Cuando a la casa del lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las
palabras no guarecen, yo hablo
When the house of language has its roof blown off and words
do not shelter, I speak
- fellow Latin American writer and contemporary, Alejandra
Pizarnik, "Fragmentos para dominar el silencio” (Fragments to overcome
silence)
---
“ALL THE WORLD BEGAN WITH A YES. ONE MOLECULE SAID YES TO
ANOTHER MOLECULE and life was born. But before prehistory there was the
prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was
ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.
Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous
effort”
- From The Hour Of The Star (1977)
---
When I read Clarice, I’m reminded of Montaigne -
"I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself,
I taste myself … I roll about in myself”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty described Montaigne as someone who put
"a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence”
This is the way I would describe Clarice.
---
Critics Speak – Stephanie LaCava
“Lispector uses her words carefully, endeavouring to find
something close to “reality,” all the time knowing she will not. This struggle
recurs again and again throughout her work — both explicitly, as a theme in her
stories, and implicitly, in the deliberately odd language she chooses. She
constructs melodic, haunting linguistic arrangements in which grammar and
syntax combine to lend the resulting prose a foreign quality. Think of Marina
Warner on Samuel Beckett and Stéphane Mallarmé, two writers who chose to write
in a language other than their native tongues, and who often deployed self-cancelling
idioms, “an estrangement through the foreign tongue”
“Lispector is always in search of ‘the symbol of the thing
in the thing itself,’ as she wrote in Near to the Wild Heart. She seeks the
abstraction, somehow embodied in the concrete”
Access to truth in the non-figurative -
“Lispector came to understand music and abstract painting as
a way to access truth — even though (or perhaps because) these forms are explicitly
nonfigurative”
Clarice’s epeolatry (worship of words) -
“Unaware that I was obeying old traditions, but with a
wisdom that the evil are born with … I was playing the prostitute and he the
saint. No, maybe that wasn’t it. Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and
alter me, and if I’m not careful it will be too late: things will be said
without my having said them.” (The Disasters of Sofia by CL)
The tension between her ordered and stable appearance and
her rich and dangerous inner life -
“ … particular brilliance as a woman and as a writer is
here: she refuses to accept that her talents might seem incongruous against the
backdrop of her appearance. In fact, she sees her appearance as in a sense
necessary to the flourishing of her talent. Having a great sensitivity to
others — always being aware of their eyes and judgment on you — exacerbates an
inability to inhabit oneself. Lispector’s own instability led her to wield the
power of her own appearance in order to mask her problematic, amorphous soul”
“… she does not want to be called an intellectual, but she
also does not want to be dismissed for clinging to what has helped her navigate
the world: lipstick and sweater sets and flared skirts”
---
Sacredness and profanity of writing -
“Cleanse thy clothes, and if possible, let all thy garments
be white, for all this is helpful in leading the heart towards the fear of God
and the love of God. If it be night, kindle many lights, until all be bright.
Then take ink, pen and a table to thy hand and remember that thou art about to
serve God in joy of the gladness of heart. Now begin to combine a few or many
letters, to permute and to combine them until thy heart be warm. Then be
mindful of their movements and of what thou canst bring forth by moving them.
And when thou feelest that thy heart is already warm and when thou seest that
by combinations of letters thou canst grasp new things which by human tradition
or by thyself thou wouldst not be able to know and when thou art thus prepared
to receive the influx of divine power which flows into thee, then turn all thy
true thought to imagine the Name and His exalted angels in thy heart as if they
were human beings sitting or standing about thee”
- Abraham Abulafia (1240-1290) – founder of the school of
Prophetic Kabbalah
---
Clarician Quotes
“I am so mysterious that I don’t even understand myself”
“My mystery,” she insisted elsewhere, “is that I have no
mystery”
“My God, but it was easier to be a saint than a person!”
(protagonist)
“I got pretty annoyed, but then I got over it. If I ran into
[its author] the only thing I would say is: listen, when you write about me,
it’s Clarice with a c, not with two s’s, all right?”
“Facts and particulars annoy me”
“Alongside my desire to defend my privacy, I have the
intense desire to confess in public and not to a priest”
“Before I could read and write I already made-up stories”
“The need for the orgy and the worst absolute delight. Sin
attracts me, prohibited things fascinate me. I want to be a pig and a hen and
then kill them and drink their blood”
“I discover now—nobody would mind if I vanished either, and
even my writing somebody else could do just as well. Another writer, yes, but
it’d have to be a man …”
“We are all participants in this theatre: in truth we never
shall die when death happens. We only die as actors. Could that be eternity?”
“I ask you not to listen only with your reason because, if
you just try to reason, everything that will be said will escape your
understanding. If a dozen listeners feel my text I will consider myself
satisfied”
“Those who pray, pray to themselves, calling themselves by
another name. The flame of the candle. Fire makes me pray. I have a secret
pagan adoration for the red and yellow flame”
“I need money. The position of a myth is not very
comfortable”
“I write through words that hide others—the true words.
Since the true ones cannot be named”
“I enjoy speaking this way: it is a language that resembles
an orgasm. Since I don’t understand, I hand myself over”
“I write because I find in it a pleasure that I don’t know
how to translate. I’m not pretentious. I write for myself, to hear my soul
talking and singing, sometimes crying”
---
(even) Clarice’s shrink speaks –
“She was a fantastic figure, an extremely generous woman,
but even so it was not easy to be with her. She carried a load of anxiety that
I have rarely seen in my life. It’s very difficult to be around someone like
that. Full-time self-centred, not because she wanted to be, out of vanity, but
a real difficulty, in connecting. She couldn’t turn herself off, and when her anxiety
heated up, it reached overpowering levels, and she had no rest, she could not
calm down. At those times living was a torment for her. She couldn’t stand
herself. And other people couldn’t stand her. I myself, as her analyst, couldn’t
stand her”
- Psychoanalyst, Jacob David Azulay
---
“Dear Reader
Do not read what I write as a reader would do. Unless this
reader works, he too, in the soliloquies of the irrational dark.
If this book ever comes out, may the profane recoil from it.
Since writing is a sacred thing which no infidel can enter. I am making a
really bad book on purpose in order to drive off the profane who want to
“like.” But a small group will see that this “liking” is superficial and will
enter inside what I am truly writing, which is neither “bad” nor “good.”
Inspiration is like a mysterious scent of amber. I have a
small piece of amber with me. The scent makes me the sister of the sacred
orgies of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Blessed be your loves. Could it
be that I am afraid to take the step of dying at this very instant? Careful not
to die. Yet I am already in the future. This future of mine that shall be for
you the past of someone dead. When you have finished this book cry a halleluiah
for me. When you close the last page of this frustrated and dauntless and silly
book of life then forget me. May God bless you then and this book ends well.
That I might at last find respite. May peace be upon us, upon you, and upon me.
Am I falling into discourse? may the temple’s faithful forgive me: I write and
that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest” (CL)
---
Near To the Wild Heart – Clarice’s stunning debut in 1943
NEAR TO THE WILD HEART BY CLARICE LISPECTOR, TRANSLATED BY
ALISON ENTREKIN
‘Published in 1943, Near to the Wild Heart introduced Brazil
to Clarice Lispector, or as one writer called her “Hurricane Clarice.” The book
was a sensation, a hit, written by a previously unknown twenty-three-year-old
woman who would go on to dazzle the literary world. Near to the Wild Heart—the
title taken from a line from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man—follows Joanna, the heroine, from her childhood through to the dissolution
of her marriage, in this novel of agency. In a series of interior monologues
and narrative epiphanies, readers come to understand the wild, fleeting, and
strange creature that is Joana but they also get a glimpse at the raw,
unadulterated power of Lispector’s prose. It’s revelatory and a perfect
starting off point to explore Lispector’s writing’
- Source: Bookriot https://bookriot.com/clarice-lispector-books/
---
Spinoza is Near To The Wild At Heart -
“The pure scientist stops believing in what he likes but
cannot keep himself from liking what he believes. The need to like: the sign of
mankind. —Do not forget: “the intellectual love of God” is the true knowledge
and excludes any mysticism or adoration. —Many answers are found in
affirmations of Spinoza’s. In the idea for example that there can be no thought
without extension (aspect of God) and vice-versa, is not the mortality of the
soul confirmed? Of course: mortality as a distinct and reasoning soul, clear
impossibility of the pure form of St. Thomas’s angels. Mortality in relation to
the human. Immortality through the transformation in nature.—Inside the world
there is no room for other creations. There is only the opportunity for
reintegration and continuation. Everything that could exist, already does.
Nothing else can be created, only revealed”
Taken from Spinoza, word for word -
“Inside the world there is no room for other creations.
There is only the opportunity for reintegration and continuation. Everything
that could exist, already does”
Unconscious God -
“A God possessed of free will is lesser than a God with a
single law. In the same way that a concept is all the more true when it need
not transform itself when faced with every individual case. God’s perfection is
proven more by the impossibility of miracles than by their possibility. For the
humanized God of the religions, to perform miracles is to commit an
injustice—at the same time thousands of other people require the same
miracle—or to recognize a mistake and correct it—which, more than an act of
goodness or a “proof of character,” means having made a mistake in the first
place.—Neither comprehension nor will belong to the nature of God, Spinoza
says. That makes me happier, and leaves me freer. Because the idea of a
conscious God is horribly unsatisfying”
Joana speaks (and also her author Clarice) -
“And a day will come, yes, a day will come in me the
capacity as red and affirmative as it is clear and smooth, one day whatever I
do is blindly safely unconsciously, walking over myself, on my truth, as
completely immersed in whatever I do that I shall not be able to speak, and
especially a day will come in which all my movement will be creation, birth, I
will break all of the nos that exist inside me, I shall prove to myself that
there is nothing to fear, that whatever I am will always be wherever there is a
woman who shares my origins, I will erect inside me what I am one day, with one
gesture my waves will rise up powerful, pure water drowning doubt, conscience,
I shall be strong as the soul of an animal and when I speak they will be words
not thought out and slow, not lightly felt, not full of human will, not the
past corroding the future,! whatever I say shall resound fatal and entire!
there will be no space inside me for me to know that time, men, dimensions,
exist, there will be no space inside me to so much as notice that I will be
creating instant by instant, no instant by instant: always molten, because then
I shall live, only then shall I live more fully than in childhood, I shall be
as brutal and misshapen as a stone, I shall be light and vague as something
felt and not understand, I shall surpass myself in waves, ah, God, and may
everything come and fall upon me, even the incomprehension of myself in certain
blank moments because all I need to do is fulfill myself and then nothing can
block my path to death-without-fear, from any struggle or rest I shall rise up
strong and beautiful as a young horse” *
* “ … the
form of the horse represents what is best in the human being” (CL)
---
The Passion According to G.H.
HE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.H. BY CLARICE LISPECTOR,
TRANSLATED BY IDRA NOVEY
‘Published in 1964, The Passion According to G.H. is
Lispector’s great mystical novel. In The Passion, Lispector follows G.H., a high-class
Rio sculptress, who enters her maid’s empty room, sees a cockroach and
panicking, slams the door and crushes it. She watches the cockroach die over
the course of the book and “at the end of the novel, at the height of a
spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in
Brazilian literature.” It’s a brilliant and hypnotic book—there’s little in the
way of plot but G.H.’s inner monologue, her stream of consciousness, is utterly
amazing. And the ending, which is challenging and unsettling, left me
absolutely speechless. It’s a powerful novel, one that I’d recommend as a
fitting end to a reading pathway’
- Source: Bookriot https://bookriot.com/clarice-lispector-books/
---
The Passion (sufferings of the Lord) is a quest -
The Passion, with its quick, sketchy plot, is the climax of
a long personal quest.
For the first time, Clarice writes in the first person. And
for the first time she captures the full violence, the physical disgust, of her
encounter with God
Is that Dante and Virgil (his hand) in Hell?
“Give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me, and I
don’t know how to speak — reality is too delicate, only reality is delicate, my
unreality and my imagination are heavier” (CL)
---
Excerpts
“I’M SEARCHING, I’M SEARCHING. I’M TRYING TO UNDERSTAND.
TRYING to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I
don’t want to keep what I lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m
afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did
something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as
something else? That’s what I’d like to call disorganization, and I’d have the
confidence to venture on, because I would know where to return afterward: to
the previous organization. I’d rather call it disorganization because I don’t
want to confirm myself in what I lived — in the confirmation of me I would lose
the world as I had it, and I know I don’t have the fortitude for another”
(9:128)
“A form shapes the chaos, a form gives construction to the
amorphous substance — the vision of an infinite piece of meat is the vision of
the mad, but if I cut that meat into pieces and parcel them out over days and
over hungers — then it would no longer be perdition and madness: it would once
again be humanized life” (11:128)
“For now I am inventing your presence, just as one day I
won’t know how to risk dying alone, dying is the greatest risk of all, I won’t
know how to enter death and take the first step into the first absence of me —
just as in this last and so primary hour I shall invent your unknown presence
and with you shall begin to die until I learn all by myself not to exist, and
then I shall let you go. For now I cling to you, and your unknown and warm life
is my only intimate organization, I who without your hand would feel set loose
into the enormous vastness I discovered. Into the vastness of the truth”
(14:128)
“I shall need courage to do what I’m about to do: speak. And
risk the enormous surprise I shall feel at the poverty of the spoken thing. As
soon as it’s out of my mouth, I’ll have to add: that’s not it, that’s not it!”
(14:128)
Eliot’s Prufrock – “Do I dare / Disturb the universe”
…
“That is not what I meant at all.
/ That is not it, at all.”
“Every man who thinks and lives by thought must have his own
skepticism, that which stops at the question, that which ends in denial, or
that which leads to faith”
-- The Pensées of Pascal
“To be, or not to be, that is the question”
-- Hamlet
“For my previous profound morality — my morality was the
desire to understand and, since I didn’t, I arranged things, this was only
yesterday and now I’ve discovered that I was always profoundly moral: I only
admitted the purpose — for my previous profound morality, having discovered
that I’m as crudely alive as that crude light I learned yesterday, for that
morality of mine, the hard glory of being alive is the horror. Before I lived
in the humanized world, but did something purely alive collapse the morality I
had?
Because a world fully alive has the power of a Hell”
(16:128)
“But — what my silence was like before, that I don’t know
and never knew. Sometimes, looking at a snapshot taken on the beach or at a
party, I noted with light ironic dread what that smiling, darkened face
revealed to me: a silence. A silence and a destiny that escaped me, I,
hieroglyphic fragment of an empire dead or alive. Looking at the picture I saw
the mystery. No. I’m going to lose the rest of my fear of bad taste, I’m going
to begin my exercise in courage, courage isn’t being alive, knowing that you’re
alive is courage — and say that in my photograph I saw The Mystery. The
surprise crept up gently, I’m only realizing now that it was the surprise that
was creeping up upon me: for in those beaming eyes there was a silence that I’d
only seen in lakes, and that I’d only heard in silence itself” (18:128)
“ … the rest were the always organizations of myself, now I
know, ah, now I know. The rest was the way I’d transformed myself little by
little into the person who bears my name. And I ended up being my name. All you
have to do is see the initials G. H. in the leather of my suitcases, and there
I am”
Like the initials YHWH (Yahweh) in the Old Testament
‘I am what I am’ – “Tell them Eheyh (I-am) sent you” – he
will be, or being
The passion is an ontological work – exploration of the
nature of being
Also, phenomenological reductionism – Husserl
“We know not through our intellect but through our
experience” – Merleau-Ponty
G.H. is a sculptor -
“Having done sculpture for an undetermined and intermittent
period also gave me a past and a present that allowed others to situate me”
And like a sculptor, she is in the act of poiesis - she is
bringing something into being that did not exist before
“… maybe it was the sporadic sculpture that gave it a light
tone of pre-climax — maybe because of the use of a certain kind of attention
that even dilettante art demands. Or because of having the experience of
patiently wearing down the material until gradually finding its immanent
sculpture; or because of having, also through sculpture, the forced objectivity
of dealing with something that was no longer myself”
Attention, wearing down materials to uncover the immanent,
the essence of the thing
Michelangelo said the sculpture lay complete within the slab
Clay - like an artist, God made man
The meaning is the no-(negative)-meaning - the negative way
of ‘sensing’ meaning -
“Only later would I understand: what seems like a lack of
meaning — that’s the meaning. Every moment of “lack of meaning” is precisely
the frightening certainty that that’s exactly what it means, and that not only
can I not reach it, I don’t want to because I have no guarantees. The lack of
meaning would only overwhelm me later. Could realizing the lack of meaning have
always been my negative way of sensing the meaning? it had been my way of
participating”
Small act of rebellion - against the grain of the super ego
“I threw my lit cigarette over the edge, and stepped back,
slyly hoping none of the neighbours would connect me with the act forbidden by
the administrators of the Building. Then, carefully, I stuck out just my head,
and looked: I couldn’t even guess where the cigarette had landed. The precipice
had swallowed it in silence. Was I there thinking? at least I was thinking
about nothing. Or maybe about whether some neighbour had seen me commit that
forbidden act, which above all didn’t match the polite woman I am, which made
me smile” (27:128)
“And in my great dilation, I was in the desert. How can I
explain it to you? in the desert as I’d never been before. It was a desert that
was calling me as a monotonous and remote canticle calls. I was being seduced.
And I was going toward that promising madness. But my fear wasn’t that of
someone going toward madness, but toward a truth — my fear was of having a
truth that I’d come not to want, an infamizing truth that would make me crawl
along and be on the roach’s level. My first contact with truths always defamed
me” (43:128)
“I HAD REACHED THE NOTHING, AND THE NOTHING WAS LIVING AND
MOIST. It was then — it was then that as if from a tube the matter began slowly
oozing out of the roach that had been crushed. The roach’s matter, which was
its insides, the thick, whitish and slow matter, was coming out as from a tube
of toothpaste. Before my nauseated and seduced eyes, the shape of the roach
began slowly modifying as it swelled outward. The white matter slowly spilled
atop its back like a burden. Immobilized, it was bearing atop its dusty flanks
the weight of its own body” (44:128)
---
The Egg and the Chicken design by Susana Ventura
---
OVO = Egg
Beginning, potential
Egg-shaped
Shell exterior
Easter – resurrection
Cycle of life
Ovaries (cancer)
---
“In ‘The Chicken and the Egg,’ she seems to pit the organic
against the analytic. To incorporate the egg into the perceptual schemas
through which we invariably filter it — the schemas that enable us to conceive
of a series of sense perceptions as an egg at all — is also to negate something
of the egg’s essence: ‘when one sees the egg it is too late: an egg seen is an
egg lost.’ To understand the egg as such — to conceptualize it, as we
invariably do when we happen upon it — is to undercut some of its force, which
is a function of its raw existence rather than the way in which it figures in
our system of wants and uses. Sort of tangentially, this reminds me of
Heidegger’s writings on “taking as”: to take an object as is to impose a
functional framework upon it, to think of it in terms of its use/value and not
in terms of its Being. When the narrator of “The Chicken and the Egg” looks at
the egg in the kitchen, ‘all [she] see[s] in it is food,’ its potential to
satisfy a human need”
Becca Rothfield
---
The Egg and The Chicken by Clarice Lispector
As translated by Katrina Dobson
1. Beginning
“In the morning in the kitchen on the table I see the egg.
I look at the egg with a single gaze. Immediately I perceive
that one cannot be seeing an egg. Seeing an egg never remains in the present:
as soon as I see an egg it already becomes having seen an egg three millennia
ago. — At the very instant of seeing the egg it is the memory of an egg. — The
egg can only be seen by one who has already seen it. — When one sees the egg it
is too late: an egg seen is an egg lost. — Seeing the egg is the promise of one
day eventually seeing the egg. — A brief and indivisible glance; if indeed
there is thought; there is none; there is the egg. — Looking is the necessary
instrument that, once used, I shall discard. I shall keep the egg. — The egg
has no itself. Individually it does not exist. Seeing the egg is impossible:
the egg is supervisible just as there are supersonic sounds. No one can see the
egg. Does the dog see the egg? Only machines see the egg. The construction
crane sees the egg. — When I was ancient an egg landed on my shoulder. — Love
for the egg cannot be felt either. Love for the egg is supersensible. We do not
know that we love the egg. —”
2.
“Over time, the egg became a chicken egg. It is not. But,
once it was adopted, it took that name. — One should say “the chicken’s egg.”
If one merely says “the egg,” the topic is exhausted, and the world becomes
naked. — When it comes to the egg, the danger lies in discovering what might be
called beauty, that is, its veracity. The veracity of the egg is not
verisimilar. If they find out, they might want to force it to become rectangular.
The danger is not for the egg, it wouldn’t become rectangular. (Our guarantee
is that it is unable: being unable is the egg’s great strength: its grandiosity
comes from the greatness of being unable, which radiates from it like a
not-wanting.) But whoever struggles to make it rectangular would be losing his
own life. The egg puts us, therefore, in danger. Our advantage is that the egg
is invisible. And as for the initiates, the initiates disguise the egg.
As for the chicken’s body, the chicken’s body is the
greatest proof that the egg does not exist. All you have to do is look at the
chicken to make it obvious that the egg cannot possibly exist.”
3.
“I pick up another egg in the kitchen, I break its shell and
shape. And from this precise moment there was never an egg. It is absolutely
essential that I be a busy and distracted person. I am necessarily one of those
people who refuse. I belong to that Masonic society of those who once saw the
egg and refused it as a way to protect it. We are the ones who abstain from
destroying, and by doing so are consumed. We, undercover agents dispersed among
less revealing duties, we sometimes recognize each other. By a certain way of
looking, by a way of shaking hands, we recognize each other and call this love.
And then our disguise is unnecessary: though we don’t speak, neither do we lie,
though we don’t speak the truth, neither must we dissemble any longer. Love is
when we are allowed to participate a bit more. Few want love, because love is
the great disillusionment with all the rest. And few can bear losing the rest
of their illusions. There are people who would volunteer for love, thinking
love will enrich their personal lives. On the contrary: love is ultimately
poverty. Love is not having. Moreover love is the disillusionment of what you
thought was love. And it’s no prize, that’s why it doesn’t make people vain,
love is no prize, it’s a status granted exclusively to people who, without it,
would defile the egg with their personal suffering. That doesn’t make love an honourable
exception; it is granted precisely to those bad agents, those who would ruin
everything if they weren’t allowed to guess at things vaguely.”
4. Ending
“Out of devotion to the egg, I forgot it. My necessary
forgetting. My self-serving forgetting. Because the egg is an evasion. In the
face of my possessive adoration it could retreat and never again return. But if
it is forgotten. If I make the sacrifice of living only my life and of
forgetting it. If the egg becomes impossible. Then—free, delicate, with no
message for me— perhaps one last time it will move from space over to this
window that I have always left open. And at dawn it will descend into our
building. Serene all the way to the kitchen. Illuminating it with my pallor.”
---
In the end –
“I am an object loved by God. And that makes flowers blossom
upon my breast. He created me in the same way I created the sentence I just
wrote: “I am an object loved by God” and he enjoyed creating me as much as I
enjoyed creating the phrase. And the more spirit the human object has, the greater
God’s satisfaction.
White lilies pressing against the nudity of my breast. The lilies I offer to whatever hurts inside
you. Since we are beings and needy. Even because certain things—if not given
away—wither. For example—beside the warmth of my body the petals of the lilies
would wilt. I call out to the light breeze for my future death. I will have to
die because otherwise my petals will wilt. And that is why I give myself to
death every day. I die and am reborn.”
I have also already died the death of others. But now I am
dying intoxicated with life. And I bless the warmth of the living body that
withers the white lilies.
Desire, no longer moved by hope, calms and longs for nothing
. . . .
I will be the impalpable substance that has no memory of the
year before. (CL)
---
2 parting thoughts –
1. Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’s fathomless desire
“In 1952, Lispector published a cronica about Virginia
Woolf, which, because it brings together female gender, writing, and violence,
can lead us to some brief concluding thoughts (Lispector 1952b). Entitled
"The Violence of a Heart" ("A violencia de um coracao"),
Lispector's essay is a retelling of the famous Judith Shakespeare episode from
Woolf's Room of One's Own, ending with the equally famous quotation: "Who
can measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled
in a woman's body?" (Woolf 1929, 50). Many years later, in 1977, Lispector
republished this same piece. Although reissuing something published earlier
was, as we have seen, a common practice for her, it is worth speculating on her
interest in this fragment of Woolf's at both the beginning and end of her
career.”
- Marta Peixoto
2. And I remembered another obscure Eliot poem (I seem to do
that a lot)
In The Department Store (1914-15) by T.S.Eliot
The lady of the porcelain department
Smiles at the world through a set of false teeth.
She is business-like and keeps a pencil in her hair
But behind her sharpened eyes take flight
The summer evenings in the park
And heated nights in second story dance halls.
Man's life is powerless and brief and dark
It is not possible for me to make her happy.
Notes thanks to Christopher Ricks (who introduced me to
Geoffrey Hill and Anthony Hecht) and Jim McCue (The Poems of T.S.Eliot, 2015)
Smiles at the world – Paradise Lost ‘fair morning
first smiles on the world … so cheered he his fair spouse, and she was cheered
/ But silently a gentle tear let fall …’
TSE also maintains ‘to our fresh employments rise’
Sharpened eyes – to render more acute, to focus –
Dante’s Inferno – ‘… and sharpened their vision (knitted their brows) at us,
like an old tailor peering at the eye of his needle’
Man’s life is powerless and brief and dark – Bertrand
Russell ‘ ‘brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow,
sure doom falls pitiless and dark’ (The Free Man’s Worship, 1903). After
Shelley – ‘Man’s brief and frail authority / Is powerless.’ and Byron – ‘Man’s
love is of man’s life a thing apart / ‘Tis woman’s whole existence’
Comments
Post a Comment