Tag Archives: Clare Carlisle

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.

Rereading and George Eliot

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Inevitably, perhaps, distraction came during Book 3 of The Iliad. To admire dedicated rereaders, as I do, is insufficient inducement to compel me to turn to an old favourite again, not often enough to make me a Nabokovian good reader; “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” I shall settle for dilettante reader status for now and promise to try better. Ellis Sharp’s Twenty-Twenty kept whispering my name, linked in my mind to Gabriel Josipovici’s 100 Days, both of which Steve listed as his favourite books of last year. I’ve been dipping again into the latter, rereading with great pleasure.

This afternoon I went to a bookshop to buy George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. Before adopting her nom de plume, Eliot taught herself Latin and spent a decade translating Spinoza’s Ethics, the first translation into English, unfortunately not published in her lifetime. Only after completing this project did she turn to writing fiction, Scenes being her first published collection of stories.

In a letter to Dr. Payne in 1876 Eliot wrote, “My writing is simply a set of experiments in life—an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of—what stores of motive. . . give promise of a better after which we may strive to keep hold of as something more sure than shifting theory.” I am fascinated to explore how Eliot’s ideas found expression in her fiction. Clare Carlisle, in an interview, argued that Eliot is a philosophical novelist. My plan is to trace Eliot’s thinking through the fiction. This will, of course, involve rereading Middlemarch as I progress chronologically, if I am able to resist the distractions of a library with over six-hundred unread books.

Sunday Notes

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Today is Epiphany II, the second Sunday after Epiphany. About a month ago I decided to listen to each Bach Cantata, as performed by John Eliot Gardiner, The Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists. It isn’t a question of religion, (to which I answer ‘yes and no’ when asked), just a way to spend more time with my music collection.

The picture above is one of those currently exhibited at Victoria Miro, a selection of Paula Rego works that are rarely shown. I don’t think any were included in last year’s magnificent Tate Britain retrospective. Those in the Depression series are particularly remarkable.

Peter Bradshaw was right in his assessment of The Father, which I watched last night. It is deeply moving and more than a little scary to anyone closer to the end of life than the beginning. It brought to mind a line from a poem by Hayden Carruth: Words misremembered, ideas frayed like old silk. The economy of that last phrase has stayed with me long after I forgot the poem.

I’m reading The Iliad again, this time in a modern (2015) translation by Caroline Alexander. Is this the first translation of the poem in English by a woman? It is readable, elegant even without rhythmic regularity, but it will have to go far to substitute for Fagles as my favourite.  Alexander’s translation successfully competed for my attention over Clare Carlisle’s Spinoza’s Religion, her pious reading of Spinoza’s Ethics. I found her argument compelling and hope to return to her book later in the year.