I want the veil of “let’s pretend” out. I don’t like to be carried into purely fanciful circumstances. The never-never lands of the imagination don’t interest me that much. Beckett decided that everything was false to him, almost, in art, with its designs and formulae. He wanted art, but he wanted it right from life. He didn’t like, finally, that Joycean voice that was too abundant, too Irish, endlessly lyrical, endlessly allusive. He went into French to cut down. He wanted to directly address desperate individual existence, which bores many readers.
A Brief Note from the Editors:
We are sad to say that this, the seventh excerpt we’ve printed from Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, will be the last. But we are happy to say that the actual book will be released near the end of this month by Alfred Knopf. For more information about the book, or to purchase a copy, go to davidshields.com, randomhouse.com, or visit your local bookstore. To read previous excerpts from the book, see our archives section.
Y. MANIFESTO
587
It’s a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many do?
588
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.
589
All great works of literature either found a genre or dissolve one. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Nadja. Cane. Oh, What A Blow That Phantom Gave Me! “The Moon in Its Flight.” Wisconsin Death Trip. Within the Context of No Context. Letters to Wendy’s.
590
We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.
591
Jazz as jazz—jazzy jazz—is pretty well finished. The interesting stuff is all happening on the fringes of the form where there are elements of jazz and elements of all sorts of other things as well. Jazz is a trace, but it’s not a defining trace. Something similar is happening in writing. Although great novels—novelly novels—are still being written, a lot of the most interesting things are happening on the fringes of several forms.
592
Still (very still), at the heart of “literary culture” is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill 400-page page-turner. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that.
593
The Corrections, say: I couldn’t read that book if my life depended on it. It might be a “good” novel or it might be a “bad” novel, but something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form.
594
Is it possible that contemporary literary prizes are a bit like the federal bailout package, subsidizing work that is no longer remotely describing reality?
595
If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term “realism” would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language. It would be assigned no matter the stylistic or linguistic method, no matter the form. This, alas, would exclude many writers who believe themselves to be realistic, most notably those who seem to equate writing with operating a massive Karaoke machine.
596
A novel, for most readers—and critics—is primarily a “story.” A true novelist is one who knows how to “tell a story.” To “tell a story well” is to make what one writes resemble the schemes people are used to—in other words, their ready-made idea of reality. But a work of art, like the world, is a living form. It’s in its form that its reality resides.
597
Urgency attaches itself now more to the tale taken directly from life than one fashioned by the imagination out of life. This is life lived on high alert.
598
I want the veil of “let’s pretend” out. I don’t like to be carried into purely fanciful circumstances. The never-never lands of the imagination don’t interest me that much. Beckett decided that everything was false to him, almost, in art, with its designs and formulae. He wanted art, but he wanted it right from life. He didn’t like, finally, that Joycean voice that was too abundant, too Irish, endlessly lyrical, endlessly allusive. He went into French to cut down. He wanted to directly address desperate individual existence, which bores many readers. I find him a joyous writer, though; his work reads like prayer. You don’t have to think about literary allusions, but your experience itself. That’s what I want from the voice. I want it to transcend artifice.
599
Nearly all writing, up to the present, has been a search for the “beautiful illusion.” Very well. I am not in search of the “beautiful illusion.”
600
Critics can’t believe that the power to make us feel our one and only life, as very few novelists actually do these days, has come from a memoirist, a nonfiction truth-speaker who has entered our common situation and is telling the story we now want told. But it has.
601
There’s inevitably something terribly contrived about the standard novel; you always feel the wheels of the novel grinding and going on.
602
If you write a novel, you sit and weave a little narrative. If you’re a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, give a little narrative here and there, etc. And it’s okay, but it’s of no account. Novel qua novel is a form of nostalgia.
603
There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.
604
One would like to think that the personal essay represents basic research on the self, in ways that are allied with science and philosophy.
605
The poem and the essay are more intimately related than any two genres, because they’re both ways of pursuing problems, or maybe trying to solve problems—The Dream Songs, the long prologue to Slaughterhouse-Five, pretty much all of Philip Larkin and Anne Carson, Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. Maybe these works succeed, maybe they fail, but at least what they all attempt to do is clarify the problem at hand. They’re journeys, pursuits of knowledge. One could say that fiction, metaphorically, is a pursuit of knowledge, but ultimately it’s a form of entertainment. (I don’t find entertainment entertaining). I think that essays and poems are, at the very least, more directly and more urgently about figuring something out about the world. Fiction may do that, too, but not in the fiction I’ve read. Which is why I can’t read novels anymore, with very few exceptions, the exceptions being those novels so meditative they’re barely disguised essays. David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, The Last Novel. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Kundera’s Immortality. Most of Houellebecq. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe. Lydia Davis, everything.
606
The kinds of novels I like are ones which bear no traces of being novels.
607
Only the suspect artist starts from art; the true artist draws his material elsewhere: from himself. There’s only one thing worse than boredom—the fear of boredom—and it’s this fear I experience each time I open a novel. I have no use for the hero’s life, don’t attend to it, don’t even believe in it. The genre, having squandered its substance, no longer has an object. The character is dying out; the plot, too. It’s no accident that the only novels deserving of interest today are precisely those novels in which, once the universe is disbanded, nothing happens—Tristram Shandy, Notes from Underground, all of Thomas Bernhard, Camus’s The Fall, Duras’s The Lover, Barry Hannah’s Boomerang.
608
What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, while from the personal essay what it takes is a wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments. Lyric essays seek answers yet seldom seem to find them. They may arise out of a public essay that never manages to prove its case, may emerge from the stalk of a personal essay to sprout out and meet “the other,” may start out as travelogues that forget where they are or begin as prose poems that refuse quick conclusions, may originate as lines that resist being broken or full-bodied paragraphs that start slimming down. They’re hybrids that perch on the fence between the willed and the felt. A lyric essay is an oxymoron: an essay that’s also a lyric, a kind of logic that wants to sing, an argument that has no chance of proving out.
609
An essay that becomes a lyric is an essay that has killed itself.
610
There are no facts, only art.
611
What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters.
612
Once upon a time there will be readers who won’t care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect, and for its formal originality.
613
Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.
David Shields is the author of ten books, including Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (forthcoming from Knopf in February 2010); The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, a New York Times bestseller; Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate,McSweeney's, and Utne Reader. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, and a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, he is a contributing editor of Conjunction magazine and lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Shields' work has been translated into ten languages.
