Free An Annie Dillard Reader by Annie Dillard

arteries must tell you/cough/“adios”/who else?/cough/drew Sept. 17, 1899 over New York???
    Sometimes too-dense fine writing is simply a psychological tic on the writer’s part. The prose of the first thirty pages of Nabokov’s Ada is a barrage of language released from occasion. It is a breastwork of puns and cryptic allusions which effectively defend the novel’s contents from the reader’s interest, until Nabokov is good and ready. The opening of Cormac McCarthy’s excellent Blood Meridian and his Suttree are similarly obscure.So, for that matter, is the opening of War and Peace —but not because of its prose. Many great writers accidentally release and reveal a certain amount of self-consciousness, anxiety, or even hostility as they settle in, or resign themselves, to the task.
    Fine writing is still with us. Density, even lushness, and formal diction, forceful rhythms, dramatically fused imagery, and a degree of metaphorical splendor—these qualities still obtain. Henry James launched the century with a splash: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl . It is hard to see why writers write anything else after James, and readers read anyone else, but literature persists.
    Here in the generalized category of fine writing belong the brittle sarcasms of Nabokov, and his much-wrought tendernesses, and especially his cryptographs—those challenges to literary criticism and parodies of its finds that are such red herrings to young writers, who must endlessly be relieved of the notion that the critic’s role is to “find the hidden meanings” and the writer’s role is to hide them, like Easter eggs. Here also belong the poignant lyricisms of Beckett, the embroideries of Gabriel García Márquez, the surrealisms of Italo Calvino, and the polished turns of Milan Kundera. Traditional in their elegances are E. M. Forster, the Ford Madox Ford of The Good Soldier , and Richard Hughes, Anthony Powell, Joyce Cary, Edna O’Brien, the D. M. Thomas of The White Hotel , Julian Barnes, and Graham Swift. In this country, grand stylists like E. L. Doctorow, Lee Smith, William Kennedy, Marilynne Robinson, Louis Begley, Denis Johnson, John Updike, and William Gass continue to expand the territory of fine writing.
    Penetration may no longer be the fine writer’s intention. A fine writer may now, as in the eighteenth century, be ironic or playful as well as sincere. He may brandish his wealth of beauties in a traditional way, as a traditional painterly painter handles paint: to describe beautifully and suggestively, to engage us, to fashion a world in depth. Or he may go abstract, and raid the world for fleeting images from which to fashion a moody expressionistic surface. This is Gass: “The sun looks, through the mist, like a plum on the tree of heaven, or a bruise on the slope of your belly. Which? The grass crawls with frost.”
    CALLING A SPADE A SPADE
    Other twentieth-century writers avoid fine writing. Borges, interestingly, disclaimed his early story “The Circular Ruins” for its lush prose. Fine writing does indeed draw attention to a work’s surface, and in that it furthers modernist aims. But at the same time it is pleasing, emotional, and engaging, like quondam beautiful effects with paint. It is literary. It is always vulnerable to the charge of sacrificing accuracy, or even integrity, to the more unfashionable value, beauty. For these reasons it may be, in the name of purity, jettisoned.
    With Flaubert a new value for prose styles emerges. Prose must not be elaborate, at risk of being lacy. Instead it should be, as the cliché goes, “honed to a bladelike edge.” This is a new sort of beauty in prose. Verbal dazzle, after all, is almost universally attractive; nineteenth-century Europeans admired it enormously. It takes a sophisticated ear, even a jaded ear, to appreciate the beauty and integrity of a careful simplicity. I