What is WORD RAIN?
By Daniella Sanader
I ask this question quite literally. What is WORD RAIN? Of course, it is a book-length work of fiction written by Madeline Gins and released by Grossman Publishers in 1969—presenting innocuously as 136 pages of paper and ink, hardcover, and priced at $4.95. If we are to follow the lead of the novel’s dust jacket, it is “a very unusual book,” wherein an unnamed woman sits and reads a manuscript in a friend’s apartment. As the protagonist works through the papers in her hands, Gins narrates the rhythms of her attention and distraction: through the sounds of a birthday party that thrum through the walls; through visitors that enter and exit the room where she reads; through her body that announces itself with hunger, or indigestion, or discomfort; through weather that changes, both outside and in. As an art writer and researcher in the midst of a PhD dissertation centred in large part on this “very unusual book,” I have grown familiar with the clarifying beats of this synopsis. Speaking with colleagues and friends about my research, I use them all the time. Yet I find myself in the midst of a coalescing generation of writers and curators1 bringing new interpretive frames to Gins’ complex body of work (along with Arakawa) across language, film, conceptual art, architecture, the list goes on—guided in no small part by Lucy Ives’ wonderful anthology of her writing published by Siglio Press.2 So, I take this moment to ask the question again: what, exactly, is WORD RAIN?
Spending close time with the text somehow carries me further away from being able to answer this relatively simple question. On any given page, WORD RAIN continually reorients the relationships between reader, author, and text, asking for different methods of approach: some are data-driven, with a system of “oiled geometry, liniment algebra, and creamed mathematics”3 that quantifies semantic meaning on a given page; some are governed by precise instructions for the reader’s intake of breath, like a score for performance; and some eschew human authorship altogether, implying that the words on the page were formed by a swarm of unruly bacteria, that Gins terms “microphytic agents,” somehow imperceptible to the naked eye but emitting a highly distinctive odour. In the final chapter of WORD RAIN, the text accumulates the closing lines from several canonical works of literature—from Mrs. Dalloway, to Crime and Punishment, to The Tale of Genji—as if the novel’s boundaries have begun to lose coherence, soaking up nearby language from the protagonist’s library surroundings, seemingly without end. “Any book which ends,” she writes, “should have its end appended to this one.” 4 Crucially, no individual strategy proves to be the most effective for readers to access WORD RAIN’s meaning, but rather, they perpetually transform, prompting us to constantly reconfigure our senses, our relationship to this book-turned-mist-turned-score-turned-swarm. This shifting terrain can seem destabilizing—yet, to anyone familiar with Arakawa & Gins’ lifelong work, destabilization can be cultivated as a welcome, or at the very least generative, feeling. Here, I find myself aligned with an assertion made by the idiosyncratic dance critic Jill Johnston, writing in a 1967 iteration of her longtime column for The Village Voice: “I like things that are certain about not being very sure what they are.”5
Having spent time at the Reversible Destiny Foundation, looking through archival material on WORD RAIN—the novel’s production, circulation, and subsequent lives—I’ve had the pleasure of coming across notes and letters that expand upon its ambiguous and mercurial qualities: archival material that further articulates the certainty of WORD RAIN’s uncertainty, to paraphrase Johnston. I’d like to share some of these here. Perhaps WORD RAIN is a novel, and a swarm, and a sticky dataset—perhaps it is also a sculpture, an object, an investigation, or just “bad” writing. Collecting these associations may not get me any closer to answering my central question, but with them, the atmosphere around Gins’ work begins to thicken. It invites my intake of breath.
“I want to squeeze the imagination till dry”
In an April 1970 issue of the New American Review, poet/critic Hayden Carruth wrote briefly, and unfavourably, about WORD RAIN, in a feature covering the changing landscape of American literature. He included Gins’ work in a cluster of writers who, in his view, were “fooling away their talents in endless novelistic puzzles,” enacting a kind of self-contained “formalistic irresponsibility” that was a leftover modernist sensibility.6 The Reversible Destiny Foundation has three copies of a letter Gins wrote in response to Carruth’s assessment of WORD RAIN, where she expressed her frustration with the critic, particularly that he situated her novel within a bygone literary tradition: “Know this Mr. Carruth, you are also the enemy of those you admire (Joyce, Eliot etc.). As for me, I have stepped all over them and walk past as each of them has implored me to,” she wrote, continuing later, “The only thing our tradition has done for us is to modify us for further change.”7 She also chided both the critic and the journal for their, in her view, limited disciplinary, geographic, and ideological scope: “Try these sources for a fresh start Mr. Carruth, but try too to keep these alive: Rimbaud, Breton, Satie, Eluard, Soupault, Calvino, and these: Foucault, Castro, Planck, Wittgenstein. Not all novelists? So what? Not American? No more token internationalism in literature (anywhere!)!”8
Amidst her clear frustration with the critic’s reductive view of her work, Gins uses this letter to articulate her expansive practice with language. In the above quote, she situates her writerly influences as decidedly beyond the scope of (American) literature, naming an idiosyncratic collection of two notable philosophers, a Marxist revolutionary, and a theoretical physicist as influential to her practice. Elsewhere in the letter, she speaks to these commitments more directly:
If writing is to become alive again, words must truly be subordinated to image and idea through art as a systematic though whimsical investigation. We don’t need any more ‘good’ writers, word shufflers. That’s why some of the most interesting writing today is done by ‘bad’ writers in scientific or philosophic journals or artists like Duchamp, Picabia or Arakawa who write with words as objects or vice versa.9
The “good” writers of the literary canon simply shuffle words, whereas “bad” writers in the sciences, or artists who work with language—like Arakawa, like Gins herself—have forged a process with language that is spatial and material; they “write with words as objects or vice versa.”10 Here, Gins is placing her own work into an expansive—and distinctly interdisciplinary—network of others who approach language in service of broader material, spatial, political, or metaphysical goals. “I want to squeeze the imagination till dry, crack it and throw it away for a new system. […],” she writes. “While most interesting works have been on an epistemological-axiological level, those in literature have been limited by the writer’s too easy acceptance of his premises, his attitudes.”11 As Gins bristles against the reductive literary frameworks of Carruth’s review, WORD RAIN’s status-as-novel reaches beyond itself, with language newly enlivened as a collection of transformative objects, a whimsical investigation, a conceptual art form—as, to use her words, radically “bad” writing.
“It is the Utopia.”
In the late 1970s, Gins was communicating regularly with Paris-based poet and publisher François Di Dio, as the two were working to translate WORD RAIN into French. Di Dio was the founder of Éditions Le Soleil Noir, an experimental press operational from 1950 to 1983, known for releasing editions of hybrid book-objects and working primarily with artists and writers from the Surrealist tradition.12 Based on the archives of their correspondence, Gins and Di Dio worked on this project (titled MOT PLUIE) for several years: it moved slowly through multiple translators—even as Gins herself was practicing the language and communicating with Di Dio bilingually—before the project was dropped, seemingly due to financial issues resulting from the closure of Soleil Noir’s partnering printing house.
There’s one portion of their correspondence that I remain struck by: in May 1978, Di Dio sent a letter addressed to Arakawa (“avec amitié”), describing Soleil Noir’s plans to turn MOT PLUIE into a sculptural object. His notes waver between the whimsical and the logistical:
The book is seen through a transparent altuglass binding filled up of liquid composed by: water + glycerine (density 1,256).
It is the Utopia. The book is perceived as if soaked into water – but remains wholly visible:
– edge treated with gold,
– back with its title, names of author and illustrator,
– boards 1 and 2 of the cover entirely readable.
So, the book becomes a sign wich [sic] displays the presence of poetry. It may be set among others on the shelf of a book-case, or considered as an object and placed anywhere. 13
Accompanying Di Dio’s instructions are a series of small sketches that illustrate this vision: a rectangular encasement with an interior sleeve to house the book, along with two curving external layers filled with so-called “heavy water,” to make MOT PLUIE appear as if suspended in a liquidy environment, which transforms the book into a sign that “displays the presence of poetry,” as opposed to functioning as a poetic text in and of itself. (However, in Di Dio’s plan, MOT PLUIE could be removed from the encasement and still read as a book: “According to my theory regarding the object-book, the book must always remain at the very dimension of the hand; it is not only to be read but fliped [sic] through easily.”14) On the back of the envelope Di Dio sent to Arakawa, he included an additional doodle: an open spread of a book encased under a low dome, also seemingly filled with a mysterious watery substance.
It is unclear to me whether Gins intended to follow through on this eclectic sculptural proposal, although their letters suggest she was making plans to travel to Paris in order to study Di Dio’s maquettes. It’s also worth noting that this thread of their correspondence was addressed to Arakawa directly, not to Gins, implying his involvement in the sculptural component of MOT PLUIE. At any rate, Di Dio’s object-book did not seem to come to fruition,15 yet I remain enamored by its possibility: WORD RAIN’s semantic capacity as a novel intersecting with its potential as a sculptural object, a watery enclosure, a sign that retains legibility while obscuring and distorting itself, soaked through with its surroundings. Di Dio’s plans, realized or not, work to extend the novel’s misty, watery form, beyond its material reality in paper and ink. In calling attention to the novel’s extended atmospheres, the plans embody a description of WORD RAIN, supplied by Gins in an interview with Martin E. Rosenberg some three decades later, where she described the text as “evok[ing] consciousness (primitive term) a few inches above each of its un-paginated pages.” 16 The novel acts as a possible catalyst for the energies of the reader that approaches it, and MOT PLUIE encases those transformative energies in plexiglass and glycerine.
So, what is WORD RAIN? As these fragments of the archive imply, it’s both a novel and something else: a sculpture, a score, a poem, a swarm of bacteria, a catalyst, an investigation, an image, an environment, an ongoing uncertainty. As I continue my dissertation research, I’m less and less interested in answering this question with any sense of foreclosing clarity. Instead, like the novel’s protagonist, I keep reorienting myself to its mercurial states. “Everything that is, is pulled towards me,” Gins writes, “[…] The more words, the more combinations, the more portraits, the more negatives to be pushed away, the more positives on which to superimpose. I am so sure, aware, that there is not one word, aware, which can portray me. Instead every word, a confusion of words, may be used to surround me, to isolate me one foot above the page.”17 Instead of answering the question, I only hope to keep asking it.
1 See also Charlotte Youkilis’ recent exhibition, Madeline Gins: Infinite Systems, on view April 5-May 25, 2025 at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College: https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/1052-madeline-gins-infinite-systems.
2 Lucy Ives, editor, The Saddest Thing is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (New York: Siglio Press, 2020).
3 Madeline Gins, WORD RAIN or, A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says [New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969] included in Ives, The Saddest Thing is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (New York: Siglio Press, 2020): p. 93. As the original edition of WORD RAIN was printed without page numbers, throughout this article I will cite the facsimile included in Ives’ anthology using the anthology’s pagination, for ease of reference.
4 Gins, WORD RAIN, p. 202.
5 Jill Johnston, “Take Me Disappearing,” The Village Voice, December 14, 1967, republished in Marmalade Me (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1971 [reprinted 1998]): p. 127. I am indebted to Clare Croft’s recent Jill Johnston in Motion: Dancing, Writing, and Lesbian Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024) for pointing me towards this specific quotation.
6 Hayden Carruth, “Symposium: The Writer’s Situation,” New American Review (April 1970): pp. 68-69.
7 Madeline Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline,” August 15 1970, Reversible Destiny Foundation Archives, 2B13_016_002.
8 Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline.”
9 Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline.”
10 Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline.” This phrasing echoes the famed line by artist Robert Smithson, describing “Language to be looked at and/or things to be read,” which titled the first of four influential exhibitions at Dwan Gallery in New York, highlighting language-based conceptual art practices from 1967 to 1970. Also note that the three artists Gins referenced in her letter (Duchamp, Picabia, and Arakawa) were all featured in that first exhibition. For more on this, see Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.
11 Gins, “Drafts of a letter to the editors of New American Review from Madeline.”
12 Jean-Michel Goutier interviewed by Jérôme Duwa, “Des Cahiers à l’enseigne du Soleil Noir,” La Revue des revues 2014:1 (no. 51): pp. 15-24.
13 François Di Dio, “NOTE ON WORD RAIN,” May 23 1978, Reversible Destiny Foundation Archives, 2B05_050_011.
14 François Di Dio, “NOTE ON WORD RAIN.”
15 However, in 2023, Greylock published a Spanish-language version, LLUVIA DE PALABRAS (o una introducción discursiva a las íntimas investigaciones filosóficas de G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, dice), translated by Blanca Gago and Ignacio Caballero. For more on this, read Mónica de la Torre’s review of the Spanish translation in the June 2024 issue of The Brooklyn Rail: https://brooklynrail.org/2024/06/art_books/Madeline-Ginss-LLUVIA-DE-PALABRAS/.
16 Arakawa and Madeline Gins, interviewed by Martin E. Rosenberg, “An Interview with Arakawa and Gins: February 10, 25; March 12, 2010”: https://www.reversibledestiny.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/MER_Interview-with-Arakawa-and-Gins_FINAL_0.pdf.
17 Gins, WORD RAIN, p. 152.
Daniella Sanader is a Toronto-based writer, researcher, and PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture at York University. With over a decade of experience writing about artists’ practices, her work has been featured in publications like Canadian Art, Artforum, and Art Papers. Her doctoral research explores Madeline Gins’ experimental novel WORD RAIN (1969), examining its impact on contemporary art writing. Daniella holds an MA in Art History and Gender Studies from McGill University, and her research is supported by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship. She has curated projects for spaces like Vtape and Oakville Galleries and participated in various art writing residencies, including at the Banff Centre (2018), Rupert in Vilnius, Lithuania (2022), and the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence Program in Scarborough (2024). For more of her work, please visit her website https://desanader.com/.
