The passion according to GH

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By BENEDICT NUNES*

Presentation of the book by Clarice Lispector.

L'esprit se meut dans un monde étrange ou l'angoisse et l'extase se composent (Georges Bataille, L'expérience interieure).

The passion according to GH (1964) enters this collection not only as the greatest book by Clarice Lispector – the greatest in the sense of being the one that expands the singular aspects of her work, extrememing the possibilities that are realized in it – but also as one of the most original texts of modern fiction Brazilian.[I] It is a revealing magnifying glass, which also opens up for the reader and the critic, through the power of narrative involvement, the frontier between the real and the imaginary, between language and the world, through which the poetic source of all fiction flows.

on the one hand, The Passion According to GH (PSGH) condenses the internalized line of fictional creation that Clarice Lispector has adopted since her first novel, Close to the Wild Heart (1944), a line that reached its turning point at that point; on the other hand, it is a unique novel, not so much because of its story but because of the exacerbated introspection that conditions the act of telling it, transformed into the narrator's clash with language, taken to domains that go beyond the limits of verbal expression.

This clash accompanies the tumultuous narrative of an ecstasy. Who makes it, under the effect of the fascination that a domestic cockroach exercises over it, is GH, a solitary character designated by the initials of his unknown name. The disturbance of his individuality, alienated when contemplating the corpse of the cockroach that, in a fit of rage, crushed on a wardrobe door, and the character's impotence to narrate what happened, that is the entire plot of this novel, if at all. plot can still be talked about. Passionate to the extent of the rudimentary and vertiginous passions she describes The Passion According to GH it is pathetic in its intensified, warm form of expression, which emotionally rises following the fuse of burning images, linked to abstract ideas.

The dry, the humid, the arid, are among the primary sensitive qualities that provide the range of descriptive images of the states of alienation that GH goes through, leaving the recess of its subjectivity for the impersonal, anonymous and strange element of the things with which it lives. identifies in a kind of ecstatic union. Stages of a journey of pain and joy, of love and hate, reaching Hell and Paradise, suffering and glory. In these eschatological stops, liberation and condemnation, salvation and loss, intermingle for the narrator-character, deprived, as if she were dead, of her human organization: “If you only knew the solitude of those first steps of mine. It didn't look like a person's loneliness. It was as if I had already died and was taking the first steps into another life alone. And it was as if that solitude was called glory (…)”.[ii]

A glory is associated with the “long life of silence” that was also the entry into a desert: “I entered a desert like I had never been. It was a desert that called to me like a monotonous and remote chant”.[iii]

But this desert of the soul anticipates the new reality it arrives at, the nothingness it enters, which has the burning of hell and the cooling of paradise: “That's how I took my first steps into nothingness. My first hesitant steps towards life and leaving my life. The foot stepped on air, and I entered heaven and hell: the core”.[iv]

The generality of sacrifice, of GH's passion, since she finds in herself “the woman of all women”, gives her path the meaning of a pilgrimage of the soul, similar to a spiritual itinerary, as in mystical writings of a nature confessional, frequent within the Christian tradition and almost foreign to Hebrew, inspired by the allegorical interpretation of sacred texts. Would we be facing an allegorical romance? More justified seems the question; when it is found, either by topos entry and exit, aridity, dryness, solitude and silence, or by the contradictory vision of what is ineffable (nothing, glory, primary reality), the “mystical context” of GH’s sacrificial itinerary

It would not be unreasonable, therefore, to repeat for today's reader, in this introduction of The Passion According to GH, Dante's admonition to Scala's Can Grande concerning the Divine Comedy: “(…) we must know that this work does not have a simple meaning, but, on the contrary, one can even call it polysemic, that is, that it has more than one meaning, since the first is what one has of the work itself. letter and the other that which derives its meaning from what is said by the letter. The first is called literal, the second allegorical or mystical.[v]

But if we can say that Clarice Lispector's work is of a disturbing polysemy, what in it "takes its meaning from what is said by the letter", does not belong, as in the Divine Comedy, on the figural scale of the allegorical.[vi] As if transiting through the rubble of Dante's vision, the religious symbology used by GH is no longer, despite the theological inflection of his long soliloquy, in the confessional tone of a penitent, the sensitive illustration of the supernatural destiny of the human soul. Hell and paradise are the soul's pathetic climax, the culmination of vertiginous self-knowledge as it descends into the abyss of interiority.

Se The Passion According to GH does justice to the classification of an allegorical novel, it will be so not in the medieval sense, but in the Baroque sense of multiple figuration of inexhaustible significance, or, as the Jewish thinker Gershom Scholem specified, returning to Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory, of a “ infinite network of meanings and correlations in which everything can become the representation of everything, but always within the limits of language and expression”.[vii] Due to the multivalence of images and concepts that the account of the state of ecstasy unites, everything in this text is a closed game of appearances under the empire of painful and perverse ambiguity.

The sacrifice of GH's personal identity, “the loss of everything that can be lost and still be”, is akin to the violent crisis that heralds a religious conversion. But stripped of herself, plunging into an abysmal moment of existence that eliminates the “superfluous individual”, she annuls herself as a person, leveled with a cockroach. Breaking the Hebrew ban on touching the filthy, the impure, the disgusting, also grotesque, the bitter feeling of the committed fault assails her, without rejecting the Sin. And when, finally, she partakes of the white mass of the insect transformed into a Host, this act takes on the appearance of a profanation, of the nefarious crime of sacrilege.

The raw nature of the life she accesses is ambiguous: domain of the organic, the biological, prior to consciousness, and also a dimension of the sacred, prohibited and accessible, threatening and appeasing, potent and inactive. And ambiguous is the love that ecstasy provokes: opposed to agape of Christianity, impulsive like pagan eros, this love tends to orgiastic rapture and enthusiasm, the forerunner of the transfusion of the corybantes in the bosom of the divinity.

Finally, oscillating between everything and nothing, from the emptying of the Self to empty fullness, GH's crucial experience, contradictory and paradoxical, mutes his understanding and hampers his speech: “What I called nothing was nevertheless so attached to me that was... me? and therefore he became invisible as I was invisible to myself, and he became nothing. Life is mine and I don't understand what I'm saying”.[viii]

Common reality subverted, the world turned upside down, the non-human becomes the unfathomable depth of what is human.

However, we alert the reader to the fact that the disturbing vision of the character-narrator is inseparable from the act of telling her, as her attempt to repossess the moment of ecstatic enlightenment, prior to the beginning of the narration, and which dispossessed her of yourself. Only as a memory, in the successive order of the discourse, will the narration be able to restore the suddenness of the visionary trance. And by giving it back, also giving back, thanks to the new I of the enunciation in which GH invests the role of narrator, the identity whose loss constitutes the core of her story.

Divided between loss and reconquest, between the present and the past, the act of narrating, doubtful, the indecisive voice of the person who makes it, without any certainty as to what he lived and what happened to him, is a “difficult story” and will be less a report than a construction of the event: “I'm going to create what happened to me. Just because living is not reportable. Living is not livable. I will have to create about life. And without lying. Create yes, lie no. Creating is not imagination, it is running the great risk of having reality. Understanding is a creation, my only way. I will have to make an effort to translate telegraph signals – to translate the unknown into a language I don't know and without even understanding what the signals are for (…). Until I created the truth of what happened to me. Ah, it will be more, a graphism than a writing because I try more a reproduction than an expression”.[ix]

Living is not reportable: the moment of experience, instantaneous, escapes the word that expresses it. Living is not livable: the narrative, a discursive link of meanings, recreates what was intended to be reproduced. And how to reproduce the moment of ecstasy, mute, without words, that goes back to a non-verbalizable world?

The simple immediate experience would lack the word that gives it meaning, and the pure delivery to the imaginary would fall into a verbalization irreducible to experience. The first would lock us in a pre-verbal world, lying to language; the second would lock us in a worldless language, lying to reality. Creating consists of the endless reference from the imaginary to the real and from the real to the imaginary, as a movement of writing, which translates “the unknown into a language I don't know…”

Em The Passion According to G.H.., the awareness of language as a symbolization of what cannot be fully verbalized, is incorporated into fiction governed by the movement of writing, which drags with it the vestiges of the pre-verbal world and the “archaeological” marks of the imaginary as far as it descended. GH tries to say the nameless thing, unveiled in the moment of ecstasy, and which is revealed in the silence between the words. But what she enunciates cannot fail to symbolize the unconscious substratum of the narration that, common matter to dreams and myths, rises from the deep layers of the imaginary that constitute the subsoil of fiction. The “archaeological” of fiction feeds what is sacral and eschatological in the possible allegory.

The awareness of language that accompanies the narrator's effort to recover the visionary trance that alienated her is dramatic. Hence, the narrative becomes the agonic space of the narrator and the meaning of his narration – the space where the narrator errs, that is, where she searches for herself, seeking the meaning of reality, which is only achieved when language fails to say. him: “Language is my human effort. By fate I have to go get it and by fate I come back with empty hands. But – I return with the unspeakable. The unspeakable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, do I get what it didn't get”.[X]

From the language process results erratic fiction, “more a graphism than a writing…”. However, consider the reader that GH's view, as you can see by the previous meditative counterpoint about his "difficult report", never manifests itself independently of the conceptual thought that asks, that questions, that exclaims, that speculates, commenting and interpreting the ecstatic illumination, retrieved as a memory, as highlighted by the reflective chain of themes – God, art, language, beauty, among many others, which extends from end to end of the novel. The narration becomes “visual meditation”, and this constitutes a graphism, a cryptography – writing of fascination, with something numinous, perpetuating the seduction of the crushed cockroach.

One could say that the narrative, with its numinous features, brings to flow, exacerbated introspection, everything that writing implies threatening and metamorphic. Before being mystical, GH's vision belongs to the mysticism of writing.

It is precisely the erratic fiction, derived from this mysticism, that is the turning point of Clarice Lispector's work, which began in Close to the Wild Heart, from the perspective of introspection that culminates in the ecstasy of GH

At the time this first novel was published, this perspective represented an aesthetic deviation from the dominant standards of modernist prose in 1922 and the neonaturalist fiction of the thirties, a deviation that linked the author, by affinity, to Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the “stream of consciousness” or inner duration fictionists. The culmination of that perspective in The Passion According to GH it is the plethoric overflow of the dialectic of lived experience – the tension between instantaneous intuition and its verbal expression mediated by memory, which naturalized aesthetic deviation as a propulsive force in Clarice Lispector's fiction.

The Passion According to G.H.., which extreme the conscience of the language already manifested, after Close to the Wild HeartOn the chandelier (1946) The City Besieged (1949) and The Apple in the Dark (1961), exacerbated this deviation. After her fifth novel, Clarice Lispector will break the historical mold of novel creation and the identifying conventions of fiction in Jellyfish (1973) The Hour of the Star (1977) and A Breath of Life (1978)

The unmistakable sign of the turning point for these texts is the pathetic gesture by GH, who holds the hand of a second person while she is narrating, without which she could not continue her “difficult story”: “While writing and speaking I will have than pretending someone is holding my hand.”[xi]

Being a fictional expedient, which amplifies the drama of the narrative and authenticates the paroxysm of the character, this dialogic gesture directed to a tu located at the edge of the narrative, it erupts into soliloquy, as a proposal for a new pact with the reader, considered an active support of the fictional elaboration – participant or collaborator – who should continue it.

For this reason, The Passion According to GH, where the dialectic of the lived experience culminates, favors the retrospective understanding of the fiction writer Clarice Lispector, and also contributes to elucidate her prospectively. In this way, the genesis of the novel, which is, as a possibility, the horizon towards which she moves from the beginning, is related to the development of all her work.

***

The genetic study of the text, by Nadia Batella Gotlib, professor of Brazilian Literature at the University of São Paulo, with published theoretical works on short stories and poetry, does not lose sight of this horizon. In the biographical-literary and analytical panorama that traces the Brazilian writer of Ukrainian origin, raised in Recife since she was two months old, he traces the process of the work's genesis back to the short stories written in her early youth, and which already contain the outline of the matrices, techniques and peculiarities of construction of Close to the Wild Heart and the mature tales of Family relationships: the stream of consciousness, the memory discourse, the humor, the grotesque, “the game of characters in a love triangle”, and, mainly, the passionate charge of seduction experienced by them, which violently pulls them away for a moment, from everyday and trivial reality to which they always return, as happens with GH returning from ecstasy to the organized human world.

prevails in Family relationships the narrative scheme in three parts with a medial climax, which will also be that of The Passion According to G.H.., which was the product of 24 years of literary activity, written at the beginning of a long period of political repression, when the author, without escaping what she has been, since the 1964th century. XIX, in our country, a rule of few exceptions in the professional activity of our writers, began to earn a living as a journalist. However, the political situation had no direct influence on the XNUMX novel, in which the theme of repression, which is moreover implicit in the rebelliousness and transgressive impetus of Clarice Lispector's female characters, is silhouetted in GH's solitude and in the collapse of her social framework. your individuality.

Perhaps the transgressive impetus of the female characters of Close to the Wild Heart, the chandelier, The City Besieged quality The Apple in the Dark, and certain tales of Family relationships who return, after a crisis of alienation from the banal and domestic day-to-day, is the inverted mark of female submission. But it is clear, on the other hand, that the personal nakedness in GH neutralizes the difference between masculine and feminine, absorbed in a general human condition in contrast to animality and organic life.

Submission and dominance, servitude and lordship, intertwine in the confrontation of the masculine with the feminine in The Apple in the Dark. Here there is a protagonist, Martim, simply The Man, as he is called; as much as the women, Ermelinda, Vitória and Francisca, he represents, within the antagonistic intersubjective relations that entertain, through the equivocal use of language, the insecure and fragile human condition. This type of affective transaction is of special significance – the “game of giving oneself to – and protecting oneself in –”, which is another facet of the game of seduction, – taken to its extreme limit in The Passion According to GH and in the tales of The Foreign Legion (1964), in many of which the metalinguistic plane of Clarice's fiction is evident.

This plan persists even in the chronicle, among us a mixed genre, adapted to journalistic communication, mixing commentary with various facts and the fictional invention, which interested Clarice Lispector, attracted by the inferior aesthetic quality of this “ugly duckling” of literature. But chronicles of her did not disconnect from her work as a fictionist. Many became fragments of larger texts. Sensitive to the variety of styles, the storyteller and novelist shed her parodistic sense by imitating the impact news and the sensationalism of the newspaper when writing around a single theme – sex – the 13 stories of The Via Crucis of the Body (1974), who substitute, for the attraction of the scabrous, the seduction of experience and the fascination of language, subsisting in some of the stories of Where have you been at night? (1974), and which contain, in a high dose, the tales of clandestine happiness (1971) and the novel An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures (1969)

In the latter, which seems like a reply to GH's monologous isolation in front of a cockroach, the narrative is polarized by dialogue; the characters, Lori and Ulisses, loving consciences who recognize each other in their interlocution and in life, carry out an apprenticeship of the human world, previously disintegrated.

Finally, Jellyfish (1973) unites the two strands, the visionary trance, the ecstatic, instantaneous illumination, and the conceptual thinking, in a continuous narrative flow, made up of discontinuous moments, thematically diverse. Compared by the narrator herself to a musical improvisation, the narration is the extension of the wandering movement of the writing of The Passion According to G.H.., creating the agonic space of language, where the narrator is lost in search of a meaning that surpasses her, and where she finds herself with no other identity than that of enunciating instance of the word, living baptismal water in which she bathes.

Improvised, the text, telling the story of nobody in episodic stories, demands the active reader to take it up again and to be able to merge, through the intervals of silence, between the lines of the meaning of the words, which are distended with the discourse, the real to the imaginary and the imaginary to the real. The reconquered dialogic relationship is transferred, with the new fictional pact, to this more than implicit reader, to whom the narrator-character addresses.

Refractory “to the logical sequence of the story”, but faithful to the dialectic of lived experience, the discourse, in which introspection bursts in improvisation, maintains the discontinuous pulsation of the snapshot, incorporating isolated traces of intuition, in the partial, fragmentary form of writing momentary that recreated them. Basically “a collage of fragments”, Jellyfish reveals this suture technique, frequently used by Clarice Lispector, as the compositional counterpart of the primacy of the fragmentary, of the intensified, instantaneous and passionate expression that impelled her to the aesthetic deviation.

The new record of The Hour of the Star (1977) – its social theme – is another scale of wandering writing by The Passion According to G.H.. Also like this one, the account of the helpless Macabéa, an insignificant northeastern girl lost in the anonymity of the big city, is difficult, given by an interposed narrator, next to whom the author herself, deceiving the disguise of fictional distance, insinuates her nominal presence: it is Clarice Lispector who suffers with Macabéa, and who dies in the end when, ironically, the merciless Fado crushes under the wheels of a car, at the moment when it seemed to rise to urban stardom – protected by a good star – the character that poverty had already crushed as person.

Published posthumously, A Breath of Life (1978), which the novelist received the extraliterary subtitle of pulsations, is an unfolding of her presence in two author-characters, a man and a woman, through whom she narrates herself, continuing, in another way, with the same pathos of death and madness that GH approached, the improvisation of Jellyfish.

***

In principle, the critical reception of The Passion According to GH depended on the acceptance of previous novels and mainly on the favorable repercussion of the tales of Family relationships and the author's chronicles. However, the fifth novel also represented, for various literary, cultural and political reasons, as Brazilian Literature professors Benjamin Abdala Junior and Samira Youssef Campedelli show us, a new threshold of access to the novelist, storyteller and columnist's books, which also devoted himself to children's literature. The history of his books, in the long post-modernist period in which they appear, is part of a fertile phase of Brazilian art and literature, when the poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto, the great poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, the novelistic work of Guimarães Rosa, and when, from the 50s onwards, the poetic avant-gardes developed which, like concretism, brought new demands for the enjoyment of the literary text as a work of language.

Complementing this critical edition, the three interpretative readings of The Passion According to GH., among which there is an impressive convergence, emphasize, each from their own particular point of view, this work of language.

Exploring, in the light of thematic analysis, the biblical vein of Clarice Lispector, Olga de Sá, professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and essayist, responds, in Parody and Metaphysics, to the question of the allegorical character of the work that we initially formulated, making us see the parodistic elements in the register of irony, which interfere with GH's mystical itinerary, inverting the current doctrinal meaning of passages from the sacred texts. Sticking to the outline of the theological motivations that accompany the course of GH’s “visual meditation”, from which the singular thread of the idea of ​​a substantive deity – the God – stands out, Olga de Sá considers the crucial experience described in the novel as a debate undecidable between immanence and transcendence, which is transferred to language and which has its high point in the silent, ecstatic and revealing moment of the epiphany.

Epiphany is the center of Affonso Romano de Sant'Anna's intratextual analysis, which begins by parodying the parallelistic reiterative aspect of the chapter segments of The Passion According to GH The poet, and professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, shows us, in The Epiphanic Rite of the Text, that the epiphany, in this work, obeys constitutive sequences of a mythical adventure, while a search of a metaphysical character, at the same time the story of a transformation carried out ritualistically. Thus, the seduction of lived experience and language takes the form of a ritual, which meets primitive manifestations of the sacred. The intelligibility of the work, which in this way falls on anthropological structures of the imaginary, also extends, through concepts taken from the theory of catastrophes, to the understanding of the contrasts and contradictions of the figures of the narrative: the Everything and the Nothing, the multiplicity and neutral as opposites. Simultaneously sublime and grotesque, the narrative, language-subject and language ritual, supported by oxymorons and paradoxes, aspects that Olga de Sá also addresses, is an anti-narrative.

The conclusion, by a different path, of the semi-linguistic-formal interpretation of the same text by Norma Tasca, from the University of Porto, is no different, which could be summarized in the answer given to the following question: how to verbally reproduce the lived experience? The essayist's response is given by the unveiling of the structures of meaning underlying the dialectic of lived experience. Developing this dialectic at the expense of an impulsive dimension, that question takes the inquiry to a level of epistemological generality: what makes it possible to narrate passion? In Clarice Lispector, the conditions of possibility of passionate narrative are preliminarily based on intensive and extensive repetition, which is, like anaphoric memory, the anamnesis of the segmented text, which threaded metaphors support in metonymic correlation. The flow of language is conditioned by the paradoxical construction of the narrative, due to the maximum proximity between enunciation and enunciation, which the preponderance of the narrating subject ensures. Hence the surprising effect of a narration, which develops against the current of the words, is a narration.

The three interpretations that harmonize, the theme becoming linguistic, the intratextual linking the anthropological constants of the text with the mastery of the word, which sticks to the semio-linguistic-formal, confirm the preponderant role of language awareness in Clarice's fiction Lispector.

“Why do I write? Because I captured the spirit of the language and so, sometimes the form is what makes the content”, writes the interposed author of The Hour of the Star. Indeed, this conversion of form into content is the privilege of the genuine writer – the writer in the sense given by Roland Barthes, who “works his word (even if he is inspired) and is functionally absorbed in that work”.

Like Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Graciliano Ramos and Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector, who worked on the word and was worked on by it, belongs to the category of matrix writers, those capable of re-dimensioning a literature to the extent that, by deepening the language, they contribute to giving new life to the spirit of the language.

In the introduction to the article about the debut of our author, which he recapitulated in the Liminar, Antonio Candido warns that, for the masterpieces of a literature to appear, it is necessary that “the thought tunes the language and the language suggests the thought tuned by it ”.[xii]

We have to take into account this double tuning in the musical sense of agreement, like the basso continuo of Clarice Lispector's work in all its phases, since she reached, through the language worked, the difficult intersection of thought with language.

* Benedito Nunes (1929-2011), was a philosopher, Professor Emeritus at UFPA. Author, among other books, of The drama of language – a reading of Clarice Lispector (Rile up).

Reference


Clarice Lispector. Passion according to G.H.. Critical Edition. Coordination: Benedito Nunes. São Paulo, Editions UNESCO / Edusp, 1988, 390 pages.

Notes


[I] Archives Collection, UNESCO Editions.

[ii] PSGH, p. 42.

[iii] PSGH, p. 40.

[iv] PSGH, p. 54.

[v] Dante Alighieri, Letter to Lord Can Grande of Scala, Complete works, vol. X, pg. 165. Editora das Américas, São Paulo.

[vi] Cf. Erich Auerbach, “Figure”, Scenes from the drama of European Literature, P. 11-76. Meridian Books, New York, 1959.

[vii] Gershom Scholem, The Jewish Mystique, pg. 26, Editora Perspectiva, São Paulo, 1972.

[viii]PSGH, p. 52 and 115.

[ix] PSGH, p. 15.

[X] PSGH, p. 113.

[xi] PSGH, p. 13.

[xii]Antonio Candido, At Dawn by Clarice Lispector, in Various Writings, P. 126, Two Cities, São Paulo, 1970.

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