It was a few days later that she received her mother’s letter summoning her to the farm.
“There’s a man here with a very good heart, my child, who saw your picture and liked it and always asks about you and your life, my dear girl. I tell him that you lead the life of a saint.”
I don’t understand! Lucrécia broke in startled — what did her photograph still want?
Spending days with the letter at her breast.
And finally making up her mind to sell the house and be reunited with her picture. Sighing with joy. The widow, the widow, she was saying laughing, teasing herself.
He’s my second husband, she was shocking herself as if she had no right to so much luck. She only really had the right to Doctor Lucas, the woman was reflecting without explaining herself.
Ah, the widow, she broke in emotionally moved rereading the letter a thousand times. “There’s a man here . . . ,” she’d sing by heart. She’d look at the portrait hanging on the hallway wall in order to divine what was awaiting her, the merry widow. She’d end up laughing again. Oh, it was later and later.
Later and later it was. Serious, ardent, she ran to the living room, grabbed the cold trinket and touched it to her cheek, her eyes shut. So she’d abandon all this . . .? On her big horse face the tear was running down. And the trinket built by her eyes . . .
But she’d abandon it and abandon the mercantile city that the excessive pride in her destiny had raised, with an embankment and a viaduct, all the way to the slope of nameless horses.
The siege of São Geraldo had been lifted.
Henceforth it would have a history that would no longer interest anyone, left to its serious subdivisions, to its fines, to its stones and park benches, miserly as one whose treasures, as punishment, no one coveted any longer. Its defense system, now useless, remained standing in the sun, as a historical monument. Its inhabitants had deserted it or from it their spirits had deserted. Though they were also surrendered to freedom and to solitude.
If they had lowered the drawbridge, nonetheless along the Almeida Bastos Viaduct no one still thought to reach the old fortress, the hill.
From which the last horses had already emigrated, surrendering the metropolis to the glory of its mechanism.
Maybe — as Lucrécia Neves would say — one day São Geraldo would have underground rail lines. This seemed to be the abandoned city’s only dream.
The widow hardly had time to pack up her things and escape.
Bern, May 1948.
Appendix: A Response to a Response
Shortly after The Besieged City was published in 1949, Temístocles Linhares (1905–1993) published a review in a leading Rio newspaper. It is a good reflection of the perplexity many early readers felt in the face of Clarice Lispector’s unprecedented style — and the break with novelistic tradition it represented.
Twenty-two years later, Clarice happened upon the review and published a short reply in her weekly newspaper column.
THE SPELL OF THE PHRASE
(published in A Manhã, October 23, 1949)
When Near to the Wild Heart appeared, the native critics fell all over themselves. Mrs. Clarice Lispector was bringing a new contribution to novelistic technique, or rather, a flexibility to language by giving it another sense of inquiry and discovery that led to great expectations.
This contribution was all the more valued since it occurred in an area where we’d hardly begun to crawl, the novel of inner life, where words are no longer simply signs or sounds but are transformed instead into ideal values or essential feelings.
What she was doing was really important and deserved warm praise. And that’s why the critics didn’t hold back, extending the honors due a person debuting in our literature with a quite original means of expression, able to capture many of the subtle and fleeting movements in our lives, occurrences that generally find no explanation.
It would be unfair not to mention, moreover, the abundant lyricism that ran through almost every scene of the book and had as its catalyzing element its central figure, that Joana, with something autobiographical about her, through whose mind images and already-felt emotions ran over and over, without modifying at all her irreducible personality, “hard, crystalline,” when placed in contact with reality. Indeed, no matter what Joana did to try to identify with herself, what remained instead ended up being “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” Her lyricism seemed to clash with the analytic spirit that denied her the possibility of communion or fusion with other worlds, so different from her own. Her own world may have had some privileged meaning and in her that meaning was reduced to a kind of effective spell, a subjective game that led her to struggle against appearances and to try to reach, within the wild heart of life, something unreachable, but also something that cannot be given up, for to give it up, in this case, would be to die. And Joana, we recall, refused to die, despite heading, in her unstoppable immobility, toward that “death-without-fear” she had chosen, ultimately, like a journey of renewal that, in the final analysis, she had to undertake.
Near the Wild Heart appeared undisguisedly as a very serious attempt at the introspective novel, having in its favor above all else a new syntactical process, matched by a spirit of inquiry and a restless instability, very much of our time.
One could not ask more from a debuting author. A well-received debut, then, that allowed us to expect more definitive results from future experiments that the novelist of course would offer us, and for which there would be no lack of encouragement from our most authoritative critics.
And other experiments were to come. The Chandelier arrived, which, though received with praise, didn’t have the same impact as the first book. In The Chandelier, the author decided to push on with the development of that new syntax, as if to lend to it the character of a thesis. That syntax she imposed upon it that, if deepened, might have resulted in a spontaneous philosophy. One got the impression that the author was wanting to establish her personality in style or phrase. It was a show of strength performed with that game of multiple images, abstract or concrete, alternating or interrupted, that emerged from her sentences, adorning them with her reflections. But all that still didn’t have the power to let us reach a more general conclusion, one that was more fully satisfactory regarding the progression of life beyond some verbal sleight-of-hand, which seemed to be the limit of the author’s intention. The Chandelier had really been a book for which the most appropriate verdict actually was the one it received — a kind of suspension of judgment. A suspension of judgment that did not preclude a well-founded fear of the abuse of those talents, deployed more as an end in themselves rather than as a means, to the detriment of her vision and to the complexity of the literary psychology of our time, which can no longer be restricted to a pure question of phraseology. A question, after all, that ends up leading nowhere.
But the litmus test was not in this second novel. It would come in what was to follow. After a long interval came The Besieged City (published by “A Noite,” Rio), which was written in Switzerland.
What’s clear is that this new book can no longer be judged as an attempt. For Clarice Lispector, the experimental phase has passed. We must look at it, therefore, as a completed work.
Does the book really open new possibilities for the Brazilian novel? Does its way with syntax really constitute in fact the missing measure that would establish firmly the place of the woman in our literary world?
If the method of suggestive description endures, with great opportunities to show what it can do, it doesn’t quite give us an impression of fullness, of something defined, real. The feeling of obscurity, of indeterminacy, persists.
The Besieged City is a grueling novel to read. It requires tremendous effort to get through it. And the worst thing is that, having finished it, we don’t feel the effort was worth it. On the one hand, if a sensibility emerges that is very attentive to the f
ree movements of Lucrécia Neves’s subconscious, to her thoughts and feelings, we aren’t given, on the other hand, an impression of overarching meaning. Each mental or emotional incident that is analyzed — Lucrécia at her mirror, her conversation with Perseu Maria, her dreams of marriage, her attitude toward the husband who turns up one day, the outsider Mateus, etc. — is emotionally relevant in and of itself and can be glimpsed outside the center from which it radiates, which, everything leads us to believe, must be São Geraldo.
São Geraldo, the city invaded by progress, but which as a township rises up to a life of its own, becoming mostly a refuge for certain lives that have refused the new era, seems to be the point de repère for the whole story. Lucrécia Neves and the horses live their lives there, too, representing the two races of builders that started the tradition of the future metropolis, as the novelist says, and that could have appeared on its coat of arms.
But Lucrécia Neves had her own problems. And the horses, if they existed, if they were worth anything, lived in relation to her, to give birth to her fear in the shadows of her room, so much so that she begins to see things as a horse sees them. And the book, in fact, is full of equine images and references. They’re not just the “foals, ponies, sorrels, long mares, hard hooves — a horse’s cold and dark head — hooves beating, muzzles foaming rising toward the air in rage and grumbling” that advance and halt at the highest point of the hill, their heads dominating the township, to let out a long neigh. It’s Lucrécia herself, who, when worked up, starts kicking with one of her hind legs at her absent tail. Who sometimes sees herself as an animal would see a house: no thought going beyond the house. Such was the intimacy without contact that she experienced when facing the horses, etc.
Moreover, Lucrécia Neves was beset by all kinds of revelations. These often appeared to her in dreams. The fantastic dreams she dreamt, with herds of mares sleepwalking out of the sewers, as well as ants, rats, wasps, pink bats. Here is a dream, as the novelist describes it and that gives a good idea of what the book is like, full of similar passages: “What the girl was seeing in her sleep was opening her senses as a house opens at dawn. The silence was funereal, tranquil, a slow alarm that couldn’t be rushed. The dream was this: to be alarmed and slow. And also to look at the big things that were coming out from the tops of the houses just as you’d see yourself differently in someone else’s mirror: twisted in a passive, monstrous expression. But the girl’s monotonous joy was carrying on beneath the noise of the currents. The dream was unfolding as if the earth weren’t round but flat and infinite, and thus there was time. The second floor was keeping her in the air. She was breathing herself out. The mirror of the room. But the girl turned her head to the side. Her heart kept beating in the premises. Then the mirror woke her.”
And “discoveries” like this continue through the entire book. Now it’s Lucrécia Neves’s dream, later it’s the dawn in her room that’s described to us with the imagistic richness characteristic of Clarice Lispector’s process, but with no apparent meaning, merely justifying a certain morbid taste for a phrase for the phrase’s sake.
Everything that the novel offers — its lyrical power, the development of Lucrécia Neves’s individual consciousness, the interspersed references to other beings and incidents without greater importance, etc. — fails to go beyond whatever verbal worth it might have. Everything is worthwhile in the eyes of this novelist, but she’s susceptible to lacking discriminating taste. And the result is that the work circles around a life and a drama without managing to lend them more than a simulation of a novel.
Temístocles Linhares
DELAYED LETTER
(published in Jornal do Brasil, February 21, 1970)
Esteemed Mr. X,
I came across your review of a book The Besieged City, God only knows from when, since the clipping isn’t dated. Your review is pointed and well-done. You said so many true and well-expressed things that resonated in me — so that for a long time it didn’t occur to me to add either to them or to myself other truths that are important in the same way. It so happens that you are or aren’t to blame for not being aware of these other truths. I know that the average reader can only be aware of things that are complete, that are apparent. What astonishes me — and this is certainly my own fault— is that the higher purposes of my book should escape a critic. Does this mean I couldn’t bring to the fore the book’s intentions? Or were the critic’s eyes clouded for other reasons, not my own? People speak, or rather, used to speak, so much about my “words,” about my “phrases.” As if they were verbal. Yet not one, not a single one, of the words in the book was — a game. Each of them essentially meant some thing. I still think of my words as being naked. As for the book’s “intention,” I didn’t believe it was lost, in a critic’s eyes, through the development of the narrative. I still feel that “intention” running through all the pages, in a thread perhaps fragile as I wished, but continuous and all the way to the end. I believe that all of Lucrécia Neves’s problems are relative to that thread. What did I mean to say through Lucrécia — a character without the weapons of intelligence, who aspires, nonetheless, to that kind of spiritual integrity a horse has, who doesn’t “share” what it sees, who has no mental or “vocabular vision” of things, who feels no need to complete impression with expression — the horse in which there is the miracle that the impression is total — so real — that in it impression already is expression. I really thought I’d suggested that Lucrécia Neves’s true story was independent of her own personal story. The struggle to reach reality — that’s the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things. I meant to make clear too the way vision — the way of seeing, the viewpoint — alters reality, constructing it. A house is not only constructed with stones, cement etc. A man’s way of looking constructs it too. The way of looking gives the appearance to reality. When I say that Lucrécia Neves constructs the city of São Geraldo and gives it a tradition, this is somehow clear to me. When I say that, at that time of a city being born, each gaze was making new extensions, new realities emerge — this is so clear to me. Tradition, the past of a culture — what is that besides a way of seeing that is handed down to us?
I thought I’d given Lucrécia Neves just the role of “one of the people” who built the city, allowing her the minimum individuality necessary for a being to be herself. Lucrécia Neves’s particular problems, as you say, seem to me just the necessary ground for that collective construction. It seems so clear to me. One of the most intense aspirations of the spirit is to dominate exterior reality through the spirit. Lucrécia doesn’t manage to do this — so she “clings” to that reality, takes as her own life the wider life of the world.
It’s not apparent to me that all these intimate movements of the book, as well as others that complement them — were drowned by what you call the “spell of the phrase.” Ever since my first book, moreover, there’s been talk about my “phrases.” Do not doubt, however, that I wanted — and reached, by God — some thing through them, and not the phrases themselves.
To call “verbalism” a painful desire to bring words as close as possible to feeling — that is what astonishes me. And what reveals to me the possible distance that exists between what is given and what is received . . . But I know that what I gave was received. San Tiago Dantas, when he first read the book, was shocked: he told me I had “fallen.” Later, on a sleepless night, he decided to reread it. And he told me astonished: but this is your best book. It wasn’t, but I appreciated the deep understanding he had of Lucrécia Neves and the horses of São Geraldo. No, you didn’t “bury” the book, sir: you too “constructed” it. If you’ll excuse the word, like one of the horses of São Geraldo.
Clarice Lispector
Acknowledgments
The translator and the editor would like to thank the following people for their valuable suggestions regarding
the trickier aspects of Clarice Lispector’s diction and syntax: Schneider Carpeggiani, Pedro Corrêa do Lago, Flavio Goldman, Eduardo Heck de Sá, Ananda Lima, Michele Nascimento-Kettner, José Luiz Passos, Lis Veras, and Paulo Werneck.
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