Purple State of John

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

the wire

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?

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