Abstract

The Art of Having is a comparatist examination of selected works from three 20th-century authors: Marilynne Robinson , Cesar Vallejo , and Clarice Lispector . This study examines the above authors' approaches to the task of writing, employing primarily the critical methods and ideas of Helene Cixous and Martin Heidegger. ;The three authors' texts examined here struggle with the idea that words will never be adequate to present either the non-linguistic, material world, nor our experiences in that world. Each text is, so to speak, a hungry text: like Kafka's hunger artist, these texts can never find the proper kind of "nourishment," kind of language, they seek. That is, although each text is situated within a tradition of narrative or poetics--the discourse of the American Transcendentalists, the poetic tradition of the Spanish American modernistas, the scenes of Sartrean writing--the stance of suspicion towards language prompts a writing which seeks releasement from the strictures of language, narration, and influence. This desire for releasement, shared by all the texts, results in an overall hermetic and aphoristic style and tone, "hungry" on all levels, from each texts' character's actual physical hunger and nausea to the textual resistance of the incorporation of influences, to the overarching thematic notion of releasement into a world which neither shelters nor nourishes. ;We will see that the text of Robinson's Housekeeping struggles to abandon the "house," or nourishing source, of its own master discourse--American Transcendentalism. Vallejo's Trilce finds its poetic body cannot be nourished either by its own early 20th-century Spanish American tradition of poetics, nor by received religious ideas, nor by contemporary scientific theories. Finally, Lispector's The Passion According to G. H. and The Hour of the Star put into question existential notions of how one "knows"--through the physical act of eating or the metaphorical notion of incorporation--the material world and the human Other