13
Hurricane Clarice
Much of Near to the Wild Heart, the novel Clarice wrote from March to November 1942, the year preceding her marriage, is a meditation on its impossibility. “The Marriage,” the opening chapter of the second part of the book, starts with Joana, the wild heroine, daydreaming. She knows her fantasy, about standing atop a staircase, is nonsense—“Absurd. So it was a lie”—but she wants to keep on dreaming nonetheless, and when she is interrupted by her husband she struggles to recapture it. “She stopped moving for a moment and only her eyes were batting quickly, searching for the sensation. Oh yes,” Joana dreams, before the dream vanishes and she is back to her life with Otávio, a mediocre intellectual who is writing a book on common law.1
“What an animal,” she thinks, looking at Otávio—the word, as always in Clarice, ambiguous—and the force of her thought jolts him. “He interrupted his reading and looked at her terrified, as if she had thrown something at him.” Joana, however, is satisfied that she has stirred him to feel something, and she realizes that she hates him. “It was his fault, she thought coldly, waiting for another wave of anger. It was his fault, it was his fault. His presence, and more than his presence: the knowledge that he existed left her without freedom,” Joana thinks. Her rage crests and then passes, but “she thinks: even so, in spite of death, I will leave him someday.”2
Joana, elemental, passionate, and cruel (“like the devil,” “the snake”), exerts a fascination over Otávio that he himself mistrusts. The first time he sees her, she is stroking the belly of a pregnant dog. “She had a hard and crystalline quality that simultaneously attracted and repulsed him. … Those lines of Joana’s, fragile, a sketch, were uncomfortable. Full of feeling, with open eyes, incandescent. She wasn’t overly pretty or refined. Even her sensuality must have been different from his, excessively luminous,” he thinks. He leaves his childhood love, Lídia, for Joana, who is haunted by a “fear of not loving, worse than the fear of not being loved.”3
Joana’s marriage to Otávio founders, and he returns to Lídia, who gets pregnant. Joana invites Lídia over for what the pregnant woman expects will be an animated discussion, only to find that Joana offers no resistance.
“Would you like to be married—really married—to him?” Joana asked.
Lídia looked at her quickly, trying to know if there were any sarcasm in the question:
“I would.”
“Why?” Joana was surprised. “Don’t you see you don’t gain anything by that? You already have everything you’d have in a marriage.” —Lídia blushed, but I have no malice, ugly and clean woman. “I bet you’ve spent your whole life wanting to get married.”
Lídia made a movement of revolt: she was being touched right on her wound, coldly.
“Yes. Every woman …”—she concurred.
“Not me. I didn’t plan to marry. The funny thing is that I’m still sure I didn’t get married. … I thought more or less: that marriage is the end, after I got married nothing else could happen to me. Imagine: always having someone next to you, never to be alone—My God!—not to be alone with yourself, never, never. And to be a married woman, I mean, a person with a defined destiny. From that point on all you can do is wait for death. I thought: you don’t even have the freedom to be unhappy because you’d be dragging someone else down with you. There’s always someone watching, looking you over, watching your every move. And even the fatigue of life has a certain beauty when borne alone and desperately—I thought. But together, eating every day the same saltless bread, watching one’s own defeat in the defeat of the other. … Not to mention the weight of the habits reflected in the habits of the other, the weight of the shared bed, the shared table, the shared life, preparing and threatening the shared death. I always said: never.”
“Why did you get married?” Lídia asked.
“I don’t know. I just know that ‘I don’t know’ isn’t just my ignorance in relationship to this particular case, but regards the basis of things.—I’m avoiding the question, soon she’ll look at me in that way I’m already familiar with.—I must have gotten married because I wanted to get married. Because Otávio wanted to marry me. That’s it, that’s it: I’ve got it: instead of asking to live with me without getting married, he suggested something else. It’s all the same, anyway. And I was giddy, Otávio’s good looking, right? I didn’t remember anything else.—Pause.—How do you want him: with your body?”4
Joana tells Lídia, “Stay with Otávio. Have your baby, be happy, and leave me alone.”5 In a dreamlike sequence that recalls Andrey Bely or Kafka—or, even more strikingly, the scenes from Steppenwolf that find Harry Haller wandering the streets, walking into shady doors and striking up hazy conversations with vague and formless people—a featureless man follows Joana through the streets. She goes with him to his house, where he lives with another woman. She returns a few times, and they presumably have a sexual relationship, though Joana never bothers to ask him his name.
At length Joana makes her unhurried way back to Otávio, and when she arrives she scandalizes him, as usual. This time it isn’t so much her wildness, which attracted him away from the placid Lídia in the first place. It is her complete indifference to the rules of conventional behavior, her failure to hold him to a standard she does not so much flout as utterly fails to realize exists. She knew, he learns, and didn’t much care about his affair with Lídia.
What …, a shaking, gasping rage thrashed around inside him, so she knew about Lídia, about the baby … she knew and she didn’t say a word. … She betrayed me. … —The asphyxiating weight pressed into him ever deeper.—She calmly allowed my infamy … she kept on sleeping beside me, putting up with me … for how long? Why? but great God why?!…
“Wicked.”
Joana jumped, rapidly lifted her head.
“Evil.”
His voice could barely be contained in his swollen throat, the veins in his neck and forehead throbbed thick, gnarled, in triumph.
“It was your aunt who called you a snake. Snake, indeed. Snake! Snake! Snake!”6
What shocks Otávio, and so many other characters in the book—the aunt, for example—is the girl’s amorality, her nearness to the “wild heart.” Joana is an animal, “natural” rather than human. Over the course of the book Clarice compares her to a snake, a dog, a wildcat, a horse, and a bird. Joana’s failure to acknowledge or understand the codes of human behavior jolts people. She is never actively malicious; she simply inhabits another world, beyond good and evil, like a pet uncomprehendingly shitting on the carpet.
“Evil is not living, and that’s it. Dying is already something else,” Joana says. “Dying is different from good and evil.”7 Joana’s young creator, of course, had reason to reject the conventional morality that had proven so futile in her own experience. The lives of her parents put the lie to any notions of a benevolent order, any illusion of a compassionate personal god who would reward the good and punish the bad.
Yet from her infancy she had been intimately acquainted with the reality of evil. Aware of what happened to her raped mother, her murdered grandfather, and her ruined father, amid the greatest disaster in the history of her people’s long history, how could she proclaim that evil was nothing more than “not living”? It is easy to understand why Clarice, and Joana, would be indifferent or rebellious. But this pure rejection of morality, which includes a rejection of the notion of evil itself, begs other questions.
Here we see the unmistakable imprint of Spinoza, who equates Nature with God and both with an absence of good and evil. “All things which are in Nature, are either things or actions. Now good and evil are neither things nor actions. Therefore good and evil do not exist in Nature,” he wrote.8 As a child of Nature, Joana is neither good nor evil, and does not even seem aware of these categories. Like Joana, Nature has “positive” attributes, freedom, for instance, alongside the “negative”: Joana is violent, thieving, aggressive.
A Spinozistic conce
ption of Nature implies that the same rules that apply to man apply equally to God, who is no longer a moral being, bound by notions of good and evil, meddling in human affairs, rewarding and punishing, but a philosophical category equivalent to Nature. This is no longer “the humanized God of the religions,” which Spinoza also calls “superstition” and “inadequate ideas,” and which would have triumphed but for “mathematics which is concerned not with ends, but only with the essences and properties of figures, [showing] men another standard of truth.”9
In Near to the Wild Heart, Otávio longs for an absurdly humanized god: “To kneel down before God and ask. For what? Absolution. Such a big word, so full of meaning. He wasn’t guilty—or was he? of what?—he knew he was, yet he continued with the thought—he wasn’t guilty, but how he would love to be absolved. Upon his forehead the large fat fingers of God, blessing him like a good father, a father made of earth and world, containing everything, everything, without failing to possess so much as a particle that could later tell him: yes, but I didn’t pardon you!”10
In a long prayer-like rumination that is the novel’s climactic passage, there is no longer any question of begging favors from the god of the large fat fingers. Instead Joana pushes her Spinozistic conception further. Just as there is no meaningful separation between man and animal, between Joana and the cat or the snake, neither man nor animal is separate from God, the single, infinite, and eternal “one substance” that is synonymous with Nature: one substance in constant transition, linked in an infinite chain of cause and effect.
The idea is the foundation of Spinoza’s thought, and in the ecstatic passage that closes Clarice Lispector’s book it recurs clearly as the narration shifts, almost imperceptibly, from Joana’s third person into the author’s first.
What rose within her was not courage, she was substance alone, less than human, how could she be a hero and want to conquer things? She wasn’t a woman, she existed and what she had inside her were movements lifting her always in transition. Perhaps she had once modified with her wild strength the air around her and no one would ever notice, perhaps she had invented new matter with her breath and didn’t know it, only felt something that her little woman’s head could never understand. Throngs of warm thoughts burst out and scattered through her frightened body and what mattered about them was that they concealed a vital impulse, what mattered about them is that in the exact instant of their birth there was the blind and real substance creating itself, lifting itself, straining like an air bubble from beneath the water’s surface, almost breaking through … She noticed that she had not yet fallen asleep, she thought she would still have to burst into flames. That it would end at once the long gestation of childhood and from her painful immaturity her own being would explode, finally finally free! No, no, there is no God, I want to be alone. And a day will come, yes, a day will come in me the capacity as red and affirmative as it is clear and smooth, one day whatever I do is blindly safely unconsciously, walking over myself, on my truth, as completely immersed in whatever I do that I shall not be able to speak, and especially a day will come in which all my movement will be creation, birth, I will break all of the nos that exist inside me, I shall prove to myself that there is nothing to fear, that whatever I am will always be wherever there is a woman who shares my origins, I will erect inside me what I am one day, with one gesture my waves will rise up powerful, pure water drowning doubt, conscience, I shall be strong as the soul of an animal and when I speak they will be words not thought out and slow, not lightly felt, not full of human will, not the past corroding the future,! whatever I say shall resound fatal and entire! there will be no space inside me for me to know that time, men, dimensions, exist, there will be no space inside me to so much as notice that I will be creating instant by instant, no instant by instant: always molten, because then I shall live, only then shall I live more fully than in childhood, I shall be as brutal and misshapen as a stone, I shall be light and vague as something felt and not understand, I shall surpass myself in waves, ah, God, and may everything come and fall upon me, even the incomprehension of myself in certain blank moments because all I need to do is fulfill myself and then nothing can block my path to death-without-fear, from any struggle or rest I shall rise up strong and beautiful as a young horse.11
If, like Joana, the author of Near to the Wild Heart feared that “after I got married nothing else could happen to me,” she was mistaken. The book, published in mid-December 1943, caused a furor.
When Clarice began writing it, in March 1942, she was still in law school and still working as a journalist. In February, she had transferred to the newspaper A Noite, once one of the glories of Brazilian journalism. Its newsroom shared a floor with Vamos Lêr! The job was less a new one than it was an extension of her previous posting, because like the Agência Nacional (and, for that matter, Vamos Lêr!), A Noite was now a middling government organ, aiding, as Clarice put it in her petition for naturalization, “in the distribution and propaganda of Your Excellency’s government.”12
Some of her colleagues made the move with her. Francisco de Assis Barbosa was one, and she turned to him for help with the novel she had begun writing. “Groping in the darkness,” she pieced the book together by jotting down her ideas in a notebook whenever they occurred to her.13 To concentrate, she quit the tiny maid’s room in the apartment she shared with her sisters and brother-in-law and spent a month in a nearby boardinghouse, where she worked intensely. At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel.14 Lúcio Cardoso assured her that the fragments were a book in themselves. Barbosa read the originals chapter by chapter, but Clarice rejected his occasional suggestions with characteristic vividness: “When I reread what I’ve written,” she told him, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.”15
Lúcio suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This became the book’s epigraph, which, together with the occasional use of the stream-of-consciousness method, led certain critics to describe the book as Joycean. The comparison annoyed Clarice. “I discovered the quote, the title of the book, and Joyce himself once the book was already finished. I wrote it in eight or nine months, while I was studying, working, and getting engaged—but the book has no direct influence from my studies, my engagement, Joyce, or my work.”16
Barbosa, who together with Lúcio was one of the book’s first readers, recalled his amazement. “As I devoured the chapters the author was typing, it slowly dawned on me that this was an extraordinary literary revelation,” he said. “The excitement of Clarice, hurricane Clarice.”17 He steered it to the book-publishing wing of their employer, A Noite, where it appeared with a bright pink cover, typical for books by women, in December 1943. It was not a lucrative arrangement for the new author. “I didn’t have to pay anything [to have it published], but I didn’t make any money either. If there was any profit, they kept it,” Clarice said.18 A thousand copies were printed; in lieu of payment she got to keep a hundred. As soon as the book was ready, she began sending it out to critics.
“Everyone wanted to know who that girl was,” the journalist Joel Silveira remembered. “Nobody had any idea. Suddenly everyone was talking about it.”19 The reviews still bear witness to the excitement “hurricane Clarice” unleashed among the Brazilian intelligentsia. For almost a year after publication, articles about the book appeared continuously in every major city in Brazil. Sixteen years later, a journalist wrote, “We have no memory of a more sensational debut, which lifted to such prominence a name that, until shortly before, had been completely unknown.”20
Clarice Lispector, critics wrote, was “the rarest literary personality in our world of letters”; “something exceptional;” possessed of a “bewildering verbal richness.” “The whole book is a miracle of balance, perfectly engineered,” combining the “intellectual lucidity of the characters of Dostoevsky w
ith the purity of a child.”21 In October 1944, the book won the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943. The prize was a confirmation of what the Folha Carioca had discovered earlier that year when it asked its readers to elect the best novel of 1943. Near to the Wild Heart won with 457 votes. Considering that only nine hundred copies had actually been put on sale, it was a spectacular number. But it was appropriate to a book A Manhã declared to be “the greatest debut novel a woman had written in all of Brazilian literature.”22 Another critic went further: “Near to the Wild Heart is the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.”23
The author of the last statement, the young poet Lêdo Ivo, sought her out after reading the book. “I met Clarice Lispector at the exact moment she published Near to the Wild Heart,” he remembered. “The meeting took place in a restaurant in Cinelândia. We had lunch and our conversation strayed from literary matters. … The least I can say is that she was stunning. It was autumn, the leaves in the square were falling, and the grayness of the day helped underscore the beauty and luminosity of Clarice Lispector. Alongside the foreign climate was that strange voice, the guttural diction which rings in my ears to this day. I was not yet twenty years old—and, under the impact of her book, felt that I was standing before Virginia Woolf or Rosamund Lehmann.”24
Why This World Page 17
