Juice
Renee Gladman
publisher: Kelsey Street Press, 2000
isbn: 0-932716-55-5
price: $11
"About the body I know very little, though I am steadily trying to improve myself, in the way animals improve themselves by licking, [88] starts Gladman in this philosophical but warmly personal first collection of fictional prose poems.
Like her fellow San Franciscan, the young writer Pamela Lu (in her book Pamela: A Novel) Gladman is focused on describing an individual/collective identity and the strange dilemma of selfhood in a post-identarian, self-conscious age in which all sorts of structuralist analyses -- psychological, sociological, ideological -- threaten basic ontological certainties.
"Translation," only 12 pages long, adopts a tale-of-the-tribe breadth 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.
The sentences themselves, shooting off into several directions, don't respect the norms of a leading-sentence paragraph, so putting things together while reading becomes an archeological feat in itself -- is she alone remembering? has the community really abandoned her? But pushed to the task of native informant by the act of recounting itself, she struggles to explain:
Bear in mind, this is a land without normal science. The Floyds' oldest boy was the only one to decipher that science, but he was sick. I'm trying to tell you how I knew we were a tribe. It was not by the length of our feet or color of skin on the inner sides of our hands that I knew it. We were tribal in our language, in the way ideas came to us.
[16]
Having surfaced from this nearly cultish communality into individuality, she is at a loss about how to provide her own "feedback," what scales of meaning to use to describe herself: "You can't just walk up to someone, or in my case a plant, and say, 'Hey, look at how I've grown'," and earlier:
There are games one plays while one is waiting for a mass return; they are mostly sexual. I cannot help but be sexual before these mountains, their flirtish behavior and exquisite face. I find that I am moved to ecstasy -- ecstasy being my most treasured activity. I would rather have the town, but will miss the nakedness of these years.
[16]
In "Proportion Surviving," the "juice" of the book's title is revealed to be an aspect of an identity that has been, at least temporarily, othered, only so that at a later time it can be re-imbibed and returned to a unitary subject -- a search for balance when there is nothing "out there" to weigh against. The narrator becomes obsessed with juice -- fresh juice only, but also to the point of stalking the juice aisles at grocery stores:
When my friends came by -- they liked to suddenly show up with all kinds of breads in their hands, thinking they knew what I needed and planning on forcing it on me -- I had to tell them I was busy with my juice.
[22]
A crisis involving a lover gets her off the juice, and though now she is a "weaker character," she writes: "Today all my ideas are liquid."
In "No Through Street," the narrator's sister, who seems some sort of figment of the "evil God" in Descarte's imagination, acquires great fame in constructing useful, if puzzling, signs that have a meaning in their intended geographical locales (like stop signs) but don't make sense in a museum context, where, nonetheless, the artist has found fame as a "directionalist."
Gladman writes as if in a post-apocalyptic world, like a Crusoe on a desert island that is actually populated, but with linguistic signs instead of people. Though one wishes at times for a more vividly descriptive language and perhaps more elaboration of the ideas, this is a rich and unusual collection, like an alien codex from a culture in one's backyard.
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