Living by Fiction

by Annie Dillard

  Why is this so? It is a very interesting phenomenon, and one which, from one point of view, casts higher education in a dubious light. I do not judge this hesitation peculiar to myself, but freely ascribe it to others: why do we say we agree with a proposition we will not call true? Is this, perchance, becoming modesty? Not likely. Is it then intellectual cowardice, or “healthy” skepticism, or simply hypocrisy? Which of these did we learn in school? Which do we teach?

  I have worried these questions for some days and settled on a simple answer which disburdens us all of the labels coward and hypocrite, and which you knew all along: we do not ordinarily apply the criterion of truth to any interpretations whatever.

  Is Linnaean classification true? Is Plato’s metaphysic true? Physical scientists, of course, speak of an interpretation’s being probable, or workable, or fruitful, just as critics do. Interpretations of data do not have the truth status of data themselves; nor are they, I think, intended to, which is why I attribute queasiness to Einstein, albeit jokingly. Physical interpretations and methodologies are debatable, just as critical ones are. To determine the “truth” of a given interpretation of physical data, we poll the experts. Even in mathematics, consensus is the final judge. Writing inScientific American , Martin Gardner says: “The validity of a difficult proof rests on a consensus among experts, who may, after all, be mistaken.” At this level the only status difference between a physical interpretation and a critical one is that new data will likely appear in, say, physics, altering as it were the world text, but it is unlikely that a substantially new literary text will replace the old one. In this way, too, criticism may be on firmer ground than physics.

  Matters of scientific interpretation, then, are subject to heated debate along the lines of “agree”/“disagree.” The debate can come to blows. But when the terms change to “true” or “false,” a curious hush descends on the ring. The blows cease and the air fills with disclaimers: gee, it’s dark in here. Who turned out the lights? That is why science has so much trouble talking to the press; the press thinks in terms of “true” and “false.” When the reporter, notebook in hand, enters the arena, the scientists who have been exchanging blows only seconds before now join hands and sing, “We cannot know. We are only fooling around.” The same situation obtains in theology. At any rate, to worry that we can never call a given critical interpretation “true” is not to worry.

  Who Is Crazy?

  We may make an interesting distinction between two types of phenomena: those which we may know, and those which we may both know and understand in terms of meaning. For the hope of all criticism, and the hope of the race, is not only that we may know, but also that we may understand. Our understanding of meaning requires that things have meaning. Do things have meaning?

  For a pantheist they do. To an Australian aboriginal before Europeanization, as is well known, every bush and rock, by its very existence, continuously uttered its human meaning as if it were speech. The desert was an elaborate and personal message, or a great book which people could read and interpret. Similarly, to superstitious people everywhere and at all times, events and objects are personal omens and portents and commands.

  It has been many centuries since adult Europeans have enjoyed and feared a universe so sentient, so voluble, and so interested in their doings. Christianity and science, which on big issues go hand in hand intellectually as well as historically, everywhere raised the standard of living and cut down on the fun. Everywhere Christianity and science hushed the bushes and gagged the rocks. They razed the sacred groves, killed the priests, and drained the flow of meaning right off the planet. They built schools; they taught people to measure and add, to write, and to pray to an absent God. The direction of recent history is toward desacralization, the unhinging of materials from meaning. The function of Western knowledge is to “de-spookify.” Christianity and early science began this process; the ideals of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, coupled with Enlightenment ideals of progress and democracy, carried it still further. The individual, with his society changing all around him, with his private prayer and reasoned vote, was the new unit of meaning.

  From there to secular existentialism was but a single, natural step: you do not find or discover personal meaning in the world, nor do your unchanging social traditions dish it out, nor does your church. Instead, you make it up. You make it up from what is left, from internal elements alone, such as moods. The paucity of internal materials, you will find, leaves you free intellectually to range the whole gamut of relativism.

  We can trace a progression, then, from the judgment that everything we see has meaning, to the judgment that nothing we see has meaning. Between these two extreme positions we have, believe it or not, criticism and the other interpretative fields, which assert thatsome things have meaning. Let us adopt this position: some things have meaning. The question now is:which things have meaning? Where do we draw the line?

  Which things have meaning? Let us consider the stirring example of Hans Prinzhorn. Hans Prinzhorn is a psychotherapist who wroteArtistry of the Mentally III. Referring to the doodles, and only the doodles, of hospitalized schizophrenics, Prinzhorn asserted: “Even the smallest loop…can be understood…and interpreted.” Happy Hans Prinzhorn! For he has found a method (presumably Freudian) for the finding of meaning in “even the smallest loop”! He will never run out of objects from which meaning can be derived, so long as schizophrenics keep doodling. In the happiness of his situation, and in the centrality of his position in the very thick of meaning, he is matched only by the schizophrenics on the other side of the desk, who were presumably hospitalized in the first place for, among other things, the creepy habit of finding meaning in even the smallest loop of everything.

  “I know for a fact,” said one patient, “that each tree has a habeas corpus in front of it…. The habeas corpus tells everything about that tree.” “You’d be surprised,” this patient said on another occasion, “how much cosmics cobwebs give off.” Very busy in another asylum was an artist, Adolf Wölfli. Wölfli, a child-molester who spent the last thirteen years of his life in isolation from other asylum inmates, made elaborate drawings and paintings dense with meanings. (He conceived of a highest number called Oberon, “which may not be surpassed, at the risk of catastrophe.”) Of his work he said brightly, “There is so much to do here. You’d never guess how you have to use your head so as not to forget anything. It would be enough to drive a body mad if he wasn’t mad already.”

  Schematically we could see an asylum as a meaning factory. The schizophrenics understand and interpret the world’s smallest loops; the schizophrenics doodle. Hans Prinzhorn understands and interprets the schizophrenics’ doodles’ smallest loops. The only question is, why is Prinzhorn on one side of the desk and the schizophrenics on the other? How do we decide who belongs on which side of the desk?

  We lock up people who gravely and harmfully trespass the limits of understanding. We consider harmlessly insane those systems of interpretation which violate the bounds of good sense by consensus, the bounds which separate that which can be understood from that which cannot. Some things have meaning; some things do not. It is well not to confuse the categories.

  Why is it sane to find meaning in a doodle and insane to find meaning in a puddle of rain? Why is it sane to count the incidence of the word “murder” in Shakespeare and insane to count frost cracks in the sidewalk? Why is mathematics sane and numerology insane? Why is astronomy sane and astrology insane? Why is it sane to perform an autopsy and insane to read entrails? Why can we sanely inspect the clouds to learn tomorrow’s weather, but not the sex of an unborn child? Why is it sane to assign meaning to the elements of a Nepalese altar and insane to assign meaning to the elements in a chemical compound?

  The boundaries of sense are actually quite clear. We commonly (if tacitly) agree that the human world has human meaning which we can discover, and the given natural world does not. That human beings and human culture
are “natural” phenomena is undeniable; nevertheless, we draw our intellectual line so it divides the human from the inhuman—quite rightly. We separate culture from nature; we perform a limited set of intellectual operations on natural things and a more extensive set of operations on cultural things. And we agree that it is sane to inquire what cultural things mean and insane to inquire what natural things mean. Doodles, Shakespeare, and Nepalese altars are human; we can interpret their human significance. Puddles, frost cracks, clouds, and chemical compounds are not human and have no human significance. Mathematics, astronomy, and meteorology operate on nature without expecting the objects of their study to bear significant messages to living people. Numerology, astrology, and all forms of divination do; they seek human meaning in raw nature. You may plausibly chart types and meanings of schizophrenic doodle loops; but if you chart types and meanings of clouds and stones, they will come and carry you away. You will have regressed historically; you will have crossed the border, and committed yourself to the other side of the desk.

  There are, then, two classes of phenomena on earth: those to which we may reasonably assign human meaning, and those to which we may not. I have I hope established not only that some things have meaning, but also which these are. Now, it is interesting to look at the branches of Western knowledge in the light of this theoretical distinction, in order to assign a slot to criticism, and ultimately to art itself.

  Let us take the positivists at their word for the nonce and say that the physical and biological sciences and the other branches of knowledge modeled upon them traffic in data and in purely physical interpretations of data. The object of their study is the raw, unmediated universe. The results are positivist, material, mechanical schemes. Science does not ask what a honeybee means.

  The interpretative fields, in contrast, may ask what a sewing bee means. The interpretative fields, which include art and literary criticism, clinical and theoretical psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology of knowledge, comparative religion, theoretical linguistics, and so forth, interpret only things human. They interpret all things human. They produce data, of course, and also interpretations in the abstract realm of human meaning. Nothing human is alien. They may interpret skip-rope rhymes, hospitality etiquette, pottery decoration, slang, warfare, verse drama, skirt length, baby talk, management techniques, nightmares, and economic classifications. Whatever is human may be understood by humans. We may notexhaust its meaning; but, again, we may know aught without knowing all.

  Science, on the other hand, produces physical interpretations of raw data, of hard data. An objection arises here, for I have already said thatall knowledge is interpretative and that every scientific datum is an edited abridgment. I must abandon this point temporarily; the positivists usually deny it, and it is well to let them define their own field. And if it is true, it is universal, and therefore useless and niggling. For everyone agrees that some things are more interpretative than others, that a measurement is less interpretative than a piece of literary criticism, and that Mrs. Marx’s reading of a thermometer differs in kind from Mr. Marx’s reading of history. So let us yield to science, and even rub scientists’ faces in it a bit, and say that science, unlike every other human endeavor, is not itself biased, is not culture-blind and bounded.

  Here we have science, then, producing data and physical schemes. It studies the raw universe at large and also, statistically, the world of men (demography, behavioral psychology, physical anthropology, etc.). Science studies what we might boisterously call “things as they are.” The interpretative fields, on the other hand, and interestingly enough, produce interpretations of interpretations. The bits of human culture they study are already edited selections and humanly meaningful arrangements. When you study Shakespeare or a Nepalese altar or even a schizophrenic doodle, you are studying a human interpretation of things. A language, a philosophy, a religion, a nightmare, a pattern on a pot, and a skip-rope rhyme are human interpretations of things. (So are all forms of science but modern Western science!) The interpretative fields interpret kinds of human order. All interpreters are like critics in this way: they require that someone else has been there first. A person or a culture knits up an artifact, and an interpreter comes along and unravels it.

  This division of knowledge is odd. It excludes mathematics and music altogether. It separates the branches of knowledge less by the objects of their study (world or artifact) than by the scope of their results: positivist data and schemes on one hand, and human significance in addition to data on the other. Examining the university curriculum in this light is like examining the physical layout of an asylum. Both the university and the asylum illustrate those boundaries of interpretation which the West has accepted since the Enlightenment: man makes sense; nature does not.

  In addition to raising an interesting theoretical question, the examination of which will occupy the rest of this book, this curious division of knowledge may, and quite incidentally, clarify the bitterness of the infighting within so many disciplines, particularly within those many disciplines, like philosophy and the social sciences, which operate on human phenomena. For some workers who prize and seek positivist methods and results must work cheek by jowl with the leaky-minded interpreters. A behaviorist has no truck with Jung, nor a physical anthropologist with Lévi-Strauss, nor a demographer with Marx. A bibliographer who works with a computer all day may find poetry criticism a bit iffy. Yet the ordinary division of knowledge by subject matter—which, after all, is perfectly sensible—means that these disparate kinds of thinkers must share a hall, a batch of student majors, a departmental vote, and a Xerox machine.

  (Outside academia, many people have not yet learned of the positivist cast of disciplines like psychology and philosophy. High school seniors and college freshmen tell their advisers that they are interested in “psychology”; it turns out they have read some Jung or Freud. After a semester or two of psychology courses they bail out of the major. Similarly, some students who have read Camus are interested in “philosophy.” Many of these students wind up in literature courses, where, they say, they are quite surprised to find, both in the literature and in the critical approaches to it, the interpretative structures and the inquiry into final meanings which they had sought originally and despaired of ever finding in the classroom.)

  The theoretical question posed by our division of knowledge is this: will criticism interpret for us the world at large?

  Science will not do it. Will criticism? The interpretative fields handle restricted objects—personality, texts, and so forth. You could not come up with a Freudian reading of celestial mechanics or (I devoutly hope) a Marxist reading of doodles. But criticism in the arts is not so limited. Since art itself interprets both nature and many aspects of culture, art criticism is used to handling a wide variety of objects: personality, landscape, history, ideas, change, the works. Art criticism, then, of all the interpretative disciplines, would seem to be best suited for interpreting the world at large. Literary criticism in particular is well adapted to handling a variety of worldly bits and every degree of abstraction, and to telling us what they mean.

  But alas, art criticism works only on art. I had hoped that when the boundaries of art fell, critics would be loosed upon the world; they would interpret the world itself. (This hope was not, I think, widely shared.) But the boundaries of art did not fall; they merely expanded to include the possibility of everything. Criticism has stayed well within its traditional bounds by requiring as usual the intervention of an artist between the object of interpretation and the interpreter. Anything may be art, and so the critic may discuss anything—but only as art.

  Octavio Paz’s new book of essays raises the issue of Duchamp; Roger Shattuck comments in theTimes on Duchamp’s question: “‘Can one produce works that are not works of art?’ He tried; we wouldn’t allow it.” Whatever any artist produces is subject to art criticism,and so has discernible meaning! But it has meaning only as art. When Duchamp exhibits a bottle
rack, criticism can interpret the bottle rack only as art object; criticism must remain dumb on the significance of bottle racks in toto. When Capote and Mailer call their factual accounts novels, criticism may interpret their materials in the light of art; criticism may interpret the authors’ interpretation of events; but sadly, criticism cannot tell us the meaning,sub specie aeternitatis , of the Clutter murders or the life and death of Gary Gilmore.

  Critics, then, interpret neither the natural world nor the cultural world directly. Critics can discuss a whale or a bottle rack only if Melville or a Duchamp has already selected and stilled those objects and shaped them for the mind. All this is, I’m afraid, self-evident to almost everyone but a very few people, to whom it comes as a continuous shock and disappointment.

  Can we not loose the methods of literary criticism upon the raw world? May we not analyze the breadth of our experience? We can and may—but only if we first consider the raw world as a text, as a meaningful, purposefully fashioned creation, as a work of art. For we have seen that critics interpret artifacts only. Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial filmmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer.*And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcendentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers.

  CHAPTER 9

  Can Fiction Interpret the World?

  We are missing a whole class of investigators: those who interpret the raw universe in terms of meaning. If science will not seek human meaning, and if interpreters (critics, anthropologists, etc.) study human events and human artifacts only, then who will tell us the meaning of the raw universe? By the raw universe I mean here all that we experience, all things cultural and natural, all of the universe that is known, given, made, and changing: the world, and they that dwell therein. Experience is something human, even our experience of dumb nature. It is sane to seek to understand it in all its breadth. Breadth is, after all, characteristic of our experience. If we confine our interpretative investigations to strictly bounded aspects of culture, like skip-rope rhymes or the Battle of Manassas, we miss learning what we most want to know.