[Name of author] on Carole Maso’s Ava: An Uncommon Refrain
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(Guest post by [Name of author])
Rarely do I marvel at the standard paragraph. (Forgive the strict literalism with which I’ve approached my “marvelous paragraph” essay.) It’s a bit much and not enough for me. I prefer it broken up into stray lines or drawn out into full pages (/whole novels). The paragraph is where poetry gives up the ghost, signaling the advent of “prose” (let’s pretend this is an unproblematic assertion), and as a failed poet turned “experimental” “novelist,” I have a contrarian (/juvenile) resistance to structural stability. An aversion to all things…congealed?
This is not to say the standard paragraph cannot breathe or move or bleed, because it can and does in the books I love (Nabokov, Marie NDiaye, Ruth Ozeki, et al.). It is more the stable, polished paragraphs that fit together to complete the programmed puzzle of a narrative that I, in principle, object to. (In practice it can be a different story.) The fragmented waxing and waning of a narrative just seems more “true to life” (mine anyway) than the diagrammatic arc, and so I’m most drawn to writers for whom the term “novelist” is more or less a misnomer. David Markson. Ben Marcus. Kathy Acker. Karen Tei Yamashita. Joel Wenderoth. Helen Oyeyemi. Paul Metcalf. Nathalie Sarraute. Steve Tomasula. Charles Yu. Samuel Beckett. Alain Robbe-Grillet. Joshua Rothes. German Sierra. Donald Barthelme. Severo Sarduy. Thalia Field. Sadegh Hedayat. Raymond Federman. Mark Z. Danielewski. Carole Maso.
I’m ravishing.
This stand-alone “paragraph” from Carole Maso’s Ava is a refrain that evolves with each repetition throughout the narrative. A friend had misspoken the above to our narrator, Ava, who recalls this malaprop from her deathbed (the novel consists of streamed thoughts on her final day). The person meant to say, I’m famished or I’m ravenous and it came out, I’m ravishing. A happy accident to our narrator, who seizes upon this phrase as an expression of the insatiable, idiomatic appetites of Being (Woman).
Other refrains appear:
You are a rare bird, Ava Klein.
Three husbands.
Treblinka.
I looked up and you were gone.
We lost the baby.
Let me know if you are going.
The potency of these “paragraphs” relies on the fact that the reader of novels has been conditioned to anticipate (among other things) a compartmentalized construct. Joyce, Woolf, et al. transformed prose, but the textual formation of “the novel” is still largely the paragraphic, chapter-driven domain of Austen, Flaubert, et al. (see note on unproblematic assertions). Maso’s floating refrains play against this expectation the way Duchamp plays against the museum-goer’s or Andy Kaufman plays against the comedy club audience’s, though it is less a subversion than an exploitation of form (reliant thereupon). And it is that misfired refrain—
I’m ravishing.
—that gathers into it all of the novel’s exuberant, undaunted angst.
Published a few years after David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress and preceding his "Notecard Quartet," Ava (/Maso) may have been influenced by and perhaps influenced that master of the allusive, line drawn “novel,” which owes much to modern poetry—in specific, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. (Fun fact: Carole Maso was born in Paterson.) Populated by those familial ghosts John Berryman referred to as “the dead I love”—
Garcia Lorca feigning death.
And Schubert who never saw the sea.
Paul Celan underwater.
And Nabokov with his butterfly net.
Primo Levi, envious of astronauts.
—Ava’s dream theater resounds with these incantatory surname signifiers (another paragraph simply: Matisse.). Maso’s Malrauvian milieu mirrors Markson’s*, but whereas the latter’s Reader/Writer/Author/Novelist mutters his** musings, Ava sings each line con brio. The unbridled, if at times anguished, joy of Ava is operatic, full-throated.
I’m ravishing…
This anecdotal line amuses at first and then pages of thoughts go by and it reemerges in the recollection of a former lover as
You were ravishing.
Now erotic, wistful. Then again, in memory of Ava’s mother,
You were ravishing.
And here it pricks, pains. And then more thoughts and memories go by and here it is again (SPOILER ALERT), a final cri de coeur addressed to herself? The loves of her life? Woman? Existence?
You are ravishing.
And as ever recalling/rereading this present tense termination of Ava (which I do now and again), I need a moment to get it back together. Take five.
….
Okay. So. Let’s bring it down a notch by comparing my “paragraphs” (per my assignment). Though my modus operandi is greatly influenced by Maso, I have difficulty dislodging tongue from cheek, and so my one-line paragraphs come out more Marksonian. E.g., these seven stand-in “paragraphs” which compose Chapter 3 of [Title]:
More writing (re: the passage of time, human nature, etc.)
Fictional Character’s plight plotted. Woes chronicled and present perils posed.
Distinctive traits emerge.
Tonal calibration. Mood set.
Adumbration of major conceit.
…Foreshadowing…? Could be.
Could very well be.
You won’t need a moment to get it together after any of my one-liners, and yet I think the same struggle to adequately express comes trippingly off my tongue, prose shattered into shards of would-be paragraphs of a would-be novel. Ache of the ineffable animating each line, mine’s the same sort of song, if off key or stuck in the Cagey silence of my throat.
And I address my sweet (and sour) nothings—as I think Maso must—to the tribe, dead or alive. We people of the book (to appropriate/extend a denomination) who belong to the race that, as Rimbaud put it, “sang on the scaffold.” And however they happen to be distributed on the page, we put nothing less than our lives in the lines.
We are, so to misspeak, ravishing.
Notes
*I was unable to insert diacritics for “musee imaginaire” on Google docs and in my frustration decided to let this phrasing stand as a protest against automated text and homage to Dr. Seuss.
**originally hers in Wittgenstein’s Mistress (sometimes considered the first of his final quintet), but the “Notecard Quartet” is quintessent of the form in question.
“[profile of author looking out a window deep in thought as if having no notion of his being at that moment photographed]”
[Name of author] was born in [#### Anno Domini], in [major metropolis/rural outpost/overseas] and was educated at [prestigious university/notable MFA program/public library]. He’s written a number of other books, several of which were [praised/ awarded/banned/remaindered]. He now lives in [university town/upstate village/parts unknown] where he [academic post and/or marital status] and where he continues to [etc., etc.] or recently perished in a tragic [etc.]