None Abiding.
[In the following review of The Living, Ganz praises Dillard's ability to find meaning in ordinary settings.]
With Annie Dillard's first novel [The Living], a frontier saga of life along the Puget Sound during the latter 19th century, the Pacific Northwest has been given its Willa Cather. Dillard's pioneers, like Cather's, are drawn against a powerful landscape, but instead of the bright, horizontal immensities of Cather's prairies, Dillard sets her characters down in the dark, towering Pacific rain forests, where 200-foot Douglas firs grow as "close as grass" and as "thick as buildings."
Measured against these giant trees, human beings are fragile things, and it seems the burden of Dillard's narrative, right from the start, to make the reader experience this fragility. In the opening scene, Ada Fishburn surveys this "rough edge of the world" to which she and her family have come, and repeats to herself, like a litany: "Our days on earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding." The land has already claimed her three-year-old son, who was crushed under the wheels of their oxen train back on the Oregon Trail, and Ada has wakened to the shock of how quickly life can be erased. It's a shock the reader is wakened to repeatedly during the course of this novel, as these settlers die from "trafficking in superior forces," the women die from "fever and … from having babies," and their children die "as other people did, as a consequence of their bodies' material fragility."
Death throws strong shadows across these pages, but even stronger is the sense of the headlong energy, the clamor, and the din of "the living." Dillard's story covers a period of tumultuous social and ecological change. Farmers wrestle with the forest to "rid the land of this tonnage of tree." Beaches transform into coastal villages and then into bustling seaport towns. The Fraser River gold rush of 1858 and the building of the railroad draw people westward like magnets: scheming prospectors, impoverished Chinese and Irish immigrants—a bouillabaisse of racial and ethnic peoples whose eccentricities and differences haven't yet been melted down.
Most compelling is Dillard's portrayal of the region's Native Americans, the Nooksack, the Lummis, and the Skagits, without whom the settlers "would have starved to death a dozen times." The Lummis regard the settlers sympathetically, as "homeless people … who did not know how to behave"; they especially pity the womenfolk, "whose houses were long journeys apart, who worked alone, got hit, and died young." There are poignant scenes—the Methodist Nooksacks at a funeral singing "Shall We Gather at the River" in their own tongue, and powerful ones—a tent full of Skagit men ministering to a pioneer who has just lost her two children, only a month after also losing her husband. The medicine man moans a soft chant as the others tenderly massage Minta's body, from her forearms down to her toes, to squeeze out the ghosts.
One of the traits that readers of Dillard's previous work have most admired is the energy and attentiveness she brings to the ordinary. Here her gift for "paying attention" to mundane details gives us an imaginary world so richly furnished that it provides the reader with what Henry James called the "illusion of having lived another life." Dillard's narrator is thoroughly acquainted with the processes and paraphernalia of 19th-century frontier life; she knows how to dress bear meat, sew an astrakhan coat, fell a fir tree, and read steamship schedules. From the shape of their barns and petticoats to the shape of their speech, from their thoughts and fears to their droll frontier humor, these characters' lives are rendered with exquisite attention to detail and nuance.
Finally, paying attention emerges in Dillard's tale, not only as literary method, but also as morality. The key event involves Beal Obenchain, an intellectual hermit who lives in a cedar stump and performs calculated experiments in cruelty to assuage his loathing of life. After grotesquely murdering a Chinese laborer, he decides that murder is less rewarding than threatening death and then watching a man's gradual unraveling; in this way he possesses not merely a carcass, but his victim's very soul. For this torment he randomly chooses Ada Fishburn's eldest son, Clare, who has grown from a rambunctious boy into an upstanding citizen, given to pretension and self-importance.
Unexpectedly, Clare's forced confrontation with the certainty of death, far from shriveling his soul, instead rescues him from his shallow preoccupations. Looking at the world "as if for the last time" enables him to see it truly for the first time. His petty self-importance gives way to a realization of the solidarity of "all the living breasting into the crest of the present together … opening time like a path in the grass." Ironically, Beal Obenchain's threat initiates Clare into the wisdom of "memento mori," the paying attention to death that overcomes our resistance to life. At the same time, "memento mori" provides the clue to how it is that Dillard's novel, so strongly shadowed by death is, even more powerfully, a rousing celebration of "the living."
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
Beneath the Wheels of Progress
'Choosing the Given with a Fierce and Pointed Will': Annie Dillard and Risk-Taking in Contemporary Literature