Review: Near to the Wild Heart (1943)
The debut novel of Clarice Lispector, translated by Alison Entrekin
Near to the Wild Heart lives by one focal desire, and her name is Joana. She is the novel’s verve and protagonist, thanks to her sheer, strong wish for rising, autonomous, free life.
Throughout the novel, Joana hums, evolves, and churns—she wishes to become free, first by creation of her spoken verse or by paradoxical imagination but then, ultimately, with a descent into her fetid self of sensations, at the expense of her external life and those who exist there.
Those people include Joana’s cold-scholar father, her distant aunt, her self-absorbed husband, Otávio, his lover, Lidía, and the unnamed man whom Joana allows to treat her like a deity come to his strange, vagabond earth. They exist only in relation to Joana, made striking even in the mundane. She determines them by her own consciousness (essentially the novel’s consciousness itself), and so they are the trappings she must shed as she recreates herself. That’s the endpoint of her primal desire: herself, newly and eternally recast.
In the final passage, after Joana begs God to approach her even as she feels He doesn’t exist in her, she fashions her final self without her body as “substance alone”: “I will be brutal and misshapen as a rock, I will be as light and grave as something felt and not understood, I will surpass myself in waves….I will rise up as strong and beautiful as a young horse.”
The Novel’s Topography: Through and Into Joana
Near to the Wild Heart sounds a little odd, doesn’t it? It is, frankly. But only as it should be: by its own standards of meaning.
Clarice Lispector—in this debut she wrote at 24, somehow—writes with a bronze, elemental hand. It means that none of her characters are relatably human, never imaginable as belching nor relieving themselves. They are unimaginable in any cast other than the prose Lispector uses to create them— “Otávio made [Joana] into something that wasn’t her but himself and which Joana received out of pity for both, because both were incapable of freeing themselves through love, because she had meekly accepted her own fear of suffering, her inability to move beyond the frontier of revolt.” Paraphrase is doomed, for this is the prose for every character, and nearly every moment.
The characters are also unimaginable in relation to anything other than Joana and her inhuman struggle to transcend them. The spare points of plot, whether the death of Joana’s father, her marriage to Otávio, her meeting with Lidía, her hearing of Lidía’s pregnancy with Otávio’s child, or Joana’s own affair with the unnamed man who wishes to worship her, exist mostly as constraints Joana must shed for her final ecstasy.
All except for the unnamed man. He alone submits to Joana and seeks her help, as Joana briefly seeks the help of God, and Joana cradles him and renames him like the goddess she thinks she ought to be.
Action is not Lispector’s obsession; she desires her characters’ mental landscapes instead.
Her prose is attuned to their depths with the uncanny precision of prophecy. Their depths can be hallucinatory and breathless, especially in the stream-of-Joana’s-consciousness. But they can also ping like undersea sonar, when Lispector signals her characters through the subtlest mental pivots. “Lidía stared at [Joana], lips slightly open, waiting for her. And suddenly she felt with clarity that she didn’t want to fight that woman. She shook her head disoriented. Her face dissolved, shook, her features hesitated in search of an expression…”
After the words “that woman,” we leave Lidía’s conciousness, where we never realized we’d entered in the first place. Her face and features become described, rather than inhabited. And, ever and always, the reader returns into Joana. As the novel grows all the more fevered in Joana’s delirious self-approach, these smallest signals of other characters and moods echo in contrast.
The Incomplete Modernist of the Body
Even beneath its cave-diving, Near to the Wild Heart has a modernist magma still further down. Its title, after all, is a line from Joyce’s semi-ironic epiphany in Portrait: “He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.”
Like her modernist cohort, Lispector parses the entrails of knowledge, expression, and language. What is sensed is rarely what is, and what is known is rarely complete, Joana finds. This essential lack is why her language must spin and accelerate and mystify and calm and reveal and, again, spin—her language remains incomplete. In the instant Joana perceives herself, she changes and is lost to that epiphany.
Take, for instance, Joana’s mournful reverie when she realizes that death, its existential blankness, is her inescapable guarantee. “And suddenly death was just cessation…No! [Joana] cried to herself frightened, not death.” In the previous sections she has renamed her worshipping subject and left Otávio in a gust of strength, and then, incongruously, Joana crumbles before the end she feels powerless to stop. She can’t know herself before death.
Her fate is to know nothing eternally even as she seeks her own paradise, even unto her final vision of herself as “strong and beautiful as a young horse.”
But where Lispector investigates mental-modernist concerns, she writes bodily, incantatory prose.
In Joana, existence is sensual—all is felt in her fingers, along her bare skin, across her shoulders. Her thoughts run the novel’s prose but only perceive what steams through her body. The very body she’s wishing to shed in recasting herself as her own, by the way.
Lispector’s word-through-word concern with the body feels nearly like witchcraft. I don’t mean this as a burning pejorative; I mean witchcraft in its incantatory, creative sense. Images recur like leitmotifs: the viper, the sea, the thundering horse. Their repetitions drum like little hypnotisms into the reader, which is why the language is often stepping into a sweeping stream. It transports you. It carries you into a humid undergrowth you have never seen.
In her enigmatic personal life, Lispector attracted speculation of as an actual witch, which to me mostly seems a mythology she allowed to shield herself. I only care about Lispector’s prose which chants. I only care about her mythic eye which watches always. I only care about her novel which guides and dives into the wild heart.
That was the first standalone book review here at A Stylist Submits, and the next review will appear in late December.
Thanks for being here, y’all. May Advent be reflective, slow, and warm!