Synopses & Reviews
Chapter One
Fiction in Bits
Many contemporaries write a fiction intended to achieve traditional kinds of excellence. Many others write a fiction which is more abstracted--the 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 Modernism, 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 argue--and I do--that diverse contemporary writers are carrying on, with new emphases and further developments, the Modernists' techniques.
Time in Smithereens
Nothing is more typical of modernist fiction than its shattering of narrative line. Just as Cubism can take a roomful of furniture and iron it onto nine square feet of canvas, so fiction can take fifty years of human life, chop it to bits, and piece those bits together so that, within the limits of the temporal form, we can consider them all at once. This is narrative collage. The world is a warehouse of forms which the writer raids: this is a stickup. Here are the narrative leaps and fast cuttings to which we have become accustomed, the clenched juxtapositions, interpenetrations, and temporal enjambments. These techniques are standard practice now; we scarcely remark them. No degree of rapid splicing could startle an audience raised on sixty-second television commercials; we tend to be bored without it. But to early readers of Faulkner, say, or of Joyce, the surface bits of their work must have seemed like shrapnel from some unimaginable offstage havoc.
The use of narrative collage is particularly adapted to various twentieth-century treatments of time and space. Time no longer courses in a great and widening stream, a stream upon which the narrative consciousness floats, passing fixed landmarks in orderly progression, and growing in wisdom.Instead, time is a flattened landscape, a land of unlinked lakes seen from the air. There is no requirement that a novel's narrative bits follow any progression in narrative time; there is no requirement that the intervals between bits represent equal intervals of elapsed time. Narrative collage enables Carlos Fuentes in "Terra Nostra" to approximate the eternal present which is his subject. We read about quasars one minute; we enter an elaborated scene with Pontius Pilate the next. Narrative collage enables Grass in "The Flounder" to bite off even greater hunks of time and to include such disparate elements as Watergate, the history of millet, Vasco da Gama, a neolithic six-breasted woman, and recipes for cooking eel. Narrative collage enables Charles Simmons, in "Wrinkles," artistically to fracture a human life and arrange the broken time bits on the page. And it enables Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian novelist, to include in his novel "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" not only prose narration in many voices and tenses, but also photographs ironic and sincere, and blank spaces, interviews, and poems.
Joyce, 163 years after Sterne, started breaking the narrative in "Ulysses." The point of view shifts, the style shifts; the novel breaks into various parodies, a question-and-answer period, and so forth. Later writers have simply pushed farther this notion of disparate sections. They break the narrative into ever finer particles and shatter time itself to smithereens. Often writers call attention to the particles by giving them each a separate chapter, or number, or simply a separate title, as Gass does in "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country." Donald Barthelme has a story ("TheGlass Mountain") in which each sentence constitutes a separate, numbered section. All these cosmetics point to a narration as shattered, and as formally ordered, as a Duchamp nude.
If and when the arrow of time shatters, cause and effect may vanish, and reason crumble. This may be the point. I am thinking here of Robert Coover's wonderful story "The Babysitter," in which the action appears as a series of bits told from the point of view of several main characters. Each version of events is different and each is partially imaginary; nevertheless, each event triggers other events, and they all converge in a final scene upon whose disastrous particulars the characters all of a sudden agree. No one can say which causal sequence of events was more probable. Time itself is, as in the Borges story, a "garden of forking paths." In other works of this kind, events do not trigger other events at all; instead, any event is possible. There is no cause and effect in Julio CortÁ zar's "Hopscotch," an unbound novel whose pages may be shuffled. There is no law of noncontradiction in Barthelme's story "Views of My Father Weeping." Barthelme writes the story in pieces, half...
Synopsis
A beautiful repackaging of Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticism.
Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon. -- Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times
Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, Garc a M rquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.
Synopsis
"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." --Los Angeles Times
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticism
Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, Garc a M rquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows how contemporary fiction works and why traditional fiction will always move us. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.
Synopsis
Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way in which she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.
Synopsis
In Living by Fiction Annie Dillard explores such writers as Nabokov, Pynchon, Borges, and Garcia Marquez, showing why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined.
About the Author
Annie Dillard has written eleven books, including the memoir of her parents, An American Childhood; the Northwest pioneer epic The Living; and the nonfiction narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A gregarious recluse, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.