Customer Reviews

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

1. Despite this book's praise for collage and appropriation, cutting passages from the jacket copy and/or Shields' own description of the book, then pasting as a five-star Amazon review, isn't valuable in any way.

2. Speaking of the jacket copy, by writing a negative review of this book it seems I will be "defending the status quo." Always useful to caricature your opponents in advance. And I thought the status quo totally depressed me ...

3. What is this "conventional literary novel" Shields keeps talking about? Yeah, I also have no desire to read Olive Kittredge, but my lack of interest in the latest celebrity memoir hardly discredits the genre of memoir as a whole. Is Shields reading Hemon, Javier Marias, Percival Everett, Kathryn Davis? For someone who persuasively writes of the novel as a hybrid genre and wants to stake out an indefinite space for his own work, Shields really likes drawing lines in the sand.

4. When Shields does admire a fiction writer (i.e. Bernhard, Coetzee, Sebald) he pretends the writer is a sort of essayist in disguise. This is bizarre. All of the above writers create imaginary characters and involve them in invented narratives. Photos in Sebald do not make him a documentarian. The reason their books do not seem like fiction is that they are incredibly well executed, that is to say artistic. Fiction that does not seem like fiction is simply good fiction. Shields can't admit that the magic is working.

5. How can a book about reality-based forms of art and writing not mention historical fiction even once? Is it because historical fiction sounds staid and proves that Shields' ideas aren't as new and exciting as they want to be? Anybody remember postmodernism, by the way?

6. "Elizabeth Costello," a book Shields recommends several times, would surely create much less cross-genre frisson (would be much less interesting in Shields' own terms) if it was just a series of lectures, if it didn't have its so-called fictional rigging. The fictional elements of it are what create the epistemological uncertainty -- a fact that was certainly remarked upon when Coetzee delivered the stories as lectures at universities.

7. It's funny that a writer tries to be au courant by citing 40-50-year-old quotes announcing the death of fiction. Doesn't this undermine the case a little? No doubt he's right ... about fiction's irrelevance to the culture, anyway, but surely it will be displaced by more meaningless chatter, social networking, and noise, not the lyric essay. Actually this book seems to be in many ways a manifesto for the blogosphere. I kept thinking, blogs are what you want to read, man. Brevity, appropriation, truthiness, the self in all its mangy glory.

8. The part where he tells his writer friends what their books are really about is insufferable. Even the original recipients must have winced when they got these letters, and it is painful to eavesdrop on them. The chapter is of a piece with Shields' bewildering theory that fiction has a sort of extractable essence. If only Ballard did away with all those drained swimming pools and crashed cars and told us what he really meant about technology and modernity! If only Kafka cut the atmospherics and philosophized! Surely Shields thinks "The Zurau Aphorisms" is Kafka's best book.

9. I realize I am getting carried away here. This is to Shields' credit. He has not instructed but provoked my soul, to paraphrase him paraphrasing Emerson. Ultimately this is a book about the lit David Shields likes, which is stuff I also like. I don't define it the way he does. I resent the sophistries and the posturing. I suspect his argument against fiction is more personal than I understand, much like Franzen's jeremiad against difficult books. But the aesthetics here seem pretty egocentric and narrow in the end. (When you read a novel you are participating in someone else's imagined reality, and it amazes me that someone so averse to this generous, beautiful act would comment on fiction at all.) However, "Reality Hunger" is a seriously intended book and it should provoke a serious debate. Let's stop essentially blurbing this book -- it's been blurbed more than enough already -- and actually discuss it.

To enjoy Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, you need three things: 1) a love of abstraction, 2) an interest in contemporary art and culture, and 3) a willingness to keep turning pages even though you don't have the best grasp on what's happening. If you have these, you're in for a treat.

Shields brings his customary intelligence and expansiveness to a dizzying array of topics, including Oprah Winfrey, independent filmmakers, Thomas Jefferson, America's Next Top Model, Facebook, and Plutarch. He says he looks increasingly to literature to offer all the epiphanies but none of the machinery (like that dowdy old matron, plot) that storywriters typically use to produce them.

Form preoccupies him, especially as it applies to nonfiction. In a few passages, he considers a current trend: the lyric essay. Some lyric essayists seem not to be writing essays at all; they fabricate details and leave events unexplained--usually the privileges of the fiction writer. Some lyric essays flirt with becoming poems, and some make collages. Shields favors collage in particular, describing it as "not a refuge for the compositionally disabled" but as "quite simply an evolution beyond narrative." Reality Hunger itself takes a collage-like structure, and there are noticeable gaps between some sections. All this cutting and pasting can annoy. It's lovely, though, for what Shields wants to do.

Shields is "over" the traditional novel, and he implies that those of us who aren't are behind. While I am not about to throw away my McEwan in order to hold myself to some arbitrary standard of postmodern hipness, I think questioning the norm, seeing what's possible in the arrangement of words, is ennobling. We all gain from the energy such questioning releases, and I'm glad this insightful, entertaining book is here to do it.

I was captivated by this slender, smart book. Part cultural studies. Part personal narrative. Part philosophical pursuit. In it, Shields attempts to digest the interactive 21st century, finding meaning in the mess of our disjointed experience. In many ways, this work continually seeks to ascribe human meaning to a world filled with non-human experiences. The book is beautifully written, a series of short, notes and reflections. In many ways, the book tells us, as readers: we're all going to die someday, and with that in mind, here are some things that might help us better understand our lives and how to find fulfillment and meaningful complexity in it. Hip hop. Reality TV. Proust. Becket. Deadwood. Art as deeply personal expression. It's all there. A book that slowly, seductively invites readers into deeply intellectual and completely accessible conversation.

-Todd Pierce

I don't know Shields's other books, but based on this one, I'd say he's an ambitious, and pretentious, lightweight. Like many another failed or stalled novelist before him, Shields tries to do an end run around the problem of creating something of value by emitting a "manifesto" of How Literature Should Be. Beware of blowhards bearing rules. He doesn't define his terms clearly, and often his ideas, such as they are, are mutually contradictory.

It boils down to this: he finds traditional narrative boring. He's bored reading it, and, perhaps more significantly, he is bored writing it. He talks about how bored he is with the "traditional form of the novel," as if there is such a thing in a genre that includes "Don Quixote," "Tristram Shandy," "War And Peace," "Nightwood," "Middlemarch," "Bleak House," and any ten other good novels you might name.

This is a gimmicky and ultimately pathetic book, in my opinion. There are already all kinds of genre-bending books out there -- "The Unquiet Grave," by Cyril Connolly, any of Lydia Davis' books, Nicholson Baker's "Vox," "Operation Shylock" by Philip Roth... I mean you could go on all day with such a list. None of these writers needed David Shields to give them permission to do whatever the hell they wanted at the writing desk. This book is basically a desperate and opportunistic attempt by an intellectual poseur to claim some shelf space next to his intellectual betters. Sorry, but that's how I read it.

But if you'd like a much more cut-to-the-chase opinion, check out Shields's appearance on the Colbert Report from mid-April. Colbert (literally) tears him a new one. See how seriously you can take him after his unctuous, self-inflated performance here:
[...]

This book is much more than an intriguing manifesto about art and reality. Most of the laudatory reviews on Amazon and the breathless notices on the book jacket miss the fact that lurking in the background of Reality Hunger is a character/narrator/trickster named David Shields. His praise or derision of various works of art is energized by a wistful sadness about most present moments, about life.

This character -and, presumably, the writer who is telling us about him-- hungers desperately for wisdom because he wants to feel better, he wants to feel real, he wants to feel. Usually insightful riffs and joyfully plagiarized quotes about fiction, non-fiction, music, TV, movies and the visual arts are a cry from a wounded heart. When it comes to reality T.V., he tells us, "the success of the genre reflects our lust for emotional meaning. We really do want to feel, even if that means indulging in someone else's joy or woe. We have a thirst for reality (other people's reality, edited) even as we suffer a surfeit of reality (our own-boring/painful)."

I found myself rooting for this character (as well as David Shields, the writer) to figure everything out, to come up with a coherent aesthetic. Full disclosure: I hung around with the writer 30 years ago and I want him to be happy, and he clearly needs a coherent aesthetic to make him happy. I am not sure that he came up with one, alas, although the attempt is scintillating and heroic.

For one thing, the same David Shields who takes great pleasure in garnering pearls of wisdom and lessons about life from Proust or Kafka also enjoys two songs mixed together by Kanye West, the buzz that surrounded James Frey's book and Tina Fey's impression of Sarah Palin. It is certainly possible for the same person to love all of that stuff at the same time, but the actual pleasure derived from each experience is quite different, isn't it? This book celebrates and exemplifies the kind of expression that resides in the murky but exciting territory between reality and artifice. But once we get beyond that abstraction, is there is enough in common between the many different works of art that David Shields loves? I am not sure. That is not meant as a criticism. It is one of the fascinating questions provoked by this brave, interesting and important book.

I am a fiction writer. The most beautiful word I know is the word invention, and the most beautiful question, in my opinion, is what happens next? So I'm a believer in narrative. I think the human creature needs story; trapped within time and space as we move towards death, we desire a means to escape the inevitable and one way we do that is through narratives about people who are not ourselves. As a fiction writer, I feel a sense of purpose. And yet, given these rather traditional views about fiction, I found David Shields' anti-fiction polemic, Reality Hunger, startling, maddening, and ultimately inspiring. He challenged me on every page. He forced me to know my own beliefs more clearly. The most surprising result is that I came away with an expanded view of the possibilities of fiction. The effect of Shields' ideas and the loose, malleable form he uses so effectively and engagingly was a loosening of my own boundaries and a widening of my aesthetic. I am aware of more possibilities now.

Megan Staffel is the author of Lessons In Another Language

I know David Shields' other books and I know that he's known for his bold confessions which occasionally make a body squirm (and no doubt make his family squirm), but I think Reality Hunger is his boldest confession--in the old sense (St. Augustine, James Joyce); it's a confession of faith (and doubt). It says next to nothing about his usual locations (bedroom, bathroom, locker room) and everything about the inner sanctum in which he must write. At first I had the impression that I might have walked in on a rehearsal, that I was listening in (behind the arras) on a fairly private meditation or a writing class. This must be what they talk about among themselves and to themselves. A writers'retreat. Readers, keep out. Then, I have to say, the aphorisms and the reflections and quotations (there are about 600 of them) drew me in. I sat down and stayed. I winced a little--embarrassed--sometimes irritated, and captivated. I mostly kept my mouth shut. (Is this what priests feel on their side of the confessional? Priests, I say, not shrinks this time.) Then, I have to admit, I added a few of my own notions in my own little notebook, thought a lot about my own reading and writing. Turns out there's no screen, no wall, no curtain, no division: fact/fiction; memory/invention or readers/writers.
Reality Hunger won't drive me to Reality Television, but it has driven me back to Proust--and, more to the point, to Shields' book which I read with greater and greater fascination, from A to Z (the names of the chapters). And I stopped fiddling with the footnotes. By the way, if you want to jump right to the True Confessions, go to chapter "t", subtitled "ds."

I found a few passages that were interesting, but not enough to make the book worthwhile. One reviewer says you need a willingness to keep turning the pages. I would agree with this. I would read something insightful, which would motivate me to keep reading another four or five pages. A quote here or there was interesting, most not by the author himself. Everyone once in a while the author would throw out something on his own, but the idea was not well developed. Shallow might be the right word. The author did have a literary emphasis. I like science, philosophy, history. I would not recommend this book.

Great as this book is--and make no mistake, it is--I'm a little flummoxed by how straightforwardly it's being read, in some cases. Shields, rather tellingly it seems to me, selects as one of his epigraphs a remark from Graham Greene: "When we are not sure, we are most alive." The epigram appears--again--deeper within the book's pages, and seems, fittingly, to half-contradict the notion of this book as "manifesto." Sure, Shields has keen arguments against certain contemporary conventions--the drab and by now familiar ropes-and-pulleys of "realism"--but for Pete's sake, this book IS a piece of fiction: a giddy, imaginative, bold, immensely pleasurable whirligig that does anything but trot out a set of pieties about how things 'ought' to be. Rather, Shields' book engages a fundamental paradox: how these books that we (yeah, I'm one) fiction writers fashion out of seemingly original clay are inexorably rooted in the works of others, and how our obligation to represent some form of 'reality' might be better served by work that necessarily acknowledges its own artifice. Is that so radical? I kind of doubt it, but Shields' playfulness, accuracy and bristling intelligence make this book delightful from end to end. "Manifesto?" Well, sure. But the book is way too alert to get pinned down by even its own orthodoxies. Ignore the doubtful: this book is an unremediated joy from end to end.

Woe to the budding wordsmith! Following his last book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, David Shields has now written a manifesto which nails the coffin on traditional prose fiction.

As has often been observed, the forms of narrative writing we have inherited are inadequate for addressing the shape of contemporary reality. The rise of new technologies--the Internet, digital photography, mixed media, etc.--- represent a challenge to older forms of expression and communication. Given that our lives have become so fragmented, the traditional persona of "the author" is rapidly losing ground. An author, as Foucault has argued, is simply a figure that is the result, not the origin, of the creation of a text.

Shields' Reality Hunger reflects this poststructuralist dilemma. For Shields, the traditional notion of authorship depends on assumptions regarding fiction vs. nonfiction, memory, ownership and identity which no longer pertain. If perception is selective and memory unreliable, who is to say that autobiography corresponds with "Truth"? If art consists of reinventing tradition and appropriating "the real," then is it possible to speak of ownership? And if the elements of traditional narrative include unity, meaning and plot, is it possible to use them to convey a reality whose ever-shifting horizon defies any attempt to create order out of it?

Shields is interested in how new artistic media--hip hop, reality television, videogames, etc.--- are encroaching upon prose narrative's traditional role as the authenticator of experience. Like Walter Benjamin, he is fascinated by how technology has upended our traditional notions of art and reframed our responses to it. According to Shields,
the writer's task, regardless of whether he was working in fiction or nonfiction, has always been to capture the world "out there". Yet this epistemology has been rendered obsolete by an atomized, accelerated world that overwhelms us with an endless flow of images and information. Faced with this surfeit of simulacra, writing can no longer pretend to be mimetic, but must declare itself an activity of mind whose divagations continually dissolve, reassemble and produce new constellations of meaning. The juxtaposition of what is found with what is imagined will produces disjunctures and discontinuities which in turn correspond to the flux of life itself.

Appropriately, Shields composes his text as a series of twenty-six chapters (one for each letter of the alphabet) which are in turn subdivided into short numbered passages. The chapters have titles like "Blur," "Collage" and "Contradiction," and the passages range from a couple of pages to a couple of words. Although the title proclaims that the work is a manifesto, it is, at the same time, a memoir--the artistic credo it espouses is manifested by the text itself. The narrator invokes several forms-- aesthetic treatise, aphorisms, autobiography, letters, diary, commonplace book--to produce an author whose presence is both within the text and beyond it. Yet Shields, in postmodern fashion, subverts our expectations. Some of the passages are unattributed quotations from Wittgenstein, Emerson, and others. Others are snatches of apparently held conversations we have no means of verifying. Still others are autobiographical assertions which are counterfactual: "For ten years I traveled all over Hungary"; "I have never written fiction," "I hate quotations." The melange of high, middle and low culture--Hamlet next to Speedboat next to Survivor--reinforces the point that culture is becoming evermore dehistoricized and heteroglossic, and that an individual voice must define itself amid a cacophony of voices. Shields suggests that the lyrical essay, rather than traditional narrative prose, is our last best hope for making sense of it all--yet ironically, the "I" of Reality Hunger is never localizable, and stands upon shifting sands. Hence, in spite of its apparent critique of fiction and memoir, the text celebrates the illusion-making (illusory?) source of all acts of writing. It honestly confronts the lie that is the truth. In spite of its polemical thrust, Reality Hunger is itself a kind of poem, perhaps the one that Wallace Stevens had in mind when he wrote: "And it has to find/What will suffice. It has to construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage..."

Ben Huang, Ph.D.
Pasadena, California