Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector
“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to
the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted,
alone amidst a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of
shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad ligthclad figures of
children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.” It is from this
passage from Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, that the late Brazilian-Jewish writer Clarice Lispector
takes her epigraph for her astonishing first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. Indeed her debt to Joyce is clear. Published
in Rio in 1943, the novel is nothing if not a tribute to the language he
unleashed.
Still, it is more the
spirit of Virginia Woolf who haunts these lonely pages. It is really from Woolf,
from her particularly feminine oppression and longing, that this novel takes
its heartbeat and blood. Jumping back and forth in time, the story concerns
itself with the startling interior landscape of a frustrated, deeply introspective,
almost monstrously imaginative child and young woman known only as Joana. In
this age of Facebook and Tumblr, one might be tempted to mistake the story for just
another drunken foray into the temple of Self, but one would be wrong. As with most
great modernist fiction, the fons et
origo of this novel is Character with a capital C, a single individual whose
perspective, whose psychology, not only subsumes and comprises the story’s plot
and setting (for what little they mean), but actually proves macroscopic in its obsessive focus on
the self, on the intricate clockwork of mind and heart and soul, so that what
one gets in the end is not just a story of a woman but a story of the world.
Charged, poetic, at points
as angular, dissonant, and unpredictable as Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” such
fiction is at first quite demanding to read. Those not experienced with poetry
will feel the weight of her words, the almost reckless invention of her prose. Given
some patience, some faith, they are sure to be moved. Yet perhaps the most
rewarding part such modernist fiction as Near
to the Wild Heart is that one’s very notion of reading is changed. One sees
freshly, with bold, new eyes. Freed from the tyranny of plot, such fiction delights
in subtlety, in complexity, in the riddle of human things. Nothing is clear-cut,
nothing certain; one stands astonished, mouth and mind agape. As Adorno puts
it, in speaking of art in general:
Artworks
that unfold to contemplation and thought without any remainder are not
artworks…every artwork is a picture puzzle, a puzzle to be solved, but this
puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation, the
preestablished routing of its observer.”*
This summer set yourself a
challenge and read this book (or any others by Lispector or Woolf). You’ll be happy you did.
Clarice (formerly
Chaya) Lispector (1920-1977) was a Brazilian novelist and short
story writer who was born in
Chechelnyk, Podolio, Ukraine on the ninth of December 1920. She was the
youngest daughter of a Jewish family. They were targeted during pogroms that
happened during the political turmoil of the early twentieth century. Following
the destruction of Ukraine in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian
Civil War, the family fled to Romania. Still, harried, still anxious, they left
Romania, sailing to Brazil in 1922, where they settle first to Maceió, Alagoas,
and then in Pernambuco. There she
was educated at the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro and Ginásio Pernambucano
where she encountered Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf,
a novel that convinced her that she was meant to write. Journalist, activist, author of
numerous prize-winning novels and short story collections (most of which have
been translated into English), she published her last novel, A Hora da estrela or The Hour of the Star, in 1977, the year she
succumbed to ovarian cancer.+
* from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, London: Continuum, 2002), p.158.
+ Thanks
to The European Graduate School for this excellent short biography.
Peter Adam Nash
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