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Living by Fiction: A Classic Work of Literary Criticism on Contemporary and Traditional Fiction for Literature Lovers
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, 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. 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.
"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, 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. 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.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
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About the author
Annie Dillard
61 books2,865 followersAnnie Dillard is an American author celebrated for her distinctive narrative voice in both fiction and nonfiction, as well as for her work in poetry, essays, literary criticism, novels, and memoir. She gained wide recognition with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a meditative exploration of nature and perception that received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and established her as a major literary figure. Raised in Pittsburgh, her formative years were marked by wide reading, close observation of the natural world, and a family environment that encouraged curiosity and wit, experiences later reflected in her memoir An American Childhood. She studied English, theology, and creative writing at Hollins College, where her academic engagement with writers such as Henry David Thoreau shaped her intellectual direction. Dillard’s work often blends spiritual inquiry, philosophy, and close attention to the physical world, drawing comparisons to writers such as Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. Her books include Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, The Writing Life, For the Time Being, and the novels The Living and The Maytrees, the latter a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award. Alongside her writing career, she taught for more than two decades in the English department at Wesleyan University, influencing generations of students before retiring as Professor Emerita. Her work has been translated widely, adapted into other art forms, and honored with numerous awards, including the National Humanities Medal, affirming her lasting impact on American letters.
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July 22, 2019
With her “Living by Fiction”, Annie Dillard seems to contradict Emile Cioran’s belief that building on the ideas/ creations of others is a form of intellectual parasitism, such an outstanding proof is this book that criticism can be art, that it can use literature as an inspirational source to its own glory, just like art uses world to the same purpose. In fact, these are the two main themes of the essay: criticism versus art and art versus world, both suggested by the inspired title. The second one is also emphasized by a clever question asked in Introduction: “Does fiction illuminate the great world itself or only the mind of its human creator?”
The answer is gradually developed in the three parts by discussing the how, the what and the why of the fiction-world relationship. Part One, “Some Contemporary Fiction”, compares what the author calls historical modernists (Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Gide, Woolf, etc.) with contemporary modernists (Borges, Nabokov, Beckett, Barth, Robe-Grillet, Calvino, Cortazar, etc.) to show that the techniques of the first are still employed by the latter, by looking over timeline, characters, point of view, fable or themes.
One of the most preferred techniques in nowadays fiction is the narrative collage, that breaks time “in smithereens” and simulates chaos, although, in the author’s opinion, art cannot imitate disorder, only pretend it, for there is always unity and meaning in the true art: “In this structural unity lies integrity, and it is integrity which separates art from nonart.” Integrity, says Annie Dillard, is the essential criterion by which we should judge a work, the sieve that separates sentimental art (which “attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us”) from real art (which creates “characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text”).
On the other hand, characters, once the center of the fiction, do not longer appeal to us emotionally, but intellectually. They are flattened (as opposed to the rounded, “drawn in depth” traditional ones), reduced to surfaces, and anyone, and anything can become a character: a mental defective (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury), a toddler (Grass, The Tin Drum), a dinosaur (Calvino, Cosmicomics), a breast (Roth, The Breast), an axolotl (Cortazar, Axolotl), a goat (Barth, Giles Goat-Boy). Moreover, they are mocked or commented, are given funny names (Humbert Humbert, Betty Bliss, Word Smith, Benny Profane), and sometimes the authors even try to impose a pronunciation (Barth wanted that Giles be pronounced in the same way as “guiles” and Nabokov that Ada be pronounced in the same way as “ardor”).
The same goes for the point of view, already limited by the Modernists to one narrator. Now there may be several voices to tell the story, or an axolotl, or a breast, and it is not a rare event for these points of view to collide, becoming another aspect of the collage. As for the story they tell, well, the drama and action that appeal to everybody are avoided (in the same way modern painting avoids representation) by serious novelists, who want to separate their work from trash, keeping in check the readers’ emotions by telling a bad story:
As a result, one of the main themes of the contemporary fiction has become art itself, be it in novels that talk about art (with heroes who are artists like in Gide’s The Counterfeiters), be it in novels in which the referents don’t leave the surface of art and the fragmented world becomes an art object contained on its own plane (like in Gertrude Stein’s works or in Nabokov’s Pale Fire). In relation to this theme there is the relationship between the tale and its teller, which can lead not only to the nature of art and narration, but also to the nature of perception (the biased narrator deals in part with the theme of perceptual bias):
However, the big challenge of Art, the problem of knowing the world, is by no means abandoned. The problem of cognition can be approached by isolating the object from its context (surrealists), by using language as a cognitive tool to plainly describe the world of objects (Henry Green, Wright Morris, Alain Robbe-Grillet), by looking for the nature of knowing (Stanslaw Lem, The Cyberiad, Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, Borges, Death and the Compass), by transforming the world in an arena of possibilities (Calvino, Invisible Cities).
But in the end most contemporary writers are in the middle of the distance between traditionalism and contemporary modernism, as are the Modernists themselves, for their mainstream still consists of stories that, using modernist techniques, penetrate the world and order it, and are populated by complex characters.
The second part of the study, “The State of Art”, after observing that there is no real revolution in literature, most techniques being known and used from Sterne’s time, with the new including the old (Gertrude Stein and Finnegans Wake’s efforts to alter the language remained without proselytes, “because the material of fiction is world”), considers that one of the greatest strengths of fiction is that any reader feels qualified to review his readings, the audience of literature being eclectic – educated but not necessarily specialized, which distinguish fiction from the other contemporary arts that “have rid themselves of all impure elements, including an audience”:
This easy approach has been facilitated by a blissful mixing of genres (a phenomenon unheard of in visual art). There is no minor or despised genre for most serious writers: Murdoch has written gothic romances, Calvino fantasies, Barth fairy-tales, etc. Unfortunately, from this blurring profits also the book industry, which has no reservation to recommend, for example, a detective novel to those who loved Ficciones. This halo effect can increase or decrease the literary value of a book:
Therefore, the role of the critics should be to help the readers to escape this halo effect, and in a way it is, since it influences the students’ thinking about fiction and it keeps fiction traditional by defending the canonic works, the national writers, and by ignoring the contemporary writers. But the critic experts are not as needed as in painting, for everyone can approach any work (except Finnegans Wake, maybe). They seem to influence more the contemporary fiction itself, both by canonizing the historical modernism and by making the contemporary one aware of criticism to the point that it helps to create it. Thus, criticism (to reassume the argument I opened my review with) has become a source of inspiration for fiction while proudly separating itself from it:
If the Part One spoke about the main traits of the contemporary modernism and Part Two about the role and place of Art in contemporary society, Part Three, “Does the World Have Meaning?” speaks about the broken links between criticism, art, and world. Criticism cannot truly interpret art, only create a parallel world and become itself art:
And this is because art cannot (and doesn’t want to) interpret the world. What it does is create something that did not exist before, because the artist is more interested to be original than to interpret the world: Melville’s whale is not the object of the world, but the tool of interpretation:
If there is a meaning of the world, the author concludes, it could be found in Art. Art’s greatest gift, finally, is to convince us that the world has a meaning and a purpose. Even if it has not.
The answer is gradually developed in the three parts by discussing the how, the what and the why of the fiction-world relationship. Part One, “Some Contemporary Fiction”, compares what the author calls historical modernists (Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Gide, Woolf, etc.) with contemporary modernists (Borges, Nabokov, Beckett, Barth, Robe-Grillet, Calvino, Cortazar, etc.) to show that the techniques of the first are still employed by the latter, by looking over timeline, characters, point of view, fable or themes.
One of the most preferred techniques in nowadays fiction is the narrative collage, that breaks time “in smithereens” and simulates chaos, although, in the author’s opinion, art cannot imitate disorder, only pretend it, for there is always unity and meaning in the true art: “In this structural unity lies integrity, and it is integrity which separates art from nonart.” Integrity, says Annie Dillard, is the essential criterion by which we should judge a work, the sieve that separates sentimental art (which “attempts to force preexistent emotions upon us”) from real art (which creates “characters and events which will elicit special feelings unique to the text”).
On the other hand, characters, once the center of the fiction, do not longer appeal to us emotionally, but intellectually. They are flattened (as opposed to the rounded, “drawn in depth” traditional ones), reduced to surfaces, and anyone, and anything can become a character: a mental defective (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury), a toddler (Grass, The Tin Drum), a dinosaur (Calvino, Cosmicomics), a breast (Roth, The Breast), an axolotl (Cortazar, Axolotl), a goat (Barth, Giles Goat-Boy). Moreover, they are mocked or commented, are given funny names (Humbert Humbert, Betty Bliss, Word Smith, Benny Profane), and sometimes the authors even try to impose a pronunciation (Barth wanted that Giles be pronounced in the same way as “guiles” and Nabokov that Ada be pronounced in the same way as “ardor”).
The same goes for the point of view, already limited by the Modernists to one narrator. Now there may be several voices to tell the story, or an axolotl, or a breast, and it is not a rare event for these points of view to collide, becoming another aspect of the collage. As for the story they tell, well, the drama and action that appeal to everybody are avoided (in the same way modern painting avoids representation) by serious novelists, who want to separate their work from trash, keeping in check the readers’ emotions by telling a bad story:
Literature as a whole has moved from contemplating cosmology – Dante – for the sake of God, to analyzing society – George Eliot – for the sake of man, to abstracting pattern itself – Nabokov – for the sake of art.
As a result, one of the main themes of the contemporary fiction has become art itself, be it in novels that talk about art (with heroes who are artists like in Gide’s The Counterfeiters), be it in novels in which the referents don’t leave the surface of art and the fragmented world becomes an art object contained on its own plane (like in Gertrude Stein’s works or in Nabokov’s Pale Fire). In relation to this theme there is the relationship between the tale and its teller, which can lead not only to the nature of art and narration, but also to the nature of perception (the biased narrator deals in part with the theme of perceptual bias):
Gradually, then, the question of the relationship between tale, teller and world fades into the question of the relationship between any perceiver and any object. And this matter is a frequent theme – nay, obsession – in contemporary, modernist fiction.
However, the big challenge of Art, the problem of knowing the world, is by no means abandoned. The problem of cognition can be approached by isolating the object from its context (surrealists), by using language as a cognitive tool to plainly describe the world of objects (Henry Green, Wright Morris, Alain Robbe-Grillet), by looking for the nature of knowing (Stanslaw Lem, The Cyberiad, Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, Borges, Death and the Compass), by transforming the world in an arena of possibilities (Calvino, Invisible Cities).
But in the end most contemporary writers are in the middle of the distance between traditionalism and contemporary modernism, as are the Modernists themselves, for their mainstream still consists of stories that, using modernist techniques, penetrate the world and order it, and are populated by complex characters.
The second part of the study, “The State of Art”, after observing that there is no real revolution in literature, most techniques being known and used from Sterne’s time, with the new including the old (Gertrude Stein and Finnegans Wake’s efforts to alter the language remained without proselytes, “because the material of fiction is world”), considers that one of the greatest strengths of fiction is that any reader feels qualified to review his readings, the audience of literature being eclectic – educated but not necessarily specialized, which distinguish fiction from the other contemporary arts that “have rid themselves of all impure elements, including an audience”:
Who apart of specialist will say of a Di Suvero sculpture, “It doesn’t work,” or of a Alvin Lucier composition, “It’s no good”? yet who hesitates to rate contemporary novels? This symptom reveals the assumption that fiction, even when it is literature, should answer to its audience by pleasing it.
This easy approach has been facilitated by a blissful mixing of genres (a phenomenon unheard of in visual art). There is no minor or despised genre for most serious writers: Murdoch has written gothic romances, Calvino fantasies, Barth fairy-tales, etc. Unfortunately, from this blurring profits also the book industry, which has no reservation to recommend, for example, a detective novel to those who loved Ficciones. This halo effect can increase or decrease the literary value of a book:
And it is here that the blurring of genres goes too far for art’s health. For the viewpoint of big business, a dog care manual and a novel of genius are both marketable objects called “books”; since the dog care manual will be easier to market for profit, there is no point in taking a chance on the novel.
Therefore, the role of the critics should be to help the readers to escape this halo effect, and in a way it is, since it influences the students’ thinking about fiction and it keeps fiction traditional by defending the canonic works, the national writers, and by ignoring the contemporary writers. But the critic experts are not as needed as in painting, for everyone can approach any work (except Finnegans Wake, maybe). They seem to influence more the contemporary fiction itself, both by canonizing the historical modernism and by making the contemporary one aware of criticism to the point that it helps to create it. Thus, criticism (to reassume the argument I opened my review with) has become a source of inspiration for fiction while proudly separating itself from it:
As an art form, criticism is more highly developed than fiction is. Its own theories are actually the most suitable objects of its intelligence.
If the Part One spoke about the main traits of the contemporary modernism and Part Two about the role and place of Art in contemporary society, Part Three, “Does the World Have Meaning?” speaks about the broken links between criticism, art, and world. Criticism cannot truly interpret art, only create a parallel world and become itself art:
Criticism must always try to know a text on its own terms; but it will always fail. Criticism cannot know its object. There is no guaranteed thread of connection between any interpretation and any text; so criticism is a particularly fanciful and baroque form of skywriting.
And this is because art cannot (and doesn’t want to) interpret the world. What it does is create something that did not exist before, because the artist is more interested to be original than to interpret the world: Melville’s whale is not the object of the world, but the tool of interpretation:
The art object does not teach, exhort, arouse, aid, and so forth. It does not “help us to see”, like an optometrist; it does not “make us realize” like a therapist; it does not “open doors for us”, like a butler. Nevertheless, insofar as art has any function whatsoever (and I am coming to believe that it does), it requires an audience. (…) If outside human perception the art object has no human value, then the art object needs a perceiver, lest or it is or does be lost.
If there is a meaning of the world, the author concludes, it could be found in Art. Art’s greatest gift, finally, is to convince us that the world has a meaning and a purpose. Even if it has not.
October 26, 2011
I have to admit that when I picked this up I was expecting something like Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird", a contemplation of the writing life. But this is actually a book of literary criticism, and, sadly, of the deadly kind.
Not that it's not well-written. It's Annie Dillard; it's perfectly written. There's not a clunker of a sentence in the whole thing. And that sort of fits her theme: that the art of fiction is in the art, and not in the story.
She spends the first half of the book describing modernist fiction as the sort of fiction whose strength is art, not story. To decide on a given piece of fiction's excellence, then, you would ask not "is it true?" but "is it well-done?". And to this, I found myself asking, "why wouldn't you ask both questions?" She spent some time deploring the fact that the masses would rather have "realized content" or "depth" in their stories instead of the self-referential integrity of "form" within their stories.
Yes, yes. Some of us think fiction is about the characters and the narrative. We poor, ignorant, bourgeois clods. We'd rather you told us a story than that you showed off your skill at word-arranging. (Again: can't we have both? The beautiful prose, the elegant structure - and the compelling plot?)
I am also one of those ill-educated clods who think that language can actually correspond to objects in the real world. I know. Dillard, to her credit, does eventually come down on the side that language can have shared meaning among different people, albeit imperfectly shared meaning.
Dillard then goes from performing literary criticism to singing a paen of praise about literary criticism. She declares that fiction itself is impotent until someone critiques it. Not merely reads it. Critiques it. Fiction interprets the world, but critics interpret fiction, and the works of fiction are mute until the critics do their job.
Yes. Of course. I'm sure that's exactly how it goes. Forget arguments about author's intent vs. what the reader brings to the story - it's all about what the critic brings to the story. Uh-huh. That's even better!
So, I spent the beginning of this book being angry (hard not to be when she keeps asking questions like, "after you have read a detailed analysis of Eliot's 'Four Quartets' . . . why would you care to write fiction like Jack London's . . . ?", as if the world weren't big enough for both), but I ended it just feeling sad.
I mean, here is Annie Dillard: brilliant, talented, writer of unmatchably elegant prose, a woman who cares deeply about literature, and she's left at the end unable to assert that literature actually does anything useful in the world. She hopes it does. She's inclined to think it does - she's especially inclined to think that fiction can interpret the human (as opposed to the natural) world to us. She says "art remakes the world according to sense," and I can see what she's saying. But she can't, in the end, actually assert any of these beliefs, because her philosophy of knowledge keeps her from saying, "I am right," or even "this, at least, I know."
I am with her when she says that not knowing completely doesn't keep us from not knowing at all. But she seems to lose even this conviction by the end of the book. This is - I kid you not - the final paragraph, and the point at which I gave up my (faint, but persistent) hope that all of these chapters were leading up to some variation of "of course, I am only joking":
"Which shall it be? Do art's complex and balanced relationships among all parts, its purpose, significance, and harmony, exist in nature? Is nature whole, like a completed thought? Is history purposeful? Is the universe of matter significant? I am sorry; I do not know."
Now, please, tell me I am not the only person who reads that and wants to weep for the woman. This poor lady, spending so much time, caring so much, and being left only with the cold comfort that at least within the text there are balanced relationships. No wonder, I realized at the end, she is so adamant that art be prized for art's sake. She doesn't think there's anything outside art that art could reflect. To be left with only the formal and cold beauty of Modernist fiction for your comfort? Only with the sop that at least, in this or that story, there might be internal integrity? That this or that artist made his little world have a formal logic, and so at least there, in all the huge universe, there is order? That's a small, lonely comfort indeed.
I think I'm going to go cry now.
But I also have to say: there's none so blind as those that won't see. There is a paragraph where she says:
"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 may - but 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."
But then, she says,
"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."
Okay: I do understand that rational people can be atheists or agnostics (though I would argue they've followed the data incorrectly), but this seems to be a case of being unwilling to even take up the argument at all! Firstly, "no one"? Really? She must be limiting those she would consider people to, what? Academics in her own social circle? Second of all, does she have a bias against taking arguments from her ancestors? That seems very narrow. Why assume that ancient man is less intelligent than modern man? Especially when so much of what we know has built on their work? This last sentence just seems very close-minded to me. "Of course, it could be there is a meaning to the universe, but no one I know has thought so for at least a hundred years, so oh well."
I might be doing her a disservice (I hope I am), but it really does seem to be a dismissal of the bulk of humanity in favor of her own class and era of people. I guess we all have our faults. (And I do mean that - we all do, and maybe this is just where she falls down. I can feel for that, as I hope others have compassion for me in my errors.)
So, I go back and forth between being upset at this book and being saddened by this book. There is some good stuff in here (observations about artistic integrity, and the effect of an audience on the artist), but that just makes it worse, because at the end the author is not sure any of that good stuff means anything. Again, I just found this a very sad read, all the moreso because I have fond memories of her other work, and now I realize that I might ascribe more meaning to her work than she could herself.
Not that it's not well-written. It's Annie Dillard; it's perfectly written. There's not a clunker of a sentence in the whole thing. And that sort of fits her theme: that the art of fiction is in the art, and not in the story.
She spends the first half of the book describing modernist fiction as the sort of fiction whose strength is art, not story. To decide on a given piece of fiction's excellence, then, you would ask not "is it true?" but "is it well-done?". And to this, I found myself asking, "why wouldn't you ask both questions?" She spent some time deploring the fact that the masses would rather have "realized content" or "depth" in their stories instead of the self-referential integrity of "form" within their stories.
Yes, yes. Some of us think fiction is about the characters and the narrative. We poor, ignorant, bourgeois clods. We'd rather you told us a story than that you showed off your skill at word-arranging. (Again: can't we have both? The beautiful prose, the elegant structure - and the compelling plot?)
I am also one of those ill-educated clods who think that language can actually correspond to objects in the real world. I know. Dillard, to her credit, does eventually come down on the side that language can have shared meaning among different people, albeit imperfectly shared meaning.
Dillard then goes from performing literary criticism to singing a paen of praise about literary criticism. She declares that fiction itself is impotent until someone critiques it. Not merely reads it. Critiques it. Fiction interprets the world, but critics interpret fiction, and the works of fiction are mute until the critics do their job.
Yes. Of course. I'm sure that's exactly how it goes. Forget arguments about author's intent vs. what the reader brings to the story - it's all about what the critic brings to the story. Uh-huh. That's even better!
So, I spent the beginning of this book being angry (hard not to be when she keeps asking questions like, "after you have read a detailed analysis of Eliot's 'Four Quartets' . . . why would you care to write fiction like Jack London's . . . ?", as if the world weren't big enough for both), but I ended it just feeling sad.
I mean, here is Annie Dillard: brilliant, talented, writer of unmatchably elegant prose, a woman who cares deeply about literature, and she's left at the end unable to assert that literature actually does anything useful in the world. She hopes it does. She's inclined to think it does - she's especially inclined to think that fiction can interpret the human (as opposed to the natural) world to us. She says "art remakes the world according to sense," and I can see what she's saying. But she can't, in the end, actually assert any of these beliefs, because her philosophy of knowledge keeps her from saying, "I am right," or even "this, at least, I know."
I am with her when she says that not knowing completely doesn't keep us from not knowing at all. But she seems to lose even this conviction by the end of the book. This is - I kid you not - the final paragraph, and the point at which I gave up my (faint, but persistent) hope that all of these chapters were leading up to some variation of "of course, I am only joking":
"Which shall it be? Do art's complex and balanced relationships among all parts, its purpose, significance, and harmony, exist in nature? Is nature whole, like a completed thought? Is history purposeful? Is the universe of matter significant? I am sorry; I do not know."
Now, please, tell me I am not the only person who reads that and wants to weep for the woman. This poor lady, spending so much time, caring so much, and being left only with the cold comfort that at least within the text there are balanced relationships. No wonder, I realized at the end, she is so adamant that art be prized for art's sake. She doesn't think there's anything outside art that art could reflect. To be left with only the formal and cold beauty of Modernist fiction for your comfort? Only with the sop that at least, in this or that story, there might be internal integrity? That this or that artist made his little world have a formal logic, and so at least there, in all the huge universe, there is order? That's a small, lonely comfort indeed.
I think I'm going to go cry now.
But I also have to say: there's none so blind as those that won't see. There is a paragraph where she says:
"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 may - but 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."
But then, she says,
"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."
Okay: I do understand that rational people can be atheists or agnostics (though I would argue they've followed the data incorrectly), but this seems to be a case of being unwilling to even take up the argument at all! Firstly, "no one"? Really? She must be limiting those she would consider people to, what? Academics in her own social circle? Second of all, does she have a bias against taking arguments from her ancestors? That seems very narrow. Why assume that ancient man is less intelligent than modern man? Especially when so much of what we know has built on their work? This last sentence just seems very close-minded to me. "Of course, it could be there is a meaning to the universe, but no one I know has thought so for at least a hundred years, so oh well."
I might be doing her a disservice (I hope I am), but it really does seem to be a dismissal of the bulk of humanity in favor of her own class and era of people. I guess we all have our faults. (And I do mean that - we all do, and maybe this is just where she falls down. I can feel for that, as I hope others have compassion for me in my errors.)
So, I go back and forth between being upset at this book and being saddened by this book. There is some good stuff in here (observations about artistic integrity, and the effect of an audience on the artist), but that just makes it worse, because at the end the author is not sure any of that good stuff means anything. Again, I just found this a very sad read, all the moreso because I have fond memories of her other work, and now I realize that I might ascribe more meaning to her work than she could herself.
Read
April 7, 2023Why Read Fiction - Episode 1: Imparting Something Missing from the World Outside
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iIaC...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iIaC...
December 2, 2021
Interesting in parts, but rather dated in others. Plus Dillard only discusses works by male authors (with one or two mentions of Doris Lessing & Virginia Woolf), which is a bit disappointing.
April 3, 2023
Video review
https://youtu.be/6xLFCrq7YZk
https://youtu.be/6xLFCrq7YZk
September 1, 2025
i love you annie dillard but this one made my head hurt. i spent this whole book struggling; every now and then a brilliant idea would break through only for me to forget it instantly
but then this at the end almost made me round up to four stars:
"The most extreme, cheerful, and fantastic view of art to which I ever subscribe is one in which the art object requires no viewer or listener— no audience whatever— in order to do what it does, which is nothing less that to hold up the universe.
This is a fundamentally insane notion, which developed in my own mind from an idea of Buckminster Fuller's. Every so often I try to encourage other writers by telling them this cheerful set of thoughts; always they gaze at me absolutely appalled. 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. People build bridges and cities and roads; they write music and novels and constitutions; they have ideas. That is why people are here; the universe as it were needs somebody to something to keep it from falling apart.
Now, for a long time I have taken this notion of Fuller's to mean something even he probably did not intend: that imaginative acts actually weigh in the balance of physical processes. Imaginative acts— even purely mental combinations, like the thought that a certain cloud resembles a top hat— carry real weight in the universe. A child who makes a pun, or a shepherd who looks at a batch of stars and thinks, 'That part is a throne and that part is a swan,' is doing something which counts in the universe's reckoning of order and decay— which counts just as those mighty explosions and strippings of electrons do inside those selfsame stars.
This jolly view soothes the Puritan conscience; it gives the artist real work. With his thumb in the dike he is saving the universe. And the best part of it is he need not find a publisher, or a gallery, or a producer, or a symphony orchestra. Thoughts count. A completed novel in a trunk in the attic is an order added to the sum of the universe's order. It remakes its share of undoing. It counteracts the decaying of systems, the breakdown of stars and cultures and molecules, the fraying of forms. It works." (pg. 173)
but then this at the end almost made me round up to four stars:
"The most extreme, cheerful, and fantastic view of art to which I ever subscribe is one in which the art object requires no viewer or listener— no audience whatever— in order to do what it does, which is nothing less that to hold up the universe.
This is a fundamentally insane notion, which developed in my own mind from an idea of Buckminster Fuller's. Every so often I try to encourage other writers by telling them this cheerful set of thoughts; always they gaze at me absolutely appalled. 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. People build bridges and cities and roads; they write music and novels and constitutions; they have ideas. That is why people are here; the universe as it were needs somebody to something to keep it from falling apart.
Now, for a long time I have taken this notion of Fuller's to mean something even he probably did not intend: that imaginative acts actually weigh in the balance of physical processes. Imaginative acts— even purely mental combinations, like the thought that a certain cloud resembles a top hat— carry real weight in the universe. A child who makes a pun, or a shepherd who looks at a batch of stars and thinks, 'That part is a throne and that part is a swan,' is doing something which counts in the universe's reckoning of order and decay— which counts just as those mighty explosions and strippings of electrons do inside those selfsame stars.
This jolly view soothes the Puritan conscience; it gives the artist real work. With his thumb in the dike he is saving the universe. And the best part of it is he need not find a publisher, or a gallery, or a producer, or a symphony orchestra. Thoughts count. A completed novel in a trunk in the attic is an order added to the sum of the universe's order. It remakes its share of undoing. It counteracts the decaying of systems, the breakdown of stars and cultures and molecules, the fraying of forms. It works." (pg. 173)
September 29, 2012
Dillard demonstrates a real command of language in this work and a real facility with words, a kind of acoustic keenness that is truly rare. The one qualm that readers may have is that there is really no definite organization to the book or rather that she elects to use really slippery demarkations in terms of her subject. Even as she begins to outline these delineations she is deftly moving in and out of these lines, though these stray remarks are thoroughly enjoyable. Another awing fact is the display of Dillard's breadth of knowledge, expanding into philosophy, metaphysics, and the variegated sub-stratum of sciences, as well as of course her depth of literary history and theory, as well as a steady drivel of amusing facts. Ultimately this book is for lovers of fiction and especially would-be writers, though one may walk away with a sort of foggy recollection of what exactly they have just read if asked to give summary (I myself am having this problem), bits of the book bubble up in your consciousness unexpectedly, as if grafted to neurons in a way only accessible by association or the purest forms of daydreaming/intellectual wandering. The book is an engrossing page turner. I read it in a fugue state-ish 2 day stint, without any intrusion from my usual book rotation tendencies. Afterward, I kept myself from turning it into my local used book store, expecting one day to pluck a piercingly cogent quote from it.
August 22, 2020
It’s weird, this one gets the fifth star more for the effect it had on me in the time of my life that I read it than for what I actually recall of it specifically. In the cauldron of my early 20’s, searching, longing, lost, hopeful, desperate, pretentious, portentous, ponderous, and more than a smidge overindulgent, to name but a few of the emotions and states roiling tumultuously within and around me, this book materialized on the cluttered coffee-table of a crash pad in Milan I was living in one fall. It meant something profound to me, this volume of Dillard’s, though of course I didn’t fully grasp that at the time. Pekid and somewhat spooked in my ongoing battle with insomnia, I took this geeky little lit-crit book with me at dawn everyday to the cafe and pored over its musings as though they held some sort of key to another kingdom of life, another realm of value and meaning, a place where another hitherto unknown aspect of myself might be lurking...
January 12, 2018
I love Dillard as a writer. And I wanted to love this. If I were writing fiction more regularly, perhaps it would be different. But the truth is, it was a struggle for me, and while I've read many of the works she references, I haven't read enough of them recently enough to feel invested in the arguments she makes.
As always, the prose is clean and clear...but I couldn't get myself invested in the arguments being made.
[2 stars for Dillard's usual prose, clean and clear.]
As always, the prose is clean and clear...but I couldn't get myself invested in the arguments being made.
[2 stars for Dillard's usual prose, clean and clear.]
April 18, 2019
Some of the coolest, matter of fact referential and confident conversation about fiction that I've ever come across.
It's also a very "80s" kind of literary criticism, which I dig.
It's also a very "80s" kind of literary criticism, which I dig.
May 15, 2025
Apparently I read this book back in 2019. I have no memory of this. Well, in any case, it was worth re-reading after having read and lived more.
Read
July 4, 2023I didn’t necessarily agree with all her valuations of different types of fiction, but the exposition was overall thorough and still relevant all these years later—though the place of non fiction has changed, as I think she’d agree. Very approachable read for those who are unfamiliar with semiotics, theories of cultural production, and post/modernism, and simply engaging enough for those coming into it having already read some of the texts cited.
November 6, 2017
When I found this book, I thought it might teach me how to better understand and appreciate fiction. It seemed like most of this esoteric work was going right over my head, especially when it felt as though Ms. Dillard's explanations were coming in for a soft, easy landing, only to suddenly accelerate back into the sky, leaving behind a fog of cute, mysterious prose and unfamiliar references. However, I'm now finding little wisps of thought from this lyrical meditation coalescing into bits of a new understanding of what fiction and art and even reality itself actually are. It's an enjoyable feeling.
February 26, 2020
As usual, Annie Dillard gives me something I didn't know I needed, in this case a discourse on fiction and its relation to the real world. Sometimes she loses me in her philosophic flights, but the next thing I know she's comparing Dylan Thomas to the Loch Ness Monster and I'm right there with her. Her two paragraphs on critical interpretation (pp. 130-131) were a great summary of everything I learned in my graduate critical theory class. As a bonus, she quotes Buckminster Fuller and explains the meaning of life. Recommended, even if you don't like theory, critics, aesthetics, epistemology, Vladimir Nabokov, or Italo Calvino.
June 18, 2015
Dillard views criticism, of which this book is an example, as the modern “focusing of the religious impulse.” The making and interpreting of art, she implies, may be our last clear purpose left here on Earth. At least she expresses the view that, of human intellectual activities, art still produces and retains holistic meaning, and she holds faith that we may discern it.
Fiercely intellectual without being pedantic, Dillard also goofs around in her sidelong way and has her quirky fun that’s fun to see. Hers and others’ theories aside, she believes, “Always, if the work is good enough, the writer can get away with anything.”
So what's the book about? Fiction and nonfiction that's modernist or traditional. Fiction and nonfiction that employs plain or fine prose styles. The mix and match here is really interesting.
Fiercely intellectual without being pedantic, Dillard also goofs around in her sidelong way and has her quirky fun that’s fun to see. Hers and others’ theories aside, she believes, “Always, if the work is good enough, the writer can get away with anything.”
So what's the book about? Fiction and nonfiction that's modernist or traditional. Fiction and nonfiction that employs plain or fine prose styles. The mix and match here is really interesting.
June 5, 2021
101027: pleasant short book that should comfort anyone who writes, that what they do is not in vain...
June 21, 2016
This felt like being dropped into a very esoteric Master's in Fine Arts program, only I hadn't taken the previous fifteen courses.
February 25, 2022
What did I just read? Parts were nearly ethereal, other parts so convoluted that I could not follow her. And she ends up with an "I don't know". What!
March 17, 2022
Living by Fiction begins by locating the literature of its times (the 60s through the 80s) in the scheme that runs traditional, modernist, post-modernist. To simplify Dillard's argument, she says traditional fiction reflected on society, modernist fiction reflected on the self, and post-modernist fiction reflected on itself. She expands on and buttresses these assessments with a wide array of examples, often bringing the modernists to the fore through Joyce and Eliot, and often bringing the post-modernists to the fore through Calvino, Barth, Coover, and company.
The odd thing about this book is that it has an almost polemical tone despite Dillard generally declaring that she takes no sides. She is a powerful and experienced writer herself, and she knowingly highlights the many, many ways any writer of fiction can write almost any kind of fiction and succeed.
Her command of the ways in which various writers--Borges, Barthelme, Mann, Dickens, Nabokov Flaubert--pursues their distinctive paths is wonderful. This old book (1982) remains vivid despite the fact that none of of her revered writers (except, as far as I know, John Barth) is still living.
Having conducted this tour d'horizon of 20th century fiction, Dillard then turns to some of the questions that always have been discussed in literary salons and writing programs: Does fiction "mean" anything? Does it contribute any kind of special knowledge in
the struggle to broaden/deepen human understanding? Do critics matter? Do they influence writers? Should writers let their "ideas" show or should fiction be more demure than that?
In the final chapters of the book, Dillard answers these questions with philosophical rigor, sometimes tediously so but always persuasively. Again, to simplify: her view is that fiction enhances human understanding by exploring the nooks, crannies, and limits of human possibility. That's probably the key word: possibility. Fiction offers the reader the opportunity to think about what might be as opposed to what is generally conceded to be. Art is what might be. Science is what is (until it isn't).
The odd thing about this book is that it has an almost polemical tone despite Dillard generally declaring that she takes no sides. She is a powerful and experienced writer herself, and she knowingly highlights the many, many ways any writer of fiction can write almost any kind of fiction and succeed.
Her command of the ways in which various writers--Borges, Barthelme, Mann, Dickens, Nabokov Flaubert--pursues their distinctive paths is wonderful. This old book (1982) remains vivid despite the fact that none of of her revered writers (except, as far as I know, John Barth) is still living.
Having conducted this tour d'horizon of 20th century fiction, Dillard then turns to some of the questions that always have been discussed in literary salons and writing programs: Does fiction "mean" anything? Does it contribute any kind of special knowledge in
the struggle to broaden/deepen human understanding? Do critics matter? Do they influence writers? Should writers let their "ideas" show or should fiction be more demure than that?
In the final chapters of the book, Dillard answers these questions with philosophical rigor, sometimes tediously so but always persuasively. Again, to simplify: her view is that fiction enhances human understanding by exploring the nooks, crannies, and limits of human possibility. That's probably the key word: possibility. Fiction offers the reader the opportunity to think about what might be as opposed to what is generally conceded to be. Art is what might be. Science is what is (until it isn't).
November 9, 2024
Wonderfully realized with Dillard's acerbic wit, Living By Fiction is at once my own confirmation bias echo chamber, and a challenging review of finding meaning when we are the ones creating and ascribing it in a world perhaps bereft of it.
"The most... cheerful... view of art to which I ever subscribe is one in which the art object requires no viewer or listener - no audience whatever - in order to do what it does, which is nothing less than to hold up the universe."
The idea that art, as a whole, is our push against entropy (despite knowing I already felt this way) is inspiring. All the more so as we continue to live uncertainly, worried about what will come next. Art, fiction, will persist in all its forms.
This one's gonna stick with me a while in the best way.
"The most... cheerful... view of art to which I ever subscribe is one in which the art object requires no viewer or listener - no audience whatever - in order to do what it does, which is nothing less than to hold up the universe."
The idea that art, as a whole, is our push against entropy (despite knowing I already felt this way) is inspiring. All the more so as we continue to live uncertainly, worried about what will come next. Art, fiction, will persist in all its forms.
This one's gonna stick with me a while in the best way.
October 7, 2019
This book is probably most interesting to literary scholars and contemporary writers. Fans of Annie Dillard’s nature writing may be confused by the fact that this is a literary criticism text. Yet for those willing to follow Annie on this journey, readers will find insight into the American literary movements of the second half of the 20th century. Those more invested in 21st century writers in turn can have a better insight into how the contemporary scene has shifted away from our literary predecessors.
December 4, 2023
A thoughtful overview of (at the time) contemporary literature, and an attempt to understand the broad methods of contemporary modernists and how those reflect on fiction’s meaning in the wider world. Maybe it’s because I don’t study literature professionally and am most likely naive in this regard, but I found the focus of the novel and the questions Dillard raises to be intriguing- and ones I’ve considered myself when reading fiction. The author lost me in the last chapter, but until then I was pretty on board with the argument they made. Nice read!
May 5, 2023
If you love literature this book is for you. Annie Dillard brings her unique perspective on the life of reading and what literature means to her and, perhaps you as well. I found it stimulating and aimed directly at readers like me who are interested in the life of the mind. With sections on contemporary literature, the state of the art, and the source of meaning there are more than enough ideas to contemplate and encouragement for your reading life.
July 14, 2024
In Living by Fiction Dillard seeks to show that innovative approaches to fiction—especially the “shattering of narrative line”—don’t always pay off, even though in rare cases they sometimes do. “If a writer is going to use forms developed by intelligent people,” she writes with characteristic snark, “he should use them intelligently. It does not do to mimic results without due process.”
Read more at timhoiland.com
Read more at timhoiland.com
June 4, 2017
Before beginning find your favorite pen and notebook. Annie Dillard's look at the purpose and role of literature in our lives is replete with insights phrased with her usual felicity of tone and eloquence. Does literature, or even life itself, have meaning? Do contemporary modernist have more to offer than slick techniques? What of symbols?
February 19, 2019
It's been almost 20 years since I read literary theory, and this was the perfect book to pull me back into the genre. Dillard packs a surprising number of beautiful and thought-provoking ideas into a short 185 pages. My only wish is that she would revisit the subject now, since more than 35 years have passed.
April 22, 2019
Short collection of dense, thoughtful essays on art, literature, and meaning. Depressing or inspirational depending on one's bent, possibly both. Deserves and perhaps even demands multiple readings. Difficult in places, unapologetically ambiguous, requiring genuine engagement and mental effort from the reader. Good exercise for the brain, rewarding and satisfying in its way.
September 14, 2022
This is not the kind of book that you like or dislike this is the kind of book that you read over and over again trying to get through the layers of meaning. I admit I did not understand all of it, but it was worth the read because it opened my mind to new ways of seeing things. Will read it again once I think I have worked through my thoughts about it.
October 31, 2025
I may not be smart enough to read this book. Every once in a while, a great concept would pop out (like Fuller’s theory that people/art/writing can counteract the tide of entropy of the second law of thermodynamics) but too quickly sink back into density….
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