Home / Literature  / The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector (1964, Tr. 1988/2012)

The Passion According to G.H. – Clarice Lispector (1964, Tr. 1988/2012)

Lispector’s G.H. wants to convey the excavated neutrality of l(ov/if)e to her everyday existence. She craves to terraform her day-to-day mode of being into a new one

 

 

Without ceasing to meditate during the journey, and in a kind of state of self-disgust, I very soon reached the conclusion that it was this identity which made it possible for every man to be loved neither more nor less than every other, and that it is possible for even the most loathsome appearance to be loved, that is, to be cared for and recognized–cherished.

Jean Genet What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet

‘I have abandoned my child, I have abandoned my child, I have abandoned my boy’, hollers Daniel ‘oh-how-delightfully-mis-fitting-his-last-name-is-for-the-incoming-cavalcade-of-words’ Plainview A.K.A. Daniel Day-Lewis, who not that long ago still kept pretending on the silver screen to make a living. Contrary to his explosive admission, I have no regrets that I have become deaf to letters, to the wild and restlessly reshuffling ABCs sprouting from the Deleuzian Baroque house metaphor, to my own concept of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, to novels which constituted its hypnotic, oftentimes convoluted entrails, its obfuscated crystal-clear interior, its rapaciously enrapturing floor plan – I have none. I have lost my way before. Every single time it was worth it. And I know it will be so in the future. Because losing is always a mode of finding another type of wandering, meandering, zigzagging. It’s taking five to take a hike. But some things just have to be SEEN THROUGH. They simply have to.


I’ve had a rather unexpected conversation the other day with someone who is very fond of giving space. As I conversed with this Space Giver, let’s call him that, about movies which are of no relevance here, he struck upon a peculiar note, or, rather, a theme. Inexplicable rules was it, and what it entails fits like a glove to the current situation with my Swan Opera. In the century overly fecund with unhealthy and straightforwardly damaging overexplicity, subduing oneself to unnameable rules feels surprisingly refreshing. Do it just because. ‘Just because’ has this air of innocuous innocence of children playing around in a kinder garden backyard in a somewhat dilly-dally-ish, somewhat dilettant-ish manner. But I digress…


Anyway, I donned myself in my grossly undersized and slightly shabby clothes of “just because”. I put on my “just because” sweatpants, my “just because” t-shirt, a pair of my “just because” sneakers, and went to see the Mansion of Litera(p)ture again. And upon seeing it, momentarily I knew the Space Giver was right – the mansion needed to be seen through. THAT was the inexplicable rule. Without hesitation, I came closer and reached for the door knob. The main entrance was locked. I looked around the porch and its immediate vicinity for some useful utensil to overcome this untoward nuisance. Fortunately, or, rather, precautiously, I had a jemmy on me, just in case, and with its invaluable aid I broke and entered the premises again.

The Litera(p)ture of Ontological Passion

So where were we? Oh yeah, we stepped in and out of an “unmansionable” intrusion, humbly bloated with a post-existential gloom. Before that we had climbed the staircase up, down and sideways, fondled and fumbled within the obsessive confines of the crawlspace, wined and dined in the desirable fusion of kitchen and home cinema, and, last but not least, we sauntered around the enchanting vestibule. Not being all too keen on falling into the same rabbit hole of referencing our previous route in total, I’ll try to outdo myself and keep this unrelenting necessity as concise and precise as possible.


Our last purely litera(p)turing pit stop was a staircase a ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky summoned up with his deontologized diary. He went sideways into somewhere where every duty, obligation and imperative is deprived of its “should-y” nature, where every phenomenon is exempt of its haughty ontological necessity to boast about that it is (‘I AM,’ they holler, just like Daniel Day-Plainview does, ‘I HAVE BEEN,’ as if they expected some prize for having the ontological ability not to cease temporospatially, ‘I WILL BE,’ oh, knock it off already, will you!), where the relation of a human being to reality shuts up at last, and it is possible to hear the ever so elusive sound of silence and the ensuing ever so subtle roar of infinities unfolding, frothing, and fuming incessantly. Nijinsky checks out his new dance moves on an infinitesimally elusive and exclusive dance floor, metaphysically uncharted territory, topologically indefinable dimension. And he is full of one of the most bifurcated and “ambidexterously” ambiguous feelings one is capable of having – limerence. Besotted with the reality he surreptitiously tries to encapsulate on a couple of hastily penned pages, he almost forgoes all that made him connected with the world before. He is able to hear the silence, and feels voracious drive towards the mute plane of infatuation with the infinite, yet he stays firmly grounded in its finite apparitions. He hasn’t scissored the upper floor of his Baroque house by “unfolding” the frequency and intensity of his own dark and minute perceptions. It (the upper floor) simply has been redraped according to its in-itself topology preconfigured by the incompossibility, itself bordering on being impossible. That’s why he seems to be simultaneously secluded within himself and abject from another variance or mode of folding within the reality (the said ‘variance’ taken here as another human being like his wife, daughter, etc.), yet he exudes the notion of having been permeated with the world’s essence, resembling a whirlwind inside a vortex. Deleuze writes:

Such are the monads, or Leibniz’s Selves, automata, each of which draws from its depths the entire world and handles its relations with the outside or with others as an uncoiling of the mechanism of its own spring, of its own prearranged spontaneity. Monads have to be conceived as dancing. But the dance is the Baroque dance, in which the dancers are automata: there we have an entire “pathos of distance,” like the invisible distance between two monads (space); the meeting of them becomes a parade, or development, of their respective spontaneities insofar as their distance is upheld.

So, if Nijinsky, our incompossible dancing monad, remains convergently ‘imbibed’ by the limerence towards everything, although having redraped his upper floor beyond conceivable recognition, and therefore manifesting within the world in a rather incomprehensible way, resembling a spaced out yet tangible phantom (a ghost ballooning from the world-membrane, pullulating as yet another multi-fold of highly indiscernible knots, loops and manifolds), where does the Clarice Lispector’s protagonist situates herself, then? How is she able to surpass Nijinsky on our lovely spectrum, and in what part of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture do we end up trailing along her passion?

The Monadic Calamity

In order to reorient ourselves on the floor plan of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture, to which we have not yet fully grown accustomed, we have to apply the Baroque house allegory on ourselves, or to put it simply, go back to basics. Why don’t we (re)turn to Deleuze again:

It is the upper floor that has no windows. It is a dark room or chamber decorated only with a stretched canvas “diversified by folds,” as if it were a living dermis. Placed on an opaque canvas, these folds, cords or springs represents an innate form of knowledge, but when solicited by matter they move into action. Matter triggers “vibrations or oscillations” at the lower extremity of the cords, through the intermediary of “some little openings” that exist on the lower level. Leibniz constructs a great Baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced with windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but on the other hand resonating as if it were a musical salon translating the visible movements below into the sounds above.

Since the Baroque house has two stories, however abstract or even body-horror-ish they might look, it also has the fold as a border which separates the upper floor from the lower, stretching, snaking, wreathing according to two different orders. The fold coils, unfurls, and is generally subjected to all sorts of inflection planes. It is a den from which a sort of two-way convergent piping or, as Deleuze puts it, “cords or springs” sprout forth, constituting and decorating both floors. Every oscillation in the lower floor generates the resonance in the draperies in the upper. Now, imagine this: what would happen, if one of the cords from the lower floor oscillated so wildly that it shattered a part of the fold, cracking open the upper floor? Or better yet, what if it pierced the latter, and barged in with its obtrusive air of total ontological de-calibration? That’s exactly what happened to the protagonist of The Passion According to G.H.

Lispector, the Passionate Inspector of the Metaphysical

Constraining myself just the way I like it, just like contorted boa constrictor crushing a careless capybara for dinner, plot-wise, I am going to give you only what is unavoidable. The nameless protagonist of Lispector’s tour de force, who is known only by her initials, G.H., is a rather well-to-do sculptress who lives on the last floor of an apartment complex in a finely furnished penthouse. A refined woman, a woman of all human predicaments (here, taken as broadly as possible), she crosses the backrooms of her apartment to take care of the room vacated by the recently dismissed maid. Stumbled by the barren condition of the chamber – with blinding, sun-soaked, whitewashed walls, one of them being doodled with speculative and crude outlines, Keith Haring style, of a man, a woman and a dog – her complete set of beliefs and ontological constitution is soon to be turned upside down by an enormous cockroach which is unintentionally almost released from a dilapidated wardrobe…


The interaction, altercation, the silent encounter with the cockroach wrecks G.H. so profoundly that she is forced to redecorate the perforated upper floor of her Baroque house. Like houses of two not so diligent pigs, her entire worldview crumbles and is blown down by a big bad wolf of fierce, totally unexpected, raw metaphysics, completely incommensurable with everything she has believed up to the point of fateful confrontation with the shattering crustacean. A metaphysics of such a pervasive intensity, raw nakedness and insurmountable power as to strip down all cultural and/or civilizational accretions, causing them to dwindle and wither in the liberating pureness of the profound ontological blast. Or rather a particular dimension of the metaphysics we all intuitively know and, under the skin, sense that it’s true, but which is obstinately obscured by its blatant counterpart with the tendencies to overshadow and to take the credit for what it simply shouldn’t. Frankly, so penetrating is the shock the cockroach induces in G.H. that she reaches a certain point, where the restrictive plane, the hindering boundary between phenomenal and noumenal–itself a profoundly peculiar space, where the being allegedly acquires “translative” powers to turn the bifurcated incompatibility of externality and internality into seemingly comprehensive and corresponding mutuality–reveals its true nature. The primordial ferocity with which pure life non-differentiates itself within the world exempt of all conceptual contaminations and misappropriated appearances, unfolds itself as a neutrality full of unquenchable thirst to depersonalize, desist, and distance itself from everything to the point of reaching non-being. For only on this level of non-existence, absolutely full of life, miraculously pure and existentially barren, G.H. claims one may fully and truly experience what passion towards everything genuinely means. Taking with a pinch of salt the literalness with which she names the clichéd three-lettered wholeness of the passion through which she becomes a oneness with everything, nothing and the ominously clandestine raw modes of in-betweenness, Lispector dives into infinity, perhaps not headfirst per se, but her dive has divine repercussions which simultaneously cannot be called that, for the words bear the stigma of a past full of complacent timidity of an everyday well-organized life. For life, as very few know it, is extremely close to (and ‘with’, too) infinity. Sometimes, perhaps, it is all too close. And when it opens, there is a gasping gaping and a spasmodic panting which both leave our gobs agape. Oh, but am I all but foreshadowing again?

Squeaky Clean Bathroom in a Shaken Attic

So, where did we end up in the Mansion of Lite(r)apture? The room is dark, only a frail smudge of light pierces its interior as if a stray ray of unknown luminescence mimicked the décor of the dreaded drapes, still in shock from their recent defilement. The meager illumination suffices for us to see we are in the bathroom. It must have unfolded right there, at the moment of impact. Its walls made of glass bricks, mocking the orificial nature of the lower floor, invoke images of a certain inaptitude of rules that must have redefined themselves in order to create surfaces which allow seeing through. The bathroom fittings and piping, threaded wildly throughout the files, ascertain the whole room must have been (re)decorated hastily, as if adapting strenuously, an invasive bubble within the hapless realm of punctured enclosure. Its bizarre aura of authenticity and falseness intermingled together in an unprecipitable solution convinces us it touches the true essence of life. The quintessence of it, in itself, unexpectedly as welcoming as possible.


For it is bathroom, no matter how otherworldly furnished or refurbished would it be, where we are most likely to shed our masks of dealing with life, the world and ourselves. How many of you have ever read a book while having a bath? Soaked inside an intentionally frothy and fragrant multiverse of escapism, you shed your outer selves and plunge into the opposite of you, forgetting about one ontology in favor of the other, conjured up by the text. Or, on the other hand, how many of you have ever been so absorbed in a so-called “moment of truth” in front of the mirror–staring into the abyss all too “post-” it didn’t want to stare back anymore–so much so you jumped on the other side of yourselves into the pure absence of every “I” you could have at that moment constituted? It is the silent triumph of the overshadowed, clandestine realm of metaphysics. It is how the Bathroom attempts to regain its intrinsic ability to reverberate and resonate with the oscillations from the different parts of the Mansion. But it forgets, just as we forget while donned in a foamy “sumo suit” of being somewhere else, or gone through the looking glass of our quasi-enlightenments. It was born out of the jolly nature of contingency, a fortunate aberration. The fold – which serves as a ceaseless beginning and fateless end to the unbreakable continuity of the feeling-spectrum – we surf upon while relocating ourselves on the premises of the Mansion of Litera(p)ture must have gotten an ontological hiccup. Just as the infinitely “loveful” neutrality, which has revealed its ineffable nature before G.H., is tautologically taut, immovable, unshakable, and, thus, impalpable neither by word nor any concept (yet Lispector is able to touch upon it somehow, using this abominable all-too-human invention like prose), so is the quietude of our realization that, surprisingly, this bathroom is already different.

Exit through the Toilet Drain Pipe

Surprisingly, this bathroom is already different. It is sterile, insipid, susceptible to perfect anonymity, as if belonging (to) “somewhere” else. The shelves are empty, the drains aren’t clogged with a stinky gooey mass made of rotting strands of hair and a defoliated outer skin. There is no piece of used dental floss lying on the rim of the wash basin. Water splashes, which precipitated into nameless constellations of semi-translucent matte grey-ish blotches, are nowhere to be seen, neither on a mirror nor on the files in its immediate vicinity. A little trash can containing the holy trinity of hygiene disposability- tampons, cotton buds, and makeup remover pads with the accompanying wrappings – still awaits its first meal. The bathroom is so unbearably pristine, unfathomably spotless that the parts of its interior lose their ability to uphold the meaning of concepts which designate them. It is dirty with pure unrecognizability. The unglued names drop on the floor and smash, their “re-lettered” shards and splinters creating a thick layer of grit, as if a bunch of stray cats have frolicked in a litter box for hours without end. The bathroom’s ultimate unCORDiality begins to show. The interior “re-drapes” itself, the fold origamis into another pit-stop within a series of differences and repetitions. Or perhaps the purely monadic upper floor is reclaiming its territory, unabashedly conquered by the ontology of a different metaphysical “flavor” beforehand? The piercing with which the Bathroom was able to unfold, if only for a brief, fleeting passing of time, a tacky tic tac toe of ticklish tick-tocking, just like G.H.’s passionate revelation, wasn’t MEANT to last forever, just as our impressions on a feeling-spectrum aren’t. Among the pulses liquefying and coagulating, throngs of creases crescendoing, throes of the fold transubstantiating, we look around, half-astounded, half-enthralled, for an exit. We reach for the door and open it. Nothing in there, just more fabrics of the upper floor flapping around, fluttering as if to flee from the ever so fallible fantasm. The only way out is to flush ourselves out. With the bathroom walls folding onto us, we take a deep breath and jump headfirst into the toilet, just in time to pull the cord, mid-air, dangling from the elevated cistern right above the bowl. The thunderous roar of whirlpool within a whirl within a vortex of pure passion towards the litera(p)ture drowns out our heartbeat…

Amonne Purity

 

amonnepurity@gmail.com

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