The Passion According to G.H. BY Clarice Lispector TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE BY Idra Novey (New Directions, 2012) From the Publisher: “The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door — crushing the cockroach — and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature…”

Spirituality is a difficult subject to pin down and an even harder one to talk about. The average human does not live in a permanent state of receptiveness to whatever is beyond the cage of the self, and when a profound experience does happen to “un-selve” her, she might spend the rest of her life trying to describe it. Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. is the record of one woman’s struggle to give voice to such an epiphanic moment, and to make out the contours of what, if anything, might lie beyond the reach of conventional language. The novel is narrated by a wealthy Brazilian sculptor, G.H., who is not so much a three-dimensional entity as she is a state of mind traced out through bracingly strange and allusive prose. There is barely any plot to speak of. Rather, the narrative reads like the interior monologue of someone undergoing a spiritual and physical metamorphosis. Lispector had certainly read her Kafka, and while his Metamorphosis is an obvious influence, she is attempting something quite different. The Passion According to G.H. is the record of one woman’s struggle to give voice to such an epiphanic moment, and to make out the contours of what, if anything, might lie beyond the reach of conventional language. From the very beginning, when she asks the prospective reader to “give me your hand,” the narrative hinges on the reader’s participation in G.H.’s search for her true identity. “I am now going to tell you how I entered the inexpressive that was always my blind and secret search,” Lispector writes, “How I entered whatever exists between the number one and the number two, how I saw the line of mystery and fire, and which is surreptitious line. A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses — in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.” One of Lispector’s most unclassifiable texts, The Passion According to G.H. has just been republished by New Directions with a foreword by Caetano Veloso and in a rigorous new translation by Idra Novey (greatly improved upon the 1988 translation by Ronald Sousa, who opted to “correct” Lispector’s unconventional grammar and syntax). When the novel was originally published in 1964, Lispector already occupied an important place in Brazilian literature. Her debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, published when she was only twenty-three, had been a critical sensation, and her story collection, Family Ties, found such a wide audience that “Clarice” became a kind of national treasure, recognizable by her first name alone. But Lispector could not stop herself from taking risks on the page, and although The Passion has several elements in common with her earlier books, it also marks a departure for Lispector towards more experimental, fragmentary work.

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.