{"id":119251,"date":"2017-12-14T09:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-12-14T14:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119251"},"modified":"2017-12-14T15:38:29","modified_gmt":"2017-12-14T20:38:29","slug":"tenuous-nonfiction-clarice-lispectors-cronicas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/14\/tenuous-nonfiction-clarice-lispectors-cronicas\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tenuous Nonfiction of Clarice Lispector’s Cr\u00f4nicas <\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Clarice Lispector<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI can feel the charlatan in me, haunting me,\u201d Clarice Lispector wrote in one of the cr\u00f4nicas<\/em>, or newspaper columns, she composed each week from 1967 to 1973 for the Jornal do Brasil<\/em>. She was writing in Leme, a neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro named for a vast rock that resembled the rudder of a ship. \u201cI am almost sickened by my basic honesty,\u201d she continued. Later in the column, she suggested that \u201cbad taste\u201d and bad writing were similar, and that bad writing essentially meant telling the simple, unadorned, too-sincere truth. In writing, she declared, \u201cthe dividing line between bad taste and truth is almost imperceptible. In writing, moreover, there is an accepted standard of good taste which is actually much worse than bad taste. Just to amuse myself, I sometimes walk that thin line between the two\u201d\u2014between, that is, being a \u201ccharlatan,\u201d as that column was titled, and writing the bland truth.<\/p>\n

A uniquely Brazilian form, cr\u00f4nicas<\/em> offered readers free-form writing from writers of all kinds, including poets and novelists. Lispector\u2019s adoring editor at the paper, Alberto Dines, simply published almost everything exactly as she submitted it. Although many of her cr\u00f4nicas<\/em> appeared autobiographical, many also seemed to bend the truth; Lispector, who rarely kept even her birthday consistent, felt most comfortable writing about herself when she was allowed to invent and embellish.<\/p>\n

In her cr\u00f4nicas<\/em>, she spoke more directly about her life than usual, yet those seeming revelations were overlaid with the metaphysical ponderings, digressions, and questions about reality that characterized her fiction, like The Passion According to G. H.<\/em>, and many of her short stories\u2014as well as the works of hers that defied characterization. \u201cI am not going to be autobiographical,\u201d she wrote in \u00c1gua Viva<\/em>, a genre-defying semiautobiographical text partly stitched together from her newspaper columns. \u201cI want to be \u2018bio.\u2019 \u201d In a note to her friend and editor Olga Borelli about the text, she wrote, \u201cI must find another way of writing. Very close to the truth (which?), but not personal.\u201d<\/p>\n

If she played with the superficial truth, it was in service, she believed, of exposing one deeper, of passing readers a brief-lit lantern for the moonless dark of ourselves, even if that light revealed, sometimes, more contradiction, more chaos, more flittering soul-storm. Her cr\u00f4nicas<\/em> blurred lines between genre\u2014some are like little Zen koans, some lyrical reminiscences, while others, like \u201cReturn to Nature,\u201d are harder to categorize, reading like parables or flash fiction. At times, they also muddied demarcations between nonfiction and fiction, resurrecting the oldest question of form: Where does nonfiction truly end and fiction begin, and what do we do with texts where we do not know the answer?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

That she started the cr\u00f4nicas<\/em> at all seemed a miracle. A year before she began them, she had nearly died when her two fatal addictions came together: cigarettes and sleeping pills. She had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette in hand after taking a soporific on the evening she was supposed to have attended a friend\u2019s book launch; at three thirty-five in the morning the following day, a neighbor noticed smoke billowing out of her apartment. She awoke in a familiar yet phantasmagoric hell: her room, acrid and ablaze. Instead of fleeing, she tried to save her papers and, in her maelstrom panic, attempted to put out the fire with her bare hands. Paulo, her son, saved her by dragging her to a nearby apartment; as she walked, she left bloody footprints. \u201cThe fire I suffered a while back partially destroyed my right hand,\u201d she reflected later. \u201cMy legs were marked forever \u2026 I spent three days in hell, where\u2014so they say\u2014bad people go after death. I don\u2019t consider myself bad,\u201d she added, \u201cand I experienced it while still alive.\u201d Pandemonium, as for Milton, had taken on a new, hellish meaning.<\/p>\n

She lived with the stagnant sadness of swamps; her old life had become an ignis fatuus, fluttering and flaming just out of reach. Typing became arduous. Her apartment, from where she could hear the hiss of waves and the thwack<\/em> of tennis balls, seemed oppressive. The cr\u00f4nicas<\/em>, however, gave her a new task to focus on and conquer, even though she had misgivings about becoming a cronista<\/em>. The idea of writing for money appalled her. \u201cI\u2019m \u2026 new to writing for money,\u201d she revealed in an early column. \u201cI worked in the press before as a professional, without signing my name. Signing, however, automatically makes it more personal. And I feel a bit like I\u2019m selling my soul.\u201d A friend consoled her. \u201cWriting is selling one\u2019s soul a little bit,\u201d he told her.<\/p>\n

Her readers purchased her soul with relish. The columns granted her a vast new range of fans, particularly the Brazilian middle-class targeted by the Jornal<\/em>. She was famous, now, in a new way. One corybantic fan, who had seen Lispector\u2019s apartment ablaze on that fateful night, even appeared at her door with an octopus and proceeded to cook the cephalopod right then and there as a token of her appreciation. \u201cBeing a columnist,\u201d Lispector reflected later, \u201chas a mystery that I don\u2019t understand: it\u2019s that columnists, at least in Rio, are very loved \u2026 I feel so close to my readers.\u201d She had joined a tradition in which some of Brazil\u2019s most renowned writers had partaken, from Machado de Assis to Carlos Drummond de Andrade.<\/p>\n

But she had also joined as a woman, making her one of the few female cronistas<\/em> of the time.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cLet us assume that I never tell lies, which does not happen to be true,\u201d she said in \u201cMistaken Assumptions,\u201d a poignant epiphoric list always ending in \u201cwhich does not happen to be true.\u201d (It begins, \u201cLet us assume that I am a strong person, which does not happen to be true,\u201d then includes darker, more lugubrious declarations, like \u201cLet us assume that among my defects there are also many good qualities, which does not happen to be true.\u201d) It is difficult to know how to read this; is she lying about lying? It appeared as a companion to \u201cCorrect Assumptions,\u201d in which Lispector asks readers to assume the \u201ctelephone system has broken down throughout the city, which happens to be true\u201d\u2014like the other column, nearly all the sentences end in epistrophe. She writes that somehow, she received a call, a crossed line from another call not intended for her, but the \u201cmay God bless you\u201d she hears at the end of the conversation is \u201calso intended for me \u2026 I shall make no more assumptions. But simply say Yes to the world.\u201d Are any of these events and assumptions \u201ctrue\u201d in a biographical sense? Lispector avoids clarifying that question: what mattered more to her was the revelation, the sudden symbolic blessing. Perhaps this is the point: that one can sometimes lie and tell the truth simultaneously.<\/p>\n

Her relation to veracity, at its core, resembles Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s celebrated and controversial brand of Gonzo journalism, which was blunt, vulgar, stylistically literary, and\u2014most notably\u2014unconcerned with the possibility of being unreliable. \u201cGonzo\u201d was first applied to his 1970 \u201cThe Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,\u201d a putative account of a Kentucky Derby (written in the middle of Lispector\u2019s career as a cronista<\/em>), in which Thompson freely used expletives and drank himself into oblivion (because he had forgotten to bring \u201cany strange illegal drugs, so we would have to get by on booze\u201d), to such a degree that it becomes unclear what is accurate in a piece marketed as nonfiction. \u201cWe were both half-crazy from too much whiskey, sun fatigue, culture shock, lack of sleep and general dissolution \u2026 The rest of the day blurs into madness,\u201d Thompson writes near the end, putting into question what, if anything, of that blur had truly occurred. William Kennedy scarcely took it as reportage at all, arguing that Thompson had \u201cused all of his fictional talent to describe and anatomize those characters and just make it all up. I\u2019m sure some of it was real.\u201d This was nonfiction that pushed at the edges of the genre, eking out a space in which nonfiction, suddenly, was not clearly the truth. \u201cIt was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids,\u201d Thompson wrote<\/a> of abandoning the stricter style of a standard newspaper like the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lispector was not composing Thompsonian Gonzo, but Kennedy\u2019s reflection could as equally have applied to her.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In 2017, in America, Lispector\u2019s confessional, ludic columns might find a harsher home, simply because they resist a blunt, factual clarity. Newspapers and magazines find themselves under a heightened scrutiny from the general public, with a sector of the American population dismissing all reports from certain sources as \u201cfake news.\u201d There is a pressing sense that we need definitive, well-sourced reporting to combat propaganda\u2014including that of the current administration.<\/p>\n

Partly because of this, some critics have declared that the confessional, as well as the personal essay more generally, no longer should define writing in the era of Trump. \u201cThe personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was,\u201d Jia Tolentino wrote in The New Yorker<\/em><\/a>. \u201cMany profiles of Trump voters positioned personal stories as explanations for a terrible collective act; meanwhile, Clinton\u2019s purported reliance on identity politics has been heavily criticized. Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.\u201d I strongly disagree. But even such contemporary essays are often expected to be simple expositions of true experience; what of Lispector, who winks at us about lying?<\/p>\n

Nonfiction itself is a curious, occasionally spurious label. Nonfiction is supposed to be true; however, our memories are fallible, and when we reconstruct a highly personal past we have to hope we remember it correctly, hope our memories have not rotted away, even as many people fail to accurately recall events minutes after they occur, much less long-faded dialogue, much less much of anything, if we are honest. This disquieting, but very real, permeability between fiction and nonfiction is a trivial truth we often sweep aside. To be sure, we should<\/em> be able to trust and celebrate great nonfiction, be it journalism, exemplary scholarship, or lyrical memoir. But \u201ctruth\u201d remains a mistier category than we may like\u2014all the more in Lispector\u2019s protean columns.<\/p>\n

How we define the world in nonfiction is influenced by our assumptions about what it contains\u2014our \u201cbackground books,\u201d as Umberto Eco put it\u2014which was why Marco Polo, upon encountering rhinos in Sumatra, declared them unicorns<\/a>, if somewhat ungainly specimens thereof. He was wrong, yet from his more limited perspective of \u201ctruth,\u201d he was right. The larger point is both simple and serious: although there are<\/em> right and wrong answers about reality, some texts we label \u201cnonfiction,\u201d from travel narratives to memoirs to newspaper columns, remain, ultimately, impossible to fully categorize as either nonfiction or fiction. My rumbustious Caribbean upbringing echoed the marvelous worlds of Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, because, as he said in a 1981 Paris Review <\/em>interview<\/a>, \u201cCaribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination\u201d; to critics outside that world, however, this was not realism but, rather, a magic-inflected variant thereof. I do not believe in magic, but cultural norms shift how we define our day-to-day realities, and, with that, our definitions of nonfiction.<\/p>\n

We need truth, not \u201ctruthiness<\/a>,\u201d in 2017, but a healthy era should have ample room for aesthetic ambiguity\u00a0as well. Art always contains ambiguity\u2019s shadows.\u00a0If we demand only the purest truths and the purest fictions, art deliquesces away, leaving dogma behind. When I read a great many straightforward articles, I eventually find myself yearning for Lispector’s brand of playful uncertainty. I feel a<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>deep, oceanic longing for her art, something like\u00a0saudades<\/i>, that perfect Portuguese term for a nostalgic yearning\u2014or, as Lispector defined it in her lyrical cr\u00f4nica<\/em>\u00a0\u201cSaudade,\u201d a \u201chunger\u201d so intense that \u201cit wants to absorb an entire other person.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lispector thrived in ambiguity. In one of her earliest cr\u00f4nicas<\/i>, Lispector writes that \u201ceverything alive is searching for someone or something.\u201d She sought a special way of revealing truth, even if that method meant softening the edges of nonfiction and fiction. She sought something deep, expansive, and, at times, unsettling, a tugging and ripping at the cartographic corners of truth, which sometimes resulted in a more beautiful fabric, if one that no longer depicted a true map of the world. Rather, she created a map best followed\u00a0with our eyes closed, walking into a nowhere place bright and strange as\u00a0starbloom.<\/p>\n

Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer at <\/em>Literary Hub, and her work has appeared in <\/em>The New Yorker,<\/em> The Atlantic,<\/em> Tin House,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em> New York Times,<\/em> Guernica,<\/em> The Cut,\u00a0and elsewhere.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI can feel the charlatan in me, haunting me,\u201d Clarice Lispector wrote in one of the cr\u00f4nicas, or newspaper columns, she composed each week from 1967 to 1973 for the Jornal do Brasil. 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