All this is a paradoxical situation for intellectuals who turn to fiction as the best possible prose vehicle for their interpretations, only to discover that those very interpretations—the urgency of which prompted the work—are to the reader the work’s most dispensable aspect. They discover that in order to write fiction that anybody might want to read, they must painstakingly conceal what is to them its very point. (Here is the germ of truth in that funny, sweet saying of the ignorant, that the function of criticism in general, and of freshman critical essays in particular, is to “find the hidden meaning.”) In order to make a world in which their ideas might be discovered, writers embody those ideas in materials solid and opaque, and thus conceal them. In the process of fleshing out a thought, they brick it in. The more subtle they are as artists (not as thinkers, but as artists), the more completely their structures will vanish into the work, and the more grouchy they will become the more readers tell them what lovely, solid bricks they make.