Event · Self · 1964
The Room and the Other Life
A woman in Rio enters a maid’s room, kills a cockroach, and does not come out the same. The book is a sitting with what will not stay human.
- Rio de Janeiro, on the page of *A Paixão Segundo G.H.*
- Mid-twentieth-century Brazil
- 22.91°S 43.17°W
Plate · Generated interpretation
A door, a maid’s room, something on the floor. Do not yet name the insect.
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
Clarice Lispector, A Paixão Segundo G.H. (1964), English The Passion According to G.H. A sculptor, a clean apartment, a room she has not entered. A cockroach. What follows is not entomology and not a wellness “ego death.” It is a Brazilian novel of a first person trying to remain after the human arrangement fails.
Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. Trans. Idra Novey (New Directions, 2012) or Ronald W. Sousa. The cockroach is in the book. The metaphysics is the narrator’s ordeal, not a doctrine the house adopts.
Zhuangzi’s butterfly is a dream of species. G.H.’s cockroach is a waking of matter. Woolf’s window is a city’s shared weather. Lispector is harsher: the I may be a luxury.
Mystical readings exist. So do feminist and postcolonial ones. The novel can bear them. It does not require them in order to be a story of consciousness under pressure.
What remains of a person who has looked too long at a life that does not need her name?
Distant echoes
Echo
Warring States China · The state of Song, traditionally
Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed
Another crossing of the human. A dream there, a kitchen here. Not one transformation.
One question remains
Self · Who or what is having the experience?
If the living does not require a person, what, then, was the person for?