The Apple in the Dark Read online

  THE APPLE

  IN THE DARK

  THE TEXAS PAN AMERICAN SERIES

  1HEAPPLE

  1HEDARK

  by Clarice Lispector

  Translated from the Portuguese, with an

  introduction by Gregory Rabassa

  UNIVERSI1Y OF TEXAS PRESS

  AUSTIN

  International Standard Book Number 0-292-70392-9

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 86-50619

  Originally published in Portuguese as

  A Ma�d no Escuro by Livraria Francisco Alves

  Copyright© 1961 by Editora Paulo de Azevedo

  Ltda.

  Translation by Gregory Rabassa

  Copyright© 1967 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First University of Texas Press Edition, 1986

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from

  this work should be sent to Permissions, University

  of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819.

  The Texas Pan lmerican Series is published with the

  assistance of a revolving publication fund established

  by the Pan American Sulphur Company.

  BY CREATING all things, he entered into everything.

  By entering into all things, he became what has

  form and what is formless; he became what can

  be defined and what cannot be defined; he became

  what has support and what has no support; he

  became what is crude and what is delicate. He

  became every kind of thing: that is why wise men

  called him the Real One.

  The Vedas (the Upanishads )

  �Contents

  I • How a Man Is Made

  1

  II The Birth of the Hero

  123

  ·

  III The Apple in the Dark

  207

  ·

  'Jntroduction

  CLARICE L1sPECTOR was born in Checkelnik, Ukraine, in 1924, a

  purely incidental fact in her life, as her parents, already en route

  to embark for Brazil at the time, had merely paused in their

  journey long enough for their second daughter to be born. The

  family settled in Recife, and Clarice attended school there until

  the age of twelve, when the family moved to Rio de Janeiro.

  Clarice completed her secondary schooling in the capital and

  entered the Faculty of Law at the university there, from which

  she was graduated in 1944. In 1943 she had married Mauri

  Gurgel Valente, a fellow student who entered the foreign service

  of Brazil upon graduation. Her husband was posted to Naples in

  1944, and Clarice spent many of the following years outside

  Brazil, eight of them in the United States. She did most of her

  writing abroad, and her two sons were born overseas. In 1959 she

  returned to Brazil, and she has lived in Rio de Janeiro ever since.

  She had begun writing while she was still in school; and while

  doing editorial work to help support herself, she struck up a

  friendship with the novelist Lucio Cardoso, who encouraged her

  and read her works. He was responsible for the title of her first

  novel, Perto do Cora�iio Selvagem (Close to the Savage Heart),

  a name he had drawn from Joyce' s Portrait of the Artist as a

  Young Man. This novel, published in 194 3, was both a critical

  and a financial sucess. It was followed by two more novels. 0

  Lustre (The Chandelier) in 1946 and A Cidade Sitiada (The

  Besieged City) in 1949. During these years she had also written

  several short stories, many of which appeared in the magazine

  Senhor and came out in book form as Alguns Contos (Some

  Stories) in 1952 and La�os de Familia (Family Ties) in 1959.

  This latter collection contains her best-known story, "O Pro-

  ( ix)

  I N T R O D UC T I ON

  fessor de Matematica," which has appeared in English in Odyssey Review as "The Crime of the Mathematics Professor." A Ma�a no Escuro (Eng. tr., The Apple in the Dark) appeared in

  1961 and was at once accepted as her finest work so far. A collection of short stories and chronicles, A Legiiio Estrangeira (The Foreign Legion), was published in 1964, the same year as her

  latest novel, A Paixiio segundo G. H. (The Passion According to

  G. H.).

  The style in all of these works is interior and hermetic. In

  most cases the action is seen from the point of view of the

  characters involved, and the description is also likely to be made

  through their eyes. This fact places her among the new vanguard

  of writers who have appeared in Brazil since the end of World

  War II and who have taken a further step along the path initiated by the so-called "Modernist" renovation of 1922. Because the Modernist movement was so broad as to defy exact definition, including, as it did, novelists and social scientists as well as poets like Mario de Andrade, who were most responsible for its

  inception, many of its effects were dissipated in the vastness of

  what would actually seem to be normal course of literary development in Brazil, whether a movement or not. The influence of social writers such as Gilberto Freyre led to a sort of regionalist

  bias in the novelist of the twenties and thirties, and even the

  most important of these, such as Graciliano Ramos, Jose Lins do

  Rego, and Jorge Amado, occupied themselves almost exclusively

  with their native Northeast.

  The poets of the time were in many ways the real forerunners

  of the novelists of today. Their mythmaking tended to combine

  personal elements with national traits and realities. Beginning

  with Mario de Andrade's fantasy-novel Macunaima, the story of

  "a hero without character," one can follow this combination

  through the work and styles of such poets as the protean

  Cassiano Ricardo-always in the vanguard-Jorge de Lima, and

  Manuel Bandeira down through Carlos Drummond de Andrade,

  in all of whom one finds introspection coupled with concrete

  circumstance. A second look at the novelists of the period,

  (x)

  Introduction

  h�wever, will reveal that beneath the surface of seeming regionalism there runs an extremely personal note: Lins do Rego's plantation boy is no stereotype; Jorge Amado, with the richness

  of Afro-Brazilian themes in his Bahian novels, is at work on a

  mythology that ultimately shows through and takes precedence

  over any political intent, as in Mar Morto (Dead Sea), easily his

  most Modernist and most "modem" novel; and Graciliano

  Ramos, as he struggles for a new expression and digs deeply into

  human and even genuinely canine motivations in Vidas Secas

  (Eng. tr., Barren Lives).

  The most obvious heir to this mixing of intents, one who has

  left the thirties far behind after having been spawned in its

  currents, is J oao Guimaraes Rosa, with Grande Sertao: V eredas

  (Eng. tr., The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) and Sagarana. In

  the second book the very title gives away his intent as he

  appends the Tupi suffix -rana, meaning "in the manner of," to

  the Norse word saga. In Guimaraes Rosa w
e have the frankest

  admission of re-creation and mythmaking plus a complex and

  often Joycean attempt to create new linguistic forms often

  derived from popular speech.

  With the postwar years there is something of a reshuffling of

  elements, and the novel loses much of its regionalism, while

  some poetry returns to the native soil. Joao Cabral de Melo Neto

  of Recife writes about his native Pemambuco from abroad with

  nostalgic feeling reminiscent of the Brazilian romantic poets in

  exile, while in Rio de Janeiro the novelist Nelida Pinon makes

  biblical themes over into modem problems with an underlay

  that is Freudian and universal. Her two novels Guia-Mapa de

  Gabriel Arcan;o (Map and Guide to the Archangel Gabriel) and

  Madeira F eita Cruz (Wood Made into a Cross) are exquisite

  models of an effort toward total expression of theme set forth

  with the skillful use of language that characterizes the best of

  current Brazilian fiction. In quite a different way Campos de

  Carvalho uses a shadowy Rio de Janeiro as the scene of his Vaca

  de Nariz Sutil (Thin-Nosed Cow), a Joyce-cum-Kafka-cum­

  Arreola antiadventure that is closest to the objective fantasies of

  ( x i)

  I N T R O D UC T I O N

  the Cuban writer Virgilio Pinera. In all of these writers one finds

  this touch of the intimate, the universal, the existential, showing

  that many contemporary Brazilian writers are in tune with

  certain international currents such as the nouveau roman and

  that this has come about more naturally and less from outside

  influences than one might suspect. It is more a matter of the

  coincidences of modem society. This is where Clarice Lispector

  fits in, somewhere between a Guimaraes Rosa and a Nelida

  Pinon.

  The Apple in the Dark represents the high point in the

  development of Miss Lispector's work, the point toward which

  she was striving nad to which her later novel is, in a sense, a

  footnote. Most of the elements that go to make up the current

  trend in Brazilian fiction can be seen in her work. The invention

  is not as obvious as in Guimaraes Rosa because it is less a matter

  of neologisms and re-creation than of certain radical departures

  in the use of syntactical structure, the rhythm of the phrase

  being created in defiance of norms, making her style more

  difficult to translate at times than many of Rosa's inventions.

  Nor is the traditional vocabulary here anywhere as rich as in the

  works of Nelida Pinon. It is precisely in their styles of presentation that the three writers diverge: Guimaraes Rosa using the primitive resources of the language for the creation of new words

  in which to encase his vast and until then amorphous sensations;

  Pinon extracting every bit of richness from the lexicon of a very

  rich language without falling into archaisms or other such absurdities; and Lispector marshaling the syntax in a new way that is closer perhaps to original thought patterns than the language

  had ever managed to approach before. These three elements are

  the stylistic basis of all good contemporary Brazilian literature.

  Martim, the protagonist of The Apple in the Dark, is a perfect

  antihero, almost quixotic, except that Don Quixote knows only

  too well-and to his detriment-where he is going, while Martim is completely without direction, negative in the sense that his motion is directed by flight rather than pursuit. He is loath

  to act even when action means escape, thinking that his capture

  ( x ii)

  Introduction

  will be his salvation; whereas it is obvious that there is no real

  salvatio� either way: if he escapes the law, he will go on thinking

  that he is morally doomed; if he turns himself in, he will go on

  worrying about the very motivations that made him do so, and

  he will be equally unfulfilled.

  It is a story with no sure future, no definitive accomplishments, with everything still doubtful at the end for all the characters concerned. It is the story of three people coming

  together, each with an aim or a fear or a combination of the two,

  and what at first seems to have been a tremendous accomplishment for each one: Martim's seeming re-creation of himself and his place in the whole universe, Ermelinda's outburst into love

  as a defense against her fear of death, and Vit6ria's softening

  into what she had felt she should have been-all are really futile

  in the end as they face their mean and shapeless reality. It is in

  this sense that the book is quixotic. The words "hope" and

  "waiting" figure prominently. Don Quixote at least had the

  advantage of being mad, so that his view of what was around

  him was clear and definite to him. These people are conscious of

  their self-delusion, and this is what disturbs them and will be

  their lasting reality as they backslide out of their dreams and

  cogitations.

  The story begins with the impression that something new will

  come about, that there will be a rebirth. The early symbolism is

  both biblical and Darwinian. It all begins in chaos as Martim

  flees the hotel and wanders across countryside that is described

  better by touch than by sight because of the darkness. It is a

  direction into the dark, the primitive, almost the spermatozoic,

  which drives him on to survive and develop. He bears a burden

  of guilt that seems natural to him but of which the reader has

  few details and which he must accept as it is. He has been

  expelled, in a sense, as if out of Eden, and he hopes for some

  kind of regeneration as he loses language, the gift that raised

  man above the beast. He wants language, but he also rejects the

  form in which he has known it. His struggle for language is one

  symbolic track of the futility of his rebirth and rebuilding as he

  (xiii)

  I N T R O D UC T I O N

  goes back to what he had had before, from his own lucubrations

  to animal noises and pantomime with the Negro girl until he has

  speech again. And then he is right back where he was before.

  Communion follows the same pattern as he goes from rocks

  to plants to vermin to cattle to children and finally to contact

  with other humans, whom he had abandoned before. There is a

  pattern of disillusionment as he climbs the evolutionary scale.

  Each new step up means a rejection of sorts, as he is repelled by

  the attitude of the little girl after he had hoped so much to

  make contact with her. And when he comes to the human level

  he had left, it becomes a shambles for him as he finds himself

  involved in two lives as complex as his own life had been, those

  of Vit6ria and Ermelinda. The effects of these people upon one

  another are transitory, a series of "happenings." Indeed, one

  might even classify the whole book as an extended "happening."

  The trait that the three seem to have in common is a need for

  involvement. Vit6ria, so deeply involved with her sick father,

  has replaced him with the farm. This could well be a great

  tragedy (in a cheap sort of way), as she herself would like to

  believe, but it really is not. Her tragedy might rather be that it is

  not tragic at all. Ermelinda, so fri
ghtened of death and its

  symbols in her nitwit way, has been widowed and therefore

  touched by death, but her widowhood is not at issue except as a

  symbol. Ultimately she is a rather routine mental case. Her

  tragedy is even shallower than Vit6ria's, almost a travesty. As we

  examine these three levels of the "tragic soul," we come to

  Martim, and his situation must be seen in the light of the other

  two. At first it would seem that he too is involved in the

  mournful course of existence as it wipes out hopes and aims, but

  in the end he chooses to go back to where he had come from,

  much like Don Quixote when he 1ecovered his senses, though at

  that point Don Quixote knew that he was dying, that it was all

  over. llartim's future is fearfully more of the same. His martyrdom (as he sees it somehow in a selfish sort of way) is represented by the shoemaker-saints in the picture on the wall of the woodshed. The patient work of a lifetime within society can end

  (xiv)

  Introduction

  up in the cauldron. There is the prospect of ascending to heaven,

  but in the course of this story Martim has not thought very

  coherently about such things. He is still too much involved in

  getting back to being a normal human being with a place in

  society. He is still striving to be Crispin or Crispinian, the

  shoemarker, and must postpone the second, saintly phase.

  What Unamuno calls "the tragic sense of life" must be the

  tragedy here, the more so because of the base circumstancesnot because of the deep involvements that Martim and the others find in their own minds, but because of what the fine and

  peaceful human life which they have been striving for really is.

  We have the outside world as represented by the professor and

  his son. They are the ones who will give continuity to the story,

  and it is the professor who arranges for the authorities to pick up

  Martim. He is society's surrogate, the one who brings the willing

  martyr back to reality. This pompous and shallow man, who has

  ruined his son (who at best could have been only as eminent as

  his father, but he cannot even be that now), represents the

  world outside that Shangri-La manque. At that point one must

  come to agree with Martim's futile, self-abusive feelings as he is

  led off. What else to do but hope for a change, any change