by Carole Maso
We have witnessed the demise of the belief system that made Jane Austen’s confidence and coherence possible.
In Chicago, I step into a small foyer before entering the magnificent lobby. It has been designed this way so we might feel and experience the space, the grandeur. The architect understood this. The novelist could well benefit from becoming an architect in prose.
The question persists: can poetic insight ever truly be reconciled with the novel’s form? On the side of narrative—a plot of motives, time, and causality. Poetry—image and pattern.
The attempt in AVA is that narrative motifs might produce a design of images. To interweave motifs through the text by use of recurrences, repetitions, etc., which often act contrapuntally and trigger through theme, rhythm, and other mysterious methods associations in the reader as well as the writer. Often it is the act itself, the association-making process rather than the subject, that is recognizable.
My favorite literature, that which really lives for me, is always an experience in itself: a drama of language and shape and rhythms, and not just the record of an experience.
That language is feeling. That syntax is feeling. One should feel in one’s whole being the necessity and inevitability of tense, point of view, tempo, voice, etc. That where the paragraph breaks is not taken for granted. That the notion of chapter is not taken for granted.
And that the formal patterns not constrict. Ephemeral, imperfect, stories without their old authority. “Notebooks” maybe “rather than masterpieces.”
Somewhere around seventh grade it seemed everyone was killing themselves or being killed. I was often afraid. Jimi Hendrix. Janis Joplin. RFK. Martin Luther King. The desire of the girl to be a horse. To run away or save. Save anyone. Just once.
The brother draws the letter K. The mother guides his hand. Says: try. Says: you can.
To use scenes, to ask scenes to function as image. I think unconsciously this was what I was trying in my first novel, Ghost Dance. So that scene by scene it makes the kinds of leaps that poetry makes line by line.
How to get character to function as image without contrivance. Time as character.
To witness the unfolding of the imagination across time and space. Like the sun rising on the bay. Provincetown in winter.
As we walk through plane after symbolic plane. In The American Woman in the Chinese Hat the fountain, the roses, the figs, the light, the forever.
In The American Woman in the Chinese Hat to find the formal arrangement of words in that limited and constantly diminishing set of possibilities that might save both protagonist and author. The struggle enacted on a formal plane.
Each word a fig.
After all the betrayals.
To orchestrate color in The American Woman in the Chinese Hat: pink and sea-green drinks, yellow drinks, a poet in a white dress, a young Arlesian in a bright blue robe, like hope—and then to systematically drain the world of every color—except red.
Vin rosé, Cotes du Rhône—so many roses, and a red dress.
A red-drenched ending.
To take one to the point of no return—and then somehow, I don’t know how, to return.
Fidelity to one’s perceptions. Trust. We look out the window at the red sign that says PSYCHIC.
One of the direct challenges of poetry is to make language work again. Something fiction, although it is made of language, tends to relegate almost always to the basement. To be responsive and responsible to thought, to emotion, to the body, in language.
Poetry to my mind rejects habitual thinking far more readily than fiction. There seems less reverence for the accepted, the tired, the cherished gestures and forms. Fiction, too often, has substituted plot for structure. Fiction writers must be structuralists in order to realize the potential of the novel or the story, but for the most part they are not.
Only now and then, I realize, do I get anywhere close to a real insight, anywhere near. As usual, I grope in the dark. Aim at the thing.
The ultimate trust. To let go in the dark.
Not to fear being ludicrous. Not to fear failing magnificently. Like the films of Kieslowski, for example. Walk the fine line between being simply preposterous and utterly convincing.
Not to protect oneself. Expose your heart. Your circular, flawed, contradictory thought process, your hopes, ambitions, vulnerabilities.
To write risking ridicule. To risk being ridiculous, inappropriate, over the top. Defiance will be such a project.
Fiction might allow miracles to arise in the luxury of its space and time. It has the capacity to dramatize interior states. To dramatize longing, to dramatize distance.
As a girl when she was sad she would turn herself into a horse. Her left-handed brother. He’s very sick.
I don’t remember the knife from before, the American woman says near the end to the young Arlesian—or your blood red robe.
Every rose pulses.
In a novel far away longings can be quite literally far. The text can mirror, approximate, distance. The text can incorporate longing through its formal structures. It can make tentative approaches or bold, operatic gestures. It can enact reunion. It can double back on itself, revise itself, simulate larger postponements, resignations. Incorporate giddiness, dizziness, lust, love even. All this is possible in the novel’s structure.
Music often performs similar feats. But the novel is different in that it conveys literal meanings simultaneous to the meaning it conveys through form and through the color and timbre and rhythms of language.
Miracles might arise.
The permission to make peace, forgive, admit when you’ve been wrong. The permission to be afraid.
My friend who makes glass books, far away, calls to say—
I look out at my spring garden. Hear the pulsing rose of her heart.
One might stop time for awhile…
But a series of radiant tableaux are not enough.
A healing, a suturing, a reconciliation…everything having been broken, or taken away.
The dream all along: to be free.
There will be room and time for everything. This will include missteps, mistakes, speaking out of turn. Amendments, erasures, illusions. The creation of a kind of original space will mean:
Everything I ever wanted was there. Everything I ever feared or desired. Yes, time and place enough for everything. I’ve come closest to this, thus far, in AVA.
A place where there would be time and opportunity enough to turn old hierarchies on their heads. A place to re-imagine epiphany.
And if not the real story, then what the story was for me.
Mallarmé’s “Le Nenuphar Blanc.” Each image devolving until all that is left is the pure, white strangeness of the water lily.
I don’t remember the knife from before, or your blood red robe.
She remembers the little emperor and how his hands turned the water red. Rose trout. She slept with a girl with crimson hair once. Objects are emanations of the subconscious. As in poetry there is a juxtaposition of themes and motifs. A manipulation of sound. Sound as desire.
Ava Klein in my AVA on the last day of her life with her one last late hope: Chinese herbs. World traveler, she had wanted to see China. This longing called up as she swallows one tablet after the next. She may have had lovers there, friends: Shi Sun, Steve Ning, Victor Chang. A line of beautiful boys—which recalls her friend Aldo, an opera singer, dead of AIDS, and his beautiful boys. Chinese tablets, China, Chinese boys, a poem: (She was a lover of literature, a professor of literature and desire.) Healing herbs, the healing lines of a poem by an ancient and forgotten poet. The one thousand Chinese murdered in a square. The desire to heal them. And all those who have been murdered. Her family in Treblinka, the whole universe, the breaking heart of the world. “The desire to speak in a language that heals as much as it separates,” as Hélène Cixous says. And maybe this after all is narrative.
And if not the real story—
The ability to embrace opp
ositional stances at the same time. Contradictory impulses, ideas, motions. To assimilate as part of the form, incongruity, ambivalence.
To make a place for ambivalence or uncertainty to be experienced and not just referred or alluded to seems one of the most interesting challenges of the novel. The tentative, the unresolved, the incomplete might be enacted. Played out in the theater of one’s imagination.
The potential for celebration. Exuberance. Virtuosity. Joy.
What did you think was beautiful there?
The intricate pattern on the scarf on the head of a Yugoslavian woman is beautiful, and the way you tried to hide your disappointment at not winning the prize so as not to spoil the evening is beautiful. And the small bird as it arrives elegantly on the plate. And how surely if I have loved anyone it is you. And how you understood in the end why we could not make it work, despite love—despite everything we had going.
I have come to celebrate. I have come to praise.
The American Woman in the Chinese Hat for me is a novel of black celebration, a riot of language and exhaustion and despair. AVA on the other hand is a novel of bright celebration, of coming together, of all possibilities, of joy, jouissance.
Ecstatic dancing to klezmer and nonsense texts.
As lyric as The American Woman in the Chinese Hat is, as patterned, as dependent on image and design, the book would not work in a shorter or more truncated form. It could not work even as a long poem. A novel of loss, told simultaneously with hothouse vibrancy and an odd, detached, cool ferocity, it could not have approximated loss without first suggesting and then suggesting again and again through the fictive conventions of narrative, what exactly was at stake.
We were working on an erotic song cycle. It was called: Everything I Owned. Everything I loved or wanted or feared was here.
To be fierce, strict, smart, like Woolf. Woolf thought Meredith created figures of large, universal, elemental structure, but that these characters lacked concreteness and depth. They were too general to be collective. The qualities of both poetry and prose simultaneously must be achieved by the lyric novelist. The poet novelist must also measure up as a novelist; yes, how silly, of course. Few are up to this. And yet it is crucial, of great importance.
Stein: “Who can think about a novel. I can.”
Themes in The American Woman in the Chinese Hat are reiterated, expanded, echoed as part of the plan, and in this way very dependent on song: “Row, row, row your boat….life is but a dream.” It is not a casual reference, as nothing in this kind of work can be casual—but rather speaks again and again to what is happening in the narrator’s psyche. The transformation of Catherine’s psychic world is constantly mirrored in the outside world. Each word is a boat, a small saving thing in this increasingly dark, blood-drenched dream. Sea.
Language engenders language. Language itself presents unexpected and often extraordinary solutions. It leads you to the what next? To the how and why. To the what if, and if only.
Think about Camus, Malraux, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet.
Throughout, images such as boats, dream, figs, swans, roses, horses, gloating, angel, butterfly endlessly repeat themselves in varying configurations as the imagination gropes and tries to make sense of chaotic experience. As the imagination tries to save, the outward world distorts to speak of the interior world. The internal world informs the external one. A hallucination. A fever dream. The way often of prose poems, I think.
Reread Baudelaire’s prose poems.
There’s a kind of glittering out there—a dark aching, a longing that can only be adequately felt through form. In The American Woman in the Chinese Hat for instance, tentative gestures give way over time to inevitability. The move towards a radiant place, a place of rigorous disintegration, a place the architecture of the novel allows and makes possible.
And all day pretty girls dip their arms like swans into the fountain…
The dark swan of her desire floating out into the pool…
At the cemetery flowers float in their watery globes…
You said: swans. He can’t help but see swans now at the fountain…
The search still remains, after all this time, (the search that was The Art Lover’s search, 1985—1989) in finding a language in which to speak and the forms that might approximate.
All this:
Forever. For the languages of star and ash and music and numbers. The search for the blue flower of poetry, or a red dress.
As we mimic the heartbeat in our upright walk, home.
Someone puts on Madame Butterfly in the square and they cry.
Woolf: “Stand at the window and let your rhythmical sense open and shut, boldly and freely until one thing melts into another, until the taxis are dancing with the daffodils, until a whole has been made from all the separate fragments.”
How to get it even a little right:
My mother whispering in the next room during the years of my childhood. She’s worried about my brother again. He’s got a hole in his heart. He’s very sick. And on the television now Bosnia. And floating in that room won’t die. How do winds, the first crocuses (I’ll bring them to my teacher), the passage of stars, of time—that’s Orion’s belt; what Mrs. Smith is calling out across the yard (sounds like bar talk) and birdsong. The body next to mine in bed, warmth and then warmth gone away. Where? To work? To the store? What year is it? Mrs. Smith said, it’s Bartok. I hear the music now she’s playing for me and her daughter Alison. The cuckoos when I finally got to France sounded just like that clock. For a moment it is the room of my childhood, three girls in the same bedroom, the cuckoo clock. Another baby, maybe on the way. No! I say emphatically and then traffic—the apartment in New York. On the television, the weatherman. The girl picks up the magic book and reads it at night by flashlight. That’s me; of course.
The illusion of including, of having it all. So many desires. A mélange of influences, techniques, pressures.
As a child my favorite book was the poetic, mystical Wuthering Heights. A somber, lonely, ecstatic meditation. So much solitude in the midst of everything. Three girls in the bedroom. Many children. So much going on. Why was I always so lonely? And still am. In the midst of much joy, such estrangement. How to get some of that down right.
As I take what I perceive, what I see out there, and abstract it, returning with a coherence, a solace of form, a shape.
The challenge: To turn the world, and the workings of the world, into song.
I love the things that continue. That never end. I love the long haul. Is this the novelist’s disposition? The forever.
The ancient consoling tradition. The impulse to sing. The impulse to tell a story, to want to know insatiably, at times, what happens next.
That said, I must admit that conventional storytelling bores me silly. The analytic bits, the dreary descriptive impulse, the cause and effect linearity, the manufactured social circumstances.
To create whole worlds through implication, suggestion, in a few bold strokes. Not to tyrannize with narrative. Allow a place for the reader to live, to dream.
All of sex called up in an apartment vestibule. All reckless, incandescent desire. As in illuminated manuscripts, an emblematic approach to narrative.
Careful of the intercom.
Now in America they call this coffee, but I remember coffee. Let the reader linger there. Go where she will.
The novel is something, even when stopped, which is continuous.
I wanted to be obliterated by light, stunned, dazzled, stopped, and also to never die. To go on.
Each word a boat.
I wanted in my books prayers, bells, arabesques, dervishes, a doomed blood, a remote chorus, the static of cats, the way you looked that night, turning away—modulations to other keys. I wanted it all: the moment and the elongation of the moment, and then another moment, and the cumulative pleasures of an intensifying, building content. I was greedy. I believed it might all be possible.
Not to forget the lost so
ngs of the troubadours and the unfixed relationship between words and music. A way in prose perhaps of speaking to some of my extraordinary solitude?
To fail. To miss the mark. To not even come close.
In the midst of ecstatic possibility, sometimes, even then, no way out.
No longer the hunger for figs. The hunger for an arrangement of anything.
Shattering of glass.
Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge is like my American Woman in that both, as lyric novels, move image by image toward intensity. Images follow a progress through interplays and modulation until they reach a level of nearly unbearable intensity. Action is a concern, but a secondary one.
The beauty and terror of silence intrigues me. Poetry reveres silence. Fiction too often tries to fill it up. And sound, voluptuous, reinsisting itself against that backdrop of silence, takes on a different quality.
As we form our first words after making love.
Not to take anything for granted.
But digression seems more built into the potential of the novel. Is true digression more possible in fiction, in that one may completely forget one strand of reality, having replaced it by an equally compelling and lengthy one, which might wipe out for awhile, obliterate what has preceded it? And then to be returned to the first world again, bewildered.
And so we get to the notion of home. The move towards home and the longing called home and all that memory, imagination, desire, belief, doubt can conjure as we circle and circle on this extraordinary journey. The novel filled with acting out, rehearsals, meditations, games from childhood, melancholy rainy afternoons or bright sunlight where you bounced a little ball and picked up glittering stars called jacks in one hand.
Where you bounced a large ball, “A,” and you went through the precious alphabet. A my name is Alice. And yes,
It is true my name is Carole Alice.
Perfect the action in your mind that will keep the hula hoop up, or the brother safe, or the dress red.
Allow, because you must allow, the broken glass to speak.
And sometimes when she wasn’t sad, but was furious and wanted to get away from all the brothers and sisters, she’d turn herself into a horse.