Anyone with wit and training can search a work for sense. And sense is by no means an obsolete virtue: sense, and not the skill to dazzle, is the basal criterion for art. Surface obscurity is, of course, by no means a sign of its absence. On the contrary, such obscurity usually proves to be smoke from some wonderfully interesting fire. We simply must not mistake the smoke for the fire. I am certain that much, if not most, of today’s lasting fiction derives from contemporary modernist writers of integrity (writers like Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Calvino). That other writers may produce fictional surfaces similar to theirs, but without their internal integrity, does not in any way dim their achievement. But someone must distinguish between art and mere glibness.