Connectedly Different: On Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Gertrude Stein
The text-based social web is dissolving. At its best, its limitations forced density and resulted in handfuls of superficial transcendence. It’s these qualities that drew me to Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Gertrude Stein’s shorter prose. Their bounds and limitations make for clear and compelling work, concerned not with consequence, but with conjuring.
Imitating the form, inventing the words
S:
Sentence. Sentence. Sentence softening or sharpening center sentence. Sentence as an island in the lake. Sentence as a lake around the island.
D:
Above the longer sentence sat a larger sentence, the function of which seemed to be to draw out the lower sentence, or maybe complete it.
W:
Sentence—nestled, bristled against its company in the cream. “Stale!” I spent today on my feet, yawning and leaning.
Imitating the words, inventing the form [1]
W[2]:
Despite the promising start—I was so excited—things went badly. I’m sympathetic to the most simple human act.
Here’s where the plot is thickening. Not to go on and on—I was there at the moment of the discovery. I could allow myself to think about it. The facts of the matter are complex.
For some idea of the full range of tools at his disposal, one would have to know what human longings are all about, a calm voice says calmly.
Our sky’s so high. It’s at the gravel stop of a tall building.
D[3]:
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time. The student hesitated for a long time. She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Each seal uses many blowholes and each blowhole is used by many seals. The fish is for her – there is no one else in the house.
S[4]:
I was not a republic. I was an island and land. I said one had power. How can you describe a trip. It is so boastful. There is a key. There is a key to a closet that opens the drawer. And she keeps both.
Available responses to constraint (boxes)
Reject the structure and rebuild.
Contort the structure, make the hinges creak.
Either might include building smaller new boxes inside the old box.
One review of Williams’s work is titled “Brutalist Fiction,” and the metaphor is particularly apt. Even the ornamental is load bearing. The architecture of these stories works to set tensions, and each of those tensions invites exformation. The definition of exformation, as suggested by Google, reads like a Davis story:
exformation (uncountable):
1. All the shared body of knowledge which is not explicitly used when people communicate, but without which communication would be impossible.
Selected words and phrases used by critics writing about D, W, and S
Nub of truth, nails, sensation of being caught, glimpse, residue, brutal, dirty realism, scrubbed, painterly avant-garde, grit under your fingernails, ever-pressurized, games of interpretation, concentrate, raw material of the unconstructed self,
Libidinal and invigorating enigmas, Freudian, friction, framed, unmoored, epiphany, varied utterance, not quite a punchline, arresting phrase.Uncomfortably intimate, very ordinary difficulties, mundanely cumbersome, handling, little truth, particular personalities and problems, care and alienation, apparently omniscient, self-deceptive strategy, absence waiting to be filled,
Brilliant aversions, approximates, representing consciousness, dilemmas of focused attention, small gains, absurdity, precision, cruel personals ads, human paradox, competing claims, rapidly consecutive acts of exclusive attention, reiterative, inventory, handled with rubber gloves, hasty aggregates, interstices.Essence, characteristic gestures, fresh and specific, verbal echo, pure insistence, surreal mutations, struggle, triumph, intimacy, alive,often idiosyncratic, always startling, deliberately naïve, repudiation, ridiculously straightforward, trying, morally obtuse, deliberate perversity, beautiful bluntness.
Skeletal
Susan Howe writes that Gertrude Stein
verbally elaborated on visual invention. She reached in words for new vision formed from the process of naming, as if a first woman were sounding, not describing, "space of time filled with moving." Repetition, surprise, alliteration, odd rhyme and rhythm, dislocation, deconstruction.
And then:
Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech, connection, and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure of a sentence? What inner articulation releases the coils and complications of Saying's assertion?
Stein consistently spills away from structure, operating under a grammar of suggestion that hovers over but never binds the prose. The prose itself is focused on effect. Traditional sentence structure is expendable.
Williams’ sentences take on familiar enough shapes, but unspool free-associatively, the details and jumps carving out our oblique sense of their observers.
Davis is the most structurally rigid of the three. She often titles her stories in ways that establish a premise. The premise becomes a kind of limitation. It is, often, within her deviations from the premise that the story takes place; in some kind of aberration or exception, in irreconcilable detail. If regularity is established, it’s being established to highlight perversion.
Assembly
In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud sets up an ax murder and in the next panel depicts a scream. He, as a cartoon character, sits around this example, and explains that we, the reader, are a part of the murder we imagine taking place in the gutter, the space between the frames:
I MAY HAVE DRAWN AN AX BEING RAISED IN THIS EXAMPLE, BUT I'M NOT THE ONE WHO LET IT DROP OR DECIDED HOW HARD THE BLOW, OR WHO SCREAMED, OR WHY.
THAT, DEAR READER, WAS YOUR SPECIAL CRIME, EACH OF YOU COMMITTING IT IN YOUR OWN STYLE.
Then later:
TO KILL A MAN BETWEEN PANELS IS TO CONDEMN HIM TO A THOUSAND DEATHS
McCloud is making the point that comics are defined by the gap-filling between panels, what he calls “closure.” In his words, comics is closure.
In ”Portraits and Repetition,” Gertrude Stein sets out a rationale for much of her work, much of it it revolving around her conceptions of repetition as opposed to insistence, and confusion as a form of clarity:
once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis. And so let us think seriously of the difference between repetition and insistence.
Here is her “comics is closure”:
Now I am quite certain that there is really if anything is alive no difference between clarity and confusion.
They both assert the same core idea in their work; it is in trying to connect dots that meaning is formed.
Davis, from two interviews:
There is something I find explosively powerful in the meaning contained in a single word, then in two words put together, and then in three, and so on.
I’m leaving out a great deal. It’s not a complete picture.
What am I doing here, putting odd sentences together and creating some little piece of nonsense.
Williams, from one:
I must manufacture text. And that is the task of being a writer – composition. It’s also my own insufficiency; I’m not good with maps or finding my way around. I guess I reside in my mind most of the time – it’s just my temperament. I don’t think I’d be happy if I were clear about everything that ends up on the page. I’d like to get beyond what I know as far as I can. In my fiction I like to provide some mystery, a place to meditate, where I might be nearing a new insight, if in fact I haven’t reached it.
Structure is the subject, form is a constant question, foregrounded, inviting.
Bones
You must lend their bones your flesh: Stein’s shoveled bones (blunt, relentless), Davis’s sifted bones (methodical, exception-focused), Williams’s rifled through bones (scattershot, driven).
Animating
Or acts of ventriloquism. Stein sketches a verbal impressionism of objects and people. Close attention, but out of focus. Williams’s passive objects, be they leaves or light, are charged with agency. Davis swaps the animate and the inanimate: people are read by their traces, objects are read by their relations.
On sea creatures
One reviewer of Davis’s collected stories read “Information from the North Concerning the Ice” as innuendo. A published letter in response ended with:
sometimes a blowhole is just a blowhole. Ask a seal.
M. F. K. Fisher (hypothetically):
The story comes to the reader as an impurity, and the reader donates layers for a pearl.
Deviations
Fisher (verbatim)[5]:
Basically it is well constructed, and most valuable, it allows for extremely personal deviations…
S:
Minute changes in repeated sentences. A gradient of homophones complicating a familiar word.
D:
Gratings and stumbles in habit, rhythm, or position.
W:
Sweeping and forming a kind of constellation of associations lent intent.
Collapse
These stories are almost always concerned with collapses and distances. Fiction often compresses and expands time, but here the distances are inter- or intra-personal. Brevity gives them immediacy. Then there are the gaps between the titles and the stories themselves, between the sensory input and the thought, between associations. Francesca Wade, writing on Stein, sees these pieces as propelled by “associative logic, verbal echo or pure insistence.”
D:
Sometimes the collapse is orderly: she places things as they are and they come undone as they were most likely to. Her drink at the table cools, her meal on the table goes stale, the sun sets behind the window. If it isn’t orderly, it’s after there tend to have been signs.
S:
The point in the story was one to come to. The point in the story was one being come to. The point in the story where the point in the story would be come to. The point in the story where the point was being arrived at.
W:
It had been coming—most people could see that. Elliot told me, “I told you so.” Though if things were going that way anyway I don’t think I’d be relishing in any knowledge. My carrots persisted into their soil, yet to be condescended to. I didn’t need to be told.
Review
Both Davis and Williams released collections last year, Our Strangers and I Hear You’re Rich respectively. Our Strangers lends itself readily to reshaping.
Davis as Stein[6]:
I have an enemy, I never had an enemy before. His enemy must become my enemy. Because his enemy’s partner is supporting, his enemy’s partner must become my enemy too.
We have some enemies, now. We never had enemies before. These enemies are both all near enough.
Davis as Williams[7]:
It is not easy to live in this world: one is insulted by a friend, another is neglected by her family. This is natural.
For a year or so, when I was young, I worked in an office. He would yell at me, “Type it!” I would yell back “I won’t!” Tears of frustration would be running down his cheeks.
Most of us actually continued to cry as we left the office. In the elevator, we would push one another aside. On the stairs descending, we would force our way down, through.
The women’s feet swelled in tight shoes, stood packed together, between.
They would blink their damp eyelashes, biting on their knuckles, read their newspapers, eyes still shining.
I myself would not usually cry at home, except at the table, if my supper was very disappointing, or close to bedtime.
D.
One story in Our Strangers, “Pardon the Intrusion,” seems to be an exercise in bartered economics, charting the allocation and reallocation of goods and occasional services within a small community. Its shape is relatively consistent throughout:
Can anyone recommend an honest stamp dealer?
We are looking for a good and reasonable local piano tuner for a very old German piano.
We are looking for a travel version of go.
We are looking for unwanted egg cartons.
There’s a lot here: implications within requests; refrains of phrases; reluctance to ask directly; playfulness.
In full, the story does what the collection as a whole does newly: Davis toys with specificity and refrains. The collection has a couple of internal series, and this story has its own little arcs of resolution, of objects that find a home or people that find their missing bits. The resolutions are rarely neat. A turtle crops up a few times, first needing company, then needing a new home. He likes turkey and leaves. It is unclear if he’s been rehomed, but on revisiting the story, I wonder how he’d fare with the second entry’s “bagged leaves from the past winter.”
If specificity and serialization are the defining technical traits of the collection, the defining preoccupations are surprising encounters and relationships being recalculated.While the scope has changed, this is decidedly Davis territory.
When I read my first Davis story, “Break It Down,” in which a woman runs through the relationship implications of actions like an unreturned phone call, I had been set on economics, on calculating efficient codifications and re-allocations, entirely seduced by the distillation of human mess into a series of if/thens. Under those terms, distilling an idea, whittling it, better transmits its significance than an expressive inflation.
Davis as Stein[8]:
Does anyone have. Is anyone interested in. I’d be grateful if someone. Can anyone recommend? Could anyone recommend? Pardon the intrusion, but
W.
“For example, the son” comes a third of the way through I Hear You’re Rich. It feels more insular than a usual Williams story, its intimacy vivid and violent. An earlier version appeared in Harper’s. It’s identical save for one sentence.
The father attempts to be mighty in battle.
I Hear You’re Rich:
The father thinks himself mighty in battle.
This is the sort of pivotal sentence you see in a lot of in Williams’ stories, one where the story shifts onto a different angle. The new trajectory casts and recasts the before and the after. We might see the grip on the boy’s wrist at the opening go from protective to punitive, perhaps.
This comes at the cost of another turn. In full, these paragraphs read:
The boy strongly has a sense he should be elsewhere, whereas the mother likes to believe she is a practical young woman and she is by all appearances placid. The father [attempts to be / thinks himself] mighty in battle.
“Attempts to be” projects the father outside the unit; realizing the sense of the boy while setting the father apart from his family. “Thinks himself” loses that, keeping him close to the family in this little census. I like “thinks himself” more than “attempts to be.” Spreading the father across both divides—the violence/placidity one and the internal/external one—is great for showing difference, but the story is about the opportunities that proximity presents for violence. “Thinks himself” shoves the father close, and lodges the violence definitively in his head rather than in an abstract attempt.
There’s no recuperating the slightly pathetic sense of the father’s implicit failings in “attempt” though, so I’m grateful to have seen the story in this other light. That hinged turn, a little like a twist on a gripped wrist.
Williams as Davis:
The father had a grip on the boy’s wrist near the lilac bush, which the mother sat beside. The boy sprang loose. The boy has a sense he should be elsewhere, the mother likes to believe she is a practical young woman and father thinks himself mighty. He never found anyone difficult to hit.
S.
I think about revision, how Stein sometimes presents an idea and then tinkers with it in real time:
I am going to conquer. I am going to be flourishing. I am going to be industrious. Please forgive me everything.
The “I” here starts a bit like the father in the Williams story. There is an intention to conquer. This is not a cold, determined conquest. It’s revised immediately. Then, again, like an external power struggle becoming internal. Behind those machinations is something softer. This brings to mind a section of Two Lives, Janet Malcom’s book around Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, that has stuck with me.
Ulla E. Dydo discovered, after consulting manuscripts, revisions had been made to Stanzas in Meditation between the manuscript and the typescript. Each instance of the word “may”, both in the capability and date sense, had been cut with no regard for if it made sense, such as the phrase, “may they shall be spared,” becoming, “can they shall be spared”.
A dream led Dydo to conclude that this was done to sever a perceived connection to May Bookstaver, whom Stein had been fixated on at one point, and had written a novel, Q.E.D., about. Malcom asks Dydo, and a few other scholars, to flesh out the story of the revised manuscript:
“How do you imagine the scene?” I asked Dydo. […] “Do you think Alice stood over Gertrude and watched her change the ‘may’s to ‘can’s?”
“No,” Dydo said.
“No,” Rice said.
“It's far more punitive for Alice to say, ‘You go there and you do it! You do it tonight! In your room!’” Dydo made her normally pleasant voice become a harsh bark.
“Go to the corner and do it,” Rice said.
“The manuscript tells a terrible story,” Burns said. “The force with which these words are crossed out. The anger with which this was done. Some of the slashes go right through the paper.”
“You almost expect to see blood,” Rice said.
This fits those Davis stories where she works with artifacts or with information and its configuration, told in Williams’ tone, one with guests and twists.
Stein as Williams[9]:
I was winsome, dishonored—and a kingdom.
I was a character sodden, agreeable, perfectly constrained. I said good morning, good evening, I said I was frequently troubled.
The door opens before the kitchen. This is very pleasant in summer.
I am not patient, I get angry at a dog. I wished to see the pearls. I could be so pleased.
Stein as Davis[10]:
Was an orphan. That is to say, her mother was put away and her father, the major, was killed in the war. He went to the war, to be killed in the war; his wife was crazy. She behaved strangely, she even behaved strangely when she did not. She played the piano. So the mother was put away and the father was dead and the girl was an orphan.
Closure
I’m trying to make this point: vivid sequential works on a fragment scale are best read distinctly and against each other.
In an essay on fragments, Davis writes:
Any imposition of a particular order on the great random miscellany of possible subject matter contradicts or distorts another possible order. We could say that the more complete a piece of writing is, if in this case complete means more fully elaborated, more particular—the more limiting it is, the more it leaves out, and therefore the more partial it is.
Completion is eschewed for potential. An author chooses what control to retain and what to relinquish.
A couple of years into reading Davis, I read a short essay, “A Note on the word Gubernatorial,” and enjoyed seeing her internal revision and connection transcribed. Much of the thrill of reading Davis is feeling the page light up little sections of thought in a way that feels both controlled and expansive: here, she moves through etymology to flesh out an observation about Jimmy Carter. She opens the essay mentioning she’s unlikely to use it in a story, meaning this essay may be the only tissue capable of meaningfully delivering this tidbit. Elsewhere, in a Forms and Influences essay, she talks about an ordered subconscious, in relation to a George Saunders interview:
Maybe Saunders would say that the material was neatly shelved in my subconscious and filed under various headings, and that my efficient retrieval system zipped through and found them as models.
Davis also writes on Felix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines (tr. Lucy Sante), a series of unsigned newspaper contributions, compressing notable events into three lines:
The cylindrical grinders in the brickworks in Saint-Leu-d'Esserent, Oise, tore a thigh off Auguste Jacquy, 33.
Four guys, three who cut down hundreds of feet of telegraph cables in Courbevoie, the fourth who then fenced them, have been arrested.
In a street in Roubaix, Legrand, a weaver, struck 10 times with a knife, fairly lightly, his ex-wife Angèle Duquesnoy.
Pajoux, who lives in Aubervilliers in a place called ‘Crime Corner,’ was arrested in the course of firing his gun at people.
There’s a lot of incompleteness here. The way they twist and stretch reminds me of Williams, the knowingly deferred delivery reminds me of Davis and that last bit, in the course of firing his gun at people feels just a little bit like Stein’s eye trying to see things plainly and newly.
I suspect Novels was a nontrivial inspiration for “Pardon the Intrusion.” Davis explicitly says it was an influence for “Local Obits,” a story published in 2013. Here is a section of that story:
William, 81, had a passion for history and genealogy.Gordon, 68, an avid hunter, died peacefully at the Firemen’s Home on Monday. Ronald, 72, former fire chief and retired truck driver, was an avid duck hunter. Ellen, 87, volunteered at the Amtrak Station Snack Bar.
Joseph, 76, peacefully fell asleep in death in the cool early morning of August 26. He was best known in the community as a master plumber, and until his death was an active member of the Federation of Polish Sportsmen. He loved his wife and family. He loved his 35 race horses, but loved one especially, his stallion, Bright Cat, who died earlier this year.
Ida, 95, put family and friends first.
Davis says:
The entries are brief, like Fénéon’s, but unlike Fénéon, I am selecting the material, not reporting it, and I am interested not in the sensational but in the oft-repeated ordinary.
Trace
A friend recently sent me this, from Mary Ruefle’s The Book:
MY MEMORY OF A STORY BY LYDIA DAVIS I READ YEARS AGO AND NEVER FORGOT
A Russian, Wassilly, is mysteriously escorted to a snowbound village in the Eastern wilds. On the way there, bells ring in the icy air. A sleigh? In the village, which is practically empty, strangers act in strange and unsettling ways. Dogs begin to bark. Faces peer out of the windows. Dogs continue to bark. As the story ends, the thin cold air is filled with faint and faraway barks …
This seems like it’s “Sketches for a Life of Wassilly,” but that story has little in common with Ruefle’s recollection. It’s one of Davis’ longer stories, but isn’t so much a directed plot as much as it is a catalog of a lonely man’s neuroses. The chunk that seems to have carried over from Ruefle’s long-ago reading is the section after “in the village.” Wassilly is actually in the city; he’s going through his late brother’s things, we’ve been told it’s midwinter and it feels like midwinter, and then he lays down next to his dog, internally regards his family, seen through picture frames as strangers:
He would never have chosen the members of his family as friends. He thought it was odd that he should have been obliged to go to the apartment of this dirty stranger and handle his things. He looked over at his grandfather’s face, with its suppressed smile and carefully folded cravat. He himself had no desire to start a family.
From bed, he goes to the kitchen, makes sandwiches, returns to bed, eats a little, falls asleep without finishing the food. The dog joins him, finishes what is left. Ruefle explains the story in an interview with Jo Bell: “I remembered nothing—my memory! Nothing! Except I think I got some dogs barking right.”
There’s a dog, but no barking, and Wassilly isn’t the right name (she says that she left it untouched after looking). The actual story she’s remembering is likely “In a Northern Country.” The character is called Magin. Magin is not mysteriously sent to a village; he goes there after receiving a postcard from his brother. Toward the end, there are the faces through the windows, though Magin is inside, and outside there are the barking dogs. The story ends with the sound of snow rustling and the anticipation of voices. It’s odd that Ruefle seems to have conflated the two stories, but also fitting: they’re two ends of the same story, one involving a grief and a traveling, a traveling that displaces the grief and mutates it in the process. I’d suggest reading them together.
I’m not sure if Davis would suggest that—they’re from collections ten years apart. It feels like some fractal Davis story, this, reconciling an impression with evidence that’s impossible to look at all at once, paying attention to discrepancy. Discrepancy is the point. It is easy to know a small thing well enough to notice what’s not right.
Sticking
Part of the Ruefle anecdote is stickiness: the question of what we retain.
In an interview with Matthew Dadonna, Diane Williams explains her approach:
I’d love for all my stories to be crammed with objects and direct speech, I aim for this, not always successfully. I believe it’s quite taxing for abstractions to find a way to stick to the ribs of the mind.
Each bit is crucial and illuminating; the story as a vehicle carrying rich cargo, the destination being the ribs of the mind. I’ve not used the word flash to describe these stories, and I don’t plan to, but the portion of the stories “flash” corresponds to is the cramming of so overwhelmingly much into something small. What Williams is setting out as a goal is the sticking, which is the difficult bit. A novel gets to occupy those ribs for much longer, and to bind to incoming information over the course of days or weeks or even months—that stickiness feels like a given. Stein, Davis and Williams don’t get to leverage drawn-out time, so must resort to other methods to address the problem at hand, put simply: how can a story this short leave a reader somewhere new, or somehow changed?
Williams touches on the difficulty of endings in a continuation of that interview with Daddonna for the Center for Fiction, and Davis sets out a rationale in a conversation with David Naimon for Between the Covers.
“Composition as Explanation,” an essay by Stein, is both an insight into how she approaches composition and how she believes composition should be regarded. It spirals around this central idea:
It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.
or (I prefer):
And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes and after that and what changes after that.
Taken loosely, this is self-evidently true, but the point of this coming in the latter portion of her essay is that we’ve come to it through the narrow path Stein has set out. Certain phrase fragments and ideas crop up again and again and again; I particularly like ‘connectedly different’:
As I said in the beginning, there is the long history of how every one ever acted or has felt and that nothing inside in them in all of them makes it connectedly different.
Connectedly different works on a few levels in the essay—it’s setting out the relation of people to texts, particularly texts that might be seen as aberrations right up to the point they become classics (“There is almost not an interval. / For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.”), but it’s also setting out what she does with her numbing, dulling repetition—trying to draw out some sense of the world, and of things in it, as familiarly askew.
Once Stein blunts a chunk like this, it becomes easy to feel it in a few places, and for all of those to feel fitting. That friction has led to some static attraction. She hopes (insists):
It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.
This works for setting out Davis and Williams’ significance as well as Stein’s herself, the notable flourish being a focus more abstract than what I can only think to call ‘traditional storytelling’. Composition and explanation are incomplete in and of themselves; uninstrumented or unheard, they necessitate someone on the other end picking bits up. These stories in practice operate as instructions, but they’re aiming for the form of a suggestion.
Interviewing Williams for the Southwest Review, Kathryn Scanlan asks:
Do you still think of yourself as a dancer? Because I remember that from other interviews—that you were a gifted modern dancer who began practicing at the age of eight—and it’s pleasing to me to think of you as a writer who dances but also as a dancer who writes stories. Your work has the poise, discipline, physical grace, and sudden, disruptive turns I associate with demanding, rigorous dance—something like the Martha Graham technique, which has been described as “powerful, dynamic, jagged, and filled with tension.” To me, the compact, expressive, irreducible quality of any story by you suggests a completed movement, a piece of performance art.
Williams likes that reading:
You can’t know how much I appreciate your finding the presence of vigorous dance in my writing—and I wish I could think of myself as a dancer. I love to feel ready to dance, and certain music makes movement impossible to resist and certain stories do too.
The slight difference, though, is that where Scanlan talks about the stories as akin to completed dance, Williams positions the work, and herself, just before it; the feeling is precipitous rather than accomplished. The story isn’t a choreography or a recorded performance, it’s a looser warm up of sorts.
Anne Carson notes Gertrude Stein mentions trains in her portrait of Picasso, and writes:
I don’t know why trains. Often when reading Gertrude Stein, I have the sense I’m getting the gist and I ride along a while in good faith, then all at once she switches tracks and there I’m left standing, as it were, at the station. She drifts out of sight.
The train feeling and the edge-of-dance feeling are close together—movement that’s “impossible to resist” at the hands of some external influence. The feeling of having been swept up by certain music and emerging the other end can be some sort of loose rails. In both cases, the outcome is our motion, but that motion is the result of action one step away. In both of these readings (Carson’s and Williams’) the story is about directing a reader to an edge somewhat involuntarily. Leave them standing, as it were, at the station.
Williams, in her interview with Naimon for Between the Covers, says, “I don’t want to know what I know; I’m curious about what I don’t know. I want access to that mysterious center.” Naimon puts this to Davis in her interview, and Davis goes on to talk about her concern about climate change remaining implicit in her work: “I think my interests come in indirectly. They’re part of what I want to write about but not frontally.” This comes after some talk about gardening; again, somewhere results are loosely directed rather than directly molded.
The visual art metaphor for pieces like these pops up again and again in criticism, but the limitation here is that these works aren’t intended to be bound, and their effects are largely not happening just when you look at them. That’s why the dance analogy or the train analogy fits better. In the process of delivering the story, you too are delivered somewhere new—as Mary Ruefle can’t recall details, she retains that feeling of a journey, and the texture of the mediation.
[1] These miniatures are made up of words and phrases taken from the cited works and then reassembled, with some punctuation changes. Wherever this is done, the original stories are cited.
[2] Diane Williams, “The Seduction”, “Naaa”, “Machinery”, “Madder Lake” in The Collected Stories of Diane Williams (New York: Soho Press, 2018).
[3] Lydia Davis, “Information from the North Concerning the Ice:”, “The Fish” and “Happiest Moment” in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010).
[4] Gertrude Stein, “Advertisements”, “A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has a Cow” in Every Day is To-Day (London: Pushkin Press, 2023).
[5] MFK Fisher, “Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup” in Consider the Oyster (London: Daunt Books, 2018).
[6] Lydia Davis, “Enemies” in Our Strangers (London: Canongate, 2023).
[7] Lydia Davis, “Everyone Used to Cry” in Our Strangers (London: Canongate, 2023).
[8] Lydia Davis, “Pardon the Intrusion” in Our Strangers (London: Canongate, 2023).
[9] Gertrude Stein, “Advertisements” in Every Day is To-Day (London: Pushkin Press, 2023).
[10] Gertrude Stein, “A Waterfall and a Piano” in Every Day is To-Day (London: Pushkin Press, 2023).