Abstract

If there’s a riddle scholarship has not yet cracked, it is what Clarice Lispector—arguably Brazil’s most notorious writer—meant when she dedicated the entire Chinese nation to a single egg. Lispector’s infatuation with China, by way of the Daodejing, the I-Ching, and the work of philosophers such as Lin Yutang has also not yet been suff iciently explored. Following Lispector’s own evocative—rather than overly analytical—writing style, this article posits that her fascination with Chinese philosophy and mysticism is deeply rooted in a distrust toward mundane and forward-looking notions of success, opting instead for embracing failure as a counterintuitive, “proregressive” politics of resistance—or, as Lin Yuntang would put it: “the Chinese are cynics and poets only when they have failed.” Drawing from the little-explored Chinese inf luences in her writings, this article sheds light on the Daoist roots of Clarice Lispector’s worldview and the role failure plays in her oeuvre.