Thoughts on Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H.

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To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona, for the human mask. When I humanized myself, I’d freed myself from the desert.

I’d freed myself from the desert, yes, but had also lost it! and also lost the forests, and lost the air, and lost the embryo inside me.

The mask—humanisation—that we put on to help us elude the harshness of reality. A personal encounter with a cockroach inside the wardrobe of her former maid provokes a profund reflection on originary existence that exceeds humanity. The year opens thus: with The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector. This is no Metamorphosis. Lispector’s narrator is not transformed but ritually ingests a part of the cockroach’s body.

The demonic precedes the human. And the person who sees that presentness burns as if seeing the God. Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.

This exploration of the prehuman and divine in Lispector’s narrative echoes themes in Spinoza’s Ethics, particularly as interpreted by Clare Carlisle. This is the conflation of God and Nature that Carlisle addresses in Spinoza’s Religion:

When Spinoza identifies Nature with God, however, this conception of Nature must be expanded, beyond consciousness and extension, to comprise the infinity of attributes which, he declares, belong to God. Spinoza offers Natura naturans as, so to speak, an alternative name of God. This divine name works to free the concept of God from the cultural baggage-particularly the anthropomorphic and moralising connotations-it had acquired over many centuries.

Lispector’s assessment of humanity through G. H. is not without hope, but as Spinoza writes in Ethics: “The emotions of hope and fear cannot in themselves be good.” We are steeped in anthropomorphism and fake morality, which inhibits the emergence of a clear understanding of what it is to be human.

Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. is best ingested slowly. It is a fine start to this year’s reading, but I do not wish to end the consequent introspective mood that it provoked. I read Ronald W. Sousa’s translation and will remain with the book in Idra Novey’s translation.

Emily Dickinson shares Lispector’s fervent interest in the relationship between Nature and the God, conceptions aligned with my limited understanding of Baruch Spinoza. As I’ve only dipped into Ethics, and read Spinoza only through Clare Carlise, an amusing project might be to combine my rereading of Dickinson and continued reading of Passion with George Eliot’s translation of Ethics, which may lead into Daniel Deronda and Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question.

Between the Lines

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Chantal Joffe: Emily with Sugar I, 2016

How to read well amidst infinite streams of information and data? Arriving at the closing pages of a long book, Anna Karenina, in my case, feels like more of an achievement than it should, but it is all too easy to get distracted. Paradoxically, inhabiting the world of a long book is one of my favourite ways of spending time on this planet. This year I’d like to embrace the resilience found in the pages of long stories like War and Peace and Moby Dick. Slowly journeying between the extended anchor points of the opening and closing pages of long books, percolating through time, allowing the linearity of time to be dissolved. Less is more and more.

Anna Karenina gave me a richly varied cornucopia of bilious old men, strutting peacocks, beautiful women, awkward peasants, uncouth nobility, cattle, rural politics, scything techniques, abundances of a different type, but what lingers are the exquisitely and precisely rendered emotions. Beware of the green-eyed monster which mocks the meat it feeds on. In Anna Karenina, the Lord of Jealousy steps in, inhabiting the text as a fully developed character You might read any number of books on the subject but come to Anna Karenina to truly understand its malignant force.

This year begins with Clarice Lispector’s The Passion according to G. H., translated by Ronald W. Sousa. I’ve been unable to read beyond the first paragraph, which I reread, inscribe into two different notebooks and now into the internet. It recalls a passage I love from Michel Serres’ Thumbelina: I am sometimes unknown to myself and on display at one and the same time. I exist, therefore I am a code. I am calculable and incalculable, like a golden needle, plus the haystack in which, buried, its brightness lies hidden.

I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don’t know who, but I don’t want to be alone with that experi-ence. I don’t know what to do with it, I’m terrified of that profound disorganization. I’m not sure I even believe in what happened to me. Did something happen, and did I, because I didn’t know how to experience it, end up experiencing something else instead? It’s that something that I’d like to call disorganization, and then I’d have the confidence to venture forth because I would know where to come back to: to the prior organization. I prefer to call it disorganization because I don’t want to ground myself in what I experienced — in that grounding I would lose the world as it was for me before, and I know that I don’t have the capacity for another one.

Thank you to those that sent messages in response to my last post. Your interest is greatly  appreciated. It is always gratifying to know that these words travel through different conceptual worlds and times to enrich readers.

Scything Through Time

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Dostoevsky’s novels, wrote John Bayley, “are full of a stifling smell of living and littered with constitute daily reality,” as compared to Tolstoy who has, “houses and dinners and landscapes, ” which is a striking and nicely balanced comparison.

There is a singular scene in Anna Karenina which marked my transition from curiosity to a genuine fondness for Tolstoy’s story. The noble Levin scythes hay with the peasantry, transitioning over the course of the long day from a sense of detachment and to a more instinctual rhythm. It is a similar metaphor to Hamlet’s “the interim” as the place where contentment is found. As Tolstoy wrote elsewhere, “True life is not lived where great external changes take place.” It is a quite extraordinary scene and set my decision to read more Tolstoy, particularly War and Peace.

Normally at this time of the year I am brimming with plans for next year’s reading, but apart from wishing to read through those Shakespeare plays I’ve not read and more of Samuel Johnson’s Lives, I have few other settled intentions. “Age with his stealing steps / Hath clawed me in his clutch.” As I turn fifty-nine a deep sense of mortality is shaping what I read and I find myself turning more to those works of art that have eluded me to date. There is more urgency to try to read well. I read more books (87) this year than any other but feel that I read too much. With a handful of exceptions, the most profound and interesting reading this year was all older books.

Time’s Flow Stemmed feels a little rudderless at the moment but still appears to be of some interest if judged by 1,200 subscribers and 1,800 visitors per month on average, but I have no point of comparison. If any readers would like me to respond to specific questions about my reading life please either leave a comment or send an email. I still clearly feel a need to write into the internet as manifested by the occasional post here and my sporadic social media presence.

Samuel Johnson’s Craft in “The Lives of the Poets”

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It will not be the last time that I stumble upon a work and wonder why I’ve not read it before. I’m reading Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets, specifically the chapter on John Milton.

It is not my first encounter with Johnson. I’ve read The History of Rasselas and some of his essays on Shakespeare’s plays. Samuel Beckett read Johnson intensely, ‘at times even obsessively, especially in the years 1937-40’.* Following the traces of books that my favourite writers ardently reread is a preoccupation.

Johnson’s Milton is no mere critical exercise; it’s a vivid journey through his intellectual life, written in a rich and sonorous prose that I frequently copy into my notebook, hoping against hope that his natural beauty of thought somehow flows through me. Each line resonates and invites me to pause and wonder. I plan to spend the rest of this year with this captivating book.

Johnson’s quotes Milton: ‘By labour and intense study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.’

This year’s rediscovery of the very great pleasures of reading Shakespeare’s plays and my reading of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets will undoubtedly, with diversions, form the spine of next year’s reading.

*Samuel Beckett’s Library by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon

Highly Anticipated Books Forthcoming in 2024

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  1. Maria Gabriela Llansol. A Thousand Thoughts in Flight. (trans. Audrey Young).
  2. Andrew Gallix Unwords.
  3. Otohiko Kaga. Marshland. (trans. Albert Novick).
  4. Pascal Quignard. Dying of Thinking. (trans. John Taylor).
  5. Karen Wilkin. Giorgio Morandi.
  6. Roberto Ohrt , Axel Heil. Warburg Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: Commentary Volume.
  7. Jane Ellen Harrison. Reminiscences of a Student’s Life.
  8. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (trans. Damion Searls).
  9. Anne de Marcken. It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over.
  10. Elias Canetti. The Book Against Death. (trans. Peter Filkins.
  11. Greg Gerke. In the Suavity of the Rock.
  12. Nicholas Royle. Shadow Lines.
  13. Michael Coffey. Beckett’s Children: A Literary Memoir.
  14. J. H. Prynne. Poems 2016-2024.
  15. Kevin Hart. Dark-Land.
  16. Paul Celan. Letters to Gisèle. (trans. Jason Kavett).
  17. Cristina Campo. The Unforgivable and Other Writings. (trans. Alex Andriesse).
  18. Yoko Tawada. Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. (trans. Susan Bernofsky).
  19. Kim Haines-Eitzen. Sonorous Desert.
  20. Ruth Antosh. J. -K. Huysmans.
  21. Friederike Mayröcker. Cahier. (trans. Donna Stonecipher).
  22. Dominic Pettman, Eugene Thacker. Sad Planets.
  23. Michel Leiris. Frail Riffs. (trans. Richard Sieburth).
  24. Franz Kafka. Selected Stories. (trans. Mark Harman).
  25. Emily Dickinson. The Letters of Emily Dickinson.
  26. Goethe. The Flight to Italy. (trans. T. J. Reed).
  27. Lara Pawson. Spent Light.
  28. Ventura Ametller. Resta Kaotica. (trans. Douglas Suttle).