An Annie Dillard Reader (6 page)

 

Deduction, then, is possible—though no longer fashionable. There are many possible techniques for the exploration of high latitudes. There is, for example, such a thing as a drift expedition.

When that pair of yellow oilskin breeches belonging to the lost crew of the
Jeannette
turned up after three years in Greenland, having been lost north of central Russia, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen was interested. On the basis of these breeches' travels he plotted the probable direction of the current in the polar basin. Then he mounted a drift expedition: in 1893 he drove his ship, the
Fram
, deliberately into the pack ice and settled in to wait while the current moved north and, he hoped, across the Pole. For almost two years, he and a crew of twelve lived aboard ship as frozen ocean carried them. Nansen wrote in his diary, “I long to return to life…the years are passing here…Oh! at times this inactivity crushes one's very soul; one's life seems as dark as the winter night outside; there is sunlight upon no other part of it except the past and the far, far distant future. I feel as if I
must
break through this deadness.”

The current did not carry them over the Pole, so Nansen and one companion set out one spring with dog sledges and kayaks to reach the Pole on foot. Conditions were too rough on the ice, however, so after reaching a record northern latitude, the two turned south toward land, wintering together finally in a stone hut on Franz Josef Land and living on polar bear meat. The following spring they returned, after almost three years, to civilization.

 

Nansen's was the first of several drift expeditions. During World War I, members of a Canadian Arctic expedition camped on an ice floe seven miles by fifteen miles; they drifted for six
months over four hundred miles in the Beaufort Sea. In 1937, an airplane deposited a Soviet drift expedition on an ice floe near the North Pole. These four Soviet scientists drifted for nine months while their floe, colliding with grounded ice, repeatedly split into ever smaller pieces.

The Land

I have, I say, set out again.

The days tumble with meanings. The corners heap up with poetry; whole unfilled systems litter the ice.

The Technology

A certain Lieutenant Maxwell, a member of Vitus Bering's second polar expedition, wrote: “You never feel safe when you have to navigate in waters which are completely blank.”

 

Cartographers call blank spaces on a map “sleeping beauties.”

 

On our charts I see the symbol for shoals and beside it the letters “P.D.” My neighbor in the pew, a lug with a mustache who has experience of navigational charts and who knows how to take a celestial fix, tells me that the initials stand for “Position Doubtful.”

The Land

To learn the precise location of a Pole, choose a clear, dark night to begin. Locate by ordinary navigation the Pole's position within an area of several square yards. Then arrange on the ice in that area a series of loaded cameras. Aim the cameras at the sky's zenith; leave their shutters open. Develop the film. The film from that camera located precisely at the Pole will show the night's revolving stars as perfectly circular concentric rings.

The Technology

I have a taste for solitude, and silence, and for what Plotinus called “the fight of the alone to the Alone.” I have a taste for
solitude. Sir John Franklin had, apparently, a taste for backgammon. Is either of these appropriate to conditions?

You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.

The Land

I have put on silence and waiting. I have quit my ship and set out on foot over the polar ice. I carry chronometer and sextant, tent, stove and fuel, meat and fat. For water I melt the pack ice in hatchet-hacked chips; frozen salt water is fresh. I sleep when I can walk no longer. I walk on a compass bearing toward geographical north.

I walk in emptiness; I hear my breath. I see my hand and compass, see the ice so wide it arcs, see the planet's peak curving and its low atmosphere held fast on the dive. The years are passing here. I am walking, light as any handful of aurora; I am light as sails, a pile of colorless stripes; I cry “heaven and earth indistinguishable!” and the current underfoot carries me and I walk.

The blizzard is like a curtain; I enter it. The blown snow heaps in my eyes. There is nothing to see or to know. I wait in the tent, myself adrift and emptied, for weeks while the storm unwinds. One day it is over, and I pick up my tent and walk. The storm has scoured the air; the clouds have lifted; the sun rolls round the sky like a fish in a round bowl, like a pebble rolled in a tub, like a swimmer, or a melody flung and repeating, repeating enormously overhead on all sides.

My name is Silence. Silence is my bivouac, and my supper sipped from bowls. I robe myself mornings in loose strings of stones. My eyes are stones; a chip from the pack ice fills my mouth. My skull is a polar basin; my brain pan grows glaciers, and
icebergs, and grease ice, and floes. The years are passing here.

Far ahead is open water. I do not know what season it is, know how long I have walked into the silence like a tunnel widening before me, into the horizon's spread arms, which widen like water. I walk to the pack ice edge, to the rim that calves its floes into the black-and-green water; I stand at the edge and look ahead. A scurf of candle ice on the water's skin as far as I can see scratches the sea and crumbles whenever a lump of ice or snow bobs or floats through it. The floes are thick in the water, some of them large as lands. By my side is passing a flat pan of floe from which someone extends an oar. I hold the oar's blade and jump. I land on the long floe.

 

No one speaks. Here, at the bow of the floe, the bright clowns have staked themselves to the ice. With tent stakes and ropes they have lashed their wrists and ankles to the floe on which they lie stretched and silent, face up. Among the clowns, and similarly staked, are many boys and girls, some women, and a few men from various countries. One of the men is Nansen, the Norwegian explorer who drifted. One of the women repeatedly opens and closes her fists. One of the clowns has opened his neck ruffle, exposing his skin. For many hours I pass among these staked people, intending to return later and take my place.

Farther along I see that the tall priest is here, the priest who served grape juice Communion at an ecumenical service many years ago, in another country. He is very old. Alone on a wind-streaked patch of snow he kneels, stands, and kneels, and stands, and kneels. Not far from him, at the floe's side, sitting on a packing crate, is the deducer John Murray. He lowers a plumb bob overboard and pays out the line. He is wearing the antique fur hat of a Doctor of Reason, such as Erasmus wears in his portrait; it is understood that were he ever to return and present his findings, he would be ridiculed, for his hat. Scott's Captain Oates is here; he has no feet. It is he who stepped outside his tent, to save his friends. Now on his dignity he stands and mans the sheet of a square linen sail; he has stepped the wooden mast on a hillock amidships.

From the floe's stern I think I hear music; I set out, but it takes me several sleeps to get there. I am no longer using the tent. Each time I wake, I study the floe and the ocean horizon for signs—signs of the pack ice that we left behind, or of open water, or land, or any weather. Nothing changes; there is only the green sea and the floating ice, and the black sea in the distance speckled by bergs, and a steady wind astern, which smells of unknown mineral salts, some ocean floor.

At last I reach the floe's broad stern, its enormous trailing coast, its throngs, its many cooking fires. There are children carrying babies, and men and women painting their skins and trying to catch their reflections in the water to leeward. Near the water's edge there is a wooden upright piano, and a bench with a telephone book on it. A woman is sitting on the telephone book and banging out the Sanctus on the keys. The wind is picking up. I am singing at the top of my lungs, for a lark.

Many clowns are here; one of them is passing out Girl Scout cookies, all of which are stuck together. Recently, I learn, Sir John Franklin and crew have boarded this floe, and so have the crews of the lost
Polaris
and the
Jeannette
. The men, whose antique uniforms are causing envious glances, are hungry. Some of them start roughhousing with the rascally acolyte. One crewman carries the boy on his back along the edge to the piano, where he abandons him for a clump of cookies and a seat on the bench beside the short pianist, whose bare feet, perhaps on account of the telephone book, cannot reach the pedals. She starts playing “The Sound of Music.” “You know any Bach?” I say to the lady at the piano, whose legs seem to be highly involved with those of the hungry crewman; “You know any Mozart? Or maybe ‘How Great Thou Art'?” A skeletal officer wearing a black silk neckerchief has located Admiral Peary, recognizable from afar by the curious flag he holds. Peary and the officer together are planning a talent show and skits. When they approach me, I volunteer to sing “Antonio Spangonio, That Bum Toreador” and/or to read a piece of short fiction; they say they will let me know later.

Christ, under the illusion that we are all penguins, is crouched down, posing for snapshots. He crouches, in his robe, between the lead singer of Wildflowers, who is joyfully trying to
determine the best angle at which to hold his guitar for the camera, and the farmer's wife, who keeps her eyes on her painted toenails until a naval officer with a silk scarf says “Cheese.” The country-and-western woman, singing, succeeds in pressing a cookie upon the baby Oswaldo. The baby Oswaldo is standing in his lace gown and blue tennis shoes in the center of a circle of explorers, confounding them.

In my hand I discover a tambourine. Ahead as far as the brittle horizon, I see icebergs among the floes. I see tabular bergs and floebergs and dark cracks in the water between them. Low overhead on the underside of the thickening cloud cover are dark colorless stripes reflecting pools of open water in the distance. I am banging on the tambourine, and singing whatever the piano player plays; now it is “On Top of Old Smokey.” I am banging the tambourine and belting the song so loudly that people are edging away. But how can any of us tone it down? For we are nearing the Pole.

1982

W
E HEAR MANY COMPLAINTS ABOUT
contemporary fiction—that its characters are flat and its stories are dull—but we hear no complaints about prose style. For in fact, prose styles have been one of the great strengths of Western fiction throughout this century. Prose style in fiction is like surface handling in painting. No matter how much people complain that contemporary works say little, no one denies that they say it very well.

Contemporary prose styles have two overlapping strands. One is what we might call for the moment plain, the other fancy.

SHOOTING THE AGATE

Many contemporary prose styles derive from the mainstream of traditional fine writing. Fine writing, like painterly painting, has always been with us. We will, I hope, never cease to admire it. The great prose stylists of the recent past, until Flaubert, were fine writers to a man. A surprising number of these—those I think of first, in fact—wrote nonfiction: Robert Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, Thomas de Quincey, Thomas Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, John Ruskin, William James, Sir James Frazer.

Who were the grand stylists of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century fiction? There is the lovely Turgenev and the brilliant Gorky, if we are to believe their translators; Melville had a rare strength; Hardy can be magnificent, and so can Dickens. But we do not think of any of these, except Turgenev, as great stylists—although we wrong Dickens not to. Who else? Stendhal? Chateaubriand? I think fine writing in fictional prose comes into its own only with the modernists: first with James, and with
Proust, Faulkner, Beckett, Woolf, Kafka, and the lavish Joyce of the novels.

This is an elaborated, painterly prose. It raids the world for materials to build sentences. It fabricates a semi-opaque weft of language. It is a spendthrift prose, and a prose of means. It is dense in objects that pester the senses. It hauls in visual imagery of every sort; it strews metaphors about, and bald similes, and allusions to every realm. It does not shy from adjectives, nor even from adverbs. It traffics in parallel structures and repetitions; it indulges in assonance and alliteration. Here is a splendid sentence from Ruskin:

The sentences of this prose may be very long, heavily punctuated throughout, and welded with semicolons. Its lexicon is enormously wide, its spheres of reference global. We think of it as decorous, but actually it is not. Those old men in frock coats were after power, and power they got, by going for the throat. (Far more decorous is plain writing, the prose of Hemingway, Cather, Chekhov, and other stylists in shirts, who carefully limit their descriptions to matters at hand and who produce a prose purified by its submission to the world.) There is nothing decorous about calling attention to yourself:

Fine writing, with its elaborated imagery and powerful rhythms, has the beauty of both complexity and grandeur. It
also has as its distinction a magnificent power to penetrate. It can penetrate precisely because, and only because, it lays no claims to precision. It is an energy. It sacrifices perfect control to the ambition to mean. It can pile object upon object to build a tower from which to breach the sky; it can enter with courage or bravura those fearsome realms where the end products of art meet the end products of thought, and where perfect clarity is not possible. Fine writing is not a mirror, not a window, not a document, not a surgical tool. It is an artifact and an achievement; it is at once an exploratory craft and the planet it attains; it is a testimony to the possibility of the beauty and penetration of written language.

 

Clearly we are in the presence of a paradox here. How can prose be said to penetrate and dazzle? How can it call attention to itself, waving its arms, while performing metaphysics behind its back? But this is what all art does, or at least all art that conceives of the center of things as insubstantial: as mental or spiritual. Fine prose in this sense is like Shakespeare's dramatic poetry, or Milton's epic poetry, or even Homer's. If you scratch an event, you get an idea. Fine writing does not actually penetrate the world of familiar things so much as it penetrates what, for lack of a better term, we might call the universe or even the realm of ideas. That is, this language does not penetrate things so much as it bears them away with it.

Shakespeare does not analyze Lear, or enter Lear. There was no Lear. Had there been a Lear, we could only say that Shakespeare transmogrified Lear. Lear, like Melville's whale, is an aesthetic or epistemological probe by means of which the artist analyzes the universe. When you really penetrate the world of things, as I understand the world of things, you encounter idea. And art, especially poetry and twentieth-century painting and fiction, objectifies idea on its own surface, by imitating thereon, in bits of world, the complex way that bits of mind cohere.

In twentieth-century painting, the art of mind and the art of surface go together. When painters abandoned narrative deep space, their canvases became abstract and intellectualized.
Similarly, with its multiple metaphors and colliding images, an embellished language actually abstracts the world's objects. Such language wrests objects from their familiar contexts. We do not enter deep space; we do not enter rounded characters; we contemplate them as objects. And when an artist both powerfully “realizes” his objects, rendering them in full material detail, and simultaneously “abstracts” them, rendering them under the aspect of eternity, then we may say that he penetrates these objects not to their specific, material hearts, but, as it were, out the other side, to their generalized forms, their created capacity to mean. He runs them through and hauls them off to heaven. Shakespeare does it with Lear; Cézanne does it with Mont Saint Victoire. Paradoxically, an artist does all this on the surface, by the studied application of materials. He tacks his objects to the sky, either by baring their flattening forms, as Cézanne does, or, as Shakespeare does, by spiriting the objects out of the world with a hundred flights of language never heard.

Two subspecies of fine writing are particularly suited to postmodernist ends. One is a prose style so intimate, and so often used in the first person, that it is actually a voice. The voice appears in Europe throughout this century, and particularly between the wars. One could argue that it appeared in Eastern Europe and worked its way westward. It is the voice of a crank narrator. You hear it a bit in Gogol and in Dostoyevsky; you hear it especially in Kafka; you hear it in Elias Canetti, Witold Gombrowicz, Knut Hamsun, in Beckett, and in Nabokov (
Despair, Pale Fire
).

This crank narrator is an enraged petty clerk, or a starveling, or a genius, or a monomaniac, or any sort of crazy. His is not an especially adult voice. He specializes in mood shifts. His voice is poetic, bellicose, and resigned. It deals in ironies, self-deprecations, arrogances, apologies, aggressions, whinings, obscenities, lyricisms, abrupt silences, flights of transcendence, and tantrums. This tone's energy depends, of course, on the rapid juxtaposition of these disparate moods—particularly a lyric mood interrupted by a note of aggrievement. Samuel Beckett has written three great novels using this one trick. The fact of the sky, in particular, seems to call forth the
essence of this prose style. In
Molloy
, Beckett writes, “The sky was that horrible colour which heralds dawn.” In
Ferdydurke
, Gombrowicz writes, “The sky, suspended in the heights, was light, fresh, pale, and sarcastic.”

The crank narrator is a character outside bourgeois European culture; so is his creator. These writers either derive from peripheral countries, or are Jewish, or émigré, or are in some other way denied social access to mainstream European culture. One could easily argue that this culture itself disintegrated early in the century, and now everyone is adrift: this would account for the curiously contemporary sound of the voice. You may recognize the following as an imitation of Woody Allen, but it is not:

This is another passage from Gombrowicz's
Ferdydurke
, which appeared in Poland in 1937 and caused a scandal. Now everyone has caught the sound of this sort of mood-shifting prose. It has moved from the provinces and ghettos of Eastern Europe to New York City; now graduate students in writing and comedians can reel it out like yard goods.

 

The voice of the crank narrator is modernist in its distance, irony, and alienation; it is a mood composed of many shifting moods. Another subspecies of fine writing is even more contemporary. I have no name for this. It is a dense extreme of fine writing.

This prose repeats a fiction's narrative collage in a prose collage. Word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it proceeds by the same leaping transitions and bizarre juxtapositions of voice, diction, and image as the fiction as a whole does. It may use the present tense: he walks, he remem
bers his father, his father is running. This flattens time and lends a floating, objectlike quality to the narrative. (Oddly, the eighteenth-century novelists used the present tense for immediacy. Now we have learned to use it for distance.) This prose is, above all, a wrought verbal surface. It changes subjects as often as it changes moods; it presents an array of all the world's objects moving so fast they spin. It whirls us on a tour of language. It does not pause to examine any object; the verbal surface is itself the object.

William Gaddis and Denis Johnson use this prose in fiction. Anne Carson and Albert Goldbarth use it in vivid narrative essays. Mark Strand and W. S. Merwin use it in lyrics short as poems—as Rimbaud did in
Illuminations
. This prose is a shifting and refracting language surface whose subject matter is largely its own technique. The world, flattened and fragmented, becomes for the reader a vivid and ironic memory in chips and dots. Such works are objects composed of glittering language cemented by reference. The partly abstracted language surface is like a paint surface that replaces deep space. No sentimentality interferes with formal development. The pleasure such prose affords to the senses, and its attraction to the mind, may be considerable.

A very self-conscious, hammering prose is difficult to sustain over the length of a novel. Even if the writer can keep hammering, the reader may balk at being hammered. A fiction writer does well to unify dense prose with a voice. An English writer, Nik Cohn, wrote a novel using such an opaque voice.
Arfur
, published in the seventies, combined the rhythms of a rarefied New Orleans jazz slang with the vocabulary of pinball (!) to make a brilliant piece of fine writing. Cohn refers to “a very mosey style of walk, adopted off the riverboats, known as shooting the agate.” “Willie the Pleaser,” he writes alliteratively, “he was a cheat without equal, and he taught me many strokes, how to flare, how to float, how to flick from the elbow, so that I became an expert in all the paths of subterfuge.”

Since Dorothy Richardson, stream-of-consciousness convention has provided a handy narrative occasion for technical col
lages—like
Ulysses
, like
The Sound and the Fury
, Henry Roth's
Call it Sleep
, and Tillie Olsen's “Hey Sailor, What Ship?” These and many others are rich and broken cubist surfaces. Their very intimacy, on the other hand, makes them anathema to those postmodernist writers who prefer to handle characters from great authorial distance, as if with tongs. For Borges and Nabokov, who despised Freud, stream-of-consciousness prose is suspect for its perilous proximity to matters subconscious, which in turn is entirely contaminated by the enthusiastic attention of amateurs.

There are abuses. In the nineteenth century, fancy-writing abuses ran to the pious sublime, and in our own, to the private ridiculous. Here is a fragment from Beckett's
How It Is:

Or do you prefer this? It is William Burroughs, writing in
A Distant Hand Lifted:

Sometimes too-dense fine writing is simply a psychological tic on the writer's part. The prose of the first thirty pages of Nabokov's
Ada
is a barrage of language released from occasion. It is a breastwork of puns and cryptic allusions which effectively defend the novel's contents from the reader's interest, until Nabokov is good and ready. The opening of Cormac McCarthy's excellent
Blood Meridian
and his
Suttree
are similarly obscure.
So, for that matter, is the opening of
War and Peace
—but not because of its prose. Many great writers accidentally release and reveal a certain amount of self-consciousness, anxiety, or even hostility as they settle in, or resign themselves, to the task.