Outside and Inside: The Writing of Clarice Lispector and How I Keep Getting Locked Out
"I locked my husband in a closet one fine winter morning...Inside that space with him were two pairs of shoes, a warm coat, a chamber pot, a bottle of water, peanut butter and a box of crackers. The lock was strong but the keyhole was the kind you can both peek through and pick. We had already looked simultaneously, our eyes darkening to the point of blindness..."
- Fanne Howe, Indivisible
"I opened the narrow wardrobe door a crack, and the dark inside came out like a breath of air. I tried to open it a little more, but the door was blocked because it hit against the foot of the bed. All of my head that would fit in I stuck through the crack that the door made. And, as though the darkness inside were spying on me, we remained for an instant spying on each other without seeing each other."
- Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
This was the kind of dream which goes on even after you have woken up: I dreamed that I was lost in my own house. I was looking for a balcony, I found three but I couldn't open their doors. I was peering through them, blinded by the outside light which was enveloped with layers of glass denying me the bless of entry. I felt like the apartment was revolving around me, a storm of glass doors which won't open. There's a quality to dreaming that either confines me inside myself, or allows me to watch over events like a spectator from the outside. This dream has given me a new experience: I was neither "out" nor "in." The balconies could be defined as rooms inside my house, but when I go on the balcony, I would write that I go "outside." It could be said that I was technically inside my house but since I'm lost and denied entry, I must be on the outside. How can I move from an outside to an outside? What an impossible movement, an impossible dream. Three spaces with glass doors, all this light surrounding me from all directions, and yet I can't go out. Light and transparency could be agents of violence too, a prison made of glass walls. My own hoouse expelled me. This makes me dizzy, I shall tell you another story.
Later on that day, I went outside on the balcony. I touched the cold glass of the sliding door and opened it, allowing myself what was denied me in my dream. I closed the door behind me, lit a cigarette and spent these few burning minutes staring at the lights coming from the cars passing by. It was dark and all the blinding light from the dream was missing. When I was finished, I turned around and pushed the glass with my stained fingers so that the door would slide open, it didn't. The door was stuck. I tried again but with no use, I've got myself locked out. The reversal of my dream occurred: I'm outside but I can't go inside. "Should I cry out for help?" How silly a thought it is, to cry for help when you are still "inside" your house. With the power of claustrophobia and sweaty palms, I pushed the door one last time and it finally opened. Now I was back inside. I got out. I got out to the inside. I was inside a space which was outside but I wanted to get outside of it so I would be inside my house but... I am dizzy again.
In my dream and outside of it, I was alone. The sinister forces which locked me out and allowed me entry were governed by chance, and the states I was thrown into in my movement between outside and inside were the effect of my own claustrophobia and my own perception of space. Thinking about inside and outside as interchangeable is a simplification, thinking about them as definite spaces which are completely separated is also inaccurate. I've experienced being inside the outside; being expelled but nonetheless roaming inside your expulsion. It feels like reading a book which excludes you from it's analysis, a prison made of glass walls. But I've only encountered myself, I was the "other" of my own little world. In what follows, I'll try to tackle these concepts using a reading of The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, a mystical novel about a woman who gets lost inside her own house.
The novel is narrated by G.H. a woman living alone in a fancy building in Rio. She begins telling her story with a gesture that made me shudder; she asks the reader to hold her hand. From the begining, we stand at the doorstep of an experience that requires holding the hand of the other, bearing with them and accepting to see what they have seen, to see with their eyes. I hold her hand and she starts telling me what had happened the previous day. G.H. opens her maid's room for the first time in years, expecting it to be dark and cluttered with things. Standing at the doorstep, she opens the room and a strong blinding light gushes out, there was nothing but a wardrobe, a bed and a mural on the wall. Where has all the darkness went? How did this room change so much? Her entire order has been disrupted, the order of the universe has been messed with. The sun itself has been displaced: "But here the sun didn't seem to come from outside to inside: this seemed to be the place where the sun itself was, fixed and unmoving, with a harsh light, as though the room didn't close its eyes, even at night." For G.H. the room is no longer a part of her house, it's not even a part of the building anymore. She describes the room as a minaret that has been lifted above all space, a bright and dry desert. By what strength can she enter a room that is outside and high above? She remained at the doorstep. The mural on the white dry walls is of a man, a woman, and their dog. The maid who occupied the room has left her marks on the walls and on the very time of that space. Who are these people? How long have they been there? When did they have enough time to be together and adopt a dog? If that room is where the sun is, the center of the solar system, then this mural must have been there for billions of years. "The room bothered me physically, as though the sound of the scratching of dry charcoal on the dried whitewash still hung in the air." This strangeness flooded with light becomes a source, something happened in that room which turned it into a center. Natural sun-light comes from outside, but the intense brightness of the room turned it in a violent manner, into a source of artificial light as strong as the sun. This is the power of the strange and the other, the maid had transformed the room by letting all that light flood it in a violent harsh way and these scratches left on the wall seem to leave a mark on the time the room occupies, not only does the room become a minaret in the middle of a desert, but time itself becomes disoriented. The room is filled with sounds, voices and shadows which are foreign to that woman's house.These sounds which fill the air aren't supposed to be there in the first place, they shouldn't have existed. The room has been detached by force, uprooted from it's place, and transformed completely by a stranger who doesn't live there anymore. Now G.H. is standing on the doorstep of a room that is "outside", how can she move from outside to outside? how can this impossible movement be allowed to happen? Moved by rage and hatred, which this othering has allowed her to feel, she decides that in order to force that room back inside her house, she would need to flood it with water, wash away the mural, demolish the minaret, and fill up the wardrobe with water till it's wood rot. I'm a reader outside of all this narrative, but I hold her hand as she finally steps into the room.
"In spite of having come into the room, I seemed to have come into a nothingness. Even inside it I some staying outside. As though it was not deep enough to hold me and left parts of me still in the hallway, in the greatest rejection I had ever experienced: I didn't fit." The room still rejects her presence, this distance can only be destroyed by a strong sense of intimacy. She thought that the wardrobe after being emptied from water, would need waxing from the inside and the outside. In this manner she would enter the room from the crack of a wooden wordrobe. An intimate plan to get her thoughts together and get that room back into her own home. She would rub the wood and give it a shine, welcome it back home and be welcomed by it. But as she approached the crack of the woredrobe, the way one approaches the light at the end of a tunnel, the body of a cockroach peered out, black dark eyes and a thick layered body moved right next to her eyes. In fear, she slammed the wardrobe's door shut, stumbled and fell and became cornered between the door, the wardrobe, and the bed. The wardrobe's door squashed the cockroach and it started dying right before her sight, oozing out the matter which filled it. Even cockroaches have an inside. There's no turning back after this, she was first rejected from the room by it's unexpected brightness and emptiness and now she's stuck with a creature that most likely rejects her as well. The oldest creature on earth, the cockroach had survived the dinosaurs. It now lives in a dark wardrobe that is surrounded by the brightest light ever. It's as if the dark cluttered room the woman expected to find, has been sucked in and absorbed into that narrow wardrobe, leaving all that light behind as a trail. All the tension at the doorstep of the room had led to this sole encounter with the cockroach, and now the protagonist needs to face this immense experience and endure it. This encounter has ironically invited her back into the room, for she spends hours with the cockroach scrutinizing every detail of it and reflecting all these remarks back to herself. I don't know if I could still hold her hand.
"Cockroaches don't have noses. I looked at it, with that mouth of its, and its eyes: it looked like a dying mulatto woman. But its eyes were black and radiant. The eyes of a girl about to be married. Each eye itself looked like a cockroach. Each fringed, dark, live, dusted eye. And the other one just the same. Two cockroaches mounted on the cockroach, and each eye reproduced the entire animal" She looked at it enough to realize that she is looking at life itself. She can't kill it now, and she can't save it either, it's dying. She can't destroy the room, nor kill herself. If only that room wasn't a minaret, if only it wasn't outside, she would have killed that insect without even thinking about it. But all this violence that has been done to the room and to herself, has allowed her to be helplessly attached to that cockroach, her only hope to getting back inside. She ends up eating a part of it, this oozing matter which she calls "Life." By the nature of this mystical experience, the body of the cockroach, like the room, has been elevated into a minaret, and the woman's salvation has been complete.
