Reality Hunger: A ManifestoBy David Shields Hamish Hamilton, 208pp. £17.99
DAVID SHIELDS'S Reality Hunger: A Manifestois a frank and articulate expression of frustration with the contemporary literary novel, as well as an inspiring argument in favour of the essay and of radical compression in fiction.
It’s half a dozen other things as well, but it is most coherent and electrifying as a declaration of the rise of autobiography as the most vital and relevant form of writing.
The novels being written by our most recognised authors, the book suggests, and all those who want to be like them, are necessarily “predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless”. The problem isn’t that these novels are good or bad. The problem is that we as a society “can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form”. Your response to Reality Hunger will largely depend on how true these suppositions sound to you.
Shields’s position is this: it is no longer possible to write a conventional novel that will perform a function as art – that is, to recover the sensation of life as it is lived. We want reality, but literary convention – or the long-uncontested position of the novel at the top of large-scale written endeavour – keeps serving us marionette shows.
“When I read fiction,” he writes, “I keep thinking, Why is this guy talking in these funny voices? Why doesn’t he put down these puppets and say what he wants to say?”
You may find yourself, if you like to write or read novels, quick to disagree. But there's a twist. Shields, the American author of the New York Timesbestseller The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll Be Dead, did not write Reality Hunger:he assembled it.
The book contains more than 600 numbered passages of varying lengths. Of these, it appears, he’s written about 20. This is not quotation but collage. (There are no quotation marks, and no one is referenced until the appendix.) It’s not a sign of Shields’s abilities or inabilities as a writer – which I admittedly know nothing about – but an attempt at “an evolution beyond narrative”. “Long live the anti-novel, built from scraps,” the book states. And what scraps.
“All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.” That’s Walter Benjamin. “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life.” That’s Viktor Shklovsky. “If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.” Naipaul. And so on, from giants such as Montaigne, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Woolf and Cioran, to contemporary writers including Joan Didion, Geoff Dyer and JM Coetzee, to musicians, artists and film-makers.
Collage, of course, changes the nature of statement. Suddenly, nothing is proclaimed with certainty. Everything is proposed. Collage destroys absolute authority along with the pretence of originality. Rather than absorb or resist an argument, we observe the author exploring his subject.
A note of caution here: sometimes Shields is as satisfied to push us with platitudes as he is to electrify with the unexpected. (He also employs a term worth forever condemning to damnation in hell: the “lyric essay”.)
The book begins: “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time has been an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist considers reality into the work of art.”
On or about these very times we inhabit, something has happened to human imagination. It has changed, and it is never going back. We long, as we always have with art, for risk and immediacy. But artifice no longer satisfies this longing – at least not the artifice proffered by the “run-of-the-mill 400-page page-turner”.
I don’t think the literary novel is dead. I think it’s undead. In order to save it from annihilation we have made it a genre: we have taken our understanding of the word “novel” as a kind of writing with no rules and replaced it with a formula of exactly predictable progressions, illuminations and tragedies. If you’re having trouble figuring out what some character in your new novel is going to do, give me a call. I can tell you. But, more importantly, who cares?
“The world exists. Why recreate it?”
Reality Hungerstates: "Autobiography is the lifeblood of art now." The reason why this is the case is the most compelling and convincing argument in the book: because when all your arrows are spent, "the way to write is to throw your body at the mark".
Shields’s rhetorical strategy, which is effective, and I would say necessary for a manifesto, is to reinvent literature as a life-or-death crisis. Art has evolved. The evolution of art is a battle that takes place within us. It is a fight not between the forces of convention and innovation but one between artists and reality.
Reality Hunger calls for literature “as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom seeking”, a literature “built entirely out of contemplation and revelation”.
This type of writing – this non-fiction truth-speaking – exists as a compendium of epiphanies; it begins, as Montaigne has told us, with conclusions; in it, the author does not create surrogates for herself. She is herself, or all the selves that she contains. She does not dramatise. She essays.
“What I want to do is take the banality of nonfiction (the literalness of ‘facts’, ‘truth’, ‘reality’), turn that banality inside out, and thereby make nonfiction a staging area . . . for investigating the most serious epistemological questions.”
Had I not, serendipitously, spent the past few years refocusing my attention, as a reader, on great nonfiction, classical and modern – partly out of disenchantment with contemporary fiction but also out of a growing astonishment at the urgency contained within honest self-exploration – I would never have believed that nonfiction was a higher calling in literature than fiction. But I have, so I came to Reality Hunger a convert.
Greg Baxter's memoir, A Preparation for Death, will be published by Penguin Ireland in July
