I started reading Clarice Lispector’s, The Passion According to G.H. but then I
put it down because I had to read something else. This past weekend I picked it
up again and it is brilliant.
It is the type of writing that does things to your
brain, it makes muscles work there that you forgot how to use or didn’t know
where there.
I haven’t finished it so I can’t do a true review but I
know enough that I want others to know about her (if you don’t already).
Below is an article on her from The New Yorker. Read
it if you have time. I don’t have any today, thus this copy and paste, but even
better, get one of her books and untangle yourself in her world.
The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector
By Benjamin Moser
By Benjamin Moser
July 10, 2015
Catholic communicants are asked at Easter, “Do
you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin?” The
question preserves a conflation, now rare, of glamour and sorcery: glamour was
a quality that confounds, shifts shapes, invests a thing with a mysterious
aura; it was, as Sir Walter Scott wrote, “the magic power of imposing on the
eyesight of spectators, so that the appearance of an object shall be totally
different from the reality.”
The legendarily beautiful
Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky
jewelry of a grande dame of midcentury Rio de Janeiro, met our
current definition of glamour. She spent years as a fashion journalist and knew
how to look the part. But it is as much in the older sense of the word that
Clarice Lispector is glamorous: as a caster of spells, literally enchanting,
her nervous ghost haunting every branch of the Brazilian arts.
Her spell has grown
unceasingly since her death. Then, in 1977, it would have seemed exaggerated to
say she was her country’s preëminent modern writer. Today, when it no longer
does, questions of artistic importance are, to a certain extent, irrelevant.
What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For
them, reading Clarice Lispector is one of the great emotional experiences of
their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend
told a reader decades ago, using the single name by which she is universally
known. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.”
The connection between literature and witchcraft
has long been an important part of the Clarice mythology. That mythology, with
a powerful boost from the Internet, which magically transforms rumors into
facts, has developed ramifications so baroque that it might today be called a
minor branch of Brazilian literature. Circulating unstoppably online is an
entire shadow oeuvre, generally trying, and failing, to sound profound, and
breathing of passion. Online, too, Clarice has acquired a posthumous shadow
body, as pictures of actresses portraying her are constantly reproduced in lieu
of the original.
If the technology has changed
its forms, the mythologizing itself is nothing new. Clarice Lispector became
famous when, at the end of 1943, she published “Near to the Wild Heart.” She
was a student, barely twenty-three, from a poor immigrant background. Her first
novel had such a tremendous impact that, one journalist wrote, “we have no
memory of a more sensational debut, which lifted to such prominence a name
that, until shortly before, had been completely unknown.” But only a few weeks
after that name was becoming known she left Rio with her husband, a diplomat.
They would live abroad for almost two decades.
Though she made regular
visits home, she would not return definitively until 1959. In that interval,
legends flourished. Her odd foreign name became a subject of speculation—one
critic suggested it might be a pseudonym—and others wondered whether she was,
in fact, a man. Taken together, the legends reflect an uneasiness, a feeling
that she was something other than she seemed.
In the eighty-five stories that she wrote,
Clarice Lispector conjures, first of all, the writer herself. From her earliest
story, published when she was nineteen, to the last, found in scratchy
fragments after her death, we follow a lifetime of artistic experimentation
through a vast range of styles and experiences. This literature is not for
everyone: even certain highly literate Brazilians have been baffled by the
cult-like fervor she inspires. But for those who instinctively understand her,
the love for the person of Clarice Lispector is immediate and inexplicable.
Hers is an art that makes us want to know the woman; she is a woman who makes
us want to know her art. Through her stories we can trace her artistic life,
from adolescent promise through assured maturity to the implosion as she
nears—and summons—death.
But something more surprising
appears when these stories are at last seen in their entirety, an
accomplishment whose significance the author herself cannot have been aware of,
for it could only appear retrospectively. This accomplishment lies in the
second woman she conjures. Clarice Lispector was a great artist; she was also a
middle-class wife and mother. If the portrait of the extraordinary artist is
fascinating, so is the portrait of the ordinary housewife, whose life is the
subject of her stories. As the artist matures, the housewife, too, grows older.
When Lispector is a defiant adolescent filled with a sense of her own
potential—artistic, intellectual, sexual—so are the girls in her stories. When,
in her own life, marriage and motherhood take the place of precocious
childhood, her characters grow up, too. When her marriage fails, when her
children leave, these departures appear in her stories. When the author, once
so gloriously beautiful, sees her body blemished by wrinkles and fat, her
characters see the same decline in theirs; and when she confronts the final
unravelling of age and sickness and death, they appear in her fiction as well.
This is a record of woman’s
entire life, written over the course of a woman’s entire life. As such, it
seems to be the first such total record written in fiction, in any language.
This sweeping claim requires qualifications. A wife and a mother; a bourgeois,
Western, heterosexual woman’s life. A woman who was not interrupted: a
woman who did not start writing late, or stop for marriage or children, or
succumb to drugs or suicide. A woman who, like so many male writers, began in
her teens and carried on to the end. A woman who, in demographic respects, was
exactly like most of her readers.
Their story had only been
written in part. Before Clarice, a woman who wrote throughout her life about that
life was so rare as to be previously unheard of. The claim seems extravagant,
but I have not identified any predecessors.
The qualifications are important, but even when
they are dropped it is astonishing to realize how few women were able to create
such full bodies of work. And the women who did were precisely those exempted
from the obstacles that kept most women from writing. These are the barriers
Tillie Olsen adumbrated in her famous 1962 essay, “Silences in Literature,” the
barriers that led to women constituting, in Olsen’s calculation, “one out of
twelve” writers in the twentieth century. “In our century as in the last,”
Olsen wrote, “almost all distinguished achievement has come from childless
women.” Edith Wharton was far from middle-class; Colette hardly lived, or wrote
about, a conventional bourgeois life. Others—Gabriela Mistral, Gertrude
Stein—had, like many male writers, wives of their own.
Clarice Lispector, as her
stories make clear, was intimately acquainted with these barriers. Her
characters struggle against ideological notions about a woman’s proper role;
face practical entanglements with husbands and children; worry about money;
confront the private despair that leads to drinking, madness, or suicide. Like
so many women writers everywhere, she was ignored by publishers, agonizingly,
for years; she was consistently placed in a separate (lower) category by
reviewers and scholars. (She persisted anyway, once remarking that she did not
enjoy being compared to Virginia Woolf because Woolf had given
up: “The terrible duty is to go to the end.”)
But her sympathy for silent
and silenced women haunts these stories. The earliest ones, written when
Clarice was in her teens and early twenties, often feature a restless girl in
conflict with a man, as in “Jimmy and I”:
Mama, before she got married,
according to Aunt Emília, was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with
thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came
Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about … liberty and
equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter.
If these women are sometimes
crushed by imposing, fascinating men, they become more assertive as the author
grows older. But it is a different kind of assertion. The strident feminism of
Clarice’s student years gives way to something less explicit, the characters
stop flaunting thoughts about “liberty and equality for women.” They simply
live their lives with as much dignity as they can muster. In art as in life,
that is not always very much.
Many are silent. The
grandmother in “Happy Birthday” surveys the petty mediocrities she has spawned
with wordless revulsion. The Congolese pygmy in “The Smallest Woman in the
World” has no words to express her love. The hen in “A Chicken” has no words to
say that she is about to give birth—and thus cannot be killed. In “The Burned
Sinner and the Harmonious Angels,” an adulteress utters not a single word, and
in the end she is burned as a witch. At the execution, her husband admonishes
the crowd, “Beware a woman who dreams.”
Clarice was nine when Virginia Woolf asked a
question she later quoted: “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the
poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” The question, Woolf
believed, applied as much to women of her own day as it did to women of
Shakespeare’s. How did Clarice Lispector—of all people—succeed at a
time when so many other women were silenced?
She was born on December 10,
1920, to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. It was a time of chaos, famine,
and racial war. Her grandfather was murdered; her mother was raped; her father
was exiled, penniless, to the other side of the world. The family’s tattered
remnants washed up in northeastern Brazil, in 1922. There, her brilliant
father, reduced to peddling rags, barely managed to keep his family fed; there,
when Clarice was not quite nine, her mother died of her wartime injuries.
Her sister Elisa wrote that
their liberal father, whose own desire to study had been thwarted by
anti-Semitism, “was determined for the world to see what kind of daughters he
had.” With his encouragement, Clarice pursued her education far beyond the
level allowed even girls far more economically advantaged. Only a couple of
years after reaching the capital, Clarice entered one of the redoubts of the
élite, the National Law Faculty of the University of Brazil. At the law school,
Jews (zero) were even more rare than women (three).
Her law studies left little
mark. She was already pursuing her vocation into the newsrooms of the capital,
where her beauty and brilliance made a dazzling impression. She was, her boss
wrote, “a smart girl, an excellent reporter, and, in contrast to almost all
women, actually knows how to write.” On May 25, 1940, she published her
earliest known story, “The Triumph.” Three months later, at age
fifty-five, her father died. Before her twentieth birthday, Clarice was an
orphan. In 1943, she married a Catholic man—unheard of at the time for a Jewish
girl in Brazil. At the end of that year, shortly after she published her first
novel, the couple left Rio. In short order, she had left not only her family,
her ethnic community, and her country, but also her profession, journalism, in
which she had a burgeoning reputation.
She found exile intolerable,
and during her fifteen years abroad her tendency toward depression grew
sharper. But, despite its disadvantages, perhaps exile—this series of
exiles—explains how she managed to write. Her immigrant background left her
less susceptible to the received ideas of Brazilian society. And in purely
financial terms her marriage was a step up. She was never rich, but as long as
she was married she did not have to work on anything but writing. She had two
children, but she also had full-time help. This meant free hours every day: a
room of her own.
Traditionally “female” subjects—marriage and
motherhood, kids and clothes—had, of course, been written about before. But had
any writer ever described a seventy-seven-year-old lady dreaming of coitus with
a pop star, or an eighty-one-year-old woman masturbating? Half a century or
more after they were written, many of Clarice’s stories, read in an entirely
different age, have lost none of their novelty.
New subjects require new
language. Part of Clarice’s odd grammar can be traced to the powerful influence
of the Jewish mysticism that her father introduced her to. But another part of
its strangeness can be attributed to her need to invent a tradition. As anyone
who reads her stories from beginning to end will see, they are shot through by
a ceaseless linguistic searching, a grammatical instability, that prevents them
from being read too quickly.
The reader—not to mention the
translator—is often tripped up by their nearly Cubist patterns. In certain late
stories, the difficulties are obvious. But many of Clarice’s reorderings are
subtle, easy to miss. In “Love,” for example, we read: “They were growing up,
taking their baths, demanding for themselves, misbehaved, ever more complete
moments.” The sentence, like so many of Clarice’s, makes sense if read in a
quick glance—and then, examined again, slowly, begins to dissolve. In “Happy
Birthday,” amidst an awkward celebration, a child verbalizes an awkward pause:
“Their mother, comma!”
In “Why This World,” my
biography of Clarice, I examined her roots in Jewish mysticism and the
essentially spiritual impulse that animated her work. As the Kabbalists found
divinity by rearranging letters, repeating nonsensical words, parsing verses,
and seeking a logic other than the rational, so did she. With some exceptions,
this mystic quality, which can make her prose nearly abstract, is less visible
in her stories than in novels such as “The Passion According to G.H.” or “The
Apple in the Dark.” But to see Clarice’s writing as a whole is to understand
the close connection between her interest in language and her interest in
what—for lack of a better word—she called God.
In her stories, the divine
erupts beneath carefully tended everyday lives. “She had pacified life so
well,” she writes in one story, “taken such care for it not to explode.” When
the inevitable explosions come, shifts in grammar announce them long before
they appear in the plot. Laura, the bored, childless housewife in “The
Imitation of the Rose,” has a “painstaking taste for method”—until, as she is
thinking about how to explain herself to her friend Carlota, her grammar starts
to slide.
Carlota would be stunned to
learn that they too had a private life and things they never told, but she
wouldn’t tell, what a shame not to be able to tell, Carlota definitely thought
she was just tidy and mundane and a little annoying, and if she had to be
careful not to burden other people with details, with Armando she’d sometimes
relax and get pretty annoying, which didn’t matter because he’d pretend to be
listening without really listening to everything she was telling him, which
didn’t ever bother her, she understood perfectly well that her chattering tired
people out a bit, but it was nice to be able to explain how she hadn’t found
any meat even if Armando shook his head and wasn’t listening, she and the maid
chatted a lot, actually she talked more than the maid, and she was also careful
not to pester the maid who sometimes held back her impatience and could get a
little rude, it was her own fault because she didn’t always command respect.
These signals can be much
more concise, as in “The Passion According to G.H.,” when another housewife
recounts the mystical shock she underwent the day before. Remembering herself
as she then was, G.H. says, “I finally got up from the breakfast table, that
woman.” The transformation described in the novel—then to now, yesterday to
today, her to me, first person to third—is resumed in a breezy anacoluthon, the
break in grammar perfectly symbolizing the break in this woman’s life. Like so
many of Clarice’s best phrases, it is elegant precisely because it
disregards the mannered conventions that are the elegance of belles
lettres.
“In painting as in music and
literature,” she wrote, “what is called abstract so often seems to me the
figurative of a more delicate and difficult reality, less visible to the naked
eye.” As abstract painters sought to portray mental and emotional states
without direct representation, and modern composers expanded traditional laws
of harmony, Clarice undid reflexive patterns in grammar. She often had to
remind readers that her “foreign” speech was not the result of her European
birth or an ignorance of Portuguese.
Nor, needless to say, of the
proper ways women presented themselves. As a professional fashion writer, she
reveled in her characters’ appearances. And then she dishevelled their dresses,
smudged their mascara, deranged their hair, enchanting well-composed faces with
the creepier glamour Sir Walter Scott described. With overturned words, she
conjured an entire unknown world—conjuring, too, the unforgettable Clarice
Lispector: a female Chekhov on the beaches of Guanabara.