Clarice Lispector, Gnostic Maenad
Photo collage of Clarice Lispector. Image sourced from Tablet.
The first time I read Clarice Lispector I happened to be microdosing on mushrooms. The world radiated with a slightly brighter-than-average luminescence. It thrummed a little more intensely with significance. You might even say that I felt a tad bit more closely attuned to the world’s thisness, its concrete and material reality, its immanence.
Yet as psychedelic adventurers will attest, when you have psilocybin in your system you feel able to access something more than the mere immanence of things. The world seems to open itself, to offer a rare channel to some otherwise concealed reality that exists not so much behind or within the ordinary things of the world, but rather radiates from them directly, if invisibly. To put this in another way, the immanence of the world becomes a conduit for transcendence.
No doubt this helps explain the quasi-religious regard “magic” mushrooms have earned over the centuries across a wide range of human cultures. Mushrooms have the capacity to induce life-altering shifts in perspective. Though it may be temporary, a trip has the power permanently to upend a person’s worldview, to reconfigure their very awareness of being alive.
Religious experience indeed.
I don’t want to inflate my own experience with mushrooms, or to suggest that I myself have passed through such a thoroughly transformative experience. In fact, the evening I first encountered Lispector it was only my second time microdosing, and I had ingested just enough of the fungus to effect a shift in my cognitive and somatic states. Slight though it may have been, this shift nonetheless offered a unique path into Lispector’s prose, the hallucinatory power of which is sure to make even the soberest reader reel as if they too were tripping.
Upon opening Lispector’s 1954 novel The Passion According to G.H., it didn’t take long to realize that I was in the hands of a writer who would tear me apart, perhaps with no hope of reassembly. From the very first Lispector’s novel seemingly has every interest in forcing the reader not only to encounter themselves on the profoundest level, but also to reflect on the very nature of selfhood. For example, before entering the novel proper the reader encounters Lispector’s enigmatic preface. Titled “To Possible Readers,” this preface functions like a sphinx gate, a ritual passage that entails making a precipitous descent into the self before entering Lispector’s altered world. The author informs her reader, “This book is like any other book.” But whatever comfort this opening assurance offers gets derailed in the following sentences, where Lispector sketches a confounding portrait of her ideal reader:
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.
For me, Lispector’s preface induced a slight existential panic. Was I someone whose soul was already formed? If I had to ask, then I suppose probably not? Then again, I don’t usually feel too worried about achieving some kind of spiritual completion. Which means, doesn’t it, that I have the kind of patience to await for “the approach,” however gradually it might come?
But then the approach of what? What is this “it” that does the approaching in the first place? Where does “it” approach from, such that “it” might also end up “passing through the opposite of what it approaches”? Is the opposition references here spatial? Conceptual? Something else entirely? And why is this subgroup of readers specially positioned to understand “that this book takes nothing from no one”? What does that mean? Am I hallucinating what appears to be a grammatical snafu at the end there? Does the phrase “takes nothing from no one” entail a double negative intended to mark the speaker’s class position — as in, This book don’t take nothing from nobody!? Or are we to read it yet more literally — as in, This book only takes something from those who are “someones,” and nothing from those who are “no ones”?
A slew of questions, all urging to know what in God’s name is going on.
Turning the page, we get a quote from the American art historian Bernard Berenson — an epigraph that, despite still being enigmatic, has at least a glimmer of epigrammatic truth: “A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.” Reading this, I felt subside the rush of questions that had swelled on the previous page. I still had no idea what it might mean to reach completeness through identification with the non-self, but some of the conundrums elicited by Lispector’s preface started to slot into a pair of oppositions: self/non-self, and completeness/incompleteness. What seemed truly enigmatic was the apparent remixing of terms. Whereas it seems rational to link completeness with the self and incompleteness with the non-self, Berenson reverses the relations. Ostensibly so does Lispector. Is this what she meant when she suggested that “the approach, of whatever it may be,” might need to pass through “the opposite of what it approaches”? Does that perhaps imply that the fully-formed soul must, in order to become so, first pass through its own annihilation? Is that what the novel to follow will be “about”?
Still more questions than answers, but at the very least we have some framing ideas to think with as we enter Lispector’s novel.
Anyone who has read The Passion According to G.H. will know that the text of the novel itself conjures many of the same responses and affects as those I’ve just tried to evoke, often on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Lispector writes intense, evocative prose that prompts more befuddlement than comprehension. As if to quell any suspicion on the reader’s part that Lispector’s writing has been mangled in translation, Benjamin Moser assures us in the afterword to his English-language rendering of The Hour of the Star (1977) that, “No matter how odd Clarice Lispector’s prose sounds in translation, it sounds just as unusual in the original” (79).
Lispector has several techniques for remixing conventional language. Her unorthodox punctuation is one such technique, one that Lispector apparently labored to defend from her exacting copy editors. Idra Novey, the translator of Passion, also draws attention to Lispector’s “fugue-like” repetition of certain words across individual passages, sections, and indeed the entire text. But what I found most characteristically strange about Lispector’s prose was its ceaseless swirl of emotion, intellection, and mysticism. It’s a heady mixture sustained with patient intensity, and which lends her slender novels something of the tortuous density one finds in the writings of the world’s great Gnostic luminaries. (Check out this nugget from the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart [c. 1260–c. 1328]: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.”)
Lispector’s style is not just an affect, something put on. One senses as one reads that she uses language to peel back — or, better, scrape off — the surfaces of ordinary life. But this act does not ultimately reveal some originary core, which is to say it doesn’t plumb the depths to discover essential meaning. Rather, like the process of stripping wallpaper, Lispector’s linguistic scraping simply reveals further layers of surface. But the newly revealed surface remains littered with lingering scraps of wallpaper, as well as gouges from the scraping blade that unveil glimpses of yet older coatings of paint. Multiple layers mingle on the same surface, a veritable stratigraphic record of domestic transformation. Such an image of a mottled wall strikes me as a suitable metaphor for the kind of revelations made palpable by Lispector’s prose: striking precisely because it provides neither perfectly smooth surface nor clearly revealed depth, but rather a confounding palimpsest of the two.
Lispector. Image sourced from Wikipedia Commons.
Accounting strictly in terms of plot, not much happens in Passion. The novel opens with a peculiar tone, as our narrator, a Brazilian sculptor we know only as G.H., meditates on some kind of existential loss that has accompanied her “new way of being” (3). We have no clear sense of what this means, and the mystery will to some extent be sustained throughout the novel. But we do soon learn that G.H.’s maid has recently (and quite suddenly) departed from her service, leaving her alone in her apartment. G.H. decides to go into the servant’s now-vacant room to tidy up, only to find everything already in order. But one thing is amiss: the wardrobe door has been left ajar. As G.H. closes it, a cockroach crawls out and gets crushed between the door and the frame. These events induce in G.H. something of an existential spiral, and her churning thoughts eventually lead her to eat the roach, which she promptly vomits back up.
Around these barebones events, Lispector’s prose slides, twists, glimmers, shifts, darkens, exults, blasphemes, grins, howls, wanders, and wonders, all the while folding in on itself ceaselessly, questioning every apparent conclusion and spinning back out into realms both existential and cosmic. It would be pointless to try to summarize all that “happens” in the subtle susurrations of thought and the grand visions that erupt throughout G.H.’s strange monologue. What’s undeniable, though, is that G.H. is struggling to form an account of herself — of what being a self entails, not to mention what it means to be in the first place.
Truly, I can’t recall another reading experience so singularly confounding yet bizarrely consuming as The Passion According to G.H. Though I’d been marginally aware of Lispector’s growing cult status among English-language readers, I had little sense for what her art was like, or what it was all about. But my interest was piqued when her name cropped up unexpectedly in the conclusion of Alex Dubilet’s book, The Self-Emptying Subject, which I had been reading as part of research into what I’ve been calling “novelistic personhood.”
Dubilet’s book focuses on the concept of kenosis, which refers to the renunciation of divinity involved in the Incarnation of Christ. Put more generally, kenosis names a kind of emptying of the self, an evacuation of all sacred “content” that leaves behind pure “form,” the most basic stuff of life. Though conventionally understood as a theological matter, Dubilet argues that kenotic thinking plays a key role in modern philosophy. He traces a lineage of such thinking through Meister Eckhart, Hegel, and Bataille, demonstrating a productive engagement with a notion he terms “life without a why.” What compels Dubilet’s study is the way these thinkers labor to destabilize a binary opposition that has been a mainstay in Western thinking since pretty much forever: the opposition between immanence and transcendence. By decoupling immanence from transcendence, these thinkers enable a form of “desubjectification” that strips away the need for subjectivity to be organized vis-à-vis some higher power or transcendental horizon.
Dubilet makes the intriguing claim that any promise of transcendence wields great power over individuals and communities. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Louis Althusser, Dubilet says that transcendence has the power to “interpellate” the subject — that is, it calls out or “hails” us such that, when we answer its call, we come into being as its subjects.
Althusser sketches out this meaning of interpellation in his essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” There he gives the famous example of a police officer in the street. The officer calls out, “Hey, you there!” When passers-by hear this and turn their head, they are responding to a call that did not explicitly name them. And this lack of explicit naming is key, since to respond to this anonymous call is implicitly to acknowledge that you are someone who could be subject to such a call. In the case of the police officer’s hailing, we might respond out of a sense, however vague, of our own real or potential guilt. We are interpellated as guilty and hence subject to punishment. Althusser’s example is meant to demonstrate how ideology works. Ideology isn’t some explicit set of rules or ideas we’re all contracted to observe. Rather, we somehow elect to follow the unspoken rules on our own. We answer their call — which is to say, they interpellate us. We become subjects by subjecting ourselves to this external (and hierarchically superior) hailing voice.
Portuguese edition of The Passion According to G.H.
If the promise of transcendence hails in this way, Dubilet outlines a contrasting form of “unrestrained immanence” enabled by a process of letting go, of emptying the self of all traces of transcendence and its subjectifying power. What results is a rejection of normative ideals of self-possession and self-knowledge (both key aspects of “the subject”), and there arises instead an embrace of immanence as that which both precedes and exceeds the subject, leaving a dispossessed life and a dispossessed joy without transcendence.
No doubt this all sounds rather abstract. And indeed, Dubilet’s work emerges from highly cerebral theological and philosophical traditions. Which made it all the more surprising for me that he concludes his book by turning to a literary example. In the final pages of The Self-Emptying Subject Dubilet gestures to Lispector’s writing as a literary example that models the type of desubjectification he has explored in Meister Eckhart, Hegel, and Bataille. Quoting from her “mystic” novel, The Passion According to G.H., Dubilet writes:
Lispector abandons the stabilizing and promising comforts of projective temporality — in both its secular and religious forms — by rendering palpable and untamed, overwhelming life that discards the proper name and delimitation assigned to it. This dispossessed, impersonal life — a life that can no longer be claimed as properly one’s own — offers “a life without redemption . . . a joy without the hope, an unbearable joy detached from the imperatives of self-possession, labor, and hope for a redemption to come.” (176–77)
According to Dubilet, Lispector’s novel refuses all forms of existential exit route. There is no escape, no exit; all that remains is “the insistence on the immanence of impersonal life, detached from all stabilizing subjections of transcendence and from the phantasmatic agency it may bestow” (177). In other words, The Passion According to G.H. offers a strange, difficult vision of an immanent life that refuses to be organized under the sign of transcendence.
Dubilet’s unique reading of Lispector caught my attention, since in my recent research I’ve been exploring how a lineage of novels imagines personhood according to mechanisms of self-inflation and evacuation. From Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747) to Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), there exists a tradition of literary subjectivity dictated by a narrative logic of accumulation and liquidation. In Richardson’s novel, for instance, Clarissa Harlowe manages time according to a quasi-economic model, accumulating profane time until she cashes out, as it were, redeeming her temporal hoard for the heavenly reward of eternity. Likewise, in DeLillo’s surreal financial parable, young billionaire Eric Packer chases the erratic exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the Japanese yen, “speculating into the void.” He eventually loses everything and even achieves a mysterious transubstantiation through the process of being murdered — a martyr for neoliberal capital.
Dubilet’s discussion of kenosis in modern philosophy and literature got me thinking about how to map this logic of accumulation and liquidation I’ve identified on to the rather larger dialectic between immanence and transcendence. Yet the more I considered Dubilet’s thesis about The Passion According to G.H. as a novel of dispossessed selfhood, the more I began to question his conclusions. It’s not that G.H. isn’t struggling to work out a sense of life that strips away all illusion and reckons with something like what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” Indeed, the novel is full of explicit rejections of the lure of transcendence. “Transcending is a transgression” (79), G.H. tells us: it’s also “an exit” (83).
But the more G.H. runs away from transcendence, the more she seems to want it. Indeed, you could say that our protagonist’s struggle against an ingrained desire to be redeemed represents the chief preoccupation of the novel as a whole. In one episode that recalls Dubilet’s discussion of transcendence as a type of interpellation or “hailing,” G.H. fantasizes about the phone ringing in the other room, calling her out of the servant’s quarters and breaking her existential spell:
I thought that if the telephone rang, I would have to answer and would still be saved! But, as if remembering an extinct world, I remembered that I’d taken the phone off the hook. If not for that, it would ring, I would flee to the room to answer it, and never again, oh! never again would return. (86)
G.H. may reject transcendence in favor of “a life without redemption,” but clearly this rejection is difficult to sustain.
Even so, the point I want to make here goes further. It isn’t just that the desire for transcendence (and hence its power to subject us) is hard to shake. The point is that transcendence is in fact so hard to shake that, unbeknownst to her, G.H. finds transcendence even in immanence. But let me immediately revise: Immanence doesn’t offer G.H. a promise of transcendence so much as it provides what I’ve already called, in passing, a transcendental horizon. As I conceive it, a transcendental horizon exists whenever and wherever we imagine ourselves to have found a conduit to the beyond. We might liken such a conduit to the kind of “eye” or aperture through which Meister Eckhart says we view God and God views us. Crucially, this “eye” is not the beyond itself; rather, it affords the elusive promise of seeing into the beyond. The elusiveness is central, for what we may at first imagine as a conduit turns out not to be a passable threshold at all, so much as a horizon. That is, it’s a horizon of desire, one in which the desired thing forever recedes as you approach it, hovering at the furthest reaches of the visible. But however much they may point to the beyond, transcendental horizons are situated in the world of our actual, immanent existence. Like all horizons, transcendental horizons are metaphors for finitude. They circumscribe the realm of the knowable and imaginable. There’s no getting to the beyond beyond them.
We can see two such transcendental horizons operating midway through the novel, when G.H. imagines herself situated between the present moment and her own future death:
Dying, yes, I knew, since dying was the future and is imaginable, and for imagining I had always had time. But the instant, this instant — the present — that isn’t imaginable, between the resent and I there’s no interval: it is now, in me. . . . The time to live, my love, was being so right now that I leaned my mouth on the matter of life. The time to live is a slow, uninterrupted creaking of doors continuously opening wide. Two gates were opening and had never stopped opening. But they were continuously opening onto — onto the nothing? (75–76)
At first, this passage appears cleanly to replicate the opposition between transcendence and immanence. Death is that future passage out of the world, beyond the horizon of existence. By contrast, the present moment is “so right now” that there can be no interval separating G.H. from it; it’s already in her, just as she’s already in it. The immanence of the now and the transcendence of death.
But on a second reading this passage proves weirder than it initially appeared. Lispector emphasizes a sense of opposition through her use of the adjectives “imaginable” and “unimaginable.” Whereas G.H. considers her future death imaginable, the present is so completely co-present as not to be imaginable at all. But shouldn’t it be the other way around? If death marks the moment of passing beyond the horizon of human knowing and being, shouldn’t that be unimaginable? Likewise, shouldn’t that which is closest and most immediately perceptible to experience be the thing that is most concretely imaginable?
To make matters even more confounding, Lispector further revises her apparent reversal of terms by offering the image of lived time as an “uninterrupted creaking of doors continuously opening wide.” Instead of an immediate, immanent present and a future, transcendent death, Lispector now situates G.H. between two thresholds that “were opening and never stopped opening,” and both thresholds lead into the unknowable: “But they were continuously opening onto — onto the nothing?” And the passage just keeps twisting, as G.H. goes on to imagine herself (her self) as a form of nothingness. Her self becomes so fully nothing that it then, paradoxically, “became a now” (76). Like a particle in the void flickering between virtuality and actuality, G.H. is fundamentally unstable, caught between being and nothingness.
Google Doodle from 10 December 2018, on the occasion of Lispector’s 98th birthday. Image sourced from Google.
This fundamental instability is part of my point. I’m suggesting that, in this passage, what initially looks like a straightforward opposition between immanence and transcendence quickly grows blurry, such that both the present moment and future death become transcendental horizons — two thresholds that, as seen from within the realm of existence, appear ceaselessly to open into the unknowable reaches of a nothingness beyond. Put simply: transcendence is immanent, and immanence is transcendent.
So while Dubilet sees The Passion According to G.H. as an exploration of a selfhood dispossessed of transcendence, I see the novel as an exploration of how selfhood is absolutely organized — or subjected — by transcendence. It’s just that instead of standing at once outside and above the self, transcendent possibility lies everywhere, in every direction. Perhaps rather than simply privilege one pole of a binary opposition over the other, it would be better to think about the curious ways in which immanence and transcendence vitalize one another. Not to be too much of a deconstructionist about it, but despite the long philosophical tradition holding them as diametrically opposed, immanence imprints itself in the transcendent, just as transcendence imprints itself in the immanent. Like in every opposition, the two poles actively constitute each other. They also collapse into one another, making for confounding topologies of thought. Inside and outside become less obviously distinguishable.
It is in this sense that transcendental horizons thwart conventional spatial hierarchies, and can exist (or be imagined to exist) both within and without the self. Not unlike how structures as minuscule as the atom can wield gargantuan power, transcendent possibility can lure us from within domains as internal and apparently banal as the present moment. Hence the proliferation (in the United States, at least) of self-help books like Eckhart Tolle’s bestseller, The Power of Now. Such books encourage us to seek spiritual enlightenment by attending ever more closely to the immediate. Of course, achieving perfect oneness with the NOW isn’t really the point of meditation practice, since such perfect oneness isn’t possible. Even so, any practice that prizes the NOW as a site of spiritual awakening effectively treats the present as a kind of asymptote, which the “curve” of individual practice may approach but will only ever reach as the function approaches an infinite limit.
(And not incidentally, in mathematics, when you have a simple function like f(x) = 1/x, as x approaches infinity, the function as a whole reduces to zero. That is, the function’s “end-behavior” involves the collapse of infinity [on the x–axis] and zero [on the y-axis] into one another. To me this sounds an awful lot like the passage I quoted above from Lispector’s novel, where G.H. imagines herself poised between the radical present and her future death, with both points of time opening infinitely into nothingness.)
Despite my reference to Eckhart Tolle and to meditation-based spiritual practices, Lispector’s novel rings most profoundly not of Zen but of Gnosticism. Much of The Passion According to G.H. explores how the struggle of existential meaning erupts from out of life in its barest, most elemental manifestation. Though she disavows any notion of a transcendent kingdom in the Beyond, G.H. consistently discovers transcendent horizons that radiate like black holes from within what philosophers Deleuze and Guattari call the “plane of immanence.” Whatever transcendence there is exists right here, right now.
Which is, at the most fundamental level, the basic premise of Gnostic traditions of thought. For the Greeks, gnosis designated a form of knowledge based on individual experience rather than intellectual awareness or study. Gnosis thus refers to that which is most familiar rather than what is formally known. This idea furnished the basis for Judeo-Christian traditions of Gnosticism that emerged starting in the first century of the common era. Broadly speaking, these traditions privileged experiential knowledge of the divinity over canonical theology, and personal knowing over institutionalized faith. Rather than prostrate themselves before a deity enthroned on high, Gnostic thinkers and theologians sought the divine spark within the human being: immortality within the mortal, transcendence within the immanent.
Like the Gnostics, Lispector seems preoccupied with tearing the inauthentic veneer of selfhood apart and retrieving whatever scraps of authentic self-knowledge remain. The Passion According to G.H. offers a sustained character study of a woman who delves into the swirling chaos of her own being, and who sometimes despairs at the prospect that it all amounts to naught, but who preserves a basic faith that meaning persists in the very fact of aliveness. Benjamin Moser echoes this sentiment in his afterword to The Hour of the Star, where he writes that Lispector’s “mystical as well as artistic” goal in her writing “was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning, but never to discard it completely” (80; emphasis added). Some frustrated or impatient readers might be tempted to dismiss Lispector’s sometimes violently searching work as approaching nihilism. But I believe that, like the Gnostics searching for the spark of divinity, Lispector was deeply invested in whatever fragments of meaningfulness she could salvage from the chaotic jumble of bare life.
If Lispector tears the self apart, she does so not as an act of pure destructiveness or an expression of madness, but out of a desire for gnosis. She’s like a maenad, but one who, in addition to worshipping Dionysus, conceals a secret affinity for Apollo. Frenzied bacchanalia meets pursuit of self-knowing.
Clarice Lispector is a Gnostic maenad, and she’s tearing me apart.
Lispector. Image sourced from A Useful Fiction.
Work Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 127–86.
Dubilet, Alex. The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star. Translated by Benjamin Moser. New York: New Directions, 2011
Lispector, Clarice. The Passion According to G.H. Translated by Idra Novey. New York: New Directions, 2012.
Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004.