Beauty Unlimited

3. Beauty’s Relational Labor

72 3. Beauty’s Relational Labor monique roelofs “I adore Macabéa, my darling Maca. I adore her ugliness and her total anonymity for she belongs to no one. I adore her for her weak lungs and her under-nourished body,” writes the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector (1925–77) in the voice of her fictional author, Rodrigo S.M.1 The novella in question, The Hour of the Star, Lispector’s last, is probably best known as an example of écriture féminine through the writings of the philosopher Hélène Cixous, or as the script of a successful movie by that name.2 In the novella, Lispector challenges beauty’s operations in the service of economic disparity and social violence.3 For Rodrigo, writing about Macabéa, his protagonist, amounts to writing about someone whose ugliness is part and parcel of her social expulsion. This endeavor is charged with the paradoxical task of making the insignificant matter, of having the existence of a disposable person count. How is this possible while retaining her insignificance ? Rather than resolving this paradox, Lispector uses it to push the limits of the web of aesthetically mediated relationships surrounding Macabéa— relationships that are organized with the help of the concept of beauty. In challenging such aesthetic relationships, Lispector rewrites the connections of the beautiful and the ugly with the feminine, the body, the postcolonial, and race, and directs us toward an alternative economy of beauty. The force of Lispector’s cultural critique stands out when considered in light of the relational frames in which philosophers historically have cast the beautiful. Plato and Enlightenment philosophers have implicitly offered accounts of aesthetic relationality, a network of aesthetically mediated relationships that subjects entertain with one another and the material world.4 Comprehended 73 Beauty's Relational Labor as a dimension of aesthetic relationships, beauty reveals conflicting moral and political commitments. It bears affiliations with the ethical as well as the unethical, with social justice as well as domination. This polyvalence appears to be a product, in part, of the relational workings and preconditions of the beautiful. Possibilities for altering the meanings of the beautiful and the ugly and for transforming the cultural labor of these concepts can then be expected to ensue from changes in the broader structures of relationality that harbor the aesthetic functioning of beauty and ugliness. Indeed, the menace and promise of the beautiful as a bearer of aesthetic value, a dimension of experience, and a category of cultural criticism turn on the ways in which we may dislocate its relational functioning. The project of reorienting beauty’s relational workings necessitates a detailed engagement with the concept’s historical difficulties. These difficulties continue to resound in its intricately racialized and gendered spell. They play a part in the entwinements of beauty with economic mobility and abandonment. They can also be recognized in the ties the beautiful sustains with constructions of cultural citizenship and liminality. The Hour of the Star explores these themes. I begin by indicating how Lispector responds to beauty’s problems by indicting and unhinging modes of relationship it has served to orchestrate. Beauty and Ugliness in The Hour of the Star In the voice of its fictional author, Rodrigo S.M., The Hour of the Star tells the story of Macabéa, a young woman from the northeast of Brazil. Orphaned early in life and raised by her aunt, she moves to Rio de Janeiro, where she works as a typist with her boss and her co-worker, Glória. Rodrigo, whose narrative is said to create Macabéa, proclaims the masculinity of his authorship—a woman writer, he declares, would have cried “her heart out” chronicling this tale.5 Lispector has Rodrigo profess his love for his character in the passage quoted above: “I adore Macabéa, my darling Maca. I adore her ugliness and her total anonymity for she belongs to no one. I adore her for her weak lungs and her under-nourished body.”6 This in-your-face aestheticization of poverty reverses the typical affective implications of ugliness. At the same time, Rodrigo’s unqualified love of the victimized body stands out in its outrageousness, resisting assimilation in a sublimatory narrative that could confer moral legitimacy on his, Lispector’s, and the reader’s attitude toward the young female inhabitant of a third-world slum, a woman who appears indistinguishable from so many others. Abject poverty renders Macabéa’s life superfluous. It is her...