Wavering Between Realities: On Clarice Lispectors' "The Besieged City"
Clarice Lispector | The Besieged City | New Directions | April 2019 | 240 Pages | Translated by Johnny Lorenz | Edited by Benjamin Moser
“To talk about Clarice Lispector we need to be extra careful and do what her writings continuously ask of us, which is for us not to explain too much nor understand too much,” said Brazilian scholar José Miguel Wisnik. In her work, Lispector created iconic scenes and moments that still follow us today. Her reader feels her words long after the book is closed. Any interpretation is a path to a deeper understanding of our human condition, a continuous exercise of empathy, self discovery and awareness.
The Besieged City (originally published in 1949) is about how Lucrécia Neves relates to the physical world, how she moves from familiar to unfamiliar spaces, carrying a reflection of herself on what she knows, what surrounds her, and what her gaze revels. She is one with her surroundings, which affect and reflect her experiences. Through this symbiotic relationship, her hometown of São Geraldo becomes a major character itself, especially as it goes through a metamorphosis from small suburb to modern city. Lucrécia sees, and in the “I see” lies her certainty, she does not think, instead she feels safe in what’s visible to her, she focuses on the physical world, safe from thought. She is a small town girl with four men in her life, each one representing a different life ahead of her. The dichotomy between the familiar and the foreign in each of them, both attracts and repels Lucrécia. Felipe is a lieutenant from out of town who despises her hometown, Perseu is a simple man from São Geraldo, Mateus is a businessman from the big city and Lucas is a married doctor.
Thinking about a husband dooms her to life’s inevitable cycle in the patriarchal society of the 1920s. Her mother knows Lucrécia has to follow her own path, like a character following a script, she is a character trapped in a stage. People emulate behaviors, they accept what nature dictates. “In this first gesture of stone, whatever was hidden was given outward expression with such prominence. Keeping, for its perfection, the same incomprehensible character: the inexplicable rosebud opened trembling and mechanical into an inexplicable flower.” Life takes its course, she knows it, what will happen will happen and that behavior is programed, awaited, necessary. Marriage is her unspoken gateway to go somewhere else, to leave, evolve. She ends up marrying Mateus, leaving São Geraldo, the suburbs, and heading to the big city where she has to establish a relationship in a space where she does not belong, where she feels “anonymous.” Just like in her hometown, the physical world controls what she sees and what she knows. In the big city, she has difficulty reading other people’s emotions, she starts working on her life narratives so she can fit in. Following the script of what her life should be, not only from the perspective of someone who would look and see her, but also from her own reflection in the mirror, she begins a systematic effort to become picture perfect as expected. She slowly realizes that she can’t get out of São Geraldo, as we will always be a product of the place we’re from, we occupy, inherit, make our own. São Geraldo is trapped inside Lucrécia wherever she goes, a besieged city inside, it is who she is, it addresses her nature. Following an inner necessity, she eventually returns to her hometown, but when she does she realizes things have changed, progress had taken its toll, and the horses, with whom she strongly identifies, have their freedom restricted, unable to run free anymore.
São Geraldo besieges her, just as she besieges the city; she will never leave her hometown and her hometown will never leave her regardless of where she is. Even though the São Geraldo she returns to is not the same place she grew up in, she still belongs there, the city is part of her. Missing that city is also missing herself and who she is, as well as the possibilities that she once had before her.
Russian writer Leo Tolstoy said “If you want to be universal, talk about your village.” Lispector makes us think about our own besieged city, our own São Geraldo. This is a book about the inevitable choices we make and how inevitable it is to pick a path, to go in one direction or another and how that is also limited by our starting point as it will compromise who we will become. The city evolves as time goes by, Lucrécia and city are side by side.
For Lucrécia, not thinking is a defense mechanism. Thinking would stall action, break a safe cycle, and perhaps invite suffering. “It’d be so dangerous to think,” she supposes. Lucrécia feels safe in her ability to see, “her fear was that of surpassing whatever she was seeing,” she would restrain herself from thinking so it wouldn't be painful to act or realize what was behind the physical world that surrounded her. So she imitated behaviors for no logical reason, “crossing the hallway and penetrating the living room lowering her head in order to pass beneath the doorway, though it was taller than she was: imitating, in obscure compensation, the habit of her dead, tall father.” There is an acceptance of this endless cycle: “Individual life? The dangerous thing is that each person was dealing with centuries.”
Unwittingly or not, Lispector seems to draw on Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the “Eternal Return,” which amongst other things theorizes that existence is recurring and will continue to recur in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. Lucrécia and the other characters in this book are living lives that have already been lived before and that will be lived yet again.
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The Besieged City, or A Cidade Sitiada in Portuguese, is Clarice Lispector’s third book. Lispector wrote it while living in Bern, Switzerland, where she was accompanying her husband, a diplomat. She fell into depression while in Bern, telling her sister that “this Switzerland is a cemetery of sensations.” It is very likely that what she felt about Bern, and how she felt in Bern, was an inspiration for her writing. “I’m very thankful to this book, the effort to write it would occupy my time,” she said. For Lispector, it was painful to live outside Brazil, she felt the absence of the things that made her who she was, her sisters, her friends, Rio de Janeiro the city she adopted as her own. She said in a 1971 interview that from all her work this was the book she found the hardest one to write.
If there is a book that can somehow mirror the feeling of displacement Lispector felt throughout her life, that would be The Besieged City. Lispector is no stranger to being out of place. She was born in 1920 in a small Ukranian city where she never set foot or got to walk the streets as she was a baby carried by others. The daughter of a Jewish refugee family, Lispector left Europe along with her parents and sisters and sailed South where her family found exile in Brazil. The uprooted writer arrived with her parents in the northeast city of Maceió, where they began to adapt by changing their names. She was Chaya, she became Clarice. Later, she lived in Recife before moving to Rio de Janeiro as a teenager. She adopted Recife as her hometown, “Recife is alive inside of me” she repeated throughout her life.
In a life of constant estrangement, wavering between realities, she moved from one culture to another, embraced different languages, adopted cities. Her parents spoke Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian at home, she learned Portuguese as her first language. Lispector had a speech impairment that made her sound like a foreigner even in her mother tongue, her whole life speaking Portuguese in a way that felt like she had a distinctive accent. Later when offered treatment, she refused, as she feared that it could altogether alter her personality.
When she got married, it meant not only sharing a life, but also leaving Brazil and the world she knew to live on another continent, inhabiting other countries. In order to cope, Lispector would focus on the physical world around her. In her letters and newspaper columns, which helped keep her grounded, she would talk about apparently petty things from her everyday life, perhaps mirroring Lucrécia, who refuses to think by holding on to what she sees. Even though she seeks a connection, her character refuses to think, perhaps to keep herself from realizing that she is reenacting a behavior, one she is conditioned to reenact. In The Besieged City, Clarice quotes Pindar: “In heaven, learning is seeing; On earth, remembering.” In heaven things are perfect, what you see is what it is, knowledge through what is visible; but on earth, real life, we remember the ideal and we aim for that idea of what is perfect even if circumstances are not so perfect.
Lispector suffered while she wrote this book, she felt out of place in Bern, lonely in the diplomatic world, maladjusted, she went through moments of disquiet and angst. She confessed that she felt lost while she was writing. Maybe Lucrécia is a part of Lispector that she herself despises, the beautiful woman who is dedicated to her husband in what was an ‘alliance’ (as she named one of the chapters) that took her to see the big city. The book is a meditation on the many choices that hid the lack of choice a woman had at the time.
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Clarice Lispector is one of the greatest writers of the Portuguese language and one of the most acclaimed Brazilian writers, often addressed simply as Clarice. Lispector is compared to Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, and is considered to be one of the most important Jewish writers of the 20th century. Her first book was published in 1943, and even though it was a huge success in Brazil, her second book The Chandelier (1946) did not gain as much traction. As a result, she had trouble finding a publisher for The Besieged City. Included at the end of this New Directions edition of The Besieged City, a harsh book review that came out in Brazil when the book was first published reflects how it was received back then: “a grueling novel to read” and “having finished it, we don’t feel the effort was worth it.” Lispector’s reply to its author is also included: “one of the most intense aspirations of the spirit is to dominate exterior reality through the spirit. Lucrécia doesn’t manage to do this- so she ‘clings’ to that reality, takes as her own life the wider life of the world.”
As multiple readers told Lispector, this is a book that needs to be read and re-read; important details shine forth, making it an even richer literary and sensorial experience each time. Although this novel was first published over 70 years ago, The Besieged City is a fascinating work of art, a philosophical and psychoanalytic novel written by an author who is slowly being welcomed, unraveled and celebrated by a worldwide audience. Clarice Lispector is reclaiming her spot in world literature. In The Besieged City, as in most of her work, the reader is made to witness that no life is ordinary.