A sentence on The Collected Stories of Diane Williams (2019)
‘For some idea of the full range of tools at his disposal, one would have to know what human longings are all about, a calm voice says calmly.’ – Diane Williams, ‘Machinery’
This sentence sums up all of Heidegger and after him Wittengstein with the accuracy lacking from even the best undergraduate curriculum, and though this quote flashed up with new brilliance in a review of a dull book by Ian McEwan, I must have read it, since I have read all of Diane Williams’ short stories in her biblically-proportioned The Collected Stories of Diane Williams, plus re-read the collection Fine Fine Fine Fine Fine, which I had purchased and begun when it was published but lacking the coordinates for reading a Diane Williams story, felt as if I had been abandoned in a dry and arid landscape, or rather suspended from a cliff without any footholds or handholds, at least not visibly since I was unprepared and had not yet listened to interviews with her or been given the critical armature by someone like Gary Lutz whose writing about Williams’ contemporary and co-contributor at NOON Christine Schutt revealed the dimensions of the sentence in a way that enabled me to approach both Schutt and Williams’ writing as though I had been cured of Emerson’s curse of ‘Experience’ that has us
wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward… the genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly
so now all we do is tell (tall) tales, but fortunately Diane Williams is that Genius who does not mix the cup too strongly, or if she does it is in search of that deliberate delirium that describes much of modern life from the pants I put on and their ugly distribution chain to the sex I have and fail to have, a topic which concerns Williams a great deal, that is, not my sex per se, but sex per se and I mean literally ‘concerns’ since she shows great affection for those who do and fail to do this act that according to the likes of Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault defines the very activity of modern human animals even if it at an unconscious (if also still political) level, but then we always did value our writers who are able to plumb the depths of the unconscious, a cliché so unworthy of Williams I am tempted to excise it in pursuit of her admirable brevity and the knife-like edge to each of her conclusions – like the sentence at the start – that don’t so much leave one wanting more as leave one wondering how the meaning of the story took such a vertiginous flight and how we, too, might cast upon that firm soil once again only it will not be in this city, in this car on this highway, in his arms, and this we know with the assurance that the story is ended and another awaits on the next crisp page.
Image credit: https://lithub.com/a-new-way-of-being-on-the-page-a-reading-list-of-very-short-fictions/