'Eyes' a Real Dog

How long can high literature continue to fetishize the impenetrable? James Joyce has been dead for over 70 years, Ezra Pound for over 40. The artistic merits of inscrutability, always questionable, seem by the modern day to have been largely exhausted. The aesthetic seems now to be used primarily as a mask of sophistication for artists who cannot maintain a coherent narrative or who do not have anything worthwhile to say—and it has been that way for some time, as indicated by Adam Morris’s translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst’s 1986 work “With My Dog Eyes.”

Hilst, inheritor of an old Brazilian coffee fortune, resided and wrote in her “Casa do Sol,” a retreat built on her family’s farm and a refuge for a tribe of literary eccentrics and an enormous packs of dogs. Hilst’s reception in Brazil, discussed in Morris’s introduction, has been mixed. On the one hand, she received all major Brazilian literary awards during her lifetime; on the other hand, her work was condemned as pornography and has largely remained untranslated from its original Portuguese for decades.

In retrospect, the decision to protect foreign markets from the hackneyed, incoherent ramblings on display in “With My Dog Eyes” looks more admirable. The Brazilian literary establishment appears to have been had. The novella (at 62 pages, it is difficult to categorize), which is ostensibly about the transcendent revelation and mental breakdown of the mathematician Amós Kéres, is not only formless and confused but also trite. The connections between mathematics, poetry, and the transcendent have been thoroughly explored, and while this fact does not preclude fresh work on the theme, none is here presented that has not already been consummately overused. Hilst describes her protagonist at work: “At night returning to his studies, searching, searching principally for order, mind and heart integrated once more in those magnificent suns of ice formulas expansions expressions, Amós would drift sublimely over some pages, and wasn’t it in a sudden burst that everything was no longer?” The image is so worn and the presentation so overwrought and so familiar that nothing edifying is to be gained from it. The same condemnation applies to her description of Amós’s ambitions. “Hopes: Amós Kéres, mathematician, proved today by scientific methods his conception of the univocal universe.” What is a univocal universe? When did pure mathematics ever prove anything by scientific methods? Why should the reader care?

Similarly, Hilst’s frequent reliance on her shallow readings of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism is wearying. At one point, one of Amós’s friends declares, “And then I understood that only polyhedrons exist.” Amós thinks unclearly as he rampages through town during his breakdown: “Cursing and cruel, stained in inks, those dark-dusks of not knowing how to say it, I attempt an amputee’s step forward, a blind knowledge of light, an armless embrace of you, Knowledge.”  The Gnostic texts especially are rich mines of images and ideas; however, to put the generic, unspecific notional end of Gnosticism directly into the mouth of a character is amateurish at best. If originality is not Hilst’s strong suit, it cannot be said that she makes up the difference in subtlety.

The prize judges of Brazil’s literary establishment were fooled by Hilst’s act; Morris, her translator, is completely taken in. His introduction is not literary criticism, or even biography, but rather hagiography: in addition to being a third as long as the text itself, it contains such hackneyed gems as “Hilst chafed at the constraints of bourgeois values” and, on her marriage, the absurdly diplomatic statement “The couple had also discovered that cohabitation was incompatible with Hilst’s rigorous devotion to her craft.” Morris seems to be unable to speak a word against Hilst in spite of the fact that he freely catalogues her abuse of her lovers, her alienation of friends, and her eventual retreat into angry, crazed isolation. Even great work can come from unpleasant people; the case of Evelyn Waugh comes to mind. Morris, however, adopts the childish critical attitude that, because he thinks that Hilst is a great writer, all her personal dislikability is to be lionized rather than excused. This sort of pandering on behalf of a good writer would be absurd; for a mediocre author playing at inscrutable greatness, it is unforgivable.

In sum, there is little to recommend “With My Dog-Eyes.” This is not “The Waste Land.”  This is not “Ulysses.” This is not “Cathay.” This is a middle-schooler’s short story ginned up with sex and incoherent poetry. Maybe opaque modernism is not dead, but this work does not give support to those who argue this. “With My Dog-Eyes” is not a lost masterpiece; it is a call to action, to reform a critical atmosphere in which failure to communicate is raised to the acme of aesthetic virtue.