The Apple in the Dark by Clarice Lispector

First published:A maçã no Escuro, 1961 (English translation, 1967)

Type of plot: Mythic quest

Time of work: The late 1950’s

Locale: A remote, desolate farming region of Brazil

Principal Characters:

• Martim, the protagonist, who is on the run from the law
• Vitória, the owner-manager of the farm where Martim comes to stay
• Ermelinda, a young, widowed cousin of Vitória

The Novel

On the surface, the story in The Apple in the Dark could not be simpler. A man commits a crime, flees into the desolate interior of Brazil, arrives at a remote farm, is taken on as a farmhand, is reported to the authorities, and is arrested and returned to face the law. It is not the minimal action of the plot which intrigues the reader but rather the process of searching for some meaning in life, for some definition of the world and of one’s place in it, that provides the interest of the novel.

Primarily, it is Martim’s quest for self-awareness that forms the core of the story. The mythic nature of his quest is straightforwardly indicated by the titles of the three sections into which the book is divided: “How a Man Is Made,” “The Birth of the Hero,” and “The Apple in the Dark.” Indeed, the author, in a stroke of brilliance, has managed to combine parallels to at least two major, complementary views of man’s existence in the unfolding of Martim’s symbolic journey: the biblical story of the Garden of Eden and the Darwinian theory of evolution. From the beginning of the book, the reader is alerted to these two viewpoints. Martim awakes from sleep “on a night as dark as night can get,” immediately after fleeing from a crime which he will come to see as an act that frees him to start all over again in life. His flight takes him first through total darkness over unknown terrain, which permits him to focus exclusively on his sensual feelings and to ignore the burden of civilization behind him. As the sun comes up, he begins to appreciate an even closer identity with nature in its most primitive forms: stones, dirt, searing heat, silence. Bereft of language, he discovers a great joy in repeating meaningless statements to the flora and fauna around him. By the time, early in the novel, that he comes upon the farmhouse where most of the story takes place, he has duplicated a sort of climb up the evolutionary ladder. Having shed the trappings of a man, he has begun to learn what it is to be like “a creature [who] does not think and does not get involved, and is still completely there.”

The farm is owned and run by Vitória, an unmarried woman in her fifties who appears to be a tower of strength and self-reliance. Staying with her is her cousin Ermelinda, a dreamy, ethereal woman recently widowed, whose rather poetic manner of approaching life is a constant source of uneasiness for Vitória. The bulk of the novel consists in observing, through the eyes of the three principal characters, the slow process of change in Martim and the effect that he has on Vitória and Ermelinda. By the novel’s end, however, the reader cannot be sure that the two women have experienced any genuine enlightenment, although it is probable that the protagonist now at least realizes that he has missed gaining a firm grip on the meaning of existence. In the last paragraph of the book, Martim finally understands that “we are not so guilty after all; we are more stupid than guilty.” The quest for knowledge, he learns too late, is like “reaching for an apple in the dark—and trying not to drop it.”

The Characters

The principal characters differ from one another radically, but they are similar in that each has a terrible fear particular to himself or herself. For Martim, it is the fear of acting—a fear which explains why the crime that he committed, one which he cherishes as an act, is essential to his survival. The crime, the nature of which is revealed only toward the end of the story, represents Martim’s symbolic banishment from Eden. Yet to Martim, a man who was in his former life a statistician—whose life depended on the most abstract of occupations—the crime is the impetus that sets him on the road to salvation, or so he believes. Martim is destined to be disillusioned, however, as he goes from rocks to plants to vermin to cattle to children and eventually to adults once again. Having abandoned his wife, son, job, and friends and fled into this wilderness, he nevertheless falls back into an involvement with complex human beings.

Vitória has spent much of her life caring for her dying father, and as a result, she has never had or at least has never reached for, a love of her own. She now fears love and has hardened herself against all possibility of it. The confrontation with Martim finally forces her to face her empty and near-tragic existence. At the climax of the novel, which occurs rather melodramatically during a rare and violent rainstorm, Vitória, unable to bear her dearth of love, races to the woodshed where Martim sleeps. Martim, however, has fled into the woods during the storm, like King Lear, distraught and seeking cleansing and purification in nature. It is not long after this episode that Vitória calls for the authorities to come pick up Martim.

Ermelinda has an elliptical way of talking to people. Unlike her cousin, she embraces love; in fact, she falls in love with Martim almost at first sight, and before long they have become lovers. Yet her way of expressing her feeling for him is strangely indirect. She explains that if she comes up and says to him, “Look at that fern!” she is really saying, “I love you.” Indeed, Ermelinda is so frightened of death that she has retreated into a world of private symbolism.

Critical Context

Clarice Lispector achieved her first general acclaim for the collection of stories Laços de Familia (1960; Family Ties, 1972), in which many of the protagonists, like Martim, struggle—often unsuccessfully—for a sense of self and harmony with the outside world. This concern with what John Gledson has called an “intense, almost exclusive interest in the subjective world,” which receives its most complex articulation in The Apple in the Dark, is also examined in A Paixão Segundo G. H. (1964; the passion according to G. H.) and Água viva (1973; sparkling water), and places Lispector among the Brazilian revisionists: those postwar writers whose move away from the regionalism of the 1920’s and 1930’s and whose focus on more universal themes has been a major force in mainstreaming Brazilian literature. Indeed, Gregory Rabassa, in the introduction to his translation of The Apple in the Dark, includes Lispector among those contemporary Brazilian novelists who are “in tune with . . . international currents.”

Bibliography

Cixòus, Helene. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Edited and translated by Verena Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Excerpts from Cixòus’ readings of Lispector from 1980 to 1985. Cixòus discusses Lispector’s work in light of l’ecriture feminine, that is, writing based on an encounter with another—a body, a piece of writing, a social dilemma—that leads to an undoing of the hierarchies and oppositions that determine the limits of most conscious life.

Coutinho, Afranio. An Introduction to Literature in Brazil. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. The noted Brazilian critic places Lispector in the historical development of Brazilian literature and evaluates her contribution to it. Focuses specifically on her “atmospheric” fiction, its strong emotional content, and her skill at creating a metaphorical language. Contains a bibliography.

Fitz, Earl E. Clarice Lispector. Boston: Twayne, 1985. This study, while undertaking certain intrinsic discussions of Lispector’s work, also attempts to place her in her proper Brazilian and Latin American contexts. Fitz urges the reader to interpret Lispector’s fiction not as an isolated case of narrative experimentalism in one of Western literature’s most neglected national literatures, but as coming from an artist and thinker fully in tune with the intellectual and aesthetic trends of her time. Contains a chronology and a selected bibliography.

Fitz, Earl E. “Clarice Lispector and the Lyrical Novel: A Re-Examination of A Maçã no Escuro.” Luso-Brazilian Review 14 (Winter, 1977): 153-160. Discusses The Apple in the Dark as an example of what Ralph Freedman has described as the lyrical novel, a kind of writing characterized by a shift in focus away from the world of action and event and toward a world of awareness and knowledge. Fitz demonstrates that this world is depicted in patterns of imagery rather than by action.

Lowe, Elizabeth. The City in Brazilian Literature. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Discusses Lispector as an urban writer, focusing mainly on A cidade sitiada, The Passion According to G. H., and The Stream of Life.

Monegal, Emir Rodriguez. “The Contemporary Brazilian Novel.” In Fiction in Several Languages, edited by Henri Peyre. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. A substantial treatment of the development of the Brazilian novel from modernism to 1968. Shows how João Guimarães Rosa and Clarice Lispector were the two major forces that changed both the nature and form of the “new novel” in Brazil. Summarizes the linguistic, philosophic, and thematic originality of The Apple in the Dark and A Paixão Segundo G. H. (1964; The Passion According to G. H., 1988) and places Lispector into a Latin American context. A bibliography is included.

Peixoto, Marta. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Written with a decidedly feminist bias, Passionate Fictions analyzes Lispector’s frequently violent subject matter, juxtaposing it with her strange and original use of language. Special attention is paid to the nexus with Helene Cixous and to the autobiographical elements of The Stream of Life and A via crucis do corpo.