colin lavery

It’s unlikely that I forget the phrase “wan little husks of ‘auto fiction’”, anytime soon, and I highly doubt whether that’s a good thing for my literary brain. For the luckily unfamiliar, I am referring to this tweet from Joyce Carol Oates:

Around the time that she tweeted this, Patricia Lockwood (the patron saint of Online Authors, imo) had just released No One Is Talking About This , now shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, but also precisely the kind of wan little husk of autofiction that Oates was trying to criticize in her unfortunate tweet. In other words, it was clear that this tweet was mostly old Ms. Oates shaking a weakly-clenched fist at the new kids on her block.

The Passion According to G.H is not autofiction by any stretch of the imagination, but at just 193 pages, this book falls closer to the “little husk” side of the spectrum, especially compared to the tomes of Dostoevsky or Joyce. Like most contemporary autofiction, it reads mostly as a formal challenge to the novel; there is only one ‘character’, no plot to speak of, and uses an extremely blurry, porous line to distinguish between imagination and reality. Despite being written before autofiction gained the notoriety it currently enjoys, The Passion refutes every claim that Oates makes in her stupid fucking tweet.

Originally published in 1964, this book read like an early predecessor to autofiction. Unlike the great, ambitious novels of Dostoyevksy[sic], Woolf, Joyce, or Faulkner, Lispector’s masterpiece does not spend any time on character development. Our narrator’s name is simply G.H., not even distinguished enough to earn a first name like Kafka’s Josef K. The only characters who have so few identifiable traits that come to mind are Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but they at least get to talk to each other and differentiate themselves through dialogue. G.H. is not so lucky.

In lieu of a traditional physical description, we learn only that G.H. roughly identifies with a white (easily painted over) chalk (impermanent) outline (no real features) left on the wall of the maid’s quarters after the prior maid’s departure. This single room ends up being the only setting for the rest of the novel, where G.H. kills a cockroach that emerges from a wardrobe. The rest of the plot consists of G.H. smoking cigarettes and contemplating the cockroach’s life and death, failing to identify what it is that makes G.H. human and therefore essentially different from the roach.

Formally, G.H. feels like an indispensable step in the evolution of the novel, bridging the gap between the traditional works that Oates enjoys, Ulysses maybe, and the increasingly popular wan little husks of autofiction that figure to keep winning prizes through the 2020’s. Rather than developing a character over the course of a novel – or even two novels, as is the case with Stephen Dedalus (originally from a work of autofiction, I might add!!!) – Lispector writes her whole novel with nothing more than a chalk outline standing in as her hero and narrator. An outline that contemporary authors are starting to fill in with details from their own personal lives.

Parts of this novel seem to reply directly to Oates’s claims about these scary new literary forms. To Oates’s assertion that paragraph breaks serve only to make the book appear longer, Lispector, or G.H., says, “A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses — in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.”

Attempting to recapture the fleeting moments of coherent vision that Lispector finds in these blank spaces would betray the point of this novel. Instead, I will simply describe her musings as a compelling philosophical argument for a kind of active existentialism. While other authors and thinkers were recoiling from the destructive effects of Deconstructionist thought, Lispector seems to be embracing the void that we find ourselves at when we keep pushing our intellectual inquiry further and further past the point of no return. Immediately upon finishing, I knew that this was a near-perfect novel, and a testament to what can be accomplished if we stop clinging to revisionist literary histories that demand every novel to have a fully developed character or plot.