If Lydia Davis’s characters were atoms,
they’d have no valence. They’d live in closed shells, occasionally
bumping into each other but rarely exchanging any meaningful amount of
energy.
The relationships in her stories, such as they are (between mothers
and daughters, friends, lovers, roommates, neighbors, strangers who
meet on the street, people and things), all seem to have equal weight,
an equal degree of intimacy. An ex-husband and the neighbor of a dead
aunt and a chair wield the same emotional power.
Davis writes the most painful and fraught scenes in a clinical,
sometimes almost Aspergian way, as if describing human relations to
aliens whose evolutionary adaptation left out emotions. For example,
the first and final paragraphs of her four-paragraph story “Visit to
Her Husband”:
She and her husband are so nervous that throughout their conversation
they keep going into the bathroom, closing the door, and using the
toilet. Then they come out and light a cigarette. He goes in and
urinates and leaves the toilet seat up and she goes in and lowers it
and urinates. Toward the end of the afternoon, they stop talking
about the divorce and start drinking. He drinks whiskey and she
drinks beer. When it is time for her to leave to catch her train, he
has drunk a lot and goes into the bathroom one last time to urinate
and doesn’t bother to close the door.
In her parents’ kitchen later, she tries to explain something
difficult about the divorce to her father and is angry when he
doesn’t understand, and then finds at the end of the explanation that
she is eating an orange, though she can’t remember peeling it or even
having decided to eat it.
It’s not that people don’t feel things in Davis stories. They get
“nervous” or “angry,” but the writing doesn’t care whether you feel
their nervousness or anger. This radical emotional
egalitarianism—this aggressive flatness—gives her stories a
coded feel, like parables. You get the sense Davis is trying to
communicate something esoteric behind the exoteric action. That
something, I think, is a profound poetry of loneliness.
The brevity of her stories amplifies this esoteric feeling. Some are
only a paragraph or a sentence long, like the small, wry joke of
“Collaboration with a Fly”:
I put that word on the page,
but he added the apostrophe.
Or the evocative “Away from Home”:
It has been so long since she used a metaphor!
They work like koans, these micro-fictions. “Away from Home” packs
the immediacy of travel, the blanketing flood of sense-impressions, the
declarative directness of communicating in a language you haven’t
mastered, and a hint of delight about all these things into one
sentence: 10 words and an exclamation point.
Davis is also a maestro of unease. Her characters spend a lot of
time watching themselves think—she inverts the flatness of their
interpersonal relations by describing the labyrinthine, folded-in
relationships they have with their own interiors, the echo chambers of
their skulls. The result is a talk-therapy gothic, an existential hum.
One character “is sick to death of knowing what she is feeling, but she
can’t stop, as though if she stops watching for longer than a moment,
she will disappear (wander off).” Another character realizes, “If I
were not me and overheard me from below, as a neighbor, talking to him,
I would say to myself how glad I was not to be her, not to be sounding
the way she is sounding, with a voice like her voice and an opinion
like her opinion.”
Living in that mental hall of mirrors could drive a person mad. Kurt
Vonnegut once wrote about a friend who described taking heroin and
immediately understanding the seductiveness of the drug—it shuts
down the existential hum and allows us to feel, for the first time,
entirely at ease.
In an e-mail, Davis wrote that she once had “a very talented student
who decided to give up writing because she couldn’t stand that
existential hum. I was sorry for the loss, but I understood. I don’t
actually suffer from it all the time.” She added that the hum is
increasingly absent in her stories: “Most recently, I have written a
piece about the cows across the road, and it is mostly pure observation
of the cows, with very little about me.”
Playing the what’s-in-a-writer’s-mind game can be misleading and
belittling—but it can also be fun. If I had to guess why Davis is
moving away from the existential hum, I’d say her second marriage,
second child, and improving career have brought her more peace of mind.
(The unnamed ex-husband, who used to lurk ominously throughout her
work, appears less frequently in her recent stories.) You can find the
peak of her talk-therapy gothic in the 1997 collection Almost No
Memory. As long as we’re playing the what’s-in-a-writer’s-mind
game, I’m guessing that the middle 1990s were not Davis’s happiest
years.
Davis’s stories share some moods with David Lynch’s films. They
provoke a similar disquiet by presenting banal, everyday scenes that go
briefly off the rails, hinting at an ominous demireality beneath the
surface of the world we think we know. In “A Strange Impulse,” the
narrator sits at her window on an average sunny day:
But why were the shopkeepers covering their ears? And why were the
people in the street running as if pursued by a terrible specter?
Soon everything returned to normal: The incident had been no more
than a moment of madness during which the people could no longer bear
the frustration of their lives and had given way to a strange
impulse.
Awkward to note but worth noting anyway: Her literary ancestors are
mostly men. Her stories carry the DNA of Samuel Beckett (interiority),
Franz Kafka (unease), Ernest Hemingway (directness, concision), Jorge
Luis Borges (parables), and Lynch (doom in the banal), but no traces
(that I can detect) of Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein or Flannery
O’Connor. Dorothy Parker, in her wryer and colder moods, might be a
distant aunt. But that’s a stretch.
Davis’s stories’ esoteric, parable-like quality gives them a uniting
atmosphere, whether she’s writing about flies or failed marriages. The
new, 688-page Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is like a
21st-century Bible or I Ching or Thousand and One Nights. It’s
for dipping into. I confess I haven’t finished the whole of Davis’s
Collected Stories yet. In a way, I hope I never do. As Borges
said in a lecture about the Thousand and One Nights: As long
as some of its stories remain unread, the world retains some of its
mystery.
I ended my correspondence with Davis by asking if she was sitting
near a window. “I’m near a window,” she wrote. “But the windows here
are set fairly high up in the wall. So from where I sit, I see the top
of a beech hedge, the tops of some trees, the top of a hill, the upper
part of an old white house, and the roof of an old red barn (where the
cows live).”
She sees the tops of things. That’s as good a description of Lydia
Davis as any.
