By Lauren Davies
“She took off her clothes, opened the spigot all the way, and the cold water coursed over her body, making her shriek at the cold. That improvised bath made her laugh with pleasure. Her bathtub took in a marvellous view, beneath an already blazing sun. For a moment she became serious, still. The novel unfinished, the confession discovered. She became lost in thought, a wrinkle on her brow and at the corners of her lips. The confession. But the water was flowing cold down her body and noisily clamoring for her attention. A good heat was now circulating through her veins. Suddenly, she had a smile, a thought. He’d be back. He’d be back. She looked around at the perfect morning, breathing deep and feeling, almost with pride, her heart beating steadily and full of life. A warm ray of sunshine enveloped her. She laughed. He’d be back, because she was the stronger one.”
Clarice Lispector, ‘The Triumph’
The above extract is emblematic of much of Clarice Lispector’s writing: fragmented, yet penetrative; mystical, yet rooted in emotion. It is almost impossible to write about without inadvertently imitating her style: Shannon Burns, for the SRB, writes of the “mania” of her writing making us “pull away from the text, eyes dilated, smitten and shellshocked”. This is how the reader may imagine many of Lispector’s protagonists: shocked at the world, at their own depth of feeling. Lispector is sensitive to decadence, sparsity, and everything between, and it is thus impossible to comment on her work without becoming lost in it.
Born in Ukraine in 1920, Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector’s childhood was characterised by change. The family moved to Brazil in 1922, when Lispector was just an infant, to escape anti-Jewish pogroms and the aftermath of the First World War. Her mother’s death in 1930 after a long paralysis would come to haunt Lispector’s conception of her childhood, with emotional and spiritual paralysis appearing in much of her work (as noted by Burns alongside the ever-present theme of cockroaches in her children’s fiction). Lispector began publishing her writing as a student at the Law School of the University of Brazil, with her first novel Near to the Wild Heart being published in 1943. Over the next thirty-five years, Lispector’s novels and stories became well-respected in Brazil for their intellectual beauty. Her death in 1977, on her 57th birthday, marked the end of an era of immense literary production, the effects of which would long outlive their creator, prefigured by Luisa’s revelation, in Lispector’s short story “The Triumph”, after losing her lover, that “things hadn’t entirely lost their charm. They had a life of their own”.
Lispector was an enigma in Portuguese literature. Despite her prolific catalogue, she only appeared once on television and was rarely in one place – but nevertheless garnered an unstoppable Brazilian fanbase who are still active today. Critics wonder if she was perhaps all the more appealing for her inability to be pinned down, both literally and in her work. Poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote in an elegiac poem when the writer died in 1977 that she “came from one mystery / and departed for another”.
What characterises her work for many reviewers (who largely – and to Lispector’s dissatisfaction – compare this quality to everyone’s favourite modernist, Virginia Woolf) is her automatism: the urge to write with complete freedom from the conscious mind. Lispector comments on the writing process as simultaneously giving her life – otherwise “I am dead […] I’m speaking from my tomb” – and as entirely involuntary. In a rare afternote to her work, Lispector writes “It is not easy to remember how and why I wrote a story or a novel”: it is purgative. Having produced nine novels, almost ninety short stories and five children’s books, this is understandable. Yet, the remembrances Lispector can cast over her stories are remarkably penetrative: she realises “with surprise” that she had accidentally been writing about “my very own” grandmother in “Happy Birthday”, of her own irritating conscience in “Preciousness”, and of something “I still don’t understand” in “The Crime of the Mathematics Teacher”. It is as if writing, producing such rich, character-heavy stories, was an act of creating something necessary for her own catharsis, while also filling a void in the imaginative realm of literature which perfectly matched the needs of her contemporary readers.
The image that sticks with me about Lispector is one Moser describes of a life-changing fire in her apartment, September 1966. An unlit cigarette sparked a catastrophic fire which almost killed her; all Lispector could do was desperately try to put out the fire engulfing her papers with her hands. The work lost, Lispector struggled to bridge the gap that had emerged between her previous writing and the possibility of creating anew. But, having produced the worldwide phenomenon Agua Viva in 1973, Lispector proved – as with every new publication of hers – that she could reinvent her style, start anew, create as if for the first time.
Without sounding like Sergio Milliet, who somewhat fetishizes her work with the assertion that her work “penetrates” a new “virgin field of literature” with her psychological complexity (while exoticizing her “strange and unpleasant name”), I think mystery is a fundamental part of Lispector’s appeal – and equally her complexity. To pick up a novel like A Breath of Life is no easy task; the reader finds themselves perpetually re-reading to try and keep up with Lispector’s seamless prose. Objects become evocative of the universe itself, and observations as simple as “a bird flying by” become a meditation on the ethics of human suffering before you’ve had a chance to realise what you’re reading (“Obsession”). A Breath of Life is a larger-than-life dialogue between a character and her writer, a male-vs-female battle of paradoxes and meditations. It opens up a ‘chicken-or-egg’ debate of sorts, as the reader questions whose voice we are really listening to – and who we want to listen to: Angela Pralini, or the unnamed Godlike author. It is idiosyncratic in premise and execution.
Benjamin Moser’s 2011 commission for new translations of her work by publishing house New Directions allowed a resurgence of appreciation for Lispector’s writing in English-speaking countries. Moser’s work biographing Lispector has been fundamental in disseminating her bibliography in English since 2009, begging the question of why this wasn’t done sooner. Helen Cixous’ 1980s feminist angle was the closest we got in the late twentieth century. Thankfully, her popularity is only growing with the years.
Once you get lost in Lispector’s rich prose style, you won’t look back. Every line is a new idea, something close to life and spasmodic. Lispector says she was inspired by “the thing itself”. Her writing moves from her body to the reader’s as if without pause. This “thing itself”, I would argue, is visible in the work she has left behind: its profound impact on Brazilian literature, and the life of every reader who encounters her.
References
Burns, Shannon. “Monstrous Maternal: On Clarice Lispector”. Sydney Review of Books (August 2014)
Lozada, Lucas Iberico. “Overlooked No More: Clarice Lispector, Novelist Who Captivated Brazil”. The New York Times (December 2020).
Moser, Benjamin. “The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector”. The New Yorker (July 2015).
— Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. London: Penguin, 2014.
Bluestocking Oxford 