A Response to Lydia Davis's "Television"

I think what Davis is doing is writing in the same mood that the narrator feels when it is time to watch TV, a time of day when she feels like it has “already moved away from [her].” As she puts it, “I want to watch a movie…which will be simple and easy to understand…It will skip over so much,” and she writes in the same way. Her sentences are often short, clear, and contain simple words. The paragraphs themselves are also very short, many only having one sentence and one only consisting of eight words. Just like the television shows too, Davis leaps to new insights and observations constantly (particularly in the second section), and these leaps reminded me of flipping through channels. We get one thing and just switch to another.

I thought use of pronouns was interesting. At first Davis only uses the pronoun we. This got me thinking, “Is she speaking about me, too? Everyone?” It’s not until after the first page until the reader realizes she was speaking about her and her family. That had to be a conscious decision to include the reader first before going into specifics. I feel that this way, it makes it hard for the reader to separate themselves from the rest of the piece even though the rest of the piece the experiences are the narrator’s own.

I am wondering why Davis would split up an already scattered piece. Maybe the second section with all of the individual bits is supposed to be the commercial break of the piece. I don’t know.

What I do admire a lot about this is how performative it is. So many elements in her writing style contribute to the subject she’s talking about. The leaps, the uncomplicated diction, the mood. That’s something I want to try.