Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977) en Spinoza [4]
In juni van dit jaar had ik een kleine serie over de joods-Braziliaanse schrijfster “Clarice Lispector (1920 - 1977) en Spinoza” en het laatste blog gaf ik de aanduiding mee: [3 en slot].* Nu zie ik toch aanleiding voor een vervolgblog.
Het zomernummer van het tijdschrift The Scofield (dat ook digitaal in te zien is) was geheel gewijd aan het leven en schrijven van Clarice Lispector. Het blad had als thema Clarice Lispector & The Act of Writing. Het bevatte een heel fraai essay van
Nathan Goldman, “Is God a Word? The Heterodox Jewishness of Clarice Lispector” [In: The Scofield, Summer 2016, p. 73 – 82
Inmiddels is dat stuk op 17 september 2016 nog eens geplaatst op Literary Hub onder een licht aangepaste titel: “On the Heterodox Jewishness of Clarice Lispector. A Writer of the Diaspora, In Search of God. Daar is het makkelijker te lezen dan op de manier waarop The Scofield wordt aangeboden [Cf.]
Nathan Goldman is zeer op zoek naar wat het betekent jood te zijn en in die zoektocht ontdekte hij Clarice Lispector. En in de beschrijving van zijn ontdekking van het werk van Lispector heeft hij veel aandacht voor haar verwerking van Spinoza in haar schrijven. Boeiend om te lezen. Reden waarom ik er in een apart blog op wijs in plaats van het toe te voegen aan een van de eerdere blogs.
Het hele artikel is uiteraard het lezen waard, maar ik citeer er graag een aantal alinea’s uit die speciaal over haar en Spinoza gaan:
Lispector’s first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, makes extensive use of Spinoza. I’m unsurprised. Here is a great Jewish writer whose relationship to Jewishness is conflicted at best; he was excommunicated at the age of 23 for, according to a written proclamation, “abominable heresies,” which included the theological and metaphysical views that interested Lispector. They interested me, too, when I read Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. A heretic to Jews of his time, Spinoza is now a hero of modern liberal and secular Judaism.
A long passage in Near to the Wild Heart borrows liberally from Spinoza and quotes from Lispector’s notes on him. The reader learns that Otávio—future husband of Joana, the novel’s protagonist—wishes that he would “be asked to write articles about Spinoza” rather than forced to practice law. The passage continues in the dramatization of Otávio “reread[ing] his notes on his previous reading.” The stream of ideas and questions that follows presages some of the preoccupations of Lispector’s career. For instance, the flux of things in an immanent creation:
Mortality as regards the human. Immortality through transformation in nature.—Within the world there is no place for other creations. There is just an opportunity for reintegration and continuity. Everything that could exist already exists. Nothing else can be created but revealed.
All things are linked; creation is continuous. Such thinking recurs throughout Lispector’s work, culminating in the meditations on creation and vitality in A Breath of Life.
Perhaps the most striking part of the passage is the section that considers whether God is a willing consciousness and the possibility of miracles:
A God endowed with free will is lesser than a God of one law. […] God’s perfection is proven more by the impossibility of miracles than by their possibility. To work miracles, for a humanized God of the religions, is to be unfair […] Neither understanding or volition are part of God’s nature, says Spinoza. This makes me happier and freer. Because the idea of the existence of a conscious God is horribly dissatisfying.
Here, Otávio considers and seems to embrace a Spinozan rejection of some of the supernatural tenets of religion. Is this opposed to Lispector’s mysticism? Not if her mysticism is an attempt to uncover divine meaning in things as they are: a transcendence borne of immanence. In A Breath of Life, the author character writes, “The miracle is the final simplicity of existence.” This statement rethinks the Spinozan disavowal of miracles by redefining miracle in immanent terms.
This thinking about miracles is inseparable from the understanding of God as something other than the “humanized God of the religions.” Throughout her work, Lispector thematizes the confrontation with the divine as a confrontation with something other than a person. She exposes her characters to the often shattering absence of moral meaning in the world and presses them to find some other, deeper meaning in the revelation of what Angela, in A Breath of Life, calls “the immanence of the sacred Nothing.” This thinking rests on an amoral, Spinozan God who emerges again and again. “God is whatever exists,” says G.H. in The Passion According to G.H. And in The Hour of the Star: “God is the world.”
lithub.com/on-the-heterodox-jewishness-of-clarice-lispector/
*) In dat laatste blog de links naar de andere blogs over haar.
Foto van haar van hier.
