With My Dog Eyes: A Novel (2 page)

Hilst’s first novel-length works,
The Obscene Madame D
(
A obscena senhora D
) and
With My Dog-Eyes
(
Com meus olhos de cão
), were written during a period of anguish in her personal life. The years in which she was writing
Madame D
(1980–1981) correspond to a tumultuous relationship with a cousin twenty years her junior, whom she refers to as “Hilst” in her journals. Her passion for Wilson Hilst was one in a series of bitterly disappointing love affairs in the author’s life. Allegedly schizophrenic, but certainly unbalanced, Wilson had learned that his cousin was a writer with an estate near Campinas. He turned up to meet her at some point in the late 1970s and initiated a period of comings-and-goings that caused some distance between Hilda and her friends at the Casa do Sol in 1980–1981. Hilda and “Hilst” were often alone together
at the house, and his unpredictable and occasionally cruel and psychotic behavior caused her significant emotional and financial distress. Friends described a sordid affair between them—mostly one-sided—and Hilda’s journal entries from the period, separated by long silences, record a volatile amorous obsession punctuated with exasperation, intense depression, and candid acknowledgment of emotional crisis. After he imprisoned Hilda in a room at the Casa do Sol and threatened her with violence, her cousin’s behavior finally merited admittance to a sanatorium. His departure deeply grieved Hilst: her beloved had suffered the same fate as her father. This affair consumed her life during the time she was writing
Madame D
; in her journals it displaced nearly all other concerns except for the occasional mention of the birth or death of one of her dogs. But when she does mention
Madame D
, it is with a sense of excitement: she knew she had written a work of genius. Today
The Obscene Madame D
is one of Hilst’s most well-known books. Together with her
Ficções
(1977), a collection of her short-form fiction, it is often called her masterpiece.

If
Madame D
is Hilst’s confrontation of death, loss, and oblivion,
With My Dog-Eyes
more directly addresses the nexus she believed existed between genius and madness, poetry and mathematics. Her notes on the novel (dated
c. 1983) suggest it was heavily influenced by simultaneous readings of Bertrand Russell and the Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato. Although it bears her trademark impurity of genre, it is perhaps the most novel-like prose work that Hilst ever produced. With its slowly unraveling genius protagonist,
With My Dog-Eyes
is also Hilst’s self-induction into the circle of heretics, antiphilosophers, and marginalized visionaries that she so admired, from Galileo to Nietzsche and Genet.

With My Dog-Eyes
also bears the imprint of new acquaintances Hilst made in the early 1980s. These were a group of physicists and mathematicians she met at Unicamp, the nearby university where she had begun lecturing in the attempt to stave off financial hardship and the inevitable sales of her land. Though she disliked taking hours away from her Olivetti, Hilst’s time at Unicamp was productive, as friendships with university scientists led to deepened study of theoretical physics and mathematics. Amós Kéres, the mathematician who narrates
With My Dog-Eyes
, was born of these encounters. Professor Kéres’s initials also correspond to those of Allan Kardec, signaling Hilst’s sustained interest in the Russellian fusion of mysticism and logic though literature.

Though there was mutual respect between Hilst and her scientist friends—she dedicates
With My Dog-Eyes
to
some of them—their friendships were also strained by Hilst’s attempts to secure their collaboration in her experiments with the paranormal. Since the early 1970s, when she claimed to have captured her dead mother’s voice by tape-recording radio waves between functioning stations, Hilst had been devoted to the practice of “transcommunication” described by the Swedish painter and filmmaker Friedrich Jürgenson, who had discovered the voice of his dead father on recordings he’d made of bird songs. In her writing studio, Hilst used a reeled tape recorder to capture unused frequencies. The voices she discerned on the tapes were, for Hilst, evidence of spiritual existence beyond that which can be scientifically explained. She even appeared on a novelty television program to share her findings and discuss her practice.

Hilst received numerous literary awards in the 1980s, but the lack of commercial success was slowly taking its toll. She managed to finance her bohemian retreat and literary production by selling off, little by little, the lands she had inherited from her family: today, her once-solitary estate is surrounded by a gated community called Shangri-La Park, where in her final years Hilst’s reputation as a reclusive occultist had matured, among neighbors who did not know her or her work, into “the woman who levitated.” Her nouveau riche neighbors bemoaned the
Casa do Sol, which was falling slowly into ruin, and even dared to throw rocks, glass, and poisoned meat over the walls of her property in an effort to thin the ranks of her dogs.

Commercial success always proved elusive, but Hilst never doubted her genius, often remarking on it to her friends and comparing herself to Joyce and Beckett. “If I wrote in English,” she once told a resident at the Casa do Sol, “I would
be
Joyce.” Critics will be tempted to liken her to Virginia Woolf, as they have mistakenly done with Hilst’s contemporary Clarice Lispector. Comparisons of Hilst to Lispector have also already arisen, though these too miss the mark: Hilst truly scorned the cultural establishment in Brazil, including the bourgeois tastemakers who had elevated Lispector to the status of high priestess of Brazilian modernism.

Hilst understood her own work as partaking in a far more radical tradition of avant-garde expression. Beyond her worship of Beckett and Joyce, she regarded herself as the literary heir to D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Pierre Louÿs, and Georges Bataille: all practitioners, in her view, of the
obscene
as a literary aesthetic. In Hilst’s formulation, the obscene is differentiated from the erotic and the pornographic by its philosophical and spiritual elements, and also through its act of social provocation. When, some
years after completing
With My Dog-Eyes
, she launched her obscene tetralogy, the quartet of works in which she undertook her own development of the aesthetic (
O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby
, 1990;
Contos d’escárnio, textos grotescos
, 1990;
Cartas de um sedutor
, 1991;
Bufólicas
, 1992), Hilst lamented to interviewers that Brazil was a country where serious literature was not appreciated, that her forty years of writing had accomplished nothing, and that it was time to “wake people up.” As she grew older, Hilst was increasingly saddened by the widespread prevalence of hunger, misery, and cruelty in the world. Her obscene works unleash a damning satire of the traditional values and generalized apathy that underwrite the commonplace poverty and violence of modern life.

The tetralogy began with
Lori Lamby’s Little Pink Notebook
, narrated by an eight-year-old sex worker whose surname is a play on the verb “to lick.” Although the tetralogy was meant as “an act of aggression” toward an arriviste literary community with middlebrow tastes and bourgeois morals, it was consistently misunderstood as pornography, and the minor scandal surrounding the works gained Hilst further notoriety as a “pornographic” writer. Hilst herself did little to dispel these misconceptions, responding to interviewers with mordant sarcasm when questioned about the book’s
alleged pornography. Though a work of devious genius, the Brazilian literary community confused
Lori Lamby’s Little Pink Notebook
with a cheap last-ditch attempt at fame, and some of the same critics who had extolled her previous works condemned
Lori Lamby
as trash. In these late years, Hilst was also becoming a legendarily volatile persona, known for her prickly treatment of the journalists who bored her and the writers who discounted her work. Erstwhile members of her elective family were excommunicated from Hilst’s inner circle. Once, in a rare appearance at a book launch, she broke a glass and threatened to stab another writer who had publicly disapproved of her unorthodox love life.

In the 1990s she began drinking heavily, from seven o’clock onward each evening. It was her way, friends say, of confronting age and mortality. Yet despite immoderate indulgence in whiskey, Hilst was never out of sorts the next day, ready to keep her usual hours of reading and writing. It was only in the final years of her life, when she had stopped writing, that Hilst began to overcome the hindrance of her reputation as a “hermetic” writer of arcane philosophical concerns and forbidding difficulty. Editora Globo, a large commercial publishing house, began reissuing her work in special critical editions in 2000, and her books are now available in shops across Brazil.

The task of translating Hilda Hilst has also faced intransigences, but her work is finally being made available to an English-reading public. In undertaking this translation of
With My Dog-Eyes
, I was aided by the opportunity to consult Hilst’s immense personal library at the Casa do Sol; her marginalia and annotations were illuminating guides to the literary, philosophic, mathematical, and occult allusions embedded everywhere in her prose. Since it would be nearly impossible to comment upon them all, notes to the text are kept to a minimum, and I will not address their many potential interpretations here.

One exception, however, is called for: the title of
With My Dog-Eyes
is a mystery. The book was originally titled “The Obscure”; Hilst’s notes show that this was in part to anagrammatically spell “TAO” with the titles of three consecutive books (
Tu não te moves de ti
, 1980;
A obscena senhora D
, 1982; and
O Obscuro
). It is unclear why Hilst changed the title to
With My Dog-Eyes
, though it is obviously related to her own extraordinary love of dogs. Her dogs accompanied her at the dinner table, watched over her while she wrote, and crowded around her as she moved through the Casa do Sol. In nearly every photo of Hilst, there are dogs and more dogs. Though they were extravagantly numerous, she always knew all of their names. Hilst disdained those who disliked dogs, and the first question she asked
visitors and new acquaintances brought to her house by friends—before proceeding to ask them about their zodiac sign and the details of their sex life—was whether or not they liked dogs. Anecdotes about Hilst’s strange ability to communicate with dogs abound. One resident of the Casa do Sol recalled the way her dogs rushed to break Hilst’s fall when she fainted upon hearing the telephone ring one day, having correctly intuited that someone was calling to tell her a friend had succumbed to AIDS. Though she kept hundreds of dogs throughout her life, her diary entries record the deep pain she felt when any of them died. When euthanasia was required, Hilst sometimes administered the injection herself.

The title of
With My Dog-Eyes
might have been inspired by Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” in which a dog gives voice to some of the same philosophical, scientific, and existential concerns that preoccupied Hilst. Or it may be that the title derives from a verse in book 11 of
The Odyssey
, one which Faulkner was believed to be quoting in the title of
As I Lay Dying
. The verse is spoken by Agamemnon, who when visited by Odysseus in the underworld, explains his murder by his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra. “As I lay dying,” he tells Odysseus, “the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” The villainous Clytemnestra is too
evil to perform this death rite for her husband as she dispatches him into the underworld. A Portuguese translation of
The Odyssey
in Hilst’s library refers to Clytemnestra as a
cachorra
, the Brazilian Portuguese word for a bitch or she-dog, reminiscent of the one that appears near the end of
With My Dog-Eyes
. Perhaps it is the gaze of Clytemnestra herself that Hilst invokes as she sends her readers, open-eyed, into the depths of madness.

Adam Morris

Special thanks are due to the Susan Sontag Foundation, the Instituto Hilda Hilst, Olga Bilenky, Daniel Bilenky Mora Fuentes, Jurandy Valença, Caroline Nascimento, Lyris Wiedemann, Marília Librandi Rocha, and Aaron Joseph.

“Vita brevis, sensus ebes, negligentiae torpor et inutiles occupationes nos pancula scire permittent. Et aliquotients scita excutit ab animo per temporum lapsum frandatrix scientiae et inimica memoriam praeceps oblivio.”

“The shortness of life, the dullness of the senses, the numbness of indifference and unprofitable occupations allow us to know but very little. And again and again swift oblivion, the embezzler of knowledge and the enemy of memory, shakes out of the mind, in the course of time, even what we knew.”