July 9, 2010 | 11 Comments
Annie Dillard first published Living By Fiction in 1982. She might have called it Living by Literature because although it’s about her love affair with reading fiction in particular, she says more about nonfiction in a few asides and by implication than some books entirely on the topic.
Her categories of “traditional” and “contemporary modernist” approaches, of “fine” prose and “plain” prose styles, cross genres as well. In fact, Living by Fiction enabled me better to appreciate and to understand David Shields’s less coherent and useful Reality Hunger for what it is: a modernist’s aesthetic.
Dillard prefers “contemporary modernist” work herself (in her lexicon, that’s postmodernism), but she’s knowing in her explanation of the forces—human, societal, economic—that drive writers into the middle ground. She observes that most writers are working there, including excellent ones, somewhere on the bell curve between traditional and modernist approaches, between fine prose and plain. Most people “write largely traditional fiction.”
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