Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard

self-consciousness, and produced work from which both the writer and the critic were absent as figures. For the contemporary modernist, however, the same self-consciousness is inescapable. Art itself is the theme, and ironic, self-aware surfaces are the method: so the writer takes no pains to conceal his jitters.
    Barth’s stories “Lost in the Funhouse” and “Life Story” tremble with the sense of being read critically and analyzed; their protagonists are writers almost gibbering with witty self-consciousness. So is the protagonist in Beckett’s trilogy Molloy/ Malone Dies/ The Unnamable ; when he can overcome his paralysis sufficiently to write at all, he writes his novel defensively, against a host of critical readings. Some fiction parodies the critical essay: Nabokov’s Pale Fire , Woody Allen’s “Lovborg’s Women Considered,” Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.” Today’s writers are conscious of literary criticism indeed, if they know it well enough to parody it. It is not unreasonable to suppose that a familiarity withcritical methods would make writers wish to produce texts which yield to, and fit, critical analysis.
    On every continent, contemporary modernist fiction is written by educated and sophisticated writers. By no means all educated writers prefer it; but nowhere do uneducated writers produce it. (The many small biographies which Barbara Howes provides for her excellent anthology of Latin American short stories, The Eye of the Heart , bears out this correlation.) How could they? Borges is a library; Ronald Sukenick started out as a Wallace Stevens critic. But the charcoal burner who quits his vines and retires untutored to a garret will not invent contemporary modernism and will not like it when he sees it, any more than most undergraduates do. It is a taste acquired through cheerful familiarity with the provisional nature of literary texts and the relative nature of historical values. Of course, this degree of sophistication, like any sophistication in any field, inclines one to irony, jadedness, and cynicism with respect to received impressions on one hand, and to formalism, emotional caution, and self-consciousness with respect to personal expression on the other hand. But that’s the breaks.
    Â 
    I would even like to proffer, as a spur to real investigation, the notion that awareness of criticism created contemporary modernist fiction. Contemporary modernist fiction arose among intellectuals in response to formalist critical ideals which have dominated the century: the ideals of the Russian formalists and the new Critics. (Phenomenologists and structuralists, heirs to this tradition, are too recent to have schooled a generation of writers.) Robert Scholes ( Structuralism in Literature ) has pointed out how the Russian formalists, who flourished 1915-1930,anticipated the fiction of Borges and Barth, fiction whose author’s presence makes his narration subject to playful irony. Their notions sound contemporary modernist, and we could make a case for their direct or indirect influence on the young Russian Nabokov. On the other hand, perhaps we need not invoke Nabokov as a human vector for carrying formalist ideas to the United States. The publicity surrounding Ulysses was doing a good job of it, as were developments in the other arts, especially poetry.
    The New Criticism arose in America in response to Modernist poetry in English—in response to the difficult, fragmented, and self-relevant poems of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Stevens. The New Critics were themselves poets to a man: Eliot, Pound, R. P. Blackmur, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, William Empson, Kenneth Burke. They codified and bruited about the highly developed aesthetic of Modernist poetry; they introduced into the intellectual milieu, and into the classroom, the notion of texts as carefully patterned intellectual artifices. How could this not affect a