David Shields, author of three novels and seven works of nonfiction, attempts to demolish the foundations of literature in his latest, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. His target: the culture. He argues that there has been a dreadful trend in fiction, and not just genre fiction and the mass-market best seller, but within the entire literary spectrum. Stories using too much detail, too much description, stories within stories within stories deviating and dwelling in obscure tangents and conventional formula.
David took time off from his busy schedule to meet in Wallingford, a neighborhood just west of the University of Washington overlooking Lake Union and the Seattle skyline. He suggested a coffee shop but I convinced him to forego the lattes and chai teas and we went to a bar. He sipped water to my beer. I came armed with what I thought were sure-fire arguments to convince him that there is value in the story, and that the writer should pursue traditional fiction while perhaps evolving to a more precise, compressed, and minimal aesthetic. I’m not sure if I succeeded in making him budge, but he may have pulled me a couple inches closer to his line of reasoning…
***
The Rumpus: You excoriate the traditional novel and fiction in Reality Hunger, yet you began writing fiction. It turned out not to be your forte. Why the attack? Isn’t it like an impotent man vowing abstinence?
David Shields: That’s a funny analogy. And I’d be a fool to think that type of criticism won’t emerge. I’m continually forced to reconsider and defend my views. I have a couple conversion areas in which I talk about impasse, my impotence vis-a-vis the novel. Zadie Smith, when she wrote about Reality Hunger in the Guardian, brought this up as if I hadn’t thought of it. Of course I’m aware. The origin of this book is my response to my fascination, bafflement, and bewilderment at the fact the novel form has died on me. You could say, ‘Who cares. So the novel went dead for you…that’s your problem.’ But I don’t think it was a coincidence the novel went dead, nor do I think it’s just my problem. For those who buy my argument I’m the canary in the mineshaft. For those who don’t…well, they’ll just say, ‘That’s David Shields opinion. He’s foisting his own foibles onto the culture.’ It’s like the abortion argument: If you’re against abortion don’t have one. If you want to write the old-fashioned traditional novel…all the more power to you. No gun to your head. If you think traditional novels are exciting stuff, like those written by Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen…that they capture what it feels like to be alive in our mass media dominated culture, well, you have my permission to go on writing and reading those books. I’ll think you’re foolish, nostalgic, a dinosaur etcetera etcetera.
Rumpus: You dismiss fiction as entertainment.
Shields: Too often it is.
Rumpus: Many fictional stories, though, are art, and the author is not concerned with entertainment per se.
Shields: Give me an example.
Rumpus: Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Nine hundred pages of traditional fiction.
Shields: Haven’t read it, though I’ve heard it’s good.
Rumpus: You watch Slumdog Millionaire?
Shields. Yes.
Rumpus: It’s the polar opposite. After about page one hundred you realize everyone will die or wish they had. That’s difficult to achieve.
Shields: Obviously there are exceptions. But what I find repeatedly is that a very intelligent writer will begin with a great idea, I know it’s an easy target, but I’ll use Jonathan Franzen. His idea is that we tend to overcorrect…on a personal level, a psychological, a familial, a geopolitical, an economic level…so he has this idea of writing The Corrections. And he wants to trace this over families and generations, and I’m really interested in that…but what does he do? He gives up way too much ground; he sacrifices too much on the altar of plot. He’s there, essentially, to hold the reader in his grip while the really interesting ideas he initially wanted to explore are barely scratched. Instead, he spends time trying to keep the middle-brow reader riveted. And I don’t think of myself as a middle-brow reader. I’m not held by plot, I’m held by thoughts…by ideas, by consciousness. We’re lonely. We’re existentially lonely. And the work I love the most shows you this for two hundred pages. What happens to me in book after book after book is the opposite, the most recent example is Louise Erdrich’s roman à clef about her marriage with Michael Dorris…he committed suicide, their marriage ended blah blah blah. I haven’t read the book, just a review, but what I want from her is a searing excavation of the pain…not a story…not a novel, because a novel is basically a story telling mechanism that exists to hold the reader riveted…it’s there to sell a book.
I love ideas and contemplation. The energy of the word as the writer wrestles with some personal or cultural cataclysm. Take Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a very short book composed of nothing but discreet paragraphs, ostensibly about her breaking up with this guy. Lots of memoirs and novels would just trace the relationship…but what she does in a series of beautifully far-ranging paragraphs is explore why the human animal is so melancholy…why are we so blue? And she explores…she flies all over, and for me that is a far richer meditation…whereas the traditional approach would be unending chapters about how this couple broke up. So many novels are hamstrung by the formulaic execution of scene, setting, dialogue, character development, back story, narrative, momentum, epiphany, closure…there are exceptions, but the books I love tend to be anti-novels. They foreground contemplation.
Rumpus: To write the traditional novel, though, you must become an authority. You want to write about prostitution in Thailand, so you need to know about AIDS, pregnancy, adoption, Thai culture…It’s like Hemingway’s tip of the iceberg, knowledge underlies a powerful story. Research may be boring, but to just reflect on your literary aesthetic, and explore your own problems, seems like a basketball player who only wants to scrimmage. No free throws, no laps, no weight room, just scrimmaging…or the musician who just wants to jam, no scales, no rehearsal. You write passionately about the panoply of your likes and dislikes…but once you’ve mastered craft and voice you’re just jamming. Where’s the exertion, the authority?
Shields: That’s a brutal analogy. Hmmm, to say that the writers I like…are just scrimmaging or jamming. Brutal. If I felt that way…I’d be bummed out. I can see how, to a lot of readers, that the kind of writing I love might feel to the casual eye that it’s loose, it’s open-ended…
Rumpus: There’s a place for it, and you capture it well. It’s definitely not easy, you have strong voice; sensitivity to literary nuance…you must be fucking intelligent and talented. But still it’s…Here’s what I like and it’s good! Here’s what I hate and here’s why!
Shields: You know, I’m definitely questioning what you say. I ask myself if I’m, maybe, shirking the big game because I’m not drawn to it…it’s the idea of boredom, I don’t want to bore or be bored as a reader or writer. Yet the work I love has this unfettered, naked, reformative, self-revealing and self-excavating quality, think…Amy Fusselman’s The Pharmacist’s Mate, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Cheever’s Journals, George Trow’s Within the Context of No Context…work that can go anywhere, that fluctuates between memoir, confession, stand-up comedy, cultural reportage, journalism, philosophy…And what I feel so often in the novel is the writer’s allegiance to a form. I can tell the writer’s terribly smart, but I don’t feel all this because they are straitjacketed in this well-established format. I don’t think I can remember the last time I was held, truly riveted, by a conventional novel or short story…I just felt like, you know, I don’t think I’m getting your best intelligence. I’m getting individual paragraphs. A glimmer…What happens in so many novels is furniture moving and throat clearing…just get to the fucking point. The work I love explodes in every paragraph.
Rumpus: I’d say the problem is too much description. It doesn’t matter if the characters are beautiful, all we need to know is A wants to seduce B…B is repulsed. Or…how many words does it take to describe a tropical beach? Two: tropical beach. But many writers spend paragraphs.
Shields: That’s a good point. Exactly. Novels that persist in writing this way are ignoring the fact that cinema, TV, and the Internet have completely usurped this function. I agree emphatically…there was a recent story in The New Yorker by Ian McEwan…I guess I’m using him as a battering ram because he expends huge amounts of time, an endless investment, on verisimilitude. He builds a package of details to convince you the scene is real. Ninety percent of the story becomes cultural tidbits about the guy’s cufflink or what books he’s reading…
Rumpus: A little detail can be important…
Shields: He’s not exploring anything but his own attempt to recreate this verisimilitude, it’s absolutely preposterous.
Rumpus: Right. You’re always talking about existential doubt…abstract art. But you say abstractness is existential, existential doubt is meaningful, the only true meaning is abstract and so on in circles. A story can produce doubt, but there is also a truth.
Shields: Do you have an example?
Rumpus: You walk into a store and hand the clerk a twenty to pay for fifteen dollars of gas. The clerk hands you back three fives. You do not discover the mistake until you are driving off. What do you do?
Shields: Did this happen to you?
Rumpus: Yeah, first time I kept the money. A couple years later, in college, I returned it. That’s what you do. You give it back. That’ s absolute. But as a young twit I justified it as sticking it to big business.
Shields: That’s a great example. I really love the story about whether or not to return the ten dollars. I could think about it forever, the pros and cons of giving the money back, and we’ve all acted incorrectly depending on our mood and our maturity. I mean, even a book like Reality Hunger has plenty of stories. I mean, I love stories, but I want succinct. I just want the story, no details, and then I want to hear you thinking about it for ten pages. All of my work, even a book as relatively abstract as Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life, Remote, Black Planet, they’re full of stories.
Rumpus: Ah! You love stories.
Shields: But they’re lashed to an idea, a philosophical investigation. Those books are a foreground to exploring race, media, death, celebrity, art…the stories are serving a larger investigation as opposed to taking a severe back seat to, say in your story, focusing on the gas station’s grease, or what the attendant’s playing on the radio, or if he has a mustache…who gives a shit? Just tell us one brief story and give me pages of Caleb worrying himself sick about whether or not he’s doing the right thing.
Rumpus: What I take is this: you’re not so much against story. You just want a new approach.
Shields: Yes. I think of a couple lines…one is by Alain Robbe-Grillet, something like…we’re not against storytelling, but we’re against naïve storytelling. It’s the faux naïve crap. Alice Munro being an example. It’s like she’s writing in 1880, very innocent and not congruent with the 21st century. There’s a line by Borges I use in my book where he says if you can summarize a book in ten sentences then why not just say it in ten sentences? What happens in three hundred pages is that the writer starts with something like a failed marriage, nerves and guts, but ends up just cranking through this narrative with the in-laws and the children and the blah and the blah blah and who cares.
That’s just it. I’m not necessarily against story. I’m trying to change the culture, and so I wrote Reality Hunger. Because we need to write compressed stories that produce a ton of thought rather than elaborate stories that produce none.
42 responses
Fantastic interview and one hell of a thorny philosophico-aesthetic question. Sure, people have been saying the novel is dead since, well, the novel was born – but my question is: Why can’t the novel evolve? Of course it does evolve – Alice Munro or Jonathan Franzen might have been recognizable to Jane Austen, but Salman Rushdie would not have been, let alone Mark Danielewski or Maggie Nelson. And when Shields brings up “Bluets,” he makes it clear he’s not rejecting the novel as a genre, only a certain type of novel.
I couldn’t agree more that we’ve reached the end of possibility for certain kinds of storytelling. But it seems inevitable that new, more dynamic kinds of storytelling will emerge – are emerging – as an inescapable byproduct of our being alive in a “mass media dominated culture.” That’s what art does: It finds a mode of expression that suits its subject. So why Shields’ insistence on saying the novel is dead, when that’s not really what he’s saying? Is it because “The Novel Is Dead” gets headlines? Isn’t that a traditional storyteller’s trick?
Excellent comment, Andrew, with several succinct and insightful thoughts (e.g. “That’s what art does: It finds a mode of expression that suits its subject”). [Though I think the interview itself falls somewhat short of fantastic]
And yes, let’s acknowledge how important Defoe was (as an innovator!) without thinking we still need to approach the novel as he did. Or as Lady Murasaki did far earlier, for that matter. Or as Austen or Dickens or the Brontes or Melville or Woolf or Wolfe or Faulkner or Joyce or Beckett or Conrad or Stein or Butor or Sebald or DFW or (this is a long list)…did.
Let’s each of us approach our texts (novels, essays, poems, plays—and especially anything that’s difficult to place in any one of these categories) as best we see fit, matching form and content (mode of expression to subject), considering what those who came before us accomplished and what we might be able to add to this ongoing art-strewn discussion on what it means to be human and alive in our own times.
The novel isn’t dead. Poetry isn’t dead. Playwriting isn’t dead. The essay isn’t dead. Philosophy isn’t dead. Classical music isn’t dead. Jazz isn’t dead. The three-minute pop song isn’t dead (nor is the twenty-minute jam). Painting (representational or abstract or some combination of the two) isn’t dead. They’re all in a constant state of evolution. And new forms we won’t quite know how to name are coming along to astonish and perplex and enrich us. Art is as dynamic as its artists make it (not as moribund as its markets or its academies seemingly wish it to be, as they package it and arrange it and desperately try to keep it static enough for them to feel on top of things—they won’t ever entirely succeed at this, thank goodness).
Shields’ collaged manifesto has a buzz right now. Will it live up to the hype? No, of course not, not for all of us. But it will keep us on our toes, for which we should all be grateful.
“I’m not held by plot, I’m held by thoughts…by ideas, by consciousness. We’re lonely. We’re existentially lonely.”
You’re looking for meaning. You’re a smart guy, you’re aware of the plight of your own existence, everybody seems to be fiddling while Rome burns, and you’re desperate to get on with it because the clock is ticking and then you’re dead.
But here’s the thing. That’s you. It’s a valid viewpoint — one that I share — but to blast the world for being something other than it should be begins the journey to madness. All of these people are not doing what they’re doing because they’re stupid or naive or afraid. They’re doing what they’re doing because they like it, and the only angle you’ve got on them is some faint hope that you can prove by logic that they’re wrong.
They’re not wrong. There’s no wrong to it when you love banana swirl ice cream. It’s what you like. I wouldn’t go near it, but it doesn’t mean you’re a fraud for loving it.
But it gets worse. There is nothing new for you to explore or invent. You are looking for a cutting-edge experience that is necessarily defined by the status quo, yet both are eternally shifting. Your unease with your own being translates into a certainty that something is wrong, and you’re right. But it’s you that is wrong. Or rather, your impulse to fix or find or free the trapped truth is wrong, because in the end there is nothing that will save you.
What you are looking for cannot be found by speeding up or flipping the microscope to x100. It can only be found by slowing down. My best advice: garden. Live at a latitude that sees four seasons. Grow some things that are beautiful to you and some things that are edible. And use as few words as possible.
You will think I am joking. I am not.
I think people spend too much time reading fiction. People are not living their own lives; in some cases, trying to escape the reality of their own lives. Short stories are the best! Because you don’t have to spend hours and hours reading, and you still get enjoyment from reading without spending all your free time doing it! Just my opinion! And I’m just a self-critical idiot!
I too seek to engage with literature as I would engage with a painting; I want involve myself in the work, not just have it served to me.
But let’s be careful about the role of description. The problem is not description itself but superfluous description that does not contribute to the reader’s understanding of the story world and the characters who inhabit it. You say “tropical beach” and sure, I can fill in the palm trees that provide the only shade, turquoise ocean clear enough that I want to drink it, and masa-harina-fine sand, but what does the place *mean*? If the character (or narrator) does not connect to it, then why do I care what it looks like? The paragraph will not–to use Shield’s word–explode.
What I admire here is a lack of self-doubt. It also sets off a bullshit detector. But I admire a lot of bullshit I detect.
I admire David, and consider him a good friend, and I have watched his positions here evolve over the years, but I don’t by the theoretical stance at all. To me he’s saying “A lot of contemporary fiction is really bad and feels artificial,” with which I agree, but I don’t, for example, think it has anything to do with “too many details” or “too many tangents.” And I imagine, generally speaking, that if you’re wanting some artifice you need look no further than contemporary “creative non-fiction.” Nothing could feel more postured and more fraudulent a lot of the time.
The larger issue, and the more compelling one to this novelist (and non-fiction writer) is whether genre exists at all. I tend to think that genre exists so that bookstores will have a shelf on which to put things. Otherwise, it’s not terribly useful, especially if you recognize that both “fiction” and “non-fiction” are true and untrue in, relative speaking, equal measure.
Of course if there’s broken glass on the beach, or a ripped pair of panties washing up in the waves, or a storm on the horizon, that needs to be described. You qualify it well, Judy,…superfluous description.
The novel itself isn’t dead, it has just been devalued. In all the areas of the arts and even in academics, the lowest common denominator is now king. At one time we valued the opinions of philosophers and professors; we treasured the writings of the true novelist. Today, they are sneered at. Postmodernism, our “egalitarian” society (almost completely lacking in real equality), “conservative” republicans and many, many other factors have played a part including the former heroes who happened to have feet of clay.
I’d love it if we were back in the days when people read “important novels” even if they didn’t understand them, because they knew they were important… and yes, because they wanted to be seen as the kind of person that could understand them even if they weren’t. Sometimes, after reading enough of them, they actually DID achieve an understanding; they could become something greater than they were.
Today, we wallow in filth and become just that.
I’d just like to know if anyone has an idea of how to turn this around. Is it just the U.S.? If it is widespread, are there some places bucking the trend? I’d love to think there was some hope.
And the thing is, the book itself is dynamite. It is, in many ways, post-genre, all the things I want from writing. Down to the last influence/inspiration–Ross McElwee, Spalding Gray, many others–and the way Reality Hunger is constructed–numbered points, fractured, as essayistic writing must be to explore many points at the same time. I think I am perhaps turned off by the meta-points, which is the only thing addressed in this interview, but am really turned on by the shape of the book itself, its methodologies, its self-questioning.
The Rumpus: . . . Or…how many words does it take to describe a tropical beach? Two: tropical beach. But many writers spend paragraphs.
Shields: That’s a good point. Exactly.
This exchange, and several others in the interview, left me puzzled. I have read a lot of books, and have yet to come across a several-paragraphs long description of a beach. Unless there’s one in Pamela, or Vanity Fair, which I admit I haven’t yet read.
But what are they saying? Help. Everything should be written in stock phrases? Is Wells Tower no longer allowed to write: “At the top of a steep bank of dunes, he stopped and saw the sea. The water lay in bands of blue and green, patterned over with little wind divots like a giant plate of hammered copper. At the foot of the slope, a long tongue of smooth rock stretched a couple hundred feet into the waves.”?
I want to stamp my foot. That little description — which is a thing of beauty, not ornamental in the least, and makes no concession to the pace of the story — is doing so much work in that piece — the giant plate of hammered copper, the long tongue of smooth rock. It’s amazingly tied into everything that story is about. You CANNOT reduce it to a stock phrase. Too much would be lost.
One more point. I agree that pointless description can ruin any piece of writing, fiction or non, but in composing this post, I realized that, curiously, pointless description cannot ruin a haiku. I don’t know why this is, but if you try to compose a haiku from pointless description, it magically becomes ABOUT something. Perhaps this is the powerful mystery of the haiku form. But try it:
Dry, rustling palm leaves
A hammered copper ocean
The phone is ringing
See? This is about how sometimes you don’t answer the phone, even when you know you should. The phones rings but you just don’t answer. Why do we do that?
The God of Small Things, in my opinion, is a good example of using long descriptions that are needless. They are poetry, they are beautiful, but move on…This is my opinion, perhaps more so than Shields. I was happy that he agreed.
TGoST begins: “May in Ayanemem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks back and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled by the sun.
“The nights are clear, but suffused with sloth and sullen expectation.
“But by early June the southwest monsoon breaks and…(okay, we’re in India and it’s fucking gorgeous, I get it…)
Okay, that’s not for me. People (friends) have wanted to choke my ass for dismissing A. Roy on the first page, and fine. I should have asked Shields his opinion, specifically, but at any rate, we can check National Geographic or the Internet for fascinating pictures of India. I’ve never been to India, but I’ve wandered the slums of Kathmandu and Karachi, and I don’t need it described to me in a book.
They say a picture says a thousand words, but writers are still trying to write those thousand words…we’re not in the 19th century looking at pencilled sketches, we don’t need Melville to describe the South Pacific anymore.
There’s a place for it, and it is not novels but poetry (and maybe essay). And it can be beautiful, and it can do two or three or four things at once. Wells Towers can do it, but if done in a novel I’m not going to like it or read it…do it in haiku, or a villanelle or sonnet, but not in a fucking novel.
Thanks to you both for this interview. In addition to the interesting questions raised, I have a fresh list of books and authors to check out, from naive storytellers to self-excavating writers.
It seems Mr. Shields is interested in prose that invites the reader to mimic the writer’s process of self-exploration, to ask the same questions the writer has asked. I think an intelligent novel invites the reader, through the experience of the narrative, to discover the same type of questions Mr. Shields is looking for, but without those questions being explicitly stated or predetermined. Great novels inspire thought by inspiring questions, whereas it seems Mr. Shields’ tastes lean more toward those books whose writers directly ask questions or even (and I think this is their danger) assert positions. A novel that serves only to present a predetermined argument can then only be supported or refuted by the reader, which, at best, allows readers to explore what they already believe on a slightly deeper level, and at worst, makes them more resolute in what they don’t believe.
“…a novel is basically a story telling mechanism that exists to hold the reader riveted…it’s there to sell a book.†There may be some truth here at the most basic level, but I think even Mr. Shields would confess it is a terrible simplification of the form.
I struggled to find any comments in this interview that fell outside the realm of personal taste (although I intend to read the book before I make up my mind). However, I was struck by his final point. “We need to write compressed stories that produce a ton of thought rather than elaborate stories that produce none.” I couldn’t agree more, but only with regard to my personal taste. I recognize that there are a great many ways to produce questions, and for many readers, an elaborate plot might be a better means to that end. Might I suggest, what we need are stories that produce a lot of thought, and leave it at that?
All that being said, here’s to this book leading to a backlash of great new novels!
Thanks for the lively response, Caleb. I’m not sure this adds up to the death of the novel, but I understand you are not necessarily signing onto that broad claim. Thanks, also, for the interview.
I like what Rick Moody says above. When Shields talks about the pointlessness of genre and how many works reside in a realm between pure fiction and non-fiction, I agree with him totally. When he tries to attack contemporary fiction as somehow being more staid, unoriginal and trite than creative non-fiction I couldn’t disagree with him more. All of his criticisms of fiction seem to apply even more so to most non-fiction.
The book is definitely an interesting read though.
Watch, as David Shields dismisses all literature that doesn’t agree with his ideology.
“So many novels are hamstrung by the formulaic execution of scene, setting, dialogue, character development, back story, narrative, momentum, epiphany, closure…”
Novels are hamstrung by momentum? This has to be a joke, right?
And simply because some scene is formulaic, that doesn’t mean all scene is formulaic, etc., etc.
Today must be April 1st.
This interview makes me very sad. It reminds me of the emperor in “Amadeus” telling Mozart the piece he composed had “too many notes,” to which Mozart replied: “But it is perfect!”. The conventional novel, too, has its own irreplaceable form of perfection.
Or, as my friend said:
“The post-literary haven that Shields is describing is like a book’s worth of twitter updates basically.”
Didn’t we already go through this? Like, from 1960 to, say, now?
Shields’ argument is going to stir up dust, of course, but any narrow, limited argument so strongly and unequivocally stated coming from a moderately high profile person is necessarily going to stir up dust.
Next, please.
I’m looking forward to reading Reality Hunger in part because I’m eager to see how Shields attends (and I’m sure he does, he must…) to the many persuasive salvos launched over time against the unacknowledged artificialities of realist tendencies in fiction (think Woolf and her gig lamps, Nathalie Sarraute and her suspicions, Robbe-Grillet and his new plot-free novel, Barth and his exhaustion and replenishment, Ben Marcus writing on John Haskell and discursiveness in The Believer, etc.). It will also be interesting to see how the criticism around Reality Hunger evolves — much of the comment I’ve seen thus far (and I’m following because I’m interested) tends to take it on as a radical gesture (an attack on realism! let’s to the barricades to defend her!), something unprecedented. Perhaps it’s because there have been so many heavy-handed smack downs of exploratory fiction in the past decade that the idea of any kind of dissent has been squelched and the idea that an important voice is taking it on, crying out for something, for god’s sake, different, seems singular…
“There’s a line by Borges I use in my book where he says if you can summarize a book in ten sentences than why not just say it in ten sentences?”
I find this a particularly funny quote, because though I’m enjoying Reality Hunger, I can’t help but note that each section pretty much accomplishes what it needs to in one or two paragraphs–then repeats the point through often barely distinct iteration.
Sorry, Caleb, but I can’t let your opening assertion (David Shields “attempts to demolish the foundations of literature”) go uncontested.* Demolish the foundations of literature? Do you really mean that? What foundations are we talking about? Homer? Sophocles? Euripedes and the other Greeks? Plato? Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare? Isn’t The House of Western Literature built on the works of folks like these? And not one of them wrote a NOVEL (which appears to be, from the above interview, anyway, the primary target of David Shields’ frustration).
If you meant “demolish the foundations of the NOVEL,” are you talking about the early iterations of the form? (e.g., Pamela? Robinson Crusoe?) (What IS a novel, anyway? Character, setting, plot? prose divided into chapters? We’re already way beyond this, aren’t we?)
And didn’t Beckett’s trilogy, or Finnegans Wake, or The Making of Americans already demolish the foundation? (or maybe they actually built on it and extended its boundaries. . . )
As Rick and Lincoln hinted at above, perhaps part of the problem Shields is addressing is the idea of novel as genre or category. Perhaps the form has grown too varied to be contained by one label. There should be room in today’s world for new forms. Why can’t we champion the new as well as honor how we got here?
Of course we would need to ask David Shields for clarification on all this; I look forward to reading his book.
*This may seem like nitpicking on my part (and I understand the point Andrew made above in his reference to headline-grabbing statements), but it seems hyperbolic or unnecessarily inflammatory on yours.
PS I also feel the need to say that when we try to reduce the conversation to debates of “too many words” or “not enough plot,” we’ve lowered the discussion to a subjective place where there could not ever be consensus.
“I tend to think that genre exists so that bookstores will have a shelf on which to put things. Otherwise, it’s not terribly useful, especially if you recognize that both “fiction†and “non-fiction†are true and untrue in, relative speaking, equal measure.”
This is bullshit. Regardless of what “relative speaking” is supposed to mean, it’s just not true. You may beat the tattered effigy of James Frey all you want in the furthering of an inane counterargument, but fiction is not as true as nonfiction. Unless what you mean by “true” is something other than “based in fact,” in which case you’re a pontificating ninny.
‘L’…of course this is hyperbole to the nth degree. It’s an ‘attempt’. You seem to recognize this, so I don’t understand the need for contestation.
Shya, good point, Shields does reiterate, he mixes it up but you can only say the same things so many ways.
Jonathan…succinct way to put it…any story (or any art) that stimulates is worthwhile.
I interviewed David multiple times, and in a forthcoming interview we discussed a quote by Naipaul, something along the lines of ‘in nonfiction facts can be changed, truths can be distorted, but fiction never lies, it reveals the writer totally’. I interpret this as meaning ‘nonfiction is easier to write than fiction’. The novelist does not have the luxury of the reader who opens the book and thinks ‘Aha! This really happened.’
Reality Hunger has passages that make you roll your eyes, but even these can twist your mind or leave you babbling about existential angst, he does meander into a couple corny turns, but for the most part I thought ‘Cool’ or ‘I’ll have to check out that book/film/etc.’ I don’t think RH will convince everyone to turn to the lyric essay/confessional/anti-novel (although these have value and a place), but it should get the writer to attack their traditional novel with greater urgency, and this is a positive development.
“And what I feel so often in the novel is the writer’s allegiance to a form.”
It’s true novelists are a slave to form. The form: the novel. But there are endless variations within that form, including novels with too much detail and others with “the story, no details,” and then the author “thinking about it for ten pages.” Either approach makes me want to shoot myself. Luckily, there are plenty of other possibilities within the form for this middle brow reader.
I’ve always thought of the novel as a sort of anti-form form. You are always told that every novel discovers its own form and the structure and styles of novels seem endless. Sure, there are obviously lots of boring novels with expected arcs and forms (same as in any genre) but I’d be interested to hear David Shields explain what he means by a conventional novel when he discusses it in his book and interviews. Does it mean any novel not written by David Markson? Or does it mean only the standard domestic realist literary novel and all the works by the likes of David Foster Wallace, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Bernhard, Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus and so on are something else?
This was a point I was never clear on in Reality Hunger.
Thanks, Laird, for the Woolf “gig lamp” reminder. From her essay on “Modern Fiction” (1919):
“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions — trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpest of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there, so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon feeling and not upon conviction, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it… Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
And thanks also for mentioning Sarraute. From this interview:
http://www3.wooster.edu/ArtfulDodge/interviews/sarraute.htm
“After the appearance of Proust and Joyce, there came about a huge upheaval in literature. I must also mention Virginia Woolf, who not only wrote very modern things, she also had ideas on the transformation of the novel. She made a strong impression on me. So when I began to write, I felt that one could no longer imitate these writers, one couldn’t imitate the classics. As a result, I had to look for something, a substance, a form that belonged to me personally. These writers had shown us that the framework of the old novel could no longer meet modern needs, and I thought that it would be interesting–actually I didn’t even think about it, I did it without thinking–to show interior movements existing all alone, without characters, without a plot.”
And Marcus’ concluding lines from “On the Lyric Essay” (2003):
“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 for its formal originality.”
I suspect these won’t be the self-limiting middle-brow readers, but neither will they just be academy esthetes. They will be any readers wanting to challenge themselves by stepping beyond the cautious assumptions of the marketplace as well as their own callow or over-grooved predilections.
Even if the Marcus quote is a mere time-bending fairy tale, I want to believe…
One last voice on this (for now):
“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.†To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.”
David Foster Wallace from “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993)
Unless what you mean by “true†is something other than “based in fact,†in which case you’re a pontificating ninny.
I guess I’m a pontificating ninny then, because I learned long ago (from experience) that fact and truth only bear a passing resemblance to each other. Objective versus subjective and all that.
Here’s the part of the interview I’ve been hoping someone would address.
Maybe it’s the pontificating ninny in me, but I don’t understand why “entertainment” is a pejorative. Should I be disgusted by myself if I’m entertained by a novel, or a poem, or a film? Can’t a work of art be both entertaining and intelligent? Or are we really reducing the novel to the notion that if something is popular it cannot, by any definition, be good?
So glad for Shields’ viewpoint re the novel. By now I’m extremely careful what I read, there’s just too much unrelated detail. Could a well-written film with a first-rate director get away with this kind of story telling?
Great interview. Sounds like Shields is stirring things up a bit, and the interview seems to do the same. One question for you though (I guess its actually two), regarding:
“…or the musician who just wants to jam, no scales, no rehearsal. You write passionately about the panoply of your likes and dislikes…but once you’ve mastered craft and voice you’re just jamming. Where’s the exertion, the authority?
Shields: That’s a brutal analogy. Hmmm, to say that the writers I like…are just scrimmaging or jamming. Brutal. If I felt that way…I’d be bummed out.”
What is wrong with jamming? Who cares about exertion, authority? I dont mean to defend the guy, but that’s what (I think) Shields should have said. If you think about what jamming is and if you know what it can be (think Hendrix, Page, Van Halen, SRV), it can stand alone. Though it is beautiful within a greater context, it is beautiful in its own context.
Again, ‘loved the interview and the exchange that followed.
Brian, your points are on target. I guess the semantics of “entertain” (or captivate/fascinate/grip/compel) is why this exchange may seem fuzzy to you (and it certainly isn’t touched upon or clarified in the interview, so it’s good you bring it up). Some readers will find RH “entertaining”. Even Shields would probably admit he is entertained by all the authors he refers to…we can reduce the concept or analyze it to death.
If we take “entertainment” to gratify in an ephemeral sense without much substance or depth…then maybe we’re giving an appropriate context. And also important are the goals of the writer, namely, does the writer only want to entertain? Or does the writer choose esoterica that offers rewards to a select few? Or balance the two? To write a novel that blows away a diverse audience is incredibly difficult.
It depends on what the writer is willing to sacrifice to entertain, provoke, or enlighten (all three contain synonymity). No writer wants to bore, and the opposite is often a form of entertainment.
Tee-Bone Chilibone, Glad you dropped by…okay, good point on the jamming, the musician that bounces riffs and solos off the other musicians is different than the musician who jams w/o listening, and perhaps this is what I meant. In a sense Shields does that, too (the former…for Shields pays attention to the culture), and this makes RH interesting.
I guess the point I wanted to make concerned the “working out” an athlete or musician must do, and for the writer of fiction this working out entails reading a lot about subjects outside direct experience in order to make the fictive imagination seem authoritative.
Take Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, Nabakov’s Lolita, or Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, in each case the author had to go outside their self; research history, psychology, sociology, etc. and show this authority in their novel, and to do this required extensive amounts of research, much tedious (Thus the laps, weightroom, free throws, or scales and rehearsal). No doubt jamming can be radical, and only those with a high level of skill pull it off, but Stevie Ray also had to work his ass off…although I do see weaknesses in my analogy concerning jamming. Thanks for pointing this out.
Great links and thoughts. Ramick, you just set me off on an afternoon of reading!
>> What is wrong with jamming? Who cares about exertion,
>> authority? I dont mean to defend the guy, but that’s
>> what (I think) Shields should have said. If you think
>> about what jamming is and if you know what it can be
>> (think Hendrix, Page, Van Halen, SRV), it can stand
>> alone. Though it is beautiful within a greater context,
>> it is beautiful in its own context.
Absolutely nothing is wrong with “jamming.” Nothing.
However, when an inexperienced musician “jams” and then passes of this jam as “music,” (as opposed to what it is: a lazy jam) he or she is no longer “jamming” but is attempting to create music for the consumption of others; it is appropriate to then approach the “jam” as such. That doesn’t make jamming wrong, but it does open the “jammed” music up to criticism. Extend the analogy to writers.
/*/
The guitarists you mention are masters of their particular idiom – a mastery that come from, literally, a lifetime commitment to their instrument. As such, often a “jam” among musicians at that rarefied level approaches an excellent example of music within that idiom. This should not be confused with a “jam” among inexperienced players, though the same word is used when speaking of both. Extend the analogy to writers.
I haven’t read all the comments here, so apologies from the outset if this trods already trodden ground.
I tend to think about these sorts of questions through a metaphor of a continuum between poetry and fiction. On one end is poetry, an investigation of states of being and the inherent beauty of language. At the other end is genre fiction, that which is about utility and movement. The metaphor tends to fall apart the more one considers specific writers, but I find it useful, especially when talking to my students. I remember having an argument once with Shya Scanlon (Hi, Shya) about whether Gary Lutz’s work should be considered fiction or poetry. Shya said poetry, I said fiction, he said potato, I said potahto, and we called the whole thing off. But the conversation really set in motion for me some years of thinking about this issue. Rick’s right in that questions about genre are really a shelving problem, but the conflict between say science fiction and literary fiction may be less severe than the conflict between poetry and literary fiction. I’m not sure conflict is the right word, either. But if we look beyond the obvious formal differences between poetry and fiction and ask what we seek them out *for* it seems that Shields is grumpy about not being able to order a Big Mac at KFC.
Many fiction writers secretly hold or at least shelter the question: can’t perceptions be ideas? Doesn’t the best fiction become a way of seeing? Isn’t that what quality lit writers strive for? New ways of seeing? Perceiving? Calling a stretch of rock standing darkly out amid dark water a ‘tongue’ is a kind of idea, no?
Sheilds rails against formula fiction and fiction’s formulas. He sees himself as a lone prophet on a lonely streetcorner, or a voice in the wilderness. How is this possible? The whole history of international fiction of the last 50 years has been “How to Make it New.” I’ve been reading Calvino’s “Cosmicomics.” In the first chapter he makes fun of traditional fiction and the formulaic piling up of details. In one paragraph he makes a list of items until the list itself just becomes absurd with junk. David, yuo ain’t alone, far from it.
A few blocks down from Sheild’s street corner (I picture him in Seattle’s Pioneer Square) there is a huge stadium (Saefco) full of like-minded literary malcontents. I think William Gass is the Keynote Speaker.
The juxtaposition of fiction vs. non-fiction may relate to a contradictory relationship between the subject matter (WHAT) and the way it is perceived and treated by the author (HOW). In this respect, fiction or non-fiction is irrelevant. Whether it is a long and hence redundant description/narrative, or a sober presentation of facts and ideas, it is the author’s perspective that matters and through which the subject or idea becomes interesting. In other words, it is the way somebody interprets the reality (translating his vision in a certain literary form) or rather the relationship between the so-called non-fiction (objectively existing subject matter) and fiction (individual perception or translation of the subject matter, thus the author as translator of reality producing fiction out of non-fiction) which makes something surprising and thus interesting.
Awesome interview. I saw Zadie Smith’s review of Reality Hunger in the Guardian and got a copy. As Daniel Nester says above, ‘What I admire here is a lack of self doubt’!
So this points up a terrible dilemma that many writers share if they are in a literary bent. I’ve dabbled in poetry and even in the beginnings, this was a problem.
And that is that writing is always dialogical. At least you hope it is. And who is your audience?
I can write a poem that engages the interior experience, I can push toward profundity, not in a haughty way but as a reach toward something deeply meaningful and revealing. And who am I writing for. As my early mentor, Robert McNamara, used to say – If you’re writing really good poetry, you’re writing stuff that 1% of the population can or care to read.
And if we protest that that’s who we care to reach, isn’t that a bit of a self indulgence and maybe even a cop out at some level. The real trick in writing, the challenge that makes us stretch beyond what we can do, is to write both profoundly and popularly. That’s what make Robert Frost such a remarkable force for me. He was very popular but didn’t write simple rhymes. He was profound but not unreachable.
Great writing is always a wrestling match. If the writer wins too easily it’s because we aren’t challenging ourselves enough.
I tend to side Shields comments as what he say is true ‘we’re not against storytelling, but we’re against naive storeytelling’. Sometimes writers tend to forget that readers are looking for an interesting, to-the-point stories which invokes some emotions and thoughts rather than long winded stories where the main story line become lost and confused. In fact you can see some truth even in movies these days, some script writers seem to write without any passion. It seems they write more as a job to earn a living rather than anything else. To write a story well, a good writer must have the passion, proper knowledge through in-depth research, immense motivation and the burning desire to share exactly what he feels or percieves to his readers in a written language.
“we’re not against storytelling, but we’re against naïve storytelling”
This is one great quote that I won’t forget. I’m sick and tired of novelist trying to write a 1000 pages novel and in the end, it’s just the same last scene that you will find in any other books. Tired of reading the blah blah blah when it end ups in the same line. In today’s generation, you can hardly find a great piece of story where you can really sit all day reading that novel.
What an insightful interview! David Shields is one of my favorite authors and his latest book, “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” left me absolutely speechless, so reading this conversation with him was a pure pleasure for me. Thank you.
Loved Reality Hunger. Was almost as good as The Hunger Games
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