Holy The Firm by Annie Dillard (review)

274 Western American Literature Holy The Firm. By Annie Dillard. (New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 76 pages, $6.50.) Although set on an island in Puget Sound, Annie Dillard’s Holy The Firm has an inward rather than outward focus. By studying “hard things— rock mountain and sea salt . . . to temper [her] spirit on their edges” (p. 19), Ms. Dillard intensely explores enigmatic questions about the mythic, mystical and mysterious nature of existence. Her explanation of the means by which the artist can answer such questions transforms a western paradise into a philosophical purgatory. Ms. Dillard structures Holy The Firm as a world of symbols in three parts. “Newborn and Salted” (Part I) illustrates an awakening into an environment where “days are gods.” This pantheistic paradise is pierced with “God’s Tooth” (Part II) when a plane falls into the firs and pain is felt by the uninitiated. A child named Julie becomes the victim of senseless suffering and a vehicle for poignant sacrifice. Thus, “Holy The Firm” (Part III) attempts to bridge the gap between a desire for meaning and the knowledge of meaninglessness by turning creative service into metaphor. Consequently, Holy The Firm becomes an act of spiritual flagellation. The narrator seems frustrated by feelings about the inability of lan­ guage to capture fully her subjective reality. Using overly thoughtful and tough language, she attempts to verbalize reactions to an apparently unlim­ ited but yet deterministically circumscribed world. To state directly that “nothing will happen in this book . . . there is only a little violence in the language” (p. 24) is extreme literary self-consciousness. The use of allusions and the exploitation of semantic possibilities in language approaches heavyhandedness . The extravagant enthusiasm of a voice which sees the world as an “illuminated manuscript” sounds pretentious and loquacious. And the underlying sense of lost innocence appears too pervasive, vocal, and hysteri­ cal. However, the haunting beauty of a moth suspended in candle flame, the grotesque violence of a 7-year-old child’s burnt face, and the magical simplicity of a cat carrying an homunculus in its wren-drenched mouth are images which bum into the eidetic memory without being strained or self indulgent. When such images are seen paradigmatically, the actual and the imaginary combine to intensify a sense of wonder, guilt and urgency. Thus, there is a brutal honesty in the idea that “if days are gods, then gods are dead, and artists [are] pyrotechnic fools.” By raising questions concerning reality, faith, and art, Ms. Dillard’s personalized and intricate study is a protean reflection of her role as an artist. Ultimately, Holy The Firm sits atop the philosopher’s stone on the island of Samos. In this situation the view is always the same and the author remains cloistered by her own efforts. BOBBIE BURCH LEMONTT, University of Tennessee ...