Obsession by Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector, the glamorous Brazilian writer, was very adept at depicting the woman’s lot. In a book bound by Penguin of her complete short stories that span her entire writing life, Lispector tackles marriage, motherhood, children, clothes, ideological struggles of a woman’s proper role, money, madness, despair, desire, and delight in the youthful female body or horror of it when it ages.

Lispector describes what it feels like to be a certain kind of heterosexual woman, navigating the course of a lifetime. Often, Lispector’s women suffer from the malaise of wilfully refusing to thrive, or being thwarted by their environment. They vary in maturity, from young women coming of age, to a masturbating eighty one year-old woman. Some spend a lot of time in bed, sick or thinking that they are sick, or in ‘a sweet and abnormal languor.’ Sometimes they are ‘crucified by lassitude.’ Inevitably, through lack of self-knowledge, they end up choosing the wrong men.

In Obsession Lispector tells the story of Cristina, a young woman who is beguiled by a charismatic but ultimately crushing lover. It is a struggle to find herself, as much as it is choice between two very different men.

Cristina is your average girl next door with an idyllic suburban childhood. She is ‘good-natured’ and possesses an ‘easy-going cheer’. Her friends think she is adorable. Ignorant of her own strengths, Cristina has learnt along the way that exaggeratig her own frailties keeps people around her. She is vaguely aware of being cut off from her wellspring of liveliness. ‘A dense veil separated me from the world and, without my knowing it, an abyss separated me from myself.’ But Cristina is either unwilling to address her own unhappiness, or she does not know how to remedy it. Her existence is shallow and distracted, which she mistakes for peace, but comes to realise that ‘it was a certain apathy, rather than peace, that turned my acts and my desires to ash.’

She meets Jamie and marries him at nineteen. Jamie is unflappable and treats her well, behaving in much the same way that her parents always have done. They appear certain of their places in life and by inference, what role Cristina ought to play. But Cristina is assailed by a turbulent yearning for something intangible, although she believes she is happy. When Cristina falls ill with typhoid fever, it gives her the excuse she has been in need of, not to take responsibility for her own life and her own learning. She goes to convalesce in a boarding house. ‘For the very first time they were giving me a chance to see with my own eyes. For the very first time they were isolating me with myself.’ Until then, six years into her marriage, Cristina has never been alone with her own thoughts. Terrified, Cristina squanders the opportunity this freedom gives her, by starting an affair with Daniel.

Daniel is haughty and out of reach. He is exotic and dangerous. To Cristina, he appears courageous for flouting convention, for daring to question the status quo, and eschewing a life of fulfilling his duties. She is afraid of him but is also drawn to him. Daniel appears knowledgeable because he speaks of the ‘universality of…’, ‘the abstract meaning of…’ ideas which slide over Cristina without penetrating.

It is obvious that Cristina has lived thus far afraid to engage with her own intelligence. She doesn’t entirely believe in the books she reads and thinks that they are just for entertainment. She is buttressed by the opinions of others, and she does not allow herself hear what she thinks. As the narrative unfolds, Cristina tells us, ‘in the end not even conventional wisdom had taken root in me, so superficially had I been living. What had kept me going until then were not convictions, but the people who held them.’ But Cristina is not quite the tabula rasa she presumes herself to be. Yet, she manages to trudge through life blindly, so that when she starts to experience an awakening, she longs to ‘walk again with the masses who have their eyes closed.’

This is how Cristina allows herself to be bamboozled by Daniel’s smoke and mirrors, and thereby prevents herself from seeing him for who he really is. Cristina is bereft of her own capabilities and in the gap this has opened, she erects Daniel on a pedestal and worships him. In her eyes, he is like a ‘dethroned god – a genius.’ She seeks him avidly, but all she succeeded in possessing of him ‘were his words, the memory of his soul, everything that wasn’t human in Daniel.’

Perhaps Daniel is too self-involved to be wilfully deceitful. He’s so barricaded in the prison of his own making, that he is incapable for providing an authentic version of himself. He exists ‘in perpetual radiance inside himself.’ No one benefits from his capabilities, ‘because when everything melted away, only in his memory was there any trace.’ Daniel exists in a perpetual adolescence of the kind described by the Jungian psychologist Marie Von Franz in Puer Aeternus as, ‘an exaggerated illustration of the introvert’s attitude in which there is great strength in accepting the inner truths but very little when it comes to real life.’

Yet, there is something sinister in his mission to ‘transform’ her. Cristina confesses, ‘He wanted to wake me up, because he wanted me to suffer too, like a leper secretly hoping to transmit his leprosy to the healthy.’ In awe, Cristina prostrates herself like a disciple at a sage’s feet, hungry for wisdom. She does not yet recognise that she is looking or a deeper connection with herself, which makes her search like that of the drunkard in the old joke about the streetlight effect, who is found by passerby looking for his keys under a street lamp. After a few minutes assisting with the search, passerby asks the drunkard where he lost his keys. The drunkard replies, ‘across the street.’

‘So why are you looking here?’ asks the passerby.

‘Because, this is where the light is.’ replies the drunkard.

Daniel laughs at Cristina. He undermines her intelligence and is unsupportive of her opinions. He demands total respect that he has not earned. Like a slow-working poison, Daniel gradually takes over Cristina. The more scornful he becomes, the more she lionises him. The entitled Daniel takes Cristina’s companionship for granted and for all the labour involved in nursing his life, looking after his books, clothes and brightening up his surroundings, Daniel never offers to assist, nor does he express any gratitude. He outsources the work of the relationship to Cristina, whilst remaining emotionally unavailable to her. In addition, he is also abusive and manipulative. He makes shreds of Cristina’s self-esteem, and passes the responsibility of his own well-being to Cristina. When Daniel doesn’t eat because he, petulant, is punishing her, Cristina feels guilty. Daniel’s appeal to Cristina lies in his aloofness. By the time Cristina wakes up to the reality of her abusive situation, it is too late: ‘I transformed myself independently of my consciousness and when I opened my eyes the poison was circulating through my blood irremediably, its power already ancient.’

Cristina’s situation is exacerbated by the fact that she cannot distinguish between her infatuation with Daniel and her awakening to knowledge and desire. ‘Everything was interwoven, mixed up inside me and I couldn’t specify whether my unease was desire for Daniel or yearning to seek the newly discovered world. Because I awoke simultaneously as a woman and as a human.’

Cristina gradually becomes aware that what she feels is not love, but debasement. ‘Love?’ she asks ‘I wanted to go with him, to be on the stronger side, for him to spare me, like one who seeks shelter in the arms of the enemy to stay far from his arrows. It was different than love, I was finding out: I wanted him as a thirsty person desires water, without feelings, without even wanting to be happy.’

Daniel deepens Cristina’s self-loathing. She begins to find herself ‘vile’, ‘despicable’ and a ‘coward’. She is in a constant state of confusion over her situation. She is perpetually bewildered by all the destruction she has wrought in her marriage to Jaime, and also with her parents. She is lonely and isolated with her thoughts. One feels that their potency might be punctured, if only she would share them with someone.

Cristina becomes aware, ‘of what a dark life I’d led up till then. Now… Now I was being reborn. Lively, in pain, that pain that has been lying dormant, quiet and blind in the depths of myself.’ Later Cristina tells us, ‘I go down every path and still none is mine. I have been sculpted into so many statues and haven’t frozen into place…’ One observes that this is at the heart of the problem for Cristina, that she has not taken the time to mould herself from her own self-knowledge, rather than allow others to impose their views on who she ought to be. As she has never desired anything with intensity, Cristina is yet to know a life of genuine passion and fulfilment.

Cristina longs for a deux ex machina , for something to happen that would rescue her. She has by now forgotten that this life is partly of her own making: she sought Daniel out, and she could therefore leave. When the clouds occasionally part, Cristina is able to discern that she must eventually find her own path and grow though her own struggles.

The end for Cristina and Daniel is an all out struggle for dominance, whose casus belli is a trivial domestic incident. On the rainy evening that they break up, having hardly spoken to each other all day, Cristina tells Daniel she is leaving. She says it five times, before she finally works up the temerity to walk out of the door.

Eventually, the confusion clears for Cristina so that she is finally able to see Daniel and understand him. Time allows the intensity of her emotions to simmer down into a ‘red dot in the arc of her life’. ‘Now that the affair is behind me,’ she tells us, ‘I can recollect it more serenely. I won’t try to make excuses for myself. I’ll try not to point fingers. It simply happened.’

This escape might be the impetus Cristina needs to find the means to pull herself out of the quicksand of non-existence, to re-learn joy, and to remember the fulfilment and reward of a passion- fuelled life. Hiding behind her family, her husband Jaime, or her lover Daniel to evade the hard work of living, is no longer viable. If she takes it, this might be the opportunity that Cristina needs to weather life like a windswept cliff, bolstered by newfound courage to seek life and discover by herself, through her own desires. Cristina would do well to hear a word from Adrienne Rich:

‘Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-pre-digested books and ideas, weekend encounters guaranteed to change your life, taking “gut” courses instead of ones you know will challenge you, bluffing at school and life instead of doing solid work, marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others–parents, friends, roommates, teachers, lovers, husbands, children–that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons. Women everywhere are finding the courage to do this, more and more, and we are finding that courage both in our study of women in the past who possessed it, and in each other as we look to other women for comradeship, community, and challenge. The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.’

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