Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  Unlike her first novel, written in fragments and constantly jumping from scene to scene, The Chandelier is a coherent whole. Though its long segments purportedly describe events, they consist almost entirely of long interior monologues, interrupted only by the odd and jarring fragment of dialogue or action. The book moves in slow waves that crest in moments of revelation. The pages between these epiphanies are precisely the moments when the book is most intolerable to the reader, who is forced to follow the interior movement of another person in such microscopic detail. Used to epiphanies, expecting continual stimulus and surprise, the reader approaching the book for the first time is quickly baffled.

  Yet the book’s glacial intensity has a special fascination. In it Clarice comes as close as she ever would to mirroring in her prose the actual experience of writing, which is made of lulls and tedium and boredom only occasionally punctuated by climaxes and joy. What is true of literature is also, more emphatically, true of life itself—“Literature is life, living,” as she said—tedium relieved by intense experience. The book is too concentrated to be read with divided attention, and the focus it demands is exhausting. Reading the book, one recalls Clarice’s friend Olga Borelli’s description of her at the end of her life: “Her eyes seemed to peer into all the mysteries of life: profound, serene, they locked onto people like the eyes of one’s own conscience, too intense for anyone to stand for long.”9 Only when read slowly, pensively, and undistracted, three or five pages at a time, does The Chandelier reveal its penetrating genius.

  The Chandelier lends itself even less than most of Clarice’s works to a description of its plot or characters. The names are general and vague: the protagonist, Virginia, grows up in a rural place called Quiet Farm near the town of Upper Marsh, from which she eventually moves to “the city.” The characters have almost no external characteristics. Nobody has a last name, and only a few have a profession, a family, or a home. The drama of Virginia’s life, which is the story of the book, is almost entirely internal, though it is often shocked from the outside; these shocks are the bits of dialogue, the extraneous people and events, that infringe upon her wraithlike existence. As in so many of Clarice’s books, the real tension comes from the individual’s attempt to safeguard her inner world from assaults from without.

  Virginia’s attempts to make contact with that external world end, without exception, in failure; on the last page of the book she is hit by a car. The symbolism, not subtle, recurs in Clarice Lispector’s work. In Near to the Wild Heart it appears at the end: “Joana had already dressed the doll, had already undressed her, she had imagined her going to a party where she would shine among all the other girls. A blue car crossed the girl’s body, killed her. Then along came the fairy and the girl came back to life.”10 The reverberations of the stories Clarice told to resurrect her mother are clear enough. The theme traversed her entire life. In her final novel, The Hour of the Star, the protagonist is run over by an oncoming Mercedes.

  The knowledge of the crude and inevitable end does not, however, result in a fatalistic worldview. Instead, it illuminates the individual’s struggle even more brightly. Virginia does not resist the attacks of other people, but neither is she attached to them. The people around her are ghosts. The punctuation of the following passage, in which a potential friend tries to bring Virginia into the everyday world, gives a banal conversation an ethereal, chant-like rhythm: “Virginia come one day to my house … I’m not just saying that, she repeated … Come … I live alone … We’ll have a nice chat just between us girls, we’ll talk about bras, menstrual cramps … whatever you want … all right?”11 The invitation is ridiculous, but in these passages Clarice is not belittling the woman issuing it. Virginia is incapable of participating in normal life, incapable of seeking fulfillment in friendship. Nothing can remedy her isolation: not her move from the countryside to the city, not family, not sex, not friendship.

  This is partly because the external world, for Virginia, does not exist. Nothing can be expected from it. Incidentally, this is another reason why comparisons of Clarice Lispector to Sartre are so misplaced: the world of politics, of “new men” and revolution and ideology, is utterly foreign to her. For one of her background, having seen where revolution and ideology lead, it probably could not be otherwise. Virginia’s freedom comes only from within. This perfection is not permanent or definitive. It can be only briefly but dazzlingly glimpsed. The longing for these states of grace is the source of the energy of Clarice Lispector’s characters, who devote themselves to meditation, prayer, and creation with an intensity that would be impossible absent the certainty of doom. In a long metaphor for Clarice Lispector’s own creation, the young Virginia shapes figurines out of mud:

  But what she loved more than anything was making clay figurines, which no one had taught her. … When she wanted to with great strength she went down the road to the river. On one of its banks, which was slippery but scaleable, she found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold. … She got a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world. How, how to explain the miracle. … She grew scared, thoughtful. She said nothing, she didn’t move but inside without any words she repeated: I am nothing, I have no pride, anything can happen to me if - - - they want they can stop me from mixing the clay - - - they can crush me, ruin me entirely, I know that I am nothing. - - - it was less than a vision, it was a sensation in the body, a frightened thought about what allowed her to accomplish so much with the clay and the water and before which she had to humble herself with seriousness.

  Her silent knowledge that she could be crushed, that she is nothing, and her obstinate determination to continue creating surround her creation with a spiritual halo, and her own role in it becomes divine.

  But sometimes she remembered the wet clay and ran fearful out to the terrace—she plunged her fingers into that mixture, cold, mute, constant as waiting, kneading, kneading, slowly extracting forms. She made children, horses, a mother with a child, a mother alone, a girl making things out of clay, a boy at rest, a happy girl, a girl seeing if it would rain, a flower, a comet with a tail sprinkled with washed and sparkling sand, a wilted flower beneath the sun, the cemetery of Upper Marsh, a girl looking. … Much more, much more. Little forms that meant nothing but which were in reality mysterious and calm. Sometimes tall like a tall tree, but they weren’t trees, they weren’t anything. … Sometimes like a little running river, but they weren’t a river, they weren’t anything. … Sometimes a little object with an almost starry form but tired like a person. A work that would never end: that was the most beautiful and careful thing she had ever known: since if she could make anything that existed and anything that did not!12

  The strange syntax and the unexpected adjectives that made Clarice Lispector’s language sound so foreign when it first appeared remain striking today, especially when given another layer of foreignness by translation. Coupled with its impossible poetic images—how can one sculpt a “girl seeing if it would rain”?—the passage produces in the reader the same vertiginous experience that one can imagine Virginia felt while creating her world of mud and sand. Like Clarice—“I write for myself, to hear my soul talking and singing, sometimes crying”—the ecstasy of contemplation and creation is the highest freedom Virginia finds.

  As a girl, and then as a young woman, Virginia, like Joana, is transgressive and sometimes violent. Yet Joana seems less defiant than indifferent to, or even ignorant of, the expectations of the outside world, of the usual ways children deal with adults, women deal with men, or humans deal with animals. In this sense, Joana is already free. Virginia, in contrast, must seek her freedom. She is not naturally inclined to resistance. As a child she is happy to submit to the will of her wicked, sentimental brother Daniel, and she meekly consents to being belittled in her adult relationships. Even her violence is not entirely her own. Her instructor is Daniel, who resembles the figure of the same name, perhaps inspired by Lúcio Cardoso, in Clarice’s early s
tory “Obsession.”

  When they are children, Daniel guides Virginia into the occult mysteries of the Society of Shadows, whose mottos are “Solitude” and “Truth.” His bullying and cruelty meet no resistance from Virginia, who finds “sweetness” in submitting to him. The Society of Shadows—that is, Daniel—orders her to spend long periods in prayer or meditation, sometimes in the basement, sometimes in the forest surrounding their large, partly ruined country house. And the Society commands Virginia to tell her father that their sister is secretly seeing a young man. It later appears that this act has ruined her sister’s chance at love.13

  Virginia’s sin is thrilling: “She had committed a corrupt and vile act. Never however had she felt she had acted so freely and with such freshness of desire.” She fantasizes about kicking a helpless dog off a bridge, and then giving herself sexually to a passing man.14 These acts, needless to say, meet no censure from the author. Virginia, like Joana, exists outside the conventional world of beauty and ugliness, virtue and sin. But where Joana’s acts are spontaneous and natural, Virginia, under the sway of Daniel and the Society of Shadows, requires instruction, for these acts are contrary to her nature.

  Whatever their origins or results, all Virginia’s interactions with the outer world require great effort, and she struggles to achieve the independence that comes naturally to Joana. Grown up, at a dinner party in the city, she seeks liberation in a meager little rebellion: “How to free oneself? not to free oneself from something but just free oneself because she wouldn’t be able to say from what. She not-thought for an instant, her head bent. She took a napkin, a round piece of bread … with an extraordinary effort, breaking in herself a stupefied resistance, deflecting destiny, she threw them out the window—and in that way kept her power.”15

  In the long, dreamlike sequence that follows, Virginia seeks to escape “other people’s laughter and brilliance” by drinking, not for the alcohol but for the meditations the drink provokes in her about the nature of sensation, and the language that does not describe but creates it. In doing so, she rediscovers the freedom she had as a child sculpting figures in the clay:

  She drank the liquor with pleasure and melancholy—trying once again to think about her childhood and simply not knowing how to get near it, since she had so forgotten it and since it seemed so vague and common—wanting to fasten the anise in the way one looks at an immobile object, but almost not possessing its taste because it flowed, disappeared—and she only grasped the memory like a firefly that does nothing but disappear—she liked the notion that occurred to her: like a firefly that does nothing but disappear … and she noted that it was the first time in her life that she had thought about fireflies even though she had lived near them for so long. … She reflected confusedly on the pleasure of thinking of something for the first time. That was it, the anise purple like a memory. She surreptitiously kept a mouthful on her tongue without swallowing it in order to possess the anise present with its perfume: then it inexplicably withheld its smell and taste when it was stopped, the alcohol numbing and warming her mouth. Defeated, she swallowed the now-old liquor, it descended her throat and in a surprise she noted that it had been “anise” for a second while it ran down her throat or after? or before? Not “during,” not “while” but shorter: it was anise for a second as a touch of the point of a needle on the skin, except that the point of the needle gave an acute sensation and the fleeting taste of the anise was wide, calm, still as a field, that was it, a field of anise, like looking at a field of anise. It seemed she had never tasted anise but had already tasted it, never in the present but in the past: after it happened she sat thinking about this and the thought … was the taste of anise. She moved in a vague victory. She was coming to understand more and more about the anise, so much that she could almost no longer relate it to the liquid in the crystal bottle—the anise did not exist in that balanced mass but when that mass divided into particles and spread out as a taste inside of people. … Beneath an attitude of calm and hard clarity she addressed no one and abandoned herself attentive as to a dream she would forget. Behind secure movements she attempted with danger and delicateness to touch the same light and elusive, to find the nucleus made of a single instant, before the quality came to rest on things, before what really came unbalanced in tomorrow—and there was a feeling ahead and another falling away, the tenuous triumph and the defeat, perhaps nothing more than breathing. Life making itself, the evolution of the being without the destiny—the progression from the morning not aiming for the night but attaining it.16

  The passage above illustrates the impossibility of describing The Chandelier in the conventional terms of plot and character. It is the same frustration that awaits a reader expecting plot and character, for if on one level the book is the story of a woman’s life, The Chandelier’s real drama resides in Clarice Lispector’s attempt to deploy, and build upon, the poetic inner language she had discovered in Near to the Wild Heart.

  Certain sequences of The Chandelier resemble Joana’s poetical riffs. But where those were limited to shorter passages, in The Chandelier they can stretch, as above, over many pages. “She wanted to tell or hear a long story made only out of words,” Virginia says,17 and in this sentiment Clarice Lispector seems to answer modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein, or even the Dadaists. Unlike the latter, though, who were given to composing poems by drawing words at random from a paper bag, Clarice Lispector, by shuffling words around, is not trying to discard meaning. She is trying to find it. “There is so much talk,” she wrote years later, “or rather, used to be, about my ‘words,’ about my ‘sentences.’ As if they were verbal. Yet none of them, but absolutely none, of the words in the book was—a game.”18

  As Sérgio Milliet recognized when he wrote of “the precious and precise harmony between expression and substance,” the union of forme and fond was the great achievement of her first book.19 The Chandelier pushes her quest even further. One can see the point of attaining that “precious and precise harmony” in the passage describing Virginia’s attempts to capture the flavor of the anise liquor. In itself, the flavor of anise is not important. The taste of a drink on the tongue is such an infinitesimal part of human experience that it hardly seems worth expending so much effort to capture it. “Her impression then was that she could only reach things through words,” she writes in The Chandelier.20 But if human language, weighed down by reflexive syntax and clichéd meanings, is unequal even to that trivial experience, what use can it be for describing anything greater?

  When Clarice writes “The thought … was the taste of anise,” that Virginia’s thinking about the taste creates the taste, she identifies the point at which a thing is named as the point where that thing comes to exist. The name of the thing is the thing, and by discovering the name one creates it. The hidden name is “the symbol of the thing in the thing itself” that already appeared in Near to the Wild Heart: the purest language possible, what could be called the concrete spiritual goal of these linguistic exercises. The point where the name of a thing becomes identical to the thing itself, the “word that has its own light,” is the ultimate reality.

  The discovery of the holy name, synonymous with God, was the highest goal of the Jewish mystics, and the methods Virginia uses to describe the anise liquor resemble their methods. “The Society of Shadows must perfect its members,” Daniel tells Virginia, “and orders you to turn everything on its head.” The repetition of nonsensical words, the combination of letters, the parsing of verses, the search for a logic other than the strictly literal were common tools, and they could produce paradoxical or even absurd results. By dislocating her language (the liquor is purple, it is a field, it is a needle on the skin), by splitting and rearranging its words, Clarice is attempting to coax shades of significance from them, finding the word that might create the flavor of the liquor on Virginia’s tongue.

  The search for hidden meanings within language is a very serious activity, like Virginia’s sculpting of mud
figurines, tied to creation itself. “Absolutely none of the words in the book was—a game,” Clarice insisted, for if something as fleeting and unimportant as the flavor of anise liquor can be captured, then some greater truth might be, too.

  For Clarice Lispector, as for Virginia, the search for the hidden word is internal and solitary—“Truth” and “Solitude” are the mottos of the Society of Shadows—and it promises no final result, no permanent rapture, no definitive salvation. In this book, Clarice is still grasping for this language, which she does not yet completely dominate, but the ecstasy of the search is the highest state Virginia attains. “There were days like that, when she understood so well, and saw so much, that she ended in a gentle and dizzy intoxication, as if her perceptions without thought were whisking her off on a brilliant and sweet current to where, to where …”21

  17

  Volume in the Brain

  The completion of The Chandelier came at a time of intense activity in the Naples consulate. On December 18, Mozart Gurgel Valente and Eliane Weil, now a naturalized Brazilian, married there, with Maury and Dr. Vasco serving as witnesses. And business was booming at the hospital, where the casualties from the Brazilian Expeditionary Force were pouring in. In four bloody and protracted assaults beginning on November 24, the Brazilians invested a German position at Monte Castello, near Bologna, finally conquering it on February 21, 1945.

  These victories pushed the war ever farther from Naples. A degree of travel was now possible, and Rome, where Mozart was employed at the embassy to the Vatican, was an obvious destination. Clarice and Maury went for New Year’s 1945, at the invitation of Vasco Leitão da Cunha,1 and in May. The impoverished city was happy to welcome them, Eliane remembered. In wartime conditions, Maury and Mozart were no longer simple civil servants, and in ruined Italy their wives were in demand by ritzy houses such as Gucci, Fendi, and Leonardo, who were seeking out those few women with dollars in their pockets to rebuild their clientele. The prices, Eliane was delighted to recall, were expensive but doable.2