Customer Reviews

Living by fiction

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I thought Ms. Dillard distinguished herself with this literary piece of literary criticism. She got into some pretty deep and convoluted places with this book, but I felt that every point was well-made and well-taken. I feel the book is an education in itself. Loved it!

"Living By Fiction" is in essence a treatise by Annie Dillard that attempts to interpret art, and thereby includes fiction as art, and as an interpretation. The book is well constructed and the sentences are beautifully crafted. The treatise starts by discussing in vast detail, the styles and forms of writing. Then it concentrates on "modernistic" fiction. This type of fiction takes numerous and varied forms.

Annie distinguishes between styles of writing. She does this very much by example. She uses the work of many, many authors as her examples and illustrations of the different manners in which a writer can craft a work. Specifically, she describes works of fiction. After detailing these different styles and their characteristics, she then turns to the purpose of fiction as a subcategory of art.

She posits that art is an interpretation. It is the artist's perspective on the relationship between something in the universe and a representation of that vision of the item. Her analysis inevitably leads her to state that art and religion are the modes by which people explain and interpret the unexplainable. Art produces an interpretation of a vision that is meant for others to see.

The interpretation, interestingly enough, is in fact non-existent without the reader and the critic to observe. While opining that fiction needs readers and critics to be interpreted, the interpretation is the very purpose of the creation. Without the reader and the critic, the work does not really exist. It exists in form, but not in value. The work is a creation that only carries a message if someone reads it; and more so if someone such as a critic helps us to interpret it.

In a fascinating "diatribe" to use her designation, she discusses the complexity of interpretation. In addition, she discusses a concept that art is the ordering of disordered and decaying existence. Basing her discussion of this concept on Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all things become randomly distributed, unless acted upon by some external force; Annie argues that fiction and art in general are an ordering of this theory of disorder or entropy. She in fact suggests that perhaps art, including fiction, is the purpose of man. And that this purpose is for man to make order of the universe around him. Does art create meaning or does it expose it? In essence Annie says the distinction does not really matter. What matters is that it is a depiction; which is open to anyone who wishes to interpret it. Without an observer, it carries no real meaning. It is just an object. Only through its interpretation does it gain meaning. Thus, art and fiction necessitate interpreters, and it is through these interpreters, the reader, that it gains meaning and substance.

While complex in her contentions, she is also sublime. The treatise truly is a thing of beauty, but that is not sufficient to Annie. Nor is it really sufficient to a reader or a critic. What is sufficient and valuable is that the art object presents the reader with an interpretation. And whether the reader's interpretation is in accordance with the artist's is really of no account. Its value is in its illustration of a message. That message is open to all to interpret as they see it, and as it relates to life and existence. This book is recommended to all readers of complex fiction. It is truly a picturesque look at the art of writing and also the purpose thereof.

... the subject phrase grates like chalk pulled across an English classroom's black board. At least for me. It conjures up images of writing critical papers on a school-assignment novel, struggling with concepts like symbolism, and at more advanced levels, "deconstructionism." All in an effort to get the "right" answer, which was how the teacher wanted us to "see" a particular novel. I still remember giving a verbal "book report" to the class on Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (P.S.), and the "right" answer was to assure the teacher that drug use was bad. In the sciences the "right" answer seemed to come easier, and certainly more objectively. Which was why I only "had" to take two years of English in college, which may be a key reason why I still read.

Annie Dillard is best known to me for her excellent Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perrennial Modern Classics) and An American Childhood. My appreciation of these works helped me overcome my natural aversion to the "subject" of literature. And I was richly rewarded. She wrote this book almost 30 years ago, when she was about 35, and just her erudition is dazzling (and humbling). Not only had she read so many of the major and minor contemporary writers, but she can deftly compare their strengths and weaknesses. There is Carlos Fuentes, Marcel Proust, James Agee, Nabokov, Borges and on and on. As she says in the introduction, she "...attempts to do unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup."

Dillard examines the transformations of various elements in modern fiction, noting that time is no longer linear, and that characters have changed from the familiar depictions of Charles Dickens to the more outlandish ones of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Thomas Pynchon. The point of view of the novel can now be multitudinous, from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (Modern Library) to Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet.

The author's style is dense and rapid fire. There is a lot to "chew over." Consider the following concept, which seems to become truer with every passing year: "Fuller's assertion was roughly to this effect: the purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Physical things are falling apart at a terrific rate; people , on the other hand, put things together." (Or, I guess that is the optimistic interpretation.)

As for the issue of our schooling in English literature, Dillard has the following observation: "Students also study Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf in the classroom, but they usually read Nabokov and Pynchon on their own, just as our professors a generation ago read Joyce on the sly." She goes on to explain that modern language departments, fighting for their lives, insist that students need to read authors in the original language, and thus English students may therefore lack genuine knowledge of European and Latin American fiction. Oh, how true.

The novel most cited in this book is Nabokov's Pale Fire (Everyman's Library (Cloth)), enough so to place it high on my "to-read" list, and is just one of the reasons this stimulating book on the very nature of contemporary literature merits 5-stars.

I'm a fan of Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of my favorites. Living by Fiction is just as sharp, just as honest, and yet it's less curious, less humble. I found Dillard's investigation into the meaning of literary art rather dry and shallow. She sought out the most exemplary in literature: Nabokov, Borges, Marquez, and asks what makes contemporary art work. How does she conclude? Basically with an existential shrug of the shoulders. I was often chastised in graduate school for writing a research paper with too large a thesis, and although at the time I disagreed, now I understand exactly what my professors meant. I finished this book with little more than a bunch of loose juxtapositions. Meanwhile, Dillard's sparkling style will cause me to go back to her again and again. Her writing is always enjoyable to read. Even when the content is lacking.

When I was a student at the University of Iowa, studying poetry writing in the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop, Marvin Bell read an excerpt from this book. The title of the piece he read was "Wish I Had Pie." I was in stitches and instantly hooked on Annie Dillard. If you're a writer, you will understand yourself and your craft in new light. If you're not a writer, but curious about the process, this book will afford you a look behind the curtains.

Amazing, magical! Annie Dillard's command of our shared language is truly amazing and her vision distinctive. From her sensitivity to the vagaries of the human condition to her exploration of Christian and Jewish mysticism, this is a wonderful book - one which can be dipped into again and again.

A friend to whom I once commended this small volume replied, "Dillard. TINKER CREEK. Nope. She takes forever to get to the point." Maybe so. But as Greyhound used to brag, "Getting there is half the fun." And simply getting there is the intriguing subject of my favorite Dillard essay published in TEACHING A STONE TO TALK (Harper & Row, 1982). LIVING BY FICTION is aimed first at readers and writers of fiction, but more broadly at artists and art audiences, and finally (if anyone remains excluded) at those who wonder if the world has meaning and if such meaning might be discerned. Like any hiking trail worth the walk, Dillard's path will lead you through unexpected swamps and over mythic mountains. You will visit Bucky Fuller's epistemology and Kubla Khan's dome (which, come to think of it, is an invertible tour through Bucky's domes and Khan's epistemology). What does a whale mean? Does an unpublished, unread novel in an attic trunk contribute to the structure of the universe? This book may anger, intrigue, puzzle or delight. It will not disappoint.

In Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard begins her introduction with, This is, ultimately, a book about the world. I cant be sure of what youre thinking but I wrote holy crap in my margin. She later goes on to explain, Fiction can deal with all the worlds objects and ideas together, with the breadth of human experience in time and space; it can deal with things the limited disciplines of thought either ignore completely or destroy by methodological caution, our most pressing concerns: personality, family, death, love, time, spirit, goodness, evil, destiny, beauty, will. Its characteristic of Dillard to deliver a surprising assertion throughout her book, which peaks enough interest that the reader is able to grapple with the theory-based arguments and eventually make ones way to beautiful, gentle explanations that are often times hard to disagree with since she covers many perspectives. Dillards strength lies in her ability to intertwine theory with her own creativity in writing, making metaphors out of her arguments: Science works the way a tightrope walker works: by not looking at its feet. As soon as it looks at its feet, it realizes that its operating in midair. This is what we would have imagined a theory book to read like years ago, if a creative writer had written it.

Dillards main concerns in her book deal with modernism and its place in the contemporary world, the never-ending argument of what constitutes art, and her caution not to commit to any absolutes in the world of knowledge and intelligence. This is the closest that a reader could get to having a conversation with a theorist. At one point when Dillard is discussing the marketplace and Melvilles essay, The Encantadas, and how its always been classified as fiction, she asks as though shes sitting with us listening to the same discussion, Is it because Melville usually wrote fiction? Is it because it is a narrative? Is it because the characters are colorful? Is it because it is good? Or is it because much of it is hearsay? Dillard is reassuring (or disconcertingdepending on how you view the literary world) in her text that there are no absolutes to how fiction fits in the world, how art movements change, or how meaning is made. This book probably addresses a more advanced writer in its focus on theory and non-focus on craft.

This work is in a sense in the spirit of Sartre's reading of Existensialism. It is Man cast alone in the Universe, but here facing a text, and making meaning out of it. The work of fiction and the work of life together are meaning- making - interpretations. And Dillard reads not only to understand but to live.

I understand and appreciate this way of thinking very much. And Dillard's elegance in defending it is clear.

However 'what exactly we live for' the 'precise values' outside of 'reading and interpreting' are not so clear to me.

'Truth, Beauty and Goodness" would seem to me not simply a supplement to 'meaning making interpretation' but a way of enriching and making more meaningful their 'content'.