In a New Feature at Tripwire, Renee Gladman Presents Her Own Theories of Language

"These interruptions, making fragments out of narrative space, question the very basis of experience, of being a participant and a witness," says Renee Gladman about Leslie Scalapino's Way, in "The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture," one part of a larger feature on her own work (currently in the new Tripwire). More from this essay:

III. The New Sentence is a Drawing (?)

To play upon a title that many of you in the audience will be familiar with, I’m calling this third part, “The New Sentence is a Drawing,” but lifting my voice slightly at the end to suggest a query rather than a mandate. Or even just to marvel: how amazing would it be were the new sentence a drawing. In any case, for months, I’ve been struggling with how to articulate a bridge between the writing I’ve been doing and this drawing I’ve started to do, that attempts to extend that writing practice Ana talks about. They are called Prose Architectures; a kind of drawing that feels very much like writing, a way of turning the sounds and symbols for speech and thought inside out. One day in a movie I noticed a character holding a fountain pen over a large pad of paper; as soon as she began to scratch at the surface I felt something turn over in me. I had been drawing for years, aspects of buildings, habitations, but drawing was something I did when I was not writing. And though I had a collection of fountain pens, I’d never used them to draw. A fountain pen has, for me, a love of the line embedded in it. A pen with a good nib wants to just go; drawing put that “turned over thing” in my hand. To move my hand was to look at it, to pass with it. This was a way of being most present in language, because, though I was drawing, I felt immediately that writing had carried over. I knew these were prose architectures I was making, and that into the drawing space: that meant I was no longer in the 108 Renee Gladman mini-feature proverbial “page” into which or out of which comes language. I was now on the visual plane. Yet, it was writing that I was doing. The notion of “drawn writing” struck me as a new kind of conversation with prose. It was the writing of a text with its inner syntax somehow revealed... 

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