What sump of literal-mindedness

There is the tendency also to extract seemingly plain aphoristic nostrums from essays or works of fiction with manifestly ironical content. Consider for example the fate of the opening sentence of Joan Didion's The White Album - "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." What sump of literal-mindedness must subtend a sensibility so obtuse as to miss the fact, even on the first page of this essay about the curdling of 1960s counterculture, that the telling doesn't work? But the impulse to read such statements literally, as if they were autonomous examples of timeless wisdom, is not entirely disreputable; sententiousness is one of the aspects of essayism, and we may find it all over the landscape of the genre, solid and informing, like a series of altitude markers on an upland trail.

Brian Dillon, Essayism