When Going too Far is Going Just Far Enough: Lydia Davis and Flaubert and Letters in Can't and Won't
Résumé
In Lydia Davis’s short story collection Can’t and Won’t (2014), out of 120 stories, 14 are appropriations and translations of Flaubert’s letters to his mistress, Louise Colet, written during part of the time he was writing Madame Bovary.Letters take on additional importance in the collection, for along with the “stories from Flaubert”, there are another five which are complaint letters which Davis sent out in her name before including them in this collection. All of Davis’s writing is infused with the fine eye and attuned ear of the translator and reveal a dimension of language that is anterior to language, or as Jean-Jacques Lecercle has termed it, “the remainder. This involves the “foreignizing” of English. By examining Davis’s purloining of both the letter form and actual letters we will demonstrate how her specific attention to language has not only revived the short-story form, it has revolutionized it
