The Aura and Lessons of Clarice Lispector

"When I read Clarice's work, I feel the many Russian dolls of self fall with ease into one another."

To celebrate Dandelion Revolution Press’s fifth anniversary, we’re running the essay series “In Her Words: Celebrating Women in Literature” throughout 2025. We’re seeking personal essays recognizing women authors and/or characters that have impacted your life. To submit your personal essay, please read our full submission guidelines.

Today, we’re honored to share an essay by Jacqueline McCormick, a creative non-fiction writer and artist living in Spokane, WA, whose work tackles issues of creativity under capitalism, feminism, and anti-algorithmic living. In this essay, McCormick outlines three unique characteristics of Clarice Lispector’s methodology and aura, and we hope you’re as entranced while reading it as we were.

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I remember catching Clarice Lispector's feline gaze at a bookstore in Portland, Oregon. That gaze, stamped on a tome of a book, eyes unperturbed, was a glance as alive now as then. The glance, her gaze, like the simple workings of a spell, brought me over to the display to open the book and sink in.

What I read initially confused me. There was something simultaneously gauzy and sharp about her diction, the translation suffused with Clarice's essence and the translator's. Whether her words make sense to me in the way they are meant is for another discussion, but it wasn't until years later that that gaze finally got me.

photo from author

I started with that very same collection of short stories and have since wormed into her collection of Cronicas, a distinctly Brazilian genre of celebrity and celebrity-adjacent missives that are non-standard in form and were read in local newspapers. After that, I moved on to Benjamin Moser's biography and am getting to know the Jewish women who fled with her family from Ukraine—through another's words—her world, her loves, her ambivalences.

When I read Clarice's work, I feel the many Russian dolls of self fall with ease into one another. How I think and absorb the world is felt in her pages. Clarice is my High Priestess, someone who enlarges the bridge between spirit, the sublime, and the minutiae of life. I've never known a writer like her, and because of this, I think all serious writers should read and understand her better. Below are three unique characteristics of Clarice's methodology and aura.

Originality is Always Possible

In an interview with friends Marina Colasanti and Affonso Romano De Sant'Anna, Sant'Anna attempts to tease out Clarice's stylistic influences:

SANT'ANNA: What the critics always said about your work is that you turned up with a fully mature style; it wasn't a style in progress. In "Near to the Wild Heart," you were already Clarice Lispector, and you were still a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl.

LISPECTOR: It's funny that I didn't have any influences. It was already there inside me. I'd already written stories before that.

While they are friends, and I hardly think conversation starts with ill intent, Sant'Anna's question belies a certain belligerence towards women's writing, or a common attitude (maybe not Sant'Anna's per se)—the question itself rests on nearly any person's mind whenever a woman's writing or creative act is raised up for examination. It's almost as if the question should be, "Who is behind your talent—because surely it isn't yours?"

But this talent, this original voice, is what caused a sensation in Brazil when Clarice first published Near to the Wild at Heart. Critics praised its complexity and use of stream of consciousness; this last quality led many to compare Lispector to Woolf, James Joyce, and Hesse. However, the human urge to trot out comparisons does not work neatly for Clarice's work. For the artist who decides that "Form and meaning are one single thing…the phrase arrives already made," inspiration is part divination, part intuition, and part living and less a formal study of other prominent writers' work.

Later in the interview, Colsanti points out this tension:

“I think that divergence is very common among Clarice's contacts with the literary critics, because the people who study literature had a hard time admitting that your work is from inside looking out and not from outside looking in. Your work really, as you yourself say, comes, happens. And that for the literary exegetes is a very complicated thing because they are looking for paths "outside" that might lead you to things.”

I am personally aligned with the philosophy that we are all entangled in each other—our lives are in a mingled stew of sorts, and very few of us are islands. That said, there are certain minds that can borrow a thread from humanity to build their own nest. This state of being is called vision, and Clarice Lispector had it. Her life and her stories contain characters who are navigating a protracted state of existential despair. They do this alone while witnessing both the world's banality and sublimity pass them by.

Her stories are a mirror to her writing. While traveling internationally with her diplomat husband, Clarice yearned for her home in Brazil—her people, her patterns, and her habits. To integrate this yearning and to avoid "dying when not writing," Clarice dedicated enormous amounts of time to writing, sometimes isolating herself for long periods when working on novels. One could argue that all of us writers need seclusion to write, but for Clarice, this seems like a self-imposed prescription and a way of life.

Through these periods of isolation, Clarice absorbs, learns, and meditates, and from reading her work, this method pays off in dividends. She is moving towards direct contact not only with herself but also with the divine. And through the divine, inspired, and fresh work manifests.

Mood and Aura Over Plot

Writing's job is partly to enchant; if there are plotted points versus an expansive range where we can see many things arriving on the horizon at once, we get more invested in what's next, versus what is. Enjoying or investigating what is through the exposition of mood gives room for enchantment and daydreaming outside of the text, with an eventual, more related, and connected return.

For those formally trained in writing, the three-act structure, a character's internal change, and the hero's journey have been foisted upon us as templates for successful writing. So much so that when a creative writer encounters work that intentionally goes against these structures, it can be striking, dazzling—even revolutionary.

Clarice consistently aims for an articulation of the tension between the sane, the domestic and the sensitive, and hyper-real reality. She sets scenes imbued in the grotesque—presenting fluctuations between close and far-seeing. Her stories are filled with fraught mental landscapes and dissolved boundaries between subject and object. Here, radical transformations can take place, but just as quickly, they can be snatched away. We see this deliciously unfold in her five-part story, "The Princess,":

"In silence, I watched the sorrow of her awkward happiness. The lingering colic of a snail. She slowly ran her tongue over her thin lips. (Help me, her body said, as it painfully divided into two. I am helping, my paralysis replied.) Slow agony. Her entire body became swollen and deformed. At times, her eyes became pure eyelashes, avid as an egg in the process of being formed. Her mouth trembling with hunger. Then I almost smiled, as if stretched out on an operating table, and insisting that I was not suffering much pain. She did not lose sight of me: there were footprints she could not see, no one had passed this way before, and she perceived that I had walked a great deal. She became more and more distorted, almost the image of herself. Shall I risk it? Shall I give way to feeling? she asked herself. Yes, she replied to herself, through me."

What is happening here is an experience of the other through the self. A transcendental understanding of the yearning and pain of the young girl, who is perceived as a nuisance from the story's beginning. This union between selves, and clear seeing on behalf of the protagonist make for a disturbing mood. In fact, the scene above is the logical crescendo of the unease the protagonist feels about the young girl. Clarice builds this tension slowly, in an almost imperceptible and masterful way. We aren't hammered away with morality, overt signals or a clear path. Clarice attempts to showcase the inexpressive, the buried, and the undercurrent of mood over plot.

Telescopic Storytelling

Multi-part stories are sprinkled throughout Clarice's Crônicas. Whether this is just the result of writing columns with word limits or whether she intentionally serialized her stories in short form, the effect is the same: allowances for experimentation and variations on theme. In a variety of stories, Lispector creates moments where our point of view floats disembodied and then suddenly jumps into embodied consciousnesses.

Lispector read Virginia Woolf for the first time after her first novel—Benjamin Moser cites the reason being that Lispector had heard enough comparisons to be curious. Whether Clarice absorbs any lessons from Woolf will likely never be answered, but like Woolf, Clarice hovers and flexes between human and non-human characters, making you question if they are separate beings to begin with.

Lispector uses this method on a macro/structural level, threading through multi-parts and micro vis-a-vis various or singular characters. Structurally, each part unfolds differently due to perspective shifts, philosophical ponderings, and a desire to meditate further on a theme found in a previous passage. A great example of this telescopic storytelling can be found in The Egg and the Chicken, which Clarice released in four parts. The first part examines the ordinariness and physicality of the egg. Through parts 2-4, she floats through philosophical examinations (the dyadic relationship between egg and chicken, the egg's representation of potentiality in all life—and specifically her own, and lastly, a summation of the egg as a signifier of cosmic proportions—an encapsulation of life and death cycles).

And we thought it was just an egg.

Writing affords us the pleasure of uncovering different meanings for seemingly simple things. A Clarice-like investigation of a philosopher’s caliber adds nuance and complexity to many things we take for granted.

And this is the work of the artist, the writer: to get us to look twice—at the cat-like gaze sent forth over time to a feral woman and aspiring writer spending an afternoon in a bookstore in the middle aughts.

Or, the egg.

photo from author

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Jacqueline McCormick is a creative non-fiction writer and artist living in Spokane, WA. Her writing is attuned to issues of creativity under capitalism, feminism, and anti-algorithmic living. Her most recent essay on the Missing and Murder Indigenous Women crisis in the United States will be available on the Anti-Misogyny Club’s website June 2025.