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Carole Maso is a difficult writer to categorize. Like other modern writers responding
to the transcendental quality of literature today, she writes somewhere between
fiction and poetry, allowing her form and structure to shift between them. In all of her
books, language and desire have an intricate relationship. Writing itself may indeed be
Carole Maso’s love letter to the world.
Maso weaves an extraordinary work with her novel Aureole. In the crafting of
this text she explains, “I have tried to leave this work at its most erotic moments, longing
at the threshold of story, before the shapes are made manifest, before the connections
lose their mysterious, fragile hold” (xi). Indeed, the reader never discovers a plotline or
the characters’ backgrounds. This text could be considered a collection of short stories.
Many of these, however, are written in verse or shift between paragraphs and broken
lines, allowing space through which the words themselves can breathe. The varying
glimpses into characters and scenes connect via sexuality. Some of the same characters
seem to be in a few sections, but it cannot be proven. As if the characters are in constant
motion in and out of our reach. Longing. Their desires (and acts of desire) hold us in
rapture – reminding us of our own passions and at the same time introducing something
original.
Perhaps Maso’s most successful technique in the language of this text is her ways
of making her words come alive: that is, causing their meaning to change over the course
of the text. She does this via using the French language in the first segment of Aureole,
called “The Women Wash Lentils.” The scene opens with two women making love and
reading from various books, and by the second page, this strange title is introduced into
the text:
They’ll notice at some point, sometimes during and sometimes
after and once and awhile before, a phrase will come to them.
Mysteriously, or an image in the rose light: two women washing
lentils. (2)
The readers, even if they know a bit of French, may not catch the hidden
meaning behind these English words. However, later on in the story, Maso describes the
women picking up their book of French Slang, and lists these definitions:
lentille f. clitoris (lit); lentil
éplucheuse de lentilles f. (lit); lentil washer (19)
Here the reader can finally get in on the joke of Maso’s text – that these two
women are the “women washing lentils” if we read lentil via the French literal clitoris.
A couple pages later, Maso again repeats the phrase, and this time, it reads completely
differently than on pages 1 and 2:
… In the space (pink) between your mouth (rose) (descending)
and my abricot.
A light fuzz.
The women wash lentils. (21)
This play with language and hidden meanings is inventive, crafty, and erotically
beautiful. The presentation of another angle of vision: changing everything.
Maso also enlivens the concept of language itself by connecting it with the
sexual acts she is detailing: “The shape of empty space, page. Don’t be afraid to let it
stand that way a moment: the hip hovering towards the desiring mouth” (23). These
lines are placed near the closing of this first story (which happens to be one of the
most structurally prosaic sections of the entire novel) perhaps as a suggestion of how
to read her following tales (where she leaves much more space between her lines). This
first chapter or story is also the most complete in the sense of scene and fulfillment
of desire. In her later sections, desire and language both hover (incomplete, not yet
fulfilled), as seen here at the closing of the second story:
He opens his hand as he watches her
remembering
must have been an angel…
And she opens her hand, her life to him: a blur of wings
And desperately.
And desperately then. (36)
This unfulfilled longing continues into the third section as Maso continues to
blend it with language itself. In this story, a woman meets another woman while walking
on a beach:
The way the rose clings…lip…
As they try (unsuccessfully) to get to the end of the sentence. (41)
These women do, however, successfully complete their desires, as seen later with
the (very direct) lines:
Like the lip clings to the clitoris, long after, long after…
On that lovely breast of beach
and love and edge and sore and swollen door. (68)
After showing this scene of two women fulfilling their desires (and apparently
unable to stop), Maso’s next story is “Dreaming Steven Lighthouse Keeper,” where
a poor man is left on the fringe of their world, like the reader, only able to glimpse
such desire, such passion, “lilting dwindling fading world” (84). The desire, and the love
making, moves on into the next story and the next, while the reader remains behind this
lens of paper and black text. This text becomes such transcendental desire, speaking
to the reader about sex and language, as one man notices in his past lover (whom he
still yearns for) “and he knows that all that life can ever be for her is making love and
language” (35). Longing.
These pages ask us: is language ever anything more than longing? Desire to
become a lovely breast of beach, like the lip clings, the hip hovering towards the desiring mouth?
Allowing this other world between the words (within the words) to hover. Alive. Almost
touching. Inspiring us to reach: desire, more —
Works Cited
Maso, Carole. Aureole. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996.
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Kristen L. Ringman is a cross-genre writer, painter, and photographer. She teaches
poetry workshops that integrate other forms of art, nature, and yoga. Her writing,
photography, and artwork have been published in the anthology eyes of desire 2: a deaf glbt
reader, Pitkin Review, and the forthcoming Deaf American Poetry Anthology.
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