Brazil - Near to the Wild Heart/The Chandelier

Country: Brazil       
Book: Near to the Wild Heart/The Chandelier
Author: Clarice Lispector
Publication Year: 1943/1946
Genre: Fiction

Brazil, it is no exaggeration to say, is big.Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Brazil. Listen..

That’s enough of that. There’s simply no time for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy parodies (FYI: there’s always time for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy parodies).

The point is that Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world and the seventh largest by population and has produced a lot of writers over its two hundred year history. As a result, this profile will do no more than scratch the surface. No. Not even that. Not so much. As with so many other nations, I will return and do a deeper dive into Brazilian literature at a later date.

For now, I chose the first couple of novels by Clarice Lispector: Near to the Wild Heart and The Chandelier.

As I might have mentioned before, I am a nerdy James Joyce fan (I can recite the opening chapter of Finnegans Wake from memory) and so any book that takes its title from a Joyce quote is bound to pique my interest. Near to the Wild Heart opens with the relevant passage from A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man:

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.

Lispector wrote the two hundred page novel in under nine months when she was only 22. She added the title and epigraph only once the book was written and she actually read Joyce for the first time.

Mainly because of the title, the book was described as ‘Joycean’ by literary critics, which irritated Lispector. She has a point. There is very little that is actually Joycean in Near to the Wild Heart. The opening passages contain perhaps some of the same ill-formed childish thought patterns of Portrait, but Lispector’s prose is nowhere near as stylised as Joyce’s (which is either a good or bad thing, depending on your point of view).

Compare:

Her father’s typewriter went clack-clack . . . clack-clack-clack . . . The clock awoke in dustless tin-dlen. The silence dragged out zzzzzz. What did the wardrobe say? clothes-clothes-clothes. – Near to the Wild Heart

With:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Similar, but idiosyncratic to each author (although both bildungsroman do begin in sharp focus on the father figure of Joana and Stephen  Daedalus respectively).. Lispector employs a similar kind of stream of conscious writing made famous by Joyce’s Ulysses, but Lispector would appear to owe more to the French stream of conscious writers who inspired Joyce than Joyce himself. Not to mention the likes of Burroughs, Faulkner and Woolf.

Perhaps the greatest influence on Lispector’s early style was Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Born in Ukraine in the years following the Russian Revolution, she could hardly escape his influence, even after her Jewish parents fled to Brazil after the latest round of pogroms against its Jewish citizens (regimes come and go but anti-Semitism is seemingly eternal).

To be fair, though, none of us can truly escape the influence of Dostoyevsky. To read him is to be changed in a way few other writers ever manage. There are few authors in the world worthy of the name that have not been influenced by Dostoyevsky, consciously or not.

A criticism made (see Benjamin Moser’s introduction to the New Directions edition: Hurricane Clarice) was that Near to the Wild Heart was compared to novels by European writers, but to very few Brazilian ones.

Yet one feature of novels made up of so much of a character’s inner life and inner monologue (while being written for the most part in the third person) is that little of the outer world penetrates. Near to the Wild Heart could be set in any city in Europe or any city in the world with little affect on the overall structure. Joana rebels, grows up, gets married, and leaves her husband, but the action could be happening in Madrid, LA or Katmandu for all the difference it would make.

By the time Lispector wrote The Chandelier, this was already changing and her second novel feels much more like a Brazilian centric novel. Though perhaps less accomplished than her first book (second novel syndrome), it is definitely a step in the right direction. 

The Chandelier is somewhat derivate of Near to the Wild Heart, stretching the same narrative flourishes almost to breaking point (translator, Benjamin Moser, called it, “perhaps her strangest and most difficult book.”). Yet The Chandelier’s protagonist, Virgínia, feels much more like a citizen of Brazil.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lispector completed The Chandelier while living in Naples. Like Joyce, writers often have to leave their home in order to write about home. Though unlike Joyce, Lispector returned to Brazil after 15 years of living in Europe and the USA and remained there for the rest of her life.

Likesay, this profile does little more than scratch the surface of Brazilian literature (and we didn’t even break the skin). Even Lispector’s bibliography has barely been entered into.

In referring to my well thumbed, pencil ticked copy of 1001 Books You Must Read  Before You Die (must read, don’t you know), there are two more Lispector novels in that somewhat arbitrary list, The Passion According to G.H. and The Hour of the Star. We will consider then when we return to South America’s most populous nation, along with such writers as Machado De Assis, Ana Paula Maia and Veronica Stigger.

Clarice Lispector