Clarice Lispector's narrator G.H. claims at the end of this book that she does not understand what she is saying and it hits a note that for me was a constantly present thread throughout the bulk of my entire reading of The Passion According to G.H. Oh yes, there were many sentences I did enjoy and I knew exactly what she was saying to me. But for the most part I felt all along that she was simply hearing herself talk and wondering if she could eventually get out of the corner she had painted herself into. For six days I slowly read the pages of this accounting and it seemed I was literally stuck in that room with the bed and the frame, the door, and an oozing cockroach. I am not sure that the roach ever died, and I am really not sure if roaches ever do. I get it that I was dealing in essence here with something primordial even if it felt crepuscular instead.Giorgio Agamben once said, "God wants gods." I used that brave quote back in 2000 to introduce my first book of poetry Zimble Zamble Zumble. It was my feeling throughout the reading of this Passion of G.H. that she herself was playing God, and I liked it, and for that reason kept myself engaged. Of course, it always helps to string good sentences along with your reader. And Clarice Lispector was very adept at doing this. She certainly wasn't a stupid girl as the proof present in her big ideas about the world we live in as well as the ones we don't. Somebody dumb would have lost too many of us with this type of thinking too much out loud. In fact, I kept swimming in her sea of doubts, lies, and wonder, thinking I might drown in her pool at some time but willing to take the exercise anyway. Again, it was similar to the indulging of my medicine every morning in order to help me keep alive. But her words a bit more pleasurable to me in a perverted sort of way. There were many moments in my duration when I questioned what I was reading and why. Is it enough to accept a work as brilliant just because some suit or crazy professor says it is? I think not, and for that very reason I question what I read in this light even more intensely than when reading a book that has been, for the most part, unrecognized and still buried beneath the growing pile of paper refuse and cloth boards now thankfully these days being electrolyzed. But do note there is plenty in my life I have somehow eaten and already imbibed. And there is not much I haven't tried and nothing I am in need of tasting for the very first time. Even though the cockroach and its pus was something real and an actual noun we could get our heads around, I would have preferred additional hard nouns to be present in this book. Yes, G.H. tasted of her mother's milk and found it unsalted and dead. I did not. I suckled the bulging plump tit of my youngest son's mother in order to know for my true self what a mother's milk should taste like, seeing as though my own mother kept me on a strict diet of baby formula and powdered milk products from the fifties. My own desire to taste my wife's milk, now as her husband and a new father, I am proof-positive that there was something more than a sexual impulse although that was my intended purpose for this brief and awful drink. Her breast milk had more taste than I was accustomed to. Her milk rich beyond any prior experience, and nothing I would want another taste of, ever. Even as a young child of seven I remember all too vividly admiring my baby brother Timothy after a bath and naked on his back in the bassinet when he spontaneously let loose a stream of urine that bulls-eyed straight into my mouth. That swift-flowing stream was extremely salty and something G.H. should have considered trying if she were looking for something with a bit more bang. I continue on these present days to salt my food, but not without the constant reminder of that fateful day as a kid in a room with my mother's baby. Too add more to the palate brought on here by Lispector herself, my friend and poetry editor, Gordon Lish, wrote a brilliant short piece of his own regarding his eating of a piece of shit, a story that I could not recommend more to anyone wanting even more pizazz or have the virtual, and thus safe, experience of doing something we all probably thought of and rejected at one time or another. It is certainly something not yet evolved of our natural world out there, as I have seen pet dogs devour stray turds from time to time. Lish's story is called Wouldn't A Title Just Make It Worse? and can be found in at least three of his books. It is documented already in many reviews regarding this book that Lispector's work was stream of consciousness. When I think of this popular handle that too many readers want to connect writers to I see Jack Kerouac feverishly typing away at his machine with that constant roll of paper piling up on the floor. Apologies perhaps may come to order here, but my personal perception of Jack Kerouac is one of a blabbering misogynist, a woeful drunk, and an extremely confused sexual being living alone with his mother. And because of my very limited exposure to Clarice Lispector I visualize a woman of beauty like Marlene Dietrich writing like Virginia Woolf, and that is just plain sexy as hell to me. Rather than terming her work as stream of consciousness I see it more as digression, but a digression vacant of the necessary nouns to make it more real and moving and something I can get my teeth around. The book was entirely too cerebral for my tastes and the few instances of actual things present in it were not enough, and made the book for me lacking. That is not to say she doesn't have a brilliant mind or that she was not beautiful in every way described by her many admirers. This being the first book of Lispector's I have been subjected to I am looking forward to reading more by this gifted writer as well as the biography so praised as the definitive work we all must read. The fact that Lispector got me to read to the bottom of the very last page is testament to her skill as a writer. I wanted to finish the book even though my head was spinning much of the time and I was curious where she might be going with it. Seems even she didn't know where the end might be, but she certainly wasn't going to stop in that room, but instead, be taken outside to dance with the band and have a welcome spin with her friends beyond that door.I recall a section in the book towards the end about the importance of giving up. I immediately thought of my wife's entire body now suffering for eighteen months due to an injury to her hand that has affected all her nerves coming from her neck as a result of her hard fall. She suffers in ways beyond my understanding, and for her it seems often enough so pointless for her to go on living in the state she finds herself in most days. But this morning I noticed on the CBS morning news program that the spire was permanently installed on the new World Trade Center. It struck me immediately at how pointless it is for terrorists to think they can affect a change in the human condition and our need to thrive and go on. Even Samuel Beckett has written extensively of how, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On. Even in the face of these terrible hurricanes of late and all their destruction, the human will is to rebuild and pick up the pieces and go on. Of course, the many deaths counted in and by these horrendous catastrophes are so painful and unnecessary, but death being a finality we all must face in one way or another ourselves eventually. So I found myself delightfully coming full circle in my understanding of this book I had just finished a few short hours before and realized it is pointless, really, to do much of anything. But still we do. And sometimes manage to have a good time.
She lives well. A sculptress, she is financially well off, living in a penthouse apartment furnished in shades of neutral colors. Claiming many friends she has reflected herself back to herself through their eyes. She enjoys what she sees as they do hers. Get-togethers occur at the right frequency. It is much like stopping at the gas station and filling up the tank.Her live-in maid has left, a black african american women. Stepping into another country, the country from within another person's mind she enters the room and finds drawings on a wall. All things there is evidence that this woman who has lived in her house, seen through her eyes, has not liked her. Possibly she has hated GH. Casting this off rapidly GH determines that the maid's views are insignificant since she is not of the same caste or position. Peeking into the former maid's closet a cockroach leaps out. She slams the door crushing it in half. The white gooed innards seep out. She panics, not at the crushed insect but the dizzying array of thoughts and questions spun sudden through her mind. Questions she has no answers for but more important, questions she does not want to answer.Why should there be questions? GH has organized herself and her life into what she wants. She has sculpted comfort, a successful denizen of life. The questions would not stop and Lispector paces us through the initial denial and anger, then the rocking fear, slow acceptance wed to steps of retreat. Then, the digging deeper. Fearless shoveling amongst tumult. She seeks not her thoughts or apprehensions in this violent poetic prose of things but the thing itself. What the startling unique prose evokes.Through her short sentences, repetitions to set the drum beat of rhythm Lispector takes us on a searing sweat soaked journey through the mind of a courageous person who garners the strength to seek and face what most other people spend their live's avoiding. Staring at the cockroach she sees, especially with its white innards hanging out, it is exactly what it is. Cockroaches have existed on this planet longer than any other creature and will continue to do so long after she will be gone. The cockroach even dying is what it is in this present moment. How to pose, what others think, judge, evaluate, the insincerity wrapped behind caravans of stylish cloth, does not exist. A pure acceptance. What…what if that were true for her? Alive in each present moment? It would leave her without her life, the self she worked so hard to conceive and mould herself into. She would no longer fit in, more significantly all lying in front of her lay unknown and always unknown. If in the present the future does not exist hope lays fallow. No will or goals. Would that be life? Alone and…Or…It occurred in the moment of the cockroach. Yet looking back she can see all the unplanned moments through her existence leading to this endless journey that has no specific beginning. Such a shock. None of this can be afforded an effort. It is an act of discovery. One searches through living to discover the awaiting self. Then, the courage to allow that self to unroll. Just one’s reflection in one’s own eyes in the present moment, then the next.Lispector penetrates GH's mind, boring relentlessly for the questions other shy from. One of the world's great modern writers. A genius at the introspection of truth. It was an honor to sweat through this so doggedly engaging testimony to strength and courage.
Do You like book The Passion According To G.H. (1988)?
How should it be called? Reflections on the death of a cockroach? Going into a room as a person and ... not exiting it? The Passion According to G.H. is a strange meditation on the nature of God, love, reality, nothingness, and language. To a person like me, who is vulnerable because a close friend I've known for forty-five years is dying in a hospice not two blocks from me, it hit me between the eyes with the force of a sledge hammer. Clarice Lispector is a Ukrainian-born author who lived almost all of her life in Brazil. What she wrote in The Passion is more of what we would expect from a writer like Kafka or Kierkegaard. This is no fiction as such; rather, it is magisterial sequence of meditations by a woman who, out of fright and disgust, has slammed a cabinet door on a cockroach and sticks around while the cockroach, still alive, oozes white goo from its thorax, sits staring at her while her mind races. Races with thought like this:I'm not speaking of the future, I'm speaking of a permanent nowness. And that means hope doesn't exist because it is no longer a deferred future, it is now. Because God doesn't promise. He is much greater than that: He is and never ceases being. It is we who cannot bear this ever-now light, and so we promise it for later only so that we do not have to feel it now, today.And again:I tremble with fear and adoration for what exists.What exists and is just a piece of something, still I have to put my hand over my eyes against the opacity of that thing. Oh, the violent amorous unconsciousness of what exists surpasses the possibility of my consciousness. I am afraid of so much matter -- matter resonates with attention, resonates with process, resonates with inherent nowness.Reading Lispector is like reading Pascal's Penseés: One's mind is dragged along passageways which are strange to it, but which are awe-inspiring. I plan to return to this book at some point and re-read it, if only there were world enough and time.
—Jim
"Give me your hand: Now I’m going to tell you how I went into that inexpressiveness that was always my blind, secret quest. How I went into what exists between the number one and the number two, how I saw the mysterious, fiery line, how it is a surreptitious line. Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. "
—Elizabeth
The Passion of G.H. is something like a miracle, so uniquely potent that you wonder how a human being could have conjured it. It’s poetry:The green water of the air. I see everything through a full glass. [...] It’s eleven in the morning in Brazil. It’s now. That means exactly now. Now is time swollen to the limit. Eleven o’clock has no depth. Eleven o’clock is full of eleven hours up to the brim of the green glass. Time trembles as a motionless balloon. The air is fertilised and wheezing. ... yet also inextricably linked to the mundane:I finally got up from the breakfast table, that woman. Not having a maid that day would give me the type of activity I wanted: arranging. I always liked to arrange things. I guess it’s my only real vocation. By putting things in order, I create and understand at the same time. [...] I looked around the apartment: where would I begin?In between these poles – the free-associative meditation on universal laws prevalent in her later work (which, to me, does not succeed as G.H. does in making that meditation pertinent) and a solid grasp of the everyday that, in offsetting it, makes it truly luminous – is where the magic happens. And somehow this unique mode, this combination of tones never before attempted, allows Clarice Lispector – gives her the privilege – to write like this:The first bind had already involuntarily burst, and I was breaking loose from the law, though I intuited that I was going to enter the hell of living matter – what kind of hell awaited me? but I had to go. I had to sink into my soul’s damnation, curiosity was consuming me. So I opened my eyes all at once, and saw the full endless vastness of the room, that room that was vibrating in silence, laboratory of hell.Histrionic? Somehow, G.H. is anything but. Somehow, this beyond-rudimentary framework of a woman in a room with a roach fully justifies the most cosmic of mind-flights. Why? Because – I hazard a guess – this is something we’ve all felt, this face-to-face with “neutral” unthinking but feeling life (the centipede writhing under the boot, the fish suffocating in the boat) that brings us up short with sudden identification, because something writhes in our guts too like the dying creature we are watching.Still, to have captured, held and explored this revelation – to have magnified it like a novel and sung its essence like a song – is an achievement uniquely Lispector’s. A true achievement. Probably one of the great achievements in writing of the 20th century.(I wrote the above halfway through G.H.; I presume my impression was true but can’t entirely confirm it, since soon I was distracted by life and other more addictive reading, and maybe from over-confidence in Lispector I put her down and never regained the same immersion. To re-read.)
—Ben Winch