Renee Gladman, Event Factory, Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 2011.
„A 'linguist-traveler' arrives by plane to Ravicka, a city of yellow air in which an undefined crisis is causing the inhabitants to flee. Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening.
Event Factory is the first in a trilogy of novels Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign 'other' place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.“
“Renee Gladman has always struck me as being a dreamer—she writes that way and the dreaming seems to construct the architecture of the world unfolding before our reading eyes. In Event Factory the details of her dream gleam specifically yet they bob on the surface of a deeper wider abyss we all might be becoming engulfed in. It has the strange glamour of Kafka’s Amerika, this book, but the narrator, lusty and persuasive, is growing up.” -
Eileen Myles
“In Renee Gladman’s extraordinary Event Factory, the world in all its languaged variousness adumbrates a ‘yellow-becoming’ map for our deepest internal spelunkings, a map we don’t dare do without as we negotiate, along with our intrepid narrator, the world of Ravicka, the sprawling city, where, we might say, to borrow from Gladman, ‘nothing happens, nothing happens, then everything is ‘said’ to happen . . .’ and where we might also say, to borrow from Beckett, the magnifying and minifying mirrors have been shattered and the body has, yes, ‘vanished in the havoc of its images.’”
Laird Hunt
„Event Factory might be considered the field notes of a polylinguist, one conversant in at least seven languages, and many dialects within them; an estranged stranger in a stranger land, that is, Ravicka, an invisible city, a city wavering between indivisibility and its opposite; all rendered by Gladman, a connoisseur of the sentence, in pellucid prose reminiscent of Italo Calvino's cosmic comedies, in service to a refractive narrative sometimes mirroring the disjunctive absurdities of Ben Marcus’s fiction, sharing Marcus’s interest in how language alters reality, how inquiries into internal identity and external reality, and their converse, lead to investigations of borders and their trespass. As with any city, seedy or not, and especially with a dystopic city, Ravicka has a dark side, an underbelly, where the consequence of language misuse is sometimes violence, where you can even lose a limb for failing to do as the Ravickians do; it’s a city where a "conspiracy of growths" may or may not be subsuming streets with new streets, or something else entirely, where one is required to perform bizarre rituals, like entering a new place sideways in order to show that it’s your first time entering it, like having to express a particular kind of apology with “three minutes of deep-knee bends.” The novella, the first in a trilogy (in keeping with its project to both undermine and pay homage to fabulist tropes) is as much a reverie on the city, of its malleability, its indecipherability, its irreducibility, as it is an inquiry into the limits of language, while also reflecting on the mutability of the self, how the self is changed by its surroundings, by the objects it engages with. More “travel-logos” than mere diary, Event Factory is a profound study of the architecture of being, knowledge, memory, and desire.“ –
John Madera
„An unnamed protagonist arrives in a fictional city-state called Ravicka where she meets people, has adventures, and then departs without, seemingly, really having been anywhere or accomplished anything. The opening epigraph from Samuel Beckett serves well as a compass : "something has to happen, to my body. . . which never. . . wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter. . . the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images." Magnifying and minifying aptly describe the challenges encountered by both narrator and reader. A visit to Ravicka becomes a tour of a land of smoke and mirrors, a Through the Looking Glass experience in which the story is as much a shape-shifter as is the sexual self. Its hard-to-pin-down quality doesn't, however, make Renee Gladman's short novel Event Factory a flawed narrative.
In Ravicka, the color yellow is pervasive; sometimes tender or empty, at others, more a green or brown. When Ravickians are healthy, they breathe yellow in and out. It's the color of the sun, but perhaps not our sun, although as the narrator reminds us, this isn't a different world than ours, since she arrived here on an airplane and that's also how she will leave. How Ravickians themselves leave remains a mystery, even though they appear to be abandoning Ravicka faster than the narrator can "stamp it" with her "tourism." (101)
The narrator is a linguist. She speaks seven languages, including several dialects of Ravic, but discovers that speaking the language isn't sufficient:
"If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing and dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now." (42) She may arrive accidentally (or not), but once in Ravicka, she embarks on numerous quests. What she's looking for changes as she changes location (place is primordial here; time more incidental, except when it's time to eat or "time to fuck." 23). She is more tourist than scholar. In search of both the Old City and Downtown, where she expects to find skyscrapers (after all she's seen them on postcards and from windows), she's led astray by false directions, as well as by erroneous and discarded maps. She seeks architecture and, above all else, what she calls "convivium." (36) She finds and then loses her guide and lover Dar. She also searches for the Ravickian literary masterpiece, Matlatli Doc, hoping it will lead her to its author, and through her, a better understanding of Ravicka.
Matlatli Doc, with its title that's almost an alliteration of Melville's Moby Dick,
"is famous for its pace: nothing happens, nothing happens, then everything is 'said' to happen though nothing happens around that saying, then the book ends, and throughout it all there is this shouting." (86) Substitute "gesturing" for "shouting" and this synopsis pretty nicely describes Event Factory itself. Ravic, the language spoken in Ravicka looks vaguely Slavic. The fact that its Old City has been in existence for seven hundred years, brings to mind Krakow, Poland which not long ago celebrated its 750th anniversary. Ravicka also carries traces of Ursula Le Guin's Gethen and Winter from The Left Hand of Darkness. Words like pareis (29) and concepts such as "inswept by time" (47) are particularly reminiscent of Le Guin. Other books and other imagined locations resonate here as well, such as Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the Tokyo of David Mitchell's number9dream.
Many of the features of Gladman's prose have been borrowed from her prose-poetry and the author often seems to be thinking about poetry as much as anything else. For example, the narrator muses:
"I meant 'silence,' but silence is not something that moves visibly from one place to another. You simply cannot use the word this way, even in Ravic. I was saying smoke and he knew I did not mean it, but whether he knew what I actually did mean was hard to say." (70) Renee Gladman, the poet, might just as well be describing her poetics.
Event Factory's plot is summed up in its opening lines: "
From the sky there was no sign of Ravicka. Yet, I arrived; I met many people." (11) Very little that happens between the narrator's arrival and her departure is causally related. Almost everything that occurs, except for language and ritual gestures, could have happened in any order. Nothing changes, other than that Ravicka continues to empty out. There is no real plot nor character development. Characters don't stick around long, with the exception of the narrator and Simon, the singing hotel/ motel receptionist without whom
"there was no center. There was no hotel . . . . without him, it was a different place." (38) Ravicka may be, in the final analysis, simply a metaphor for life, where we, tourist-linguists, find ourselves for a short while, because "
the plane . . . had landed and not yet taken off." (18)“ -
Paula Koneazny"Event Factory, by Renee Gladman, is a devious little science fiction book about a woman who visits a fictional city called “Ravicka”—which may also be a planet—where only commonplace banalities occur and everyone is uncomfortable and mystified. It’s a reticent gem of poise and subtle humor, and, at only 126 pages, it punches—or, more accurately, frowns—way above its weight.
Most of the joy in Event Factory comes from watching the unnamed narrator puzzle out how to behave amid Ravicka’s opaque social conventions. “
I wanted to protest, but thought that would require why I had come, which I had not yet discovered.” The narrator is exceedingly polite, but her unusual choice of words makes her nearly as mysterious as the planet she is visiting. Some of her declarations are utterly cryptic, as with, “Getting off the desk proved a challenge: you could not trust the floor.” Other comments are dryly observant:
“After a while, so much time of non-interaction had passed between us that she was a stranger again…” while some are hilariously deadpan: “‘
Hello,’ I said trying to find my sexy voice, in case it was time to fuck.”
The narrator tries to find her way around Ravicka with even less success than one expects in a book about social bumbling. Her attempts at communication fail hilariously:
“[T]here was a gesture I was to make upon entering a place that was already peopled, something between ‘hello,’ ‘sorry,’ and ‘congratulations I’m here,’ and I could not remember what it was.” She finally makes a friend, another foreigner named Dar who doesn’t get Ravicka, either, and they search the old part of the city, trying to “…
experience the muscularity of the present diminishing in me as it was replaced by a past I could never have known myself.” And yet, while they encounter natives and try to interact with them,
“Listening to them was like gathering water without a pail.”
She and Dar have pretty good sex: “
A fist entered me…The fist lingered there; my muscles clutched it.” Still, she seeks out other partners, and falls in with a group of revolutionaries so laconic that the reader can’t tell why they’re angry. Addled by ennui is more like it. Instead of finding some great purpose to contribute to, she works on speaking the language. “
I worked on my libsling, that peculiar Ravickian method of transposing verbs and proper nouns to account for a speaker’s ambivalence.” Even in a world as unusual as Ravicka, Renee Gladman doesn’t act like life is less banal than it is, a brave decision for a novel with pretensions toward science fiction.
There are passages in Event Factory which are furiously beautiful. The evening air is “tender;” the light is “yellow;” the morning is a “
greener yellow at the start of the day but very moment growing golden.” Everything the narrator tries to do ends in failure, but experience somehow happens anyway. And while it’s probably important for the critic to preserve the oddness of Gladman’s project, it must be said that Event Factory, for all its challenging images and language, is cheeky and hilarious. It makes great, unpredictable company." -
Adam Novy"like a static sculpture that also seems constantly in motion or a dance momentarily evoking an architectural shape, renee gladman’s excellently strange new work EVENT FACTORY is a deliberate and skilfully sustained act of contradiction. gladman steadily is at play in moving the work forward, in its development — while committed to a flat, still affect. this commitment also gives the work a sense of unwavering integrity and moral purpose (as this affect perhaps the costume worn only by the true philosopher and/or depressive).
the story is of a visit to Ravicka, an odd place continuously evoking crisis and yet eerily absent of rage or tears or other emotional drama, except perhaps loneliness. this city-state seems on the verge of collapse (or at least utter transformation) but among its residents there’s an oddly muted reaction, a constant disassociation.
the rowdy, sage hitchhikers of the greater vehicle believe most of all in two ideas which for them are synonymous: emptiness and never-ending flux. so too in gladman’s new world, where the tender refrain, spoken by a prescriptive salsa dancer, goes: “It has to be done with movement” — but the ‘it’ has a necessarily obscure or inscrutable antecedent. a book also about the brittle and insufficient possibilities of communication, the uncanny EVENT FACTORY indeed is one, where the modular fabrications thus created are put together to move a reader from end to end, yet underscoring our locked, fixed positions within language.
Yet, what words besides “old” and “extraordinary” can I use to describe life there? And were I to write the description in the language of these hidden people what symbol would I use to represent air? You would want to listen to this language. I am sure of this, because to hear a person speak in gaps and air — you watch him standing in front of you, using the recognizable gestures — opening the mouth, smiling, pushing up the eyebrows, shrugging the shoulders — and your mind becomes blank as you try to match this with the sounds you hear. An instinct says tune it out, but something deep within fastens your attention. Your mouth falls open. You taste the strangeness; you try to make the sound with your mouth. That is speech. Now, how do you do this in writing? (61-62)" –
Eugene Lim
"Q: Who is Renee Gladman?
A: A quick internet search doesn’t unearth much. Her name may also be Annette. She teaches in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. She lives somewhere in Massachusetts. I don’t know where she was born. She edits and publishes Leroy, which brings the world beautifully bound chapbooks. She also operates Leon Works, which is an independent press. She’s friends with Eileen Myles. She’s the author of 4 works of prose and 1 collection of poetry. She’s a restless writer. Her prose poetically bends our expectations of what a novel should be and what it can do to the inside of us.
I read EVENT FACTORY, Renee Gladman’s first installment in what will be a trilogy of novels about the invented city-state Ravicka, while sitting on top of a stone wall, feeling a lot like Humpty Dumpty.
At only 126 pages, it is a slender novel, each word packed, lean, and oddly flat.
Although at a glance everything seems straightforward in this story about Ravicka – which is on the verge of vanishing – and is in fact quite explicit, there is a puzzling air wafting throughout Gladman’s prose, something contradictory in nature, that kept me at a peculiar distance.
I reached out.
I tried to scale walls.
But,
No matter how much I wanted to be a part of her make-believe world, I never forgot I was a foreigner in this place, someone who would eventually leave Ravicka, much like her linguistically-inclined narrator, who arrives at the opening of the book and leaves with us at the end.
On the surface, Ravicka has yellow air and strange outgrowths and customs that seem friendly enough. Every interaction begins with cordial greetings and gestures – Hello, Hi, Gurantai – but any dialogue after these aerobic salutations is either misleading or deceptively ambiguous.
Deceptive because everything seems to make some kind of weird sense but nothing ever really does, no dots are connected, and yet I always wanted to read more, my curiosity tangled up with the slow disappearance of this silent city that often felt (but never truly was) entirely emptied of its inhabitants.
There is a pervasive sense of urgency among Ravickians yet none seem deeply bothered, just lonely and disconnected and constantly in motion.
As with any novel that digs its fingernails into my skin, there were parts that will perhaps forever remain lodged in my brownish brain matter.
Being somewhat perverted by nature, I will probably always remember the narrator (a woman) waking from a disorienting sleep and feeling a hand enter her, then some fingers, then a different amount of fingers, then a whole fucking fist, and the narrator makes a primitive sound, the sound of unexpected delight, something I can hear only because I want to, and the convulsion that cracks her spinal cord is her body getting up and leaving her breathless.
The other memory stuck in between the electrified pillows of my consciousness is not so sexual but more musical and foreboding.
The narrator is with her friend, Simon, waiting for a concert to begin. Until then she has not seen so many Ravickians gathered in the same place. As with many cultures, music brings the people together. Finally, 2 musicians walk onstage. The woman is armed with a cello, the man, an oud, which, according to Eileen Myles, is a totally percussive guitar.
The Ravickians make a lot of noise when these 2 people walk out to perform for them. The frenzy even makes a woman in the audience rip open her gown. Then everything settles and silence regains control of Ravicka, pressing down on its populace.
But that is not the image I have lodged in my brownish brain matter. It isn’t. What I remember, and probably always will, is the narrator’s voice speeding loud and clear towards the stage the second the woman pulls across the strings of her cello. A pointy eruption from the narrator, an acoustic shout that can’t be kept guarded inside her throat when the cellist brings her instrument to life, and so the opening notes of this concert are a mixture of the lowest-pitched viol directly followed by an uncontrollable punctuation mark of vocal glee.
Beautiful." -
The Open End
"This very little book published by Dorothy Project, which calls itself a novel, looks and feels fun to begin with, something about the shape of it, I think. Like the shape of the book, the sentences and fragments are also short. The choppiness of the sentences create the sense that she is almost dismissive of any questions about what she is saying, just simple facts. Yet the facts are bizarre. Likewise, the narrator reports matter of factly that she had sudden sex with strangers in the book that she meets, mentioning it quickly, like it’s nothing, and then moving on.
The linguist has to Ravicka, (a made up city) unsure of why she has made the trip. The mores of this foreign place are baffling. She experiences waking up in the house of a Ravickian, for example, which “required tears, the squeezing of lemons, and the plie. The group could not acknowledge each other until after I was gone.” Greeting the people in the room leads to being beaten about the head, while smiling. They are insulted when she leaves.
One element of reality in this city after another proves mysteriously inaccessible for surprising reasons. She eventually lets movement guide her. She searches for the elusive downtown, unsure it even exists, for an inordinately long time. Nothing makes sense, almost as if it were experienced in the throes of hallucinatory dementia, but written with mastery. The dreamlike state is well captured here and unlike our elders with dementia, we can here immerse ourselves in the story while feeling we are being led through it for our own great pleasure." -
Tantra Bensko
"It’s hard to know what to make of Event Factory, a short novel that’s the first offering from Danielle Dutton’s Dororthy, a publishing project. The book starts off with an epigraph from Samuel Beckett’s posthumous narrative “The Calmative,” which might offer a clue where Renee Gladman is coming from. Another clue comes in the thanks at the end of the book, which end “and most especially to Samuel R. Delany, for Dhalgren.” Event Factory might be seen as somewhere between Beckett and Delany (the later Delany, of Dhalgren and the Nevèrÿon books).
While Gladman’s book might be read as science fiction, there are none of the usual signifiers of science fiction: no novelties, no space ships, everything taking place in a universe that seems to be our own. Except that it’s not: the first sentence announces “From the sky there was no sign of Ravicka.” Ravicka is, we’ll learn, a city: the reader knows of no city named Ravicka, but might suspend disbelief even for fiction that is not science fiction – has any city ever been more prosaic than Sinclair Lewis’s Zenith in the state of Winnemac? But a sentence later we find this:
The city was large, yellow, and tender.
City refers, presumably, to Ravicka – although three sentences into the book, this isn’t entirely clear to the reader: “Ravicka” could have been any geographical object that can be seen from the sky. Attaching a proper name to it that isn’t a proper name that we know signals that we are outside of our usual space: but how far outside? A city can easily be large: there’s no problem there. Yellow gives pause: this isn’t one of the colors that a city is usually described at. It’s easy to imagine a gray city. A yellow city could conceivably be some sort of tourist destination – walls painted yellow in the way that Marrakech is sometimes called a red city. But the word yellow is functioning differently than large: we’ve stepped, to some degree, into the metaphorical, because, presumably, the city is not entirely yellow, only parts of it is. Or maybe it is: an emerald city suggests fantasy. In science fiction, Delany notes somewhere, there’s a looseness of language: what’s usually seen as metaphor could conceivably be entirely descriptive inside the mode of science fiction. Tender, the third adjective, pushes us in this direction. Even if a city can be yellow, how can it be tender? This adjective, of course, points us to Gertrude Stein, whose Tender Buttons pointed out the possibilities of using words in ways they weren’t intended. (Certainly someone must have by now suggested a science fictional reading of that book?)
Science fiction is inevitably disappointing to me because you often get an opening paragraph like this: one where you can’t understand how the words fit together, which is then defused: over the course of the narrative, you learn exactly what those words mean and why they’re being used in the sense that they are. A second reading is inevitably very different from the first, because the reader has already learned how to read the book. (Perhaps this is why one finds so many trilogies in science fiction?) Event Factory does not work this way. By a second time through – I have now read this book three times, which isn’t that much of an accomplishment, as it’s not very long – this paragraph does not make any more sense. Estrangement is continual in this book. While the proper nouns at the start seem recognizable – there are characters named Simon and Mrs. Madeline Savoy and Timothy; there’s a 32 bus; Simon sings from the Gospels, which could conceivably be the Gospels we know – but soon we find characters named Zàoter Limici, Ulchi Managua, and Dar which might almost be recognizable. (Diacritical marks, as in Delany’s Nevèrÿon, function as a signifier of difference: we look at a name on the page like “Zàoter” and realize that we have no idea how it might be spoken aloud, only that its a is almost certainly not our a.) As the book progresses, recognizable proper nouns almost disappear entirely. It comes as almost physical relief when Kecia Washington reappears toward the end of the book.
What does happen in this book? The narrator, a linguist, goes to the city of Ravicka for reasons left unclear. The air of the city appears to be yellow, though it’s hard to be sure about this, and what exactly this means: perhaps its only smog, maybe its something more fantastical. People seem to be leaving or to have left the city, though why and where they’ve gone is left unclear. The narrator speaks Ravic, the language of the city; she seems to understand the gestural components of communication in Ravicka, which are many. But she still seems to be on the outside of something, mirroring the position of the reader with the book. Because there are the signifiers of science fiction, we keep expecting that something might be explained that will make everything snap into place or to explicate what the ground rules are; perhaps the narrator is expecting the same thing, but it never does. The effect is of taking a long trip in a country that you don’t understand as well as you’d hoped. Again and again there’s the sense of linguistic breakdown:
The woman interrupted, “Yes. We know all of that,” and nodded compassionately. Then continued, more upbeat, “My name is (then gave a puff of air). Will you come with me?”
And that was what I had feared: she was not Ravickian and, what was worse, she used air instead of hard sound for speech. (pp. 56–7)
There’s more than a hint of metafiction scattered through this book (on the next page, they eat what seems to be “shredded paper, which seemed to have been stewed in various dark and spicy sauces”): one wonders if “hard sound” could mean written or printed letters, since we already know that the air of Ravicka is not quite the same as the air we know. Or we might read this passage as the narrator having become estranged from language: that spoken language turns into only “a puff of air”. This is left unresolved: perhaps it’s both at once.
This book feels like Dhalgren might if that book were more linguistically turned in on itself. There’s the same sense of inscrutability: I think that’s a lot of why I like Dhalgren, and that largely works here as well. Event Factory is supposed to be the first book of a trilogy; I’ll be interested to see where Renee Gladman goes." -
Dan Visel
Excerpt
and here
Renee Gladman, Newcomer Can’t Swim, Kelsey Street Press, 2007.
„Written as seven loosely connected pieces, Renee Gladman's NEWCOMER CAN'T SWIM blurs boundaries between poetry and prose. In languages of elegy and splintered consciousness, the book recreates life for the twenty-first century flâneur in urban America amid a confusion of aims, identities and street life of people connected to ipods downloaded with personalized mixes and sets. In a contemporary world of signs that crisscross a global culture, how can one maintain a firm existence and make human connections? Gladman posits a fluid self and parallel existence attuned to being lost. Quote: The / body moves away from living, from the flesh and bone of life, / and becomes regions. I take on / water. I look outward." A tension holds all frequencies together, keeping the contradiction of a life that animates the "I" of this book at the same time that it goes on without her.“
„Imagine yourself in a world in which you have to know who you are to know where you are or is it the other way around? Welcome to Renee Gladman's Newcomer Can't Swim, a textural world that configures issues of personal agency and social relations in geographical terms. Gladman confronts us with a landscape that is constantly shifts and morphs, sometimes within the space of a sentence. Brilliantly astute witty challenging, Newcomer Can't Swim re-envisions the dangers of living, as Stevie Wonder would say, "just enough for the city" -
Evie Schockley
„In Newcomer Can't Swim, Renee Gladman invites us to accompany her protagonists on their treks into, through and across variegated, mysterious soul-spaces and dreamscapes, troubling the surfaces and boundaries of story and genre. Her figures touch down, chapter by chapter, on beaches, city streets, and unmarked territories, in which echoes, shadows, and parallel presences delineate borders of the cannily strange. As the narrative flickers before us, gathering into an enthralling flow, we find ourselves recording with unmediated exhilaration that Gladman once again is mapping one of the most original and vital courses in contemporary literature.“ -
John Keene
„Newcomer maybe Can't Swim, but in this much-anticipated new work by Renee Gladman, "Newcomer," her friends, and lovers, know how to cross estranged cities with the allegoric gravity of figures on a Tarkovskian set. These are cities where water falls everywhere (or there is none). Where a woman lies smashed on the pavement. Where two women make love in a restaurant restroom (and are invited to leave). Where chairs cruise hotly toward each other across rooms. Where a beloved dog bespeaks its mistress, and a musician and a fish are both out of water. On the beach "the person you're with has a hard time focusing on you because you appear to be between forms." In precisely the same way, these installations, as Gladman calls them, shift through spaces normally reserved for poetry: beside the lines, under them, are more stories, not always sweet. By combining the tension of story with the thinking spaces of the poem, Gladman resolves the interstice between prose and poetry, demonstrating once more that she is a leading practitioner of the "new prose" of her or any generation.“ -
Gail Scott
„The author of Juice and The Activist , two enigmatic prose works that investigate the ways people move in and out of cities, identities and collectivities, returns with a set of seven linked, cinematic, mostly prose works that push her researches into new territory: “From the street, into an uncom-/ mon space, then through it, and/ to the threshold of the room,/ every possible way of asking 'Is this me?' ” Gladman, who publishes Leon Works Books (see below), is here published by a Berkeley collective cofounded by poets Rena Rosenwasser and Patricia Dienstfrey.“ –
Publishers Weekly
"who’s aiming higher than Renee Gladman? her wrestling with the basic ideas of fiction–and its osmotic border with poetry–can lead to spectacular instances of art, passages at home in strangeness, maneuvering with uncanny grace in fields of indeterminacy and unknowing.
i knew her mainly from reading JUICE, a strong, sustained meditation where she stretched the connections that mended sentences’ semantic gaps to their limit… this latest, NEWCOMER CAN’T SWIM, is a collection of “installations” and i found myself taking a shine to some more than others. i liked those with a stronger narrative momentum than those that constellate various portraits or scenes (but it’s pretty radical stuff and i may be too poorly equipped to apprehend some of these seriously new approaches.) …in any case i thought “Untitled, Woman on Ground” was awesome, heartbreaking, and completely new. it might be a breakup story, it might be a story about rubbernecking around an accident. it repeats a theme of the book–the various ways we fail to communicate or only communicate in desperate and blunted ways. another favorite was “kingdom in three panels,” especially louie’s dog-mind…
some came up short nonetheless, where i both emotionally and intellectually couldn’t connect. but i did think what she’s going for is some incredible place that requires real inspiration each time. and it’s pretty hard to hit that every outing. people get blamed for that much ambition, and i’m not sure wrongly–but when she connects the transport’s pretty phenom." -
Eugene Lim
“This conversation is one of a nomadic contemporariness.” -Danielle Vogel, in an intro to an essay discussing Renee Gladman
“No sooner had the puppet satisfied his hunger than he began grousing and crying, because he wanted a pair of new feet.” - from Geoffrey Brock’s 2009 translation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio
It follows, then, that we must revolt. I suggest that we can do so by reading and writing and thinking in new ways, by entering the conversation fully informed and intellectually available but hotly ready to stutter and make elliptic.
Start with Renee Gladman’s new book, Newcomer Can’t Swim.
Above the head, a mouth. Body flat against the ground, except the small of the back curved, the legs pulling away. Surrounded by other bodies stranger with her eyes closed. I’m awake because I’m not sleeping next to you ever. The mouth is blue. It is as though the sky. Opened like so and waiting. She recognizes what it is -the sky.Although this excerpt is by no means representative of all that Gladman does in this book, it does suggest the kind of world into which she lures the reader: violence to and of the body, split worlds/places, syntactical double-ness and time travel, dissociation, voice, terror, calm. At The Collagist, Danielle Vogel argues that Gladman’s “anti-narratives help the reader into a dislocated and liminal state of encounter. These borders include all edges of the page, the word, the reader, and the writer: each acts as a portal, as a door.” This makes tremendous sense when the book is considered as aligned with the alienating and stylish films of Andrei Tarkovsky, about whom (so says Wikipedia), Bergman said “[He] is... the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.” Gladman’s book is a certainly of the same matter, and she directly references his films (especially Stalker) throughout. Vogel again: “[T]ransfusion occurs... passage becomes possible.” What we get out of Newcomer Can’t Swim is a gift; Gladman returns power to the reader. She offers entry into a deliciously unsettling “narrative,” really, a sort of adventure. She reassembles art she likes and makes new art -- all in service of creating a new art “experience,” suggesting a chain-letter of creation. One particularly heart-wrenching piece, “Louie Between Cities,” creates the projection effect, by which a viewer/reader/listener can project any number of possibilities onto a text; more than metaphorical openness, such an effect also allows a “user” to imagine multiple possibilities for the textual reality. “Louie” can be related to Tarkovsky’s scary “zone,” a locale of terror and dream in Stalker; can be about the experience of an alienated individual returning “home” (there might be issues of class/race/ethnicity “betrayal” or of the aftermath of coming out or even immigrant experiences); can be about the “after” of a trauma; can be about grief; can even be, quite simply, about the nightmare of adventure and return.
Everybody howled when I walked through the front door. They missed me; I deserted them. That combination of sound. I could hardly recognize them -- all drenched in brown. “Where are your things?” my mother asked me. I had lost my few possessions in the mud. “So come in, come in,” she said. I sat there, trying to contain my horror, straining for the past: the room where I’d slept as a child, the window whose generous light I’d sworn to die in, the balls I played with stored beneath the couch, the old wide couch. Nothing was the same. She said she wasn’t “Mother” anymore; they called her “Dagwright.”
Step two: consider text as adventure. If the work isn’t suggesting multiplicity, then it seems to me that the writer (or some other force) is exerting too much control over the reader. I don’t mean to suggest that poets can’t strive for “mastery” of language’s tools, but poets should be offering more than their own writing; the work should offer an experience, right? To this end, it might be useful to think of good poetry (good art) as something that allows the user to have an adventure. Collodi’s Pinocchio reveals something about the potential for adventure (especially as it is created in “projection effect” and as it implies alienation). In her lovely analyses at the end of the Brock translation, Rebecca West notes “the mysterious preexistence of Pinocchio, a sheer potentiality hidden in a piece of wood and waiting to be liberated into form”; what could be more suggestive of the act of creating (as writer and as reader)? Of the act of submitting a body to an adventure? “Geppetto’s home is just... right... for such a birth to occur, since it is a humble abode with real, broken down, meager furnishings but embellished with a painted fire and a painted kettle steaming away on the back wall. It is a liminal space...” It seems just right, to me, that textual adventures emerge in these liminal spaces, lovingly framed, of course, by generous writers, but also juxtaposed against our domestic lives." -
Olivia Cronk
„The events in Renee Gladman’s Newcomer Can’t Swim take place in the present tense and without a primary cohesive narrative frame or voice. Caught in a de-narrativized limbo, the characters and their actions resist the normal interpretative processes that readers bring to fiction; they are presented to the reader in unmediated form, with the apparent intention that the individual elements of the book will resonate sufficiently to supply a different, non-narrative type of coherence. Of course such a project always risks that coherence, because the interpretative community to which most people belong seeks particular kinds of shape, an authoritative pattern applied retrospectively to otherwise random events. At times, especially during a car accident scene, the sheer power and uniqueness of Gladman’s sequences ensure success, and one hardly notices the absence of an interpretative narratorial voice. The authenticity of the character’s perspective (lying on the ground, badly bleeding) is extremely memorable and well rendered. But coherence and continuity are also occasionally sacrificed, particularly in the final third of the book, simply because the absence of fictional signposting is not compensated for with engaging enough images or set pieces. Nonetheless, when Gladman manages to evoke qualities of impermanence and of the intangibility of being (“I see you flickering. I don’t know if the others see you. How long can you last?”), she creates a powerful sense of the tentative nature of human consciousness and how it interacts with its surroundings. The risk-taking is worth it.“ -
Neil Murphy„Renee Gladman’s 2007 release, Newcomer Can’t Swim, resists spatial binaries, forcing the reader to reevaluate “common ground,” to morph and change in both familiar and unfamiliar environments. Though Gladman writes in prose for the duration of this particular volume, we are forced to commit to the shifts in time and space that are just as likely to occur within a single sentence as they are within an entire paragraph. An unsettling anchor in reality is ever-present in these dreamy domains. While the poems fit in spaces both confined and broad, from the paradox of sexuality to a vast multi-cultural city to the seat of a folding chair, they are truly reminiscent of territories only a mind can go to thrive. Leave your body at the door.
Narrative and point of view play a dual role within the seven individual vaguely-titled “chapters” of the collection. These narratives are mind personas or forms rather than tangible bodies carrying out physical deeds in a concrete setting. We are taken from place to place (a city, a restaurant, a painting, a chair) all nonspecific where unique details are concerned. Gladman’s impressive use of somewhat cryptic and obscure description ensures that each word in every poem counts. From “Untitled, Park in City”:
Against the back, the mouth, when having to turn away from
It. Bodies move closer through the night, but remain sepa-
rate here in this park. The impulse hovers. Time makes the
long body short, small-waisted now: yellow skin, a brown tuft
of hair, you or I dreaming. With the back up.Description is secondary. The subject of the poem links and thereby roots ambiguous, blobby people (small-waisted things with yellow skin, brown hair) to a generic, unnamed park. A separation between “bodies” or forms in this environment is crucial, but also allows for the impulse to draw nearer.
Similarly, in “Untitled, Woman on Ground,” Gladman navigates a habitat with her sketchy mapping. This time, the subject, a female form, is positioned on the ground, having been struck by a cab. Others perch on the sidewalks to catch a glimpse of her and to gain knowledge of her plight. This particular section is told in second person so as to invite the reader into her metamorphosing mind-over-body experience:
A woman bends down and wipes your forehead with a
cloth, perhaps a bandana taken off her hair. ‘The car that
hit you is parked around the corner,” she reassures. You
reach out for her retreating hand and bring it back towards
you. “Honey, you were crushed,” she whispers.
In the fourth section, “Untitled, Colorado,” Gladman’s sharp, dry wit is showcased as she sketches a scene from a restaurant in which two women (designated by letter rather than first name) leave their table to have a brief sexual encounter in a bathroom stall:
A. towers above me as we walk to the lady’s room. The restaurant is
working out fine, but the conversation we need to have can’t take place
at the table where we’re sitting. So we agree to continue it in the bath-
room. A. worries that her beer will be taken while we’re gone, and I’m
worried about my wallet, which I left in the middle of the table, under
a pile of napkins surrounded by hot-sauce bottles. The bathroom is un-
occupied. Once inside, I pull her tank top over her head and seize her
left nipple with my mouth. I have to stand on the toilet to do this. Well,
I have to kneel on the toilet. I tug on the nipple, and wrap my arms
around her waist. She does next what all day I’ve been hoping she
would do, and afterwards screams, “Re…!”
Time to go back to our table.
One gets the sense that the occasional body (form) in Gladman’s work is a wanderer and that we are merely invited to wander alongside them. In the “chapter,” “Louie Between Cities,” our chief subject is a dog whose understanding of the world both mirrors and contradicts that of a person-body’s and smudges the lines so that animal blends into human:
From the ship, as we made our approach, I watched the mud in dis-
belief. Something had happened to the sand, to the absolute blue of
the sky. When I was young, I stood between the two and burned. My
skin blistered and my ass wagged; I was excited. We called it “eating
heat.” We scavenged across the plains, like dogs, for the sun, and by the
end of the day, found enough to return home happy. This time, the
mud made everything brown, from the sky to the grass surrounding our
houses—yes my house was still there, just miserably brown—even my
family exhibited the cast.
Here, the reader is given disjointed clues as to the species of the speaker. While “ass wagged” would certainly suggest a canine narrator, “like dogs” challenges and disputes this theory. We recall the section, Untitled, Woman on Ground,” in which a speaker we can assume is somewhat human has a ground-level view of her surroundings. Here, too, we are back on the ground, this time as a dog-body, looking up at passersby. This is a fine illustration of Gladman’s literal attention to positioning, how it shapes and mold perceptions and informs environments.
Gladman doesn’t necessarily strive to fulfill specific goals in her work, nor does she attempt to operate in themes other than the overly general theme of disjointed dream-space. Rather, much like Thalia Field and Nicole Brossard, she blurs the boundaries between genres, expanding and tightening the perimeters of the traditional story with what I imagine is a great deal of ease and an enormous success. While her non-sensible (though, not at all senseless) outcomes may be somewhat standoffish, they’re always a surprise. Gladman, in writing Newcomer Can’t Swim, aims perhaps to challenge the conventions of prose, poetry, space, subject, and point of view. In this capacity, she doesn’t disappoint.“ -
Stephanie Carpenter
"
Where cities built by magic
parted before us like mirages
mint captured our way
birds escorted us
and fish swam upstream
while the sky spread out before us
as Fate followed in our wake
like a madman brandishing a razor. (From Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, The Mirror, written by the filmmaker’s father, poet Arseny Tarkovsky)
Renee Gladman, in Newcomer Can’t Swim, gives us cities like these: at once hypnotic and treacherous, mapped and counter-mapped, landscape and dreamscape. Artifact and experience pull against each other and the reader, expertly guided, falls somewhere in between. Characters are brought forth, and then questioned; we can never really know them, because the narrator doesn’t fully know them. They wander through her lines, which read as a metaphor for streets in specific urban settings and for almost Anywhere, USA. The disorientation is what orients: welcome to this world. The known is in the not-knowing. How we organize or think about our multiple realities in 21st century urban North American society is at stake.
Gladman is best known for her books, Juice (2001) and The Activist (2003). Her work is most often referred to as “new prose” or “narrativity” along with poets and writers such as Gail Scott, Pamela Lu, Camille Roy, Mary Burger, and Robert Glück, among others. And for good reason–Gladman’s prose/poetry is not incantatory and neither is it reportage–it is a re-writing of genre and of the world. Boundary conditions, even of blended forms, are frangible and deliberately subverted. The narrative consciousness is polyphonic and discordant with unconventional transitions and sentence construction. Newcomer Can’t Swim does not offer a given signage. Though the reader can follow, the following leads everywhere and nowhere. Here everything is in progression: the story, and the form and by what language the totality of her experiment is named.
The book is divided into seven main sections. The first, “Untitled, Park in City,” begins, “Above the head, a mouth. . .” (1) and ends, “The eyelids shut” (2). It serves as an introduction to the body and to the body of the book. The reader is asked to externalize the instrument of language while also viewing it through a closed interiority. This sets up the twinning of subjectivity and narrativity throughout the book and the limitations of each. From the narrator: “. . . I have the map you drew in my back pocket,/but I want to get to you without using the map. . . . I am not in the place where you live. I am on my way there. . . ” and “. . .What street/is on the corner of two other streets? What could you have/meant?” (5). Is the narrator lost? Or situated in the errant cartography of the designed city? Or suspended between the constructed binary of self and other? The tension between the intimacy of contact and the isolation of distance at once exalts and exhausts.
The shifting realities in Newcomer develop by accretion. Her sentences are conduits through the urban landscape and punctuation functions as a kind of traffic signal. Stop. Go. Yield. Turn. She modifies and directs the way the space of the page is experienced as a communicative device. Each paragraph is site-specific. Gladman sees them as “installations.” It is easy to see why. There is volition, a patterning modulation and a figurative repletion; they are both philosophic and cinematic. They motion to one another in scenes with long takes and jump-cuts. She writes, “When the birds leap off the wall/and enter this world, no one/reacts. The museum simply/closes its doors; the artist leaves/the country. The birds fly above/us—all the inhabitants of the/zone—and in that way of birds, /form their own world” (101).
The geography of the external collides with the geography of the internal producing a democratized aesthetic of indeterminacy. Epistemological borders are permeable even as concrete and experiential differences abound. Throughout the book, but especially in the third section, “Untitled, Woman on Ground,” and the fourth section “Untitled, Colorado,” Gladman upends themes of race, gender, class, and sexual identity with genre-bending precision. The city and the word are a locus of power and devastation. Sentences break; people bleed. Constructions of self and other are contested. Multiple questions arise: What is the obligation between the polis and the private, the subject and the object, the language of autobiography and the language of autography? The social production of identity and its manifestation in the every day is what her characters inhabit and question.
In “Untitled, Woman on Ground,” the danger of crossing the street becomes the racial politics of moving through communities (which becomes the danger of “being,” highlighting the inequity and peril of the world in which you do reside and the inaccessible world in which you do not and how your self-presentation and “being-ness” is perceived and mis/treated). The narrator describes a scene:
These are the externals: one, you will never make it home in time; two, cars have bumpers but pedestrians do not and this is not universally understood; three, you have been plowed into by a car; and four, a crowd encircles you but it
is an inattentive crowd. ‘What are you doing,’ you gurgle
to a man near you. ‘Standing guard,’ he replies with his
chest puffed out. So, if they are proud, you are. . . ? (11)
The driver is a white male; the angry youth is black. (I did this
on purpose. Here are two reasons. First, as you’re lying
there, as this youth is very articulate, you can convalesce in
thinking he’s family: he represents you. Second, I wanted
to see if anything has changed now that blacks are the second
largest “minority” in this country instead of the first—
if that makes their voice more like an echo, if the anger of it
has receded.) (16)
The scene of an accident, its chaos, fear, anger, shock, dislocation, forced interaction and the quality and tenor of rescue, is beleaguered and uncompromising. Gladman’s words circle and haunt, they expose and harbor, they confront and query—and they never underestimate the reader. She interrogates racism and the condition of African Americans in a contemporary urban locale. It is a moving (as in motion, as in heartbreak) rendering of the brutal and delicate vicissitudes of connection and loss in a failing society. “I want to tell you that this is a metaphor or a dream, as in/Kundera, but you are too fascinated with dying to hear me” (22).
In “Untitled, Colorado,” Gladman again underscores conflicted social biases and the disorientation of public space. The narrator “I” and the character “A.” are waiting to be seated in a restaurant. The waiting is delayed and fraught. It is unclear exactly why they are not being seated. Is it racism? Homophobia? Both? “‘Gladman party of two’. . . . But she [the hostess] doesn’t mean us. I can’t explain how I know. My name is Gladman and there are two of us. . .but that call, it’s for a different sort of folk” (25). The narrator “I” has the same last name as the author. Additionally, the mysterious party of “Gladman’s” that the hostess does call further complicates the layering of subject and object. Misrepresentation becomes representation in the text and the metatext.
The scene fluctuates between states of mind at turns anxious, angry, knowing, and detached. Visual and auditory stimuli crowd the experience and exacerbate the relegation of the characters as “other” and the cleft positioned between them and the rest of the world. That the first person narrator/character is listening to an audio book (from which phrases are taken and interspersed with the text and which is either a travel guide or an account of the disappearance of two women, or both), while this is taking place adds another stratum of displacement and involvement. When the two women finally make it inside the restaurant, they experience sanctuary only in the restroom. From the narrator: “The bathroom is unoccupied. Once inside, I pull her tank top over her head and seize her left nipple with my mouth. I have to stand on the toilet to do this. Well, I have to kneel on the toilet. I tug on the nipple, and wrap my arms around her waist. She does next what all day I’ve been hoping she would do, and afterwards screams, ‘Re…!’” (28).
This urgent and starkly beautiful lesbian lovemaking in a place called “Colorado” in a line of other “Gladman’s” in a restaurant of ugly repute in a room of literal elimination is how the couple finally enters and creates their own space. The restaurant, however, subsumes them as they return to their table. “Everybody’s white. . . . A. signs to me. . . ‘You’re talking too loud’. . . . The waiter rushes over. . . ‘Ladies, could you come with me?’” (29). The body and the idea of the body are impugned. But the other Gladman intervenes. “Meanwhile, words between the waiter and old Mr. Gladman are destabilizing” (29). There is innuendo, accusation, overlapping exchanges, and a general hush of bewildered intention. In the end, Mr. Gladman pays their bill. Yet, “Outside nothing has changed. The car is still in the parking lot; the sun is still out. . . . We pull away from the restaurant and, for some minutes, I allow myself to hold onto the image of Old Mr. Gladman. ‘What happened back there?’ I ask A. . . . , ‘Could have been anything,’ I open the book, replace the headphones” (31). The reader is left to her own flawed devices. As in an earlier statement in the section, “More of this relying on signals for comfort” (27).
Newcomer Can’t Swim is full of false starts, occlusions, and constancy. Sometimes this can lapse into a kind of writerly ennui. A dearth of structural variation or tone change, when the composition lulls, the repetition reads flat or the characters too indistinct, the feeling can be inchoate in a way that may vex or tire the reader. But this is extremely rare, as pause and interval are deftly handled, repetition and character are animate and superbly written, and contemplative turns are timed and welcome. The front cover, strikingly designed by Quemadura and perfectly fitted to the book, is textured and the seemingly rusty remnants are ominous. The font between sections of the book pushes forward with its uppercase diagonal sweep to the next page. Gladman writes, “Being in a place ‘Colorado’ that doesn’t quite look like ‘Colorado’. . . makes you begin to wonder about maps and orientation. I want to test these thoughts” (26). Again, the author’s thinking about thinking is a kind of map—but without a legend. In Newcomer Can’t Swim, the map is cultural construction, dissolution, and illusion. People and locations disregulate. Sudden and overwhelming meteorological events occur; rain, wind, and leaves are almost themselves characters. Positionality is the setting and the undoing.
In “Kingdom in Three Panels,” the penultimate section and perhaps the most important, Gladman’s voice is surreal and almost subliminal. In the first subsection, written in short paragraphs, “Street and Cello,” the four characters are running from something. They move lithely and then thickly through time and space. “Mona paints the image of Natalie running from the door/of the pink house exactly one hour before she does it. . . .” (41). Rain interrupts the action and then becomes it. There is a violin (that is really a cello) in the distance (that no one is playing). There are repeated sequences made to seem random but are deliberately unscored and build, quite suspensefully, to sentences like this: “In this way Eva, Mona, and Natalie take refuge on the partially covered rooftop. . . . Eva considers the rain, recalls the fish” (55). The characters enact but cannot entirely articulate the rush or what magnitude of risk. A flood? Hurricane Katrina?i “The light mutes behind gray clouds, such as winter, such as fish beneath the waves of water” (46).
Gladman continues this disturbing twist around what we think is happening and what we think is not happening with the next section, “Louie Between Cities,” which is more expository. Species, place, and time are malleable, contorted and under threat. The character “Louie” is now a dog, and reflects and expands on what occurred in “Street and Cello.” The roads are flooded with detritus, and bodies float. Louie witnesses the infrastructural and human wreckage on the streets, and makes direct address to his own lost companion. A catastrophic event and the abysmal, criminal failure of response have created an incomprehensible crisis and split between experience and reality. The perspective of a person is “channeled” through the perspective of a dog. Or vice versa? It is not gratuitously anthropomorphic. It is just that Louie the dog, as narrator, grabs attention such that we cannot turn away. Gladman writes, “Of course my thoughts went instantly to you. I was still without an answer, but I’d practiced a lie . . . . [B]ecause I did not have access to fact. And they accepted it, for indeed it was a narrative I could have lived had I . . . ” (60).
In the final section of the book, “Zone,” Gladman writes the epitaph, “after Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Stalkerii” (84). This film takes place in a desolate urban landscape, which is forbidden territory patrolled by the government. After the previous section, the exploration of Tarkovsky’s film here is a perfect gesture. The characters are called “The Writer” and “The Professor.” “The Stalker,” (“stalker” as in “tracking”), leads them through natural and preternatural obstacles to a room that may or may not grant their innermost wishes. It is post-apocalyptic allegory. Gladman re-tells the story (of a story) in bruising and elegant language. Small details and complex, impossible dilemmas fuel the unresolved “plot.” In her book as in the film, the element of water is a constant: mud oozes, water drips, pools form and transform. The room itself is a portal into the nearly biblical and Dante-esque unknown. As spoken by the film’s stalker character, “. . . The Zone is a very complicated system of traps and they’re all deadly…safe spots become impassable. Now your path is easy, now it is hopelessly involved. That’s the Zone. . .It lets those pass who have lost all hope. . . . ”
Renee Gladman’s characters are equally despairing with contracted emotion and desires. Whether the characters in the film enter the room is never revealed. Likewise, whether or not any of Gladman’s many characters experience resolution is left open. It is also of note that in this section of the book, her writing assumes a more recognized poetic structure with short lines forming a narrow column down the page as if leaving the reader with an inconclusive nod to form. She writes, “Because the worlds shift, I can’t/believe in either of them. The/power of the room remains/closed to us, thus I give the room/no power. I wish. Now watching/the water pour down” (93). These lines, perhaps invoking the book’s title—that the new, the untested, may be vulnerable or thwarted—that all of us are the “Newcomer.” Can we keep our heads above water? The last word of this extraordinary book “as” tells us that we do not yet know (104).“ -
Denise Leto
Renee Gladman, The Activist, Krupskaya, 2003.
"Straddling fiction and poetry, Renee Gladman's writing operates on the level of the sentence, constructing suprise and oblique meanings at every turn, and somehow managing the supremely difficult trick of both engaging and pushing the reader. "THE ACTIVIST begins in the middle of a revolution....There is a bridge that may or may not have been bombed. People speak in nonsense and cannot stop themselves. In the mids of all this, the language of news reports mixes with the language of confession. The art of this beautifully written book is in how it touchingly illustrates that relations between humans and cities are linked in a more complex interface than most realize" -
Juliana Spahr
"Whether this is a dream in which I'm captured or I've been captured and made to think I'm in a dream, I can't figure." Apropos to the rapturous tension The Activist evokes. A covert narrative operating as an event disguised as a repot. A grass trap glimpsed through the lashes of a sleepwalker. Topography of disrupted positionality, reflection girders flaccid memory against the romantic high up. Flea-bitten news and neuralgic placards. You are here**. Is dreaming the medium for crossing the ambiguous borders of talk, responsibility, collectivity, solitude? Or does reading anatomize a phantom bridge that carries you over to an unmappable reality and calls you by your secret name? Root, plan and faction, armed with tongue-tied intensity. You may ask how Renee Gladman knows that this city of slippage is your city, how she holds you within it, riveted. And therein lies the magic of this book.“ -
Tisa Bryant
"Following up on her 2000 debut Juice (Kelsey Street), Gladman here pushes West Coast "new narrative" further into Kafka- and Poindexter-esque territory. A form of elliptical prose taken up in the '90s by writers like Dodie Bellamy, Mary Burger, Laura Moriarty and Camille Roy (and adapted by Gladman's peers Pamela Lu and Lytle Shaw), new narrative allows the basic elements of novels (plot, character, dialogue, specificity of setting) to run through the text without being sketched all the way in. By turns noirish first-person memoir and journalistic satire, The Activist depicts the goings on of a cell or affinity group that may or may not have blown up a bridge that may or may not have existed. Descriptions are inflected such that the names of characters (Lomarlo, Monique), their relations to each other (often same sex) and the way they talk ("This our downtown"; the title itself may be in the plural) put pressure on categories of race, gender and sexual orientation. The group may also have developed technology for emptying the memories of subjects, and controlling them Matrix-style, and their prevarications have a Godardian intellectualized haplessness. Yet the memory technology sets up the most powerful of the book's 10 sections, "The State," where it is unclear if the first-person narrator is being held by the government or by the activists, for what reason and to what purpose. The book works best as one of the first full-length mirrors held to the post 9/11 U.S.; in its targeting and rhetoric; it is something less than allegorical, more than a little chilling, and often very beautiful." -
Publishers Weekly
„A haunting and hilarious mix of dreams, news reports, confessions, and internal monologues, Renee Gladman's latest book is an absurdist political satire and a poetic consideration of points of contact among people, people and society, people and cities, and also, perhaps most captivatingly, between a person's sense of self in opposition to her sense of the Other or sense of herself as the Other. At the heart of the story is the J. Gifford Bridge, reputed by the government to have been blown up by activists. However, a group of scientists declare that the bridge has not been blown up and contend that it may never have existed as "a crossing point" at all, commuters protest their inability to use the bridge, and the activists themselves will "not admit to 'living a life among people.'" In response to the activists' refusal to communicate in codified terms, one government agent complains, "'Instead of a hunger strike ... it's as though they are issuing a logic one'--but then immediately added that he didn't know what he meant by that." Crossing points of all kinds are threatened, language continually fails to connect people as they unknowingly spew nonsense at one another, or have trouble saying what they mean, or aren't sure they know what they want to say, can't remember if what they said was what they meant, or if they said it out loud, or to themselves, or in a dream. In addition, maps go blank and the infrastructure of the city is attacked or perhaps never existed. Given these circumstances, everyone is afraid. The activists end one meeting because, "Each feeling himself so separate from the others began to grow tired, to grow heavy with that unassailable exhaustion--fear." And the primary fear is to be alone--physically, politically, psychologically. So characters cling to political movements or familiar-if-meaningless slogans in hopes of being swept up in the patriotic or rebellious fervor of belonging, as if this will solidify a watery reality or reconnect what may have once been workable crossing points. It seems unlikely that anything can mend the rift. The reader (along with the characters) is engrossed but dazed by the book's structure and style. And yet Gladman's prose is precise, and her book is strangely optimistic.“ -
Danielle Dutton
„In an era of extreme paranoia, everything is about perceptions, not evidence, so everything can be spun to suit a cause. Not even a journalist can be relied upon to see clearly. These are the lessons of Renee Gladman's powerful prose poem The Activist.
The narrator of this book is a journalist drawn into a pressure-cooker tale of politicians versus activists. But she discovers following the activists is a dangerous business because objectivity is difficult to cling to in the presence of a swelling sense of righteousness and deepening commitment.
The cause? The cause barely matters. And it is not even easy to discern. Has a city bridge been bombed and destroyed or not? Such an apparently simple question is confused and confounded by the spin and the rest of the world looking on is required to make up its mind based on mere perceptions because there is no truth to be found.
With the administration putting its case and the evidence from others at odds with it, a specialist on perception theory and war summarizes it thus:
"This is the situation we're facing: a shockingly high number of witnesses claim that the bridge is in perfect form, the President of our nation is convinced that the bridge has been exploded, another group asserts that the bridge has collapsed, not exploded, and a handful of researchers contests that there never was a bridge."
The Activist is almost too explicit for allegory. It is practically a direct metaphor for current circumstances in the United States, where the book is set. And yet, it explores ideas that go far beyond the current situation and are applicable to any case in which civil liberties are at issue and a government is trying desperately to support its own agenda at the expense of the truth. It peers insightfully into the activities of activists and discovers their strengths and shortcomings.
Demonstrators are protesting the bridge situation, but the purported ringleader, one Alonso Mendoza, is not to be found. Yet, the absence of evidence is simply not acceptable to an administration hell-bent on proving its case:
"Three men -- Al Mendoza, Alejandro Mendoza, and Alpine Mencini -- were questioned at police headquarters about their political affiliations."
Later, as the administration's desperation increases:
"This morning, forces stormed the homes of Altar Mendleshon, Alvin Mendocci, Alsana Mendoza, and Alonso Mitchell in search of the spurious leader of the Commuters, now accused of three felony counts of conspiratorial behavior."
You can fill in the intervening time with quotes of your choice taken from newspapers since 9/11 and particularly since Iraq War II: Bigger, Badder, Bloodlustier.
But The Activist is not a mere polemic against the current administration's actions. A critical eye is turned on the activists involved:
This last declaration calls each member's wandering mind to attention. While the pitch of the utterance can be quickly characterized as Stefani's pitch, its authenticity is entirely suspect for most of the group. Alonso recognizes her, but the rest do not. Stefani, at once, registers the discomfort and obvious fluster of concern that infects them. However, her struggle to recall the precise words of her speech, to then correct them, yields no reward.
A map that mutates as some of the activists study it is a metonymic representation of the overall plan. The activists have trouble keeping track of their goals and end up doing what they are able to do rather than what they planned to do.
As time passes, the activists become less coherent as a group and less effectual. The administration is not any more successful but its force of overwhelming power leads directly to war. A war on what or whom is never made explicit, and nor does it need to be. Meanwhile, the activists turn inward and make their own war on each other.
Our narrator journalist has been drawn in to the battle, unable to remain an independent observer. But what did she experience? In the haunting chapter, "The State," the journalist is psychologically tortured -- but who got to her? Is it really the State or is it the Commuters? In any event, independence is gone and truth has lost it's only potential champion for this battle. The proliferation of extremism has won, with barely anybody noticing.“ –
David Harris
Renee Gladman, Juice, Kelsey Street Press, 2000.
„Gladman wields an idiosyncratic skill with description and characters that has drawn praise and attention from her contemporaries. JUICE describes a world where seemingly minor obsessions and details (like the narrator's almost random preference for juice) can structure and develop an entire story, down to its tone and style. As her narrator puts it: "So far it has been sex and leaves that keep me alive."
"About the body I know very little, though I am steadily trying to improve myself, in the way animals improve themselves by licking," begins Gladman's agreeably personal and expansively philosophical first collection of four fictional prose poems. Like the recent debut from fellow San Franciscan Pamela Lu (Pamela: A Novel), Gladman describes the strange dilemmas of selfhood when basic assumptions about who we are and why we do what we do have collapsed under various pressures, linguistic and otherwise. The opening 12-page "Translation" adopts various sociological poses to describe a people who "migrated off the `declining' coast" intent on discovering, via archeology and some odd logistical gestures, the secrets of its occluded past. In "Proportion Surviving," the "juice" of the book's title gets a delightful metaphorical ("I was happy. I mean, I was in my juice") and recollective workout from a Proustian glass of apple juice, to stalking the bottled aisle of the grocery store, to a love "crisis" that finally gets the speaker off it, seemingly for good. In "No Through Street," the narrator's sister wins fame for painting a series of functional but nonstandard street signs, setting off a series of oblique meditations on race, intimate relationships ("if this woman is the directionalist whom everyone knows about, who is my sister?") and cultural capital. In the most fragmented but most evocative piece, "First Sleep," the search for a "Mrs. Gladman" is carried out amidst a series of "sleeps," as if identity itself can be discerned only in the synthetic, but punctuated, moments of the subconscious. Though one wishes at times for a more vividly descriptive language or more concentrated elaboration of the ideas, this is a rich and unusual collection, like an alien codex from a culture in one's own backyard." -
Publishers Weekly
„When reading “Juice” you can't help to feel you are encountering something very intimate. And what feels at first as a document of self discovery, leads itself to become a play on the essential idea of discovering, of wondering and reaching for meaning, without the necessity of achievement. Gladman's language is powerfully unique, for it pronounces itself conversationally, yet is still buoyant in its philosophical games and acts of deconstructing through time-jumbling and non-linear associations. Emotionally, this story brings you into its poetry, its softness, and its deliberate reassembling of its narrative, artfully enough to give back a reflection of how you can fit meaningfully within its spacing.“ –
Ritchie's Book Noise
„In Juice, Renee Gladman reconstitutes the narrative I in deliciously concentrated prose poems which pour past the limits that typically proscribe first person writing. But this is not to suggest that the liquidity of Gladman's I makes it untrustworthy. Rather, hers is a narrative presence that seems bracingly consistent in its expression of the paradoxes that are rife in any seeking to know, or in any attempt to express the implications of that search upon a subject's experience and condition of being:
I knew it was me
by the way my head felt: people find themselves in an
idea and feel so specified by the idea that they are com-
pelled to show it. Today all my ideas are liquid. (from "Proportion Surviving," 28)
Gladman is adept at presenting invitingly direct speech in which her readers will recognize her striving for absolute veracity as she describes her attempts to see—and to release herself from—sanctioned limitations upon our beliefs about what is known or knowable. We feel her fracturing the systemic constructions we take for granted which organize and constrain our sense of ourselves and the world around us.
A person makes a chart in her room; the room bears
a resemblance to the chart. Inside of the chart is the
periphery of the person's body. She places the chart
against the wall and stares at it. Half of the body falls.
I ran into the room and then quickly out of it, having
realized I did not want to be there. (from "First Sleep," 58)
Where typical narratives of the Western tradition would incorporate attempts to fill in—to make knowable—any gaps in logic, Gladman allows the chasms of alterity within her speakers to be exposed. One can see affinities between this project and texts like Clarisse Lispector's Stream of Life, which Helene Cixous introduces, saying:
It is always a question of beginnings. It is hard to imagine a text that would be more violently real, more faithfully natural, more contrary to classical narration. Classical narration is made of appearances, caught in codes. Here there are no codes. (x)
Like Lispector's, Gladman's text is also made up of beginnings—of appearances—that do not develop in expected hierarchical or chronological ways, but instead open into the disappearances in which the text abounds. While Gladman's appearances and disappearances do not conform to normative codes or systemic modes of thought, such systems are often alluded to:
To save this land I have to bring back archeology. As a child
this thought was implanted in me: In the appearance of
any species there is an element of disappearance and
within its disappearance a particle of return. And that is
why we have storage.
......................
In our past there is a germ for survival, beneath our weath-
ered clothes and yellowed papers, a propellant of time.
If I wanted to I could spend the rest of my days devoted to
time. Or end the township here for something on the other
side of the mountains... (from "Translation," 19)
Gladman dices and skewers the discourses through which our ideologies manifest—the ways we typically, with scant awareness, speak of history, culture, time—then she seasons with a diction that is incontrovertibly calm, and roasts her language in the flame of a syntax that is subversively direct. What we are served fills us with the emptiness of seeing through the gaps in our signifying systems, and into a subject's unknowability and otherness.
The juice on my mind was no longer
juice. There was an absence there, but one so constant it
became familiar. I did not want to drink it. (from "Proportion Surviving," 28)
Concomitantly, her strategies also allow us to observe othernesses that are "disappeared" or "displaced" by the norms of dominant culture in the external world. Thus, each of the prose poems that comprise Juice has at its center an inexplicable appearance of absence, disappearance, displacement—one that might encompass private as well as public, and internal as well as external, loss—whether of a culture, a community, a relationship, a period of memory, a sense of self.
Between the moment fifteen years ago when I turned the
corner away from Hershey Street and a year later when I
"woke up" outside a Midwestern hotel, there is water
where memory should be. There is evidence in my bags,
my pockets, that made me think I had been on trains.
There was a way I kept looking over my shoulder—
back east—that reminded me of trains. So that's where I
assumed I had been, and that is where I went. (from "No Through Street," 34)
Gladman's representation is rich with such losses, as if to clarify that any narrative is as much about omission as it is about incorporation. Juice is dense—"pulpy", I dare say—with emptiness, with what can't be brought into consciousness with words, reminding us that any language is a narrowly limited container shaped by the proscriptions of the past. But, in Gladman, we find exemplified not only Frederic Jameson's premise that we are "imprisoned" in the language of our particular temporality; also demonstrated is the value of filling language to the breaking point with a palpable attention to that imprisonment.
Of course, heightened attention of this nature doesn't necessarily mean the prose will include a high degree of specificity. In the excerpt quoted above, we are told: "There is evidence in my bags, my pockets, that made me think I had been on trains," but we are not told what that evidence might be. Here Gladman is deftly exposing the mecurial workings of mind—in this instance we see the ways mind uses its system of preconceived ideas to sort the data of experience. Gladman is exquisitely subtle in reminding us of just how much specifity a mind may unconsciously ignore in its environment when coming to its conclusions.
Of course, we need the mind's systems of stimulus-selectivity in order to manage the enormous infusion of material that must be processed in any instance of living. But it is exactly such scissions between using habituated experience and attending to the shock of fresh insight that Gladman watches shut and open, open and shut. Often her most disruptive shifts of narrative development expose the enormous energy flow of this process, and suggest the myriad directions of thought and alternate paths of knowing that any instant offers. Gladman's narratives, rather than simply progressing forward in linear fashion, accrue such eliptic disruptions spacially, exposing a sequencing that is as close to three dimensional expansion as one might come in articulating a subject's perception of a situation. Pressing such limits allows Gladman to point almost simultaneously in many directions toward what arrives in the gaps between our language's ability to express what we perceive.
The friend
whose easy chair gave way to my failures moved out of
town the next week, and though I miss her it was the fail-
ures that saved me. On every other day of any kind of crisis
one finds particular sayings helpful. If certain words are
spoken quietly into a cup of hot water, with the handle of
the cup of water turned towards the wall, whatever strength found
in the person may be mirrored in the wall. The person
leaves the house with her hand against this wall but strut-
ting slightly. (from "Proportion Surviving," 26-27)
Exposed in sections like the one above are both the fragility and limitations of mind's attempts to account for—and to preserve some faith in making comprehensible—any causality in event, as well as the apparant discrepancy between these mental propositions and the fleeting reality that mind would capture in them. But by exposing such discrepancies, such boundaries, such limits in the frames of perception, Gladman also points us toward intuiting the shifting expanses beyond them.
Such use of the narrative I neither ignores, nor is limited by, the parameters of traditional first person, which, as Luce Irigary has explained, projects its own ego onto the world and then sees only its own reflection. Gladman incorporates into her text the complexity of a narrative I that refuses mastery over either "itself" or the "other" it cannot incorporate. Through this unsynchronizing lens's paradoxical optic acuity, Gladman focuses upon stories that enact some of our era's most provocative cultural and philosophic questions. Gladman transgresses, even as she writes through, the private and public paradigms we find constraining a speaker's subjectivity—whether in the role of community member, artist, lover, daughter, or sister.
I was aware of the possibility of an actual encounter
between my sister and me, but I went anyway—suddenly
prepared for everything. All past and all future, at once,
and any other knowledge that might come up. (from "No Through Street," 43)
As Marjorie Perloff has expressed it: "poetic 'uniqueness' in our postromantic age is less a matter of authenticity of individual expression than of sensitivity to the language pool on which the poet draws in re-creating and redefining the world as he or she has found it." (Italics are Perloff's. From Wittgenstein's Ladder, 187) Gladman's text is "juiced" with a concentrated awareness of our thirst for knowledge outside the paradigms that constrain our knowing, and the richness of Gladman's sensitivity to our culture's language pool only heightens the headiness of her work's textural and textual flavor and flow. Fill your glass with Juice; you'll want to take many long swallows.“ –
Rusty Morrison
Renee Gladman: Proportion Surviving
