“You are used to contradictions in Ravicka; you just hope to get the ones that allow you to go on making a life doing whatever it is you do, observes the occupant of a perplexing home in Houses of Ravicka (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2017), the fourth volume of Renee Gladman’ s Ravicka series. The remark doubles as a commentary on the series, which as of 2018 also includes, in order, Event Factory, The Ravickians, and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge. With the Ravicka series, the mainstay of Dorothy Project’ s catalog, Gladman produces an account of contemporary life that gains not only in relevance but also somehow in coherence as it accumulates contradictions.
Ravicka, the mysterious city-state, amplifies present-day dynamics of urban living. Ravicka is a city defined by crisis. Yet the crisis is mute about its nature. It’ s all effects, few discernible causes. Here’ s what we know: some event, referred to in The Ravickians as an “attack from above” (from the sky, or by some elite—we don’ t know), led to a collapse in public infrastructure. “Structures [became] ash.” The crisis going on in the wake of this event is environmental, perhaps ecological. Inhabitants and visitors debate how to refer to what fills the air. Some name it smoke, others silence. Characters register the crisis, notably, by breathing it. Accustomed to the Ravickian air, locals react to its transformation in a manner illegible to foreigners. So, too, the ethnic factions that compose the local population present clashing symptomatologies.
Gladman, who’ s African American, creates a world that demands to be apprehended in light of questions inextricable from issues of racial subordination and segregation. Questions like: To whom does a city belong? Who absorbs the cost of crisis, be it political, economic, or environmental? At the same time, Gladman deforms the reader’ s expectation of what the representation of race or blackness might encompass. Identity doesn’ t stick to characters in the series. Different ways of blending in with or standing out from the city’ s characteristic yellow, different ways of taking in the city, hint at constantly reworked group affiliations.
In the first three books of the series, characters who seek to make sense of Ravicka’ s crisis—an unnamed, non-Ravickian ethnographer and linguist; the great Ravickian novelist Luswage Amini; her friend, the “not exactly Ravickian” Ana Patova—take turns as narrators. The fourth volume concretizes the project to figure out Ravicka’ s crisis as a visual endeavor. Our new narrator Jakobi, whose gender identity wavers, is head of Ravicka’ s Office of the Comptroller and author of the amusingly titled Regulating the Book of Regulations. Jakobi travels across Bellona to take “geoscogs”—“measurements that keep track of a building’ s subtle changes and movements over time”—of two elusive houses, no. 32 and no. 96, located respectively in the neighborhoods of cit Mohaly and the Skülburg. The novel’ s second act presents first-person accounts of life within a house such as these.
The publication of Houses of Ravicka followed by just a few months that of another book by Gladman, Prose Architectures. In a sumptuous edition, Wave Books amassed Gladman’ s drawings, most of which are in black ink against white, gray, or oatmeal backgrounds, with the occasional, glorious splash of color. Prose architectures are more or less abstract urban plans— geoscogs?—drawn without perspectival techniques. Made in the negative space between two books of the Ravicka series, the drawings themselves magnify the liminal or the in-between: circulation lanes, parks, air, and water systems. Gladman’ s scribble-like plans, which resemble thinner, more delicate counterparts to Rorschach’ s inkblots, evoke alternately an alveolar arrangement, a power grid, and a public performance space or perhaps a site of political assembly. The drawings afford, in Gladman’ s own words, “some interiors, some energies of [her] prose.”
Refracted through Prose Architectures, technically not part of the Ravicka canon but indissociable from the series, Houses of Ravicka suggests that Gladman is now interested in the novel less as a storytelling technology than as a site for tackling problems of description and representation. Her own account of the bumpy genesis of Houses of Ravicka, offered in the afterword, is just as enigmatic, just as fascinating as the work that precedes it. As Gladman invented the science of geoscogs and began to tell of Jakobi’ s journey, the words flowed. “And then,” she recounts, “I hit that wall. There was a mystery. No. 96 was not where it was supposed to be, thus we couldn’ t be sure that no. 32 was where it wasn’ t appropriately.” It’ s tempting to interpret Gladman’ s report straightforwardly: unable to visualize Ravicka in its entirety, and thus where houses no. 32 and 96 could plausibly be situated, she had to draw and write—Prose Architectures but also Calamities, a collection of essays; Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (at first intended as number four in the series); and a still-untitled Ravicka novel on the grass—in order to return to Houses of Ravicka with a more developed sense of the world she had created. But this interpretation would be an oversimplification. For one, what are we to make of Gladman’ s double negative: “we couldn’ t be sure that no. 32 was where it wasn’ t appropriately”? What Gladman likely means here is not that she lacked a clear-enough map of Ravicka, but that she hadn’ t worked out a way to express Ravicka’ s contradictions that felt real. Gladman zigzags across negative or contrastive locutions to lay out the paradoxes of a crisis that resists resolution or mending. The conclusion to her afterword corroborates this: “It was only a couple of weeks ago in January 2017, as I was finishing Houses…that I understood where house no. 96 was. It is where I am, where many of us probably feel that we are: somewhere where the boundary between places has broken.”
Houses like no. 32 and 96 convey Gladman’ s vision for spaces that allow dwellers to live through a crisis: such spaces should offer protection, a shield, and still there must be a fluidity to their interior, one that favors experimentation, emancipation. Buildings in Ravicka are on the move, but not only because of external forces like wind or erosion. Houses have a subjectivity, a psychology. They have instincts. A dweller describes the interior of a house as one where living, walking, breathing, thinking, and writing all extend into one another, are one another:
Living was like writing a long, immersive essay: inside something fluid and labyrinthine, where light shined in at odd angles, even during the new moon. Sleeping was a terrifying pause in writing. Walking was writing. Each room held an essay you wrote as you breathed and the subject of the essay usually had nothing to do with the function of the room, but maybe the room’ s architecture, for that day, was shaped by the quality of your thinking. First, I breathed the steps to my house, and then I descended them.
This utopia of integrated living (which nonetheless flirts with dystopia, if we consider the demand in a creative economy that workers be productive just by virtue of being) contrasts with the impenetrable solidity of exteriors. Indeed, not only does the house “fail to present a door,” notes Jakobi, “there also appeared to be no windows. It was one solid, unbroken, cascade of wall.” “The material,” he adds, “was stone or stucco, I couldn’ t tell.” Elsewhere, Jakobi describes what he initially finds in lieu of house no. 96 as “whatever you call ‘turning the corner’ as a place.” Gladman’ s interiors are soft, her exteriors jarring.
Granted, from the outside, Gladman’ s books, Houses of Ravicka in particular, might appear just as impenetrable. They demand on the part of the reader a commitment to getting lost. But the payoff—the chance to inhabit some of her prose’ s interiors—is worth the commitment. Reading the series isn’ t a masochistic practice. It doesn’ t hinge on the reader’ s subservience to a controlling formal master. Early in Houses of Ravicka, Jakobi says, “I had gone to see Duder Munhandyi to silence the conversation I’ d been having with him in my head.” We return to Ravicka to reignite the conversation with Gladman that we were having in our heads between the two installments of the series: a conversation about living and walking and breathing and thinking and writing amidst brokenness.
June 2018
This review will be published in issue 61.3/4.