An Apprenticeship reading notes

Human beings, humans being [in love]

The staggering thing about the love story in An Apprenticeship is how much it’s about the act of becoming yourself so that you can conjoin to another. How much that act of becoming is one of rejecting and accepting, of finding the hard boundaries of the personal and dissolving them.

Lovers, Nancy Spero, 1962, The Tate Museum, London

But first she needed to reach herself, first she needed to reach the world. (45)¹

Is this a rejection of outside influence — the whole of the world contained within — or is it an acknowledgment that the self is part of the weave of the world at large? The self is a world, and also of the world. Lóri is initially a seemingly closed circuit: “But her God was of no use to her: He had been made in her own image, looked too much like her, fretted about solutions — except in Him it was creative anxiety — the same severity she had” (53). Her evolution over the course of the book — her “apprenticeship” — comes in subtly repositioning or reshaping the world she’s made in her image, the one contained within her solitary self. Meanwhile, it also comes in expanding her self to reflect a broader external world, to be in it and of it materially, to set aside “her pachydermic resistance to letting the world enter her” (50). Lóri and her world accommodate one another, and as a result, she learns to make room for another discrete and connected self in her existence.

In the last section of the book Lóri says to Ulisses:

You once said that when people ask my name I shouldn't say Lóri but "I." Well it's only now that I call myself "I." And say: I am in love with your I. So we is. Ulisses, we is original! (135)

Only in fully understanding and creating an “I” can she fall in love and attach that “I” truly to a “we.” Within boundary, she can obtain permeability, multiple states of being, proximity. An Apprenticeship is a book about falling in love as an act of bridging the distance between selves while reinforcing them. Love, in its porousness, is a strengthening, rather than erasing, agent. Lóri doesn’t lose herself in love. Nor does she quite find herself in it, either. She finds herself so that she can love. She doesn’t lose herself in “we” because it’s derivative of and part of her “I.” Its solidity stems from the strength of her “I.”

And what is the process of finding or forging that “I”? It too is both a strengthening and a softening. “There was no apprenticeship for new things: it was only rediscovery” (89). Again the push and pull of the interior and the exterior, of the contained self and the expanding self learning from external sources. There’s constant sourcing and digging in Lispector, a sense that to source deep enough within is also an act of coming out. I think that’s what I’m constantly trying to do myself, and I assume that’s why I read this in her work. I feel that this is the role of the divine in her characters and in her writing. God is cellular, encoded within Lispector’s creations. This is how spirituality can be both utterly intellectual, heady, cosmic, and yet utterly animalistic. Divinity and the contemplation of the divine is instinct. “Why is a dog so free? Because he’s the living mystery that doesn’t ask itself questions” (65). The animal — human and non-human (and recurrently a dog or a horse in Lispector) — is free to be through a sort of ingrained physical knowing that’s also a lack of “knowledge”:

I possess a deep peace, he continued, only because it is deep and cannot even be reached by myself. (48)

She knew she shouldn’t ask for the impossible: you can’t ask for the answer. (44)

In freedom, the human or non-human animal is actively [a] being.

A human being’s most pressing need was to become a human being. (21)

We see Lóri become a human being, evolve, deepen, change… and yet also remain herself. What interests me in this sentence is its repetition. The human being is already a human being, and the destination is the same as the start. This is true in the original Portuguese, too: “A mais premente necessidade de um ser humano era tornar-se um ser humano.” In this way, Lispector draws the acts of being and of becoming together. The state of being (solid, infinite in permanence) and the action of being (malleable, infinite in change).

A pivotal scene in Lóri and Ulisses’ coming together (and in her evolution) ends with the somewhat enigmatic, “Lóri was softly astounded. So this was happiness. At first she felt empty. Then her eyes moistened: it was happiness, but how mortal I am, how the love for the world transcends me” (60). It’s a moment of thawing and living. Of falling in love with him, with the world, with herself. What precedes this wonderful, painful realization? Lóri softly says “I am being” (58) to Ulisses. It’s a sort of admission, or an explanation for what she’s currently doing in his company and, as such, for who she is. It marks him.

He looked closely at her and for a moment it was strange, that familiar woman's face. He found himself strange, and understood Lóri: he was being.

They didn't say a word as if they'd just met for the first time.

They were being.

—Me too, Ulisses said quietly.

Both knew that a great step had been taken in the apprenticeship. And there was no danger of wasting this feeling out of fear of losing it, because being was infinite, infinite like the waves of the sea. I am being, the tree in the garden was saying. I am being, said the approaching waiter. I am being, said the green water in the pool… But the light was going quiet for the night and they were surprised again, the dusky light. Lóri was fascinated by this meeting with herself, she fascinated herself and almost hypnotized herself. (58-59)

They were being. Strangeness and familiarity, conjunction through understanding. Notably, the apprenticeship is mutual. As much as Lóri is learning to be and to love (and to be in love), Ulisses is astounded by her and shifted by her. He understands that he is being — as a continuous verb tense — and that he is a being — a noun, um ser²— while getting to know her being. Her being already and becomingly. To be, and yet to become, to become more than. If that’s not a divine thing, I don’t know what is.

1. All citations in English come from Stefan Tobler’s translation (2021). Page numbers match the Penguin Modern Classics edition.

2. And speaking of nouns, Ulisses asks Lóri:

—But I'd like to know why you, instead of saying God, like everyone else, say the God?

—Because God is a noun.

—There's the primary school teacher talking.

—No, He is a noun, substantive like substance. There's no single adjective for the God.

"You are gods." But we were gods with adjectives. (117)