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In an interview with Philip Yancey in 1978, Annie Dillard described her primary audience as "the skeptic, the agnostic, not the Christian." And one of her major tasks as "Just getting the agnostic to acknowledge the supernatural." Dillard elsewhere suggests that getting anyone to acknowledge the supernatural is a problem in a world in which materialism holds sway.

Enlightenment science and institutionalized religion together have "de-spookified" nature and experience (Living by Fiction 136):

She suspects that even believers have been partly blinded to this realm: "On the whole," she says, "I do not find Christians–outside of the catacombs–sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?" ("An Expedition to the Pole" 40).

In this desacralized world, Dillard is an explorer of the ontological frontiers, of the fringes of the "real" world–that is, what is conventionally accepted as "real." In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, we see her poking around her valley and her life, looking for the cracks where meaning grows, where the divine breaks through surprisingly, if you happen to be watching. In Holy the Firm, she writes three days’ events in search of the "gods" of those days. In her novel, The Living, she sends some hearty characters to the western edge of the continent, to the extreme edge of American civilization in the second half of the 19th century, to the raw edge of life itself, to see what happens when they notice these "conditions."

And in her long essay, "An Expedition to the Pole," Dillard juxtaposes her own spiritual explorations with reflections on the history of polar exploration. It is on this masterpiece in Dillard’s sole collection of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk, that I will focus today. Both the quests described in this piece–spiritual and polar–involve venturing beyond the known into uncharted, sublime realms in search of inferred points. Polar explorers sought first the poles; then, after those had been reached, they invented the Poles of Relative Inaccessibility: on the Arctic Ocean, the imaginary point farthest from land in any direction; and in Antarctica, the point farthest from salt water. Dillard describes her spiritual goal as "the pole of relative inaccessibility located in metaphysics, the point of spirit farthest from every accessible point of spirit in all directions" (Expedition 18-19). "It is for this Pole," she says, "that I am searching, and have been searching, in the mountains and along the seacoasts for years" (Expedition 44)

Dillard jokes in "An Expedition to the Pole" that judging by firsthand accounts of men like Robert Scott and Edward Parry, polar explorers might have been chosen

It is no joke, though, that her own observational and expressive skills have conscripted her as explorer. Her ability to wrap a mysterious light around objects described in the most straightforward prose; her syncopations of everyday speech against the cadences of the King James; her willingness to endure and report the creative agonies of drawing out the possibilities of meaning–all these characteristics adapt her for this role. Her works, then, are her dispatches from the ontological or metaphysical frontiers. So she reports near the end of "An Expedition" that although "Our attention is elsewhere now, the light-soaked land still exists: I have seen it." And she’s going to tell us about it. Not content merely to report on "conditions" in this ontological hinterland, Dillard writes to make this land real to her readers. To convey the experience, the reality, of this difficult quest in "An Expedition," she artfully distorts the very genre of the essay to fit the lay of this unknown land … to fit her readers to the land. That is, to follow her in this piece, we must cross into these ontological frontiers.

A genre is more than a set of conventions about literary form and content. Encoded in every genre is a different way of viewing the world, a different set of expectations about the nature of truth, reality, being. That is, genres are ontologies, definitions of what is expected and accepted as real in the world evoked by a narrative text. Nonfictional genres also cue expectations. The essay–while notoriously hard to define–can nevertheless be expected to include some combination of personal narration, historical or scientific fact, reflection upon actual literary texts, observation of nature or society, and extended meditation in general. The proviso is, as Dillard herself puts it, that "the elements of nonfiction should be veracious, for that is the convention and covenant between the nonfiction writer and his reader" (Introduction, Best American Essays xvii).

In "An Expedition," Dillard adds to the usual essayistic material, description and narration of the fantastic, without cueing her reader that this material departs from the expectation of veracity. In other words, "An Expedition" is a magical realist essay. The simplest definition of "magical realism" is: "a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the reliable tone of objective realistic report" (Baldick). One thinks of novels such as Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion, the work of Salman Rushdie. In each of these cases, though, more is going on then the simple addition of the magical to the realistic, since the two ontologies represented by these genres are incompatible. Realism, by definition, excludes the un-realistic. And while fantasy is often framed by or connected to a realistic world (for instance: Narnia’s wardrobe, Alice’s rabbit hole), it inevitably overpowers any realistic frame in the reading experience.

So, injecting the fantastic into the essay’s veracious description and narration creates unresolvable ontological problems. As Stephen Slemon puts it in an article entitled "Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse":

One would think that the fantastic would erode the realistic, yet this is precisely what does not happen in the best magical realist texts.

Nor, does realism defuse the potent magic. In this hybrid form, then, each genre colors the other’s world: the realistic becoming more fantastic; the fantastic, more real. And the reader, to stay in the game at all, must let go of his or her expectations and be prepared for anything whatsoever.

The essay begins right where we would expect an essay to, with "objective realistic report":

As we also expected from an essay, Dillard explains the significance of this event: in spite of what she calls a "fiercely anti-Catholic upbringing," she has come to this church in search of the sublime; unfortunately, the presence of "Protestant guitars" is only the first of many banalities to offend her taste and sense of dignity on this particular morning. She passes the peace with the "lug" beside her, and he responds, "Yeah." A christening ends with a towel being wrapped swami-like around the head of the newly-baptized. The theme from The Sound of Music is banged out enthusiastically during communion.

Between these sections of (somewhat absurd) personal anecdote, Dillard intersperses accounts of nineteenth and early-twentieth century polar exploration, describing how ludicrously unprepared early polar explorers were for the brutal conditions of these frontiers. The Franklin expedition, for instance, set out in search of the Northwest Passage wearing standard issue Royal Navy uniforms, the ship’s holds stocked with backgammon boards and the officer’s engraved silverware: they were, that is, "adapted only to conditions in the Royal Navy officers’ clubs in England. The Franklin expedition stood on its dignity" (20). The contrapuntal arrangement of sections of personal and historical anecdote strengthen and enrich the analogy Dillard established in the first pages: expeditions into the spiritual and geographical unknown are alike not only in their to attain some previously unrealized destination, but also for the inherent human absurdity that attends and undermines all our journeys toward the sublime.

This analogical relationship begins to transmute into a stronger connection as the present narration of the Mass approaches the Sanctus–the highlight for Dillard. And this is where the magical begins to intrude in earnest into the essay:

It becomes difficult here to distinguish between the analogues. The polar ice-scape has become an explicit metaphor for the region in which spiritual quests are undertaken. Yet the metaphor is so extended that we feel pulled out of the narration of the real Mass into the Arctic scene, no longer safely distanced from the harsh environment by Dillard’s bemused attitude toward the explorers. Now more than simply like each other in certain revealing respects, the analogues have become two sides of the same coin: the polar search is a spiritual search; spiritual exploration in this newly hybrid reality is polar exploration.

But this is still "just" metaphor. Dillard herself says, that one strength of the essay as a form is its ability to give metaphor room to expand: unlike the lyric poet, who must compress his metaphors to half a line, "the essayist can devote to [her metaphor] a narrative, descriptive, or reflective couple of pages, and bring forth vividly its meanings" (Introduction, Best American Essays xvii). However, in "An Expedition," the metaphoric incursion of the one realm into the other extends beyond a couple of pages, crowding the essay’s metaphoric roominess toward fantasy or fiction: Something happens at this climactic moment of the Mass that pushes Dillard into another world:

The reader here begins to feel truly "lost at sea." The passage’s imagery has reached escape velocity, breaking free of tenor-vehicle structures and of the generic restraints of the essay itself. The two independent "objectively realistic" grounds of the essay–personal anecdote and historical fact–have merged into an unresolvable fantastic-realistic whole. Which only keeps getting more fantastic. In subsequent sections, the narrator encounters priest-like clowns, Parry and Scott, and her church-mates frolicking on ice floes, drifting north in the hazy light. There are sections of more essay-like comment and description, including a brief account of Dillard’s real trip to the Arctic (I somehow feel able to tell it is real). But the balance has been tipped to the magically real.

Though it doesn’t really matter whether you call what Dillard is doing magical realism, spiritual fantasy, or even surrealism, it is important to notice what this conflation of genres is doing and why. And this is where my comparison of this essay with magical realism becomes most useful: in considering Dillard’s broader agenda, her purpose as a writer trying to get readers of all stripes to accept the supernatural. In current theoretical discourse, magical realism is often read as the byproduct of imperialism. As Slemon again describes it:

In the colonized culture’s effort to recover its indigenous modes of perceiving the real, a dialogic mode arises in which the prevailing ontology, usually represented by Western novelistic realism, is forced to accommodate another set of expectations and possibilities. In effect, the author of the magical realist narrative writes himself back into a "reality" that previously excluded him: into an imposed "reality," a restricted and restrictive ontology. By injecting his version of reality into the other, irrespective of the dominant ontology’s standards of logical and imaginative consistency, such a writer can in some sense alter reality: alter "reality" as coded within the realistic genre.

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My argument, then, is that it might be useful to consider Dillard as a kind of postcolonial writer. She writes back against the prevailing "despookified" ontology by confusing levels of reality within veracity’s own genre, the essay. She stretches the skeptical, "pan-atheistic" reader’s expectations in order to allow–or force–him to notice unexpected incursions of the supernatural… Initially, within the essay’s world… But more enduringly, perhaps, within the world of "real" experience. Unlike other adventurers who venture into the unknown to plant a flag in it or colonize it, she seeks only to carry back enough light to decolonize the known, to loosen the tyranny of modern gnosticism or agnosticism, skepticism or materialism. "An Expedition to the Pole" creates an unresolved and unresolvable confusion of definitions of reality, hopefully broadening what the reader is willing to accept as real inside and outside texts.

Elsewhere, Dillard quotes Thomas Browne: "it is valuable to lose ourselves in mystery, [Browne says,] ‘for by acquainting our reason with how unable it is to display the visible and obvious effects of nature, it becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtilties of faith’" ("Winter Melons" 89). In "An Expedition to the Pole," Dillard creates mysteries in which readers can lose themselves–and find themselves, more humble and more submissive to the subtilties of constructed realities of all kinds.

Works Cited

conference paper delivered at
Festival of Faith and Writing
Grand Rapids, MI
April 1996