Your World is Not Entirely in Your Hands—At Least, Not in Literature

If there’s one thing to know about me, it’s that the only constant relationship I put an effort into is with words. I can still remember the excitement I would always have lining up to buy a book in those scholastic book fairs in elementary school. One day, I stayed home from school, not feeling sick but also not feeling well—a weird suspension in space wherein only the depressed angsty kids will know—and picked up Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. From then on, I always had a book glued to my hand—it’s just become my entire personality. As for writing, it wasn’t until my undergraduate studies that I was told that if you love to read, you have the makings of a great writer. I’ve learned to earnestly love writing and consider it as one of my strengths, if not my only strength if I’m being honest. But also, if there’s another thing to know about me, it’s that I never settle and I always look to improve my abilities. And it’s not too often that one would find the perfect example of writing that would inspire anyone to emulate its craft. Clarice Lispector’s “The Fifth Story” is that perfect example of writing to me.

Clarice Lispector’s short story revolves entirely around one premise: killing cockroaches. In five stories, the narrator starts off with this premise, but each story is written using different angles designed to look into the different psychological motivations and internal dialogues of the narrator, as well as reflect certain kinds of personalities that may relate to some readers more than others. This craft of world-building through the deliberate use of words has almost a manipulative feel in the way that the reader’s experience is molded in accordance to the writer’s will. It depicts an art of letting go on the part of the reader to allow being taken into another’s world where the writer is in charge, playing God. This to me is what true writing looks like: the ability to create entire worlds out of one seemingly simple act. Clarice Lispector’s “The Fifth Story” does exactly that by taking on a teacher-like presence to show how clever ways of storytelling can shape what kind of experience a writer wants the reader to have by the words carefully chosen. Personally, there is a freedom in the art of letting go of my personality and knowledge and becoming an entirely different person going on all sorts of adventures or life changes that I would never think could happen to me—just by picking up a book and being almost manipulated, pushed and pulled, into thinking and feeling the way the author wants me to think and feel. It shows a unique author-reader bond that is almost inexplicable, and it’s why it’s difficult to truly express this connection to those who don’t understand the joy of reading.

The first story is straightforward, completely to-the-point that comes off as casual. It is called “How to Kill Cockroaches” and it reflects the inconsequential facts of an event that doesn’t require any deep thinking, something that’s not a big deal; she was just complaining about the cockroaches so a woman told her how to kill them, and she did. But when it comes to the second story, titled “The Killings,” the narrator describes in great detail her actions and how the problem of the cockroaches wasn’t even hers until she started to act on the process of eradicating them: “A vague loathing had taken possession of me, a sense of outrage. By day, the cockroaches were invisible and no one would believe in the evil secret which eroded such a tranquil household. But if the cockroaches, like evil secrets, slept by day, there I was preparing their nightly poison” (1). Lispector’s choice of words here are breath-takingly dark, a tone of creeping seduction willing you to take part in committing the utmost evil for the narrator’s morbid pleasure. And if there’s any way to make you think of the dark, hidden recesses that you would blissfully remain ignorant of, feelings of “vague loathing” and “a sense of outrage” for such helpless creatures will do the trick. Not to mention, what horrors there are lurking just beneath the surface of one’s designated space of comfort, no one wants to really know. Lispector achieves to bring the darker sides of readers to light, and gives a wonderful lesson on how to depict the ego’s unconscious sinister desires out of something that would seem ordinary until painted a certain way.

Now we delve into the third story, “The Statues,” which is even more in-depth about the setting and the day she woke up after she killed the cockroaches, witnessing the carnage: “…Even more sleepy is the scullery floor with its tiled perspective. And in the shadows of dawn, there is a purplish hue which distances everything; at my feet, I perceive patches of light and shade, scores of rigid statues scattered everywhere…” (1). I taste a hint of grandiosity in this story’s narrative; I’m particularly fond of the reference to Pompeii’s destruction alluding to all the shell-shocked (pun definitely intended) cockroaches splayed around. Looking closely at a cockroach and personifying its thoughts by guessing that it “…must have realized too late that it had become mummified…” (1), it’s as if the narrator is placing herself in its spindly little legs and sympathizing with its last thoughts before an untimely death dealt by a mightier being: “‘…It is just that I looked too closely inside myself! it is just that I looked too closely inside…’— from my frigid height as a human being, I watch the destruction of a world” (2). This makes me wonder, who exactly is speaking? The narrator seems to be projecting her own fears onto the statue cockroach, perhaps truly afraid of her own actions or herself—does she actually show a propensity for killing? What is this grim satisfaction she gets from seeing all the death and destruction, is it from succeeding in making something—the concoction of sugar, gypsum, and flour—that gave her the power to play God and decide to take lives away? And why was this actually so easy for me to understand…was it easy for you to understand, too?

Lispector then shifts the narratives in the last two stories outwards, questioning the state of the soul that’s leaning towards a necessary evil in the untitled fourth story, and a completely different energy for the titular fifth story called “Leibnitz and The Transcendence of Love in Polynesia,” still starting off with the narrator complaining about the cockroaches. It should make you wonder, how did it get to Love in Polynesia? In what world does Leibnitz have any relation to killing cockroaches? But what choice do you have in where you were led? With this intention, you’re completely caught off-guard and suddenly you’re placed in a whole other world wondering what will play out this time. Lispector teaches the writing skill of creative choice of words to build worlds that evoke intense emotions and the feeling of immersion set by the imagery playing on one’s darker, oft repressed desires. She illustrates the purpose for readers to lose themselves in the world created for them, but also how writers trap them in feeling and experiencing what the writers want them to. This signifies the unique bond of how writers and readers will forever be inextricably linked to each other, and as a reader I understand this in the way writers choose their words intentionally for me.

Works Cited

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 (pp. 121-122). Persea. Kindle Edition, 2014.