Living by Fiction

by Annie Dillard

  The span of fiction’s movement in this century has been narrower than that of painting, but the direction is the same: from depth to surface, from rondure to planes, from world to scheme, from observation to imagination, from story to theory, from society to individual, from emotion to mind. Literature as a whole has moved from contemplating cosmology—Dante—for the sake of God, to analyzing society—George Eliot—for the sake of man, to abstracting pattern itself—Nabokov—for the sake of art. At its purest, the new fiction parallels the scheme of, say, a Stevens lyric poem: in Nabokov’sPale Fire , fictional objects revolve about each other and only each other, and shed on each other and only each other a lovely and intellectual light.

  In the contemporary modernist view, the work of art is above all a chunk in the hand. It is a self-lighted opacity, not a window and not a mirror. It is a painted sphere, not a crystal ball. The reader, then, must not wholly enter such a work of fiction; if he enters it emotionally, he will be lost, and miss the work’s surface, where the framework of its meaning as art is spread. So the contemporary modernist fiction writer deliberately flattens the depth elements of his art. He replaces emotional strengths with intellectual ones. He makes his characters into interesting objects. He flattens narrative space-time by breaking it into bits; he flattens his story by fragmenting its parts and juxtaposing disparate elements on the page. He writes in sections; he interrupts himself by a hundred devices. In so doing, he keeps his readers fully conscious at his work’s surface. Finally, he may wish to distance readers so thoroughly that he dispenses with character and narration altogether.

  InThe Voices of Silence , André Malraux likens storytelling in literature to representation in painting. Telling a story and painting a likeness of a face or a tree are sure-fire crowd-pleasers. (And for the idea of crowd-pleasing Malraux displays a fine Gallic contempt, in which he illogically does not include either storytelling or representation themselves.) Malraux is correct. A good story and a good representation have wide appeal. But his is a cheap shot. The more interesting comparison between storytelling in literature and representation in painting is this: that each was considered for centuries the irreducible nub of its art, and is no longer.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Fiction of Possibility

  To round out a picture of contemporary modernist fiction, only a few more considerations remain. Art is modernist according to its handling, not according to its themes. Nevertheless, some themes are especially significant to recent contemporary modernist fiction. One of these is art itself.

  Art About Art

  Fiction has been redefining itself along theoretical lines. It has also been advancing its claim, throughout an increasing din from film, journalism, and advertising—not to mention the increasing din from the twentieth-century world at large—to be understood as art, as high holy art. Fiction has helped advance the successful claim of all the arts to be worth their candles. It has asserted its own purity, its disdain of mere commercialism, and its structural kinship with its poor and above-reproach cousin, lyric poetry. And in doing all this it has been increasingly interested in the subject of its own artfulness. So, of course, has painting. The enormously increased concern shown by both painting and fiction with their own art as their own subject matter reflects the overall self-consciousness of man in this century, I think; more specifically, it also reflects the quest for purity of practice which is born of this self-consciousness.

  But painting is different. In contemporary painting, a work’s surface and its subject matter—its form and content—may, and often do, entirely coincide: Frank Stella’s “What you see is what you see.” Words refer, and fiction’s elements must always be bits of world; so fiction must ever quit its own surface and foray into the wide world in order to be about anything, even itself.

  Language is weighted with referents. It is like a beam of light on Venus. There, on Venus, heavy atmospheric gravity bends light around the entire circumference of the planet, enabling a man, in theory, to see the back of his own head. Now, the object of every artist’s vision is, in one sense, the back of his own head. But the writer, unlike the painter, sculptor, or composer, cannot form his idea of order directly in his materials; for as soon as he writes the least noun, the whole world starts pouring onto his page. So fiction, using language like a beam of Venusian light to see the back of its own head—to talk about its own art—makes a very wide tautological loop. It goes all around the world of language’s referents before coming back to its own surface. It may, for instance, likePale Fire , create a world, or a grid for a world, which is an artful context for a set of meanings which in turn define art as the creation of worlds as artful contexts for meaning. Now, painting does such tricks directly, on a square of linen, with a line. There is a little paint, but there is no world, necessarily, between mind and hand. It is a game of inches. But fiction, happily, gets to go round via Zembla, or Yoknapatawpha County, or Dublin.

  Fiction may be about art in a number of ways. All works of art are to some extent about art—but this way, as it is general, is meaningless. Fiction may talk about art by talking about art; this is common enough in many kinds of fiction. A novel’s characters may be composers, poets, painters, or, especially, novelists. Gide’sThe Counterfeiters , published in 1926, was among the first of an undiminished spate of novels about a novelist who is trying to write a novel. Some of these end, predictably, when the hero seizes his or her pen and writes (on the very first try) the present novel’s first words. Alternately, the protagonist’s work-in-progress, described or even sampled in the text, serves as comment upon his own situation, or, more interestingly, acts as a gloss upon, or parody of, the living author’s own future, unwritten novels (Nabokov,The Real Life of Sebastian Knight ).

  A work of art may be about art insofar as its referents never leave its own surface. This, as has been stressed, is a purely ideational state—it cannot occur in literature—but it can be approached. Gertrude Stein approached it.Pale Fire approaches it; its elements refer to each other in a brilliant snarl. If you were to cast the interconnected lumps of elements inPale Fire into lines and geometric figures, into a chart of relationships, you would produce a Klee. To readPale Fire you need English, you need the world evoked by the English, and you need, especially, a mental dictionary composed entirely of interdefined elements ofPale Fire . (The latter is true of any coherent text, of course, but it is especially true of those modernist texts which stress pattern over reference. Other clear cases might be Yeats’s “Byzantium” or Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream”—texts which baffle a reader until he locates or composes such a provisional dictionary, a set of terms defined internally by the text.) Much contemporary modernist fiction works in this way. The fragmented world becomes an art object contained on its own plane, a surface of refracting bits. The fiction transforms the world into a complex diagram. Whenever a work’s own structure is, by intention, one of its own themes, another of its themes is art.

  Related to the theme of art, but actually grounded in metaphysics, is the modernist attention to the relationship between a tale and its teller. When characters are telling the tale, and especially when they are telling it all cockeyed, the subject at hand may be not only the nature of art and the nature of narration, but also the nature of perception. Clearly, fictions which have a biased narrator, or many biased narrators, deal in part with perceptual bias as a theme. I am thinking here of works like Nabokov’sDespair with its sole viewpoint or Durrell’sAlexandria Quartet with its many. But perceptual bias is not limited to cranky characters. It is every artist’s stock-in-trade. It is every perceiver’s stock-in-trade. And, as the thinking artist knows full well, everyone is cockeyed. Since everyone is cockeyed, what can anyone perceive truly? What can we know, or what can we say of the world? Gradually, then, the question of the relationship between tale, teller, and world fades into the question of the relationship between any perceiver and any object. And this matter is a frequent theme—nay, obsession—
in contemporary modernist fiction.

  The Problem of Knowing the World

  Any penetrating interest in anything ultimately leads to what used to be called epistemology. If you undertake the least mental task—if you so much as try to classify a fern—you end up agog in the lap of Kant. For in order to know anything for certain, we must first examine the mind’s own way of knowing. And how on earth do we propose to do that?

  This is a live issue in this country. John Dewey pointed out, quite intelligently, that philosophy progresses not by solving problems but by abandoning them. It simply loses interest. The question of “epistemology” is one which thinkers of this century have not yet abandoned. On the contrary, everybody seems to be working on it. So much interesting work is being done outside the field of philosophy proper, and outside philosophy’s terms, that it seems appropriate now to replace the term epistemology with a new term—such as cognition—to refer to this new wealth of related topics.

  Examining the structures of human thought and perception are recent thinkers like Paul Weiss and Ludwig Von Bertalanffy in systems theory, Gregory Bateson in information theory, Roman Jakobson and Thomas Sebeok in semiotics, Noam Chomsky in linguistics, John Eccles and Wilder Penfield in brain physiology, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas in anthropology, Ernst Gombrich in art criticism, and Jerome Bruner and Jean Piaget in psychology. They seek to understand the processes by which the mind imposes order. They seek to clarify the relationship between perceiving and thinking, between inventing and knowing. Microphysicists are interested in these matters too. Science as a whole, like philosophy, wants to proceed from a firm base. Interestingly, the human effort to locate that base, to set knowledge firmly upon the plinth of perception, seems repeatedly to result in everybody’s sinking at once. At any rate, I think the interest in cognition derives ultimately from a genuine interest in the world for its own sake. And I imagine that Western thought intended simply to get this little business out of the way, so it could proceed with its task of tracing quarks or analyzing texts; but no one has been able to get it out of the way. Instead, it just gets more interesting in its own right.

  From the time of Greek science till now, Western culture has usually had a lively, unselfish, and intellectual interest in the phenomenal world for its own sake. Historians of culture think that this interest sprang originally from meeting cultures. In the port towns at the peripheries of major civilizations, people of varying cultures and religions met. They soon asked themselves (according to this theory) what could be true if men disagreed, and if one world view was apparently as workable as another. This innocent inquiry—an inquiry it would have been impossible to make from the middle of China, the middle of Egypt, or the middle of Mexico—led straight to the moon. It is, then, a very good question, and we have not stopped asking it. What is absolutely true? What can we know for certain? What is really here?

  In fact, we are asking these questions now with fresh urgency. Of course, we in the West agree now that there is more than one way to skin a cat, or raise a baby, or help pain, or live. And no one is losing much sleep now over the idea that our tribal gods are not absolute. But weare having a slow century of it, digesting the information that our yardsticks are not absolute, our mathematics is not absolute.

  Science, that product of skepticism born of cultural diversity, is meant to deal in certainties, in data which anyone anywhere could verify. And for the most part it has. Our self-referential mathematics and wiggly yardsticks got us to the moon. I think science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes it is operating in midair. At any rate, the sciences are wondering again, as the earliest skeptics did, what could be a firm basis for knowledge. People in many of the sciences are looking at their feet. First Einstein, then Heisenberg, then Gödel, made a shambles of our hope (a hope which Kant shared) for a purely natural science which actually and certainly connects at base with things as they are. What can we know for certain when our position in space is limited, our velocity may vary, our instruments contract as they accelerate, our observations of particles on the microlevel botch our own chance of precise data, and not only are our own senses severely limited, but many of the impulses they transmit are edited out before they ever reach the brain?

  Even if we could depend on our senses, could we trust our brains? Even if science could depend on its own data, would it not still have to paw through its own language and cultural assumptions, itsa priori categories, wishes, and so forth, to approach things as they are? To what, in fact, could the phrase “things as they are” meaningfully refer apart from all our discredited perceptions, to which everything is so inextricably stuck? Physicists have been saying for sixty years that (according to the Principle of Indeterminacy) they cannot study nature, but only their own perception of nature: “method and object can no longer be separated” (Heisenberg). Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, British Astronomer Royal, said in 1927: “The physical world is entirely abstract and without ‘actuality’ apart from its linkage to consciousness.” It is one thing when Berkeley says this; when a twentieth-century astronomer says this, it is a bit of another thing. Similarly (and this is more familiar), Eddington’s successor Sir James Jeans wrote, summarizing a series of findings in physics: “The world begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” The world could be, then, in Eddington’s phrase, “mind-stuff.” And even the mind, anthropologists keep telling us, is not so much a cognitive instrument as a cultural artifact. The mind is itself an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration “knowledge.” The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

  The Fiction of Possibility

  Where does fiction fit into all this? For one thing, the interdisciplinary treatment of these issues is in a state so lively it is scarcely distinguishable from outright disarray, and fiction writers, like everyone else, are drawn to messes. Fiction writers are as interested in their century’s intellectual issues as any other thinkers. Fiction, like painting, intrinsically deals with the nature of perception. And fiction intrinsically deals with the world. So that finally fiction, if it has anything at all to do with the world as its subject matter, will begin to ask, What world?

  Early inSwann’s Way , Marcel recalls:

  When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form.

  This is one way that fiction may pose the problem of cognition. How may we come “directly in contact” with “any external object”? Some writers approach it by wresting the object from the grip of its ordinary contexts, so that we see it as it were for the first time. Surrealism racks its brains to dislocate ordinary expectations; it wrenches objects from their ordinary mental settings until at last (it hopes) it unhinges the mind itself.

  Writers may also approach fresh vision by restraining their painterly impulses and using language as a cognitive tool. That is, fresh vision is an unstated goal but a guiding one, I think, in fiction written in that very plain, exact, unemotional prose which contemporary writers of both traditional and modernist fiction use to describe the world of objects. Writers like Henry Green and Wright Morris on one hand, and Alain Robbe-Grillet on the other, write as if the world were indeed here and fiction owed it the responsibility of a careful and unbiased attention. Robbe-Grillet wishes the writer to limit his efforts to describing the surfaces of things and measuring the distances between them. On this effort he comments (my emphasis): “This comes down to establishing that things are here.” Establishing that things are here is, so far as I know, a new goal for art. And establishing that things are here is no mean feat: it is an effort that kept Kant and Wittgenstein quite occupied.

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bsp; Some fiction deals with matters of cognition more directly. Stanislaw Lem’sThe Cyberiad , which describes the plottings of two rival computer makers, concerns the nature of knowing. Also concerned implicitly with the nature of knowing are detective and mystery stories, and, explicitly, contemporary modernist fictions using detective or mystery conventions, like Robbe-Grillet’sThe Voyeur and Borges’s “Death and the Compass.” Other fiction, of which theAlexandria Quartet is the clearest type, deliberately treats the “relativity” of all knowledge by presenting a series of narratives which contradict. Still other fiction mimics the unknowableness of the world by being itself unknowable. It works—if it works—by eliciting confusion. If you track down some of the allusions and puzzles inPale Fire , what you get amounts to a Bronx cheer.

  In many works, the world is the arena of possibilities. Anything may happen. This “anything” is fiction’s new subject. Traditional writers labor to make their “what-ifs” seem plausible. But contemporary modernists flaunt the speculative nature of their fiction. What if, they say, and what if what else? Italo Calvino’sInvisible Cities is a wonderful case in point. In this book, Marco Polo reports to Kublai Khan on the many cities he has discovered by exploring the khan’s realm. Each description of a city is formal and titled (with a woman’s name); each occupies about a page. There is the city hung from high nets suspended over a plain; there is the city whose inhabitants stretch string all over town to delineate their every relationship, until the strings make a web in which no one can move; there is the city whose carnival stays put year after year while its banks, docks, and municipal buildings are loaded onto trucks and taken on tour. After every few descriptions of cities, Marco Polo and the khan discuss the reports; many of their discussions hinge on the question of whether Marco Polo is making everything up. But what, in the realm of imagination, could be the difference between invention and discovery? And is not all the world the realm of Kublai Khan, the realm of imagination?