Emotion, obsession, and repression is an endless cycle far too familiar for me. Growing up in America you tend to learn the value of putting your nose to the grindstone and never complaining even when you’re bleeding everywhere—literally or metaphorically. This way of thinking seeps into everyday life until most emotion is squished to the far corners of your mind.
Clarice Lispector’s “The Fifth Story” is a tale of obsession, emotion, and repression. Throughout the two-page story, the narrator picks apart the killing of a group of cockroaches by retelling the event at least five times. “The Fifth Story” may seem simplistic, but reminiscent of the many ways people hide the inner workings of their minds, and for myself sparked a reflection into my own repressed emotions.
The first story is minimal, the simplest version of the events that transpired and the most objective of them all. After this, the narrator descends into the emotion of the event and their imagination of it. I can’t speak for the entire world, but in my lived experience, strong emotions are commonly thought of as undesirable. I would be remiss to ignore the patriarchal element of this, many emotions like anxiety, sadness, or even excess amounts of joy are deemed as being more feminine and women, as a whole, more sensitive. The narrator of “The Fifth Story” is genderless in the translation I read, aside from one potential clue: “…my double existence as a witch.” (Lispector 2) This may indicate the narrator is a woman, but for my examination it doesn’t quite matter. While on the reverse, men are typically meant to be either stoic or angry and nothing else, the dismissing of emotions affects people in varying degrees, but the biggest, across gender, is repression.
Our narrator begins with the facts before, in the second story, rolling out the somewhat acceptable emotion of anger and disgust toward the pests invading their home: “A vague loathing had taken possession of me, a sense of outrage.” (1) The narrator is intense and the loathing they feel is maybe stronger than warranted, but it’s not necessarily an overreaction. Connecting this to my personal experience, I have a bit of a laundry list of mood disorders, boiling down to my inability to properly regulate my emotions, most things are either not felt at all or felt too intensely to be seen in the light of day.
Instead, I pick them apart to be more palatable. Most people will understand annoyance at a plan being canceled when you’re already at the venue, but blinding rage where you need to sit down before you pass out is a little on the extreme side. Simple emotions are the only thing I can show if I want to keep any semblance of a social life. The same is true even for people who aren’t mentally ill. Bursting into tears in the middle of Biol 190 might be understandable but it will likely make most people wonder how immature you are and if you should be in college at all. Likewise, wanting to murder every cockroach on Earth might be something anyone could say, but being taken possession of by that feeling is something that might lean on too intense.
Obsession is another facet of this, in this case it is tied closely with imagination. A kinder word might be preoccupation, but obsession is commonly defined as overthinking disturbing topics which cockroaches could be seen as. The repetition of the story makes me think of obsession wanting to go back in time and redo a moment, though the narrator is simply relieving the moment with more detail instead of altering what occurred.
Obsession can carry a tinge of unreality in the way “normal people” move on from things. The killing of a group of cockroaches is nothing in most people’s lives, maybe a moment of relief or satisfaction, but nothing beyond. Here with the narrator, the unreality comes from the in-depth examination of every part of the killing of these pests like in the third story, “Until they turn to stone, in innocent terror and with such, but such an expression of pained reproach. Others— suddenly assailed by their own core, without even having perceived that their inner form was turning to stone!— these are suddenly crystallized, just like a word arrested on someone’s lips: I love . . . The cockroaches, invoking the name of love in vain, sang on a summer’s night.” (1) Cockroaches probably don’t feel everything the narrator mentioned, any other person would be stuck on the outside of the emotions and the narrative built up by the narrator. They would just see cockroach corpses to be swept up. There might be many reasons for this constant reimagining, I see someone wanting to bask in the aftermath.
Obsession on this level is also something frequently pushed away if it’s not in service of something. A writer for example is more easily able to get away with fantastical thought if it’s for their writing. Imagining a torrid love affair between a bubble and a leaf is less acceptable when you just want to think about it for its own sake. The amount of times I’ve been told to stop being childish or stop looking too in depth into nothing is uncountable. This story started with three stories to be told, but the narrator contradicts themself almost immediately, “Although they constitute one story, they could become a thousand and one, were I to be granted a thousand and one nights.” (1) If this were a real person I might say the constant examination was compulsive, the narrator is unable to let go, yet unable to be open with this obsession.
“The Fifth Story” is not directly about repression, though there is a thread of it. The slow reveal of the true mind of the narrator could be said to be them getting used to the idea of telling someone their truth. Towards the end of the stories shared with an audience, the narrator says, “The grim moment of choosing between two paths, which I thought would separate, convinced that any choice would mean sacrificing either myself or my soul. I chose.” (2) This is the choice between killing the cockroaches every night and what that would mean for their soul in the long term which might imply that instead of basking, they are concerned about the consequences on their soul, or mind, being unable to let go of even the first night of killing.
Repression, obsession, and emotion are intangible things that affect the ability to live at true peace with one’s mind. There are many reasons why they exist such as the culture of stoicism, the idea of emotions being weak, or obsession being crazy or childish. The Fifth Story serves as an examination of obsession and being swept away by the fantastic in the mundane. Clarice Lispector may not have intended any of this for “The Fifth Story” but obsession or reading too much into things is the nature of any observation of art.
Lispector, Clarice. “The Fifth Story.” Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms, Persea, 26 Mar. 2014, pp. 121–22. miamiartscharter.net/ourpages/auto/2017/8/23/55609573/LISPECTOR_%20Clarice_The%20Fifth%20Story.pdf.
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