Near to the Wild Heart
Encyclopedia
Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector
's first novel
, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday in December, 1943. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary
, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazil
ian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize.
(National Law School), and was also working as a journalist. In February, she had transferred to the newspaper A Noite (The Night), once one of the glories of Brazilian journalism but by then under the direction of the dictatorial Getúlio Vargas
government. She had published some stories and journalism, and turned to one of her colleagues, Francisco de Assis Barbosa
, for help with the novel she had begun writing. She pieced the book together by jotting down her ideas in a notebook whenever they occurred to her. To concentrate, she quit the tiny maid’s room in the apartment she shared with her sisters and brother-in-law and spent a month in a nearby boardinghouse, where she worked intensely. At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel. Her great friend Lúcio Cardoso
, a slightly older novelist, assured her that the fragments were a book in themselves. Barbosa read the originals chapter by chapter, but Clarice vividly rejected his occasional suggestions: “When I reread what I’ve written,” she told him, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.”
Cardoso suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce
’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This became the book’s epigraph, which, together with the occasional use of the stream-of-consciousness method, led certain critics to describe the book as “Joycean
.” The comparison annoyed Lispector, who had not read Joyce; instead, the book bears the much more distinctive mark of Spinoza, whom she had been reading at the time she wrote it.
Barbosa, who together with Cardoso was one of the book’s first readers, recalled his amazement. “As I devoured the chapters the author was typing, it slowly dawned on me that this was an extraordinary literary revelation,” Barbosa said. “The excitement of Clarice, hurricane Clarice.” He steered it to the book-publishing wing of their employer, A Noite, where it appeared with a bright pink cover, typical for books by women, in December 1943. It was not a lucrative arrangement for the new author. “I didn’t have to pay anything [to have it published], but I didn’t make any money either. If there was any profit, they kept it,” Lispector said. A thousand copies were printed; in lieu of payment, she got to keep a hundred. As soon as the book was ready, she began sending the book out to critics.
The book opens with a scene of the child Joana playing in the garden, making up poems for her father. Joana's wildness and barely suppressed violence, along with her linguistic creativity, are her most notable features. She is frequently compared to animals: over the course of the book Lispector describes her to a bird, a snake, a wildcat, a horse, and a dog. She commits transgressive acts—as a child she throws a book at an old man's head, for example, and as a married woman she leaves her husband, Otávio, and greets the news of his adultery—he has made another woman, his old friend Lídia, pregnant—with utter indifference. She is not so much immoral as she is amoral: “Evil is not living, and that’s it. Dying is already something else. Dying is different from good and evil.” In the book, she cites long passages from Spinoza, the longest quotes that appear anywhere in her novels; it seems that she felt an affinity with the Dutch philosopher's amoral conception of the world.
, Virginia Woolf
, Katherine Mansfield
, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust
, André Gide
, and Charles Morgan
. The reason seems to be that its language sounded completely un-Brazilian, as the poet Lêdo Ivo wrote: “Clarice Lispector was a foreigner. … The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even of the history of our language.”
At the time, Ivo called it "the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language
". Other reviews were as enthusiastic. For almost a year after publication, articles about the book appeared continuously in every major city in Brazil. “The whole book is a miracle of balance, perfectly engineered,” combining the “intellectual lucidity of the characters of Dostoevsky with the purity of a child.” A Manhã (The Morning), not going quite as far as Lêdo Ivo, had declared it to be “the greatest debut novel a woman had written in all of Brazilian literature
.”
Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist...
's first novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday in December, 1943. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life...
, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
ian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize.
Background and publication
When Lispector began writing, in March 1942, she was still a law student at the Faculdade Nacional de DireitoFederal University of Rio de Janeiro Faculty of Law
The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Faculty of Law , also known as the National Faculty of Law , is a law school located in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Founded in 1920, from the merger of two law schools created in the 1880s, it is the...
(National Law School), and was also working as a journalist. In February, she had transferred to the newspaper A Noite (The Night), once one of the glories of Brazilian journalism but by then under the direction of the dictatorial Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Vargas
Getúlio Dornelles Vargas served as President of Brazil, first as dictator, from 1930 to 1945, and in a democratically elected term from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. Vargas led Brazil for 18 years, the most for any President, and second in Brazilian history to Emperor Pedro II...
government. She had published some stories and journalism, and turned to one of her colleagues, Francisco de Assis Barbosa
Francisco de Assis Barbosa
Francisco de Assis Barbosa, known as Chico Barbosa, was a Brazilian biographer, essayist, historian, and journalist. He was a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.-External links:...
, for help with the novel she had begun writing. She pieced the book together by jotting down her ideas in a notebook whenever they occurred to her. To concentrate, she quit the tiny maid’s room in the apartment she shared with her sisters and brother-in-law and spent a month in a nearby boardinghouse, where she worked intensely. At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel. Her great friend Lúcio Cardoso
Lúcio Cardoso
Joaquim Lúcio Cardoso Filho, known as Lúcio Cardoso was a Brazilian novelist, playwright, and poet....
, a slightly older novelist, assured her that the fragments were a book in themselves. Barbosa read the originals chapter by chapter, but Clarice vividly rejected his occasional suggestions: “When I reread what I’ve written,” she told him, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.”
Cardoso suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This became the book’s epigraph, which, together with the occasional use of the stream-of-consciousness method, led certain critics to describe the book as “Joycean
Joycean
A text is deemed Joycean when it is reminiscent of the writings of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. Joycean fiction exhibits a high degree of verbal play, usually within the framework of stream of consciousness. Works that are "Joycean" may also be technically eclectic,...
.” The comparison annoyed Lispector, who had not read Joyce; instead, the book bears the much more distinctive mark of Spinoza, whom she had been reading at the time she wrote it.
Barbosa, who together with Cardoso was one of the book’s first readers, recalled his amazement. “As I devoured the chapters the author was typing, it slowly dawned on me that this was an extraordinary literary revelation,” Barbosa said. “The excitement of Clarice, hurricane Clarice.” He steered it to the book-publishing wing of their employer, A Noite, where it appeared with a bright pink cover, typical for books by women, in December 1943. It was not a lucrative arrangement for the new author. “I didn’t have to pay anything [to have it published], but I didn’t make any money either. If there was any profit, they kept it,” Lispector said. A thousand copies were printed; in lieu of payment, she got to keep a hundred. As soon as the book was ready, she began sending the book out to critics.
Plot summary
Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states.The book opens with a scene of the child Joana playing in the garden, making up poems for her father. Joana's wildness and barely suppressed violence, along with her linguistic creativity, are her most notable features. She is frequently compared to animals: over the course of the book Lispector describes her to a bird, a snake, a wildcat, a horse, and a dog. She commits transgressive acts—as a child she throws a book at an old man's head, for example, and as a married woman she leaves her husband, Otávio, and greets the news of his adultery—he has made another woman, his old friend Lídia, pregnant—with utter indifference. She is not so much immoral as she is amoral: “Evil is not living, and that’s it. Dying is already something else. Dying is different from good and evil.” In the book, she cites long passages from Spinoza, the longest quotes that appear anywhere in her novels; it seems that she felt an affinity with the Dutch philosopher's amoral conception of the world.
Literary significance and criticism
Near to the Wild Heart was greeted as a revolution in Brazilian literature, though it was very rarely compared to the work of any Brazilian writer. Critics mentioned James JoyceJames Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
, Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
, Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and...
, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, André Gide
André Gide
André Paul Guillaume Gide was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.Known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works, Gide...
, and Charles Morgan
Charles Morgan
Charles Morgan may refer to:* Sir Charles Morgan , military governor of Bergen op Zoom* Charles Gould Morgan, Sir Charles Morgan, 1st Baronet , Member of Parliament for Brecon, 1778–1787, and Breconshire, 1787–1806...
. The reason seems to be that its language sounded completely un-Brazilian, as the poet Lêdo Ivo wrote: “Clarice Lispector was a foreigner. … The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even of the history of our language.”
I met Clarice Lispector at the exact moment that she published Near to the Wild Heart. The meeting took place in a restaurant in CinelândiaCinelândiaCinelândia is the popular name of a major public square in the centre of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Its official name is Praça Floriano Peixoto, in honour of the second president of Brazil, Floriano Peixoto.-History:...
. We had lunch and our conversation strayed from literary matters. … The least I can say is that she was stunning. It was autumn, the leaves in the square were falling, and the grayness of the day helped underscore the beauty and luminosity of Clarice Lispector. Alongside the foreign climate was that strange voice, the guttural diction which rings in my ears to this day.
At the time, Ivo called it "the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
". Other reviews were as enthusiastic. For almost a year after publication, articles about the book appeared continuously in every major city in Brazil. “The whole book is a miracle of balance, perfectly engineered,” combining the “intellectual lucidity of the characters of Dostoevsky with the purity of a child.” A Manhã (The Morning), not going quite as far as Lêdo Ivo, had declared it to be “the greatest debut novel a woman had written in all of Brazilian literature
Brazilian literature
Brazilian literature is written in the Portuguese language by Brazilians or in Brazil, even if prior to Brazil's independence from Portugal, in 1822...
.”