The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the uncanny correspondences between Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector in terms of their innovations in language and technique, which challenge the boundaries of fiction. In their battle between words and silence, they go beyond the limits of language and write with their bodies by printing words as if they were painters. In so doing, they are giving voice to their unique experience of female jouissance, which can be understood, by the reader, as feminist pouissance.
Woolf's Web and Lispector's Web: A Sharing Dialogue
Hermione Lee argues that books have changed their readers, teaching them how texts should be read, but that readers have also changed books. Books change as they are read, and re-read; therefore, readers must be conscious about their roles, not as isolated individuals, but as part of a long succession of readers. Woolf was aware of this in A Room Of One's Own: “ For masterpieces are not single and solitary births, they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice” (69).
In this dialogue between writers and readers, a number of different Woolfs have emerged, as have different aspects of her works. The contemporary critic has re-read Woolf's thinking through a varied range of issues, creating a new map of her writing. It becomes part of a complex web of intertextual dialogue in Woolf's works, and combines with novels, stories, diaries, letters, notebooks, essays, essay-novels, and essay-stories. The result is a long conversation between texts that now is beginning to be understood in a more comprehensive manner.
Lispector's Web
Clarice Lispector (1925-1977), though coming from a very different cultural and ethnic background—she was born to a Jewish family in Ukraine and emigrated to Brazil when she was three years old—moves in the same direction as Woolf, exploring through the stream-of-consciousness technique the domains of the mind. Such a technique expresses the fluctuation of subjectivity—the states of soul, themselves sometimes unspeakable.