Near to the Wild Heart (22 page)

Her thoughts were now becoming coherent and she was breathing like an invalid who had survived moments of crisis. Something was still rumbling inside her, but she was quite exhausted, and her face relaxed into a smooth mask with vacant eyes. From the depths the final surrender. The end...

But first from the depths as a response, yes as a response, enlivened by the air that was still penetrating her body, the flame shot up, burning bright and pure... From the sombre depths the inclement impulse burning, life rising anew, formless, audacious, pitiful. A dry sob as if they had shaken her, happiness shining in her breast, intense and unbearable, ah, such turmoil. Above all, that constant stirring in the depths of her being became clear... it was now growing and throbbing. That stirring of some live thing trying to release itself from the water in order to breathe. And how was she to fly, yes, how was she to fly... walk along the shore and feel the wind on her face, her hair blowing, glory on the mountain... Rising, rising, her body opening itself to the atmosphere, surrendering to the blind pulsation of her own blood, crystalline notes, tintillating, glistening in her soul... There was still no disenchantment before her own mysteries, oh God, God, God, come to me, not to save me, salvation should be in me, but to smother me with Your heavy hand, with punishment, with death, because I am powerless and afraid of dealing that tiny blow which will transform my whole body in this centre which longs to breathe and which is rising, rising... the same impulse as that of the tide and genesis, genesis! The tiny blow which only allows mad thoughts to exist in the madman, the luminous wound growing, hovering, overpowering. Oh, how she harmonized with what she thought and how what she thought was gloriously, oppressively fatal. I only want You God so that You may take me in like a dog when everything may be once more simply solid and complete, when the moment of bringing one's head out of the waters might be nothing but a memory and when inside me there might be nothing but knowledge, which has been used and is used and by means of which things are once more received and given, oh God.

What dominated in her was not courage, she was only substance, less than human. How could she be a hero and want to vanquish things? She was not woman, she existed, and what was inside her were movements lifting her in constant transition. Perhaps at some time she might have altered with her savage strength the atmosphere around her and no one had noticed, perhaps she had invented a new substance with her breathing and she did not know, she merely sensed what her tiny woman's head could never understand. Endless, feverish thoughts sprang up and pervaded her startled body and they were important in so far as they concealed a vital impulse, they were important in so far as at the very moment of their conception there was that blind and authentic substance creating itself, rising and bulging out like a bubble of air on the water's surface, almost breaking it... She was aware that she still hadn't slept, she thought that she would still be forced to burst into flames. That she would terminate once and for all the prolonged gestation of childhood and that from her painful immaturity her own being would explode, free at last, at long last! No, no, no God, I want to be alone. And one day there will appear, yes, one day there will appear in me, the capacity, as red and affirmative as it is clear and sweet, one day whatever I may do will be blindly securely unconsciously, treading inside me, on my truth, so completely immersed in whatever I might be doing that I shall be unable to speak; above all, the day will come when my every movement will be creation, birth, I shall break all the negations that exist within me, I shall prove to myself that there is nothing to fear, that everything that I might be will always be wherever there is a woman who shares my origins. I shall raise within myself what I am — one day, at a gesture from me, my mighty waves will soar, pure water submerging my doubt, my conscience, I shall be as strong as the soul of an animal and whenever I might speak they will be slow, unthought words, not felt lightly, not full of a desire for humanity, not the past consuming the future! whatever I might say will sound preordained and complete! there will be no space inside me for me to know that time exists, that men and dimensions exist, there will be no space inside me even to notice that I shall be creating instant by instant, no, not instant by instant: forever fused, for then I shall live, only then shall I live more fully than in childhood, I shall be as brutal and misshapen as a stone, I shall be as light and vague as something felt rather than understood, I shall transcend myself in waves, oh, God, and may everything come and fall on me, even the incomprehension of myself at certain blank moments, for I need only fulfil myself and then nothing will impede my path until death-without-fear; from whatever struggle or truce, I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.

AFTERWORD

Believe me, the thing I like most of all in the world... is what I feel deep inside me, opening out as it were... I could almost tell you what it is, yet I cannot...

Near to the Wild Heart
[The original title in Portuguese is
Perto do coração selvagem.
First published in Rio de Janeiro,
A Noite,
1944. Subsequent editions published by Editora Nova Fronteira.]
was published in Brazil in 1944. It was Clarice Inspector's first novel and she was nineteen years of age. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, she had amused herself writing stories and short plays. For one reason or another, these were never published. She worked on the manuscript of
Near to the Wild Heart
for several years, a task she combined with her career as a journalist for a prestigious Rio newspaper,
A Noite.
Lispector was one of the first women to be employed there as a journalist. She found the work congenial and became friendly with other talented young writers. The most significant friendship of all was that with Lucio Cardoso, a writer of considerable experience who read and criticized draft chapters of her novel in manuscript form. Cardoso also suggested the lines from James Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
as a suitable title.

The reviews commented on the book's striking innovations and welcomed its publication as 'the most serious attempt in Brazil to date to write a truly introspective novel'. But no critic could possibly have foreseen the influence Lispector would exert on feminist literature at home and abroad in years to come.
Near to the Wild Heart
focuses on psychological and philosophical problems in its portrayal of Joana, a young woman in search of an authentic existence. Joana's confidences echo those of Lispector herself. For here is a writer who claimed to be 'affected by everything', who saw and heard too much, who was constantly struggling against the tide of her own self. The traumas experienced by Joana foreshadow most of the preoccupations voiced by woman writers everywhere from the 1960s onwards.

Near to the Wild Heart
is divided into two parts. The nine chapters in Part One operate on two different but interrelated planes, the one dealing with the protagonist's childhood and adolescence: the early years with her father, orphanhood, the male teacher whom Joana secretly adores, the aunt who offers her a home without love or understanding, the emotional and physical turmoil of puberty as she comes to discover her own body and its demands. Interspersed with these fragments of her past are glimpses of Joana as a conventional suburban wife with unconventional thoughts:

How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her?... And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?...

A mysterious 'female voice' engages Joana in earnest dialogues about existence and constraints.

A second plane focuses on the adult Joana who becomes increasingly aware of
who
and
what
she is. A triangular relationship involving Joana, her unfaithful husband Otávio, and Lídia, Otávio's ex-fiancee who is now expecting his child, exacerbates obsessive self-questioning about social and sexual roles. Joana sees her marriage in retrospect as an unforgivable betrayal of self. Bravely confronting her humiliating situation, she makes a bid for freedom, whatever the cost.

Part Two of the novel sees Joana emerge as a prototype for all the reflective women who appear in subsequent stories and novels. Trapped in a servile and meaningless existence, she rebels in frustration. The mockery of her relationship with Otávio precipitates a crisis which makes their separation inevitable.

My God! — never to be yourself, never, never. And to be a married woman, in other words, someone with their destiny traced out... Even boredom with life has a certain beauty... when you suffer it alone in quiet despair.

It is significant that Clarice Lispector married a fellow law student whilst in the midst of writing this first novel. Early experience of marriage undoubtedly sharpened her perceptions about the considerable problems of readjustment. Joana's simmering resentments are articulated with subtle precision:

Now all her time was devoted to him and she felt that any minutes she could call her own had been conceded, broken into little ice cubes which she must swallow quickly before they melted.

The paths of awareness in
Near to the Wild Heart
were to be further explored in the steady output of novels and short stories Lispector continued to publish until she died from cancer in December 1977. But the power and originality of her best work can already be appraised in this moving tale of self-discovery. Plot or intrigue in any conventional sense is disregarded. Any physical action is sparse. Her characters are much less interested in external reality than in their own inner responses to the people and objects around them.

The essence of Lispector's fiction is her pursuit of a figurative language capable of conveying things arcane and elusive. Joana progresses through a labyrinth of signs and symbols. She sifts the grains of experience and uncovers unsuspected layers of meaning. Her dreams are more lucid than any encounters with reality. Existence is seen to be governed by alien forces, and anguish gathers as she starts to penetrate the mysteries that cloak her destiny. Even in this first novel, Lispector unravels perceptions of remarkable intensity which are not simply physical and emotional but, above all, spiritual. Acute powers of observation and feeling permit her to articulate the most subtle ambiguities, even though Lispector always thought of herself as more intuitive than intellectual. She brings a new pliancy and refinement to the language of Brazil and, like the French existentialists, she believes language to be as mysterious as life itself. Joana becomes the alter ego of Lispector when she recognizes that humans have 'a greater capacity for life than knowledge of life', that thoughts must be treated with suspicion, feelings with mistrust, words with caution. Both author and protagonist abhor 'counterfeit emotions' and 'creative lies'.

Lispector's fictional world takes us into the realms of phenomenology, to a place of heightened awareness and a higher plane of
being.
Rejecting any accepted laws of time or space, Joana confides:

I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself.

Joana, like nearly all of Lispector's women characters, rebels against the contradictions of existence. The 'wild heart' she pursues is the very core of freedom and power, an inner sanctum where she can listen undisturbed to 'the music of confusion murmuring in her depths'. Joana's suppressed violence, when she realizes that
fraternity
and
justice
are not merely unattainable but contrary to nature, gradually peters out into 'awesome silence'. Her situation, however, is one of anguish rather than despair. Her threatened existence induces defiance rather than panic, for as she herself recognizes: 'Solitude is mingled with my essence'. Hence her mistrust of 'life in common, plotting and threatening you with a common death'.

Lispector's unorthodox use of syntax and punctuation, her bold rhythms and syncopated phrasing contribute to the overall impression of tense, haunting lyricism. Her startling metaphors and similes show a preference for suggestion rather than clear-cut definition. Words are given new meanings and resonances in order to encompass things amorphous and impalpable. Conscious of the dilemma that confronts any writer who opts for approximations as opposed to certainties, who struggles with perceptions much too organic to be conceived in thoughts', Lispector has attempted to clarify her own solution to the problem. She observed:

What cannot be expressed only comes to me through the breakdown of language. Only when the structure breaks down do I succeed in achieving what the structure failed to achieve.

This approach is consistent with her avowed preference for 'things which are incomplete or badly finished, which awkwardly try to take flight only to fall clumsily to the ground'. In short, Clarice Lispector was a writer of vision and courage who was never afraid of 'plunging into darkness only to emerge bearing trickling mirrors'.

GIOVANNI PONTIERO Manchester, March 1989