The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Aureole by Carole Maso
Nicole Cooley

Carole Maso. Aureole. Ecco, 1996. 214 pp. $22.00.

Aureole is an exploration of liminal states, “the place where one thing is about to change into another.” The spaces between light and dark, waking and dream, and language and meaning are only some of the passages invoked here. Betweenness defines Maso’s writing practice: the text hovers between poetry and prose, lyric and narrative. The relation between writing and the body is central. Composed of a preface and thirteen sections, Aureole focuses and refocuses on the connections between language and sexuality. In the first part of this narrative, “The Women Wash Lentils,” two women, lovers, read from a dictionary of French slang: “Read, she begs: and I straddle her mouth. . . . “Sex, words and the body conjoin as words and phrases are defined: “To have a crush on: faire des yeux de merlan frites, or literally, to make fried marlin eyes at one another.” The gaps between French and English, between formal and colloquial diction, become figures for the play of desire between the lovers.

Just as the text investigates the relation between self and other, lover and beloved, it also examines the relationship between Maso, the writer, and other women writers and artists. As well as Colette, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes, all credited in the book’s acknowledgments, Marguerite Duras’s character Anne-Marie Stretter from her play India Song and the writer Anna Kavan appear in the body of the text. In my favorite section, “Sappho Sings the World Ecstatic,” Maso juxtaposes her own writing with Sappho’s poetry, sentences from Gertrude Stein, and the shot lists from filmmaker Maya Deren’s haunting and beautiful films Land and Meshes of the Afternoon. The women’s voices work as a collage; juxtaposition is the organizing principle as poetic logic builds the narrative.

In the preface Maso writes, “Line by line I have tried to slip closer to a language that might function more bodily, more physically, more passionately.” Throughout her work, Maso seeks new textual structures to contain her experiments, continually pushing the boundaries and questioning the definitions of what fiction might be. In her novels Maso proposes a narrative poetics. In Aureole she offers an erotics of narrative, a celebration of the possibilities of human connection and language. [Nicole Cooley]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Aureole by Carole Maso Nicole Cooley Carole Maso. Aureole. Ecco, 1996. 214 pp. $22.00. Aureole is an exploration of liminal states, “the place where one thing is about to change into another.” The spaces between light and dark, waking and dream, and language and meaning are only some of the passages invoked here. Betweenness defines Maso’s writing practice: the text hovers between poetry and prose, lyric and narrative. The relation between writing and the body is central. Composed of a preface and thirteen sections, Aureole focuses and refocuses on the connections between language and sexuality. In the first part of this narrative, “The Women Wash Lentils,” two women, lovers, read from a dictionary of French slang: “Read, she begs: and I straddle her mouth. . . . “Sex, words and the body conjoin as words and phrases are defined: “To have a crush on: faire des yeux de merlan frites, or literally, to make fried marlin eyes at one another.” The gaps between French and English, between formal and colloquial diction, become figures for the play of desire between the lovers. Just as the text investigates the relation between self and other, lover and beloved, it also examines the relationship between Maso, the writer, and other women writers and artists. As well as Colette, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes, all credited in the book’s acknowledgments, Marguerite Duras’s character Anne-Marie Stretter from her play India Song and the writer Anna Kavan appear in the body of the text. In my favorite section, “Sappho Sings the World Ecstatic,” Maso juxtaposes her own writing with Sappho’s poetry, sentences from Gertrude Stein, and the shot lists from filmmaker Maya Deren’s haunting and beautiful films Land and Meshes of the Afternoon. The women’s voices work as a collage; juxtaposition is the organizing principle as poetic logic builds the narrative. In the preface Maso writes, “Line by line I have tried to slip closer to a language that might function more bodily, more physically, more passionately.” Throughout her work, Maso seeks new textual structures to contain her experiments, continually pushing the boundaries and questioning the definitions of what fiction might be. In her novels Maso proposes a narrative poetics. In Aureole she offers an erotics of narrative, a celebration of the possibilities of human connection and language. [Nicole Cooley]

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