Rachel Kushner on How Clarice Lispector Disrupts Our Notions of Good and Bad

I’m tempted to suggest you skip this introduction and save your energy for Clarice Lispector, but she will give you energy instead of taking yours away. The fruits of her project — both an art and a philosophy (ontological, but also chosen, deliberate, developed) — are strangely restorative. While reading itself is not passive, you can relax, while she is hard at work, asking questions that are inside you, too, so that you yourself don’t have to frame them. Her aspiration is nothing less than to uncover the bizarre mystery of consciousness, to contemplate being while being, to apprehend life while living it. Someone has to do this work.

Lispector seems to have recognized that she had a gift for the job and plunged in. I’m not claiming she made art as self-sacrifice. But in some eternal space, the philosophical boiler room of the world, the secret alcove behind a heavy velvet drape, she is yet tarrying in the void, the same void that in you and me is repressed for the sake of appearances. For the sake of “reality.”

The twenty short stories collected here are a perfect gathering of Lispectarian types: of people, epiphany, mystery. If her grand oeuvre of short fictions forms a kind of pastiche painting, here you can see, spotlit, key scenes: A housewife encounters a blind man on a tram and is destabilized by her own benevolence. A chicken is granted clemency after laying an egg, but cannot comprehend human clemency, which in any case does not last. A wife, neither intelligent nor good but with her secret feelings, according to her indirect third-person self-assessment, has just recovered from some mysterious ailment, which she refers to, ominously, as an extravagance. This wife, tempted by Christ, by genius, by “extreme beauty,” decides the bouquet of roses she’s bought for herself are a danger, and pawns them off on a friend, only to regret this forfeiture.

“The one who understands disrupts,” we are told in “Mineirinho.” “There is something in us that would disrupt everything — a thing that understands.” The story is about a man who has killed and is assassinated, in turn. “In killing this cornered man, she writes, “they do not kill him in us. Because I know that he is my error.” Lispector digs under received notions of good and bad, of the gentle and the violent. “Everything that was violence in him is furtive in us.”

Underneath Mineirinho’s act is a pure energy that is “dangerous as a gram of radium,” a potentiality that can curdle and in Minheirinho “became a knife.” The musings in this story on the nature of justice and charity are of an extraordinary depth. The one who understands disrupts. Lispector ponders the possibility of a killer inside her and declares that’s not it, and instead, what’s in us is this radium, which in Minheirinho, “caught fire.” She calls for a justice that would examine itself, that “does not forget that we are all dangerous.”

In “The Smallest Woman in the World,” a family reads an article about a pygmy woman and pities her, but no more foolishly than the explorer who has “discovered” this woman, who pities him in turn. A little girl with purple circles under her eyes, in “The Foreign Legion,” keeps intruding upon the writer who lives next door, her little girl pride a majestic absurdity the writer must somehow maneuver around, in the space of her own apartment. (This little girl, named Ofélia, reminds me so strongly of imperious young Lila in Elena Ferrante’s novels, that I’m convinced Ferrante is influenced by Lispector, and why not? What could be better?)

In “Remnants of Carnival,” a different if equally intense and prideful little girl has aspirations to be a rose in the costumed public procession, to give an impression that will match her desires and mask the childhood she wants to reject. In “He Drank Me Up,” a woman and her male makeup artist compete for the attentions of a metals magnate in a Mercedes. In this competition, the woman becomes convinced that her makeup artist is erasing her face, in order to drain her powers. She slaps herself back into reality, looks in the mirror, declares herself reborn.

Masks, makeup, domestic rooms that give way to the void: Appearances, Clarice helps us to understand, are not “mere,” and instead critical, because they serve to cover the inscrutable deep. Lispector herself apparently had “permanent makeup” applied near the end of her life (she died at fifty-six, the age I will be tomorrow). I believe this turn to permanent makeup has meaning. A finally fixed visage is a kind of privacy, within which her interior work of introspecting could stay secret.

That work continues now. If makeup distracts from flaws, literature masks mortality. A writer who speaks the truth lives forever. This might be the case for a few, the great seers, and yet with none do I feel it so keenly as I do with Clarice (if I may be so bold). Because even as she does not mean to comfort, I feel her — here, still right here, to tell us how it really is.

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Covert Joy: Selected Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated from Portuguese by Katrina Dodson, is available from New Directions.