English Studies Forum

“The Music that is Silence”: Carole Maso’s Ava and Samuel Beckett’s Voice

“A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine” (7). The opening words of Samuel Beckett’s Company could as well set the scene for Carole Maso’s novel, Ava. Indeed, just as voice and imagination define the faculties through which the world of Company shapes itself, so also do they set the terms through which self is constructed and perceived in Maso’s text. Nor would this contemporary American writer have us miss the connections between her work and that of the Irish Nobel Laureate. One of the first endnotes to Ava identifies a reference in that novel to Waiting for Godot. The third note reads as follows: “‘Tell him that you saw us’: from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Other lines from the play are buried in the novel like treasures” (269). In an early review of Ava, Eric Brace quotes Maso on the influence of Beckett’s “renowned silences” in her writing. “’Of course Beckett is a big influence,’ Maso fairly shouts. ‘I don’t see how you can write as if Beckett never existed, though tons of people do. He should be somebody to reckon with, to wrestle with’” (8). At the level of allusion, Ava resonates of Beckett in numerous ways: with its direct quotations from Godot and Endgame, with references to Deidre Bair’s biography of the playwright, with quotations from criticism of Beckett’s works, notably of Company. Yet the influence of the playwright extends far beyond these more overt tributes to his texts and references to the events of his life. Ava articulates the condition of humanity to which Beckett’s oeuvre bears witness, and yet it does so with an affirmation of the body and an appreciation for the richness of life which are rarely, if ever, associated with the playwright’s texts. In elaborating some of the ways in which Maso uses Beckett in this, her third novel, I want to explore how Ava defines a sensibility that is in many ways informed by that of Beckett even as it transforms itself through the particulars of an individual life. Ava defines and transforms that sensibility through direct and obscured references to Beckett’s life and works, but it does so as well through its form: through an opening up of a familiar yet distinctive interpretive space whose contours are shaped as much by rhythms and silences as they are by words.

The situation Maso defines for her protagonist would seem in many ways to be as far removed from the world of Beckett’s characters as possible. The novel evokes a day—the last—in the life of Ava Klein, a professor of Comparative Literature who is dying. As her life slips away, it simultaneously becomes insistently present, the sensuous pleasures of distant lovers, places, and events expanding within and in some ways against the textures of her immediate surroundings. In the sterility of the hospital in which she lies, Ava is reduced to nothing more than her body—“Pains in the joints. Dizziness. Some pain “ (6)—and yet it is through her body that she resists such diminution. While the voice of an attending nurse asks her to move her arm for a shot or some other routine ministration, it is through Ava’s representation of the lived experience of mind and body in times past and present that much of what the reader apprehends in the text communicates. No Beckettian country road here—at least not yet—no Chaplinesque clowns inextricably bound to one another as mind and body, existential angst confronting sore feet, but rather a staging of desire through the mutual relation of mind and body. No facile completion of a version of the assignment Ava conjures within the novel—“Rewrite Death in Venice as a feminist text” (31)—but an elaboration of some of the ways in which voice and voices, sound and silence come to define a self, however provisional that self may be.^{^[1]}

Yet for as faithful as Maso is to the sensibility of Beckett’s texts, she nevertheless transforms Ava’s extreme condition into a celebration, all the richer for its imminent end. Though the dying woman reconstructs her life in part through the words of Beckett’s texts—“Tell him that you saw us” (Godot 34a; Ava 9) and “I see my light dying” (Endgame 12; Ava 18)^{^[2]} among the earliest of her allusions—she does so throughout a day and night whose overarching impulse is celebration, whose initial verbal gesture sets the tone: “Each holiday celebrated with real extravagance. Birthdays. Independence days. Saints’ days. Even when we were poor. With verve “(3). Despite its grounding in a self-consciously Beckettian sensibility, Ava enacts a sensually rich, if poignant, celebration: “Mardi Gras: a farewell to the flesh” (3).

Maso incorporates quotations from Beckett to a variety of ends, as three prominent examples demonstrate. “Tell him that you saw us” sounds in its initial citation almost like a friend’s casual greeting passed along through another, or a way of recording one’s presence at a popular site:

Because the corner of Broadway and West Houston is everyone’s in summer. (Ava 9)

The author identifies the source of the line in an endnote, using the textual apparatus to bring to bear the signifying capacity of the line in its original context. In Beckett’s play, Vladimir utters the words in response to a question posed by an unknown boy who has appeared as Godot’s messenger.

Vladimir: Tell him. . .(he hesitates). . .tell him you saw us. (Pause.) You did see us, didn’t you?

He steps back, hesitates, turns and exit running. The light suddenly fails. In a moment it is night. (Godot 34a)

For Vladimir, the line Maso quotes serves to confirm his own material being, to affirm that he and Estragon do, indeed, exist. It is at once the very least to which the boy could attest—mere being—and simultaneously, in Vladimir’s apparent judgment, the absolute most, the only thing that matters. In their first appearance in Maso’s text, then, the words transform a busy, public thoroughfare into a bare, almost barren terrain, while simultaneously sustaining the integrity of each.^{^[3]} They introduce the existential condition against which and in terms of which much of the rest of the novel takes form, and they shape a kind of undeclared pre-condition of its being. As if to draw attention to that, just a few lines later another important motif is introduced: “Somewhere a young girl learns how to hold a pencil. She writes A” (9).

The line from Godot recurs several times in Ava, as phrases from many texts very well might in the thoughts of a professor of literature. Its repetition later in that same section, “Morning,” insists on its original association from within the narrative this time, following as it does a direct reference to the playwright, to his interview with Georges Duthuit, and to another passage from Godot which goes unidentified for the time being in the novel:

Beckett in a tree: To be an artist is to fail, as no other dares fail. That failure is his world, and to shrink from it is desertion, arts and crafts, good housekeeping. . . .

Do you remember the day I threw myself into the Rhône? You fished me out. My clothes dried in the sun. . .

I had recently published an essay on contemporary American fiction entitled “Good Housekeeping.”

Ava’s recollection here asserts a connection with Beckett intellectually. Her essay has apparently criticized contemporary fiction as a kind of shrinking from true artistic risk of the type Beckett describes in his remarks to Duthuit. The line from Godot reinforces the professor’s connection with her mentor more substantively than in its first incarnation in the text.

As the dying woman gets closer to her death in the final section of the novel, however, an important shift occurs:

Tell them that you saw me—that it wasn’t far—from here to the nurses’ station and back,

In appropriating Vladimir’s words and elaborating them in terms of her own situation—“me” instead of “us”--Ava Klein sustains the original referential capacity of the words while extending their range. This time, though, the extension into her personal world is not merely the repetition of an increasingly familiar refrain. Beckett’s text is made present, but it is present now on Ava’s terms rather than its own. The dominant representation is that of Ava Klein’s voice, and her inscription of herself in this world—the A-V-A the child learns to write—signifies at once the forward movement of the text in articulating its protagonist’s being and the recursive structuring through which that being endlessly revises itself, deferring meaning even as it accumulates it, proposing meaninglessness against the very texture of the narrative whose meaning-giving gestures ultimately prevail. The integration of the notion of flight into this segment of the narrative further multiplies the interconnections with Beckett: references to the playwright’s biography recur in terms of his desire to learn to fly and in his hiding, perched in a tree, to escape capture during World War II. Images of flight accumulate around the name Ava, a “rare bird” whose attachment to flights of all kinds—those of birds, of butterflies, of airplanes, of angels, flights of fancy—play themselves out as the text advances.

While Maso’s use of the line, “Tell him that you saw us,” explicitly links her protagonist’s situation with that of Beckett’s characters, even if in increasingly personal terms, she creates a much different effect with two passages among the other “buried treasures” in the novel. Shortly after the above slippages occur between the Beckett characters and Maso’s, Ava thinks,

What the dying woman alludes to is lost on those whose Godot may not resonate quite as readily as it might for another professor of literature. In its original, the line reads as follows:

The pronominal reference obscured in the novel reveals itself to be strikingly apt for its new context when situated again in the original. While the exchange in Beckett constitutes one of what Estragon refers to as the verbal “canter[s]” (42a) which help Didi and Gogo pass the time as they wait for something to give meaning to their lives, in Maso the line echoes of the undertaking of the entire novel: all the dead voices do, indeed, make a noise like wings, like leaves, like ashes as they weave themselves into the texture of a life that is the dying meditation of Ava Klein. Yet they do more than that. Even as they connect this text with that of Beckett, these words signal the distance between the two. In Estragon’s inability to get beyond his limited comparisons, Beckett demonstrates the inadequacies of language to do justice to one’s experience of the world and of selfhood in that world. In destabilizing the referent while invoking it all the same, Maso demonstrates the opposite: that is, the ability of language to sustain a referential capacity while giving voice to a decidedly particular experience. The references to leaves that seem to signal in Beckett the limits of language open out in Maso to echo the lines from Federico García Lorca’s “Sleepwalking Ballad” quoted elsewhere in the novel: “Green, how much I want you green” (4, 82, 89, passim). Likewise, the “ashes” of Gogo’s utterance retain their original power—referring to the sounds of all the dead voices—while in Maso’s text accumulating weight and resonance peculiar to the dying woman’s own life. Here, “ashes, ashes” conjures the children’s rhyme, “Ring around a rosy” (166), at once innocence itself and a poignant reminder of mortality and of the impossibility of anything so pure as “a simple game of Hide and Seek” (5). The ashes further resonate when associated as explicitly as they are in Ava with the holocaust, with references to six million dead (182-83, for example). The very words whose repetitions in Beckett mark a failure of language—Estragon can’t seem to get beyond “leaves” and “ashes”—sustain their original, if concealed, reference to dead voices while transforming themselves in Maso into elaborately interconnected signifiers that would seem to argue for the fullness of language rather than its insufficiency.

Maso makes a rather different use of Godot in a passage to which I have earlier referred, this time with an incremental accretion of meaning that integrates the passage into the seamless narrative that becomes the voice of Ava Klein. The lines from Beckett read in Maso’s novel as follows:

Beckett in a tree: To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail. That failure is his world and to shrink from it is desertion, arts and crafts, good housekeeping. . . .

Do you remember the day I threw myself into the Rhône? You fished me out. My clothes dried in the sun. . . .

As I have already noted, the reference to Beckett in a tree and the line “Tell him that you saw us” both set the playwright’s dramas, personal and aesthetic, as important contexts here, but neither signals that the passage in between pertains as fully as it does. Instead, that segment repeats itself in other ways, all but obscuring the associations surrounding its initial appearance in Ava.

All but the first and last lines of this passage are from Waiting for Godot, but most readers would miss the reference. Certainly nothing in this segment suggests that the quoted passage is any different from the narrative surrounding it. On the contrary, further references in Ava function to obscure that fact by embedding the passage in other personal memories.

He spoke of Trieste, of Constantinople. He pushed the curls from his face. He was adapting Dante for the screen. He thought of buying a hat, perhaps. It was how the days went—

Do you remember the day I threw myself into the Rhône? You fished me out. My clothes dried in the sun.

Body oils leave the fabric. Sperm and sweat and perfume make a pretty pattern in the water. Like a fingerprint. Carried over the rocks. . . . (254)

In the incremental accretion of meaning that the recursive structure of Ava enacts, what the novel demonstrates, more than anything, is the extent to which such intertexts can be transformed and can come to define one. By the time it has been repeated four times, the passage seems to conjure memories of a sensual, sexual abandon, a moment of freedom and spontaneity that lovers have shared and that Ava, on her deathbed, recalls. How different this obscuring of speaker/s is in its ultimate signifying capacity than would a more explicit citation of Godot be. The quoted passage actually occurs near the end of Act I of Godot, as part of a conversation in which the two main characters contemplate committing suicide. In that context, it might very well refer to an earlier suicide attempt by Estragon, the speaker who recalls throwing himself into the Rhône, thwarted by Vladimir, who fished him out.

With the transformation of this segment of Godot in Ava, Maso suggests the extent to which voice is a construct, and she demonstrates the extent to which that construct is implicated in the elaboration of a self. The cumulative effect of this and the repetitions of other sections of Beckett’s texts is Ava’s tacit assertion that meaning, rather than inhering in relation to some external entity, lies instead in “[w]hat is offhand, overheard, half remembered, overloved. Loved until it is a smooth stone in your palm. Bits of remembered things” (147 and elsewhere). It lies in the misunderstandings that occur within and between languages, in the interpretive spaces texts open up: “The spaces between words. Between thoughts. The interval” (171). Nowhere more powerfully than at the end of the novel does Ava affirm the potential of language to signify because of itself and despite itself. The text ends with the words, “You are ravishing” (265). Earlier in the novel, though, the reader learns that that phrase—specifically that last word—is a mistake.

The beautiful woman I could not keep my eyes off of, waltzes into the kitchen, taking the lid from the pot and says, I’m ravishing.

Again later, “Ravishing, feminine night” (228). While the repeated words recollect an opportunity missed, a silencing of self, a risk not taken—“Why was it I hesitated?” (81 and elsewhere)—in these and their many other variations throughout the text, they mark as well a slippage that is especially telling, the more so for all of its instability. The last words of the text, “You are ravishing” (265), conjure, not so much the unknown woman to whom they originally refer, but the professor of literature herself, whose wry appreciation for the linguistic imprecision occasioned the observation and destabilizes the pronoun references. The words make present in the final textual silence the phrase with which they were once followed—“And she was”—this time affirming the dying woman, ravished by AIDS-related maladies even as she is ravishing, exquisite in her appreciation for the sensual pleasures of life. The words sustain a multifaceted referentiality: the pronominal instabilities together with the linguistic error generate constellations of meaning which implicate and enrich one another, which demonstrate the fallibility of all linguistic systems and which, despite and because of that fallibility, manage to signify, nonetheless, all the more.

The soundings of this final textual silence suggest what much of the rest of Ava affirms: that it is to Beckett’s “renowned silences” that Maso’s text most fully appeals in creating a fictive space whose contours help define a self, however provisionally. Lines, phrases, individual words take on the weight of association or free themselves of meaning depending on their relation to textual lacunae as much as to the other words on the page. The spaces between narrative units make visible at the level of textual materiality the arena in which Ava’s life and death construct themselves. Indeed, what Michael Worton notes of Godot and Endgame with regard to textual silences could as well apply to this novel: “The pauses are crucial. . . .[They] leave the reader-spectator space and time to explore the blank spaces between the words and thus to intervene creatively—and individually—in the establishment of the play’s meaning. . . .This strategy. . .fragments the text, making it a series of discrete speeches and episodes rather than the seamless presentation of a dominant idea” (75).

The novel’s final silence is anticipated by Ava Klein in literal Beckettian terms. She asks at several intervals, “Will night never come?” (59, 75 var., 213), a question posed by Vladimir repeatedly in Godot (22b, 24a) and the question that sets up the final section of Ava, “Night.” Yet the silences that fragment this text do not have the effect Worton describes of Godot and Endgame, turning each text into “a series of discrete speeches and episodes” (75). Instead of disrupting or resisting a “seamless presentation of a dominant idea” (Worton, 75), the spaces on the page in Ava become part of the larger representational gesture of the novel: they help establish rhythms and set the pace at which meaning emerges, the pace at which words, events, images echo of one another. The visual gaps help determine “the music that is silence” (Ava, 123 and elsewhere), “the irresistible music of the end” (Ava, 174 and elsewhere) towards which Ava Klein feels drawn and towards which the text moves. The silences help articulate “a language that heals as much as it separates” (Cixous cited in Ava 53, 163 and elsewhere), the ideal condition to which the text aspires.

The notion of a “music of the end” reverberates in many ways throughout the novel, quite pointedly with references to the music of death: requiems. Of the various requiems mentioned, none is perhaps more resonant in its associative capacity than Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” (57 and elsewhere), written after World War I. Ava underscores the link with that war in her initial recollection of the piece, thinking as she does of “the Wilfred Owen text” and recalling the “remote chorus of boys” that recurs throughout. She thinks of the requiem shortly after a reference to the 1991 Gulf War she watches on the television in her hospital room, and within five or six lines of its initial recollection the Britten composition takes on associations with the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The Vietnam War, bombs, tanks, bullets, street violence, a student shot, the Zodiac killings of an earlier summer, the sound of thunder Ava Klein fears: the clusters of associations become so dense and yet so understated as to argue with compelling voice for a rather different, if especially provocative, connection between Maso and Beckett. The former has said of Ava, “[W]ar dictates the novel’s shape. A very deep longing for peace, one I must admit I had scarcely been aware of, overwhelmed me. . .” (“One Moment,” 3). Stan Gontarski makes a similar observation about Beckett’s works:

War is latent in much of Beckett’s work, sitting as part of the subtext, the unstated. One interpretation of Waiting for Godot sees the play as the autobiographical account of Beckett and Susanne’s flight from Paris to the Vaucluse, where they slept by day in haystacks and walked at night, tired, hungry, and without food. . . .The play is doubtless a conflation of incidents from the war period. . . .What seems plausible is that despite very little direct reference to the war itself, Waiting for Godot grew out of Beckett’s war experience, not so much disguised, although disguise may have been part of Beckett’s intention, as universalized. (35 - 36)

The Britten “War Requiem” helps foreground these kinds of associations, associations that define the sensibility of Ava Klein as ineluctably as do her more explicitly existential musings—“We waited for God’s word, in vain” (233)—and her darker remembrances of critical readings of Beckett:

The only reality is that we became aware of the world on our back in the dark (the womb, the cradle), with a voice speaking to us, and will end on our backs in the dark (deathbed, grave). Beckett in Company connects these two points of existential helplessness. We are forever on our backs in the dark, listening to a voice (dreams, the imagination, philosophy, religion, Walter Cronkite). But, as he says, the voice is company,

Yet while music becomes in Ava a presence that evokes Beckettian subtexts, it is a presence that also diverges markedly from a Beckettian sensibility. What the novel does with the notion of a song cycle demonstrates that better than any other representational gesture of the text.

The beginning of the second act of Godot encapsulates the movement of that drama: at once linear and circular, advancing through time yet endlessly repeating itself. The tree that defines the space of play and which has been barren up to this point now “has four or five leaves” (37a), marking the passage of time. Didi draws attention to this: “Things have changed here since yesterday. . . .Look at the tree” (39a). Yet that same character’s own actions at the outset of Act II suggest a kind of entrapment in a perpetual present: he repeatedly “[c]omes and goes. . . .[c]omes and goes. . . .[c]omes and goes” and begins the Act with the loud singing of a song that circles back on itself:

Embedding its beginning in what would otherwise be its end, the song presumably cycles back into itself endlessly, suggesting a musical repetition that is as tedious as the song is dark.

The notion of a song cycle in Ava casts itself in radically different terms, though in peculiar ways maintaining its connections with Godot. No dry, repetitious, drone about violence towards a fellow creature, Ava Klein’s music—that to which she endlessly returns on the day of her death—is cyclical perhaps, but with important differences. Hers is an “erotic song cycle,” a work in progress. It is a collaborative gesture, a text whose name keeps changing, even as her relationships transform themselves to take on new life. It is a celebration of the body, a naming that refuses stasis, a simultaneous conferral and deferral of signification.

The motif is introduced at the beginning of the novel: “We were working on an erotic song cycle” (2). The naming of the cycle becomes a kind of running joke, an elaboration of life into the realm of art, the use of music as a signifying system whose fluidity corresponds with the simultaneous composition and decomposition of a life, of a self. “Music assumes a shape in me” (23); “Music moves in me. Shapes I’ve needed to complete. Listen. Listen hard “ (7, 20, and elsewhere). The shape of that music emerges in the naming of the song cycle in seemingly “endless variations “ (9): “It was called A Place We Can Still Go” (46); “It was called Toward a Female Subject “(52, 174); “ It was called Not Yet” (121); “It was called Landscape With Two Graves” (175). It was called, in fact, more than fifty different names, by the time Ava ends, most corresponding with on-going events and/or erotic escapades Ava recalls.

Whereas song—specifically a song cycle—signifies a kind of sterility in Godot, its function is quite the opposite here. It constitutes the “throbbing, [a] certain pulsing” (3 and passim) with which the text begins and whose rhythms punctuate Ava Klein’s life:

We had made a plan to work on an erotic song cycle because ‘you are a poet in your blood, Ava Klein,’ the young composer said. . . .

The ever-evolving cycle signals the extent to which Ava “reshape[s] the world according to the dictates of desire” (6). It celebrates the body in all of its multifarious pleasures, whether in the eroticism of sexual encounters, in the sensual indulgence of tastes, smells, sounds, sights, and touch, or simply in “[t]he luxury [of being] able to form these words” (60).

In the penultimate naming of the erotic song cycle in Ava an important shift occurs: “We are working on an erotic song cycle. It is called In the Joie de Vivre Room” (259, emphasis mine). As she moves closer to death, Ava shifts to the present tense in this particular naming, and she identifies a site especially resonant. It was in this same “room,” we learn much earlier in the text, that “the baby was conceived” (20), a baby who dies: “We lost the baby, Anatole” (237). The proximity of birth and death in Maso’s text recalls Pozzo’s noted pronouncement before his final exit in Godot: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more” (Godot 57b). It recalls as well Vladimir’s attempts to come to terms with Pozzo’s words and with his own situation: “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps” (Godot 58a). Indeed, a few lines after her reference to the erotic song cycle called In the Joie de Vivre Room, Ava muses, “And I thought that human being out there on display digging her grave is my sister” (259)—this not long after repeating in the present tense what earlier in the text appears in the past: “A pregnant woman is weeping. She is my sister” (257). The echoes of Godot here would seem to be especially dark, given the literal death of the child and the “birth into death,” to echo a phrase from Beckett’s Malone Dies, that is advancing for Ava Klein. Maso’s novel continues with another echo of Pozzo’s words: “One night only, once—“ (262). Yet Ava doesn’t end with the existential despair such soundings suggest. It proceeds from that phrase to a final naming of the song cycle, to evocations of some of the signal motifs of the text, to “a pulsing field of extraordinary music” (262), and, of course, to silence. In its final silence, Ava affirms life, fecundity, imagination, and it does so with a clear grounding in Beckett, in that which it transcends. It does so with images of birth—literal and figurative, real and imagined—and it does so while tying those images to the immanence of death.

Ava manages to sustain a Beckettian sensibility while transforming it, in fact, precisely because of female agency, precisely because Maso situates Ava Klein’s articulation of a self in terms of the body—the female body whose pleasures resist singularity, whose language “heals as much as it separates” (Cixous cited in Ava 53 and elsewhere). Instead of Endgame’s and Godot’s binary oppositions, articulated, for example, in Pozzo’s command, “Dance, Misery!” (Godot 26b), we find in Ava, “Carlos doing an improvised flamenco” (125); ”But when will we finally dance the horah?” (125); “Did you dance? . . .Without music, as the piece had been choreographed” (76); “And the silence at the end of the receiver we dance to” (76); “I think of those dancers and how hard they listened to hear the music that is silence” (78); “Dancing in Harlem—her favorite place in America—to jazz music” (104); “You kissed me everywhere—And we danced” (248); “The body gets up and dances. . . .In the Picasso Musée in the town of Antibes, in the room called Joie de Vivre” (40). Instead of the master/slave dialectic of Pozzo and Lucky or the power relations inherent in patriarchy that would situate the meaning-giving force in a singular male—Mr. Godot or Hamm—even while questioning that power, Ava posits a sexual/textual energy that allows for the subversions that desire occasions, even in its silences, its hesitations. “Why was it I hesitated?” (Ava 80) Instead of verbal imprecisions that merely pass the time, Ava’s referential instabilities multiply the possibilities of meaning: one lover becomes another or yet another, male or female; an intertextual allusion becomes an integral part of the multifaceted texturing of a life and of a death, focusing sharply “moment[s] of coherence” (244) while refusing absoluteness all the same. It is desire and the body, of course, that have betrayed Ava Klein. A letter from Francesco states matter-of-factly, “I am writing, dear Ava, to tell you that I, too, have tested positive for the AIDS virus” (200). Yet it is the body whose transgressions as well as whose pleasures the text affirms. Song, dance, silence: all move towards a moment of death that is a celebration of life—“Mardi Gras: a farewell to the flesh” (3 and elsewhere). Even when the body serves as a nexus of disorientation—“It is and is not my body” (128); “Please invoice me. Input me. Format me. Impact me” (8)—the prevailing representation is that of pleasure. “I got to dance. I got to sing. I got to kiss you on the cheek. I got to. . .careful of the intercom” (261).

This dance to the music of time, this poignant celebration ultimately communicates in a language decidedly un-Beckettian: “That we had any of it—it was a kind of miracle” (78); “Every moment has been a moment of grace” (228, 258); “Every moment was a gift, a blessing” (249). In Ava, it is this sense of the miracle of life that sustains the text’s momentum, that moves it forward while circling back: the palindrome of a name, A-V-A, signals as it gives form to those textual energies.^{^[4]} “And I am happy for any of this. That we lived at all” (83). The distance between this assertion of happiness and Vladimir’s in Godot (38a – 42b) is telling. In Ava, the assertion emerges as a part of the representational rhythms that affirm Ava Klein’s sense of who she is and how she has lived. In Godot, Estragon immediately calls into question Vladimir’s use of the term “happy” to describe himself. Vladimir declares the word imprecise, and the two turn it into a lie that they tell one another—or a possible lie: “Say you are [happy], even if it’s not true” (39a). In Godot, the word “happy” circulates insistently at the level of discursive construct and stays at a remove from too unequivocal a declaration of a condition of one’s being. Its capacity to signify is made so problematic as to be diminished almost entirely. Not so in Ava. Here, the declaration insistently signifies, and it does so because of the texture of life into which it is woven, a texture whose affirmations are as diffuse as they are incremental.

The conferral of meaning in Ava—arbitrary, transitory and fleeting though it may be—is a gesture made in relation to another, to the body, to one’s past, to the many voices that come to make up the voice through which any individual articulates a self. Determined as Ava Klein is “to reshape the world according to the dictates of desire” (6), the novel’s representational strategies make explicit “the seduction that is, that has always been language” (227).

In considering the ways in which Maso integrates Beckett’s texts, the events of his life, and even scholarly discussions of his works into this novel, I have done so at the expense of silencing the many other voices that echo throughout Ava. Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Federico García Lorca, Hélène Cixous, Vladimir Nabokov, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and others “make a noise like wings” here, too. Still, what emerges through it all is the voice of Ava Klein, Professor of Comparative Literature, whose life has been enriched immeasurably by the literature, music, and dance which she has so unapologetically known and loved. I want to end recognizing the myriad other interpretive gestures Ava invites with its multiplicity of intertextual references, noting the particular aptness of Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” to whose Ramon Fernandez Ava Klein occasionally returns, though never citing these particular lines of Stevens’s poem.

Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York and London: Harcourt, Brace,

Brace, Eric. “The Author and Her Life’s Sentences.” The Washington Post 3 July

Davenport, Guy. Every Force Evolves a Form. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987.

Stevens, Wallace. “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The Collected Poems of Wallace

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1927.

^{^[1]} We do have “a man in a bowler hat” (21) and a reference to “Father [who] would do his Charlie Chaplin walk” (175 and elsewhere). Still, neither plays itself out in a manner at all reminiscent of the antics of Godot’s characters.

^{^[2]} I use the standard pagination from the Grove Press edition of Waiting for Godot, with the pages on the left referred to as “a,” with the corresponding number, and those on the right as “b,” with the corresponding number.

^{^[3]} Maso foregrounds this terrain further on in the text. The middle section of Ava ends with Vladimir’s repeated question, “Will night never come?” (Ava 213; Godot 22b, 24a), echoing earlier versions of the same question in the novel. When night does arrive, Ava Klein thinks, almost immediately, “A country road. A tree. Evening” (Ava 216), one of the most recognizable landscapes in all of twentieth-century literature. See Godot 6.

^{^[4]} At a number of moments throughout her final day, Ava thinks of Mr. Ramsey in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. (See, for example, 192-93.) For Mr. Ramsey, the alphabet serves as a system whose signifiers mark in linear progression his increasing presence in the world: he contemplates others’ assessment of his brilliance in terms of the progress he makes towards the letter Z. For Ava Klein as for the novel that bears her name, that same signifying system is at once much simpler and more complex. It is the young girl learning her alphabet, learning to inscribe her being in the world as she writes her name. Yet that inscription itself embodies no singular, linear progression. It is the palindrome, with its forward and backward movements; it is the beginning, but not quite the end; alpha, but not quite omega. At almost the instant of death, the girl spells her name, signaling a tension between presence and absence that the text embodies in many of its other signifying systems.