Dave's Book Blog: "Near to the Wild Heart" by Clarice Lispector

This amazing novel is not so much a stream of consciousness as a raging ocean. It's hard to stay afloat but if you can keep you head above water you're in for the surfing experience of your life.

Lispector's debut novel, NttWH was hailed as a masterpiece when it was first published, in Portuguese, in Brazil, in 1943. It won a prestigious literary prize and was described as a “literary revelation”, “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in Portuguese” and “the greatest debut novel a woman had written in the literature of Brazil”.

My first thought was that it was like James Joyce on amphetamines. This impression was reinforced (or, perhaps, preinforced) by the title, which, as the epigram makes clear, quotes JJ in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But that was suggested by her mentor. In fact Lispector said she hadn't read JJ and was influenced by the works of early modern Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza whose works she had been reading. In the book Joana’s husband Otavio is depicted as reading Spinoza.

My second thought was that it reminded me very much of Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes which also consists of a series of fragmented impressions.

There isn't a plot, as such. We first encounter the protagonist, Joana, as a young motherless child. After her father dies, she goes to live with her aunt and later goes to boarding school. She marries Otavio who himself continues his affair with his earlier fiancee, Lidia.

But the language! I was worried, at first, because Lispector herself said that rereading her work was like “swallowing my own vomit" and I had a feeling that NttWH is an outpouring of words, a sort of literary data dump, free association without structure. It's undoubtedly hauntingly original and beautifully expressed images but the torrent of words threatens to swamp the reader. Was I supposed to understand it or simply surf on the flood of language?

So far I have only read it once, slowly, and I need to revisit it (after a bit of a break) and when I do I promise I will update this blog, but at the moment I think I can catch a few glimpses of understanding which I tentatively offer.

The first section is entitled "The Father ..." and although we do actually meet Joana's father, I think this title refers to God because this section seems to be about creation and God is traditionally, in philosophy, regarded as the creator of the universe, the first cause of everything, and the ellipsis after 'The Father' suggests this beginning and then continuing.

The first thing mentioned is a typewriter (words are important as we shall shortly see) and then "the clock awoke"; this is the dawn of time. “There was a great still moment, with nothing inside it. She dilated her eyes, waited. Nothing came. Blank. But suddenly the day was wound up and everything spluttered to life again." This is a rewriting of Genesis, chapter one: “the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep."

The next thing to happen in the Bible is that God speaks "let there be light". The power of language to create is one of the themes of the book. In the first section Joana writes childish poems and makes up stories about her doll and pieces of cardboard; in the second section she thinks: “The moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say.” (Joana’s Day) Words make things happen (but not necessarily correctly). It isn't exactly the word that does the creation but the articulation of the thought: “Something thought didn’t exist before it was thought ... What you thought came to be thought.” (The Aunt) Don't forget that first image: the typewriter. Metafictionally, of course, this is a story, which is to say something created using words.

The third thing to happen in Genesis is that God starts to separate things. He divides light from darkness and then separates the chaos of waters into the water above (the sky) and the water below which then in itself separates into land and sea. Joana does this too, reflecting the psychological development of a human child who has to learn to create structure from a stream of sense impressions and learn that things have boundaries and develop concepts such as 'me' vs 'the world' and 'subject' vs 'object'. To start off, Joana doesn't grasp this: “Between her and the objects there was something but whenever she caught that something in her hand, like a fly, and then peeked at it ... she only found her own hand, rosy pink and disappointed. Yes, I know, the air, the air! But it was no use, it didn’t explain things.” (The Father ...) But as she develops the stream starts to soldify into objects; this too is a process of creation. Even time is represented by a series of moments (all those ticking clocks!).

Later, she will see the process of creating boundaries to segment and fragment reality as having drawbacks. For example, when two people marry they draw boundaries which co-create each other: “Just as the space surrounded by four walls has a specific value, provided not so much because it is a space but because it is surrounded by walls. Otavio made her into something that wasn’t her but himself.” (Joana’s walk) This curtails freedom: “The freedom she sometimes felt. It didn’t come from clear reflections, but a state that seemed to be made of perceptions too organic to be formulated as thoughts.” (Joana’s Joys) But there can be ecstatic moments, such as during sex, when this separation is reversed and oneness can be achieved: “All of her body and soul lost their limits, mixed together, merged into a single chaos, soft and amorphous, slow and with vague movements like matter that were simply alive. It was the perfect renewal, creation.” (Otavio)

In the second chapter of Genesis, we have the story of the Garden of Eden. This also has its parallels in this book. Her aunt and uncle see Joana as a “viper”: is she the serpent in the garden of Eden? From the second section she feels “The certainty that evil is my calling ... goodness makes me want to be sick. " (Joana's Day) She tempts Otavio away from Lidia, his first love; Lidia later calls Joana “evil”. But after marrying Joana, Otavio continues to see Lidia, making her first his mistress and then pregnant.

Is Joana not the creator God but the devil? After all, that first chapter was entitled "The Father ..." and it was the father who was using the typewriter. But Joana is also creating, for example, she writes little poems (scorned by her dad). The trouble is that Joana's creations are somehow false. We've already seen that she finds it difficult to express her thoughts accurately. We now learn that “In the imagination, for it alone has the power of evil, just the enlarged and transformed vision: beneath it the impassive truth. You lie and stumble into the truth.” (Joana’s Day)

Which is, I suppose, a definition for a work of fiction.

Whatever NttWH is meant to mean, there is masterful and spectacular use of language.

Selected quotes:

“Her father’s typewriter went clack-clack ... clack-clack-clack ... The clock awoke in dustless tin-dlen. The silence dragged out zzzzzz. What did the wardrobe say? clothes-clothes-clothes." (first line)
“It’s hard to suck in people like the vacuum cleaner does.” (The Father)
“Goodness was lukewarm and light. It smelled of raw meat kept for too long. Without entirely rotting in spite of everything.” (Joana's Day)
“Her thoughts were, once erected, garden statues and she looked at them as she followed her path through the garden." (Joana's Day)
“Light black birds flew distinct through the pure air, flew without a single human eye watching them.” (Joana's Walk)
“Circles were like the work of man, finished before death and not even God could finish them better. While straight, fine, freestanding lines - were like thoughts.” (Joana's Joys)
“The wind had nested in her hair, making her short fringe flap about like mad.” (... The Bath ...)
“Her aunt played with a house, a cook, a husband, a married daughter, visitors. Her uncle played with Maya, with work, with a farm, with games of chess, with newspapers.” (... The Bath ...)
“Around the dark table, in the light weakened by the chandelier’s dirty fringes, silence had also taken a seat that night.” (... The Bath ...)
“She had the feeling that life ran thick and slow inside her, bubbling like a hot sheet of lava.” (Otavio)
“She laughed out loud and glossed at herself quickly in the mirror to see the effect of her laughter on her face. No, it didn't light it up.” (Otavio)
“Sleeping was an adventure every night, falling from the easy clarity in which she lived into the same mystery, dark and cool, crossing darkness." (Otavio)
“She was traversed by long whole muscles. Thoughts ran down these polished ropes until they quivered there, in her ankles, where the flesh was as soft as a chicken’s.” (The Marriage)
“The dark circles under his eyes made him look like an old photograph.” (Refuge in the Teacher)
“The teacher was like a large neutered cat reigning over a cellar.” (Refuge in the Teacher)
“A clock’s chiming only ends when it ends, there is naught to be done. Either that or throw a rock at it, and after the noise of broken glass and springs, silence spilling out like blood. Why not kill the man?” (The Encounter with Otavio)
“When the door opened for Joana, he ceased to exist. He slid deep down inside himself, hovering in the penumbra of his own unsuspecting forest.” (Refuge in the Man)
“How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? ... Where does music go when it's not playing?” (Refuge in the Man)