Davenport's literary intelligence can be stratospheric, and when he
aims it high, he's able to make an inimitable sort of
constructivist sculpture from it (Tatlin!, recall, was the title of
his first collection in 1974): part quotation, part commentary,
part reimagination. The feat can be electrifying - as is very much
here: in "The Concord Sonata" - considering a phrase of Thoreau's -
and "The Kitchen Chair" - off a sentence in Dorothy Wordsworth's
Journal. From both he takes a bit of wordwork that we believe we
merely can decode and elevates it into mystery and subtlety and
diamond-like style. But, unfortunately, in order to be astonished
by Davenport of late means having to endure what once again here is
a surfeit of the soft-core gay kiddie-porn (masquerading as
Arcadian idylls) that he puts so much of his effort to. Danish
teenagers cavort and jut and spurt in tiresome displays of riggish
(and etymological) energy: "I rode the foreskin full stretch with a
swirl of tongue deep on the downstroke. Shallow with a flicker on
the up. I put a thraw into the treadle. For style. A thropple dive
plumb to the bush. A slow ripping passage"). A frustratingly mixed
bag. (Kirkus Reviews)
A Table of Green Fields includes ten stories, variously about the
painter Henry Scott Tuke, the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester,
Kafka, Thoreau, along with some imaginary Frenchmen and
Scandinavians, among others. Calculating the infinite in the
finite, tracing geometries of desire, placing the obdurate world in
an uncustomary light, each of these stories opens out its own
world. Without giving up the plot or character of the traditional
short story, Guy Davenport's inventions are complex events in which
ideas and cultural history are a kind of music to which the
characters dance. Despite the fractal, syncopated collage of his
narrative style, Davenport's prose is objective, terse, and
transparent. A constant theme in this book is the transmission of
the past as an imaginative act; hence the title, Falstaff's dying
vision of "a table of green fields," probably a mishearing of his
recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, corrected by editors to "he
babbled of green fields," a symbol of all fiction, an art that must
be exact about the uncertain.
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