Living by Fiction

by Annie Dillard

  Students may infer from painting’s critical disarray that painting as a whole underwent a revolution in this century. Literature did not. Painting has “before” and “after” periods; literature does not. Young painters must look forward; young writers may look around.

  Still, there are plenty of ways in which literary criticism encourages contemporary modernism. To return to canon: no writers are more firmly canonized than the historical Modernists. There is no shortage of critical attention to Faulkner or Woolf, say, or to Yeats or Stevens. And when curricula do teach literary history, they may talk about innovation; the present overblown reputation ofUlysses rests on its historical innovations.

  More to the point is this: any formalist textual exegesis at all, whether it be Russian formalist, New Critical, phenomenologist, or structuralist, incidentally forwards contemporary modernist virtues. Such an exegesis stresses self-reference by limiting discussion to the text; it stresses ingenuity and pattern by tracing the visible patterns of structure and detail; and it stresses structural tautness by focusing on those materials which fit the analysis at the expense of those materials which do not fit. Dickens may fret a great deal about the engaging qualities of his work: will they like this character? Is this description vivid? Will this scene wring their hearts? But formal criticism, outside of vague and personal British appreciations, cannot and does not analyze or quantify these effects. Emotional impact and simplicity are two virtues which traditional fiction may possess but which nevertheless strike textual criticism dumb.

  Markedly characteristic of contemporary modernist fiction is its awareness of criticism. Any published criticism at all fuels these fires. Self-consciousness may be a handicap or a virtue; in either case, it is nothing new for writers. In 1818, John Keats was aware of the haunting demands on the writer which criticism and the weight of literary history made; but Keats “internalized” those demands, overcame his self-consciousness, and produced work from which both the writer and the critic were absent as figures. For the contemporary modernist, however, the same self-consciousness is inescapable. Art itself is the theme, and ironic, self-aware surfaces are the method: so the writer takes no pains to conceal his jitters.

  Barth’s stories “Lost in the Funhouse” and “Life Story” tremble with the sense of being read critically and analyzed; their protagonists are writers almost gibbering with witty self-consciousness. So is the protagonist in Beckett’s trilogyMolloy/ Malone Dies/ The Unnamable ; when he can overcome his paralysis sufficiently to write at all, he writes his novel defensively, against a host of critical readings. Some fiction parodies the critical essay: Nabokov’sPale Fire , Woody Allen’s “Lovborg’s Women Considered,” Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.” Today’s writers are conscious of literary criticism indeed, if they know it well enough to parody it. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a familiarity with critical methods would make writers wish to produce texts which yield to, and fit, critical analysis.

  On every continent, contemporary modernist fiction is written by educated and sophisticated writers. By no means all educated writers prefer it; but nowhere do uneducated writers produce it. (The many small biographies which Barbara Howes provides for her excellent anthology of Latin American short stories,The Eye of the Heart , bears out this correlation.) How could they? Borges is a library; Ronald Sukenick started out as a Wallace Stevens critic. But the charcoal burner who quits his vines and retires untutored to a garret will not invent contemporary modernism and will not like it when he sees it, any more than most undergraduates do. It is a taste acquired through cheerful familiarity with the provisional nature of literary texts and the relative nature of historical values. Of course, this degree of sophistication, like any sophistication in any field, inclines one to irony, jadedness, and cynicism with respect to received impressions on one hand, and to formalism, emotional caution, and self-consciousness with respect to personal expression on the other hand. But that’s the breaks.

  I would even like to proffer, as a spur to real investigation, the notion that awareness of criticismcreated contemporary modernist fiction. Contemporary modernist fiction arose among intellectuals in response to formalist critical ideals which have dominated the century: the ideals of the Russian formalists and the new Critics. (Phenomenologists and structuralists, heirs to this tradition, are too recent to have schooled a generation of writers.) Robert Scholes (Structuralism in Literature) has pointed out how the Russian formalists, who flourished 1915-1930, anticipated the fiction of Borges and Barth, fiction whose author’s presence makes his narration subject to playful irony. Their notions sound contemporary modernist, and we could make a case for their direct or indirect influence on the young Russian Nabokov. On the other hand, perhaps we need not invoke Nabokov as a human vector for carrying formalist ideas to the United States. The publicity surroundingUlysses was doing a good job of it, as were developments in the other arts, especially poetry.

  The New Criticism arose in America in response to Modernist poetry in English—in response to the difficult, fragmented, and self-relevant poems of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Stevens. The New Critics were themselves poets to a man: Eliot, Pound, R. P. Blackmur, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, William Empson, Kenneth Burke. They codified and bruited about the highly developed aesthetic of Modernist poetry; they introduced into the intellectual milieu, and into the classroom, the notion of texts as carefully patterned intellectual artifices. How could this not affect a generation of fiction writers? After you have performed or read a detailed analysis of Eliot’s “Four Quartets” and Stevens’s “Comedian as the Letter C,” why would you care to write fiction like Jack London’s or Theodore Dreiser’s? Contemporary fiction writers may be more influenced by Pound’s criticism than by Joyce’s novels, more by Stevens’s poems than Kafka’s stories. In style their work more closely resembles “The Waste Land” thanHerzog ; in structure it more closely resembles “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” thanThe Naked and the Dead . This strand of contemporary fiction has purified itself through the agent of criticism; it has adopted the brilliant virtues of Modernist poetry, whose bones are its beauty.

  On the whole, then, criticism nudges fiction toward contemporary modernist values. Its stress on textual values and on theory, and the self-consciousness it breeds, outweigh the effect of its conservative stance toward canon.

  Actually, the impact of criticism on literature is not nearly so great as it is on painting. For literature is not yet the special province of experts, as we have seen. Experts are not needed; we can approach any work exceptFinnegans Wake unarmed. Literary criticism is useful, but not needful. In this it is like any art. It moves along independently and harmlessly, fascinated with and despairing of its own techniques, advancing by leaps and bounds into the empyrean. As an art form criticism is more highly developed than fiction is. Its own theories are actually the most suitable objects of its intelligence.

  Painting’s audience needs art critics. Anything interesting on earth will occasion many words, and when the words do not immediately suggest themselves, someone will propose them. Some painters themselves, even, may need art critics, not only to aid their own careers in the marketplace, but also to articulate a set of terms with which to disagree. The literature of Abstract Expressionism, for instance, is a catalogue of the painters’ acrophobia and vertigo. They knew that much of their paintings’ real action occurred in the realm where terms empty, analysis stammers, and judgment gapes. If someone is doing something that cannot be put into words, what, precisely, is he doing? The press wanted to know.

  If you read six histories of Abstract Expressionism, you will read six accounts of the enormous influence of Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. The social art world befriends critics much more than the social literary world does. Literary criticism has some great figures, but none analogous to Rosenberg and Greenberg, whose criticism grew up alongside the painting, who introduced the art to the world and suggested some terms by which i
t could be discussed, and who arguably influenced the art itself.

  CHAPTER 7

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

  We hear many complaints about contemporary fiction—that its characters are flat and its stories are dull—but we hear no complaints about prose style. For in fact, prose styles have been one of the great strengths of Western fiction throughout this century. Prose style in fiction is like surface handling in painting. No matter how much people complain that contemporary works are saying little, no one denies that they say it very well.

  We may distinguish among contemporary prose styles two overlapping strands. One is what we might for the moment call plain, the other fancy. Neither of these prose styles is distinctively, diagnostically modernist in the contemporary sense. Any sort of writer may use any sort of prose. But the fancy styles, in particular, may further modernist intentions by calling attention to themselves.

  Shooting the Agate

  Many contemporary prose styles derive from the mainstream of traditional fine writing. Fine writing, like painterly painting, has always been with us. We will, I hope, never cease to admire it. The great prose stylists of the recent past, until Flaubert, were fine writers to a man. A surprising number of these—those I think of first, in fact—wrote nonfiction: Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, Thomas De Quincey, Thomas Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Ruskin, William James, Sir James Frazer.

  Who were the grand stylists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction? There is the lovely Turgenev and the brilliant Gorky, if we are to believe their translators; Melville had a rare strength; Hardy can be wholly limpid; Dickens is often rhythmic and powerful. But we do not think of any of these, except Turgenev, as great stylists—although we wrong Dickens not to. Who else? Stendhal? Chateaubriand? I think fine writing in fictional prose comes into its own only with the Modernists: first with James, and with Proust, Faulkner, Beckett, Woolf, Kafka, and the lavish Joyce of the novels.

  This is an elaborated, painterly prose. It raids the world for materials to build sentences. It fabricates a semi-opaque weft of language. It is a spendthrift prose, and a prose of means. It is dense in objects which pester the senses. It hauls in visual imagery of every sort; it strews metaphors about, and bald similes, and allusions to every realm. It does not shy from adjectives, nor even from adverbs. It traffics in parallel structures and repetitions; it indulges in assonance and alliteration. Here is a splendid sentence from Ruskin:

  Every alteration of the features of nature has its origin either in powerless indolence or blind audacity, in the folly which forgets, or in the insolence which desecrates, works which it is the pride of angels to know, and their privilege to love.

  —Preface toModern Painters , 2nd edition

  The sentences of this prose may be very long, heavily punctuated throughout, and welded together with semicolons. Its lexicon is enormously wide, its spheres of reference global. We think of it as decorous, but actually it is not. Those old men in frock coats were after power, and power they got, by going for the throat. (Far more decorous is plain writing, the prose of Hemingway, Chekhov, and other stylists in shirts, who carefully limit their descriptions to matters at hand, and who produce a prose purified by its submission to the world.) There is nothing decorous about calling attention to yourself:

  The world is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat; a Mist; a Spider’s Snare; it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold…. Must I call the heaven and the earth a maypole and country fair with booths, or an anthill, or an old coat, in order to give you the shock of pleasure which the imagination loves and the sense of spiritual greatness?

  —Emerson,Journals

  Fine writing, with its elaborated imagery and powerful rhythms, has the beauty of both complexity and grandeur. It also has as its distinction a magnificent power to penetrate. It can penetrate precisely because, and only because, it lays no claims to precision. It is an energy. It sacrifices perfect control to the ambition to mean. It can penetrate very deep, piling object upon object to build a tower from which to breach the sky; it can enter with courage or bravura those fearsome realms where the end products of art meet the end products of thought, and where perfect clarity is not possible. Fine writing is not a mirror, not a window, not a document, not a surgical tool. It is an artifact and an achievement; it is at once an exploratory craft and the planet it attains; it is a testimony to the possibility of the beauty and penetration of written language.

  Clearly, we are in the presence of a paradox here. How can prose be said to penetrate and dazzle? How can it call attention to itself, waving its arms as it were, while performing metaphysics behind its back? But this is what all art does, or at least all art that conceives of the center of things as insubstantial: as mental or spiritual. Fine prose in this sense is like Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry, or Milton’s epic poetry, or even Homer’s. If you scratch an event, you get an idea. Fine writing does not actually penetrate the world of familiar things so much as it penetrates what, for lack of a better term, we might call the universe or even the realm of ideas. That is, this language does not penetrate things so much as it bears them away with it.

  Shakespeare does not analyze Lear, or enter Lear. There was no Lear. Had there been a Lear, we could only say that Shakespeare transmogrified Lear. Lear, like Melville’s whale, is an aesthetic or epistemological probe by means of which the artist analyzes the universe. When you really penetrate the world of things, as I understand the world of things, you encounter idea. And art, especially poetry and twentieth-century painting and fiction, objectifies idea on its own surface, by imitating thereon, in bits of world, the complex way that bits of mind cohere.

  We have seen in twentieth-century painting that the art of mind and the art of surface go together. When painters abandoned narrative deep space, their canvases became abstract and intellectualized. With its multiple metaphors and colliding images, an embellished language actually abstracts the world’s objects. Such language wrests objects from their familiar contexts. We do not enter deep space; we do not enter rounded characters; we contemplate them as objects. And when an artist both powerfully “realizes” his objects, rendering them in full material detail, and simultaneously “abstracts” them, rendering them under the aspect of eternity, then we may say that he penetrates these objects not to their specific, material hearts, but as it were out the other side, to their generalized forms, their created capacity to mean. He runs them through and hauls them off to heaven. Shakespeare does it with Lear; Cézanne does it with Mont Sainte Victoire. Paradoxically, an artist does all this on the surface, by the studied application of materials. He tacks his objects to the sky, either by baring their flattening forms, as Cézanne does, or, as Shakespeare does, by spiriting the objects out of the world with a hundred flights of language never heard.

  At any rate, in this century even the illusion of penetration may no longer be the fine writer’s intention. A fine writer may now, as in the eighteenth century, be ironic or playful as well as sincere. He may brandish his wealth of beauties to engage us or to dazzle us, to recreate a world or to embellish a surface. Fine writing is still with us. Density, even lushness, and elegance, forceful rhythms, dramatically fused imagery, and a degree of metaphorical splendor—these qualities still obtain and are the hallmark of fine writing. Included in this category are the rich collages of Joyce, where modernist fiction begins. Also included are the brittle sarcasms of Nabokov, and his much-wrought tendernesses, and especially his cryptographs—those challenges to literary criticism and parodies of its finds which are such red herrings to young writers, who must be relieved endlessly of the notion that the critic’s role is to “find the hidden meaning” and the writer’s role is to hide them, like Easter eggs. Here in this generalized category of fine writing also belong the poignant lyricisms of Beckett, the surrealisms of Gabriel García Márquez, the traditional elegances of Richard Hughes, E. M. Forster, and Joyce Car
y, and the prose of many excellent and traditionalist Americans, like John Updike and William Gass. This is Gass: “The sun looks, through the mist, like a plum on the tree of heaven, or a bruise on the slope of your belly. Which? The grass crawls with frost.”

  Two subspecies of fine writing are particularly suited to modernist and contemporary modernist ends. One is a prose style so intimate, and so often used in the first person, that it is actually a voice. The voice appears in Europe throughout this century, and particularly between the wars. One could argue that it appeared in Eastern Europe and worked its way westward. It is the voice of a crank narrator. You hear it a bit in Gogol, and in Dostoevsky; you hear it especially in Kafka; you hear it in Elias Canetti, Witold Gombrowicz, Knut Hamsun, and now in Beckett, and Nabokov (Despair, Pale Fire).

  This crank narrator is an enraged petty clerk, or a starveling, or a genius, or a monomaniac, or any sort of crazy. His is not an especially adult voice. He specializes in mood shifts. His voice is poetic, bellicose, and resigned. It deals in ironies, self-deprecations, arrogances, apologies, aggressions, whinings, obscenities, lyricisms, abrupt silences, flights of transcendence, and tantrums. This tone’s energy depends, of course, on the rapid juxtaposition of these disparate moods—particularly a lyric mood interrupted by a note of aggrievement. Samuel Beckett has written three great novels using this one trick. The fact of the sky, in particular, seems to call forth the essence of this prose style. InMolloy , Beckett writes: “The sky was that horrible colour which heralds dawn.” InFerdydurke , Gombrowicz writes: “The sky, suspended in the heights, was light, fresh, pale, and sarcastic.”