thought, "has often made a stronger impression of depth on someone than the ocean, for the simple reason that we have more occasion to experience puddles than oceans." It seemed to him that it was the same with feelings, which was the only reason commonplace feelings are regarded as the deepest. Putting the ability to feel above the feeling itself -- the characteristic of all sensitive people -- like the wanting to make others feel and be made to feel that it is the common impulse behind all our arrangements concerning the emotional life, amounts to downgrading the importance and nature of the feelings compared with their fleeting presence as a subjective state, and so leads to that shallowness, stunted development, and utter irrelevance, for which there is no lack of examples. "Of course," Ulrich added mentally, "this view will repel all those people who feel as cozy in their feelings as a rooster in his feathers and who even preen themselves on the idea that eternity starts all over again with every separate 'personality'!" He had a clear mental image of an immense perversity of a scope involving all mankind, but he could not find a way to express it that would satisfy him, probably because its ramifications were too intricate.

Now, my critical error is not that of forging illicit connections between these widely separated books at some textual level, but rather of fortuitously juxtaposing such problems in the train of thought arising from my reading schedule. And I should note that Danilo Kiŝ (garden, ashes) put me on this track ...