Read Online Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard - Free Book Online Page A

shifting stance, not án outright leap. Just as there has been no sudden shift to abstraction in fiction, because the nature of fiction’s materials preventsit, so also there has been no sudden shift to contemporary modernism in fiction, because the nature of everything else prevents it. Before I get to this interesting “everything else,” let me make this point. Mere change is not revolution The contemporary modernists are here, all right, but they did not slay the old guard in their beds. Instead, the old guard liked their looks, invited them in, and exchanged a few tricks with them after dinner.
    This assertion is controversial. Robert Scholes, in his excellent Fabulation and Metafiction , argues at one point that contemporary modernism has replaced traditional fiction. Those who write the old fiction constitute “a small school of neo-naturalists” who write “frantically, headless chickens unaware of the decapitating axe.” This is perfectly true, as far as it goes; a purely naturalist fiction today is an absurd relic, like a horseshoe crab, especially if it is, in Scholes’s terms, “unaware.”
    But who is unaware? Only undergraduates who try to write without having read. Surely critics are not in the business of berating the ignorant. Woody Allen uses modernist techniques freely; so do television commercials. You can no more avoid either the techniques or the aesthetic they express than you can avoid the Mondrian look at Penney’s. If someone out there is writing a purely naturalist fiction, using only nineteenth-century techniques, he is not so much a chicken with his head cut off as a dead horse.
    The notion of “schools” does not work because neither set of writers constitutes a school. If we admit, as Scholes does, Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Malamud, John Fowles, and Iris Murdoch to the new school—and this is only reasonable—then what have we proved? That the new school has wielded its axe in triumph, or that almost alldecent living novelists are capable of using techniques developed sixty years ago?
    The techniques have been around for centuries, even, if you want to go back to Sterne, and writers are perfectly aware of them. If someone like Saul Bellow does not want to use them, he is not, I think, unaware, or making a last stand; rather, he would prefer not to. * Fiction writers are aiming at eternity, I do believe, and not at each other, and not at the power to determine fiction’s direction. And in the house of eternity there are many mansions.
    Fiction has expanded its borders. Nothing has killed or replaced anything. The old co-opted the new. Everywhere, categories overlap. Even if we name names we get into trouble. There is no such animal as a thoroughgoing, cradle-to-grave contemporary modernist outside France. Pynchon and others describe society; Nabokov, Beckett, and Barth round character; many contemporary modernists imitate the unbroken flow of time; Ada brims with emotion; some surrealist work is a bit skimpy on idea; and Borges of late seems to quit the library and hunker instead at a neolithic campfire, bringing fiction full circle to its putative beginnings. As Scholes is pointing out, almost all contemporary writers use the new techniques. Where would Frederick Buechner belong? Larry Woiwode? Evan S. Connell, Jr.? Lessing? Garrett’s Death of the Fox ? Updike’s The Centaur ? Grass’s The Tin Drum ?
    Of course, it is false logic to maintain that where boundaries are blurred, no distinctions exist. Just because no one can specify at which smudge a clean wall becomes a dirty wall, that does not mean there is no difference between a clean wall and a dirty wall. There are abundant differences between naturalist fiction and contemporary modernist fiction. But there are simply too many writers and works of fiction which do excellent things in both categories for anyone to talk about revolution or even opposing