Book review: Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector

(Originally published on Edward Coke's Jots and Plots)

“I feel who I am and the impression is lodged in the highest part of my brain, on my lips (especially on my tongue), on the surface of my arms and also running through me, deep inside my body, but where, exactly where, I can’t say.”

Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do coração selvagem) has been compared to modernist works like those of James Joyce, and the title is in fact taken from a line in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, although the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) claimed she had not read his work when she wrote this, her first novel, in 1942. Joyce enjoys special notoriety as a ‘difficult’ writer, even more than his peers in the modernist movement, who collectively often stand accused of putting potential readers off books entirely by writing obscurely inaccessible prose.

There are clear parallels between literature and other art forms in this respect: As modern painting becomes more abstract, it increasingly provokes the suspicion amongst the uninitiated that it is all a trick, recalling the fable of the emperor’s new clothes.

All of which makes Near to the Wild Heart a daunting prospect for the casual reader. It is not a ripping good yarn. It’s not the Three Musketeers, not Treasure Island. But it is a rewarding book and, I believe, offers insights into the invisible threads which link developments in visual art and literature across continents, perhaps without the artists even being conscious of them.

For the first few chapters, I found Clarice Lispector’s writing frustratingly difficult to make sense of, infuriatingly lyrical and imprecise. I forgave the naïve stream-of-consciousness style of the first chapter as it reminded me of the memorable first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I thought that the narrative would resolve itself as it went on, like a picture coming into focus.

When it failed to do so, I became less indulgent, and I have to confess I started searching for concrete examples of the meaninglessness of the prose. I read: “The afternoon was nude and limpid, without beginning or end. Light black birds flew distinct through the pure air, flew without a single human eye watching them.” And I wondered whether it would have made any difference if the afternoon had been bloated rather than nude, or if it had been slender rather than limpid, or any other combination of two adjectives. It seemed to me that the words, since they could not be productively interpreted where they were, had been robbed of their meaning, reduced to mere words. In that case, any other words would have done the same job just as well, only playing the role of ‘word’.

But there was one idea floating around in my mind which would enable me to read on and appreciate the book. The blurb on  the back cover describes it as “this impressionistic, dreamlike and fiercely intelligent novel”, and the word ‘impressionistic’ was for me the key which opened up the text. Impressionist painting involves the creation of an impression through individual, usually small, brushstrokes. The abstract, created image began to challenge the original, objective, real subject of the painting, and the question of what it was an impression of became harder to answer. I thought especially of the pointillist, neo-impressionist paintings of Georges Seurat, in which an image is built up from hundreds of small coloured dots. If just one of those dots was red instead of green, would it change the overall impression created by the painting?

Similarly, Lispector’s words create an impression, although not a visual one. Instead, the impression is a kind of fleeting feeling, the sense of a state of mind, something which can’t quite be summarised in a few words or even in a book review – a specific, precise but intangible thing. This must be what Lispector meant by “the symbol of the thing in the thing itself,” which she wanted to surprise and capture in her writing. Once I realised this, I had to shut out the rest of the world and read the rest of the book quickly, letting the words wash over me, immersing myself in the dappled light which filtered through the layered pages.

There is much more that could be written about this book. I could explore what it tells us about the artistic temperament, about childhood, womanhood, marriage, idealism and truth, but I could never accurately describe the symbol of the thing in the thing itself contained in the text, because the symbol is the text. At most, I can suggest a way of reading it which will make it more accessible, which allows me to recommend it to casual readers. If you have never read an impressionistic text and would like to know what this means, and are ready for a challenge, this is an excellent book to try.

Detail from A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte - 1884 by Georges Seurat