Meaning is a Breath: Images in Clarice Lispector

Hack, Lilian. Meaning is a Breath: Images in Clarice Lispector. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2021. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2021/04/14/meaning-is-a-breath-images-in-clarice-lispector/. Acesso em: 09 October 2024.

Crossing the Atlantic Forest breathing outside, I enter the small research room with white walls and lots of tables1. The interior resembles a kind of aquarium, with a large glass extending from one side to the other of the wall, in front of the hallway that gives access from the elevator to the other rooms on the same floor. The air conditioning feeds the environment and takes care of its noises. Preparing an atmosphere for reading and writing, I see an empty table next to a chair, in which I sit. My hands, covered by surgical rubber gloves, still do not know exactly how to measure touch. In this setting, I wait for the two paintings by Clarice Lispector that are under the care of the Literature Archive of the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS)2. After a few minutes, not knowing what to do with my eyes, I accompany the footsteps of a woman who brings two boxes in her hands, smiling discretely out of restlessness. As she opens the door to the glass room, she receives the help of her colleague, who was supervising my wandering eyes and the concentration of another researcher. I feel a certain complicity between the two as they put the volumes on a higher table, right behind the one where I had sat down. Promptly, and with the discretion of a few words, I join them. And then, in a whisper, I hear something more or less like this: “Wow, I’ve never seen these paintings before….” Escaping the tension, the woman from the boxes lets out a smile and adds: “Me neither!” I was absolutely stunned by what I heard, equally thrilled by my first time. So we opened the boxes together and saw the two paintings with the same surprise, in a brief and intense moment.

That was the first sensation which I had when I saw Clarice’s paintings: my whole body shivered in a flush that was shared with these two women who worked every day at the archive. A kind of slip, a discomposure, a “human dismantling.” As Clarice wrote, “She needs to move her whole boneless head to look at an object.”3 – it is necessary to disorganize the act of seeing in order to see a disorganized form. My flush understood this measure of sharing an unveiled intimacy that fluctuated from strangeness to bodily rapture. Two images were lit up in an intense red inside the boxes and offered themselves for the first time to the gaze of three women. The painting was like a body shown inside out: beyond the entrails, there was the uterus. Clarice’s painting had the viscosity of a placenta. Her images had the consistency of a thing.

Gradually, I contained my emotion and identified my sensations. Each of us resumed our places, and I dedicated myself to the details. These images have the consistency of trees, of vegetable matter, wood being the support for these two paintings. In one of them, the vertical lines visibly follow the designs provided by the wood, and create a spatiality that is flaccid and hard at the same time. The warm colors loosen in a lassitude given by the repetition of the strokes. It is the painting titled Interior de gruta (Cave Interior), as can be read on the back which contains this inscription next to Clarice’s signature. However, its dating is controversial, for it is hidden in a dense mass of paint. Only in the transparency of the colors do we guess with a certain insistence the year 1960, drawn with a felt-tip pen in a small “text box,” which was demarcated by Clarice with the paint itself, on the lower right side of the painting’s surface. This date is the same as that recorded in the writer’s collection at the IMS.

Figure 1. Clarice Lispector. Interior de gruta (Cave Interior), 1960. Mixed technique on wood, 40x56cm. Literature Archive Collection at the Moreira Salles Institute. Image source: personal archive.
Figure 2. Clarice Lispector. Interior de gruta (Cave Interior), 1960. Detail of the thickness of the wood support. Image source: Personal archive.
Figure 3. Clarice Lispector. Interior de gruta (Cave Interior), 1960. Detail of the title, date, and signature. Image source: Personal archive.
Figure 4. Clarice Lispector. Interior de gruta (Cave Interior), 1960. Detail of the back of the painting. Image source: Personal archive.

The other painting on the table is recorded, in the same collection, without a title or a date. In this painting of wild and quick brushstrokes, the green color predominates next to the very pasty blue, white, and red strokes and smears, in a gesture very different from the one we sensed in the previous painting. When I request to see it outside the box to which it was attached, I notice how Clarice gave it special care, framing the small painting made on the thin wooden board and adding a hook on the back – we can even see the seal of the framer who did the work. But it will only be on a second visit to the archive, this time in another consultation room and with natural lighting, that it will be possible to see an inscription that seems to draw the title, the date, and the signature on the painting. Insisting with a magnifying glass at the edges of the frame, it is possible to see lines that, in this consultation, allowed me to suppose the inscription of the word “Mata” (Forest) and the year 1975 next to Clarice’s signature, again in the lower right corner, in the small “text box,” where it proceeds in the same way, covering the record with ink.

Since research always holds surprises and discoveries generated by the archive’s own inexhaustible status, it was only very recently, months after this consultation and the publication of the doctoral dissertation in which I make this attribution, that a new investigation with equipment more fit for the task, revealed that the title of this painting would be Esperança (Hope), dating from May 1975.

It is curious that the reading and confirmation of the title depend on a certain insistence, leaving us extremely uncertain. This occurs in other paintings by Clarice. Had she acted in order to erase the traces, to elide names and titles? As researchers, we are immersed in the task of unveiling and disseminating, but as artists, we know full well that incompleteness, chance, and hesitation are decisive factors in the outcome of a work. My hands in surgical gloves are ultimately tiny in the face of the unprecedented experience of contact with the work. What remains of the traces is always subject to recreations, and that is what nourishes the words.

Figure 5. Clarice Lispector. Esperança (Hope), 1975. Acrylic on wood, 30x40cm. Literature Archive Collection at the Moreira Salles Institute. Image source: personal archive.
Figure 6. Clarice Lispector. Esperança (Hope), 1975. Detail of the title, date, and signature. Image source: personal archive.
Figure 7. Clarice Lispector. Esperança (Hope), 1975. Detail of the back of the painting. Image source: personal archive.
Figure 8. Clarice Lispector. Esperança (Hope), 1975. Detail of the painting on the research table. Image source: personal archive.

In comparison, we clearly see how these two paintings are different from each other. Interior de gruta (Cave Interior), from 1960, has an economy of gestures. The watery paint was well spread and absorbed by the wood, which consists of a surface so thin and improvised that it has not escaped the deformations of time. There is a transparent, viscous layer covering the painting, which may be a dull varnish or a colorless gum. The vertical lines follow the designs of the wood, and in fact recall the walls of a cave, the walls of the cave. A few beings float through the painting and help to compose this shapeless landscape. They are small butterflies drawn with ballpoint and felt-tip pens, in cliché forms, that preserve a gesture of lightness, as if they were flying at the entrance to the cave. But the composition of colors, the freedom in making apparent the spots of paint that follow the lines of the wood, make the title induce this analysis, since the representational, mimetic meaning is not evident. It seems that Clarice paints a cave seen from the wood in its veins. The cave arises from the painting, not from a scene painted on it. Esperança (Hope), on the other hand, admitting this recently attributed title and dating, would have been painted more than ten years after Interior de gruta (Cave Interior). In this painting, there is a freedom and lightness in gesture that imprints the colors onto the picture. Applied with greater speed, the brushstrokes are dense from the paint mass, displaying more confidence in the command of the material and the technique. It is surprising to see how Clarice seems to be more at ease, without feeling so attached to this kind of boundary given by the lines of the wood. In addition, the frame demonstrates the genuine desire to exhibit this painting. Due to its more planned finishing, it stands out in relation to Interior de gruta (Cave Interior), as well as in relation to the other paintings by Clarice found under the care of the Museum Archive of Brazilian Literature (AMLB) at the Rui Barbosa House Foundation (FCRB), which has most of the collection of the writer’s paintings, with sixteen paintings, all made during the same year of 1975. However, Interior de gruta (Cave Interior) marks the presence of a theme that seems to be very important for the writer, since she will repeat this motif in another painting titled Gruta (Cave) – which is found under the care of the AMLB/FCRB.

Figure 9. Clarice Lispector. Gruta (Cave), 1973-1975. Mixed technique, 40 x 50 cm. Brazilian Literature Museum Archive. Image source: personal archive.
Figure 10. Clarice Lispector. Gruta (Cave), 1973-1975. Detail of the title and date. Image source: personal archive.

This presence of the caves is also intense in the books in which Clarice left us records of aspects of her paintings.  In Água Viva4, the elusive painter character who ventures to write for the first time offers us the following passage:

I want to put into words but without description the existence of the cave that some time ago I painted – and I don’t know how. Only by repeating its sweet horror, cavern of terror and wonders, place of afflicted souls, winter and hell, unpredictable substratum of an evil that is inside an earth that is not fertile. I call the cave by its name and it begins to live with its miasma. I then fear myself who knows how to paint the horror, I, creature of echoing caverns that I am, and I suffocate because I am word and also its echo.

We can suppose that it concerns the painting Interior de Gruta, which would date from 1960, and that therefore Clarice will already have painted in 1973, when she publishes Água Viva.  In A Breath of Life5, it is the character Ângela Pralini who reveals to us the method used by Clarice to paint:

I am so upset that I never perfected what I invented in painting. Or at least I’ve never heard of this way of painting: it consists of taking a wooden canvas — Scotch pine is 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. I once did a painting that turned out like this: a robust horse with a long and extensive blond mane amidst the stalactites of a grotto. It’s a generic way of painting. And, moreover, you don’t need to know how to paint: anybody, as long as you’re not too inhibited, can follow this technique of freedom. And all mortals have a subconscious. 

We have many indications that Clarice is referring here to the painting Gruta. And analyzing the two paintings on the same theme, we confirm that this is Clarice’s procedure for painting these and other pictures. That is how we could read these two novels from the records and traces that both keep of her paintings. And that is how Clarice reinforces, in her texts, this interest in caves in the elaboration of her images.

Clarice Lispector’s painting is at the same time close and far from her words. This means that we cannot so easily submit one to the other, that is, search in the literature for a meaning for her images, or believe that her images contain a meaning for her literature. We refer here to meaning experienced as correspondence, explanation, narrated fact, biographical or iconographic data to be unveiled. In her work, Clarice seems to ceaselessly escape from everything that makes sense, to escape from facts in the direction of sensations, of that which affects the body in a certain chaos of senses. Or rather, for Clarice, meaning is a breath. To friend and secretary Olga Borelli6 she would have once said: “My books, fortunately for me, are not overcrowded with facts, but rather with the repercussion of facts on individuals.”7 If this “repercussion of facts” – the surrender to sensation – is what moves Clarice’s writing, we can assume that it will be no different in her painting.

This is how we can see her images painted from this “repercussion of facts” on our body. But these “facts” are of a different order. We would say that Clarice’s painting is “overcrowded with material facts.” And these material facts produce sensations, as Gilles Deleuze8 very well demonstrated. The material facts of painting are different from historical, literary, narrative facts. At the level of sensation, they become detached from words, or move towards an indiscernibility between word and image. And at this point, the material facts of Clarice’s painting demands from us a perspective from the sensation that the image reflects on us. In other words, Clarice’s painting is made of the material of things. The painting is a thing. It is not an image of a thing, but this thing that is the image. It is necessary to repeat: the image is not in the place of things, representing them, but is something showing itself through the painting, the drawing, the colors, a gesture. As Maurice Blanchot9 wrote, “one lives an event as an image.” Sensation flutters before images, producing effects that are always different each time. It makes meaning escape, at the same time that it generates meanings. So that when we name the sensation, we fabricate possible meanings for the vertigo in which the image has cast us.

Georges Didi-Huberman10 shows us how much the history of art remains, at times, excessively concerned with the facts and ends up not worrying about the effects of painting, that is, with its repercussion on individuals. A proposition parallel to that of Clarice! According to the philosopher and historian, the image calls for a methodology of the gaze which would be that of metamorphosis: a desire for words to be transformed into an image, a desire for the image to be transformed into words, a desire to see the two as two sides of the same coin. And so, to write in the face of the image would be to desire for the metamorphosis to happen, for the word to make the image appear – as if in a flutter of wings.

Clarice writes and paints glued to sensations, to the repercussions of facts, glued to this desire for metamorphosis, wanting the material of things – of words and images – to deliver her a vitality that life lacks, for it pulsates in what is most tenuous and delicate, in an extraordinary infra-dimension of what is most ordinary. That is why she wants to escape the description of the painting, the description of the cave. It is suffocating to echo words. She thus surrenders to sensation, to horror, as we read in the passage quoted from Água Viva. Therefore, it will be necessary to make words an experience of exploring images, an exploration of the interior of the painted cave. It will be necessary to strip her human body and become an animal. It will be necessary to strip the writer to become a painter and vice versa. It will be necessary to strip words of their ready-made meanings to make them images. To metamorphose the body and words. To surrender to becoming. To return words to the gush of a spring, of a fountain that bubbles in the depths of the earth – living water. To return words to the meaning that comes as a breath. And on this point Clarice is a painter who has a singular capacity to understand that her images do not encounter a description, a double, an explanation in her words. The word touches the image precisely in that dimension in which it is delivered to the event, to the experience, to a fact lived and only very precariously transposed into words. To refer to this experience will be possible only by making words into images, and images are made of sensations, as Clarice herself has written.

It is not by chance that in the two novels in which Clarice explores her painting – Água Viva and A Breath of Life – the act of writing itself is a central theme, which makes writing function, and the writer is also a character in the plot, always in the process of being confused with the narrator, and sometimes even with the objects and scenes that are narrated. There is a tension, a suspension in the separation between subject and object, which we could transpose into a suspension of the separation between word and image. It is not by chance, either, that painting, the image, is what makes writing enter the vertigo of the impossibility of naming, a theme that is dear to a certain mystical-religious tradition, especially the Jewish one, which was certainly not foreign to the writer. But it is also a fundamental theme for any debate about the practices that involve writing about art, writing about the image, a clash faced by anyone who creates images or who elaborates discourses about them, and is confronted with transposing this process of creation/perception in words. And we know full well that all perception is a creation, and that writing would resume an infinite pulsation of images. These novels by Clarice expose the desperate attempt to offer a word that can reach the images in her sight, in the act of seeing – of seeing even her own paintings – encompassing a certain experience of seeing much more than naming the seen. Some of the titles of her paintings can be read in this way, as the attempt to enunciate an experienced sensation – to name the sensation and not the painting. Thus, Esperança (Hope), for example, will not be the representation of what Clarice believes to be hope, but the sensation that the painting causes to emerge in the face of the impulse to produce meanings. It does not concern only a game between visual perception and verbal description, of making words say the painting, say the seen, but giving words a capacity to see the sensation, to make words seers. It is not an echo, but a pulsation. A breath.

In November 1950, Clarice Lispector visits a prehistoric cave on the outskirts of the city of Torquay, in England. At the time she was living with Maury Gurgel Valente, who was pursuing his career as a diplomat, which led them to settle in that location. We read the impressions of that visit in a letter addressed to her sisters:

Yesterday we went to see some ancient, prehistoric caves – from millions of years ago. It was very beautiful. Despite a certain anguish. I left there inclined not to worry about small things, since before me so many years had passed.11 

Known as Kent’s Cavern, this set of caves constitutes one of the most important paleontological sites in Europe, since some of the most remote hominid fossils in the region were found there.

Only ten years before Clarice’s visit in 1940, the Grotte de Lascaux, in France, was “discovered,” whose walls contain one of the oldest sets of cave paintings of which we are aware. Along with other grottos or prehistoric caves thus recognized not only in Europe, but also in Africa, the Americas and Asia in the following years, a very particular scenario for theories of the image in modernity was considered, causing a true stir in the history of art, raising issues that have different ramifications on the movements and theories of modern and contemporary art, as well as on the production of several artists.

Five years after Clarice’s visit to the Torquay cave in 1955, the writer and philosopher Georges Bataille visits the Grotte de Lascaux. This long and impressive tour will give rise to one of the most important books to date on the philosophical and artistic impact of the historical recognition of cave paintings for modernity. In LascauxOr, The Birth of Art,12 Bataille asserts: “We know next to nothing of the men who left behind only these elusive shadows.” And today it is no different. Almost nothing. We make suppositions, we invent possible stories. Recently, an exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou13, in Paris, had as a theme the impact that this new area of ​​research, prehistoric art, had on modern artists, immersing them in this phantasmatic view of that which is “before history.” Prehistory would thus be a modern enigma. We understand how the desire to know the origins of humanity in its relation to art is inseparable from an impulse to recognize these same origins based on the sphere of the enigma. In Bataille’s words, “we are left painfully in suspense by this incomparable beauty and the sympathy that it awakes in us.” 

To say the same about the caves painted by Clarice and, by extension, all of her images, would not be an exaggeration. We know “almost nothing,” they leave us likewise in suspense, left to the enigma. We may ask ourselves: would Clarice have transposed, years later, the experience of this visit to the caves of Torquay to the paintings of the caves, as well as to her texts? Or would it be that, as a good reader, she would have accompanied some debate about cave paintings, supposedly the first images made by these humans “without language,” influencing their first forays into the elaboration of their own images? This universe of associations – an underground connection between things – will not be enunciated by the writer, of course, but perhaps, we may suppose, felt by her through contact with the material of painting and words. As a friend and interlocutor of several important Brazilian and foreign artists of the time, Clarice did not paint ignoring the modern debates on art. Thus, despite the timidity and technical fragility of her paintings, they are likewise part of a corpus of works and practices that offer us a scenario of the artistic production of the period. Of course, Clarice would nonetheless never agree with such a statement, she, who in her own words “was never modern.” Clarice was actually ancient, prehistoric, extemporaneous. Basically, in her own words: “when I think a painting is strange that’s when it’s a painting. And when I think a word is strange that’s where it achieves the meaning. And when I think life is strange that’s where life begins.”14

Notes

1  Translated from the Portuguese by Marco Alexandre de Oliveira. The original title was: “O sentido é um sopro: Imagens em Clarice Lispector.” 

2  This consultation was part of my doctoral research in visual arts, with an emphasis on history, theory, and art criticism, in the Graduate Program in Visual Arts at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). The dissertation, titled “Escrever um sopro em papel de água viva: imagem e pintura em Clarice Lispector” (Writing a Breath on Living Water Paper: Image and Painting in Clarice Lispector) is available here: http://hdl.handle.net/10183/214321

3  LISPECTOR, Clarice. Água Viva. Translated by Stefan Tobler. New York: New Directions, 2012, p. 83.

4  LISPECTOR, Clarice. Água Viva. Translated by Stefan Tobler. New York: New Directions, 2012, p. 9. 

5  LISPECTOR, Clarice. A Breath of Life (Pulsations). Translated by Johnny Lorenz. New York: New Directions, 2012, p. 43.

6   BORELLI, Olga. Clarice Lispector. Esboço para um possível retrato. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1981, p. 70.

7  The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Meus livros felizmente para mim não são superlotados de fatos, e sim da repercussão dos fatos nos indivíduos.”

8 DELEUZE, Gilles. Logique de la sensation. Paris: Editions de la difference, 1981.

9 BLANCHOT, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989, p. 260.

10 DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. Falenas. Translated by António Preto, et al. Lisbon: Imago, 2013, p. 306.

11  LISPECTOR, Clarice. Minhas Queridas. (Ed.) Teresa Montero. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2007, p. 236. The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Ontem fomos ver umas cavernas antigas – milhões de anos pré-histórica. Foi muito bonito. Apesar de dar certa aflição. Saí de lá disposta a não me preocupar com coisas pequenas, já que atrás de mim havia tantos e tantos anos.”

12  BATAILLE, Georges. Lascaux: Or, The Birth of Art: Prehistoric Painting. Skira, 1955, p. 12-13.

13  DEBRAY, Cécile; LABRUSSE, Rémi; STAVRINAKI, Maria. Préhistoire, Une énigme moderne. Exhibition Catalogue. Paris: Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 2019.

14  LISPECTOR, Clarice. Água Viva. Translated by Stefan Tobler. New York: New Directions, 2012, p. 76.

“Becoming”: Notes on Clarice Lispector’s “secret life”

, “Becoming”: Notes on Clarice Lispector’s “secret life”. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/12/21/tornar-se-notas-sobre-a-vida-secreta-de-clarice-lispector/. Acesso em: 09 October 2024.

1.

In this year in which we commemorate The Hour of the Star, the entry of Clarice Lispector and her alter ego (one of many), Macabéa, into the “própria profundeza (…) – a floresta”, the profusion of factual explanations for this or that character, narrative element or writing situation, in bonding and plastering a work already marked by biographical reading, one seems to lose sight of the essential lesson repeatedly stated by this writer and her writing known precisely for the rarity of plot, of facts. If the formulation of such a lesson appears in Agua Viva (“Não vou ser autobiográfica. Quero ser ‘bio’”), it is in the “Explanation” of the opening of The Via Crucis of the Body that it manifests (a key term in Clarice’s poetics) itself in all its radicalism. The very unmarked position in relation to the other thirteen texts that comprise the volume, which makes it impossible to distinguish graphically or by means of a paratextual element whether it is a preface (by the author) or already a fiction (by a narrator) is reinforced by what “Explanation” says: “É um livro de treze histórias. Mas podia ser de quatorze. Eu não quero. Porque estaria desrespeitando a confidência de um homem simples que me contou a sua vida. Ele é charreteiro numa fazenda. E disse-me: para não derramar sangue, separei-me de minha mulher, ela se desencaminhou e desencaminhou minha filha de dezesseis anos. Ele tem um filho de dezoito anos que nem quer ouvir falar no nome da própria mãe. E assim são as coisas”. The fourteenth story, told in the same gesture in which its omission is announced – an unconfident confidence –, thus resembles “the fifth story” and eponymous titled story in The Foreign Legion: the last, or first, of the stories is the story of the making of the stories, not only implying (folding inward) the life in the work, but also explaining (folding outward) the fiction in reality. In this sense, it is worth recalling that, according to the explanation, the genesis of The Via Crucis came from a commission for “three stories that (…) really happened” (emphasis added), and those are, according to the author (or narrator), “Miss Algrave”, “Via Crucis” and “The Body”, the three parts of the book that are furthest from the proposal, for they consist in, first of all, the parodic rewriting of other texts: in order, mystical experience of Catholic women, the incarnation of Christ, and a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, which Clarice had already translated (or rather, rewritten, giving it the title “The Denouncing Heart”). Like “Useless Explanation”, from “Back of the Drawer”, the second part of The Foreign Legion, which gained autonomy in Not to Forget, the “Explanation” complicates more than it supplies a key to reading for the relation of life to literary work and for the genesis (the birth) of fiction in reality – which was already foreshadowed in the book’s epigraphs, mixing Biblical passages and one attributed to “a character of mine still without a name” and another “I don’t know whose it is”. Thus, on the one hand, Clarice makes of a fiction of Poe (or takes it as) a story that really happened (what is written has happened, what one writes happens), in a paradoxical literary movement of deliteraturization, masterfully elucidated by João Camillo Penna, and that appears already in Near to the Wild Heart, when Steppenwolf, a character in the book of the same name by Hesse, and therefore a literary reference, figures as a life memory of Joana’s. On the other hand, in a game with the editor’s commission, she inserts into this book of stories, of fictions, three other stories (“The Man Who Showed Up”, “Day After Day” and “For the Time Being”) that sound, by the diction and resumption of dates and facts mentioned in the “Explanation”, like non-fiction, in every regard close to Clarice’s chronicles. That is, the writer at the same time complies to the letter and doubles the bet placed by the editor to fictionalize real facts: indeed, from the very opening of the book, as we have seen, life becomes fiction, but what is fictionalized (or realized) are not only certain facts, but the writing of the book itself, the commission and its realization, the life of the writer and of writing, in sum, the very relation between life and literary work, reality and fiction. It’s as if, for Clarice, literary fiction, the “as if”, constituted a two-way street, through which the non-existent gains  life only to the degree that ‘real life’ becomes unreal, that is, it occurs from a recreation of the given, as we can see in this famous passage in which the birth of writing coincides with the non-birth (death) of the writer, or rather, with reciprocal transformation (and intersection) – a face-to-face – of reality and of fiction: “Escrever é tantas vezes lembrar-se do que nunca existiu. Como conseguirei saber do que nem ao menos sei? assim: como se me lembrasse. Com um esforço de memória, como se eu nunca tivesse nascido. Nunca nasci, nunca vivi: mas eu me lembro, e a lembrança é em carne viva” (emphasis in the original).

2.

The “Explanation” appears to poetically formulate a much sought after and worked for solution, combined and of financial origin, to a double problem which plagued her: the necessity to write crônicas every day, and, therefore, to ‘talk about oneself’, take

3.

If, as Joana states, “nada existe que escape à transfiguração”, this feminine excess that is in everything that exists and that is confused with existence itself as a transformation (including, and this is the point, transformation of what is the female), the problem of gender shows itself right away as a problem of genre, with the progressive transfiguration of the narrative form of the novel, which, starting in the third person (unmarked position, i.e., masculine, and, in a certain sense, isomorphic to the divine omniscience of the phallic, Father creator ex nihilo) and with the father writing, gradually he is being contaminated by the female first person, the voice of Joana, who gives the last enunciation. The movement of formal transfiguration, the feminization of the narrative form, is not restricted to Near to the Wild Heart, but traverses through Clarice’s novels, having as its apex The Passion According to G.H., now entirely in the first person, with the protagonist narrator facing the challenge of not relying more on a “third person” and on the eye that “vigiava a minha vida” (the omniscient third person?), and, to that end, and in return, inventing a male path: from a he that creates and talks about a she, we pass to a she that creates and talks about a he. In Agua Viva, after this strange body (and, for this reason especially important) that is An Apprenticeship, she resumes the structure of G.H., but now free of any plot other than the writing itself and her desire to capture the “instant-already”, which is the “semente viva”, the “instantes de metamorfose”, the exact moment of transformation, of becoming oneself. It’s not startling, therefore, that it is not presented as a novel, but as “fiction” (or as “thing”, as Hélio Pólvora disparagingly—but attuned to Clarice—classified it in his opinion of Agua Viva for the National Book Institute). But as nothing in Clarice escapes transfiguration, the final two long prose works, The Hour of the Star and A Breath of Life (also not “novels”, but “novela” and “pulsations”, respectively), produce a further twist: in them, we find ourselves facing first-person male narrators writing books about (creating) female characters, in a gesture packed with critique of the criticism that Clarice – and women’s literature in general – suffered. Think, for example, of the old flaw of sentimental or intimate literature, that is, the accusation of always talking about oneself, and how Rodrigo S.M., “the most cynical narrator ever created by Clarice Lispector”, according to Ítalo Moriconi, cannot help but project himself and his stereotypes onto Macabéa, to the point where she sees his image when looking in the mirror – and this coming from an engaged writer, documentary, interested only in “fatos sem literatura”, and who complains that “escritora mulher pode lacrimejar piegas”. And, to talk about the “nordestina amarelada”, about the “cadela vadia”, in the name of Macabéa, Rodrigo S.M. must necessarily attribute to her not only the total absence of a voice and consciousness, as even, by narrative means, a name. On the other hand, however, it is emblematic that the final movement of A Breath of Life resumes that of Near to the Wild Heart, with Ângela, a character, coming from fiction to the world, and the Author losing the words, in an inversion of the fate of another creature, Macabéa:

“E agora sou obrigado a me interromper porque Ângela interrompeu a vida indo para a terra. Mas não a terra em que se é enterrado e sim a terra em que se revive. Com chuva abundante nas florestas e o sussurro das ventanias.

Quanto a mim, estou. Sim.

‘Eu… eu… não. Não posso acabar.’

Eu acho que..”

4.

In a crônica that confronts this series of issues– the classification of her books, in particular GH, the form of her narratives and the rarified plot, and the relation between life and fiction –, Clarice exposes in a theoretical key the coming into the world of Ângela (and other characters, such as Joana, since Near to the Wild Heart concludes in media res, with the protagonist traveling, leaving the bonds of the family and the narrator to another, unknown place): “O que é ficção? é, em suma, suponho, a criação de seres e acontecimentos que não existiram realmente mas de tal modo poderiam existir que se tornam vivos”. It’s not a matter of proximity or appearance of truth or reality (an internal or external verisimilitude), but of an entry into life: fictional creation names, for Clarice, a certain intensification in the way of being of the possible or the nonexistent (“de tal modo”), which makes it – transforms it– alive. In this sense, the Spinozist conception intoned by Joana, “Tudo é um”, should be read in the broadest sense possible – everything participates of the same substance, including fiction and nonexistent beings: “Tudo é um, tudo é um…, entoara. A confusão estava no entrelaçamento do mar, do gato, do boi com ela mesma. A confusão vinha também de que não sabia se entrara ‘tudo é um’ ainda em pequena, diante do mar, ou depois, relembrando. No entanto a confusão não trazia apenas graça, mas a realidade mesma. Parecia-lhe que se ordenasse e explicasse claramente o que sentira, teria destruído a essência de ‘tudo é um’. Na confusão, ela era a própria verdade inconscientemente, o que talvez desse mais poder-de-vida do que conhecê-la. A essa verdade que, mesmo revelada, Joana não poderia usar porque não formava o seu caule, mas a raiz, prendendo seu corpo a tudo o que não era mais seu, imponderável, impalpável.” If everything participates in the same substance, if the difference between things is not of nature, of essence, but of manner, of form, then there follows a continuity not only between human and animal, but also between the organic, live, and the inorganic, supposedly dead, and, moreover, between existing and non-existent beings: it is thus a matter of questioning the prerogative of human exceptionality, of biological life and ontological superiority of the currently existing, and, at the same time, since everything participates in the same substance, changing only its form, to postulate the universal possibility of metamorphosis and transfiguration, in short, of life. “Tudo é um” means that everything can be modified, that everything is alive – including, and this is the extension we want to emphasize, the fictional beings, who are as alive as existing beings. Following the Shakespearean maxim – “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” –, Clarice seems to postulate a radical monism, which can be seen in a series of her formulations or of her characters in which creation doesn’t refer to an other whose reality or life is inferior, as when G.H. states: “Terei que fazer a palavra como se fosse criar o que me aconteceu? Vou criar o que me aconteceu. Só porque viver não é relatável. Viver não é vivível. Terei que criar sobre a vida. E sem mentir. Criar sim, mentir não. Criar não é imaginação, é correr o grande risco de se ter a realidade”. Perhaps this explains why the experience of the “thing” is always accompanied by an experience of language in her fictions, because, when entering the “bio” before the biographical, the “neutral”, “it”, the “raw material”, the “forest”, the “forbidden fabric of life”, the zone prior to individuation and separation of genders, where “She/he” reigns, the “He/She” of Where You Were at Night, the Clarice characters feel the need to write, fictionalize, for they see, like Joana, their bodies connected by a root to everything that is no longer theirs– all the other things, all the other beings, among them the non-existent. “Having the reality” of the experience of the oneness of the world therefore implies creating, as a gesture of becoming alive, of intensifying a way of being that normally appears not only dead, but nonexistent. Thus it is not by chance that, in Agua Viva, the narrator-protagonist, after experiencing the “state of grace”, describing it as “se viesse apenas para que soubesse que realmente se existe e existe o mundo”, states that “depois da liberdade do estado de graça também acontece a liberdade da imaginação. (…) A loucura do invento”. The “state of grace” comes only to know that one really exists and the world exists – and that, among them exists the non-existent, which fiction has the power to make alive.

5.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights opens with the protagonist Dori facing a situation of extreme anguish, fictionalizing, in a succession of “make-believe” described as “os movimentos histéricos de um animal preso”, which “tinham como intenção libertar, por meio de um desses movimentos, a coisa ignorada que o estava prendendo”. This transvaluation of a typically (stereotypically) feminine scene, associating, as in Agua Viva, creation and freedom, brings us to the true Clarice date, or rather, Clarice time par excellence, between two dates, possibly invented in the writing of The Via Crucis of the Body. If “Explanation” states that “Today is May 12, Mother’s Day”, the date on which the three stories that “really happened” would have ended, the “P.S.” that supplements it (or rewrites) and on which other stories of the volume would have been written is dated another today, after the “domingo maldito”: “Hoje, 13 de maio, segunda-feira, dia da libertação dos escravos – portanto da minha também”. One can read this sequence, this association or succession between motherhood and freedom in two ways, not necessarily contradicting each other. On the one hand, as the liberation from slavery of the characters, especially the feminine ones, from the social, family role, epitomized in reproduction, in maternity – the transition from mother to liberated. In this sense, it would be about the radicalization of the movement that intensifies in Clarice’s writing starting with what José Miguel Wisnik called the separation trilogy– Family Ties, The Foreign Legion and The Passion According to G.H. In it, family bonds, socially familiarized, not only unite, but also bind, arrest, serving as instruments of domestication that allocate each to their place. Yet, on the margins of the familiar, the edges of the ties of the domesticated, a series of figures that will dominate Clarice’s later fiction begin to emerge: crazies, servants, animals (hens, dogs, cockroaches, horses, etc.), “natural” spaces domesticated in the city, surrounded by it (gardens – private, zoological or botanical), etc. Like a true foreign legion – in a sense completely opposite to the military formation with that name –, these figures increasingly gain more and more the center of the scene, questioning and revealing the violence of the domesticated and domesticating relations to the point where, in The Via Crucis, multiplicity can longer be alien to the family body of that time– gays, lesbians, transsexuals, prostitutes, nuns and widows full of carnal desire, beggars, in short, “everything that has no worth”, to use the words of a worthless politician. Thus, for example, the duo of short stories “Monkeys” and “The Smallest Woman in the World”, articulating racism and speciesism, brings out the role of violent exoticism, even when pious, which is at the base of the process of familiarization (of humanization) in our society. Such questioning, however, is not limited to a denial of the given, a reverse affirmation; rather, it seeks to convert the affirmation into a question, in what appears to be a movement that runs through Clarice’s writing: “Este livro é uma pergunta”, claims Rodrigo S.M.; “Escrever é uma indagação. É assim: ?”, we read in A Breath of Life; “sou uma pergunta”, says the narrator in Agua Viva, a phrase that is also the title of a crônica; and, to offer just one more example, the strongest of them: “O único modo de chamar é perguntar: como se chama? Até hoje só consegui nomear com a própria pergunta. Qual é o nome? e este é o nome.” It is thus not only about denying existing ties, or of affirming others in their place, but to open space for the experimentation with other relations– that is why liberation is only the first step in a movement of inquiry that cannot stagnate at an affirmation, at a name: “Liberdade é pouco. O que eu quero ainda não tem nome”. Take the short story “The Foreign Legion”. In it, we are faced with a family configuration that is at minimum strange. The members of the narrator’s own family are not named and hardly appear. Who occupies the place of prominence, in the first moment, is a chick who, terrified, makes the children ask their mother that she be the mother of that animal, of someone who doesn’t properly belong to the family, and not even to the human race – a motherhood role that the narrator says she doesn’t know how to fulfill. It is this “unfamiliar” scene (to use a term that appears three times in Family Ties, and is a possible translation for Freud’s Unheimlich) that makes her remember another, the familiarity with Ophelia, the daughter’s neighbor and another stranger to whom she was a mother. If, on the one hand, the narrator seems to hold a certain attraction for her, to the point where the child visits her every day, on the other hand, the relationship seems socially inverted, for it is Ophelia who behaves like an adult, as the embodiment of obedience to behavioral social norms (the theme will reappear in a tragic way in “The Obedient Ones”), it’s up to the hostess to indeed bow and define the tie between them paradoxically: “já me tornara o domínio daquela minha escrava”. The turning point comes when Ophelia hears a chick (another) in the kitchen, and the narrator allows her and encourages her to play with the animal, which she ends up doing, against all the rigidity imposed on her by her own family. It’s not surprising that in the description of the event again we come across an image that has already become familiar: “A agonia de seu nascimento. Até então eu nunca vira a coragem. A coragem de ser o outro que se é, de nascer do próprio parto, e de largar no chão o corpo antigo. (…) Já há alguns minutos eu me achava diante de uma criança. Fizera-se a metamorfose”. It is in a relationship that is not exactly maternal that motherhood gains an opening of meaning, that new ties between the narrator and Ophelia, between this girl and the world and with herself, can be experienced: here, motherhood (‘improper’) designates the opening of the door to disobedience, so that one can get out of family ties, so that one can make contact with the stranger, and thus modify oneself, “be the other that one is”. Thus we can return to the succession of dates of “Explanation” and see them in another way, complementary to this first: motherhood as a liberation from given relationships, possibility of recreation of the given, including motherhood itself, since the most maternal figure (including literally) of The Via Crucis of the Body is the transsexual Celsinho/Moleirão, “mais mulher que Clara”, her friend (‘biologically’ a woman) and rival.

6.

The strength and uniqueness of Clarice’s conception of fiction, and its relation to life, lies in this attention to those who/that are on the margins, as if the power to make fiction alive, its power to liberate, were related to the “power-of-life” of the radically other– and “attention” is another of the crucial words, also associated with the feminine, with her writing: “Lóri era uma mulher, era uma pessoa, era uma atenção, era um corpo habitado olhando a chuva grossa cair”. In her beautiful text on The Hour of the Star, Hélène Cixous points out the minutia of this attention and its consequences: “The greatest respect I have for any work whatsoever in the world is the respect I have for the work of Clarice Lispector. She has treated as no one else to my knowledge all the possible positions of a subject in relation to what would be “appropriation”, use and abuse of owning. And she has done this in the finest and most delicate detail. What her texts struggle against endlessly and on every terrain, is the movement of appropriation: for even when it seems most innocent it is still totally destructive. Pity is destructive; badly thought out love is destructive; illmeasured understanding is annihilating. One might say that the work of Clarice Lispector is an immense book of respect, book of the right distance. And as she tells us all the time, one can only attain the right distance through a relentless process of de-selfing, a relentless process of deegoization. The enemy as far as she is concerned is the blind self.” Thus, for Clarice, paying attention to the other would require a “depersonalization” or “objectification” of oneself, the entry into the neutral, the “non-birth” of oneself, movement without which her conversion into an “inhabited body” is not possible, the “Involuntary Incarnation” a story/crônica speaks of and that seems to be a good name for fiction according to C.L.: “Às vezes, quando vejo uma pessoa que nunca vi, e tenho algum tempo para observá-la, eu me encarno nela e assim dou um grande passo para conhece-la (…) Já sei que só daí a dias conseguirei recomeçar enfim a minha própria vida. Que, quem sabe, talvez nunca tenha sido própria, senão no momento de nascer, e o resto tenha sido encarnações”. Exemplified by the incarnation in a missionary and later in a prostitute (an always present pairing), the operation, which I have called oblique, often occurs before, or in relation to, figures of an extreme otherness, especially animals. It is a matter of adopting the perspective of the other and, in this way, estranging oneself (hence the importance of the intensity of the difference), as in “Dry Sketch of Horses” (“E veria as coisas como um cavalo vê”), or in “In Search of a Dignity”, in which the perspective of inversion is fully enunciated: “Ulisses, se fosse vista a sua cara sob o ponto de vista humano, seria monstruoso e feio. Era lindo sob o ponto de vista de cão. Era vigoroso como um cavalo branco e livre, só que ele era castanho suave, alaranjado, cor de uísque. Mas seu pelo é lindo como a de um energético e empinado cavalo. Os músculos do pescoço eram vigorosos e a gente podia pegar esses músculos nas mãos de dedos sábios. Ulisses era um homem. Sem o mundo cão” (The children’s book Almost True will pull this thread even further, as it is narrated by the “same” dog Ulysses, Clarice’s life companion, and it is up to her to transcribe or translate his barking into writing). However, the movement does not end there: we would not be faced with a true birth, a true becoming, a transformation, if such an incarnation were not to establish a relationship with life, were not to become alive itself, we would not be changed, it would not make us reborn. It is necessary, therefore, that the perspectivist  transformation be a way of looking at each other through the eyes of the others and that we be looked at by them, not only to see the world through the eyes of the others, but also to see ourselves by this gaze, see ourselves in another way, changing us. At least, this seems to be the “experiência maior” which Clarice speaks of, and that her fictions keep searching for: “Eu antes tinha querido ser os outros para conhecer o que não era eu. Entendi então que eu já tinha sido os outros e isso era fácil. Minha experiência maior seria ser o outro dos outros: e o outro dos outros era eu. “A experiência maior”, while becoming another from contact with the other is not reduced to being the others (an experience not flush with reverse egotism); rather, it constitutes an experiment of subjectivity anchored in transfiguration, through which, traversing the non-birth of oneself and the birth of the other in us, we access the “terra em que se revive” of which A Breath of Life speakswhere we recreate– or we are recreated. Fiction makes the other alive in us, to make our life another. It provides the liberty to question oneself and one’s ties to the world and to inquire of other relations, for which we do not yet have names, for which the question is the only possible name.

7.

Starting from a mirrored formulation of A Breath of Life, “A sombra de minha alma é o corpo. O corpo é a sombra de minha alma”, the young scholar of Clarice’s works Letícia Pilger said that the author’s relationship with the posthumous book could be defined in an analogous way: indeed, the fictional work is the shadow of Clarice’s life, provided we take the reciprocal as true, namely that Clarice’s life is also the shadow of her fiction. After all, to paraphrase Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, if everything, including fictional beings, is alive, then life is also a fiction, is something else – everything is one (becoming).

Alexandre Nodari is Professor of Brazilian Literature and Literary Theory at the Federal University of Paraná, where he is also a collaborator in the graduate programs in Humanities and Philosophy. He is also editor of the periodical Letras and coordinator of SPECIES – speculative anthropology research group: http://speciesnae.wordpress.com.

Notes

  • 06/09/2017

Ulysses, A Little Neurotic

, Ulysses, A Little Neurotic. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/09/06/ulisses-um-pouco-neurotico/. Acesso em: 09 October 2024.

Ulysses is not only the great mythical character who with a cunning idea ended the bloody, ten-year Trojan War, moving both men and gods. In presenting the Trojans with a wooden horse full of Greek soldiers, Ulysses, or Odysseus in the Greek reference, could then return home.

This return is one of the most beautiful works of literature and is recorded in the Odyssey. From here on, a whole legion of Ulysses (real and symbolic) are inaugurated in the literary realm. Starting with the obvious: the title of the novel by James Joyce – Irish author with whom Lispector has been compared many times. Ulysses narrates a short interval in the life of agent Leopold Bloom, in a kind of condensed Odyssey.

Yet another Ulysses is present in An Apprenticeship Or the Book of Delights. The novel turns this character into a professor of philosophy, Dori’s guide in the apprenticeship of pleasure and loving/sexual autonomy.

Even more prosaic, albeit literary, Ulysses was Clarice Lispector’s last dog, a mutt who stole cigarette butts and lined up for Coca-Cola and whiskey for visitors. He was so eccentric – “and a little neurotic, as it turns out” – that he earned a robust note in the infamous periodical O Pasquim.

The animal, which also went by the names of Vicissitude, Pitulcha, and Pornósio, was bought when the author’s two sons, Pedro and Paulo, had grown up and moved on. She “needed to love a living creature who gave me company.” 

If for a dog, “being with the owner means being with God,” it is not much different for some owners. Indeed, it is difficult to write about this category, animals, without falling into sappiness. Among a few authors, I highlight a stanza from Mayakovsky that is as poignant as it is affectionate:

I love the creatures.
When I spot a pup–
There’s a funny one–
all bald–
hangs round the baker’s—
I feel like I could cough my own liver up: 
Here, doggie
don’t be so shy, dear, take this!

In A Breath of Life, published a year after Lispector’s death, the narrator speaks extensively about Ulysses, the dog.

“I can speak a language that only my dog, the esteemed Ulysses, my dear sir, understands. Like this: dacoleba, tutiban, ziticoba, letuban. Joju leba, leba jan? Tutiban leba, lebajan. Atuoquina, zefiram. Jetobabe? Jetoban. That means something that not even the emperor of China would understand.” And furthermore: “My dog Ulysses and I are mutts. Ah what a good rain is falling. It’s manna from heaven and only Ulysses and I know it. Ulysses drinks ice-cold beer so adorably. One of these days it’s going to happen: my dog is going to open his mouth and speak. It will be glory.”    

Lispector solves the issue of the non-language of the animal in a no less creative way. If the dog were to be a state without language – “How envious I am of you, Ulysses, because you only are” –, in the children’s book Quase de verdade [published as “Almost True” in the collection The Woman Who Killed the Fish], Ulysses himself is the narrator of the story involving silly chickens and a proud fig tree.

A recently inaugurated bronze statue of Lispector is located in the Leme neighborhood, where she lived for more than a decade. Today the statue attracts hundreds of visitors, provoking the envy of the nearby statue of Drummond, further ahead along the Copacabana boardwalk. Beside the placid figure of the author, Ulysses is immortalized.

Perhaps if Ulysses could talk – or better, if he could read poetry–, he would recite for his owner the verses of Mayakovsky in the human version.

*Elizama Almeidais a PhD candidate in Materialities of Literature/University of Coimbra, lacuna‘s study group researcher and cultural assistant at Instituto Moreira Salles.

Notes

40 Years of The Hour of the Star

, 40 Years of The Hour of the Star. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/02/15/40-anos-de-a-hora-da-estrela/. Acesso em: 09 October 2024.

One of Clarice Lispector’s most translated books, The Hour of the Star was published almost 40 years ago by the José Olympio publishing house in October of 1977. 

The Rocco publishing house, which as of 1998 assumed the republication of Clarice’s works, is preparing a special volume to celebrate the occasion. Expected to arrive in bookstores in May, the hardcover publication will include six essays written by scholars of the author, among them Nádia Gotlib, Eduardo Portella, Colm Tóibín, Hélène Cixous, and Paloma Vidal.

With a new look, the book will also have an extra section with a facsimile reproduction of the novella’s manuscripts. A part of these manuscripts, in the care of the IMS since 2004, has been scanned and can be accessed here.

Original manuscript of The Hour of the Star / Clarice Lispector Collection / IMS

In addition to the originals for The Hour of the Star, the Clarice Lispector Collection, which is entirely catalogued and available for research in person, is made up of the manuscripts of the novels A Breath of Life and Água Viva, family correspondence, two paintings by the author, LPs, photographs, negatives, and a personal library with around one thousand items, such as books and periodicals.

Notes