What are peoples' opinions on her? I'm trying to finish the last 50 pages of Teaching a Stone to Talk in two days and I gotta say, it's killing me. Maybe I'm not an enlightened reader, because literary experts and whatnot love this woman, apparently.
So, my question: has anyone read her work, and if so, what do you think about it?
Oh, Annie Dillard! I and a friend of mine both pull our hair out over her. Her early writing is extraordinary. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is among the most striking books I've ever read. Her voice is vivid and her perceptions sometimes breathtaking. I suggest that anyone interested in either nature writing or creative nonfiction read it immediately and often. Her first memoir is also excellent. But she seems, at least to me, to have gone soft in the head more recently. I don't like her ideas at all. And she's always been weaker when writing about people and their relationships than writing about nature, animals, or her relationship to nature and animals.
I've not read the work you're reading, so I can't comment on that. But I can empathize with the emotion of being vexed by Annie Dillard.
I must confess to having read very little of Annie Dillard's work, so I can't be of much help here. I am curious, though, about this:
I don't like her ideas at all.
What about her ideas don't you like? And what don't you like about them? Do you or find them to be self-contradictory? Difficult to follow? Ideologically offensive? Just a bit dull? I'm guessing it has something to do with her portrayal of people psychologically, given your next sentence, but that still covers a lot of possibilities.
Ah, well, she used to write from a stance that allowed the reader to simply see the world through her eyes. But recently she has been writing in a more moralistic vein that seems to be inflected by her (perhaps new) religious beliefs.
The general consensus in my class is that everyone despises her writing, or at least this particular collection of essays. I'd probably be chuckled at for saying that I do sometimes find the connections she draws with her metaphors to be pretty cool. Sometimes. But at the same time, a lot of it is, to me, fluffy writing that (possibly due to a fault of my own) confuses me.
And yes, oh yes, most of these essays intensely religious. In one of her longer essays about her trip to the Galapagos, she allocates a good portion to a (misinformed) criticism of Darwinism. That section abandons her distinctive prose in favor of a blunt assault on evolution. It all seemed very out of place :(
I think there's a GoogleBook of Teaching a Stone to Talk, Sean. If you wanted to see what we're talking about. Total Eclipse and Sojourner are, in my opinion, the best essays in it.
I find myself disagreeing with most of the comments here. She's certainly not soft in the head; in fact, she values clear-thinking above most other things. Her book For the Time Being points to all the information about the largeness and cruelty in the world that threaten to make our minds spin, but steadfastly looks at it anyway and comes away with important knowledge about how to live. (And for the record, she has been religious from her first book on.)
The writing is the exact opposite of fluffy. She painstakingly works through ideas, using both reason, poetic language, narrative, and images. The ideas can be difficult, but they can also be transformative for the reader.
If others are interested, her most commonly anthologized essays are "Total Eclipse," "An Expedition to the Pole," and "Living Like Weasels."
Lastly, and this is what motivated me to register on this site, I wanted to correct the reading given of "Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos." Dillard is not attacking Darwinism. She feels sorry that fundamentalist Christians "feel they have to make a choice between the Bible and modern science." She does criticize social Darwinists (those who use Darwinian principles to "sanction ruthless and corrupt business practices"). Not only does she not reject evolution, but it informs the way she understands the world, as shown in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, For the Time Being, and the essay under discussion.
I haven't read any of her other work, so I can't judge Dillard's global outlook on this. It seems to me that in Life on the Rocks, Dillard is quite clear in her thoughts on Darwinism, or at least neo-Darwinism, which today is the commonly accepted model of evolution.
"Lack of proof in [the fossil records] doesn't worry scientists. What neo-Darwinism seriously lacks, however, is a description of the actual mechanism of mutation in the chromosomal nucleotides. Neo-Darwinism also lacks, for many, sheer plausibility. The triplet splendors of random mutation, natural selection, and Mendelian inheritance are neither energies nor gods; the words merely describe a gibbering tumult of materials. Many things are unexplained, many discrepancies unaccounted for... So much for scientists.
She also says that a Lamarckist amendment to Darwinism would "solve many problems."
Social Darwinists and fundamentalist Christian backlash, in the following two passages, are considered the negative effects, the "unappealing responses" to this new paradigm of evolution.
And, again, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is among the most striking works of creative nonfiction or nature writing I've ever encountered. Whatever one does or doesn't like about Dillard's more recent turn of mind, that book ought not be skipped. Besides being thought-provoking nature writing, it offers a case example of how careful observations and factual information, expressed in the unique voice of a singular narrator, can add up to fascinating reading even for people who might not be particularly interested in the subject matter.
Dillard takes evolution as a given, a fact of life, as shown by her references to it throughout that essay. She says point-blank of the animals on Galapagos, "Most exist nowhere else on earth. These reptiles and insects, small mammals and birds, evolved unmolested on the various islands on which they were cast into unique species." Of the shearwater fly, she says "it has evolved two nice behaviors which serve to bring into its nest alive." When she flicks off the flies that bite her, she refers to this action as giving their "evolutionary ball an offsides shove."
The paragraph you cited isn't describing her own thoughts, but the inability of Western and Russian scientists to reconcile their thoughts on evolution. That is why she says, "So much for scientists." The "many" for whom neo-Darwinism "lacks [...] sheer plausibility" are the descendants of Lamarck's ideas. They want to "append [...] a very modified neo-Lamarckism to Darwinism [to] solve many problems--and create new ones." She doesn't show herself to be on their side, as she mentions that this view holds ideas for which it lacks any proof.
She does say that "neo-Darwinism seriously lacks [...] a description of the actual mechanism of mutation in the chromosomal nucleotides." The scientists still have work to do, as they always will in every field. But that doesn't mean she doesn't accept that evolution is a basic principle of life.
I've only read "Seeing" by Annie Dillard and I did not like it for one second. She just jumps from topic to topic and it drives me crazy trying to follow what she's trying to say. Also the speaker in her piece, is so focused on see more than what's on the surface that she missed the whole picture. For example, the speaker at one time only focuses on the "green ray" of the sunset and how it's so amazing and extraordinary that she's missing out on the best part of a sunset: the actual enjoyment of it. And by the way "Seeing" is about how people nowadays take vision of granted and are unappreciative of the world around them. It was the most boring piece of literature I have ever read and I literally fell asleep reading it.
