New Voice

Fiction and Reflection – Part 2

by David O’Connor

     There is great attention to detail in many of the shortest stories.  Often only a paragraph or a page or two in length, these offer meditations on the minutiae of daily life, slowing down lived experience, framing and isolating aspects of that experience.  This technique may be elucidated, perhaps, by looking at “The Mice”, in which the domestic scavengers of the title are unable to find food in the dirty kitchen as there is “something so out of proportion to their experience that they cannot deal with it.”  The mice are overwhelmed by overabundance, incapable of taking it all in, of finding their way amidst such plenitude, just as we cannot process all that surrounds us, the unassimilable superfluity of sensual, emotional and cultural material to which we are (over-) exposed. 
  In “The Caterpillar”, from the collection Varieties of Disturbance, the narrator gives us a precise description of the creature she finds in her house, this “thin, dark, hairless little caterpillar” which is “not an inchworm, though he is the size of an inchworm”.  How does the narrator know it’s not an inchworm?  Because she has taken the time to watch it move and it “does not hump in the middle but travels steadily along on its many legs”.  She’s clearly either read about or seen inchworms in motion too, to have such an acquaintance with their habits.  Later in the story we can also see and touch and smell the “dust and dog hair” on the stairs where the caterpillar has fallen.   
   But it becomes more and more apparent that it is not these objects that are most prominent.  Rather, it is the perceptions, sentiments and speculations of the narrator that are of most concern, and the language in which these are grappled with and articulated.  As so often happens with writers, Davis sees in Proust what is also of primary concern in her own work.  In her translator’s introduction to The Way By Swann’s (an awful choice of title, it must be said, and a confusing one), she says: 

  “For although Proust’s own life experience is the material out of which he forms his novel, as is the case for any writer of fiction, it has been altered, recombined, shaped to create a coherent and meaningful fictional artefact”.  She goes on to talk about “the crucial role of our intellect, our imagination, in our perception of the world and our recreation of it to suit our desires, and the importance of the role of the artist in transforming reality according to a particular inner vision: the artist escapes the tyranny of time through art.”  These comments apply just as appropriately to Davis’s, albeit much quieter, stories. 

  
       Inside the narrator’s head is where the story takes us as she decides that the creature “will have to do the best he can” without her help, having earlier asked herself  “how he can make his way down to the back door and out into the garden”.  Observed detail has given way to imagination.  The caterpillar’s importance as an object of the narrator’s attention and of the story is emphasized when we are told that the narrator doesn’t “care as much” about whether or not he has escaped outside, that she “will forget him entirely”, for he “is simply too small, really, for” her “to go on thinking about him”. 
    We can perceive, not primarily a bearing witness to, or affirmation of, the mundane, but an incorporating of everyday details and emotions into a self-contained form that says all that needs to be said and no more, making of them a more lasting, more coherent, entity.  Davis has said herself in an interview with Kate Moses that she seeks to make of “one afternoon or one mood…something whole”.  Shaping, ordering and structuring are of the utmost concern.  Even if the narrator’s confusion persists, the stories impose proportion and contour on that confusion, containing it within a structured, balanced whole.    
    The almost circular shape of “Agreement”, its contorted reasonings, its sentences coiling in and around one another, with slight variations in rhythm and content, grants a tense and terse equilibrium to the tortuous language of a domestic argument.  The often darkly irresolvable absurdities of such situations are conveyed but, at the same time, they are also coaxed into a coherent formal arrangement.  This much is suggested in the title, as the story ends with the couple disagreeing, or more precicsely, with the man refusing to agree.  Yet, an agreement is reached within the speaker’s mind and within the work as a whole, between the formal unity and the material used in its making, achieving “the unity” of  which Proust’s Marcel says “belongs only to the creations of the mind.”  Though the story resonates with feeling, there are no raised voices, no screams, no contorted faces or slammed doors, none of the messiness of an actual argument.  All the dirt and din is removed, the frayed edges smoothed and aligned and the action is allowed to speak for itself.    
    By way of a serious, strenuous play of the imagination over the multifarious and complex matter of everyday life, Davis’s sharp, pointed prose shows that there is more to the passing phrase, to the fleeting sensation, to the glanced caterpillar, or ant.  The everyday is made strange.  No, the strangeness of the everyday is made apparent.    

Afterword

Affinity 

 by Lydia Davis 

We feel an affinity with a certain thinker because we agree with him; or because he shows us what we were already thinking; or because he shows us in more articulate form what we were already thinking; or he shows us what we were on the point of thinking; or what we would sooner or later have thought; or what we would have thought much later if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have been likely to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now; or what we would have liked to think but never would have thought if we hadn’t read it now. 

Part 1 of Fiction and Reflection