A brief survey of the short story part 56:
Clarice Lispector
This darkly addictive Brazilian writer is more concerned with perceptions of objects than conventional plot structures
Chris Power
Wednesday 5 March 2014 13.48 GMT
In The Apple in the Dark, the novel Clarice Lispector completed in 1956, she writes about a man "abashed in front of the white page". His task is "not to write down something that already existed but to create something that would then come to exist". This challenge is one all Lispector's work confronts as it cuts away, sentence by sentence, at conventional conceptions of reality. Again and again she and her characters – the latter often against their will – penetrate beyond the everyday into what she describes in one story as "stranger activity". Her vivid and mysterious bibliography is the fascinating record of this process.
In Brazil (her family, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms, emigrated from Ukraine in 1921 when she was still an infant), Clarice Lispector became that unusual combination: an avant-garde artist who is also a household name. Fame arrived in the 1960s, two decades after she published her first book and a decade before she died, aged 56, from ovarian cancer. She had no particular desire for fame, just as she had no particular desire to be identified as an experimental writer. She never understood why readers found her work opaque, while the fact that she consistently attempted new things in her writing was, for her, simply necessary to her aim: "In painting, as in music and literature, what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and more difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye."
The difficulty is plainly discernible, the delicacy less so. "Probing the way in which consciousness perceives objects," one of her translators writes, "Lispector creates a world of exciting and terrifying perceptions." This world does not exclude tenderness or humour, but it is often coloured by an existential horror; as a reader of The Buffalo reported, "the whole story seemed to be made of entrails". In Love (1952), a Rio de Janeiro housewife, Ana, is jolted from her complacency by a glimpse from a tram of a blind man chewing gum, the mechanical movement of his jaw making him "appear to smile then suddenly stop smiling, to smile and stop smiling". Ana flees the tram and takes refuge in the city's Botanical Garden, but the way she perceives the world has altered radically:
"And suddenly, uneasily, she felt she had fallen into a trap. In the Garden a secret labour was being done that she was starting to perceive. On the trees the fruits were black, sweet as honey. On the ground there were dry seeds full of circumvolutions, like little rotting brains. The bench was stained with purple juices. The waters rustled with intense softness. The luxurious legs of a spider were fastened to the tree trunk. The crudity of the world was restful. And death was not what we thought."
As those last lines suggest, Ana's nightmarish vision is not so easily characterised as nightmare alone. Lispector's relationship with religion was complex but she had a mystic's regard for any level of perception that transcended blinkered normality, no matter how dreadful the revelation. Epiphanies of the Joycean type are a constant throughout her shifting body of work, but they are unusually raw and vertiginous. In one story the narrator declares that she "suddenly saw the chasm of the world. What I saw was as anonymous as a belly split open for an intestinal operation"; elsewhere a woman breaks a tooth and "instead of going to the dentist, she threw herself out of the apartment window". Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser compares her to Kafka, in that her investigations often locate, in a spiritual sense, "locked doors, blocked passageways and generalised punishment". This moment-to-moment uncertainty makes reading her stories, in Caetano Veloso's description, "a dangerous adventure".
This sense of adventure applies not only to Lispector's concepts: it is endemic at the level of the sentence too. Paradoxes and sudden shifts lie in wait, and inattentive readers can rapidly lose their way. A story like The Hen and the Egg begins plainly enough – "In the morning I see the egg on the kitchen table" – but quickly spirals off into something like a prayer, a philosophical meditation, a language game and an absurdist monologue, flipping between grace, humour and unease. Moser draws a parallel between it and the "cubist portraits in words" attempted by Gertrude Stein. In The Fifth Story, another masterpiece, a woman prepares a mixture of sugar, flour and gypsum to kill the cockroaches that emerge in her apartment each night "like evil secrets" (cockroaches, a recurring symbol, appear even in Lispector's books for children). The story begins five times, the line "I was complaining about the cockroaches" becoming an embarkation point for a series of hypnotic and troubling explorations of death and morality.
The structure of The Fifth Story echoes Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. In the Exordium, that book's opening section, Kierkegaard presents us with a man who tells himself the Old Testament story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac four times, each version changing the emphasis as a cubist painting might simultaneously present a face from multiple perspectives. The man is trying to understand the story, but the repetition suggests the failure of the attempt. ForZadie Smith this curious beginning to Kierkegaard's treatise is "a rehearsal: it lays out a series of rational explanations the better to demonstrate their poverty as explanations", and Lispector's narrator, too, is hunting a meaning that continues to elude her. When she views the "huge and brittle" dead cockroaches from her "frigid height as a human being", she is like a cruel god observing slaughtered innocents, her motives increasingly unknowable even to herself. "Using her experimental technique," writes K David Jackson, "Lispector has created another kind of labyrinth of stories, as in a hall of mirrors or a recurring dream full of the statues of death."
Labyrinths proliferate, both in Lispector's work and in critical responses to it. Her translator Giovanni Pontiero notes that "she is less interested in conventional plot structure than a labyrinth of perceptions". Blake Butler finds her sentences "wired with psychosis, fixated on some kind of understanding of the dark maze of every day". In the late story In Search of Dignity (1974), a woman becomes lost first in the endless corridors of the Maracanã stadium, and later in the suddenly unrecognisable streets of Rio. Lispector's fiction swarms with such moments of threatening intensity. The feminist theoristHélène Cixous, who took up Lispector's work in the 1970s as a prime example of what she calls "écriture féminine", identifies "an intense worry" running through her work. In its blend of high tension and domestic settings (the most common Lispector character is the housewife) it recalls elements of Katherine Mansfield, whom Lispector adored, and Virginia Woolf, whom she read only after reviewers noted similarities between them.
In fact Lispector was often compared with writers – Woolf, Joyce, Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre – whom she then went on to read for the first time. The critics' attempts are understandable: the more singular a writer, the more they try to find comparisons that ensnare the work. But read enough Lispector and you realise she has a habit of slipping these nets; she both is and is not a feminist, a postmodernist, an absurdist, a mystic. Rather than find an existing style that suited her project, she embarked on an individual quest to locate, as she put it in her first novel, "the symbol of the thing in the thing itself": the word that doesn't merely gesture towards something, but becomes it. Twenty years later, in 1962, she told an audience at the University of Texas that "there are some young writers who are a bit over-intellectualised. It seems to me that they are not inspired by, shall we say, 'the thing itself', but by other literature, 'the thing already literalised'." In her writing she was prepared to dispatch with all else – even words themselves – to get at this essence:
"Since one feels obliged to write, let it be without obscuring the space between the lines with words … The word fishes for something that is not a word. And when that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be thrown away with relief."
Translations from the work are by Benjamin Moser, Giovanni Pontiero and Alexis Levitin.
THE GUARDIAN
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