[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Like Take It or Leave It, Maso’s page is a positive fact, not a blank, not just an absence of print.That is, the appearance of her page is not of a text laid onto what would otherwise be an emptiness.There is just too much page, too much bare paper to call Maso’s book the material support for her narrative.(One feels like saying, “What narrative?”) The appearance of AVA is more nearly that of a field or plane, something composed essentially of space and merely interrupted at sporadic intervals by incursions of text.That is, what punctuates in AVA is not white space but print.Which is the most obvious way in which Maso’s novel diverges from Federman’s.In AVA, as in Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the significance of white space does not seem to be the narrator’s doing, resulting instead from something already present, conditions more fundamental than anything represented.In AVA white space seems prior.However, whether we’ll want to describe its presence as active seems uncertain.That is, the presence of white space in AVA, at least in my experience of it, feels nothing like an event.One could risk gibberish here and refer to the whiteness of Maso’s page as a continuous event, a ceaseless action, but my point is that Maso’s text, unlike both Federman’s and Markson’s, isn’t narrated.I want to say it’s breathed.I realise that this way of characterising Maso’s discourse may be just too metaphorical, too impressionistic, but I know of no other words that could describe so precisely what I have in mind: specifically, that the fragments of text do not represent anything Ava Klein tries to say—they aren’t her efforts to explain what happened or comment on her life, are rather what escapes from her, slips out, like a sigh—and that they are weightless, light as thought.That is, regardless of the gravity of Ava’s predicament, her lines remain free-floating, detached, suspending all action and leaving events up in the air.In other words, while Maso’s discovery is of the page itself, not only or primarily of its availability for use (as in Take It or Leave It), her discovery is of something more fundamental than, prior to, a surrounding or enclosure (as in Wittgenstein’s Mistress).I want to call it a ground.That is, the oddest fact about Maso’s novel is that its parts are separate.Unlike compositions in which the basic units (e.g., sentences, lines, phrases) are grouped on the page into larger units (e.g., stanzas, paragraphs, verses, chapters), every fragment in AVA is separated by a uniform distance from every other.With the exception of the three long sections “Morning,” “Afternoon,” and “Night”—marked off by two expanses of white on pages 123-4 and 213-4—only the fragments’ occurrence in the same book, on the continuous field or plane projected by the space of its pages, implies that they have a connection, are all parts of something.What this something is cannot be a voice, since the speakers are changeable, and the occasions (e.g., “Brazil, 1988; Venice, 1976; Quebec, 1980” [6]) seem as discontinuous as the fragments themselves.If we say the fragments are connected by or in Ava’s consciousness, we will be interpreting what connects them, not describing it, and saying that they aren’t connected, that the reader must connect them, only confuses the issue: first, by suggesting that the reader could just do this, as if we knew some way of connecting the fragments of AVA that didn’t raise the same problems as AVA itself, and, second, by suggesting that the reader could just not do it, that we knew some way of reading AVA without connecting its fragments.No, the problem of reading AVA is simply the problem of Ava’s remarkable life, that it occurs in time.That is, if in order to be complete reading must presuppose a finality impossible of rearrangement, then the reader’s plight is as hopeless as Ava’s.No single life will exhaust life, no text will comprehend the meaningful.Reading cannot be the origin of what it seeks.The question to ask is: What does Maso’s ground ground? That is, if the white space in AVA reveals properties independent of the novelist’s use and if these properties prove more fundamental than the enclosure of narration, then what white space grounds is our ability to make of Maso’s words, or of any novelist’s words, a novel.To read AVA we must acknowledge what goes without saying in every other novel we’ve ever read.I want to say that this more radical discovery—call it the discovery of literature—makes AVA’s relation to its predecessors historical.That is, AVA is both an advance over Federman’s and Markson’s innovations and a transformation of them, as though the history of the page that Maso’s novel, in my experience of it, culminates, had not been tellable, in no way connected Federman’s novel to Markson’s, was simply no history, before AVA.AVA dates Federman and Markson by revealing their white spaces to be discoveries for the first time.The way that it does this is by achieving presentness.That is, what fixes AVA in time, what situates it at a specific historical moment (e.g., after publication of Wittgenstein’s Mistress in 1988), is precisely its revelation of what for the duration of that moment—a period without fixed limits—remains timeless: the space of telling.A page is not a surface onto which a pre-existing entity, e.g., a novel, has been laid, nor is it an agglomeration of particles.A page is the presence of a novel before my presence to it, after its presence to me.This very autonomy, this material subsistence, threatens to make every page immaterial, as negligible as earth underfoot.Maso makes hers matter again, uncovers her page’s presence, by making its space our means, almost our only means, of telling Ava’s life from an agglomeration To see white underlying the dividedness of Maso’s words is to see, for the duration of a moment—August 15, 1990—Ava’s life wholly there.In this way white space solves the problem of Maso’s novel in her novel, i.e., how a life can be complete while coming to an untimely end.What seems crucial here is to acknowledge that the white space in AVA is no more complete than Ava’s life, or not if “complete” means it could not extend beyond what we have now.It certainly seems possible to imagine more of it.In fact, saying that the last line, “You are ravishing,” completes the white space seems as groundless as saying that it completes Ava, assuming that this means something partial from beginning to end required just this one sentence to be entire.When Maso quotes Cixous,.”.[E]ach page I write could be the first page of the book” (58), she suggests that the space of her telling is as protean, as utterly without predetermined limits, as human being itself.And yet it is just the strange thing about a page, at least when it ceases to be seen as blank and begins to be seen—”seen”?—as white, that it appears complete in a way no writing could surpass.We could say that its dazzling surface composes a picture of total expression.It is against this background of austere purity that every word must come to matter.I have at times regretted that, in my 1995 Dalkey Archive paperback version of AVA, Maso’s notes and the publisher’s advertisements follow page 265
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]