Living by Fiction

by Annie Dillard

  Who is doing this? Who interprets the raw world directly? Schizophrenics do this, and superstitious people, and pantheists, all in their several fashions. Following a tradition at least as old as Aristotle, some scientists of our time interpret limited sets of data in terms of human meaning (B. F. Skinner, Edmund O. Wilson). Who else? Prophets and the founders of religions interpret the broad world directly. Theologians and metaphysical philosophers, if there are any, do. And artists do.

  We mistrust schizophrenics, pantheists, and superstitious people. Science’s interpreters (those who are not drawn like Lewis Thomas and Richard Selzer into the welcoming arms of literature) are apt to be innocent outside their fields (Jaynes) or, worse, so steeped in positivism (Wilson, Skinner) that they try to make a virtue of ignorance by denying that anything else exists. The findings of former religious investigations repel some people, and new prophets and leaders arise but rarely; when they do, they speak the same hard words. We have a shortage of metaphysicians. This leaves artists.

  Individual artists are unlikely to produce interpretations of experience so broad and valuable as those of, say, Moses, Buddha, Plato, Paul, or Kant. Nevertheless, artists are almost the sole contemporary workers in the field. And since paint, wood, steel, motion, and musical tones do not necessarily refer to any particular aspects of the world, and since words do indeed refer to all the aspects of the world that we know—nature, culture, feeling, and idea—the literary arts are in a better position to interpret the world in all its breadth than are the other arts.

  I am certainly not going to insist upon this curiously central position of the arts, and especially the literary arts, in relation to all knowledge. If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself. We have not lost all that has already been written, nor have we yet understood it. It is merely very interesting to consider literature this way: as a formal assignment of meaning to many things, as a kind of interpretative criticism with the great world as its object. This view sheds a curious, even weird, light on fiction, and also, incidentally, on poetry.

  For lyric poetry, of all the arts—of all human endeavor—does this very thing, first and best. Throughout its long history all over the world, lyric poetry has been less fanciful than fiction. A book of lyric poems is most often a collation of interpreted facts. Poetry’s materials, its characters, objects, and events, its landscapes and cities, its mornings and afternoons, are far more likely to have been actual than fabricated. This means that poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.

  So we are all the more disappointed when poets shirk, when they bait their hooks with tidbits and fish for small fry in their backyards. Very often poets limit their take of the actual to wee private moments the significance of which they assert on only personal grounds. It is a shame that poetry has decayed to such sensory self-indulgence that it has abdicated that task to which it is so well and uniquely suited.

  How a Whale Means

  Where does this leave fiction? We must grant from the start that to hope that fiction can do a sober and useful job of interpreting the universe is preposterous. It is preposterous on many grounds. For one thing, fiction, especially Old World fiction, is scarcely concerned with any materials but cultural ones—with only the odd moor or mountain thrown in for scenery. So even if fiction does interpret, it interprets the human arena almost solely. And its results differ from those of more limited and rigorous interpretative fields like history and moral philosophy mainly in their sloppiness, insouciance, and inaccessibility.

  For another thing, we may question whether any art, let alone fiction, is especially interpretative at all. Of course, insofar as fiction writers select materials from the world, they interpret them, for every selection is an interpretation. But this is no great distinction, forall mental activity is selective and interpretative; all language is interpretative; all perception is interpretative; all expression and activity is interpretative. And all interpretations miss their mark or invent it, make it up. Humanity has but one product, and that is fiction. On this head, fiction is no more interpretative than any other mental product such as eyesight or gossip. It is merely more fictive. It is, in fact, by definition a tissue of lies.

  Fiction is fabrication. Fabrication is itself, of course, an ordering or rearrangement of selected materials from the actual world. But fiction’s resemblance to, say, botany stops here. Every fiction writer knows that he selects materials and fabricates unsystematically, according to love, whim, and convenience. The fiction writer is astonished to note that some materials fit a particular idea for order so well that he finds himself writing whole books about peripheral or random objects to which he has never previously devoted a care or a thought (which may account for the quality of much that we read). He will grant at once, abashed, that his work’s ordering structure does not necessarily derive from the materials themselves, but derives instead from bright ideas in the middle of the night, tabloid newspapers, misunderstood snippets of small talk or philosophy, dreams, outlandish coincidences, jokes, and other sources so suspect and dubious he blushes to name them. When a writer actually “selects” his materials, he chooses them to fit. This process violates every principle which legitimate, responsible interpreters use in order to approach a limited object with a minimum of prejudice. A writer obtains his materials, and his ideas of order, by the arbitrary and unscrupulous processes of eruption on one hand and plunder on the other.

  Art is a terrible interpreter. The artist’s intention is not to learn what exists but to create what never before existed. He wishes to make an interesting art object. Art cares not if it truly knows the world. Art prizes originality more than fidelity. This preference drives it to consider trivial bits of world whose possible significance is of little moment, or to handle momentous materials in flashy and dishonest ways.

  Worse still, and damnably in this setting, art’s interpretations take the form of contexts. They may not apply at all to the great world outside the artistic context. Melville assigned to whiteness, to a doubloon, and to a whale a great load of significance inMoby-Dick ; but who could say that, since Melville, we as a race have a greater understanding than we ever did of the human significance of whiteness, doubloons, or whales? It would be better to say that Melville interprets the world through theagency ofMoby-Dick and its parts, and that the whale is the tool of interpretation and not its object; but even so, what can we say of Melville’s interpretation of the world inMoby-Dick apart fromMoby-Dick —apart from the context of the art object itself? Can we say anything? How, then, may we regardMoby-Dick or any other art object as interpretative?

  I think we must conclude, under pressure from the arguments above, that fiction per se is not interpretation per se. A novel is not a critical analysis.

  But—and this is a fine distinction—a work of fiction is indeedinterpretative in the special sense that it is, by intention, an object to be interpreted. Unlike the critic, who intends his interpretation to be near the level of a “final say,” and who does not, at any rate, expect the world to devote much energy to analyzing his interpretation, the fiction writer intends his work to be a primary object. He intends it to be interpreted. This is the sense in which we can say that fiction is interpretative. It applies to all fiction; it applies especially clearly to traditional fiction which intends to present a picture of the actual world.

  People interpret the world, undeniably, and a fiction writer like Mann on one hand and Borges on the other may deliberately produce a work of fiction to delineate and objectify his interpretation. He will fashion a miniature world whose parts are selected and ordered in such a way that no one examining them could fail to interpret them more or less as he does. We may perhaps gingerly infer that the writer himself interprets the actual world along the same lines as those we interpret
out of his created world—though such an inference is both unwarranted and irrelevant. Our inquiring into a writer’s personal opinions and private vision of things is bankrupt intellectually and nasty as well. Nevertheless, those opinions and that vision are not entirely irrelevant to the production of the work, unless the writer is an outright hack.

  The writer—to continuepro hominem —is the world’s interpreter. The writer is certainly interested in the art of fiction, but perhaps less so than the critic is. The critic is interested in the novel; the novelist is interested in his neighbors. Perhaps even more than in his own techniques, then, the writer is interested in knowing the world in order to make real and honest sense of it. He worries the world and probes it; he collects the world and collates it. No part of it is outside his field. All the great world is his field. That is, the novel’s potential field is the whole world; any given novel’s actual field is only a small wedge of it. But that wedge may include anything: philology, genocide, childbirth, naval architecture, micro-physics, love, the dressing of game. The writer is interested in everything (which is why he is such good company)—in hockey and horseshoe crabs and baton twirling. His interest, I think, is genuine. It is not only that he plans touse these bits of world in his work; it is actually and wonderfully that he plans to learn them all, for starters, and then to understand them.

  For his interpretations of the world to be as valuable and accurate as possible, they must include as much breadth and variety as possible. The aim of the interpretative, referential writer is to render as much of the world as he possibly can as coherent as he possibly can. To this end the writer studies the great world closely, and takes notes. The writer, then, approaches the world exactly as a critic approaches a text.

  Instead of a critical analysis of the great world, or of any given wedge of it, the writer produces a simulacrum of it. The work of fiction is a smaller and more coherent world alongside the great world. We may inquire of the world within the work of art all that we inquire of the great world: what, pray, is going on here? What sort of a world is this? Do social matters dominate it, or spiritual matters? Is man himself glorious or shameful? In other words, we can examine an artistic world not only formally, but also culturally, morally, and metaphysically, to gain insight about the great world—the great world that is the truest object of our most urgent inquiries and deepest hopes.

  To return to my starting point, then, fiction is not so much itself an interpretation (except insofar as everything is) as it is an object for future interpretation. It is, God help us, a text. Sadly, as an interpretation it is dumb until someone interprets it. The writer “conceals,” as it were, his interpretation inside literary materials which feign lifelikeness on one hand or elaborately wrought surfaces on the other. The lifelike materials absorb us and draw us into the narrative; the wrought surfaces suspend us over a semi-opaque surface of words and images. One feints, the other dazzles. Each of these kinds of fictional handling has, as a secondary property, the effect of misleading us, the readers; both of them lure us to drink from Lethe, whose soothing waters make us forget that the whole show is only a subterfuge by means of which some loquacious and probably half-educated crank is making us sit still and listen to his theories.

  In Zola novels, for instance, we might find in the sum of particular cases the generalization that an individual’s place in the mechanism of society determines his fate. InMoby-Dick , however, we might discover a different reading of the world at large: an individual’s fate is determined not so much by his society as by his own private character. In the controlled world of the novel, these things are optional. A gifted writer can make almost any option work, almost any opinion stick—especially as we seldom read fiction for its interpretations in the first place. The reduction of literary works to pious epigrams is a jolly parlor game and little more. Nevertheless, such generalized relationships, truisms or not, are yours for the asking in any fiction, and they may be of major importance (at least to the writer, who has to start somewhere) as the principles upon which the work is founded. Contemporary modernist fiction is no exception. From any work of fiction we may derive an interpretative view of the world.

  Of course, the novel, even the unabashed novel of ideas, is not a tract. Insofar as it is complex and honest, it will be enriched by a certain amount of contradiction which gives depth and rondure to ideas; insofar as it is energetic and powerful, it will have the vigor of many clashing materials; insofar as it is broad and broken, like the great world, much that is in it will make little or no sense.

  Unless we are Marxists or fundamentalists, we do not judge a literary work according to whether or not we agree with its world view. Nor do we usually devote critical attention to its views on their own merits apart from the work. Nevertheless, when the interpretations are absolutely stupid, we shun the work no matter how strong its surface. When the fictional world is contrived to point up some miserable cliché, such as that man is threatening his own habitat, we dismiss the work. Yet when the fictional world is contrived to point up some interesting interpretative relationship, we will read it—even sometimes if its writing is clumsy (A Voyage to Arcturus, The Diary of a Country Priest). This is as it should be.

  Complexity, subtlety, and breadth are the virtues here. If a writer is going to engage in the intellectual business of assigning meanings and showing relationships, he had better think very well. The novel of ideas had better be good. We are not interested in simple allegory, nor in a world so biased as to be unrecognizable, nor in any excited shoutings about. For most of us, the “whole truth” is necessarily complex; to simplify is to fudge. Nobody wants to read a well-ground axe.

  On the other hand, a novel is not a kind of very long-playing but lightweight television set. We are no longer children, and we no longer enjoy fiction with our eyes only. We seek, as I say, a complex, subtle, and broad set of ideas. But in our horror of oversimplification and piety we may have bent too far in the other direction. We are so accustomed to finding intelligent ideas and excellent surfaces together, and stupid ideas and clumsy surfaces together, that in our decadence or in our haste we may fail to inquire beyond appearances. As a result, we undoubtedly miss some interesting thinking. And—importantly—writers who have only an ear for prose and a taste for subtle surfaces may be credited with having a good deal more. We may actually assume such writers have something on their minds. We may even ascribe to them a thought-out interpretation of the world, which we may then seek in their works. It may be this factor more than any other which leads to the common assertion that the theme of twentieth-century fiction is meaninglessness. Meaninglessness, that is, may actually be not so much a deliberate theme as it is an inadvertent achievement.

  Find the Hidden Meaning

  Fiction elicits an interpretation of the world by being itself a worldlike object for interpretation. It is a subtle pedagogy. When the thoughtful reader or critic interprets the work as text (and only then), when he inquires into the work’s structures and assumptions, he will be led to formulate a set of relationships obtaining in the work which will correspond (since words refer) to a limited and exaggerated interpretation of experience itself. Sadly, the interpretative aspects of fiction absolutely require further interpretation by a reader in order to exist. They are simply not present to the senses, but rather concealed behind materials, until they are interpreted out. If you really have “something to say” in literary fiction, then, you will have to interest a critic in your work, or somehow interest your readers in analyzing its structure—or else what you “have to say” will go unheard. For this reason, it is a pity that so few critics work on contemporary fiction.

  All this is a paradoxical situation for intellectuals who turn to fiction as the best possible prose vehicle for their interpretations, only to discover that those very interpretations—the urgency of which prompted the work—are to the reader the work’s most dispensable aspect. They discover that in order to write fiction that anybody might want to read,
they must painstakingly conceal what is to them its very point. (Here is the germ of truth in that funny, sweet saying of the ignorant, that the function of criticism in general, and of freshman critical essays in particular, is to “find the hidden meaning.”) In order to make a world in which their ideas might be discovered, writers embody those ideas in materials solid and opaque, and thus conceal them. In the process of fleshing out a thought, they brick it in. The more subtle they are as artists (not as thinkers, but as artists), the more completely their structures will vanish into the work, and the more grouchy they will become the more readers tell them what lovely, solid bricks they make.

  Insofar as a writer is interested in interpretation, then, he is stuck in this paradox. His role is like that of a scout whose job it is to blaze a new trail, all traces of which he must carefully obliterate. When the writer completely covers his traces, he is no longer said to be writing the novel of ideas.

  If the novel of ideas constitutes a kind ofvia positiva , a fiction of openness, of bold and faithful action in which the writer permits his understanding of things to be bared, its complement, the fiction of aestheticism, is a kind ofvia negativa in which the writer (Chekhov, Flaubert) finds himself by losing himself.

  In such fiction, ideas dissolve into their materials without a trace. This is the very opposite of contemporary modernist fiction. In contemporary modernist works (inPale Fire or Ficciones ), the relationships among bare ideas constitute the real action. Narrative materials are a thin tattooed skin flattened over the structural bones. These works are as purely intellectual as art can contrive. But the apparently motiveless fiction of which I speak is as purely material as art can contrive. InDubliners , inMadame Bovary , in Chekhov stories, materials stand purified of their causes. Each narrative event is a material object, a mute given, as shorn of apparent cause and idea as any tree. This is an art of perfect concealment. And it illustrates the writer’s paradox very well.