Cartesian literature: the narrative mathematics of being in Clarice Lispector

Abstract

The origins of the intellectual inspiration that drives Clarice Lispector are not easily identified. Critics have attempted to apply perspectives of both existentialism and feminism to her works, and such perspectives do reveal a true connection between the writer and her time. However, they do not serve to explain the author herself or provide a unified understanding of her works from the initial years of her career to the end of her life. In this essay I will attempt to identify some of the specific philosophical concepts that provide structure to the author’s earliest work, not as the result of the influence of intellectual movements or social contemporaries, either in Brazil or in Europe, but almost uniquely from personal elements and experiences in her own early life and also the significant early influence of the French philosopher René Descartes.

Les sources d’inspiration littéraires de Clarice Lispector ne sont pas faciles à identifier. Les critiques ont tenté d’expliquer son travail au prisme de l’existentialisme et du féminisme, et de telles perspectives révèlent un lien réel entre l’écrivaine et son temps. Mais elles peinent à expliquer tout à fait l’écrivaine elle-même, ou à fournir une compréhension unifiée de son travail des premières années de sa carrière à la fin de sa vie. Dans cet essai, je me propose de tenter d’identifier certain concepts philosophiques clés qui structurent les premières œuvres de l’auteur. J’appréhende son œuvre non pas comme la synthèse de l’influence des courants intellectuels dominants de l’époque ou de ses contemporains, au Brésil et en Europe, mais presque uniquement en m’attachant à des éléments et des expériences personnelles qui remontent au début de la vie de l’auteur. J’analyse également une première influence signifiante, celle du philosophe français René Descartes.

Keywords:

• Clarice Lispector
• existentialism
• feminism
• principles of philosophy
• René Descartes
• Spinoza
• Sartre
• Camus
• being
• cogito ergo sum
• modernism

Notes

1. Jean-Paul Sartre’s groundbreaking philosophical study, Le Transcendance de L’Ego (The Transcendence of the Ego), which attempted to describe the human ego as something other than a purely independent and non-material or transcendent philosophical entity contemplated most recently by Husserl, received initial publication in Recherches Philosophiques, VI, 1936–1937. His initial novel with an existential perspect-ive, La Nausée (Nausea), was published in 1938. However, L’etranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus was published by Gallimard only in 1942, and L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) by Sartre in 1943. It’s quite possible that Clarice encountered Le Transcendance de L’Ego, and even La Nausée, before the disruption of the Second World War, but it would seem chronologically improbable that she encountered the other works mentioned before the publication of her own Perto do coração selvagem.

2. The extent of cultural isolation and small moments of social rejection experienced by the young Clarice can hardly be appreciated. Even the publication of her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem, in 1944, would be greeted by the critic Sérgio Milliet with a curious mixture of recognition for the work’s modernism, but only along with a petty assault on the young author’s identity: describing her alien name, which he casually misspelled “Clarisse Lispector”, as a “disagreeable, unpleasant name, possibly a pseudonym” (Williams 2006, xv).

3. This obsession with impressions, and with the recreation of the enchantment of words, which represent immediate perceptions of the senses, does not begin with this first novel. Curiously, in Pernambuco, as a little girl, the author wrote brief stories for the children’s page of O Diário de Pernambuco (Pernambuco Daily News). The paper refused them all for the reason that they lacked narrative. They featured no facts or plot, only sensations (Lispector 2001, 1).

4. There is still another feature, which is evident in this citation: it has the quality of an image after an image after an image, from the past toward the future; very much like the experience of cinema. Leo Charney believes that the presence of film is an important element of modernism and the modern life. He explains the analysis of Walter Benjamin of the “momentary present”, observing that:

Benjamin, like Heidegger, linked the possibility of presence to vision, to what he called throughout the Arcades Project the ‘Now of recognizability.’ The possibility of a ‘Now’ could occur only through its tangible – that is, visual – ‘recognizability.’ As Benjamin elaborated, ‘The dialectical image is a lightning flash. Then must be held fast as it flashes its lightning image in the Now of recognizability. The rescue that is thus–and only thus–effected, can only take place for that which, in the next moment, is already irretrievably lost’. (Charney 1995, 284)

The experience of film in the era before and post-war was already affecting perceptions of existence in Brazil and the world, independently of the ideas introduced with European existentialism, and was perhaps also an influence on the thinking of Clarice even as a very young writer. In childhood one of her greatest pleasures was the adventure of attending with her sisters, and sometimes Bertha her cousin, the local Saturday matinee. It was “the flower of our stale week” (Ferreira 1999, 46).

5. Some years later Lispector privately acknowledged to Autran Dourado the ill-disguised but uncredited adaptation in A Maça no escuro of a piece of text borrowed from Nietzsche, perhaps illustrating nothing except that philosophical concepts are difficult to reinvent completely for the purposes of narrative abstraction (Moser 2009, 278–279).

6. In his first collection of poetry published in 1925, Pau-Brasil, Oswald also introduces “the photo” or snapshot – a visual subject which already exists, and is only “captured” by the technology of a photograph – to the field of literature, by snagging selected pieces from historic letters, blessing them with a title, and offering them to the reader as “poems” (de Andrade 1970b).

7. This final principle is still more complex when considering Lispector’s struggle to understand the “eu” of the author herself. A mirror is no help. Described by others as vain, she writes “Minha aparência me engana” (Lispector 1999b, 108).

8. At the same time, A Maça no escuro also carefully investigates, in contrast to the protagonist Martim, the experience of life by five women, and each of these personalities has a character that is both different and important to the development of the philosophy of the novel and to the development of the story. If, on the one hand, the novel reflects an evolution in the thinking of the male protagonist, it also reflects, on the other hand, the understanding of life, existential or practical, of a series of women at different points on their own path. These are all observed in reflection through the observation of Martim, and vice-versa, despite the emotional isolation of Martim and his personal rejection of any social life on the assumption that he is a murderer.

9. The “scientific” premise for the cognitive experiment framed by this fundamental biological de-evolution actually precedes Kafka. In Machado’s witty “Conto alexandrino”, published in Histórias sem data ([1884] 2011), the same thing happens to a pair of not-so-swift Greek philosophers visiting Alexandria. In order to prove their brilliant theory that, by consuming the blood of lower-order live animals to extract o seu principio, their own fundamental construction might be transformed to reflect the essential nature of these beasts, Pítias and Stroibus suck down the heart blood of some unfortunate experimental rats to see what will happen to their own pure nature as philosophers. It’s stupid, it’s crazy, but it works: the esteemed philosophers become compulsive thieves, are tossed into prison, and later, in the same spirit of philosophical inquiry, are themselves dissected alive.

10. This novel can also be understood as simply a cynical portrait of the essentially empty life of the urban Brazilian woman of the era, upper middle-class and living in Rio. For Lispector there was no hard line separating the abstract from the actual. She comments: “In painting, as in music and literature, so often works that are called abstract seem to me rather as figurative of a reality more delicate and difficult, almost imperceptible to the naked eye” (Lispector 1999b, 31).

11. This novel, like A Paixão segundo G.H., can also be understood as a simple portrait of the empty and at times cruel life of the Brazilian city – in this case Rio de Janeiro – in that era.

12. It must be recognized that Fitz, to his credit, acknowledges at the outset that his approach is somewhat retroactive. But he argues that:

because for most of her career Lispector was writing what I believe were essentially poststructural texts before poststructuralism as such even existed, we can, now that the basic tenets of poststructuralism are well established, see how revealingly they apply to her work and how well they explain it. (Fitz 2001, 2)

On the other hand, the meaning of “poststructuralism” is still so vague that he feels compelled to borrow a description from Holman and Harmon to define it:

More written about than clearly defined, poststructuralism has been understood in a variety of ways but always ‘[a]s a term loosely applied to an array of critical and intellectual movements, including deconstruction and radical forms of psychoanalytic, feminist, and revisionist Marxist thinking, which are deemed to lie beyond structuralism’ (Holman and Harmon 371). (Fitz 2001, 2)

13. If the impulse to write highly abstract fiction arose out of early factors in her own life, and the Principles of René Descartes provided the structural engine, perhaps a catalytic moment or what might be termed post-publication literary permission or affirmation was provided by the modernist poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. It is interesting to speculate that his 1944 meta-poem, “Procura da Poesia” (The Search of Poetry; de Andrade 2012), published in Rio’s high-profile Correio da manhã (Morning News) on the nature and meaning of poetry itself – and which divorced the concept of poetry from any specific content – might have helped to confirm to the young novelist that her own investigation of literary meaning was not only legitimate, but important.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry Schwarz

Henry Schwarz is an independent scholar.