Given that The Passion is deeply concerned with the question of spiritual growth, it should come as no surprise that the novel is often synopsized in a simplistic, if technically accurate, fashion that implies causality in a way that is almost willfully misleading. In actuality, G.H.’s encounter with the cockroach and her “mystical crisis” are sublimated — either denied or forgotten until she begins to tell her story to the reader.

Near the beginning of her monologue, G.H. realizes that the incident — “the thing itself,” as she calls it — will only be uncovered once she has forgotten everything she previously knew. But how can she give voice to her experience when she is no longer herself? The struggle with such a contradiction — to want to know everything and to recognize that absolute knowledge assures one’s own destruction — brings to mind Rimbaud’s Illuminations (and indeed, Hélène Cixous described Lispector as what Rimbaud would have been if he had been a mother and reached the age of fifty). Lispector has a penchant for subtle verbal play, and her sentences often engage with this paradox at the grammatical level. Consider one of my favorite passages, a desperate appeal to the Virgin Mary that propels into poetry:

Holy Mary, mother of God, I offer thee my life in exchange for that moment yesterday’s not being true. The roach with the white matter was looking at me. I don’t know if it was seeing me, I don’t know what a roach sees. But we were looking at each other, and also I don’t know what a woman sees. But if its eyes weren’t seeing me, its existence was existing me — in the primary world that I had entered, beings exist others as a way of seeing one another.

The tone and register of Lispector’s sentences are constantly shifting from the matter of fact to the rapturous (“I offer thee my life”), the statements from the simple (“I don’t know what a roach sees”) to the more abstruse (“its existence was existing me”). Like Rimbaud, G.H. must invent a new language in order to accommodate her deeply private visions.

I would add that Lispector’s inner ear was tuned to the note that exists between two notes of music, and that she breathed in rhythm with the breathing of the world.

The closer G.H. gets to describing ‘the thing itself’ the more abstract her thoughts become, but her journey towards abstraction isn’t linear. Just when she feels herself going towards “the divine primary life,” she breaks down and pleas with the reader: “Give me your hand. Because I no longer know what I’m saying. I think I made it all up, none of this existed! But if I made up what happened to me yesterday — who can guarantee that I didn’t also invent my life prior to yesterday?” At another moment, she tells us that: “…if I reach the end of this story, I shall go, not tomorrow, but this very day, out to eat and dance at the ‘Top-Bambino,’… I’ll eat crevettes à la whatever, and I know because I’ll eat crevettes, tonight, tonight will be my normal life resumed…” She seems to be reminding us, in her darkly humorous way, that it is all too easy to return to our normal lives, unchanged, after what may seem like a transformative experience.

This is what differentiates us from non-human life. G.H. is constantly advancing towards and retreating from the ineffable, while the cockroach, for her, is a part of the ineffable. The roach is all cilia and antennae, “as ancient as a legend,” “without a name for pain or for love.” G.H. has a language, and therefore, her “destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But — I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.”

Lispector’s destiny was to write sentences that tested the limits of language, to find a new way to tell. It is interesting to note that Portuguese might not have been her first language: born in the town of Chechelnik in the Ukraine, she moved with her family to Brazil while still an infant. Whether or not she had learned any Russian, it seems as though the language may have had an influence on her prose. In an introduction to the English edition of her book of short stories, Soulstorm, published in 1989, Grace Paley reflected on the question: “Unless Clarice Lispector’s parents were linguists with an early knowledge of Portuguese, they must have spoken Russian, as my parents did most of my childhood. It must have been that meeting of Russian and Portuguese that produced the tone, the rhythms that even in translation (probably difficult) are so surprising and right.” I would add that Lispector’s inner ear was tuned to the note that exists between two notes of music, and that she breathed in rhythm with the breathing of the world.