One of the aspects of Annie Dillard’s career writing books of essays that always comes up in reviews, criticism and studies is the difficulty of categorization. She puts a lot of herself into the essays so are they autobiographical memoirs or pure non-fiction studies of topics? Even in essays devoted to narrow and singularly contained subjects, Dillard is likely to interject philosophical digressions, so now one must consider the validity of the autobiography argument. And, of course, there is the curious case of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which reads like a Thoreau-esqe account of a writer going into the woods for a year spent in isolation with only rare occasions of interaction with other humans when, in fact, Dillard spent much of that year living as she did at any other point of her life. She has never tried to claim that the narrator of the essays which comprise that coherent work of non-fiction is intended to be interpreted as a true story of her own life. So what the reader is left with is a work of non-fiction constructed as though it were a work of fiction. So what’s the deal with Dillard, anyway?
The 1960’s and 1970’s challenged the prevailing ideological foundation of reportorial non-fiction. The “New Journalism” made it acceptable for writers to inject themselves into the true stories they wrote in a way that hadn’t been fashionable since the 1800’s. And while the essays that Dillard writes were never intended to be considered “journalism” in the sense of a newspaper or magazine, they are journals of traditional sense of the word. Dillard composes her essays as if she were recording a journal or diary. The writing is personalized to suit whatever fancies her intention at the moment. Sometimes it is loose and conversational to the point of being made suitable for a middle school English class. At other times, it becomes deeply metaphorical, abstruse and too complicated for even some college classes.
Dillard also presents problems for the traditionalist with her active use of dialogue. When one thinks of essay writing, the concept of a dialogue between characters is not typically one of the elements of writing that first comes to mind. Dillard’s essays are not chock full of conversation, but are rather examples of strategic use of a technique more commonly associated with fiction. This goes hand-in-hand with another tactic that is engaged so often as to become central to her overall writing strategy. Dillard eschews the common engagement of the essay form as opinion pieces in favor of a narrative approach. She writes stories with her essays. These are not necessarily linear stories that begin at Point A and take the reader across hill and dale until they finally arrive at Point D. They are stories about things specific things, however: a solar eclipse, being raised by parents to understand why a joke is funny, a man who tries every day to get a stone to communicate, a trip to Disneyland, the history of polar explorations. The result, however, is not merely a story, not simply a tale told for the sake of being told. The story is most often—not always, but usually—the foundation upon which she construct…whatever she wants. When it comes to the art of writing the essay, what Dillard does is probably best explained by Dillard herself. Not coincidentally, that explanation can be found in her introductory essay to a collection of the best American essays of 1988:
“The essayist does what we do with our lives; the essayist thinks about actual things. He can make sense of them analytically or artistically. In either case he renders the real world coherent and meaningful, even if only bits of it, and even if that coherence and meaning reside only inside small texts.”
