{"id":135833,"date":"2019-04-30T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-04-30T13:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=135833"},"modified":"2019-04-24T13:57:07","modified_gmt":"2019-04-24T17:57:07","slug":"the-siege-of-clarice-lispector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/04\/30\/the-siege-of-clarice-lispector\/","title":{"rendered":"The Siege of Clarice Lispector"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1949, Clarice Lispector found herself in a bit of a funk, despite the effusive acclaim surrounding her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart<\/em>, six years earlier. After the difficulty she\u2019d faced getting her second novel, The Chandelier<\/em>, published in 1946, her attempt to find a publisher for her third novel, The Besieged City<\/em>, was proving no easier. The publisher of The Chandelier<\/em> had rejected it, and so had many of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s prestigious publishing houses. <\/em>How was it that an author who had revolutionized Portuguese writing several years earlier, whose debut novel was praised as \u201cthe greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language\u201d suddenly couldn\u2019t get her name in print? The Besieged City<\/em>\u2019s translation into English would be even more arduous\u2014it is only arriving now, in 2019, seventy years after its initial publication and forty-two years after its author\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Besieged City <\/em>follows Lucr\u00e9cia, an independent young woman living with her mother in Switzerland in the twenties. Lucr\u00e9cia dates several young men, marries the older Mateus, travels through the countryside, is widowed, and, in the book\u2019s final lines, is saved from spinsterhood by a miraculous marriage proposal from one of her old flames, Perseu. The final pages are what sets The Besieged City<\/em> apart from Lispector\u2019s other works: it has a happy ending of deus-ex-machina scale. Yet much of the novel is deeply inscrutable. Told by a removed and roving narrator in fleeting, epigrammatic vignettes, it can be difficult to inhabit Lucr\u00e9cia\u2019s emotions or motivations as she navigates the repressive world of early-twentieth-century romance: \u201cShe batted her eyelids disturbed, though she didn\u2019t know what form she\u2019d choose to have; but whatever a man sees is a reality. Without realizing it the girl took the form that the man had perceived in her. That\u2019s how things were built. She turned all modest toward Perseu\u2014like an elongated person\u2014reaching out, removing a bit of lint from his jacket.\u201d Throughout much of The Besieged City<\/em>, Lispector\u2019s characteristic experimental, associative stream-of-consciousness style can make even the simplest interactions feel alienating, disjointed, and baffling. Even the act of Lucr\u00e9cia picking lint off a man\u2019s sleeve becomes strained and peculiar. Such experimentations and departures do not lessen the novel\u2019s greatness, just as they didn\u2019t for James Joyce, or for Lispector\u2019s frequent critical parallel, Virginia Woolf.<\/p>\n

Lispector wrote The Besieged City <\/em>while living in Bern, Switzerland, during her husband\u2019s European postwar tour as a part of the Brazilian diplomatic corps. Lispector referred to it as her most difficult book to write and said of the novel, \u201cI was chasing after something and there was nobody to tell me what it was.\u201d She found Switzerland dreadful and dull. According to the biography, Why This<\/em> World<\/em>, by Benjamin Moser, Lispector referred to the country as a \u201ccemetery of sensations\u201d and said that Bern \u201clacks a demon.\u201d In the novel, the fictional Swiss city of S\u00e3o Geraldo (the titular \u201cBesieged City\u201d) grows from a sleepy village into an industrialized town. When Lispector did eventually return to Rio in 1949, and found a publisher for the novel, it sold terribly and was, by and large, ignored by critics. One of her early champions, S\u00e9rgio Milliet, panned the novel, claiming that \u201cthe author succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness.\u201d Though Lispector would find more success writing for newspapers and publishing short stories\u2014particularly the story collection Family Ties<\/em>\u2014the perceived failures of The Chandelier <\/em>and The Besieged City <\/em>may have weighed heavily on the author. It would be twelve more years until the publication of her next novel, The Apple in the Dark<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Besieged City<\/em>\u2019s challenging prose certainly contributed to its long-delayed appearance in English. Yet underneath Lispector\u2019s inventive, modernist style is a poignant and radical depiction of a young woman navigating a patriarchal society. Given its bellicose title, its European interwar setting (even in neutral Switzerland), and its publication several years after the end of World War II, readers might have expected a book about war. But instead of reading about the great deeds of men on the battlefield, one of the presupposed \u201cimportant topics\u201d of literature, they would read about the strained self-image and wandering vision of Lucr\u00e9cia: \u201cShe\u2019d see herself the way an animal would see a house: no thought going beyond the house. This was the intimacy without contact that horses had; and the city\u2019s houses were entirely seen only by them.\u201d Horses are at once beautiful, powerful, beloved, and crucial to the success of the city, but they are also the tools of the men who ride them. Lucr\u00e9cia watches the horses being ridden through the street, and refers to her own hands as \u201chooves.\u201d In Roman myth, the men of Rome used the suicide of Lucretia, who took her own life after being raped by the despotic king Tarquin, as their justification for overthrowing the monarchy and sparking the Roman Republic. In both the Roman myth and The Besieged City<\/em>, men use women as vessels suited to their own warlike purposes\u2014one Lucretia is the rally flag and the other Lucr\u00e9cia is the steed.<\/p>\n

In her 1984 treatise, How to Suppress Women\u2019s Writing<\/em>, Joanna Russ details the ways in which, for centuries, male gatekeepers disenfranchised writing by women. Though Clarice Lispector is absent from Russ\u2019s English-language focus, she might have made a case study. In step one, Russ writes that books written by women were often assumed to be written by men instead, and given Lispector\u2019s atypical Brazilian name, not only was this the case but it was also postulated that she had not existed at all; even the effusive praise for her debut novel caveated it as \u201cfor a woman.\u201d Later on, Russ argues that critics have dismissed women\u2019s experience as a subject matter entirely: \u201cIf women\u2019s experience is defined as inferior to, less important than, or \u2018narrower\u2019 than men\u2019s experience, women\u2019s writing is automatically denigrated. If women\u2019s experience is simply not seen, the effect will be the same. She wrote it but look what she wrote about<\/em> becomes She wrote it, but it\u2019s unintelligible\/badly constructed\/thin\/spasmodic\/uninteresting<\/em>.\u201d Would The Besieged City <\/em>have been dismissed if it had followed the promise of its warlike title? If it had described Perseu\u2019s life as a soldier in the aftermath of war-torn Europe, instead of Lucr\u00e9cia\u2019s?<\/p>\n

The Besieged City<\/em>\u2019s debut translation into English is the newest entry in the decade-long project of New Directions to translate or retranslate all of Lispector\u2019s work, led by Lispector\u2019s biographer, Benjamin Moser. The Besieged City<\/em> arrives to us today as an artifact and a time capsule, a bittersweet revelation of a missed moment in a modernist movement that has long since passed. What sort of influence might it have had on English-language letters if the translation had come along sooner? In its titular moment, Lucr\u00e9cia considers the suffocating presence of S\u00e3o Geraldo itself:<\/p>\n

There was the city.
\nIts possibilities were terrifying. But it never revealed them!
\nOnly every once in a while a glass would shatter.
\nIf at least the girl were outside its walls. What a painstaking work of patience it would be to encircle it. To waste her life trying geometrically to lay siege to it with calculations and resourcefulness in order to one day, even when she was decrepit, find the breach.
\nIf at least she were outside its walls.
\nBut there was no way to besiege it. Lucr\u00e9cia Neves was inside the city.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lucr\u00e9cia is keenly, nihilistically aware of her role within the city. She is held apart from the rights and privileges of society while also being bound by its rules and norms. These norms require her to waste her life, perhaps in vain, trying to achieve a position of power, to become anything other than a beast of burden. Lispector\u2019s attempts to assail Brazil\u2019s literary parapets are akin to Lucr\u00e9cia\u2019s own modest desire to find her own breach in the city\u2019s walls. For Lispector, the space for The Besieged City<\/em> may finally come, four decades after her own death. In the novel\u2019s final pages, on receiving the news of the miraculous last-minute marriage proposal, Lispector writes simply that, \u201cThe siege of S\u00e3o Geraldo had been lifted.\u201d A lifted siege is not a successful one\u2014it is one in which the assault has failed and the attackers have given up hope of ever taking the city. In this brief line we see the cracks in Clarice Lispector\u2019s happy ending.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mike Broida\u2019s work has appeared in <\/em>The New York Times Book Review,<\/em> the<\/em> Washington Post, and <\/em>The Times Literary Supplement, among others. He is currently living on a Fulbright grant in Portugal.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How was it that Clarice Lispector, whose debut novel was acclaimed as \u201cthe greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language\u201d could barely get her third novel published? Its English translation arrives only now, forty-two years after the author\u2019s death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Siege of Clarice Lispector by Mike Broida<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 30, 2019 \u2013 How was it that Clarice Lispector, whose debut novel was acclaimed as \u201cthe greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language\u201d could barely get her third novel published? 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