123 - The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard

The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard
By Sandra Humble Johnson
Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1992. 214 pp. $28.00.

The Bible tells us that no one has seen God at any time. Contemporary philosophers go the Bible one better and tell us that no one has ever proved God at any time. They inform us that our words, it matters little how intelligently or devoutly arranged, have no referential use to the transcendent. Our "language games" have no more meaning in relation to truth or God or the world than the games of Monopoly and pinochle.

George Steiner has countered in a brilliant riposte that all words are evidence of transcendence (Real Presences, 1989). They may not prove God to the satisfaction of the language philosophers, but they witness to God in the very act of utterance. "There is language, there is art, because there is 'the other.' " Shrugging off the obfuscations and denials of the learned, writers and artists and composers go on their merry way writing stories, painting pictures, and composing scores that stop us in our tracks exclaiming, "God!" At root, all aesthetics is theology.

Among American writers, Annie Dillard is one of our preeminent witnesses. For nearly twenty years, she has been setting down words on blank pages of paper that wake us up to what is other than us, waking us to the huge but smudged-over realities of life and death, to the holiness of Blake's "minute particulars," to God.

Sandra Humble Johnson shows how she does it. Johnson designates Dillard an "epiphanist" and uses the theological term "epiphany" to locate the core of what is distinctive in her writing. In order to give the word its full weight, she sets Dillard in the lineage of William Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins, passionate romantics who understood their writing as a vocation of spirit. But the lineage, while it provides a necessary context for understanding Annie Dillard, does not account for her-there is something distinctively 20th century and American here. "Language theory, ecology, art, literary criticism, religion, and history, among other matters, are brilliantly woven into a soft, mystically intriguing collage, which, in one sense, defies genre definition, but in a more important sense announces the emergence of a new genre that uses illumination at its core."

The literary analysis is carried out in the spirit of the material itself, thorough and detailed, but always with a light touch, a welcoming

124 - The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard

gesture. Subtitles to the chapters chart the course: the Appearance of Epiphany, the Need for Epiphany, the Shape of Epiphanic Time, Surfaces and Directions in Epiphanic Time, Epiphanic Landscapes, Epiphany On and Off the Page. Epiphany is exactly the right word; it emerges out of Annie Dillard's writing, is not imposed upon it. There is nothing ponderous or heavy-handed here. "Epiphany," after all, is not a butterfly one can pin to a mounting board.

For those of us who are involved vocationally in dealing with words that reveal the transcendent rather than provide information on the state of the world, interest quickens as Johnson draws the lines of her exposition together and directs our attention to what she calls "the space between." For epiphany can never be approached directly. "No one has seen God at any time." Or proved. The transcendent is always apprehended on the slant. Words do not in themselves create the epiphanic moment, they clear space for it. Intuition and mystery are cultivated, not explained. "The heart of epiphany can only be observed obliquely, as it glances off the bordering objects of the moment." When words are used in this way, the reader becomes an active participant in the act, for the text itself never quite equals the epiphany-in the " space between," in the holes and discontinuities deliberately and skillfully provided by the writer, the transcendent breaks through to the prepared and participating spirit of the reader.

But the epiphany cannot be manipulated or forced. Coleridge, echoing Augustine and Boehme, wrote, "I warn all Inquirers into this hard point to wait- not only not to plunge forward before the Word is given to them, but not even to paw the ground with impatience. For in a deep stillness only can this truth be apprehended."

There is always more than meets the eye (or ear). Eternity penetrates the temporal; the transcendent is revealed in the ordinary. Johnson via Dillard convinces. Her careful and detailed demonstration of how Annie Dillard uses words to bring us to the epiphanic moment, is at the same time an invitation to cultivate a certain mystic reticence before words. Since we live in a time when journalistic gossip takes over pulpit and lectern with distressing frequency, pastors and professors especially need books like this.

Eugene H. Peterson
Regent College
Vancouver, BC