Maybe Something Else

The Passion According To G.H. by Clarice Lispector

Salutations, bibliophiles.

Today, I’m very excited to bring you Sarah Kokernot.

Sarah writes This Is All Going Away, where she teaches others how find meaning and joy in their creativity.

Here, Sarah describes how she found both of those tenets in a remarkable book, the book that made her — The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector. Enjoy!

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I found the strange book that would never leave me during the 2014 polar vortex. My first year in Chicago. My mother was dying, but we had to wait a few days before saying goodbye and taking her off life support. In the meantime, a friend of mine had scheduled a visit. Before my mother’s coma, before her dying—we had planned this visit. I figured it might be a good time to see a friend. It would remind me that something else existed after the grief I was already in the midst of.

We stood in our kitchen, relatively young still. Because we were both writers, we drank tea and talked about what good books we’d read recently. 

“The Passion According to G.H.,” my friend said. “It’s about a woman who eats a cockroach.”
I must have made a face. 

My friend shook her head. “It feels inevitable. The whole book leads to it.”

I knew and loved Clarice Lispector’s stories—“The Smallest Woman In the World,” “The Imitation of The Rose”—but I’d never read any of her novels.

I made a note of the book. Six winters later, I would read it. 

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Every January is dreary in Chicago, but this one was especially bad. Thirty-one consecutive days of no sun. Thirty-one days of flat gray skies. I was recovering from surgery, loaded up on painkillers, when I downloaded the book on Kindle. I was curious about that sense of the inevitable that my friend talked about. 

Like the title suggests, the novel is hagiographic, the testimony of a person who has gone through a brutal transformation into the numinous. The mystical remains out of fashion these days in spite of a wellness culture uptick of hallucinogenic drugs. This particular mystical novel feels more rooted in a medieval belief system than what undergirds contemporary, social novels, which focus on human interaction and the way we live now. Lispector’s The Passion reaches beyond the ordinary boundaries of time. It offers a rapturous, unflinching insight into the way one person’s life is connected to the swamp of experience and history. The novel is not entirely anthropocentric. Its concerns transcend the human, and that exploration can be deeply uncomfortable. 

I have never read a book before or since where the central relationship is not with humanity but with the materiality of life itself, featured in the form a primeval, ancient form—a cockroach—a being that preceded humanity, an entity which disgusts us because it exists on our refuse and because it will likely exist without us. 

The social novel is so common in the U.S. and in anglophone literary culture it’s sometimes still hard for me, as a reader, to imagine the novel as anything else than some manner of Jane Austen’s quip: “we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn.”

In socially minded novels, the mystical experience comes in fleeting moments, in a denouement gathered up in the wind tunnel of ordinary life, a breaking into the sky, when the character realizes that they might be connected to something more than say, their small-town family in Mississippi, or the love affair they’re having with a woman in Yalta, or their anger at their heroin-addicted brother. The mystical in the social novel arrives as a quick possibility of the transcendent, a flash of maybe something else in conditions which otherwise are too cramped with misery to give much room for existential imagination.

I can’t say that I ever read a book-length novel whose entire concern is only the maybe something else, whose purpose is to map whatever lies outside the ordinary bounds of selfhood and stretch into whatever lies outside ordinary constraints of the body. The two-sided coin of the sublime and of horror flips back and forth on the knuckles of the Lispector, who switchbacks between the grandeur and weirdness of life and the grandeur and weirdness of the abject, until we see they are both the same damn thing. This carnal reality, which we would like to forget about, oozes out of the pus from the cockroach when the narrator accidentally slams the wardrobe door on it. 

Lispector is not concerned with telling us how we live. 

She’s concerned with telling us how we die and how this fact makes us alive. 

That same materiality in the severed cockroach is also inside us, and while I read the book for the first time, I considered this materiality under the bandages of my abdomen, where I had been opened with lasers—a more delicate maneuver than a slammed door but producing a similar effect. What are we if it isn’t just this? And another what if: Maybe something else? 

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