Living by Fiction

Annie Dillard

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061856532
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." — Los Angeles Times

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticism

Living by Fiction is written for—and dedicated to—people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows how contemporary fiction works and why traditional fictionwill always move us. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.

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.

The use of narrative collage, then, enables a writer to recreate, if he wishes, a world shattered, and perhaps senseless, and certainly strange. It may emphasize the particulate nature of everything. We experience a world unhinged. Nothing temporal, spatial, perceptual, social, or moral is fixed.

This is the fiction of quantum mechanics; a particle’s velocity and position cannot both be known. Similarly, it may happen that in the works of some few writers, the narrative itself cannot be located. Events occur without discernible meaning; “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” What if the world’s history itself, and the events of our own lives in it, were as jerked, arbitrary, and fundamentally incoherent as is the sequence of episodes in some contemporary fictions? It is, these writers may say; they are.

The Egg in the Cage

I would like to pause here to talk about artistic integrity. Distinctions of value need to be made among contemporary modernist works, as among all works, and I think they can be made most pointedly here, where technique fades into meaning and raises the issue of integrity.

Interestingly enough, contemporary modernist fiction, unlike traditional fiction, has no junk genres. Like poetry so long as it is serious, fiction, so long as it is witty, is almost always assumed to be literature. Well, then, it has already passed the qualifying rounds and must go on to the finals: Does it have meaning? For any art, including an art of surface, must do more than dazzle. Is this art in the service of idea? And it is right here thatsome contemporary modernist fiction can claim, Yes, it does mean; it recreates in all its detail the meaninglessness of the modern world. And I cry foul. When is a work “about” meaninglessness and when is it simply meaningless?

Clearly the shattering of what we feel as the rondure of experience (or of what, according to this theory, we who were born after 1911 have never felt as the rondure of experience), and the distant and ironic examination of the resultant fragments, serve, in Robbe-Grillet’s terms, “to exile the world to the life of its own surface”—and, by extension, to express our sense of exile on that surface. If meaning is contextual, and it is, then the collapse of ordered Western society and its inherited values following World War I cannot be overstressed; when we lost our context, we lost our meaning. We became, all of us in the West, more impoverished and in one sense more ignorant than pygmies, who, like the hedgehog, know one great thing: in this case, why they are here. We no longer know why we are here—if, indeed, we are to believe that large segments of European society ever did. At any rate, our contemporary questioning of why we are here finds a fitting objective correlative in the worst of the new fictions, whose artistic recreation of our anomie, confusion, and meaninglessness elicits from us the new question, Why am I reading this?

We judge a work on its integrity. Often we examine a work’s integrity (or at least I do) by asking what it makes for itself and what it attempts to borrow from the world. Sentimental art, for instance, attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us. Instead of creating characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text, sentimental art merely gestures toward stock characters and events whose accompanying emotions come on tap. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls. An honest work generates its own power; a dishonest work tries to rob power from the cataracts of the given. That is why scenes of high drama—suicide, rape, murder, incest—or scenes of great beauty are so difficult to do well in genuine literature. We already have strong feelings about these things, and literature does not operate on borrowed feelings.

As in the realm of feeling, so in the realm of intellect. Naming your characters Aristotle and Plato is not going to make their relationship interesting unless you make it so on the page; having your character shoot himself in the end does not mean that anyone has learned anything; and setting your novel in Buchenwald does not give it moral significance. Now: may a work of art borrow meaning by being itself meaningless? May it claim thereby to have criticized society? Or to have recreated our experience? May a work claim for itself whole hunks of other people’s thoughts on the flimsy grounds that the work itself, being so fragmented, typifies our experience of this century? Can a writer get away with this? I don’t think so.

But let me state the question more sympathetically, from the writer’s point of view. The writer’s question is slightly different. If the writer’s honest intention is to recreate a world he finds meaningless, must his work then be meaningless? If he writes a broken book, is he not then a bad artist? On the other hand, if he unifies a world he sees as shattered, is he not dishonest? All this is an old problem for any writer, for a traditional one as well as a contemporary one. Stated broadly, the question is, What is negative art? What can it be? What can a writer do when his intention is to depict seriously a boring conversation? Must he bore everybody? How should he handle a dull character, a hateful scene? (Everyone knows how the hated voice of a hated character can ruin a book.) Or, in the big time, how can a writer show, as a harmonious, artistic whole, times out of joint, materials clashing, effects without cause, life without depth, and all history without meaning?

There are several strategies which may ameliorate these difficulties. A writer may make his aesthetic surfaces very, very good and even appealing, in the hope that those surface excellences will impart to the work enough positive value, as it were, to overwhelm its negativity. Better, he may widen his final intention to include possibilities for meaning which illuminate, without relieving, suffering: but this solution, the writing of tragedy or of contemporary art whose intentions are wider than those posited, does not address the problem. The only real solution is this, which obtains in all art: the writer makes real artistic meaning of meaninglessness the usual way, the old way, by creating a self-relevant artistic whole. He produces a work whose parts cohere. He imposes a strict order upon chaos. And this is what most contemporary modernist fiction does. Art may imitate anything but disorder. The work of art may, like a magician’s act, pretend to any degree of spontaneity, randomality, or whimsy, so long as the effect of the whole is calculated and unified. No subject matter whatever prohibits a positive and unified handling. After all, who would say of “The Waste Land” that it is meaningless, or ofMolloy , orMrs. Bridge? We see in these works, and in traditional black works like Greene’sBrighton Rock and Lowry’sUnder the Volcan...