The Temporality of Chewing Gum: a reading of Clarice Lispector's Chronicle, Fear Of Eternity

Abstract

This article discusses time and temporality in Clarice Lispector's chronicle Fear of Eternity, which intertwine in an interdependence to mark the succession of events. We will show that both reveal the moment in which events occur not only through verbal endings, but also through other elements that mark circumstances, moments and permeate privileged places, among them, the metaphorical notions of life and conceptions, which, in the aforementioned narrative, are represented by chewing gum due to its durability. Therefore, the perception of time goes beyond, reaching a temporal dimension measured by memories, feelings, absences, behaviors, actions, words, and speeches. Thus, we present an excerpt from the Master's research in progress, in which we aim to develop a work that manifests the complexity of time, especially when dealing with literary texts. Not only verbal tenses are capable of sustaining temporality, which transcends the verb. Thus, for methodological purposes, an analysis will be carried out in the aforementioned chronicle, which will not be exhausted here, and which will delve into the forms of expression of time, with the scope of temporality. In this regard, we need to follow the conception of Indisciplinary Applied Linguistics (Lopes, 2006) because the notion of temporality attracts that of grammaticalization (Neves, 2002), through which the reading process needs to consider for the category of time not only the verb, but also the expressions and even the metaphors that contain the notion of permanence, durability, which, in turn, keep initial and lasting phases. We are applying as a methodology the ‘indisciplinary’ linguistic description that brings together linguistic time and other temporal expressions in Fear of Eternity by Clarice Lispector, a chronicle published in 1970. From this perspective, we will explore time according to Paul Ricoeur (1994, 2010) and other theorists: Benveniste (2006), Ilari (2014), Terra (2015), Todorov (2014) based on the morphology of the verb in Portuguese.