Kant’s Tulips / Clarice’s Mystery: Taking Time to Recollect

Clarice Lispector, trans. Katrina Dodson, The Complete Stories

New Directions, 640pp, $28.95, ISBN 9780811219631

reviewed by Dominic Jaeckle

Only parts of us will ever / touch only parts of others – / one’s own truth is just / that really – one’s own truth. / We can only share the / part that is understood by within another’s knowing acceptable to / the other therefore so one / is for most part alone. / As it is meant to be in / evidently in nature – at best though perhaps it could make / our understanding seek / another’s loneliness out.

Marilyn Monroe, from ‘The Undated Poems’

I’m the one who’s listening to the whistle in the dark.

Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life


In reading Clarice Lispector, it is impossible to divine a singular frame of reference with which to begin. In this collection, she admits that fiction enacts a kind of ‘mystery,’ and through its murk it gets harder and harder to divine its focus. That atmosphere, and the rift between a view of her collected stories as a creative biography or, conversely, as a series of exercises on the mysterious character of fiction, promotes two avenues of thought that we are constantly ushered down over the breadth of this vast collection of stories – 86 in all. Taken collectively these collated works not only realise her stylistic development but also elide something as to the relationship between that same aesthetic evolution and biographical time. Thus, to begin here, we need first examine the threads that Lispector herself would pull out of her work and consistently attach to a broader rumination on the links between the work-made and the life-lived that prove to characterise this new edition. We need accept the fact that in reading Lispector we’re reading the very idea of reading and questioning its limitations – limits grounded in a critical view of personality.

This is a notion that she repeatedly plays with through reference, and the fact that citation always initiates a two-fold agenda that runs between original meaning and appropriation. We have two pictures of two different writers that co-exist in her collected stories. The struggle between these two poles arguably brackets our sense of her mystery.

In his work Abstract Painting: Fifty Years of Accomplishment (1964), Fernand Berckelaers expresses this predicament and remarks on its purchase beyond the remit of his own interests to frame something true to our efforts to read a writer’s collected works from our own vantage point:

Who does not see that the work goes beyond the one who created it? It marches before him and he will never again be able to catch up with it, it soon leaves his orbit, it will soon belong to another, since he, more quickly than his work, changes and becomes deformed, since before his work dies, he dies.

Berckelaers’ life would frame itself, in end, with the run of the 20th century: born in 1901, he would die in 1999. In those intervening years he dedicated himself to theories of diffusion – to the primacy of abstraction. His work represents an entelechy of generalisations, a will to present a void as central to our collective field of vision, that we’ll quickly fill up with little else but a picture of ourselves. That his Dictionary of Abstract Painting (1938) and his Fifty Years are now out of print feels pertinent, presaged perhaps in his taking the pseudonym Seuphor – an anagram of ‘orpheus’ – and his own acknowledgement of his shortcomings as a dreamer. His various emphases on our need to blur the vision, to ignore specificity, and to both receive and produce work that rejects itself and its own subject matter is a notion that Clarice Lispector would herself employ and acknowledge. She cites Seuphor directly as epigram to her work Água Viva, or The Stream of Life (1973):

There ought to exist a painting totally free of dependence on figure – on the object – which, like music, represents nothing at all, tells no story and propounds no myth. Such a painting limits itself to evoking the incommunicable realms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where trace becomes existence.

Lispector would self-identify as a ‘primitive painter.’ She takes the book-as-object and tries to portray it as conceptually captured within Seuphor’s frame so as to aim after an ‘anti-literature,’ as she would eventually term it: a literature of detachment that ironises the belief that the critical function of literature only coheres when attached to the individual context of personality. The irony persists, however: in her adumbrations of a literature that endeavours to negate itself, the resultant product can only ever be literary. For Lispector, and as evidenced in the chronological progression of these stories from adolescence to maturity, this interest is bound up in a romantic understanding of time as relative to the specifics of biography. In the late story ‘Report on the Thing’, she frames her ‘anti-literature’ as relative to these focal points:

I am not going to speak of clocks. But of one particular clock. I’m showing my cards: I’ll say up front what I have to say and without literature. This report is the antiliterature of the thing.

In ‘The Useless Explanation’ – included by Benjamin Moser as an appendix to this collection – Lispector implies in a rare moment of critical self-reflection that the need to negate literature owes to the heavy presences and absences that preponderate in authorial process. How in writing about one thing you are ignoring another, and that that curatorial line not only foregrounds the ways in which we parse information through a personal bias but also promotes the idea that we are all writing ourselves into some kind of existence. To write the closed or objective book, however, gets in the way of the business of living:

It is not easy to remember how and why I wrote a story of a novel. Once they detach from me, I too find them unfamiliar. It’s not a “trance,” but the concentration during the writing seems to take away the awareness of whatever isn’t writing itself.

Every story is thus charted herein as a ‘mystery’ imbued with a ‘feigned distraction’ that regulates an atmosphere of ‘non-participation.’ Each ‘mystery’ is marked by the self-awareness that a story is a product, and that that product proves entirely neutral – belonging neither to reader or writer – until it is engaged with, reconstructed, reinterpreted and owned. Time, as such, is the obvious metaphor in Lispector’s rendering of literary practice and product. We steal moments – live on borrowed time – hoping that we can do something with the time we have taken.

This deep anxiety over the use of literature has preoccupied the more philosophical responses to Lispector’s corpus. Hélène Cixous, in her foreword to Stream of Life, suggests that Lispector’s ‘writer’ strives after the feeling that we are constantly beginning again and again. That Lispector focuses on the infinite lines of demarcation that define a singular moment and give it value. The short story itself as a measure of her biography feeds perfectly into this argument. That these moments become cumulative, building a portrait of a writer through their myriad works, or indeed a picture of a reader through the order in which we receive them, is an issue that runs through a reading of her stories. Each and every piece feels like a paean to that lost moment, like a prefatory note on the one that precedes it, a fantasy on the one that follows. Imbued with the atmosphere that impels us to write things down, it becomes harder and harder to recognise the individual call of each ‘mystery;’ instead, we see her in the page breaks, in the intervening white spaces between blocks of text. In reading her it’s like we’re trying to fight free of that particular dependence on figure – to find something other than Lispector herself between the lines. We try to overcome the stillness of her character as adjunct to the stream of the world.

As Moser suggests in his introduction, this is a dilemma that directly pertains to our automatic impressions of Clarice herself within the terms of her fictions: ‘to speak of Clarice Lispector is to speak of Clarice… the figure greater than the sum of her individual works.’

‘Hers is an art,’ Moser continues, ‘that makes us want to know the woman… to know the woman is to know the art.’ These two visions (or versions) of Clarice as provided by the collection build a portrait framed with a ‘tragic majesty,’ claims Moser, and it is in an outline of that tragedy that we are capable of fleshing out some of the broader manifestations of her anti-literary technique and anxiety. In between the ‘First Stories’ and the ‘Last’ we are privy to a view of the development of a subject and a style that sophisticates with the cumulative life of Lispector. The tragedy is mired up in this progression: as though her ‘stream of life’ were a file of representative photographs, we witness her fall in love with her subject – refine its expression – and then presume its irrelevance, allowing it to turn inwards and against itself. She perfects a way to depict the interior life of the mind to such a degree that it begins to antagonise all of its own enthusiasms. Personal history gives each image a referential context but simultaneously aggregates a detachment, a distance. Each story captured feels as though it owes to somebody else. Her ‘covert joy’ ends as a feeling bred by a dynamics of doubt, and we watch her progressively question her forms and figurations of language until it becomes nigh on impossible to look outside of the parameters of that well-developed aesthetic interior.

In this sense, we can perhaps read Lispector’s stories as a significant tract on the nature of literary celebrity. That we confuse a name with a method of expression is an issue that Moser cannot get beyond in his introduction. In looking for Clarice in this book, we see Clarice as artist, as critic and as woman. The interchangeability of these classifying epithets is testament to her brilliance as a writer. The fact that these terms all coalesce beneath ‘Clarice’ as a single and calcified moniker is a testament to a struggle that repeats itself throughout the stories: that the ‘collection’ becomes biographic statement. So the question that we are encouraged to respond to when reading Lispector’s work is not only how we read Clarice but how we read more generally.

Seuphor’s suggestion that we need an art freed from its object can perhaps then be read as an aspiration here. It becomes our guideline for approaching the breadth of this collection and underpins the impossible effort to try and rid Lispector herself from its scope. This is ever present in Lispector’s metaphorical language. Cixous references Kant in her foreword to Stream of Life, and frames a Kantian conception of beauty with relation to his own remarks on a singular flower. A flower is a form ‘held to be beautiful because in perceiving it one encounters a finality which, when judged as we judge it, does not relate to any end.’ Clarice talks a lot about flowers. The terminal status of the flower as a perennial characteristic of its aesthetic qualities represents the aesthetic potency of the poetic image for Lispector. But the flower in bloom is abstracted. It ‘tells no story and propounds no myth.’ It is that blooming flower, in end, that she seems to be looking for. In its openness it ignores neither its birth nor its decay; it merely is:

I want to possess the atoms of time. And I want to capture the present which, by its very nature, is forbidden me: the present flees from me, the moment escapes me, the present is myself forever in the now. […] I want to capture my
is.

This ‘is’ is iterated in a multitude of ways throughout her stories: it emerges as cigarettes and Coca-Cola, as a woman left behind in an empty house, as a girl representing herself as a rose, as fowl ahead of its slaughter, as a woman smoking in front of a television. Katrina Dodson’s new translations sing with the melancholy of that hunt, of an inability to pin anything down to a singular concrete meaning for anything more than a fleeting minute. As Dodson admits in the introduction to her notes on the translation process, ‘reading Clarice is a disorientating experience.’ But these vignettes, when collated, begin to bleed. It is in the work’s developing of a picture of Lispector herself as ‘writer’ that a broader theme emerges as to the nature of our own habits as readers. Are we looking for expression or simply a methodology of exploration? Do we call on work to talk, or are we just looking for something that allows us into rooms that would otherwise be sealed off – peer-through windows that would otherwise be curtained? Lispector’s image runs through the book, from the cover to the final leaf, but all we’re left with are 86 separate incarnations of her ‘mystery.’
Dominic Jaeckle is a writer and academic based in London.