Living by Fiction

by Annie Dillard

  If to the artist, and to the mind, each of the world’s bits is a mental object for contemplation or manipulation, then those bits may be actual or fancied; it does not matter which. They may derive indifferently from newspaper accounts or dreams. And since mental objects and imaginary objects have equal status, the man of imagination is the creator of the world.

  These ideas, I say, underly some of the best contemporary modernist fiction. They dominate the work of Borges, Nabokov, and Calvino; we find them also in many other writers, like Barth, Coover, Cortázar, Gilbert Sorrentino, Guy Davenport, Flann O’Brien, and almost any other contemporary modernist we can name. Some works stress the role of mind in actively shaping reality, as Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” does. In this story, the inhabitants of the planet Tlön—which was itself invented and set in motion by a series of thinkers—may through their expectations call objects into being. If a man is looking for a lost pencil, he may find, not the original pencil, but a secondary object, “more in keeping with his expectation.” “These secondary objects are calledhrönir and, even though awkward in form, are a little larger than the originals.” The people may also bring another class of objects into being; anur is “an object brought into being by hope.” (The subject at hand in this frankly philosophical story is the nature of Berkeley’s idealism.)

  Other works, like Nabokov’sThe Real Life of Sebastian Knight , stress the role of the conscious artist as imagination’s lord. If inventing is knowing, and if meaning is contextual, then the artist is the supreme knower and the artificer of meaning. Still other works, like Lem’sA Perfect Vacuum and Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” which are modeled on the interpretation of texts, stress the equal status of all mental objects. Imaginary or third-hand texts, or accounts of texts, have not only the same ontological status as canonical texts, but also the same status and capacity for meaning as actual events. And actual events may be interpreted as if they were texts. Everything on earth or in imagination is a conjunction of mental objects; it is an art object which may be interpreted critically.

  The world, happily, still exists, and contemporary modernist fiction still interprets it. One interpretation to which these same writers are prone is a reading of the world in the light of its multiple material combinations. We scarcely require imagination to produce a wealth of possible conjunctions; the actual world is doing very well on its own. In these works, such as Calvino’sCosmicomics , Cortázar’sHopscotch , or Borges’s “The Aleph,” the artist’s generative role is again secret, and the dizzying multiplicity of the world itself is the subject. I think that the new sense of stellar and geologic time we have in this century, and the reiterated tale of how chemicals evolve, and how new species arise from random combinations in multiple circumstances over unimaginably long reaches of time, must surely contribute to this contemporary fiction of possibility. The work of Calvino and Borges, at least, is visibly stricken with a sense of a finite material world so long and wide it becomes a material metaphor for infinity. Beckett and Borges treat these matters soberly; other writers, like Barth, Cortázar, and Coover, seem to grow giddy at the thought, as if creating were not the deliberate work Genesis made it out to be, but instead God’s spendthrift and neverending jubilee.

  Writers and artists of this century may well ascribe to their work a new and real importance. If art is the creation of contexts,and so is everything else , how false or trivial can art be? Was not the Linnaean system of classification a poem among poems, a provisional coherence selected out of chaos? It has always been possible for artists of every kind of sniff at science and claim for art special, transcendent, and priestly powers. Now it is possible for artists to have and eat that particular cake by adding that, after all, science is in one (rather attenuated) sense “mere” art; art is all there is. I am not saying that writers or painters have made such a claim—but it is there to be made.

  This, then, is contemporary modernist fiction. Its themes are its own artfulness and pattern, and the nature of a world newly elusive and material, and a mind newly aware of its limits, and an imagination newly loosed. Technically as well as thematically it has taught us to admire the surfacing of structure and device. It prizes subtlety more than drama, concision more than expansion, parody more than earnestness, artfulness more than verisimilitude, intellection more than entertainment. It concerns itself less with social classes than with individuals, and, structurally, less with individual growth than with pattern of idea. It is not a statement but an artifact. Instead of social, moral, or religious piety or certainty, and emotional depth, it offers humor, irony, intellectual complexity, technical beauty, and a catalogue of the forms of unknowing.

  I should say in conclusion, before we leave modernism altogether, that the modernist direction in all the arts is a movement from what might be called the organic to the inorganic. Traditional painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, drama, and, lesserly, music since the Renaissance deal in organic forms in which materials as it were flow from each other. The work moves and grows across time with an imitated living energy; cause precedes effect, “leaf subsides to leaf,” chord yields to chord tonally, and the leg bone attaches to the…hip bone. Modernist forms, on the other hand, are inorganic, as a triangle is inorganic, as a model of the atom is fixed and unmoving. (At least half of painting’s major movements in this century have promoted inorganic structures: Constructivism, Suprematism, some Futurism, Orphism, Analytic Cubism,Abstraction-Créationism , Geometric Abstraction, and color field painting.) We can watch Mondrian transform an apple tree, and a drawing of an apple tree, into a grid of inorganic forms. Cézanne found the cylinder in the thigh. Yeats enjoined his actors not to move; Beckett props prevented their moving. Schönberg purged chromatic movement of tonal content and won through to a scaffolding of pure form. And contemporary modernist fiction disassembles human life in time. It dissects the living, articulated joints and arranges the bright bones on the ground.

  Where Is the Mainstream?

  The description I have given of contemporary modernist fiction is piecework. It extracts, collates, and examines as a unit such diversities as say, the characterizations of Borges or Pynchon, the narrative collages and surrealisms of Burroughs or Barthelme, the ironies of Beckett or Disch, the aesthetics or metaphysics of Barth or Calvino, and the cryptographic surfaces and reflexive structures of Nabokov. In fact, no single writer matches in all his work every aspect of this theoretical description. My coarse distinctions between two kinds of fiction are useful heuristically, but they give a damaging impression of clear boundaries and a misleading impression of two armed camps.

  I have not yet stressed that most contemporary writers write largely traditional fiction. Many excellent writers, like Graham Greene, John Updike, Joyce Cary, Anthony Powell, and many others, are writing a fiction whose virtues are largely those of realist or naturalist fiction. After all, if we posit traditional fiction at one extreme of a spectrum and contemporary modernism at the other extreme, we see that not only do most living writers of serious fiction belong near the spectrum’s center, but so also do the historical Modernists themselves. The Modernists—Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Joyce—were interested in society, deepened time, verisimilitude, complex character, and authorial austerity. They were a sincere lot. They wrote big books. Contemporary modernists alter their aims by isolating them.

  In fact, on a very gloomy day one could say this: that contemporary modernism accurately puts its finger upon, and claims, every quality of Modernist fiction that is not essential. It throws out the baby and proclaims the bath. Joyce wrote parodies and made puns and allusions on his way to elaborating a full and deep fictional world called Dublin. Now people write little parodies full of puns and allusions. Kafka wrote fiction rooted in profound cultural criticism and in metaphysical and theological longing; along the way he had a character turn into a cockroach. Some contemporary writing has jettisoned the rest and kept the cockroach for a laugh. Joyce and Woolf bade their
characters think on the page to deepen the characters, not to flatten the world solipsistically. Proust and Faulkner fiddled with time to create an artful simulacrum of our experience of time and also our knowledge of the world; now some contemporary writing may fiddle with time to keep us awake, the way television commercials splice scenes to keep us awake, or they may fiddle with time to distract us from the absence of narration, or even just to fiddle. The wit that was perhaps incidental in Joyce has become an end in itself. In short, Modernist writers expanded fictional techniques in the service of traditional ends—one could say on this putative very gloomy day—and those ends have been lost. On the other hand, of course, great contemporary modernists bend those techniques to new interesting, and valuable, ends, as I think I have shown.

  The Modernists themselves, I say, begin to look semitraditional in the light of contemporary practice. It is not unreasonable to placeThe Castle, Ulysses , orLight in August near the center of a spectrum on which we placeGreat Expectations orThe Charterhouse of Parma at one end andPale Fire, Hopscotch , andFicciones at the other. And given these extremes, it is easy to see that most living writers also belong somewhere in the middle. Most often these writers, like the Modernists themselves, bend sophisticated techniques toward traditional ends. Here are the many writers of serious fiction—including the majority of writers in the Americas, Britain, and Europe whose work is widely known, as well as many other excellent and great writers as yet uncelebrated—who are writing novels and stories of depth and power, novels and stories which penetrate the world and order it, which engage us intellectually and move us emotionally, which render complex characters in depth, treat moral concerns and issues, make free use of modernist techniques, and astonish us by the fullness and coherence of their artifice. This is still, if only by volume, the mainstream.

  PART TWO

  The State of the Art

  CHAPTER 4

  Revolution, No

  Ihave asserted, but not yet defended, the notion that fiction cannot shed the world because its materials are necessarily bits of world. The writer’s materials, common sense says, are various characters, places, actions, ideas, and actual or mental objects. The writer’s materials are real or imagined phenomena.

  One could say, however, that the writer’s materials are words and the other paraphernalia of language. After all, a writer does not sit at his desk pushing little people and landscapes around. He manipulates words like so many dabs of paint. And who is to say that the words correspond to anything? I want to treat this idea with some respect before I discard it.

  Language scarcely accounts for things, or for the flux and mystery of experience. If it did, Romantic poets could go about their task with the aplomb of bricklayers. We know that language itself is a selection and abstraction from unknowable flux; the world shades into gradations too fine for speech. A Jerome Bruner study shows that human eyes can distinguish among approximately twenty thousand colors. Yet English, a language rich in color terms, names only a few score of them; some languages name only three or four. Language, like other cognitive structures, is useful for some tasks and worthless for others. I cannot tell you, because I do not know, what my language prevents my knowing. Language is itself like a work of art; it selects, abstracts, exaggerates, and orders. How then could we say that language encloses and signifies phenomena, when language is a fabricated grid someone stuck in a river? Or how can we even say that language communicates by agreed-upon convention, when people personalize symbols so readily, so that a word which means life to me may mean death to you, and we cannot agree?

  We must grant, then, that words for things miss their marks, or at least, as I see it, obscure things here and there around the edges. And we grant, sighing, that we see through a cultural-linguistic glass darkly, and cannot tell snow from snow. Nevertheless, the plain fact is that language does serve literary purposes adequately.

  To be quite precise, we must say that a writer’s language does not signify things as they are—because none of us knows things as they are; instead, a writer’s language does an airtight job of signifying hisperceptions of things as they are. The term “salty” may hopelessly confine my perceptions—my sensations—when I taste saltiness, so that I miss a dozen accompanying sensations and taste only saltiness. You suffer the same loss. Well, then, the term “salty,” which so dictates how we perceive, at least expresseswhat we perceive, very well, and also communicates it to those afflicted with the same language. Language need not know the world perfectly in order to communicate perceptions adequately.

  Language actually signifies things transparently, in a way that paint must labor to do. The word “apple” signifies appledom (or our perception of appledom) to all of us, and we will politely suspend our private meanings for the word in order to hear each other out. If I write “apple,” I can make you think of a mental apple roughly analogous to the one I have in mind. But I am hard put to make you think of a certain arrangement of alphabet letters or phonemes. The word itself all but vanishes, like Vermeer’s paint.

  The writer, then, composes with mental objects, actual or imagined; he composes with what Poe called “the things and thoughts of time.” Dickens drew his materials inBleak House from the breadth of London society and from contemporary British legal usage; it were madness, or quibbling, to say he drew them from a dictionary.

  The upshot of all this, as I have suggested, is that fiction cannot escape the world as its necessary subject matter. Hence it cannot break with its own traditions, or throw its criticism into crisis, or lose its audience, or move its action entirely to its own surface. Whether a writer writes “grapefruit,” or “God,” or “freedom,” his indispensable subject matter is the world beyond the page. Even when Joyce writes (to cite a familiar example), “Nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!” his passage does not eliminate referents; it multiplies them.

  One notable effort to alter the subject matter of fiction—Gertrude Stein’s—was an effort to alter the subject matter of language. Her aim (like that of Juan Gris, the similarity of whose work to hers she acknowledged) was “exactitude.” “A star glide,” she wrote, “a frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness.” “Toasted susie,” she wrote, “is my ice cream.” Stein’s work, andFinnegans Wake , come close to vaporizing the world and making of language a genuine stuff. Often Stein’s work achieves the unity of a single plane which glitters with a thousand refractions where the words, bound together at the surface, still tilt in every direction toward their referents in the world.

  Stein’s writing brought forth no revolution; neither didFinnegans Wake . Literature co-opted them; they joined the canon with scarcely a ripple, and inspired few successors. What Stein did, and what Joyce did inFinnegans Wake , was playfully to misread the nature of fiction. Fiction could have moved its arena to its own material surface, to virtually nobody’s interest, if fiction’s materials had really been words, and if writers had succeeded in detaching the words from their referents. But fiction’s materials are bits of world. Fiction’s subject matter can indeed move very far in the direction of its own surfaces; but those surfaces are not language surfaces but referential narrative objects. It turned out, then, thatUlysses , with its broken narrative surface, indicated a more fruitful and honest modernist direction for fiction.

  The movement toward the modernist in fiction is one of emphasis. It is a shifting stance, not án outright leap. Just as there has been no sudden shift to abstraction in fiction, because the nature of fiction’s materials prevents it, so also there has been no sudden shift to contemporary modernism in fiction, because the nature of everything else prevents it. Before I get to this interesting “everything else,” let me make this point. Mere change is not revolution The contemporary modernists are here, all right, but they did not slay the old guard in their beds. Instead, the old guard liked their looks, invited them in, and exchanged a few tricks with them after dinner.

  This assertion is controversial. Robert Scholes, in h
is excellentFabulation and Metafiction , argues at one point that contemporary modernism has replaced traditional fiction. Those who write the old fiction constitute “a small school of neo-naturalists” who write “frantically, headless chickens unaware of the decapitating axe.” This is perfectly true, as far as it goes; a purely naturalist fiction today is an absurd relic, like a horseshoe crab, especially if it is, in Scholes’s terms, “unaware.”

  But who is unaware? Only undergraduates who try to write without having read. Surely critics are not in the business of berating the ignorant. Woody Allen uses modernist techniques freely; so do television commercials. You can no more avoid either the techniques or the aesthetic they express than you can avoid the Mondrian look at Penney’s. If someone out there is writing a purely naturalist fiction, using only nineteenth-century techniques, he is not so much a chicken with his head cut off as a dead horse.