The art of the fragment in Lydia Davis
Precursors in Turgenev and Fénéon
Housekeeping
The next bookclub is on 26th November, 19.00 UK time. We are reading Darwin. Selected Letters and The Origin of Species. For letters, any edition will do, and it’s less essential than Origin.
On November 9th, I am running my final salon in the ‘How to Read a Poem’ series.
Lydia Davis, Ivan Turgenev, Félix Fénéon
While I waited for my copy of Lydia Davis’ new collection, I read two of her precursors: Félix Fénéon and Ivan Turgenev. When we talk about Davis and influences, Beckett, Kafka, and Bernhard take centre stage, but Davis is part of a longer, richer tradition of writing than that. To my mind, she is most strongly part of the lineage of fragment writing. She says in Essays II,
what I finally see that I mean when I think of the fragment, old or new, is a text that…suggest[s] that something is missing, but that has the effect of a complete experience.
It’s also notable that Davis is a reader of mystery stories. One way of thinking about her writing is that she creates fragmentary fiction with scenarios that often lend themselves to mystery or thriller settings. Her brevity is designed to leave you with a sense of mystery to explore.
there can be freedom and expansiveness in thrift, because in saying so little, one allows the reader the freedom to enlarge upon what one has said.
Often, Davis’ stories take a strange twist at the end, or simply in what they choose to focus on. The sense of mystery may not be plot based, it may be psychological or existential. Her focus on the small is a focus on the ways in which normal life is a patchwork of weird fragments. In this, she strongly resembles the nineteenth century Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev and the French modernist journalist Félix Fénéon.
Compare this story by Davis, with the one below by Turgenev.
The Dog Hair (2016)
The dog is gone. We miss him. When the doorbell rings, no one barks. When we come home late, there is no one waiting for us. We still find his white hairs here and there around the house and on our clothes. We pick them up. We should throw them away. But they are all we have left of him. We don’t throw them away. We have a wild hope—if only we collect enough of them, we will be able to put the dog back together again.
A wild hope—what a beautiful use of irony to show the way that small domestic sadness can become so intense. Now Turgenev.
The Dog (1878)
Us two in the room; my dog and me.... Outside a fearful storm is howling.
The dog sits in front of me, and looks me straight in the face.
And I, too, look into his face.
He wants, it seems, to tell me something. He is dumb, he is without words, he does not understand himself—but I understand him.
I understand that at this instant there is living in him and in me the same feeling, that there is no difference between us. We are the same; in each of us there burns and shines the same trembling spark.
Death sweeps down, with a wave of its chill broad wing....
And the end!
Who then can discern what was the spark that glowed in each of us?
No! We are not beast and man that glance at one another....
They are the eyes of equals, those eyes riveted on one another.
And in each of these, in the beast and in the man, the same life huddles up in fear close to the other.
These stories share a sense of the sorrowful: in Turgenev that is done in an existential-tragic mode, while Davis is tragi-comic. There are two more Turgenev stories at the bottom, which shows the way that Turgenev catches psychology and irony so sharply in such a short space. Davis’ project, in one sense, has been to continue that with more subtlety.
Davis also has the lapidary quality of Félix Fénéon, whose work can only be experienced, not described. Here are a few examples, from Novels in Three Sentences.
Notary Limard killed himself on the landing stage in Lagny. So that he would not float away if he fell in, he had anchored himself with string.
Wether by suicide, accident, or crime, Dalmasso, a carpenter of Nice, fractured his skull falling from the fourth floor.
Following the exhumation of the remains of his wife, whom he may have poisoned, M. Pinguet, of Chemault, Loiret, was locked up.
In Verlinghem, Nord, Mme Ridez, 30, had her throat cut by a thief while her husband attended Mass.
Mms Tripier fired twice (blanks, she claimed) at her father, Marquet, of Montberthault, Cote-d’Or, in a dispute over a small boat.
These were news stories (novels is translated from nouvelles, which can means news or novella) to which Fénéon brought the careful attention of Modernism. Davis herself often starts from things that happen to her, careful to explain in interviews that fiction takes the events beyond her. We see this in Fénéon too. In both of them, the boundary between the true and the fictional is not easy to discern.
Two Turgenev fragments
The Contented Man
A young man goes skipping and bounding along a street in the capital. His movements are gay and alert; there is a sparkle in his eyes, a smirk on his lips, a pleasing flush on his beaming face.... He is all contentment and delight.
What has happened to him? Has he come in for a legacy? Has he been promoted? Is he hastening to meet his beloved? Or is it simply he has had a good breakfast, and the sense of health, the sense of well-fed prosperity, is at work in all his limbs? Surely they have not put on his neck thy lovely, eight-pointed cross, O Polish king, Stanislas?
No. He has hatched a scandal against a friend, has sedulously sown it abroad, has heard it, this same slander, from the lips of another friend, and—has himself believed it!
Oh, how contented! how kind indeed at this minute is this amiable, promising young man!
February 1878.
A Rule of Life
‘If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly, and even to harm him,’ said a crafty old knave to me, ‘you reproach him with the very defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself. Be indignant ... and reproach him!
‘To begin with, it will set others thinking you have not that vice.
‘In the second place, your indignation may well be sincere.... You can turn to account the pricks of your own conscience.
‘If you, for instance, are a turncoat, reproach your opponent with having no convictions!
‘If you are yourself slavish at heart, tell him reproachfully that he is slavish ... the slave of civilisation, of Europe, of Socialism!’
‘One might even say, the slave of anti-slavishness,’ I suggested.
‘You might even do that,’ assented the cunning knave.
February 1878.