Authors: Annie Dillard
Take the Bellow story “Leaving the Yellow House.” Bellow has covered his tracks even more thoroughly (if less tensely) than Joyce did in “The Dead.” You may read this story half a dozen times before you discover, by prolonged and even extraordinary inquiry into its title, that it is not about survival, as it appears to be, but about dying, and the relationship between soul and body, the loaning of matter to spirit for a time. The vivid character and her elaborated setting are actually designed to be as minimal as possible. Bellow describes, in specifics which lend her supreme importance, an old woman living alone at Sego Lake Desert, Utah. The surface of the story is full of interesting action; the life at hand, however, is specifically as reduced and empty as imagination permits. This enormous, unstated metaphor gives Bellow a chance to examine what we have when we have only life itself, when we have as our sole possession only a yellow houseâonly a living bodyâwhich we must leave. (This is not criticism, note, but blithe assertion.) Now, there is not one blessed clue in the body of the text to these considerations I have just sketched. Yet if you read the story you will see that all its materials fall under this head and no other. As a reader, however, you may easily omit to worry about any of this. The story lacks nothing; it needs no excuse; it raises no questions about its principles. You may enjoy the story alone, or in the light of character and survival; or you may enjoy the story in the light of its actual sense. (I trust you did not greatly enjoy my account of the sense alone.) The sense is optional; it is dispensable. And you will not absorb it from the story as it were
subliminally; you must seek it out and articulate it, or do without.
What are we to make of this silly state of affairs called art, that a writer should go to all the trouble to say something interesting so well that scarcely anyone will ever hear it? How wonderful, people say, that we may read a good work on so many different levels! What they do not go on to say is how seldom they bother, and in fact, how much bother it is, to poke and poke at something which you are enjoying anyway. But, dammit, is a work of art really about what it is about, or is it not? My bias here is plain.
The interpretative, referential structures by which writers make sense of the world occupy an unenviable position: they fascinate or obsess the writer and escape or bore the reader. The reader enjoys his books like so many skinless sausages dropped on his plate.
And what does this mean? Is a book's interpretative structure merely the harmless hobby of the writer and a few critics? To what extent does a work's intellectual structure contribute to its value?
One school of thought holds that a work's greatest value coincides with its greatest appeal; that literature is a joy and not a puzzle, essay, or lecture; that readers quite reasonably like what they like, not what some critic thinks they should like; that writers know not what they really do, because the final value and significance of a writer's work lies in whatever shiny materials happen to attract a casual reader's eye; and that “Leaving the Yellow House” (by this account) is a fascinating depiction of aging, or a great character study, or a colorful and desolate depiction of Utah, or of life in any American small town.
Another view, which is both more respectable and even more discouraging, grants that a work's interpretative and intellectual structures have value, but only a practical one. They serve the writer, and the writer alone. They serve him either as motive or as scaffolding. As motive they get him out of bed in the morning. They interest him sufficiently in the work that he will begin it and see it through. As scaffolding they serve the writer as abstract superstructures. They are organizing principles which are utterly vital to the process of construction and utterly obsolete when the job is done. As scaffolding, then, they merely give the writer a place to stand in order to lay his bricks.
This is a miserable problem, but it is not a problem for all fiction writers. This is a good century for writers like the contemporary modernists who wish to make their works' aesthetic structures plainly visible; all the arts have moved in this direction. Writers whose vision is almost wholly formalized, and not referential or interpretative, have free rein. And writers who are sitting on a story absolutely great in its own right have no problem either; if they have little extra to say, they also have little to hide. The paradox hurts only frankly interpretative thinkers, who have a theory or two about the world, as well as an art; their sort of thinking is frowned upon in fiction. Such a writer has several options. He may pursue his own bent, either hoping to effect, single-handedly, a change in our taste in fiction, or hoping more modestly that our taste will change of its own accord sooner or later. He may then, like Thomas Mann or Aldous Huxley (or like Shaw in drama), toss it all in, right there in cold, discursive type, or with the flimsiest veneer of narrative artifice, and risk being thought the clumsier storyteller
for it. His hope in this case is that the work's other virtues will outweigh this particular vice, or that its other virtues will at least get it read. If he persists in making plain his thoughts, his only other hope is for a name as ringing as “Thomas Mann”; such an institutionalized set of syllables licenses anything. Alternately, he gives up; he yields. Still wishing to be heard, he nevertheless perfects his aesthetic surface, obliterates his tracks, dismantles his scaffolding, and prays or weeps silently under his pile of bricks. His only hope, then, is that his story will have such enormous appeal that some critic will take it to the beach.
In most cases, the writer of thoughtful literary fiction chooses the second route, but simply cannot refrain from waving little flags from his hiding place under the bricks. He makes liberal use of epigraphs which plainly raise the intellectual issues at hand. He gives his work a mystifying title. He names his characters “Mrs. Graal” or “Zooey” or variations on, or anagrams of, Zeus, Christ, Beelzebub, Plato, or Darwin. He slips other clues into the text, either with a syringe or with a sledgehammer: he will unexpectedly liken an infectious disease to human immorality, or Cro-Magnon man to a nuclear physicist.
It is demeaning that serious novelists have to resort to such coyness. But interpretative fiction is very much out of fashion. There are, however, two ameliorating circumstances. One is that the fictional surface may embody its idea so beautifully well that the writer may, if he wishes, spell it out without forcing or pleading. Always, if the work is good enough, the writer can get away with anything. Thus at the end of “The Dead,” Joyce may do with us what he will; he may even tell us a little bit about what has been going on.
The other ameliorating circumstance is more subtle; I am not sure that it even exists. It could be, however, that aesthetic perfection in a work of fiction carries with it a certain felt tension of tone which not only awes the reader, so that he judges the work to be absolutely excellent, but also inspires him to consider it deeply. It is “The Dead,” again, which leads me to this thought. Its perfection is of the purely aesthetic kindâwhich is perhaps the only kind of perfection possible for fiction (we do not speak of “perfection” in Mann, Melville, Conrad, Dostoevsky, or even Shakespeare, but of other values instead). The perfection of “The Dead” resides in the total disappearance of ideas into their materials. Why this? we ask, as we ask of the great world: Why this, and not some other?
The story contains no trace of that bundle of bias, enthusiasm, motive, morality, personality, and mind which we might term “the author.” Where is Joyce? The work is seamless. I do not mean that Joyce does not intrude his opinions into his storyâthat is a pleasing but not uncommon virtueâbut instead I mean something more profound and less easy to name. The sentences have in their rhythms an austerity that is complete. They exhibit, by their perfect concealment of it, an absolutely controlled tension, like that of a mastered grief or longing. I suggest that the austerity with which a writer wholly subsumes his thoughts to his fictional materials reminds us ofâor is even identical toâthe difficult dignity with which some people control strong and private feelings. We are people, and we call this “power”; it will always command our respect.
Perhaps, then, this high degree of tension and control in prose, this sense of great emotional passion at short
rein, attracts our mind and leads us to inquire into the sources of the tension and the principles of control. And perhaps, too, the absence of any hint of explanation or motive on the author's part will lead us to seek it, lead us to inquire, as we do of “Leaving the Yellow House” and, somewhat differently, of “The Dead,” what these things are doing here in the first place. I hope so.
F
iction does interpret the world at large. It traffics in understanding. Does it also traffic in knowledge? Do its interpretations have the status of hard data? Does art know?
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Knowledge and understanding meet where science meets theology, where substance and idea mingle their parts. This juncture is the apex of the pyramid of abstractions. It is the apogee of all our researches; it is the vanishing point where all lines of thought converge. Here eternity gives birth to time. I wish to assert that art is especially competent to penetrate these regions, and others as well.
Zola, according to Charles Child Walcutt, said that fic
tion “had been an art but would henceforth be an instrument for the scientific study of man and society.” Now, no one is going to attack Zola, who is not so much a sacred cow as a dead horse. Let me just use these notions. Zola makes a false distinction when he says that fiction was formerly an art but was now an instrument for scientific studyâan instrument, I infer, like a lens or a sextant. Because the truth is that only by being art is fiction an instrument at all. Art itself is an instrument, a cognitive instrument, and with religion the only instrument, for probing certain materials and questions. Art and religion probe the mysteries in those difficult areas where blurred and powerful symbols are the only possible speech and their arrangement into coherent religions and works of art the only possible grammar.
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All art may be said to be symbolic in this sense: it is a material mock-up of bright idea. Any work of art symbolizes the process by which spirit generates matter, or materials generate idea. Any work of art symbolizes juncture itself, the socketing of eternity into time and energy into form. Of course, all that man makes is similar in this respect: a bowl, a highway, and a triangle are also material mock-ups of mental orders. But this is
all
that art is, in essence and by intent. A highway intends something quite other. Any art object is essentially a model in which the creative process is frozen with its product in its arms.
Any art object as a whole is symbolic, then. But more pertinent to my point is the familiar level at which an art object is symbolic because its parts are. These things warrant a brief restatement.
An allegorical symbol is precise and bounded. When fair-haired Virtue shatters the opium pipe of Indolence,
we may conclude that moral virtue in the abstract, which the author finds as attractive as he finds blondes, rejects indolence, strongly. Nonallegorical symbols, which are the topic at hand, are not precise. It is when these symbols break their allegorical boundaries, their commitment to reference, that they start stepping out on us. The laxity of their bonds permits them to enter unsuspected relationships. They become suggestive. These artistic symbols do not represent things in the great world directly, as the opium pipe represents indolence. Instead, these symbols, like art objects themselves, are semi-enclosed worlds of meaning the essence of whose referential substance we may approximate, but whose boundaries and total possibilities for significance we can never locate precisely or exhaust.
Of the “stately pleasure dome” of “Kubla Khan,” shall we say it is an ordered, pleasing, and aloof work of art (“A stately pleasure dome”); or any conscious product of active power (“decree”); or the passive receptacle of the wellspring of the creative imagination itself (“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran”); or a formal ordering of subconscious materials (“Through caverns measureless to man”); or the civilization from which instruments of cognition are launched which discover and illuminate that civilization's sources in chaos, or its fated destiny, or its brute environment (“Down to a sunless sea”)? Of course, these are just opening suggestions; the other parts of the poem shed much light on the pleasure dome, clarifying some interpretations and suggesting others. Complete readings of the poem are available. If we even begin to investigate “Kubla Khan,” do we not hazard into realms where paraphrase is inadequate? Of course. That is truism. Well, then, does this not mean that the pleasure
dome and other symbolic parts of the poem, and the poem itself, are vehicles of understanding? They are not the express products of past knowledge and understanding, such as the expression 2 + 3 = 5, or the statement that virtue rejects indolence; instead, they are new objects wherein new understanding may be sought and found. They are objects set beyond the limits of the already known.
We may find symbolized in “Kubla Khan”âby the dome, by Kubla Khan, the river and its fountain, the forests, the caverns, the sea, the ice, and the Abyssinian maid and her songâsomething of the relationship between order and chaos, and between spirit and matter, between the artist and his materials, and the artist and society (“Ancestral voices prophesying war!”), and the romantic imagination and its sources and values (“A savage place! as holy and enchanted”), and the dangerously close relationship in the art object and perhaps in the artist between inspirational sources and the appalling chaos of the abyss (“the mingled measure/From the fountain and the caves”). We are interested in these relationships. The poem presents them. The poem is a form of knowledge.
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But what is knowledge if we cannot state it? If art objects quit the bounds of the known and make blurry feints at the unknown, can they truly add to knowledge or understanding? I think they can; for although we may never exhaust or locate precisely the phenomena they signify, we may nevertheless approximate themâand
this, of course, is our position in relation to all knowledge and understanding. All our knowledge is partial and approximate; if we are to know electrons and chimpanzees less than perfectly, and call it good enough, we may as well understand phenomena like love and death, or art and freedom, imperfectly also.
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Artistic symbol, in other words, instead of merely imitating the flux and mystery of the great world, actually penetrates them on its own. That is, if a document like
The New York Times
or Pepys'
Diary
is a kind of island miniature of our planet, an island which we may explore on foot, then a symbol or a structure of related symbols (including myth, religion, and innumerable works of art, like
Moby-Dick
and “Kubla Khan”) is, by contrast, a kind of exploratory craft. It is a space probe. Although it is constructed of the planet's materials, it nevertheless leaves the planet altogether. It is a rocket ship; it opens new and hitherto inaccessible regions.
This is the unique cognitive property of symbol: there is no boundary, and probably no difference, between symbol and the realm it comes to mean. An art object, say, and a myth are each the agent and the object of cognition. Each is a lens focused on itself. Say that the story of Christ is a symbol. Say that generations of thinkers have enlarged and enriched the symbol. What then? What is the difference between this narrative, or this artifact, and what it symbolizes? It is it, itself. You cannot address this question (or any other) in depth without using its own terms, which are symbolic at every level: cup, manger, and cross, or grace, incarnation, and sacrificeâand so on, either “up” or “down” the levels of abstraction. You must either learn to use these terms,
and like them, or relinquish this field of knowledge altogether.
Similarly, to speak of “Kubla Khan” at any useful level is to speak of the pleasure dome and of Alph the sacred river, and the caverns measureless to man, and the Abyssinian maid. You learn the poem as you learn Italian. You cease to translate its bits in your mind, and instead let them speak for themselves. All our knowledge is of course in one sense symbolic, and to go deeply into any fieldâphysics, say, or artâis to learn faith in its symbols. At first you notice that these tools and objects of thought are symbols; you translate them, as you go, into your own familiar idiom. Later you learn faith and release them. You learn to let them relate on their own terms, hadron to hadron, paint surface to paint surfaceâand only then do you begin to make progress. (In this sense, faith is the requisite of knowledge.)
One interesting, well-known, yet elusive thing about true symbols is something unmanageable about the way they are formed. Since their regions of meaning are blurred, and since there is no clear difference between symbols and the realms they come to mean, and since they act at the level where the scarcely understood fades into the unknown, the hapless artist who sets one of these things in motion shortly finds himself out of control. Symbols, and the many works of art that contain them, “assume a life of their own,” as the cliché goes; they outreach the span of their maker's arm; they guide their creator's hand; they illuminate a wider area than that which their maker ever intended. I will show, shortly, that the art object is always passive in relation to its audience. It is alarmingly active, however, in relation to
its creator. Far from being like a receptacle in which you, the artist, drop your ideas, and far from being like a lump of clay which you pummel until it fits your notion of an ashtray, the art object is more like an enthusiastic and ill-trained Labrador retriever which yanks you into traffic. I do not intend to wax mystical or sentimental at this juncture; nevertheless, this familiar notionâthat the art object drags its maker into deep watersâis worth mentioning again, matter-of-factly, as one evidence that art, especially insofar as it is symbolic art, is not only an object of past knowledge but an instrument of new knowledge. For if you already understood all the relationships among phenomena to which the parts of your art referred, you could control them easily from the startâand you cannot. It is the artist's business, then, to learn from his art and to order formally his new understanding. Confused art is merely confusing. When in the art object the artist has mastered his own confusion, he has gained new ground; and if he is mature enough and educated enough to have begun at the far edge of his own culture's knowledge, then he has won new ground not only for himself but for his culture as well.
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Symbol does not only refer; it acts. There is no such thing as a
mere
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 meaninglessâas you choose. But it is not
mere
. 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.