By RICARDO IANNACE*
Experiences never manifest themselves in isolation – they are losses, disappointments, expectations and utopias.
1.
I blamed the ephemerides entrusted to Franz Kafka and Clarice Lispector for the inflammation of my sciatic nerve.
“— A year with many events,” he said jokingly to the acupuncturist during the needle application session.
I told him that, as if the workload of academic work were not enough, tributes to the author of To metamorphose, whose death completed a century, and to the author of The passion according to GH e the foreign legion, works published in 1964, sixty years ago, when the military dictatorship was established in Brazil.
The Asian interlocutor, skilled in preventive medicine, warned of the need to slow down. He told me about an increasingly stressed society with a gradual loss of memory; he used the term synapse copiously, referring to connections between neurons, nerve impulses and impulses spread throughout the body; he referred to meridians, dopamine, vital energy and the pinching that occurs in the spine and lower back (no word was pronounced with excessive intonation, but rather with the benign accent of gentleness).
I, overcome by an irresistible drowsiness, listened to him and tried to follow the therapist's sudden change of subject, commenting that, throughout his daughter's childhood, he invariably gave her Estrela dolls as Christmas presents. At that moment I thought – however, the mild state of dormancy did not allow it – of summarizing two books corresponding to this context: How the stars were born: twelve Brazilian legends, by Clarice Lispector, and Kafka and the Traveling Doll, by Jordi Sierra i Fabra.
Perhaps the motivation was justified by the sequence of words announced in that space. In other words: synapse, meridians, pinching. It turns out that, ironically, synapse provided me with an involuntary articulation with analepsis.
2.
How the stars were born: twelve Brazilian legends came to light in 1987, ten years after the writer's death. The texts, written to order and published in a posthumous book, originate from the work carried out by Clarice Lispector for the Estrela toy factory, aiming at the production of a calendar for the year 1977.
As the subtitle of this work aimed at young readers rightly points out, these are narratives that reference national folklore (month by month a new incident is reported, in the recovery of excerpts from our fauna). Thus, from January to December, a celebratory party, a popular character from the country, a myth and/or animal representative of the local culture are summoned: Saci-Pererê, Curupira, Yara, Malazarte, Negrinho do Pastoreio, in addition to tortoises, jaguars, alligators and many other animals.
Without much effort, the reader will associate some female marmosets, with their festive trinkets, with the memorable Lisette from the story “Monkeys”, by the foreign legion;you will notice that “A True Legend” (the last story of How the stars were born, emblematic of the month of December and contemplative of the birth of Jesus) is the reissue of the chronicle “Today a boy is born”, originally published in Newspapers in Brazil on December 24, 1971.
The writer's language, known for conveying a disturbing and mysterious perception of life, is embodied in the opening pages of the work, identified in a recent edition by Editora Rocco with the title “The Power of Dreams”. Here is the writer's entry in December 1976: “Let us tell our children our intriguing legends in this 1977, a key year, because if the number 7 gives power, two 7s add even more good luck: the decade of the 7s is permeated by the whisper of a secret inspiration” (Lispector, 2015, p. 05).
He says further: “[…] For 1977, which is yours and mine, I ordered thirty thousand chandeliers to be lit, nervous and excited with so many flexes and reflections and reverberations and streaks of rays, sparkles and flashes with the trembling pendants of the most excited luminosity. Luminosity – that is what I wish for you for 1977. Amen. Clarice Lispector” (Idem).
When compared to other children's productions by Clarice Lispector, such as The woman who killed the fish (1968) and Laura's intimate life (1974), these twelve legends are silent insights and disconcerting associations of imagistic latitude. However, although the poetics of How the stars were born lacks boldness, but the rhetoric that structures the narratives does not bow to pedagogical stereotyping and childish mannerisms.
Nádia Battella Gotlib rightly highlights: “[…] the stories do not present great aesthetic interest, although there is a good repertoire of motives, characters and situations. The final surprise, common to almost all the stories, does not have an important function, so as to cause the typical astonishment of the good stories told by Clarice. Not even the final moral, when there is one, causes an impact worthy of greater admiration. Only one or two phrases bear the marks of the great writer, such as this one, with which one of the stories ends: 'And the fate of the animals was made and remade there: that of loving without knowing that they loved'” (Gotlib, 2009, p. 556).
Indeed. And to this sentence I add these two: “[…] as we know, 'always' never ends” (Lispector, 1987, p. 08) and “[…] the animal's duty is to exist” (Idem, p. 26).
3.
Kafka and the Traveling Doll, a title released by Ediciones Siruela of Madrid in 2006, is one of the most beautiful children's works by the Spanish author Jordi Sierra i Fabra. The protagonist is Franz Kafka; the plot recreates a singular and charming incident that occurred in 1923 in the life of the writer, according to the testimony of his companion Dora Diamant.
One morning, in Steglitz Park in Berlin, the Austro-Hungarian writer is moved by the tears of a little girl named Elsi, who has just discovered that her doll Brígida is missing. To console her, he plays a risky and captivating make-believe game: “Your doll is not lost,” said Franz Kafka happily. “She has gone away on a trip!” (Sierra i Fabra, 2009, p. 21).
This gives rise to a tense and no less fascinating game, in which the retired worker from the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute pretends to be a "doll postman" in order to feed the girl's dreams and hopes in the sunlight of the public children's play area. Over the course of three weeks, Franz Kafka – suffering from fevers caused by the worsening of his tuberculosis –, accompanied by his lover Dora, scripts the doll's outings in the letters he writes and addresses to Elsi.
And each letter receives an envelope with the original stamp of the multiple countries through which the traveler ventures. It reads: “Brigida traveled the world at a dizzying speed and her adventures were increasingly unusual, more beautiful, more worthy of a doll’s odyssey and a writer’s fantasy […]”; she “crossed the vast Sahara desert in a camel caravan, explored India, walked along the Great Wall of China, swam in the Dead Sea” etc. “Brigida was in Beijing, Tokyo, New York, Bogotá, Mexico, Havana, Hong Kong… […] Not even Jules Verne could have created her more fabulous, and in less than eighty days the world would allow itself to be embraced by her.” (Idem, pp. 73-4).
The solution found for the scribe's rest was to arrange a marriage for Elsi's friend. This epilogue marks the final point in the series of twenty fabulous correspondences. In the end, the girl is given a porcelain doll, which Brígida sends her from faraway lands and in a cardboard box covered in colored paper. Her name is Dora.
Walter Benjamin argues, in the essay “Cultural History of Toys”, that “we would not understand toys, neither in their reality nor in their concept, if we wanted to explain them solely from the perspective of children. Children are not Robinsons, children do not constitute a separate community, but are part of the people and the class to which they belong. Therefore, children’s toys do not attest to the existence of an autonomous and segregated life, but are a silent dialogue, based on signs, between children and people” (Benjamin, 1994, pp. 247-8).
Of course, experiences never manifest themselves in a split form – they are losses, disappointments, expectations and utopias.
4.
After the consultation, I said goodbye. As I went down the elevator of the building located on Avenida da Liberdade (リバティアベニュー), I randomly correlated the acupuncturist's ethnicity with the Japanese-Brazilian neighborhood and the Japanese Culture House, located in campus from the University of Sao Paulo.
That's because I was there, participating in the 5th Kafkiana Meeting, between September 18 and 20, and I filed away in my memory an event I witnessed in the auditorium: my colleague Susana Kampff Lages, at the end of the symposium I was coordinating, surprised us with a ladybug she had picked up from the seat of the chair next to hers. She placed the tiny beetle on her thumb and, jokingly, made reference to Gregor Samsa, revealing that the lines on the palms of her hands form the letter K.
Also with humor, I said to my table companion: “– How curious, unlike Susana, the creases on my palms do not inscribe either K or L (from Lispector), they draw the consonant M, from the Minas Gerais magician Murilo Rubião”.
A happy 2025!
*Ricardo Iannace He is a professor of communication and semiotics at the Faculty of Technology of the State of São Paulo and of the Postgraduate Program in Comparative Studies of Portuguese Language Literatures at FFLCH-USP. Author, among other books, of Murilo Rubião and the architectures of the fantastic (edusp). [https://amzn.to/3sXgz77]
References
BENJAMIN, Walter. Magic and technique, art and politics: essays on literature and cultural history. Translated by Sérgio Paulo Rouanet. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994 [Selected works; v.1].
GOTLIB, Nádia Battella. Clarice: a life that counts🇧🇷 São Paulo: Edusp, 2009.
LISPECTOR, Clarice. How the stars were born: twelve Brazilian legends. Illustrations by Ricardo Leite. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1987.
LISPECTOR, Clarice. Twelve Brazilian legends: how the stars were born. Illustrations by Suryara. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco Digital, 2015.
SIERRA and FABRA, Jordi. Kafka and the Traveling Doll. Translated by Rubia Prates Goldoni and illustrated by Pep Montserrat. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2009.
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