The February 2010 publication of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, by David Shields, generated an amazing amount of discussion from all sides.
Shields traded contrarian ideas with Nicholson Baker, Stephen Colbert, and Rick Moody, among others, and provoked stalwarts Michiko Kakutani and James Woods. Such fiery debate rare for a work of literary criticism, leading to the February 2011 release of the book in paperback. Within Shields argues for a certain aesthetic, a blurring of genre, a future without novel, a literature that penetrates “reality at ground level,” specifically: the lyric essay, collage, and other non-traditional forms. One cannot deny his manifesto has stimulated debate, and that the art he loves can be quite stunning. However, the underlying jeremiad against fiction has proven troubling, though attempts to persuade Shields of his follies prove futile. Christopher Hitchens might get better odds in convincing The Pope to renounce Catholicism. Nevertheless, I offer this salvo, not so much to dissuade Shields, but to promote the value, going forward, of the novel.
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The Rumpus: A long time ago someone close to me told me she was raped, that she had been impregnated by her stepfather, and then had an abortion. When she told me I acted like she had a venereal disease. I avoided her. I lost contact. Years later I felt regret, and I wanted to understand her experience. I read Bastard out of Carolina. Through story, character, even setting and plot, through a novel, I learned about her reality at “ground level.” This reality obliterated something inside me. You’ve stopped reading novels…are you certain they can offer nothing?
David Shields: The question doesn’t really make sense. One idea is not connected to the other. What I think of is the novel Louise Erdrich wrote “about” Michael Dorris’s suicide. Everyone understood that the novel was a roman à clef, but it didn’t scrape to bone in the way that I wanted it to. I’m not sure what to say other than that for myself and other like-minded writers, I’m establishing an aesthetic of radical compression, naked discomfiture, etc. Louise Erdrich is a born novelist, and that is her métier, and she’s good at it, but what I found in that book, and what I find in 99.99% of novels is that the armature takes over – the impulse to keep the reader turning pages. What I want from work front and center is the writer struggling with nothing less than how he or she has or hasn’t solved the problem of being alive. A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it. Almost all novels do the former; I want the latter.
Rumpus: How to escape? How to endure? Dorothy Allison’s novel asks: How can a 12 year-old child solve being raped by her stepfather? What can this child do when her mother does not believe her? How should she stay afloat when her mother ultimately chooses her stepfather? Thus specifically: “How can a child stay alive when she is raped and has no one to turn to?” The novel concludes with hardcore doubt. It’s a grueling lesson, and struggles mightily with how to endure, not escape. I question your certainty thus:
A. David Shields is certain the novel does not solve being alive.
B. There are novels that struggle with the problem of how to be alive.
Therefore…
C. David Shields’ certainty is called into question.
I would say most novels are “entertainment.” You say “almost all.” You pull out your exceptions, and then label them anti-novels, but I’m trying to show, by one exception, that you may be wrong. That a novel, even if it’s a roman à clef, offers compelling art. I’d say that 99% of novels don’t do it, but this may also be the case with 99% of lyric essay/collage etc. The novel is equal to other forms in this respect.
Shields: Sure. If you found the Dorothy Allison novel powerful, go for it. Not sure what to say. I’m just saying that for myself, I was looking at the New Yorker last night. Thought I’d look at the first sentence of Tessa Hadley’s short story. It seemed to me a gesture made so many millions of times before that we can’t read it anymore. It’s played out. At least it is for me. I’m fifteen years older than you are. I’ve read a lot more. I’ve read all of these things. I’ve read all of these novels. Forms evolve. Art, like science, progresses. Why should a novel written in 2011 take very nearly the same form as a novel took in 1880, with minor variations? Is this true in music? In visual art? No. Then why should it be true in literary work? How can we not take full advantage of the digital materials now available to us? I can’t argue with your experience or anyone else’s. I’m just saying that for me I can’t read such works anymore. They feel hackneyed and predictable. I’m trying to develop an aesthetic flag to fly under for people who share this. Hundreds of people write me to say, “Thank you for writing this. I never knew what form I was trying to get to. This is it.”
Rumpus: Hey, I’m as picky reader as you, I’ve got my eclectic mix of nonfiction and fiction, essay, journalism, cultural flotsam…I want art full of life, language, and I want to get into the mind of a fucking genius.
Shields: That’s all I ever want to do, too – get into the mind of a genius. But I want the mind. Almost no novels major in mind. I love the exceptions: Sterne, Markson, Proust, etc.
Rumpus: Fair enough. You’ve done tons of interviews, and pretty much everyone has come up with these so-called “exceptions”… I’ve got mine, Larry Watson’s Montana 1948, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin…man, that novel fucks with your brain. But I’ll stay with Bastard out of Carolina…the power comes from three hours of intense reading. A lyric essay could never match that. When you describe novels you aren’t describing this…unless you despise “real.” These are novels for the 21st century, for now, for the future, and they could not have been written in 1880.
Shields: My goal was never to convince you or anyone else. It was just to write an ars poetica for myself, to figure out what it is I love and why, and if there are any like-minded individuals who find the argument useful, then I’m delighted. This probably sounds like an evasion on my part, but it’s the “truth.” One novel that I read fairly recently and loved, and that is utterly traditional, is Coetzee’s Disgrace. I haven’t read those novels you mention, but whenever I do read such novels that everybody else admires – e.g. Philip Roth’s The Human Stain – all of the armature inevitably defeats me.
Rumpus: Who’s everybody else?
Shields: Conventional wisdom, I suppose. The gate-keepers.
Rumpus: I’d say you’ve developed an inveterate bias.
Shields: No art without bias.
Rumpus: The artist should embrace all forms.
Shields: Nope. Gotta choose.
Rumpus: I love what you love…fiction also. But I’ll admit…I’m concerned for the novel’s future. I see literature becoming less and less important.
Shields: I’m trying to save it, I promise you.
Rumpus: I think about David Foster Wallace’s take on poetry, that poetry is only written for poets, experimental writing is a lot of work with little reward…new forms capture the same landscape. I say the novel offers the best chance to avoid this.
Shields: As I mention, there are definitely some novels that I like, but they aren’t novelly novels. They might have a somewhat fictive rubric, e.g. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, but they are not sacrificing investigation for entertainment. They are all about the investigation.
Rumpus: So I ask…do you think lyric essay and collage face the same danger as the poem? What about literature in general? Will there be a day when the only people reading literary art are those who create it? And how important is this to our future?
Shields: I suppose that is a real concern, isn’t it? This is the elitist idea? I guess I don’t think in those terms. I just am trying to stay alive as a writer and reader and teacher. Almost all fiction writing bores me out of my mind. I’ve found, to my great relief and joy, work that thrills me and that I want to write. Many writers who are 55 are phoning in their SOP by now. I feel proud that I’m still completely confused, completely feeling my way in the dark through this new form, this nonfiction drawer labeled nonsocks. People will always read and write. It will take utterly new forms. And one of the main ways we’ll get there is by embracing new technologies and new modes rather than pretending “literature” consists of replaying the hits of 1908.
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Read Caleb Powell’s first Rumpus Interview with Shields here.
7 responses
I don’t agree with everything Shields has said/written in the past year, but Reality Hunger did expose me to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which was better than just about anything else I read last year. But his kind of snobbish “Why waste my time with old forms?”-attitude is really aggravating. He says his goal was never to convince anyone that their beliefs about books/music/movies are wrong, but RH condescends so strongly to people who enjoy traditional narratives. It’s nearly polemical. I don’t know how much I buy that there isn’t a trace of trying to be a tastemaker with Reality Hunger.
“It was just to write an ars poetica for myself, to figure out what it is I love and why, and if there are any like-minded individuals who find the argument useful, then I’m delighted.”
Part of me feels he’s just as delighted when he comes across the many who disagree with him, so that he can wax poetic on why the prologue to Slaughterhouse-Five is the only thing Vonnegut’s ever written that he’s liked.
I’m not sure if “interview” is the ideal form for Shields, that is, one can’t help but react to his arguments, when delivered in the casual and summative form they are here, by thinking it all comes down to a matter of taste. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I think he is saying a lot more than “I don’t like this and I do like that,†but it’s hard to hear much more than that in an interview. But, of course, “manifesto†is a better form for Shields. I really enjoyed Reality Hunger, the way I enjoy a great conversation with someone I disagree with, which isn’t even to say I think he’s wrong, about any of it, but either way I appreciate what he’s done just by raising the questions he has about form and literature.
The only problem I had with what he’s said here is the comparison between progress in science and progress in art. I would argue they are two fundamentally different forms of progress. Science evolves in order to satisfy the needs of society. It’s about necessity and efficiency, about finding ever better technologies to deal with the problems of mankind (even those problems created by advancements in technology). But art doesn’t change in that way or for those reasons. If we want to look at the nature of their evolution, comparing art forms to animal species makes more sense to me. In the realm of science, new technology tends to replace old, it’s mostly linear, but in nature, it’s rare that a species immediately dies out just because another becomes more dominant, it just becomes less prominent, or else it adapts in a different direction. Like art forms, new species do emerge from old over time, but more often they diverge, not replacing but adding to and branching off from. Film evolved from photography but did not replace it, and photography did not replace portraiture. It just forced a change in the art form.
@ JR: exactly
I think the confusing part about this interview with Shields is that he doesn’t exactly explain what he means when he refers to these inert, primitive techniques of the novel. It seems so grandiose and heavy handed to proclaim that everything about the contemporary novel is trite/antiquated when obviously there are aspects of the form that still appeal/communicate to readers – otherwise they would stop reading them, right? I guess I don’t really understand what Shields thinks good art is supposed to do. Is it just supposed to be innovative and avant-garde or is it supposed to do something broader and more diffuse? I think its reductive to say that no novel right now is worthwhile and the only reason people read contemporary stuff is because its entertaining. Really, that’s all? Just entertaining? I can be entertained in 8 zillion different ways if I want to. I think people read novels because they are entertaining, but also because certain aspects of the form/structure are communicative in ways that other forms aren’t (and for this reason, certain aspects of the novel haven’t been supplanted – like JR notes, this is kind of like natural selection). I think that the novel naturally adapts itself to the condition of its readers. Plain speech, dialogue, stream of consciousness – all of these techniques developed because they were congruous with the needs of readers in a given historical moment. I don’t think we need to sit up in a tower and say: IF THERE ARE NEW FORMS OF MEDIA WE MUST USE THEM IN ART, if people don’t feel like they absolutely need to be communicated with via new forms of media. Unless, of course, we think art is only important as an ars poetica masturbation session for the writer. But hey, who am I? Just a guy sitting at my computer eating a banana and typing a comment on a David Shields interview.
-Daniel
Also, I can’t help but find the reference to Disgrace tremendously confusing – Disgrace is, structurally speaking, very traditional. Why would Shields be blown away by it?
The comments on this interview have been as interesting and enlivening as the interview itself. So great to see that smart readers are thinking about all this (and defending the novel).
Just one comment, on the idea of technology influencing literature. Of course, if a writer finds ways to change literary forms through technology and wants to try it out, then she should. But technology does not directly affect the actual medium of literature as immediately as it does those of visual art or music. The medium of literature is language (and thought), and literature evolves along with language and thought. It has been doing so all along, apparently without Shields noticing. Novels of today, whether they adhere to traditional forms or not, could mostly not have been written long ago because they are communicated in the language and thought patterns of the current time. The same way that musical evolution has been mostly tonal and structural, not technological, over the years, though technology has given more room for those shifts in tone than it could in writing.
Age is a big factor here though, it’s really difficult to get excited about the typical Booker prize genre book when you(ve been reading them for 20 years.
Also, the French have got on board as a culture with adopting non-novelly novels. There is this wonderful quote from Amelie Nothomb:
“The only discovery of life is time,” she says. “It’s life’s true reward – the only thing which is not a loss – the discovery of time, the effect of time, the sensation of time, time passing, and the effects which time produces on yourself and others which are fascinating,” … “That’s the only dimension which the imagination has absolutely no chance of recreating, and which is amazing to see.”
I think this makes more and more sense as you get older, and novelly novels struggle to capture it.
Can’t we just call novels novels? I think the imposition of an adjective like “novelly” works to pigeonhole the form. If there are novels that are less “novelly”, doesn’t that just mean the form is evolving and finding new parameters, and that where those shifts turn out to be valuable, new veins of fiction might develop over time, as they always have done? A writer can only try to produce work that resonates emotionally and intellectually with him, and when he finds the old forms are insufficient for that he must bend them break them or find new ones. When we succumb to the idea that conventions must first and foremost be avoided, and then tailor our content to that end, we have left art behind and become academics.
I haven’t read a novel in years. I have to agree with Shields (despite is sometimes off-putting and arrogant tone) that novels bore me to tears. The language in most novels has become its’ own sort of cliche. There are so many incredible narratives woven out of the thread of real lives that novels do have a degree of artifice that I find pales in comparison to these narratives.
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