Annie Dillard

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Annie Dillard American Literature Analysis

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Dillard is much more than the voice of her most popular book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In fact, those readers and critics who view her as an untutored Appalachian local who both rhapsodizes about and is horrified by the natural world of rural Virginia greatly misjudge their subject. That Dillard can make her readers share in such small and private activities as seeking out praying mantis egg cases or sitting quietly trying not to scare a muskrat attests to both her powers of observation and her skill at descriptive narration. All of Dillard’s writing displays this almost photographic evocation of place, a skill that has prompted critics to label her a naturalist. Dillard does not agree; for her, the natural world provides the only avenue by which to contemplate the ultimate, the absolute, the divine. Nature provides metaphors that describe human agonies and activities; nature, for Dillard, is the only place where she can catch glimpses of an otherwise silent and invisible God.

Surprisingly to some people, Dillard does not think of herself as an environmentalist or as a champion of wilderness preservation; rather, she sees herself as someone for whom the world is her greatest subject because it allows her to consider those questions she sees as being most vital. Because she believes that it is a writer’s goal to bring enlightenment, give clarification, search out answers, and provide inspiration, her writing probes the nature of being and the meaning of meaning. She looks to nature—to the concrete world—for examples of courage and inspiration, and sometimes her search is a painful one, for wherever she turns she confronts the hard realities of living in an eat-or-be-eaten world, a place where things are born only to die and where destruction seems to be waiting around the next corner.

The mystery that infuses the natural world does not provide Dillard with easy answers to a core question such as “Why am I here?” In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for example, she looks at the prolific activity of the insect world and comes away frightened by the ravenous and destructive appetites that even seem to compel females laying eggs to devour their offspring. What should be one of the most powerful images of hope—birth and the perpetuation of life—becomes an image of destruction. The explanation she offers suggests that what Dillard hopes for is not affirmation through explicit religious salvation but acceptance of the great dance of birth, death, and renewal that surrounds and includes every living being on earth. From that acknowledgment comes tranquillity, for Dillard can see herself as a part of, rather than apart from, the teeming activity that surrounds her at Tinker Creek.

The search for the answers, the quest to bring meaning to day-to-day events underpins all that Dillard writes. In Holy the Firm (1977) she again looks at pain, suffering, death, and chaos. She wants to find a reason for human suffering, and again her answer is to affirm that there does, indeed, exist a tie between living beings and God, but a tie that is not always immediately obvious in the daily round of accident, pain, and irrationality. In both Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm, Dillard perhaps raises more questions than she answers, or at least so it seems to those critics who want her to tie up all the loose ends satisfactorily. However, loose ends are precisely what interest Dillard; the world as she sees it offers even the most practiced observer more loose ends than easy answers.

In Teaching a Stone to Talk , although Dillard ranges...

(This entire section contains 4833 words.)

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further afield than her immediate “backyard” and presents essays not only about the goings-on near Tinker Creek but also about the creatures of the Galápagos Islands and the Arctic Circle, her intention remains the same: witnessing nature. For Dillard, this witnessing is a religious act; in everything she sees and experiences, she seeks answers to primal questions. In this sense, one could say that Dillard’s work reveals the nature of the writer intensely, yet she insists that she never writes about herself, that she works painstakingly to keep her personality out of what she has to show her readers.

Dillard brings her precision and sense of detail to An American Childhood, a book that explores her growing up in Pittsburgh. In her earlier work, the person of Dillard remained behind the scenes; the reader saw what she saw, heard what she heard, and reacted. The personality of the narrator was somehow distanced, muted. In contrast, in An American Childhood, although Dillard insists that she is not revealed, this book offers a much more intimate view of Annie Dillard than any of her previous volumes. Most important, An American Childhood allows readers insight into the careful observer and deep thinker that is the “voice” of all that Dillard writes.

One important side of her personality that surfaces in An American Childhood is something that was also apparent in her earlier work: a voracious intellectual curiosity. Concrete knowledge serves as her catalyst, allowing her to spring from mere facts to a consideration of their metaphysical implications.

In Holy the Firm, for example, she describes a plane accident in which a young girl is horribly disfigured, and the girl’s burns then serve as the vehicle by which Dillard explores the meaning of pain and, by extension, the nature of a divinity that could allow such horrors to occur.

In The Writing Life (1989), Dillard examines the profession of writing: how one writes, what it means to write, why one writes. With her usual intimacy—but typical lack of concrete personal details—she discusses the solitary struggle that writing is. As in all of her earlier work, Dillard concerns herself with knowing, meaning, and interconnectedness. For her, the world is both the palette and the canvas: She draws her materials from her surroundings, and she colors her surroundings with the philosophical considerations that are her preoccupation. Like Henry David Thoreau, whose heir Dillard has been called, she travels far and rarely leaves home. Her universe starts in her study or at her back door and extends from there to the farthest corner of the universe . . . and beyond.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

First published: 1974

Type of work: Essays

The beauties and horrors of the natural world offer the careful observer access to the divine.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Dillard touches on all the important themes that would continue to inform her writing. At first glance, this book might appear to be a collection of occasional essays that track the changing seasons through one calendar year. In fact, that is how some critics have viewed this work: as essays on the perplexities of nature. While the book does take up this theme again and again, it is not for the simple pleasure of holding up a quirk of nature for its thrill value.

Dillard carefully built this volume after months of painstaking observation of and research about both metaphysics and the natural world. The rhythms of the book are tightly controlled and depend on recurrent images and themes that surface over and over, allowing Dillard to focus on the key issues at the heart of the narrator’s personal journey. As much as anything, this book is about seeing and about gaining the ability to see within oneself, into the surrounding world, and beyond to the divinity that informs the world.

The book opens with a startling image of violence, creation, and death in a description of the bloody paw prints left on the narrator by her returning tomcat. The world Dillard sees as she looks out from her cabin beside Tinker Creek in Virginia is one in which little seems to make obvious sense. Wherever Dillard turns, she sees the raw, brutal power of nature to reproduce itself, and she finds the sheer exuberance of the natural world startling, overwhelming, and stupefying. She cannot look at an insect laying its eggs, for example, without being reminded of all the instances in the insect kingdom where the mother devours its mate, its eggs, or its young—or is food for them in return for giving them life.

What is the point, Dillard asks, in bothering to replicate oneself only to serve as grist for the mill, food for the soon-to-be-born? In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard questions a god that would set such a horror show in motion, and she wonders how one can go on in the face of such depressing statistics: No matter what, everyone must die.

Yet Dillard wants to find an answer that will allow her to celebrate rather than be repulsed by what she sees. Rather than being only a collection of essays about her observations of the natural world, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek traces the author’s abundance and vitality. By looking carefully at the world around her confined neighborhood of Tinker Creek, Dillard discovers a pattern and gains some conviction that there is something more going on than a mad dance of death. She learns to see beyond the particular individual, past the moment, to a larger picture.

While some readers will find her answers depressing, others will discover that Dillard achieves an acceptance of what she sees around her. Unlike many others, who look on the violence of nature and see no possibility for a divine plan, Dillard comes to believe that the endless cycle—birth, death, and transformation into atoms of other beings—is in itself a way of gaining transcendence over death and achieving immortality.

Certain central natural images, such as her cat’s bloody paw prints, surface again and again after Dillard has once told their story. For example, she stands transfixed beside the creek, at first seeing the water and a frog that appears to collapse into itself as she looks on. Then her eyes shift focus, and she sees the giant waterbug that has just finished draining its captured frog. This picture of the malign side of nature hovering immediately below an apparently tranquil and innocent surface is one which Dillard will revisit time and time again. Dillard sees the death’s head behind the living form many times; she confronts nature’s seeming blind preference for the species over the individual. She sees things up close and notices the ragged wings, the frayed leaves, the living things being ground to dust. A more timid person would have given up and perhaps turned suicidal. Dillard, however, continued to look for answers, realizing that there is more to nature than the surface turmoil and violence.

In one chapter, Dillard recounts the story of a young woman who was born without sight. When surgery allows the woman to see for the first time as a young adult, she at first cannot see anything, then she begins to see but cannot comprehend or distinguish one image from another, then she sees in distorted fashion because she has yet to gain the experience by which to interpret what her eyes show her. Thus, when the young woman is asked to describe the tree outside her hospital room that so fascinates her, she talks about a tree with lights in it. To her untutored, inexperienced eyes, the focal point is the spaces between the tree’s leaves backlit by the sun. The young woman sees the world from a fresh perspective, one denied most of us who have been “taught” how to “see”—to focus on what is deemed “important.” This story serves as a central parable in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and is an image to which Dillard returns many times in the book, serving as her metaphor for that which she seeks in her journey through the natural world. She is looking for the divine power behind the everyday; its discovery is something that she comes to realize happens infrequently at best, but it does happen. When Dillard least expects it, the force behind the universe shines out and nearly blinds her.

In a sense, Dillard had to suffer through the deep, pessimistic despair she describes in many chapters of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek so that she could emerge with the understanding she attains by the book’s final chapter, “The Waters of Separation.” Like many mystics before her, Dillard had to despair of ever finding God before she could apprehend the presence of the divine. By showing her readers the power, might, and violence of the world of Tinker Creek, she takes them along with her on her quest to make sense of a seemingly senseless world. She gains freedom or salvation by recognizing that she is a part of the great dance of birth and death that she has so carefully recorded.

Holy the Firm

First published: 1977

Type of work: Nonfiction

This work suggests that pain is a necessary part of living and does not negate the existence of the divine.

In Holy the Firm Dillard explores the metaphysical and religious concerns that inform her first two books, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In this book, Dillard looks more closely at the problem of pain: How can one reconcile the existence of pain, suffering, and death with a belief in a benevolent God? Set near Puget Sound, Washington, where Dillard lived while writing it, the book is short, spanning only three days. In the first of its three sections, “Newborn and Salted,” Dillard describes a moth being attracted to the flame of a candle and burned to death. The moth’s death is an image to which she often returns in her discussion of the nature of the divinity.

The second section, “God’s Tooth,” is concerned with Julie Norwich, a seven-year-old child who, with her father, survives the crash of his small plane. Unlike her father, however, the child is horribly burned, and her face is destroyed. Asking if God were responsible for this tragedy, Dillard concludes that God cannot be present in a world where an innocent child is mutilated for no reason. “Holy the Firm,” the book’s third and final section, attempts to find a place for a merciful God in a violent world. The solution Dillard achieves is that God owes humankind no explanations. Because God created humans and not vice versa, God is not required to answer to them. Dillard also concludes that the control that people cherish so dearly is only an illusion, that humans are only passengers on earth, along for the ride rather than behind the steering wheel, and on a journey whose destination they cannot know.

For Dillard, accepting or affirming that God is the foundation for all things allows her to believe again in the unity of all things, even when some things—such as the disfigurement of a child—seem unjust. Acceptance of the ineffable nature of God enables Dillard to reaffirm her desire to proclaim the mysteries of the universe through her art and her life, thereby reaffirming the essentially divine nature of creation.

Many people see Holy the Firm as a powerful visionary statement, a testament to the triumph of faith in a seemingly irrational universe. Dillard does not find the role of prophet a comfortable one and denies that her intention was anything other than to describe her personal visionary experience. As in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Teaching a Stone to Talk, Dillard again struggles to work through her dark night of the soul, her bleakest despair. Like other mystics, she must find a way to come to terms with those things that challenge her belief in a divine purpose for the world.

In Holy the Firm, Dillard reaches an understanding of God’s relationship to her world and the natural world that she observes around her. She seems able to resolve the contradictions by something that esoteric Christianity calls “Holy the Firm,” a universal substance that keeps the human world in touch with God—a god who remains present but invisible and unknowable. This is enough to allow Dillard to believe that God exists and for her to worship him.

Teaching a Stone to Talk

First published: 1982

Type of work: Essays

By observing nature, both close to home and in remote places, one can discover the presence of the divine.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters resembles both Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm in that Dillard is still seeking answers to what she considers to be key questions: What is the universe about? What is the god like who created such a place as this? How is it possible to make sense of a universe that contains so much destructive energy and violence? In this book she again hunts for the silent god who created the natural world that Dillard often finds disturbingly violent and indifferent. This time, rather than center her investigations around one locale, as she did in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she ranges far afield. Dillard is adamant that her other books are not, as some critics and reviewers have asserted, collections of essays; as far as she is concerned, only Teaching a Stone to Talk fits that description.

A trip to the Galápagos Islands provides her with the opportunity to examine evolutionary theory in her essay “Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos.” In “The Deer of Providencia,” she describes a small deer caught and suffering in a hunter’s snare, unable to do anything but injure itself more severely as it struggles. “Total Eclipse” recounts her experiences in Yakima, Washington, during a total eclipse of the sun when she felt overwhelmed by the power of nature as the moon’s shadow slammed across the earth. She shared the primal fear that the sun’s light would be extinguished forever. “Living Like Weasels” discusses the fierce competitive energy of these hunters, and Dillard wonders if, freed from the constraints of society, she could fight as viciously for her survival as they do every day.

As in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard uses the things that surround her as starting points in her search for meaning in a violent, indifferent universe. Unlike in the earlier book, however, she occasionally interacts with other people. Here she tries to fit in, to feel comfortable in a world that seems to threaten from all sides and at all times. Sometimes the world looks like home, while at others it appears completely unfamiliar and aloof.

In “An Expedition to the Pole” she interweaves a description of the Catholic church that she attends (after having given up her family’s Presbyterianism when a teenager), an account of the ill-fated Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, and her own trip to the Arctic Circle. In all three instances she finds herself in alien territory, yet at the essay’s conclusion she joins in the song, frantically: What choice does she have but to become a part of the only congregation, the community of humankind?

Although Dillard says that Teaching a Stone to Talk is a true book of essays rather than a tightly knit series of pieces, the pieces in this book wrestle with what for Dillard are central issues. The title essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” clearly makes this point, recounting the story of a man who kept a stone and each day tried to get it to utter a word. Absurd as this sounds at first, it is precisely what Dillard tries to do in almost everything she writes: get an answer back from the universe. She listens and listens to nature, hoping to hear the voice of the creator; sometimes, as in “An Expedition to the Pole,” “Lenses,” “A Field of Silence,” and “Life on the Rocks: The Galápagos,” she seems to detect a faint whisper in response to her questions, “Are You out there?”

An American Childhood

First published: 1987

Type of work: Autobiography

Childhood experiences shape and prepare a person to be and to see as an adult.

In An American Childhood Dillard uses herself and her experiences growing up in Pittsburgh to examine the nature of American life. She claims that the book is not an autobiography but is rather a capturing of what it means for a child to come of age in the United States. Dillard seems to be uncomfortable with revealing information about herself; despite the fact that An American Childhood is intensely autobiographical, she denies that her purpose was to compose a memoir. Nevertheless, it is her account of her inward intellectual journey, offering incidents in her life through her mid-teenage years, the time Dillard says that the consciousness that directs her perceptions of the world as an adult was formed. She believes that it is as a child that one is truly alive, can feel most deeply, and is affected most strongly by experiences.

Perhaps Dillard feels compelled to attempt to escape the merely personal because she intends, as she says, to make a commentary on the universal nature of her experiences. Perhaps she also so strongly asserts the separation between her personal life and the life that she presents in this book because she is a genuinely private person. It is rare that Dillard gives interviews, does readings or lectures, or provides information about herself. She repeatedly insists that the personality of the writer is not what is important; rather, it is the ideas an individual conveys about the meaning of life, nature, and meaning that count and are what both readers and writers should pursue. She does not like the limelight because it takes away from the time she needs to read, reflect, and write. An American Childhood, then, offers readers a rare glimpse of the private side of Annie Dillard.

Her intention was to use herself as an example so that she could examine the way in which a child comes to consciousness—that is, arrives at the perceptions and attitudes that will guide her as an adult. She is by no means the first writer, American or otherwise, to attempt such an undertaking: Marcel Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu (1913-1927; Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and William Wordsworth’s The Prelude: Or, The Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850) are three oft-cited examples of this mode. An American Childhood is particularly reminiscent of Wordsworth’s famous spiritual epic. Like Wordsworth, who is regarded as one of the most important poets of nature, Dillard provides her readers with accounts of those childhood events that caused her to have such a passionate regard for and interest in the natural world. Also like Wordsworth is Dillard’s intense focus on the spiritual, mystical, and violent aspects of the natural world and her need to fit herself and, by extension, all of life into a meaningful pattern that makes sense of the seemingly senseless aspects of the natural realm.

Like Wordsworth, Dillard was a youthful rebel, always out of place in her upper-class environment. In An American Childhood, she explores the values that she could not adopt, the goals that she did not share, and the manners that she would not practice in order to examine the alternatives she ultimately chose.

Wordsworth was a child who needed solace; nature in all of its terrible majesty gave him the comfort that he could not find in other people. Dillard, too, needed an escape from her fears; for her, knowledge—in particular, knowledge about the natural world—gave her the power to triumph over her fears.

An American Childhood also provides readers with glimpses of Dillard’s family that tell more about Dillard than about her parents and siblings. It is not so important that these events be true as it is that she thinks that her interpretations of them are accurate. We see a loving family that does not quite know what to do with a daughter who rejects their Presbyterian religion, craves and seeks out solitude, is wild and unruly at school. The reader sees the psychic place in which Dillard grew up, and that view, no matter what she says to the contrary, offers readers a closer look at her as a person than did her earlier works. Even so, the book still maintains a distance between the reader and the person of Dillard.

The Living

First published: 1992

Type of work: Novel

The difficult early years of the Pacific Northwest town of Bellingham are chronicled in the account of the various people who were drawn to settle there.

In The Living—a book that took her three years to research and write—Dillard creates a tapestry of the American Frontier but set in an area not generally portrayed in novels: the Pacific Northwest. In her only novel to date, Dillard chronicles the lives of the people who settled at Whatcom on Bellingham Bay and built the town of Bellingham in what would later become the state of Washington. The book’s setting is one with which Dillard became personally acquainted while artist-in-residence at Western Washington State University in Bellingham.

The people in this novel are pioneers of the first order who struggle against so many difficulties that it seems unlikely that they should succeed. However, these people persist, even in the face of great odds. Moreover, because Dillard wished to create a novel in the spirit of nineteenth century novels, The Living is a “big” book, full of violence and murder, offering many plot threads and spanning several generations in its telling.

Besides being a departure from her usual forms in that it is a novel, The Living also marks a change in Dillard’s focus, from one sighted mostly on a solitary person to that which takes in multitudes. She accomplishes this breadth of perspective by creating four interconnected groups which each include various types of people: white, Chinese, and Lummi and Skagit Native Americans; rich and poor; hardworking and conniving; good and evil. In this manner the perspective of Dillard’s writing vision expands outward in a way different from her previous work; yet the result is the same: to explore people’s place in a vast and oftentimes unwelcoming or at least seemingly indifferent universe. In fact, Dillard makes a point of noting that she chose to make this shift to include others, to get away from the self-absorption of her earlier writing and concentrate on many people rather selecting just one person as her main focus. In that regard, The Living provided Dillard with a large and complicated cast of characters to move among. Dillard said that in writing this book she “wanted to write about little-bitty people in a great big landscape.” For the same reason, characters “come and go” throughout the novel, appearing and disappearing from the story as individuals would in real life. To achieve the verisimilitude she sought, Dillard immersed herself in research, reading extensively in the literature of the period so that she could replicate the language and spirit of the time.

The Living opens in 1855 when the young married couple Ada and Rooney Fishburn move West by covered wagon, embodying the struggle facing pioneers leaving home seeking a “better” life. This novel accurately and brutally portrays what the people making this journey experienced on the way and found once they arrived at their destination, thousands of miles from home and family. The times are never easy for the people of Bellingham; it is a cruel world in which there can seem to be no rational reason for the bad things that happen, as in the case of the actions of the dark, twisted Beal Obenchain or the violent Thompson family: they just “are”—as so many “evil” things in the world just “are,” as Dillard has so carefully described in earlier works such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Many other characters exemplify persistence, sometimes even courage: Minta Honer, a former socialite, or the stalwart pioneer, Clare Fishburn. At the same time that these “settlers” are learning to survive and sometimes thrive, the Native Americans such as the Lummis watch as their culture is superseded by one built on the lust for gold and land and carried into their country by the newly arrived railroad.

This novel is not meant to focus on one character, or even on one generation, but it is meant to tell the story of the birth and growth of a place, Bellingham. The novel concludes with the grandchildren of Ada and Rooney at the time of the 1897 stock market crash; in the forty-two years between the time Ada and Rooney left the East and the 1897 economic disaster, Dillard brought a large number of characters momentarily to the forefront and then moved on to new arrivals; although this large cast of characters prevents maintaining a focus on any one family or person’s individual story, it captures the period’s turbulence and energy, a time when so many easterners and Europeans were coming west to start anew.

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Annie Dillard Long Fiction Analysis

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