Irresolution and Completeness in Lydia Davis’ « How I Know What I Like »

If the urge to write comes from the realization that, according to Maurice Blanchot, nothing can be done with words, reading Lydia Davis’ short stories demonstrates Blanchot’s further claim that reading is situated beyond and before comprehension. Davis, who translated Blanchot (as well as Leiris, Flaubert and Proust), is mostly known for her short, short stories, sometimes known as flash fiction or micro fiction. Though her work is not confined to short, short pieces, in each collection, they make up roughly 50-75% of the stories. Though her stories are short on character, scanty of plot, and vague or silent in regards to place, they are replete with meaning. In order to grasp the meaning, the reader must delve into the workings of English grammar, a domain that Davis, as a translator has probed with minute consideration. Paul De Man wrote that meaning is always displaced with regards to the meaning it initially intended1. This displacement is of course, the source of misunderstanding and eventual conflict. Davis works with this idea of displaced meaning in her stories, and her attention to language invites the reader to examine her stories down to the very morpheme, and in some cases down to the punctuation mark. The analysis of « How I Know What I Like » from Davis’ 2015 collection Can’t and Won’t will demonstrate through her use of function words, modality and punctuation how the very fleetingness of this short, short-story leaves an indelible impression on the reader.