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    If we grant that fiction has changed gradually, we still get to ask why it has not changed wholly. Why is anyone still writing “neo-naturalist” fiction? Why, since everyone can see fiction’s direction as plain as day, does anyone fail to follow the pointing finger? How could anyone prefer not to?
    I have said that the writer is aiming at eternity—at perfecting his art. The writer of traditional fiction may see fiction as a form both solid and open, one which permits him to assault perfection from any intelligent stance without fear of ridicule. (No one is laughing at Saul Bellow, after all.) On the other hand, such a writer may have motives personal as well as theoretical. He may like the world of things. Or he may wish to keep a roof over his head.
    Fiction, insofar as it is traditional, has a large and paying audience whose tastes serve to keep it traditional. Shall we deny this, or merely deplore it? As Emerson said of the fall of man, “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped.” But, one could find in the fall of man, or even in the mass audience for fiction, a certain grim felicity. The next chapter will detail some colorful and low-down reasons why contemporary modernist fiction does not wholly dominate the field.

CHAPTER 5
Marketplace and Bazaar
    O ddly, almost everyone who can read feels qualified to discuss works of fiction, and even to discuss their merits and demerits in print. You could work yourself into a genuine froth over this: everyone who reads fiction seems to feel qualified to review it. One might as well let children, who eat, judge restaurants. Some book reviewers have no training in literature whatever. Now, no one would collar a man in the street to review a showing of a contemporary painter’s work. The man in the street would be decent enough to beg off. So why do people with no special training in literature discuss so unabashedly their tastes in fiction?
    The preceding paragraph was a hoax. I want you to feel, as I mostly do, that although its argument has a fewmerits in the abstract, it is essentially elitist, curmudgeonly, and morally wrong. Why? We would swallow the same argument about painting or music without demur. Clearly, our assumptions about fiction are different.
    In the simple answer to this exaggerated question lies one of fiction’s great strengths. It is of course that fiction, as a field, is not entirely the prerogative of specialists. And the fact that fiction is not the prerogative of specialists militates in favor of its traditional virtues simply because nonspecialists prefer depth to abstract surface. Specialists are interested in form; nonspecialists like lots of realized content.
    This little social phenomenon is more a symptom than a cause; but it is an interesting one. How many educated Westerners feel free to comment, especially negatively, outside their fields? Who apart from specialists will say of a Di Suvero sculpture, “It doesn’t work,” or of a Alvin Lucier composition, “It’s no good”? Yet who hesitates to rate contemporary novels? This symptom reveals the assumption that fiction, even when it is literature, should answer to its audience by pleasing it. The notion is still abroad, even, that pleasing an audience is precisely what the fiction writer had in mind. Given these assumptions, any member of the audience—any reader—naturally prizes his own reactions and considers them useful and pertinent. The extreme of this position is Philistinism, which permits a reader to fume and rage, disbelieving, at those contemporary modernist works which do not engage him. The Philistine does not fume and rage on the grounds that the writers’ aims are uncongenial, but on the unquestioned assumption that writers intend to be congenial first and foremost, that writers’ aims are changeless, that everyone is trying to be Charles Dickens.Of course, by these lights the works fail