Living by Fiction was published by Harper & Row in 1982 and is Dillard’s single work of literary criticism — a book about contemporary fiction that asks three questions: what is happening in fiction now? Why? And does it matter? The book is both a survey of contemporary narrative experiment (Borges, Nabokov, Calvino, Coover, Barthelme, Pynchon) and a defense of fiction itself as a way of knowing the world — as necessary as science, as serious as philosophy.
The Argument
Dillard divides contemporary fiction into two broad camps: “traditional” fiction (realistic, character-driven, plot-based) and “contemporary modernist” fiction (experimental, metafictional, language-centered). She refuses to choose between them — arguing instead that both respond to genuine aspects of human experience, and that the best fiction of any era combines the pleasures of both.
Her central argument is that fiction matters not as entertainment or self-expression but as a form of knowledge. Novels and stories give us access to aspects of reality that no other form of inquiry can reach: the interior life of others, the texture of experience, the meaning of time passing. “We live by fiction” not because we need escape but because we need understanding.
The book’s most provocative chapter — “Does the World Have Meaning?” — argues that fiction’s deepest function is to assert (or deny, or question) the meaningfulness of existence itself. Every novel makes an implicit metaphysical claim: that human life has a shape (or doesn’t), that events have causes (or don’t), that suffering has purpose (or doesn’t). Fiction is thus the art form most directly engaged with the question of meaning.
Method
Dillard writes criticism the way she writes nature essays: with intensity, with personal engagement, with a willingness to follow questions wherever they lead. She is not a systematic critic (no Marxist analysis, no structuralist apparatus) but an intelligent reader thinking in public about what she reads and why it matters.
Her examples range widely — from Proust and Joyce through Borges and Nabokov to Marilynne Robinson and contemporary minimalists. She reads with attention to surface (prose style, sentence structure, formal invention) and to depth (what the fiction reveals about reality, about consciousness, about time).
Collecting Living by Fiction
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1982): Cloth binding with dust jacket.
Identification points:
- Harper & Row imprint
- “First Edition” with number line
- 185 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $50–$150.
Signed copies: $150–$300.
The book is collected primarily by Dillard completists and by readers interested in the relationship between creative practice and critical thought — what happens when a major writer turns her attention to the theory of her own art.