07 literary-analysis-follow-up

"It reminds me of McDonald's"

Assumption: your message doesn't say what "it" is. I'm reading it as my analysis of the Dillard essay, not the essay itself, because that's the thing you'd just read. I cover the other reading at the bottom. If you meant something else, the last section is where to push back.

The analysis is the McDonald's part

You're right, and I can point to why.

• Every paragraph is the same sandwich. It opens with a bolded claim and adds a quote. Then it turns with "That's why…" or "This is where…", and closes on a line about tension or both truths. You could swap the paragraphs around and nothing would change.
• It tastes the same whatever the essay is. "Portrait that turns into an argument with its subject," "the same quality that attracted us is the cost," "the structure lets us feel both." Those sentences would fit almost any biographical essay about a flawed admirable person. A good reading should only work on this essay.
• It's engineered to satisfy. Every odd thing in the essay gets turned into a function ("the expedition passages are doing much more than supplying colorful background"). Dillard's essay is full of things that aren't there to be useful, and the analysis doesn't leave room for them.
• The ending is too tidy. Dillard ends on a wish, and an awkward one: "One hopes, too—at least this one does—that in heaven souls suffer fewer scruples." "At least this one does" is the essay's only real step into the first person, and it comes as a hedge. My close ("the structure makes us feel both truths") wraps it up in a way she declines to.

What got flattened

• Section II isn't mainly about faith and doubt. The doubt admission is one paragraph. The rest is Peking Man, the mole-rat skulls used to date him, and Homo erectus leaving Africa. Then comes the strangest passage in the essay. Chinese people drink powdered fossil bone as an elixir ("dragon's teeth"), the pharmacist's shop is how the cave was found, and starving locals probably ground up and drank the first Peking Man skull. The bones the science depends on are also being eaten. My summary skipped this. It's the best evidence in the essay that matter is what people actually live on, and that's Teilhard's own thesis ("There are only beings, everywhere"). It's also a bleak version of it.
• The parentheticals are the argument. "(Is it useful and wise to think of God as punctiform?)" and the aside about how obedience, not chastity, is the hardest vow are Dillard speaking directly. I quoted the first one as tone. It is her actually doing something, which is refusing to let him off.
• I missed the flat enumerations. She lists his friends (Huxley, Frick, Valéry), his fossils and his travels in a level voice. The lists make everything equal, including the bandits, the vipers he never mentioned and the lost lighter. Then "These things happen" lands as something close to a philosophy.
• I underplayed how much she likes him. Reading it as an argument with her subject is too adversarial. She admires him almost to the end, and the closing wish is love for both people.

If you meant the essay

There is a version of this that's fair. The scene openers repeat: a date, a landscape, a physical description of him, a quote from a friend about his eyes or manner. They appear in 1923, in the tea scene of 1930, and in the field portrait in Section II. The repetition looks like a franchise, but it works as a set-up. Because the pattern is so regular, the things that break it stand out: the lighter, the "Such dust today!", the eleven days. If that's the resemblance you saw, I'd say the essay uses the template and doesn't turn out product from it.

Next step

Tell me which you meant. If it was my analysis, I'd rewrite it as a shorter, rougher reading built around the dragon-bone passage and the parentheticals, with no bold topic sentences.