2010-05-03 14:44:29

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Author David Shields Talks Doubt, Belief And HBO’S The Wire

Filed under: Books, David Shields, Featured, Television, The Purple Interview, The Wire, Treme
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Last week, in the Purple Interview, we spoke with author David Shields about his new book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. In the book, published by Knopf, Shields argues passionately and personally for a new kind of narrative art, a form of writing that breaks down barriers between reported fact and fiction, that favors immediacy over narrative architecture, raw feeling over refinement, that dares to borrow liberally from other sources, to “appropriate”, the author’s preferred term for what others have called plagiarism.

The book has plenty of fans, including lots of literary all-stars, among them the writers Jonathan Lethem, Amy Hempel and Philip Lopate. Detractors have been numerous as well, taking Shields to task for nihilism and naivete both, but the mere fact of so much attention being paid to a work of literary criticism says something about the force and timeliness of Shields’ arguments.

This week, we talk a bit more about the criticisms, focusing on the murkiness in his argument surrounding the term “reality”. We also discuss HBO’s The Wire, the most critically praised version of the sort of straight-forward narrative that he professes to resist, not to mention the Twilight books, Mad Men and Madame Bovary.

Join us for part two of our Reality Hunger marathon.

Q: So why do people get worked up about your book? I was trying to answer that question for myself, and here’s what I came up with. Scientists reject whole cloth the idea that evolution can be a belief. For them, it’s a demonstrable process in the physical world. So when you start talking to a scientist about blurring the lines in the physical world, the line between the real and unreal, the truth and untruth, immediately the hackles go up, because it suggests there might be something fungible about the line, for instance, between Creation as understood by religious people and evolution as understood by scientists.

Now, I don’t have a fixed sense about exactly where that line is–one terrific thing about your book is the way you try to tease it out—but you can see how this question of reality can go from being a look at raw and unmediated aesthetics to a raw and unmediated line between, say, the scientific truth about evolutionary processes and the theory of intelligent design. So there were times when I felt you elided things that were critical to your argument.

A: I’ve been traveling on the book’s behalf for the last six weeks, and this has definitely come up, to what degree have I got inadvertently in bed with the sensibility of the Bush administration official who said, “We’re not part of the reality-based community. We make up our own reality. You follow after us.”

But for me, and maybe this is too easy, I’m arguing very much for a literary aesthetic. You know, it’s like that silly thing on the Colbert show, where he talked about how I was breaking into his house. I guess it was a funny joke on TV, but it didn’t translate for me. It’s just a ludicrous metaphor. I’m trying to argue about the history of art, the history of appropriation, the nature of philosophical discourse. I’m arguing that the perceiver by his very presence alters what is perceived, the essential post-structuralist insight.

You may simply disagree. I don’t know if you’re a religious person still now, or to what degree you’re still wrestling with those issues, but I’m not. I’m just a completely secular, completely subjective human being who believes it’s damnably difficult to get to any agreed-upon reality, and that so much about what makes the world go to war is that we all hugely disagree about what is real. I think it’s hugely humbling and quite life-giving to acknowledge that we have a much more acute sense of our own flawed perception, that we’re all, the eight million people on the planet, are endlessly arguing about what is real. No one has a purchase on it, and I think we go to war and do horrible things precisely when we’re convinced that we can agree on what is real.

Q:In answer to your question, I’m not religious anymore, but I came out of this world with a huge sense of the reality of god for the people who do believe. So when you talk about this idea that there is no longer a single story line, what hit me like a ton of bricks was that that’s not true for billions of people on this planet. For billions of people, there is, in fact, a single story line.

They’re not all the same billions, but it’s highly possible that those who do hold to their single story lines far outnumber those who believe that no one can agree on a story line. And you’re right, it’s often that insistence on a single story line that leads to conflict, yet I found myself reading your book and thinking, as much as I love it, it’s butting up against a reality that is everywhere at hand, the reality of a few story lines insisting upon themselves everywhere. For me, that is the great struggle aesthetically, to try to grasp that and figure out my place as a writer in the midst of a competition of large, over-arching narratives.

A: What sorts of story-lines? That there are billions of people starving, for instance? Something like that?

Q:No, no. One story line is that Jesus Christ is the son of God and redeemed everyone through his death. Or Allah is the only god, and Mohammed is his only prophet. There are three or four or five of those that are just huge and which have vast numbers of adherents who are asserting themselves quite powerfully everywhere, and as a secular writer with a deep commitment to the same literary and philosophical tradition to which you subscribe, I look at all this and I think, okay, I can either try to elaborate on or work within my tribe’s rules, or I can try to start as a writer to grapple with these other story lines that rule out the validity of my story line and completely marginalize it. Because if I don’t subscribe to those metaphysical story lines that are reasserting themselves through violence, through text, through music, through art of various kinds, then what reality am I actually coping with? It’s as complicated a problem as the one you’re addressing, but I wonder if it makes any sense to you?

A:You raise such great issues. The line that keeps coming back to me—a couple of lines, actually—I guess I’m prone to quotation, aren’t I?—the first one comes from Graham Greene who says, “When we are not sure, we are alive.” And for me, that becomes my North Star, because I was raised as a completely secular Jew in California in the 1960s and 1970s, and I have no religious impulse. I understand how dominant it is, but it seems quite far from my own sensibility.

Obviously, on a political, social and civic level, I struggle to understand it, lest the planet go up in smoke, but just not on a human level.

There was also this incredible thing that David Foster Wallace said a few years ago. Someone was asking him why writing mattered, and he said, “We’re existentially alone on the planet. You can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling, and I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling, and so writing at its best is a bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness.” That’s really it. Basically, the best we can do as writers and readers is to be radically true to our own sensibility, and through writing works of extraordinary candor and nerve and intelligence, we can actually get to know one another person by person. That’s the best you can do. I don’t know if that satisfies you, but that’s my answer. I’m kind of a radical doubter, a radical skeptic.

Do you know that wonderful piece that Foster Wallace wrote about the conservative talk show host? It may be the last essay in his collection Consider The Lobster. It’s terribly sympathetic to this very likable guy who happens to have a different politics than Wallace has. The last line of the essay goes on about how certain the guy is in his beliefs. But the last line, for Wallace, is, “I’ll take doubt.” That’s his answer to the certainty.

For me there’s an amazingly life-giving property to endlessly questioning all premises constantly. When we’re not certain, we’re alive. That’s my religion. Just endlessly questioning and self-questioning, I find artistically and philosophically and civically a very useful stance. That’s the best I can do. That skepticism is tonic in an age full of too much belief.

Q:Let’s change the subject and talk for a minute about the most highly praised work of narrative art of our time. It’s not a book. It’s a TV show, HBO’s The Wire, and I wonder if you’re a fan of that show at all?

A: Funny you ask. I like films. I like TV shows. But I’ve resisted The Wire. Many people who I respect say it’s the best television show ever, absolutely without qualification. I must admit [[laughing]]I’ve watched a few episodes, just a few, on DVD, and I was sort of bored.

What was it that I resisted? It seemed like a civic lesson. It seemed terribly politically correct. Apparently that’s not true as you hang in on it. The acting seemed horrible in the first few episodes. Still, evidently, it’s great. I’ve watched a grand total of four episodes, but I watched the first couple of minutes of The Sopranos and knew I was into it. I love The Sopranos a lot, and I would tend to think of the first year and a half as the best TV I’ve ever seen.

What was it I felt about The Wire? I didn’t get too far in. What was it I felt? There was a huge amount of liberal white posturing, of always trying to show us how totally down the white creators were with this very entrenched black subculture. I could feel it in every line, this kind of agenda, always showing you how cool and down the creators were. I found it sort of tedious. But again, that’s based on four shows. But do you really love it?

Q: I do love The Wire, although I do see your point, and actually where the same sensibility is coming out to a fault is the new show Treme.

A: It sounds like it. Times ten.

Q: It is. The whole sense of wanting to be down with African American culture, but also down with New Orleans culture, they can’t violate the cool factor of being more inside than the insiders. It’s a huge mistake, exactly the great swamp that New Orleans presents as a dramatic subject.

A:I was listening to David Simon and Eic Overmyer talking about Treme on Fresh Air. It’s unfair, because I don’t want to be judged on my Colbert appearance, and I don’t think they want to be judged on their Fresh Air appearance. They were just chatting, but the terms they were talking were not very rich. They were hugely invested in an easy moral agenda that seemed the opposite of investigation and doubt and questioning. They were always on the side of the angels in a really easy way, and I did feel that, a little bit, in what little I watched of The Wire, but I sort of know that at some point I’ll pull out all five years on DVD and lock myself in a room for seventy or a hundred hours, and it will probably be this extraordinary experience.

Q:The show is extraordinary and it is cumulative, and one of the reasons I asked about it is because it’s often been compared to 19th Century literary works. It’s been compared to Dickens.

A: Someone compared it to Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s just unbelievably high praise, and I do think that part of the reason why I resist is this unbelievably naked devotion to sheer linear native. I really like the show Mad Men, and the episodes I tend to like the most are ones in which things are almost static, and it just rotates a metaphor around, about homelessness or desire. There was this incredible episode in the first year about male desire, just running eight or ten moments all around desire. That interests me so much more than sheer narrative oomph.

On the other hand, The Wire might be great, and I might just not be the best viewer, because of its sheer narrative velocity.

Q:As someone who loves to read voraciously, to consume entertainment, have you noticed this other impulse in the culture, this fantasy bent, with vampires, fantastical worlds, a movie like Avatar? Do you see that as a complementary movement that is perhaps antithetical to what you like, but which is its own form of resistance to old school realism?

A: I haven’t read hugely in that field, though my daughter tends to go to Avatar. And she’s read all the Twilight books, each just a staggering number of times. When she was younger, she was a huge fan of the Harry Potter books. And I’m fully aware that everyone’s reading Dan Brown. I’ve been traveling by plane a lot for the past two months, and all I see, everywhere I look, everyone is reading the very novels that I claim to hate, Reality Hunger be damned.

So what do I do with that? The move that I tend to make to myself is this. Those works function as pure escape valves, pure nostalgia, pure dream world, pure bubble wrap. Look, life these days is so cacophonous, so crazy-making, so nervous-making, that these works essentially function as a retreat, a kind of escape. Obviously, there are some works of extraordinary science fiction and fatasy, which do an amazing job. Say, J.G. Ballard. Some of his works are terribly sharp and are trying to get at existence through an indirect path.

For me as a writer and reader, quasi-teacher and critic, for me, I’m more drawn to getting that membrane as thin as possible between writer and reader. That’s the stuff that has the best chance to break through the frozen sea within is. The other stuff, the moment I’m in purely metaphorical territory, I get like Plato trying to banish the poets. I fight that move. Maybe it’s pretty interesting culturally, but it tends not to get me into the psychic spaces that are the most exciting. There’s too much narrative machinery. The armature of those things is so enormous that the game doesn’t become worth the candle.

You have seven incredible insights in Philip K. Dick, but you have to go through so much machinery that it tends to deflate the insights. That’s an awful lot of jungle to have to machete my way through.

Q: Well put. Even though I had some criticisms in my essay, I really love your book, and I’m going to urge people to read it. One of the great things about it is that you don’t have to be a reader of books to enjoy it. You can be an avid watcher of television and still find something here, because the boundaries between what art can and can’t be are breaking down. The boundaries between media forms are breaking down. On the IPad, you’re going to have books, TV shows, movies all in one place, and that just raises all these questions addressed by your book.

A:Totally. One of my favorite lines is that line from Walter Benjamin, who says, basically, all great works of literature dissolve a genre or invent one. That’s a lot of what I’m trying to argue for, for contemporary writing to lose its obeisance to pretty antiquated 19th Century forms and try to make the kinds of moves that literature has been making for centuries, but that art and music have been making for the last thirty years, to mix and match, to remix, to appropriate, to blow apart generic doors. I mean, come on. I’m trying to reinvent the novel, not bury it. I’m trying to remake it. It just seems preposterous to think that we’ve got to go on trying to rewrite Madame Bovary. That’s a really good novel, it was written a really long time ago, can we please move on?

Q: There we’re in agreement.

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2010-04-26 12:35:02

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Author David Shields Talks Fact, Fiction and How He Turned Into The Poster Boy For Plagiarism (Part 1)

Filed under: Books, David Shields, Featured, Purple State Of Mind, Reasons To Believe, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Plagiarism is cool. All art is theft. There’s not much difference between fact and fiction. The traditional novel is dead. If you’ve heard these lines lately, chances are you’ve been listening to someone talk about author David Shields, whose new book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has been making waves in the literary establishment.

Actually, that’s an understatement. The waves have reached the shores of major media. Unlike most works on the subject of literature, Reality Hunger has become part of a much wider discussion about the future of reading and writing. That’s partly because it’s a stirring and thought-provoking book, deserving of its attention, but it’s also a matter of timing.

I found out about the launch of the Apple IPad and the publication of Shields’ book at roughly the same moment in early March, and the two events bonded in my mind, as if the book functioned as a manual for grasping the implications of the device. That’s not far from the truth. The IPad seems likely to scramble media as never before, bringing music, books, movies, television and the Internet into one cosy device.

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto suggests what that scramble might look like, existentially and philosophically. The book is organized into 618 items on 204 pages, not counting the appendix. Some items are miniature essays. Some are declarations. Others are aphorisms. Most entries are quite short. Roughly half of them were written by other people, half by the author.

Item 1, an essay, starts, “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.” The last, item 618 ends with the line, “Let’s see who controls the danger.”

The philosophical heart of Reality Hunger might be item 503. “When I was seventeen,” Shields writes, “I wanted a life consecrated to art. I imagined a wholly committed art-life: every gesture would be an aesthetic expression or response. That got old fast because, unfortunately, life is filled with allergies, credit-card bills, tedious commutes, etc. Life is, in large part, rubbish. The beauty of reality-based art –art underwritten by reality hunger–is that it’s perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) “life as art”. Everything in life, turned sideways, can look like–can be–art. Art suddenly looks and is more interesting, and life, astonishingly enough, starts to be livable.”

Most items in Reality Hunger receive a citation in the appendix at the back of the book. Item 503, we’re told, was written by Shields. Item 502, on the other hand, “Deep down, you know you’re him,” is ad copy for HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Reality Hunger makes a lot of people uneasy, even fairly powerful people like Stephen Colbert.

Several days ago, when Shields appeared on the Colbert Report, Colbert tore the book apart, literally.

The comedian compared Shields to a neighbor who enters a friend’s house and decides to take the furniture and call it his own. On the one hand, it was a comedy bit; on the other, you got the feeling Colbert meant every word. Meanwhile, in a New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani called the book “deeply nihilistic”. Laura Miller, over at Salon, was more sympathetic, but ultimately questioned why the book had to be written in the first place. Who was stopping the author from exercising his predilections?

I have my own reservations, which you can find here, but I would still argue that David Shields’ book is a must-read for anyone who cares about the state of literary creation. It’s not so much about the arguments themselves. It’s about the cultural moment embodied by the book, the appearance of the Apple IPad and the collapse of mainstream journalism, the rise of the e-book and the decline of print. Shields may or may not be right on any given score, but he’s unimpeachable in his sense of the zeitgeist.

Everything is changing for people who write and read books.

So if you want a launching point for teasing out the implications of that change, or if you merely want to orient yourself on a wildly chaotic taste grid, this is the book for you. Despite my caveats, which I made known to him before we spoke, Shields was kind enough to join the conversation.

We spoke for more than an hour, covering everything from his reasons for writing the book to his hopes for its reception, from his thoughts on god to his lack of sympathy for HBO’s The Wire. In the interest of a better read, I’ve broken the interview into two parts.

Part Two will appear next Monday.

Q:My first question is whether you’ve been surprised at the response to the book. It’s such a hard publishing environment in which to get any book noticed, but especially a literary manifesto, to break through the screen of white noise and get people talking about your work. Did you know as you were putting it together that you had something like that or was it more of a wing and a prayer?

A:More the latter. It was just a funny book that I put together that seemed to me possible to get published by a small press or an academic press, so I was delighted that Knopf decided to publish it. I worked hard to get the book out there, as did the publisher, but yeah, I was surprised as anyone.

What happened, for better or worse, is that the book got cartoonized into two positions. One, that the novel is dead, and two, plagiarism is A-OK, and somehow those became the talking points of the book. It’s fine by me, I guess, but it definitely cartoonizes the argument of the book, which to me is much more about the literary and existential and artistic refinements of non-fiction, but that’s a harder argument to parse. Basically, what happened is that the book got talked about far more than I could possibly have imagined, I think primarily because of those two talking points that the book got cartoonized into imbibing.

Those ideas are in there, but there’s been a bald simplification of them, I think.

Q:Right, because they’re both embedded in everything else.

A: Right. Does that ring true to you?

Q:It absolutely does. I can see why it happened. Just watching the Colbert episode the other night, that’s obviously what he went for, the whole idea of plagiarism, and that’s a neat bit for a comedy routine.

A: Yeah.

Q: But it doesn’t really talk about how you reach that conclusion or all the many ways that you tease out the ramifications or how you surround it with your own sense of conflict. You’re thinking aloud to me a lot in the book, and since it reads me like you’re including thoughts that have provoked your own thoughts, and to separate the argument about plagiarism from those other pieces does seem to turn it into a gag.

A: I saw some blog post that called me a con artist. Michiko Kakutani called me “deeply nihilistic”. That’s the farthest thing from the book. The book is deadly serious. It’s not a con game. It’s trying to rescue non-fiction as art. It’s trying to resurrect the nature of literary discourse. It’s an utterly serious, utterly committed, completely passionate book, and I completely stumbled into this other posture.

I’ve told this story a few times on the web, so stop me if you’ve heard it, but for many years I taught creative writing at UW. I was hired as a fiction writer, and then my interest in fiction started to evaporate, and I felt like I had to justify my existence to myself and my students, because I was no longer reading or writing or teaching fiction. I was much more interested in the philosophical excitements of literary non-fiction, and so I developed a course, and the course packet became this big blue unwieldy binder that year by year I was able to edit down with greater and greater precision, so that basically became Reality Hunger.

But I didn’t begin with some clever idea, oh, I’ll have the whole book be plagiarized. Basically the whole book is a mixture. About half of it is “mine” and about half of it is other people, and I didn’t especially care who was making the argument. But I did come to realize how beautifully the confusion of who the speaker is embodies the argument that the book is trying to make, namely that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

I love that the reader is not to be able to tell who is speaking. Is it Shields? Is it Emerson? Is it Nietzsche? Sonny Rollins? Is it some weird admixture of all those. I came to realize that the quote that you can’t tell the provenance of beautifully embodies the argument I’m trying to make about genre. Does that make sense to you?

Q:Yes.

A: I didn’t begin with the appropriation, in other words. I stumbled into it, but then came to realize it was a gorgeous trope of the argument I was trying to make, and I’m fine with being the poster boy for appropriation. I stand in an ancient and noble tradition from, you know, the beginning of artistic creation until now. Artists have always plundered, but that’s hardly the only argument I’m making, and it’s not even the entire argument I’m making. I’m not even an absolutist against copyright.

Q:How did you decide what went into the book and what didn’t? Obviously if the book arose through years, there were things that came in at one point and other things that maybe slipped out. How did you winnow to the point where you thought, okay, this is roughly the book? Or did it kind of happen organically over time?

A: That’s a great question, and it drove me completely crazy, and it drove a couple of my friends completely crazy because I basically finished the book, my goodness, three or four years ago. I had a rough, rough draft of it pretty much done, essentially the book, and then Knopf bought The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead[[an earlier Shields book]] and Reality Hunger together as a two-book deal. They wanted to publish The Thing About Life first, and they did, and they wanted that book to have a long life before Reality Hunger came in and moved the conversation in a different direction, so basically Reality Hunger was sitting there for a couple of years, and what happened is that I would have to update stuff as the world changed.

James Frey entered the picture, for instance. The hip hop chapter got built up. I forget if the balloon boy made it into anything other than the flap copy.

I was constantly moving stuff around. It was basically a case of reading as writing. There would be certain passages, and I was never looking to find stuff per se for the book, but I’m a voracious reader, an obsessive reader, and so basically any time a passage would just completely seize me and demand entry, I would consider it, and I would rewrite the book and rewrite it and rewrite it, until I could find a place for the new passage. I’d bounce it off a couple of friends, and the book was just constantly changing.

In a way, the book is a kind of record of the favorite passages I’ve ever read, 618 passages, and as I’ve said, about half of them are mine, and of the ones I’ve added, they were passages that knocked so loudly on my door that they demanded entry. They were just passages where I just said, ‘my god, that has not been said yet, and it’s said beautifully. I’ll tweak it a bit.’

To me, it was a case of what passages lived on my nerve endings with such ferocity that they demanded inclusion. That was the criterion.

Q: Beautifully put. And it absolutely feels that way in the reading. Let me ask you about something that really struck me and was an intense part of my pleasure in the book and really reminded me of this old Julio Cortazar novel Hopscotch. I actually really enjoyed flipping to the back of the book and finding out who said what, and actually when I then went back to the passage, I found myself lingering over things maybe longer than I would have.

It was interesting, and this may have just been my lack of observational skill, but I read about half of the book without realizing that the citations were at the back, so when I went back there and saw it, I had two separate readings of the book, one in which I didn’t know who said what, and one in which I did. Now, in the book, you talk about the fact that you wrestled with the lawyers about whether to include the appendix, and they insisted that you must, and then you advised the reader to cut those pages out, but as a reader, I actually found the appendix with the citations to be a source of delight. I wonder if you saw at all the aesthetic possibilities of the inclusion of the appendix?

A:Definitely. I must admit, I’ve come to love the appendix. It’s one of my favorite parts of the book. However, given what the book’s about, it’s a complicated thing. Someone sent me an email that said, ‘I don’t believe you ever intended not to have citations,’ but I really did. It was a quite serious legal battle between me and the publishers and copyright lawyers. I was adamant that, given what the book is arguing for, it would be completely hypocritical and completely an act of bad faith if I were to then willy-nilly put the citations in the back without a whiff of protest. It was crucial to me to register a protest.

I have come to see the literary and dare I say the commercial value of the appendix, and I feel that if we didn’t have the appendix in the back, and if I didn’t have a disclaimer, it seems to me quite possible this book would have fallen considerably lower on the radar than it did. I think that one of the ironies of the book is, by having the appendix and talking about my reluctance to include the appendix, that I think I forced the issue of appropriation out into the open, saying outright that I’m not doing anything that Shakespeare and James Joyce and Tchaikovsky and Monet and William Burroughs and Kathy Acker and every artist from the beginning of time has done, but making that armature an actual part of the book.

I got a wonderful email from my colleague Heather McHugh, talking about four different ways in which the appendix sort of forces one’s reading. One, she said, you read the book blind, without checking the citations. Two, that you read from the book to the appendix, constantly flipping back and forth. Third, that you read the appendix almost as a separate text, and fourth, that you read the appendix scouring for your own name, hoping that you got quoted.

So many people have said the same thing, which is that there is a kind of giddy, funny, limbo joy in going back and forth between text and citations, and I get the appeal.

But at the same time, it’s crucial to me to democratize culture, to flatten out those voices. I don’t want people saying, “Okay, Nietzsche said this, so therefore it must be profound, whereas Joe Biden says this, so it must be silly.” To me, it’s extremely important that the book is not an anthology of other people’s voices, but in some crucial sense it’s my book, that I’ve chosen these passages, I’ve remixed them, I’ve positioned them in such a way that the quotes are decontextualized. It’s crucial to me that the passages get read as weirdly inside my megaphone.

It’s vital that on some level the book not become a game of spot the quotation, and that you enter the argument that the book is making, and as a friend of mine says, that you experience the dubiety of the first person pronoun, that you not be sure who’s speaking. Otherwise, to me, it can become this endless came of tic tac toe or jeopardy, and that’s considerably less interesting me.

But tell me how it’s a pleasure for you. In what way is it interesting to go back and forth?

Q: I think if the book had been only other people’s quotations, that would have been different. But because of the mix of your own very strong authorial voice and the other voices, which feels very organic, the appendix becomes a way of investigating, I guess, which pieces of the argument come from where, how they might reinforce each other, how they might be differently read.

A: One thing I was hoping is that people would recognize how much of it was quotations without any help. There are a few hints I give early, and then in the middle of the book, I essentially cop to it, at section 296 or so, in which I basically say that half the book is taken from other sources. But even without the citations, I would hope that people would start to hear quotations. There are well-known lines from Eliot and Emily Dickinson, so at a certain point. I was just hoping that people would start to recognize how much of the book is quotation, and they’d sort of do the investigation themselves through Google. There’d be kind of a pleasurable feeling of investigation, whereas part of me still resists the idea that I hand to the reader on a silver platter what the quotes are.

A lot of friends of mine read an early galley of the book that didn’t have any quotations, and you know, they’d have one hand on the Google search button and the other hand reading the book, and there was kind of a fun investigation going on, and I was sort of hoping there would be a funny carnival ride in which readers would start to realize how much of the stuff is from other sources, and almost all these passages, the moment you type them in, they essentially come up on the web.

I just wanted that extra step to be part of the readers experience.

Q: One of the things that makes the book work is that the voice is consistent throughout. No matter how much you borrow, there is a sense that it’s all of a piece. How did you manage to balance those two forces?

A: Let’s see. The two forces being…

Q:A singular voice of your own mixed with a huge amount of material from other people.

A: To me, it was always about the former. It was always about violating everyone else’s voice as needed in order to put it into my own register. Some friends of mine think, and in many ways I agree with them, that it’s the most personal book I’ve ever written. Or if you don’t like the word written, perhaps composed.

It’s a deeply personal book, which is one of the ironies here. It’s in some ways a very naked, very personal, very revealing and oddly passionate book, the irony being, of course, that it’s composed of a lot of the work of others. It’s a short book. It’s about 60,000 words, and maybe 25,000 words come from other people.

So for me, the loyalty was always to making it a consistent voice. As I worked on this manuscript over many years, as a course package became a quasi-manuscript, became a book, I often forgot, did I write that? Did I write this anew? Is it something I wrote in an earlier book? Did it begin as a passage from Frank Rich and have I rewritten it so much that I can’t even find it? That happened many times, when I would begin with a passage from who knows where, and I’d rewrite it so thoroughly that I could no longer find the actual source. There was almost not a single word left in the original passage.

There’s a crucial moment in the book where I say, “Most passages in this book are taken from other sources. Nearly every passage I’ve clipped I’ve also revised, at least a little—for the sake of compression, consistency, or whim. You mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at…”

To me, that’s the loyalty. To me, it’s to making the argument cohere, and to making the voice weirdly my own, so that a lot of people, even my editor, thought it was all me. It all sounded like me, which to me is a high compliment. I hope the book is weirdly seamless, and that was the whole point for me. Virtually everyone agreed with my project. There were a couple of people who said, no, I’m not cool with that, so please take me out, but everyone else was excited, because they understand, as I say ad nauseum, this is the history of art. Art Is Theft. Plagiarism and creativity are, in my view, and in the view of many people virtually synonymous, so in a way I’m just making manifest what creative artists have done from the beginning of time.

Anyway, a long-winded answer to your question, which is all of my loyalty was to consistency of voice.

Q:When it comes to writing a manifesto, one of the questions, maybe the first question, the obvious question, that always arises, is who is this for? If I hear you correctly, at least the first audience for this stuff was your students.

A: It really was, and also my colleagues who did not want to have a non-fiction track in the creative writing program. There’s kind of a pedestrian origin of the book, where I was trying to convince myself, convince my students, convince my colleagues who only wanted a poetry and fiction track, that somehow non-fiction wasn’t art. And my feeling was You’ve got to be kidding. Really? Non-fiction to me is thrillingly art.

I’m less interested in plagiarism per se, which is only a subset of my argument. I’m less interested in the sort of boring take-down of the novel, which is only a subset of my argument. To me, the core of my argument is to try and rescue non-fiction as an art, to argue for a certain kind of essayistic non-fiction.

I’m doing defining non-fiction upward, in other words, when so much of the contemporary discussion of non-fiction is defining it downward, as a subset of journalim.

So we get what I call trials by Google, where every work of non-fiction gets vetted as if it were an article in the New York Times, and we find out that a person stole three words from another source or he didn’t really go to the dentist on Thursday, and all this discussion is defining non-fiction downward. To me, the core manifesto is to bring along fellow travelers, fellow writers of literary non-fiction, personal essay, lyric essay, whatever you want to call it, and try to make extraordinarily high claims for the most ambitious non-fiction to stand absolutely shoulder to shoulder with poetry and fiction.

It’s complicated because on the one hand I’m saying genre doesn’t exist, and at the same time I’m saying something like non-fiction is terribly interesting within the terms of genre, so it’s complicated, and the argument in my view is not completely worked out, but the core manifesto, for me, is that I’m trying to issue a call to arms to writers of non-fiction and readers of non-fiction to stop defining non-fiction downward, stop genuflecting at the altar of the novel, and see that non-fiction, when turned sideways, can be unbelievably interesting.

To me, the key move is one where, instead of taking non-fiction premises for granted, like fact and reality and truth and verifiability, that if you turn those counter-clockwise, you can take of non-fiction and make a kind of trampoline off which to bounce into the most serious questions. What is truth? What is reality? What is memory? What is knowledge?

The most interesting questions in existence can get incredibly, richly investigated by non-fiction because of the very fact that it’s purporting to be true, and works of non-fiction that worry that truth value strike me as having the potential to be extraordinary works of art.

On my Facebook page, I have this thing called a very partial reading list, 120 books that, to me, embody that really beautifully.

Q: What’s the top of the list? What’s something that’s grabbed you lately?

A: But what’s something that I really love of late? A few that come to mind. I’m a huge fan of Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries, a four-volume book in which he meditates for a thousand pages on the relationship between mortality and art. Another book I really love is Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, an incredibly wonderful book. I love Leonard Michaels Shuffle.

I love Sebald, of course. I love some V.S. Naipaul. I love Sarah Mancuso’s The Two Kinds Of Decay. I love J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello.

Q:That’s a fantastic novel.

A: I love that book so much. That book hovers so beautifully between forms. What do you like about it?

Q: I think I like it so much because that character feels like Coetzee thinking aloud about everything that’s ever mattered to him but also about what it’s been like to be the figure who thinks aloud publicly about those thing, and yet also, I think she’s a fully realized character, but realized through the ideas, realized through her tastes. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and it’s also my favorite of his books.

A: You’ve said it really beautifully. I once wrote a long fan letter to Coetzee about the book, just how much I loved it, and I told him how badly undervalued I thought the book was. Each chapter, in my view, is an attempt by Coetzee to revisit a stance he had taken in an earlier book. In each chapter, virtually without exception, the character undermines an affirmation that Coetzee earlier made, whether affirmation of animal rights or anti-apartheid political activism or friendship or love or sex or art. Each chapter, almost point by point, eviscerates an affirmation of human existence, so the whole book could not be more thrilling, as Coetzee-Costello is trying to find something in existence that he/she can actually affirm, and by the end of the book the only thing she can affirm is the belling of the sound of frogs in mud, just sheer animal existence, and that to me is essentially Coetzee’s stance. He’s not a nihilist exactly, but a starkly godless realist.

It’s a point by point attempt to meditate on the most serious aspects of existence. I think of this great line by Samuel Johnson, who said “a book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure existence”, and I love, love, love books that put as the latter their primary reason for existence, that are investigating the question of how the writer felt being alive. That I find utterly thrilling, and everything else I find utterly trivial. The books I want to affirm, the books Reality Hunger is trying to argue for, are the books that put absolutely front and center how we solve being alive and don’t settle for entertaining the reader with a kind of narrative legerdemain which often bores me to tears.

Q: Let’s talk for a second about that word “reality”. That’s a really interesting, really riveting part of reading this book for me, because my last book is a look at evangelical Christianity through the lens of my own experience in that world, my getting into it, and my leaving of it, and reality means something very different for devout evangelical people, as it does for a lot of people, than it would for me now. It’s a hugely loaded term that can mean anything from the aesthetic of a particular kind of television to the essence of a major truth claim. And then there’s the whole question of literary realism. So I’m just wondering how you bat that word around and how far you wanted it to stretch in this book?

A: That’s a fair point, and I think people have questioned me, and I didn’t read your whole review, but I looked at it, and I got the sense that you struggle with my use of the term “reality”, and I’m not totally satisfied with how much I’ve defined reality. The way I’d say it is this. Obviously, I’m not pretending to have unique access to reality, that I’m the first person on the planet who’s determined what reality is, and it’s sort of like that famous line by Justice Stewart about pornography, you know I can’t define it in concrete terms, but I know it when I see it.

For me, I’m obviously not defining reality in Christian terms or in religious terms. I’m not defining it according to the terms of reality TV. I don’t think reality is constituted by reality television or by the canons of realistic fiction. Those are not useful guideposts for me. For me, what I keep on coming back to is this.

In my view, we can never quite get to “reality”. Reality is always within quadruple quotation marks. The perceiver by his very presence alters what is perceived, but I always come back to the idea that I want the thinnest possible membrane between writer and reader. That is what I seem to want, and whether that’s in film, in a movie like Humpday, which has no script, but tried to allow as much rawness, a lack of filter…

Q:Great movie, by the way.

A: Oh good. I’m glad you’ve seen it That’s just of one among many examples. I have the long list at the beginning of the book. Humpday or Curb Your Enthusiasm or Billy Collins or Dave Eggers or Todd Haynes first film, Eminem’s first album—there’s a kind of rawness, nakedness, unfilteredness, that strikes me as real. I can talk probably best about writing. I saw a New Yorker review by James Wood that said I was trying to define reality, but I’m not a scholar, I’m not a literary critic really. I’m just a working, practicing writer who is bored to death by the novel, bored to death by the conventional memoir, and I want to argue for the work.

I don’t know, I know it when I see it, this idea…I’ve just been re-reading this extraordinary work by Maggie Nelson called Bluets, and it’s so raw, so unfiltered, that I guess that’s the best I can do, this idea that there is as thin as possible a membrane between writer and reader.

I’m trying to find a passage in the book where I quote Adam Gopnik. He’s talking about some work by Francis Bacon, and he says, only work of authentic disorder can break through our contemporary existence, basically that we live in a completely simulated, completely mediated, completely artificial society, and only works of authentic disorder can somehow break through. I always go to that Kafka line, “a book should be the axe to break the frozen sea within us.” To me, I really love work that has this authentic disorder.

That’s the best I can do. I have that long list on page two. And I have a relatively useful description on page three, in which I say, “An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 Film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and non-fiction; the lure and blur of the real.”

I feel like, gee, that’s as good as I can do. If someone has a better distinction, go for it. That’s a relatively useful description.

[[IN PART 2, ON MONDAY, WE'LL TALK ABOUT GOD, CREATIONISM AND THE WIRE. BE THERE]]

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2010-04-15 06:05:13

REALITY HUNGER: Stephen Colbert Eats A Writer Alive

Filed under: Books, Colbert Report, David Shields, Featured, Jesus Christ, Television, The Wire
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

Last night, Stephen Colbert diced, sliced and roasted author David Shields on his show, but Colbert loves comic books, so allow me to offer the comedian a fresh and perhaps more appetizing way to devour what his guest has actually written.

If issue 100 of Marvel Comics The Avengers, published in 1972, were a work of literary criticism on the attempt to capture “reality” in the digital age instead of a story about superheroes gathering to face a moment of singular crisis in the history of planet earth, it might be called Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and might look something like this.

In other words, author David Shields has penned an old school spandex and tights superhero epic in the form of a literary manifesto, and the combination works.

What the hell am I talking about? In case you can’t make them out, those small lines of text on the cover of the book belong to superheroes of contemporary American literature, the literary equivalent of the Scarlet Witch, Thor, Iron Man, the Black Panther, Captain America, the Wasp, Hawkeye and, of course, the Vision, a team of costumed warriors who graced the cover of a comic book that I loved and lost when I was 10-years-old.

Instead of the Scarlet Witch raising her hands to cast a hex, we have novelist Amy Hempel crying out, “Brilliant. I’m going to use it in my syllabus this year, and I’ll be quoting it endlessly.” Or there’s Captain America, Charles Baxter, shield up, shouting (again), “Brilliant. It keeps the reader alert and attentive and excited through intelligence, epigrammatic concision, wit, and sheer rightness, as when a pronouncement is so correct that it just pulls all the clouds aside.”

Hawkeye, a.k.a. Philip Lopate, calls it an “exhilirating, audacious plunge”, and the Wasp, a.k.a. Wayne Koestenbaum, completes the effect, likening the book to, “a sock in the jaw or an electric jolt in the solar plexus”.

Biff!

I’m not kidding, and I’m not crazy, and the similarities go deeper than the cover art. “Avengers Assemble!” is the spirit and the letter of the Shields book. It’s uncanny. If it weren’t for the differing visual impacts created by comic book illustrations and literary text, Reality Hunger would be downright plagiarism, which would be fine with Shields, who believes plagiarism is endemic to art.

In both works, the enemy threatens reality itself. In both, only a few heroes stand between cosmic annihilation and the rest of us. The literary Avengers don’t just tell you to read Reality Hunger. They are actually in Reality Hunger, utilizing their various powers to fend off the bad guys. At one point, author Jonathan Lethem, whose blurb sits at the top of the hardback (”I’m lit up by it–astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed”), himself receives a plaudit destined one day itself to become a blurb. Of Lethem, on page 189, Shields writes, “Big surprise: I love the book, love it to death”.

Literary avengers really assemble in Reality Hunger, and when they do, they use powerful blurbs. But who are the bad guys in this fight?

*

Here’s one way to answer the question. Does anyone remember that classic photograph of Woody Guthrie? A photo of the folk singer holding his guitar bearing the inscription, “This guitar kills Fascists”?

Well, this manifesto kills novelists, or means to.

I’m a novelist, and Shields would no doubt despise my works on principle, but I enjoyed Reality Hunger just the same. I enjoyed its spirit of playfulness and guts. I loved the wide-ranging taste in culture. I loved the form and structure of the work. I loved its comic book brio.

It’s clobberin’ time, Dickens!

If I stop short of declaring Reality Hunger a triumph, it’s because of the ending, which I read with the astonishment of a pulp fiction reader who didn’t see the identity of the murderer coming. I truly wish I could say that this superheroic work of literary criticism had done its work and like Thor’s mystic hammer Mjolnir smashed open a new reality. The fact that it doesn’t is something of a loss for contemporary literature.

*

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto is organized into 617 items on 204 pages, not counting the appendix. Some items are miniature essays. Some are declarations. Others are aphorisms. Most are quite short.

Item 1, an essay, starts, “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.” The last, item 617, reads merely, “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.”

(Unless, of course, you’re one of the world’s billions of religious believers, but we’ll get to that.)

Oops, I forgot the coda, item 618, which ends with the line, “Let’s see who controls the danger.”

The philosophical heart of Reality Hunger might be item 503. I love item 503. I relate to its sentiment, but I also consider it the best overall statement of the author’s concern. “When I was seventeen,” Shields writes, “I wanted a life consecrated to art. I imagined a wholly committed art-life: every gesture would be an aesthetic expression or response. That got old fast because, unfortunately, life is filled with allergies, credit-card bills, tedious commutes, etc. Life is, in large part, rubbish. The beauty of reality-based art –art underwritten by reality hunger–is that it’s perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) “life as art”. Everything in life, turned sideways, can look like–can be–art. Art suddenly looks and is more interesting, and life, astonishingly enough, starts to be livable.”

If one idea summed up the book’s concern, item 503 might be it. Most of this book was written by other people, but 503 belongs to the author. Everything else is borrowed.

That’s part of the fun. There is an appendix at the back, and once I became aware of it, and I didn’t until I was halfway through the book, I would read a tart comment or penetrating line and flip immediately to the appendix to see who got credit for it. Shields tells us the publishing house lawyers fought him on that appendix, but I’m glad they won. Its existence constitutes the book’s greatest originality.

Read a single line, for instance, like item 502, “Deep down, you know you’re him,” and flip to the appendix to discover that it’s ad copy for HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

That’s an important clue. Shields isn’t just talking about literary fiction here. He’s talking about everything. His book presents a unified field theory of culture, taking in books of all kinds, movies, television, music, YouTube videos, ad copy, graffiti, Tweets and Facebook pages. Nothing escapes his insatiable reality hunger (except, of course, a ten-course meal of soul food like The Wire or Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, both of which must fill him with nausea)

As we read, we discover his likes and dislikes. He’s no fan of distinctions or boundaries, it turns out. When it comes to movies, for instance, he tells us in item 73, “they [movies] seem to be so pigeonholed. That’s a comedy, that’s a horror film, that’s an adventure film, that’s an epic, boom, boom, boom…down the line. I want all of it; I’m incredibly greedy.”

That’s not Shields, of course. That’s Terry Gilliam, maybe. The appendix note for item 73 reads: “I’m pretty sure these lines, or something close to these lines, were spoken by Terry Gilliam in an interview, but I can’t for the life of me find the source.”

Roll your eyes, but there’s method in this mess. Shields doesn’t like distinctions between fact and fiction, between memoir and journalism any more than he likes genre distinctions because those distinctions aren’t real to him; they’re a lie. He thinks James Frey got a raw deal for falsifying parts of his “true” story in A Million Little Pieces, for instance. In item 104, he writes, memoir “is as far from real life as fiction is. I think you’re obligated to use accurate details, but selection is as important a process as imagination.”

Oops. That’s actually a quote from Susan Cheever, interviewed by Roberta Brown in the AWP Chronicle.

The book has this to say about plagiarism in item 102. “I don’t feel any of the guilt normally attached to “plagiarism”, which seems to me organically connected to creativity itself.” Or rather, that’s what Jonathan Lethem had to say in an interview with Harvey Blume of The Boston Globe.

On and on it goes until we grasp the point as refracted through a hundred mediums of expression. The old modes of narrative fiction have broken down, and a new mode has arisen that challenges our notion about truth to such an extent that the line between fact and fiction is automatically erased. The old is a watered down version of the Bible or the Koran, a made-up story with a made-up plot and characters, posing as actual truth. The new is a detonation of the walls separating truth and untruth, and through the clearing smoke we now glimpse reality.

Shields is a reality hunger artist. He only wants the sort of reality that happens when the definitions break down. In item 304, unless I’m mistaken, he–or rather some guy named James Nugent–uses reality TV producers as a model for reality hungry art. “I like to see how reality shows are put together, especially the way in which the shows are a hybrid mutant of documentaries, game shows and soaps. The producers have no problem blurring the lines between these three types of shows: they take what works and discard the rest.”

*

I have sympathy with so much of what appears in the pages of this book. Shields rightly nails the second-class citizenship that “literary” fiction now enjoys. The novels that are routinely praised on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and become the stuff of envy in writing programs around the country exist in a ghetto of cultural sensibility, mostly cut off from everything else around.

Novelists, who once bestrode the national conversation like giants, have nowhere near the presence in national conversations that musicians or film-makers or non-fiction writers do. When was the last time a great novelist appeared on The Daily Show or Bill Maher? Moons ago, if ever. Is that just because readers have become a bunch of lumpen thugs, no longer able to appreciate the finer points of complex plot and character? That would be an easy out, but it’s self-evidently fraudulent.

More people watched the second season of HBO’s The Wire than typically buy novels in a year, and that’s a more richly imagined work of art than most of what appears on paper these days.

“Literary” fiction long ago became a formula genre, like horror, romance or westerns, but with this difference. Most of its practitioners don’t believe it’s a formula. They think it’s a better, higher, more elevated form of fiction. There are, in fact, better, higher, more elevated forms of fiction, but they can be found at every end of the reading spectrum, in every genre. These days, the last place I would look for them is in the “literary” genre.

So I agree with Shields’ diagnosis of the marginality of traditional fiction to the culture, but when I reached his item about reality TV, it stopped me cold. I recognized instantly the great structural defect in the project, which works beautifully in individual moments, but falls apart as a grand new statement about culture.

Truly, sadly, deeply, it falls apart. At some level, Shields has committed a cardinal sin of aesthetics. He’s mistaken the “reality” of reality TV and creative non-fiction and for something larger and more open to the actual world; he’s bought into that “reality”, in effect, that is the essence of our most profound modern lie, the absolute perfection of a con job, the notion that the lines are structurally blurred, so that there can be no real difference between truth and untruth.

Tell that to the dissidents who sat in prison cells in the Eastern Bloc until 1989, none of whom appear to be quoted here. Tell that to the families of journalists murdered in cold blood for trying to get to the bottom of an ethnic cleansing or a government cover-up or the business of a drug cartel.

Better yet, tell that to the billions of religious people all over the world who subscribe to a single truth for which they would readily give their lives.

In closing his manifesto with line 617, “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one”, Shields gives away the game. Believing he has written a work of universal application, he has written a manifesto for the tiniest possible sliver of the human race, ignoring the fact that as his book comes to press, the vast majority of readers on the planet, the absolutely overwhelming majority, whether in the developed or undeveloped world, do, in fact, subscribe to one ultimate story that trumps all the rest. I say that as a committed, even passionate skeptic of all religious experience, and as someone who himself experiences reality hunger every day.

*

How could Shields ignore these ultimate stories of the species? They go by familiar names, after all: Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna, Science. There was a time when western intellectuals could believe in a multiplicity of realities, all competing in the market place or arena or agora or television set of our minds, all on equal footing. That moment has passed, and true reality hunger demands that we look this truth in the face.

Most human beings live within one great over-arching narrative, against which all others necessarily pale. Its constituents part may be cut or sliced or diced, but only to the extent that the master narrative stays intact.

Jesus must die on the cross in a real place and time in history, and he must resurrect, and his resurrection must redeem mankind. That’s the story. Fine if you don’t buy it, but for believers you’re in possession of a false reality. Allah is the only god, and Mohammed is his prophet. There are five noble truths, and not six.

For a thinker who truly wants to confront the world as we find it, to borrow a line from Wittgenstein who, of course, appears in an item in this book, the unbreakable and unmistakable factuality of those belief systems must be confronted. We don’t have to believe them to acknowledge their presence as insuperable obstacles to the sort of pomo preachiness that Shields gives us here. What’s weird is that the contestants on half of the shows in the “reality” genre that attracts him so often seem to be Christians who constantly refer to their over-arching narrative. How did Shields miss that?

“The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” says Detective William “Bunk” Moreland at the beginning of the final season of HBO’s The Wire, the greatest work of narrative art of our time. “Reality”, as Shields construes it, is the ultimate form of that lie, and he believes to a fault.

Stephen Colbert’s full frontal assault was funny, but in some crucial way, he missed the largest point about the book. As revolutionary as its thesis may seem to a handful of people, Reality Hunger is in many ways old hat. It is nostalgic and sentimental for a cultural moment when no one had to bother much with those huge religious narratives. They were considered backward and non-essential, just as, to the vast majority of people on the planet, most of them religious in one way or another, this book and its readers will feel marginal at best.

That’s the reality check for Reality Hunger. God isn’t dead. God is anything but dead. His armies rise on every hand. His stories demand to be the only stories. Let’s see who controls the danger indeed.

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