Toward a Minor Architecture by Stoner Jill;

Author:Stoner, Jill; [Stoner, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3339404
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative forces.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

To desire (without object) places the autonomy of a desiring subject at risk. A disembodied state of desire is the essence of minoritarian immanence; in architecture, it draws material out of construction, it overrides authorial intentions. It can elicit speech from the very walls that were designed to silence speech. We find such desiring space in Lawrence Thornton’s novel Imagining Argentina.23 Desire is at the heart of protagonist Carlos Rueda’s clairvoyant abilities. Family members of los desaparecidos24 come to his courtyard to ask for his for help; Carlos “sees” and tells what has happened to their loved ones. But when his own wife Cecelia and his daughter Teresa are kidnapped, Carlos sees nothing. Meanwhile, in her solitary cell in a prison deep within the Argentine pampas, Cecelia suffers unspeakable acts by prison guards. She has no knowledge of Teresa’s whereabouts. Like Jacobo Timerman, she is a journalist by profession; her torment is her lack of paper and pencil, for writing is potentially her means of survival. Unexpectedly, a kind of salvation comes to her through the architecture of her cell:

One day she sat on her bed staring at the wall on the other side of the room. She was so discouraged that her depression felt like a physical presence. The walls of her room had been plastered by someone who cared for his work and had left designs in the plaster, a uniform series of swirling patterns from floor to ceiling, from side to side. Cecelia realized that the walls offered the answer to her problem. All along she had been looking at an index. To each of the patterns she could assign paragraphs, starting with the top left-hand side of the wall facing her bed. When that wall was filled there were the others, and after them she was certain she could find ways to make the floor, the windows, even the furniture remember for her. By the time she had begun to realize something was wrong, that she had not been taken to see Teresa for over a month, the walls of her room were filled with invisible writing, her words indexed in the swirling patterns of a mnemonic system which, when written out, would yield hundreds of pages about what she had seen and what it means to live in darkness.25

As in other prison stories, walls function as an apparatus of exit. But this is not an escape through the wall (as with Timerman and his peephole or Rubashov and the quadratic alphabet). It is not Cecelia who initiates the mechanism; it is that unnamed someone who “cared for his work.” Surely the midlevel functionary of the dictatorship that commissioned the prison wanted the construction completed expediently. The patterns in the plaster are not deliberately ornamental; but the plasterer’s act of swirling the trowel is significant. It authorizes a latent secret code constructed without any apparent subversive intent.

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