Reviewed by John Biscello
Água Viva
by Clarice Lispector
New Directions Publishing
88pp., $14.95
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas
by Clarice Lispector
New Directions Publishing
864pp., $29.95
The word is my fourth dimension
–Clarice Lispector
And on the eighth and endless day, where the bottomless hallelujah meets Ouroboros, God created Clarice Lispector. Maybe. Maybe the music of that name was more pure music and vivid living syntax, and less history and persona. Or maybe Clarice Lispector’s innate capacity to shape-shift, from lantern-eyed panther to clucking hen to hothouse orchid, demands to be perceived as multiform epiphanies in an infinity of mirrors. Possibly, maybe resides at the Bjorkian core of Clarice Lispector’s output and purview. As an existential Lou Costello, she questioned with rabid circuitous intensity, again and again: Who’s on first? Who, exactly? And as a literary high priestess with a lifelong crush on void, she understood clearly that everything knows everything … we are a species of kissing cousins in a grammarless whirlpool. From mortar to manna, Lispector’s legacy in prose is one of paradoxes and trap-doors, rococo balconies kissing sea air, perfumed arias and empty cola bottles, gutted mermaids on dusty streets bleeding out brackish emeralds. In her world, silence favors its motives and heaven commits the meek to memory. [Read more…]
“But at three o’ clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work — and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’ clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retreating into an infantile dream — but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza — one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality.” –Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)
For the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. In a world, or perhaps I should say industry, often bereft of visionary spellcasting, Lynch has been the equivalent of a cinematic shaman, a goofball deviant in bi-polar shades, trafficking in symbols, archetypes, glyphs, images and impressions, fished out from a fathomless substratum. His oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap-opera with an eye toward the numinous. Carl Jung eating apple pie in a diner while riffing on anima with a gum-clacking waitress named Flo; the red-jacketed ghost of James Dean partying on top of a toxic mushroom cloud while Marilyn Monroe lip-syncs “Happy Birthday” in Yiddish; a blue jukebox isolated in the desert where it serves as an altar for a congregation of devout rabbits . . . these could be dispatches from a world of Lynch’s making.
If I had to choose one face as the truest and most magnetic testament to Miss Desmond’s proud claim, that face would belong to Renee Maria Falconetti in the 1928 classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Falconetti, who was a stage actress and comedienne (Joan of Arc was Falconetti’s only major film role, and her final one) delivered what you might call a virtuoso facial performance, unparalleled in its plasticity of range and soul-felt expressiveness. Or in the words of the late film critic, Roger Ebert, “You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti.”