Novels, Yes
Dillard, Annie
Novels, Yes LIVING BY FICTION by Annie Dillard Harper & Row. 192 pp. $12.95. Writer and critic Annie Dillard has made a careful study of modern writing in Living by Fiction, an impressive but...
...By showing how fiction is a genuine attempt at answering such questions, Dillard proves its significance...
...She shows how the basic methods of story-telling have altered dramatically in recent years, how ideas of character and time are altogether different in today's novels from what they once were...
...or are they instead only play-pretties, the products of wishing, which console...
...Did Mondrian...
...Doesn't all great art...
...Yet who hesitates to rate contemporary novels...
...She gives startling examples: "Did Plato or Kant, or Freud, discover a series of significant relationships, or fabricate it...
...Invention and discovery, claims Dillard, are all part of the same process, all fiction...
...Dillard concludes that the differences have to do with our understanding of modern life...
...Did Noam Chomsky discover a series of significant relationships, or fabricate it...
...Esther Cohen (Esther Cohen, a free-lance critic and fiction writer, is an editor of a social-issues publishing house in New York...
...Characters, too, have changed, shifting from familiar people in Charles Dickens and Henry James to beasts and crazies in James Agee, William Faulkner, Gunter Grass, Italo Calvino, and others...
...At the outset, Dillard groups these writers into schools, analyzes their styles and techniques, and draws conclusions: an unexpected set of assumptions about life, philosophy, and art...
...The art she speaks of is a complicated morass of philosophical assumptions: ideas about life, the world, and our place in it...
...Her witty, conversational style is most unusual for a literary critic: She exudes familiarity and ease...
...That she loves fiction is obvious even from the book's dedication, to other fiction-lovers far and wide...
...It covers such subjects as the effect of the marketplace on writers, the influence of critics, and the new prose styles popular today...
...Did Schonberg...
...The other perplexing fact: Nowhere does she explain what her fiction compulsion is about, though the entire volume stems from her obsession with reading and understanding countless volumes...
...This notion has many implications for both writer and reader, including the emergence of the Super Book, or blockbuster: books about diet, jogging, sex, and cats that are bought in great quantity by the broad general public...
...The reader is left wondering why she chose to live with fiction and not painting, or dance, or psychiatry...
...Writer and critic Annie Dillard has made a careful study of modern writing in Living by Fiction, an impressive but baffling book...
...In four chapters, Dillard discusses meaning, symbol, and understanding the world through novel-writing...
...Dillard displays an unusual grasp of an astonishing number of modern writers—Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and many more...
...Literature as a whole has moved from contemplating cosmology—Dante—for the sake of God, to analyzing society—George Eliot— for the sake of man—to abstracting pattern itself—Nabokov—for the sake of art...
...Did Conrad, did Beethoven, did Donne...
...any number of other disciplines are ways of understanding life...
...In her introduction, Dillard explains how fiction encompasses other kinds of knowledge...
...The first, that everyone who reads feels entitled to criticize, is made more startling when prose is held up to other art forms...
...Most of us could use the enlightenment...
...Two of her points are especially intriguing...
...Did Confucius or the Baal Sham Tov . . .? Did Shakespeare...
...Dillard names few women writers...
...Her answer, that fiction is a way of understanding life, is only partially satisfying...
...It is hard to see whence arises the fuss about these objects whose share of the gross national product surely does not approach that of, say, bananas or measuring cups—the details of whose marketing coups we are spared—unless someone really fancies that these leafy paper products borrow respectability from literary works on the flimsy coincidence that they are all 'books,' or unless even a small sum of book money has a creatio ex nihilo charm to it that a great sum of banana money does not...
...Two things baffled me about the book...
...Some examples: "Time no longer courses in a great and widening stream, a stream upon which the narrative consciousness floats . . . instead, time is a flattened landscape, a land of unlinked lakes seen from the air...
...She names strangers who wrote to her about novels, friends, teachers, and others in all walks of life as devoted to reading as she...
...What's unique to this book is her approach to the novel, her categorizing, analyzing, and arguing the bond between novel writing and philosophy...
...the mysteries themselves are there to be uncovered...
...She raises the crucial questions for interpreters of fiction: "Are these structures really intelligences, the products of knowledge, which enlighten...
...Her second section treats of "The State of the Art...
...In her book's final third, "Does the World Have Meaning," Dillard describes how fiction interprets reality...
...She takes the argument further: "Do we discover reason and harmony in the universe, or do we invent it...
...The question is meaningless...
...Even so, the book is a well-argued case for novel reading...
...This symptom reveals the assumption that fiction, even when it is literature, should answer to an audience by pleasing it...
...People uncover mysteries by making them up...
...Who apart from the specialist will say of a Di Suvero sculpture, 'It doesn't work,' or of an Alvin Lucier composition, 'It's no good...
...In an index of more than 200 entries, she cites only nineteen females...
Vol. 46 • June 1982 • No. 6
