By that I mean this book is all about semantics when the day is done. And I don’t believe fiction is dead at all. This is ridiculous! I agree with your point about simply ignoring what doesn’t fit his argument is just terrible and makes him look bad. I think this book is silly. It is silly because it is fundamentally human to have the capacity for abstract thought. It is what enables language and separates us from all other species. It is the reason why man looks up at the sky and sees heros and animals and gods and not just “balls of gas burning millions of miles away” (Lion King)
To be human is to create stories. You can argue there is no fiction, but that doesn’t seem to be the real debate here… and that would just be a debate on semantics and you can argue about that “’til the cows come home.” As a young writer/novelist I’m fairly outraged over the fact that Shields was basically trying to steal a book. Generally people who make “collages” use substances that aren’t copyrighted, or they get permission. Even what’s in the public domain should be acknowledged as not being “yours.” Oh… so by Shield’s logic I can just go around claiming I wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays b/c they’re in the public domain now? I think he’s a mean, rude hack, and his argument is pointless… he’s like the one word poem guy… no real talent, but trying to claim it’s a masterpiece b/c of some nowhere “logic.” By the way I would claim all art is true on some level, and that in some cases fiction may be more true in some aspect than actual events regurgetated… is he advocating we give up art entirely and become historians? Well I for one am not going to listen to him and am going to continue listening to the people in my head who tell me stories.
To reject fiction is to reject human-ness. I’d rather not a be a neanderthal, thank you, Shields. I guess you do want to be one, just kept your thieving ways away from me. As far as I can see he’s not a good writer. I think he’s just inept at stealing a daimon/muse… so he’s trying to reject the idea that they exist hoping everybody else’s daimons will go away and level the playing field… well I’ve still got mine!

But the entire point of remixing is to blend the disparate elements together so that they both recall and distort their previous meaning.

most of Reality Hunger feels closer to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations than the new vital new form the book calls for.

Ironically, the elements of literature most ripe for literary remixing—characters, narrative, genre tropes, dialogue, plot—are the very elements of traditional fiction that Shields rejects.

“Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I’ve ever wanted.”

If you are publishing something as nonfiction, you are borrowing part of your authority from reality, from its relation to truth.

As I said at the beginning, I love what Shields has to say about collage, fragmentation, form-breaking, sampling, genre-dissolving, and the power of brevity.

Once upon a time there will be readers who won’t care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect, and its formal originality.”

from a google quote of the day recently:

“A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.”
Alfred E. Wiggam

The collorary might be “a liberal is a person who believes that everything one does should be totally original” or something like that.

I find the dogmatic adherence to the “original” in both ultra-left politics and ultra cutting edge art(ists) to be severely intellectually/academically flawed. Flawed is not exactly the right word. Somewhere between infected and totalitarian, with a hint of blindness.

If you allow the existing, acceptable forms, what the mainstream deems safe, to totally define what you cannot do, you are lowering yourself to the same predictable, dogmatic existence of those you castigate as conservative, or unoriginal, with the notable difference that you think of yourself and call yourself original. Technically, you are correct, you are arguably original, but because you have sequestered yourself dogmatically, rigidly, unquestioningly to only the new, defined by what the mainstream accepts, you are instantly, by definition, in truth, not original. You are limited; originality cannot have limits.

Bansky (http://therumpus.net/2010/03/the-contradiction-of-contradiction-a-conversation-with-banksy/) is using existing forms (lifelike drawings of recogniziable subjects, e.g.) in original ways that totally break old forms. His work conquers the ground of orginality, breaks the old forms, but as he breaks the old forms using some of the old tools (rendered drawings are an analogy for narrative, character, etc that Shields rejects), he achieves a third more important conquest: the total destruction of Shield’s argument.

The mash up of the mash up, while totally original, if un-artfully executed, is just noise.

I suppose I agree with Miller that Shields built his soapbox tall (and then mostly deploys the words of others as his puppet-speakers) in an attempt to represent something he believes isn’t getting its due and to shout down the status quo (as loudly as possible, for maximum effect). Isn’t that the nature of manifestos?

Thomas Bernhard’s misanthropic ever-spiraling-inward fiction (even if Shields wants to claim it’s non-fiction wearing a mask) is far more engaging to me than Bernhard’s shrill and verbose memoir (Gathering Evidence). Bernhard’s novels (especially as his style developed) aren’t so much narratives as they are pathological monologues (or even contorted fictional lyric essays).

Most of the writers who most impact me wrote works that defy categorization (or works that are so uniquely their own they can’t be confused for anything received—or expected—via convention). I still want to stubbornly insist that this is Shields’ most salient point and that it can’t hurt to breach the walls of the marketplace and the academy to let in some new air.

I appreciate your critique of Shields’ lack of “collage” dexterity in #5 and I agree that the latter half of the book is the clumsier half (he achieves his greatest potency when he lauds the mongrel, not when he denounces the notion of the pure-bred). And I like your take on Kierkegaard in #13. I’d also enjoy hearing you amplify your final sentence from #17.

And I’ll finish this (yet again much too long) comment by (in agreement) quoting you back at yourself: Reality Hunger …”left me challenged and spurned to do more, to push harder. Really, that is all one can ask of a book like this.”

To the degree that Shields is against received forms and is suggested new ways to play with form (collage, remixing, etc.), I’m behind him totally. I don’t think I’m inventing his anti-fiction bias though and I’m certainly not inventing his anti-narrative claims, which he makes pretty explicitly. He does spend a lot of the book arguing for nonfiction over fiction and also arguing that when fiction is good (his examples being people like Bernhard, Baker, Proust, etc.) it is secretly actually nonfiction. Laura Miller at Salon suggested Shields was really trying to make a case for essays because he feels they are slighted by literary academics. He might be right, lyric essays might not have the status they deserve within that world. I wonder if trying to tie lyric essays into seemingly unrelated forms like reality TV shows is really the best way to achieve that though.

But like you, the book and discussion still excites me to the degree it makes me think about how we puncture new holes in the received forms we have.

The invention of the sonnet and the perpetuation of the sonnet aren’t commensurate. We may or may not need any more sonnets (or novels, or symphonies, or color-field paintings, or epic poems, or lyric essays, or surf guitar songs), but we could always use new ways of seeing (developed out of our old ways of seeing), and new forms can help us explore anew (as can stretching or “perfecting” or modifying old forms). That’s what art does. Forms persist only as long as they maintain their cultural and aesthetic vitality.

This (coming from my obvious position of bias) is what I choose to take from Shields’ earnest and clumsy collage-manifesto. And it’s what so excites me about any discussion of this sort. We are creative beings—let’s keep poking at our collective complacence and not flinch away from taking risks.

The view from here is exciting: twilight precedes darkness, another excellent place to be, bumping into strange things we don’t yet fully understand, before a dawn of something totally unpredictable, or totally predictable, full of crappy formulaic everything, which we could still consume like another shot of heroin: going back to to the same old shit for the same old high. I love it.