by Carole Maso
My relationship to poetry was always one of reverence: How could I ever approach such beauty, such perfection? An unhealthy relationship, finally. With fiction I feel far less reverent. What has been done? Maybe not that much.
The novel might be musically or visually conceived—pictorial relationships, symphonic turns rendered in prose.
The novel’s design, for me, being an abstract relationship between parts.
Recognition of the patterns, the relationships, so they might be destroyed if necessary or deviated from or tampered with.
The ability to manipulate shapes and space. Writing AVA I felt at times more like a choreographer working with language in physical space. Language, of course, being gesture and also occupying space. Creating relations which exist in their integrity for one fleeting moment and then are gone, remaining in the trace of memory. Shapes that then regather and re-form, making for their instant, new relations, new longings, new recollections, inspired by those fleeting states of being.
Complexities.
How to prolong the lyric moment?
Andrey Tarkovsky: “Writing which links images through the linear, rigidly logical development of plot…usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience with some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when plot is governed by characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life’s complexities.”
Room as well for the random, the accidental, and the associations and shapes that arise from allowing accidents to happen.
It’s not easy to keep this thing from that. At other times I feel most like a composer. More than anything else I aspire to the state of music. It’s not desirable or possible to keep things separate. Many things arise:
The child draws the luminous letter A.
As a girl my favorite novel was Wuthering Heights. But I could not find a book anywhere else remotely like it. It created a hunger.
And my father playing his trumpet. Lying in the dark listening to that aching music. And how it seemed to approximate all we could not say.
Always I have loved poetry most, but at the same time felt the need for a larger canvas: a series of panels, a series of screens.
My form is always an odd amalgam—taken from painting, sculpture, theory, film, music, poetry, dance, mathematics—even fiction sometimes.
Reread: Goethe’s Werther, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Gide’s Le Voyage d’Urien, Barnes’s Nightwood, Melville’s Moby Dick.
To sit next to the great mysteries, or to lie in the dark next to them and find shapes, ephemeral and changing as they may be, for this. All this:
A beautiful passing landscape.
Our uncertainties, hopes, fears, longings, disappointments, our forgetfulness. Our relationship to language.
Huddled around the fire of the alphabet.
A free and large enough notion of story so that it does not coerce. All too often novels are narratives of coercion because they are too narrowly conceived.
A novel presumes a story and a storyteller. But who is the self who is telling? And what is the story? And where have we gotten our small definitions of story? And why?
And what if the story is:
The way you sound in letters, or on the beach, or at the moment of desire.
Three P.M. when the shadows cross the border.
The way you looked that night on your knees.
The way the swing swung.
And if not the real story, then what the story was for me.
The pull and drag of the tide.
Gertrude Stein: “I have destroyed sentences and rhythms and literary overtones and all the rest of that nonsense, to get to the very core of this problem of communication of intuition. If the communication is perfect the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.”
To use all and everything that is available to us through observation, memory, fantasy, desire, imagination—so as to get up close next to one’s vision.
Miracles might occur.
Jean-Luc Godard: “Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas but rather the phrasing of moments.”
New definitions of story and character may be required. To imagine story as a blooming flower or a series of blossomings. To change the narrative drive, to better mimic one’s own realities, drives. So that narrative might be many things. One hundred love letters, written by hand.
Understand and accept the limitations and contours of the traditional narrative. In The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, my third novel (published fourth), there is an end to narrative as I once understood it. Without going there first, I do not believe I could have gotten to AVA—which is something quite else.
And characters may be perceived as a light or a force or a pressure, or as an aspect of possibility.
In the negotiations between poetry and prose one might like something neater. Let’s put our mind to it:
To each—both lyrical fiction and poetry, a certain irresistible music. An Orphic voice speaking. A childish belief in the whole.
Is the sustaining of the lyric voice (certainly a kind of stamina) dependent on an insistent and pervasive sexuality? One feels an intimate link between the two.
The desire for—
Miracles.
Miracles. Helen reading my father the recipe for ravioli dough. He remembers his family drying pasta on all the beds in the Brooklyn house of his childhood. “Dig a well. Then put in eggs.” And I type it directly into the text of AVA, which I am working on in the next room. A place for the random, the accidental, the overheard, the incidental. Precious, disappearing things.
“Stay a little.”
I love you.
An expansive narrative. Bela Tarr’s Sátántangó—a terrifying film, filled with exhilarating narrative choices.
In my new work I want music, meditation, narrative, philosophy, more—and all at once.
I give myself room. The drama of the creative imagination being my one true subject. A continuous exploration made concrete, somewhat palpable, through fiction.
My aim in The American Woman in the Chinese Hat was to dramatize the breakdown of language, and with that carrying off of language, a belief system, a world. Much of the book’s drama is linguistic. The novel, being a spacious form, allowed me to establish the rules of language within a temporal framework and then, once established and understood, I could subvert them. This is one of the things novels do well. The world falls apart as you read. One hopes, by the end that the impact of the fractures are not only understood, but felt. Because having been engaged, involved in the fluency of images, when they begin to dissolve, one feels dissolved as well. Only shards remain, disrupted syntax, words detached from their meanings. A bleak code calling up the lost, the fluent, the integrated world, once whole. Language enacts the speed and degree and manner of breakdown. We are forced to witness an entire history: a world is born, evolves, warps and finally breaks. Breakdown is dramatized, imaginative and linguistic ways of escape are cut off.
She hears a high sound. Like mermaids or birds. She’s watching her hat. Strange angel. Butterfly.
To lose fluency. To become speechless.
The choice of lyrical techniques must augment and enhance the narrative decisions. Only then will the result be radiant, authentic, inevitable, grave.
Tarkovsky: “I think in fact that unless there is an organic link between the subjective impressions of the author and his objective representation of reality, he will not achieve even superficial credibility, let alone authenticity and inner truth.”
Much of my work is propelled by the desire to be reunited with lost, unremembered aspects of self and world.
Who were we, and why did we live?
Aspects of self, aspects of personality, temperament, take an outward shape and then are animated. Often, my obsessions, fears, hopes, all that matters most
, grow heads, arms, legs and then move, interact with one another, in the form of characters.
Character, rather than well-rounded carriers of story, might work more like images do.
She waves. Wavers. In the agony of the afternoon. In a red dress. The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. She’s not American at all. She is German maybe, or Suédoise. And she has no hat.
Poetry and prose. How to reconcile poetic forms with the narrative requirements of an extended prose work? Because finally, yes, it is the novel I have to work in.
A new energy is needed to sustain a contemporary lyric fiction. The energy of writing into one’s desires, passion. The energy derived from many things might sustain such a voice. The energy from writing outside of fashion, against the fictive fashion, even. Easy to be a renegade in such an inauspicious fiction milieu. Use it to your advantage.
How to prolong the lyric moment?
What might the phrasing of moments look like in prose?
Rent Godard’s Pierrot le Fou.
The novelist’s lyric “I” engaged, as the epic poet is, in the world. A singer singing in relation to others. This perhaps defines the difference of the enterprise between lyric novelist and lyric poet.
The novel as huge, shifting, unstable, unmanageable canvas. Smudged with lipstick, fingerprints, crumpled, tear-stained, many-paged.
The novel as a geometry of desire.
A high sound like burning… Stranger. Light. The sound of water over stones. She waves. Each word in its watery globe. Pulses. Once, twice, good-bye. Love. Forever. A woman. Floating like a heart. And roses.
How to prolong the lyric moment?
In The American Woman with the Chinese Hat, the reiteration and gradual mutation of images mirror the disintegrating psyche of a narrator in the process of mental breakdown. The novel makes this acting out possible.
In a lyric novel, objects often are emanations of the unconscious.
I love winter most because it’s the most recognizable outward correlation I know of my interior life. There is recognition. Snowfalls like music.
What is narrative? Narrative might be:
I wrote you one hundred love letters.
One thousand love letters, written by hand.
This is probably the last love letter I will ever write.
One thousand love letters—you probably never got them all.
Prose, it seems to me, has the great ability to dramatize states of mind, as well as incorporating other kinds of “action” and development.
In AVA though there are elements of story everywhere, I am still reluctant and unprepared to say what the story is.
A polyphony. A bouquet of voices.
The storyteller as chameleon. Fluid, mutable.
The novel is all potential. All what might be. All what might have been. A record of all we cannot remember, all we’ve lost—never to be retrieved.
Despite my efforts, it resists me, eludes me. Perhaps it might be possible to write a perfect poem, but I do not believe it is possible, or even desirable, to write the perfect novel. That is what I love most about the form.
It is as rebellious, as unruly as I am.
There is another kind of novel other than the novel of adventure, the novel of manners, the psychological, the realist novel. It is strange, exotic, hybrid—and it is beautiful.
Lyrical fiction introduces the conventions of poetry (image, metaphor) into a genre dependent on causation and time. Characters, scenes, plots are turned into patterns, designs of imagery. Life and manners are sensually apprehended and then turned into design.
Lyrical novels are concerned with aesthetic relations—space, temporal and shape relations, tone and tempo. They are sensitive to tensions and pulls, resistances—gatherings and release.
An imaginative act, a design in which life is simultaneously brought up close and also viewed from afar at a more detached distance.
As in my The American Woman in The Chinese Hat, where figs, roses, butterfly, angel, fire, floating, stranger, red achieve a measure of impersonality, universality, love, dread. Inner emotion transforms the outer world into a fever dream, a hallucination where images from the exterior world are thrust into strange, glowing relief and reflect both a verisimilitude, a portrait of the outer world as we can know it, and a private, interior, symbolic reality.
This sort of work requires a strange combination of both utter control and complete recklessness.
A leaping and staying in one place at the same time. Paradoxically what is closest and most personal is also turned into the universal, outside and removed from the self. Abstract and concrete at the same time.
Characters, too, weave patterns. Voices overlap as do motifs, echoing one another, reiterating, enlarging. Many techniques are employed: call and response, rubato, counterpoint, and these strategies heighten and formalize the ordinary narrative ploys.
The Waves by Woolf to my mind being the precursor to my AVA. Symbolic qualities are felt, perceived through voice and rhythm. Whole worlds are conjured in scraps of dialogue, a turn of the head, a pause, a deletion, a last extravagance. One feels, if I’ve been at all successful, their colors, tones, pressures, their human presences.
There is compression in lyric fiction, yes, but also expansion. Elongation. The longing for clearings. An opening up of perceptions, possibilities, every time the writer or the reader sits down. And duration, and the obvious erotics of this.
How to reconcile succession of time and sequence, of cause and effect, with the instantaneous moments of the lyric?
Tarkovsky: “All must come from inner necessity, from an organic process. Any artificial move is easily detected.”
Reread Poe, Novalis.
Is the loss of self in lyrical fiction like the loss of self in poetry?
One thing is evident: the conventional psychological novel with its phony or simplistic truisms and its grasping at straws doesn’t approximate experience sufficiently.
Portraits of the mind and the moves the mind makes.
And if not the real story, then—
A girl in a striped bathing suit sits at the water’s edge. She digs deeply in the sand and from the vast beach makes shapes: an arch, a pyramid, two towers.
And if not the real story, then what the story was for me.
A feminine shape—after all this time.
Virginia Woolf in “Modern Fiction” (1919) criticizes Joyce’s Ulysses for not ever going beyond the self. And this is always my problem, too, with Joyce, and why for me he fails finally to be a great novelist.
Not to own or colonize or dominate.
The known world dissolves into feelings and groups of feelings, into music, which then might escape the dilemma, the trap of the personal.
Perversely, I find Joyce too confining.
To sing in prose, to somehow get the urgency of bone and blood and hair, entire histories, into prose.
Prose which remains lyrical in intention eschews consecutive action for other kinds of narratives. The narratives are not merely associative either; it’s rather more mysterious and elusive.
The identification of self and world transmuted into shapes.
Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”
In Woolf I think more than any other writer the conventions of the novel blend most perfectly with poetic technique.
The narrative beliefs that animated and propelled with such authority writers like Jane Austen no longer hold. Writers are forced into a reexamination of what are useable forms, if they are serious writers. What forms might be opened up by our particular predicament. This is a poetic as well as a fictive concern.
Woolf writes in “How it Strikes a Contemporary” that twentieth-century writers “cannot make a world, cannot generalize. They cannot tell stories because they do not believe that stories are true.”
As we try to make meaning—
The shattered glass might mend.
—where maybe there is none.
Woolf
implies that the writer may have to write notebooks rather than masterpieces. Notes instead of coherent, authoritarian, beginning-middle-and-end, thesis-and-conclusion pieces.
Virginia Woolf from The Writer’s Diary: “The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought, sensation, the voice of the sea… It must include nonsense; fact; sordidity; but made transparent.”
The problem of course is that a sequence of illuminations is simply not enough.
A kind of liberation, a freedom, occurs by assuming the concentrating and illumination, the saturation of the moment as in poetry; and the prolonged temporal ability to stay where one’s vision is and watch it evolve, change, double back on itself, augment, amplify, come to uneasy terms, resolutions—of a sort, as extended prose is capable of doing.
A poetic unity. An ecstatic, even mystical, integrity.
What is perhaps most astounding is the typical novelist’s almost total disregard for language, as if it were only some bothersome means to an end. Some way of imparting information. And most prose called “poetic” is turgid, purplish, overwrought, self-conscious.
An intimate knowledge of the workings of language is as essential for prose writers as it is for poets. No matter what sort of fiction one writes.
The external world, facts, history, politics, manners, and the natural world shall be embraced. Also dreams, loves, fears—all aspects of the interior life.
Symphonic forms. Fugue forms. The improvisations of jazz. Montage. Jump cuts. Slow dissolves. Cubism, Cortàzar, abstraction, the troubadours, the left-handed child. Love songs.
Woolf in The Common Reader: Forget that “appalling narrative business of the realist: getting from lunch to dinner.”
Jane Austen ended forever a certain tradition. Reread Austen, Balzac, and all those you made facile enemies of back when you were struggling for a vision, for a voice. She had taken a certain kind of novel to its limits. I needed, I suppose, as a result to demonize her. Had no room for her.