A racial reading of "The Passion According to G.H.": reinterpreting Clarice Lispector's novel through of racism studies

Abstract

This discussion focuses on the analysis of The Passion According to G.H., by the modernist author Clarice Lispector, and promotes a reading of the racial issue in the novel. The interpretation analyzes the figure of Janair, a black maid, who, although not present in the plot of the novel, marks her participation through an inscription she made in charcoal, left on the wall of the maid's room. This attitude moved the organized and monotonous life of the protagonist of Clarice Lispector's novel, making her uncomfortable, angry and imagining that the maid hated her, which indicates that these feelings against this absent character can be analyzed as images of racism. In order to do this, the reading goes through the discussions of authors who debate the issue of race, such as Frantz Fanon, who in his text The lived experience of the Negro is a kind of confessional theory. To this end, the work brings the works together in order to think about and/or rethink Lispector's novel, analyzing the visions of G.H., Janair and Fanon as ways of translating racism. Thus, in addition to reading Frantz Fanon (2008), authors such as Benedito Nunes (1995, 2009), Alfredo Bosi (2017), Evando Nascimento (2012) were used as a theoretical scope, as well as reference to official documents such as demographic data (2019) and revisiting the literary text, with the interest of promoting an interpretation from the racial bias about this work by Clarice Lispector.