The Passion According to G.H.

WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN, we used to play football constantly in the streets of the Middle East. My neighbours and I would all pretend, in one way or another, to be our favourite footballers. The identities depended on whatever match had recently been played. I remember Sergio Ramos being my favourite player, so naturally I was Ramos. Another kid was Cristiano Ronaldo.

Someone else was Casillas, Messi or Neymar. Then another Champions League or World Cup match would happen, someone would put in an incredible performance, and suddenly the identities on our street would change. One day I was Ramos, another day I was Kanté, and sometimes I was Özil.

You see this frequently with children, but somewhere along the transition into adulthood we seem to forget something we instinctively understood as kids: identities are malleable. We construct them, borrow them, perform them and eventually discard them. The child doesn’t suffer an existential crisis because yesterday he was Sergio Ramos and today he is someone else. He simply plays.

Instead of recommending an enormous philosophical reading list to prepare someone for Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., I would almost recommend the animated film Rango. It is one of the easiest ways of approaching some of the questions about identity that Lispector takes to terrifying extremes. Rango chooses a name and constructs a personality.

He understands the society he has entered and plays along with it. His identity changes according to circumstances, and he demonstrates, in an almost childish way, how strangely performative identity can be. Lispector asks what happens when that performance collapses.

If Clarice Lispector had been called Albert, she probably would have gained considerably more popularity among people interested in existentialism. It is almost criminal that she is not routinely mentioned alongside Kafka and Camus. The Passion According to G.H. is one of those books in which individual sentences could become entire essays.

It moves through existentialism, mysticism, psychology, identity, morality, embodiment and the strange terror of simply existing. Readers of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf may recognise a similar psychological landscape: isolation, interior monologue and the fragmentation of the socially constructed self. There are also moments that invite a Jungian reading, particularly Lispector’s confrontation with the parts of the self that have been excluded from the identity one consciously constructs. Yet Lispector ultimately goes somewhere entirely her own.

“Finding myself was already having an idea of a person and fitting myself into it. I would incarnate myself into this organised person, and didn’t even feel the great effort of construction that is living.” This may explain why so many attempts at “finding yourself” fail. We imagine ourselves as external observers trying to discover an ideal person, and then attempt to fit ourselves inside that person. Instead of discovering through trial and error what we genuinely like and dislike, we design a character.

In modern terms, it is almost like constructing yourself through Pinterest and then curating the appropriate Instagram profile around that construction: these clothes, these books, this coffee shop, this music, these holidays, these opinions, this aesthetic.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with taking inspiration from these things. The danger begins when inspiration becomes a box and the box becomes an identity that must constantly be defended.

Lispector’s biography also changes the temperature of the novel. Born into a Jewish family in what is now Ukraine, she was taken to Brazil as an infant after her family fled the violence and pogroms surrounding the Russian Civil War. Her childhood was consequently marked by migration, illness and loss. Knowing this does not mean G.H. should simply be treated as Clarice Lispector in disguise, but it makes the novel’s obsession with instability, disorganisation and belonging particularly interesting.

When your life has repeatedly been changed by events outside your control, whether through war, migration, family circumstances or work, you can begin living in anticipation of the next disruption. A strange instability remains inside you. Even when life is calm, part of you is asking what comes next. You begin reacting not to what life currently is but to what it might shortly become, rejecting the present in anticipation of a future that has not happened.

As the Arabic saying goes, the winds blow contrary to what the ships desire. Eventually there is nothing left to do except accept that life contains randomness. Lispector considers something similar when she speaks of exchanging fate for possibility. Life stops being a predetermined identity and becomes an enormous field of possibilities, but possibility itself has a danger. She asks whether she is happy because of hope, whether disappointment can paradoxically produce happiness because disappointment reopens the future. Imagine meeting someone who appears to be the perfect man or woman.

Everything makes sense on paper, yet you do not feel love. Something is missing. Eventually they do something that gives you “the ick,” and strangely you feel relief. The disappointment has given you hope again because perhaps the imaginary love you wanted is still somewhere ahead.

But this can become a form of avoidant thinking. Possibility can become an escape from accountability for our own emotions. We expect a Cinderella like transformation to descend upon our lives. The perfect relationship, career, city, body or future self that will finally produce the feeling we have been waiting for. Reality is less romantic. We participate in building the spark, and we participate in building a fulfilling life. Disappointment is part of it. The imagined future is seductive precisely because it has never had to survive contact with reality.

Lispector writes, “I am afraid to begin composing in order to be understood by the imaginary someone.” What an extraordinary line. G.H. wants to imagine herself speaking to another person so that she can understand herself almost in the third person, yet the moment she creates an observer another problem appears which is judgement.

She becomes conscious of being watched and begins to resemble a doll observing herself from outside. How much of what I am saying is what I actually feel, and how much is what I want the imaginary person to understand? How much am I performing? The person she imagines as necessary for understanding herself simultaneously threatens to contaminate that understanding because the moment another observer appears, performance begins.

This problem appears repeatedly throughout the novel. “I treat myself as others treat me.” We often construct identities from other people’s reflections. Someone repeatedly tells you that you are funny, so you become the funny person. Someone tells you that you are intelligent, so intelligence becomes something you must protect. Someone decides you are irresponsible, weak, unattractive or incapable, and suddenly you find yourself living either inside that judgement or permanently fighting against it. Yet the average human being is not a reliable narrator of another human being. Some people misunderstand you. Some project themselves onto you. Some benefit from lowering your self-esteem. Others encounter one version of you during one particular period of your life and assume that version is permanent. Why should their mirror become your identity?

This becomes even more apparent when you move between countries. Something considered normal in one culture can be strange in another.

Something admired somewhere can be embarrassing elsewhere. Even ideas about morality, success, attractiveness, responsibility and adulthood change. The mirror changes when you change rooms, so which reflection is actually you? Lispector even explores the strange power of defining yourself negatively. A person can construct an apparently strong identity entirely from negations: I am not stupid, I am not irresponsible, I am not weak, I am not poor, I am not vulgar, I am not needy. But remove everything you are not and ask what you actually are, and suddenly the answer becomes much harder. Negative identity requires an external object to oppose.

It requires other people, categories and judgements to establish its borders.

This is why G.H.’s encounter with the maid’s room is so disturbing. There is a room inside her own house that somehow does not feel like hers. Her apartment is organised according to her identity, yet this room feels outside her control. It is foreign territory inside something supposedly belonging to her. The room invites a Jungian reading of the shadow. Something that belongs to the self but has psychologically been experienced as not self. Even more disturbing is the possibility that the maid saw G.H. differently from how G.H. saw herself. Another person had lived inside her world while possessing an entirely different image of her. Which G.H. is real?

Then Lispector introduces the cockroach, and the philosophical temperature of the novel completely changes. G.H. asks what the only feeling of a cockroach is and arrives at something like the awareness of living, inseparable from its body. The cockroach does not require a biography. It does not need a career, philosophy, class, Instagram account, political ideology, aesthetic or coherent narrative about itself to justify continuing to exist.

It is alive. Its body, existence and survival are one, while humans have superimposed layer after layer upon the living organism underneath.

This is where Lispector becomes particularly interesting beside existentialists such as Sartre and Camus. Camus famously confronts the problem of how we continue living in a universe that refuses to provide an obvious ultimate meaning. Sisyphus must continue pushing his boulder. Lispector’s cockroach seems to suggest an even stranger question: why did life require an intellectual justification in the first place? The cockroach does not need a boulder to push in order to justify its existence. It simply exists and survives.

G.H.’s immediate reaction to the cockroach is equally important.

For dozens of pages she has been talking endlessly about consciousness, identity, organisation and existence, and then something disgusting appears and her body reacts. For one moment all the philosophy disappears. This reveals something that philosophical discussions about identity can occasionally forget: consciousness is attached to a brain, and the brain is attached to a body. There is an organism underneath the intellectual. The body becomes hungry, sexually attracted, exhausted and frightened. It recoils, seeks pleasure, competes, moves and tries to survive. However sophisticated the philosophy becomes, the philosopher never stops being the human animal.

The other day I went with friends to a shooting range and we fired at targets. We all had an absurd amount of fun. The same can be said of watching boxing live, riding a jet ski at intense speed, playing sports or camping. According to society’s standards, we are educated adults with postgraduate degrees and sophisticated jobs.

We can sit around discussing existentialism and asking what produces happiness, but sometimes we forget that underneath these conversations is an organism. Sometimes you do not need to philosophise your way towards happiness. Sometimes the organism needs movement, sunlight, good food, sleep, companionship, competition, novelty and physical experience. Not necessarily in a hedonistic sense, but more in the Mediterranean sense of living: treating the body almost like a child entrusted to you. Take care of it, let it move, feed it properly and allow it to experience the world, because when the body becomes miserable, consciousness does not remain unaffected.

This raises another question. Does this encounter with instinct need to happen accidentally? G.H. encounters the cockroach unexpectedly, and her body reacts before her intellectual identity has time to prepare itself. If she had known exactly what she was about to encounter, if everything had been explained beforehand and she had mentally prepared herself, would she have felt equally alive? Can these moments of contact with raw existence be deliberately created, or does preparation itself transform them back into performance?

Lispector writes, “But if I screamed even once, I might never again be able to stop.” There is something terrifying in the idea that civilisation requires us to keep certain screams secret. If I reveal exactly how needy I am, perhaps people will become frightened, so I remain within the rules. I behave. I remain intelligible. I preserve the identity others recognise. Yet underneath that organisation exists something considerably less organised.

This connects with another extraordinary line: “The possessed are not possessed by what is coming but by what is coming back.” What a phenomenal description of intense emotion, anxiety, repression or trauma. Sometimes what attacks us is not something new arriving from the future. It is something returning: something buried, unfinished, or something we thought our organised identity had successfully left behind.

Lispector also writes of wanting “the guarantee that what one sees be mixed immediately with what one feels.” This reminded me immediately of René Magritte’s The False Mirror, the enormous eye whose iris contains the sky. What we see participates in constructing what we feel, and what we repeatedly feel participates in constructing the person we understand ourselves to be. This means perception is not innocent. We select what we look at, but our environment also selects things for us. Other people direct our attention.

Culture tells us what is beautiful, successful, embarrassing, desirable or frightening. Eventually the gaze begins shaping the observer.

So perhaps we should be careful about what we repeatedly teach ourselves to see: the people we surround ourselves with, the conversations we repeatedly have, the places we visit, the media we consume and the lives against which we compare our own. Perspective shapes identity. This does not mean we can simply “control” every feeling by controlling what we see, but it does mean that the mirror we stare into every day participates in constructing the person staring back.

Lispector references the biblical idea of the unclean animal, writing that “the unclean is the root” and describing created things that “never decorated themselves” but remained as they were when they were created. This connects beautifully with the cockroach. Humans decorate existence. We classify it, organise it, name it and alter it. We even alter physical environments so they accommodate us. We install air conditioning in the desert and heating in cold climates. We construct cities, clothes, houses and technologies that place layers between the organism and its environment.

Psychologically, perhaps we do something similar to ourselves. We change our bodies, thoughts, behaviours and personalities to survive other humans. Eventually so many layers have accumulated that returning to some imagined original identity may be impossible, like a river whose course has been permanently changed.

But perhaps Lispector is not asking us to recover some pristine original self at all. Perhaps there was never a perfectly defined original identity waiting underneath the layers. There was simply life.

This becomes especially important when Lispector turns towards the present. “Dying, yes, I knew, since dying was in 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 present and I there’s no interval: it is now, in me.” The future is strangely comforting because it is imaginary. We can manipulate it.

We can create scenarios, rehearse conversations, imagine careers, relationships, children, failures and successes. Even death is imaginable because death remains somewhere ahead.

The present is more frightening because there is no distance between ourselves and it. The present is already happening.

“The time to live is a slow uninterrupted creaking of doors continuously opening wide.” That may be one of the most beautiful descriptions of time in the novel. We constantly imagine the future as a destination, yet every future we reach immediately becomes another present. We worry whether the job is right for us, whether the relationship is right for us, whether we live in the correct country, whether we have developed the correct skills.

Even on holiday we can spend our time thinking about returning to work, planning tomorrow or photographing the experience so that it can be displayed later. We can even be afraid of adulthood because imagining adulthood is safer than experiencing it. In imagination there is the perfect spouse, the perfect house and the perfect children. Reality contains tired mornings, disagreements, uncertainty and ordinary Tuesdays.

Lispector writes, “I want the present without dressing it up with a future that redeems it.” This is not simply an argument against planning or ambition. It is an attack on the idea that the future must justify the present. We can spend our entire lives telling ourselves that real life will begin after the next promotion, relationship, move, achievement or transformation. Yet the future, when it finally arrives, becomes another present, and if we have never learned to inhabit the present we simply begin constructing another future.

Perhaps sometimes we ought simply to enjoy the coffee and the atmosphere around us.

For a brief moment, nothing needs to become anything else. This connects with Lispector’s fascinating question about morality: “Would it be simplistic to think the moral problem with regard to others consists in behaving as one ought to, and the moral problem with regards to oneself is managing to feel what one ought to?” Society can regulate behaviour relatively easily. Do not steal. Do not kill. Be polite. Say thank you. Attend the funeral. But things become stranger when society begins regulating emotion. You should love this person. You should feel grateful. You should be sad. You should feel guilty. You should be happy because your life is objectively good.

This is where Lispector approaches one of the questions Camus explores in The Stranger. Society is not only disturbed when someone behaves incorrectly; it can also become disturbed when someone fails to display the expected emotional grammar.

Lispector takes that problem inward: “Am I feeling what I am feeling, or am I feeling what I would like to feel? or am I feeling what I might need to feel?” It is the identity problem transferred directly into emotion. If I learned what someone like me is supposed to feel, how do I distinguish that expectation from the feeling itself?

Her recurring imagery of blindness and disorganisation can therefore be understood as fear of encountering reality before it has been categorised. Organisation can itself become a kind of blindness. If everything already belongs to a category beautiful or ugly, successful or failed, civilised or disgusting, good or bad, me or not me then perhaps we never encounter the thing itself. We simply recognise its category and continue walking. To truly see something might require temporarily surrendering the structures through which we normally understand it, and that means accepting disorganisation.

This is why the book does such an excellent job of making the reader question the book itself. At various points I found myself wondering: is what I am reading genuinely of enormous philosophical depth, or am I simply witnessing a woman experience an extraordinary psychological crisis after doing something completely ordinary? But perhaps that uncertainty is part of what makes the novel successful. Lispector makes you question whether meaning is being discovered or manufactured even while you yourself are manufacturing interpretations of her book.

Eventually Lispector describes things returning to what they were: “The world had reclaimed its own reality.” It is almost an image of existence stripped naked, returning towards something before human intervention.

We manipulate environments to survive them, and perhaps we manipulate identities for the same reason. We learn what behaviour receives affection, what receives punishment, what makes us desirable, what makes us employable and what makes us socially intelligible. Gradually the constructed self becomes so elaborate that we mistake adaptation for essence.

Yet Lispector’s answer is not simply to destroy everything and discover the “real you.” That would merely create another identity project. The freedom may instead come from realising that no identity has to become permanent. This returns me to those childhood football matches. One day I could be Sergio Ramos and another day Kanté without feeling that one identity had betrayed the other. I could inhabit the role completely without demanding that the role explain me forever.

That possibility changes the meaning of an identity crisis. If identity is partly constructed, then its instability does not necessarily have to be terrifying. It means change is possible. If others do not consider you athletic, that does not prevent you from becoming athletic. If someone once considered you irresponsible, that judgement does not have to become fate. A career changes as you are promoted, fired, bored or redirected. Musical taste changes. Friendships change. Countries change. Bodies change. Emotional states change. Fear, shame, regret, happiness and fulfilment belong to a human emotional spectrum that is itself unstable, so perhaps none should be allowed to harden into an eternal identity.

A failed friendship does not necessarily mean you are a failure at friendship; perhaps two people simply stopped matching in values. A blocked career path does not necessarily reveal your destiny; perhaps it is a diversion. Other people’s perspectives should not be allowed to place a fate upon you. Their perception is a mirror, not a prophecy.

Yet Lispector does not leave us with infinite malleability either. The cockroach complicates that conclusion. Beneath the social identities and mirrors there remains a biological existence that we did not choose. Hunger arrives without asking what identity we curated. Fear can appear before philosophy. The body can recoil before the conscious mind has decided what it thinks. There is something beneath the constructed identities not necessarily another secret “true self,” but an organism. Perhaps biological existence itself precedes identity.

This is what makes Lispector’s reflections on neediness so radical. We spend enormous amounts of energy trying not to need. Some people constantly surround themselves with others because they are terrified of experiencing loneliness. Some constantly enter relationships because they are frightened of needing intimacy. Some constantly eat because they do not want to experience hunger. Some endlessly stimulate themselves because silence might reveal desire. We often treat neediness as evidence that something is wrong, when perhaps need is simply evidence of being alive.

Lispector writes, “And I don’t even need to care for my soul, it will inevitably care for me, and I don’t have to make a soul for myself: all I have to do is choose to live.” This might be the answer to the identity problem she began with. She does not have to manufacture a soul and then force herself to inhabit it. She does not have to become the organised person she imagined from outside. Perhaps all she has to do is choose to live.

This makes another of her ideas particularly beautiful: abandoning hope can mean accepting neediness. Hope, in this specific sense, can become the fantasy that one day I will finally be complete. One day I will completely understand myself. One day I will possess everything I need. One day I will become the correct person and then real life will begin. Abandoning that fantasy means accepting that incompleteness is not necessarily a defect. A living organism needs. Hunger reaches towards food. Loneliness reaches towards another person. Curiosity reaches towards knowledge. Desire reaches towards the world. Need creates contact.

Perhaps that is why one of my favourite passages arrives when G.H. says that because she “dived into the abyss” she began to love the abyss of which she was made. Identity can become dangerous precisely because of the pleasure of finally believing we have defined ourselves. There is comfort in saying, this is who I am. The abyss is frightening because it refuses that stability. Yet once the demand for a permanent identity disappears, the abyss can become possibility.

And perhaps this is ultimately a surprisingly hopeful book. It should not necessarily throw you into an identity crisis. It can be read from the opposite direction.

If so much of human identity is constructed, reflected and revised, then every stage of life contains the possibility of becoming capable of meeting its next challenges. The mistake is not constructing identities; humans probably cannot avoid doing that. The mistake is building upon quicksand and then pretending it is eternal stone.

This is where I cannot stop thinking about what Clarice Lispector would make of the world we live in now. G.H. was already terrified by the imaginary observer, by mirrors, by constructing herself according to how others saw her, and by the difficulty of distinguishing what she genuinely felt from what she believed she ought to feel. Yet she lived before Instagram, TikTok, algorithms and smartphones. She lived before we began carrying a mirror in our pockets that follows us everywhere.

Today the mirror does not simply reflect us. It measures us. It counts how many people liked the reflection. It shows us thousands of other lives against which to compare it. It learns what holds our attention and then decides what we will see next.

If Lispector believed that what we see becomes mixed with what we feel, what would she think of an algorithm choosing what millions of people see for hours every day? What happens to identity when the mirror is no longer passive but actively learns how to keep us looking?

And then there is artificial intelligence. G.H. imagines an invisible hand holding hers because entering the unknown alone is terrifying. Today we can literally open our phones and speak to an artificial intelligence whenever we are confused about ourselves.

We can ask it what our feelings mean, whether our relationship is right, whether our writing is good, whether our interpretation is intelligent, what career suits us and sometimes even what kind of person we appear to be. The imaginary observer Lispector feared has, in a strange way, become interactive.

So I am left with a question rather than an answer. If Clarice Lispector were alive today, what would she make of all this? Would she see AI as another hand helping us enter the unknown, or as another observer preventing us from ever entering it alone? Would social media appear to her as the ultimate extension of the identity problem she was already describing sixty years ago? And if so much of identity is created through mirrors, what happens to us when we spend hours every day staring into a mirror that is staring back, learning from us, choosing what we see, and quietly helping us decide who we are?