Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard Page B

time and also our knowledge of the world; now some contemporary writing may fiddle with time to keep us awake, the way television commercials splice scenes to keep us awake, or they may fiddle with time to distract us from the absence of narration, or even just to fiddle. The wit that was perhaps incidental in Joyce has become an end in itself. In short, Modernist writers expanded fictional techniques in the service of traditional ends—one could say on this putative very gloomy day—and those ends have been lost. On the other hand, of course, great contemporary modernists bend those techniques to new interesting, and valuable, ends, as I think I have shown.
    The Modernists themselves, I say, begin to look semitraditional in the light of contemporary practice. It is not unreasonable to place The Castle, Ulysses , or Light in August near the center of a spectrum on which we place Great Expectations or The Charterhouse of Parma at one end and Pale Fire, Hopscotch , and Ficciones at the other. And given these extremes, it is easy to see that most living writers also belong somewhere in the middle. Most often these writers, like the Modernists themselves, bend sophisticated techniques toward traditional ends. Here are the many writers of serious fiction—including the majority of writers in the Americas, Britain, and Europe whose work is widely known, as well as many other excellent and great writers as yet uncelebrated—who are writing novels and stories of depth and power, novels and stories which penetrate the world and order it, which engage us intellectually and move us emotionally, which render complex characters in depth, treat moral concerns and issues, make free use of modernist techniques, and astonish us by the fullness and coherence of their artifice. This is still, if only by volume, the mainstream.

CHAPTER 4
Revolution, No
    I have asserted, but not yet defended, the notion that fiction cannot shed the world because its materials are necessarily bits of world. The writer’s materials, common sense says, are various characters, places, actions, ideas, and actual or mental objects. The writer’s materials are real or imagined phenomena.
    One could say, however, that the writer’s materials are words and the other paraphernalia of language. After all, a writer does not sit at his desk pushing little people and landscapes around. He manipulates words like so many dabs of paint. And who is to say that the words correspond to anything? I want to treat this idea with some respect before I discard it.
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    Language scarcely accounts for things, or for the fluxand mystery of experience. If it did, Romantic poets could go about their task with the aplomb of bricklayers. We know that language itself is a selection and abstraction from unknowable flux; the world shades into gradations too fine for speech. A Jerome Bruner study shows that human eyes can distinguish among approximately twenty thousand colors. Yet English, a language rich in color terms, names only a few score of them; some languages name only three or four. Language, like other cognitive structures, is useful for some tasks and worthless for others. I cannot tell you, because I do not know, what my language prevents my knowing. Language is itself like a work of art; it selects, abstracts, exaggerates, and orders. How then could we say that language encloses and signifies phenomena, when language is a fabricated grid someone stuck in a river? Or how can we even say that language communicates by agreed-upon convention, when people personalize symbols so readily, so that a word which means life to me may mean death to you, and we cannot agree?
    We must grant, then, that words for things miss their marks, or at least, as I see it, obscure things here and there around the edges. And we grant, sighing, that we see through a cultural-linguistic glass darkly, and cannot tell snow from snow. Nevertheless, the plain fact is that language does