Precision and disorientation in the writing of Lydia Davis
Observations that are at once strange and familiar.
The singe quality I would choose to describe the writing of Lydia Davis is precise.
She is economical, but not miserly: each word is carefully selected, weighed, and arranged. Her stories are sometimes extremely short (a single sentence), and sometimes (though more rarely) on the longer side; sometimes they are very funny, and sometimes they are very sad; but invariably they feel masterful and tightly controlled. They are also, at times, a little surreal. Reading her stories sometimes makes me envious—I wish I could write like that—but mostly I just feel a sense of admiration, similar to watching an incredible feat of athleticism or musical virtuosity.1 She is so skilled that the thought of reviewing her writing is quite intimidating, but I would like to try anyway.
Davis has a knack for crafting sentences that pithily convey strange observations that offer unique and novel insights into a common experience. It is difficult to convey what it is like to read these sentences except by way of quoting them directly. Take, for example, her (very) short story “Hand”:
Beyond the hand holding this book that I'm reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus—my extra hand.
The phrase “my extra hand” immediately strikes me as both very funny and weirdly apt. Moreover, there’s a detachment to the way both hands are introduced (e.g., “the hand holding this book” and “another hand lying idle”). It is only after this introduction that the latter hand is given an owner (“my”), and even then its status is auxiliary (“extra”). This is productively disorienting: it gives voice to an aspect of experience I typically wouldn’t attend to but which nonetheless feels true.
This disorientation shows up in other stories as well, such as “The Senses”, which distinguishes between two ways we could treat our sensory faculties:
Many people treat their five senses with a certain respect and consideration. They take their eyes to a museum, their nose to a flower shower, their hands to a fabric store for the velvet and silk; they surprise their ears with a concert, and excite their mouth with a restaurant meal.
But most people make their senses work hard for them day after day: Read me this newspaper! Pay attention, nose, in case the food is burning! Ears!—get together now and listen for a knock at the door!
In the span of just six short paragraphs, Davis conveys: first, the notion that we demand much of our senses but often give little in return; second, that they have a will of their own and might well throw in the towel, leaving us on our own:
If it all quits on him, he is really alone; in the dark, in the silence, numb hands, nothing in his mouth, nothing in his nostrils. He asks himself, Did I treat them wrong? Didn't I show them a good time?
As in “Hand”, there’s this curious separation between body and person. But in “Senses”, parts of the body are construed not merely as objects (“extra hand”) but as little agents unto themselves, complete with desires and frustrations. And while I don’t think Davis is trying to teach some kind of “lesson” here—she’s never didactic—something about the underlying premise really does resonate with me: I, too, have used my body as an instrument of my will without asking it what it wants; I have become frustrated when it malfunctions or hurts or otherwise breaks down; I have, fundamentally, viewed it as something other than the “real” me.
There’s something very funny about “Senses”, perhaps simply in the core premise of viewing our sensory faculties as frustrated underlings with goals of their own (a theme also explored in Gogol’s The Nose). But it’s also undeniably sad: the man ends alone, in the dark, wondering where he went wrong. In my read, these two feelings exist simultaneously and cannot really be separated from each other.
Estrangement emerges again in “Trying to Learn”, this time in our relationships with others. Here, the narrator identifies the multiplicity of selves that can exist within a particular person, or more precisely, within the relation we have with that person:
I am trying to learn that this playful man who teases me is the same as that serious man talking money to me so seriously he does not even see me anymore and that patient man offering me advice in times of trouble and that angry man slamming the door as he leaves the house.
On some level, the narrator recognizes that in wounding one (the angry man), they are wounding the others (the patient man offering advice), but this insight cannot be sustained:
Yet I look at the patient man, for instance, whom I would want above all to protect from such bitter words as mine, and though I tell myself he is the same man as the others, I can only believe I said those words, not to him, but to another, my enemy, who deserved all my anger.
Once again, the insight here is both unsettling and resonant: if asked, we would probably say we view the people in our lives as stable, unified agents; and yet our interactions with them unfold in singular, particular ways—sometimes so particular that it is hard to believe they are with the “same” person.
As in “Senses”, this process of disorientation serves to reorient the reader to something they’ve implicitly known but which has (likely) gone overlooked in their mental model of themselves and of others. Also like “Senses”, the reorientation does not necessarily lead to a happy or “pat” ending, which one sometimes worries about with stories that contain insights such as these. The man in “Senses” is left alone, after all, and the narrator of “Trying to Learn” can’t quite seem to let go of their anger.
Still, a quality of Davis that I worry I haven’t sufficiently highlighted here is her humor: her stories really are very funny. I’ve laughed out loud many times reading them, and some feel almost like one-liners:
Like a tropical storm, I, too, may one day become 'better organized’.
The best match for this combination of qualities (precision, humor, estrangement, endings that defy a satisfying resolution) is probably the short stories of Franz Kafka.2
Kafka is, of course, best known for works such as The Metamorphosis and The Trial, and for conveying the peculiar sense of alienation and impotence that accompanies interactions with impenetrable, bureaucratic systems. This quality is now so strongly associated with his work that it has been named after him. Yet he also wrote many short stories, some of them—like Davis’s—only a page or two long. These stories are often funny, sometimes tragic, and always a bit strange.
A story that, in my view, illustrates all three properties is A Little Fable:
"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
The story has almost the structure of a joke, with the cat’s entrance serving as the punchline. We’re thinking about and perhaps identifying with the mouse, ruminating over our own fears and comforts and the eventuality of death, and then this new character enters the scene and ends our ruminating with a decisive act—but not before pointing out a logical solution to our anxieties. This sense of irony pervades Kafka’s stories.
With the caveat that I’m obviously reading the pieces in translation, his writing—like Davis’s—is surgically precise, often conveying that same sense of disorientation or estrangement from familiar scenes. In The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man, the narrator laments the loneliness of aging alone. The story ends as follows:
That’s how it’s going to be, except that in reality both today and in the future you’ll actually be standing there yourself, with a body and a real head, as well as a forehead, which you can use your hand to slap.
It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly, but this passage strikes me as very much akin to Davis’s writing3, both in the strangely detached way with which parts of the body are described (“with a body and a real head”) and in the specific constructions used, at least in translation (“as well as a forehead, which you can use your hand to slap”). It reminds me very much, in fact, of “The Senses”: both end with a narrator alone, estranged from their body and regretting their choices.
Both writers also occasionally veer into longer stories with a (somewhat) more traditional structure, such as a clear “protagonist” with some kind of goal. There is often something standing in the way of that goal; on its own, this is not at all an unusual property of a story, but these obstacles tend to present in stranger, bleaker ways in both Kafka’s and Davis’s fiction.
In a Northern Country is one of my favorites of Davis’s longer works. It features an older man (Magin) searching for his younger brother in a remote, snowbound village called “Karsovy”. Magin repeatedly struggles to communicate with the inhabitants of the village, who appear not to speak any language that Magin knows (including “Trsk”, a language spoken by inhabitants of a nearby village). The villagers are, in some ways, as cold and remote as the village; but in other ways they are surprisingly hospitable, leading Magin to a small hut where he can stay—where, incidentally, he finds some of his brother’s old possessions, implying that his brother had once stayed in this hut too.
What lingered with me in this story was the bleakness of the imagery and, as always with Davis’s writing, the precision of the prose:
Before he could steady himself, the woman disappeared from his side. At first the firelight dazzled him. He looked down. A dog was snaking toward him with its belly to the ground. The room was dense with people. In perfect silence they watched him: near the fire, men squatted on low stools and benches digging rhythmically into the thick socks that covered their ankles and scratching their scalps and ears; farther away, in a disordered group, the women sat together hissing over their needlework, shrugging fitfully, and sucking their teeth.
Later in the story, Magin falls very ill, and his continual inability to understand the villagers furthers this sense of alienation:
The pain had wrapped around him tightly. His throat burned. He looked across at the inner wall and followed the grain of the wood. It was dark and water-stained. He looked at the floor. Clumps of snow lay over the pocked dirt. His eyes turned up toward the ceiling, and found only deepening darkness over the beam. His eyes moved down over the outer wall, from stone to stone, until they fixed on the window. There, beyond the pane, was a crowd of faces, staring intently at him.
Perhaps it is fitting to close this short essay with one of Davis’s most Kafkaesque stories, The Strangers. The story is just 1.5 pages, and opens as folows:
My grandmother and I live among strangers. The house does not seem big enough to hold all the people who keep appearing in it at different times.
The premise is unsettling, even frightening, more so because the narrator and the grandmother apparently never explicitly discuss the fact that their house is full of a rotating cast of strangers, some of whom they see only once. There is, further, nothing they seem to be able to do about the situation, and the story ends with a kind of resignation:
Though we are of different generations, we were both brought up never to ask questions and only to smile at things we did not understand.
The stories I’ll be discussing are all from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, a compilation of previously existing short story collections. It’s a thick book, but most of the stories are quite short (1-2 pages). If you’re interested, I’d recommend opening it up to a few random stories and reading each one to determine if her style catches your interest.
It’s no coincidence, I think, that one of Davis’s stories is called Kafka Cooks Dinner, which features a neurotic man fretting about what to fix for a prospective dinner date.
Or perhaps I should say that Davis’s writing strikes me as very much akin to this passage.