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.
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.