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 oppositional 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.