Cristina, predictably enough, falls madly in love with Daniel, whom she considers a genius, and who awakens in her a fierce latent desire. He warns her, though, that this desire can lead to madness, a “privileged” madness. “Cristina, do you know you’re alive?” he badgers her. “Cristina, is it good to be unconscious? Cristina, you don’t want anything at all, do you?” He longed to “breathe into my body a bit of venom, of the good and terrible venom.”33
Cristina’s mother becomes ill, and she returns to Jaime. There is no word from Daniel. She grows to fear the madness he has breathed into her and remembers him saying, “You have to know how to feel, but you also have to know how to stop feeling, because if the experience is sublime it can also become dangerous.” Madness looms as she attempts to settle back into the bourgeois routine she had left. “ ‘It’s hot, isn’t it, Cristina?’—Jaime said. ‘I’ve been trying this stitch for two weeks and I can’t do it,’ said Mother. Jaime interrupted, stretching. ‘Imagine, crocheting in weather like this.’ ”34
Tormented by guilt—“But my god (lowercase, as he had taught me), I am not guilty, I am not guilty”—she nonetheless longs to reencounter the profundity of real life that she had experienced with Daniel, that “feeling that inside my body and spirit there vibrated a deeper and more intense life.”35 She leaves a cruel note for Jaime and returns to Daniel. One day she comes home to find Daniel sullen, and hungry. She discovers that the man who has exercised such fascination over her cannot even prepare his own meals. Her love ferments into contempt, and she returns to her milquetoast husband.
The forty pages of “Obsession” introduce many of the themes Clarice Lispector’s subsequent writing would expand. There is an epiphany that shakes up a humdrum life, awakening the protagonist to the possibility of mystical knowledge. There is the condescending view of that conventional, “human” life (“Marry, have children, and, finally, be happy”), coexisting alongside a scared awareness that a full embrace of the irrational, “animal” life involves, and even invites, a descent into madness. “Two souls, alas! inhabit my breast,” the Steppenwolf quotes the lament of Faust, the two souls the artist, breathing in the “good and terrible venom,” strives to unite, always afraid of casting off the melancholy burden of sanity.
Another theme appears at the end of the story. When Cristina returns to Jaime, she discovers that her absence has killed her mother.
As she was writing her first stories, Clarice also met many of the “introspective” group, who, along with Lúcio Cardoso, gathered at the Bar Recreio in downtown Rio. She had plenty to do as a journalist and a student, and was anyway little given to literary chitchat, but she nonetheless encountered the slightly older writers—Octávio de Faria, Vinicius de Moraes, and Cornélio Penna—interested, like her, in metaphysics, and through the Agência Nacional she met Augusto Frederico Schmidt, whom she was to interview about industrial fibers. The admiration she expressed for his poetry caused them to veer off-topic, and a long friendship began.36
The Agência Nacional was a government organ, and the young reporter was dispatched to interview her share of generals and admirals and visiting dignitaries. Yet a skeptical and irreverent personality shines through even those articles most carefully pitched to flatter Getúlio Vargas’s regime. A case is the ironically titled “School of Happiness,” a puff piece about Mrs. Darcy Vargas’s new school for five thousand girls, an island of industry and learning based on Father Edward Flanagan’s Boys Town in Nebraska. “They can hardly suspect, Darcy Vargas’s girls, that they are beginning life surrounded by that rarest of sentiments: that of pure goodness, which asks nothing for itself, wanting only to give,” wrote Clarice with a straight face. “The young women will learn that they have the solemn duty to be happy.”37
Writing only a few months after her father’s untimely death, during a hopeless love affair with a man who could not love her as she desired, Clarice Lispector was understandably skeptical about the ability of an institution to teach happiness—and indeed about the very possibility of happiness. Despite her recent successes and the relish with which she pursued her writing and journalism, she was skeptical about other ideas, too.
In A Época, the law students’ magazine, she published a short essay titled “Observations on the Right to Punish” in August 1941. Her interest in crime and punishment, related of course to the notions of guilt and sin that had always preoccupied her, had brought her to law school in the first place. “There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,” she wrote. “A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished, because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing else at all.”38
This is an extravagant declaration. On a practical, political level, it is an assertion, in a dictatorship, of the fundamental illegitimacy of any state. More fascinatingly, it is an assertion of atheism from one who would become famous as a mystic. By the time she wrote that sentence, Clarice Lispector had already shown the interest in the inner life that had drawn her to Lúcio Cardoso, Augusto Frederico Schmidt, and other Catholic writers. She had been raised by a man whose main talent, she said, was for “spiritual things.” As her early writing suggests, and the whole of her life would prove, her interests were spiritual rather than material. Whatever material or ideological strains her early writing betrays—the rather strident feminism, for example—would soon disappear.
Because the story of her life, as a writer and a mystic, is in great part a story of her movement toward God, this initial rejection must be seen as a starting point. It was, in fact, nothing more than what she had already felt when her mother died: “I see myself small, weak, and helpless in the enormous house of my childhood, where nobody could help me and where I felt abandoned by God.”39 It is also the point that separates her from her Catholic colleagues. Her rejection of God is quite different from the loss of faith that Christian writers record. Their wavering faith can be ascribed to personal circumstances, interior circumstances; Lúcio Cardoso’s homosexuality, for example, was an internal characteristic that placed him apart from the teachings of the Church. The impulses that force a Jewish mystic into himself come from outside: the persecution, exile, and segregation that have haunted so many Jewish generations. “The spiritual experience of the mystics was almost inextricably intertwined with the historical experience of the Jewish people,” Gershom Scholem has noted. Certainly, as a general rule, mystical revolutions follow upheaval: “Mysticism as a historical phenomenon is a product of crises.”40
Seeing her parents’ suffering, exile, and ungratified toils, it was easy enough for Clarice Lispector to reject God, or, at the very most, to feel rejected by the God who had withdrawn from her family and her people. “I am Jewish, you know,” she said in a rare declaration. “But I don’t believe this nonsense about the Jews being God’s chosen people. That’s ridiculous. The Germans ought to be because they did what they did. How did being chosen ever help the Jews?”41
It is her only known reference to the Holocaust, and it is typically indirect (“they did what they did”). References to the trauma her family experienced in the Ukraine are equally infrequent and elliptical. Yet the harrowing historical circumstances of her early life are the fundamental point that allies her to the Jewish mystics who preceded her. Like her, they would transform their real traumas into complex allegories that only rarely alluded to the historical circumstances that produced them.
In Jewish history, in its cycles of catastrophes followed by mystical revivals, God must repeatedly retreat in order for the Jews to blaze different paths to him.42 The retreat is terrible. Many will not survive it, including those it does not physically destroy. This is the case of Elisa Lispector, her childhood robbed and her adult life one of pain and solitude.
But a few religious and artistic geniuses transfigure the horror of their people’s history into their own individual creation. And when they do, because of the tragic consist
ency of the Jewish historical experience, they will find themselves re-creating the entire ethical and spiritual structure of Judaism. God had to withdraw from Clarice Lispector to allow her to begin her own work of creation.
In August 1941, a year after her father’s death, when she declared that “beyond mankind there is nothing else at all,” God had, once again, turned his face from his chosen people. Hitler was advancing unimpeded across Europe. The girl who had survived one genocide now looked helplessly on as another unfolded.
“In the great cataclysm now stirring the Jewish people more deeply than in the entire history of Exile … the story [of Jewish mysticism] is not ended, it has not yet become history, and the secret life it holds can break out tomorrow in you or in me,” Gershom Scholem wrote in May 1941. “Under what aspects this invisible stream of Jewish mysticism will again come to the surface we cannot tell.”43
Two months later Clarice Lispector confessed to Lúcio Cardoso her “great desire”: “To prove to myself and others that I am more than just a woman. I know you don’t believe it. But I didn’t believe it either, judging by what I’ve done up to now. And I’m nothing more than potential—I feel a fresh spring within me but cannot locate its source.”44
When, after her father’s death, Clarice Lispector drifted away from institutional Judaism, she was no more than reflecting the slow but inevitable dissolution of the religion practiced in places such as Chechelnik. That Eastern European world, where the majority of the world’s Jews had lived at the beginning of the twentieth century, was disintegrating, and in the next couple of years would be irremediably destroyed.
Even without the Holocaust, the traditional society would not have survived. It had already been bled by mass emigration; in Brazil, as in all the countries where the emigrants settled, the economic and social barriers to advancement were nothing like they had been in the Russian Empire. By the second generation, the immigrant Jews entered the middle class everywhere. In those countries, as in the European homeland itself, modern people no longer found the old beliefs adequate. The greatest mass movement in recent Jewish history was Zionism, which, though it heralded the return of the children of Israel to their ancestral home, was a secular nationalist movement surprisingly unconnected to the ancient tradition of Jewish millenarianism.
The loss of the old universe did not go unmourned, nor was it unanimously greeted as an emancipation. It is perhaps in Kafka where one feels with the greatest intensity the Jewish despair at the loss of God. Clarice Lispector’s renunciation of God, in this context, was no more than a reflection of a loss that the Jewish world as a whole had experienced. And it was all the more cruelly ironic that they were singled out for persecution just as they had lost their old faith. “They could no longer find any meaning in their suffering, or any guilt,” Stefan Zweig wrote. “Those exiled in the middle ages, their ancestors, at least knew why they were suffering: for their faith, for their law. They still had an unbreakable trust in their God. … They lived and suffered in the proud delusion that they were a people chosen by the Creator of the world and of mankind for a special destiny and mission.”45
But in 1941 that God was dead. The Torah and Talmud were no longer consoling trees of life, and the immense edifice of the cabala, the intricacies of its metaphysics refined and elaborated by centuries of mystical geniuses, lay in ruins. Only the facts of exile and persecution, and the thirst for redemption they engendered, were unchanged. It may have seemed a dead end, the same dead end Kafka confronted. But the combination could present a challenge to a person with an extraordinary spiritual vocation and the linguistic power to express it. After all, the longing for redemption born of hard persecution had shaped the Jewish mind-set for centuries. When Clarice Lispector began to enunciate her own speculations about the divine, she would echo the writings of earlier generations who sought the eternal amid crisis and exile.
12
Straight from the Zoo
In Clarice Lispector’s writings, there are echoes of another great Jewish thinker, another product of exile, who faced the death of God and sought to re-create a moral universe in His absence. Thanks to the recent discovery in Clarice Lispector’s library of a French anthology of Spinoza, the connection is not merely speculative, a possible result of a coincidence of historical circumstances. The book comes complete with her annotations and the handwritten date February 14, 1941.1 Even without this important information, the novel she began in March 1942, Near to the Wild Heart, makes it obvious that she had read Spinoza attentively.
“They could ask him to write articles about Spinoza, as long as he didn’t have to be a lawyer, watching and dealing with those affrontingly human people, walking by, shamelessly exposing themselves,” one long passage begins. (The “he” is the law student Otávio, the future husband of the protagonist, Joana.) He makes annotations:
The pure scientist stops believing in what he likes, but cannot keep himself from liking what he believes. The need to like: the sign of mankind. —Do not forget: “the intellectual love of God” is the true knowledge and excludes any mysticism or adoration. —Many answers are found in affirmations of Spinoza’s. In the idea for example that there can be no thought without extension (aspect of God) and vice-versa, is not the mortality of the soul confirmed? Of course: mortality as a distinct and reasoning soul, clear impossibility of the pure form of St. Thomas’s angels. Mortality in relation to the human. Immortality through the transformation in nature.—Inside the world there is no room for other creations. There is only the opportunity for reintegration and continuation. Everything that could exist, already does. Nothing else can be created, only revealed.2
This passage is noteworthy in many ways. It is not very well digested, first of all: parts are lifted almost verbatim from the notes in the back of her copy of Spinoza (“Inside the world there is no room for other creations. There is only the opportunity for reintegration and continuation. Everything that could exist, already does,” for example.) Though it has somehow escaped the attention of her many commentators, it is by far the longest citation to be found in her extensive body of work, which otherwise includes only a handful of quotations, these rarely more than a sentence or two. The rather dry recitation is unusual, a staccato presentation interesting because it also, in a few lines, offers a list of many of the philosophical preoccupations that Clarice, throughout her life, would so vividly animate and illustrate.
The list goes on: “If it is true that the more man evolves, the more he tries to synthesize, abstract, and establish principles and laws for his life, how could God—in any sense of the word, even in that of the conscious God of the religions—how could God lack absolute laws for his own perfection?”3
Clarice will often mock this “conscious God of the religions,” but only because she so desperately longed for the same perfection and assurance that Spinoza, too, had rejected as impossible.
A God possessed of free will is lesser than a God with a single law. In the same way that a concept is all the more true when it need not transform itself when faced with every individual case. God’s perfection is proven more by the impossibility of miracles than by their possibility. For the humanized God of the religions, to perform miracles is to commit an injustice—at the same time thousands of other people require the same miracle—or to recognize a mistake and correct it—which, more than an act of goodness or a “proof of character,” means having made a mistake in the first place.—Neither comprehension nor will belong to the nature of God, Spinoza says. That makes me happier, and leaves me freer. Because the idea of a conscious God is horribly unsatisfying.4
Perhaps Clarice was thinking of her mother as she wrote these lines, remembering her own failure to generate a miracle: the idea that a “conscious God” had saved someone else instead might have been unbearable. An unconscious God would have been a bit more satisfactory, at least on an intellectual level: God had not, for example, actively killed her mother. She concludes with one of Spinoza’s most famous s
entences, one for which Near to the Wild Heart, with its emphasis on the wild energy pulsing through the universe, might have stood as an extended poetic metaphor: “He would garnish the top of the study with a literal translation from Spinoza: ‘Bodies are distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, and not in respect of substance.’ ”5
Clarice’s philosophical involvement with Spinoza was not a matter of copying down phrases and then forgetting them. His thoughts would be incorporated into her own, and though she would never quote from him at such length, Spinozistic phrases recur throughout her work. The Chandelier, her second novel, also contains a near-quote from Spinoza: “In order to be born, things must have life, since birth is a movement—if we say that the movement is only necessary for the thing giving birth, a thing cannot give birth to something outside its own nature and therefore always gives birth to something of its own species and so it is with movements as well.”6 In her third novel, The Besieged City, we find the line “Error was impossible—everything that existed was perfect—things only begin to exist once they are perfect.”7 She repeated this two decades later, in An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures: “Everything that existed was of a great perfection.”8
These concepts may seem abstruse, but Clarice returned to her paperback Spinoza many times in the following years. Was it simply for these ideas, or was it for a moral and philosophical model? As portrayed by Arnold Zweig, who wrote the book’s long introduction and whose more famous brother Stefan had killed himself near Rio only a month before Clarice began writing Near to the Wild Heart, Spinoza was a secular saint. His exhortations to remain true to one’s own nature would have resounded with Clarice; his “grandiose pantheism had exercised a particular influence upon poets and poetic natures, and on those of Faustian temperaments.”9
Why This World Page 15