A Table of Green Fields: Stories

by Guy Davenport

Guy Davenport est un auteur de nouvelles, à la frontière entre l'essai, l'histoire et l'imagination, entre l'érotisme et l'érudition. Davenport fait revivre en éclats éblouissants et vibrionnants des figures aussi diverses que celles de Jésus-Christ, Franz Kafka, Soren Kierkegaard (Mr Churchyard), James Joseph Sylvester - le premier professeur juif à avoir enseigné dans une université américaine -, Lawrence d'Arabie, Dorothy Wordsworth, quelques gamins qui s'éveillent à la sexualité, Thoreau et d'autres encore.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, The United States Of America, American, Literature

149 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has been edited out of the gospels as we have them, by some high-minded copyist who did not notice that an animal whose whole soul is composed of loyalty and whose faith in his master cannot be shaken by any force, neither by death nor by distance, is given a voice, like Balaam's ass centuries before, to remind us that our perception of the otherworldly is blind.

Throughout A Table of Green Fields I would pause and admire the images and especially the erudition which yielded such pleasure. Davenport scored well on his classification as an academic author. There are traces of ivy in all his stories and sperm in most of these. I remain curious as to whether his other collections are similarly bound in theme and specifics of action. I allude here to the frequency of male tandem masturbation which almost dominates the tome.

Kafka, Thoreau, Toke and T. E. Lawrence are brought to visibility within these stories. There is little or no danger of caricature. Davenport approaches each with modest eye.

This is a humble work yet loaded with a scholar's detail.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more Davenport I read the more I see the light of Eros in his words. What I had originally taken to be a “shadowless” quality to his writing is looking more and more like a focused light with its own inherent shadows, for while Eros is all about light and flow and burgeoning, like all gods it is also unfathomable and beyond our ultimate understanding. Not to say that Davenport, even with all his learnedness and rare words, is difficult to understand, but his clarity, like a marvelously engineered bridge of well-lit details, spans the deepest mysteries, lending his clarity a host of reflective shadows.

I found this description of Eros:

He is a primeval deity who embodies not only the force of love but also the creative urge of ever-flowing nature, the firstborn Light for the coming into being and ordering of all things in the cosmos.

…which means a lot to me without actually meaning anything too specific. I get a feeling of purity and uninflected fresh life from it; of uncluttered reason before its descent into verbal logic; of a universal love without baggage, without even emotion as we generally know it; of keenest piercing intellect, of intellect like sun-soaked vision.

Davenport invokes an Eros of attention (which is a kind of light, a reversed light directed at things), of knowledge as it joins most intimately to the physical world, of eyes making love to things, climaxing freely and repeatedly, impregnating the very air we breathe.

Eros is intsensest Life.

So why all the boy-on-boy circle jerks?

Because Eros is also sex, or rather Eros is the sex impulse, which is a physical quickening but is not entirely physical (which is lust). Eros is the intellect as a “descent” into the purely physical, into the animal. Eros is like Jesus’ harrowing of Hell, which in my mind is a flooding of the deepest darkness by a light which is love. A giving of life.

But all the jerking off can still come as a shock, like a cum shot to the eye.

I could say the cum shot is like Jesus’ resurrection after the harrowing of Hell; a further giving of life; intellectual Eros descending into the gonads’ taproot to then spurt into new life as gobs of white fruition. And all the better if it’s “only” onanism, as this retains the idea of Jesus’ purity and stainlessness (unless it gets all over the sheets).

All of which is to say - Guy Davenport is seminal.

But A Table of Green Fields is not all about downy-furred joysticks.

One of my favorites in the collection is Belinda’s World Tour. It’s starting point is an actual event in Franz Kafka’s life. Kafka saw a little girl in the street crying because she had lost her doll. He told her he had just met the doll and the doll had told him that she was going off to travel around the world. But he didn’t stop there; masquerading as the doll he wrote letters to the little girl describing her (the doll’s) adventures. Davenport’s story is a recreation of these, presumably lost, letters, and it is a thorough delight.

Another favorite is O Gadjo Niglo which is a very moving coming of age story told almost entirely in clandestine jerk-off sessions.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Davenport's short story collections seem organized around a particular type of deep usefulness that they want to communicate. In "A Table of Green Fields," the trick is domestication. In each story, the imagination of characters and author makes its home in a difficult world, and tries to teach the reader how to do the same. As in his essays, Davenport's mind is various to the point of impossibility: he seems to have literally known everything. The wordplay is so dense that whole sections are almost impossible to read; this is both annoying and strangely fascinating, like trying to discern figures and shapes in an abstract painting. Davenport paints with words (as he admits). Oh yes, and then there's the high level of man-boy, boy-boy, girl-boy (but, I think, no girl-man or woman-man)eroticism. Put it this way: I never realized how intricate a mechanism the human penis was. And I have one. Some of the feats the brave little utopians in these stories contemplate and perform rate high on the unintentional humor scale, though I guess saying that implies me in the real preoccupation of all Davenport's fiction: innocence, and where it's gone.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

Davenport’s obviously a genius though this isn’t necessarily a masterpiece. It is, however, very good. Bizarre economy of language and prose for short fiction that feels genuinely energizing to encounter right now. The story about the Doll’s travels is wonderful if even playing on the knife’s edge of whimsy but the author’s note at the end of the collection elaborating on the context makes it probably my favourite story of the set.

[Seth Tisue · Rating 5 out of 5]

the fifth star is for “O Gadjo Niglo”

[sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

it feels right to read davenport on a molten summer day

[Gareth Schweitzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual mix, some fragmented and oblique.

Beautifully written and not always easy to read, there is an underlying eroticism that culminates in the final story, which is deeply sexy.

[Donny · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a deep sense of idyllic life, ten different stories that are still too hard for me to digest, my review would only be the wayward thought of an infant. But I thoroughly enjoyed it, really, tremendously.