Free An Annie Dillard Reader by Annie Dillard Page A

am thinking here of the prose of Flaubert, Chekhov, Turgenev, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Wright Morris, Henry Green, and Borges.
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    This prose is, above all, clean. It is sparing in its use of adjectives and adverbs; it avoids relative clauses and fancy punctuation; it forswears exotic lexicons and attention-getting verbs; it eschews splendid metaphors and cultured allusions. Instead it follows the dictum of William Carlos Williams: “no ideas but in things.”
    Plain writing is by no means easy writing. The mot juste is an intellectual achievement. There is nothing relaxed about the pace of this prose; it is as restricted and taut as the pace of lyric poetry. The short sentences of plain prose have a good deal of blank space around them, as lines of lyric poetry do, and even as the abrupt utterances of Beckett characters do. They erupt against a backdrop of silence. These sentences are—in an extreme form of plain writing—objects themselves, objects that invite inspection and flaunt their simplicity. One could even, if one were cynical, accuse such plain sentences of the snobberyof Bauhaus design, or of high-tech furnishings, or of the unobtrusive dress suit: one could accuse them of ostentation. But I anticipate a theoretical flaw I have never encountered in fact. As it is actually used, this prose has one supreme function, which is not to call attention to itself, but to refer to the world.
    This prose is not an end in itself but a means. It is, then, a useful prose. Each writer of course uses it in a different way. Borges uses it straightforwardly, and as invisibly as he can, to think, to handle bare ideas with control: “Hume denied the existence of an absolute space, in which each thing has its place; I deny the existence of one single time, in which all events are linked.” Robbe-Grillet uses it coldly and dryly, to alienate, to describe, and to lend his descriptions the illusion of scientific accuracy. His prose is a perceptual tool: “…the square in the far left-hand corner of the table corresponds to the base of a copper lamp now standing at the right-hand corner: a square base about an inch high…” Hemingway uses it as a ten-foot pole, to distance himself from events; he also uses it as chopsticks, to handle strong emotions without, in theory, becoming sticky: “On the other hand his father had the finest pair of eyes he had ever seen and Nick had loved him very much and for a long time.” (This flatness may be ludicrous. Hemingway once wrote, and discarded, the sentence, “Paris is a nice town.”)
    Writers like Flaubert, Chekhov, Turgenev, Cather, and Knut Hamsun use this prose for many purposes: not only to control emotion, but also to build an imaginative world whose parts seem solidly actual and lighted, and to name the multiple aspects of experience one by one, with distance, and also with tenderness and respect. Wright Morris is a careful writer of unadorned prose. He wrote, “The father talks to his son. The son listens and watches his father eat soup.”
    This prose is craftsmanlike. It possesses beauty and power without syntactical complexity. Because of its simplicity, writers use this prose to handle children, as Joy Williams does often in her stories in Taking Care . These children see the lives around them with mocking irony. Philosophically, they stick to facts, as though they believed that where we cannot be certain, weshould be silent. The effect is deadpan: “There is Jane and there is Jackson and there is David. There is the dog.”
    Many Western writers (like Jim Harrison), many if not most Scandinavian writers (like Knut Hamsun, Pär Lagerkvist, and F. E. Sillanpää), and other writers of scenes rural (like Flannery O’Connor in the South and John Berger in France) use plain prose to handle characters who do not belong in a drawing room, but are not merely picturesque rustics like