ENG430 Week 4: Lydia Davis' Vivid Varieties of Disturbance

In her collection of stories Varieties of Disturbance, Lydia Davis crafts evocative bursts of narrative with an experimental flare. Through varying text formats Davis throws her audience headfirst into her first-person narrator's shoes. These characters are rarely contextualized with a long exposition. Instead, her narratives often rely on a slow release of information, which pushes readers to piece together the story on their own. Many of these stories are deeply satisfying because of this narrative strategy. Davis' shorter, confined work is also satisfying because it follows a massive rule of the flash fiction genre, to consider the most critical aspects of the story and cut or combine any unnecessary content. Her longer pieces, especially those in the format of studies and those segmented by headers show an astounding ability to focus on obsessive detail, sometimes following this focus beyond what seems narratively enticing.

I was drawn to the distinct parallel between the works Grammar Questions (pg.17) and Travelling with Mother (pg.197). These two-and-three-page entries both expertly display her short narrative strategy, described above, by delaying information about the looming death of a parent. In Grammar Questions, the narrator debates the proper tense to use when referring to a man, who (after the turn of a page) we learn is his father, who is dying. Similarly, in Traveling with Mother, we confront a narrator who is in transit, carrying something important in their too-sturdy backpack that we learn (after the page turns, again) carries a metal container of her mother's ashes that she wishes to finally travel with again. The tone of these works is starkly opposite, Grammar Questions is rooted in an obsessive hunt for correctness over the looming possibility of a father's death which grows increasingly more personal and emotionally taxing, while Traveling with Mother paints the picture of a child moving on from a period of grief, traveling to a bright, open, future with the memory and physical reminder of their mother closeby.

The format of these pieces also shapes her rich narrative quality. Where Traveling with Mother is methodically organized in neat couplet statements that slowly expand the reader's understanding of the narrative world, Grammar Questions starts abruptly with, "Now, during the time he is dying, can I say, 'This is where he lives'?"(Davis 27). In this opener, the looming fear of death is made extremely overt while the reader is left in the dark about who is doing the dying, represented in this intense, uneven, distracted, fury of writing. The format of the other creates a numbered list that is easy to maneuver and slowly introduces the audience to the idea of something in the bag, and then someone's ashes in the bag, and finally the understanding made apparent by the title Traveling with Mother.