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 in 1970 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 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.