I am stronger than I

Avoiding Clarice Lispector, and finally diving back in

Oh, hello. I was supposed to write you about Clarice Lispector in September, and now it’s the very end of November, and… well… I didn’t. Why? I have a banger of an excuse: I was diagnosed with cancer.

The short of it (because I’ve already announced my cancer several times over the past two months on various platforms, and you, gentle reader, may already have heard all about it): it’s a lymphoma, it’s treatable, I’ve been undergoing chemo, I’m having a shitty autumn, it could be worse. Much worse, in fact.

So, I still haven’t finished An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, despite the fact that it clocks in at a rather modest 142 pages in the English translation and 190 pages in the French. Despite the fact that I started reading it on the second day of September. Despite the fact that I’ve finished twenty-eight books in the meantime.

The Color of Pomegranates, dir. Sergei Parajanov, 1969

Casting a stone down a deep well

Perhaps we have to reconsider the “why” above. It’s not just cancer. It’s something about this book, about Clarice Lispector herself. I’ve said before that while I find her way of writing the world deeply resonant with my thought process, I also avoid her because of how easily my brain gets to whirring. Lispector makes me want to turn the impossible impulses of the world into imperfect words, and that desire terrifies me. It’s exhausting. Finding words means sifting through the experience of being within a history of other beings, at once a mania-inducing urge and a total bother.

In A Breath of Life (Um Sopro de Vida, 1978), Lispector says that “writing is a stone cast down a deep well” (trans. Johnny Lorenz, 2012). It’s potentially such a bleak image — losing a tiny, insignificant thing to an unbearably broad emptiness. But there’s also the small hope of filling that well, changing it just slightly, and therefore entirely. If there’s water, the stone will make ripples and grow through them. And even if it becomes invisible to the caster, the stone will make another kind of wave: noise. To thrust a bit of rock into the chasm is to transform the stone into something so much larger than itself. If you have the courage to drop — and essentially to lose — the stone, you can transfigure it.

Humbly I tried to write it

Lispector begins An Apprenticeship with the following note:

“Este livro se pediu uma liberdade maior que tive medo de dar. Ele está muito acima de mim. Humildemente tentei escrevê-lo. Eu sou mais forte do que eu.”

“This book demanded a greater liberty that I was afraid to give. It is far above me. Humbly I tried to write it. I am stronger than I” (trans. Stefan Tobler, 2021).

Or in French, which is how I read it on a train to an artist residency in New Hampshire at the very beginning of September: “CE LIVRE - s'est demandé une plus grande liberté que j'ai eu peur de lui accorder. Il est très au-dessus de moi. Humblement j'ai essayé de l'écrire. Je suis plus forte que moi” (trans. Jacques & Teresa Thiérot, 1992).

There’s a happy accident that occurs in the French version: Whereas the same first person singular subject pronoun is used twice in the last sentence in both the original Brazilian Portuguese (eu) and in the English (I), in French you can’t just dangle a subject pronoun without a verb, even when it’s implied — than I [am]. And so we have both the subject pronoun je and the tonic pronoun moi, which is also used as the object of the preposition. You see it earlier in “au-dessus de moi” (“acima de mim” — the Portuguese tonic — and “above me”). Two version of “I-ness,” one a subject pronoun, one an object pronoun (even if both serve as subjects). And somehow that perfectly captures the conflicts and mirrored dualities in Lispector’s writing: the changeable internal “I” and the one scratched into a language, the author and her characters, Lori and Ulysses in constant conversation about the nature of the world and being…