Since leaving my full-time job as a dull paddle in the digital content churn, I’ve avoided superlatives. The most, the worst: arrogant, ahistorical. I’ve continued to gravitate toward writers who make assertions as a kind of play, though: Marguerite Duras, Sarah Manguso. I’m often delighted when it’s a woman (or any person somehow coded as meek) making the claims; her narrowness feels more prismatic in a lot of contexts. She’s asserting, but she’s also assuming the performed role of assertive person. She pokes fun at the genre while participating in it.
With this in mind, I’ll say it: Until recently, I’d always held the belief that Lydia Davis is the most overrated living writer. Bon mots are for saying, not for writing down. Ditto memories of dreams.
My relationship with Lydia Davis has been a lot like my relationship with shrimp, the food to which I’m most averse. When shrimp’s around, I think: this time, it’ll be different. Shrimp is seafood; shrimp is a pale pink; shrimp smells like the Gulf. Every shrimp has a little tail, a soft, bright shell. I’ll simply remove the bright shell! It’ll be just like slipping out of a comfortable dress while visiting my parents on the Gulf, in their best imitation of the home where we all lived while I was growing up.
But my aversion to shrimp is deep and semantic: that shrimp is—or, oh my god—isn’t!—deveined. That a shrimp was once—or still was, at the time of its consumption, by me—visibly in possession of a tiny, black intestine. My understanding of shrimp as having been, or having not been, deveined, is inextricable (unlike veins, apparently) from my experience of eating shrimp.
Deveined is to shrimp as dreams are to Lydia Davis. The problem was never that she’d dreamed—all writers, I assume, have dreamed—but that her dreams have been made visible. Unlike the shrimp, whose display isn’t exactly willed—except maybe collectively, if you can allow me the stretchy claim (the metaphor) that evolution is the result of some collective will—Lydia Davis has chosen to make her dreams visible. What a thing to do. Entire stories by Lydia Davis are the result of her attempt to translate a dream into language. For the unfamiliar: I mean literally. These stories are sometimes a couple of sentences long. Strange, I always felt, to call that a story. But, as with shrimp, I felt like I must be missing something, and I would come to appreciate Lydia Davis next time.
The mystery of a dream—and its purpose, I’ll claim—is its untranslatability. On a handful of early mornings in the last several years, I’ve woken up laughing. Whoever I’d been sleeping next to whenever this happened has always been a little disturbed: What’s so funny? At first I feel irritated (why was I being asked, while still partly inside the world of the dream, which was so funny, to explain it, to socialize?) and wistful (I could never return to that particular dream). Then: Well, okay: If I’m here now, I’ll explain; I’ll invite you in; we’ll recreate this funny situation in language; it’ll be fun! Then I’ll explain about the produce. I’ll explain about his mother and my friend Jessie’s bon mot. Also about my Tuesday boss sitting in the yellow-room chair sideways. Whoever I’d been sleeping next to will ask me if I’m okay.
My tendency not to share my own dreams, especially dreams that’ve moved me to totally unconscious laughter, to anyone other than who I’ve been sleeping next to, and even then warily, is that they never translate well; I’m always left trailing off: You had to be there. To be left trailing off you had to be there is a mark of failure when telling a story. Telling a story is to make social, to legibly recreate a felt situation. I guess this is why we say it’s bad form—boring, antisocial—to go on about our dreams. It’s probably also why a professor of mine always said dreams are a copout in fiction; what’s more interesting is how all that unprocessed gloop is involved when a person’s awake, talking, acting, being social.
(Of course, the shrimp’s visible intestine, or my knowledge of the shrimp’s visible intestine—all shrimp having once had a visible intestine, regardless of their state when they’ve arrived with their friends on the lip of a glass—disgusts me because it reminds me of my own invisible intestines.)
A lot of people tweeted about having strange dreams during lockdown. Maybe they were forced to be less social than they had ever been, so their unprocessed gloop surfaced gloopier. For me, a nearly opposite thing happened: I stopped remembering my dreams at all. The person I was sleeping next to at the time told a lot of stories when we were awake (often the same stories, canted), so, in that way (the way of listening to stories), I felt more social than ever. And, in other ways (the way of telling stories to a very attentive audience), I felt less social than ever. When I wasn’t listening to stories, I spent a lot of time in a dream state, looking out the window at whatever was or wasn’t yet again in bloom or was again already. Blank branches whipped around in tight circles.
In a static image, isolated moment, or very short story, the suggestion of the moment’s place in a long timeline can be marked by the absence of something particular. The shrimp once had a dark, visible intestine. We can use words to signal this absence, which suggests a long timeline, words like deveined. Deveined suggests that the shrimp had once lived and is no longer living. Deveined contains the lifecycle of a shrimp. For me, on some gloopy level, this is deeply repellent.
Before I stopped dreaming, I had thought, unconsciously, that a social life is the material of dreams, but dreams aren’t the material of a social life, that this relation flows in one direction.
Then lockdown ended, and I stopped sleeping next to the person who told a lot of stories, and I started dreaming again. I’m not sure in what direction the relation between these events flowed, or whether the relation between these events flowed only in one direction.
Sometime after that, I started quoting Lydia Davis when my students asked about contractions. I hadn’t remembered reading her work closely enough that I could accurately quote it, and I was pretty sure I had gotten the gist, but that I was probably missing something important, each word in a short Lydia Davis story carrying as much weight as it does. When I checked my copy of Can’t and Won’t to see whether I had accurately quoted its title story, I was surprised to find that I had; at least I was pretty sure that I had, although I could no longer remember the exact wording I had used out loud in class.
Apparently, I liked Lydia Davis more than I realized.
This week, I read through the latest issue of NOON, a journal I’ve always realized I’ve liked, and was surprised to find myself moved to tears by Lydia Davis’s relatively long story, “Undated Slips of Paper from the Wooden Box: Starting in 2022 and going back to the 1990s”. The story includes notes taken while reading a biography of Robert Walser, notes taken after looking at a hummingbird, fragments of things her mother had said, and this memory of a dream: “Who is this very opinionated woman disagreeing and saying, ‘No, you won’t last an hour standing on a tea table!’? She has some strong existence, some selfhood somewhere, though she has only appeared in my dream during a very brief afternoon nap.”
Where else was this very opinionated woman’s selfhood? Making no sense in the plot of things, she could only exist inside Lydia Davis’s unprocessed gloop.
Although it moved me to tears, this was a pretty ordinary dream for me, not having been the one who dreamed it. That Lydia Davis wanted to translate it, to make it social, is enough to suggest it was at least slightly less than ordinary for her, extraordinary enough to record, which is, no matter what sort of recorder you are, still a cut above ordinary, considering the impossibility of recording everything, even if one spent one’s entire life recording, in a feedback loop of recording recordings, never catching up with oneself.
A cut above ordinary, barely more than life itself, unconsciously lived. To put down only this fine layer of experience—to make meaning only through the process itself of arranging what you’re moved to put down, and only by excluding the rest—is invention enough (invention in this case being a frame on the world) given the impossibility, again, of recording everything or even nearly everything, unless you’re stuck churning digital content, a whole other gloop, gloopy because too processed: This is my translation of Lydia Davis’s dream stories into a thesis.
Translation can never be perfect, though. In some year between the 1990s and 2022, Lydia Davis was moved to put this down: “Translation: the act of transformation […] is so pleasing that we confuse the pleasure of it with the pleasure of the product itself.” And this, too: “[…] that I search and search for the right translation of a phrase and the only perfect translation is the phrase itself in the original.”
Some clippings from the last few months:
Tom Committa’s The Nature Book, reviewed for The Baffler