“Near to the Wild Heart” by Clarice Lispector: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” said author, quoting Flaubert, when asked about similarity to her protagonist

Background

“Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories…She has been the subject of numerous books, and references to her and her work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films…

“Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector’s first novel…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 on 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 Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize…

“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…” —Wikipedia

“Splitting”

I first heard of Clarice Lispector in a recent review of another of her novels in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/books/review-chandelier-clarice-lispector.html. The review says that the strangeness of Lispector’s novels is due to splitting: “…the strangeness comes from a splitting — of women experiencing themselves as subject and object. This fracturing is everywhere in Lispector…”

I wondered what kind of splitting would be found in Lispector’s autobiographical first novel.

Near to the Wild Heart

Although much of this novel is unintelligible, it was award-winning, and the author went on to a brilliant literary career. And so, since the unintelligibility was not due to illiteracy or psychosis, what was it due to?

The usual answer is experimental literary technique. Search “experimental” in this blog for past posts on what I see as a fallacious idea. In short, much of what has been interpreted as experimental literary technique has been a manifestation of the author’s multiple personality (the trait, not the disorder).

Added April 15: My best guess as to the cause of the unintelligibility is that multiple personalities are trying to speak at the same time, and editorial personalities are declining to intervene.

Are there any other indications of multiple personality in this novel?

As seen in quotations from the novel (below), the protagonist experiences a separate awareness of another being inside her; she hears voices inside her, probably of alternate personalities; she says she feels split in two; what is probably an alternate identity slaps her face; she sees what is probably an alternate personality in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog); she says she is divided into complete little lives; and she has an anonymous lover who never actually existed (probably an alternate personality) (and search “nameless” in this blog).

“I am suffering, a separate awareness told her. And suddenly this other being loomed big and took the place of the one who was suffering” (1, p. 44).

“Joana didn’t pay her too much attention until she heard her voice…she’s just repeated one of the voices she’s heard so often when she was single…From that day on, Joana felt voices. She understood them or didn’t understand them” (1, p. 66).

“One day she split in two…She gathered up all of her pieces…her inner ones…she found herself different to herself…she really had split into two, each part facing the other, watching her, wishing for things that the other could no longer give. In truth, she had always been two…It was just that until then the two of them had worked together and couldn’t be told apart. Now the one that knew she was worked on her own…” (1, pp. 68-69).

“At times, when through a special mechanism, the same way one slides into sleep, she closed the doors of conscience and allowed herself to speak, she was surprised…by her own hands slapping her own face. At times she heard strange, crazy words coming from her own mouth” (1, p. 73).

“She looked for herself a lot in the mirror…without the strength to sustain her gaze against that woman’s…” (1, pp. 88-89).

“I’ll never have guidelines then, she thought some months after marrying. I slide from one truth to the next, always forgetting the first, always dissatisfied. Her life was made up of complete little lives, of whole closed circles, which isolated themselves from one another…Why so independent, why don’t they merge into just one block…Fact was they were too whole…Nothing therefore binds me” (1, pp. 91-92).

“…the woman with the voice” (1, p. 132).

“I will be closer to Him and to the woman with the voice” (1, p. 148).

“…her [anonymous] lover, the unhappy man had never existed” (1, p. 182).

1. Clarice Lispector. Near to the Wild Heart [1943]. Translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin. Edited and with an Introduction by Benjamin Moser. London, Penguin Books, 2012.