THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE QUESTION OF LITERATURE

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus (6.4311)

It seems increasingly apparent to me that formally experimental writing is running counter to the main current of history. Whether we consider the global expanse of capitalism, the unrivaled position of the United States in international affairs, the rise of the Republican party nationally, or the worldwide audience for Hollywood film and American popular music, the general direction of the last three decades has been toward increasing consolidation of the dominant. My aim in acknowledging this bleak fact is not to minimize the real fissures and counter currents of recent history. It is to motivate a question: Why does formally experimental writing persist, at least for some of us, in the face of what appears to be its growing marginalization? In what follows I will not be providing a historical explanation for this persistence, nor will I be seeking a political or ethical justification, although it's essential to the force of my remarks that, on occasion, they compete with such accounts. My background idea is that the continuation into the new millennium of literary experimentation, despite its widespread neglect, is forceful evidence that modernism was not a response to historically circumscribed conflicts and crises but, on the contrary, arose from necessities internal to literature itself. I'll try here to give concreteness to this idea, to indicate how these necessities arise, what they look like, why they're not generally recognized, while attempting some rapprochement with the history I'm bracketing. After all, what I've situated internal to literature, counter to history, is simply the necessity for change, that is, for history. Said another way, it's unclear whether I'm looking for the necessity of formal experimentation or perhaps for freedom from necessity altogether. These could be the same thing.

For those of us who are committed to radical change in literature, there are good reasons why we might want to avoid using the term "avant-garde." The philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose writings on modernism have been influential on me, has noted three confusions endemic to the concept (Cavell, 216-17). First is its tendency to overemphasize art's future at the expense of its past, leaving present work ungrounded. The result of this lopsidedness is an impression that contemporary art bears no relation, or only an arbitrary one, to those historic achievements that have given rise both to art's significance and to its problems. We could speak of this first confusion as the avant-garde's misrepresenting possibility as indeterminacy, its misinterpretation of art's unforeclosable future as a hedge against its historical specificity, its present fix. A second confusion has to do with the avant-garde's uncritical enthusiasm for any and everything that calls itself innovative, regardless of an "innovation's" sterility, irrelevance, or just plain stupidity. Cavell speaks of this tendency as the avant-garde's "promiscuous attention" to newness, a phrase intended to suggest both indiscriminate coupling and infidelity. The idea is that the avant-garde habitually conflates novelty with change, imagining that artistic advance results from mere unconventionality, from difference as such. Call this the "farther out than thou" syndrome. And the third confusion is a tendency, already implicit in the avant-garde's military metaphor, to represent artistic advances as historical or political advances, as though significant changes in the forms of art could be validated by their political efficacy. Although Cavell wants to keep open the question of art's relation to politics, not to imply that there is no relation, he means here to criticize the habit, so characteristic of 20th century avant-gardes, of underestimating the real differences between artistic practice and serious political action. How to characterize this last confusion is difficult, since we're still in it, but it has something to do with art's paradoxical autonomy, with the political significance of art's irreducibility to political significance. Taken together these confusions emphasize the avant-garde's tendency to turn on itself, to represent the historical conditions of art as mere obstacles, and thus to undermine those problematic continuities on which, not just mainstream art, but even revolutionary art, depends.

In her 1926 lecture, "Composition as Explanation" Gertrude Stein offers an account of historical change that, while insisting on the necessity for advances in art, seems to avoid Cavell's critique. Her originality stems from two ideas, both involving what she calls "time-sense" (Stein, 514). First is her idea that the goal of any advance is not the future but the present. That is, every generation lives instinctively and unself-consciously several generations behind itself, in a kind of anachronistic hybridity, preoccupied with earlier emotions, reflexes, styles, and concepts, and discovering its own time only afterwards, in narrating it. Her paradigm of this belatedness is World War I, which she says the generals imagined as "a nineteenth century war...to be fought with twentieth century weapons" (513), a time lag that suppressed modern warfare until too late, after the carnage had forced contemporaneity on it. Part of what Stein wants from this example is the contrast between the academic and the modern, a contrast she'll develop later as something "prepared" versus something "that decides how it is to be when it is to be done." But more immediately she wants to deepen the problem of time itself.

For Stein, the present is never what the present naturally wants. On the contrary, wherever the present achieves expression, those living in it will find it confusing, irritating, unnatural, ugly. Consequently, art cannot be made present by accomodating it to popular styles or dominant ideas, and art's motivation to become present has nothing to do with striving after novelty. Instead, changes in art occur because in some befuddling but life-determining way, they already have occurred, are already present, inescapably so, even when repudiated. Stein's idea is that what changes from one generation to the next is a form, not a content, what she calls "composition," and although each generation's composition controls its consciousness absolutely, i.e., "makes what those who describe it make of it" (513), it does not itself readily submit to consciousness, to description. It's as though everyone can feel how out of synch things are, can recognize the obsolescence of what our leaders, parents, peers have to say, but as soon as anyone tries to say what's out of synch, he or she becomes obsolete too. Art's problem then is to acknowledge something as inescapable as an entrenched enemy but that resists our direct advance as forcefully as a machine gun. As Stein says, "No one is ahead of his time" (514), one of several remarks meant to dislodge our confidence that we already know what she's talking about. The avant-gardeóin Stein's senseóis merely art's struggle for its time, for embodiment of those formative but unrepresentable conditions on which art's continued presence, and possibly everything else's too, depends.

But Stein's second idea seems to complicate, if not undo, this first one. Her word "composition" is meant to set up an analogy between the action of history and the activity of painters, writers, and musicians, the point being that the modern work is one that incorporates this new "time-sense," the consciousness of the present, into itself. However, when Stein tries to explain what this change means concretely, she comes out with a stupefying series of redundancies: "a thing made by being made" (514), "what is seen when it seems to be being seen" (514), "the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing" (516), and most dizzyingly, "the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living" (516). Despite their circularity, these formulations seem to me uncommonly precise. What they all share is a suggestion of something already in existence that is the means by which it is itself brought into existence. The idea seems to be that what has always existed unrecognized in artói.e., the creative power of presentnessóis in the modern work, not just what is recognized, but what actually does the work of art, what makes art art specifically by being recognized. This is what her phrase, "a thing made by being made," tries to bring out. But now everything has gotten turned around, since presentness no longer seems limited to the present. It's as if modern art weren't just the latest change in art, say, the form of Stein's own generation, but were instead a change of a wholly different order, one that has revealed something about all art. That this is, in fact, Stein's idea is indicated by her lecture's first sentence, which insists on a historical changelessness underlying changes in composition, as well as by her later, more paradoxical insistence that what results from incorporating the new time-sense is not a historical document but something timeless, a classic. It is as though what Stein's generation needed to do to make art was to find out for the first time what art was. In other words, the whole point of acknowledging the present for Stein is to disclose what, once laid bare, seems always to have existed. When this happens, art happens. Understood in this sense, the avant-garde isn't just the struggle for its time. It's the struggle in its time for something suppressed by time itself. Stein's term, both for this struggle and for its object, is "a continuous present" (517).

Despite the difficulty of making these ideas clear, I think Stein's account of artistic advance is basically right. If literature is to exist in the present, then it must be discovered there. This is, I believe, what the idea of an avant-garde meant for Stein's generation and what I believe it still means, even if ignored. To write after modernism, not as though before, is to acknowledge modernism's discovery of this necessity of discovery as such. Initially, this implies that nothing known about forms of writing can count as a guide for producing novels and poems now. That is, we are to imagine an inadequacy of our current knowledge that is not overcome by newer or better knowledge, an inadequacy intrinsic to knowing itself. Stein's idea seems to be that what needs discoveringóour timeóhas the character of obviousness, as though the new composition were too proximate, too present, for knowing. Understood in this way, the problem isn't so much that current knowledge is obsolete, as that it's neurotic. What can be taught in writing workshops and literature coursesói.e., the version of poetry and fiction we are presently prepared to recognizeóhas the same status as the version of his or her present life that the analysand enters psychoanalysis prepared to recount. One can say about such versions that they repress what needs discovering or that they incessantly reveal it, but either way, an unacknowledged presence controls all that's said. It is this paradox that Stein brings out by saying, not that nations are behind the times, but that they are "behind themselves" (515), as though our anachrony comprised an essential dividedness. The implication is simply that discovering will not take the form of narrating. That is, the present cannot be revealed as a new or further episode in any story we are prepared to recount, and being present does not mean recounting it. Nothing obvious to us about machine guns was unknown to WWI generals. This failure, even impertinence, of current knowledge is what remains right about modernism's insistence on newness, innovation, experiment.

At the same time, the impertinence of knowledge does not mean literature must be, or even can be, created directly from present experience. Nothing seems further from Stein's idea than that changes in art are identical with changes in taste, sensibility, cultural style, or fashion, which is what we're likely to have in mind if we say every generation's experience is unique. Quite the contrary, Stein's idea is that present experience will be as anachronistic, as much a hybrid of past experience, as poetry and fiction, and for the same reasons. To insist that literature must be discovered means that, far from creating poems and fiction ex nihilo, from literature's absence, literature can only be createdóas contradictory as this soundsófrom literature, that is, from something always already in existence, controlling in misunderstood and largely unrecognized ways every writing. This is what Stein's "continuous present" tries to name. I take it to be a version of what Heidegger had in mind when, in apparent defiance of logic, he insisted that art was its own origin (Heidegger, 17-18). That is, what the present discovers is not just a new composition or form. It discovers literature, as though for the first time. Stein's originality was in seeing that, where the present is at issue in this way, acknowledgment proves more radical than even the farthest-fetched invention. In her account, the avant-garde writer undergoes, succumbs utterly to, what in other writing exists as frustrated, ignored, incomplete. In other words, the notorious irritation and ugliness of avant-garde art can be said to measure, not the present's distance from the past, but the present's distance from itself. It is a dividedness of the same kind, and with similar consequences, as the analysand's dividedness from his or her own body. Between linguistic materiality and literature's presence there persists this gap. Or stated in a sentence, after modernism, literature ceases to exist as history and materializes as a question.

Probably the best way to give tangibility to these remarks would be to examine Stein's own writings, since her lectures were always meditations on her own literary practice, but because my interest is less in what the avant-garde was than what it is, I want to conclude with some reflections on Carole Maso's novel AVA. Although the order of my paper suggests that I am using Maso's novel to illustrate a theory developed independently and beforehand, I think the opposite chronology is more nearly the case. At any rate, if I had not come to understand what literature is by discovering from specific works of fiction that I didn't already know, then none of what I have said so far would have been for me of more than academic interest. Which is another way of saying I wouldn't have written this.

AVA is my candidate for a present representative of the avant-garde in fiction, that is, for a novel that continues modernism's advance into the present. Ultimately, my commitment to AVA does not result from its mere difference from other novels but, as I'll try to show, from its revelation of what novels are, what they have always been. However, I'm highlighting it initially because its form seems a version of nothing that, before AVA, I was prepared to recognize as a narrative. Its originating predicament is that Ava Klein, professor of comparative literature and ardent lover of life, is dying at age 39, and Maso's text purports to be a record of the phrases, images, writings, and recollections that pass before Ava's consciousness on the morning, afternoon, and night of August 15, 1990, the day Iraq invades Kuwait and Ava dies. The problem Ava faces on this day is how her life can be whole, complete, even while coming to such a premature end. She recalls a remark by Eva Hesse, "Life doesn't last, art doesn't last" (185), one of countless passages that imply something closer than an analogy, more like an identity, between the problem in the novel and the problem of the novel. What Ava the character seeks, what AVA the novel seeks, is something that, as long as there was God, meaning provided, call it lasting significance or a higher end, but something that atoned for the shortcomings of flesh and matter. However, without recourse to the everlasting, Ava's death cannot be redeemed through any spiritual allegory. Her salvation has to be literal: "Here is my arm," she tells the chemo nurse. "I want to live" (49). Nothing not complete in itself, nothing that stands for something else, can matter to Ava now. All that will atone for life is life. The problem then, for both novel and character, is time.

AVA's pages seem a material realization of Stein's anachronistic hybridity, their lines comprising a congeries of times and places, texts and experiences, each with its distinctive mood, inflection, rhythm still intact. Some lines express regret, as though the past had presented itself too late ("How could Iówhy did I hesitate, given all that we knew, even then?" [173]), while others acknowledge present longings that still look toward future consummation ("Because decidedly, I do not want to miss the grand opening scheduled for early winter, still some months away, of the new Caribbean restaurant down the block that will serve goat" [11]). Several lines allude to events that were never more than partly present, even on their original occurrence: Schubert's unfinished symphony, a deferred marriage proposal, a fragment of orchestral music heard on a car radio, a miscarried pregnancy, Moses dying within sight of the promised land. Taken together, these lines epitomize a frustration that seems more than just accidental, an anachrony built into Ava's very existence, as though to be mortal were simply to be balked. She recalls George Steiner's remark, "Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short, but because it is a human life" (100). That is, deprived of paradise, human finitude seems itself a broken promise. It's as if Ava's capacity to imagine a future without herself, or possibly just her ability to say the words, "If we could live forever" (102), projects a limitlessness by contrast with which every present, regardless how extraordinary, seems truncated. "So many plans," she thinks, then adds, "time permitting" (162). Some lines attribute this frustration to language. Ava repeatedly recalls Hélène Cixous's wish "to create a language that heals as much as it separates" (52), a wish frequently juxtaposed with Ava's hope for cure, as though the two forms of brokeness, Ava's body and Ava's dying words, were each forms of a single disruption. More than once Ava flirts with the idea of a lost, primordial wholeness, as if articulation were not her natural condition, juxtaposing the remark, "Let me describe what my life once was here," with the fragment, "Home before it was divided" (22), and wishing repeatedly for the fluency of music. A recalled quote from Monique Wittig (37) attributes this linguistic disruption to maleness.

Interpreting Maso's myth of lost origins is tricky, since it can express either a wholly satisfactory solution to Ava's problem or a temptation to repeat it. It's to this temptation, for example, that Ava and her first husband yield, seeking ever younger lovers in an effort to make their love present again by replicating its inaugural moment: "You were looking for the way I was once," Ava tells him, "the age I was when we first met" (167). That is, interpreted as the projection of fullness into a retreating past, Maso's myth reinstitutes the temporal confinement Ava's literally dying to escape. Although Maso means for her myth to recall us to a forgotten promise, she doesn't mean that Canaan could only be entered by going backwards. On the contrary, if Ava's life is to be whole, its wholeness must come, not through a return to the past but of it, as of the repressed, a return identical with Ava's absorption in the present. In other words, the incompleteness of Ava's life is not its discontinuousness, or not if by that we mean life's comings and goings, its punctuation by silence and questions, its parsing into discrete experiences, what Ava calls "moments." If language is implicated in Ava's problem, then that's not because it is articulateói.e., not because it is language. If anything, as Ava draws closer to AVA's end, she seems increasingly affirming of all that separates words, thoughts, feelings, people. "Learn to love the questions themselves," she tells herself. "The spaces between words. Between thoughts. The interval" (171). No, the complicity of language in her life's incompleteness must involve something with which the discontinuousness of words, their articulations, can be readily confused, some capacity of a word to dislocate from its origin, from those moments in which its occurrence brings fulfillment or relief, and recur where its presence can create division. If we have difficulty seeing what this is, that is probably because, in reading AVA, we are doing it too.

What makes time problematic in AVA is narrative. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that Ava's predicament, like the reader's, is not that she lives in time but that, being mortal, she must tell it, recount every moment. The source of life's incompleteness, then, is not its division into words but its division into beginning, middle, and end. It is this schism that Stein's continuous present means to repair. When Ava's consciousness, when Maso's page, is split into what Stein calls "the time of the composition and the time in the composition" (516), even the fullest moments resemble forestalled actions ("And what in the world were we waiting for?" [24]), unfinished developments ("I might have gone to China" [241]), dashed hopes ("We lost the baby, Anatole" [81]), or epiphanies that came too late ("Everything in me is suddenly beginning to emerge clearly. Why not earlier? Why at such cost? I have so many thousands of things, some new, some from an earlier time, which I would like to tell you" [241]). It is this representation of her life as never wholly present that periodically rises up in Ava as an insatiable demand for more time: "Find a cure.... Find a cure.... Find a cure" (221). Either the past returns as reminder of her life's fullnessó"You were all I ever wanted" (61), "You gave me the world" (178), "It was paradise" (43)óor it retreats eternally, trapping her in finitude: "But I am only thirty-nine, Dr. Oppenheim" (55). Everything can be narrated except what must be present for anything to be narrated. In other words, the solution to the problem of Ava Klein's lifeóand therefore to the problem of representing itóis not discovered by postponing death a few more years, for the problem is not life's shortness. And the solution remains hopeless only so long as representing it substitutes for undergoing it, which is roughly what Wittgenstein meant in the Tractatus when he called aesthetics "transcendental" (6.421). Ava's solution remains where Ava has always discovered it, in the living out of every moment in its completeness, fully, up to the moment of life's close in death. That is, whatever enables words to come and go, anything to be a preparation for anything else, each moment to be a conclusion, a complication, a denouement, a beginning, or time in its continuum to be punctuated by now, now, nowówhatever permeates every present, making it count, that is what makes AVA, both novel and character, whole.

I realize this way of speaking can seem frustrating, almost as frustrating as calling the deathbed question of Ava's loveró"But what, after all, is wrong with now?" (87)óan answer. Either nothing needs explaining here or nearly everything. I feel like saying: You simply have to hear the words! But the problem is, if you did hear the words, then saying you have to verges on an insult, and if you didn't hear the words, saying you have to is an insult. We're banging our heads against a limit. What can't be said can't be said. However, if I were to try to give concrete expression to this present I find so absorbing, I'd turn my attention to the most immediately striking but readily overlooked feature of Maso's novel: the deluge of white space on every page. This white space represents something no novel has ever existed without but whose precise significance for novels went largely uninvestigated until the latter half of the twentieth century. It is in terms of Maso's further discovery of this significance that I want to speak both of AVA's continuous presentness and, in retrospect, of its historical advance.

To explain what I mean, it will help to contrast the relation of white space and text in AVA with that of two other earlier novels with which it seems to have some affinity: Raymond Federman's Take It or Leave It, and David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. White space in Take It or Leave It is used, for the most part, as it was by modernist poetry from, say, W. C. Williams through Charles Olson, primarily, as the spatial equivalent of a break in speech, a breath stop or syntactic division, and secondarily, as a way of foregrounding linguistic materiality, the print as a visual object. The opening lines of Federman's "Pretext," despite their initial appearance of disorder, seem on closer examination arranged in near perfect accord with speech rhythms, syntax, and grammar:

in the beginning

words scattered

by chance

and in all directions!

Similar vertical series of syntactically or grammatically parallel units can be seen elsewhere on the novel's opening pages:

a shy silhouette

a profile

a shiny saxophone

or in the lower right corner of the second page;

treees

roads

cars

people

rooms

...puppets

...people.

However, the jumbled text on the right margin of the first page,

u c n r l e e e g e

n o t o l d n r i s!

operates by another principle, providing something like a visual mimesis of its own sense or meaning. While arranging the text according to rhythm and syntax works to emphasize the spokeness of the narration, its saturation with voice, the visual mimesis seems to disrupt or compete with this voice, asserting the autonomous existence of page and print. But in both instances Federman's relation to the white space is that of using it, that is, manipulating it for expressive ends or to actualize his narrator's character. Despite the expanded signifying repertoire of Take It or Leave It, its white space remainsóin some sense still to be articulatedópassive and inert, incidental to the action in the same way as commas and periods. Federman's artistic advance is to reveal his pages as white, not blank, not just lacking printing, but even if considered a disclosure of materiality, the ultimate effect of his use of white space is to foreground, not the page, but the voluble Franco-American whose self-representation provides both the novel's matter and manner, its speech and its writing.

We could call Take It or Leave It a graphic performance or the graphic representation of a performance, but either way, Federman's novel represents an investigation of narrating as a kind of action, one happening on the page. The kind of action in which its white space is involved is that of interrupting, of breaking up what is continuous: i.e., lines, sentences, phrases, meanings, letters. We could say that, for Federman, white space becomes a new form of punctuation. However, for this use to count as presentness, as a discovery of fiction in the terms I've laid out, it would need to reveal something about novels generally, about the function of all white space, and here one can feel unsure whether Federman's deepest discoveries are really of the page. That is, unlike the edge of earlier paintings, which modernism revealed to be only apparently accidental, line breaks in earlier fiction are accidental. Their location remains irrelevant to the significance of the line. What makes them essential to Take It or Leave It is the action of the narrator, who, no longer contained within the dematerialized space of representation, has penetrated the fourth wall of materiality, breaking into Federman's book. White space for Federman is expressive. In this sense, we could say that Federman discovers the page as a space of action, dispelling its blankness, but leaves unexplored the action of that space itself.

Wittgenstein's Mistress continues Federman's investigation of the page as a white space, but Markson's novel does not make the action of this space the narrator's doing. That is, although the white space in Markson's novel does something to the narrative, or tries, it does not do anything in the narrative. It does not punctuate. Here I want to record a peculiar fact about my experience of Markson's work. I first thought to compare it with AVA because I remembered, or thought I remembered, that the pages in the two books looked alike, that in Wittgenstein's Mistress a white expanse separated each of the narrator's statements. Therefore I was quite surprised when I returned to his book and discovered, on first glance, that the pages appeared wholly traditional. That is, the white space appeared to be merely a passive background on which the text was printed. What had created my false impression was the similarity between Maso's and Markson's narrators, specifically, that both seem to express themselves in short, disconnected utterances, utterances that resist closure, that seem unable, at least without disappointment or frustration, to stop. It was as though I had wanted space to intervene, felt the rightness of or need for Federman's punctuation. When I didn't find it, I felt a little panicky.

This misremembering is, for me, the first clue to Markson's discovery. In Wittgenstein's Mistress the impression created by the narration is that of breathlessness, as though the absence of any naturally occurring divisions in speech or thought, of pauses, resting places, were the condition of an augmenting claustrophobia. We could speak of it as narrative gone mad, as though the present were wholly absent and all that remained were the continuous, unsatisfying transformation of past into future, future into past, a hellish parody of timelessnessócall it neverending static. The contrast I want here is between Federman's voluble narrator, whose interminable digressiveness expresses his irrepressible life, and Markson's tormented solipsist, whose run-on utterance is pure compulsion. Within the context of this compulsion, white space becomes active. Its action is, in one sense, perfectly familiar, merely its action in all novels. That action is to enclose. That is, Markson's advance, if calling it an advance makes sense yet, is not in its use of white space but in its disclosure of what might be considered every novel's use of white space, its revelation of what white space has always been doing. What white space does in Wittgenstein's Mistress is fill every void, every opening the narration offers, as though the ceaselessness of narrating were a continuous effort to keep it out, to keep at bay whatever would be there but for the narrator's run-on voice. I do not know if I am speaking metaphorically or literally here. This is the significance of what, on a second glance, one can see is the new look of Markson's page, i.e., that the margins appear unjustified. Or almost. The left is a ragged column of indentations; the right is broken repeatedly by long incursions of white. It's as though silence were struggling to break in, to contest speech. That is, Markson's page does not look like a surface on which text has been laid. It looks like an active presence, a natural force. In short, Wittgenstein's Mistress reveals white space to be a surrounding.

It should be apparent now that what makes the function of white space in these books both newly revealing and newly significant, is the novel as a whole. That is, when we're speaking of white space, we're not talking about a primarily visual phenomenon, that is, an appearance of essentially the same kind as a picture. Despite the enhanced importance of visual experience in both Federman's and Markson's works, the significance of the visual remains a function of the narrator's voice, of various qualities of the discourse that give to the novel's appearance its interest. It is this interaction of inflected text and white space, that makes the page, not merely a background but an integral part of the work. Likewise, the significance of white space in these novels is not the same as in modernist poetry. Even in Federman's usage, its significance is not a function of the line so much as of the event, of the nature or kinds of discursive continuity staked by the teller's predicament. That is, it is the encounter of fiction, i.e., both narrator and situation, with reality, i.e., the physical book, that transforms the accidental into the essential, the page into the meaning, matter into spirit. What makes white space new in these novels is seeing this.

These remarks are intended to show that white space in AVA is distinctive in just the ways AVA is distinctive. 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 realize that this way of characterizing 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 sayóthey aren't her efforts to explain what happened or comment on her life, are rather what escapes from her, slips out, like a sighóand 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"ómarked off by two expanses of white on pages 123-4 and 213-4óonly 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 discoveryócall it the discovery of literatureómakes 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 momentóa period without fixed limitsóremains 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 momentóAugust 15, 1990óAva'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 seenó"seen"?óas 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. That is, it has sometimes struck me that we should conclude with white pages, as though confronting the thing itselfóAVA. The wish is fanciful, of course, but it poses a serious question: where does Maso's novel end? If what I have said is correct, then its last sentence is no more conclusive than any other, or only accidentally so. Or said differently, if the space of telling has become necessary to telling AVA from an agglomeration, then the materiality of Maso's book has ceased to be accidental and become essential. Something artificially truncated but potentially boundlessóthe white space upholding AVA's / Ava's wordsóhas imparted wholeness to what exists in time, in history, as fragmentary. The seeming incompleteness of Ava's life is not a function of its ending. Everything needed is presentócontinuously. All that's lacking is me.

The problem of history, that is, of the representation of life in time, is not our limitedness, not our inability to see and do and say all. It is more nearly our awareness of our limitedness, specifically, that this awareness continually threatens to displace what we do see, denies the significance of what is constantly before our eyes. When Wittgenstein remarks in the Tractatus, "The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem" (6.521), he doesn't mean that there just aren't any problems. Ava's dying, for God's sake! What could be more of a problem? He means that the desire for life constantly projects us beyond life, making human life incomplete metaphysically. "Death is not an event in life" (6.4311), a remark meant to recall us to here and now. Or in the terms I've set forth, narrative is the present working out of a problem, an attempt to acknowledge what's past, and where narrative isn't, then narrative is the present problem. Can a book be as full as life, as complete for the moment of reading as what exists without bounds? I find myself divided between saying that white space in AVA is allegorical, that it stands for what underlies all narration, what continuously presents itself throughout history, and that it's literal, that it is what underlies all narration, continuously presents itself in history. Either way, it seems a version of what Wordsworth called nature, what Heidegger called being, what Beckett called silence, and what Stein called the continuous present. That is, it is an absence of human saying and doing that represents no lack of anything said or done, an absence of lack itself. If we wish to represent the present more concretely, the problem will not be that the representation proves lacking. The problem will be that the present proves lacking. Wholeness isn't history's other. Or as Ava herself remarks, "It was everything while it lasted."

WORKS CITED:

Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged edition.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979.

Heidegger, Martin. "The Origin of the Work of Art." Poetry, Language, Thought.

Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. 15-87.

Stein, Gertrude. "Composition as Explanation." Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl

Van Vechten. New York: Vintage, 1990. 511-23.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F.

McGuinness. London: Routledge, 1978.