Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard Read Free Book Online Page A

shambles of our hope (a hope which Kant shared) for a purely natural science which actually and certainly connects at base with things as they are. What can we know for certain when our position in space is limited, our velocity may vary, our instruments contract as they accelerate, our observations of particles on the microlevel botch our own chance of precise data, and not only are our own senses severely limited, but many of the impulses they transmit are edited out before they ever reach the brain?
    Even if we could depend on our senses, could we trust our brains? Even if science could depend on its own data, would it not still have to paw through its own language and cultural assumptions, its a priori categories, wishes, and so forth, to approach things as they are? To what, in fact, could the phrase “things as they are” meaningfullyrefer apart from all our discredited perceptions, to which everything is so inextricably stuck? Physicists have been saying for sixty years that (according to the Principle of Indeterminacy) they cannot study nature, but only their own perception of nature: “method and object can no longer be separated” (Heisenberg). Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, British Astronomer Royal, said in 1927: “The physical world is entirely abstract and without ‘actuality’ apart from its linkage to consciousness.” It is one thing when Berkeley says this; when a twentieth-century astronomer says this, it is a bit of another thing. Similarly (and this is more familiar), Eddington’s successor Sir James Jeans wrote, summarizing a series of findings in physics: “The world begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” The world could be, then, in Eddington’s phrase, “mind-stuff.” And even the mind, anthropologists keep telling us, is not so much a cognitive instrument as a cultural artifact. The mind is itself an art object. It is a Mondrian canvas onto whose homemade grids it fits its own preselected products. Our knowledge is contextual and only contextual. Ordering and invention coincide: we call their collaboration “knowledge.” The mind is a blue guitar on which we improvise the song of the world.

The Fiction of Possibility
    Where does fiction fit into all this? For one thing, the interdisciplinary treatment of these issues is in a state so lively it is scarcely distinguishable from outright disarray, and fiction writers, like everyone else, are drawn to messes. Fiction writers are as interested in their century’s intellectual issues as any other thinkers. Fiction, likepainting, intrinsically deals with the nature of perception. And fiction intrinsically deals with the world. So that finally fiction, if it has anything at all to do with the world as its subject matter, will begin to ask, What world?
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    Early in Swann’s Way , Marcel recalls:
    When I saw any external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, enclosing it in a slender, incorporeal outline which prevented me from ever coming directly in contact with the material form.
    This is one way that fiction may pose the problem of cognition. How may we come “directly in contact” with “any external object”? Some writers approach it by wresting the object from the grip of its ordinary contexts, so that we see it as it were for the first time. Surrealism racks its brains to dislocate ordinary expectations; it wrenches objects from their ordinary mental settings until at last (it hopes) it unhinges the mind itself.
    Writers may also approach fresh vision by restraining their painterly impulses and using language as a cognitive tool. That is, fresh vision is an unstated goal but a guiding one, I think, in fiction written in that very plain, exact, unemotional prose which contemporary writers of both traditional and modernist fiction use to describe the world of objects. Writers like Henry Green and Wright