The Nothing is The Everything: On Clarice Lispector's "An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures"

Clarice Lispector; transl. Stefan Tobler, ed. Benjamin Moser | An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures | New Directions | 1968; 2021 | 176 pages

All mystics have the same problem. It’s a problem of comprehensibility, for the mystical is inherently beyond ordinary human experience; a connection with the unspeakable, untouchable beyond. Rumi, the Sufi, describes this kind of place as a field “beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.” He writes: “I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass / the world is too full to talk about.” Rumi depicts a place that transcends moral values, beyond descriptions of the self, beyond names, beyond the distances between two people (a place where “you” and “I” can meet) but also a place beyond “talk” or  language. And so the question of transcending the self–the question of the world beyond this world, what some might call God; what Clarice Lispector will call “the God,” a Nothing, the Everything, the Void, silence–is also a question of description. A problem with language. 

Herman Melville, the recovering Calvinist, struggled with these same questions. He wrote, "Silence is the only Voice of our God." Melville–who might not at first glance be associated with mysticism–faces the same paradox as Rumi: how does one describe what is indescribable? How to say silence? With various metaphorical bits, he drills into this question, and the famous whale becomes a stand-in for this unreachable vast silence. As literary critic James Wood writes: “[Moby Dick] is likened to everything under the sun, and everything under the moon, too... the whale is also Satan and God. The whale is ‘inscrutable.’ It is so full of meanings that it threatens to have no meaning at all.” Thus, a myriad of meanings attach to the empty signifier of the whale. Like religious writers before him, and like Lispector after him, Melville did his best with the tools at his disposal: approximations in the form of language. Wood puts the issue concisely: “Language does not help us explain or describe God. Quite the contrary, it registers simply our inability to describe God; it holds our torment. Yet language is all there is.” 

Clarice Lispector, like Rumi and Melville, takes up the mystic's mantle in An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (originally published in 1968, with a new translation released in April 2021 by New Directions). Anyone who reads the jacket’s promise of an “unconventional love story” about the “distances between people” and expects a 20th century Brazilian Sally Rooney will be quickly disabused. Lispector’s epigraphs include religious texts (the New Testament and a libretto about Joan of Arc’s final moments) and the poetry of Augusto dos Anjos on the transcendent power of pain. Moreover, in an introductory note, Lispector locates herself firmly within a tradition of figures whose mystical experiences impelled them to express the inexpressible: “This book demanded a greater liberty than I was afraid to give […] It is far above me. Humbly I tried to write it. I am stronger than I.” Before we even begin reading, we are already confronted by the paradox of description. How do we make sense of these two “I”s that look the same on the page, but that carry different ontological weight? Embedded in the DNA of this book is the problem, the agony, of language. Words for Lispector are less a description and more a spiritual undertaking in and of themselves. 

So what does this have to do with an “unconventional love story”? The jacket is provisionally correct in that the book’s plot is about a woman named Lori and her overwhelming obsession with and love for the philosophy teacher Ulisses, who to a modern feminist reads as insufferably self-important ("Lori you can learn anything even how to love–and the strangest thing, Lori, is that you can learn to have joy!” He tells her). But to harp on his paternalism is to miss the point of the novel, for it is more metaphysical journey than love story. Or, it is a metaphysical love story; a love story that must be constantly postponed while spiritual, individual work happens. At one point, Lori articulates this condition: "And was it only when being was no longer pain that Ulisses would consider she was ready to sleep with him?” There are some hallmarks of a traditional romance: Lori speculates about Ulisses, imagines herself through his eyes, spends painful hours wondering when he’ll call (waiting for the phone to ring a few times before she picks up). At one point, they even disclose how many people they've each slept with. Still, their relationship is strange. Many of their interactions are silent, or else they talk seriously about metaphysical concepts: “It’s a gentleness towards life that also demands the greatest courage to accept it,” Ulisses pontificates in one of their meetings. He is more of a spiritual guide than romantic interest for a large portion of the book. Like with Rumi’s field, being able to lie down with another soul (Ulisses) requires for Lori a personal transcendence, a reaching of a “state of grace,” for only there can “you see the profound beauty, once unreachable, of another person.” Thus, rather than write a romance novel, Lispector writes a novel about the spiritual life of the self, which is, yes, a novel about the distance between people, but also the distances between the self and the self, the self and “the God.”

Clarice Lispector spent her life writing through these kinds of spiritual and metaphysical questions. Born into a Jewish family in Ukraine in 1920, she moved to Brazil when she was a child, escaping the chaotic aftermath of World War I. After attending law school, she began her writing career as a fashion journalist, quickly shifting to fiction; her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (published when she was 23) was hailed as “the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language" and shifted “Hurricane Clarice” into the public eye, where she stayed until her death in 1977. She is a singular literary figure, one of the few women writers of the early 20th century whose prose was not halted by children, marriage, or suicide; rather, her writing follows her full life as she transitioned from wife, to mother, to expatriate, alternately entangled in and alienated from the world. Over the course of her life, she published some two dozen novels, short story collections, and volumes of children’s literature. Regardless of the genre, her prose is always recognizable. At times, her language is so strange you might think you’re reading in some odd dialect: light becomes “fresh and timid” and the self  “spins sensations with a golden thread.” It has a physical quality, a velocity and intensity; emotions and images burst into the sentences unexpectedly, and she often unhinges grammar from its rules (paragraphs begin with punctuation marks). An Apprenticeship itself begins with a comma, as if to indicate that the story has already started, and we have merely entered it. Taken together, Lispector’s oeuvre seems to be working to achieve this overall effect, a continuous revelation; to start any of her books isn’t to enter a story, but Lispector’s world. This strange continuity and a rawness of written emotion, amplified by her personal air of glamour and mystique, contribute to the “cult-fever” that surrounds her as a figure, beginning in her life and still growing after her death. 

Some critics attribute the particular quality of her prose to her foreignness (an Eastern European raised in Brazil, with Yiddish as the household language). Others claim it is a modernist literary impulse, christening her a Brazilian Virginia Woolf or James Joyce–though she vehemently rejected these affiliations. Neither explanation feels fully aligned with the spiritual core of her work, and yet a comparison with these modernists helps illuminate her singularity. Devotees of Woolf might note the way she and Lispector similarly trace (female) consciousnesses, unearthing the intricate inflections of the domestic world, how emotions can become main events on the stage of life. One might recall the passage in Mrs. Dalloway, in which Clarissa Dalloway has a moment of erotic passion for Sally Seton: 

Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush when one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over–the moment.

This stream of consciousness resembles Lispector’s own narration, and one scene in An Apprenticeship bears uncanny resemblance to Woolf’s description of Dalloway: “Through the drunkenness of the jasmine,” Lispector writes, “for a moment a revelation came to her in the form of a feeling–and in the next instant she’d forgotten what she’d learned from the revelation.” But to think of Lispector as a Brazilian analog of Woolf is to miss a fundamental element of Lispector’s aim, and her mystery. For while they both engage in free indirect discourse–that generous dipping of the narration into the heads of their characters–Woolf’s narration is, expectedly, limited to the characters within the story. Lispector, on the other hand, seems subject to the same throes as her character. In one passage, during a drought in her city, Lori enters a moment of spiritual reverie that transcends third person narration, the confines of a consistent tense, and even logical comprehensibility: 

Even if there were water, out of hatred she wouldn’t wash […] Nothing was flowing. The difficulty was a motionless thing. It’s a diamond jewel. The cicada with its dry throat wouldn’t stop growling. And what if the God finally liquefies into rain? No. I don’t even want that. Out of calm dry hatred, this is what I want, this silence made of heat that the tough cicada makes you feel. Feel? There’s nothing to feel […] I want this intolerable thing to keep going because I want eternity … it’s the Eternity of trillions of years and stars and of the Earth, it’s rutting without desire, dogs without barking. It’s at this time that good and evil don’t exist […] It's the absence of judge and felon. And it’s not raining, not raining […] I’ll speak the truth to you: out of dry hatred, that’s exactly what I want, and for it not to rain.

Within the course of this reflection, the narration switches from third to first person with no warning or discernible pattern. At moments it seems Lori has been lost in Lispector’s own stream of consciousness, that the two have merged into a new “I”; in this trance-like state, the object of the writing becomes the subject; character is author, Lori is Lispector. And just as character blends into author, so does the past blend into the present, from “Nothing was flowing” to “this is what I want,” suggesting that what once happened is also currently happening, creating a sense of universality across time. Suddenly, Lispector isn’t talking about Lori in a particular moment, but depicting the dissolution of the things that give life–and literature–firm, comforting structure: stable identities, chronological time. Lispector becomes, like Lori, “just one of the women in the world, and not an I, and joined as if for an eternal and aimless march of men and women on pilgrimage toward the Nothing. What was a nothing was exactly the Everything.” Throughout the book, Lispector dips into this state of selflessness, of universal time and affiliation; for moments, meaning dissolves and boundaries between humans, objects, and eras disappear. The Everything is the Nothing. And of course, by saying these words, distinctions reemerge and the narrative proceeds, having been washed over by a momentary threat of universality, of nothingness.

Whereas Woolf keeps a loose but vigilant grip on the reins of her prose, Lispector unleashes the beast entirely. Her sentences begin with “And” or “But” or “Because,” as if she is steering a ship and each moment re-navigating, checking the compass, never perfectly in the right direction. This descriptive approximation happens on an imagistic level as well. Lori compares herself to a ship, a fisherman, an “enormous, scarlet, and heavy fruit,” a “black and shiny horse” with no name. These revolving metaphors for the self, like with Melville’s whale, are an admission of the impossibility of saying the self. The title, too, is a kind of approximation, not one thing but the space between: An Apprenticeship OR The Book of Pleasures. The apprenticeship may also be in learning to accept pleasure ("Unlike Eve,” Lispector writes of a moment at the farmer’s market, “when she'd bit the apple she'd entered paradise"). Neither description is wrong, but neither is complete; neither pierces the experience itself. She cannot say what she is and for her it is this acceptance of the beyond-language that is part of the apprenticeship: "not-understanding had no frontiers and led to the infinite, to the God." Ultimately, Lispector's language is not strange for its foreignness or its literary genre, but because reaching “the God” with words is, inherently, an impossible act. Experiencing consciousness, for Lispector, can be done but it cannot be said. Which is why she is not a modernist, but a mystic. What makes her following a cult, not merely a readership.

At the end of the book, Lispector writes of Lori, “She didn’t want anything except just what was happening to her: to be a woman in the dark beside a man who was sleeping.” In one moment with Ulisses, Lori feels that she sees him perfectly, and in the next realizes, “He hadn't understood her.” She at once wants to “merge,” and to “absorb Ulisses completely” and also feels “the desire to be apart from Ulisses.” They finally get together (no airport chase scene here), and then he discloses that he might not have a lot of time for her in their marriage. They are close and distant at the same moment. This romantic relationship mirrors the way Lispector is at once proximal and distanced from her readers. We are welcomed into her emotional life, invited to share in her revelations and at the same time repelled by the particularity of this consciousness, which can be so inaccessible. This is the paradox of her glamour and her celebrity. We feel that any moment we might reach out and grasp her, but part of this desire involves an acknowledgment of our distance from her. In a way, we the readers are left lying next to Lispector in the dark, eyes closed, watching as her world continues silently, rising and falling, forming and dissipating against the insides of our eyelids.