Context
Reading Carole Maso
Carolyn Kuebler
“I want something else. I want there to be space enough for all sorts of accidents of beauty, revelations, kindnesses, small surprises. A space that encourages new identity constructions for the reader as well as the writer. New patterns of thought and ways of perceiving. New visions of world, renewed hope.”
Carole Maso’s growing body of work traces this impassioned search for “something else,” each book further elucidating her desire to take fiction to new places. Maso’s faith lies firmly in the possibility of language itself, and her books often take unexpected shifts and turns: erotic wordplay gives way to nursery rhyme, rage to mathematics, death song to a story of childhood. Borrowing from found materials and employing techniques from old genres, Maso creates a chaotic fluency, always in a state of ripening. Anaïs Nin wrote in a book on the future of fiction: “When I am told that my novels have no form, I always remember the story about Erik Satie. When Satie was told his compositions had no form, he composed a piece which he entitled Sonata in the Form of a Pear.” Maso, then, writes the novel in the form of a pomegranate—thick with referents, extravagant by nature, but earth-bound in its sensuality.
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“Sometimes I think I have heard the fluttering of wings. Sometimes I think I have seen something: a tip of a tail, a piece of beak, a leg, one thin leg of that incredible bird.”
Maso finished her first novel, Ghost Dance, after a ten-year apprenticeship with herself, and in it many of her themes, ideas, and aesthetics begin to take shape. This book is more like a conventional family saga than her others, as it details the death of the narrator’s poet-mother, but it ambitiously draws parallels with other sorrows—environmental, cultural, and political. Maso’s sensibility is in full force, even as she adheres to her book’s narrative stricture. Ghost Dance holds the promise of something about to happen—of the Topaz Bird she catches in a glimpse. Of that miraculous and fleeting place where genius meets insanity, and beauty collides with despair.
“You are telling me to come. You are telling me not to come. You are dead. You are not really dead.”
Further dissolving the expectation for a single narrative, The Art Lover finds its voice in many voices, many distinct sections. At times it is a novel about a teenage girl, then of a writer remembering her dead father. It is an autobiography and an elegy, then a bit from an art history text or the New York Times—it is a novel again. Its struggle to find the right contour enlivens every page, creating a sense of danger, of a literary trapeze act. And yet it feels coherent, as if the author’s vision alone will be enough to hold all of this together.
Like many writers who don’t fit into the tidy tradition of the novel of the conflict and its denouement, Maso had a difficult time getting her work published at first, and then, because of the stubborn resistance of the media, a hard time getting it noticed. The publication of AVA, however, brought her enough critical acclaim to secure the kind of prize money she needed to keep writing, as well as some prestigious teaching jobs. This book breaks the already accommodating forms of her previous work, and opens a new space in which everything is possible.
“My passionate, promiscuous reading of the literature of this world,” she writes. Then: “Mimi dreaming of home on the highly patterned quilt there.” Or: “How does this strike you as a beginning?” She steers the narrative of this novel by the impetus of thought patterns, of observation, memory, and repetition. Though she uses this technique in all of her work—images reappear, often transformed by context—in AVA there is no connecting tissue. It’s not needed. AVA consists entirely of these voices, and its basic setup (that this is the last day in the life of Ava Klein, who is dying of a rare blood disease) is described on the book jacket but never so perfunctorily by the book itself. The guiding consciousness of this extraordinary novel holds distinct images apart from their place in time. Like memories, these pieces accrue as fragments of varying significance and persistence.
The white spaces between the lines are not line breaks per se, but places where the reader can rest, places where the words reverberate or sink and fall. The lack of paragraphs frees the author from discursive explanation, leaving desire to grow in the silences. Ava’s mind thinking is like a wheel spinning, circling back on itself, venturing forward, occasionally pinned to the book’s present—yet the overall effect is shockingly musical. A list of sources at the back of the book provides clues to her free-associative quoting. “Green, how much I want you green” is from Lorca. “Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night,” from Paul Celan. “There are roses tulips peonies lupins poppies . . .” from Monique Wittig. The book is a pulsing mind collage. All of these voices come in and out in a kind of fugue.
Readers who resist the rarified air of European delicacies and artists colonies should be warned, but not driven away. It pays to keep an open mind, even when it seems like too much—all this beauty, this sexual trembling, this stream of tears and roses she writes. Maso’s love of spring’s first asparagus, Nouveau Beaujolais, the films of Godard, is genuine, bursting with life beyond the mere mention of these words. Her sensibility is raw enough, honest enough, to make such hothouse refinement wild and dangerous. It is tempered by awareness of history, of ugliness; and Maso is conscious of the traps she has set for herself.
The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, which she wrote while staying at the Karolyi Foundation in Venice, plays off of many of these images—this fascination with France and its language, for glittering seas—but rather than being about a woman on her death bed, it is about a woman very much alive, even as she strives toward death in her depression. But again, Maso maintains enough narrative subterfuge to keep the book from being merely a tortured and romantic death song. As the narrator writes, “And she is a little in love with it. This romance of sex and sorrow.” The voice switches in and out of first- and third-person; its intellectually decipherable tactics are nearly disguised in her rhapsodic prose, and yet they are there. Always teetering on this delicious edge of melodrama and real tragedy, Maso’s work dares to reveal itself without the carapace of cynicism or irony so common in contemporary fiction. Maso flees the mundane, the living dead. The world comes alive and language reawakens under her passionate gaze, infused with the heat of a desiring mind. Her self-awareness, or consciousness of being the writer of such passion plays, adds a layer of deliberateness to this surrender. Clearly, this author knows where her work verges on this precipice, and is not afraid to fall.
“You opening in my brain like a flower, a product of desire this woman, salty, bleeding now in the little town off season wow I see her through veiled light from afar.”
All of her work contains elements of music, which, like language, she says, “shapes silence,” but she directly refers to Aureole as the “erotic études.” These short pieces—very much about lovemaking in many forms, about framing love, or putting words to sensuality—read like a notebook of meditations. Or they are beautiful, unfinished attempts as language stretches, digs, and rearranges its broken pieces. Free of the restraints of a coherent novel, this book is a series of poem sketches in a state of becoming. She said in an interview that the short form was born out of necessity, out of a heavy academic schedule, but it also allowed her to try new things she had never dared before.
Her new position as Director of Creative Writing at Brown also made her contemplate constraints in another way. While writing the highly unconventional etudes, Maso was also, ironically, working on her most commercial book. Defiance is her first foray into mainstream publishing and indeed makes a gesture toward a more popular novel. Here Maso attaches her sensibility and voice to a single character, Bernadette O’Brien, a genius mathematician on death row for murder. Maso herself called it a “mystery” but as it turns out, this sensational premise, which gives away its own ending, functions more as a container in which Maso can assemble her own vision. And this is the book’s most subversive surprise. Like her other work, Defiance is rich with observation and flights of language, revealing how this sensibility is malleable enough to adapt to the death-row murderess without sacrificing its immediateness and power. Here Maso veers closer than ever toward the edge of melodrama, and sometimes she takes it too far—the young Bernadette would have to have been playing her Bach awfully hard on that paper keyboard to bloody her fingers, for instance. Yet as she says, “I was able to constantly undermine and question the standard narrative stance while utilizing it.” I would argue that this book employs more outrageous calamity than necessary, but I would also argue that it is a riveting and frightful portrayal of a raging mind.
Parts of The Bay of Angels, her forthcoming book many years in the works, have appeared in journals and anthologies, and it promises to be as erotic as Aureole, as formally daring as AVA, and as historical/political as Ghost Dance. Maso strives for freedom on every level, and every book offers her another chance to attain it: “I am imagining free. Free some day.”
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In excerpts and interviews, Carole Maso has appeared in venues of many kinds: on web sites like NerveCenter: The Community of Thinking Hedonists and the literary Web Del Sol; in Norton’s Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction and Yellow Silk’s Seven Hundred Kisses. Her work has been excerpted in feminist anthologies, lesbian erotica, journals of avant-garde criticism. She was even featured on the cover of American Poetry Review, a place usually reserved for poets. That her work finds a home with sex writers, versifiers, academics, and everyone in between attests to its intelligence, its fluidity and sensuality. No other writer has so deliciously created a present tense of rapture—the rapture not only of joy, of beauty, of celebration—but of true aliveness, ugly and terrifying as it often is.
In 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote, “If we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.” Maso continues to strive for a fiction of what Woolf calls life’s “uncircumscribed spirit,” its “semi-transparent envelope.” In her own essay on the future of fiction, Maso writes, “Language is a rose, and the future is still a rose, opening. . . . The future is women, for real this time. I’m sorry, but it’s time you got used to it.”
Maso rages on, breaking the rules, stretching genres, and producing an erratic and stunning body of work. She invents, one book at a time, the viable future of fiction she so irreverently calls for. With vulnerability and strength, she challenges the boundaries of “twenty-six figures on fire”—our language.
