Diane Williams’ Precision Angst:
Small Sacrifices
Book feature for The Stranger, 10/24/96
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf said something to the effect that women’s writing ought to have “incandescence,” a force of light shining outward. The terse, descriptive, often dark short-short stories of Diane Williams don’t beam forth so much as they pull in. Williams says she tries to create “what I’m calling, for lack of a better terminology, stories” that are “powerful, durable, and could conceivably have a scarring effect.”
Such effects can be found usually in the very beginnings and endings of her stories, which in turn are often in the same paragraph. Her story “The Revenge” begins: “She sat in a chair and looked out a window to think sad thoughts and to weep.” It ends, 92 words later: “She arrives at a plausible solution for at least 8 percent of her woes. I know what she is thinking, and I am envious of her. But I am shitting on it.”
In eight years, Williams’ published output has consisted of three slim collections, comprising a total of 163 stories (none longer than 700 words, many as short as 50) and one 7,000-word opus, The Stupefaction (the title story of her newest book), billed by her publishers (Knopf) as a “novella.”
In a recent phone interview, Williams admitted she wrote The Stupefaction to comply with commercial requirements for longer, more traditional narrative structures. Yet even here, Williams eludes the easy summer read. Her long story turns out to be more like 44 of her tiny stories, strung together with the thinnest of narrative strands–one woman’s sequential thoughts and sensations while with a male lover in a country cottage. Yet even this simple premise is broken up and refracted by Williams’ technique. For one thing, it’s narrated by an enigmatic, voyeuristic third party–possibly the woman having an out-of-body experience, though it’s never explicitly stated.
What is explicitly stated is the woman’s sex drive, how her hunger for her man’s flesh leaves her “stupefied”: dazed, dulled, beyond her mind’s control. Unlike today’s “women’s literary erotica,” which usually focuses on women’s bodies and emotions, Williams’ heroine and narrator devote a lot of their (her?) attention to the man, to his “helike face” and his “impressively distinct penis.” Williams is one of the few women writing about men as objects of physical desire instead of moral contempt.
Sex played a principal role in her earlier books, This Is About the Body… and Some Sexual Success Stories, and a major role in this one. One of the short-shorts in The Stupefaction uses a male narrator to remark about how great Diane Williams is as a lover: “How much fun I had with my prick up inside of the great Diane Williams.” She insists there’s more to that piece than mere boasting: “My awareness of my own shortcomings, or my own self-loathing, is also revealed.”
Some of her stories are microscopic observations of personal life: “The stewing chickens–they didn’t lay eggs, and they got their heads copped off. They are tough. The fryer, the Perdue, the capon–they are tender, is her verdict on them.”
Others are like fragments, ending just when another writer’s story would start: “I remember when there was no nostalgia.” And others play with verbiage to pull nuances of feeling into their disciplined length: “Maybe he has not figured out yet how much I wish to stiffly represent myself at coital functions as stiffly as I do here as I speak.”
“It’s the way dreams are,” she explains; “it’s my attempt to have some sort of mastery over what I have no mastery over–to at least in this realm have a measure of control.
“I become very frustrated with my everyday talking in the world of speech. Just retrieving words is getting harder for me. I become more desperate to do the composition work that I do.”
The work she does isn’t as familiar or as popular as longer fiction, but it now has at least a niche in the marketplace, thanks to the short-short boomlet (including the Sudden Fiction and Micro Fiction anthologies). But when she was getting started in the late ’80s, it was a form without a forum, except for tiny-circulation literary magazines.
“There didn’t seem to be too many modern examples of short work. I’ve had to explain what I do in terms of the crucial speeches or declarations of history, which have always been rather short; and in terms of the Psalms, the prayers, the magical incantations, the proclamations, the Old Testament.”
She co-edits the literary mag StoryQuarterly, which despite its title comes out only about once a year. It is, as you might expect, a slender thing, 80 pages of huge type. She joined the journal when she was still living in Illinois; she won’t even go there on book-selling tours now, calling her memories “too painful, still.” Since 1991 she’s lived in New York City (though refraining from the literary-schmooze circuit). She lives with two sons, whom she says are “scared” by some of her writings. It’s easy to imagine, with passages like this from “Rain”: “Found stretched out dead, dead, dead is a speck that used to look like all of the rest. I don’t say they’re all like that, but I might as well say it.”
“If the imagination is not amoral,” Williams insists, “it is not free. I have said things that were disturbing, especially to a small child. Now they’re proud of me, but I don’t know if they want to get too close to it.”
She has another “novel” and batch of “stories” already written, awaiting the vagaries of publishing schedules. But don’t think this stuff comes quickly.
“I collect text in a rather chaotic fashion; and then I manupulate it. Sometimes it’s conscious; some maneuvers are less conscious for [the text] to find its shape. The procedures are slow and tedious and difficult. I am intimidated by what I do. I don’t know many artists who don’t feel that way.
“I would like to feel that what I do isn’t that different from anybody else doing a hard job. I never sit down feeling masterful. I want to keep that in mind.”
