Minor, Marginal, Minimal, Miniature

Critics and readers have always struggled to size Lydia Davis up. Indeed, the continuous critical indecision surrounding the form and genre of her work is bound up with the difficulties in placing her in the postwar American literary canon (two points of confusion that Davis herself has gladly perpetuated). On closer inspection, however, it is striking just how much the shortness and smallness of Davis's work delineates her place in these larger surveys of the American literary field as marginal or as a "minor" writer in both positive and negative senses of the word. 

Davis is, of course, a short story writer, a form that despite its dominance and ubiquity in the literary market and in creative writing pedagogy (the supreme "teachable form" of the postwar era) is still largely thought of as minor, subordinate to the novel and, more recently, less marketable than the essay or memoir. But Davis's contribution to the short story refuses even its programmatic aspects, making it shorter, smaller, and infinitely more "minor." As Maggie Doherty writes, "Though nothing could be more minimal than a two-sentence story, Davis refused the dirt as well as the realism of 'dirty realism.'"1 Despite quite literally embodying the terms of literary minimalism — "brevity, irony, and opacity" — Davis's form seems, paradoxically, to make her an outlier of this literary mode, to place her on its margins.2 As Larry McCaffery claims, "Davis's minimalist style was not developed as a reaction against the excesses of her postmodern contemporaries. Indeed, quite the contrary, both as a writer and a person Davis has evolved pretty much outside the context of contemporary American literary or cultural movements."3 While Davis's writing seems entangled in the aesthetic movements central to Mark McGurl's The Program Era, her work seems to set its central tenets aslant. If her stories frequently use autobiography and recognizable details from her life, they do not demonstrate the kind of self-searching that characterizes the postwar compulsion to "write what you know." Instead, a persistent and unrelenting defamiliarization shapes her commitment to (or obsession with) intense, precise description that flaunts the principle of "show don't tell." 4  

Eliza Haughton-Shaw chalks up the problem of positioning Davis to her "eccentricity," a state that entails a "minor role in the canon": 

McGurl seems to resolve this correlation between smallness and canonical eccentricity by including Davis in list of "miniaturists," writers who are "small and self-contained but not linguistically parsimonious . . . maximalism in a minimalist package."6 

Defining Davis's smallness (both formal and thematic) through miniaturism rather than minimalism offers an enticing way to read her relationship to the post-45 literary sphere because it places her in a position of active resistance to and revision of the dominant literary trends of the period. Literary miniaturism, a largely under-theorized form of writing, takes its cues from visual art, miniature books or portraits that have been popular aristocratic collectibles since the sixteenth century. While miniaturism is closely allied with the visual arts, miniaturists have always been largely concerned with the intersections between art and writing, with the first miniature books comprising microscopic copies of illuminated manuscripts.7 As printing technology advanced and with the advent of photography, creators of miniature works shifted their focus away from the handwritten and hand-painted and instead tried to master new modes of production. These intricate artworks sought not to condense, cut out or minimize, but, with encyclopedic interest, to rescale the world into the miniature. 

Susan Stewart writes that these "experiments in the scale of writing" produce a sense of "infinite time" and "infinite detail," a work of art that both calls attention to its own painstaking labor and tries, through its mastery, to make this labor invisible.8 In this way, the miniature resides in a peculiar space between perfection and inadequacy. This tension is prevalent in theorizations of the miniature, most notably Gaston Bachelard's seminal reading in The Poetics of Space (1957), in which he emphasizes the "play of miniature": "the cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it."9 This search for possession, for risk-free domination, in Bachelard's terms, is destabilized by the scale of the miniature. As Stewart explains, the miniature establishes itself through "a series of correspondences to the familiar" — as she evocatively describes: the hand is "the measure of the miniature" — but in constructing these correspondences the miniature dissolves into "a delirium of description."10 "As Bachelard attests," Stewart continues "'because these descriptions tell things in tiny detail, they are automatically verbose.'"11 This tension between compression and constriction within the space of the miniature and the expansive detail required to describe it imbues the form with a sense of verbal inadequacy, its tendency to be distracted by its own description preventing it from progressing into the category of literature, resigning it, as Andreas Huyssen suggests, to the realm of "anti-form."12 These characteristics have traditionally taken on a feminized slant: consider Gulliver's description of the gentle, naive, Lilliputians or Jane Austen's likening of her own writing to miniaturist portraiture, a tendency that Charlotte Brontë and others disdainfully read as a weak kind of "daintiness," a distinctly feminine misappropriation of the novelistic gaze towards the microscopic.13 

We can see so many of these traits at play in Davis's work, not least in how her fiction participates in this microscopic process of description and definition. "Break it Down," one of Davis's early stories and possibly her best known, is frequently cited as evidence of her minimalist credentials. The story features its narrator's attempts to "break down" the cost, both financial and emotional, of his failed relationship, resulting in a series of equations. These calculations ultimately lead him nowhere. Given how the story quite literally establishes and then deconstructs its own emotional economy, it is unsurprising that readers have interpreted it in line with minimalism's anti-sentimental, interior compression, and this kind of deconstructive and overly analytical thinking is a defining characteristic of Davis's writing more widely. On closer inspection, however, the story does not seek to "break it down" in order to diminish or compress but, rather, to enumerate, to describe in precise and absolute terms, a form of subtle and accurate world-building and an attempt to master and control a world in crisis. 

Davis's miniaturism is most visible in what I call her "example stories," a series of sentence-long pieces that propose to illustrate a grammatical principle. These "stories" disrupt the boundary between narrative and linguistic artefact. These examples, some of which are "found" pieces of language Davis encounters in her reading or daily life, threaten to expand beyond the boundaries of the form: 

These short fragments of language threaten to transform into complex narratives, referring beyond the boundaries of the single sentence, while the mode of the example curtails and contains their expansion. The exemplar is a fascinating miniature form, working between the boundaries of the universal and the specific, seeming to embody the miniaturist motto: multum in parvo. The "miniaturisation of language" inherent in the example, the aphorism, the quotation, the epigram, or the proverb displays, Stewart argues, language's ability to "sum up" the physical world but it also is a form of abstracted discourse that seeks to "transcend lived experience and speak to all times and places" and "put an end to speech and the idiosyncrasies of immediate context."15 

Considering Davis as a miniaturist seems to go against the grain of her self-professed interest in the fragment as an organizing force in her writing. In her essay "Form as Response to Doubt" (a fragment of a longer talk published in HOW(ever) Magazine until the full version  "Fragmentary or Unfinished" appeared in Essays One) Davis attempts to rationalize her interest in the fragment as a viable literary form. Drawing from a variety of literary texts and using Roland Barthes as her primary model, Davis is fascinated by the unfinished. But while she engages the form of the fragment, her emphasis throughout the essay repeatedly returns to its potential and unrealized largeness, its relationship to wholeness and completion: "I would like to take the idea of the fragment as a form of writing and examine, explore, and digress from it, to consider ideas of wholeness, completion, incompletion, order."16 Davis's will to digress suggests an expansion and inflation of the fragmentary mode. Using Adorno's distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis, Davis categorizes her form as "horizontal" rather than "hierarchical," nevertheless acknowledging the tension between the total and the occasional. While Davis's fragments resist a totalizing impulse, they work through accumulation, skirting around intellectual problems of definition, characterization, exemplarity before she adds everything up, at the end of the essay, to make the point that "form" is a "response to doubt": 

What we can see, here, is not Davis's retreat into the fragment, but a desire to expand its parameters, to allow it to incorporate those systems that resist the act of fragmentation. This reads a lot like miniaturism's intense but uneasy relationship between the world and the act of writing (or production). It also speaks specifically to the kind of effect that the miniature intends to have on its beholder: to "exceed or surprise expectations."  

Huyssen has suggested the miniature's resistance to hierarchy - even as it tries to produce a form of totality - places it in conversation with postmodernism's petits récits and littérature mineure, or, as Barthes referred to his own fragmentary writing, petits riens ("little nothings"). Indeed, McGurl's description of the miniaturist suggests that they emerge from a dialectic of maximalism and minimalism, two of the dominant forces shaping his account of post-45 literary production. Miniaturism sits between minimalist "understatement" and maximalist "elaboration" and "condenses a maximalist relation to language into small forms."18 Miniaturism takes minimalism's craft, precision, and control but turns away from interiority, orienting itself, instead, towards maximalism's enduring "publicity":

While McGurl admits that the miniaturist strives to provide a totalizing vision, one that is inseparable from issues of mastery and imperialism, he suggests that the miniaturist's emphasis on totality necessitates that its "total vision" also "includes the decline of its own vision."20 

But McGurl's account of miniaturism seems to enfold too neatly writers like Davis into the institutional narrative of the Program Era. We might consider, instead, how Davis's miniaturism articulates a specific form of institutional resistance, staging her marginal position in the "culture of the school." In stories like "Ph.D," "The Professor," and "A Position at the University," Davis miniaturizes the dynamics of the institution in ways that obscure a straightforward assimilation of her work into these institutional dynamics. In "Special Chair" the narrator's and her colleague's desire to gain a special chair at their university — "so that we would be paid more and not have to teach as much and not have to sit on so many committees" — is constantly distracted by the description of a "strange heavy chair belonging to our friend who had moved away long ago and had to leave it behind."21 The narrator is gifted sole ownership of the chair (dubbed, in a syntactical inversion, "the chair special to our friend") because he has been granted a job with tenure at another institution. As Julianne McCobin also points out in her contribution to this cluster this displacement of the institutional chair with the physical chair that the two characters share satirizes the interaction between personal growth, ambition, and financial security and makes it, instead, a problem of space. The colleague is

Here, the contrasting scales of the "empty" geographical space and the "too small" house works to minimize institutional success — made both spatially and financially insignificant, the university wholly disappears into this vast space. The story ends by collapsing into a minute description of the chair's physical features, its heaviness emphasized a second time. In this final sentence, as the narrative eye moves across the "vinyl upholstery," the "bunghole, and "genuine cork," the chair fills the space of the narrative, unseating the abstract "special chair" that remains out of reach. 

While Davis's miniaturization of the university in stories like "Special Chair" unsteadies the dynamics between writer and university, and between maximalism and minimalism that McGurl outlines, her miniaturism also resists this institutional dynamic in another way. So many of Davis's stories mimic remedial forms of pedagogy ("French Lesson I: Le Meurtre," her example stories), continuously moving away from the higher order study of the university and back to first principles. Many of these stories focus on grammar and in doing so signal an alternative means of reading, writing, and translating that chafe against institutional modes of interpretation. Davis's focus is too close, too microscopic, too miniature in its intensity. It does not progress, as the practice of close reading demands, from the observation of textual detail to a summative, overarching reading, but, instead, remains enmeshed in the specifics. As Davis writes in an essay about translating Blanchot "very closely" in which "understanding became an intensely physical act": "I found I could follow the thread of M. Blanchot's argument from one sentence to the next, and that it made sense to me, I could not seem to summarize at the end of the page or even at the end of the paragraph, what I had just read."23 What Davis first identifies as her "intellectual weakness" she then recognizes as a mode of resistance, since "resisting summary did not mean resisting understanding. Somehow the experience of reading had to take place moment by moment; one had to remain in the moment and not look back on the whole; or one had to swell inside the moment and not stand back from it."24

This model of close attention manifests as both quintessentially academic and not. In "We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders," Davis both satirizes academic modes of reading and advocates for uncomfortable and intensely close engagement. Detailing the "general appearance," "length," use of "formulaic sentences," and "overall coherence" of each one, the study pays great attention to sentence structure in the get-well letters. Alluding, perhaps, to the methods of literary stylistics, a form of analysis influenced by Chomsky's "generative grammar" that sought to reconcile formal linguistics with literary study and which largely fell out of fashion in the 1980s, the narrator assigns creative weight to conjunctions in compound sentences such as "but" or "because," noting that "the most common, and least expressive, conjunction is and."25 The study also encompasses a stylistic account of the letters, noting with relish one of the children's use of the "Anglo-Saxon [verb] yank," and attempts to draw conclusions from the largely meaningless and formulaic phrases, resulting in a number of comic insights and characterizations: "the length and content of the shortest letters appear to connote depressive or apathetic states of mind in their authors."26 

Like so many of Davis's stories "We Miss You" dramatizes the act of interpretation, ushering her reader toward a focused attention that is, perhaps, too close for comfort. This closeness manifests most clearly in Davis's attention to grammar, which is central to her miniaturist impulse. Grammar is expansive and totalizing, it demands mastery and intricate attention, but it is also, by nature, small, compact, and easy to miss if you are not reading closely enough. "We Miss You" is anxious about the kind of detachment and scientific coldness this mode of grammatical reading produces, questioning the interpreter's ability to make meaningful connections between the small and large. This uncertainty regarding scale pervades Davis's fiction, emerging most prominently in a story like "Grammar Questions," which seeks to measure the ontological through shifts in pronoun and verb tense. Davis's miniaturism, therefore, not only helps us think through her marginality in the post-1945 American literary scene but it also underscores the very different vision her writing offers, one that doesn't adhere to the dominant literary movements of the second half of the twentieth century, but which miniaturizes their concerns, making them small in order to place them in new relations — to see the whole picture or to revel in new and undiscovered detail.  

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Lola Boorman is a Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of York. She is currently writing her first book, Make Grammar Do: Grammar and Twentieth-Century American Fiction, focusing on the work of Gertrude Stein, Fran Ross, Lydia Davis, and David Foster Wallace. 

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