Lennon, Brian. "Reading Diane Williams." Context: A Forum for Literary Arts and Culture 1 (Fall 1999): 5.

This document is an edited preprint (author's subsequently edited version of submitted version preceding peer or editorial review).

Reading Diane Williams
Brian Lennon

Announced recently (The New York Times, May 2, 1999): the "return of narrative." A renascence of traditional storytelling, that is to say, as a mythical reading public, driven to despair by soul-crushing postmodernist fragmentation and Internet bitting and byting, longs for the panacea of a good old-fashioned linear yarn. If to nothing else, such claims might be understood to point to the diversity of our current literatures, thirty years after the great surge of politically motivated formal and theoretical experimentation that transformed U.S. fiction in the 1960s. For other sectors of our contemporary scene certainly suggest something quite different: that the new digital technologies in our homes and workplaces make real sense of such fragmentation, in a manner that no academic theory historically preceding it might have. Those who see storytelling "returning," now, at the turn of a new century, are missing the point: that it never went anywhere, in the first place. Rather, like other art forms, U.S. fiction has reflected the complex mixture of the native with the strange, and of tradition with innovation, that if our own myths are to be believed, defines much that is most vital in U.S. culture. There has never been such a clear-cut division between tradition and the avant-garde, in U.S. American letters. While such so-called postmodernist innovators as John Barth, Robert Coover, and William Gass are often regarded, today, as demolishers of narrative, fact nothing could be further from the truth: virtually all of their work is inextricably enmeshed in the deepest problems of narrative, and acts not to resist storytelling, so much as to radically expand its range.

The fictions of Diane Williams certainly owe something to this (masculinist) U.S. American countertradition. In their extreme compression -- most of her stories are under three pages long, and some run less than a single page -- and their obliquity, they draw also on a French tradition of short prose forms that runs from the prose poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud through the writings of the Surrealists to the nouveau roman (new novel) of the 1950s, and which might also include Samuel Beckett's late work in French and the writings of contemporary figures like Hélène Cixous, Edmond Jabès, and Jacques Roubaud. The last decade has seen an extraordinary flourishing of the short form in U.S. American fiction, perhaps most interestingly in the work of writers such as Carole Maso, Lydia Davis, and Fanny Howe, who have transposed Euro-American feminist cultural critique into a practice and politics of radical form. Lucent miniatures and episodic, open structures replace the gigantic metanovels of the masculinist postmodernists, which might be said to require nothing less than canonical (and canonizing) persistence to complete.

Williams is one of the most fascinating of these new writers. Her stories take place right on the surface of language, as much as in the structural elements (plot and character) that support it. In many ways, her prose recalls that of Gertrude Stein, whose influence may be sensed in one way or another in much exciting new writing today. It's less radical than Stein's most influential work, but then Stein manages to escape genre entirely, whereas Williams offers her writings -- this is important -- as short fiction. In its contemporary context, Williams's work is quite radical: it's neither the inspired mismanagement of "ordinary" stories, nor the total relinquishment of story found in a prose poem, but something in between, partaking of both. "Lady," which leads off her first book, This Is about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (1990), begins like this:

She said please. Her face looked something more than bitter, with hair which it turned out was a hat, which came down over her ears, which was made of fake fur, which she never removed from her head.

A whole story in a sequence of clauses. A wrenched character sketch, cold-seeming at first, but with back tones of violent and empathic sadness. More than these, though, the passage is a purposefully chunky sculpture of language, pitched so delicately on the verge of bad writing that it turns beautiful. A Williams sentence works by distressing grammar and syntax, accumulating itself, gliding from "face" to "hair" to "hat" to "ears" to "fur" to "head" in a cubist portrait where all these features seem to grow into each other, rather than remaining distinct.

A few pages later, in "The Nature of the Miracle," one encounters this:

This is unrequited love, which is always going around so you can catch it, and get sick with it, and stay home with it, or go out and go about your business getting anyone you have anything to do with sick, even if all that person has done is push the same shopping cart you pushed, so that she can go home, too, and have an accident, such as leaning over to put dishwasher powder into the dishwasher, so that she gets her eye stabbed by the tip of the bread knife, which is drip-drying in the dish rack. It is a tragedy to lose my eye, but this heroism of mine lasted only a matter of moments.

We find here an unsettling mix of the colloquial and formal, of lyric sentiment ("This is unrequited love") and bureaucratic vagueness ("...and have an accident, such as..."). The impression is of genuine passion muted not by formulaic postmodernist irony, but by a fiercely optimistic resistance to melodrama and cliché. The generic "accident" and "dishwasher powder," the deliberately clumsy "such as," implicitly mock the idea that anyone's heart's pain is unique, that it may be originally described; but it does so more to acknowledge than to deny that lovesickness is for everyone.

Williams's fictions are spoken by unnamed, unfaced narrators in an abstract suburbia of lawn parties and baby showers, supermarkets and movie theaters, toy-strewn family rooms and sparkling kitchens. Marriage is common, but so, it seems, is a vaguely coerced or invited or neutrally indulged adultery. Sex is a motive force, an animus, not (as in the suburban novels of John Updike) a vehicle for personal epiphany or theological speculation. As such, it too is highly abstract, almost hostilely so: less a union of realistic characters than a collision of clauses, an event taking place in the sentence: "I have fucked him and fucked him and fucked him, and I have felt all that hair on his head in my hands plenty of times" ("The Kind You Know Forever"). The product of such encounters might be despair, except that despair is an affect the reader herself must bring to (or away from) the writing: it's not "in" there, laid out one way or the other, for anyone to see. The stories are so stripped down, in fact, that the "active" reading they demand can be exhausting: tiny as they are, the best strategy is to read them one at a time, a handful a day, as one might move through a book of poems.

Williams's fictions virtually teem with suppressed kinetics: reading the first lines of a story is like walking into a dark room containing a cat. What you choose to do there -- shut the door behind you, switch on the light, walk back outside -- determines what you take away from the work. In her second collection, Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear (1992), the paragraphs grow more discursive, a little talkier, even a little friendlier. A metafictional sensibility crops up from time to time, as in the occasional appearance of a character named Diane Williams (as in "The Real Diane Williams Has Captured the Whole of Freud"). A more overt thematics links desire, will, eros, and transgression into a tangible complex, without blunting the irony that places pressure on the idea of fiction being "about" something. (Look again, for example, at the titles of these two books, or consider any number of the stories' own titles, many of which -- "Cannibal, the Natural History" -- glance obliquely off their dependent paragraphs with a wit worthy of Wallace Stevens.) If the first book's linguistic radicalism is dampened somewhat, there are new and tantalizingly ironical forays into big ideas, which operate, here, through equally fruitful collisions of official discourse with personal vernacular:

Clinkety-clink! clinked the ice cubes in my drink. I spilled some of my drink, of course, on my sweater, when the apparition began a conversation, which constitutes our culture. It seemed so trivial, our culture.

("The Strangest and Most Powerful")

The jarring shifts here from past to present tense and back, from cocktail-party self-consciousness to Platonic form, are willfully and brilliantly perverse. Consider the syntactic and metrical precision propelling this micronarrative: it begins with a purposefully clichéd musical phrase ("Clinkety-clink!"), echoed subsequently in the twice-recurring "drink," after which the pattern shifts to alliteration ("spilled... sweater"; "conversation... culture") and slant rhyme ("apparition... conversation"). The stunted thought of the last sentence means everything and nothing, and it brings the undulating paragraph to a weird, sudden halt, lest all this music lull us into some slack epiphany. Here, again, the contrast with a writer like Updike is instructive. In the more traditional realist mode, fiction depends for its effect on metaphoric structures, the microcosmic alignments that make a lawn party seem to stand in for all society, make passing anxiety point to the grander "human condition." To some degree (in prose, at least), these structural correspondences invite explication, an interpretive mediation that with overuse can come to seem pedantic. In Williams's fictions, metaphor is simply and unceremoniously dropped: and who could have known what extraordinary possibilities this might disclose? Rather than unrealized writing -- far from it -- what develops is an arrangement of thoughts, sensations and events that seem to be exactly as they are, and yet cannot be just as they are, either: the particular and the universal are joined without coercion, without force-feeding or pandering to habits of thinking, habits of knowing, habits of reading. Here we move directly from "sweater" to "apparition," from "conversation" to "culture": free, like the narrator herself, to choose what we see.

In The Stupefaction: Stories and a Novella (1996), Williams revisits the anxious ferocity of earlier work, moving it forward. Even shorter and more disjunctively limned, the stories break partly away from the narrative armatures that used to sustain them. This produces some of the finest miniatures yet -- part fiction, part poem, part aphorism or essay:

A coil of green, a part of me, or any additional garnishing, when assembled, can produce sufficient allure anyplace.

The old idea that enticements should be ever more sophisticated is what prevents most seers -- plumbers and electricians alike -- from being optimistic.

Keep on hand containers which you have filled compactly. Wrap these securely. A stream or a flow is a thing of the past.

("The Answer to the Question")

The prose forms shrink precipitously throughout this volume, which ends in a 44-section, 71-page novella. The story of a woman and a man attempting an erotic vacation, The Stupefaction is staffed by a bevy of sexual ghosts who interfere and complicate things every step of the way:

By this time, it was twilight. They could barely see the ground or the form of a person doing something patiently and carefully. This apparition is what she has so often feared. She said, "I think that that looks real."

They were struggling. He said, "I'm not sure I like this whole thing. Can't you hurry?"

("Oh, I Hope You Like Everything I Say!")

Gender roles and the differing knowledges they propagate, the problem of wanting something and the problem of getting it, whether we fulfill or erase ourselves in love: these and other modes of duality splinter the woman and man into multiple points of view -- a "she," a "he," an "I," a "you" -- that by the end of the novella have formed a cloud of personalities, speaking not in turn but all at once. What might elsewhere be realist pornography here turns into an episode of language, the massing of pronouns not bodies: "When I sat down on top of him, having put his impressively distinct penis up inside of her, everything was what I hoped it should be" ("I Bend Down").

Why such emphasis on the language, on the actual, intransigent, interfering material or stuff of words? Does an art of such extreme preoccupation risk estranging us from our own very real bodies? Of course. What makes this preoccupation worth witnessing, though, is its suggestion that language is in fact more than the world -- that as we speak and write, as we narrate our lives to each other and to ourselves, we are effectively creating our lives, rather than merely reflecting them. "The sounds on the roof could be scuffling," as Williams puts it, "if it is a good night." The achievement of this work is to show us how to tell stories not for security or consolation, but as a means to live, to risk life, to open it to that which always lies just past the story's end.

--end--