Ciudades in-corporadas : espacio, tiempo e identidad en A cidade sitiada de Clarice Lispector

If we assume the distinction between place and space, understanding that the place is the lived space, the space becomes a sort of grammar, an abstract combination of elements that coexist orderly but that we always have to know through their updating, their experience. There is therefore a bidirectionality going on: the place determines our itinerancies even though, at the same time, we translate and reinterpretate places through our body. These elements achieve an absolute centrality in one of Clarice Lispector's earliest pieces: A cidade sitiada (1949). Lucrecia Neves, the main character, not only lives in San Geraldo but she lives with San Geraldo (and it could be even argued that she is San Geraldo). The narrative vicissitudes are going to take both of them - the woman and the city - through a series of irreversible transformations. We will observe the change from a premodern San Geraldo to a modern San Geraldo, who builds the foundations to become a future city. Lucrecia Neves will no longer belong to it; in parallel to the changes in her lived space, her vital fate will be so much affected that she will lose her identity membership.