Context

Acknowledging, let alone creating, new perspectives from which to view life and literature is liberating, yes, but also morally imperative. Hailed in 1999 by Vince Passaro of Harper’s Magazine as one of this generation’s masters of the short story, Lydia Davis is, ironically, at work refuting or at very least reinventing that form, as well as sawing off at knee height any signposts that might tell us a book of a certain length, breadth and symmetry is indeed what we are used to calling a "novel." An accomplished translator (currently working on the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time) and the author of six works of fiction, Davis demands that we take another look at our process of thinking, particularly as it corresponds to the act of writing and its semi-inevitable outcome: story.

I will concentrate my attention on her novel, for that is what truly won me over. (The End of the Story disoriented me, rearranging my perception of the surrounding world: I’d become Lydia Davis-ized.) But first, let’s look at the stories. Stunning and peculiar, they provide an excellent series of sketches, intellectual and artistic, some of which the novel elaborates. In Break It Down (containing stories from earlier collections) and the most recent book, Almost No Memory, many pieces are notably brief, a paragraph or a page long, and have the quality of parables, minus obvious meaning or intent. Others are joyous, nervous romps through language, riddles that embody twists and turns of consciousness, carnival rides taken in service of logic. On one level, these works satisfy our desire for narrative, for sitting at the campfire and hearing what it’s all about. Yet they tease us, withhold expected outcome by magnifying or miniaturizing key elements—in "Visit to Her Husband," a concise account of a meeting between a woman and her estranged husband ends with understated action which, rather than offering itself as metaphor, shifts the focus to a scrutinized internal reality:

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.

Serious, post-nineties, post-post nineties, self-consciousness afflicts many of Davis’s characters. In "Almost No Memory," we find logic that disorients one step faster than it clarifies:

Sometimes she would only read and think, and sometimes she would make a note in her current notebook of what she was reading in a notebook from an earlier time, or she would make a note of an idea that came to her from what she was reading. Other times she would want to make a note but choose not to, since she did not think it quite right to make a note of what was already a note, though she did not fully understand what was not right about it.

Making sense of things feels like vertigo, yet provides an antidote to the gloss and polish usually pawned off as perception. In the title story of Break It Down, a man attempts to affix cost to a love affair. It starts out easy enough, for there are only X number of days together and X dollars spent, but the endeavor gets more complicated when he factors in time away from the lover—this, too, sweetened by longing—and the painful period after the affair is over, which lasts much longer than, for instance, the total of hours spent in bed. You might claim, wearily, that these people think too damn much. Yet what initially may appear to be a bristly neurosis actually reflects a quest for authenticity in relationship to ourselves and others. (This is most evident in the later collection.)

Davis is committed to realigning our systems of storytelling; her dialogue with the components of craft is often center stage. In "The Family," Davis breaks down a scene, numbering each human action. This staging, both visual and literary, fractures the story, at the same time displaying the desire to create order in a nonsensical or painful world. In some pieces, a story is being written as the (written) story unfolds. The act of writing, along with its attendant decisions and expectations, become characters themselves. Inviting in these mischief makers, in particular memory (one of the more mercurial and necessary aspects of communication), changes the nature of the game. And so we come to The End of the Story.

A woman is writing a novel about a love affair, or, more specifically, the end of the affair. What the woman is really doing is writing a novel about writing a novel about a love affair that has ended, and so we have a woman writing a novel about a woman who is writing a novel about a story—the affair—which changes as it is written, as it is remembered and newly remembered. But in any case, here’s something: it’s a novel about a love affair. So what do you expect to find within? Sex, hopefully. Then some emotions—the passion, the blossoming of feelings, the romantic knowingness, the kinship, the rapport, the soul mate business. But none of that is in The End of the Story—or not exactly.

Consider the ruminations of a writer in "The Center of the Story":

Perhaps if she takes out things that are not interesting, or do not belong in the story for other reasons, this will give it more of a center, since as soon as there is less in a story, more of it must be in the center.

This statement is true, tantalizing, maddening—and illuminates the choices Davis herself makes regarding what to leave out of this novel: besides roses and steamed-up windows, many other expected notions and guideposts: the lover’s name, for instance. This unnamed person, like the unnamed narrator, and the unnamed town, become real to us not because of phylum or placement on the equator, but despite this. By shedding the name, something else emerges—in this case, a deep sense of the personal. (Think about how you know those closest to you, a family member or a lover. Frequently, darkly and deeply, as he, as she. The vast she that you live within, like the weather.) The namelessness of the lover creates heightened particularity, at the same time giving his character the edge of the purely subjective. How perfect for love, and for this novel. The story emerges from the lover’s absence—from the end of the story.

Indeed, the novel opens with the conclusion of the affair, and we are privy to the narrator’s opinions on the pros and cons of beginning this way, as well as other decisions about how to tell the story. Toward the end of the novel, for instance, we witness the narrator’s discovery of the end. She experiences the moment, familiar to artists, when the clay bakes hard, the object is no longer malleable, and the maker is stunned that her hands no longer have a part to play in forming the world (did they ever?).

But now I suspect that I did not really have much choice about my vocabulary either, or anything else, and in fact the novel had to be just this long, leave out this much, include this much, change the facts this much, have this much description, be precise here but vague there, literal here but metaphorical there, use complete sentences here but incomplete there, an ellipsis here but none there, contracted verbs here but not there, etc.

The reader is forced out of the story of the affair itself; will not, alas, be swept up in a seamless narrative, flipping through pages as she follows the heroine across snow-swept fields. Instead of offering a static, summed-up product, Davis presents us with the apparent process of creation. Jarred by the narrator’s (or even the author’s) presence, we construe writing as a fallible act. Pinched awake when our original expectations are not met, our sense of fictive reality is lost, and we are left with doubt.

Beautiful, glorious doubt—it ravages lives, paralyzes us or makes us moral beings. We are trained to be sure—as writers, readers, lovers—but doubt! Where can it lead?

I say at one point that I fell in love with him quite suddenly, and that it happened when we were staring at each other by candlelight. But this seems too easy, and I also can’t remember just what candlelight I was talking about. There was no candlelight in the café the first evening, and there was no candlelight in my house later that night either, so I evidently don’t mean that I fell in love with him the first night. And yet I do remember that even as soon as the next morning, when I saw him again, I felt a sudden, strong emotion. The search is on; there is strength in questioning and much to fear in answers (or at very least, much to find boring).

And here, on the dark street, we meet the mysterious sister of imagination, memory. Memoirists, lovers, storytellers at the bar all use her—and what she tells by what is left out can render character like nothing else. There is something extraordinary and truthful about how our own pasts, for example, change as we view them from various angles (not to mention as they intersect with the perspectives of other people, or are challenged by source documents or photographs). Can a good story be written that accommodates the tidal tug of memory? It’s hard; verisimilitude is king. With hubris and anxiety and humor and a kind of weird honesty, Davis shows that it’s possible to use the attributes of memory, the qualities of doubt, to enhance, to reinvent, story.

Love loves mystery—the sense that you have not captured, you may never capture. The love object is, in part, a blank page—excellent opportunity for a writer. For there is something peculiar, isn’t there, with writer-lovers? Something a little untoward. What are they doing, what are they imagining, what stories are they weaving as you simply try to enjoy your Saturday night dinner? For Davis, the words themselves are the real lovers. (And oh, they are inconsistent. They lie. They create miracles.) The End of the Story isn’t so much a love story about a fellow without a name, virtually faceless, it’s an affair with language. Have courage, a friend writes the narrator, and these words are a talisman to her. Long after the affair is over, the woman and her lover exchange works of art (a poem, a story) in a duet of distance (or shared passion). At the beginning of their relationship, they read passages from their journals—words more intimate than can be said freestyle. These details rely on the electric charge of words, but beyond them, woven through the novel as clearly as the end of the story, is indication that to put language to an emotion or a situation changes it. Writing kills off one thing to create something new—how do you write a story about that, she asks.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

CONTEXT is available at bookstores nationwide.