\u201cHe was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.\u201d This is the epigraph, borrowed from Joyce\u2019s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/i>, that captures the modernist spirit so essential to Clarice Lispector\u2019s revolutionary novel, Near to the Wild Heart<\/i>. As her fierce and precocious protagonist struggles through adolescence and young adulthood, Lispector offers a wealth of luminous meditations on human nature, consciousness, individuality, and God. In this new translation by Alison Entrekin (New Directions, 2012), the intensity and brilliance of Lispector\u2019s prose thrills to life. Surprising, powerful, and revelatory, Near to the Wild Heart<\/i> recounts with unforgettable candor the life of an audacious young woman in modern society.<\/p>\n
Lispector\u2019s breakthrough novel rose to instant and lasting fame in Brazil upon publication in 1943, and it\u2019s no wonder: the ideas presented within are mind-blowing. Take, for instance, Joana\u2019s description of what it feels like to be in a relationship:<\/p>\n
\nJust as the space surrounded by four walls has a specific value, provoked not so much because it is a space but because it is surrounded by walls. Ot\u00e1vio made her into something that wasn\u2019t her but himself and which Joana received out of pity for both. . . Besides: how could she tie herself to a man without allowing him to imprison her? How could she prevent him from developing his four walls over her body and soul? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This startling metaphor is remarkably precise: haven\u2019t we all felt, at one time or another, \u201cenclosed\u201d by a loved one, albeit protected? Don\u2019t the structural walls of relationships also compromise our identity, defining us with a substance that is not ourselves? Add to these astute insights Lispector\u2019s radical writing style, which mirrors the process of thinking – much like in Woolf\u2019s The Waves<\/i>. Though nominal events do take place in the text – Joana\u2019s father dies; Joana goes to live with her aunt; Joana attends boarding school, gets married, and leaves her husband – inner mental life constitutes the book\u2019s central concern. Fraught with dense introspection, many pages are devoted solely to Joana\u2019s philosophical quandaries:<\/p>\n
\n. . .She asked herself many questions, but she could never answer herself: she\u2019d stop in order to feel. How was a triangle born? As an idea first? Or did it come after the shape had been executed? Would a triangle be born fatally? Things were rich. – She would want to spend time on the question. But love invaded her. Triangle, circle, straight lines. . . As harmonious and mysterious as an arpeggio. Where does music go when it\u2019s not playing? -She asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: may they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Indeed, Joana is a beautiful thinker, but the wilderness of her imagination also isolates her from others. Other characters perceive her with confusion, sometimes labeling her \u201cevil\u201d or \u201cunfeeling\u201d: \u201cShe\u2019s a cold viper, Alberto, there\u2019s no love or gratitude in her,\u201d her aunt says. On the other hand, her husband, Ot\u00e1vio, is baffled by the fatal mix of attraction and repulsion Joana arouses in him. Nonetheless, he can\u2019t deny the way she profoundly impacts his life: \u201cShe would rise up in him, not in his head like a common memory, but in the center of his body, vague and lucid, interrupting his life like the sudden pealing of a bell.\u201d A sort of irony emerges in the push-pull attitude Joana exhibits toward relationships, alternately embracing others for the comfort they promise and rejecting them when they burden her.<\/p>\n
I question whether the actions and emotions Joana unleashes are really \u201cevil\u201d – they\u2019re intense, for sure, but I think Joana is better described as amoral. And it\u2019s precisely this lack of conventional mores that allows her to imagine and discover so much: because she moves through life without needing to label anything \u2018good\u2019 or \u2018bad,\u2019 Joana can think unrestrained. No thought or feeling is taboo for her, even if it proves her animal nature. If a man devouring meat allures her, or if contrived human \u201cgoodness\u201d disgusts her, she\u2019s not embarrassed or afraid to report it with gritty impartiality:<\/p>\n
\n. . .goodness makes me want to be sick. Goodness was lukewarm and light. It smelled of raw meat kept for too long. Without entirely rotting in spite of everything. It was freshened up from time to time, seasoned a little, enough to keep it a piece of lukewarm, quiet meat.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n. . . she had seen a greedy man eating. She had secretly watched his bulging eyes, gleaming and stupid, trying not to miss the slightest trace of flavor. And his hands, his hands. One holding a fork with a piece of bloody meat (not warm and quiet, but very much alive, ironic, immoral) skewered on it, the other twitching on the tablecloth, pawing it nervously in his urgency to eat another mouthful already. . .The ferocity, the richness of his color. . . A shiver had run down Joana\u2019s spine, with the sorry cup of coffee in front of her. But she wouldn\u2019t be able to tell afterwards if it had been out of repugnance or fascination and lust. Both no doubt. . . As if she were watching someone drink water only to discover her own thirst, profound and ancient.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
As difficult of a heroine as Joana is, and as difficult as Lispector\u2019s prose may be – sometimes verging on abstraction – there\u2019s something deeply relatable about both: a deep yearning to understand and to be understood permeates the text of this book. Beneath the surface of her words, Joana is deeply self-conscious, frustrated with her ability to say what she actually means. Wearily, she repeats: <\/p>\n
\n\u2018Yes, I know. . . The distance that separates emotions from words. I\u2019ve already thought about that. And the most curious thing is that the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say. Or at least what makes me act is not, most certainly, what I feel but what I say.\u2019 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This is the challenge, which Moser points to in his introduction, that forms the crux of the book: to capture \u201cthe symbol of the thing in the thing itself;\u201d to successfully unite words with meaning and emotions. This linguistic struggle parallels Joana\u2019s own psychological struggle to make herself understood in relation to others, while simultaneously preserving her individuality. Should she exist alone, full-fledged – like a solitary word – symbolizing only that which she contains in her own form? Or should she attach herself to other layers of meaning – people, beliefs, or God – which will necessarily plaster themselves over her own essential meaning? <\/p>\n
Joana\u2019s conundrum, though complex, is common. Haven\u2019t we all been bound in the archetypal struggle of communication at some point? \u201cTry to understand my heroine, Aunty, listen,\u201d Joana says. \u201cShe is vague and audacious. She doesn\u2019t love, she isn\u2019t loved. . . However what Joana has inside her is something stronger than the love that people give and what she has inside her demands more than the love people receive. Do you understand, Aunty? I wouldn\u2019t call her a hero, as I promised Daddy myself.\u201d Yet Joana is a heroine of sorts: as much as she might defy our expectations, she\u2019s brave enough to tell the truth. By maintaining her selfhood to the last, Joana gives us something deeply real. Though the truth may not be convenient or comfortable, those who have the courage to tell it are the real heroes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cHe was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.\u201d This is the epigraph, borrowed from Joyce\u2019s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that captures the modernist spirit so essential to Clarice Lispector\u2019s revolutionary novel, Near to the Wild Heart. As her fierce and precocious protagonist struggles through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[46356,9196,25506,56,5686,47426],"class_list":["post-291206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-alison-entrekin","tag-brazilian-literature","tag-clarice-lispector","tag-new-directions","tag-portuguese-literature","tag-quantum-sarah"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340876,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291206\/revisions\/340876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}