“Is it painful being ugly?”
I found this when I Googled the book. It’s a movie now?
I’ve completely neglected this whole blog thing lately, but here we go, I’ll try to get back into the swing of things.
Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star was like nothing I’ve ever read before. It was half philosophy, half fiction. Is it metafiction? Is this what metafiction is? The writer (though masked by the character of Rodrigo S.M.) is writing about writing a story? Normally the idea of writing about writing just seems intrusive, but in this it worked. When Rodrigo interrupted his story about Macabea, the reader felt that he really was frustrated and overwhelmed thinking about her–the way that one does often feel when thinking about someone they love, as he claims to love her.
But is Macabea real at all, or is she something that Rodrigo just made up? I couldn’t quite figure that out. The end, after she’s been hit by the car, makes it seem like he controls her fate, whether she lives or dies. At the end of the story, Macabea, or at least the stories Rodrigo tells us about her seem to all be fabrications from his own mind.
What makes this story so tragic is that Macabea was happy in her ignorance. She didn’t care that she was poor and ugly because that’s what she was and it was all she had. She wasn’t covetous or jealous of others. She was pure in her ignorance, like a child. She doesn’t think she can have things better than they are. It is only after she goes to see Madame Carlota and is told that she has a miserable life and that she could have fancy clothes and a rich husband that she feels misery. It is the imposition of society (Mme. Carlota) on its inhabitant that causes sorrow, in this case Macabea’s sorrow, and the final thing she feels.
It doesn’t really seem like this has to be set in Rio de Janeiro. In fact, the city didn’t seem to play that much of a role in the story to me. There is obviously a subculture of these “unfortunates,” but every city has its poor and its destitute. While it did provide a juxtaposition against what one usually associates with Rio–Carnivale, nude beaches, party time vs. poverty, loneliness, misery–it just seems to me that the story could’ve taken place anywhere and would have been just as good. The city didn’t seem like a character as much as it has in other novels (Mrs. Dalloway, The Passion.)
So do we only feel bad (lonely, ugly, inferior) because society tells us that we should have more? Does society tell us that we all have a bright future, when in actuality some of us could be dead tomorrow? Is this what causes unhappiness? Is ignorance really bliss?
Also, this is beautiful and true:
“I am alone in the world. I don’t believe in anyone for they all tell lies, sometimes even when they’re making love. I find that people don’t really communicate with each other. The truth comes to me only when I’m alone.”
