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Give me your hand: I’m going to try to tell you of how Clarice Lispector gently and earnestly fractured my mere human joints, de-stabilizing the “paralyzing security”(12) of my third leg(s). The Passion According to G.H is a shocking piece of literature which seeks an answer to existence itself. In a flowing monologue that is at intervals neurotic, timid, courageous, and poetically unnerving, Lispector asks for the innocent reader’s hand and pulls them into a dark hole, a hole of neutrality, of the indifferent molecular and elemental buzzing that is the blank canvas of all life and perceivable images. When G.H enters her maid’s room to see the haunting hollowness of three figures outlined on the wall, and the cockroach that comes to symbolize a primordial, unthinking existence, she is about to confront “a degree of living so originary that it bordered on the inanimate”(15). This is not a book that can be discussed in any traditional sense. I lack Clarice’s audacity to advise the reader on the unknowable, and so to enter this existential book, you must take her hand and mine, and hope for the best. One must offer their hand, and with fingers splayed half covering their squinting eyes, dare to look into the face of the inhuman, the inexpressive matter, the “white matter”, the fabric of the universe, (call it what you will!) that makes possible all that we consider to be reality.

The core of this miniscule volume that somehow wrenches open a galaxy wide chasm of perception, is apprehension of the self. Milan Kundera offers helpful insight on this motif in his book The Art of the Novel. First, Kundera notes that “The paradoxical nature of action is one of the novels great discoveries”(24). He is referring to the strange element in human nature that can make it impossible to predict the actions of an individual. More importantly, the individual's own ability to predict his actions is impaired. Humans commit irrationality. To get closer to a ‘self’, “Man hopes to reveal his own image through his act, but that image bears no resemblance to him”(24). If our own actions are so unintelligible, where do we find the self? The action in G.H is minimal, and internal. The largest movement in the whole book is the shocking decision to eat the cockroach in a macabre attempt to understand primal life. Utterly unpredictable, and altogether ineffectual, this event doesn’t help G.H access her essential self (and thank ‘God’ for that). In fact, she has to lose herself momentarily to accomplish it, falling into a daze and waking up after the deed is done. But G.H already knew this about action. She has lived her life doing this or that action carried out by her ‘third legs’, what she labels as the fabrications humans make to anchor us to a reality. She suspects that reality to be false. She suspects that reality is more inhuman than it is human.

G.H’s losing of herself in that scene which I’ll affectionately term the “lunch scene”, raises another of Kundera’s key points. The sensation of vertigo is defined by him as “the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it”(31). This weakness comes with the sense of despair that is the subject of one of his novels “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. It seems that G.H is facing the same lightness in her confrontation of the “singeing nowness”(94) of the divine neutrality of existence. If what G.H tries to see is “God”, it is a neutral God, content with existence, and is nothing more than the invisible skeleton of the void. Kundera asks, “But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being”(41). This fear of the inconsequence of being, the vertigo it produces, and the elusive quest for ‘the self’, turns human reflection away from “wonder at the immeasurable infinity of the soul” and confounds it with “wonder at the uncertain nature of the self and of its identity”(Kundera 28). This is precisely the wonder that G.H attempts to express to the innocent reader. Lispector as an author seems to hold true to Kundera’s theory that “the more powerful the lens of the microscope observing the self, the more the self and its uniqueness elude us”(25). Of course, G.H has to go back to her human reality, and although feeling she has just sensed something profound, her humanness leaves the inevitable residue of perplexity. After 170 pages she admits, “I don’t understand what I am saying”(173). Even so, it’s clear she has said something, and something that is eerily beautiful. When meeting what we can’t comprehend we either cower in its fearful beauty, or we ignore. G.H manages to not ignore for a small amount of time.

When asked “if the self and its uniqueness cannot be grasped in man’s interior life, could it be grasped at all?”, Milan Kundera replied: “Of course not. The quest for the self has always ended, and always will end, in a paradoxical dissatisfaction. I don’t say defeat.”(25).