The Moment You Open the Door: On Kathryn Davis' "Aurelia, Aurélia"

Kathryn Davis | Aurelia, Aurélia | Graywolf Press | 2022 | 128 Pages

It should come as little surprise to fans of Kathryn Davis that at the beginning of her latest book, Aurelia, Aurélia, she expresses her fondness for both the television series Lost and the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. With Lost, Davis delights in the same quality that drove so many of its fans crazy—the show’s “delectable inexplicability” amid “the growing suspicion that the creators of the series… never had an explanation in mind for [the] why and how” of its events. Plot’s failure, or rather its disregard, holds a similar appeal in “Time Passes,” the famously experimental second section of Woolf’s novel. “The rules governing this place are as real as those that pertain on the astral plane,” Davis writes of the section. “We’re in the place of transition… a space or time as vast and long or small and brief as our experience of space/time itself.” However apt a description this might be of Woolf’s writing, what this most sounds like is the experience—delectable and inexplicable—of reading Davis herself.

Aurelia, Aurélia, Davis’ first work of nonfiction after eight novels, concerns the illness and death of her husband, Eric. As with her fiction, Davis is less invested in conveying a series of narrative events as she is in exploring what associative slippages stem from it. To focus on plot is to miss the point—“I’m not referring to plot. In fact plot was the least of it,” she writes of a childhood fairy tale. Rather, Davis’ focus is on the ways we measure, or find immeasurable, a beloved’s slip from life into death and what that might mean about slippage and movement in general. The cultural references pocketed throughout this slim, rich book—Brigadoon and Madame Bovary, Hans Christian Andersen and Für Elise—mark moments in Davis’ life and marriage; Lost, for example, is the show she and Eric watched to distract themselves during his illness. But the intertextuality of these references also exist to disturb a fixed sense of time and place. Such references operate as hinges, allowing Davis to swing us through time and space and explore the conjuring power of certain associative acts.  

Where, then, does Aurelia, Aurélia lead? If we go by its title—which refers to both the student ship that Davis crossed the Atlantic on as a teenager and the last book published by the French author Gérard de Nerval, a “fantasy-ridden autobiography” that calls to mind this Aurelia—then we might say Davis has written a memoir about how one thing is never just one thing. A memoir is not just a memoir. Or more precisely: something never happens just once. Indeed, Aurelia, Aurélia is full of dreams, ghosts, second lives, bardos, and “the unfathomability of our course of transit in the face of the universe.” All of these might be gathered under the term “transition period,” a phrase Davis herself returns to. Aurelia, Aurélia posits a life, or a lifetime, as a continuous series of transitions and crossings that confound sequentiality. Davis writes in “Vigilance,” the book’s fourth chapter:

In the bardo, narrative seems to happen but doesn’t. You think you are making a tuna sandwich. You think you are cutting the tuna sandwich into little squares to tempt your dying husband’s appetite. We’re born into the life bardo, and when we begin to die we’re in the dying bardo, and after that we’re in the death bardo, at which point we make our transition back via rebirth into the birth bardo.

In a lesser writer’s hands—one is tempted to say “in any other writer’s hands”—this stray into the metaphysical might dull grief’s keen edge. In Aurelia, Aurélia, as in Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, it’s the consideration of grief’s reverberations—that is, not what grief is, but what grief makes one think about—that serves to sharpen the sense of loss. The straying is the point. 

Where does Aurelia, Aurélia lead? One might also quote the line that comes after Davis declares her disinterest in plot: “I’m referring to individual words, phrases.” For someone concerned with destabilization in time and space, a hallmark of Davis’ style is the directness and simplicity of her prose, not only in Aurelia, Aurélia, but also her dizzyingly difficult novels such as Duplex and The Silk Road. As with those novels, chapters are short and plainly titled; sentences are precise and brief, yet never clipped or staccato. “Narrative seems to happen but it doesn’t.” They are deft in not just their transition periods but the punctuation mark itself. Her style retains something of the fairy tale’s flatness, an effect that’s heightened by her tendency to withhold details about setting, subject, and time, thus allowing the reader to stray into misreading. The effect—as in the standout chapter “Ghost Story One,” which simply and brilliantly inverts the sequence of waking life and dream—is an ability to selectively orient and disorient the reader. We are never sure if we’re moving from left to right—“the good direction, from past to future”—or from right to left—the direction in which Death, “overfull of something that seemed more like life,” leads his charges at the end of The Seventh Seal, the movie that fascinated the teenaged Davis during her crossing on the Aurelia. Davis’ return to transitions and the associative—the “kind of transit that occurs between the place in your mind where memory resides… and the operative tool of thought”—helps bind the chapters that do read more like standalones and are thus harder to reckon into the book.

“Eventually I fell into an uneasy sleep, the kind where you remain unsure about whether you’re asleep or not.” So Davis writes in “Ghost Story Two,” a continuation and further inversion of “Ghost Story One.” Readers will be nodding along. This sensation, too, is like reading Aurelia, Aurélia. The book does something to you with language—in language—that is recognizable and palpable yet, like grief, resists easy order.