Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard

expectation.” “These secondary objects are called hrönir and, even though awkward in form, are a little larger than the originals.” The people may also bring another class of objects into being; an ur is “an object brought into being by hope.” (The subject at hand in this frankly philosophical story is the nature of Berkeley’s idealism.)
    Other works, like Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , stress the role of the conscious artist as imagination’s lord. If inventing is knowing, and if meaning is contextual, then the artist is the supreme knower and the artificer of meaning. Still other works, like Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum and Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” which are modeled on the interpretation of texts, stress the equal status of all mental objects. Imaginary or third-hand texts, or accounts of texts, have not only the same ontological status as canonical texts, but also the same status and capacity for meaning as actual events. And actual events may be interpreted as if they were texts. Everything on earth or in imagination is a conjunction of mental objects; it is an art object which may be interpreted critically.
    The world, happily, still exists, and contemporary modernist fiction still interprets it. One interpretation to which these same writers are prone is a reading of the world in the light of its multiple material combinations. We scarcely require imagination to produce a wealth of possible conjunctions; the actual world is doing very well on its own. In these works, such as Calvino’s Cosmicomics , Cortázar’s Hopscotch , or Borges’s “The Aleph,” the artist’s generative role is again secret, and the dizzying multiplicity of the world itself is the subject. I think that the new sense of stellar and geologic time we have in this century, and the reiterated tale of how chemicals evolve, and hownew species arise from random combinations in multiple circumstances over unimaginably long reaches of time, must surely contribute to this contemporary fiction of possibility. The work of Calvino and Borges, at least, is visibly stricken with a sense of a finite material world so long and wide it becomes a material metaphor for infinity. Beckett and Borges treat these matters soberly; other writers, like Barth, Cortázar, and Coover, seem to grow giddy at the thought, as if creating were not the deliberate work Genesis made it out to be, but instead God’s spendthrift and neverending jubilee.
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    Writers and artists of this century may well ascribe to their work a new and real importance. If art is the creation of contexts, and so is everything else , how false or trivial can art be? Was not the Linnaean system of classification a poem among poems, a provisional coherence selected out of chaos? It has always been possible for artists of every kind of sniff at science and claim for art special, transcendent, and priestly powers. Now it is possible for artists to have and eat that particular cake by adding that, after all, science is in one (rather attenuated) sense “mere” art; art is all there is. I am not saying that writers or painters have made such a claim—but it is there to be made.
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    This, then, is contemporary modernist fiction. Its themes are its own artfulness and pattern, and the nature of a world newly elusive and material, and a mind newly aware of its limits, and an imagination newly loosed. Technically as well as thematically it has taught us to admire the surfacing of structure and device. It prizes subtlety more than drama, concision more than expansion,parody more than earnestness, artfulness more than verisimilitude, intellection more than entertainment. It concerns itself less with social classes than with individuals, and, structurally, less with individual growth than with pattern of idea. It is not a statement but an artifact. Instead of social, moral, or