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

Morris on one hand, and Alain Robbe-Grillet on the other, write as if the world were indeed here and fiction owed it the responsibility of a careful and unbiased attention. Robbe-Grillet wishes the writer to limit his efforts to describing the surfaces of things and measuring the distances between them. On this effort he comments (myemphasis): “ This comes down to establishing that things are here .” Establishing that things are here is, so far as I know, a new goal for art. And establishing that things are here is no mean feat: it is an effort that kept Kant and Wittgenstein quite occupied.
    Some fiction deals with matters of cognition more directly. Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad , which describes the plottings of two rival computer makers, concerns the nature of knowing. Also concerned implicitly with the nature of knowing are detective and mystery stories, and, explicitly, contemporary modernist fictions using detective or mystery conventions, like Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur and Borges’s “Death and the Compass.” Other fiction, of which the Alexandria Quartet is the clearest type, deliberately treats the “relativity” of all knowledge by presenting a series of narratives which contradict. Still other fiction mimics the unknowableness of the world by being itself unknowable. It works—if it works—by eliciting confusion. If you track down some of the allusions and puzzles in Pale Fire , what you get amounts to a Bronx cheer.
    In many works, the world is the arena of possibilities. Anything may happen. This “anything” is fiction’s new subject. Traditional writers labor to make their “what-ifs” seem plausible. But contemporary modernists flaunt the speculative nature of their fiction. What if, they say, and what if what else? Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a wonderful case in point. In this book, Marco Polo reports to Kublai Khan on the many cities he has discovered by exploring the khan’s realm. Each description of a city is formal and titled (with a woman’s name); each occupies about a page. There is the city hung from high nets suspended over a plain; there is the city whose inhabitantsstretch string all over town to delineate their every relationship, until the strings make a web in which no one can move; there is the city whose carnival stays put year after year while its banks, docks, and municipal buildings are loaded onto trucks and taken on tour. After every few descriptions of cities, Marco Polo and the khan discuss the reports; many of their discussions hinge on the question of whether Marco Polo is making everything up. But what, in the realm of imagination, could be the difference between invention and discovery? And is not all the world the realm of Kublai Khan, the realm of imagination?
    If to the artist, and to the mind, each of the world’s bits is a mental object for contemplation or manipulation, then those bits may be actual or fancied; it does not matter which. They may derive indifferently from newspaper accounts or dreams. And since mental objects and imaginary objects have equal status, the man of imagination is the creator of the world.
    These ideas, I say, underly some of the best contemporary modernist fiction. They dominate the work of Borges, Nabokov, and Calvino; we find them also in many other writers, like Barth, Coover, Cortázar, Gilbert Sorrentino, Guy Davenport, Flann O’Brien, and almost any other contemporary modernist we can name. Some works stress the role of mind in actively shaping reality, as Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” does. In this story, the inhabitants of the planet Tlön—which was itself invented and set in motion by a series of thinkers—may through their expectations call objects into being. If a man is looking for a lost pencil, he may find, not the original pencil, but a secondary object, “more in keeping with his