Portrait of a Creep
Reviews
By Marshall Shord
I spent much of my time reading Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures—first published in Brazil in 1969—concerned about the well-being of its protagonist, Lóri. Within a page of the novel’s opening, she experiences “a powerful, shaking pain, the shaking of the whole body.” It is not so much a seizure as it is a fit of existential anguish, and it leaves her drained and unsure of herself. Later, Lóri shows a worrying ignorance of the dehydrating effect of seawater: “With the conch of her hands full of water, she drinks it in great gulps, good for a body’s health.” Worst of all, she is romantically entangled with a man who says to her things like:
I write poetry not because I’m a poet but to exercise my soul, it’s man’s most profound exercise. In general what comes out is incongruous, and it rarely has a theme: it’s more like research into how to think.
Lóri lives on her own in an apartment near the beach in Rio de Janeiro. She has moved from her family home in a small city called Campos because she desires an independent life, free from the pressure of having to marry. Her family was at one time very wealthy. The death of her mother has left them now just wealthy. Still, her father is able to send her an allowance to supplement the income she earns as a grade-school teacher.
As a romance, An Apprenticeship is unconvincing. As a philosophical novel, its ideas are lacking and repeated without development. Its actual achievement is something else entirely: it paints a startlingly accurate portrait of a real creep. This makes the novel as—if not more—relevant today than when it was first published.
In Rio, Lóri meets Ulisses when he accosts her on the street and offers her a ride. She accepts and enters a new phase of her life. Ulisses teaches philosophy at the university and is willing to help her answer the question: “Who am I?” His methodology involves comparing her to a canvas “blackened by thick smoke, from some nasty fire.” It also involves making her aware that she has no fashion sense, talks too much, and can’t properly arrange fruit in a bowl. There will be no sex, not so much as a kiss, until Lóri gets her act together. In the meantime, while she struggles to conceive and correct all the wrongs her being has inflicted upon him, herself, and the world, Ulisses continues to sleep with other women.
This is not romance, nor a viable process of growth (if there is such a thing). Rather, it is a ritualized system of abuse, humiliation, and manipulation—the sort cult leaders employ in breaking down their followers to gain their devotion. One wishes throughout that Lóri would snap out of this infatuation. But she is in thrall to Ulisses and his promises: “Lóri was always amazed at how well Ulisses knew her.”
Lóri hardly sees Ulisses because his classes demand so much from him. When they do get together, it is in public places of his own choosing. The settings seem maximally calculated to give Lóri an acute feeling of discomfort. For instance, Ulisses invites her to his club’s pool, where she immediately worries about exposing so much of her body to him in a swimsuit. She disrobes and sits beside him, their legs in the water, and, after a prolonged silence, the first thing Ulisses says to her is:
Look at that girl over there, for example, the one in the red swimsuit. Look how she walks with the natural pride of someone who has a body. You, besides hiding whatever is called the soul, are ashamed of having a body.
Just what a person wants to hear after overcoming their “deep reluctance to appear practically naked.”
Maybe most disturbing of all is Ulisses’s fixation on Lóri’s sexual history. Although he tries to position himself as detached and clinical, he recurrently presses her on how many men she has slept with. He can be outright cruel about it: “When I saw you in the street for the first time I immediately saw that you’d be good in a bed.”
At the end of the novel, after Lóri has demonstrated that she is “ready,” Ulisses invites her to his family home—called the Vila Mariana—and gives her his address. Recognizing the neighborhood, she asks, “Isn’t that a red-light district?” He affirms, and then, as if to reassure her (in a way that is in no way reassuring), adds, “And, in case you were wondering, no prostitute has ever entered Vila Mariana.”
Before they sleep together, in his bedroom, Ulisses falls to his knees and presses his face into Lóri’s lap. She strokes his hair and realizes, at the threshold of this event that she has both dreaded and anticipated, she is afraid that, like her father, “who had overburdened her with contradictions . . . Ulisses, the great Ulisses whose head she was holding, would let her down.”
Postcoitus, Lóri notices that her lover’s voice has changed: “It had lost its professorial tone, his voice now was that of just a man.” She concludes (one imagines with some satisfaction after what he has made her endure) that “finally he was realizing that he didn’t know anything.”
But Ulisses quickly regains his confidence and tells her that “I don’t have much time for you because I work a lot . . . you’ll have to be patient.” After one hundred-odd pages of protracted philosophical navel-gazing (a Lispector specialty, usually carried out to greater effect) about whether or not to meet this man for a drink, her reaction is surprisingly practical: “And I even want to be busier: teaching is becoming a passion, I want to clothe, and teach, and love my students, and prepare them in a way that I was never prepared.”
Both Lóri and Ulisses are teachers. But the respect they are afforded in their culture is radically different. Ulisses fits the tweedy and assured stereotype of the university professor. He is perceived as brilliant because of his manner and his position—and because he is, of course, a man. Lóri is a lowly instructor of children, and poor children at that. The school is underfunded and she is paid little.
Yet we see the emptiness of Ulisses’s pedantry, its lack of positive impact on the lives of others. Meanwhile, Lóri exhibits a true warmth and compassion in her role as a teacher, demonstrably affecting the lives of her students. In the winter she even gives them sweaters to protect them against the cold. Yet, in a country as radically unequal as Brazil, both are extremely privileged. Ulisses uses his privilege to stroke his ego; Lori uses hers, at least, to help others.
Such a dynamic, however, is ultimately dissatisfying for those readers concerned with Lóri’s ultimate well-being and independence. She only develops her true passion for teaching to fill the time in the absence of Ulisses. Despite wanting a certain freedom she couldn’t find in Campos, she has tied herself to a man explicitly unavailable. In doing so, she is knowingly confining herself to a waiting room, where she can only hope the door to Ulisses’s office eventually opens for her.
This review could have simply been a list of the ghastly things Ulisses says to Lóri and the state of near constant panic to which they reduce her. It cannot be stated enough how repellant he is. If Lóri were less anonymous, if her interior life weren’t rendered in prolonged flights of pseudo-profundity, or empty of much that would make her seem a real person rather than a philosophical exercise, the novel might put up a stronger fight against this bully. But, alas, Ulisses overruns the plot. And he overshadows what Sheila Heti calls in her afterword Lóri’s “work of becoming an actual human being in this world.”
In its depiction of the brutal power imbalance in a quasi-romantic relationship, An Apprenticeship brushes against the sadistic and unsettling world of Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. But, whereas Jelinek’s psychosexual masterpiece is propulsive and strange, An Apprenticeship feels inert; its conclusion inevitable. Of course Lóri and Ulisses are going to have sex. Of course it’s going to be epiphanic. Whatever happens after can only be deflating after such a build-up.
Clarice Lispector was one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. But, according to her biographer Benjamin Moser, even she worried An Apprenticeship was a failure. In Why This World, his biography of Lispector, Moser is more sympathetic. He calls it “something of an orphan” for having fallen between two of her greatest works: The Passion According to G.H. and Água Viva.
“An Apprenticeship has a strong autobiographical element,” Moser writes. Ulysses Girsoler was once Lispector’s psychoanalyst. He was also in love with her, although nothing came of it. Nevertheless, he still had an effect on Lispector. According to Moser, “Ulysses was always on her mind,” and she “must have felt understood by Girsoler.” However, that Lispector created such a toxic character and named him after Girsoler, then “a few years later she named her dog Ulisses, too,” suggests the influence this figure had on her life might not have been so salutary.
Marshall Shord lives in Maryland. He is currently at work on a novel about the formation of the CIA.
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