Living by Fiction (14 page)
Authors: Annie Dillard
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There are, then, two classes of phenomena on earth: those to which we may reasonably assign human meaning, and those to which we may not. I have I hope established not only that some things have meaning, but also which these are. Now, it is interesting to look at the branches of Western knowledge in the light of this theoretical distinction, in order to assign a slot to criticism, and ultimately to art itself.
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Let us take the positivists at their word for the nonce and say that the physical and biological sciences and the
other branches of knowledge modeled upon them traffic in data and in purely physical interpretations of data. The object of their study is the raw, unmediated universe. The results are positivist, material, mechanical schemes. Science does not ask what a honeybee means.
The interpretative fields, in contrast, may ask what a sewing bee means. The interpretative fields, which include art and literary criticism, clinical and theoretical psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology of knowledge, comparative religion, theoretical linguistics, and so forth, interpret only things human. They interpret all things human. They produce data, of course, and also interpretations in the abstract realm of human meaning. Nothing human is alien. They may interpret skip-rope rhymes, hospitality etiquette, pottery decoration, slang, warfare, verse drama, skirt length, baby talk, management techniques, nightmares, and economic classifications. Whatever is human may be understood by humans. We may not
exhaust
its meaning; but, again, we may know aught without knowing all.
Science, on the other hand, produces physical interpretations of raw data, of hard data. An objection arises here, for I have already said that
all
knowledge is interpretative and that every scientific datum is an edited abridgment. I must abandon this point temporarily; the positivists usually deny it, and it is well to let them define their own field. And if it is true, it is universal, and therefore useless and niggling. For everyone agrees that some things are more interpretative than others, that a measurement is less interpretative than a piece of literary criticism, and that Mrs. Marx's reading of a thermometer differs in kind from Mr. Marx's reading of history. So let us yield to science, and even rub scientists' faces in it a bit, and say that
science, unlike every other human endeavor, is not itself biased, is not culture-blind and bounded.
Here we have science, then, producing data and physical schemes. It studies the raw universe at large and also, statistically, the world of men (demography, behavioral psychology, physical anthropology, etc.). Science studies what we might boisterously call “things as they are.” The interpretative fields, on the other hand, and interestingly enough, produce interpretations of interpretations. The bits of human culture they study are already edited selections and humanly meaningful arrangements. When you study Shakespeare or a Nepalese altar or even a schizophrenic doodle, you are studying a human interpretation of things. A language, a philosophy, a religion, a nightmare, a pattern on a pot, and a skip-rope rhyme are human interpretations of things. (So are all forms of science but modern Western science!) The interpretative fields interpret kinds of human order. All interpreters are like critics in this way: they require that someone else has been there first. A person or a culture knits up an artifact, and an interpreter comes along and unravels it.
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This division of knowledge is odd. It excludes mathematics and music altogether. It separates the branches of knowledge less by the objects of their study (world or artifact) than by the scope of their results: positivist data and schemes on one hand, and human significance in addition to data on the other. Examining the university curriculum in this light is like examining the physical layout of an asylum. Both the university and the asylum illustrate those boundaries of interpretation which the West has accepted since the Enlightenment: man makes sense; nature does not.
In addition to raising an interesting theoretical question, the examination of which will occupy the rest of this book, this curious division of knowledge may, and quite incidentally, clarify the bitterness of the infighting within so many disciplines, particularly within those many disciplines, like philosophy and the social sciences, which operate on human phenomena. For some workers who prize and seek positivist methods and results must work cheek by jowl with the leaky-minded interpreters. A behaviorist has no truck with Jung, nor a physical anthropologist with Lévi-Strauss, nor a demographer with Marx. A bibliographer who works with a computer all day may find poetry criticism a bit iffy. Yet the ordinary division of knowledge by subject matterâwhich, after all, is perfectly sensibleâmeans that these disparate kinds of thinkers must share a hall, a batch of student majors, a departmental vote, and a Xerox machine.
(Outside academia, many people have not yet learned of the positivist cast of disciplines like psychology and philosophy. High school seniors and college freshmen tell their advisers that they are interested in “psychology”; it turns out they have read some Jung or Freud. After a semester or two of psychology courses they bail out of the major. Similarly, some students who have read Camus are interested in “philosophy.” Many of these students wind up in literature courses, where, they say, they are quite surprised to find, both in the literature and in the critical approaches to it, the interpretative structures and the inquiry into final meanings which they had sought originally and despaired of ever finding in the classroom.)
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The theoretical question posed by our division of
knowledge is this: will criticism interpret for us the world at large?
Science will not do it. Will criticism? The interpretative fields handle restricted objectsâpersonality, texts, and so forth. You could not come up with a Freudian reading of celestial mechanics or (I devoutly hope) a Marxist reading of doodles. But criticism in the arts is not so limited. Since art itself interprets both nature and many aspects of culture, art criticism is used to handling a wide variety of objects: personality, landscape, history, ideas, change, the works. Art criticism, then, of all the interpretative disciplines, would seem to be best suited for interpreting the world at large. Literary criticism in particular is well adapted to handling a variety of worldly bits and every degree of abstraction, and to telling us what they mean.
But alas, art criticism works only on art. I had hoped that when the boundaries of art fell, critics would be loosed upon the world; they would interpret the world itself. (This hope was not, I think, widely shared.) But the boundaries of art did not fall; they merely expanded to include the possibility of everything. Criticism has stayed well within its traditional bounds by requiring as usual the intervention of an artist between the object of interpretation and the interpreter. Anything may be art, and so the critic may discuss anythingâbut only as art.
Octavio Paz's new book of essays raises the issue of Duchamp; Roger Shattuck comments in the
Times
on Duchamp's question: “âCan one produce works that are not works of art?' He tried; we wouldn't allow it.” Whatever any artist produces is subject to art criticism,
and so
has discernible meaning! But it has meaning only as art. When Duchamp exhibits a bottle rack, criticism can interpret the bottle rack only as art object; criticism must re
main dumb on the significance of bottle racks in toto. When Capote and Mailer call their factual accounts novels, criticism may interpret their materials in the light of art; criticism may interpret the authors' interpretation of events; but sadly, criticism cannot tell us the meaning,
sub specie aeternitatis
, of the Clutter murders or the life and death of Gary Gilmore.
Critics, then, interpret neither the natural world nor the cultural world directly. Critics can discuss a whale or a bottle rack only if Melville or a Duchamp has already selected and stilled those objects and shaped them for the mind. All this is, I'm afraid, self-evident to almost everyone but a very few people, to whom it comes as a continuous shock and disappointment.
Can we not loose the methods of literary criticism upon the raw world? May we not analyze the breadth of our experience? We can and mayâbut only if we first consider the raw world as a text, as a meaningful, purposefully fashioned creation, as a work of art. For we have seen that critics interpret artifacts only. Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial filmmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer.
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And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcendentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers.
W
e are missing a whole class of investigators: those who interpret the raw universe in terms of meaning. If science will not seek human meaning, and if interpreters (critics, anthropologists, etc.) study human events and human artifacts only, then who will tell us the meaning of the raw universe? By the raw universe I mean here all that we experience, all things cultural and natural, all of the universe that is known, given, made, and changing: the world, and they that dwell therein. Experience is something human, even our experience of dumb nature. It is sane to seek to understand it in all its breadth. Breadth is, after all, characteristic of our experience. If we confine our interpretative investigations to strictly bounded aspects of culture, like skip-rope rhymes or the
Battle of Manassas, we miss learning what we most want to know.
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Who is doing this? Who interprets the raw world directly? Schizophrenics do this, and superstitious people, and pantheists, all in their several fashions. Following a tradition at least as old as Aristotle, some scientists of our time interpret limited sets of data in terms of human meaning (B. F. Skinner, Edmund O. Wilson). Who else? Prophets and the founders of religions interpret the broad world directly. Theologians and metaphysical philosophers, if there are any, do. And artists do.
We mistrust schizophrenics, pantheists, and superstitious people. Science's interpreters (those who are not drawn like Lewis Thomas and Richard Selzer into the welcoming arms of literature) are apt to be innocent outside their fields (Jaynes) or, worse, so steeped in positivism (Wilson, Skinner) that they try to make a virtue of ignorance by denying that anything else exists. The findings of former religious investigations repel some people, and new prophets and leaders arise but rarely; when they do, they speak the same hard words. We have a shortage of metaphysicians. This leaves artists.
Individual artists are unlikely to produce interpretations of experience so broad and valuable as those of, say, Moses, Buddha, Plato, Paul, or Kant. Nevertheless, artists are almost the sole contemporary workers in the field. And since paint, wood, steel, motion, and musical tones do not necessarily refer to any particular aspects of the world, and since words do indeed refer to all the aspects of the world that we knowânature, culture, feeling, and ideaâthe literary arts are in a better position to interpret
the world in all its breadth than are the other arts.
I am certainly not going to insist upon this curiously central position of the arts, and especially the literary arts, in relation to all knowledge. If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself. We have not lost all that has already been written, nor have we yet understood it. It is merely very interesting to consider literature this way: as a formal assignment of meaning to many things, as a kind of interpretative criticism with the great world as its object. This view sheds a curious, even weird, light on fiction, and also, incidentally, on poetry.
For lyric poetry, of all the artsâof all human endeavorâdoes this very thing, first and best. Throughout its long history all over the world, lyric poetry has been less fanciful than fiction. A book of lyric poems is most often a collation of interpreted facts. Poetry's materials, its characters, objects, and events, its landscapes and cities, its mornings and afternoons, are far more likely to have been actual than fabricated. This means that poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion.
So we are all the more disappointed when poets shirk, when they bait their hooks with tidbits and fish for small fry in their backyards. Very often poets limit their take of the actual to wee private moments the significance of which they assert on only personal grounds. It is a shame that poetry has decayed to such sensory self-indulgence that it has abdicated that task to which it is so well and uniquely suited.
Where does this leave fiction? We must grant from the start that to hope that fiction can do a sober and useful job of interpreting the universe is preposterous. It is preposterous on many grounds. For one thing, fiction, especially Old World fiction, is scarcely concerned with any materials but cultural onesâwith only the odd moor or mountain thrown in for scenery. So even if fiction does interpret, it interprets the human arena almost solely. And its results differ from those of more limited and rigorous interpretative fields like history and moral philosophy mainly in their sloppiness, insouciance, and inaccessibility.
For another thing, we may question whether any art, let alone fiction, is especially interpretative at all. Of course, insofar as fiction writers select materials from the world, they interpret them, for every selection is an interpretation. But this is no great distinction, for
all
mental activity is selective and interpretative; all language is interpretative; all perception is interpretative; all expression and activity is interpretative. And all interpretations miss their mark or invent it, make it up. Humanity has but one product, and that is fiction. On this head, fiction is no more interpretative than any other mental product such as eyesight or gossip. It is merely more fictive. It is, in fact, by definition a tissue of lies.
