Tag Archives: Clarice Lispector

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.

Solitude and Essence

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  • No . . . – she said nervously. – It’s just that everything I have cannot be given. Nor taken. I myself am capable of dying of thirst in my own presence. Solitude is mingled with my essence . . .

—Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart. trans. Giovanni Pontiero)

On a fair evening in the garden, I am languidly enjoying Clarice Lispector’s prose. The days, with their sweltering heat, confine me indoors, where open windows offer a whisper of respite. It is almost unfathomable to contemplate that Lispector was merely nineteen when her seminal work, Near to the Wild Heart, was published in Brazil.

Her first novel serves as a coming-of-age narrative, permeated by her profound communion with the meditations of Spinoza. Curiously, her conservative husband, perplexed by this revelation, discovers that his wife possesses an instinctual comprehension of Spinoza’s ethical principles, far surpassing his own.

Latterly, I find myself drawn towards something more antiquated. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in-between.” Upon my shelves, two volumes await my attention: an untouched Loeb edition of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Charles Singleton’s translation of Paradiso. Both are tenderly whispering to me.

Sunday Notes (Clarice Lispector)

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There is an undeniable force in the way that Clarice Lispector’s words dance on the boundaries of language. Slowly reading the Crônicas, as translated by Giovanni Pontiero in Discovering the World, an encounter that softens, in part, the intensity of that force, without providing any guidance through the labyrinth. This settled my resolve to immerse myself in the works of Clarice throughout the summer, exploring and revisiting the invaluable English translations available.

This week, interspersed with the chronicles, was for Elizabeth Lowe’s and Earl Fitz’s translation, The Stream of Life, originally published as Agua Viva. A third reading with no less wonder at how Clarice depicts subjectivity to establish a unique intimacy. Can any other writer convey such a profound sense of directly accessing the intricacies of another consciousness, with all the inherent opaqueness that would entail? Clarice offers no overt clues, no keys to unlock the mystery of language. Instead she presents doors that go deeper into the ineffable nature of existence.

Some promising additions to my library this week: Jeremy Cooper’s Brian, Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, The Geoffrey Hartman Reader, Kobe Abé’s The Ark Sakura and a new Penguin Editions collection of Clarice Lispector’s stories, The Imitation of the Rose.

My Year in Reading: 2022

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The voice remains. It somehow survives that cataclysmic leap from oral epic to self-consciousness fiction. The inimical voice of writers like Beckett, Woolf and Bernhard. This isn’t the first year I read Jon Fosse’s writing, but it is the first in which his voice became a tremendous presence.

I’ve read most of Fosse’s books available in English translation, saving Trilogy, and his writing seems to have that rare transcending quality called literature. In his essay, Anagoge Fosse writes, “Why do we never read with our attention turned towards the thing in literature which makes it so obvious that it both belongs to the world and does not belong to the world? That makes it incomprehensibly comprehensible? Which gives it meaning without meaning? Why don’t we read to see how the paradox of literature is a strange fusion of the extremely heavy and the extremely light, of the material and the spiritual?”

My most cherished literary discoveries encapsulate literature in precisely those terms: writers like Mayröcker, Llansol, Lispector and Murnane. This year, Fosse’s Septology, translated by Damion Searls and Melancholia II, translated by Eric Dickens, left the most significant impression, together with Thomas Bernhard’s Yes, translated by Ewald Osers and Friederike Mayröcker’s brutt, or The Sighing Gardens, translated by Roslyn Theobald.

Much of the summer was spent with Geoffrey Hill’s Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012. A planned chronological reading ended up with the repeated rereading of Tenebrae and For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 before getting entangled, against my usual practice, with explicatory secondary texts. Hill is a highly lucid poet, particularly in his early days. These are poems to get to know throughout a lifetime, but the scholars help to build light.

For a few months, I carefully followed Iain McGilchrist’s prose in The Matter With Things, a book I shall undoubtedly reread, enhanced by my later reading of Geoffrey Hill and Jon Fosse. Perhaps these coincidents only seem so; the future’s roots are buried in the past.

Also notable this year was one of Steve Mitchelmore’s favourites of last year: Ellis Sharp’s mesmerising Twenty-Twenty, which records daily for a year his struggle against the compulsion to write and a return to Beckett’s Company, a reminder to slow down and look back more often.