«We live immersed in time and for this reason, when we visit the kingdom of the dead, we must bring our time with us, otherwise we will literally experience nothing and will never be able to know that we were there».
There are books that are carriers of language, which take the word form and dissolve it into other smaller forms, sounds, images, until they make something completely different. New. If within a novel, and this is the case of Riddance by Shelley Jackson (Rina edizioni, 2024, translated by Valentina Maini), language is not content with just being a series of sentences – more or less logical, constructed correctly, which sound good, which are put at the service of descriptions and characters – but it becomes a mobile fabric that is not limited to being just a word but more or less everything, so the novel is not just a fact that unfolds on paper, from page x to page y, but it is something else that overflows and becomes performance together with the story, asks our eyes to go and see what lies between the dust and the carpet, between the narrative windowsill and the panorama of the story.
Riddance it is definitely an experimental novel, but limiting it only to the field of experiment would do it a disservice. Perhaps we should say that it is a kind of non-static work of art, one of those that changes depending on the time you go to admire it, just like what happens with performances. You enter a museum, perhaps you find a series of people reproducing actions which – as a whole – represent the idea of the artist who conceived them. Those movements will never be the same, there will always be something different, and sometimes the difference arises from the eye of the spectator, other times from the moment, from the light that changes inside the building, all these variations descend from the specific will of the artist, In the work of Shelley Jackson, artistic and literary, this complexity and variability is recurrent and is its beauty. He doesn’t chase the amazed reaction but provokes it, he doesn’t do tricks but establishes the rules of the game, he doesn’t limit himself to writing a good story but ensures that dozens of them develop. It does not involve a plot but the threads, millions of threads, which will then weave something on the loom, an object made of mobile words, literary modules, characters who are past and future at the same time, who cross – because ultimately it does not exist – the border between life and death.
«Save her? From death? But the emergency is life. Death is paradise, a large branch adorned with sequins towards which the sparrow migrates, humus for the cockroach and earth for the earthworm, virgin hiding place of harpoons for the whale. This is what I teach.”
Riddance came out in 2018, it took Jackson twelve years to make and contains all the author’s obsessions. Throughout his artistic and literary activity, Jackson has always shown a certain aversion towards the rectangular playing field, the perimeter dictated by her page. The architecture of her writing is never linear, and takes into account, as great architects do, the structure and the space that surrounds it, the interior but also the view, what people will do and how and where. they will move. Writing seems to come from another world, the daughter of an alphabet of ghosts, a kingdom where the letters danced on their own before arranging themselves; letters that will continue to dance in the head, in the heart, on the tip of the tongue of every reader.
“The house was a receiving device, in which students were given the opportunity to vibrate in harmony with the dead.”
Jackson wrote short stories and novels, children’s books, experimental works. Among his works we should mention the Skin project, a story of which every word was tattooed on the skin of around two thousand volunteers. Everything holds true: if I am able to tattoo pieces of a story on you, then I can make you enter the pages of a book, I can make you participate, I can make you choose from this story (and the others) which breath or wound to take away from you.
What’s happening in Riddance? What doesn’t happen? The protagonist is Jane Grandison, she is 11 years old and suffers from a serious form of stuttering, we meet her sitting on the back of a car, she has with her a letter inviting her to live and study at the Sybil Joines Professional Institute for Spokespersons for Ghosts and Young People with Hearing Mouths. This is the beginning, this is one of the beginnings. The Institute was founded in 1890 by principal Sybil Joines, and appears to be a magical and haunted place, a sort of temple for children who have speech disorders. The birth of the school is inspired by Sybil’s sad, complicated and downright tragic childhood. And her ideas go beyond simply providing support to the children she welcomes. The girls and boys have a gift, the same as she has: they have the ability – thanks to stuttering – to channel ghostly voices and sounds that are able to communicate from the realm of the dead, a territory that Sybil herself knows very well. At a certain point someone disappears and the school attracts the attention of parents and the police. Meanwhile, someone writes letters to the dead, to dead writers, such as Melville, Poe or Emily Brontë. These are some of the paintings, but they are not all.
«The voice crackles, disappears, returns as pure sound, ice crystals blow like frozen snow, a handful of sand swirls inside a sieve. Then silence. My fingers tapping on the keys are as loud as bones breaking.”
Riddance
All this, along with much more, makes up Shelley Jackson’s mosaic, even the chapters are constructed so that they can be read in a different order than that of the pages. Pages made up of (fake) newspaper clippings, disturbing photographs, diction exercises, musical scores, letters to the dead, in fact, and even a speculative map of the necrocosm.
Jackson with Riddance puts it on stage a horror universe that is also a great comedy, a communication manual that continuously moves from the possible to the impossible and returns, a project that uses the sciences – from that period, the story unfolds in 1919 – to put the rational at the service of imaginary and spiritual things; in short, through the birth of a third language, something that only narrative invention can do. Communicating with the dead, learning to speak, having dreams or nightmares, writing and then reading novels. Riddance it will hardly be surpassed in complexity and beauty by the other things we will read in the rest of the year.
