Discovering the World     by Clarice Lispector, Translated by Giovanni Pontiero Original title: A Descoberta do mundo Original language: Portuguese Country: Brazil   Published by Carcanet Press Ltd Pub. Date: March 1992 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 652 pages ISBN: 0856359548 List Price: $34.00, £18.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £18.95

‘I am so mysterious that I do not understand myself’ CL

Clarice Lispector is universally recognised as being the most original and influential Brazilian woman writer of her time. In feminist circles she is revered as an intensely feminine writer who articulates the needs and concerns of every woman in pursuit of self-awareness. Critics worldwide have found much to admire in her introspective writings, both fictional and —non-fictional. Her obsessive questioning of human relationships and the social constraints which threaten rather than foster meaningful communication bring her to the conclusion that the problem of existence is that of language itself.

In 1984, seven years after she died of cancer, Lispector’s son edited and published the so–called crônicas or columns she had written for the Saturday edition of Rio’s leading newspaper, the Jornal do Brasil, from August 1967 until December 1973. The book comprises a miscellaneous c-ollection of aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialised stories, and essays, somewhat loosely defined as ‘chronicles’: a genre peculiar to Brazil which allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or weekly columns in the European press.

Lispector, the severe and impassioned novelist, confided that she did not find it easy to adapt to the freedom and intimacy of the weekly column. She asked; ‘Is the chronicle a story? a conversation? The revelation of one’s inner thoughts?’ She questioned the wisdom of tackling a genre which to some extent was alien to her introspective nature. Summing up her disquiet, she commented: ‘I am apprehensive. Writing too much and too often can contaminate the word’, or as Fernando Pessoa once said: ‘Speaking is the easiest way of becoming unknown’. Weighing up the contrasting demands of journalism and creative fiction, she shied from the stereotyped role of the garrulous agony aunt and frequently ignored the expectations of her readers with arbitrary forays into other genres. To her surprise, readers reacted positively to her unpredictable contributions and she was soon freely adapting the chronicle to suit her own idiosyncrasies.

The wide range of genres assembled in Discovering the World allows the reader to piece together the life and career of this singular personality. The material registers contrasting moods, one moment whimsical, the next grave and questioning, but whatever the topic, the chronicles are disarmingly frank.

Marriage to a fellow-student, Maury Gurgel Valente, — coincided with the publication of her first novel Near to the Wild Heart. Lispector was in her early twenties and unknown, but the unusual form and searing effect of this unsparing account of marriage and betrayal attracted the attention of several important literary critics. Sérgio Milliet and Antonio Candido recognized at once that a promising new writer had made her début. Their reviews spoke of a ‘sudden break’ with established criteria and of a radically different concept of fiction, which opened up new possibilities. Her début was timely.

Marriage to a diplomat meant foreign postings, and for some sixteen years Lispector was to be separated from her beloved Brazil, apart from brief return visits which only intensified her sense of exile and homesickness. She found many of the social obligations required of a diplomat’s wife extremely tedious. Writing became increasingly important for her spiritual survival and synonymous with a more meaningful form of existence, and only her work and children kept her sane during those years in alien surroundings. In 1959, she finally separated from her husband and returned to Rio with her children. Despite her Ukrainian Jewish ancestry, Lispector identified completely with Brazil and, most of all, with north–eastern Brazil. Memories of her childhood, especially in Recife, evoked the authentic Brazil where traditions and folklore had been preserved. A slight speech defect made her sound like a foreigner, but she was adamant that she had forged her soul and innermost thoughts with the Portuguese language, ‘a difficult language’, which she was to transform and even re–invent by means of conceptual refinements, subtle nuances and bold experiments with syntax.

Brazil’s other great writer of this century, João Guimarães Rosa, once told her: ‘Clarice, I don’t read you just for the literature, but in order to learn about life.’ Most readers would agree. Her dramatic insights can surprise and shock, amuse and distress. Such is the intensity and vehemence of her prose that it unleashes everything which is gentle and violent in this world of ours. And as she herself confided: ‘Everything affects me... I see too much, hear too much, everything demands too much of me.’

The intimate revelations of Discovering the World take us through the various stages of womanhood from childhood innocence to awakening perceptions of good and evil. The transition from adolescence to maturity is re-enacted in solemn rites, at once delicate and perilous. The lurking fear of ‘ambush’, both physical and emotional, is central to many of the narratives. Lispector stalked the uncertainties of life in fear and trepidation, yet anxious and determined to unravel the mystery of existence. She dubbed herself ‘an audacious coward’ and persisted in confronting life on those terms.

In all her work there is relentless self–questioning. Aware that she was speaking on behalf of all mankind, she was wont to say: ‘I am so mysterious that I do not understand myself.’ She saw the human condition as flawed, fragmentary and incomplete; the darker side of our nature as being compounded of fear, revulsion, cruelty and hatred. But once having recognised the inherent contradictions, she set about trying to reconcile freedom with restraint, humility with pride, solitude with the need to communicate. Strength had to be drawn from weakness, human reversals transformed into salvation.

The sense of wounded innocence and cruel deception is a constant theme in Lispector’s stories and chronicles. She is nevertheless convinced that ‘generosity (akin to love) is the very core of our humanity’ and that ‘wrath and hatred are the sorrow of not being able to love’. For her, ‘a world without love is lost’, and like most of her women characters she —confessed to ‘an enormous capacity for love’. Strong convictions, alas, are no guarantee of painless achievement. She understood that love could elevate the spirit but that it could also be deceptive. ‘Love’, she observed, ‘can never be a bad thing. But it often turns out to be hatred in disguise.’ Her characters invariably discover that love, whatever its nature, exacts some measure of self–abnegation. As she herself confided: ‘I often tire of people. Then it passes and I once more become curious and attentive.’ For Lispector, it was most essential that love should never become obtrusive. In one of her chronicles she describes the perfect companion: ‘Someone who will not stare too much and cause embarrassment. Someone who will know when to speak and when to be silent, someone who will adore me with discretion and accept both my virtues and faults.’

This might explain why she enjoyed most of all the company of children and her pet animals. Her conversations with young children provide some of the most engaging dialogues in Discovering the World. Lispector excels in expressing a child’s sense of things. Her maternal instincts were strong and she never tired of observing, guiding, questioning her own sons, but, above all, of listening to them and analysing their responses to the world around them. She insisted: ‘One must be gentle, very gentle when dealing with children.’ She associated children with spontaneity and a refreshing candour.

The constant presence of some pet animal gave her the same sense of compatibility and mutual understanding. As a child, her family nicknamed her ‘The Protector of Animals’, and she brought up her own children to love and care for domestic pets. The various species in her narratives and chronicles arouse a wide range of emotions: compassion, fear, amusement and horror, but in general terms she firmly believed that the beasts of the earth enjoy greater freedom and adapt more readily to ‘the grace of existence’. She explained: ‘An animal never substitutes one thing for another, never sublimates things as we humans are obliged to sublimate them.’ Pets offered the loyalty and integrity she often found lacking in human beings.

The haunting fear and mistrust of her own inner nature intrigued Lispector as she struggled to unravel the mysteries of life and death and the ultimate meaning of existence. The nature of God, matter, spirit, and human misery is explored time and time again throughout her work. She asks: ‘What is anguish?’ then gives her own answer. ‘This search of mine for meaning is in itself a kind of anguish. This is something which starts with life, for when they cut the umbilical cord there is pain and separation’. Like the man who came close to suicide in one of her chronicles, we can only survive by finding a register mid–way between pianissimo and fortissimo. The temptation to abdicate was often overwhelming. But in the end, Lispector saw life as a mandate. Death held no fears for her, only its prelude.

Guided by inner rather than external voices, solitude and silence were an essential part of her spiritual armour. She agreed with Thomas Merton that ‘true solitude separates a human being from others so that he or she might develop all that is good in their heart and soul’. She astutely observed that ‘the solitude of others saves us from solitude, just as self–imposed solitude can save us from being submerged by the excessive love of others’. An habitual insomniac, she learned how to value silence and converse with the night. In her own words: ‘There is a great silence inside me. And this silence has been the fount of my words. And from this same silence has come the most precious thing of all, namely, silence itself.’

Solitude and silence were conducive to ‘a state of grace’ (another of her favourite phrases), which she was careful to differentiate from inspiration or that spiritual state often attributed to saints. The ‘state of grace’ to which she referred was that enjoyed by ordinary people who suddenly become totally real, because they are ordinary, human and recognisable, ‘an experience capable of redeeming the human condition even while emphasising its cruel limitations.’ The spiritual world Lispector inhabited, like that of her fiction, was woven from fragments of experience and intuition. Her search for a faceless god was also a search for ‘lost essence’, a search for unassailable integrity and wholeness.

Fleeting references throughout Discovering the World identify the writers at home and abroad who made most impact (she preferred the word impact to influence) on her. Critics have suggested links with Kafka, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Camus and Faulkner. She herself singled out the names of D.H.Lawrence, whom she described as ‘pure fire’, and of Hermann Hesse, whose seminal work, Steppenwolf, left her spellbound. She defines the book in one of her chronicles as a ‘spiritual voyage’ and classifies Hesse’s novel as a genuine landmark. Lispector clearly interpreted this book as Hesse himself intended: as ‘a tale of griefs and needs; still not a book of a man despairing, but of a man believing.’

Her links with the philosophers and writers of the so–called Existentialist Movement have been exhaustively researched and sometimes over-stated. Echoes of Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre can be found in many of her narratives and essays. She shared their anguished awareness of nothingness and encroaching absurdity which renders life intolerable and meaningless. She experienced the same frustration and nausea in the face of life’s contradictions and the uncertain nature of human freedom. Endless confrontations with human weakness — her own as well as that of others — when confronted by the enormity of life, led her to conclude: ‘We can use our defects as crutches just as easily as our qualities’ and continuous errors helped her find new paths.

Inevitably Lispector is compared with Virginia Woolf. Both women were concerned with the inner life of feelings and thoughts and forged a language of their own to describe the fragility of existence and its dark, enigmatic forces. Emotionally they were both prone to alternating moods of elation and depression, of expansiveness and withdrawal. In both writers there are the same intensive perceptions of sound, sight, touch, the same irresistible urge ‘to brush, scrape and kindle ...’ And most important of all, they shared a belief that plots do not matter, what goes on inside the characters’ minds does. Lispector dismissed any direct influence. She claimed only to have read Virginia Woolf’s novels some years after the publication of her own first novel Near to the Wild Heart.

Lispector’s prose, like that of the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield whose work she deeply appreciated, appears to flow easily and naturally, governed by feeling and observation rather than by any apparent calculation of its effect. Both built their narratives on fragments of memory and experience with single–minded intensity. Both writers excelled in shorter narrative forms, their eye focused on the moment, the instantaneous, fleeting impressions amidst cross–currents of fear and hope.

Both imposed their own shape on the seemingly intractable realities of life in the shared belief that art is not an attempt on the part of the artist to reconcile existence with his or her vision: it is an attempt to create his or her world within this world.

The enemy of creative lies, she was anxious to enlighten rather than to mystify her readers. Like Mansfield, she was labelled both witch and mystic, but neither of these descriptions does her justice. If she could be stark and pessimistic, she could also be droll and witty. Her sharp eye misses nothing of the human foibles and absurdities around her. The chronicles include amusing encounters with society women, loquacious taxi–drivers, the business–like madam of a brothel, beggars with their own code of honour, unpredictable housemaids who can be formidable and wreak havoc, and an envious nanny whose social ambitions outstrip those of her mistress.

The chronicles also confirm that Lispector was by no means indifferent to political and social problems. The temptation to see her as a tragic muse has misled some critics and readers. The image is not merely false but a travesty of her true nature. Lispector was an astute observer of human concerns. The economic plight and social divisions in her native Brazil were never far from her thoughts. As a child, she had seen the most degrading poverty in the North–eastern provinces, causing her ‘to tremble with impotent rage’; in Rio, the starving poor pricked her conscience, and the future of the Brazilian Indians concerned her as deeply as the exploitation of the indigenous population in Portugal’s African colonies. She wrote: ‘Frankly, I feel socially committed. Everything I write is tied, at least in my mind, to the real world in which we live. Perhaps this aspect of my writing will become stronger one day.’ She wrote those words in December 1967, and this social concern had indeed become stronger by the time she came to write her penultimate novel The Hour of The Star some ten years later. The plight of her heroine, the ugly, illiterate, impoverished Macabea, who has made her way from Alagoas to the slums of Rio, sums up the Brazilian social drama: the same drama which perplexed and disturbed Lispector as a child in Recife and later influenced her decision to study law in the hope that she might help to reform the country’s penal system. When pressed to comment on the question of literature and commitment, she replied: ‘It would indeed be strange if I were to remain indifferent to life in my own country. I may not write about social problems but I live them intensely.’ Even in her stories for children there is a gentle plea for racial tolerance and social equality. And her mistrust of politicians and their abuse of power is quite unambiguous in two chronicles: ‘The Leader’s Dream’ and ‘In Memory of the Man who Stood Down’.

Her political voice may have been understated, her note of censure discreet, but her solidarity on behalf of justice and human dignity was beyond question. She needed no convincing that charity is a futile substitute for social justice and firmly believed that hunger spiritualises no one. Her sentiments echoed those of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brazil’s most politically committed poet this century, when he declared: ‘Time is my concern, time now, men now, life now.’

First and foremost, however, was her commitment to writing. In a television interview, she confessed: ‘When I am not writing, I am dead.’ She believed that writing could turn a human being into a divinity. And when the words flowed in harmony with thought and feeling, she experienced something akin to ecstasy. She staunchly defended her individual freedom as a writer and insisted: ‘If there exists such a thing as expression, then let it emanate from what I am.’ Appropriately enough, the last item in this collection leaves us with the question which was to haunt her all her life: ‘Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?’ That was the price she paid for the rare insights she so memorably expressed.