Free Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard Page B

the cult of personality, catches up with them.
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    Among works of nonfiction, which are literature and which are not? Surely there is a distinction between such works as A River Runs Through It, Green Hills of Africa , and Wind, Sand and Stars and other nonfiction, from field guides to cookbooks. But where are the boundaries? Is In Patagonia literature? People seem to think so, apparently because it is very well written, sentence by sentence, and nothing happens in it. Precisely where does journalism or memoir become literature? Surely Gorky’s My Childhood and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory are literature, because Gorky and Nabokov are canonical. But what of John Cowper Powys’s Autobiography? This is a strong, vivid, and eccentric artifice whose author is not quite canonical.
    I have never read a story better than Endurance , Alfred Lansing’s account of the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica; but no one considers it literature. If Mailer had written it, might we not read the same text as a parable ofsomething or other? The matter of context here is interesting. When Capote called In Cold Blood literature, he made it more likely to be read as literature than is, say, Hiroshima , whose author kept mum.
    Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song is the new case in point. Mailer’s calling this documentary account of the life and death of convict Gary Gilmore a novel seems to say, This text is meaningful, it is a work of art. The cultural assumption is that the novel is the proper home of significance and that nonfiction is mere journalism. This is interesting because it means that in two centuries our assumptions have been reversed. Formerly the novel was junk entertainment; if you wanted to write significant literature—if you wanted to do art or make an object from ideas—you wrote nonfiction. We now think of nonfiction as sincere and artless. According to Wesleyan historian Henry Abelove, this changed assumption makes it impossible for modern historians to understand seventeenth-and eighteenth-century texts so long as they assume that people have always written essays in order to proffer ideas in which they sincerely believed. In fact, writers then were more apt to write essays for the same reason that Wallace Stevens wrote poems. Now we have come half circle. Now the novel is seen as the literary form, the art form. This is actually great news, for which we have to thank generations of serious novelists and also the defenders of the novel at the much-publicized 1933 Ulysses controversy. Less great are its implications for nonfiction.
    Mailer gets it both ways. Nonfiction is more popular than fiction; but no one is in danger of mistaking The Executioner’s Song for invention. What if another novelist, say a housewife in Illinois, contrived a novel about a fictional murderer who was executed to national fanfare?What if this fabrication matched Gary Gilmore’s actual life? What if it matched Mailer’s text? Would the meaning be the same? Would anyone give a blessed fig? If you want to analyze society, people will listen to your data, but not your parables. Diane Johnson, reviewing The Executioner’s Song for the New York Review of Books , wrote: “It is finally the fact that all this really happened that moves us most.”
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    Similar juggling of context surrounds Melville’s The Encantadas . This wonderful essay, a wholly factual account of the Galapagos Islands, is always considered fiction—for no reason which I can learn. Is it because Melville usually wrote fiction? Is it because it is narrative? Is it because the characters are colorful? Is it because it is good? Or is it because much of it is hearsay?
    What if Darwin had written The Encantadas word for word? Ruth Benedict wrote the classic anthropological study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword , without ever having seen Japan; no one considers it fiction. What if Borges had written The Chrysanthemum