{"id":106184,"date":"2017-01-03T10:55:23","date_gmt":"2017-01-03T15:55:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106184"},"modified":"2017-01-04T12:08:50","modified_gmt":"2017-01-04T17:08:50","slug":"finding-davenport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/03\/finding-davenport\/","title":{"rendered":"Guy Davenport\u2019s Elusive Prose"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

London Tower Bridge, 1901.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our\u00a0complete digital archive is available now.\u00a0Subscribers can read every piece\u2014every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview\u2014from <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019s sixty-three-year history. Subscribe now<\/a> and you can start reading 0ur\u00a0back issues\u00a0right away. You can also try a free ten-day trial period<\/a>.\u00a0Below, Norman Rush recommends a story from our Summer 1996\u00a0issue by Guy Davenport.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The other day I realized that the contemporary American writer whose personal journals I most wished I could read before I die was Guy Davenport. In my scan, I included masters in every specialty\u2014poetry, the essay, plays, short and long fictions. It still came out Davenport.<\/p>\n

And it was Davenport because of his achievements in fiction. I mean his latter-day fictions. He tried, and then abandoned, the conventional narrative-driven change-of-consciousness short story early in his career while distinguishing himself in poetry, translation, and criticism. Twenty years elapsed, and then he emerged, utterly remade, as a creator of experimental prose works. his stories are unique constructs. They are put together with elegant skill and power and tend toward the unclassifiable. In fact, scrutinous readers may change their minds more than once in the matter of what exactly it is that they are reading: Are these essentially armatures for Davenport\u2019s aphorisms and philosophical asides? Are they primarily demonstrations of the possibilities in the interpenetration of poetic and prose forms (and visual\u2014he sometimes illustrated his pieces). Are they freestanding baubles? In his \u201cinhabiting,\u201d in his writing, of the minds of iconic figures in the history of Western art and thought, is he being obscurely didactic? Is he subtly deconstructing the inner lives of culture heroes like Picasso and Diogenes?\u2014What?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whether there is a larger subliminal architecture connecting Davenport\u2019s diverse works\u2014something like the scaffolding of myth in Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>, but subtler\u2014is a question on which professional critics will disagree. (Interestingly, the first doctorate on James Joyce produced at Oxford University was by Guy Davenport.) Certainly there is a sexual subtheme that surfaces often enough in the stories (although not in \u201cDinner at the Bank of England<\/a>\u201d) and most explicitly in his one novel, or suite of linked stories, Apples and Pears<\/em>. His lyrical homoerotic and androgynic scenes have led to unease in some readers and doubtless played some role in the consistency with which mainstream literary honors eluded him.<\/p>\n

I shouldn\u2019t emphasize the figuring-out or puzzle-solving processes in reading Davenport\u2019s works. That element is reflexive, and it takes place against the foremost and overwhelming pleasures of craft, surprise, indelible smiles, and on \u2026<\/p>\n

So yes, Davenport is elusive, but the expedition to find him is its own reward.<\/p>\n

This essay appeared in<\/em>\u00a0Object Lessons: \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 Presents the Art of the Short Story<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other day I realized that the contemporary American writer whose personal journals I most wished I could read before I die was Guy Davenport. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":836,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[26453,1016,26451,26456,26452,26455,26454,364,71,19907,7278,2861,1638,813,3137,10437,17842,261,75],"class_list":["post-106184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archive","tag-american-writer","tag-art-of-fiction","tag-art-of-the-short-story","tag-cultural-hero","tag-dinner-at-the-bank-of-england","tag-dissertation","tag-elusive","tag-essays","tag-fiction","tag-from-the-archive","tag-guy-davenport","tag-history","tag-kentucky","tag-norman-rush","tag-oxford","tag-oxford-university","tag-prose","tag-short-story","tag-writing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNorman Rush on Guy 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