Literature that conforms. Has structure. Intact syntax. Progressive narrative.
Not for Lispector.
"Be careful with Clarice...It's not literature. It's witchcraft." - Otto Lara Resende, Brazilian author
Perhaps the most innovative and mysterious writer of Brazil, Clarice Lispector was renowned for experimenting with the meaning of language and pushed the boundaries of linguistics. With every word she would write, it's not difficult to imagine her asking, ‘What is the relationship between this word, what it represents, and me?’ Her novels attempt to bridge the deep waters between existence and expression which is an intimidatingly complex task to achieve. Clarice was after the inexpressible, the silent space between the vibrating soul and the hum of one's tongue: “...one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”
One of her most well-revered novels exploring the nature of existence is 'The Passion According to G.H.' The story itself is simple if not bizarre: a woman finds a cockroach in her maid's room, and eats it. The physicality of the novel is impressively minimal, in that the protagonist G.H. doesn't move from the maid's room at all. Yet her mind travels far, and it is the journey of her spiralling thoughts that we follow. Clarice writes in such a way that we read the thoughts of G.H. as if they are our own; we get lost in her mind palace as she stares into the soul of a cockroach and into the psyche of ourselves. She recognises that our inner self is often far from the self we show on the surface: “- if I go ahead with my fragmentary visions, the whole world will have to be transformed in order for me to fit within it.”
Clarice explores from the get-go the turbulent emotions we often run from. G.H. isn't afraid to confront her cowardice, her disorganisation, and most importantly, her confusion. Even as the protagonist herself, G.H. doesn't have full comprehension of what happens over the course of the novel. The very first lines that open the whole story are, "I'm searching, I'm searching. I'm trying to understand," and throughout the novel we are asking questions as G.H. does: "will I be freer?" she asks; "was I happy while imprisoned?"; "maybe nothing happened to me?" In this way, 'The Passion According to G.H.' is a complex read. You have to be prepared to meticulously deconstruct G.H.'s already ambiguous thoughts as they unravel.
If you can grasp it, the reward is extraordinary; Clarice's use of language reflects the experience of an epiphany. So much so that the words on the page eventually dissolve and instead build into a shared experience with the protagonist. As G.H. slowly climbs further and further inside of herself, so do you. Clarice acknowledges this in her preface 'To Possible Readers', in which she describes "the approach, of whatever it may be, happens gradually and painstakingly". While I cannot admit I fully understood what Clarice meant in the beginning – as she directs it towards those "whose souls are already formed" and I, myself, am still a growing person – by the end I felt it. I felt the gradual, painstakingly still movement through the story: through G.H., through Clarice and through myself. Even now, Clarice has reached so far inside of me and so far into everything else that her fiction feels like it isn’t fiction at all. I felt ‘the passion’: to be beyond thought and beyond feelings. I knew what it meant to melt into existence just as a candle leaks from its burning heart: "Love already is, it is always. All that is missing is the coup de grace -- which is called passion."
Her books are her lifetime; with every story Clarice wrote, she presented herself on paper. Her journey as a developing writer is seen in the progression of her publications, the complexity of not only her writing but her understanding of herself and the world grows with every novel. She never liked to consider herself a professional writer; her art is sporadic and arises when it comes to her, not when she goes to it. This intimate connection between Clarice and her art is what makes her language so existential.
Clarice would not be constrained by expectations or limited to producing books for the sake of lining them up on the shelf. G.H. would not be confined by her material façade and delves into the most metaphysical realm of being Brazil had ever seen. Clarice asks: What is the gap between the ontological world and the name we give it? And G.H. answers in her final moments of fame: "...never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me?" A genius use of irony that brings the foundations of the novel full circle.
Clarice’s volatile nature is also sensed in her distinctive way with punctuation. Question and exclamation marks are often scattered in the middle of sentences, mirroring the way our thoughts often overlap and amalgamate into one continuous loop of consciousness. Her syntax is long and disruptive, and is so vivid that the words seem to lose their meaning and what we really listen to is the rhythm of profound poetic prose. 'The Passion According to G.H.' is a song, a sculpture, that uses literature as a medium to express the beat of life.
And through all of the intensity, the disgust, the dread, we seem to forget that G.H. was a woman. A woman of regality and respect, upholding the ideologies of a woman who is beautifully independent, who is an artist with an eye for the abstract world and the negative space we often forget to perceive. G.H. realises: "Only in photography, when the negative was developed, was something else revealed that, uncaught by me, was caught by the snapshot: when the negative was developed my presence as ectoplasm was revealed too."
‘The Passion According to G.H.’ is both a mental challenge and mental liberation. Clarice calls us to confront our own ectoplasm, and through the most philosophical poetic prose, we evolve not only as readers but as thinking, living beings. Do not fear the linguistic challenge, for the greatest work of literature will change your perspective of language forever, and Clarice does just that.
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