Free With My Dog Eyes: A Novel by Hilda Hilst Page B

Although she enjoyed the esteem of a cadre of São Paulo poets and writers, andquietly amassed all of the country’s most prestigious literary awards, Hilst’s work was little-read in Brazil and remained, until recently, mostly untranslated. This was partly due to the author’s own inflexible editorial decisions: Hilst scorned mainstream publishing houses as “bourgeois” and instead published small artisanal editions featuring her artwork and that of her friends. She would later claim, however, that literary publishers had turned her down. This is not hard to imagine, given that the frank sexuality of her work brazenly transgressed the patriarchal order that held sway in Brazilian letters through most of Hilst’s lifetime. In any case, her books were difficult to find, and not as widely distributed as those of her contemporaries. Even more challenging are the texts themselves, whose prolific allusions and dense stylistics require a degree of literary cultishness that Brazil—a country whose inequality and illiteracy rates were until recently some of the worst in the world—did not afford.
    Until she began publishing experimental prose fiction in the 1970s, Hilst was almost exclusively a poet. She was also a playwright, and the plays she wrote during the first years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, along with theatrical adaptations of her prose texts, have experienced a revival in recent years, with numerous productions staged in São Paulo and Campinas. Her turn to prose fiction in1970 marked a significant development in her style and themes: though her poetry was always well-regarded, it was through fiction that Hilst established herself as an avant-garde stylist. Her prose incorporates poetic, dramatic, and epic registers, revealing her far-ranging study of literature, science, philosophy, and religion. Erudite appropriations from these literary forms create what critic Alcir Pécora has called her “anarchy of genres.” Frequent and irregular shifts in perspective also create a strange and elusive diction in her prose, often mystical in timbre.
    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 togetherat 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