Living by Fiction

by Annie Dillard

  The crank narrator is a character outside bourgeois European culture; so is his creator. These writers either derive from peripheral countries, or are Jewish, or émigré, or are in some other way denied social access to mainstream European culture. One could easily argue that this culture itself disintegrated early in the century, and now everyone is adrift: this would account for the curiously contemporary sound of the voice. You may recognize the following as an imitation of Woody Allen, but it is not:

  Unparalleled cunning, great honesty of thought, and intelligence sharpened to a degree, will be required to enable man to escape from his stiff exterior and succeed in better reconciling order with disorder, form with the formless, maturity with eternal and sacred immaturity. In the meantime, tell me which you prefer, red peppers or fresh cucumbers?

  This is another passage from Gombrowicz’sFerdydurke , which appeared in Poland in 1937 and caused a scandal. Now everyone has caught the sound of this sort of mood-shifting prose. It has moved from the provinces and ghettos of Eastern Europe to New York City; now graduate students in writing and comedians can reel it out like yard goods.

  The voice of the crank narrator is modernist in its distance, irony, and alienation; it is a mood composed of many shifting moods. Another subspecies of fine writing is even more contemporary. I have no name for this. It is a dense extreme of fine writing, and it is diagnostically contemporary modernist.

  This prose repeats a fiction’s narrative collage in a surface collage. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it proceeds by the same leaping transitions and bizarre juxtapositions of voice, diction, and image as the fiction as a whole does. It may use the present tense: he walks, he remembers his father, his father is running. This flattens time and lends a floating, objectlike quality to the narrative. (Oddly, the eighteenth-century novelists used the present tense for immediacy. Now we have learned to use it for distance.) This prose is, above all, a wrought verbal surface. It changes subjects as often as it changes moods; it presents us with an array of all the world’s objects moving so fast they spin. It whirls us on a tour of the world of language. It does not pause to examine any object; the verbal surface is itself the object. I exaggerate; but the direction is there. Here is an example from a recent issue ofTriQuarterly :

  In the jungle of language iridescent parrots and stern anchorites flash through the visual screen of the observer out to divine the scientific laws of the organic continuum that speaks in an infinity of frequencies ranging from a strident Squawk! to the smoothly radiating ripples in a pool.

  —John Bétki, “the footnote as medium”

  Writers of such modernist prose may use the stream of consciousness convention to enhance the collage effect. Early stream of consciousness writers—Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf, and perhaps Joyce, and Tillie Olsen today—use a disjunctive, imagistic, irrational prose in order, I think, to describe human experience as intimately and accurately as possible. Both intimacy and accuracy are traditional goals for fiction. Today some writers who use stream of consciousness technique (Burroughs, Beckett) use it for contemporary modernist ends. They intend, I think, to write neither intimately nor accurately. Instead, they may use interior monologue to unify and to justify the surface collage of language. Here is a fragment from Beckett’sHow It Is:

  my life a voice without quaqua on all sides word-scraps then nothing then again more words more scraps the same ill-spoken ill-heard then nothing vast stretch of time then in me in the vault bone-white if there were a light bits and scraps ten seconds fifteen seconds ill-heard ill-murmured ill-heard ill-recorded my whole life a gibberish garbled sixfold.

  All these blithers and leaps are going on in somebody’s mind. It makes sense for the writer; it enables prose surfaces to be as rich and broken as cubist surfaces without sacrificing a narrative occasion.

  I should mention here that contemporary modernist fiction has two major strands, and that these are never farther apart than here, over this matter of stream of consciousness. The aesthetics of surfaces and the aesthetics of distance do not always coincide. Modernist writers who use stream of consciousness today are most likely making prose objects; they are fabricating detailed canvases composed of fractured and reflecting bits. This is certainly contemporary modernist. But it is also contemporary modernist to emphasize intellectual structures, to dabble less in language than in metaphysics, and to handle characters and events from a great authorial distance, as if with tongs. Here we have Borges and Nabokov. And Borges and Nabokov despise stream of consciousness prose, almost as much as they despise Freud. It was the cliché of the generation that preceded theirs, and generation follows generation in a rage. For Borges and Nabokov, and perhaps for many of us raised on New Criticism, stream of consciousness prose, while it ranks among respectable techniques, is nevertheless suspect by virtue of its perilous proximity to matters subconscious, which in turn are entirely contaminated by the enthusiastic attention of amateurs.

  The extreme among these dense modernist prose styles gives a clotted, impasto effect. It slathers an almost opaque layer of language between the reader and the world. The Beckett passage I just quoted falls into this category. Here is another passage, from William Burroughs’s “a distant hand lifted.” Burroughs wrote that he meant this prose to “approximate walky talky immediacy so that the writer writes in present time.” The subject matter here is what he calls “random impressions from whatever is presented to [the writer] at the moment.” Here goes:

  “You/and I/sad old/broken film/knife/cough/it lands in/cough/present time/long cough/decoding arrest/wasn’t it?::::::cough/immediacy/cough/empty arteries must tell you/cough/‘adios’/who else?/cough/drew Sept. 17, 1899/over New York???

  A very self-conscious, hammering prose is difficult to sustain over the length of a novel. Even if the writer can keep hammering, the reader may not wish to be hammered at for so long. A writer does well to unify a dense prose with a voice. An English writer named Nik Cohn wrote a novel using such an opaque voice. The novel,Arfur , published in England in the mid 1970’s, combined the rhythms of a rarefied New Orleans jazz slang with the vocabulary of pinball (!) to create a rich and brilliant piece of fine writing. He refers to “a very mosey style of walk, adopted off the riverboats, known as shooting the agate.” “Willie the Pleaser,” he writes, “he was a cheat without equal, and he taught me many strokes, how to flare, how to float, how to flick from the elbow, so that I became expert in all the paths of subterfuge.” Without the unity of a voice, a very dense prose can be rough going, especially in a novel. It may be emotionally overwrought, as in the work of Edward Dahlberg, or it may be distant and bristling. The prose of the first thirty pages of Nabokov’sAda , for instance, is a barrage of language released from occasion; it is a breastwork of puns and cryptic allusions which effectively defend the novel’s contents from the reader’s interest—until Nabokov is good and ready.

  Very often we find an especially dense and contemporary modernist fine prose style outside the novel. We find it in the short story, and especially in the very short story, the “prose piece” with which we have been lately overwhelmed. Published as fiction, works of the latter category are less often referred to as stories than as “pieces”—just as objects of contemporary art which are neither easel paintings nor formal sculptures are called pieces.

  I think a theory of contemporary modernism could have predicted the burgeoning of these short prose objects, some of them so reminiscent of Rimbaud’sIlluminations . After all, fiction in this century has been moving closer to poetry in every decade. These are shifting and refracting language surfaces whose affective subject matter is in large part their own surface technique. The authors of such works do not resort to the radical aesthetic experiments of Gertrude Stein; they do instead permit their language to refer to the world. But the world is so flattened and fragmented it becomes for the reader a kind of vivid and emotional memory in chips and dots which color the surface workings of the text
. The world is finally almost buried in technique. The replacement of deep space with abstracted patterns of paint, and of felt events with semi-abstracted patterns of language, is an achievement of modern art. The technical surfaces of such works are pure. Their intentions can be only aesthetic. No sentimentality of subject matter interferes with their formal development. Their pleasure to the senses, and their attraction for the mind, may be considerable.

  Contemporary American poets, incidentally, write some of the best of these short prose pieces: Jayne Anne Phillips, Mark Strand, W. S. Merwin. Donald Barthelme was writing them in the sixties. The works are disparate. Each artist of course bends the form to his own vision. The works resemble each other only in length and in the polished and compacted ironies of their prose. Often the sentences are slower, more tense, and more imagistic than the sentences of contemporary poetry. As narratives they may be evocative or symbolic or relatively straightforward. As descriptions they are often disturbing in their brutality, irrationality, sexuality, or sudden lyricism. Their mood may be at once evocative and mean. The writers of these prose pieces do not, I think, intend them to be deep and engaging as traditional short stories are deep and engaging. They are small objects composed of a glittering language cemented by reference. At their least significant they may be mere slices of language which startle, disturb, or titillate; at their best they are structured and patterned short pieces of fiction or description which display in small, and upon a flattened aesthetic surface, the coherence of art.

  Fine writing, as I have said, need not be contemporary modernist in intention. A traditional fine writer like Updike handles his prose as a painterly painter handles paint—with it he describes, beautifully and suggestively, an object in the world. The object shapes the medium. By contrast, contemporary modernist fine writers wield their prose more aggressively. Their prose is not so much a descriptive tool as an end in itself. Raiding the world for fleeting images, they fabricate a prose impressionist and refracting, or moodily expressionistic, or fragmented, cryptic, and surreal.

  Calling a Spade a Spade

  Other twentieth-century writers avoid fine writing. Borges, for example, has disclaimed his early story “The Circular Ruins” for its lush prose. Fine writing does indeed draw attention to a work’s surface, and in that it furthers modernist aims. But at the same time it is pleasing, emotional, and engaging, like quondam beautiful effects with paint. It is literary. It is always vulnerable to the charge of sacrificing accuracy, or even integrity, to the more dubious value, beauty. For these reasons it may be, in the name of purity, jettisoned.

  With Flaubert a new value for prose styles emerges. Prose must not be elaborate, at risk of being lacy. Instead, it should be, as the cliché goes, “honed to a bladelike edge.” This is a new sort of beauty in prose. Verbal dazzle, after all, is almost universally attractive; nineteenth-century Europeans admired it enormously. It takes a sophisticated ear, even a jaded ear, to appreciate the beauty and integrity of a careful simplicity. I am thinking here of the prose of Flaubert, Chekhov, Turgenev, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Wright Morris, Henry Green, Robbe-Grillet, and Borges.

  This prose is, above all, clean. It is sparing in its use of adjectives and adverbs; it avoids relative clauses and fancy punctuation; it forswears exotic lexicons and attention-getting verbs; it eschews splendid metaphors and cultured allusions. Instead, it follows the dictum of William Carlos Williams: “no in ideas but in things.”

  Plain writing is by no means easy writing. Themot juste is an intellectual achievement. There is nothing relaxed about the pace of this prose; it is as restricted and taut as the pace of lyric poetry. The short sentences of plain prose have a good deal of blank space around them, as lines of lyric poetry do, and even as the abrupt utterances of Beckett characters do. They erupt against a backdrop of silence. These sentences are—in an extreme form of plain writing—objects themselves, objects which invite inspection and which flaunt their simplicity. One could even, if one were cynical, accuse such plain sentences of the snobbery of Bauhaus design, or of high tech furnishings, or of the unobtrusive suit: one could accuse them of ostentation. But I anticipate a theoretical flaw I have never encountered in fact. As it is actually used, this prose has one supreme function, which is not to call attention to itself, but to refer to the world.

  This prose is not an end in itself, but a means. It is, then, auseful prose. Each writer of course uses it in a different way. Borges uses it straightforwardly, and as invisibly as he can, to think, to handle bare ideas with control:

  Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; I deny the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked.

  —“A New Refutation of Time”

  Robbe-Grillet uses it coldly and dryly, to alienate, to describe, and to lend his descriptions the illusion of scientific accuracy. His prose is a perceptual tool:

  …the square occupying the table’s left rear corner corresponds to the base of the brass lamp that now stands in the right corner: a square pedestal about one inch high capped by a disk of the same height supporting a fluted column at its center.

  —In the Labyrinth

  Hemingway uses it like a ten-foot pole, to distance himself from events; he also uses it like chopsticks, to handle strong emotions without, in theory, becoming sticky: “On the other hand his father had the finest pair of eyes he had ever seen and Nick had loved him very much and for a long time.” (At its worst, this flatness may be ludicrous. Hemingway once wrote, and discarded, the sentence “Paris is a nice town.”)

  Writers like Flaubert, Chekhov, Turgenev, Sherwood Anderson, Anthony Powell, and Wright Morris use this prose for many purposes: not only to control emotion, but also to build an imaginative world whose parts seem solidly actual and lighted, and to name the multiple aspects of experience one by one, with distance, and also with tenderness and respect. In two sentences I heard read aloud many years ago in a large auditorium, Wright Morris introduced me to the virtues of an unadorned prose. The two sentences were these: “The father talks to his son. The son listens and watches his father eat soup.” (Love Affair—A Venetian Journal)

  This prose is craftsmanlike. It possesses beauty and power without syntactical complexity. Because of its simplicity, writers use this prose to handle a certain kind of character—a character who does not belong in a drawing room, but is not meant to be seen as a picturesque rustic. Plain prose can follow such characters intimately, lovingly, even a little ironically, and always with respect. It is this which Wright Morris does so well. He writes a perfected prose of surpassing delicacy, control, and power. It is a fictional prose tied to character. It honors the world because the characters honor the world. Listen to these adjectives:

  Floyd Warner kept a calender on which he jotted what sort of day it was, every day of the year. Windy, overcast, drizzly, rain, clear and cool, clear and warm, and all through October he put simply,Dandy . Practically every day was dandy, and that had been true over the years.

  —Fire Sermon

  This prose is a kind of literary vernacular. It possesses the virtues of beauty, clarity, and strength without embellishment.

  In England, Henry Green also writes very often from the minds of people who are not formally educated and who know the world and love it on its merits. But Green’s prose, unlike Morris’s, is stylized to the point of self-consciousness. It is hard to know where to place Green’s prose, a prose so plain it is distracting. Almost all experimental prose is a species of fine writing; Green’s is experimentalplain writing. At its quirkiest, it omits articles for the sake of concision, and sounds like Tonto: “Mr. Craigan smoked pipe, already room was blurred by smoke from it.” The warped purity of such prose achieves a watercolor lyricism: “Just then Mr. Dupret in sleep, died, in sleep.” “What happened of her. What did her come to?”

  Plain prose is also good for comedy—as opposed to mere wit. Henry Green, Wright Morris, and Eudora Welty all use
a vernacular prose to deadpan:

  “I,” says Mama, “I prefer to take my children’s word for anything when it’s humanly possibly.” You ought to see Mama, she weighs two hundred pounds and has real tiny feet.

  —Welty, “Why I Live at the P.O.”

  Finally, plain prose is almost requisite for handling violent or emotional scenes without eliciting dismay or nausea in the reader. We have long since tired of imitation fine writing, of bad fine writing, of the overwritten, gushing prose which we find not only in unskilled literature but also in junk fiction—and we tire of it especially in the wringingly emotional and violent scenes of which failed literature and junk are made. So unless he is William Faulkner, a serious writer of this century has little other recourse than to plain writing for violent and emotional scenes. If a writer wants to play safe, he will underwrite all drama. Plain prose affords distance; it permits scenes to be effective on their narrative virtues, not on the overwrought insistence of their author’s prose. The central love scene of Powell’s twelve-volumeA Dance to the Music of Time ends unforgettably: “I took her in my arms.”