Near to the Wild Heart is divided into two parts. The nine chapters in Part One operate on two different but interrelated planes, the one dealing with the protagonist's childhood and adolescence: the early years with her father, orphanhood, the male teacher whom Joana secretly adores, the aunt who offers her a home without love or understanding, the emotional and physical turmoil of puberty as she comes to discover her own body and its demands. Interspersed with these fragments of her past are glimpses of Joana as a conventional suburban wife with unconventional thoughts:
How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her?... And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?...
A mysterious 'female voice' engages Joana in earnest dialogues about existence and constraints.
A second plane focuses on the adult Joana who becomes increasingly aware of who and what she is. A triangular relationship involving Joana, her unfaithful husband Otávio, and Lídia, Otávio's ex-fiancee who is now expecting his child, exacerbates obsessive self-questioning about social and sexual roles. Joana sees her marriage in retrospect as an unforgivable betrayal of self. Bravely confronting her humiliating situation, she makes a bid for freedom, whatever the cost.
Part Two of the novel sees Joana emerge as a prototype for all the reflective women who appear in subsequent stories and novels. Trapped in a servile and meaningless existence, she rebels in frustration. The mockery of her relationship with Otávio precipitates a crisis which makes their separation inevitable.
My God! — never to be yourself, never, never. And to be a married woman, in other words, someone with their destiny traced out... Even boredom with life has a certain beauty... when you suffer it alone in quiet despair.
It is significant that Clarice Lispector married a fellow law student whilst in the midst of writing this first novel. Early experience of marriage undoubtedly sharpened her perceptions about the considerable problems of readjustment. Joana's simmering resentments are articulated with subtle precision:
Now all her time was devoted to him and she felt that any minutes she could call her own had been conceded, broken into little ice cubes which she must swallow quickly before they melted.
The paths of awareness in Near to the Wild Heart were to be further explored in the steady output of novels and short stories Lispector continued to publish until she died from cancer in December 1977. But the power and originality of her best work can already be appraised in this moving tale of self-discovery. Plot or intrigue in any conventional sense is disregarded. Any physical action is sparse. Her characters are much less interested in external reality than in their own inner responses to the people and objects around them.
The essence of Lispector's fiction is her pursuit of a figurative language capable of conveying things arcane and elusive. Joana progresses through a labyrinth of signs and symbols. She sifts the grains of experience and uncovers unsuspected layers of meaning. Her dreams are more lucid than any encounters with reality. Existence is seen to be governed by alien forces, and anguish gathers as she starts to penetrate the mysteries that cloak her destiny. Even in this first novel, Lispector unravels perceptions of remarkable intensity which are not simply physical and emotional but, above all, spiritual. Acute powers of observation and feeling permit her to articulate the most subtle ambiguities, even though Lispector always thought of herself as more intuitive than intellectual. She brings a new pliancy and refinement to the language of Brazil and, like the French existentialists, she believes language to be as mysterious as life itself. Joana becomes the alter ego of Lispector when she recognizes that humans have 'a greater capacity for life than knowledge of life', that thoughts must be treated with suspicion, feelings with mistrust, words with caution. Both author and protagonist abhor 'counterfeit emotions' and 'creative lies'.
Lispector's fictional world takes us into the realms of phenomenology, to a place of heightened awareness and a higher plane of being. Rejecting any accepted laws of time or space, Joana confides:
I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself.
Joana, like nearly all of Lispector's women characters, rebels against the contradictions of existence. The 'wild heart' she pursues is the very core of freedom and power, an inner sanctum where she can listen undisturbed to 'the music of confusion murmuring in her depths'. Joana's suppressed violence, when she realizes that fraternity and justice are not merely unattainable but contrary to nature, gradually peters out into 'awesome silence'. Her situation, however, is one of anguish rather than despair. Her threatened existence induces defiance rather than panic, for as she herself recognizes: 'Solitude is mingled with my essence'. Hence her mistrust of 'life in common, plotting and threatening you with a common death'.
Lispector's unorthodox use of syntax and punctuation, her bold rhythms and syncopated phrasing contribute to the overall impression of tense, haunting lyricism. Her startling metaphors and similes show a preference for suggestion rather than clear-cut definition. Words are given new meanings and resonances in order to encompass things amorphous and impalpable. Conscious of the dilemma that confronts any writer who opts for approximations as opposed to certainties, who struggles with perceptions much too organic to be conceived in thoughts', Lispector has attempted to clarify her own solution to the problem. She observed:
What cannot be expressed only comes to me through the breakdown of language. Only when the structure breaks down do I succeed in achieving what the structure failed to achieve.
This approach is consistent with her avowed preference for 'things which are incomplete or badly finished, which awkwardly try to take flight only to fall clumsily to the ground'. In short, Clarice Lispector was a writer of vision and courage who was never afraid of 'plunging into darkness only to emerge bearing trickling mirrors'.
GIOVANNI PONTIERO Manchester, March 1989
Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
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