Some Stories by Clarice Lispector

I would like to tell you that having passions does not mean living beautifully, but rather suffering pointlessly. That the soul was made to be guided by reason and that no one can be happy when at the mercy of the instincts. For we are animals yet we are animals disturbed by man. And if they forgive him, he is proud and demanding and never forgives their excesses.

Clarice Lispector doesn't really do narrative. At least, that's the impression I get from this slim collection of early short stories, all of which focus on one character who describes, normally in first-person, the epiphanic moment when they realize that everything in life is unimportant, or at least incomprehensible.

The centerpiece of the collection is Obsession, about a girl who, while sitting in a coffeeshop, hears two young men discussing philosophy in abstract terms. Apparently never having heard life described in anything but concrete terms, she becomes obsessed (and later involved) with one of them, Daniel. Daniel is, from all indications, a real jerk whose behavior is repeatedly justified by the narrator by his tortured existence; he disdains the physical world which he cannot escape, and lives in a world of abstractions which he can never really understand. And though the characters in this collection wrestle from time to time with God, none of them truly believe in the metaphysical, and so with Daniel--he is a Gnostic with no hope of transcendence. In modeling her life after his, the narrator finds herself in the same position, ever alone but unwilling (or unable) to return to the world of the simple and physical--she loves chocolate, which shames her; she admires her husband Jamie's simplicity, which makes he despise him. And the story ends, as it must, and as most of these do, with the protagonist alone in an incomprehensible universe.

Hope, however, hovers in the peripheries of these stories, though the protagonists never recognize it as such. Jamie, from the story above, is content with the way the world is, even when he's being mentally cuckolded by Daniel. He's perhaps the only happy person we meet, and his relentless physicality and resistance to any sort of internal analysis seem to serve as a buffer to the misery the thinking characters feel. As the excerpt that opens this review indicates, passion doesn't lead to happiness; it leads to pointless suffering.

The final story, A Couple of Drunks, points forward to... something as well, though it's not clear what it is. A woman bar hops, looking for someone, a man or a woman, who will need her, who will realize they don't deserve her, who will lend her a sense of control she can't seem to get ahold of on her own. She finally meets a divorced man whose son has an angina, and proceeds to shame him for his divorce and then, in a passage that made me laugh at its ghoulish hyperbole, describes what's liable to happen if he doesn't return to his son:

“Imagine her, eyes burning, at the child’s side. The child wheezing painfully, dying. He dies. His little head is contorted, his eyes are open, staring at the wall, obstinately. Everything is silent and the young lady doesn’t know what to do. The boy is dead and all of a sudden she has nothing to do. She collapses onto the bed, sobbing, tearing at her clothes: ‘My son, my poor son! It’s death, it’s death!’ The household rats take fright and start to race around the room. They crawl up your son’s face, still warm, gnaw at his little mouth. The woman screams and faints, for two hours. The rats visit her body too, cheerful, nimble, their tiny teeth gnawing here and there.”

She moves from this macbre fantasia to the moon and the sadness of knowing that it has shone, will shine, on those who lived before and will live after her, after she has "returned to the humus, eyeless for eternity". And the man prepares to respond and the collection ends thusly: "Suddenly, he took the toothpick from his mouth, eyes blinking, lips trembling as if about to cry, said:"

We never learn what he had to say, just like the woman will never know what happens after she dies, just like she and the other tortured, free souls in these stories will never see the climax of their passions. And yet, there's a sense that somehow in connection, in conversation, even in mutual animosity, some meaning can be found--but don't ask anyone here how.