Maternal Grammar

If you are, as I am, in the reductive mental habit of categorising things into mothers and fathers, Lydia Davis is a trap into which it is easy to fall: famous mother (real), a mother herself (real), translator of forefathers (literary). Let's dispose of that for the purposes of this short essay. Instead, I want to think about the function of maternity in Davis's short stories, not at the level of biography or even in particular relation to symbolic psychic structures, but as a function of language in the text. What boundaries are drawn between reproductive labour and the work of the writer? How are the burdens and joys of care figured in relation to the distance of the narrative voice? (In mostly eschewing psychoanalytic understandings of the mother I am simply trying to engage on Davis's own terms lest I, like Adam Mars Jones before me, become upset and discombobulated by her refusal to capitulate to a Freudian interpretation of dreams.1) I am not trying to advance a grand unified theory of the mother in Davis's work — nor do I necessarily think that she herself has such a theory — but merely wish to pay attention to the maternal grammar that her stories utilise and create, especially in relation to communication and to time.

The mother, or "Mother" as Davis often renders it, is, of course, a stock character with varying uses: the innocent victim (usually dead), the controlling matriarch, the frustrated symbol of emotional distance and domestic regret (the Betty Draper). In Davis's work, the maternal is most closely aligned with control, by which I mean the kinds of restraint and constraint that are produced by the structural demands made by the nuclear family. As a writer, Davis has a formidable reputation for control, which is both to do with the length of her (very) short stories in particular and more generally with her mastery over multiple modes and forms, including translation. This impressive reputation has sometimes been aligned with the maternal characters in her own texts, although obliquely: in a 2014 review of Can't and Won't in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael LaPointe writes that "A memorable character emerges from the stories of Lydia Davis, and it is Lydia Davis — author, translator, mother, daughter, friend."2 For what it is worth, I don't think this conglomerated character exists in her work. Davis, it seems to me, is interested in mothers and daughters as structures, created and sustained by linguistic features. Individual character reveals itself in relation to familiar and repeated patterns of speech, form, and tone. 

In Davis's grammar of maternal control, the power dynamics revealed by the text are based around learning and telling, rather than learning and teaching, the expected pairing. The fundamental miscommunication between mothers and daughters from the perspective of the daughter/writer in Davis's texts is that the mother is not teaching but telling: there is no room for dialogue or indeed for any kind of reciprocal listening. When the persona of the story is switched, however, and the narrator occupies the role of the mother, the position of that motherhood becomes a shockingly vulnerable one: that of a learner, who is willingly taught by the act of nurturing an infant. (This is, crucially, nonverbal.) It is tempting, then, to assume that it is within the acquisition of language that the conflict between mothers and their children raises its head; I think that it is also within this conflict, and the recording of it in prose, that their bond is able to endure. The shockingly final nature of relationships — namely, that we're all going to die — is kept at bay by the most familiar of all linguistic intimacies: bickering, needling, and criticising. 

In the stories where the narrator is recognisably a daughter rather than a mother, maternal control is the central concern. (We could see this as belonging to a particular tradition of daughterly writing that began in 1978 with the publication of Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl".) Whether the mother's speech is reported or directly recorded, it is within it that their relationship to the daughter-writer is performed. In Davis's work it is most often the former, due to her stated disinterest in "creating narrative scenes between characters', meaning 'whole scenes complete with dialogue." In the same interview, she indicates her preference for the "ongoing narrative inside our heads" as a natural mode. "I'm saying," she says, "that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place."3 

Perhaps the most famous example of this is the story "The Mother":

Unlike a story in the same collection (1986's Break it Down) in which the titular "Mothers" are pluralised as well as defanged and infantilised — "Mothers, when they are guests at dinner, eat well, like children, but seem absent" — the Mother is a prohibitive and intimidating figure.5 It is not necessary to linger over the content of the story to establish an emotional response to its brisk move from what could conceivably be understood as parental encouragement to the bleak absurdism of the large hole and the death wish. In this slippage, protection is problematised. The urge to do better, to be more "practical" is in part recognisable as that maternal responsibility that extends beyond babyhood into the conflicted period of development that is girlhood, and indeed from a certain perspective, even the final sentences are legible as protective in the sense that we arrive at the end point of overwhelming protection itself. (Sometimes it genuinely would be easier, if not necessarily "better," to sleep forever.) In "Mothers," the mothers have ceded their power to protect and control. The story, which begins "Everyone has a mother somewhere," positions them as categorically elsewhere figures, to be pitied for how utterly they have surrendered to time: "It is often the case that they cannot follow what we are doing or saying. It is often the case, also, that they enter the conversation only when it turns on our youth."6 Their suffering is noted and recorded — a fact of history — though not respected: it wins them tolerance, but not relevance. This is far sadder, and far less bearable, than the manipulation and tension rendered by Davis in "The Mother."

Conflict, then, can be a necessary and even generative structure in relationships between mothers and children: in stories like "How Difficult," the battle for control forms a defensive barrier against sympathy, which threatens to destroy the emotional barriers erected between the mother, the daughter, and time. 

Unlike the finality conveyed by the clarity of speech in "The Mother," the failures of communication between mother and daughter function here to keep an ending at bay. A single "moment" of climax or catharsis never comes, meaning at no point does the daughter transcend beyond her subordinate position; she is always on the defensive, on the telephone, and therefore she never has to become that final, fatal thing: the bigger person. 

The safety of this dynamic is threatened in "Notes during Long Phone Conversation with Mother," from Davis's 2014 collection Can't and Won't, which in its entirety reads:

Here, a familiar struggle for mastery is staged: the notes begin in a supercilious tone (the pathos of "pretty dress," the spatially emphasized suggestion of unwieldy conversational length) heightened by the lack of the possessive definite article in front of "Mother" in the title: it could be my mother, and it could be Mother, a character in need of no name. The story moves, however, into unsettling terrain. Does the disintegration of language in the note belong to the speaker — is it a transcript, perhaps, of a stutter, or a textual representation of a failing and elderly memory? — or to the writer who, in control at least of the language that exists outside of the telephone line, is engaged in her own rebellious play at the level of attention as her mind wanders. "Notes," then, can either be read as the former, and therefore a painful — too painful — inversion of the relationship between mother and child, as the mother begins to regress toward a second childhood and can no longer tell things coherently, or as the latter: the narrator, now an adult, does not have to learn language from the mother anymore, but can play with it, distort it, and control it. In "Traveling with Mother", the former possibility is taken to its inevitable fatal conclusion: "Mother," in this story, is a quantity of ashes inside a metal container in her luggage, and the narrator loses direction as the boundary she has long pushed against gives way. She is on a bus, but the destination is unclear. She has prepared careful answers to questions about what she is carrying in her bag, but nobody asks her anything: language has lost its loadedness, its charge. The backpack itself, carefully selected, is "stronger than it needed to be."9

Davis's accounts of maternal life before the child's acquisition of language also rearrange the division between the learner and the teller: the mother, confronted with an entirely new set of experiences, has to learn what the baby — who, speechless, cannot tell — has to teach. This is not without its own tensions. In "What You Learn about the Baby," wry aphorisms — "A problem of balance: if he yawns, he falls over backward" — are interspersed with considerations of ambivalence: 

In a relationship between two speaking subjects, impatience might solidify quickly into bickering, defensiveness or bitterness; this impatience grows into a new kind of understanding. The narrator begins to realise that this is also a problem of balance: "You begin to understand paradox: lying on the bed next to him, you are deeply interested, watching his face and holding his hands, and yet at the same time you are deeply bored, wishing you were somewhere else doing something else." The baby is a patient instructor, and he teaches by showing: "He demonstrates to you what you learned long ago from reading Henri Bergson — that laughter is always preceded by surprise."11 His communication style is refreshing: we are encouraged to notice, through the narrator, "how confident he is, to the limits of his knowledge; how masterful he is, to the limits of his competence; how he derives satisfaction from another face before him, to the limits of his attention; how he asserts his needs, to the limits of his force."12

Interpretation, however, remains a problem. The sound of his needs, when he asserts them, take on such an urgency that they absorb other previously legible sounds: "Listening for his cry, you mistake, for his cry, the wind, seagulls, and police sirens." Violence and disturbance loiter close by, but — more unsettlingly — so does misunderstanding. In "The Old Dictionary," arguably one of Davis's most famous stories, the narrator's care for the eponymous dictionary is compared to the care she gives to her son, creating and then meticulously dismantling the idea that there could ever be a comparison between the needs of a 120-year-old inanimate depository of language and a living human child. The dictionary's primary function is to make meaning intelligible; the son, on the other hand, has needs that constantly change and need to be interpreted. He can't be read, and within this opacity is frustration: 

The closeness of the maternal relationship is threatened, or even simply loosened, by the passing years: by the accumulation of language and with it, the capacity for privacy and for concealment. At the same time, we're not yet at the point where the adult child and the mother can meet each other on the plane of familiar speech as equals, who make and deny demands upon and of the other as if they could do so in perpetuity. I don't know. It is difficult to be a mother and it is difficult to be a child. Perhaps the baby is only a good teacher because it can't yet tell the mother she's getting things wrong.

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Helen Charman (@helen_charman) teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University. Her first book, Mother State, is forthcoming from Allen Lane. 

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