‘My Error Is My Mirror’: Clarice Lispector’s Jewish Rhetoric of Mistakes

This essay takes its cue from an epigraph, a seemingly modest paratext liable to be overlooked, but one that often holds the key to the text, putting the reader’s ‘hermeneutic capacity [...] to the test’, as Gerard Genette puts it.² Indeed, Clarice Lispector’s epigraph to her 1974 short story collection, A via crucis do corpo [The Via Crucis of the Body], reveals a fundamental facet not only of this collection, but of Lispector’s oeuvre more generally.³ As I will show, this epigraph suggests that Lispector engages in her writing with a specific aspect of the Jewish exegetical tradition: she adopts...