Clarice Lispector: From a Process-Oriented View

by Floyd Merrell

Clarice Lispector’s narrative moves along a razor’s edge between reality and fantasy, objectivity and subjectivity, reason and imagination, and linear thought and nonlinear feelings flowing out toward everywhere and nowhere. Ultimately, Clarice opens the reader up to a void that entices yet terrifies. She paints a picture provoking a feeling for Charles Sanders Peirce’s three categories of feeling, action and thought, of what is possibly available to consciousness, in the process of entering consciousness and conscious sensing and experience. Her writing profoundly embodies the inevitable struggle to comprehend process, the becoming appearance of what is, and the impossibility of expressing that becoming. It effectively reveals the nature of Peirce’s three categories of thought, the world, mind’s process, and signs. It creates an intangible awareness of our co-participation with ourselves, with others, and with the physical world; it suggests the interdependent, interrelating complementarity of our becoming.

30 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 24, 2012