ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
13.1
13.1
|
David Berridge
|
|
Several pages into her eviscerating, poetical, and somewhat mischievous The Writing Life, Annie Dillard offers two stories to illustrate a section on the reluctance of writers to edit their own work. Both have the brevity and mnemonic tautness of certain folk tales. In the first, a young photographer visits an old, revered master every year. He brings along the photographs he has taken and the expert sifts them into good and bad piles. Each year the photographer includes the same landscape, and every time the master condemns it to the bad pile. “Why do you like it so much?” he asks. The young photographer replies, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it” (6).
The other tale, also a single paragraph in length, finds Dillard in a taxi in midtown Manhattan. The driver has turned off the meter and drives around singing songs he has composed. Sometimes the author joins in, enjoying all the songs apart from one, which is longer than the others and she finds dulls. Dillard is surprised when the driver starts singing this number again, so pulls him up, suggesting he sing something else. His reply: “You don’t know how long it took me to get that one together” (7). Both tales hook themselves into my thinking about nonfiction writing, as memorable stories and because I remain puzzled by their implications as kernels of writerly wisdom. The archetypal “apprentice” and “master” of the first example operates in a clear world of “good” and “bad,” for which the story offers no elucidation other than the authority and experience of the older man. Dillard’s second tale is more personal and less generalized into some archetypal story world, but is also based around categorical judgement and rejection, where the desires and experiences that led this taxi driver to work at the “dull” song are deemed less interesting than the preset values Dillard brings to their impromptu singalong (unspecified in the text, but I infer a pop song verse, chorus and bridge three-minute catchiness). Like Dillard’s universalizing male pronouns, both tales encounter a different sensibility in 2026, something dramatized in the recent memoir Isn’t X Beautiful! by artist and writer Odette Elix England, who describes her own method of sorting through photographs as follows: “It’s a good picture. It’s great! I like That, but not That. It’s good-ish. It has some merit. It’s dumb. It stinks. It’s too this/that/the other thing. It’s ridiculous.” (31, italics in original). England continues such tormented indecision for a few more lines, confirming my readerly feeling that the long song and rejected landscape photo are moments where a gestating difference is to be welcomed and explored, not immediately shut down. Furthermore, according to Dillard’s own argument, both stories should surely have been crossed out of the manuscript of The Writing Life by an editor’s pencil. By the time she tells that tale of the master photographer, Dillard has already spent a page criticizing how if “It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away” (5), there remains a pernicious belief that because the writer needed to write it the reader needs to read it. Both stories then reformulate this, but Dillard has still not finished. The momentum of serial reiteration opens into a trio of questions of ever widening scope: “How many books do we read from which the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?” (7). Here the section ends. This prompts questions of my own: is Dillard celebrating a perceptual, associative and literary facility which, if it is good enough, can break its own rules? Is Dillard a creative writing pedagogue who emphasizes-with-variation again and again to ensure a point made and remembered? If that umbilical cord and price tag play close with cliché, is it to suggest an absurd, parodic aspect to writing, or writing about writing? All yes, if I am answering from my own readerly experience, and this is a strategy explained by how Dillard repeats it elsewhere. In “Living Like Weasels,” the opening essay of her collection Teaching a Stone to Talk, Dillard concludes of meeting a weasel: “Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key” (14). Only, this is not a conclusion at all for there is then a paragraph which I quote whole to give a sense of how this accretion of images also works in those two tales of The Writing Life: Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So. (14) Dillard really makes an image work for its stay in one of her essays. That metaphorical blow to the brain is first a “clearing blow” then (also) “bright blow,” before it is a “beating of brains” whose affects are analogous to balloons. This creates an image metabolism held together by Dillard’s commanding conviction, which suggests the reader is going through the logical stages of an argument or narrative. In fact, there is a wild lack of correlation to the contradictory images Dillard strings together, their only validation the literary one of affective readerly impact. This culminates in Dillard attaining a God-like omnipotence that “felled the forest, moved the fields” towards an end goal of a “world dismantled”.
When Dillard further suggests “our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t”, language again mixes excess with a matter-of-fact plainness. In her later Living by Fiction, plainness and baroque elaboration are proposed as two opposite poles of the spectrum of Modernist writing. Here and in The Writing Life, such polarities feel entwined in the very structure of the thought that occurs in writing; a virtuosic response to Lakoff and Johnson’s conterminous Metaphors We Live By, where human understanding depends on often unnoticed metaphors that turn abstract phenomena into something lived with. As the weasel tells, Dillard’s heightened, repetitious language is also a space beyond anthropocentrism, evoking Thomas Nagel’s essay “What’s it Like to Be a Bat”—published 15 years before The Writing Life--less for any Chiroptera-ness in Dillard’s prose than for how this image metabolism is a working solution to Nagel’s opening contention that “Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable” (435). Full disclosure: I reread The Writing Life after recalling an autobiographical incident that, like Dillard’s two tales above, seems both a mundane anecdote and an audition for Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim. I tell it like this: in the mid-1990s, a North American exchange student at a UK university was much admired by the Creative Writing Society for sharply written, hilarious prose. They told me they had studied with Annie Dillard at a university in the US, and I was star-struck. What did she say? I asked. My friend frowned. Well, they finally continued, she told me I should think about working in publishing in some other capacity than writing. No! I said, appalled at the presumption, the know-it-all Professor shtick, although who knows what was really going on in Dillard’s office hours. Damning judgement? Helpful careers advice? Now, at thirty years distance, I imagine myself leaning across the table in the student union bar to say, obliquely: "Is it pertinent and courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer personally?” Like Dillard’s reported comment to my friend, this initially annoys me as a conclusion to this section. It feels smug and disingenuous after the injunctions, metaphors, and multiple questions around killing your darlings. Stay longer with all this, however, and a multivalence begins to breath. Whilst Dillard argues a koan-like surety and discipline to the almost impossible task of good writing, the very fact of presenting this in the form of the two anecdotes also allows a world where the “bad” photograph is forever the favourite, the long dull song is the taxi driver’s best. Then that driver turns around and says: “Annie! Just try it! This song is the best one!” Would such tale telling be a convincing writing pedagogy today? Dillard doesn’t write Flash, but such a pedagogy might place those two tales on separate pages amidst lots of white space. That multivalence also finds contemporary form in the 100-word prose pieces that Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart wrote as a “High intensity tableau of the way things are or could be”; their motivation being to “notice relations and varieties of impact, [where] we’re neither stuffing our pockets with ontology nor denying it: attention and riffing sustain our heuristics” (5). Likewise, recent accounts of “the writing life” in Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night and Jenny Boully’s Betwixt-and-Between map different decor in the room of one’s own amongst variant priorities and precarities of body, thought, desire, literature and livelihood. Then again, Dillard’s essay “Total Eclipse”—originally also collected in Teaching a Stone to Talk--was recently reissued as a standalone book in a series of Feminist originals and reprints, its Anthropocene2026-akin disquiet torquing reflective nature writing into a state of being resembling an existential art house zombie flick. Likewise, what I come to appreciate about Dillard’s two anecdotes is the strangeness-directness interaction. Perhaps Dillard herself explains this best with, throughout The Writing Life, repeated references to the “line of words” that is “a miner’s pick, woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe” (3), whilst also a “hammer” (4) and a “fiber optic” (7) . Then Dillard holds back for a bit, don’t want to overdo it, at least not quite yet, for the line of words is not finished. It “fingers your own heart” and “feels for cracks in the firmament” (20). Then I put the book down to google my 1990s university friend and read an interview celebrating thirty years of a successful career in publishing. |
|
David Berridge is a writer and anthropologist living in Hastings, East Sussex. He currently researches art writing, the voice, bookshops, autoethnography and grief. They curate the online archive and pop-up project space Vocal Practices in Print. A novella, The Drawer and a Pile of Bricks, was published by Ma Bibliothèque and some recent writings are in After the Art, GlobalEurope, The Blue Notebook, and ASAP Review. See: https://linktr.ee/davidberridge.
|