The Space Between

Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard

Sandra Humble Johnson

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781612770529
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Annie Dillard, a foremost practitioner of the literary epiphany, has become a representative of a necromantic movement that combines the ecological interest of wilderness literature with the aesthetics of a highly stylized literature. This first full-length study of the Pulitzer prize-winning essayist considers her as wilderness philosopher, religious mystic, professional critic, and arch-romantic.

Sandra Humble Johnson moves Dillard from the category of nature writer to the area of aesthetics as she examines the importance of literary epiphany—a distinctive type of "illumination"—to her work. She then explores how Dillard, through her own peculiar use of language, describes and creates these moments of illumination, or "dots" of self, for the reader.

Johnson also reveals Dillard's relationship with other writers who practiced this same literary device: William Wordsworth in his "spots of time, " T.S. Eliot and his "still points, " and Gerard Manley Hopkins through his "inscape." In addition, Johnson shows how the reader experiences a similar yet personal epiphany in sharing the writer's moment of illumination and further interprets how Dillard's absorption with pain, violence, and beauty is resolved in the nature of language itself.

1

The Same Old Vision

The Appearance of Epiphany

Annie Dillard, in the concluding pages of An American Childhood, writes:

What is important is anyone’s coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch, and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch—with an electric hiss and cry—this speckled mineral sphere, our present world. (248–49)

The moment of “coming awake,” which is the central concern of An American Childhood, has been Dillard’s literary preoccupation since the publication in 1974 of her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Admitting that she presents essentially the same message in all of her work, Dillard said in a 1981 interview that “given half a chance, the same old palaver comes inching out—molecule by molecule. It is visionary in content, if not in quality. It is the same old vision that I keep writing about over and over again” (“Drawing the Curtains” 35). This vision, a moment which sizzles with an “electric hiss and cry,” is not only the philosophical tenet, the raison d’etre which supports her work, but also the literary device with which she steadies and centers the massive range of material she scrutinizes. “Virtually all of Dillard’s narrative,” according to James Aton, “concerns itself with epistemology: how to see the world and the implications of that vision at a particular moment in time” (80). Language theory, ecology, art, literary criticism, religion, and history, among other matters, are brilliantly woven into a soft, mystically intriguing collage, which, in one sense, defies genre definition, but in a more important sense announces the emergence of a new genre that uses illumination at its core.

Although Dillard has published a volume of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), the bulk of her writing is prose, a nonfiction that can be loosely designated as romantic in tone and essaylike in structure. But in general her language is experienced like poetry, rather than read like prose. This simplistic and superficial comparison, however, severely limits an accurate categorization of Dillard’s work, which in many respects hies back to nineteenth-century British romanticism, more specifically to Wordsworth. Elements of Dillard’s style and content can also be linked to a later romantic, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Dillard’s romanticism is “high” romanticism in that she touches upon the deepest concerns of these nineteenth-century artists, particularly nature’s revelation of a divine spirit. However, Dillard, a very conscious twentieth-century technician, is romantic with a twist; she brings almost two centuries of scientific thought to bear upon the concerns of the romantic’s quest if she is to avoid being an anachronism in the literary art-philosophy world. This is a paradox central to an understanding of her work. Undeniably a twentieth-century thinker, Dillard is nonetheless an outright, bold romantic in the tradition of a nineteenth-century poet, grappling with images of birds and mountains, seeking unity in her natural environment, questioning the purpose or reality of beauty, dismissing institutional strictures, and most significantly, finding solace in the moment which strains toward antidefinition, a moment which by its very nature defies rationality, an illumination of human essence and its relationship with a greater being. This is the epiphanic moment.

The twist, however, is that Dillard introduces within these ephemeral journeys the most minute and excruciatingly factual detail from the arenas of contemporary science and history and uses them to scrutinize the very fabric of life. This scrutiny commences in a seemingly heartless manner, particularly through Pilgrim, with the painful minutiae of existence brought full to the reader’s attention; then when the detail has been paraded out and duly catalogued, Dillard with a bold, dramatic sweep of her favorite literary device—the epiphanic moment—scatters the logic of science and diachronic time to the corners of the page. In fact, she eventually brings the world of science and physics to affirm her own philosophically romantic conclusions, noting that physicists themselves have become “wild-eyed, raving mystics” in that they have “perfected their instruments and methods just enough to whisk away the crucial veil, and what stands revealed is the Cheshire cat’s grin” (Pilgrim 202). When Dillard can place the wild-eyed physicists in her philosophic camp, the epiphany becomes at the very least an epistemological tool, if not the central structure of her neoromantic epistemology.

Critics and book reviewers have often been at a loss when they have attempted to place Dillard in a literary tradition. Margaret Reimer notes the disparity of responses at the publication of Pilgrim when she writes of its “peculiar power, for reviewers were either rhapsodic in their praise or passionate in their indignation” (182). The confusion centered on the genre of Dillard’s book. What is it? Eudora Welty, in reviewing Pilgrim, was alarmed by Dillard’s style and mystical prose; she accused Dillard of being “a voice that is trying to speak to me out of a cloud instead of from a sociable, even answerable, distance on our same earth … .What’s going on here?” (8). Dillard’s prose, very much like poetry, skims across the page in Pilgrim with a fresh, contemporary power, but, on the other hand, is obviously dealing with a traditional romantic message. Pilgrim crosses boundaries: prose and poetry, literary art and ecological treatise, religion and philosophy, science and art. It is mysterious, which is exactly where Dillard’s genius would have it; Pilgrim is a mystery resulting from its insistent employment of the most abstract of literary structures— the illuminated moment. “What’s going on here,” in answer to Welty, is the emergence of a skilled neoromantic craftswoman who can handle language and subject matter with the unleashed imagination of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Blake, and the polish and control of Pope. One might say, with Pope, that Dillard can both “guide” and “spur the Muse’s steed” (“Essay on Criticism” Part I, line 84).

With her insistence on the importance of the moment Dillard has revealed a propensity for extreme romanticism. She has ultimately gone beyond nineteenth-century romanticism with her epiphanic moments. Wordsworth, who realized the importance and nourishing power of his own moments or “spots of time,” which are scattered throughout The Prelude, wrote in book 11 that his mind is “nourished and invisibly repaired” by these moments which have a “distinct preeminence” in his life (264, 258).¹ For Hopkins the moment is startling and gemlike and provides brilliant clashes of language in a Christian setting, illustrated by “God’s Grandeur”: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil” (1–2). But for Dillard the illuminated moment is more central than it is for Wordsworth and Hopkins; it is the focus of her thought and art and consistently provides the pillars on which her writing rests.

Annie Dillard was 31 years old when she received the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). This prose nonfiction work is structured around her year’s sojourn near Tinker Creek in Virginia, where through the meticulous observation of her environment, she involves herself, much like Thoreau at Walden, with elemental questions of life. Here Dillard provides for the reader her first important illumination, the moment of seeing a cedar tree filled with mourning doves and light: “I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed” (Pilgrim 33). The narrator continues her observation by the creek throughout the book, but it is for the renewal of this moment she waits: “I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam” (34). The moment for which she lives appears again in several forms in Pilgrim. In the chapter titled “The Present” the narrator experiences a moment which she feels is the locking in of the exact present. She has stopped along a Virginia highway at a gas station which is attended by a young boy who has his new beagle puppy “skidding around the office” (77). The sun is changing the color of the mountains with “brilliant blown lights” and “yellow brome,” “purple pigment,” and “rumpled rock in gilt” (78). The narrator bends to pet the puppy and feels a “wildly scrawling oscillograph on the present moment. The air cools; the puppy’s skin is hot. I am more alive than all the world” (78). The “puppy epiphany,” which emphasizes the relationship of time with the illumination, a relationship which will be considered here in chapter 3, further enunciates Dillard’s specialized treatment of the moment.

A variation of the illumination occurs in Pilgrim in chapter 12, “Nightwatch.” At the deserted Lucas farm, a “garden in the wilderness” near Tinker Creek (213), the narrator watches through the framed window a goldfinch perch on a thistle. Downy seed erupts from the dried plant and scatters into the wind. This, like the tree with lights and the puppy, is highly significant for the narrator: “I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place at this moment, with the air so light and wild?” (216). Once again the narrator emphasizes a moment’s sensations with its seemingly altered environment, and although the goldfinch spot will be discussed later as distinct from the tree with lights and the puppy, its high relief in the text marks it as another Dillard illumination.

Finally, a very quiet epiphany, the falling maple key, concludes Pilgrim. Although many other illuminations occur throughout the narrative of Pilgrim, the maple key reiterates Dillard’s peculiar reliance on this device if only because it appears as a conclusive episode. By the final chapter, “The Waters of Separation,” the narrator has been humbled and emptied; she can no longer apply effort to her search for meaning in a parasitic world. It is the winter solstice. She stands alone, “lost, sunk… gazing toward Tinker Mountain and feeling the earth reel down,” when suddenly she sees a winged seed spiral in the wind to the ground: “It flashed borrowed light like a propellor. Its forward motion gently outran its fall. As I watched, transfixed, it rose, just before it would have touched a thistle, and hovered pirouetting in one spot, then twirled on and finally came to rest; it was a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair” (267). The narrator picks the maple key from the ground, tosses it into the air, and it is carried off:

I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down. O maple key, I thought, I must confess I thought, o welcome, cheers. (267–68)

The fall of this single seed creates in the narrator an elaborate response, a kind of resonance; “the bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish as of blended horns, clarion, sweet” (268). Like the other illuminations, its reverberations create meaning, a “true note,” for the narrator.

Dillard has indicated that the 15 chapters of Pilgrim parallel the via positiva and via negativa of the medieval mystic. The first half is “keyed by [the] Seeing chapter” which “builds up [the] Via Positiva, the journey to God through action & will & materials” while the “apex of structure” occurs with “Intricacy” and the book changes movement to the Via Negativa, “the spirit’s revulsion at time and death” (personal correspondence to William Reyer). Throughout the first chapters, the narrator seeks the Spirit with an increasingly arabesque stratification of description applied to earth’s materials. In the central chapter, “Flood,” the exquisite cataloguing of insect, plant, and mineral life makes an abrupt turnabout and descends into the way of “nothingness,” the via negativa, where the Spirit cannot be sought or considered symbolically through any earthly medium. The narrator says she has “glutted on richness and welcome[s] hyssop…. [she] stand[s] under the wiped skies directly, naked without intercessors” (259). The ascent and descent of the mystic’s way are redeemed by the individual moment wherein lies the only evidence humankind can assume as proof for a divine plan or creator.

This overview of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek characterizes Dillard as an artist of the literary phenomenon which has been variously referred to as the epiphany, illumination, or significant moment. It is useful, first of all, to clarify the variation which can occur within the development of this moment in order to place Dillard’s manipulation of these forms within a historical framework and to specify her peculiar use of the device.

Morris Beja, in Epiphany in the Modern Novel, working with Joyce’s comments on epiphany in Stephen Hero, defines the literary epiphany as a “sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind— the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it” (18). Beja indicates that the event or object marking the moment must be seemingly unimportant and not logically connected with the reaction it produces in the recipient. This definition specifically connects epiphany with its verbal construct and points toward its uses in modern literature, including the works of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Wolfe. But the highlighting of a moment is not a modern device, although Joyce was the first to denote this kind of psychological and literary mode of perception with the theological term “epiphany” (Langbaum 336). The illuminated moment is as old as Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus and Augustine’s interest in time, which Beja connects with the tradition because time for Augustine was “measured within the minds and souls of men” (Beja 24, 27). French philosopher Henri Bergson is also a precursor to the modern concept of epiphany when he writes that “one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible…. To analyze, therefore, is to express a thing as a function of something other than itself ” (Beja 55). Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, rejects empiricism and idealism and believes in a “faculty beyond the senses” which can illuminate the “will,” or the thing itself (Beja 30). In addition, Kant, Sterne, Locke, and Proust, the latter of whom Beja considers to be the “most thorough literary exponent” of an epiphanic theory, are ancestors of the tradition (28). Emerson may be added to this list when he writes that epiphany rises out of “vulgar fact”: “Day creeps after day, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised things… presently the aroused intellect finds gold and gems in one of these scorned facts, then finds…that a fact is an Epiphany of God” (quoted in Langbaum 339). Wordsworth coins his own epiphanic term when he speaks of the “renovating virtue” of his “spots of time” (Prelude 11.208–11), while Walter Pater comments on epiphany when he writes that “success in life” is to “burn always with this hard, gemlike flame,” to “be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy” (Renaissance 222).

While the epiphanic experience may display some commonality among various writers, the illuminated moment itself can be subdivided into five types: the experience of the “sublime,” the mystical experience, the conversion, the vision, and the epiphany. The “sublime” is “characterized by nobility and grandeur, impressive, exalted, raised above ordinary human qualities” and is, according to Longinus, writing in the first century A.D., a “thing of spirit, a spark leaping from writer to reader, rather than a product of technique” (Handbook to Literature 489). Although this early appraisal of illumination does not recognize “technique” as the transmitter of the moment, Longinus does insightfully identify the essential character of the moment by labeling it as a “spark leaping from writer to reader.” The literary epiphany, on the other hand, is highly involved with technique and devices which result in the transmitted “spark.” One critic has, in fact, called epiphany the “modern sublime” (Langbaum 351).

Journeying as it does along the path the way of the via positiva and via negativa, Dillard’s structure for Pilgrim results in the illuminated moment, which can be called the mystical experience. The elements of this experience share similarities, as Beja points out, with some elements of the epiphany (25). First, the mystical moment is sudden and intense with an exhilaration or pain that brings a new awareness. This moment is irrational in nature but brings an intuitive insight. Further, this illumination is authoritative and cannot be refuted by logical argument. It is fleeting and momentary. The mystical experience is an affirmation of God or a divine spirit and a denial of self (Beja 2 5). In addition, it is marked by an impersonal tone. The epiphany, on the other hand, is not necessarily a revelation of divinity but could as easily be a revelation of the self and, in this way, is entirely personal. The epiphany is, however, like the mystic’s moment, fleeting, intuitive, and irrational.

The third subcategory of illuminated moment includes the experience of conversion. The great religious conversions of literary history can be linked in ways more reminiscent of epiphany than mysticism in that a conversion appears to illuminate the self rather than highlight a divinity. The seventeenth-century Puritan John Bunyan, with his tinker’s pots and pans, is changed by a moment when he hears a voice instruct him to give up his sinful habits of drinking, bell-ringing, and gaming (Bunyan 11–13). This moment reveals the godhead but more significantly illumines Bunyan’s self as he recognizes his “ungodly” pursuits. Bunyan, the recipient of illumination, has been identified and changed, rather than made selfless, by the moment. This constitutes conversion and, in some respects, echoes epiphany in that it emphasizes the self.

Finally, the vision must be distinguished from the epiphany, the latter being a relatively modern concept ushered into practice by Wordsworth through his notion of “spots of time.” The major difference between the epiphany and the vision in post-Wordsworthian terms is the engagement of the reader: the literary epiphany works upon the reader, forcing him into an experienced moment, while the vision is a literary moment experienced or “read” by the reader from what could be deemed the “outside” of the moment. The writer describes his vision; the reader recognizes the description but does not physically experience the vision. It is this “outside” reading that sets Blake apart from Wordsworth or Coleridge, according to Robert Langbaum (341); Wordsworth and Coleridge construct the epiphany while Blake builds the vision. When Blake says he sees “a World in a Grain of Sand” and holds “Infinity in the palm of [his] hand” (Auguries of Innocence 1, 3), he describes for the reader his own experience, but he does not force the reader into the mysterious psychological operations of the epiphany. Wordsworth, however, leaves the reader to forage his own way through the powerful moments the poet himself cannot explain. When he recalls in book 11 of The Prelude the “spot” when, as a child, he sees a “naked pool,” a “girl who bo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Same Old Vision: The Appearance of Epiphany
• 2. The Cheshire Cat’s Grin: The Need for Epiphany
• 3. The Circle is Unbroken: The Shape of Epiphanic Time
• 4. Upstream and Down: Surfaces and Directions in Epiphanic Time
• 5. When Everything Else Has Gone: Epiphanic Landscapes
• 6. Feints at the Unknown: Epiphany On and Off the Page
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index