CLARICE Lispector’s eminence as one of the superior fiction writers of the 20th century is not so widely known, though those familiar with her background and intellectual depth accord her work, especially her short stories, the same high distinction as bestowed upon the work of some of her famous Latin American contemporaries who are household names.

There is no doubt that she is an original. Her stories, centred usually on ordinary events experienced as a confusing and incomprehensible reality, engage the reader’s imagination at a profound level that no well-made story of the conventional type, full of dramatic action of the kind to be seen, for example, in Doris Lessing’s “Our Friend Judith” or Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, ever does. Lispector’s stories, like Franz Kafka’s or Samuel Beckett’s, don’t offer the cheap entertainment and easy-to-grasp message, which becomes the subject of gossipy debate among book-club readers, that Lessing’s and Heminway’s stories do ­— Lispector’s focus is on the existential mystery that throbs with an unremitting anguish within the universal human condition.

I shall return to Lispector’s stories presently, but first the literary background as related to the human condition: most people live in a state of somnolent contentment, their dream of existence passing in a passive acceptance of an unrelenting repetition of events with its annual litany of ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘Merry Christmas’, or whatever the formula greeting of one’s native festivities; then there is the minority of tormented souls who live in a state of agitated discontent, their senses puzzled by the flow of images that they cannot arrest into a meaningful revelation, leaving them trapped among reflections of illusions of the contorted self in a solitary cell lined with distorting mirrors. The former group comprises the so-called ‘normal’ people, the majority that unquestioningly accepts religious fantasies as a credible explanation of the existential puzzle, and populates the bulk of popular novels which chronicle its trials in breathtaking clichés; among the latter will be found the stranger, the outsider, the dissident, and the greatest existential hero in all literature: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

The quest for the meaning of existence has been the implicit impulse that pervades much of literature, and the hero, whether a prince or, like Robinson Crusoe, an ordinary man, invariably negotiates a labyrinth of mystery and doubt with the expectation of arriving at an illuminated spiritual or physical frontier where all doubt will have been extinguished by the shining light of some ultimate knowledge.

Various 20th-century writers, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, made existentialist philosophy a central force driving the action, or inaction, of their characters. One problem with their work, as with all writing which is calculated to prove a point or illustrate a general idea, is that it self-consciously manipulates the plot to communicate the author’s philosophical thought and directs the narrative to a predetermined conclusion. It is like writing a newspaper story in which the characters are the witnesses quoted by the journalist to substantiate his report. There is the satisfaction of completion, like the conclusion of an Euclidean theorem which, once proven, leaves nothing more to be said: with such writers, one is left with the sense that the author’s organisation of his story has been somewhat mechanical and that he has not allowed himself space for the discovery of surprise.

Existentialism had the advantage of being easily understood as a descriptive language that convincingly defined the human condition; its essential thought, however, had been in the human psyche long before the 19th century when, following Søren Kierkegaard’s writings, it became a popular philosophical school. The expectation that existence should provide us with an intensely poignant gratification and not constrain our desires by confining us within the boredom of repetition and the tedious waiting for our fortune to change is a basic cause of existential anguish. Anna Sergeyevna, the heroine of Chekhov’s story, “The Lady with the Dog”, having found that marriage and wealth have not gratified her longing for that exhilarating experience that would give her an ecstatic sense of her ‘self’, seeks relief in adultery as if the drama of secret meetings and urgent, breathless love-making would excite her soul with a hitherto unimagined fulfillment: an affair seems to promise to be “something very special, very serious”, but soon that too initiates a weariness with existence. She who had cried out, “I wanted something higher. I told myself that there must be a different kind of life”, cannot find that something special, for the brief excitement of every new adventure is soon exhausted and the resulting ennui is all the more intense. Life’s wonderful promise that we will achieve perfect happiness with the fulfillment of what we most long for, leaves us, when that wish has been granted, in a sharper state of dejection, a sort of unending post-coital sadness.

Chekhov had the supreme artist’s perception that literature is not a didactic medium with which to justify some ideological bias. He wrote in a letter: “As yet I have no political, religious, and philosophical view of the universe; I change it every month and will be compelled to limit myself solely to descriptions of how my chief characters make love, get married, give birth, meet death, and how they talk.” And that essentially is all he did in his stories and plays, most notably in The Three Sisters in which little happens that can be called dramatic as in the neat and narrow manner of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People with its inevitable moral conclusion; unlike Ibsen whose ideas, which made him seem so important, have gone stale, Chekhov’s drama continues to engage our imagination by transforming the dull events of everyday experience, when nothing special happens but time passes, into a representation of the universal and timeless human condition. Like Sergeyevna, the three sisters yearn for something higher, not this renewal of boredom, there has to be a different kind of life, Oh if only we lived again in Moscow with its theatres and glittering balls, they cry, and not in this provincial weariness where nothing happens. We falsify the past, suggests Chekhov, reinvent it as a sentimental paradise and long to regain it, but in the end we are alone, abandoned, with nothing but an empty sky above us.

It was a philosophical viewpoint shared by some 20th-century writers who, arresting the imagery at the heart of personal anguish, created a language which distinguished their work as superior to the formula-driven work of their contemporaries. Lispector (1920-1977) was one such writer of rare distinction. Born in the Ukraine and taken to Brazil as an infant, it is as a Brazilian writer in Portuguese that she is known — though I should add that such biographical facts, which belong to what I call the gossip level of life (which is of perishable value), are irrelevant in the estimation of artistic quality which is determined by universal, not nationalistic, aesthetic considerations that are of lasting value.

Some of Lispector’s best short fiction in English is in the two volumes, Family Ties and The Foreign Legion, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. A reader coming to these titles with the expectation of finding common family dramas related with interesting new twists or exciting action set in French colonial times depicting pith-helmeted cavalry riding out to the edge of the Sahara will be bewildered to find that Lispector’s stories offer none of that familiar entertainment. Indeed, many readers will be puzzled that the words before them which suggest the appearance of a narrative occurring in historical space and time don’t add to their idea of a story. This is why a detailed description of her stories would give a misleading impression, as will be shown by the following two examples, both brilliant works of art and both quite absurd when thus described. The title story in The Foreign Legion begins with a line which could be the opening of any traditional story — “If I were to be asked about Ofélia and her parents,…”, creating the expectation that one is going to have a good old-fashioned read; but the short paragraph abruptly ends with a surprising declaration: “But sometimes I wake from a long sleep and turn submissively towards the delicate abyss of disorder.” Delicate what? Pausing there, the reader, too, goes tumbling down that abyss. The narrator then states that her “sudden acquiescence in knowing” was triggered when a little chick was brought to her on Christmas Eve. She observes that the chick is terrified and remarks, “It was impossible to give the chick those words of reassurance which would allay its fears and bring consolation to that creature which was terrified just to have been born.” So, it’s going to be a story about existential anguish, the sudden terror that one exists without knowing why? Not yet, because the narrator has an association of the time when her neighbour’s little girl Ofélia used to come uninvited and sit, making odd remarks while the narrator sat typing. One day Ofélia hears a strange noise. The narrator explains that it is a chick in the kitchen that she had recently acquired because it is Easter time. A long passage ensues in which the little girl’s attachment to the chick provokes unspoken questions from her uncomprehending self and she looks vaguely disturbed, which the narrator interprets as the “agony of her birth”, and comments: “The courage to be one’s other self, the courage to be born of one’s own parturition, and to cast off one’s former body.” The girl recovers her tranquility by killing the chick, as if making a ritual sacrifice.

Well, asks the reader, what is this all about? One chick sacrificed at Easter, another reborn at Christmas, is there some religious allegory here? No, that would be simplistic. One could easily come up with a more complex interpretive analysis but that would be a futile exercise even if it gave the reader the illusion of complete understanding, for this narrative is of the high order of literary writing where the meaning is generated not by the reader creating an equivalent set of linguistic symbols to substitute the ones on the page in order to illuminate what might appear obscure in the original but by the reader absorbing the experience which can only be intuited from the language on the page and not by the application to it of some algebraic rule of practical criticism.

The same is true of even a simpler and more direct of Lispector’s stories, “Journey to Petrópolis”, in which “a tiny, shrivelled-up old woman” called Missy “did not seem to understand that she was all alone in the world.” All her family has died, and she’s left to gaze at the world “with her rheumy, expectant eyes, which were almost entirely covered by a white, velvety membrane.” Brought from the interior of Brazil to be entered into a hospice in Rio de Janeiro, that proving impossible, she lodges with a family to whom she is a stranger until one day when they decide they’ve put up with her long enough and drive her to Petrópolis, the hill station some 50 miles from Rio, to abandon her there at a relative’s house. There, she is told curtly, “No, it’s out of the question, there’s no room here.” She’s given some money and told to take the train back to Rio. She goes out and instead of proceeding to the station walks away from it on the main road, a fierce thirst burning in her throat.

As if a vision has suddenly sprung before her, she sees, “At a fountain made of lustrous black stone, set in the middle of the road, a black woman in her bare feet was filling a can with water”. The woman joins her hands “in the form of a shell”, drinks and goes away. Missy advances stealthily to the fountain. Instead of describing her drinking, Lispector projects an image that transforms the simple moment into one of transcendental beauty: “Threads of icy water trickled down the inside of her sleeves right up to her elbows, tiny drops of water gleamed, caught in her hair.” She walks away “terrified, wide-eyed”, the water in her stomach making “violent gyrations” and “awakening tiny reflexes like flashing lights throughout her entire body.” As if she has been on a pilgrimage climbing up to a shrine, she has come to a healing station and quenching her thirst to still the body’s ceaseless anguish, a spiritual calmness fills her as an inner illumination, and she resumes her climb up the steep road which she finds “much more charming than any road in Rio de Janeiro”. Her physical strife almost at an end, her gaze is fixed on the paradise before her. She sits down on a boulder beside a tree and admires the view. The cloudless sky above her is immense like an infinite heaven. She leans her head against the tree trunk and dies.

As in a Chekhov play, there is none of the usual dramatic action in “Journey to Petrópolis”, yet its presentation of the brief history of an individual lost in an incomprehensible reality conveys a profounder impression of the human drama than, say, a perfectly crafted well-made story by Flannery O’Connor — this is not to belittle O’Connor’s mastery of the traditional short-story form, but only to suggest that even the most brilliantly executed conventional writing is never a match for what’s accomplished by an artist’s subtle subversion of the traditional form, as Lispector does to make her thought startlingly forceful.

Her narrative style is simple and direct, but only apparently so; as her English translator Pontiero remarks in his ‘Afterword’ to The Foreign Legion, Lispector “is less interested in conventional plot structure than a labyrinth of perceptions”. In many of her stories, there is the initial semblance of a familiar type of narrative about an ordinary person unquestioningly going about the routine business of life; and then something happens that challenges the complacent acceptance of existence and fills his or her mind with a volcanic rumbling of disorder which the character scarcely hears but can no longer escape a deeply disturbing, almost nauseous, awareness that an eruption is about to break the uneasy silence.

ZULFIKAR GHOSE is a poet, novelist and literary critic. Apart from criticism and poetry, he has also penned many novels, including the trilogy The Incredible Brazilian. He is Professor Emeritus in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin.