[Sally's] letter, though one of the briefest, carries the most powerful, and the darkest emotional burden: 'Hope you are feeling better. Your seat is empty. Your stocking is not finished.' This last sentence is followed by a period, but then, ambiguously, by a lower-case b, so that we cannot be sure whether Sally meant to continue the sentence or begin a new one when she goes on to say, again dwelling on darker possibilities: 'but I don't think it will be finished.' Joseph A. writes: 'I hope you have fun.' It is not clear when or where Stephen should have fun; It may be noted that Joseph is the only child to associate Stephen's stay in the hospital with having fun.

Lydia Davis is not for the fainthearted. Her short story, "We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth Graders" is a critical analysis of 26 students' letters to Stephen, a hospitalized classmate. Davis's narrator investigates the minutiae of children's writing, cataloguing every handwriting quirk and syntactical tic. As the tedium wears on, what began as a simple index of student responses evolves into a full-blown portrait of loss. Fiction permits Davis to take the serious tone, headings, and subheadings associated with research in a haunting direction. She carefully estranges her reader through juxtaposing banality and grief—what we would broadly recognize as documentation and children's sympathy cards.

By pairing the two seemingly disparate forms, she jolts the reader into viewing their common instabilities. The research format only gives the appearance of truth, not the truth itself. Davis hangs on to the appearances, and by fixating on the children's letters, she directs her reader's attention to other, profoundly disquieting truths. We scan the words on the page, but what happens between them and our heads is incommunicable.

I've spent the past year frustrated at my inability to understand or articulate the experience of losing my parents to lung cancer within three years of each other. My mother died one year ago. On March 8th, 2011, she checked herself into the hospital complaining of stomach pains. The doctors said the issue was typical of cancer patients and treatable. She confessed to me that she hadn't eaten in a month.

Wednesday night, I stuttered and shook through a midterm presentation, barely able to get a word out. My mother's condition remained the same until Saturday, when she contracted pneumonia and her right lung collapsed. I remembered to postpone a drink with a friend. Sitting across from my mother's bed, I typed from my phone:

I don't know how to tell this to non-family but my mom unexpectedly went in to Sloan Kettering on Tuesday. She forgot to tell me she has Advanced Stage IV lung cancer that spread to her bones and liver. Pneumonia, the other lung collapsed, some extra fluid somewhere, ICU looking after her, though she is not down there. She's being blasted with antibiotics and oxygen now. She'll overcome this. She was in scary condition two hours ago, but is doing better. Sorry to bombard/share that. I'm alright! See you soon."

I wrote this e-mail on March 12th at 7:19pm, two or three hours after I received an urgent phone call from a nurse asking, "In the worst case scenario, would you want her to be on a ventilator?" I thought my mother would be home by Tuesday. I bolted to the hospital. The doctors assured me, "This isn't the end." I said, I thought she was in near-remission. Their faces froze in unison. I had the ventilator conversation three more times in two days.

I apologized because I wished there were an etiquette for informing others of crisis. I wanted a dialect, a new grammar. In the years after my father's death, while my mother was still alive, I alternated referring to my parents in the past and present tense. Now when strangers ask me about my parents, I still discuss them in the present tense, or with a vague "used to." I don't want to interrupt anyone's comparatively stable life. I reflexively apologized to protect myself from the grave tone people use to compensate for idiotic banalities. When I emailed to postpone, I just wanted to get across the absurdity of it all. Here I was, back on the thoracic floor of Sloan Kettering, flagging down nurses and holding my mother's hand. I couldn't even process that my mother's impending death was beyond my capacity to understand. I wasn't alright (exclamation!); I still thought we'd meet the following week.

On March 16th, my mother was gone.

Unspeakable experiences cannot fit on a comparative grid. Whereas conventional storytelling entails a beginning, middle, and end, elusive encounters cannot be resolved into a format as readily understood. Davis calls to order the contradictions inherent to discussions of loss by using a form that neither fits traditional modes of storytelling, nor is it research. Instead, she has created an interstitial genre, a pastiche of fact and fiction to show a moment of becoming-witness to senselessness. Using the overarching frame of an objective study, Davis stretches the limits of fiction to give voice to an occluded truth. She specifically responds to the fact that language falls short of describing how it feels to suffer a death, a departure, or an absence. The vocabulary of grief only circumvents and tames the horrific feeling. We can name the experience "loss," but once glimpsed, we'd rather forget it.

Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, a philosophical text, also uses a constraining format to portray and attempt to understand the isolation and anxiety of a person in love, apart from his or her beloved. He indexes what he refers to as "figures," bits and pieces of the discussion we recognize as having to do with love (and loss): "I love you," "truth," "anxiety," "fade-out," and "contingencies." By design, it is a purposefully idiosyncratic and chaotic language archive.

No logic links the figures, determines their contiguity: the figures are non-syntagmatic, non-narrative; they vanish with no more order than the flight of mosquitoes. Amorous discursus is not dialectical; it turns like a perpetual calendar, an encyclopedia of affective culture.

Barthes intercepts our understandings of love. His structure seems to suggest that unintelligibility transports the reader to the moment before he or she developed their expectations. He defines each phrase through excerpts selected from literature taken out of context, in addition to marginalia of references to friends, other authors, texts, and ideas. As an anguished person humbled in (or by) love, he escapes to literature to express what he cannot say himself. Barthes asserts that love is not a feeling we experience directly, but instead sense through proxies of colloquialisms and assumptions. He enacts the mediation by looking at the language used on the periphery of the love story—not the conversation of a first meeting, but the individuals' thoughts when they depart. Barthes, the pained lover, cannot describe the figures himself. He addresses the digressive aspects of love by going off-site into other texts, using language apart from his own.

Davis is unique in that she writes fiction with analytic intent. She employs the contours of research for fictional purposes for the same reason that Barthes draws upon literature for philosophy: their ideas coalesce in the detours they take to express that which they cannot say. As a variation on Barthes, Davis's work concerns the limits of language as a reflection of our tendency to defer discussions about traumatic events, and relatedly, our impulse to assert order on irreducible complexity. "We Miss You" is astonishing for the author's ability to embed these dense facets of human nature within form and content, yet never name them. It is fiction staked on a philosophical premise: literature can accentuate written and spoken impasses to recall a hidden truth. The elements in her story that would appear non-functional in the context of a scholarly work here reinforce the ability of fiction to go beyond evidence.

Davis's co-optation of research reveals a new way of thinking through Avital Ronell's claim that testimony relies on the possibility that it might be untrue. Though testimony is defined as a factual account, a witness can still blur the distinctions between "simulacra, dissimulation, the lie, and perjury". Ronell continues:

If testimony were to limit itself to establishing proof, information, certainty, or archive, "it would lose its function as testimony. In order to remain testimony, it must therefore allow itself to be haunted. It must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, the possibility, at least, of literature.

Writing in response to the legal system, she contrasts proof, the confirmation of facts, with literature, which allows for multiple interpretations. From a philosophical standpoint, she argues for the legitimacy of "a fleeting blush, a flicker of anxiety, a tapping of the foot, a shrugging of the shoulder, a blink" (492), flashes of behavior that are excluded from court-approved evidence, and rendered impotent in the gaze of the law. In Ronell's view, the seemingly trivial tics are constitutive of an alternative form of proof. She locates the threshold of these movements' importance in the testimony of trauma victims, who cannot prove the damage after it has already occurred.

Davis writes fictionalized testimony. In a short story, Davis highlights what Ronell otherwise finds hidden in reality. Taken as a whole, the children's letters and narrator's commentary constitute evidence of becoming witness to a potential loss, or to the concept of loss itself. She translates Ronell's testamentary whimpers—the blush, flickers, and silence—into evasions and absences within her text. She even confronts avoidance head-on: the student Van closes his letter, "I think that is all to say [sic] because I just can't think".

The narrator decodes that despite Van's lack of inspiration, he is "one of the few pupils to construct a compound-complex sentence, though he omits two words and contradicts himself (see his use of think)." On the levels of framing, syntax, and content, Davis parodies the expectation for testimony to have a referent. Her characters' language, as dry exposition of their daily experiences, is animated by the powers of fiction. The piece is still haunted by her readers' recalcitrance against loss.

I told everyone I'd pull through. My defense mechanisms went into overdrive. I intended to prove to friends, family, and colleagues that the world did not end with my mother's death, by taking on an extreme workload. I packed up and sold my parents' house between May and July. If I could withstand that degree of stress, I reasoned that I could handle anything. By August 1st, I no longer had a home. And so I convinced myself that I would tackle all of my course work and financial obligations and display ultimate grace under pressure. I had weekly meltdowns. I stopped going to therapy for two weeks to try and get back on track, which I never did. Despite keeping a handwritten journal, the past six months are still a blur.

Davis evokes her subject without explicitly discussing it, leaving the reader to fill in what information is repeatedly missing. The children often discuss everything but Stephen's hospitalization. They disclose their doubts about where their absent classmate is and when he will return to school by clinging to learned expressions and letter-writing conventions.

Although [Maureen's letter] is undeniably friendly and cheerful, the friendliness and cheerfulness seem somewhat rote: 'How are you feeling? I miss you very much. I hope that you will be back in school soon. I like school very much. I had a very nice time in the snow.' Her handwriting is round and slants consistently to the right with one notable exception: the word I, which is vertical. It may not be going too far to suggest that these markedly contrasting I's express a sublimated rebelliousness, a suppressed desire to be less conformist and obedient than she evidently is."

Maureen's rote letter prefigures the narrator's study: she neither knows what to say nor can hardly say at all. The student thought of appropriate stock phrases and wrote them down without attaching any of her own thoughts and feelings to them. She avoids the questions of where Stephen is or why, only that he is absent. The narrator's accompaniment to Maureen's letter is similarly off-key.

As readers, we are drawn to the narrator's failure to mention that the student did not know how to respond. The shortcomings of thought, language, and maturity are on full display. Children are impelled to ignore that which confuses or upsets them, an instinct doubled by the narrator's elision. The narrator expends more energy on analyzing what Maureen's handwriting might reveal about her personality. Her hypothesis does not directly bear on the significance of the letter—and hence, is safe.

The stilted and non-committal phrasing of, "It may not be going too far to suggest" tips off the reader to Davis's shifting in and out of the framework she created. The narrator's tone dramatizes the implicit differences between fiction and factual discourse. Her insistent use of the passive voice underscores a loss of trust in her account—she refuses to take responsibility for her bleak conjecture. "It may not be going too far to suggest" an idea that comes out of nowhere, has an inflection of absurdity. The narrator's sensibility maintains the flatness of reportage, except she is unwittingly tragic. Her melancholia and self-editing amplifies the children's pain, and our own.

In the years after my grandparents' and father's deaths, my mother prefaced her phone calls to me with "It's not an emergency, don't worry."

Davis also exposes the students' hesitant penmanship that strays between lines as the raw material of perception. The manual process of bringing a thought into existence and writing it down is clear from the children's letters, since the skill does not come naturally to them.

We must remember, when imagining these children learning to write neat script, that a line is not an actual resting place for a letter. It is a conceptual mark, and a very thin one, and a beginning writer finds it difficult to touch that line exactly with each letter. There is thus a certain amount of anxiety, for some children, even in the act of writing script, regardless of what they are trying to express.

The narrator breaks down writing into its fundamental elements of having an individual thought, thinking of the correct letters and their formation to spell out the words of the thought, and then drawing the letters on the page. "For some children," she adds, any writing produces anxiety. Their writing embodies the tribulations of everyday experience. The narrator's scrutiny of penmanship touches upon its transience. The frustration will eventually lift. Soon the children's handwriting will stay between the lines, and their thoughts will conform to the what Ronell calls "the rules of cognitive discourse".

In a similar vein to both Davis and Ronell, Barthes was also a miniaturist. He valued the traces and smears that fell outside social constraints yet distilled the underlying story, much in the way that Ronell finds the significance of testimony in its excluded capacity for fiction. Nearly imperceptible minutiae tell the viewer, do not take life for granted; it's more complicated than you think. We approach nuance on its own terms, exclusive of allegory or preconceived meaning. On the texture of the voice, Barthes wrote:

What constitutes the voice is what, within it, lacerates me by dint of having to die, as if it were at once and never could be anything but a memory. This phantom being of a voice is what is dying out, it is that sonorous texture which disintegrates and disappears. I never know the loved being's voice except when it is dead, remembered, recalled inside my head, way past the ear.

He pays attention to the sound of the voice, not what it says. Davis's handwriting analysis studies the messenger, not the message. As Barthes' beloved retreats from him, his voice fades away. Within his lexicon, he uses the word "lacerate" to describe the original moment of one's subjectivity. A person must be subjugated in order to confront the core of his being. As he says, "Where there is a wound, there is a subject."

The voice gnaws at Barthes because he realizes that one day, he will no longer hear it. His attempt to preserve or resuscitate the voice as the ghost in his head, "way past the ear," past objective bodily capacities, snatches at the impossibility of ever reproducing the experience of hearing it again. He reminds us that language slips away as it is spoken or written. The children's handwriting, as a reflection of their voices will fade over time, swallowed up by the depths of adulthood.

"Language fails you," writes Ronell. "It is not as if one has mastered trauma so well that one can get out from under its laying machine or see or speak or know or understand." Following Ronell, the children are the unwitting victims of an in-class assignment to write letters to an absent classmate, where the everyday difficulties of learning how to triangulate between thought, word, and pencil are compounded by the terrible recognition of loss. They can't crawl out from under the weight of everyday uncertainty or school exercises.

"We Miss You" embodies the possibilities that Ronell seeks for fiction in testimony. As readers, we are able to consider the children as victims because we situate them within a framework of childhood, a stage within the lineage of human development. We can acknowledge that they are rolled into what Ronell refers to as, "an ongoing surprise attack, shaken down by a sudden spread of anxiety that bears the caption, 'Is it happening?'" By definition, adults have more life experience than children, and thus more experiences to establish how the world operates.

In comparison, most children have fewer expectations and a less refined idea of what their worlds should look like. They can neither articulate nor have a sense of what appears "normal" within their surroundings, hence can be viewed as constantly under "surprise attack." But we are only reflecting our commonly understood truths onto fictional characters in order to make sense of them. We subject the children to a kind of reality test—we implicate them in the passage of time. Davis, as the author, uses fiction to exaggerate the limitations of life, but her genre runs up against its own limitations: our readerly impulse to grasp for an idea in the text that is out of reach is akin to that which the children are unable to express to Stephen, who is outside the classroom and may not return.

The difficulty in writing about traumatic experiences is our all-too-human relationship to time. The ability to dredge up the details to the best of our memory requires some distance from the event, which runs counter to the immediacy of official records. Whereas hard research prioritizes clear-cut determinations, fiction allows for negotiable timing.

The act of writing what I saw in the hospital, for example, does not lend itself to a detached statement of events. In piecing together the sequence of my parents' deaths over the past four years, and my reactions to them, I've found myself involuntarily connecting unrelated thoughts and events for the sake of narrative. And I've seen "the extent to which history is a lineage of extremes, limits, and events that resist totalizing narration." Writing down the chain of reveries and breakdowns takes place in a strange time zone of after-already, where the process of writing is that of life unfolding, yet I am writing about the very recent past. Barthes explains the temporal challenge beautifully:

There is deception in amorous time (this deception is called: the love story). I believe (along with everyone else) that the amorous phenomenon is an "episode" endowed with a beginning (love at first sight) and an end (suicide, abandonment, disaffection, withdrawal, monastery, travel. etc.). Yet the initial scene during which I was ravished is merely reconstituted: it is after the fact. I reconstruct a traumatic image which I experience in the present but which I conjugate (which I speak) in the past.

His parenthetical phrases demonstrate the "after the fact" disruptions that he describes. Barthes edits himself—;he is allowed to change his mind.

Not only does he believe that love unfolds with a beginning and end, we all do. The episode's beginning only has one option, love at first sight, but the endings are multiple, closing with "etc." And so on, the reader knows how the story goes. It is unclear whether he intentionally lists the possibilities in the parentheses in order of worst to least painful, though the following sentence again tends toward anguish: "I was ravished." By ascribing a storyline to love, he revisits the moment of coming into consciousness. But how can he accurately reconstruct a traumatic image?

Confirming Ronell, Barthes suggests that a person cannot retell the stupefied flash of becoming attuned to existence. Falling in love, or off Raskolnikov's horse, or Rousseau's dog, renders a person out of commission. He can only speak of an after-image that is "merely reconstituted" in his mind's eye, but otherwise irretrievable.

Part of us wants to believe that, perhaps if we shore up enough data, we can sandbag against an unknown. Scrolling through information reassures us, but avoidance can only last so long. The structures we impose on information, whether it's recollected, tested, or imagined, are provisional. Their purpose is to scale content to a manageable size. The details contained in any diary or stack of white papers are endlessly recursive; each detail maintains its own storehouse of details. Narrative structure cannot support the weight of our losses, nor answer irreducible questions. In our ability to restructure information, find new relationships and scramble impressions, though, we may find unintended truths about ourselves.

Like Lydia Davis, my graduate work also looks at the potential to use investigative (documentary, archives, reportage) or quantitative (statistics, programming) methods in the service of ineffable ideas. I am currently working toward a Master's in interactive technology, a loose hybrid of design, social science, and computer programming. My academic interests revolve around catching life off-guard in order to expose what we either fail to notice or intentionally edit out in our everyday lives. When we look out a window, we do not acknowledge the frame.

This is partly a means to survival, since we can't process all of the information that we are bombarded with everybday. But with time, we only see what we expect to see. For example, we compare the likeness of a new acquaintance to someone we already know. By shifting emphasis on an event, thing, or idea, our perception changes.

The prospect of losing one's parents in quick succession, at a young age, is rare. In the years after my father's death, the idea of my mom also dying from cancer (the same kind of cancer!) was one of my greatest fears. I couldn't bear the thought. And then, it happened. As Ronell tells us, "You yourself, as lacerated victim, cannot believe this has happened, is still happening to you". In some way, I've survived the past eleven months by trying to communicate with others what the worst case scenario feels like.

Shortly after my mother's death, I wanted to create an art piece to show others what my despair and confusion looked like. At the same time, the process of making the work and displaying it helped me confront the reality that my parents are dead.

In the weeks after my mother's funeral, I became fascinated by the conventions of condolence e-mails. "Sorry to hear," "I hope you," "I don't know what," "I wish you," "I'm here." The letters formed a corpus in my mind that I idly parsed, staring into space. I thought about patterns. Which ones meant the most to me, which friend or colleague went out of their way to reveal something slightly more intimate about themselves that I wouldn't have known otherwise? I was taking an introductory course in programming text analysis at the time, and for my final project, I decided to make productive use of my cache of e-mails.

In the spirit of Barthes, I slipped into others' words to convey senselessness. I compiled all the letters, and ran an algorithm that, in very general terms, selected the most statistically probable world, based on its frequency within the body of letters, to follow the previous one. The result was a montage of generic condolence comments, unintentionally absurd or poignant sentences, and personal details. I assembled the text into a video projection, which I titled the "Sorry to Hear." Against a black background, white text flashes and staggers down the screen. "Oh God Blythe," is followed by "I'm so sorry." The language accelerates, then slows down to the repetition of "I'm here; I'm here."

Ronell argues for philosophy to concern itself with the voices of those excluded from reigning discourses. In creating a piece from unusual source material, I considered her position in relation to technology—how does philosophy engage the voices we leave behind? I couldn't believe my mother died. Upon looking at the objective records of what I said last March, I did not remember the events unfolding how they did. I surprised myself: I thought I'd remained composed at the hospital. In actuality, I was desperate to remain optimistic.

"We Miss You" is touching not only from the innocence of the children's language, but also their inability to recognize the power of their words. As fictionalized characters, they can't look back. I wonder now, what is the relationship between my memory and the objective records of what I said, during a time I only recall in bits and pieces, and could not understand while it was happening? I would like to see a metaphysics for data collection. How is our concept of self today informed by our trails of personal information, left consciously or accidentally, or without us even knowing?

Davis, by way of her narrator, makes it clear that it is one of our most painful desires, as humans, to recover our childhood innocence. In my mind, it is that same painful desire that causes us to recoil, like small children, at gut-wrenching situations. We distance ourselves from tragic events with well-worn expressions, yet refer to them as exceptional. I have fewer key figures to help fill in the details of childhood memories. I can't go home for the holidays; I describe my parents in the present tense to simplify small talk. I have found that there is a bizarrely childlike aspect to facing each day anew.

Notes
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance. (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux Paperbacks, 2007), 45.
Ibid., 41.
Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 7.
Wayne Koestenbaum, "Forward," in Roland Barthes, A Lover's
Discourse: Fragments. trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 2010), xix.
Avital Ronell, "The Testamentary Whimper," The South Atlantic
Quarterly 103:2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004), 498.
Ibid.
Davis 2007, 40.
Ibid., 44.
Ibid.
Ronell 2004, 489.
Barthes 2010, 114.
Ibid., 189.
Ibid., 114.
Ronell 2004, 494.
Ibid.
Ronell, Avital. "The Debilitated Subject." New York University. Silver
Center, New York, NY. 22 September 2012.
Barthes 2010, 193.
Ronell 2004, 498.