"Habitualization," said the critic Viktor Shklovsky, "devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. . . . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life." That the devouring of one's wife -- and one's husband -- is a topic vigorously taken up by Diane Williams let's put to one side for a moment to contemplate the pitfalls of habitualization and the ways art may or may not help us to overcome it. I think Shklovsky means that it can be pretty hard to remain alert on a daily basis to the intense, complicated and seemingly endless variety of stimuli that constitute experience and that it's natural to start substituting what we expect to see for what we really see, just to be able to get to work on time or not want to jump out a window once we arrive there.
Convention crasher
It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature A Novella and Stories; Diane Williams; Fiction Collective Two: 132 pp., $17.95 paper
Luckily, there's literature to help us reverse the substitution by making the familiar unfamiliar again. But a potential problem for avid readers is to become habituated to various techniques meant to help them transcend their habits of perceiving, thinking and feeling. In the 19th century, when European fiction writers developed a set of techniques we now think of as realism, those techniques may have seemed an unfamiliar way to depict the world. By now, they have become so much a part of what we expect when we read that they strike us as quite natural, and much realist fiction these days reinforces our habits of perception rather than encouraging us to free ourselves of them.
One of America's most exciting violators of habit is Williams, who has written six books of fiction, beginning with 1990's all-encompassing story collection "This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate." Following is a brief and necessarily incomplete catalog of ways in which Williams, throughout her career and especially in her latest book, "It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature," pushes beyond convention.
1. Titles (not only the books but also individual stories): "I Was Very Hungry!," "Well, Well, Well, Well, Well," "The Easiest Way of Having," "Both My Wife and I Were Very Well Satisfied."
