Thoughts on Água Viva

The Stream of Life

Ice-bound in Lexington with the power out—it was too cold to sleep very well that night so I picked up and read through Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, her short 80 page book that I had intended first as an airplane read (finally, after thirty-something years of doing it, I’ve completely shed my nervousness about flying). On the first day of 2025 I put together the beginnings of my list of books to read and Lispector features heavy on it. My first encounter with her was The Hour of the Star, which I loved and gave a brief review to in my November ‘24 book review post. Next up is The Apple in the Dark.

There was at first a strong pull to compare Água Viva and The Hour of the Star. Both revolve around the theme of identity and the relationship between it and the act of writing, both are short, and both jettison the conventionally trappings of plot and structure to allow life to unfurl at a natural, if brief, pace. At first glance, I related to and enjoyed The Hour of the Star much more: it exhibits more ‘story’, boasts a skeletal frame to hang the meditations upon. Over time, my patience for pure abstraction has waned, form and structuring becoming more privileged in my mind—and Água Viva goes much, much further into abstract territories than Hour would allow for. Form melts into a swirling tapestry of language, sometimes repetitive, always maze-like. Too wordy, I thought.

A fantastical world surrounds me and is me. I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers. I’m a fruit eaten away by a worm. And I await the orgasmic apocalypse. A dissonant throng of insects surrounds me, light of an oil lamp that I am. I then go too far in order to be. I’m in a trance. I penetrate the surrounding air. What a fever: I can’t stop living. In this dense jungle of words that thickly wrap around whatever I feel and think and live and transform everything I am into something of mine that nonetheless remains entirely outside me. I’m watching myself think. What I wonder is: who is it in me who is even outside thinking? I’m writing you all this because it’s a challenge which I have accepted with humility. I’m haunted by my ghosts, by whatever is mythic and fantastical—life is supernatural. And I walk on a tightrope up to the edge of my dreams.

What bothered me at first was the repetition of that singular designator, pouring out across the book thousand of times—“I”. This intense focus on self, the things I do, say, think, experience, meditate upon, find joy through, experience sorrow or terror through. When I write these posts, I often find myself cringing whenever I use it: the dreaded I. Who wants it? But I’ve felt compelled, more and more and more, to insert myself into them, little vignettes and life experiences and internal experiences. The detachment that comes from theory and analysis and historical recounting no longer appeals much to me, even if I am uncomfortable with the the presence of ego and centering that inevitably comes with such an existential foregrounding.

I wondered if Lispector also felt a discomfort with the endless presence of the I, and I think she must have. The book is a really a diary, but it’s a diary not of events as they unfold in the day-to-day, hour by hour, but a diary that seeks to go to a deeper level. Story and form and structure all have a temporal character: one writes a story, they lay out events out in a sequence and that sequence is time-series. It’s a straight line. But the unconscious mind doesn’t know time—there’s no past, present or future there as conscious life organizes it. It’s all topology, arcane surfaces of nonsensical configurations.

That’s what Água Viva ultimately is: an attempt to bring the unconscious mind to the surface and present it in language. To render the unconscious mind exposed is, of course, a common trope: that’s what surrealism, using automatic writing and painting to generate linguistic or visual chains of association, was all about, but in Lispector’s hands these exercises avoid the ‘isn’t this so kooky?’ pitfalls that come with something like surrealism. One gets the sense that the roaring Niagra Falls of words in Água Viva is deathly serious. It’s a matter of life itself.

Language here is used to dig: for all of the baroque trappings and gymnastics that shape each paragraph, Lispector is really digging down into herself, stripping everything away piece by piece. The book is the dirt-pile sitting to the side of that archaeology.

“To strip everything away”, in a experimental-psychological sense, is a common motif in French theory—yet the goal of French theory is to do these exercises until the I itself is washed away to the sea, the very conceptual and existential edifice of self cut open with a pair of scissors, like the ghastly and morbid opening of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, and turned inside out. But Lispector’s excavation of the depths isn’t to annihilate the I, but to unearth it for the time, not to torture, disfigure or discard it, but to traverse the innermost reaches of the self’s existence and let it emerge as a strong and beautiful crystal.

She almost gives way to the temptation at one point early on in the book but is able to catch herself, steady the flow of words and keep them on target. There’s an invitation there too:

Am I one of the weak? a weak women possessed by incessant and mad rhythm? if I were solid and strong would I have even heard the rhythm? I find no answer: I am. This is all that comes to me from life. But what am I? the answer is just: what am I. Though sometimes I scream: I no longer want to be I! but I stick to myself and inextricably there forms a tessitura of life.

May whoever comes alongs with me come along: the journey is long, it is tough, but lived. Because now I am speaking to you seriously: I am not playing with words. I incarnate myself in the voluptuous and unintelligible phrases that tangle up beyond the words.

There is an inverted polarity that forms between this unfolding of the I’s essence and the act of arranging language and words in the act of writing. The fossil of the I is finally found, but it requires the twisting and breaking of word, symbol and syntax in order to find the proper modes to express this self-extraction. Lispector here isn’t one to treat the word like a delicate flower, she instead stretches them and breaks them, the act of making language stammer and contort and be pulled out into elaborate architectures. It could even be read as a disrespect for the word, but what it really is is the cultivation of language in minor, the flow of words and syllables in a way that escapes the regimented confines of major language and canon.

…an impoverishment, a shedding of synactical and lexical forms; but simultaneously a strange proliferation of shifting effects, a taste for overload and paraphrase.

Or as she puts it herself: “This is not a message of ideas that I am transmitting to you but an instinctive ecstasy of whatever is hidden in nature and that I foretell. And this is a feast of words. I write in signs that are more a gesture than voice” [the bold is my own emphasis].

What is a word and how does it relate to the intrinic hiddenness of the natural world? A word is a symbol, whether it is spoken or written—a represenation of some thing that it can never truly be captured or disclosed, and the wresting of language into a minor is the striving for that remarkable site of disclosure. But when we speak a word—and one learns to speak before one learns to write—the larynx contracts in a way to allow certain tensions, unleashes vibrations in the vocal chords through the movement of air across them. The hyoid bone supports the larynx and throat tube. Ligaments and tissue bind them all together, the cervical fascia attaching the hyoid to the spine. The spine, keeping us upright, the throat vertical, the brain at the top of the body and the cascade of the nervous system fixed in the body, flickering electrical impulses that allow us to feel the sensory impulses of the outer world impacting us.

All development in nature takes place together. There is no separation from the co-development of the human form, crafted and shaped over many millenia and the movement of the earth, the slow crush of continents shifting, the spiral of great storms, the catastrophic ruptures of volcanic fury and grind of glacier flow. Ice melts and tropical heat, oceans expanding and receding. Chemical compounds and the dust expelled by stellar burn. Mineral deposits growing and burrowing like vines blossoming in the bowels of the terrestial sphere.

The distinct form of the human body molded by all that, starting out as horizontal creatures in some remote past and becoming erect, the development of the hand, grasping rudimentary tools that complexify over time. “The hand is not only the organ of labor but the product of labor” (Engels). And the unique constellation of spine, hynoid, calcium bone and spongy tissue, larynx and throat that swirl around one another and finally fixed into a place that allows the breaths of air and vibrations to utter the word. Eons of geological pressure and cosmic change so that one can say “I am”, that “I” containing all of that time compressed and densified into a single instant like a snapshot.

So a word might be a symbol fixed in a regime of representation but it is never just one thing: each word contains within it all things. It is monadic in character, an ever-shifting kaleidoscope—packed in there is all of history, indexing the elusive sense of natural history and human history alike. Minor language is about unlocking that sense of pure expansion and disaggregation—to make it possible to pass from one thing to the other, to not so much as locate uncover readymade truths but to call them into being the first time.

Lispector:

I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth…

To the span of my existence I give an occult meaning that goes beyond me. I’m a concomitant being: I gather in me past, present and the future, the time that pulses in the tick-tock of the clocks.

To interpret and formulate me I need new signs and new articulations in shapes found on this side and beyond my human story. I transfigure reality and then another dreaming and sleepwalking reality, creates me. And then all of me rolls and as I roll on the ground I add myself in leaves, I, anonymous work of an anonymous reality only justifiable as long as my life lasts. And then?