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.