Annie Dillard's Way of Seeing

With a Shake Of the Fist

When an author wins a Pulitzer Prize for her first book the sensible reader will vote with the majority. What other analysis is possible than that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is in places a beautifully written and moving book? Or that Annie Dillard deals with such difficult questions as the meaning of nature, the role of death and birth in the universe, the problem of pain, and the nature and image of God; that she approaches them with a unique eyesight.

The difficulty is increased when the author explains her work, as she does in this issue (see page 14). Yet, a reviewer can fall back on the statement that writers are less dependable than an outsider, being both too close and too removed from her own work. Also, that what a writer writes is more important than what a writer says about what she writes.

Dillard’s descriptions of nature and the aspects of nature on which she concentrates reveal a particular view of God that does not necessarily match that of biblical revelation. She takes the Old Testament into account, particularly the book of Job. She asks the same questions. But Dillard leaves out the New Testament almost entirely.

Since Dillard might say that the nature of a person is revealed in his work, it is important to get an accurate picture of her picture of nature. In some sense it is pantheistic. She sees God animated in nature; yet she also sees him as quite apart from his creation; you can’t have it both ways.

Dillard’s views on God and his work are implicit in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. There is little straightforward philosophy or theology. She is much more explicit in Holy the Firm, particularly in the central chapter, “God’s Tooth.”

That the world was created by God is never denied. But when Dillard asks “whatever for” she is really asking about the nature of God. She views nature as bleak, dark, almost wicked. Just when the day looks inviting, she reads about parasites who feast on a man’s guts. Or she watches a praying mantis eat her mate as he mates her. Or she thinks of cockroaches who devour human hair and nails and rats who gnaw a child’s flesh. This is what God made, she says. But how can we rejoice and be glad in it?

All of this healthy questioning should not go unheeded. She provides a balance to the treacle that sees every slug as beautiful. Yet in forcing us to face the problem of pain in a world made by a presumably good God she stacks her case by ignoring some basic Christian doctrines. First, the fall. Second, that nature is herself a creature, just as man is. Third, the Incarnation.

God told us to care for nature; we were born to be gardeners and animal tenders. When we disobeyed God we failed at that just as much as at obedience. We brought nature down with us. And, as Paul tells us, it too waits to be redeemed. The seeming irrationality of nature is a result of the fall. We may not like it; we may not understand all that it means. But we cannot deny it, or impute to God any unrighteousness that belongs to us alone.

Of all the passages on the nature of God in Pilgrim, the most telling is in “The Waters of Separation,” the final chapter. Dillard draws a parallel between an ancient Eskimo tale and God:

“A young man in a strange land falls in love with a young woman and takes her to wife in her mother’s tent. By day the women chew skins and boil meat while the young man hunts. But the old crone is jealous; she wants the boy. Calling her daughter to her one day, she offers to braid her hair; the girl sits pleased, proud, and soon is strangled by her own hair. One thing Eskimos know is skinning. The mother takes her curved hand knife shaped like a dancing skirt, skins her daughter’s beautiful face, and presses that empty flap smooth on her own skull. When the boy returns that night he lies with her, in the tent on top of the world. But he is wet from hunting; the skin mask shrinks and slips, uncovering the shriveled face of the old mother, and the boy flees in horror, forever.

“Could it be that if I climbed the dome of heaven and scrabbled and clutched at the beautiful cloth till I loaded my fists with a wrinkle to pull, that the mask would rip away to reveal a toothless old ugly, eyes glazed with delight?” (p. 273).

Later in that chapter, where the New Testament enters her thinking, in a tone of irony Dillard comments on the peace and happiness that God gives. Read between the lines, she says, and you might find it. But her conclusion: we are “dealing with a maniac.”

Can Annie Dillard possibly think that God is like that old woman? That he sits laughing at our distresses, drunk with lust? That he is crazy? She seems to answer yes in Holy the Firm. As she looks at the universe and sees sorrow piled on pain, she asks, “The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re all victims?… Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can—and will—do?” (pp. 60, 61). Is this the fault of God?

No Christian should walk around with an unreasoning optimism. If our consciences have been seered by God’s holy light we must recognize pain and evil. And then work, where and when we can, to change it. But that is different than asking who is to blame, a question that seems to get us nowhere.

But what of the things we can’t change? What of the praying mantis and its habits? Dillard looks at these seeming aberrations of nature as evil. But an insect has no moral concept of evil, no way of thinking, no soul. Man can be evil; can nature? These are questions she needs to face.

God, Dillard says, has a stake in the universe. Agreed. But just what the stake is she never tells us. That stake and the answer to the question “Does God care?” were given in the Incarnation. What we know of pain and irrationality God knows, because Christ does. Have we suffered? What is that compared with Christ’s suffering? Does nature suffer? Look how it reacted to the crucifixion. Do we weep? Did Christ when he saw his creatures fall? All that sounds pat. It looks pat in print. But to understand it from the inside out takes a lifetime of commitment.

Dillard wants to love God, though she admits that he is “less lovable than a grasshead, who treats us less well than we treat our lawns.” We can agree that at times it may seem that way, but seeming and reality are two different things. And we return again to the Incarnation. And to biblical revelation.

Throughout Pilgrim and again in Holy the Firm Dillard insists that all we can know of God is what we see in nature. And that is the weakness of her argument. Orthodox Christianity teaches that we have a trustworthy guide to understanding God and for knowing his will, the Bible. God made us rational human beings; we can think; we have language. He reveals himself through these means. We don’t need to look at nature alone to learn of God. We can understand what we see in nature because of the Bible. And because of the Incarnation.

At times that may strike us as insufficient. We may shake our fists at God; Dillard’s books are her way. But faith demands that we accept the witness of the writers of the Bible that God is who he says he is. Ultimately, that is the question to decide.

CHERYL FORBES

Annie Dillard’s Way of Seeing

Since the 1960s American culture has been marked by the resurgence of a popular brand of neoromanticism. We have fled urban blight and searched for calm and simplicity in a country lifestyle. We have rediscovered the vanishing wilderness and become conservationalists. Annie Dillard’s romanticism, however, is of a deeper sort. She writes in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century writers: her heightened moments of consciousness within nature are akin to Wordsworth’s “spots of time.” Like Blake and Rimbaud, she is a voyant—a seer whose imaginary eye transforms prosaic details of this world into visions of another universe. Like Emerson, she ponders how a transcendental reality may participate in the nature we know. And she has followed Thoreau by living an at times ascetic life as an amateur naturalist.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm indicate that Annie Dillard’s nature experience is also religious. She calls readers to discover the intense joy of really seeing the created world. Her frequent allusions to the Bible, along with a wealth of other reading, place her personal observations within larger and larger contexts, pulling the reader along on a metaphysical quest.

Dillard claims that she is not a scientist, but an explorer of her neighborhood; the world of these two books is spatially limited. Tinker Creek and the cycle of the seasons during one year in Virginia make up the framework of a nature diary in the first book. She also deals with the process of her own consciousness as she moves between observation and poetic vision. Moments of insight into the mystery of nature lead Dillard to a new understanding of what writing is. “Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.… My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones which show with increasing elaborations a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle. I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing” (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 30). To see is to perceive connections between everything in this world and thus is a metaphoric act.

Dillard uses religious language to describe this perception, which involves an apprehension of the divine presence in the world and a creative, artistic act. (Coleridge would have called these two aspects of seeing the work of the primary and secondary imagination.) In order to see, one must yield the self in an act of faith; one receives a gift in return. Illumination follows.

Time, particularly our consciousness of the present moment, intrigues Dillard. The present is “an invisible electron,” but when the poet-observer is able to transcend her time-bound position to experience eternity within the present moment and to capture that moment, then it is the scandal of particularity. The creative perception of the poet parallels the scandal of particularity of the Incarnation, but all of us have the potential of perceiving the eternal in our time-bound midst.

The intricacy and fecundity of nature also cause Dillard to meditate about the underlying reality of the universe. In the end she is drawn to a hymn of praise for the creator of this world she loves so much. “And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says ‘Glory,’ and my right foot says ‘Amen’: and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise” (p. 271).

Even as Annie Dillard experiences time and decay in her first book, few doubts enter her mind about the reality of her own glimpse of the sacred at work within nature. In fact, she sees herself as a co-operator with God.

“Hasidism has a tradition that one of man’s purposes is to assist God in the work of redemption by ‘hallowing’ the things of creation. By a tremendous heave of his spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into that rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst. Keeping the subsoil world under trees in mind, in intelligence, is the least I can do” (p. 94).

Holy the Firm depends upon this notion of a holy “subsoil world,” which is only alluded to in this passage from Pilgrim. It may refer implicitly to God as the ground of all being; in any case, “holy the firm” is a metaphor for an insight that enables Dillard to resolve doubts about the reality of her nature experience when an awful accident threatens her joy.

In form, Holy the Firm is a spiritual diary in prose poetry, though its opening is strongly reminiscent of one of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Only three days are covered in this diary, but they are a paradigm of the romantic experience of joy: joy lost and consolation.

The nadir of the book comes as the result of a plane crash that causes the burning of Julie Norwich, a young girl who lives in the vicinity of Dillard’s Puget Sound home. The accident points up the fragility of beauty. Dillard now asks whether there is any metaphysical reality undergirding our world of time and space. In asking this question, she also asks whether her nature experience has been only an illusion. The resolution to this crisis is a mystical one. To Dillard’s question, “But how do we know—that the real is there?” comes first the realization that the love of the real is preferable to the knowledge of the illusory and that all of us must be reminded of what God chooses not to do. Then comes the moment of mystical transformation as the writer walks home after buying the bread and wine for the next communion at her country church.

“Here is a bottle of wine with a label, Christ with a cork. I bear holiness splintered into a vessel, very God of very God, the sempiternal silence personal and brooding, bright on the back of my ribs. I start up the hill.

“The world is changing. The landscape begins to respond as a current upwells” (Holy the Firm, p. 64).

The world becomes translucent. As Dillard looks at the sea, she sees Christ being baptized and the drops of water falling from him take on microcosmic symbolism. “I deepen into a drop and see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds. […] And I am gone” (p. 67). In this statement of the classic mystical loss of self, Dillard experiences the essential spiritual unity of the world. Taking ideas from the esoteric Christian and Jewish traditions, she believes in God’s participation in the world: in a holy firm, or foundation below the salts and earths, marking God’s presence in nature, and in Christ as the link back to a transcendent God.

With its pantheistic overtones, Dillard’s intuitive view of the spiritual unity of the universe makes everything sacred and restores to the artist the exalted task of making the world blaze to the glory of God. The artist becomes a Christ figure.

The thought and experience of Annie Dillard are not unique; they are rooted in the romantic and mystic traditions. She makes, however, a personal restatement of the need to see the world as a poet sees it, and her prose poetry is that of a fine writer. Holy the Firm is unified on the metaphoric scale by a number of images. Taking from the orthodox tradition the practice of salting a child to preserve her for God, Dillard makes Julie Norwich a symbol of that child. A dead moth, immolated in the flame of a candle, becomes linked to the crucified Christ and the sacrificing artist. Dillard reformulates with feminine imagery the romantic view of the artist as God’s visionary. She will be God’s chaste bride, his nun, and she will bear Julie Norwich’s suffering. This vocation is a consuming one; the consolation is God’s love.

“Held, held fast by love in the world like the moth in wax, your life a wick, your head on fire with prayer, held utterly, outside and in, you sleep alone, if you call that alone, you cry God” (p. 76).

PATRICIA WARD

Patricia Ward teaches French and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

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