Making Stones Stony: On Jordan Abel’s “Empty Spaces”

Empty Spaces by Jordan Abel ABOUT 100 YEARS AGO, the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky argued that the purpose of art is “to make a stone stony.” He meant something like this: we are easily desensitized to everyday things like the little pebbles that litter our paths. We don’t truly see them, we just recognize them and move on. “A thing passes us as if packaged,” he wrote; “we know of its existence by the space it takes up, but we only see its surface.” For Shklovsky, the radical potential of art lies in the way it slows down and complicates our attention to the world. Routine, automatic perception flattens out our view of “things, clothes, furniture,” even “your wife, and the fear of war.” But art restores “sensation,” showing us the world in a new way. It forces us to reorient ourselves toward and within what is all around us. I was brought back to Shklovsky’s infamously stony stone in reading Empty Spaces , a new novel by the Nisga’a poet and visual artist Jordan Abel. Empty Spaces opens with “[a] deep, narrow chasm. Black rocks. The river lies still on those black rocks.” The rocks get to take up space—for pages, the narration focuses on them. It pores over “roses and rocks and shrubs in the spring rain” before panning out toward the horizon: “Somewhere there is an islet and another islet and a clear sheet of water and bald rocks just beneath the surface.” Description thickens, repetition intensifies: “The woods are full of sounds and rocks and trees.” Pushing beyond standard, packaged narration, Abel extends and complicates our perception so that these rocks become newly rocky. Empty Spaces awakens us to the sensations of this forest, this river, this beach; it asks us to slow down, to move beyond surface-level engagement and really look. If Abel’s vivid, lushly detailed opening were a film, here’s what might happen next. The camera would track back again, pulling our gaze away from the jagged outcroppings and sea stacks on the horizon, leading us past the flickers of light on […]

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