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serve literary purposes adequately.
    To be quite precise, we must say that a writer’s language does not signify things as they are—because none of us knows things as they are; instead, a writer’s language does an airtight job of signifying his perceptions of things as they are. The term “salty” may hopelessly confine my perceptions—my sensations—when I taste saltiness, so that I miss a dozen accompanying sensations andtaste only saltiness. You suffer the same loss. Well, then, the term “salty,” which so dictates how we perceive, at least expresses what we perceive, very well, and also communicates it to those afflicted with the same language. Language need not know the world perfectly in order to communicate perceptions adequately.
    Language actually signifies things transparently, in a way that paint must labor to do. The word “apple” signifies appledom (or our perception of appledom) to all of us, and we will politely suspend our private meanings for the word in order to hear each other out. If I write “apple,” I can make you think of a mental apple roughly analogous to the one I have in mind. But I am hard put to make you think of a certain arrangement of alphabet letters or phonemes. The word itself all but vanishes, like Vermeer’s paint.
    The writer, then, composes with mental objects, actual or imagined; he composes with what Poe called “the things and thoughts of time.” Dickens drew his materials in Bleak House from the breadth of London society and from contemporary British legal usage; it were madness, or quibbling, to say he drew them from a dictionary.
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    The upshot of all this, as I have suggested, is that fiction cannot escape the world as its necessary subject matter. Hence it cannot break with its own traditions, or throw its criticism into crisis, or lose its audience, or move its action entirely to its own surface. Whether a writer writes “grapefruit,” or “God,” or “freedom,” his indispensable subject matter is the world beyond the page. Even when Joyce writes (to cite a familiar example), “Nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!” his passage does not eliminate referents; it multiplies them.
    One notable effort to alter the subject matter of fiction—Gertrude Stein’s—was an effort to alter the subject matter of language. Her aim (like that of Juan Gris, the similarity of whose work to hers she acknowledged) was “exactitude.” “A star glide,” she wrote, “a frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness.” “Toasted susie,” she wrote, “is my ice cream.” Stein’s work, and Finnegans Wake , come close to vaporizing the world and making of language a genuine stuff. Often Stein’s work achieves the unity of a single plane which glitters with a thousand refractions where the words, bound together at the surface, still tilt in every direction toward their referents in the world.
    Stein’s writing brought forth no revolution; neither did Finnegans Wake . Literature co-opted them; they joined the canon with scarcely a ripple, and inspired few successors. What Stein did, and what Joyce did in Finnegans Wake , was playfully to misread the nature of fiction. Fiction could have moved its arena to its own material surface, to virtually nobody’s interest, if fiction’s materials had really been words, and if writers had succeeded in detaching the words from their referents. But fiction’s materials are bits of world. Fiction’s subject matter can indeed move very far in the direction of its own surfaces; but those surfaces are not language surfaces but referential narrative objects. It turned out, then, that Ulysses , with its broken narrative surface, indicated a more fruitful and honest modernist direction for fiction.
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    The movement toward the modernist in fiction is one of emphasis. It is a