Living by Fiction
Authors: Annie Dillard
IVING BY
F
ICTION
Annie Dillard
This book is dedicated to people whose names are, for the most part, unknown to me. They are men and women across the country who love literature and give it their lives: who respect literature's capacity to mean, who perhaps teach, who perhaps write fiction or criticism or poetry, and who above all read and reread the world's good books. These are people who, if you told them the world would end in ten minutes, would try to decideâquicklyâwhat to read.
Those known to me are only a small sampling. There is my friend Judy Hawkes, who works in New York as a messenger “boy.” There is Robert Fitzgerald and Penny Laurans, at Yale. This book is for themâa woman I know well and a couple I met brieflyâwho live by the same love for literature; and for R. C. Day at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California (the briefest acquaintance with whom prompted this dedication); for L. L. Lee at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, John R. Moore and Betty Moore at Hollins College in Virginia, and Paul Horgan at Wesleyan University in Connecticut; for Michael Collins in New York, Daniel Butterworth in North Carolina, Doe Burn in California, Cort Conley on Waldron Island, Washington; for Garrett Epps and Spencie Love at large, the late DeVene Harrold in Florida, Ruth Vande Kieft in New York, Julia Randall in Maryland, and Jim McCulloch in Texas; for all of you in university English departments or in hock (or both), people well known or unknown, tending bar or retired, going to night school, raising children, writing novels or criticism, fitting pipes, awarding or receiving degreesâwho love books, think about books, read or write books, for love of literature. I wish I could name all of you, all of you in every country and township in the land; for I know by extrapolation that you are there.
Art must recreate, in full consciousness,
and by means of signs, the total life
of the universe, that is to say, the soul
where the varied dream we call the universe
is played.
âTeodor de Wyzewa, 1886
T
his is, ultimately, a book about the world. It inquires about the world's meaning. It attempts to do unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup. The teacup at hand, in this case, is contemporary fiction.
Why read fiction to think about the world? You may, like most of us most of the time, read fiction for other things. You may read fiction to enjoy the multiplicity and dazzle of the vivid objects it presents to the imagination; to hear its verbal splendor and admire its nimble narrative; to enter lives not your own; to feel, on one hand, the solemn stasis and immutability of the work as enclosed art objectâbeginning and ending the same way every time you read it, as though a novel were a diagram inscribed forever under the vault of heavenâand to feel, on the other hand, the plunging force of time compressed in its passage, and that compressed passage like a river's pitch crowded with scenes and scenery and actions and characters enlarged and rushing headlong down together.
You may, I say, enjoy fiction for these sensations, and turn to nonfiction for thought.
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This is, indeed, a wonderful way to live. You read biography, ethics, cultural anthropology, psychology if you can stand it, aesthetics, linguistics, art criticism, every kind of personal narrative imaginable, and history above all, history of peoples and ideas and knowledge and places, history of everything. You read theology if such is your bent, and contemporary metaphysics if you can find any. And you turn to science for data, in order to do your own thinking; you read physics and astronomy, geography, cellular biology, field zoology and botanyâthe works. This is entertaining: “Let us gather facts,” Buffon said, “in order to have ideas.” If you do this, you will have ideas about facts.
You can, in short, lead the life of the mind, which is, despite some appalling frustrations, the happiest life on earth. And one day, in the thick of this, approaching some partial vision, you will (I swear) find yourself on the receiving end ofâof all thingsâan “idea for a story,” and you will, God save you, start thinking about writing some fiction of your own. Then you will understand, in what I fancy might be a blinding flash, that all this passionate thinking is what fiction is about, that all those other fiction writers started as you did, and are laborers in the same vineyard.
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Fiction can deal with all the world's objects and ideas together, with the breadth of human experience in time and space; it can deal with things the limited disciplines of thought either ignore completely or destroy by meth
odological caution, our most pressing concerns: personality, family, death, love, time, spirit, goodness, evil, destiny, beauty, will.
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Fiction writers are, I hope to show, thoughtful interpreters of the world. But instead of producing interpretationsâinstead of doing research or criticismâthey doodle on the walls of the cave. They make art objects which must themselves be interpreted. How convolute, how absurd, how endlessly interesting is this complexity! The world is filling up with works of fiction, with these useless, beautiful objects of thoughtâto what end? What links any work of fiction with anything we want to learn? To the world we see? To our understanding of the world we see? Does fiction illuminate the great world itself, or only the mind of its human creator?
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Like many people, I have for years been reading fiction by various United States and South American writers like Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, and by European writers like Samuel Beckett, the dull Alain Robbe-Grillet, the wonderful Italo Calvino. I have asked myself how their work's goals differ from those of the Modernists before themâFaulkner, Joyce, Mann, Kafka, sayâor from the goals of Hardy or Eliot, or of Saul Bellow or Salinger or Mailer. What do these varied contemporary writers aboveâthe contemporary modernistsâhave to say about the world? About fiction? What characterizes their fictional worlds and their artistic methods? The answers to these questions are old hat among critics. Nevertheless,
these considerations, and some interesting side issuesâlike the matter of integrity in artâoccupy Part One of this three-part book.
In Part Two, which is far more entertaining, I ask why this brand of contemporary fiction does not wholly dominate the field. Why is anyone still writing traditional fiction? Why has there been no radical revolution in fiction? How far can fiction go in the direction of abstraction? How do fiction's audience, its publishers, and even its critics, influence its direction? These are, I think, lively topics. There is also in this section a chapter about a much-beloved side issue, contemporary prose styles.
The final third of the book raises the roof on fiction and takes on the world at large. Who, among thinkers, is interpreting the great world itselfâlandscape and culture togetherâin terms of human meaning? Is interpretation possible at all? We lock in asylums people who see meaning in clouds and rocks, but we heap honors on people who see meaning in children's jokes and patterns scratched on pots. Where do those of us who are not in asylums draw the lineâby tacit agreementâbetween the humanly meaningful and meaningless? Is the search for meaning among the high heaps of the meaningless a fool's game? Is it art's game? What is (gasp) the relationship between the world and the mind? Is
knowledge
possible? Do we ever discover meaning, or do we always make it up?
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I approach fiction, and the world, and these absurdly large questions, as a reader, and a writer, and a lover. Although my critical training and competence, such as it is, is as a careful textual critic, I have here flung this sensible approach aside in favor of enthusiasm, free specula
tion, blind assertion, dumb joking, and diatribe. The book as a whole sees the mind and the world as inextricably fitted twin puzzles. The mind fits the world and shapes it as a river fits and shapes its own banks.
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M
IDDLETOWN
, C
ONNECTICUT
M
AY
1981
M
any contemporaries write a fiction intended to achieve traditional kinds of excellence. Many others write a fiction which is more abstractedâthe kind of fiction Borges wrote in
Ficciones
, or Nabokov wrote in
Pale Fire
. This latter kind of fiction has no name, and I do not intend to coin one. Some people call it “metafiction,” “fabulation,” “experimental,” “neo-Modernist,” and, especially, “Post-Modernist”; but I find all these terms misleading. “Post-Modernist” is the best, but it suffers from the same ambiguity which everyone deplores in its sibling term, “Post-Impressionist.”
Recently a stranger from New York City sent me a green button, a big green button, which read:
POST-MODERNIST
. From his letter I inferred that he disliked Modern
ism, found it baffling and infuriating, and for reasons I could not fathom, included me on his team.
But Modernism is not over. The historical Modernists are dead: Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and also Biely, Gide, Malraux, Musil, Woolf. But one could argueâand I doâthat diverse contemporary writers are carrying on, with new emphases and further developments, the Modernists' techniques.
I am going to use the dreadful mouthful “contemporary modernist” to refer to these contemporary writers and their fiction. I trust that the clumsiness of the term will prevent its catching on. I will also use the lowercase, nonhistorical term “modernist” loosely, to refer to the art of surfaces in general. The historical Modernists explored this art and bent it, in most cases, to surprisingly traditional ends. Transitional writers like Knut Hamsun, Witold Gombrowicz, and Bruno Schulz expanded its capacity for irony. Now various contemporaries are pushing it to various interesting extremes: Jorge Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Robert Coover, John Barth, John Hawkes, William Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Thomas M. Disch, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jonathan Baumbach, William Hjorstberg, and Flann O'Brien, Italo Calvino, Tommaso Landolfi, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, Elias Canetti, and Carlos Fuentes.