Category: Uncategorized

Jon Fosse – A Shining

If a story is going to create a mystery without a single answer, it should at least aim at the creation of the potential for the reader to find an answer. The alternative is simply frustration. For instance, Kafka’s brilliance lies in the way that we can find a solution to his works’ problems, just never a conclusive one. We all know why Gregor Samsa becomes a bug – only our views inevitably conflict with one another. The text, nevertheless, provides clues for all of us. It prompts endless exploration. Whereas I am not sure Jon Fosse’s A Shining does.

I had high hopes for A Shining. After all, Jon Fosse has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I spent weeks going around bookshops, trying to find Septology. Perhaps this effort meant that I demanded more (when I finally found a book of Fosse’s in stock) than the writing could give me. A Shining is about fifty pages long. It’s so thin that it bends the wrong way if I carry it in a breast pocket. But plenty of stories have managed much in fewer pages.

The plot is very simple. A man drives into a forest. He has been driving aimlessly, out of boredom. In the forest his car gets stuck. He gets out of the car and tries to find help. It starts snowing and he gets cold. He sees a mysterious “shining” that approaches and talks to him. Then the shining goes inside him. He then sees an old couple that he recognises, not immediately, as his parents. Then he sees a man in a suit. Then they all float away, the narrator included.

The narrator asks :

“What’s happening here in the middle of the forest, in the black darkness of the trees, where there’s white snow on the branches and on the ground between the trees[?]”

What, indeed.

I propose to start with the narrator, whose consciousness we inhabit. Often narrators are the way into a story like this.

He shows signs of depression: “Boredom had taken hold of me—usually I was never bored but now I had fallen prey to it. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do.” He hasn’t eaten a proper meal in days, and he experiences a kind of emptiness and anxiety that worsens as the story progresses. He is lonely. What else? As so often in these kinds of stream-of-consciousness books, he has a lack of self-knowledge that can easily grate: “And what was I doing on this forest road?”

Does he want to end his life? Perhaps – “And maybe that is exactly why I walked into the forest, because I wanted to freeze to death.” Perhaps not – he then immediately decides this is not the case. We don’t know his job, his life before the story, except for hints that are insufficient to form a view – “You might almost consider me a thinker.” In other words, our man is a blank slate, albeit likely a prideful one. Even when his “parents” arrive upon the scene, the dialogue between the three is very limited and focused on his trying to find a way out of the forest. There is insufficient evidence there for even the most ardent Freudian to make an essay from. 

Let’s go back to Kafka. Gregor Samsa was a travelling salesman. This made him a bug in the eyes of others. He had a family whose interactions with him give plenty to think over. Like the narrator of A Shining, he seems oblivious to certain things – in Gregor’s case, for example, that being a bug might make it hard for him to do his job. But unlike the narrator of Fosse’s story, his outward existence as an individual is sufficient to give us something to keep in our minds as we try to make sense of things. Both have personalities, but only Gregor seems to have had a life.

We might say that A Shining is about meaning, as if this is an excuse. Certainly, one real part of the work is the way that we try to find order and meaning in the world. The narrator’s hope for rescue leads him to ascribe meaning to the ground itself: “and that was probably a path leading into the forest, and it has to lead somewhere, doesn’t it, and there must be people there.” He finds a stone that just seems to have been shaped for sitting on. There is a human desperation for everything to make sense that he clings to.

Philosophically, this comes across in questions of determinism. On the very first page, the narrator notes: “All right then, this sudden urge to drive off somewhere had brought me to a forest. And there was another way of talking, according to which something, something or another, led, whatever that might mean, to something else, yes, something else.” (We might note here that our narrator, who thinks he is a “thinker”, refuses to state outright the simple name for this idea). If everything is determined by something else, then that suggests an ordering of the universe. That is a comforting thought.

Against that thought, there is reality and the random. The snow of the forest that obliterates any path that might be there,  that the car gets stuck to begin with. The narrator walking in circles as he tries to get out. The way that his parents, rather than helping him escape, argue with one another sadly and admit that they do not know the way out either.

We might look to parts of the story as symbols to guide us, to things as echoes of others. Dante’s Divine Comedy begins:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

This is our narrator’s problem, through and through. After the uncertainty of the forest, Dante meets his guide. Our narrator in A Shining also meets guides – the shining, the parents, and so on. He also remembers seeing a cabin beyond the forest – a symbol, clearly, of the order and meaning he can achieve if he can work through the muddle of snow and trees. Back on the road, there was an abandoned farmhouse, showing that the world he left behind cannot be returned to. This all sounds good to me, reasonable interpretations of things. But it does make things look quite simple.

The Shining

Now it’s really as dark as it can get and there in front of me I see the outline of something that looks like a person. A shining outline, getting clearer and clearer. Yes, a white outline there in the dark, right in front of me. Is it far away or is it nearby. I can’t say for sure. It’s impossible, yes, impossible to say whether it’s close or far away. But it’s there. A white outline. Shining. And I think it’s walking toward me. Or coming toward me.

With the shining itself, it’s perhaps not necessary to demonstrate the parallels, except that I am increasingly aware that the extent to which I was exposed to Christianity as a child through my schooling is completely unrepresentative of the general distance many now have from the common stories of the Bible, regardless of belief. It could be an “angel”. Certainly, it brings comfort to the narrator, warming him up. At one point he thinks of it as a voice of “love.” The shining form enters the narrator and occasionally talks to him –

I say: who are you. The presence says: I am who I am—and I think that I’ve heard that answer before, but I can’t remember where I heard it, or maybe I read it somewhere or another.

So at least the book is aware that people’s connection to God is not what it used to be, and makes it obvious. Although the narrator suggests it might be some dark angel, it is fairly conclusive from the context that it is a positive spirit, trying to help him. “I’ll leave that for other people to decide,” he thinks, about whether it is the voice of God. But the book does not leave much room for an alternative.

Next, we have the parents, once the shining has gone quiet and entered the narrator. Their portrayal is touching, because of its vulnerability. We expect his parents to help, but they seem just as lost in the forest as the narrator:

She says: you don’t know the way—and he says no and she says she was sure he knew where the way was, he always knew the way, she couldn’t remember a single time when he hadn’t known the way, she was sure he knew the way, she would never have imagined anything else, she says and she’s stopped, and she’s let go of my father’s arm and now she’s looking up at him, and she says, and her voice sounds scared: you don’t know the way, you can’t find the way back home—and my father shakes his head. She says: so why did we walk so far into the forest—and my father doesn’t answer, he just stands there stiffly. She says: answer me. He says: but we came here together. She says: no, it was you who dragged me into the forest. He says: but you wanted to find him.

But at this point, we can say that the parents are sent by some higher power, clearly not to help the narrator escape, but to help him understand something about the world. “Wasn’t he always his own person,” his mother says to his father. Perhaps the lesson has something to do with selfishness and pride.

The final person is a man in a black suit. He has no face and perhaps is God, or the man the narrator could become. It’s impossible to say.

No, I don’t understand this. It’s not something that can be understood either, it’s something else, maybe it’s something that’s only experienced, that’s not actually happening. But is it possible to only experience something and not have it be happening? Everything you experience, yes, is real in a way, yes, and you probably understand it too, in a way. But it doesn’t matter either way.

He does not talk, but he and the narrator and all the others float off into the distance and the story ends, essentially bathed in light.

Conclusion

Now, either the narrator dies, or he is saved. It’s fairly immaterial. We can go for an atheistic interpretation that the whole thing was the delusion brought on by freezing to death, his parents, and the rest of it all just one of those near-death-experience oddities. Or we can say that in the forest he found some higher truth that is incommunicable, except as a strange second-hand experience for us readers. But it’s hard to see any other interpretation. It’s essentially a mystery that is not mysterious because there isn’t an answer here. We just need to accept the truth of it, which works with religion but seems fairly annoying with fiction.

A Shining isn’t actually bad as a religious tale. Its air of mystery is effectively created and it feels like a modern-day allegory. But it then suffers from not knowing what it is by trying half-heartedly to add ambiguity. Either it’s a story about a sad man who finds God/Meaning/Truth, in which case it should take itself still more seriously, or it’s an ironic tale that might just be a man freezing to death after taking a drive – at which point it could give us more to work with as we try to reach our own satisfactory interpretation of things. Either more ambiguity or more Truth, in other words.

Still, the funny thing is that I can see myself reading A Shining again. It’s not often that you have something that’s really trying to convey a mystical feeling – and partly succeeding. But on the other hand, I can’t see myself turning to the seven hundred or so pages of Septology too soon.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna and the Approach to his Tractatus

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-born British philosopher, “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating” (Bertrand Russell), was a master logician who studied under Frege and Russell before, like any great apprentice, overcoming them in one fell linguistic swoop with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

In that work he put to bed all the codswallop about metaphysics and morals, ethics and eschatology, which had bedevilled philosophy for centuries, nay, millennia, with his canonical “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” and his dismissal of all the above as nonsense. Wittgenstein was a knife that cut away all the gristle. All that mattered was logic, cold and hard.

But is that what he was really about? Is that what the Tractatus was really about?

This slender book, first published in 1921 and now out of copyright, has started recently reappearing in a flurry of new translations in English, one of which has prompted me to write to you today. But much more than the book, the main subject is the approach to the book. Is it really, with its crystalline numbered tree structure, a structured work of logic alone, or is there reason to think there is more to it?

The introduction to my edition, and what it passes over

I first wrote about Wittgenstein the man after reading Ray Monk’s biography, but could not make my way through any of his actual works. It was all too alien to me. Now I have finally gone through the Tractatus in the new OUP translation made by Michael Beaney, who to judge from his various distinguished positions is extremely successful in his field of study. In fact, the book is more introduction than Wittgenstein, with a long traditional introduction and then a long note on the text, explaining the publication history of the work, and finally the seventy pages of the Tractatus itself, followed by an annex with simplified “tree-structure” of the propositions, notes and glossary.

Beaney talks a lot about logic and the influence on Wittgenstein of Russell and Frege, two titans of funny letters and mathematical squiggles. He mentions contemporary scientists Boltzmann and Hertz and the philosopher Schopenhauer as other influences, whilst giving an indication of in what this influence consisted, at least in his opinion. But there is something funny in this, even to one little versed in philosophy. Schopenhauer, for example, this arch pessimist, is reduced to a reaction to Kant and his understanding of sensory and rational experience. Pessimism, in Beaney’s reading of influence, or the ethics which followed on from Schopenhauer’s vision of the world, does not get a look in.

This is the first hint of dissatisfaction, but there is more to come. The account of the sixth section of the Tractatus, which Wittgenstein wrote after the experience front line action in the First World War, is merely the part that “gave Wittgenstein the most trouble.” The trouble, however, is logical for Beaney. The statements on ethics and the meaning of life and human happiness, are given a single paragraph in his account. They do not appear to be important, more aberrations to be passed over in relative silence.

Yet is this man just a genius of logic?

Bertrand Russell, finally meeting Wittgenstein after the war where he had fought bravely before ending up in Italian prisoner-of-war camp, wrote home to complain of him: “He has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and [German mystic religious writer] Angelus Silesius, he seriously contemplates becoming a monk.” The remark is quoted by Beaney, but only in the context of Wittgenstein’s attempts to get the Tractatus published. Another famous letter, to Ludwig von Ficker, a publisher, is also introduced in a way that suggests we must assume it is of no importance at all to understanding the book:

“it will probably be a help to you if I write a few words about my book. You see, I am quite sure that you won’t get all that much out of reading it. Because you won’t understand it; it’s subject matter will seem quite alien to you. But it isn’t really alien to you, because the book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here, because it will perhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits”

During the war, Wittgenstein carried around a copy of Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, which he said “saved” his life. His fellow soldiers even took to calling him “the man with the Gospels.” He disliked Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus, which was necessary for the work to be published in English, saying that Russell had misunderstood him. This misunderstanding seemed only to increase with time. Russell thought the later Wittgenstein had squandered his talents completely.

Other things about Wittgenstein’s behaviour seem odd. I remember from Monk’s biography how Wittgenstein would go into Russell’s chambers at Cambridge late at night and pace around, saying that he would kill himself once he left, thinking and pacing for hours at a time until he resolved whatever was bothering him. And when he met the men who became the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, he shocked them by reading them poetry and recommending someone as “illogical” as Heidegger. In short, Wittgenstein himself, in his living, seemed anything but a merely logical genius. He seemed animated by another force. And if the man was animated by another force, is it not likely that his first work was animated by another force too? 

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

I bought this book, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, back when I first thought I would read Wittgenstein. It has proven the work which has most helped me to engage with the Tractatus, far more than Beaney’s introduction or any other which I have read, which is funny given that the Tractatus is scarcely quoted here, and Wittgenstein is part of the shadows, certainly not the main act like the title might imply. But the arguments in the work are convincing. Wittgenstein, as part of his journey to the Tractatus, contacted the eminent philosophers Frege and Russell. But why did he do this? Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein was already engaged with some problems – for why else would he reach out? And that after meeting the logicians, he was given a set of tools that let him resolve them. But logic was never the main thing. It was just the means to another end.

Wittgenstein’s Vienna is an attempt, circumstantially we might say, to consider what these problems were. Vienna was an extraordinary place in the early 1900s, with Freud and Schoenberg and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, to name just a few of the leading literary and cultural lights. To their number Janik and Toulmin add others of whom I was less aware, like the architect Adolf Loos, and most importantly to their argument, the firebrand writer Karl Kraus. Through depicting the state of intellectual upheaval in Vienna at this time, and all its components, they lead us to see that the Tractatus was not a link in a logical chain, but rather a response to a problem that was at the time particularly Viennese.

They have, perhaps, some good reason for this. Professor von Wright, Wittgenstein’s literary executor, said to them that the two most important facts about Wittgenstein were that he was Viennese, and that he was an engineer with a thorough knowledge of physics. Both of these flow into Janik and Toulmin’s analysis, and both lead to a very different picture of the Tractatus to the one we might be used to.

Context: The Proving Ground for World Destruction

It was the Viennese writer, Karl Kraus, who called the city the “Proving Ground for World Destruction”. And it is he who looms large as one of the central influences on the milieu that a young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in. Vienna, towards the end of the Habsburg Empire, was a place that produced some of the most brilliant art and philosophy that we have – and for its time, some of the most experimental, most modernist. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, are just some of these names which have in one way or another made their mark on culture, and often been featured here on the blog. But as so often happens with great art, much of that was produced in response to its environment, rather than thanks to it, as the hostile forces artists experienced in their daily lives were rejected and transformed in works of art.

Vienna at this time was a place where the gulf between appearance and reality was as great as it has perhaps ever been anywhere. The “City of Dreams” shone with palaces and parks, it seethed with its rapidly growing population – it quadrupled in size over about fifty years, without growing its city limits nearly so much – and its multinational, multiethnic population, led by a benevolent sovereign, lived according to the great values of that land: reason, order, disciplined conformity to good taste. Some families had done well, like the Wittgensteins, who through canny business decisions had risen to become some of the richest people in Europe. But many more people found themselves trapped in accommodation far too small for them, unable to feed themselves on puny wages.

Ethnic harmony was a lie that was increasingly hard to paper over, and antisemitism was shifting from an unfortunately common personal conviction to a political programme. The lights that the city shone with were not often electric, because the Emperor Franz Joseph plugged any hole that modernity might seep through, keeping the toilets in the palaces without modern plumbing, and the lights running on gas. Like the Russian Empire at that time, society was rigid to the extreme and taboos were rigorously enforced. It seems no surprise that Freud should have his first successes here, working with women who felt things they were not allowed to feel, and had no way of managing those feelings. For a literary response to female sexuality, we need look no further than Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, one of my favourite works of the period.

What was said and what wasn’t, what was unimportant and what was, were completely out of order. If in people’s personal lives this led to the rise of psychoanalysis and associated topics – Alfred Adler discovered the “inferiority complex” while in Vienna – in the arts this led to what we might call a crisis of representation. Perhaps this was most obvious in the case of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, some of whose poetry I’ve previously translated here. The enfant terrible of Austrian letters suddenly discovered, after a few years of effortless brilliant poems, that he had “lost completely the ability to think or speak of anything coherently”. This much he wrote in his fictional Letter of Lord Chandos, where he talks about words failing him. It is not that he cannot write, it is that words cannot express what he wishes they could. In short, he can only write – now in prose – of his inability to write and other things. But not of what is higher.

This inability or unwillingness to express things was not just the case with Hofmannsthal. In architecture, Adolf Loos created buildings that were extremely stripped down, with a huge shift away from ornamentation. Schoenberg in music was doing something similar, as were the first non-representational, abstract painters. All of them took inspiration from Kraus, who had a strong sense of mission and morality. In his works he was constantly taking to task politicians and intellectuals for using language badly, often by simply repeating their words back to them. One of the pranks he used to play was sending in fictitious letters to newspapers, claiming to be an expert in a given field (e.g. metallurgy) and watching as they included his deliberate fantasy, without daring to challenge it.

Kraus saw a person’s language as reflecting her morality. In other words, he adopted a holistic view of a human being, where everything can and must be judged together. We can see this in an aphorism of his: “Worthy opinions are valueless; it depends on whose opinions they are.” Kraus was well aware of the emptiness – or in some sense, performativeness – of many of the words and speeches his contemporaries made out of social decorum. His ideal, meanwhile, was a kind of authenticity, where action and speech and person were united. In this he reflected a growing interest in the works of Kierkegaard, and the intellectual dominance of Schopenhauer during this time.

Just as Tolstoy discovered Schopenhauer when writing Anna Karenina, leading him to see the world as full of frustrated desires we had little control over, so too did the Viennese around the turn of the century, where the philosopher was massively in vogue. In his rejection of the external world as controlled by will, and his emphasis on internality, he appealed to intellectuals who found Vienna more fake than real. He was joined by Kierkegaard, who also re-emerged out of obscurity in an environment where authenticity appeared to people like Kraus as the overriding ethical impulse, society be damned.

This crisis of representation and being in the world was not just limited to the arts. In the sciences and philosophy, people like Hertz, Boltzmann, and Mach were also considering questions about what could or should be said and shown. Take this statement of Hertz’s: “When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.” He had been discussing the idea of “force”, which seems harder to pin down the more you think about it. But the conclusion he came to was remarkably similar to the one Wittgenstein himself had to the problems of life – the solution is not the answer to the question, but the end of the questioning:

6.521 The solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem.

               (Is this not the reason why those to whom the meaning of life became clear after prolonged doubt, could not then say in what this meaning consisted?)

The young Ludwig Wittgenstein grew up in the heart of this culture. As one of the richest families in Austria, his home was filled with artists and cultural figures – as was only proper. Many of his siblings had great artistic talents, especially musically. There were also several suicides among his brothers, and as noted above Ludwig regularly spoke of such an end for himself. He hoped to become an aeronautical engineer, first studying in Manchester before being overtaken by philosophy. This led him to Frege, and thence to Bertrand Russell. Janik and Toulmin argue that Wittgenstein turned to them because he was already vexed by questions of representation that he naturally encountered, growing up in Vienna, about what could and couldn’t be said and how to think about ethics, and thought logic might help him sort all of this out. Logic was merely a means to solve that all-important (for some) question – how should I live?

The Evidence Does Not Quite Add Up

The evidence for Janik and Toulmin’s view is, they readily acknowledge, circumstantial. Their book, far better than I could, explores the way this crisis penetrated every aspect of Viennese society, so that Wittgenstein simply could not have avoided it. At the same time, we know how the Tractatus was actually written, and the chronology seems wrong. Wittgenstein’s interest in ethics and mysticism seems, or at least the point where it becomes part of the Tractatus, to have come from his experience fighting in the first World War.

Wittgenstein was already odd – for example, he had a superstitious idea that he was soon to die. But it seems that the focus on ethics and God came a little later, when death and he became closely acquainted. “What do I know of God and the purpose of my life?” He wrote in his diary, after the beginning of a particularly brutal offensive on the Eastern Front. It was then that he wrote much of the sixth section of the Tractatus, where he discusses ethics and meaning and what cannot ultimately be spoken. With that said, Russell, meeting Wittgenstein after the war for the first time and finding him a complete “mystic”, also blames William James and Wittgenstein’s experience living and working alone in Norway just before the war.

Conclusion

Yet all this is not particularly important, either way. Wittgenstein’s Vienna cannot conclusively prove that Wittgenstein was concerned with questions about the sayable and authenticity before he met Russell and Frege, but it can certainly show that these were the questions he would not have been able to avoid as a young man surrounded by the culture of his native city. It seems obvious to me, based on my knowledge of Wittgenstein’s life and the genesis of the Tractatus, that these questions of ethics and representability certainly became important to him, probably more important than the rest of the book. And they are what is most important to me, reading the book now.

One slightly mean aside in the book which I nevertheless find myself nodding to, is the suggestion that we in the UK and US undoubtedly understood Wittgenstein very poorly. The cultural shock of this man who was concerned with ethics and life with a passion that in Britain we have rarely allowed ourselves to experience, meant that we almost certainly corralled him into appearing as a figure he was not in reality. Just as in Russia, in Vienna people were taking seriously problems that we have struggled even to see as problems. And rather than see them as problems, we prefer to dismiss them as ravings and madness. Much to our discredit as human beings and inhabitants of this world.

Having read through the book in English now, I am returning to it in the German original. I expect it will take me a long time to understand the Tractatus properly. But I am not trying to understand the logic; at least that is not my primary goal. Instead, I am trying to understand the soul the work contains, and the fire that inspired it. Still, that seems a more worthy aim than merely running around in circles calling things nonsense and tautologies, thinking I am the cleverest fellow in the room.

Life’s Moments and Self Creation in Lispector’s Agua Viva

It’s a question I generally leave to those philosophers whom I haven’t yet read: what is life? I always leap ahead, asking myself and the world what I must do with my life or how to live. Yet is it not foolish to skip over that fundamental questioning? If we don’t know what life is, we can hardly know properly how to live it.

Clarice Lispector is the next stop on my unofficial tour of the literature produced by authors that are not Ukrainian but belong, in a better world, in part to the land of today’s Ukraine. She was born in that country in 1920, but swiftly emigrated with her family to escape ongoing pogroms to Brazil, where she is considered one of that country’s greatest authors. She wrote in Portuguese, and in Agua Viva, she tried to work out what life is.

This is a strange book. As with W.G. Sebald, whose Vertigo I recently finished but which doesn’t get a blog post, Agua Viva is one of those works which is not entirely a novel, but not quite anything else either. It is an aphoristic work, made up of short reflections, many only a few sentences long, some connected to one another and some disconnected. And they all aim to work out what life is.

Moments

“I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.” Life, for our narrator, is a moment. A thing that passes. But a thing that we can, and should, grab onto. Lispector’s language is lush, and it is linguistically that she attempts to depict this moment. A huge array of images creates cumulatively this impression of the instant passing by. “The next instant, do I make it? or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath. And with the flair of the bullfighter in the ring.”

At times, the narrator is full of enthusiasm. There’s a kind of ecstatic exclamation that seems reminiscent of Whitman, together with an enthusiasm for movement and travel. “May whoever comes along with me come along: the journey is long, it is tough, but lived,” is very like the Whitman of Song of Myself’s section 46, for example. Lispector also has an affinity with Rilke, in that the entire book is an attempt to “live the questions”, as Rilke suggests to the questioner in Letters to a Young Poet. “I find no answer: I am,” She writes.

However, there’s a certain anxiety here too, which Rilke and Whitman are (largely) immune to. This is not the buoyant self-sustaining grandiosity of Whitman – Lispector’s narrator knows that her utterances, though they float in the air, need to be heard. She cannot live alone. “I write to you because I don’t understand myself.” Self-doubt appears in other guises too. In the questions, in the repetitions of what does not to be repeated, such as how “I am myself”. This is not bad writing, but rather anxiety expressed indirectly on the page. This anxiety belying the confidence gives the narrator kinship with the person that Whitman, after years of study, became for me – a self-creating figure whose assertions are designed to hide the sadness and loneliness at the core of his being.

Yet throughout, there is a distinctly feminine angle to Agua Viva that it would be remiss to ignore. Her Whitmanian exclamations are tinged with a sense of her own limitations, specifically as a woman. Where Whitman, in Song of Myself, attempts to identify and praise everything – every profession, every life – Lispector’s narrator here comes up against the limits of a much more bounded existence. The moments she attempts to pour light onto are simple, average. Having coffee outside, having a smoke. The flowers she has in the room. Or the light playing on a tap:

“In this instant-now I’m enveloped by a wandering diffuse desire for marvelling and millions of reflections of the sun in the water that runs from the faucet onto the lawn of a garden…”

This praising of existence is a praising of the existence that is available to her, which is why it appears so undefined to a reader. She lives in her mind, on the page, in words. But not, it seems, in the world. Because she cannot, simply put.

We might also make out the hazy edges of a plot, of a reality lying beyond the experience of individual moments. The narrator seems to deny this: “Do I not have a plot to my life? For I am unexpectedly fragmentary. I am piecemeal. My story is living.” But there is a failure, a broken relationship. The narrator addresses an absent man at certain points of doubt. “But what can I do if you are not touched by my defects, whereas I loved yours. My candour was crushed underfoot by you. You didn’t love me, only I know that. I was alone. Yours alone. I write to no one and a riff is being made that doesn’t exist. I unglued myself from me.”

Creation

And this thread is what lets us construct a hidden narrative for the story of Agua Viva, of a reaction against a life that somewhere went wrong. Our narrator is not a writer, not primarily, but rather a painter. Her writing is not her natural medium, but the style is like a painting in that it attempts to capture the blur of experience in the way that someone like Monet could or Renoir could. She had a relationship, but it has ended. She makes veiled references to “he” as a topic she will discuss – but she never manages to get that far.

Her confidence has been hurt by her rejection. And so she has turned to writing. The narrator’s introspective, aphoristic language is tentative, it is testing the waters of language’s possibility. And it is also an act of creation. All writing creates, but here we have something different from the sentences of realist novelists, who try to build up characters on the page. The impression given by phrases like “this writing I’m attempting is a way of thrashing myself free” is of a real person, trying to gain a reality that their immediate reality does not allow them. The impression of the voice here is much more intimate, human, and emotionally affecting.

In the task of freeing herself from the world, the narrator relies on writing. She also relies upon a conscious reaction against rationality, which no doubt for her represents an aspect of men that is hateful to her. “I have the mysticism of the darkness of a remote past,” she says. She also talks of her “witching ceremonies.” Through these tropes unclaimed by men, and through the blessing of her reality through its description, the narrator attempts to live a free life in the mind, and build a new life beyond the failure of the relationship to the “he”.

A State of Grace

In spite of the moments of doubt, the narrator succeeds and slips away at the book’s end into something like a state of grace where every moment is blessed. But as with everything mystical in fiction, the success of Agua Viva’s portrayal of its narrator’s ecstasy depends upon our sympathy and our willingness to give ourselves over to the strength of the exclamations and images. “That is living: the joy of the it”. Do we believe in her, or do we doubt her, as we might do Whitman?

I cannot say for sure what I think in my own case. Lispector’s language is very beautiful and full of striking images, but I found it all too abstract for my tastes. There was a disbalance between experience and underlying reality that I disliked, so that I almost have to look down on the narrator. If this is a book of philosophy, rather than fiction, and it perhaps is – arguing by images about the importance of each moment – then it immediately encounters the problem that such arguments are not particularly unconvincing to a cruel and logical mind, such as my own.

Whitman was not wrong when he exclaimed that “Logic and sermons never convince, The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.” The problem is that, with a few exceptions, literature is not the damp of the night. Those kind of arguments require the reader to get up and go outside. Just like Lispector’s work will succeed or fail based on whether we can look at a mirror or a faucet in the same way again after we’ve read it.

Anyway, Agua Viva is a lovely little book, and my first Lispector. I’m sure I’ll read more of her later, but for now I won’t be sad to return to the earth and the concrete and the conflict of the world outside.