The Passion According to G.H.
THE PASSION
ACCORDING TO G. H.
CLARICE LISPECTOR
TRANSLATED FROM THE PORTUGUESE, WITH A NOTE, BY IDRA NOVEY
INTRODUCTION BY CAETANO VELOSO
EDITED BY BENJAMIN MOSER
A
NEW
DIRECTIONS
BOOK
Contents
Introduction by Caetano Veloso
The Passion According to G. H.
Introduction
I read
The Passion According to G. H.
as soon as the book came out, in 1964. I was in my early twenties. Clarice had been an illumination when I was seventeen. The story “The Imitation of the Rose,” which I read in a magazine, had fascinated and frightened me. My older brother started buying all of her previously published books for me. I discovered in her other stories the same thing I had seen in “The Imitation of the Rose”: a language that transformed itself in order to allow an event to emerge with the power of an epiphany, amidst the humdrum concerns of a normal life (usually a woman’s life).
That transformation of language created a kind of lyrical prose that I had never before encountered. That lyricization erased the text — which nonetheless is always a narrative, never a poem — in order to allow some nearly unspeakable thing to appear. The thing.
In “The Imitation of the Rose,” a woman, after a successful psychiatric treatment, goes mad once again at the sight of a bunch of roses. Daily happiness, so harshly reconquered, cannot resist the direct experience of something like an impersonal God, and the experience makes her housewifely existence impossible.
All the other stories I read of Clarice’s at that time had the same basic power, and pointed in the same direction. Their elegance made them perfect objects: each was a dangerous adventure, a miracle of composition. While reading them, the aesthetic experience itself spurred me to think about the experience of being. When I read
The Apple in the Dark
, it seemed to me that the novel was not ideally suited to Clarice’s inspiration (I still hadn’t read
Near to the Wild Heart
).
But
The Passion According to G. H.
remade — and radicalized — her most beautiful stories. Unlike them, however, it itself wasn’t beautiful. Or maybe it was even more beautiful — but that beauty was hard for me to perceive. In the middle of the book, the narrator says that she had never before had so little fear of bad taste. She had written “billows of muteness” to refer to the content that forced her to use words like a life raft, clinging to them in order to float atop the muteness that fell upon her in successive waves. She would never before have used that expression because she respected “beauty and its intrinsic moderation.”
Well, I missed that moderation, which made her short stories read like perfect songs. But I had already been ensnared by the immoderate reflexive disorder of this new beginning of Clarice’s. Here, the characteristics of two extreme and perhaps non-narrative texts come together. These are among the finest texts she produced: the dirge for the murdered gangster Mineirinho, in which her observations on the yawning divisions of Brazilian society emerge so pungently, and the interminable and labyrinthine meditations on “The Egg and the Hen.”
And then
G. H.
appears as a novel above and beyond perfection. It’s not a story that leads the reader to philosophical thoughts. And it’s not a philosophical treatise that needs a story to convey them. Instead, it is a vivifying experience that leads a person to the most ambitious philosophical discoveries. An experience transformed into literary art, in which harmony and disorder are the price of the revelation.
A younger friend said, back in the Bahia of my early twenties: “I don’t like it much: it’s pantheism.” We were crazy kids. Now I think that this novel of Clarice´s (for me the most beautiful of them all) tells us more about the possibility that Spinoza wrote his
Ethics
in Portuguese than about the dispute between immanentists and transcendentalists.
C
AETANO
V
ELOSO
To Possible Readers
This book is like any other book. But I would be happy if it were only read by people whose souls are already formed. Those who know that the approach, of whatever it may be, happens gradually and painstakingly — even passing through the opposite of what it approaches. They who, only they, will slowly come to understand that this book takes nothing from no one. To me, for example, the character G. H. gave bit by bit a difficult joy; but it is called joy.
C
.
L
.
“A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.”
––
B
ERNARD
B
ENSON
The Passion According to G. H.
—————— I’m searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else? That’s what I’d like to call disorganization, and I’d have the confidence to venture on, because I would know where to return afterward: to the previous organization. I’d rather call it disorganization because I don’t want to confirm myself in what I lived — in the confirmation of me I would lose the world as I had it, and I know I don’t have the fortitude for another.
If I confirm my self and consider myself truthful, I’ll be lost because I won’t know where to inlay my new way of being — if I go ahead with my fragmentary visions, the whole world will have to be transformed in order for me to fit within it.
I lost something that was essential to me, and that no longer is. I no longer need it, as if I’d lost a third leg that up till then made it impossible for me to walk but that turned me into a stable tripod. I lost that third leg. And I went back to being a person I never was. I went back to having something I never had: just two legs. I know I can only walk with two legs. But I feel the useless absence of that third leg and it scares me, it was the leg that made me something findable by myself, and without even having to look for myself.
Am I disorganized because I lost something I didn’t need? In this new cowardice of mine — cowardice is the newest thing to happen to me, it’s my greatest adventure, this cowardice of mine is a field so wide that only the great courage leads me to accept it — in my new cowardice, which is like waking one morning in a foreigner’s house, I don’t know if I’ll have the courage just to go. It’s hard to get lost. It’s so hard that I’ll probably quickly figure out some way to find myself, even if finding myself is once again my vital lie. Until now finding myself was already having an idea of a person and fitting myself into it: I’d incarnate myself into this organized person, and didn’t even feel the great effort of construction that is living. The idea I had of what a person is came from my third leg, the one that pinned me to the ground. But, and now? will I be freer?
No. I know I’m still not feeling freely, that once again I’m thinking because I have the objective of finding— and for safety’s sake I’ll call finding the moment I discover a way out. Why don’t I have the courage just to discover a way in? Oh, I know I went in, oh yes. But I got scared because I don’t know what that entrance opens onto. And I’d never let myself be carried off, unless I knew where to.
Yesterday, however, I lost my human setup for hours and hours. If I have the courage, I’ll let myself stay lost. But I’m afraid of newness and I’m afraid of living whatever I don’t understand — I always want to be sure to at least think I understand, I don’t know how to give myself over to disorientation. How could I explain that my greatest fear is precisely of: being? and yet there is no other way. How can I explain that my greatest fear is living whatever comes? how to explain that I can’t stand seeing, just because life isn’t what I thought but something else — as if I knew what! Why is seeing such disorganization?
And a disappointment. But disappointment with what? if, without even feeling it, I must have hardly been able to stand my barely constructed organization? Maybe disappointment is the fear of no longer belonging to a system. So I could put it like this: he is very happy because he was finally disappointed. What I used to be, was no good for me. But it was from that not-good that I’d organized the best thing of all: hope. From my own flaw I had created a future good. Am I afraid now that my new way of being doesn’t make sense? But why not let myself be carried away by whatever happens? I would have to take the holy risk of chance. And I will substitute fate for probability.
But will the discoveries of childhood have been like in a laboratory where you find whatever you find? So it was only as an adult that I grew scared and created the third leg? But as an adult can I find the childish courage to get lost? getting lost means finding things without any idea of what to do with what you’re finding. The two legs walking, without the third that holds you back. And I want to be held back. I don’t know what to do with the terrifying freedom that could destroy me. But was I happy while imprisoned? or was there, and there was, something restless and sly in my happy jailhouse routine? or was there, and there was, that throbbing thing I was so used to that I thought that throbbing was being a person. Is that right? that too, that too.
I get so scared when I realize I lost my human form for several hours. I don’t know if I’ll have another form to replace the one I lost. I know I’ll need to be careful not to use furtively a new third leg that from me sprouts swiftly as weeds, and to call this protective leg “a truth.”
But I also don’t know what form to give what happened to me. And without giving it a form, nothing can exist for me. And — and if it’s really true that nothing existed?! maybe nothing happened to me? I can only understand what happens to me but things only happen that I understand — what do I know of the rest? the rest didn’t exist. Maybe nothing ever existed! Maybe all that happened to me was a slow and great dissolution? And that this is my struggle against that disintegration: trying now to give it a form? A form shapes the chaos, a form gives construction to the amorphous substance — the vision of an infinite piece of meat is the vision of the mad, but if I cut that meat into pieces and parcel them out over days and over hungers — then it would no longer be perdition and madness: it would once again be humanized life.
Humanized life. I had humanized life too much.
But what do I do now? Should I cling to the whole vision, even if that means having an incomprehensible truth? or do I give a form to the nothing, and that would be my attempt to integrate within me my own disintegration? But I’m so little prepared to understand. Before, whenever I tried, my limitations gave me a physical sensation of discomfort, any beginning of thought immediately banged into my forehead. Early on I had to recognize, without complaint, the limits of my small intelligence, and I strayed from the path. I knew I was destined to think little, reasoning kept me confined inside my own skin. So how was I supposed to inaugurate thinking within me now? and maybe only thought can save me, I’m afraid of passion.
Since I must save the day of tomorrow, since I must have a form because I don’t feel strong enough to stay disorganized, since I inevitably must slice off the infinite monstrous meat and cut it into pieces the size of my mouth and the size of the vision of my eyes, since I’ll inevitably succumb to the need for form that comes from my terror of remaining undelimited — then may I at least have the courage to let this shape form by itself like a scab that hardens by itself, like the fiery nebula that cools into earth. And may I have the great courage to resist the temptation of to invent a form.
This effort I’m making now to let a meaning surface, any meaning, this effort would be easier if I pretended to write to someone.
But I’m afraid to begin composing in order to be understood by the imaginary someone, I’m afraid to start to “make” a meaning, with the same tame madness that till yesterday was my healthy way of fitting into a system. Will I need the courage to use an unprotected heart and keep talking to the nothing and the no one? as a child thinks about the nothing. And run the risk of being crushed by chance.