Placenta-Book: On Água Viva by Clarice Lispector

Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, translated by Stefan Tobler. 128 pages. New Directions, 2012. $14.95
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Agua-viva means jellyfish in Portuguese. More often than not, we don’t see jellyfish, we feel them: they sting our legs or arms, they burn our backs and stomachs, their acid licks at wounds that we never knew we had. Going swimming as a child, the water would suddenly stir up: it was a jellyfish. To see it, you had to dive right into the risk, and peer into the thickness of transparency. With a simple stroke, a world opened up which you would never have an inkling of while boating.

Getting out of the ocean, another menace lingered. Vive—weevers—are fish who bury themselves in the sand along the shoreline. If you step on one, the spines along their dorsal fin will prick the sole of your foot, and the pain will rise from the root of your leg to the very core of who you are. For me weevers were just another reason to worry about entering the water. The desire to see and feel below the surface, however, was much stronger. Nothing could sap my will for long or make me turn away completely. And those were lessons I instinctively transposed onto literature: diving in to seek out the filamentary origins of wounds of which we are unconscious; writing with the awareness that you may be pricked by a buried reality.

Água Viva is also one of Clarice Lispector’s greatest books. Of the woman, it has been said that she was a wanderer, transient, an exile; that her face was hard and sculpted, as though from stone. Of the author, that she was the Kafka of Brazil, that she was a mix of Elsa Morante, Katherine Mansfield, whom she admired, Woolf, to whom she was compared, Blixen, and Duras the Seer.

Regarding Agua Viva, you will hear it said that it is a meditation or incantation, a road which follows a seemingly hazardous logic: I follow the tortuous path of roots bursting the earth. Lispector is not content with unconscious associations; she has decided to permit what is created when mastery is abandoned, allowing that which has taken the words’ bait to emerge. The book is one which writes writing itself, she said; one which massages the place of transition where language makes what is a stranger appear; one which recognizes the intimate familiarity of a thought that comes from the body, and, at the same time, betrays an intuition that we are perpetually alienated from what is so familiar to us.

Once again we must contravene our own fear. That is living. That is writing. Lispector once said to a journalist who came to interview her: You are too fearful to be a writer. Fearful are those who cannot become the oyster and the lemon again, nor march barefoot on shifting sands. Fearful are those who compulsively ask why we write, while we write as we drink water: to stay alive, she said, because I am desperate, because I am tired, because I can no longer bear the routine I follow for myself. The first time I read Água Viva it seemed to me the sum of an ungraspable wisdom. I immediately felt like wrapping myself up in it, listening again and again to that voice and the mystery it probed. Writing about such a text or its author seemed like snatching at the impossible. I had to be encouraged to do so indirectly. One question in particular left me speechless at first, but speechless with abundant words: And the female body? Confronting the impossibility of thinking about such a subject had given rise to what my sudden grandiloquence would have qualified as a vast world. The world? More like the impersonal, which Lispector justly discerns in Água Viva. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. Because this book is one of those rare books which does not manifest a feminine body but an inner body—female perhaps, in the sense that it seeks to be entirely itself and also to escape its sex. And that frightened me even more. It must sometimes be left to a chance question to spark a desire which can never be extinguished.

In this book, which melds philosophy and the body, the body is first and foremost a voice. Água Viva is, essentially, the monologue of a woman, a painter who is writing to someone we don’t know, to a love from which she seems to have returned: I come from the hell of love; to a confidante within; to the book or to whomever reads it; to a living and secret god; to this inaugural act, launched like a challenge or sacrilege: but now I want the plasma—I want to eat straight from the placenta; to the animal we no longer are but for which we are nostalgic; to the rose that has become an unexpected friend; to the cat that licks the yolk sac of its young, and also eats the placenta.

Though the text may bewilder, it attaches itself singularly to those whom it fascinates. It has been spoken of as a witch’s book, and an enchanting filter—the final confession of its author: What I’m writing to you goes on and I am bewitched. I reopen it like it is my home, foreign and my own. And if each time I reread it, I am little scared, I also revel in it. It cries out to me in joy and terror. I am, as some critics have said, “in the belly of the whale.”

In a prophetic accident in a chapter of Moby Dick, a harpooneer falls into the open head of a sperm whale, and nearly drowns in a lump of spermaceti. Don’t let the words fool you: it’s in the head-stomach that he is at risk of disappearing, that other mouth, caricature of the womb, damned by the anguish of being doubly swallowed, as the sea will also bury him. The sailor is only able to get out thanks to the sword of a comrade-become-brave midwife. Both the new-born and his rescuer, completely stupefied, are returned to the sky and the open sea, but to contend with the ultimate hunt, as though they had only escaped death to run towards its hypnotizing recurrence. I ask myself if this book of Clarice Lispector’s is not just such a spermaceti book, of an amber oil which gives it light; but more secretly yet, a book-womb holding the placenta in which the mental beyond of language pulsates. What I say is never what I say but instead something else.

Many pages and all their networks of phrases—many books, in sum—must have been required to transform the swallowed words into a body and companion. At the threshold of Água Viva, Lispector tells us that she wants the plasma and to eat her placenta. But to what birth is she making allusion? Her own first and foremost, no doubt. The being herself through herself. [Until] now my true word has never been touched. And: I am having the real birth of it. I feel faint like someone about to be born. With the inaugural movement of devouring, which is also one of separation, it repeats, waiting for whichever words catch on, and what is not them: that being of a time which will never return, that in many cultures is considered our twin, a companion in the depths, memory even, the bed of our becoming, through which even our mother is transmitted to us. And we bite not into this principle but into that milky egg, to the seed that gives birth less so than it nourishes.

Lispector wrote Água Viva only a few years before her death. There was nothing to suggest that she would die so soon. With this book, was she biting into that which brushes against every tomb? right into the memory of a life? ecstasy? Because the text also unfurls a path which turns the word mystical sour. Not a relationship of swooning and visions, but one of intensified perception. When being flourishes in the impersonal: At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah. Lispector had read Spinoza, and perhaps he is unquestionably the other companion, one of those who awakens us to our expansion and to the care of our being. With my eyes I look after […] misery.

If, in Moby Dick, the sailor who is buried alive in the demonic womb is reborn, it is to chase disaster. Lispector regenerates to give and open herself up: I want to write to you like someone learning.

To read Água Viva is to advance through writing which is still warm with matter: few are the writers that go toward those places or whose writing articulates with matter itself, toward the thought that is not yet thought, not even preformed thought, when words are launched to grasp at what does not yet exist but nevertheless is still present. There is Michaux, Artaud, Bessette, Duras sometimes, a few others: there are a handful of mystics who know how to discern verbal representations of what they perceive of the invisible. And, like Lispector, they are not the kind of thing we can comment on without suspecting there is treason in pretending to do so. We only try to draw from them a little oil, whether of carnage or of joy, with which to illuminate our nights.

There are neither plot nor characters in Água Viva, but rather it is the breeding ground of all stories, that substrata of cells and synapses, the flux of images and ideas—perhaps the feeling body. Not a short story, novel, or biography, but a placenta-book which returns us to the cave, making us lose all our bearings without either suddenly confounding or suffocating us; a book which makes you bite into the non-words under language and the unborn without it, that leads to ecstasy less so as to reveal an abstract knowledge than to tend toward that knowing unknown, which is joy.

Água Viva might therefore be a manual or research guide of the most singular kind. It went through several versions and was the labour of a patient relinquishment. If explicit biographical elements have been almost totally erased, a profound link between the author and the character remain, and is felt. We may not know what paths unfurled between Lispector’s first novel, which immediately won her recognition as a new voice in Brazilian literature, and the famous Passion According to G.H. and Água Viva a few years later, but we can imagine that the latter is nothing less than the culmination of a journey in the course of which writing eroded, animated, and transformed the woman’s being into something which became the living impersonal—that “it” hard like a pebble,but also inconclusive, that water drunk at the source of the spring, that escape from its kind. Did she know of Hugo Wolf’s lied or Goethe’s poem? A vision of souls which no longer ask if they are male or female and rise toward a human place where they will remain forever young—with that youth that is sometimes granted to those who are very old. The youth of stones, perhaps.

This path toward the impersonal—that of the book, that of the one who wrote it—is a path of asceticism, which is not without parallel in the mummification practices of Buddhist masters. Could this apparent paradox be found in the works of Lispector (and certain other writers of her caliber): to unite living flesh with the lasting substance that it contains?

Living water, jellyfish water, water of death.

Water of life, water guardian of fruit.

Here a process of reinvigoration touches beings at the point when life is extinguished. A sacrifice perhaps, from which the body of painting or writing is born, which is neither survival nor salvation but the impersonal life. With this text, Clarice slowly retreats to leave nothing but Lispector—and the beyond of her. A retreat without decomposition or dislocation, as though we could remove the water/bones of the body so as to conserve only the flesh rendered incorruptible. A contradiction in becoming skeleton, rebecoming what has not been born but is beyond death: an ultimate conversion, like those of the ancient corpses found in peatland, their faces so well preserved that we can make out their wrinkles and their fingerprints, but whose bones have been dissolved by the acidic water of the bogs.

In an unpublished preface to her novel The Apple in the Dark, she wrote: In breathing in the cold scent of the morning, I thought that each of us is offering their life to an impossibility.

I wander through Água Viva. Several translations and the original text. And I have sensed the boneless body there, the not-yet-born corpse and the already-more-than-dead. An impossible book but one that exists: That which doesn’t exist is completely different to the impossible, she warned. And: when writing I’m dealing with the impossible. I see the body that I have eaten several times (a placenta, which may be the liver of that fire-bringing titan, is not used up having been devoured). I have nothing more to say about that which remains intact despite all my sentences. A face without a skull waits in the background. Familiar in its strangeness. And when I think a word is strange, she confides to you, inviting you not to worry, that’s where it achieves the meaning. And when I think life is strange that’s where life begins.

It comes back to me that, after having received the greatest praise on the publication of Near to the Wild Heart, her first novel, she wrote to a friend: It is horrible to be accomplished. And that, perhaps, is the success of Água Viva thirty years after she wrote those words: un-accomplishing in accomplishment. Making and unmaking without destroying. Removing the bones to become mollusk again, striving for all that was possible before being born without denying the substance of the most complete humanity. Don’t we spend our lives attempting this kind of contortion?