Origins
For all my writing life I have been fascinated with notions of origin and passage, though rarely in terms of ancestry—since I don’t know where I’m from. I don’t know the languages or landscapes that preceded the incursion of English and what is now the United States into my lineage. Yet, the violence of that erasure—all the inheritances interrupted—is as foundational to my relationship to language and subjectivity as is grammar. There remains some aspect of my speaking that expects a different mode of expression than English provides. I know this because of my tendency to encode as I write, also to invent languages as I’ve done in half of my books. I open my mouth in my own life and I want to distort, rearrange, mispronounce the available vocabulary. This comes from a desire to resist assimilation, but equally, it arises out of a sense of exploration or adventure, a sense of puzzlement: as if something has happened to my occupation of the language, where a kind of split occurs. I move through it and see myself moving at the same time. It’s a double consciousness, a questioning that simultanates my rendering of experience. (I know that’s not a word—simultanates—but I needed a verb that would indicate one thing causing something else to run parallel to it.) I say, “I,” in my language, and whatever I was setting out to describe or place in time undergoes an immediate complexity. This points to a displacement, which I believe is at the heart of any narrative I write—the displacement indicates what I call “the problem of the person,” where articulating one’s experiences in time—that is to say, describing the origins of one’s acts, the chronology of events of a day in the life of, something which would seem to suit language very well, which would seem to be the purpose of language, is in fact one of its foremost struggles. Narrative language seems baffled by both time and memory. And yet, these are its main source materials for world- building.
So, to return to the predicament of my displaced origins, that unmappable first land and unutterable first language, rather than comb my mind for their traces I have found myself more taken by the structural and philosophical implications of their absence. How these ghosts make voids and reflective surfaces within language the very means of one’s self- determination.
In 1997 or ‘98, I wrote a sentence that would be the beginning of a two-decade long investigation of what comes after absence. I wrote: “About the body I know very little though I am steadily trying to improve myself, in the way animals improve themselves by licking. I have always wanted to be sharp and clean.” This grouping of sentences, which opens the first story of my first book, has stayed intact in my memory, because it exemplifies perfectly my predicament as a subject in language, place, and time. The voice announces itself through a declaration of what it doesn’t know “about the body,” but it turns itself toward knowing. Though, not toward a countable knowledge—something that will attenuate this lack with regard to the body— rather, toward a better disposition, in a sense a better vantage point for viewing the unknown. The voice wants a lighter constitution, to be highly functioning, “winning,” so it looks out into the world for behavior to emulate: “in the way animals improve themselves by licking,” and finds a gesture that encompasses both the insistence and absurdity of trying. If there is anything my narrators do it is to try. To try and try. Which results in an arrival: “I have always wanted to be sharp and clean.” A statement that at once sets a standard—to be sharp and clean—but looks at that desire with nostalgia, with detachment: “I have always wanted.” With these sentences I sought to establish the conditions through which I would investigate the nature of experience, which, at that time, would be understood as something originating from a feeling of being “without”—of being foreign or disoriented —but, at once, moving forward, moving through itself, because the language or the street says so. We move through language because we place it between our selves and the world, we agree on it as the means by which we represent thought and emotion. We use it as a repository for most of our facts and observations and wonderings. But, what does language have to do with the street?
For me, the two are inextricable, and the one makes the other phenomenally more interesting through this link. In 1994 I moved to San Francisco to study poetics at a college that no longer exists but which, at the time, was very centrally located. The neighborhood, where I studied and where I lived and walked my dog, provided a ground (a staging, even) that laid out not only a trajectory of arts venues, bookstores, coffee shops, taquerias, etc., but also made evident the tension and sometime collaboration between the Mexican and Central American residents of that part of the city and their mostly white, young hipster neighbors. There were demarcations of space that you processed through your urbanized body, that presented you with a set of ever evolving questions regarding your itinerary—the streets you habituated, the streets you avoided, where you felt safe, felt central, where you sought refuge, difference, etc. By contrast, I grew up in a city where one experienced passage from one place to another by car or bus. You walked only if you were poor, and you didn’t get very far before your course was interrupted by expressways. Thus, that city was always held away. It felt un- enterable and evacuated as a space of cultural exchange. Living in San Francisco, however, a place where my primary mode of passage was walking, dramatically altered what was visible and what could be experienced. To repeat, foremost, it was the fact of the body—this body turning corners, passing other bodies, being seen and read by other bodies, climbing hills, touching the sides of buildings—it was the fact of this body, following lines, making new lines, resting, moving that gave the city a sense of syntax; the day was divided into intervals, like clauses. Walking became a way of reading the city, of writing one’s subjectivity and thinking into it. My walking became a story of movement, of crossing in and out of different modes of being, and fragmenting place and time. And, it did not take me long to understand this also as the very character of the sentence: movement, crossing in and out of different modes of being, fragmenting place and time.
In Toaf, a book I wrote to memorialize this time in my life, which I also cite as the location of another kind of crossing, the shift from being a poet to a writer of prose, I describe writing as, “returning home ‘half the person’ and looking into the space of writing for a refill. But not just to put back what the outside had taken, also to add some new information.” In my thinking, at the time, experience was something that you were losing as you moved through the day, as you encountered acquaintances or ran errands, something time wore out of you, and it was only through writing that you could retrieve it. But it was not so much the specifics of the day you captured—who you saw, what you did, what you thought—more the shape and energy of those encounters. I wrote so as to turn over in my mind repeatedly the irrefutable but endlessly perplexing fact that I was a person in the world, here was my body, and it was with this body (enclosed in it) that I left the house that morning and it was with the same body that I returned.
It was similar perplexities that drew me, as a college student, to philosophy over twenty years ago. I remember quite vividly my excitement whenever the professor turned our attention away from some dense text we were trying to parse to focus on a “problem” in the room. I loved the moments where we were gazing at a chair or a pencil on a desk trying to get at some essence, some clarity on what it means to know or perceive those objects. The question of how we know and how we know that we know or see or experience anything is still one of the most interesting to me—utterly unresolvable but ever present. I am interested in what one has to quiet or to suspend in the noise of one’s mind to simply order a coffee in a café or to say “I am well.” Ultimately, I found philosophy uninhabitable, and found poetry better suited for my particular “problems” of language, but I am indebted to the field for providing me with certain gestures and vocabulary that I’ve found indispensable.
While I have been trying to talk to you about “origins,” in many ways I have all this time been talking about translation as well. I have a dear friend, a translator from Spanish to English, who feels very protective of this word [“translation”]; it irritates her a bit how freely I use it. Of the known languages, I am fluent in only one. So I do not translate. I don’t really know what it’s like. But I also know of no other word that functions so brilliantly as a metaphor for everything I’ve said so far. At the core of my work is the question of the original—the event before it becomes memory, trying to locate oneself in the present, in language, which is always slightly behind the present. At the core of my reading, the majority of which is work in translation (from languages all over the world) is that same question of the original. I am captivated by the beauty of the problems of translation and find that these problems transfer easily to those of experience and language—how to construct a bridge between them, how the story of our experience changes once it enters language.
When we talk about a text being translated from one language to another we often worry about the original, whether it is getting carried over, where it exists in the new language, the new text. We can’t help but wonder what it is we’re reading and whether this “translation” has anything to do with that original text, the one that is out of our reach (ungraspable, because we do not have competency with it, or it’s simply absent, because the original is not available in our country). Does this translation contain the traces, the friction of the writer’s contact with the original language, the tension of moving through that language toward the book? Is this original energy re-written by the translator’s movement between the original and target language? When I think of these questions I get so excited about where literature actually exists. Where is the poem? Is it in the mind? Is it on the page? Translation is amazing, because it presumes that there is something that needs to be carried from one place to another. But, where is that thing? And does only the translator see it? Indeed, not only does translation presume that there is something to carry, but also that it can be carried. Jordan Stump, a North- American translator of French, has written a provocative work on the idea of “the original” in translation. In The Other Book, Stump writes: “Translation forces us to admit a potentially uncomfortable truth: on some level, to some degree, and no matter how vigorously we deny it, we do believe in the text as certain words and not others, as something inherently right in itself.” What Stump is somewhat facetiously getting at is that what we appreciate and grasp from a written text has every thing to do with the precise arrangement of its words—the words chosen, the order given. He goes on to reveal the supposed discomfort: “For even as we judge a translation according to the respect it displays for a fixed set of signifiers, the translation shows us the unfixedness of those very signifiers, their fluidity, their mutability.” But, I am less interested in debating a translation’s “faith” to an original text as I am fascinated by the problem—this discomfort—that emerges, that haunts the reading experience. How does one reconcile these corresponding texts, both of which we presuppose carry the same “something,” though by means of an entirely different set of words, a different syntax, among other incompatibilities? The problem draws my attention to the passage between sites (if we understood two texts as respective sites), to what lies in the liminal space between them, in the moment where Hungarian becomes English or Japanese becomes Turkish. And what exactly does this “becoming” entail? And, beyond these questions about the relationship of the original to the translation, is another exciting query: how we arrive at an original, in the first place.
Where does the original “originate”? Although I have no idea what thoughts, impulses, memories, and other material of our interior being look like—I don’t know if they take up physical space in the brain, if they exist apart from the neurons that seem to catalyze them—and I’m not sure science has gotten very far in providing an answer. But when I imagine these energies in the mind, I see them as having a very different architecture and sense of time than does the sentence. So, when we move from our minds into language, from something that must be multilayered, full of fragments, full of complete feelings, like novels that exist in the shape of an instant, what are we doing? What is the nature of that movement? How do we find language, how do we put the complex shape of our interiority—its vast web-like structure— into the straight line of the sentence? I think particularly of the English sentence, which forces one to begin with a subject, a kind of encapsulated self or other that speaks, sees, knows, or, in the case of objects, a subjectivity that presumes grasp-ability. To say, “The piano is over there,” is to put across an incontrovertible statement. The speaker knows. The speaker sees. Within the statement there is little room for ambiguity, for questioning the capacity of the room, for creating duration between object and location. And, it doesn’t improve the situation to adjust the sentence so that you can ask: Is the piano over there? This points us back to that “unfixedness” I mentioned earlier. How do we cultivate a language that perceives in modes other than identification and assignation? How, in prose (and I specify prose because poetry has a much easier time of dislodging objects from their categorical existences)—so, how in prose, in that gathering of sentences can we position ourselves as adventurers (not unlike translators) of space? In Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, the third book in a series of novels I’m writing about the city-country Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, I come upon an architecture where the object world and language and the body and the book have become a kind of breathing, moving singularity. For the characters of this book to make sense of what’s happening to them they do three things: they write, they walk, and they gather. But to write is to activate the space in which they meet, and to meet is to activate the stories of their moving through the city and their failures to move, and to move and not-move is to write. It creates a collapsed space inside which a narrative occurs. Here is a passage (or “bridge” as I like to call them) from Ana Patova that demonstrates a little of how I’m seeing this process.
There was ringing in my mouth. I
hummed so I could see it. Somebody
was looking at me. It was Hausen.
Hausen had walked by and stopped
and was now staring. It was Z. and it
was me and suddenly Hausen, but
Hausen stood on the other side of the
window, his bags in tow, his silence.
Zàoter stood up and walked to the
counter, leaving Hausen and me to
figure out who we were to each other
(there was never enough time) and
who we were to this glass between us
and any possible reflection. Zàoter called
to me from the counter. “Two,” I
returned to him. He called again. “I
don’t know,” I confessed. “Hausen?” I
asked, but Hausen couldn’t hear me and
wouldn’t step inside. “Hausen?” Zàoter
called from the counter (you began to
wonder if he were really there). I
hummed as I waited for coffee and the
man tapped the window. I looked up.
It was Hausen, who was a phenomenon:
you saw him; it made you think. “We’re
in place,” I mouthed against my
reflection, then leaned back to see the
small cup. Two people were calling my
name and leaning and scraping the floor
and one of them pulled my ear and
brushed her mouth against my brow and
the other grabbed the shoulder of Z. and
tapped it and wrote (without ink) across
it, probably something about the man
outside, then this same one turned to me.
He raised his right knee, he spoke without
sound, he brought his open palm to his
abdomen. “Uh Huri,” he said.
In this particular bridge, I understand this “ringing in the mouth” as the book, the book that arises out of moments of contact between beings or objects. The book is both a duration and a response to what I see as an inverted interiority —these exchanges that are happening between Ana and Zàoter and Hausen are expressions of inner material that has somehow become exterior, that must now be incorporated as narrative. I think the glass front wall of the café, where Ana stands on one side and Hausen on the other is very important here. Not just the wall but also the distance between these three bodies; it is “distance” that creates the fragment of their speaking. Furthermore, it is within the space between these bodies, in the waiting for language to depart and arrive, that I feel I can really touch the fragility and essential confusion of (1) being in the world and (2) being in the world with others.
I have explained why this “in-between-ness” is important to me as a post-abducted subject in language (to repeat: it allows me to work on that absence or problem of origins, where the first language and first land has been erased from what is knowable), but I haven’t yet said why I think it’s important for fiction. However, first, I’d like to talk about why fiction itself is so central to my investigations into the nature of experience. Even as a poet, I was drawn to the inherent narrativity of language. I was entranced by how little of it one needed in order to suggest a narrative, how one need only say or write the word “chair” or “inside” before a story—multiples stories—took shape around the inscription. That gave me the sense that embedded in every word was a possible story for me but also one that existed in language. Language awakened its own self when it emitted the word “inside,” so writing became something you were encoding and decoding as you moved through it. I liked to imagine how this dual action troubled the space of fiction. It led me to think that perhaps what disorients my narrators, what creates the obstacles they endure, are, in fact, these revenants of other possible stories that hide within language. There is a trace of a bridge or a memory of a bridge without there ever having been a bridge in that story. I love the conceit of fiction: that there is a world and inside this world there is a sequence of acts with consequences. I love this because, within this system one can immediately begin to ask questions: what if the sequence is broken or reordered, what if an act makes no difference in the world, what if an act makes all the difference but the world does not respond, does not notice, what does it mean to act, does one act only with the body, is memory an act, what is an act if it is only occurring in the representational space of language, in the space of abstraction? Imagine how fiction might learn from ambiguities, silences, voids or labyrinths that lie within its own structure. How through derailments within story or at points of interruption (grammar breaking) some new or other space might open up. For me, this break would be more than a city or street suddenly appearing on the surface of an uncomprehending map, it would be experienced in the passing of language, as a revelation of syntax.
Renee Gladman is the author of eight works of prose and poetry, most recently the first three novels of the Ravicka series, published by Dorothy Project. A short novel, Morelia, and a book of essays, Calamities, are forthcoming in 2015. Her current project explores the intersections of narrative and architecture through drawing and writing about drawing. She lives in northeastern United States with the poet-ceramicist, Danielle Vogel.