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- - - - Copyright 2003 EBSCO Publishing
- - - - Title: 'Samuel Johnson Is Indignant,' by Lydia Davis; McSweeney's Books (201 pages, $16.95)
"SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT: that Scotland has so few trees." That's it. In a recent issue of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, Lydia Davis told her publisher, megawatt literary star Dave Eggers, that she jotted the line, taken from a report by Boswell, in a notebook she keeps. "I liked it and ... over the years I began to see that it could make a whole piece," she said. What did she see? We are clearly meant to see something more than a bit of marginalia or a literary anecdote. Davis is a serious writer and an accomplished translator, most notably of the works of French literary theorist Maurice Blanchot (including his exquisite 12-page novel, "The Madness of the Day"). Davis, like Blanchot, often seems as interested in demonstrating how a story works as she is in telling a story. What makes a story for Davis is not just the machinery of the plot and the interactions of the characters (though many of her stories have both), but what goes on around the words: the act of reading, the knowledge the reader brings, the action of the reader's imagination. Davis' stories are narrative distilled to pure essence. By carefully considering and polishing each word in her elegant miniatures, Davis means for us to see the experience of reading as the story. In "Almost Over: Separate Bedrooms," she limns the dissolution of a marriage in just three lines: "They have moved into separate bedrooms now. That night she dreams she is holding him in her arms. He dreams he is having dinner with Ben Jonson." What we know of this couple is only what is essential: that they are separated and what separates them. The rest can only be imagined by the reader. Even if the story were expanded into something on the order of "Madame Bovary" or "Anna Karenina," she suggests, the narrative would work in essentially the same way. Many of Davis' stories are set in a world of hyper-sensitive, alienated academics both emotionally and physically insecure. "All this time we have been employed by our universities only to teach from year to year without even the security of tenure," while desiring the security of an endowed chair, says the narrator of "Special Chair." The job applicant of "The Meeting" has taken special care in choosing a book to read while waiting: " ... Once I got in there he might even ask me what I was reading-Wait, he might say, is that Addison?" Not all of Davis' stories are set in this world. There are epigrams and fables. One of the most successful stories is an epigrammatic biography of Marie Curie, in which the passage of time is beautifully rendered in a single, evocative line: "And now the red curls of Perrin, discoverer of Brownian motion, have become white." Lydia Davis' stories are ultimately about words, in the same way that the paintings of Jackson Pollock, for example, are ultimately about paint. There is an element of trickery involved. The trick is that any narrative, any story, is ultimately just an illusion of words arranged in such a way that we imagine we are seeing characters operating in a recognizable world, just as in a painting we are always seeing daubs of paint rather than trees or buildings or people. That works of art can be broken down and yet still retain their power is a testament to the force of the imagination, both the artist's and audience's. - - - - (c) 2001, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Visit Philadelphia Online, the Inquirer's World Wide Web site, at http://www.philly.com/ Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.- - - -
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