Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  “My kids liked it and that’s the judgment that interests me the most,” Clarice said. “Usually, after reading reviews of my work, positive or negative, I stop writing for two or three days in order to forget that I’m a writer.”4 The subject of good and bad literature, of “being a writer,” in any case no longer interested her. “Any cat, any dog is worth more than literature,” she wrote in Via Crucis.5

  The literature of Clarice Lispector, however, was increasingly interesting to others, both at home and abroad. The pornographic tingle that attached itself to her name with the publication of Via Crucis added to her notoriety in Brazil, and by the time the book appeared in mid-1974 she already enjoyed a wide reputation throughout Latin America.

  In August 1974, she was with her friend and fellow writer Lygia Fagundes Telles in Cali, Colombia, for another conference. They had traveled together in the same plane, which suddenly started to bounce around wildly in the air. Seeing Lygia’s alarm, Clarice took her arm and laughed. “Don’t worry,” she said, “because my card-reader already told me, I’m not going to die in a disaster!”6

  Once they had arrived intact, Clarice, as usual, avoided the bigwigs, preferring to walk around the city. In August of the next year, she returned to Colombia. This appearance, though brief and by most accounts unremarkable, has become a central part of the legend of Clarice Lispector. Perhaps impressed by her appearance in Cali the year before, a Colombian aristocrat named Simón González invited her to participate in his First World Congress of Sorcery:

  We feel that this will be for you an important experience, eminently revealing, fraught with new insights, whether your field of research be witchcraft or parapsychology, astrology or alchemy, ancient magic or modern sorcery, extrasensory perception or any other of the countless means whereby men and women become aware not only of capacities ordinarily untapped within themselves but also of a pulsing reality beyond their senses, and mystic realms of love, joy, and power never attained by unbelievers.7

  “Everyone is having a convention these days. So why not Satan?” the Evangelical Missions Quarterly wondered.8 And Satan, sure enough, did it in style, luring notables such as the spoon-bending Uri Geller to Bogotá, where two thousand people paid $275 to participate in the gathering’s forty seminars, and where an estimated 150,000 individuals, presumably less committed, visited the various occultists offering their services and wares in a hall open to the public. The spectacular opening, the New York Times reported, on a stage dominated by “a huge white plaster reproduction of a pre-Columbian idol,” featured “150 young women in black and colored robes swirling to a voodoo dance on a moonlit outdoor stage.”9

  Perhaps not surprisingly, the press took a somewhat patronizing interest in Clarice’s participation in the convention, even before she left Rio. She herself took it seriously. “At the conference I plan to listen more than speak,” she told Veja. “I will only talk if I can’t avoid it, but I will speak about the magic of the natural phenomenon, since I think it is entirely magic that a dark and dry seed contains within it a brilliant green plant.” Creating another one of the paradoxes that were a trademark, she said, “Magic as well is the fact that we invented God and that, miraculously, He exists.”10

  She prepared several versions of a speech but did not read any of them.11 Instead, she limited herself to a brief introduction that summed up her entire approach to writing and its relationship with the world it reflects and creates:

  I have little to say about magic. In truth I think that our contact with the supernatural must be made in silence and in a profound solitary meditation. Inspiration, in all forms of art, has a touch of magic because creation is a thing that is absolutely inexplicable. No one knows anything about it. I do not think that inspiration comes from outside, from supernatural powers. I suppose that it emerges from the deepest I of a person, from the deepest individual, collective, and cosmic unconscious. But it is also true that everything that has life and is called by us “natural” is in truth as inexplicable as if it were supernatural. It happens that all I have to give you is just my literature. Now someone is going to read in Spanish a text I wrote, a kind of story called “The Egg and the Hen” which is really mysterious for me and has a secret symbology. I ask you not to listen only with your reason because, if you just try to reason, everything that will be said will escape your understanding. If a dozen listeners feel my text I will consider myself satisfied.12

  Clarice was very fat, the Mexican journalist Horácio Oliveira recalled, and her lipstick a loud shade of red. She sat silently while, to the amusement of the audience, someone reading her story rambled on for two hours about an egg. “Nobody understood a word,” Oliveira said. After it was translated and printed, Oliveira wrote, everyone understood it was the most brilliant thing at the conference.13 But Clarice had no illusions about the impression she made. “My presentation, in English, was not a resounding success,” she reported. “ ‘The Egg and the Hen’ is mysterious and does indeed have a bit of occultism. It is a difficult and profound story. That is why I think the audience, very mixed, would have been happier if I had pulled a rabbit out of my hat. Or fallen into a trance. Listen, I never did anything like that in my life. My inspiration does not come from the supernatural, but from unconscious elaboration, which comes to the surface as a kind of revelation. Moreover, I don’t write in order to gratify anybody else.”14

  When she returned home, she was besieged by the press, until, “worn down by persistence or perhaps fatigue,” she conceded an interview to the same journalist who had met her before the trip. She emphasized that the reports of her walking around Bogotá dressed in black were mistaken. “For her, the reporter who saw her strangely dressed and covered with amulets was the victim of poor vision, excessive imagination, or bad faith.”15

  As usual, though, the mythology was resistant to facts. The few days she spent in Colombia were enough to earn her a lasting moniker: “the great witch of Brazilian literature,” in Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna’s phrase.16 “Be careful with Clarice,” her old friend Otto Lara Resende told the Canadian writer Claire Varin when she came to Brazil to do research on Clarice. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.”17

  Ironically, or psychically, enough, Clarice seems to have anticipated this latest wrinkle in her legend, even before she heard of the Bogotá conference. The year before, in Where Were You at Night, she had imagined a ditzy journalist calling up a friend: “Claudia, sorry for calling so early on a Sunday! But I got up with a fabulous inspiration: I’m going to write a book about Black Magic! No, I didn’t read that book about the Exorcist, people said it was no good and I don’t want everybody saying I copied it. Think about it. Human beings have always tried to communicate with the supernatural, from ancient Egypt with the secret of the Pyramids, to Greece with its gods, to Shakespeare in Hamlet. Well, I’m going to do it too.”18

  Back in Rio, Clarice announced, as she did periodically, that she was tired of, “indeed nauseated by,” literature. This was not a pose: writing increasingly exhausted her and she feared it had become an obsessive tic. “I am writing because I don’t know what to do with myself,” she wrote in one of the fragments that would become A Breath of Life. “I mean: I don’t know what to do with my spirit.”19

  She was tired of writing, but she was equally unable to halt the restless creative urge that throughout her life had pushed her from one experiment to the next. Just as Lúcio Cardoso turned to painting after his stroke made it impossible for him to use language, Clarice, too, began to paint. She had been dabbling in painting since the time of Água viva. In the first versions of the manuscript, the narrator is a writer; in the published version she has been transformed into a painter.

  That book began with Michel Seuphor’s evocation of a “painting totally free of dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth.” Água viva was full of allusions to painting and its connection to creation: “And now just as
in painting all I say is: egg and that is enough.”20 In Vision of Splendor, an anthology of mainly older works she published in 1975, she wrote, “If I knew how to paint, I would struggle to manage to paint the complete shape of an egg.”21

  By the middle of 1975, she was painting in earnest. Olga Borelli published a note in which Clarice described the process by which she began producing these weird works. “What relaxes me, incredible as it may seem, is painting,” she said. “Without being in any way a painter, and without learning any technique. I paint so badly it’s not even funny and I don’t show my quote-unquote ‘paintings’ to anyone. It’s relaxing and at the same time exciting to play with colors and forms for no reason at all. It’s the purest thing I do.”22

  Many of her pictures have the same fascination as certain of her abstract writings. Like Água viva, they give the impression of having been composed without any modification or elaboration, of being “brainstorms.” But unlike the painstakingly refined Água viva, their colors and forms were, in fact, applied directly, without subsequent editing, to their wooden supports. Clarice could not polish her paintings as she could her words, and this immediacy gives them a primitive, visceral impact.

  “I painted a picture that a friend advised me not to look at because it would hurt,” Clarice said. “I agreed. Because in this painting which is called fear I managed to express, maybe even magically, all the fear-panic of a being in the world.”23 Dated May 16, 1975, Fear shows a bright blob dabbed with eyes and a mouth, hurtling through black space. Looking at it, one might recall what a man said in Washington after reading “The Buffalo,” included in Family Ties: “He said the whole story seemed to be made of entrails.”24

  She did not, in fact, have any training in painting, but it is not true that she had no technique. “I am so upset that I never perfected what I invented in painting,” she wrote in A Breath of Life. “Or at least I’ve never heard of this way of painting: it consists of taking a wooden canvas—Scotch pine is the best—and paying attention to its veins. Suddenly then a wave of creativity comes out of the subconscious and you go along with the veins following them a bit—but maintaining your liberty.”25

  Using this method, she created Rorschach-like images that do indeed seem to be direct flashes of her subconscious life. They have none of the beauty of the language that made her famous. But it may have been easier for her to use color and form to reach the state “beyond thought” that she had sought in mystical writings such as The Passion According to G. H. or Água viva. After a lifetime of writing, her mastery of her language was so complete that she now had to deliberately seek its roughness and novelty.

  In language, she feared that she could not attain “the symbol of the thing in the thing itself” without being reduced to gibberish and “barking at God.” Perhaps in painting, without the imperfection of words, she could reach that goal more directly. The goal, though, was unchanged. “My ideal,” she wrote, “would be to paint a picture of a picture.”26

  42

  The Thing Itself

  “A picture of a picture,” a representation of a representation, the symbol of the thing in the thing itself: the ideals Clarice sought in her painting inevitably came from, and led her back to, her writing. The phrase above, like so many of her thoughts on painting, appears in A Breath of Life (Pulsations), the book she began sketching out around 1974.1

  She would not live to see it published. At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured” by Olga Borelli. But if an unfinished, posthumously published work necessarily feels incomplete, and if readers will naturally wonder if what we are reading is what the author would have wanted us to read, A Breath of Life, like so many of Clarice Lispector’s works, achieves “the precious and precise harmony between expression and substance” to an almost spooky degree.

  Not only published but also, to some extent, written after Clarice’s death, A Breath of Life is completed and perfected precisely by its incompletion and imperfection. This is the kind of uncanny paradox in which she had always delighted, and it was exactly what she anticipated and intended when writing it: “This I suppose will be a book made apparently out of shards of a book. But in fact it is about portraying quick flashes of me and quick flashes of my character Angela. I could grab onto every flash and go on about it page after page. But it so happens that the essence of the thing is sometimes in the flash. … My life is made of fragments and that’s how it is for Angela.”2

  These fragments form a dialogue between an author and a character, Angela Pralini, the same name Clarice used for the woman in the train in Where Were You at Night. A discarded subtitle of Água viva was “Monologue with Life,” and A Breath of Life could be called a dialogue with life, between a godlike artist who infuses the breath of life into his creation, and that speaking, breathing, dying creation herself: Angela Pralini.

  The miracle of creation through words was the same wonder that had always fascinated Clarice, but in her other meditations on the subject, The Apple in the Dark, for instance, the fictional edifice is less visible, the author hidden in the tangles of her dense and allusive allegory. The author and her creation were often identical: “I am Martin,” Clarice said in an interview, referring to the protagonist of The Apple in the Dark.3 This was exactly what Álvaro Lins had criticized in Near to the Wild Heart, speaking of its “feminine” incapacity to disguise the author in her work: “There is, however, in masculine temperaments, a greater tendency to hide the author behind his creations, to disconnect from the finished and completed work. That means that a writer can put all of his personality into a work, but diluting himself inside it so that the spectator sees only the object and not the man.”

  This was not a criticism that Clarice Lispector had taken to heart, to say the least. In her last books, the identity of the divine author with her creations reaches a poetic climax. In A Breath of Life, both Angela and the male author character Clarice interposes between herself and Angela are Clarice Lispector, far more than any of her previous creations had been. Even in a body of work as richly autobiographical as Clarice’s, no character, not Martin or Joana or G. H., had ever been as boldly and transparently Clarice. Angela says:

  The object—the thing—always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In my book The Besieged City I speak indirectly of the mystery of the thing. A thing is a specialized and immobilized animal. Years ago I also described a wardrobe. Then came the description of an immemorable clock called Sveglia: an electric clock that terrified me and that would terrify any living person in the world. Then it was the telephone’s turn. In “The Egg and the Hen” I talk about the crane. It is my timid approach to the subversion of the living world and of the threatening world of the dead.4

  The male author, Angela’s purported creator, also bears certain similarities to Clarice Lispector, though she distances him with irony. “I never had a vocation for writing,” he says, “the number fascinated me since I was a boy. The only reason I awkwardly and daily write down notes is because I can’t have a conversation with my wife.”5

  There is more to this distancing than irony, though. Clarice emphasizes over and over again the fictional qualities of this and all writing. Angela and “the author” are her creations; so, too, is the “I”. “The I who appears in this book is not I. It is not autobiographical, you all know nothing of me. I never have told you and I never shall tell you who I am. I am all of yourselves.”6

  Painting had prepared Clarice for her new experience in writing. After returning from Bogotá, she described her two previous books, Where Were You at Night and The Via Crucis of the Body, as “light” and “direct,” and announced that she would not be continuing in that direction: “I am afraid of acquiring a detestable facility. I don’t want to write out of habit but out of necessity, as has been the case until now. A while ago I thought about stopping, but a desire came to me that was so strong that I started again. Today, I am thinking once again about abandoning literature. If I contin
ue, it will be the old Clarice Lispector, since my vein of ‘light’ literature has run out. But the experience was important. After all, profundity is not the only thing that exists. The surface is a real aspect.”7

  Just how much she understood of the surface as “a real aspect” is most immediately visible in her paintings. Her technique is the opposite of the trompe l’œil. By allowing herself to follow the grain of the wood she painted over, she covers the surface at the same time that she calls attention to its reality, and thus to the artificiality of her own creation. She is not trying to make a piece of canvas look like wood or marble. She is not creating a fake surface but, by following the contours suggested by a natural surface, making that natural surface reveal its depths. The tension between the “natural” and the “invented,” between the “real aspect” of the surface and the profundity of human artifice, is the source of the paintings’ disquieting power.

  In A Breath of Life, Angela Pralini is a painter. More significantly, Angela Pralini is a painting, the “picture of a picture” that Clarice sought, and A Breath of Life is a picture of Clarice creating her. In creating the character, she does not strive to paint over the raw material, in this case the author herself; the canvas is never occulted by the creation overlaying it. Few characters in fiction are as self-consciously fictional, as obviously avatars of their creator, as Angela Pralini.

  “I call the grotto by its name and it begins its murky life,” Clarice had written in Água viva of one of her paintings. The process of infusing a “breath of life” into inanimate objects was one of her oldest mystical themes; the link between language and creation was the same link that she had pondered so poetically in her many books, in The Apple in the Dark, for instance, or in Virginia’s rumination on the anise liquor. “The thought … was the taste of anise,” she wrote three decades earlier in The Chandelier. Now Clarice’s thought about Angela Pralini is Angela Pralini. “Does Angela feel that she is a character?” the author wonders. “Because as for me I sometimes feel that I am someone’s character. It is uncomfortable being two: I for me and I for others.”8