Living by Fiction

by Annie Dillard

  At any rate, the blurring of fictional genres keeps traditional virtues to the fore. Although we are certain that contemporary modernist fiction is, by intention, literature, nobody cares about these distinctions very much, and there is little pressure now on a writer to write it in order to be considered serious.

  On the other hand, another exigency of the marketplace keeps fiction growing. Fortunately, I guess, the cry and clatter of forks is for young blood. The market requires new books. Poetry, music, and painting do not make much money until they are old. But for reasons I do not understand, people like to read their fiction before its ink has dried, and prefer the Book-of-the-Month Club to the public library. Since new writers are interested in expanding forms in fiction, many new books will necessarily exhibit new forms, and nudge fiction, and its recalcitrant audience, along.

  Fiction’s wide audience, its independence from dictatorial experts, and the sloppiness of its own literary definitions all keep the field lively, loose, and at the same time rooted in its own traditions. They keep it healthy. Other factors also keep fiction healthy in the same way, by contributing to the general confusion without unleashing mere anarchy.

  Of these factors, none is more salutory than critical ambiguity about fiction’s audience. Although we may call Jacqueline Susann a writer of entertainments and Anthony Powell a writer of literature, the relative size of their readership is not our basis for judgment. Although we look askance at any work which appeals to a very wide audience, we do not necessarily look away. We do not let audiences call the tune one way or the other.

  A strange exception to this principle might be any critic who sees literature primarily as a cultural artifact. By these lights, a given narrative fulfills the unconscious wishes of a nation or a sex or it expresses the vision and needs of a social class. It follows that a Freudian or a Marxist critic would be intellectually inclined to pay particular attention to best sellers, on the grounds that these novels receive cultural sanctions precisely because they best express cultural norms. But these critics, I suggest, are not interested in literature for art’s sake, and the concept of canon does not concern them.

  In general, then, we not only refuse to fancy that all popular novels are good literature, we also refuse—although less emphatically—to label them all bad. (Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tolstoy were popular, as are García Márquez, Pasternak, and Grass.) All this ambiguity amounts to this: fiction as a field, and even criticism, is almost free of the myth that plagues the plastic arts, that popular works are ipso facto bad. The stirring and true tales are at large of genuine artists, like the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters, or like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who lived in obscurity or ridicule and died in shame, while merely popular painters, whose works now fetch pennies, won their day. The idea is loose, I say, that popular work is bad, but it is not law, and it has not yet injured literary fiction.

  On the other hand, it must make it almost impossible for painters to paint. How is one to guard against pleasing? If very popular painting is, by law, very bad, the painter, who is aiming at eternity, must insure against making his assault on eternity too attractive or available. For in one case, at least, popularity in the plastic arts amounted to a blackball. The example is Op Art. Lawrence Alloway of the Guggenheim has shown in an essay, “Notes on Op Art,” how Op Art, in which he identifies fully respectable aesthetic intentions, was tarred and feathered by the art world before anyone thought about it, because advertising and business exploited the look in boutique fashions, teen magazine layouts, and dime store gear. Alloway cites, with venom, Thomas B. Hess’s dismissal of Op Art in which Hess said that real painting is “difficult, serious, remote, aristocratic.” Hess may be right. It is at any rate a memorable series of adjectives. But the poor “Op” painters were simply addressing real aesthetic issues, like any other painters. It is rough enough doing any artsub specie aeternitatis without asking yourself every morning if your art is sufficiently aristocratic to be worth the candle, and sufficiently remote to discourage all comers.

  The French Impressionist bedtime story (which implies that popular works are ipso facto bad) combines appallingly with art’s severing of historical ties to give contemporary painters the abysmal license of a free fall. Cut off from both an audience and an agreed-upon set of traditional values, pushed out of a plane, a free-falling painter may wiggle any way he chooses, repeating, “They laughed at Manet and they laughed at Renoir”; but the air is very thin. If the remote and aristocratic painter can do no wrong, he can also do no right. And no one is laughing now.

  Another injurious idea of which literary critics and writers are free is the notion, so damaging to the plastic arts, that a work of art is produced only at some sort of cutting edge of history. Wyndham Lewis called this notion “the demon of progress.” By this account, the history of art is a thin, wandering, and capricious line which may intersect your studio or, more likely, miss it altogether. The artist, designated by hindsight, was the one powerful enough, prophetic enough, or lucky enough to swing that line his way. One might exaggerate further and say this: that a given contemporary art object—say, a painting—has artistic value not in itself, nor in relation to enduring artistic values, but only in relation to the line. (And it is a line, mind you, characterized by caprice. Who can believe in it?) Contemporary objects are nothing in themselves but potential objects of potential fate, waiting until the moving finger writes and, having writ, moves on. They are so many horses motionless at the gates. All this means, to push an already overstated point, that the world of painting at any given moment consists of limbo objects on one hand and historical artifacts on the other: possible art, and former art (de La Tour, de Kooning) from former cutting edges.

  It is hardly possible to exaggerate, in this respect, the importance of college curricula. Here we are at last: curricula. Put up your dukes.

  Colleges and graduate schools educate both painters and writers; but art and literature curricula differ. Students infer from art history courses this notion of a cutting edge. Students can regard the history of art, like the history of science, as a series of innovations, or even corrections. Worse, they can see nineteenth- and twentieth-century art history as a series of liberations, as a systematic destruction of one barrier after another. How could those who become painters resist seeking the next barricade? In contemporary practice courses, students may paint grids or make mud huts; but they certainly realize that whatever the schools teach them is what is now and not what is next, and their only hope is to be next. The historical direction is abundantly clear. It moves from representation of the spiritual world to the secular world, from the secular world to increasingly abstracted forms, and from abstract forms to idea bare. But the line narrows, and it travels only forward. And there is nowhere to go from here.

  On the other hand, literature as it is taught is scarcely the history of innovations. In fact it is, alas, scarcely even history at all. English departments are just as likely to teach literature generically as historically. Students may read ballads, Pope, and Yeats in the same week and learn to regard them all on the same plane. Even epic poetry may be taught simply as poetry. The novel is a genre; so is the short story. It is standard practice in fiction writing courses for students to read short stories by Tillie Olsen and Robert Coover alongside those by Turgenev and Melville; nobody bats an eye. Art history, by contrast, has no altarpiece courses.

  Literature courses do not stress innovations; they stress texts. I have in fact an unexamined impression, which is surely not true and equally as surely not important, that Shakespeare made no innovations whatever. But a standard art history text lists an even dozen for Rembrandt. Even survey courses may come at history all cockeyed. In 1964, the first week of our sophomore literature survey took us directly from “Heart of Darkness” toSir Gawain and the Green Knight . Art history is actually chronological history; a syllabus would not jump from Goya to Byzantine mosaics. I am by no means applauding any curricular trend away f
rom the teaching of literature’s history—quite the contrary. I mean only to suggest, ducking, that the decreased emphasis on historical survey courses could, theoretically, influence future writers and only future writers for the good. From any curriculum which stresses close textual scrutiny over chronological history, students infer that it is the task of writers in every generation to produce coherent texts—not to jump on a bandwagon or lead a charge.

  Fiction as a field, however, is not suffering a crisis in the damaging-myth department. Of damaging myths there is no shortage whatever. Sometimes it seems as though the notion that art is expression is winning, or the notion that art is social documentation, or that art is over. People still magically regard novelists as helpless, fascinating neurotics who compose in deliriums or trances; the younger critics may regard them as even less conscious automatons who jerkily pace out the myths of their tribe; and the older critics do not regard them at all until they are dead. Young writers may be misled into thinking that novelists are rich or even that they are active. But this is silly.

  More serious a threat is this notion: that quality will out, that quality has already outed, and that the novelists of whom we have heard are the novelists we have. People who believe this pronounce early and dismal verdicts: no one is writing interesting novels, or great novels, or great poetry, or great short stories. Which is absurd. How do we know who is writing what out there? Could Faulkner find a publisher now?

  That we are much informed does not mean that we are well informed. What little contemporary criticism we have is responsible, but it must rely on what is available and even on what is expected. TheTimes could scarcely assign stringers, who also happen to be literary critics, to every garret and kitchen table in the country where the mute, inglorious Miltons are churning it out. And if theTimes assigned such stringers, where would it print their reports, when it devotes breathless pages each week to the signing of blockbusters, jogging books, dieting books, and so forth? (It is hard to see whence arises the fuss about these objects whose share of the gross national product surely does not approach that of, say, bananas, or measuring cups—the details of whose marketing coups we are spared—unless someone really fancies that these leafy paper products borrow respectability from literary works on the flimsy coincidence that all are “books,” or unless even a small sum of book money has acreatio exnihilo charm to it that a great sum of banana money does not.)

  At any rate, the fact that the growth of the art of literature is largely dependent upon the book industry makes for hard feelings all around. And it is here that the blurring of genres goes too far for art’s health. From the viewpoint of big business, a dog care manual and a novel of genius are both marketable objects called “books”; since the dog care manual will be easier to market for profit, there is no point in taking a chance on the novel. This makes perfect sense. Every few dozen dog care manuals can, and do, fund a novel. But the offices are increasingly geared to the manuals, and decreasingly geared to literary fiction—which is sad for literature. So long as publishing is an industry among industries, the prestige of whose executives depends on profits, it will wish to publish literature, especially very original literature, only as an expensive, if beloved, hobby. Publishers, they say, deplore this state of affairs as much as anyone, wringing their hands all the way to the bank. Fortunately the prestige of publishing executives still depends a little bit on the literary quality of their lists; and fortunately the industry still harbors men and women who love literature and who try to move mountains in order to see it into print and even, at times, to ensure its promotion.

  This is an old lovers’ quarrel, the bitterer on the writers’ side because ours is the greater dependency. Lord Byron, for instance, received an extravagantly printed Bible as a gift from his publisher John Murray. Byron sent the Bible back to Murray with a single emendation. At John 18:40, where the King James Bible read “Now Barabbas was a robber,” Byron had changed the text to read “Now Barabbas was a publisher.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Who Listens to Critics?

  What effect has criticism on the direction of fiction? Is its influence conservative or innovative?

  The question itself needs defending. For who in this country listens to critics? Are not the critics, off in their departmental corners, uselessly employed, changing their terms every few decades out of sheer boredom? Surely real fiction writers have no truck with academic critics, nor with any school but the school of hard knocks.

  The notion of the novelist as gifted savage dies hard, even in English departments. (Perhaps it dies hardespecially in English departments—for if Faulkner was a man of letters like thee and me, why have we not written great novels? Further, department scholars may doubt their own methods, their students, and especially their colleagues so much that they deny that anyone ever connected with that world could produce a novel worth reading.) It breaks our American hearts to learn that Updike was an English major. We wish to forget that Thoreau, like Updike and Mailer, was graduated from Harvard, and that Walt Whitman spent his life in his room studying and rewriting, and that Willa Cather lived among the literati in Greenwich Village, and that Melville left the sea at twenty-five. The will to believe in the fiction writer as Paul Bunyan is shockingly strong; it is emotional, like the will to believe in Bigfoot, the hairy primate who stalks the Western hills, or in the Loch Ness Monster. In fact, by the time the media had worked on Hemingway, he was scarcely distinguishable from Bigfoot, or less popular—and Dylan Thomas, that sentimental favorite, was the Loch Ness Monster. The assumption that the fiction writer is any sort of person but one whose formal education actually taught him something is particularly strong in this country; our democratic anti-intellectual tradition and our media cult of personality dovetail on this point and press it home, usually with full cooperation from writers.

  In opposition to all this romance, I say that academic literary criticism is very influential: students listen to critics. What student does not read fiction for one course or another? And who is writing fiction these days who has not been to college?

  For years on end the future fiction writer listens to Ph.D.’s, people professionally trained to approach texts using one method or another. It stands to reason that any critical approach which dominates the graduate schools will also dominate undergraduate thinking about fiction, such as it is, and will be felt, either positively or negatively, in the fiction those undergraduates will eventually write. Whether all this academic influence is baleful or not is another matter; the influence is real.

  Well, then, how does academic criticism influence fiction’s direction? Specific critical works, of course, have less effect than critical trends, which in turn are not so important as the fact of criticism itself and the milieu of self-consciousness that fact generates. For it is the nature of all the arts in this century to exist alongside criticism: alongside critical theory and history on one hand, and formal analysis on the other.

  Let us say first that criticism keeps fiction traditional in several ways. As it influences curricula it most often defends the notion of canon and keeps students reading Trollope and Fielding, Hardy and Dickens, Cooper and Hawthorne. Students also study Joyce, Faulkner, and Woolf in the classroom, but they usually read Nabokov and Pynchon on their own, just as our professors a generation ago read Joyce on the sly. Further, English departments are usually stuck teaching solely literature written in English. This is so because modern language departments, in an understandable fight for their lives, may insist that students need German to read Kafka, French to read Proust, and Spanish to read Borges. English students may therefore lack genuine knowledge of European and Latin American fiction—which is far more modernist than British and American fiction—and so be graduated with a quaint and lopsided notion of the work done in this century. Finally, insofar as critical journals, as well as curricula, ignore contemporary fiction altogether, they may give the impression that anything written in our time is not interesting.


  Criticism could encourage the stronghold of traditional fiction in another, more complex way. Literary criticism, for all its changing terms and emphases, has a real continuity. Samuel Johnson’s readings of Cowley and Shakespeare are still valuable; T. S. Eliot admired them enormously. And Eliot’s readings of the English metaphysical poets and the French symbolist poets are still standard. Inversely, various modern critical methods work well on texts from any century—even on myth and folk tale. And when criticism does address itself to contemporary modernist fiction, it does not need a new language. A critic may intelligently apply to even the most experimental novel the same terms and methods he uses onPamela . Nowhere do you find a set of critical tools appropriate only to a specific historical period.

  Students absorb a sense of this critical continuity, and infer from it, as may we, that fiction as an art is proceeding along a bumpy but contiguous route to do what it has always done. This idea, in turn, devalues innovation per se, and allows respectability to older forms.

  Art criticism, on the other hand, underwent a real crisis prompted by the radicality and swiftness of developments in the plastic arts. In even the most radical fiction of 1980, we have no departures so radical, in work or in theory, as the plastic arts had as long ago as 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1913, in Kandinsky, Kupka, Duchamp, and Malevich. The critical crisis was in full swing during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. In 1962, for instance, leading critic Dore Ashton wrote: “No one has developed a rhetoric for criticism of abstract painting.” Faced with the terms the painters themselves used for their methods and goals—paroxysm, delirium, orgasm, somnambulism, risk—critics could either soberly elucidate these misty nouns or go scrabbling for more nouns in the sticky realms of quantum mechanics, Taoism, Zen Buddhism, or Jung. The old terms suitable to figurative painting did not apply—because the multiple objects which figurative artists painted, and which figurative artists today continue to paint, are not merely incidental clothing of forms but genuine iconic subject matter. And the merest leaf or numeral in the corner of a painting permits critics to discuss the work as an interpretation of nature or of culture; its absence prohibits it.