The Obscene Madame D E-Book

Hilda Hilst

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press Classics
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 94

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The Obscene Madame D is the electrifying masterpiece by one of modern Brazilian literature's most significant and controversial writers.At sixty years old, Hillé decides to abandon conventional life and devote the rest of her days to contemplation in a recess under the stairs. There, she is haunted by her perplexed, recently deceased lover, Ehud, who cannot understand her rejection of common sense, sex and a simple life in favour of vain metaphysical speculations.In a stream-of-consciousness monologue, Hillé speaks of her search for spiritual fulfilment from a space of dereliction. In thrilling prose that is part Joyce, part Lispector and part de Sade, Hilda Hilst takes us into the disorder and beauty of a mind restlessly testing its own limits.

Leseprobe

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‘The most striking account of aging, grieving and dwelling you’ll read. More honest for its strangeness than any conventional text’

HOLLY PESTER, AUTHOR OF THE LODGERS

‘One of the great achievements of Hilst’s fiction is… the way it challenges and provokes, with a seriousness and irreverence, a comedy and bleakness all its own’

MUSIC AND LITERATURE b

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THE OBSCENE MADAME D

HILDA HILST

TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE BY NATHANAËL AND RACHEL GONTIJO ARAUJO

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN KEENE

PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS

Contents

Title PageIntroductionEpigraphDedicationThe Obscene Madame DAvailable and Coming Soon From Pushkin Press ClassicsAbout the AuthorsCopyright

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THE OBSCENE MADAME Df

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Introduction

John Keene

Man becomes animal, but he does not become so without the animal simultaneously becoming spirit, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or fate.

—GILLES DELEUZE

“Le corps, la viande et l’esprit, le devenir-animal”

Suffering was much easier.

—ADÉLIA PRADO

“Episode”

How possible is it to know the self when the self is seemingly unknowable? This is one of the chief questions that Hilda Hilst poses in her extraordinary and extraordinarily strange novel TheObsceneMadameD. But it is only one of many questions this work raises, or better casts forth in existential terms, as it plumbs the experiences, the depths of experience to be more exact, of its protagonist and main narrator, Hillé. We might begin with the answer that Hillé’s husband, Ehud, states quite clearly of his spouse, defining her epistemological method: she chooses the path of radical abjection, of herself and others, to approach and achieve that sought-after self-knowledge, but not abjection in the sense of negation or iiabnegation. For Hillé’s approach is antithetical to that of the Platonism of The Symposium, that shedding of the body toward the achievement of the purity and beauty of the gods. It also is antithetical to the self-negation of the Christian martyrs, or the abnegation of Simone Weil. Instead, Hillé’s method is closer perhaps to the Sade of Justine, or the Lispector of the stories and ThePassionAccordingtoG.H. It is knowledge fashioned, if that word might be employed with utmost irony, out of the messiest, basest corporeality, out of obscene animality. Out of dereliction—the eponymous “D” of the title—unto death. Dereliction of sociality in all its forms, dereliction of Ehud and of their marriage, dereliction of herself, of life itself. Dereliction, we might even argue, of the reader. For in TheObsceneMadameD, Hilst seduces and then abandons the reader to the fitful filth of Hillé’s queer quasi-existence, her acts or non-acts, her roiling, untethered, ever-searching quest. Her dereliction and the knowledge it produces, or at least aims to produce, become ours.

TheObsceneMadameDopens with an untitled lyric whose sentiment reads as a hymn to sacrifice: “To be able to die / I disarm the traps / I stretch out between the walls / In ruin... Because this is necessary / For you to live.” This is as clear a précis as the reader will get: for the beloved to live, the speaker must die. But who is this speaker? It is very likely the “incestuous theophagite,” devourer of God, Ms. “Nothingness” and the “Name of No One” herself, a being akin to Sartre’s néantbut without his unity of subjectivity, as Hilst quickly makes clear. Nor is this nihilism as we might usually understand it, but instead a foundation for self-construction. Hillé is married, or was married; Ehud, her husband, is alive, or was iiialive; the narrative unfolds—for it is as intricate in its shape as origami—in present time, or in the past. What is more overtly fixed is the delimitation of Hillé’s physical space, in the “recess under the stairs,” to which she remanded herself while her husband was still alive “a year ago,” this figure capturing the affective box in which she has placed and finds herself, from which the novel proceeds, as conversation, argument, rant, and, a few more pages in, as carnivalesque polyphony when the neighbors, from whom Hillé, lapsed believer and writher in the muck of her degraded experience, has hidden, peer in upon her, in fascination and horror. That is, when they are not scared off by her porcine shrieks and grunts, by the grotesque masks she hangs, like totems, in her windows.

Ehud, which means “love” in Hebrew, is the erotic principle made flesh, in its many manifestations. Manifest yes, but moribund. Mostly before his end nears he wants, or wanted, his wife to return to some semblance of domesticity, neighborliness, hospitality. Mostly before he takes his last breath he wants or wanted her to make love with him again, to share their bodies and bed again, to “fuck,” as he repeatedly and bluntly, though lovingly, puts it. Mostly he tries or has tried to understand and explain to others, to himself, his wife’s flight into her psychological and physical cubbyhole, her departure from him into her new ideas and ways of seeing—for the word ideais related to the Greek root verb tosee—into her illusions, which cannot but elude him. Ehud nevertheless attempts, up to his dying breath, to reach his wife through dialogue, conversation, the corporeality of the voice itself. Yet in life she not only does not see his decline, she is unable to and will not see him.iv

For Hillé is already striving for first principles, a phenomenological mode in which every aspect of the world, every sense, is pitched at and reduced to its limit point. Even language itself she interrogates, investigates, for meaning, evacuated thereof, leaving only absences that she will spend the rest of her own existence dis- and re-assembling. If Ehud’s final desire hinges on spiritual and sexual connection, Hillé, whose name has “battle woman” and “stronghold” seeded in it, has already abandoned and killed him, Hilst implies, through her main weapons in her war to know, her relentless questioning, her strategy of self-deconstruction. To resolve this crisis of knowledge she is willing to lose everything and everyone, including herself, rendering herself into the literal and not just figurative condition of being a “sow,” querying herself down to her “pulveressence.” Become-animal, become-ashes, Hillé is willing to die for it; knowledge lies in her body, but her body zeroed out to nothingness to be remade, renamed, by her alone.

TheObsceneMadameDpresents the challenge of how to read it in the practical sense, given that its protagonist-narrator is so utterly unreliable, and ostensibly mad, though, as suggested above, possessed of a method. This novel moreover has no plot to speak of, returning again and again to the same narrative starting point. Throughout the text, time constantly shifts and dissolves, making impossible any sense of stable temporality. Setting and perspective as well often leap about, sometimes to the point where it is hard to know where you are beyond Hillé’s gray matter, until she mentions some tiny spatial detail, a specific place marker, and the reader can then at least momentarily orient herself. There is also the question  vof voice: Hillé’s voice, or voices, her unholy apostrophes, her evocations of Ehud, directly and indirectly, jar. Amidst these there is also the chorus of the many neighbors who cannot but help to catch a peek at her provocations, their scandalized and enthralled commentaries one of this novel’s delights. By the narrative’s end sentences begin to “shred,” as Hillé herself says, the linguistic thread but fragment, fraying into utterance, and silence.

For some Brazilian writers and critics, particularly of Hilst’s generation, the challenge might also include how closely to identify TheObsceneMadameD’s protagonist, Hillé, as Hilst’s alter ego. It was no secret that mental instability marred the life of Hilst’s father, Apolônio de Almeida Prado Hilst, also an author, who spent large portions of his life away from his daughter in mental institutions. Mental problems also unsettled her mother, Bedecilda, towards the end of her life. Though Hilst had begun to experiment both with form and content in her poetry of the 1960s and in her plays later in that decade, and produced a prose work, Fluxo-Floema, defying genre in 1970, TheObsceneMadameDmarked a sharp turn in Hilst’s oeuvre toward more overtly provocative texts, sometimes to the point of scatology. In fact, with TheObsceneMadameD, Hilst launched a series of works that would push the limits of taste, form, representation, and language itself; of this phase in her work, she said in 1990 that she was saying “goodbye to serious literature” altogether. Fantastical and risqué, plotless and often lacking unified consciousness or voice, full of abrupt thematic and narrative shifts, the prose hovering between lyric and song, shriek and keen, these works provoked denunciation from friends, some deeming it vi“filth”; there are therefore more than a few autobiographical resonances surrounding this text.

I would argue, however, that Hilst’s novel, or anti-novel, which requires the reader to enact Hillé’s narrative process of de- and re-construction, represents a Foucauldian ethics in fictional form, of becoming and un-becoming, of instability and destabilization; it is an ethics of the mutability of process, true in many ways, despite its exaggeration, to life itself, and thus suggests an aesthetics which, once assimilated, orients the reader quite effectively. The novel’s aesthetics also reveal much more fully Hilst’s authorial vision, indicating the direction in which she ventured in the final prose works of her career. To put it another way, TheObsceneMadameD’s experimental form, its defamiliarizing prose, its continuous polyvocality, and its insistent philosophizing offer a way of reading and entering a work whose central principle is un-making as a path to self-making, dereliction as the compass to navigating what looks at first unnavigable. Hilst places us, the readers, at the very core of Hillé/Madame D’s dereliction, allowing us to hear and feel and see, to witness her battles with her various selves, her importuning and imprecations, her constant dis-membering and re-membering, her means through which she might begin to understand. “A horror that became comprehension, what Hillé was.” An epistemology, that is, indeed.

Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst was born April 21, 1930 in Jaú, a city in the interior of São Paulo State. The only child of farmer, journalist, poet, and essayist Apolônio de Almeida Prado Hilst and Bedecilda Vaz Cardoso, she spent only a little time in this rural setting before her parents separated and her mother took her to live in the port city of Santos. viiDuring this period and often for long periods until his death her father, who suffered from schizophrenia, was frequently institutionalized in mental facilities. Hilst finally visited him in Jaú in 1946, while studying at the Escola Mackenzie (now Mackenzie Presbyterian University) in São Paulo, and this encounter, which she captures in “Carta ao Pai” (“Letter To My Father”), would echo throughout her literary works, especially her fiction. Hilst went on to study law at the Faculty of Law at the University of São Paulo (Largo São Francisco), where she befriended Lygia Fagundes Telles, who would later become an acclaimed novelist in her own right, and graduated in 1952.

Even before completing her studies, Hilst began publishing her poetry, beginning with Presságioin 1950. Other early volumes include BaladadeAlzira(1951), BaladadoFestival(1955),