Living by Fiction Read online

  LIVING BY FICTION

  Annie Dillard

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to people whose names are, for the most part, unknown to me. They are men and women across the country who love literature and give it their lives: who respect literature’s capacity to mean, who perhaps teach, who perhaps write fiction or criticism or poetry, and who above all read and reread the world’s good books. These are people who, if you told them the world would end in ten minutes, would try to decide—quickly—what to read.

  Those known to me are only a small sampling. There is my friend Judy Hawkes, who works in New York as a messenger “boy.” There is Robert Fitzgerald and Penny Laurans, at Yale. This book is for them—a woman I know well and a couple I met briefly—who live by the same love for literature; and for R. C. Day at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California (the briefest acquaintance with whom prompted this dedication); for L. L. Lee at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, John R. Moore and Betty Moore at Hollins College in Virginia, and Paul Horgan at Wesleyan University in Connecticut; for Michael Collins in New York, Daniel Butterworth in North Carolina, Doe Burn in California, Cort Conley on Waldron Island, Washington; for Garrett Epps and Spencie Love at large, the late DeVene Harrold in Florida, Ruth Vande Kieft in New York, Julia Randall in Maryland, and Jim McCulloch in Texas; for all of you in university English departments or in hock (or both), people well known or unknown, tending bar or retired, going to night school, raising children, writing novels or criticism, fitting pipes, awarding or receiving degrees—who love books, think about books, read or write books, for love of literature. I wish I could name all of you, all of you in every country and township in the land; for I know by extrapolation that you are there.

  Epigraph

  Art must recreate, in full consciousness,

  and by means of signs, the total life

  of the universe, that is to say, the soul

  where the varied dream we call the universe

  is played.

  —Teodor de Wyzewa, 1886

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE: SOME CONTEMPORARY FICTION

  1 Fiction in Bits

  Time in Smithereens

  The Egg in the Cage

  2 Two Wild Animals, Seven Crazies, and a Breast

  Character

  Point of View

  Return to Narration

  3 The Fiction of Possibility

  Art About Art

  The Problem of Knowing the World

  The Fiction of Possibility

  Where Is the Mainstream?

  PART TWO: THE STATE OF THE ART

  4 Revolution, No

  5 Marketplace and Bazaar

  6 Who Listens to Critics?

  7 Fine Writing, Cranks, and the New Morality: Prose Styles

  Shooting the Agate

  Calling a Spade a Spade

  PART THREE: DOES THE WORLD HAVE MEANING?

  8 The Hope of the Race

  May We Discover Meaning?

  Who Is Crazy?

  9 Can Fiction Interpret the World?

  How a Whale Means

  Find the Hidden Meaning

  10 About Symbol, and with a Diatribe Against Purity

  A Diatribe Against Purity

  11 Does the World Have Meaning?

  Source Notes

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Annie Dillard

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  This is, ultimately, a book about the world. It inquires about the world’s meaning. It attempts to do unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup. The teacup at hand, in this case, is contemporary fiction.

  Why read fiction to think about the world? You may, like most of us most of the time, read fiction for other things. You may read fiction to enjoy the multiplicity and dazzle of the vivid objects it presents to the imagination; to hear its verbal splendor and admire its nimble narrative; to enter lives not your own; to feel, on one hand, the solemn stasis and immutability of the work as enclosed art object—beginning and ending the same way every time you read it, as though a novel were a diagram inscribed forever under the vault of heaven—and to feel, on the other hand, the plunging force of time compressed in its passage, and that compressed passage like a river’s pitch crowded with scenes and scenery and actions and characters enlarged and rushing headlong down together. You may, I say, enjoy fiction for these sensations, and turn to nonfiction for thought.

  This is, indeed, a wonderful way to live. You read biography, ethics, cultural anthropology, psychology if you can stand it, aesthetics, linguistics, art criticism, every kind of personal narrative imaginable, and history above all, history of peoples and ideas and knowledge and places, history of everything. You read theology if such is your bent, and contemporary metaphysics if you can find any. And you turn to science for data, in order to do your own thinking; you read physics and astronomy, geography, cellular biology, field zoology and botany—the works. This is entertaining: “Let us gather facts,” Buffon said, “in order to have ideas.” If you do this, you will have ideas about facts.

  You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end of—of all things—an “idea for a story,” and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.

  Fiction can deal with all the world’s objects and ideas together, with the breadth of human experience in time and space; it can deal with things the limited disciplines of thought either ignore completely or destroy by methodological caution, our most pressing concerns: personality, family, death, love, time, spirit, goodness, evil, destiny, beauty, will.

  Fiction writers are, I hope to show, thoughtful interpreters of the world. But instead of producing interpretations—instead of doing research or criticism—they doodle on the walls of the cave. They make art objects which must themselves be interpreted. How convolute, how absurd, how endlessly interesting is this complexity! The world is filling up with works of fiction, with these useless, beautiful objects of thought—to what end? What links any work of fiction with anything we want to learn? To the world we see? To our understanding of the world we see? Does fiction illuminate the great world itself, or only the mind of its human creator?

  Like many people, I have for years been reading fiction by various United States and South American writers like Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez, and by European writers like Samuel Beckett, the dull Alain Robbe-Grillet, the wonderful Italo Calvino. I have asked myself how their work’s goals differ from those of the Modernists before them—Faulkner, Joyce, Mann, Kafka, say—or from the goals of Hardy or Eliot, or of Saul Bellow or Salinger or Mailer. What do these varied contemporary writers above—the contemporary modernists—have to say about the world? About fiction? What characterizes their fictional worlds and their artistic methods? The answers to these questions are old hat among critics. Nevertheless, these considerations, and some interesting side issues—like the matter of integrity in art—occupy Part One of this three-part book.

  In Part Two, which is far more entertaining, I ask why this brand of contemporary fiction does not wholly dom
inate the field. Why is anyone still writing traditional fiction? Why has there been no radical revolution in fiction? How far can fiction go in the direction of abstraction? How do fiction’s audience, its publishers, and even its critics, influence its direction? These are, I think, lively topics. There is also in this section a chapter about a much-beloved side issue, contemporary prose styles.

  The final third of the book raises the roof on fiction and takes on the world at large. Who, among thinkers, is interpreting the great world itself—landscape and culture together—in terms of human meaning? Is interpretation possible at all? We lock in asylums people who see meaning in clouds and rocks, but we heap honors on people who see meaning in children’s jokes and patterns scratched on pots. Where do those of us who are not in asylums draw the line—by tacit agreement—between the humanly meaningful and meaningless? Is the search for meaning among the high heaps of the meaningless a fool’s game? Is it art’s game? What is (gasp) the relationship between the world and the mind? Isknowledge possible? Do we ever discover meaning, or do we always make it up?

  I approach fiction, and the world, and these absurdly large questions, as a reader, and a writer, and a lover. Although my critical training and competence, such as it is, is as a careful textual critic, I have here flung this sensible approach aside in favor of enthusiasm, free speculation, blind assertion, dumb joking, and diatribe. The book as a whole sees the mind and the world as inextricably fitted twin puzzles. The mind fits the world and shapes it as a river fits and shapes its own banks.

  MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

  MAY1981

  PART ONE

  Some Contemporary Fiction

  CHAPTER 1

  Fiction in Bits

  Many contemporaries write a fiction intended to achieve traditional kinds of excellence. Many others write a fiction which is more abstracted—the kind of fiction Borges wrote inFicciones , or Nabokov wrote inPale Fire . This latter kind of fiction has no name, and I do not intend to coin one. Some people call it “metafiction,” “fabulation,” “experimental,” “neo-Modernist,” and, especially, “Post-Modernist”; but I find all these terms misleading. “Post-Modernist” is the best, but it suffers from the same ambiguity which everyone deplores in its sibling term, “Post-Impressionist.”

  Recently a stranger from New York City sent me a green button, a big green button, which read:POST-MODERNIST . From his letter I inferred that he disliked Modernism, found it baffling and infuriating, and for reasons I could not fathom, included me on his team.

  But Modernism is not over. The historical Modernists are dead: Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and also Biely, Gide, Malraux, Musil, Woolf. But one could argue—and I do—that diverse contemporary writers are carrying on, with new emphases and further developments, the Modernists’ techniques.

  I am going to use the dreadful mouthful “contemporary modernist” to refer to these contemporary writers and their fiction. I trust that the clumsiness of the term will prevent its catching on. I will also use the lowercase, nonhistorical term “modernist” loosely, to refer to the art of surfaces in general. The historical Modernists explored this art and bent it, in most cases, to surprisingly traditional ends. Transitional writers like Knut Hamsun, Witold Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schulz expanded its capacity for irony. Now various contemporaries are pushing it to various interesting extremes: Jorge Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Coover, John Barth, John Hawkes, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Thomas M. Disch, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jonathan Baumbach, William Hjorstberg, and Flann O’Brien, Italo Calvino, Tommaso Landolfi, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, Elias Canetti, and Carlos Fuentes.

  Time in Smithereens

  Nothing is more typical of modernist fiction than its shattering of narrative line. Just as Cubism can take a roomful of furniture and iron it onto nine square feet of canvas, so fiction can take fifty years of human life, chop it to bits, and piece those bits together so that, within the limits of the temporal form, we can consider them all at once. This is narrative collage. The world is a warehouse of forms which the writer raids: this is a stickup. Here are the narrative leaps and fast cuttings to which we have become accustomed, the clenched juxtapositions, inter-penetrations, and temporal enjambments. These techniques are standard practice now; we scarcely remark them. No degree of rapid splicing could startle an audience raised on sixty-second television commercials; we tend to be bored without it. But to early readers of Faulkner, say, or of Joyce, the surface bits of their work must have seemed like shrapnel from some unimaginable offstage havoc.

  The use of narrative collage is particularly adapted to various twentieth-century treatments of time and space. Time no longer courses in a great and widening stream, a stream upon which the narrative consciousness floats, passing fixed landmarks in orderly progression, and growing in wisdom. Instead, time is a flattened landscape, a land of unlinked lakes seen from the air. There is no requirement that a novel’s narrative bits follow any progression in narrative time; there is no requirement that the intervals between bits represent equal intervals of elapsed time. Narrative collage enables Carlos Fuentes inTerra Nostra to approximate the eternal present which is his subject. We read about quasars one minute; we enter an elaborated scene with Pontius Pilate the next. Narrative collage enables Grass inThe Flounder to bite off even greater hunks of time and to include such disparate elements as Watergate, the history of millet, Vasco da Gama, a neolithic six-breasted woman, and recipes for cooking eel. Narrative collage enables Charles Simmons, inWrinkles , artistically to fracture a human life and arrange the broken time bits on the page. And it enables Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian novelist, to include in his novelThe Collected Works of Billy the Kid not only prose narration in many voices and tenses, but also photographs ironic and sincere, and blank spaces, interviews, and poems.

  Joyce, 163 years after Sterne, started breaking the narrative inUlysses . The point of view shifts, the style shifts; the novel breaks into various parodies, a question-and-answer period, and so forth. Later writers have simply pushed farther this notion of disparate sections. They break the narrative into ever finer particles and shatter time itself to smithereens. Often writers call attention to the particles by giving them each a separate chapter, or number, or simply a separate title, as Gass does in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” Donald Barthelme has a story (“The Glass Mountain”) in which each sentence constitutes a separate, numbered section. All these cosmetics point to a narration as shattered, and as formally ordered, as a Duchamp nude.

  If and when the arrow of time shatters, cause and effect may vanish, and reason crumble. This may be the point. I am thinking here of Robert Coover’s wonderful story “The Babysitter,” in which the action appears as a series of bits told from the point of view of several main characters. Each version of events is different and each is partially imaginary; nevertheless, each event triggers other events, and they all converge in a final scene upon whose disastrous particulars the characters all of a sudden agree. No one can say which causal sequence of events was more probable. Time itself is, as in the Borges story, a “garden of forking paths.” In other works of this kind, events do not trigger other events at all; instead, any event is possible. There is no cause and effect in Julio Cortázar’sHopscotch , an unbound novel whose pages may be shuffled. There is no law of noncontradiction in Barthelme’s story “Views of My Father Weeping.” Barthelme writes the story in pieces, half of which examine a father’s death and half of which depict the father, in the same time frame, alive and weeping.

  Narrative collage, and the shifting points of view which accompany it, enable fiction to make a rough literature of physics, a better “science fiction” which acknowledges the equality of all relative positions by assigning them equal value. One extreme of this kind of fiction is an art without center. The world is an undirected energy; it is an infinite series of random possibilities. (Barthelme ends “Views of My Father Weeping” with
a section which reads only “Etc.”) The world’s coherence derives not from a universal order but from any individual stance. God knows this is a common enough position. It is not really physics but ordinary relativism. (In literature, relativism need not be cynical; in “The Babysitter” andHopscotch it is downright gleeful. Relativism is particularly suited to artists and writers, who, as a class, have often been dedicated to private vision anyway, and especially to the private vision of the world as a storehouse of manipulable ideas and things.)

  Not only does time shift rapidly in contemporary modernist narrative; so does everything else. Space, for instance, is no longer a three-dimensional “setting”—the great house into which generations of little lords are born, the setting into which readers sitting in their own great houses can settle. Instead, space is, or may be, a public, random, or temporary place. Instead of being exotic, places may be merely alien—rucks in the global fabric where no one is at home. The action may occur all over the globe, with everywhere the same narrative distance, so that works of this sort (V., Terra Nostra) may have geographical breadth without emotional depth. (I am not speaking pejoratively here in the least; I mean merely to distinguish between sets of excellences.) The traditional novelist labors to render an exotic setting familiar, to put us at our ease in the Alps or at home in burning Moscow. But contemporary writers may flaunt their multiple, alien settings, as Pynchon does, or make of the familiar world someplace alien and strange, as Thomas M. Disch does with Manhattan. Narrative collage touches every aspect of the fiction in which it appears. The point of view shifts; the prose style shifts and its tone; characters turn into things; sequences of events abruptly vanish. Images clash; realms of discourse bang together. Zeus may order a margarita; Zsa Zsa Gabor may raise the siege of Orléans. In a recentTriQuarterly story, Heathcliff meets Chateaubriand on a golf course. These things have almost become predictable.