the beginning of the story
Reading
by Lydia Davis / at the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater (Redcat) in the
Disney Center on November 13, 2013, 8:30 p.m.
I
can’t recall when I first met Lydia Davis. I like to think it was with Paul
Auster, to whom she was once married, but I also remember that when I once
stayed overnight at Paul’s Brooklyn apartment, they had obviously already been separated
and, perhaps, divorced, since I remember talking to Paul’s second wife, Siri
Hustvedt, about Charles Dickens, on whom she had written her PhD dissertation—so
clearly Lydia was not there!
In any event, I have known her, if nothing
else indirectly, for about 28 years. I published one of her short tales, “Meat,
My Husband,” in my cookbook, The Sun
& Moon Guide to Eating Through Literature & Art. And I have kept
vaguely in touch with her through these long years, reading most of her short
collections and her longer fiction, The
End of the Story, after discussing the work with Davis’ close friend, Rae
Armantrout.
I was delighted, therefore, when my friend
Deborah Meadows suggested that we attend Lydia Davis’ reading together.
I have been enchanted with Davis’ so
called “mirco-fictions” for the many years that I’ve been reading her—having
myself written a book also of very short fictions. Her works, which are very
much about language, are, however, not as poetically self-referential as my
works, but give the pretense of a narrative thrust that even Scheherazade might
envy. But I rediscovered, listening to her works of the other night—stories from
a new collection that she gathered under various related processes and topics:
dream stories, letters of complaint, very short, almost maxim-like comedies,
and, what one might describe as somewhat acerbic reactions to criticisms of her
work (one hilariously describing her as a lazy author for using contractions
such as “can’t and won’t”). Since she had also just spoken to a classroom of
students at Cal Arts, Davis punctuated her excellent readings with statements
of her own techniques and approaches, including the relationship of these very
short pieces with her, often, very long translations, such as Proust’s Swann’s Way.
What I realized, however, in hearing her
stories (I have no actual texts available to me, since this represents a
soon-to-be-published book) is that, unlike her one longer fiction, which speaks
of “ending” the tale, most of her works of fiction function more as
“beginnings” with ironic closure that stories with a beginning, middle, and
end. One of Davis’ remarkable eccentricities (and I say that word to suggest
only its positive connotations) is that her tales are almost finished before
they have begun, shutting down at the very moment when a writer of lesser
talent and linguistic assuredness, might just started. And in that sense, Davis
relies on the reader more than most writers to imagine and involve him or herself in the tale in order to finish
it. If she were a comedian, she might write (and, at times, almost does)
something like “A minister and a rabbi come into a bar...,” stopping even
before the punch line, or finishing it more like the “standard” comic line:
“the bartender says, what is this some kind of joke?” Davis’ works are pared
down to the refined of linguistic punch-lines, so eloquently expressed (she
talks about how most of her revisions are in the arrangement of the words) that
we have to rethink the tale in order understand, or, put another way, we have
to work our way again through her terse language in order to perceive the
profoundness of her nearly deconstructed story.
When we do finally “get the
message”—although there are no true messages
in Davis’ work, only questions that basically remain unanswered—the superficial
irony of the tale has almost been lost as we sink into the deeper meanings
behind her lurch into narrative.
In the longer pieces, Davis explores the
meaning of things, as in her brilliantly satiric letter of complaint to a
company who has sent her a letter of award for Woman of the Year, chosen by a mysterious 10,000 judges—if only she
might pay $149 for a plain letter of award or $249 for a laminated edition.
Beyond that they have spelled her name wrong! The question boils down to
whether she is actually stupid or purposefully deluded by the meaningless
award. Bit by bit, the author explores all the logical and illogical avenues of
such the absurd “logic” of such a pontification.
But throughout, Davis’ marvelous tales are
not at an “end of the story,” but merely a beginning, a salvo into the dark
silence of the white page. Like Beckett, Davis’ work, ultimately, is about “won’t
and can’t,” shifting always into I “will,” I “must” go on. That “going on” is
the marvel of her nascent creations. “Did I ever tell you,” Davis might as well
begin, without entirely ever finishing what she might want to tell us. We must,
in joy and delight, complete her “endings.”
Los Angeles,
November 15, 2013
