(May, 2017)
Though Cape Cod holds a place in the American cultural imaginary as a vacationer’s paradise, replete with white sand beaches and quaint New England charm, the impressions Lydia Davis presents in her short story “Cape Cod Diary” resist this romantic characterization. The story depicts a writer visiting a Cape Cod town for a month during the summer in order to work on their essay, spending each day writing and cataloguing the banal, routine events of the town: the rainstorms, the comings and goings of neighbors, the horns of boats, the indeterminate chattering of tourists and shop owners. Though Davis does not give this writer — who also narrates the story — a name, it would not be difficult to come away from a cursory reading with the impression that the story is autobiographical. That is to say, it seems plausible that the voice of this vacationing writer could in fact be Davis’ voice, mediated through the text, but nevertheless reaching the reader more or less intact, an unambiguous transmission and articulation of Davis’ own experiences.
As enticing and intuitive as this initial reading may seem, contemporary interpretive practice all but forbids us from making this assumption. Since 1968, when Roland Barthes declared “the birth of the reader…at the cost of the death of the Author,” much of Western academia has canonized and pedagogically codified the radical decoupling of textual meaning from authorial intention that his theory proclaims (Barthes 148). If we as readers get the impression that Davis’ story is autobiographical, perhaps this feeling alone constitutes a good reason to suspect that Davis wrote “Cape Cod Diary” precisely in order to unsettle our intuitions and expectations about the text, and to toy with the Barthesian rupture between writer and writing. This last claim, of course, is beside the point: if we are to take Barthes seriously, this kind of speculation regarding what Davis meant or intended to accomplish through her story becomes futile and misguided. Instead, our role as readers emerges as the interminable “disentangl[ing]” of “the traces by which the written text is constituted,” the following-out, rearranging, and recontextualizing of those threads which may appear to us in any given instance of reading (Barthes 147-148).
With this in mind, this paper will provide a reading of “Cape Cod Diary” which seeks to follow out the thread of this initial suspicion, this feeling that Davis acts out her own authorial death on the page. I will map the myriad ways in which the text both enacts and plays with the anti-teleological and necessarily nebulous quality of the sign, both as it manifests itself within writing and within the awkward, occasionally uncomfortable confines of an existence where we are responsible beyond our intentions. Through this play with signs, through the use of meticulous, descriptive, persistently unreflective language, and through the narrator’s experiences of boredom and ennui, I argue that “Cape Cod Diary” calls attention to the simultaneous absence and excess of meaning which inevitably plagues language, and which in turn makes itself felt in each of our lives. In order to facilitate this reading, I will make use of Barthes’ concept of the death of the author, Jacques Derrida’s notions of arche-writing, differance, and trace, as well as Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of boredom, parsing and deploying their thought in conjunction with my analysis of Davis’ text. Through the lens offered by Barthes, Derrida, and Heidegger, I will seek to provide a ground for understanding Davis’ “Cape Cod Diary” as a story that signals both its own failure and infinite capacity to convey meaning, and offers the reader an aesthetics which are at once bored and uncertain, ecstatic and enmired.
This mood of uncertainty and boredom which permeates “Cape Cod Diary” asserts itself as early as the story’s first lines, in which the writer listens all hours of the day to the horns of nearby boats, tediously and carefully noting the timing and timbre of each blast. The sounds of the boat horns and engines mingle over the harbor, and the writer listens, “hoping to learn what kind of boat [they are] hearing and what the signal means” (Davis 202). This first sentence of the story already gestures towards the text’s engagement with theory and the ambiguity of the sign: the meaning of the “signal” — whether “the boat [is] leaving or entering the harbor,” whether it’s a ferry or a fishing boat — evades deciphering. Even in spite of the writer’s meticulous cataloguing (“At 5:33 p.m.…at 12:54 p.m.…at exactly 8:00 a.m.”), the signifier remains divorced from a final signified, and the amalgam of sounds issuing from the harbor go unassigned to discrete origins (ibid.).
Here, Derrida’s notion of arche-writing resonates metaphorically with Davis’ writer’s inability to align each boat with the sound of its horn, each signified with its signifier. For Derrida, because “oral language already belongs to [generalized] writing,” and because rigid, structuralist distinctions between graphic and phonic language neglect the mixture and “derivation” that occurs ceaselessly across this gap, he asserts the need to inaugurate a new concept of writing which he denotes as “arche-writing” (Derrida 54-56). Arche-writing, as irreducible to an “object of a science,” and as unassignable to any site within a structuralist linguistic system, stands for the temporalization of meaning produced by any sign (graphic or phonic), for the “movement of the sign-function linking a content to an expression” (ibid. 60). In other words, arche-writing consists in the plurality of possibilities for meaning that a sign gives rise to within a given moment of experience. The boat horns (phonic signs) Davis’ writer hears could emanate from any number of boats, entering or leaving the harbor: within Derrida’s poststructuralist framework, “what the signal means” cannot be finally determined, and whatever meaning it produces for the writer remains constrained by “the minimal unit of temporal experience” through which the writer encounters the signal (Derrida 62).
Davis enacts this Derridean concept of arche-writing and the murkiness and ambiguity it entails throughout “Cape Cod Diary.” The temporality and duplicity of the sign especially permeates those passages in which Davis’ writer construes a sign to mean one thing, only to reevaluate in the moments to follow. At various points in the story, the writer briefly confuses rain with footsteps, or quahogs with shellfish, gesturing towards the myriad little ways in which graphic and phonic signifiers become available for (mis)interpretation (Davis 214, 216). Davis illustrates this ambiguity and deferral of meaning crisply in the writer’s encounters with their upstairs neighbor: the writer listens to what seems to be the man upstairs playing the saxophone, and remarks, “I know he is friendly because of a smile and greeting he gave me on his way into the building once, a greeting that lifted my spirits” (Davis 205). Only two paragraphs later, the writer has changed their interpretation: “I was wrong about my neighbor upstairs. He is not the friendly man who once greeted me. He is barely polite. … I was also wrong about the saxophone, which is not played by the man upstairs but by my neighbor across the patch of garden” (Davis 206). The temporal contingency of the writer’s impressions, and of the writer’s interpretations of these impressions, suggests that meaning arises through this mercurial and particularized interpretive process, only to be evaporated by the exigencies of the moments to follow. That is to say, meaning comes into its fragile, temporal being through “movement which produces difference,” wherein difference stands for that which enables a sign to be distinguishable from other signs, and renders it recognizable as having a particular referent (Derrida 62). Although Davis floods the writer’s descriptions of their phonic surroundings with doubt about the meaning of the signs they hear through their apartment walls (“seem,” “as though,” “may be,” “I think,” “I have trouble imagining what he is doing”), even these simple acts of tentative description rely on precisely this production of difference: insofar as we make use of language at all, we inevitably attribute meaning to signs which have only a temporally fickle and ambiguous reality; we entangle ourselves in what Derrida calls the trace (Davis 205-206).
Derrida’s conception of the trace emerges not only as that which allows us to attribute meanings to signs, thereby “permit[ting] the articulation of speech and writing,” but also as the “absolute origin of sense in general” (Derrida 63-65). It is the “movement which produces difference” through time, space, and texts, which is to say that it is both difference and deferral: it is “differance,” the active process by which a “track” of meanings comes into being, weaving together with and diverging from other such “track[s]” (ibid. 62). Insofar as the trace opens up the possibility for intelligibility, for interpretation in general, and for the endless, excessive proliferation of meaning, it simultaneously marks language’s deficit, or the inability of signs to convey a static, univocal, or final meaning. It is because meaning is always constituted through difference, and always deferred indefinitely that it can never reach — in Barthes’ terms — a “theological” meaning (Barthes 146). Instead, we are left with ambiguity and multiplicity, with no ‘correct’ interpretations but an infinity of possible interpretations.
“Cape Cod Diary” seems to be intimately aware of the trace, and even adopts its interminable uncertainty and interpretive excess as a kind of poetics or hermeneutics. The story offers us this meta-commentary in the form of a “recent mystery” which Davis’ writer relays to the reader:
On the day of the storm something washed ashore that was smooth, rubbery, and the size and shape of a dolphin’s nose, though not the right color. It might have been the back of an upholstered plastic seat from a boat. … Today…a man in a ranger’s uniform…dragged the thing out, and methodically tore it to pieces, separating it into different layers. Some layers he left lying on the sand, the rest of it he folded and carried away with him. (Davis 209)
Here, the “smooth, rubbery” object’s ambiguity and its “myster[ious]” status both point almost immediately to its metaphorical resonance with the ambiguity of the sign, or the ambiguity of any text in the absence of an Author to limit and determine its meaning. Indeed, the object has “washed ashore,” and lacks any identifiable origin from which to ascertain its identity. If we push this reading of the strange object qua text further, the ranger’s decision to “methodically [tear] it to pieces, separating it into different layers” begins to resemble a kind of interpretive practice: the ranger “disentangle[s]” the object’s traces, separates, arranges, and “fold[s]” them, before walking away with his particular interpretation, with those “tracks,” threads, or traces which appeared to him from out of the object’s multiplicity (Barthes 147, Derrida 62).
Insofar as we can read this passage as presenting us with a metaphor for reading, for picking apart the traces which constitute an interpretation of a text, Davis’ writer’s decision to leave the object untouched — and in doing so to metaphorically resist or avoid the trace — brings another thread of Davis’ “Cape Cod Diary” into focus for our own “methodical [tearing] to pieces”: the boredom and apathy of the writer in the story. The writer’s hesitance to ‘read’ the object on the beach indicates their attitude expressed throughout the story by the descriptive yet doubtful tone of the narration, wherein impressions of the seaside town are catalogued indifferently, with only brief moments of personal reflection, interpretation, and commentary punctuating the story. While this descriptive rather than reflective tone often effects an anticipation and avoidance of premature or incorrect interpretations which might later frustrate the writer (such as the discovery that their neighbor is not friendly after all, but “barely polite”), it also works to communicate a detached, isolated, and indifferent sense of tedium and ennui to the reader.
The indifference and detachment expressed by the writer evokes — and may be usefully understood through — Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of boredom as a modification of our fundamentally ‘caring’ orientation towards the world. Heidegger distinguishes between the world of our involvements on the one hand — in which we immerse ourselves in specific activities which “fragment[]” our experience — and the world “as a whole” on the other, experienced as a “unity” we have not yet engaged with, not yet dissected or broken apart through our care or interest for a particular thing. This latter unified view, for Heidegger, constitutes our “attunement” or experience of “genuine boredom” (Heidegger 101). He writes, “profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole” (ibid.). In this kind of existential boredom, we are simultaneously brought before ourselves and “removed” along with “beings as a whole” into indifference. Our attachments and involvements fall away, leaving us at once isolated and detached from ourselves (ekstasis) and entrapped within ourselves, unable to escape into a world which has lost its vitality and no longer entices us.
Through the brief glimpses the text provides us into the writer’s interiority, we can see the extent to which Heidegger’s descriptions resonate with the writer’s own reflections. Davis’ writer laments, “[the] view itself, because it hardly changes, becomes a sort of confinement. The streets, too, teeming with people, seem always the same. I feel as though I were knocking up against myself at every turn. I am sometimes almost in a panic” (Davis 207-208). The world has gone flat for the writer, the teeming streets have become static and uniform, and everywhere they go they encounter only themselves, a lone prisoner in a skull-sized cell. This kind of boredom — in which beings as a whole take on the same grey pallor and people and entities lose their alterity — stands in stark contrast to precisely the notion of the trace. Because trace is differance, the unceasing movement which constantly posits and evaporates meaning through difference, the genuinely bored person (in the Heideggerian sense) has become blind to trace precisely in proportion to their indifference. This, of course, is not to say that they succeed in escaping the trace. Language, and even thought in general insofar as thinking makes use of signs, could not persist without it. Instead, it is to say that the bored person (Davis’ writer) resists the trace’s enticements to become involved in the world which surrounds them, choosing a detached, ecstatic, and “sometimes almost [] panic[ky]” boredom over the possibilities, risks, and failures of interpretative play and engagement (ibid.).
The irony here, of course, consists in the profession of Davis’ protagonist: as a writer, the narrator of “Cape Cod Diary” would seem more disposed and obliged than most to engage in this interpretive work which is so antithetical to Heideggerian boredom. Within the story, however, the writing process seems to open up an altogether new and paradoxical space for the narrator. Rather than serving simply to thwart or enhance their boredom, writing instead allows the writer to both follow and shy away from the trace, to both overcome and succumb to their detached, ecstatic condition. The writer states, “I trace and describe [the French historian’s] itinerary through this country; he progresses, I progress in the essay, and the days pass. I am coming to feel that he is more my companion, in this room, than the live people in the town” (Davis 207). Here, the writer explicitly “trace[s]” the path of their protagonist, and intertwines the threads of their own life with the life of their character. They lose themselves in the fabric of the essay, and even “fe[el they are] not here in this seaside town” but traveling alongside their character, hundreds of miles away (ibid.). In this instance, the trace, rather than boredom, becomes the occasion for detachment, ecstasy, and indifference to the immediate world; by weaving together threads from historical sources, and following them to distant locales, the writer engages the world even as they avoid participating in the life of the town that surrounds them. Still, this engagement remains cautious and tentative: “It is not an easy piece of writing. … I am afraid it will be very easy for me to make mistakes” (ibid.) Because the writer seems to be working on an historical essay, they seem to experience a fear stemming from the interpretive excesses and absences which will inevitably plague their text as it circulates and proliferates meanings. In this moment of fear, they “knock[] up against the limits of what [they] can do with this work,” and are thrust back away from the dangers and instabilities of the trace, back into a boredom in which indifference supersedes the possibility for linguistic play (Davis 208).
Perhaps it is because Lydia Davis’ writing so consistently “knock[s] up against the limits” of language in general, as well as of her own work, that the writer in “Cape Cod Diary” at least initially or intuitively resembles Davis herself. However, after unpacking this story through this particular frame, this possibility seems less likely than ever. While the writer in “Cape Cod Diary” shys away from linguistic play and from the uncertainty of interpretation generally, this story alone (or to be both more and less precise, this reading of this story alone) seems to demonstrate Davis’ commitment to the use of exactly these poststructuralist techniques in the development and continuing renegotiation of her aesthetic. By invoking “diary” in the story’s title, and by refusing to clarify the identity of the narrator, the text almost begs the reader to assume the narrator’s co-extensiveness with the author in order that it might proceed to trouble, undermine, and draw attention to the assumptions we make about the way meaning operates in this text and any other. If we can learn anything from the writer in Davis’ story, it is that we cannot — and should not seek to — resist the trace. Instead, we ought to affirm the deficits and surpluses that language passes on to us, aspiring to courage in the face of its essential ambiguity, and creativity in the face of its infinite possibilities.
WORKS CITED:
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Fontana, 1977. Print.
Davis, Lydia. “Cape Cod Diary.” Varieties of Disturbance. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. 202-17. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U Press, 1980. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. “What Is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 91-112. Print.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 