1 00:00:05,190 --> 00:00:09,250 Claire. Hello. Um, I'm so pleased. Um, you're here with. 2 00:00:09,270 --> 00:00:14,490 Been talking about Kafka and the kind of traces that he leaves in all kinds of different cultures. 3 00:00:14,950 --> 00:00:20,400 Uh, and you're here to talk about Brazilian, um, literature, which is just fascinating and brilliant, 4 00:00:20,790 --> 00:00:25,610 and particularly Clarice Lispector, who is someone I hadn't really read and had always wanted to. 5 00:00:25,620 --> 00:00:31,560 So I'm really glad I got the opportunity. Can you tell us a little bit about, um, her and then we'll think about the work? 6 00:00:32,500 --> 00:00:40,680 So, yes. Um, so Clarice Lispector, um, was born in 1920, in the Ukraine to a Jewish family. 7 00:00:41,010 --> 00:00:45,960 And, um, they escaped, uh, the pogroms to to Brazil. 8 00:00:46,140 --> 00:00:53,340 A lot of, uh, Jewish people escaped from Ukraine and Eastern Europe at that time in the 1920s. 9 00:00:53,790 --> 00:01:02,910 Um, and the family settled in northeastern Brazil and then moved to Rio when the mother died and goes to study law like Kafka. 10 00:01:03,450 --> 00:01:11,460 Um, and then in 1943, um, she'd worked a little bit as a journalist, one of the first journalists in Brazil. 11 00:01:11,700 --> 00:01:15,720 But she married, um, a former classmate who became a diplomat. 12 00:01:16,260 --> 00:01:27,510 Um, 1943, she published her first novel, and with her diplomat husband, she travelled first to Italy, where the war was coming to an end. 13 00:01:28,140 --> 00:01:35,610 Then they lived in Bern, in Switzerland, um, London, very briefly during the GATT talks after the war. 14 00:01:35,970 --> 00:01:44,490 Uh, and then he was posted to Washington, DC. Um, uh, and so she was away from Brazil for 16 years. 15 00:01:45,060 --> 00:01:50,910 Um, and she kept, uh, sort of one foot in the press, uh, and in the publishing industry by, 16 00:01:51,300 --> 00:01:58,290 uh, by bringing out short stories, um, uh, and writing for various magazines. 17 00:01:58,650 --> 00:02:06,580 And then she returned definitively in 1959 and started to work more seriously as an author. 18 00:02:06,600 --> 00:02:15,780 She couldn't work full time as an author because, uh, it was very difficult to to be to, to make one's living just as an author. 19 00:02:15,900 --> 00:02:25,350 So she did a lot of journalism as well. And translations. Um, and in 1964 she published this novel, The Passion According to G.H., 20 00:02:25,350 --> 00:02:30,120 which was her fifth novel and the first one that she wrote in the first person. 21 00:02:31,170 --> 00:02:42,090 Um, and it's a novel that has kind of minimal plot, um, in which the character, the protagonist, who we only know by her initials, G.H. 22 00:02:42,720 --> 00:02:47,250 Um, it's it's a a day when she has nothing to do. 23 00:02:47,340 --> 00:02:51,530 She takes the phone off the hook. She. There's nobody else in the house. 24 00:02:51,540 --> 00:02:55,290 And she decides she's going to clean her maid's room. 25 00:02:55,710 --> 00:02:59,280 Um, she's just. The maid has left. She's been, um. 26 00:02:59,520 --> 00:03:06,990 She has the maid has left, and she decides that she's going to clean the room, ready for the next maid to come. 27 00:03:07,620 --> 00:03:15,730 Um, and when she gets to the maid's room, she finds, uh, an unexpected mural on the wall. 28 00:03:15,750 --> 00:03:19,650 She finds, uh, lots of surprises. 29 00:03:20,700 --> 00:03:28,350 Tiny things. Um, which which spark off a kind of existential crisis in her. 30 00:03:29,070 --> 00:03:34,889 Um, and one of the things that she finds when she opens the wardrobe door is a cockroach crawling out. 31 00:03:34,890 --> 00:03:40,170 And this, I think, is a clear reference to to the creature in metamorphosis. 32 00:03:40,770 --> 00:03:45,470 Um, and all sorts of emotions go through her mind because she. 33 00:03:45,480 --> 00:03:48,600 This is the insect, the creature that she fears the most. 34 00:03:48,600 --> 00:03:56,670 She has, uh, like a phobia of cockroaches. And so she builds up the strength, and she slams the wardrobe door on the cockroach. 35 00:03:57,480 --> 00:04:08,790 And then the rest of the novel is sort of her looking at the dying cockroach looking out of the window, vomiting, falling asleep. 36 00:04:09,030 --> 00:04:12,450 But the narrative is, is also it's all first person. 37 00:04:12,450 --> 00:04:23,820 And it's it kind of goes in spirals as different things come into her mind about death, existence, um, femininity, subjectivity. 38 00:04:24,240 --> 00:04:30,210 Um, and she sort of starts to think of herself, uh, in a completely new way. 39 00:04:30,240 --> 00:04:39,630 So it's it's almost like her, her character, uh, dissolves and she rebuilds herself. 40 00:04:40,710 --> 00:04:45,480 Um. That's fascinating. Um, you said there's a clear reference to Kafka. 41 00:04:45,810 --> 00:04:51,480 Um, and when I was sort of thinking about this, to me it seems completely obvious since there's a clear reference to Kafka, 42 00:04:51,480 --> 00:04:56,670 but I don't think it's generally acknowledged. And she didn't write about it in those terms. 43 00:04:56,670 --> 00:05:01,560 Or, um, so is it is it a Kafka story? 44 00:05:01,620 --> 00:05:05,290 I think there are lots of things in common. I think we can say, you know, there's. As an insect. 45 00:05:05,710 --> 00:05:10,690 There's a, um. Most of the action takes place in a very small enclosed room. 46 00:05:11,290 --> 00:05:21,700 Um, it's about, uh, a metamorphosis, a change, a transformation that takes place over the course of the of the novel or the or the short story, 47 00:05:22,060 --> 00:05:26,410 but at the same time, there's no when I said a clear reference, uh, 48 00:05:26,410 --> 00:05:32,710 what I meant was she mentions metamorphosis several times, and she also talks about. 49 00:05:33,550 --> 00:05:41,620 So the the woman when she's kind of gazing at the cockroach, uh, almost falling in love with it, 50 00:05:41,620 --> 00:05:50,529 identifying with it, and, um, uh, she, she sort of becomes the cockroach, um, although she doesn't. 51 00:05:50,530 --> 00:05:55,720 So it's it's not like Gregor, who wakes up and has become an insect. 52 00:05:56,020 --> 00:06:07,000 She is kind of divesting herself of her humanity to to try and understand what it might be like to be this prehistoric creature that survives, 53 00:06:07,480 --> 00:06:12,490 uh, earthquakes that's been here since, uh, that's been on the Earth for millennia. 54 00:06:13,030 --> 00:06:15,549 Um, and is a female creature. 55 00:06:15,550 --> 00:06:29,140 So, uh, in Portuguese, Bharata is a feminine noun, um, and she imagines this, this creature, um, the cockroach having hundreds and hundreds of babies. 56 00:06:29,500 --> 00:06:35,649 And, uh, she looks at it in minute detail and sees the hairs on its legs, um, 57 00:06:35,650 --> 00:06:44,020 and particularly the white oozing goo that comes out of the cockroaches back where it's been smashed. 58 00:06:44,620 --> 00:06:54,790 Um. I'm sorry. I've got, uh, distracted by the by the, um, the disgusting part of the story, but, um, some people, I mean, 59 00:06:54,790 --> 00:06:59,260 I've seen references to her being described as Brazil's Kafka, 60 00:06:59,680 --> 00:07:06,700 which I think is a very reductive, um, description because she's so much more than just that. 61 00:07:07,060 --> 00:07:15,460 I think there are references to, um, the metamorphosis in this novel, but it is not meant to be a rewriting of it. 62 00:07:15,580 --> 00:07:23,570 I think anyone who links the insect and the sort of communing with the insect in both stories can see, 63 00:07:23,590 --> 00:07:28,330 can see there are links, but it's not an exercise in rewriting that story. 64 00:07:29,230 --> 00:07:37,180 I mean, I guess in a way Kafka makes the the younger who is, um, could see for the monstrous vermin. 65 00:07:37,180 --> 00:07:42,700 I mean, he doesn't actually call it necessarily an insect and not a cockroach and, you know, not a specific insect. 66 00:07:43,000 --> 00:07:48,460 Um, so he uses that. He uses that as a sort of metaphor for looking at humanity that, doesn't he? 67 00:07:48,730 --> 00:07:53,709 And then in a sense, she's doing the same, but it's not her. It's it's that sort of part from her. 68 00:07:53,710 --> 00:07:56,560 There's a distance. Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely. 69 00:07:56,800 --> 00:08:07,690 Um, so she sort of transfers her feelings onto it and, and tries to understand its life and kind of repents of, 70 00:08:09,520 --> 00:08:18,129 of killing it, but also repents of all the, uh, the sort of the shallowness, the the frivolity of her life. 71 00:08:18,130 --> 00:08:25,870 She is she starts to sort of do accounts, as it were, and trying to understand all the things that she's all the way she's gone wrong. 72 00:08:26,500 --> 00:08:34,090 Um, another thing that she does is to link the cockroach to the maid who's just left, and there's a whole, uh, 73 00:08:34,090 --> 00:08:39,760 sort of question about race there because the the maid is Afro-Brazilian, and, 74 00:08:39,940 --> 00:08:47,829 um, uh, G.H. first can't remember her name and then can't remember her face. 75 00:08:47,830 --> 00:08:58,840 And this sort of shows a portrait of very kind of, uh, blasé, um, middle class life where the maids are disposable, they come and go, um, 76 00:08:59,110 --> 00:09:10,270 but by linking the cockroach, which is sort of becomes almost an all powerful symbol, a scarab beetle that survives, that has lots of children. 77 00:09:10,720 --> 00:09:16,000 Um, uh, she links that to the maid, um, 78 00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:24,340 and gives them gives the maid a kind of autonomy that she didn't have when she was present in, um, in the apartment. 79 00:09:24,790 --> 00:09:33,100 And it's sort of creepy that in a way that the maid has created this world within the woman's apartment that she doesn't know about, 80 00:09:33,220 --> 00:09:35,170 which will challenge her. Very cool. 81 00:09:35,380 --> 00:09:41,590 And of course, in the Kafka, it's the maid that gets rid of dry clothes almost at the end and from his dirty little room. 82 00:09:41,920 --> 00:09:47,680 Um, so there's a power in that subservient role as well, isn't there? 83 00:09:47,950 --> 00:09:54,730 Yes, yes. Um, so the maid Jenny has, uh, has left the room completely clean. 84 00:09:55,060 --> 00:09:58,600 Not not as, uh, expected. 85 00:09:58,600 --> 00:10:04,299 Dirty, unkempt. Um, she's cleaned it and she's left, uh, a mural on the wall. 86 00:10:04,300 --> 00:10:12,410 She. Storm. Three figures which are not sort it, not hieroglyphics, but they're facing the viewer they're facing. 87 00:10:12,920 --> 00:10:19,790 And she is completely shocked by this. I always think of, um, you know, the outlines, the white outlines. 88 00:10:19,790 --> 00:10:23,960 When you see, when you've seen the dead, a dead body, a crime scene kind of image. 89 00:10:24,470 --> 00:10:27,620 But it will be a crime scene. Yes it will. 90 00:10:27,620 --> 00:10:30,620 Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. 91 00:10:30,620 --> 00:10:35,450 So, yes, the maid has this. She's a kind of ghost that haunts the story as well. 92 00:10:37,040 --> 00:10:45,530 I want to ask you about the, um, the sort of the first person voice as well, because you said it's a sort of interior, uh, 93 00:10:45,800 --> 00:10:55,430 monologue focussed on this dying creature, um, but spanning kind of time and space and, uh, and and undoing herself in Kafka. 94 00:10:55,440 --> 00:11:04,520 I mean, it's all very deadpan, it's very brief, it's very deadpan, and we're aware of the human within the insect and and so on. 95 00:11:04,670 --> 00:11:11,629 But but this is a much more, um, expansive, complicated language. 96 00:11:11,630 --> 00:11:21,110 I found it quite hard, going to be honest. Sometimes I think we're supposed to I think she's she's working through a lot of problems there. 97 00:11:21,110 --> 00:11:24,620 It's to use a kind of psychoanalytical, um, jargon. 98 00:11:24,830 --> 00:11:37,370 She's she's she's thinking through things. She's asking so many questions, and she's sort of as well, she's, um, she's kind of questioning language. 99 00:11:37,790 --> 00:11:41,060 So she asks lots of questions, like, who am I? Why am I here? 100 00:11:41,330 --> 00:11:48,440 But she's also trying to find the words to to say who she is, uh, and to say who she wants to be. 101 00:11:49,010 --> 00:11:57,440 Um, so the the language is sometimes it sounds philosophical, sometimes it sounds and psychoanalytical. 102 00:11:57,440 --> 00:12:00,049 Sometimes she, she needs to talk to someone. 103 00:12:00,050 --> 00:12:09,650 So she's created a two, um, an interlocutor who's a a you and she, and she says, I can't narrate this without holding someone's hand. 104 00:12:09,950 --> 00:12:16,040 And she's telling this sort of build up in the first few sections where she's, um, 105 00:12:17,660 --> 00:12:22,309 getting up the strength to talk about this traumatic experience that happened yesterday. 106 00:12:22,310 --> 00:12:28,040 So it's very fresh in her mind. And we knowing that we know that she has survived this traumatic experience. 107 00:12:28,040 --> 00:12:37,549 But we think, what could it possibly be? And I think we probably don't think it's going to be something as maybe as trivial as killing an insect. 108 00:12:37,550 --> 00:12:44,030 But the way that the story is built up, we we feel the drama of it as well. 109 00:12:44,750 --> 00:12:51,590 Um, and the way it's constructed, it's 33 sections and it's sort of takes this. 110 00:12:51,830 --> 00:12:55,070 I keep doing this, these gestures because it's a sort of looping form. 111 00:12:55,400 --> 00:13:03,290 So it's a short they're short sections, but the last line of one section becomes the first section of the next. 112 00:13:03,290 --> 00:13:14,149 So again, we're sort of swept along in, in these, uh, jerking, um, stages as she moves towards the, 113 00:13:14,150 --> 00:13:18,650 the, the actions, which are first of all, to, to kill the cockroach. 114 00:13:18,920 --> 00:13:23,270 And then I don't want to spoil what she does next, but she, um, 115 00:13:23,270 --> 00:13:33,050 there's another kind of moment of, uh, of of reckoning, um, which is what cleanses her. 116 00:13:33,170 --> 00:13:40,880 Uh, and then she's able to move towards a sort of calmer, um, finale, as it were. 117 00:13:41,240 --> 00:13:48,889 And another thing about the the narrative, it begins with dashes, six dashes, and it ends with six dashes, 118 00:13:48,890 --> 00:13:59,150 as if we're sort of being sewn into a story or dropped into this, this, uh, account that's being told to someone. 119 00:13:59,840 --> 00:14:07,790 And we like to sort of think it's being told to us, but it's something that she's, she's she's speaking to an audience. 120 00:14:07,790 --> 00:14:17,330 She needs to tell this story. Um, but, um, but because there are so many questions, I think we, we get lost among the questions. 121 00:14:18,020 --> 00:14:28,220 Yeah. Can I ask, um, also about biblical allusions because, um, metamorphosis is often, um, interpreted in a kind of religious way. 122 00:14:28,610 --> 00:14:33,799 Uh, the father throws an apple into the back of Gregor where it rots. 123 00:14:33,800 --> 00:14:38,930 And when he's nailed somewhere, isn't it? Yes. Exactly as if you were nailed. 124 00:14:38,930 --> 00:14:46,610 That's right. And, uh, and, uh, he dies, you know, with, uh, three strikes in a sort of elevated tone, 125 00:14:46,610 --> 00:14:53,090 with three strikes with the strikes of the of the of the, um, sorry, the strikes of the clock. 126 00:14:53,120 --> 00:14:58,999 And, um, so it's often been interpreted in a kind of religious way that he might represent guilt, 127 00:14:59,000 --> 00:15:04,370 which is a short death, or guilt is a key word, but it's a very different kind of relationship. 128 00:15:04,420 --> 00:15:10,840 With religion, perhaps because of the very different context in this, in this, in the passion, according to G.H. 129 00:15:11,410 --> 00:15:20,950 Yeah. I mean, right from the title we can see that there's a biblical allusion, uh, and that and we recognise the, uh, the similarity to the Gospels, 130 00:15:20,950 --> 00:15:32,020 the, the passion according to, um, Matthew, Mark or Luke or John or the Saint John Passion, which is, um, a wonderful, uh, piece of choral music. 131 00:15:32,440 --> 00:15:41,920 Um, so we recognise that formula and think, oh, this is, this is somebody relating a very important event that involved, 132 00:15:42,820 --> 00:15:53,140 um, suffering because the root of, uh, of passion, um, is, uh, is suffering, undergoing an experience. 133 00:15:53,800 --> 00:15:57,700 Um, so we know that it's according to G. 134 00:15:57,700 --> 00:16:03,250 H. But she's also the one that is undergoing the the experience. 135 00:16:03,760 --> 00:16:11,770 Can I take you in a completely different direction and say, when you were telling me the plot, um, you were laughing and I was laughing? 136 00:16:12,100 --> 00:16:15,969 Um, we've just been thinking about humour and Kafka. 137 00:16:15,970 --> 00:16:22,600 How much humour is there in this? Not much, but it's interesting the way you presented it. 138 00:16:22,690 --> 00:16:34,480 It was with humour. Yes, yes, perhaps I, I tend to be quite ironic about, uh, a lot of things, but it's, it's the idea, I suppose, of trying to. 139 00:16:34,570 --> 00:16:41,410 What I ask students to do sometimes is to summarise. If can they summarise the novels that they've been studying in one line? 140 00:16:41,980 --> 00:16:45,100 Um, what would you say is the story of this book? 141 00:16:45,580 --> 00:16:52,060 And, you know, if you say if you try and express that to someone else and say it's about a woman who kills a cockroach, 142 00:16:52,300 --> 00:16:56,590 they can laugh and say, but that doesn't that doesn't constitute a plot. 143 00:16:57,250 --> 00:17:01,840 But there is a sort of absurd weight to it, isn't there? Which can be quite funny, maybe, I don't know. 144 00:17:01,990 --> 00:17:06,250 Well, then, let me ask you a different final question, which is how much does it matter that she's an artist? 145 00:17:07,390 --> 00:17:12,250 Uh, I think I think that's to do with the construction and deconstruction of the self. 146 00:17:12,640 --> 00:17:20,170 She starts at the beginning. She's moulding these little bowls, and she she thinks about how she likes to put order into chaos, 147 00:17:20,440 --> 00:17:23,440 which is another way of the sculpting that she does. 148 00:17:23,920 --> 00:17:32,230 Um, and I suppose her her greatest work is, is herself while cutting a slice through the, 149 00:17:32,650 --> 00:17:43,810 the poor cockroach, but also sort of cleansing herself of what she used to be and adopting a new self. 150 00:17:44,200 --> 00:17:53,260 So she's, she's she realises that she's been to, um, she depends upon what others think of her. 151 00:17:54,430 --> 00:18:05,200 And, uh, she's been playing a role and that's where the, the, the, um, initials come in as well because she, she talks about how, who is she? 152 00:18:05,200 --> 00:18:08,800 She is her initials on which are embossed on her suitcases. 153 00:18:09,520 --> 00:18:14,260 Um, she's reduced to these sort of two letters rather than having a name. 154 00:18:14,830 --> 00:18:19,960 Um, I think that's part of the depersonalisation and the the dehumanisation. 155 00:18:20,500 --> 00:18:24,100 So it's liberation rather than punishment? Yes, I think it is. 156 00:18:24,100 --> 00:18:27,040 Liberation rather than punishment is a kind of redemption. 157 00:18:27,610 --> 00:18:34,600 Um, another crime which takes place, which is also linked to the femininity, is the fact that she's, well, a crime. 158 00:18:34,610 --> 00:18:42,610 Um, it's sort of portrayed in terms of guilt that she had a, uh, an abortion at some time in her life, 159 00:18:42,790 --> 00:18:47,920 which links her to the the cockroach, because that's been squashed in its in its middle. 160 00:18:48,520 --> 00:18:54,580 Um, and so she, she's, she's kind of rationalising that. 161 00:18:55,430 --> 00:18:59,650 And that's another part of what she's, um, working through. 162 00:19:00,340 --> 00:19:10,200 And of course, in Kafka, um, the family is deeply entrenched in this idea of, uh, liberation and, uh, and punishment. 163 00:19:10,210 --> 00:19:13,930 Um, how what's the role of the family in this one in this time? 164 00:19:14,110 --> 00:19:21,850 They're completely absent. Um, so indeed, she has terminated the pregnancy, so she she's completely alone. 165 00:19:22,090 --> 00:19:31,840 Um, and that was something that I noticed as well, that in Kafka, it's all about how at the end, they're actually better off without him. 166 00:19:33,100 --> 00:19:39,640 Um, and I think is is all about solitude. 167 00:19:40,300 --> 00:19:45,980 Um, she she needs an interlocutor to speak to, but she doesn't have any family structure around her. 168 00:19:46,000 --> 00:19:51,070 She's. She's an independent working woman, independently wealthy. 169 00:19:51,460 --> 00:19:57,010 So she's in sort of financially, um, uh, independent. 170 00:19:57,010 --> 00:20:04,140 So she doesn't need to rely on anyone. But I think that's another thing that she learns through the experience with the cockroach that she does. 171 00:20:04,390 --> 00:20:07,570 Need someone to talk to. Brilliant. 172 00:20:07,630 --> 00:20:11,020 And it's been great fun talking to you. So thank you very much, Claire. 173 00:20:11,560 --> 00:20:12,100 Thank you.