The Existentialism of Feminist Extratextual Reality in Carol Maso’s The Art Lover

The postmodern text takes on the experimental challenge of confronting the lack of a center at the heart of language and dwelling in that void. Carol Maso accesses that void to confront issues of selfhood and authorship in her postmodern novel, The Art Lover (1990). Maso clearly understands that the conventional novel is predicated upon dominant ideologies of truth and identity, as well as on realism rather than existential reality. For her, it fails to represent truthfully the chaos of the world outside the authentic existential experience. She therefore consciously writes differently in order to tell some kind of truth about herself. Yet, as Dwight Eddins observes, by opting out of long-established literary conventions, postmodern authors like Maso are placed in a dilemma: “In humanizing this world, [s/]he lies; in trying not to lie [s/]he is threatened by incoherence and chaos” (205). Maso avoids the problem by fusing experimental writing with narrative conventions. Meanwhile, in her non-fictional writing, Maso asks, “What is a book and how might it be reimagined, opened up, transformed to accommodate all we've seen, … been hurt by … given … taken away?” In using the inclusive term, “we”, she recommends this experimental approach to other marginalized (oppressed or subjugated) authors. In the fiction itself, she indicates a means by which other marginalized female authors can emancipate themselves from the stultifying boundaries of fiction and the stereotypical identities /realities created for them by long-established literary convention. As an embodiment of this question about this project to re-imagine the book, The Art Lover, also invites marginalized readers to reread predetermined notions of a centered identity and accepted reality. Maso invites them to test her theories of the constructed nature of reality in their own lives. The multi-layered text of The Art Lover discusses both authorship and existential experience through the narratives of a fictional author, Caroline Chrysler, and that of the doubly fictional characters in the novel she is writing. Caroline distills something of her own fictional life into her fictional narrative both textually and through the insertion of a variety of intertexts in various media. But it is not just the fictional Caroline, who interpolates her life experience into the text of a novel. The real-world novelist, Carole Maso, does the same. Maso herself appears as a character in the fifth section of the novel, where she reveals that she is, in reality, dealing with the death of her best friend, Gary, who has died of AIDS. Arguably, Maso uses her novel – on a variety of levels - to carve out a space for herself where she can tell the “truth” of her lived experience as a woman and an author.