Free Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard Page A

popularity. Similarly, everything which encourages fiction’s audience also, and incidentally, discourages developments in contemporary modernism.
    A case in point is the blurring of fictional genres. Fictional genres blur in a way that plastic art genres have not done since Cellini and Ghiberti turned out hope chests and salt cellars. We do not find Sol LeWitt painting on velvet, nor Rauschenberg trying his hand at motel art. Yet we do find writers of real stature writing literature in any category: spy and detective novels (Chandler), murder mysteries (Robbe-Grillet), gothic romances (Murdoch), fantasies (Calvino), fairy tales (Barth), and science fiction (Disch). We cannot eliminate any genre or any materials across the board, saying, This cannot be art. (Similarly, the large audiences for these sorts of fiction are broad-minded and generous; they do not, I think, discriminate against literature, saying of a Graham Greene spy novel, This cannot be good.)
    Publishers encourage this healthy confusion, seeking readers where they can. They fertilize these fields heavily, and reap the harvest. The advertising and jacket copy of books make little or no distinctions between junk fiction and works of art, and in fact may cloud the issue. The issue is certainly clouded anyway. It is clouded even in the minds of critics, even in the minds of writers: who among serious literary novelists or short story writersdearly wishes not to be widely read? And conversely, what junk novelist, no matter how calculating, no matter how languidly he taped his latest blockbuster from the deck of no matter how large a boat, will dismiss any suggestion that his novels may, in fact, in part, in significance, or in skill, in the long run be considered literature?
    The journals which print reviews also seem at times to dwell in a marketing wonderland of undifferentiated objects called “books.” If the new Updike novel is good and the new Junker is good, reviews saying so are apt to appear on facing pages. Rarely does one find a printed distinction drawn between real literature and mere entertainment. It is as though distinctions, per se, might be thought illiberal. Since most serious contemporary fiction falls somewhere between realism and contemporary modernism, and since good literature is usually entertaining, most new novels please in many ways. Both reviewers and the journals which print reviews would be hard put to define all these overlapping categories.
    No one, in fact, is losing sleep over these things anyway—over the blurring of genres in fiction and the blurred distinctions between literature and non-literature—although they interest me enormously. Is Appointment in Samarra literature? Sweet Thursday? The Bridge of San Luis Rey? Is On the Road literature? If it is, was it when it was published?
    Of course, literary fashion, which may determine which contemporary works are considered canonical, is a whimsical thing, determined by nobody in particular, and stressing authors as dead personalities. As I go to press, for instance, Steinbeck’s stock seems to be very low, and presumably that of his novels as well, on the wondrous grounds that he was not always a nice guy,and even on the grounds that as a philosopher (!) he was not entirely original, but instead openly acknowledged that his friend Ed Ricketts influenced his thinking. Similarly, Flannery O’Connor’s stock seems to be high at the moment, and perhaps even, by extension, that of her cryptic, Catholic stories, on the grounds that her posthumous letters show that she was witty and knew her place. The concepts of canon and literature do not coincide. Canon is an historical category which includes failed works of literature like Shakespeare’s worst play and Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Contemporary works of highest-quality literature, like Fred Chappell’s novels say, or Doris Betts’s stories, are not yet canonical; they must wait until time, or