In I Am A Resident of An Ivory Tower Peter Handke discusses the relationship of literary fiction to the reality it explores and creates. Literary reality, as Handke sees, it, is not the reality of objects, of things, but rather the reality of words, of language…. Cognition must be mediated through the vehicle of language. But language is at the same time a social institution in which the cultural history of its speakers is deeply imbedded. The word 'tree' signifies an object occurring in nature; but at the same time it evokes a whole series of emotional responses related to the historically determined value of that object in our culture. Thus the artist as writer is constantly confronted with the dilemma of having to form a medium which already contains a pre-conceived notion of reality.

I believe that Walter Abish shares a similarly skeptical view of fiction as...