Sveglia and the claricean Swiss landscapes

Abstract

This article presents a journey between the narratives of Clarice Lispector through the clock Sveglia, the protagonist of “A report on a thing”, of Onde estivestes de noite (1974). The text had two other versions: “Objecto-relatório-mistério” (1971) and “Um anticonto” (1972). In these tales, the clock performs a temporal allegory: as an alarm clock for the now. It takes other directions based on a small detail between the versions: the identification of the Italian name clock with a Swiss watch. This detail highlighted by “Um anticonto” provides a tour between other texts by Clarice, those composed by Swiss and spring scenes. In them, a dialectical look goes through landscapes, portraits and in this way the Swiss characteristics of neutrality, organization, predictability, coldness, insensitivity are profiled. These machinic features consist the Swiss desire to keep the senses of the body and the daimonic transits at a distance. They coincide with the “Swiss precision”, an idiomatic expression attributed to Swiss watches. This harsh Kantian and anesthetic discipline, however, is broken with spring and the sensitive, unpredictable outbreaks brought on by the season. The encounter with Clarician narratives about Swiss passages makes it possible to project temporal and aesthetic questions about the clock Sveglia as an awakening time.