Living by Fiction

by Annie Dillard

  Symbol does not only refer; it acts. There is no such thing as amere symbol. When you climb to the higher levels of abstraction, symbols, those enormous, translucent planets, are all there is. They are at once your only tools of knowledge and that knowledge’s only object. It is no leap to say that space-time is itself a symbol. If the material world is a symbol, it is the symbol of mind, or of God. Which is more or less meaningless—as you choose. But it is notmere . In the last analysis, symbols and art objects do not stand for things; they manifest them, in their fullness. You begin by using symbols, and end by contemplating them.

  A Diatribe Against Purity

  As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible—or at least visible, at least discussible—those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains which science’s tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all that we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts and of all ideas to forms.

  The task, then, of all the arts in each century is to rescue the clichés, not to turn from them, and to dedicate themselves each new decade to more comprehensive forms of beauty and understanding. It is to expand those arts’ purviews, to expand the arc of the comprehended world, and not to restrict any vision according to the demands for purity set by theory. Purity of practice guarantees that the artist will not err, and that superficial critics will find no flaw in the work, and that nothing has been ventured. Within the bare pantry of purity, stocked solely with what the mind knows to be essential, symbol, which is itself material and which requires a chaotic wealth of materials, can neither grow nor flourish. Symbols arise from material messes.

  Purity is one of the two most attractive ideas the human race knows. The other is perfection. Purity is absence; perfection is fullness. Purity seeks to eliminate; its worshipers from the right or the left wage war with swords. As an idea, purity has been steadily diluting lyric poetry since Valéry. It has wreaked outright havoc in the plastic arts. (In Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1913 Cubist manifesto, which runs nine pages, the word “pure” and its variants occurs seventeen times, each time honorifically. “Too many painters,” Apollinaire said ominously in the same essay, “still adore plants, stones, the sea, or men.” To be pure means to stop all this needless adoration.)

  Purity seeks to eliminate inessentials. But even if we could agree on the essentials of any art (which we patently cannot), what have we got when we are “down” to them? It is hard to see how anyone could think, even in the abstract, that a purging of inessentials is good in itself. Who would want to see the woods purified of inessentials? His children? By the time the arts are down to their various irreducible nubs, they dissolve into concepts; they lose the material energy which made them interesting.

  When the art object contains a wealth of varied materials, it can act. The coherent relationships among those materials serve as a kind of rocket fuel, so to speak, which propels the object into the regions it explores. But when the object is only a theoretical mock-up of those regions—when it presents only those relationships whose structures are already known—then nothing of the universe can be learned. In the latter sort of object—in the Mondrian—we can study the mind’s own structures, and the structures of disembodied relationships, and this is something; but if we really believe that there is a world external to mind, and if it can be known and art can know it, then our ambitions for art are higher. Material complexity is the truth of the world, even the workable world of idea, and must be the truth of the art object which would imitate, order, and penetrate that world: complexity, and contradiction, and repetition, diversity, energy, and largesse. I am as attracted to purity as the next guy. But it must not happen here.

  CHAPTER 11

  Does the World Have Meaning?

  The most extreme, cheerful, and fantastic view of art to which I ever subscribe is one in which the art object requires no viewer or listener—no audience whatever—in order to do what it does, which is nothing less than to hold up the universe.

  This is a fundamentally insane notion, which developed in my own mind from an idea of Buckminster Fuller’s. Every so often I try to encourage other writers by telling them this cheerful set of thoughts; always they gaze at me absolutely appalled. Fuller’s assertion was roughly to this effect: the purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Physical things are falling apart at a terrific rate; people, on the other hand, put things together. People build bridges and cities and roads; they write music and novels and constitutions; they have ideas. That is why people are here; the universe as it wereneeds somebody or something to keep it from falling apart.

  Now, for a long time I have taken this notion of Fuller’s to mean something even he probably did not intend: that imaginative acts actually weigh in the balance of physical processes. Imaginative acts—even purely mental combinations, like the thought that a certain cloud resembles a top hat—carry real weight in the universe. A child who makes a pun, or a shepherd who looks at a batch of stars and thinks, “That part is a throne and that part is a swan,” is doing something which counts in the universe’s reckoning of order and decay—which counts just as those mighty explosions and strippings of electrons do inside those selfsame stars.

  This jolly view soothes the Puritan conscience; it gives the artist real work. With his thumb in the dike he is saving the universe. And the best part of it is he need not find a publisher, or a gallery, or a producer, or a symphony orchestra. Thoughts count. A completed novel in a trunk in the attic is an order added to the sum of the universe’s order. It remakes its share of undoing. It counteracts the decaying of systems, the breakdown of stars and cultures and molecules, the fraying of forms. It works. (If an essentially mental order and an essentially physical one are equivalents, then all we need are the conversion tables. With a little tinkering, Einstein’s formula might work for this. Perhaps a decent line in a decent sonnet weighs in the balance with a bonfire, say, or the force of a very high tide. Could a complex and ordered novel pull the stars from their courses?)

  Having disburdened myself of this crackpot notion, a little ghosty story I never tire of telling myself, I shall retreat to firmer ground. All the other interesting views of art require that the art object attract an audience, if only an audience of one.

  In this century, orthodoxy no longer believes that art objects act directly upon that audience, by informing its members, for instance, that prison conditions are terrible, or that land use requires management. Whatever the art object does, it does not do itto us, actively, like a headmaster with his cane. It is our object, after all; we are not its people. The art object does not teach, exhort, arouse, aid, and so forth. It does not “help us to see” like an optometrist; it does not “make us realize” like a therapist; it does not “open doors for us” like a butler. Nevertheless, insofar as art has any function whatsoever (and I am coming to believe that it does), it requires an audience. It requires an audience just as the tree falling in the forest does; it requires an audience as subject, so that it may be object. If outside human perception the art object has no human value, then the art object needs a perceiver, lest all it is or does be lost.

  The art object is always passive in relation to its perceiver. A book which no one is reading rests in its own being; it is an enduring and undecaying jar upon a hill in Tennessee. It holds round and shapes forever its share of the general air. Or a book no one is reading is like Victoria Falls, or a zoo at night, its internal activities unperceived. Its virtues are untapped, like those of an empty wall socket. The bright lights of a book no one is reading bounce inside its binding unseen, like the streaking electronic light inside a compu
ter game’s screen, which draws its endless patterns in a dark corner of a bar whether someone is watching or no. At any rate, we measure the function and value of human objects in human terms (unless we regard the art object as a natural fact, as the first view above does); so that object’s doing, however internal, requires a perceiver to complete its value.

  The art object does not do to us; rather, it presents to us. What does it present? It presents an object for study and contemplation. Why should we study and contemplate this object more than any other, more than a pebble or a pelican? After all, the art object wholly lacks certain qualities which we prize. Its components may lack simple material presence—mass and extension—such as we find in the components of pebbles. As a total object, the art object lacks life, the capacity to grow and change and reproduce, spontaneity, mobility, warmth, senses and sensations, appetite, and other such fine things which any pelican possesses. Nevertheless, the art object may represent these things. And in the manner of its representing—in its surface and in its structure—the art object may present, embody, and enact certain additional qualities. We clearly prize these additional qualities as much as, or even more than, we prize the qualities of pebbles and pelicans, or we would never read or sketch on the beach. We find in art objects qualities in which the great world and its parts seem often wanting: human significance, human order, reason, mind, causality, boundary, harmony, perfection, coherence, purity, purpose, and permanence.

  InFiction and the Figures of Life , William Gass says, and I concur, “The aim of the artist ought to be to bring into the world objects which do not already exist there, and objects which are especially worthy of love.” Always crucial to these thoughts is the caveat that art is lovable and has beauty neither according to its novelty as a newborn object on earth nor according to the lovableness and beauty of the worldly objects it represents, but only according to its internal merits as art. Thus painting has turned from pretty ladies; thus a photographer makes little progress in his art until he ceases making prints of beautiful or lovable objects (like leaves or slaves), the aesthetic or moral virtues of which he attempts to borrow or heist. Similarly, fiction’s function is not to people the earth with lovable folk and their dramatic doings in order to widen our acquaintance and cheer our stay on the planet. InA Dance to the Music of Time , Anthony Powell manufactures the representation of a person named Kenneth Widmerpool, who is neither beautiful nor lovable. As an artifice, he is both. Graham Greene’sBrighton Rock is about as crafted a novel as you will find. Its subject, which it presents with unflagging intensity, is human evil. It is very, very good. So also isShip of Fools ; so isThe Good Soldier . As objects, these works possess integrity, intelligence, harmony, and so forth, although their characters and events may not. These points are widely understood; I beg indulgence for mentioning them again.

  Art remakes the world according to sense. The art object is a controlled context whose parts cohere within an order according to which they may be understood. Context is meaning. With all my heart, and in vain, I have hoped to avoid or conceal the question of what, if anything, these artistic coherencies have to do with the actual world.

  Are the world’s artists, with all their noble orderings, playing in the sand? Another way to phrase the same question is this: do artists discover order, or invent it? Do they discern it, or make it up? Finally—are the significance, causality, harmony, purpose, etc., which we find in art objects to be found in the actual world? The remainder of this book devolves upon this question. Are these structures really intelligences, the products of knowledge, which enlighten; or are they instead only play-pretties, the products of wishing, which console?

  It is a shame, having stated the question so tidily, and I hope so poignantly, that we must now disallow it. For the drearily abstract truth of the matter is that there is no final difference between the two choices. The question pertains only to the realm of positivist knowledge—to science. One may discover America, which is actual, or invent a unicorn, which is not. Inventing a trip to the moon is mere literature until we discover a way to get there; the discovery of a unicorn would be very hard news indeed. In science, our fictions do not necessarily create our facts (although, as is well known, they may certainly facilitate their discovery, as Kepler’s elaborate, angelical cosmology led him to posit elliptical orbits). Even in the sciences, however, the matter becomes steadily cloudier as the levels of abstraction climb. What do we mean by asking if a context is actual? According to whom? For all we know of the actual is our knowledge of it, and that knowledge is contextual, partial, verbal, and so forth. Do we know that the brown pelican,Pelecanus occidentalis , is a bird of the order Pelecaniformes and the family Pelecanidae—or did somebody just make that up? Did we discover the calculus or invent it? Do we discover or invent a new move in chess? Did we discover or invent the qualities of color and charm in particles? Anti-matter?

  Outside of positivism, in the realm of understanding—of human interpretation—invention and discovery are the same process. It is all fiction. Did Plato, or Kant, or Freud, discover a series of significant relationships, or fabricate it? Did Noam Chomsky discover a series of significant relationships, or fabricate it? Did Schönberg? Did Mondrian? Did Confucius or the Baal Shem-Tov discover a series of significant relationships or fabricate it? Did Shakespeare? Did Conrad, did Beethoven, did Donne? The question is meaningless.

  But let us go further. The intellectual, interpretative orders which we find in art objects must be there to be found in the actual world, for somebody found them, if only by making them up. But surely there are false interpretations, such as that the Aryan race is destined to rule Europe. Surely there are human orders which only madmen discern, such as the one in which the tide of history is understood to have risen and borne upon its breast the returned general Napoleon Bonaparte, in the person of the speaker. How do we distinguish between those inventions which we honor by the name “discoveries”—such as Freud’s—and those inventions we dismiss as balderdash, such as the doctrine of signatures? Alas, we have only empiricism. Some interpretations, such as Plato’s and Freud’s and Buddha’s, are still proving useful in their respective fields. This, in turn, is a matter of consensus. Consensus within various cultures sets useful inventions/ discoveries in the shrines of convention, where they reign until consensus changes, when some even more useful fiction replaces the old, as the doctrine of signatures was replaced. This is all very well, and establishes that much of our question is disallowed. But we press on.

  What are we to make of artistic interpretations of the great world? Do they obtain? Do those in what consensus calls a great work obtain in the actual world? We have seen that, so far as we know, interpretations of natural facts do not obtain outside their artistic contexts; Melville has not explained to us whales. Interpretations ofhuman facts, however, may well obtain outside their contexts. In the presentation of Achilles and Lear and Lord Jim and Madame Bovary and Dorothea Casaubon and Ahab we may discern relationships between character and event, or character and its parts, which empiricism, if it could ever be directed to such insubstantial ends, would I think discover to be actual recurring patterns. These structures are actual; the articulation of them is discovery. This is a great value of literature. But this is referential. It presents a model of discoveries, of relationships interpreted out of the great world. Well and good.

  But please, what aboutartistic (not interpretative) values in art? The idea of order is actual; a pebble is an ordering. But do the ordered relationships among all parts which we find in a great short story or sonnet exist in nature? Do the reflexive structures and intellectual patterns and purpose which we find in art—do these obtain elsewhere? Or do we merely make them up because our minds are uniquely adapted for making things up?

  This is an appalling possibility. If our minds are selected for inventing bits of order, then art’s highest function is to shed light on the mind. And, terribly, any human artifact is the mind’s own simulacrum. A play
or a government, a canal or a culture, is a physical replica by means of which the mind duplicates its own structures unwittingly, as a strand of DNA replicates itself inside a banana leaf. And ifthis is true, and the natural world which churned out the mind is a wreck and a chaos, like a rock slide, then the mind is a marvelous monster indeed. And the work of art (in addition to being the least of our worries) is always a tour de force in which the mind displays abilities absurdly in excess of, or at least incidental to, their survival function. For the ability to conceive and execute murals and epic poems and symphonies and novels is a grotesque trick of tissue which sprang from the pot of the possible, like the grossly overdeveloped antlers of the extinct Irish elk.

  The mechanism would be this. The overrefined abilities which go into the production of art, religion, and any systems of value would have persisted within the expanding brain of the species, and developed further, and in fact made a rollicking success of the lot of us, because they are extremely adaptive—not for understanding what is, but for getting through the winter. The fictive ability to invent and order makes possible the imaginative conception and execution of shaped tools, the agricultural calendar, complex societies with myth, social ideals, and civic order, and other such dreary, survival-enhancing phenomena. The murals and novels, then, while not specifically useful, would be merely harmless excrescences of the same adaptive tissues, or at best, useful models of social ideals, or abstractly, ideas of order. By these lights, there is no order anywhere but in our brains, which are uniquely adapted for inventing it and for handling complex abstractions. These abilities have served us very well. The only significance and value which obtain anywhere are in the mind’s discernment of these fictive qualities in its own manufactured models. We create value and locate it in our monstrously overdeveloped mental self-replication, our stuttering repetitions of our brains’ own order, with which we have covered the gibbering earth.