Uncovering Comfort in the Work of Lydia Davis
An Advocation for Moments without Context
Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a University of Virginia English Department special lecture titled “Thirty (but really thirty-two) Pieces of Advice for Writers” by Lydia Davis. If you are unfamiliar with Davis, put simply she is a modern American writer whose work revels in straddling the threshold between poetry and short prose. Her writings range from pieces a few pages in length, like the story “Kafka Cooks Dinner,” to only a few perfunctory lines, as in “Collaboration with a Fly,” which goes: “I put the word on the page, / but he added the apostrophe.” (That’s it.)
Davis’s guidance generally circulated within the usual counsel imparted upon aspiring writers — immediately take note of inspirations, be open to revision, read the “greats,” and so on. However, her craft talk was uniquely colored by the way she was able to personify and vocalize her literary philosophy. Davis’s works operate within an environment precluding situational context. She manifests humor within her pieces by precisely plucking language from its circumstance of origin, then wipes away all elements of context when she then places those words on a page. For example, she explained that she educates herself on how to more acutely handle description by reading detailed texts such as a dictionary or a weather phenomenon encyclopedia. “Fresh gale,” she pithed, “some twigs broken from trees, cars veer on road, progress on foot is seriously impeded. Whole gale: Trees are broken off or uprooted, saplings bent and deformed,” and so forth. It was not her reading from seemingly monotonous texts that struck me, but rather her ability to find meaning, and even humor, in words without context. There was something oddly comforting about her ability to appreciate things so simply — most especially in the haze and aftermath of the recent presidential election.
I, like many, have been unsettled by the contentious tide of the recent political events. As a result, it unfortunately seems to have contextualized even the most benign interactions — like a conversation with a stranger at a bar. In having this political chat (clearly my first mistake), I expressed my concern for women. In response to my anxieties, this stranger gleefully toted his active service in the military, stating that he would gladly “lay down [his] life for [mine], when a man inevitably tries to rape [me].” I stood there flabbergasted, wide-eyed, and silent — a reaction he clearly misinterpreted as speechless appreciation. Who could blame him really — a scenario where a stranger appears to rescue you from an “inevitable” assault on your humanity, how romantic. In that moment, Donald Trump, his rhetoric, and his soon to be presidency came to contextualize my gender’s fate.
Only days later, towards the end of her talk, Davis mentioned an overheard conversation between an elderly couple at a restaurant. I immediately thought of my misfortune at the bar. As the room was sprinkled with laughter at the thought of this un-contextualized conversation, purported to be sex talk between aged lovers (but really about overstuffed luggage), something struck me. Perhaps in times such as these, where an event seems to overshadow all interactions, Davis’s writing technique offers small consolation. Within some moments of your day-to-day being, if you strip away Trump; if you wipe away the election; if you erase gender, race, class, and sexual orientation; if you preclude context, we are all still human. In our pursuits of equality, whatever they may be, we cannot let situations spiral us into despair. There can still be humor, happiness, or love even in the tiniest of observations — whether that be in an overheard conversation, or the pages of an innocuous text. The context of these upcoming four years will be difficult for this country. So for the preservation of our humanity, we should remember the philosophy of Lydia Davis — sometimes things can operate best without context.
