Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart - When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy!

My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read.  I read Alison Entrekin’s English translation because 1) I did not have a Portuguese text handy and 2) I figured it would be too hard for me, which I think is right.  I had enough trouble with the book in English.

When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy!  (162)

For 90 pages, Lispector alternates scenes of Joana’s childhood and the beginnings of her marriage.  Then we get a hundred pages of the marriage falling apart.  The husband has, for example, a pregnant girlfriend, although that is more of a symptom of the collapse.  The real cause is that Joana is psychologically, hmm hmm hmm, unusual.

How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it. (101)

That is maybe the strangest clear thought she expresses.  Joana’s stream of thoughts are generally much more abstract.  Entirely abstract.  Here is the ending of one abstract paragraph moving into the beginning of another.

Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession.

Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form – it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form! – and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity. (36)

Joana’s thinking, outside of the childhood scenes, if often unconnected, or just barely connected, to a scene, or anything material at all.  A lot of this:

How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? would a triangle be born fatally? things were rich…  Where does music go when it’s not playing? (164, ellipses mine)

I would describe passages like this as philosophical if I understood how Joana moves from one thought to another, which I generally did not.  Sometimes I felt a move toward Surrealism, although without the playfulness or materiality I enjoy in Surrealism.

The man was a child an amoeba flowers whiteness warmth like sleep for now is time for now is life even if it is later… (165, ellipses in original)

This is Joana falling asleep, so here I did know what Lispector was depicting.  I could, in this section, draw a connection between my own perceptions of what I call “reality” and Lispector’s representation of an aspect of reality, the process and psychology of falling asleep.  But mostly I found that hard to do.

Another possibility is that Joana is meant to be a pathological case study, repellent to understanding.  Or that she is meant to be entirely normal, a version of the way Lispector sees the world, however nuts she looks to me, the kind of mismatch I often bounce off when reading D. H. Lawrence, where I think I am reading about someone who is psychologically unusual and begin to think, oh no, he thinks everyone is like this.

Yet another idea is that the novel is full of nonsense and anti-rationality, again like Surrealism, something I usually enjoy a lot.  I could have used more, I don’t know, jokes, I guess.  Surrealism is fun.  And material, too, not abstract.  Paris Peasant is about walking around in the mall.

Benjamin Moser, in the introduction, suggests that Lispector’s “project was less artistic than spiritual… not an intellectual or artistic endeavor” (xi), a good clue about my difficulties with Near to the Wild Heart.  Beyond a couple of the childhood scenes I never found a hook into the art of Lispector’s novel.  It is the biggest mismatch of a book with my taste that I have bumped against in quite a while.

Tony Malone liked the novel more than I did but his response, section by section, looks similar to mine: “the internal monologues were a little too abstract at times,” were they ever.

Someday I will try another Lispector novel, perhaps one from the 1960s, and see how that goes.  Perhaps I will try one in Portuguese.