Prose Architecture, Renee Gladman (2017)
âIn my other life, I was writing the Ravicka novels, which primarily were concerned with a bodyâa body with a storyâmoving through city space, looking for other bodies. I began to think architecture all the time as I was writing, wanting language to take the word on energetically.â (viii)
âas a means to give language to the spaces she recognizes between building and bodies, between books and bodies, between one body and anotherâ (viii)
âShe thinks about architecture, about the lines in her books and the lines on the street. She tries to switch one for the other. She turns to architecture to describe the configuration of her friends meeting over coffee, her friends writing and surviving a national crisis together. She writes things like:
A group happened, because place and / time had done something to you: you / were waiting for a train, you were waiting / for a city to stabilize, for its buildings to / stay in place, for traffic to return, for / there to be traffic, and you wanted to / write about it, even though you didnât / understand it, and you wanted other / people to read what you wroteâyour / friends who were also writingâand you / wanted language to move out of you and / out of them into the space between you / and for it to do some extraordinary thing / of bending and becoming ...
Ana Patova attempts to build structures with her lines (something beyond paragraphs and chapters), structures that are, somehow, inhabitable. But her objective is not solely to write a story about how one inhabits structures of thinking (these structures in the context of the book, creating new possibilities for community and connection, for the production of art and thought); rather, she wants to manifest these structures, for them to come out of the writing and into existence. There are dimensions to language that are very difficult to describe with language, and yet it is only in languageâin trying to move through itâthat one has the privilege of experiencing these dimensions.â (ix-x)
âimagining that shapes the languageâ (x)
âThe dream is often not the text youâre reading but comes from some other part of the page, some part of the text that is not quite visible.
How could I inhabit thought as architecture, as a space that could be seen or experienced bodily?â (x)
âunlike any time previously, I wanted something out of the act, or, more precisely, I wanted to be changed by it.â (x)
âIt wasnât as if each new thought was a correction of the previous one; it was more like the previous drawing allowed the subsequent drawing to see itself better. Ultimately, I began to understand the lines I made as a means of pulling the act of writing away from the act of making sense, so that I could look almost mechanically at what writing was.â (x)
âBoth narrative and writing are events of progression, something (language or events) moving across a given space. But to progress in language (in sentences) is to move forward through a kind of syntax weâve all agreed upon (you will make sense if you order your words in this way, etc.). However, this âmaking senseâ wasnât actually a representation of how what I wrote came to me or existed in me. I realized that if I were to write without making sense I would be doing exactly what Iâd begun to do: I would draw! I would say to people in reference to the drawings, âThis is language with its skin pulled back.â This was an inner syntax we were seeing; maps or diagrams of the way the mind goes, how thoughts form or approach language, perhaps how the imagination reaches into language. I made so many drawings because each time I drew I could feel writing. I could feel all the parts of writing that tended to go away when I tried to write about them. Somehow, they remained when you drew them, and that is what I wish to offer in this book: some interiors, some energies of my prose.â (xi)
