Free Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard

miserably, and the reader is aghast that living writers could so lack talent to please, and suspects a hoax.
    But Philistinism in the raw is not our present concern; and although all this is decidedly unnerving, it is by and large a healthy state. That fiction is not yet the exclusive province of specialists, that those who make it their business to understand it are not quite yet priests, that most of it requires of its audience no initiate status—these things distinguish fiction from most of the best contemporary poetry, music, painting, and sculpture. Fiction has a wide audience. The audience that a serious short story writer or novelist may address is literate and perhaps educated; but it is not necessarily educated in the formal issues of literature per se. All sorts of people read good fiction. All sorts of people may not read Henry Green or Julio Cortázar or Italo Calvino, or even Henry James, Bruno Schulz, or Samuel Beckett, but all sorts of people do read Faulkner, García Márquez, Nabokov, and Grass, say, and the contemporary picaresque novelists. By contrast, the other contemporary arts are marvelously down to essences. They have rid themselves of all impure elements, including an audience.
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    Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it. The world’s abounding objects, its rampant variety of people, its exuberant, destructive, and unguessable changes, and the splendid interest of its multiple conjunctions, appeal, attract, and engage more than ideas do, and more than beauty bare. When the arts abandon the world as their subject matter, people abandon thearts. And when wide audiences abandon the arts, the arts are free to pursue whatever theories led them to abandon the world in the first place. They are as free as wandering albatrosses or stamp collectors or technical rock climbers; no one is looking.
    I would be the last to argue that fiction’s wide audience keeps it responsible. Anyone could far more easily argue that it keeps it mediocre and stunted. This latter position is as familiar and self-evident as it is valid. God only knows what works of art will not see print in this generation, or ever, in the name of that wide audience whose wide neck one so often wishes to wring. Fiction’s wide audience does not keep it responsible; it merely inhibits its development away from the traditional.
    Contemporary modernist works, which concern themselves as much with the solution of their own formal and intellectual problems as with the peopled world, have no very wide audience save for a few isolated works, like Lolita and Giles Goat-Boy —which in fact treat of the great world more than their sibling works The Gift , say, or Chimera . The taste of fiction’s wide audience inadvertently preserves fiction in its historical context and keeps fiction’s aesthetic impure. These things in turn enable fiction to maintain a breadth of practice, a material density, and a richness of inventive possibility.
    All this works only because the wishes of fiction’s audience carry weight. So long as fiction is mass marketed, the taste of the “mass” is a force majeure . By contrast, the audience preference for representative easel painting is as irrelevant as wind. The audience is no longer attached to the mechanism. The powerful force which drew such enormous crowds—hardly Philistines or mere nostalgics—to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum for their Degas, Cézanne, and Monet exhibits is virtually lost, unharnessed to the mechanism of contemporary practice, which whirs, pops, and whistles along untouched in its several corners.
    Its wide and influential audience is only one of many factors which keep fiction traditional. Each of these factors, as it muddies the purity of fiction as art, also enhances its