New Voice

Fiction and Reflection: Part 1

 by David O’Connor

Lydia Davis had been writing stories for magazines, periodicals and small presses since the mid 1970s when her first book for a major publishing house came out in 1986.  Break it Down comprised of new and less recent stories, and introduced a wider readership (in the USA anyway) to the style she would develop further in subsequent collections: Almost No Memory, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant and Varieties of Disturbance.  Ranging in length from a single line, through paragraph-long meditations, to 20-30 page narratives, these stories, as Dave Eggers put it, in McSweeney’s, “straddle a line between philosophy, poetry and fiction”, rendering such categories “meaningless because her stories just work.”  As Foucault said of Maurice Blanchot, paraphrased by John Gregg in his introduction to Blanchot’s Awaiting Oblivion, her works “escape generic classification” and their “effect is to contest the boundaries thought to separate the activities of fiction and reflection”.  She is, as Eggers again has said, “trying to get at some truth.”

 
      It is fitting, then, that we should turn first to that great master of  reflective American prose, a writer far more exuberant, prophetic and all-embracing than the one of primary concern to us here, the sage of Concord, whom an enraptured Harold Bloom referred to as “no less than the mind of America”.  In a journal entry dated August 24, 1828, Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses the belief that if men “would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner”, then “every man would be interesting.”  Much of the interest and immediacy generated in the stories of Lydia Davis is achieved through the impression that the narrators are sharing what is “uppermost in their own minds”, what’s troubling or preoccupying them, the aspects of daily life which they can’t casually shrug off, the difficulties they encounter with language, their families, their own attempts to live well, to be patient, kind, and understanding, to live ethically, to do their best for themselves and others whilst acknowledging the strain, often the impossibility of appeasement inherent in such struggles.  We are drawn in, ever closer, as the pieces progress in a voice so intimate, so compelling that, as we read, it seems like we are bearing witness to another’s solitude, their most private thoughts.  
    “Patience”, from Varieties of Disturbance, deals with an emotional anomaly that is not resolved or overcome, but encapsulated within a formal unity.  No way out is proferred, no answer arrived at, yet the feeling is noticed, moulded and expressed,by the one who experiences it.  There is an air of someone admitting herself to herself, confronting the fact that, on certain days, her patience falls short of what is asked, and she puts her baby “away in his bed to cry alone”.  A turbulent aspect of  life is tamed, if only artistically, in literary form, and not in the lived experience that may constitute the ostensible subject matter of that form. 
     Again, in “The Old Dictionary”, the narrator confronts herself and the reader with her doubts, and her inadequacies as a parent:  “When I took it off the shelf today”,  she says of the dictionary, “I realized that I treat it with a good deal more care than I treat my young son”.  She is willing to acknowledge, and to divulge the most unsavoury intimacies, the least palatable of her innermost fragilities:  “Though I often know, I do not always know just what he needs.  Even when I know, I am not always able to give it to him.  Many times each day I do not give him what he needs.”  What a thing for a mother to admit.  Fittingly too, and this is an indication of the precise formal ingenuity on subtle, unshowy display in so many of her stories, Davis places the “I” at the core of each clause, propelling each pulse of thought through the extended meditative passage, as the thinking “I” reflects on the actions of that same “I”.  The centrality of formal structure and its relation to the structure of thought itself will be discussed later in this essay.  Hearing this voice untainted by self-pity,  one can’t but respect the validity of these uncertainties, and the integrity of a parent willing to think them through until she arrives at some sort of fragmentary resolution or respite.  In so doing, the extended metaphor is amply justified and the story made whole: “Some of what I do for the old dictionary, though not all,  I could do for my son.  For instance, I handle it slowly, deliberately, and gently.  I consider its age.  I treat it with respect.  I stop and think before I use it.  I know its limitations.  I do not encourage it to go farther than it can go (for instance to lie open flat on the table).  I leave it alone a good deal of the time.”
       We have here, also, a few touches of Davis’s keen eye for small details, whether observed or imagined.  The “brownish” margins and “brittle pages” of the dictionary, its cracked spine, “already split more than halfway up”.  Her son’s posture “bending over a game or manhandling the dog”, his “strong and flexible body” which she watches get “bruised” before healing once again.  She draws attention to these things without crowding the reader’s mind with too much colouring, allowing one’s imagination to rework the given materials.  Whether she’s gracing a found piece of language, like that in the one-line story: “Your housekeeper has been Shelly”, with the sublimely evocative title “Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room”, or noticing the threatening appearance of an ant’s flexing forelegs, apparently mundane and easily skipped over “blinks of sensation” (Michael Silverblatt, presenter of the online radio programme Bookworm on KCRW) are brought vividly and vitally into focus, time and again.

Part 2 of Fiction and Reflection