From Roland Barthes’s essay “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet“—
Robbe-Grillet’s purpose . . . is to establish the novel on the surface: once you can set its inner nature, its “interiority,” between parentheses, then objects in space, and the circulations of men among them, are promoted to the rank of subjects. The novel becomes man’s direct experience of what surrounds him without being able to shield himself with a psychology, a metaphysic, or a psychoanalytic method in his combat with the objective world he discovers. The novel is no longer a chthonian revelation, the book of hell, but of earth–requiring that we no longer look at the world with the eyes of a confessor, of a doctor, or of God himself (all significant hypostases of the classical novelist), but with the eyes of a man walking in his city with no other horizon than the scene before him, no other power than that of his own eyes.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis compiles all 198 of Davis’s short stories in one handsome volume. That’s all four of Davis’s exceptional short story collections: Break It Down, Varieties of Disturbance, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, and Almost No Memory. FS&G debuted the hardback edition a year ago, and this month Picador offers up a lovely (and more affordable) trade paperback version; it sports deckle edge pages and French flaps, and runs over 700 pages.
I front-load my review with this data to make it obvious that, if you have any interest in Lydia Davis, this is a book to pick up. It’s a wonderful collection, a tidy brick of words that begs for immersion, the kind of book you float around in, flipping pages at random to find and enjoy yet another strange little gem. Go get it.
If you’re not sure why you should be interested in Davis, read on.
Most of Davis’s stories are very short; many are just a paragraph or two, and some a mere sentence in length. They are not stories in the traditional sense: don’t look for sweeping character development or grand plot arcs. These stories thrive rather on tone, a keen sense of inspection, perception, and mood, and an intensity of observation on matters large and small. They are tales, fables, riffs, annotations, skits, jokes, japes, anecdotes, journals, thought experiments, epigrams, half-poems, and would-be aphorisms.
“In a House Besieged,” from her first collection Break It Down (1986) reveals much about the Davis program. Here it is in full–
In a house besieged lived a man and a woman. From where they cowered in the kitchen the man and woman heard small explosions. “The wind,” said the woman. “Hunters,” said the man. “The rain,” said the woman. “The army,” said the man. The woman wanted to go home, but she was already home, there in the middle of the country in a house besieged.
“In a House Besieged” illustrates a number of the themes and motifs that run throughout Davis’s oeuvre: unnamed protagonists identified only as “the man” and “the woman” (later stories might call them “the husband” and “the wife”) who are at once allegorical placeholders and at the same time singular individuals; a domestic setting (with family members as protagonists); an unknowable and perhaps unidentifiable threat; a pervasive sense of alienation balanced by an ironic sense of humor. The story’s brevity also shows that, from the outset of her publishing career, Davis was already working toward something wholly different from the Carveresque stories that dominated MFA fiction in the 80s.
The domestic settings of Break It Down–spaces often haunted by mothers and fathers–rear up again and again throughout the collection. 1997’s Almost No Memory kicks off with “Meat, My Husband,” a story about a wife who is trying to get her husband to eat healthier–a difficult prospect considering his affection for beef. The tale should be utterly banal, but instead it is humorous and even oddly moving; the wife, who narrates the piece, concludes by realizing that her husband would really just prefer to cook for himself. The insight transcends the particular domestic scenario: it seems applicable to the reader’s own life (or to this reader’s, anyway). “How He Is Often Right,” also from the same collection, is a short paragraph where the narrator concludes that the titular “he” is often wrong, “but wrong for circumstances different from the circumstances as they actually were, while [his decision] was right for circumstances I clearly did not understand.” The story captures the way that we impart great meaning to the smallest arguments, dwelling on them, connecting them to our sense of identity. We see the same analysis at work in “The Outing” (also from Almost No Memory). In full–
An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.
Davis’s sentence might be telescopic, but it also, paradoxically, puts the relationship in the story under a microscope. The reader can fill in the gaps with his or her own background: we’ve all experienced this anger, this silence, this refusal. We’ve been there. The story is real. It’s true.
The truth of Davis’s stories is what unites them; it’s the reader’s recognition of their truth that makes them so pleasurable. Take “Boring Friends” from 2001’s Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (again, in full)–
We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
Davis’s treatment on friendship consistently penetrates facades, exposes our competitive cores, and, at the same time, celebrates the joys we might take in others. This precarious line also evinces in Davis’s stories about taking care of young children. The short scene “Child Care” focuses on a grumpy father who’d rather watch TV than take his turn with the baby. Solution: “Together they watch The Odd Couple.” And perhaps it is because I have two young children, but I can’t recall a more accurate depiction of the simultaneous wonder and boredom of taking care of a new baby than “What You Learn About the Baby” (a lengthy treatise at six pages).
Not all of Davis’s stories focus on family and friends. There’s much here about academia: troubles with translation, grappling with tenure, the perils of teaching, and so on. There are at least three entries on grammar here. If not all readers can connect with these stories (although I certainly did), they need not worry–part of the joy of the book is its diversity. If a story doesn’t catch right away, flick to the next one, or one a hundred pages down the line. Perhaps you will alight on one of the collection’s imaginative historical biographies, like “Kafka Cooks Dinner” or “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman,” positively epic at 18 pages. Davis’s histories fascinate; they seem utterly real and true and absurd and improbable, all at the same time.
Indeed, discursive movement is the core of Davis’s, but her digressions all point to a thematic analysis of truth, of an individual’s attempt to understand the world in terms other than the individual herself. They dwell on problems of self-consciousness, often employing literary distortion as an analytical tool. Davis’s literary distortions always point to a concrete reality, a livable, experiential reality; the fact that we should experience the real as surreal or absurd only makes her work more truthful.
It would be easy to park Davis with the postmodernist counter-tradition, but I think her work looks to something else, something post-postmodernist (I write this, I know, at the risk of falling into an abyssal loop). Davis’s work presages contemporary “flash fiction”; her stories’ brevity reflect the simultaneous contraction of our attention spans and the expansion of our diverse interests. Her story “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:” reads like a Facebook update. Here it is in full — “that Scotland has so few trees.” Davis transmutes an amusing annotation into a story that somehow brings the great critic back to life. The title of the story is also the title of the book; what follows then is a kind of meta-joke on reader expectations, subverting our expectations of Dr. Johnson’s (supposed) meta-commentary on the book-proper. But I fear I’m headed into a lit-crit navel-gazing snoozefest (in what has already been a long review). Far better to wrap things up, I think, by simply noting again how joyful it is to move through the book, to open at random and read. Very highly recommended.
(Via).
“The Discharged Soldier” is William Wordsworth’s moving poem about the pain of a war veteran returning home.
No living thing appeared in earth or air,
And, save the flowing water’s peaceful voice,
Sound there was none–but, lo! an uncouth shape,
Shown by a sudden turning of the road,
So near that, slipping back into the shade
Of a thick hawthorn, I could mark him well,
Myself unseen. He was of stature tall,
A span above man’s common measure, tall,
Stiff, lank, and upright; a more meagre man
Was never seen before by night or day.
Long were his arms, pallid his hands; his mouth
Looked ghastly in the moonlight: from behind,
A mile-stone propped him; I could also ken
That he was clothed in military garb,
Though faded, yet entire. Companionless,
No dog attending, by no staff sustained,
He stood, and in his very dress appeared
A desolation, a simplicity,
To which the trappings of a gaudy world
Make a strange back-ground. From his lips, ere long,
Issued low muttered sounds, as if of pain
Or some uneasy thought; yet still his form
Kept the same awful steadiness–at his feet
His shadow lay, and moved not. From self-blame
Not wholly free, I watched him thus; at length
Subduing my heart’s specious cowardice,
I left the shady nook where I had stood
And hailed him. Slowly from his resting-place
He rose, and with a lean and wasted arm
In measured gesture lifted to his head
Returned my salutation; then resumed
His station as before; and when I asked
His history, the veteran, in reply,
Was neither slow nor eager; but, unmoved,
And with a quiet uncomplaining voice,
A stately air of mild indifference,
He told in few plain words a soldier’s tale–
That in the Tropic Islands he had served,
Whence he had landed scarcely three weeks past;
That on his landing he had been dismissed,
And now was travelling towards his native home.
This heard, I said, in pity, “Come with me.”
He stooped, and straightway from the ground took up
An oaken staff by me yet unobserved–
A staff which must have dropped from his slack hand
And lay till now neglected in the grass.
Though weak his step and cautious, he appeared
To travel without pain, and I beheld,
With an astonishment but ill suppressed,
His ghostly figure moving at my side;
Nor could I, while we journeyed thus, forbear
To turn from present hardships to the past,
And speak of war, battle, and pestilence,
Sprinkling this talk with questions, better spared,
On what he might himself have seen or felt.
He all the while was in demeanour calm,
Concise in answer; solemn and sublime
He might have seemed, but that in all he said
There was a strange half-absence, as of one
Knowing too well the importance of his theme,
But feeling it no longer. Our discourse
Soon ended, and together on we passed
In silence through a wood gloomy and still.
Up-turning, then, along an open field,
We reached a cottage. At the door I knocked,
And earnestly to charitable care
Commended him as a poor friendless man,
Belated and by sickness overcome.
Assured that now the traveller would repose
In comfort, I entreated that henceforth
He would not linger in the public ways,
But ask for timely furtherance and help
Such as his state required. At this reproof,
With the same ghastly mildness in his look,
He said, “My trust is in the God of Heaven,
And in the eye of him who passes me!”The cottage door was speedily unbarred,
And now the soldier touched his hat once more
With his lean hand, and in a faltering voice,
Whose tone bespake reviving interests
Till then unfelt, he thanked me; I returned
The farewell blessing of the patient man,
And so we parted. Back I cast a look,
And lingered near the door a little space,
Then sought with quiet heart my distant home.
“Nietszche” [sic] by Lydia Davis, from Varieties of Disturbance, and reprinted in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis—
Oh, poor Dad. I’m sorry I made fun of you.
Now I’m spelling Nietszche wrong, too.
“Self Portrait at Twenty Years,” a poem by Roberto Bolaño, from Laura Healy’s translation of The Romantic Dogs—
I set off, I took up the march and never knew
where it might take me. I went full of fear,
my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing:
I think it was the icy wind of the dead.
I don’t know. I set off, I thought it was a shame
to leave so soon, but at the same time
I heard that mysterious and convincing call.
You either listen or you don’t, and I listened
and almost burst out crying: a terrible sound,
born on the air and in the sea.
A sword and shield. And then,
despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek
against death’s cheek.
And it was impossible to close my eyes and miss seeing
that strange spectacle, slow and strange,
though fixed in such a swift reality:
thousands of guys like me, baby-faced
or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,
brushing cheeks with death.
Several Paul Auster interviews for those inclined. Also, read our review of his new novel Sunset Park.
Auster on NPR’s Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal.
And, on a video interview with Borders, Auster leaves his shades on for the duration of the interview, perhaps commenting on the brightness of his future.
From Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 lecture, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction“—
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.
Hear O’Connor read a version of her lecture here.
Dinaw Menestu’s new novel How to Read the Air tells the story of a family over two generations. The novel opens in the 1970s as Mariam and Josef, a young married couple from Ethiopia, take a road trip through the American heartland. The pair has been separated for over three years–after just one year of marriage–and they hope that the trip will help renew their bonds and in some way forge their new identities as Americans. But they don’t really know each other, and perhaps they can’t; the violence they sought to escape in Ethiopia’s communist revolution recapitulates in their own marriage, eventually sundering it. Nearly 30 years later, their son Jonas–the introspective, sensitive, and inventive narrator of this novel–tries to come to terms with his own crumbling marriage, job, and identity, by re-examining the past. By literally recreating his parents’ journey, Jonas tries to convert his father’s pain and fear into a stable identity in this moving novel about family, place, and the need to move both our bodies and our souls. How to Read the Air is new in hardback from Riverhead Books.
There’s a thread of vengeful anger that runs through Stephen-Paul Martin’s new collection of stories, Changing the Subject. Although a tidy portion of that anger is reserved for George W. Bush and his nefarious gang (the stories seem to have been composed under last decade’s regime), Martin’s various characters also aim their anger at scientists, whalers, cell phones, born-again Christians, college students, journalists, fast food restaurants, Americans, and all the people of the world. That anger works best when working in a reflective mode, especially when Martin blends his vitriol with humor. The opening paragraph of the first story “Safety Somewhere Else” provides a nice illustration of Martin at his finest–
The greatest mistake of all time took place thousands of years ago, when God let Noah’s family survive the flood. God’s plan was to start a new human race with a man he though he could trust, but the limits of Noah’s moral awareness were obvious right from the start. No sooner had God’s rainbow vanished into the clouds than Noah was getting drunk and cursing his grandson, declaring that Canaan’s descendants–one-third of the human race–would be the lowest of slaves, a monstrous over-reaction that would have tragic consequences for countless generations of innocent people. Clearly, Noah wasn’t the man God thought he was.
The story then shifts into a bizarre picaresque involving revenge against a scientist who uses animals as research subjects (there’s also an attack on a whaling vessel, a fascinating reading of The Odyssey, and a woman whose son was consumed by a bear). Great stuff, but I think I would have been just as happy to hear more of Martin’s thoughts (or, his narrator’s thoughts, to be fair) on the Old Testament. Changing the Subject is new in trade paperback from Ellipsis Press.
Susan Straight’s new novel Take One Candle Light a Room explores the physical and psychic traumas that evince from America’s long, painful, complicated history of race relations. FX Antoine, the novel’s narrator, is an LA-based travel writer who found herself, as a young girl, transplanted from rural Louisiana to California at the end of the fifties, in order to escape the rapes perpetrated by a local plantation owner on three of her sisters. In 2005, FX–Fantine to her friends and family–watches over Victor, her godson, a recent community college graduate. Fantine encourages Victor to expand his unlikely success (he is the son of a crack-addicted murder victim, one of Fantine’s childhood friends) by applying to four-year schools; however, after Victor is implicated in a shooting (wrong place, wrong time), he runs away to Louisiana. Fantine follows, attempting to save the young man and find some sense of personal redemption as well. The novel’s climax is set against the devastating backdrop of Hurricane Katrina. For more on Take One Candle, read Francesca Mari’s review at The New York Times. Take One Candle Light a Room is new in hardback from Pantheon Books.
The following selection is from William S. Burroughs’s “Hieroglyphic Silence,” collected in the totally out-of-print volume The Third Mind, a book of cut-ups Burroughs co-authored with Brion Gysin (you can access the book here via extralegal means). From “Hieroglyphic Silence”–
“I am the Egyptian,” he said, looking all flat and silly, and I said: “Really, Bradford, don’t be tiresome.”
All right, let’s put it apple-pie simple with a picture of a wedge of apple pie there, containing fifty-three grams of carbohydrates.(See the L-C diet.)
Well now, if you don’t know the word for apple pie where you happen to be and want it, you can point to it or you can draw it. So, when and why do you need a word for it? When and why do you need to say, I want apple pie, if you just don’t care how fat you get?
You need to say it when it isn’t there to point to and when you don’t have your drawing tools handy\ In short, words become necessary when the object they refer to is not there.
No matter what the spoken language may be, you can read hieroglyphs, a picture of a chair or what have you; makes no difference what you call it, right? You don’t need subvocal speech to register the meaning of hieroglyphs. Learning a hieroglyphic language is excellent practice in the lost art of inner silence. “It would be well, today, if children were taught a good many Chinese ideograms and Egyptian hieroglyphs as a means of enhancing their appreciation of our alphabet.” If you are able to look at what is in front of you in silence, you will be able to write about it from a more perceptive viewpoint.
What keeps you from seeing what is in front of you? Words for what is in front of you, which are not what is there. As Korzybski pointed out: whatever a chair may be, it is not a “chair.” That is,it is not the label “chair.”So, now try this: pick up your Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics, by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, and copy out the following phrases:
p. 104; They fall down upon face their in land their own.
p. 173; Stood the prince alone in the presence of the gods.
p. 181; The lock of hair which was in.
p. 79; the wind
p. 202; Giver of winds is its name.
p. 190; coming forth waiting for thee from of old
p. 200; night that of the destruction of the enemies
p. 208; come thou to us not having thy memories of evil come thou in thy form
p. 103; In the writing of the god himself he writeth for thee the book of breathings with his fingers his own.
p. 195; Shall it be that thou wilt be silent about it.
Now, having memorized the above passage, turn to the hieroglyphs on the following page and read in silence.
In 200 black and white archival photos with accompanying captions by historian Mike Cox, Historic Photos of the Old West winds its way through almost two centuries of American history, tracing the exploration of the West from its earliest pathfinders like Lewis and Clark, through later generations who mythologized the practitioners of Manifest Destiny. Along the way, we’re treated to photos of lawmen and settlers, civilizers and politicians, along with plenty of roustabouts, rustlers, and rascals (admittedly, some of these “heroes” had no problem slipping from the former category to the latter and back). There are all the famous names you’d expect to see in here–Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Pat Garrett, the Earp brothers, just to name a few–but its photos like this one, below, of a pioneer family in Nebraska that signal the less sensational (and perhaps more human) side of the Western migration.
Of course, those settlers needed land when they arrived out West, as well as protection from the Indians who had been there first (not to mention each other). The picture below shows the bureaucrats of the U.S. Land Office who doled out Indian land to white people, along with the armed U.S. marshals who enforced these actions. Are they heroes?
The following picture depicts a company of Texas Rangers, posing with their Winchesters in South Texas in the mid 1880s. Some tough-looking hombres.
Historic Photos of Heroes of the Old West, available now from Turner Publishing, makes a nice companion piece to Historic Photos of Outlaws of the Old West.
Biblioklept 