Flâneuse of the Quotidian

If I say that I'm writing from home, where is my writing directed to? If I say that I'm writing at home, it would seem that I also write when I'm not at home and my location needs to be specified. Three years into this thesis, there is no preposition that accurately describes the spatiality of my writing. And so the letter 'i' in what I type keeps looking like a diminished exclamation mark. In Spanish, you see, we use exclamation (and interrogation) marks to open a given expression: "¡". But I'm writing in English, and in English, I find it difficult to shout.

I suppose the limits of my language do mean the limits of my world. It is true that the more I stay at home, the more I write. And yet, every time I feel like I'm not writing when I should, I find myself at home. Certainly, I was lucky enough to be able to reproduce a studying space at home during lockdown; but contrary to idealised productivity, I've found myself diligently attending to domestic signifiers that prevent me from getting any work done. Last Monday, I decided that the name "mushroom" does not represent the opinionated character of this fungus. The word in Spanish, "champiñón", or, for that matter, in French, "champignon" is in fact more accurate.

I think of Lydia Davis.

In the late '80s, Marjorie Perloff established Lydia Davis as a remarkable example of what she calls postexperimental fiction, "the return to normative realism, to the recounting of ordinary incidents that stand synecdochically for the larger fabric of life."1 Over thirty years, Davis has continued to create minimalist mosaics of the quotidian that, as Perloff suggests, represent existence as a chain of somewhat minor events. For some a nondescript space, the quotidian in Davis's stories stands for a place nonetheless rich with information. Engaging with the affordance of objects, her narrator dives into a series of associations that often result in self-interrogation. The quotidian for Davis is an intellectual minefield — the potential for action.

Davis pushes association to its cognitive limits much in the spirit of Gaston Bachelard, "a thinker who urges the reader to discover an excess of association" in the spaces we inhabit.2 Privileging inner speech over conventional storytelling based on plotting, Davis shares Bachelard's phenomenal interest in the impression of quotidian space, which she attends to as a rare, extraordinary opportunity for self-interrogation in language. Swaying between the attentive, the lyrical, and the humorous, Davis's "domestic" pieces enact Alain Badiou's philosophical theory of the event, which he sees as "something that brings light to a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable . . . not by itself the creation of reality [but] the creation of a possibility" that is yet "merely a proposition."3 In what follows, I look at some of the pieces that prompt my reading of Davis as a flâneuse of the quotidian, committed to the linguistic observation of domestic events and the ways they invite her to wander not only the streets of Arles but the slopes of her own mind. 

According to Bruno Latour, "in addition to 'determining' and serving as a 'backdrop for human action', things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on."4 This emphasis on the affordance of objects in a space often reduced to a frame of human activities is explicit in Davis's "The Language of Things in the House"; a story where an almost incidental narrator puts together an orchestra of sorts carried on by the sounds made by home appliances and kitchen utensils:

"Once the chain of possible inferences is set into motion, there is no end to the desire of knowledge," Perloff says.6 A territory of possible, previously unthinkable meaning becomes available through the narrator's association of sounds and words. Remarkably, although said association is not entirely justified, it rests on an inexplicable logical pursuit that in fact disappears if we arrange objects and sounds arbitrarily. Something about the plates saying "neglected" makes sense; whereas it would not to hear them say "Pakistani." Whether we attribute this ulterior logic to the alliteration of "rattling" and "rack" — the latter of which modulates into the "c" sound repeated in "neglected," or associate the "te" sound in "plates" with "neglected"— or not, something in the narrator's observation eludes capricious interpretation.

The role of the narrator as witness of an orchestra is in fact emphasised by self-reflexive interventions, whereby she attempts to understand her thinking process:

Presumably, these argumentative fragments will convince the reader that, while subjective, these are not fully arbitrary connections. "The affordance of objects," Steven Connor explains in Paraphernalia, "means that they are not merely externally loaded with associations and connotation, but that we find ourselves implicated in, or apprehended by, them."8 In Davis's story, the narrator's observation is prompted by the "performance" of domestic objects, which invite an examination of the relationship between sounds and words in the human mind, more specifically, in her own head. 

In the same way that the narrator starts speculating on the ways the human mind responds to "the words . . . spoken by the things in our house," we are invited to conjecture the story's fictive context by means of association. While it is not evident why the narrator finds specific words like "firefighter" and "Pakistani" in the sounds made by the washing machine, linguistic association may be rooted in experience. The domestic environment, for instance, may suggest that the narrator had been listening to the news. Undoubtedly, many interpretations are elicited, and none will be proved; yet, they are not cancelled out. 

A similar reading experience takes place in "The Cornmeal", where action seems to find its way even in the most imperceptible manifestation:

Minute as a droplet, the word "too" prompts a series of associations in the reader, who wonders what the adverb is referring to. Is the condensation a parallel event to morning dew? Is it simply a reference to the beginning of the day? Or to the narrator's waking? Who, put simply, is also taking action?

Perloff argues that postexperimental stories tend to be "singularly devoid of plotting, characterization, description, and figurative language."10 However, readers may respond to narrative minimalism and, much in the spirit of Davis, find themselves drawn into the logic of making meaning through association. It may be the case, for example, that we gender the narrator based on associations with other stories where a woman's voice has been made explicit.11 However, although "we learn little about the 'I' who tells these stories," Perloff admits that they "convey great personal feeling."12 This emotional characterisation, I would say, is often a consequence of the mental engagement prompted by an assessment of the language of things in the house. 

For Perloff, individual words in Davis's fiction entail a physical presence that takes part in "the network of action and reaction, event and interpretation." ¹³ As such, expressing the language of things in the house complicates the quotidian, revisiting it as a space made of fortuitous events that nonetheless suggest an ulterior logic. The narrator's associations, however, are not only limited to the things around her, but also to her frame of mind. In "The Dog Hair," for instance, observation of an almost imperceptible element allows for the proposition of an action and an emotional characterisation of the narrator and their partner, who are grieving the loss of their pet:

Living in a household altered by the death of a family member, the couple is caught up in a now silent, somewhat empty space. The narrator's reflection, however, rests on a paradox. Even though the dog "is gone," it is his hair that elicits the narrator's inner speech: the fact that dog's hair remains reminds them that he is not there anymore. Action, bringing the dog back by collecting the hairs around the house, is only ideated, an impossible event prompted, almost haphazardly, by an element in the house. 

Latour's Actor-network theory claims that "any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference in an actor [is] an 'actant'," or non-human actor.15 In Davis's domestic pieces, matter, in all its physical manifestations, acts on the narrator as these small but significant events allow for a subtle emotional characterisation. In "The Dog Hair," the "ordinary turbulence"16 of the days gone by without the pet is addressed in a simple, unceremonious tone which may seem at odds with the solemn, potential act of hair-collecting. Compare the narrator's emotional engagement in the dog story with Davis's epigrammatic "Housekeeping Observation":

Humorous and optimistic as the statement is, simply knowing that the floor is very clean underneath does not constitute an action, as it would to sweep the dirt away. While this piece enacts an anticipatory detachment from action similar to the dog hair collecting, the narrator's clever, matter-of-fact tone also indicates a subtle emotional engagement in her observation. What at a first glance could be regarded as mere description of a space, an observation taking place in a hypothetical setting, realised by a hypothetical speaker at a hypothetical time, turns out to be someone's very specific account, evinced by the dirt's modifier: "this." The narrator's "interaction" with the floor in the form of a mental observation points to a particular circumstance that we as readers ignore: the narrator may have been too tired or busy to clean. As objective as it is, "Housekeeping Observation" contains a minimal subjective charge that insinuates a narrator's personal account in a specific place, looking at "this [and not any] dirt."

As Josh Cohen points out, Davis's "casualness . . . has the paradoxical effect of inducing us to listen to [an] anterior dimension of language . . . microscopically exacting focus on the contingent detail of everyday life, bringing to light a stubbornly untranslatable enigma at the heart of the ordinary."18 For Cohen, Davis's language alienates words from their ordinariness, inviting its reader into a number of possibilities. What is more, it examines the narrator's relationship to that ordinariness, a thought process that, in itself, estranges the idea of normality.

Davis's stories address the question of normality, understood as the span of time in which nothing really extraordinary happens, by observing possible, merely suggested action. This is the case in "The Cows," a narrator's observation of her bovine neighbours who "come from behind the barn as though something is going to happen, and then nothing happens."19 The space between action and motionlessness is reduced to the narrator's observation; when things are noticed, a different account can be considered: 

The observation of the cows subtly questions the limits between inertia and deliberate action, for it is never clear whether the cows change position out of physical or emotional discomfort. As seen in the previous stories, Davis's "characteristic [almost scientific] re-evaluation of the quotidian,"21 in Jonathan Evans's words, opens the space for the narrator's awareness of her own perception. Thus, the attention she pays to her surroundings ends up mirroring her own position in the world. By stating that "it is hard to believe a [cow's] life could be so simple,"22 she is in fact suggesting a comparison between the "protected domestic ruminant" and her human, more complex life. Davis's unassuming observation then becomes a characterisation of the narrator herself: the cows are not the only ones ruminating.

The narrator's rumination in the domestic space, characterised by detailed attention and at times excessive association in the present, revolves around action or its lack. Touching on narrative paralysis, some of these stories create the illusion of a photograph in which the narrator attends to her body in relation to objects, as in "Hand":

Blurring the line between the space she inhabits and her own body, the narrator evaluates herself with the same attention that she does the domestic space. In her characteristically unassuming tone, Davis's use of the present tense conveys the narrator's awareness of this specific, fleeting moment, and her relationship to the space (we may anticipate the extra hand turning the page at some point). Interestingly, it is her position that allows her to reconsider her own body not as a witness of the material world, but as an element of it. The "extra hand" out of focus contrasts with the book she is holding, an object which seems more in harmony with her sense of self than her own body. 

A flâneuse of the quotidian, Davis suggests linguistic events and raises important questions about the ways in which the domestic informs other worlds. More importantly, she exerts a phenomenological approach to the makings of meaning and how we come to understand ourselves as part of the world. As Davis's narrator states in "Lost Things,"

To some extent, it may be implied that possible events like finding the lost things could take place within the story world, but the process of acting on this awareness remains outside the moment of narration. This may respond to the reader's eagerness to know more and her feelings about narrative uncertainty. Finding those things remains merely a possibility: they have been verbalised as lost, yet, it is only that observation that is offered in terms of action. The dirt is never swept away; the dog is never put back together.

Action in Davis's domestic stories is often created out of its own absence, suggested only by the possibility that comes with linguistic attention to the quotidian. Davis's language revisits an alleged disconnection between the extraordinary and the mundane in a way that interrogates the creation of meaning. It is the language of curiosity, quiet and unassuming, yet sharp and acute, reflective in its endeavour. As Cohen states, her fiction "invites its reader's desire to interpret and explain its pervasive enigmas . . . There is in her writing an incessant, oddly ingenuous investigative drive, a curiosity [of] obsessive colouring."25 These stories do accentuate the pervasive enigmas but render the quotidian space a somewhat autonomous territory of which she is only a part.

I'm sitting at my desk. I catch myself looking from time to time towards the open kitchen. There it is: the pan next to the sink. It has not been washed and it seems as if the orange fat on the water's surface becomes more confident as the days pass. It's so thick that I suspect I could write on it with the end of a knife. Contrary to my lower back and hips, which are sinking in my chair, the bright layer of fat grows, defying my attention, indifferent to my impulse to throw it away. I turn my eyes and try to concentrate on ideas worth writing. But I cannot write about anything else: the thought is sticky against my head like the orange fat on the water's surface of the unwashed pan.

I write about Lydia Davis.

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Inés García (@InesMorita) is a Mexican writer, translator, and PhD candidate in English at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research project, "Acts of Form: Self and Theory in Contemporary Writing," looks at anecdotal theory and autotheory in contemporary women's writing. She has been published in Poligrafías and Still Point.

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