Migrant Silence and Animal Silence in Clarice Lispector

This article focuses on texts from across Clarice Lispector's oeuvre in relation to two figures she frequently associates with silence, the migrant and the animal. As figures, both the migrant and the animal are often perceived as marginal to the community. Jean-Luc Nancy has understood community as an experience of finitude and being-in-common—that is, a sense of one's unique mortality that is necessarily experienced simultaneously with the existence and mortality of others. I suggest that silence in Lispector's work, particularly in relation to the two marginal figures of the migrant and the animal, evokes a similar experience of being-in-common—an understanding that to exist is necessarily to exist with others. Identifying such silence as a theme across Lispector's writing, this article particularly addresses examples from Lispector's crônicas (newspaper columns), short fiction and the novel A Paixão Segundo G.H ..