Near to the Wild Heart (Penguin Modern Classics)

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New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914–1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. “I asked Ezra Pound for ‘career advice,’” James Laughlin recalled. “He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do ‘something’ useful.” A wretched marriage… Unhappiness… A miserable lover… Now she’s alone and lonely… She turns into a dot. Lispector viene sempre avvicinata a Joyce e Virginia Woolf: da Joyce arriva il titolo di questo suo primo romanzo, la frase presa dal Dedalus è messa in esergo. Il flusso di coscienza la incastra tra lo scrittore irlandese e la scrittrice inglese. Ma a me ricorda più di tutti Djuna Barnes.

Alison Entrekin (Translator), Benjamin Moser (Preface). Near to the Wild Heart, New Directions (May 8, 2012). ISBN 978-0-8112-2002-6

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a b c Moser, Benjamin (2009). Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 125. In spite of Lispector's apparently foreign-sounding Portuguese (she was born in the Ukraine) which the translator has translated into slightly foreign-sounding English, the author somehow succeeds in conveying the truth and meaning of Joana's conflicting emotions to the reader. There is a naturalness and spontaneity about the writing that makes the many impossibilities in the text possible. I can imagine that if anyone set out consciously to write the way Lispector does, or if she herself tried to repeat this kind of writing, it might not work so well. It works here because there are twenty three years of uncensored feeling poured into it. Cardoso suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This became the book’s epigraph, which, together with the occasional use of the stream-of-consciousness method, led certain critics to describe the book as “ Joycean.” The comparison annoyed Lispector, who had not read Joyce; instead, the book bears the much more distinctive mark of Spinoza, whom she had been reading at the time she wrote it. [6] Cover art by Julia Robinson The song (and album)’s title is taken from Irish writer James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Chapter IV, Joyce says: Eternity wasn't just time, but something like a deeply rooted certainty that she couldn't contain it in her body because of death; the impossibility of going beyond eternity was eternity; and a feeling in absolute, almost abstract purity was also eternal. What really gave her a sense of eternity was the impossibility of knowing how many human beings would succeed her body, which would one day be far from the present with the speed of a shooting star.'

Atsigulė kniūbsčia ant smėlio, rankomis užsidengusi veidą, palikusi tik mažutį plyšelį orui. Vis tamsiau, tamsiau, tada pamažu ėmė ryškėti apskritimai, raudonos dėmės, pūstašoniai virpantys burbulai, tai didėjantys, tai mažėjantys. Smėlio kruopelės graužė odą, spaudėsi į ją. Net užsimerkusi jautė, kaip greitai jūra pakrantėje susisiurbia bangas, irgi užmerktais vokais. Ir jos klusniai grįžta, delnai ištiesti, kūnas laisvas. Gera klausytis jų mūšos. Aš esu žmogus. Ir daugybė dalykų dar atsitiks. Kas? Kas nutiks, ji papasakos sau pačiai. Vis tiek niekas nesuprastų: ji ką nors pagalvodavo, bet paskui nemokėdavo lygiai taip papasakoti. Ypač neįmanoma su tais apmąstymais. Pavyzdžiui, kartais šaudavo mintis ir nustebusi ji svarstydavo: kodėl anksčiau taip nepagalvojau? (p. 47) Near To the Wild Heart is a much-lauded novel by Brazilian author, Clarice Lispector. It was hailed as an unprecedented sensation from the pen of a 23-year-old law student and journalist. This introspective novel, written in the Portuguese language, won the prestigious Graca Aranha Prize for the best debut novel of 1943 and immediately established her as a powerful writer. For her use of interior monologue, Lispector’s work was compared to that of Joyce, Woolf, Proust, and Dostoyevsky. Near To the Wild Heart has been favorably reviewed by my GR friends. It is not fun or easy to read. The style is one of extreme introspection and stream of consciousness. I think many people go through this kind of thing at the cusp of adulthood. She wrote the book when she was nineteen. I think I went through it but I didn't know or understand what it was and I sure didn't talk about it to anyone, except maybe a little with a friend of my parents who was nothing like my parents.A young woman describes her weltanschauung… She recalls the fragments of her childhood and girlhood… And her story is about feeling alive… Of being conscious of existence… Elation of being… The only thing she hadn't got used to was sleeping. Sleeping was an adventure every night, falling from the easy clarity in which she lived into the same mystery, dark and cool, crossing darkness. Dying and being reborn.

Prose is elliptical and hypnotic, reminds Virginia Woolf in Waves . The plot almost doesn't exist, and if - it's secondary, because what really matters here is Joana's inner life. Only images, flashes and snatches, and self-exploration to finally make her decision, to be triumphantly reborn. It just seemed unnatural that a child’s world should be so suffused with dread. Death as a metaphor loomed large in little Joana’s world: The listening ear is dead; the hens didn’t know they were going to die; her doll is run over by a car. Joana, ‘a little live egg’, morphed into a viper by the time she hit adolescence. A sample of her thoughts said, ‘Wasn’t it in evil alone that you could breathe fearlessly, accepting the air and your lungs?’ I knew I was in for a long ride with Joana. She seemed to luxuriate in that which was perverse or evil. Joana’s words were mired in psychosis. The latin phrase ‘De Profundis’ was repeated often. It means ‘from the depth’. The call from the depths of Joana’s being was eerie and alienating. The following extracts will give an impression of her wild heart status:

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Her intuitive practice spans sculpture, drawing, writing and installation with a focus on materiality, process and the body in space. As a trained neon-bender and maker of light, she has explored the seductive combination of electricity, light, glass and noble gases for eight years, playfully disrupting the formal and conceptual tropes of this elusive and dying craft.

I've seen this described stylistically as stream-of-consciousness but, technically speaking, it isn't: it's too unfractured at the sentence level, too syntactically correct (at least in English translation). It is, though, deeply introspective and the movement of the story, such as it is, traces the psychic journey of Joana, a journey that has no ending other than death so that she's always in an open state of becoming. As with most good novels that invent a set of parameters to define the use of language, to say nothing of the dazzling images that flood the reader's consciousness, Near to the Wild Heart, too, cannot be stripped down to its plot and content. Whether she's a motherless child being brought up by the absentminded father, or living at her aunt's not knowing why her father abandoned her (he's dead), or when she gets married to Otavio to escape the terror of happiness (i.e. love) that's eating her from the inside, every stage in Joanna's life is a reflection painfully embedded in the memory of things past and future, gyrating their way out of the momentary present. It is the singular continuation of the intolerable agitation of the soul which is captured in a dynamic image that ironically bespeaks a sharper state of dejection, exhaustion, and ennui just when her life's path is laid out clearly ahead of her ( Clearly? Really? Joanna seems to be asking)Even without the epigraph from James Joyce— He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life —I would’ve recognized the influence of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on the novel. Its beginning is a delight as the young protagonist plays with and thinks about words: “She went over to the little table where the books were, played with them by looking at them from a distance.”