22.
Perhaps Shields sturdiest ground is television. He devotes an entire chapter to reality TV, undeniably a big part of modern culture. Still, reality TV has been moving towards greater unreality. The first two seasons of Real World, as Shields himself points out, were much more “real” than subsequent seasons. The writers, cast members and directors of reality shows have increasingly opted for more scripted and constructed realities. Look how quickly we turned from “regular” human beings to B-list entertainers—people raised in the art of creating false personas—to star in our reality shows. Strange Love is a long way from Candid Camera. Perhaps these shows have only retained the label “reality” out of inertia.
23.
The second point is that reality TV, for all its popularity, feels fleeting. I suspect few people are sitting at home re-watching the first season of Road Rules or talking to their friends about season 4 of American Idol. The interest is in the concept more than the execution. Will anyone watch old seasons of those shows in thirty years? And yet I have little doubt that people will still be watching and analyzing The Wire, Seinfeld and The Sopranos for decades.
music and art
24.
Throughout the book, Shields seems to group non-narrative art forms in with “nonfiction” and “reality.” I’ve never thought of art as existing in that dichotomy. Some paintings depict real events, others fictional events and others are abstractions. Take, for example, this quote regarding Andy Warhol’s Monroe and “Double Elvis” prints: “Having preexisting media of some kind in the new piece is thrilling in a way that ‘fiction’ can’t be.” For one thing, the image in Warhol’s Double Elvis works was taken from the fictional western Flaming Star. But what is this quote trying to say? Does Shields mean a fan fiction story using Harry Potter characters is not fiction since those characters are part of preexisting media? Or that “Double Elvis” wouldn’t have been thrilling if it was “Double Darth Vader”?
25.
A similar assumption seems to be made that music, or at least sampled music, is somehow an example of “reality.” Ironically, the music most discussed in Reality Hunger is also perhaps the most fictional and narrative. Hip-hop is the inheritor of the folk tradition of narrative stories through lyrics. Rappers are also expected to create personas that are either completely exaggerated (the small-time crack dealer becomes the Noriega of the entire South) or utterly fictional (murderous space doctor from the year 3000). Rappers frequently have multiple, contradictory characters with their own names and invented histories. Take one of the most important hip-hop artists of all time: Robert Diggs. Depending on the album, Diggs might be the spiritual leaders of a clan of ninja-rappers (RZA), a psychopathic serial killer (The Rzarector) or a hedonistic sci-fi party boy (Bobby Digital).
what does nonfiction add?
26.
Since Shields is an advocate of memoir, he must ultimately tackle the James Frey situation. I found the wording of his defense to be surprising though: “What does it matter if Frey actually spent the few nights in prison he writes about in his book?”—note: Frey actually invented a three-month jail stay—“Fake jail time was merely a device to get a point across, a plausible situation in which to frame his suffering.” Using fictional elements as devices to create a plausible narrative for the author to frame his feelings…isn’t that just a description of a novel?
27.
The question is what does the label “nonfiction” add to a piece? What would be gained by relabeling Frederick Exley’s magnificent A Fan’s Notes a memoir? What purpose would it serve to publish Lydia Davis’s brilliant contemplations as essays instead of stories? It is a question, I think, of “authority.” If you are publishing something as nonfiction, you are borrowing part of your authority from reality, from its relation to truth. This is not a slight against nonfiction, for it is asking to be judged on those grounds as well. If you publish a work of prose as fiction you are asking for it to be judged as one would judge a painting, a song or a poem. The authority arises only from its own merits.
28.
Shields notes, perhaps correctly, that “anything processed by memory is fiction.” He believes readers need to “make their peace with this there will be less argument over the questions regarding the memoir’s relation to the ‘facts’ and ‘truth.’” I am skeptical readers will ever make their peace with this because what readers want from nonfiction is the truth, is facts. If someone picks up A Million Little Pieces today, do they still read it as nonfiction or do they just read it as a novel? Speaking for myself, I am not likely to spend time guessing or Googling what is true or false. I will read everything as fictionalized and judge the work as I would judge any novel.
attempt at conclusion
29.
We have heard the cries of the death of the novel for so long that even pointing out how many times we have heard it feels cliché. In a world where Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling are the best-selling authors, Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time and the biggest broadcast TV disaster occurred when NBC tried to push aside scripted dramas for an inexpensive talk show, speaking of societies hunger for reality over fictional narratives feels a little premature.
30.
Of course, Shields, myself and the readers of The Rumpus are concerned with more complex and interesting art than that. But as I’ve argued the desire for fiction and imagination is still quite strong, even in the zones that Shields discusses. I have nothing but respect for the many fantastic nonfiction writers working today. Real events and reflection on them is always essential, but I believe that the desire for imaginative works is alive and well and their place in culture is secure.
31.
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. Reading his work reminded me of the modern works I most admire—the enigmatic contemplations of Lydia Davis, the collage stories of Donald Barthelme, the mystifying shorts of Diane Williams, the relentless rants of Thomas Bernhard, David Foster Wallace, Barry Hannah, Anne Carson, and so on and so on—and left me challenged and spurned to do more, to push harder. Really, that is all one can ask of a book like this.
32.
I’ll end on the quote from Reality Hunger I found myself most in agreement with. From Ben Marcus: “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.”
71 responses
Michel ends with “From Ben Marcus: “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.—
But he spends much of the essay refuting the very idea that nonfiction can function as art. While I’m no fan of Shields’ book (and think Dead Languages, his novel, far superior to either Remote or Enough about You, both nonfiction), his argument against the manifesto betrays a limited understanding of what people who practice nonfiction care about. And that is ART.
“Real events and reflection on them is always essential, but I believe that the desire for imaginative works is alive and well and their place in culture is secure” — can’t imagination have a place in nonfiction?
“Since Shields is an advocate of memoir, he must ultimately tackle the James Frey situation.” — Why? If you advocate for film, must you address Ishtar?
“The old saying that you read nonfiction for the facts and fiction for the truth still rings true.” — I think he Michel queried anyone who takes the essay, or nonfiction more broadly, seriously, he’d find that they’re after the truth. To shackle them to information delivery is manifestly unfair.
Hey gladys,
Thanks for your comment. If I came across as claiming nonfiction can’t be art, then I must worded things badly as I do not believe that. Nonfiction can certainly be art. John D’Agata and EM Cioran, to name two people Shields frequently references, are certainly artists. I don’t know if I’d say broadly that what nonfiction practitioners care about is art, as nonfiction encompasses everything from user manuals to police blotters.
My contention would only be that the reader expects that art to be bound to factual events. To be, in short, not fiction.
I do think an interesting can of worms is the difference between reader and writer expectation in nonfiction though. There was actually a post on the Rumpus about this recently: https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/02/why-read-nonfiction/
I would have liked to talk about that if I’d more space using the following D’Agata quote as a jumping off point “Do we read (nonfiction) to receive information, or do we read it to experience art?†So, even D’Agata thinks it is something of a question.
Regarding James Frey, I did not mean so much that Shields has to specifically tackle A Million Little Pieces, but that given the large number of memoir scandals that have occurred in recent history, I think he did have to tackle the issue of truth in memoir. Indeed, central to his argument is the question of what is true and can truth (in that sense) arise from memory? So yes, I think it is an issue he had to address and he does.
Bravo, Lincoln. You make many cogent points.
Very good piece. Most of the points made in this book are as old as Henry Miller–and that in their current form.
however, you’ll note that henry miller never abandoned ‘fiction.’
My issue is that when we’re talking about nonfiction in this space, we’re obviously not talking about user manuals, or if we are, they’re being used in a Kenneth Goldsmith fashion. To make art. All Shields in interested in is art, as is D’Agata. The quote you have from him (D’Agata) is one I think he answers pretty definitively in his anthologies — we read it to experience art.
Shields definitely backs himself into a corner defending memoir, and Frey. But he’s right about one thing — all memoir is at least part fiction. That is unless everything is qualified with an “as I remember…”
Yet many of his biggest fans treat Miller as though he did. Indeed, there is/was a British paperback of Tropic of Cancer with an (absolutely awful) afterward by James Frey.
Gladys,
As said, I certainly think there is nonfiction that is art and yes that is much (though not all) of what Shields concerns himself with in Reality Hunger. I am not making the case that nonfiction is not art. I think the only case I was making in this regard is that most readers expect it to be art bound Odysseus-like to the facts as it listens for truth (that metaphor doesn’t work that well, does it?). I suppose the other case I might be making is that these writers are not only concerned with art. If someone is doing a piece of journalism, for example, their are concerns beyond art involved, right?
I believe D’Agata may have answered that question definitively for himself, but not for all readers. As someone who has studied fiction, I’ve had plenty of friends or relatives tell me they really only like to read nonfiction and their reason is always “because I like to learn things.” I think all writers, nonfiction or fiction, should strive to make their work as artful as possible. That is certainly what I desire. But I do believe there may be a disjunction between what many readers want and what some nonfiction writers want.
If there wasn’t, we wouldn’t have these seemingly weekly memoir scandals, right?
Perhaps I should add that I think there is disagreement on these points amongst nonfiction writers as well. The Rumpus’s own Stephen Elliott, a great memoir writer (amongst other things), had a post on memoir recently where he said:
https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/01/defending-memoir/
“There is only one rule in writing a memoir, but it’s an important one: You can’t intentionally lie. This one rule has the effect of form on poetry, setting up a challenge that often forces creativity and makes the work more powerful than free verse.”
And yet Shields would appear to disagree in defending Frey inventing out of thin air a three-month jail stay.
Lincoln,
I guess we have a fundamental disagreement — journalism is something, for me, that exists independent of nonfiction. (I betray myself — you studied fiction, I studied nonfiction, and I’m deeply wedded to the idea not just that it has the potential to be art, but that arguing about its failures in relation to journalism is like arguing about the lack of attention to line breaks in prose.) The same is true of books that have as their goal artfulness, but not art. Biographies (almost always) fall into that category. They’re absolutely worthy books, but they’re in a different category. And there’s a lot of nonfiction being written with art as the goal (as you have acknowledged). It seems like the kerfuffle is that people are trying to make rules that encompass journalism and informational nonfiction and literary nonfiction, and that’s an impossible task. And if we’re talking distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, and we’re talking D’Agata (who is absolutely an artist, as you’ve said), then we’re talking implicitly about work that aspires first and foremost to be art.
Frey wrote a bad book. Lying is only part of that, and that, I think, is true for most memoir scandals, as most memoirs, scandalous or otherwise, are also crappy books. And Elliott’s rule is a nice one, but it’s also impossible to follow. Dialogue is an automatic lie. It’s a presentation of a situation that is imagined, unless you grew up carrying around a tape recorder.
Gladys writes: “All memoir is at least part fiction. That is unless everything is qualified with an ‘as I remember…’â€
And here is the crucial question that it’s become all too fashionable to shrug off, or worse – to dismiss as irrelevant, a relic of a more innocent, pre-postmodern time when we thought we knew what the “truth” really was. How quaint!
But I would say it’s more relevant than ever. No, we don’t expect a nonfiction writer to qualify every statement. A child understands that a memoir is a work of art, and a work of memory (hence the name: memoir) and thus is subjective and imperfectly reliable. But what’s important here is whether a memoir is written in good faith – the memoirist’s absolutely best possible effort to get it right – or whether it is altered, enhanced, sexed up, sensationalized, for cynical reasons of marketing and sales.
Can we always trust writers to do this? Can we ever verify every last little detail? Of course not. But to shrug our shoulders and say that it’s not worth bothering is to ask people to lie to us. (See: Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Scooter Libby, etc.) Haven’t we had enough of that?
“journalism is something, for me, that exists independent of nonfiction. ”
Hmm, this is an interesting comment. Let me clarify that by bringing up journalism all I meant is that many of the writers Shields (and you and I) are referring to in this discussion write types of nonfiction. Maybe a piece of journalism, maybe a book review, maybe a history or a profile or whatever. They don’t only do those things, but they do them to. If Nicholson Baker, to pick a random name, is asked to review a Kindle for the New Yorker he is going to write a great and artful essay. But art is not the only thing in his mind, right? I assume he is also concerned with describing the product and getting certain info and judgement across, right?
I imagine we agree much more than we disagree though. Part of the stickiness of any discussion like this is the terms involved are very elastic or have multiple meanings. Do we mean the same thing when we say “truth” or “nonfiction” or “art”? etc.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that many of the commenters believe the same thing but are just using different “languages” to talk about it. I think we all agree that being dishonest or untruthful is something that shouldn’t be allowed in fiction or nonfiction because it makes for bad art. But being dishonest isn’t necessarily the same as being accurate. And it’s in that ambiguity that everybody gets lost. And I don’t know the answer, but my gut says this: If you are not telling the truth in order to hurt someone, or to aggrandize yourself, or to make the story more likely to sell, then you are being dishonest. If you are being intentionally inaccurate in order to make the story more honest, you are creating art.
I agree Shields is totally wrong, but correct at the same time. The novel is dead, if the writer accepts the form without question at the outset, and creates a tired re-hash with the same old tools and techniques.
But I’m trained as a sculptor. I made maybe 3 pieces (found object welded metal collage compositions) in 1989 that I considered competent, but not ground breaking. Then I quit. For me the form is dead. I can’t continue to make sculptures, so I don’t. Many of my friends and peers are still creating what the general public might call painting or sculpture, but unless their very existence negate all previous sculptural form, they fail, in my opinion (but you still might want to hang them over your couch). Occasionally, pieces emerge that evolved through a process that starts with the demolition of the form, and build something new from the wreckage. This is very rare.
“something strangely familiar yet startlingly new” could be a definition of art.
something that shows us that which we know already, yet did not understand, or see. (plagerized defintion, source unknown)
For me, this boils down to one analogy: this new form Shields hungers for, so far, he’s only using as a wrecking ball to try to destroy the novel form. It’s not clear that it can be used to create anything without referencing the novel form (to create in the absence of caring whether he veers into “the novel” form or not).
He gives the ultimate power to his view of the form of the novel to define an area off-limits to the new form, before he even finishes creating it.
Collage alone did not save painting or sculpture, and it won’t save literature. Collage is a spectrum: anything can be a found object, even a new tube of oil paint, purchased for the purpose of creating an new painting, squeezed out, and applied with a brush, or pierced and bolted to a canvas intact. The ink in the writer’s pen can be thought of as a found object, about to be appropriated for a new thought. A formulaic novel can be analyzed to pieces and re-presented as a finely-polished collage, for the sake of argument.
Joseph Beuys, the sculptor, said that all expression that exists in the physical world and has an effect on another person’s spirit/mind/soul/psyche is sculpture (even these words used to relate this idea). It really doesn’t matter how you cut it up and put it on a shelf.
If you call yourself an artist, just don’t bore me.
Andrew,
The point I was trying to make, however badly, isn’t that the truth should be shrugged at, but that the self-righteous hysteria of a lot of the hand-wringing about it vis a vis nonfiction is absurd. We know that memoir isn’t true, yes, but then we affect this shock and horror when it’s exposed as being exactly what we know it is — remembered, framed, and, at best, partial.
Abu Ghraib is a big leap from that. Aren’t the responsibilities different? Isn’t it hugely different? This is another point I seem to have failed to make — that the game changes when you are creating art, not public policy. Just as it does when you are creating art, not journalism or scholarship.
Why do we read literary (I failed here as well, as I assumed that’s what we were talking about) nonfiction when it’s memoir? I don’t read it to find out about someone’s childhood. I read it to experience art, and if things are compressed or otherwise altered, no, I’m not upset. I don’t care, because I also don’t care about the details of their story — I care about the telling. I care about what they make happen in that telling. And I am able to undersand, just as a child is able to understand that memoir is somewhat fudged, that allowing that compromise in art has nothing to do with allowing that compromise in war, in crimes against humanity, and in governance more broadly. Just as it has nothing to do with whatever might be in the Lancet, or Popular Mechanics.
Truth isn’t quaint, but neither is saying there are different rules for different things. I also don’t expect the Lancet to produce work that aspires to be art — that’s not their mandate.
I should have totally sat this last one out — Seth said it for me:
If you are not telling the truth in order to hurt someone, or to aggrandize yourself, or to make the story more likely to sell, then you are being dishonest. If you are being intentionally inaccurate in order to make the story more honest, you are creating art.
I completely agree.
With all due respect, Gladys, I believe the responsibilities are the same. We should tell the truth when we say we are telling the truth. We should not be a society that allows itself to be lied to by its artists or its leaders. How can such a society survive?
Politics has increasingly come to rely on narrative (a quick review of recent criticisms of the Obama administration will bring up scores of uses of “narrative” to describe what he is doing badly), because handlers and PR folk understand that narrative is how people understand the world. If artists train their audience to disregard or belittle the importance of telling the truth, they make it easier for politicians to “sell” us lies.
Also respectfully — truly, it’s heartening to disagree with someone because they care deeply about how much, and how dangerously, we are susceptible to narrative — I can’t hold art captive to the failures of our politics.
I don’t think artists are lying. I think that, sometimes, they are foreshortening, and trying to get at the truth by messing with the facts. And I think that’s fair. But I also don’t think they are promising me a factually accurate truth, so I suppose we have a difference of expectation.
If you are being intentionally inaccurate in order to make the story more honest, you are creating art.
But is there a point when you are creating fiction? I realize there is leeway between these terms, but at some point it seems you move out of the realm of nonfiction…at least in most readers eyes.
Hm, well this is getting dangerously close to a “what is truth” argument, which I doubt will be resolved in any comments section :), but I don’t see fiction and nonfiction as a 1 and a 0. Isn’t it true that the moment you start to write about something, anything, whether it is fiction or nonfiction, you are by definition being intentionally inaccurate? That doesn’t mean you aren’t telling the truth, but art is, well, artifice, because, well, that’s what art means. You have to pick and choose certain things to talk about, and by doing so, you are ignoring other things, etc. It’s true certain things are more accurate than others, and maybe nonfiction should be a helluva lot more “accurate” than fiction, but it’s not going to be a 100% accurate representation of events. It’s just not. So you have to approximate (ie be inaccurate) in order to capture some sort of “truth” behind the story. Right? In which case, according to the strict fiction/nonfiction model, everything is fiction. My point was that the trouble comes, I think, when someone is disingenuous, not when someone is inaccurate. Does that make any sense? It’s definitely possible I’m rambling.
I know the argumentative format Schields chose is unhelpful in this regard, but I found it a far more conciliatory approach to the sometimes conflicting and maddening points in the book to begin with the personal statements he sprinkled throughout the text about his own impatience and struggle with reading fiction. At the end of the day, Reality Hunger speaks to a kind of hyperactivity of the mind that isn’t able, any more (if it ever was) to produce the kind of focus and suspension of disbelief many novels require (or at least request). I think this kind of adult ADD is not all that uncommon, even among writers of fiction, and so I’m far more sympathetic and willing to look beyond the grossly generalizing and often highly intolerant claims of his book, feeling as I do that it’s really just a way he’s found to celebrate what at first probably struck him as a massive readerly shortcoming. That Schields found a way through a crisis of faith with his vocation and came out the other side with something to champion and pursue is courageous and even noble, I think–and I find I’m finally able to forgive him the churlish, over-adamant prosthelytizing that comes with the high emotions accompanying personal victory.
My point was that the trouble comes, I think, when someone is disingenuous, not when someone is inaccurate.
That’s when the trouble starts for me at least. Truth is never at issue for me when I’m looking at fiction or non-fiction because I feel, as Michel seems to, that fiction is often more effective at getting at metaphysical truth than non-fiction is. But if you claim the mantle of non-fiction, it seems to me, you make a promise to the reader that what you are putting on the page is as close to accurate as you can make it, at least when it comes to matters of fact, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re aiming for something higher, like art, if you break that promise. The second you deliberately move into the realm of inaccuracy, you leave the world of non-fiction behind, and any excuse you come up with in order to justify that move is just that–an excuse, and a weak one in my opinion. If you need to change facts in order to make the story more artful, then call it fiction and be done with it.
Interesting discussion. I said it in another thread (https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/02/why-read-nonfiction/#comment-17657), but the art-or-information question is a false dichotomy in the first place.
Creative nonfiction, and the essay in particular, draws its power from navigating these two elements. I think Gladys and perhaps Spears is drawn to the speculation of the genre, which is fine and needed in the current discussions. But I do think the essay/an essay/a piece of nonfiction is always *about* something. The reality of an epistemological underpinning might irk some of us, but it’s there in nonfiction.
The photo-realistic painter has more success with actual photography, in the market and with the critics, which amazes us: is it journalism, or reality-as-art (did he pose those scenes, or happen upon them?). He then tries to say photo-realistic painting is dead, we need to paint on actual photographs; we argue that the photos themselves were invented fictions in the first place. And what about all the documentary photographers, surely they use reality artfully? “Dorothea Lange is an artist!”
But wait, photo-realistic painting allows the artist to bring out or subdue any part of the scene, it’s not dead, and besides, my sister in law just sold out her show at $25k a piece. No, it’s only valid when it’s at least partly invented, including disparate subjects juxtaposed in impossible relationships, in order to allow the viewer the opportunity to see the familiar in a new way.
If I sit down and paint a scene from a photograph, with no invention along the way, with the sole intent to call it an invented piece, sure, it’s fictionalized reality, but will sit there dead on the easel. Does it matter if I paint the same painting from the world and not the photo? Do I need to footnote the photographer? Oh wait, don’t foot note a fictitious photographer when there’s not photo, that’s unethical.
I’m reminded of Borges’s comparative essay “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” on Don Quixote, between the original and the exact duplicate written by the writer who lived his entire life so that his life experience would enable him to write it word for word, having never read the original. (quote from memory: ” the 17th century Spanish comes off as stilted an affected in Menard’s hand”).
Chris Oxford, I am reminded of the work of James Casasere, which is in the Whitney Biennial:
http://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial/JamesCasebere
I am still surprised no one has mentioned Lejeune’s Autobiographical Pact. Does Shields mention it? Here’s a cool diagram from it:
http://danielnester.com/2010/03/09/diagram-from-philippe-lejeune-the-autobiographical-pact/
“If you need to change facts in order to make the story more artful, then call it fiction and be done with it.” Right, I think that it all comes down to expectations, like Gladys said. Because you are calling something nonfiction, if you are deliberately changing facts, you are being disingenuous.
But it gets more complicated than that, I think. You can also be disingenuous in both fiction and nonfiction a million other, more serious, more hurtful ways, either through the selection of which facts to share or the way in which you frame the story. Or you could be disingenuous, I think, by calling something fiction when it, or at least most of it, is in fact not fiction — say if one of the “characters” wants to be recognized for his or her work. And this makes me wonder if part of the reason for all this “reality hunger” is that writers think of fiction as an extension of nonfiction, something they can go to when they get into ethical deep water, when in fact it should be its own thing. Like the bass and the guitar. Anyone who writes may be able to pull off a short story. Any guitarist can be a decent bass player. But like only a bassist can be a great bassist, only a fiction writer can be a great fiction writer.
“Or you could be disingenuous, I think, by calling something fiction when it, or at least most of it, is in fact not fiction”
Is it an all or nothing solution, then, that makes people happy? I agree with Seth that it’s complicated, but isn’t saying something is nonfiction an understanding that that is its larger role, not that every single thing is factually accurate? If it’s wrong to alter fact in nonfiction, and it’s wrong to call 90% fact fiction, then do we just junk everything that doesn’t meet a purity test? Because you’re tossing out a lot of serious and valuable work. Do we no longer read In Cold Blood?
If it’s wrong to alter fact in nonfiction, and it’s wrong to call 90% fact fiction, then do we just junk everything that doesn’t meet a purity test?
The boundaries between the genres are blurry, but I disagree with the above statement. I’m not sure what a great metaphor to use here is, but “nonfiction” is a term like “vegan.” . The border of what is vegan or not is somewhat blurry (does honey count? can you wear hand-me-down leather products?), like the border of fiction and non, but vegan food needs to pretty much be vegan to satisfy most people. Any vegan dish can be turned nonvegan by adding a slice of bacon, even if 90% of the dish is still not made of animal products. In short, nonfiction implies a kind of purity test and anything that doesn’t meet it becomes fiction.
At least this is what I think most readers expect, even if creative nonfiction writers think otherwise.
Sorry, that last post should have been responding to Seth not gladys:’
“Or you could be disingenuous, I think, by calling something fiction when it, or at least most of it, is in fact not fiction“
I think you hit on the problem, Lincoln:
“At least this is what I think most readers expect, even if creative nonfiction writers think otherwise.”
and to finish my thought — if it is like veganism, and what you say about expectations is true, why is it the “vegans” in this analogy aren’t in the position to define what they are and are not?
I like that point. I’ll have to ponder it. We do seem to agree there is a disjunction though. My only argument right now is that I think these issues are being constantly debated between nonfiction writers as well, yes?
(or are the readers, ie the consumers, the vegans and the nonfiction writers the chefs?… maybe we should scrap this metaphor now, ha!)
@Lincoln and Gladys: Good points all around. My brain hurts, which is usually a good sign, though that might be the Jameson from last night. But I still kind of feel like calling something “fiction” even though it is at heart nonfiction is a cop out. Not always. And there are ways around it. Like Bernard Cooper’s fiction. Or our own Stephen Elliott’s novels. But if you’re writing nonfiction, and at some point you decide that something is fiction, just saying “this is fiction now” doesn’t really seem to cut it. All of the sudden, you have a million new tools, you have different expectations from readers, and there’s a lot you suddenly can’t get away with because it’s not “true” anymore. By the way, and for the record, I’m parroting (maybe badly) a teacher of mine, who I’ll leave out of it, but if she’s watching this and wants to jump in she is more than welcome to.
hmm. In my experience? No, they’re not debating it. I think that intention matters a lot, and like Seth says, if you call something fiction, when it is almost entirely not, that is a cop out. Are you intending to write a novel, or are you taking cover?
But if your intent is nonfiction, even if some fictional devices/elements make it in there, and you call it nonfiction, it is (I don’t know any cnf writers who aspire to being declared scrupulously factually true).
Is it more like salad versus bacon? Like, a rasher of bacon is bacon, but a salad with bacon on it is still a salad? I like bacon on salad. I like it a whole lot, but it has to be in proportion.
A documentary photographer is documenting a high-profile event (like a street protest in Iran after the elections), and publishes a photograph in a western newspaper, but this photograph is more of an atmospheric description (an image of the street, some blood, a discarded placard the demonstrators dropped); the photographer kicked the placard toward the blood first, so it would fit in the shot: Ethical foul? he interfered in a purported journalistic endeavor, even if it was only to heighten the emotional response, in order to allow the viewer some emotional equivalent to being there. Call it fiction and be done with it?
Publishing the same photo in a coffee table book of the journalism photographer’s personal memoir of that event: Foul? If so, does a disclaimer on the title page or introduction claiming the book to be full of Art photos negate the foul? Does the fact that the fiction is exposed, but not specifically called out with a footnote, destroy the emotional weight for the viewer? Does he need to footnote the actual fiction?
If he paints the photo in oil in the studio, no one questions the fiction, but the subject will seem trite. It wasn’t much to begin with; a visual cliche, even if it was true with no intervention in the beginning, but still might have shed some truth on the event, and have been worth putting in a daily paper.
Sorry to keep butting in with photo analogies, but it’s the only way I can relate to the discussion; this has been keeping me up nights.
I think that intention matters a lot, and like Seth says, if you call something fiction, when it is almost entirely not, that is a cop out.
Well, I must disagree with you and Seth on this point. As I said in the essay, I judge fiction in the way I judge a painting or poem. Sometimes poems are based on true things, sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes the painter is painting something as he saw it, other times he is arranging or inventing the image. I don’t really concern myself with the truth or untruth of these things. I’ve never seen someone read, say, a Lydia Davis story published as fiction in a magazine and go “wait, I bet that really happened! Cop out!” What is the cop out in listing something that happened as fiction?
The only time I could see it being a cop out is if you were thinly veiling an attack on real people as fiction just to avoid legal troubles and give yourself a way out from criticism. But if I write a short piece on how good my tea tasted this morning and I publish it as fiction or a story, I’m unclear what would be problematic?
I guess my suggestion, re: expectations, is that a modern reader doesn’t “expect” much from something listed a “a story” or “fiction.” They don’t expect it to be totally fiction. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
But that’s where intention comes in — if you write a novel that’s hugely informed by actual events, it’s a novel because you sat down to write a novel. But if you write about how much you hate your dentist, and then call it a story because you don’t want to have to actually say you hate your dentist, it’s a cop out.
People reading into work, and deciding that, because you were an IT guy, and your main character is an IT guy, your novel must be based on your life is silly and not even worth dismissing. And I feel the same way about finger pointing about factual discretion in (creative) nonfiction.
What makes a prose poem a prose poem, other than the author deciding it is? Why is it not an essay? Or even a Lydia Davis story?
I’d like it if writers of nonfiction could expect the same flexibility from readers of their work. That the intention if nonfiction, but it shouldn’t be treated like the World Book.
From the essay: “Even if you want to turn a literary discussion into a definition war, you can not merely redraw the boundaries on your map. You must conquer the actual ground.”
This is a key point, and it seems the work itself (Reality Hunger) has not conquered any ground. From here (me having read only about 25 reviews and 9 pages of the book available online), it seems to try to create new ground adjacent to where we are out of the ether, but can’t be said to have succeeded until Shields or someone else creates new material that holds the ground. Not only does he have to conquer the ground, he or someone sympathetic has to work the ground to legitimize the claim, or forfeit it.
From Reality Hunger: “463: I have a very vivid memory of being assigned to read The Grapes of Wrath as a junior in high school and playing hooky from my homework to read Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72…”
I want to dismiss this as boastful posturing; big deal, I’d read Grapes of Wrath as a freshman for the hell of it, all Steinbeck, in fact. I was assigned Fear and Loathing in my college creative writing class (no so much assigned, but it was on the list of books we had to have read or shut up). By 1985, it came off as a slightly self-indulgent posturing, but enormously entertaining. At the same time, I was reading some romantic French novel to impress a female classmate who claimed to adore it, to try to get laid. It didn’t work. So what.
But then I get caught thinking about the transformation of the novel from The Grapes of Wrath to Fear and Loathing, and wonder where the next transformation will take us.
In the meantime, most of David Foster Wallace totally fails to satisfy on an entertaining level, which a novel needs to do, even if it is critically legitimate. Stieg Larsson (Girl with the Dragon Tatoo) over-succeeds in being entertaining and riveting, but comes off as a highly polished mystery novel in form. I’m withholding judgment on the death of the novel, or necessity of the birth of some new form until after I read Gregory David Robert’s second one, out later this year? Shantaram was riveting, and apparently structurally sound, but seemed to depend too much on the similarity between the true and fictionalized. I can’t help wondering if it would have held up if the blurb on the back didn’t reveal the similarities between the author’s life and the novel.
But if you write about how much you hate your dentist, and then call it a story because you don’t want to have to actually say you hate your dentist, it’s a cop out.
Romans a clef anyone?
I’d like it if writers of nonfiction could expect the same flexibility from readers of their work.
You’re not asking for flexibility–you’re asking that non-fiction writers be able to write fiction and sell it as non-fiction. That’s like a slaughterhouse asking to package horse meat as beef. To be absolutely clear here, I’m not talking about questions surrounding memory or partial reconstructions of conversations–I’m talking about inventing new facts a la James Frey. Once you do that, you’re writing fiction, no matter what kind of bullshit excuse you come up with about trying to create art. No. You’re trying to have it both ways.
The great storytelling advantage non-fiction has is that it can be outlandish and the audience will play along because they’ve been told “this is all true, and truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.” When you deliberately change the facts to “make the story better,” you’re breaking that contract with the reader–the reader feels lied to because the reader has been lied to. Your part of the deal as a nonfiction writer is to make sure you hold up your end and not, as Stephen put it, intentionally lie. Because the second you do that–and if you want percentages, my percentage is the storytelling equivalent of the one-drop rule–you’re writing fiction. You’ve broken your deal with the audience.
If you want your readers to be flexible, write something other than non-fiction. In other genres, the only requirement is that it be worth reading. There are no expectations of either accuracy or truth (and those are two very different things).
I read (most of) Frey’s book, well after the controversy, and only to be able to follow discussions like this (his book comes up in every lecture, article, etc. about nonfiction writing). The one thing no one ever says is that it’s a terrible book. Just awful. Who cares what genre it is?
Imagine reading about the craft of fiction, listening to lectures about the genre, etc. and hearing the obligatory defense/attack/opinion about The Da VInci Code. Frey has become an albatross for the nonfiction genre, and I wonder why so many writers indulge questions and opinions about him and that crappy book. It sucks–move on.
I haven’t read the current title by Shields, but in Enough about You, he tries his hand at a kind of collage, with the same result described in the review: ineffective. He strikes me more as a quirky cultural critic than an artist.
Shields has attempted to wedge a blog into a book and call it a new form, end of story. The debate over fiction/non-fiction, novel, autobiography, is all missing the point.
With that appropriation, he’s exposed himself on several fronts, the most dangerous being that we are now free to dismiss his work as easily as surfing to a better, more timely blog.
The debate swirling around the book has been confused by the disguise: book, so we all jump around trying to classify it in terms of every other book, when it has more in common with a tv gossip show (The Insider, last year, with only one host).
As he has disavowed footnotes as being so passe, we are free to call his book rubbish and move on, without reference or reasoned, sourced arguments.
The other dangers of the blog-novel are self evident: every journalistic pitfall inherent in every blog have come along for the appropriation.
If, for a moment, we are to take him seriously, we can take note that he has swallowed Lejeune’s Autobiographical Pact,
http://danielnester.com/2010/03/09/diagram-from-philippe-lejeune-the-autobiographical-pact/ (thanks, Daniel, for the link, above)
got it stuck in his throat, and whether he wants to or not, assumes the new role of author-oracle, feeding us bits of reality and pithy commentary so that we, the unwashed masses, are now enlightened by the TRUTH that our own experience of reality utterly failed to show us.
I’d never heard of Shields till this recent press. I just read “Enough About You” and enjoyed it. I think it was good for a new reading list (which makes sense, as he went to Brown) but after that plus it all feels Junior High School English Teacher. Which is not to say it’s not fun, as Junior High English was fun. But he can be dangerous: there is a moment where he talks about licking a woman’s foot in “Enough about you” which might be the worst moment in literature. The thought of a writer as non-sexual as David Shields licking a woman’s foot and even before I saw that picture of him up there. Not cool. Worse than Vollman. I moved the book away from my body.
I don’t know if he’s trying to put a blog in a book (isn’t that the other way around?) I think it’s more he’s probably interested in Markson, who he mentioned in the Millions interview. Stuff like this new book of his (and things like Twitter) are the first rounds of Markson imitators. That’s how I see it. They’re gonna blow boring, but they need to be written. I’m glad we’re all talking so hard about David Shields and not “Oscar Wao” or something sequential like that.
“Imagine reading about the craft of fiction, listening to lectures about the genre, etc. and hearing the obligatory defense/attack/opinion about The Da VInci Code. Frey has become an albatross for the nonfiction genre, and I wonder why so many writers indulge questions and opinions about him and that crappy book. It sucks–move on.”
Exactly.
And to go back to Brian’s point — do you write nonfiction Brian? Or have you, a non-writer of non-fiction, decided that you know what it is, and you know what’s promised, and that it’s your rule that wins? I’m really curious. Because I do not know one single serious literary nonfiction writer (and I know a lot of them) who would agree with you.
If I write a book and, oh, make one composite character, do I have to call it a novel? That’s absurd.
As for changing facts to make the story better, that’s not why people do it. The do it to get at the truth, however much bothers you. Maybe what should be agreed is that there is essay, and there is verse, and there is prose fiction, and that when you are not writing scholarship and not writing journalism, you don’t have to adhere to any one-drop anything. I mean, seriously! Did no one read Armies of the Night? Why are we even having this conversation?
Richie:
I think everything you say there is correct. For the record, Shields does state that Frey is a terrible writer at one point in Reality Hunger. Also, as I said above to gladys, while Shields may not need to tackle James Frey specifically in his argument I think the preponderance of major memoir scandals in recent history is something that needs to be commented on.
Gladys:
I think everyone can agree that some amount of “fictionalizing” is acceptable in nonfiction or is at least inevitable (as you note, dialogue is always going to be invented unless you tape record everything). The question, though, is where is the line? To get back to Frey (only on the level of invention, not quality) Almost everything that was checkable turned out to be wholly invented (3-month jail stay when he was only there a few hours) or highly exaggerated. Is his book still a memoir to you?
Certainly there is some point when a book becomes fiction for you, if if we disagree on where the line is exactly?
The main argument I wanted to make on this front was not so much where the line is for what we can or should call something nonfiction, but rather at what point do we cease to read it as nonfiction? I’m willing to give nonfiction writers whatever freedoms they want, but for me personally I’m going to read the piece as I would read a poem or a piece of fiction if a fair amount of fudging has gone on.
Gladys, others:
I think my problem is that I play devil’s advocate for either side of debates and discussions, at least the ones I really care about. I am trying to make my second-rate intelligence hold two opposed ideas in my head at the same time, as Fitzgerald writes.
Anyway, I wrote about truth-in-memoir and changing the truth, and I came to many of the same conclusions you do (I posted it, inspired by this discussion and others, here: http://tinyurl.com/notesonfrey). I find myself agreeing and not-agreeing at the same time. Maybe that’s a good thing?
Either way, I love the Shields book.
I agree that it’s a line question, Lincoln. But that means acknowledging that there is a line, and it’s not over at 100%. I think a lot of nf people get frustrated when you have to deal with 1 drop arguments like the one Brian is making — it takes away any assumption of intelligence on the part of the reader. Line drawing, and that kind of discretion, is essential. And that is where the fun, hard questions come in: (to crib from Goldbarth) Does “context†matter? Does “earned†count?
Frey wrote a terrible, terrible book. Does it count as memoir? Bad memoir, sure. Bad, self-serving, distorted memoir. I guess I stumble always over why we even have to talk about it. It’s not a good book, and I don’t think it’s worthy of the time that’s been spent on it.
I actually, gasp, like his books a lot.
Frey claimed he submitted his book as a novel to several publishers and it was rejected. Eventually that book was accepted — but only when he called it a memoir. Memoirs and novels, it turns out, have different publication standards. A bad writer with an interesting story to tell has a better chance with publishers than a modestly capable writer of fiction. The true legacy of the Frey/Oprah fiasco is this: James Frey wanted to be a novelist and didn’t have the chops, so he lied his way in — but Frey still doesn’t have the chops, and now he is a more or less established writer of fiction. In his book, Shields — who is a very capable writer — ignores this aspect of memoir: much of it is poorly written. If the “lyric essay” that Shields champions in this book catches on, it will only open the doors for very poor writing indeed. (Perhaps Shields can do it, but few others can.) Ultimately I’m not sure who his manifesto is for: those already writing fiction will be insulted by its demands for the substance of non-fiction, and those writing non-fiction will be insulted by its insistence on fabrication.
Of course, most readers won’t care.
If I write a book and, oh, make one composite character, do I have to call it a novel? That’s absurd.
Why is that absurd? Composite characters are, by their very definition, fictional. They do not exist in the real world. They exist in fiction.
But when you put the tag of “nonfiction” on a piece of writing, you’re making a claim of accuracy to your audience. Whether or not you’re making stuff up in pursuit of a higher truth is irrelevant–your audience won’t usually make that distinction. They’ll discover (if your book has any success) that you made some stuff up and that will negate any other truth claims you make in the rest of the book or essay or whatever. It’s in your own best interest to be as accurate as you can be in this kind of writing, because your reputation with your audience is at stake. If you don’t want to be held to that standard, don’t call your work non-fiction. And it’s the audience that matters here, not your fellow writers.
There is a genre, by the way, for those who want to write about their own lives but create composite characters and change details in order to get to a “higher truth.” It’s called autobiographical fiction, and it has a pretty decent history.
I don’t know, Brian. I agree you can’t go making composite characters willy-nilly, especially if you don’t cop to it. But there are times when you can do composite characters in nonfiction, as long as you are honest and forthright about the fact that it’s a composite character. In fact, there are times when that’s the only ethical thing to do. I wrote an essay once about Iraq War vets with Traumatic Brain Injury who were getting treatment at the VA. I couldn’t call any of them by name because it would violate all kinds of ethical rules … shit, I couldn’t even describe an individual one of them because I would be violating patient confidentiality laws, possibly getting jail time. So I had to make a composite character, but I identified that character as such, and I still felt justified calling it nonfiction. The rest of it was pure nonfiction. In fact, I would’ve felt weird calling it fiction because that’s just not what it was.
Johnny, you say the lyric essay “will only open the doors for very poor writing indeed.” Except lots of people are writing lyric essay. Lots of people have been writing it. Very very well. Much better than Shields, and much before Shields. Read Thalia Field. Read Mary Ruefle. Read John D’Agata, or Jenny Boully, or Juliana Spahr, or David Antin and see what essays can do.
Brian:
“And it’s the audience that matters here, not your fellow writers.” I actually think it’s the work that matters, and what you want from it, not other writers or the readers. Everyone hated Moby Dick. Does that, by your calculus, make it a bad book? And the idea that one composite character shuttles an entire work into the novel category, I’m sorry, is just nonsense. Absolutism like that has no place when we’re talking about art. Seth makes a very good point that it’s also sometimes essential. Treating your subject with respect is far more important than not fooling an apparently credulous, dogmatic reader.
Seth,
I’d say that as long as you’re admitting to your reader up front that you’re writing about composite characters, then you haven’t breached a trust with them, and that’s what I’m concerned about as a reader. As a reader, if I see a note about composite characters, for example, I can adjust my expectations about the accuracy of the material. If that isn’t there, though, and I discover later that the author decided to do that, then I have reason to question not only the accuracy of the rest of the piece, but the “higher truth” that the piece claims to be seeking.
Everyone hated Moby Dick. Does that, by your calculus, make it a bad book?
No. And that’s not close to anything I’ve written in this thread.
You said that the judgment of readers is what matters. But I suppose you’re drawing a convenient line, and saying it only matters when it comes to arguments about genre?
You’re talking about aesthetic judgment in your question to me. I’ve never once mentioned aesthetics here. What I have consistently said, and what you have consistently ignored, is that when you use the term “nonfiction,” you make a claim as to the accuracy of what you’re writing that fiction writers and poets do not. If the reader judges you to be a liar based on the inaccuracy of some of your facts, that matters. It matters because you have then given the reader a reason to discount every thing you’ve written in that book or essay, and to challenge the “higher truth” you were aiming for.
Now, you may not want to accept that the term “nonfiction” carries that responsibility, but I can tell you as a reader that it does, and that recent history has not treated nonfiction writers who play fast and loose with facts kindly, no matter what claims they make about creating art or searching for higher truth.
Daniel:
I read both of Frey’s “memoirs” a few years back, before the whole thing blew up in everyone’s faces. I enjoyed the shit of each one. I could care less what the hell those books were/are classified. I also just finished Reality Hunger last night. I dug it, too. Maybe there’s a place for guys like us. Not here in this comments section of course. But maybe somewhere. While I’m at it, forging alliances, that is, I might as well say that your essay about 80’s video gaming in How to Be Inappropriate treated me really nice! If I lived in your neck of the woods, I’d be tempted to say, “We should get a cuppa joe & BS about books and film and whatnot.”
I think the nonfiction conundrum will never be solved, for me. It’s a problem that’s been around a while, and it’s not so much that some bullshitters have all of a sudden made it an issue, but rather a bunch of academics are trying to get jobs/tenure by beating this horse to death.
I actually never had a problem before understanding/classifying works that were mostly nonfiction, but with embellishments, etc. Thanks, but I don’t need a reading guide for The Woman Warrior, et al. I can mostly tell when someone is lying (because they are usually doing so for self-aggrandizement). Great memoirists are great not because of feats of their character, but because they’re good writers.
+1 to the guy who said Shields is just a blogger who appears in print.
Reality Hunger = hipster snake-oil
I wonder if the encomiums greeting this work aren’t the makings of an industry in the last throes facing the golden, hazy twilight. The death (again) of the novel, the death of short fiction, et al. Reality hunger? Rather, REALITY GLUTTONY.
If it is the twilight of the industry, like most twilights I seen, it’s a very pleasing thing to experience. I’m fully enjoying certain recent novels, the way I really enjoy having a late 20th century painting on my wall and listening to recent music coming from a similar place in history. I consume them like setting waypoints on the GPS, firmly marking the ground I’ve covered, a trip that I try to map out in a way that relates meaningfully with the larger journey the culture at large is taking.
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.
Wish I got in on the discussion sooner. Great review & alternative views. Kudos on The Wire & all of #12. Not sure ‘Reality Boredom’ is the right title, though, as the review doesn’t seem written out of ennui. As for nonfiction or fiction…for me, all I want is writing that provokes thought, one mind communicating to another…RH does that. I’d say I disagreed with half of RH, more or less…which isn’t too bad considering how far The Bible has gone with a less persuasive argument.
This comment thread has me riveted.
I don’t believe Shields is actually weary of fiction, or that he is some dynamic champion of all things non-fictional. And any talk of not being able to ever differentiate between the two isn’t much more than awkward hyperbole that overpraises the composite. I also don’t for a moment think our imaginative spaces are any more or less real than the empirical world in which they exist and to which they respond. In my reading of him, he just feels unchallenged (as a reader) by the literary marketplace. He’s tired of received forms.
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.
Hey Tim, thanks for your comment.
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.
Lincoln—you’re right, like Shields, I’m too often guilty of overstating my position in an attempt to keep the pendulum swinging. I don’t want it stuck on fiction or non-fiction (or on novel or essay, or on poetry or philosophy, or on pro-Shields or anti-Shields, etc.). But that’s the wrong metaphor for me to use—as has already been pointed out by many others—since fiction and non-fiction shouldn’t be placed on a continuum. They infect one another and can’t be pulled apart into separate states of purity. But, again, that doesn’t mean they’re identical twins and can’t (in most situations) be recognized as distinct from one another.
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.”
from the review:
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.â€
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.â€
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 (https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/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 find your lack of faith disturbing” (Star Wars)
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!
This is the most thoughtful and interesting and compelling response to Shields I have read, and I wrote three blog posts myself after reading Reality Hunger, though focused narrowly, on his argument about truth in memoir. I think you are right that, essentially, he has elevated personal taste to a movement. Something is going on, with communication and culture and all, but something is always going on. Fiction has just as much or more claim on this new reality, as well as eternal realities, as nonfiction.
Tim Ramick #65 (not a chinese menu order) I think you have it(dare I say truth?) in your statement “I don’t for a moment think that our imaginative spaces are any more or less real than the empirical world in which they exist and to which they respond”. I confess to cruising you-tube recently and stumbling upon a great interview with the late Ken Kesey. I can’t quote exactly, but way back then he was calling for a new kind of writing, one that could compete with other more modern forms (media). Well, that’s at least what I got out of it. And all the hyperbolic flim-flam (sorry) about fiction: non, semi, pure, etc… that I’ve been reading here (extremely intelligent observations and passionate rhetoric) ain’t the real point.
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