The premise of The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel from 1964 is almost nothing: a sculptor, known to us only by her initials, decides to clean out the maid’s room after the maid has left her employment. That’s the entire plot. She opens a door at the back of her own apartment, into a room she has apparently never properly entered before, and what happens next takes Clarice Lispector roughly 180 pages and does not, by any normal definition, resolve.
What happens is this: the room is almost bare, whitewashed, reduced to a bed, a wardrobe, and a drawing on the wall left by the maid, a charcoal outline of a man, a woman, and a dog, done with a directness that unsettles G.H. more than the room’s emptiness does. And then there is a wardrobe, and inside the wardrobe there is a cockroach, and the next hundred-plus pages are what happens to a woman’s entire sense of self when she is confronted, at close range, with an insect she cannot look away from. I am aware this sounds like the setup to a parody. I assure you it is not. It’s one of the most sustained metaphysical crises in twentieth-century fiction, and it starts because someone walked into a room in her own home that she had spent years successfully not thinking about.
And that’s the detail that earns this book a place in a month about rooms: G.H. does not have a crisis in her own bedroom, or her studio, or any of the rooms she actually inhabits and has presumably furnished with some intention: she has it in the one room of her apartment that was designed for someone, by someone, but never by her, or for her own use. The maid’s room. Every house of a certain size and certain era has one of these, and every architect who has ever drawn a floor plan for a house of that size has drawn one too: the small room off the kitchen, the service quarters, the space allocated to the person who keeps the rest of the house running and is architecturally acknowledged only as a footprint on a drawing, a door swing, a minimum egress width. It is a room designed with total professional competence and almost no imaginative investment, because the person drawing it has never had to imagine actually living in it.
What Lispector does, with a kind of ruthlessness I don’t think I’ve encountered anywhere else, is send her
narrator into that exact blind spot and have the blind spot look back withb a vengeance. G.H. goes in expecting to tidy up an inconvenience and instead finds the one honest room in her apartment, the one that was not arranged to produce an effect on a visitor, was not composed, was not, in the sense architects use the word, designed at all, only allocated. And the emptiness of it, the directness of the charcoal drawing on the wall, and finally the cockroach, undo her so completely that by the end of the book she’s no longer confident she knows herself, or what a self is, let alone a room.
I’ll think about this novel every time a program document lands on my desk with square meterage assigned to “staff area, 4 sqm” or “storage, n.d.” as though those rooms are exempt from having anything happen in them, as though only the client-facing rooms deserve the kind of attention that produces experience. We know, professionally, that this isn’t true: the back-of-house rooms are where half the actual life of a building takes place, where the people who make the building function spend the bulk of their working hours, in spaces that received a tenth of the design hours the lobby got. And this gets even worse where no operational activity takes place: their living quarters. Lispector’s whole novel is an argument, made without ever once mentioning architecture, that the unregarded room doesn’t stay unregarded. It waits. And when someone finally walks into it properly, pays it the attention it was denied at the drawing stage, it turns out to contain the entire building’s unexamined conscience.
I won’t pretend the book is an easy one: it’s punishingly slow, written in long looping sentences that circle the same few images — the room, the wardrobe, the insect, the drawing on the wall — until they stop meaning what you thought they meant. Lispector wants you disoriented. But if you’ve ever handed a program brief back to a client with the staff room reduced to a number instead of a place, this is the book that will make you go back and look at that line item differently. Not because you’ll suddenly render the maid’s room in walnut and skylights, but because you might remember, next time, that somebody is going to have to actually be in there.
My first reading of this author was a collection of short stories, earlier this year, and you can find it here.
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