i’m not in the mood to get all clever with this one.
last week i read david shields‘s reality hunger because i’d gotten myself all worked up about reality in my previous post and i thought it might give me something smart to argue with. instead i found it to be a shitty, cynical little thing. it’s also almost impossible to engage with in a critical fashion, first because anything you try to latch onto in the text is directly contradicted by something else before or after (he seems to think this is archly ironic in a 19th century continental sort of way, but he sounds more like a “precocious” child taking delight in cheap contradiction) (paradox, man), and second (arising from and compounding the first) because the book tries (and fails) to create its own context without giving context to the fragments that make it up, fragments that, taken out of their own context, range from dull to dangerous, though never in the provocative way shields clearly means them to be taken.
so why am i writing about this? it might seem like i enjoy being an asshole (because i do), and i’m definitely not above the occasional cheap shot, but you can’t deny that i actually analyze at least something about the books i mention here. in this case i want to analyze the phenomenon surrounding the book rather than the book itself because i’m interested (if a little disappointed) by that.
by “phenomenon” i mean circumstances. i qualified that because, while the book is by no means a phenomenon in the colloquial sense (nor is the public’s reaction to it), at least not yet, there are a handful of people who have been treating it like one, and they have been for months. if you spent much time in certain ghettos on the web, you might think this was the literary event of the year, not to mention the literary breakthrough of the ages. even the dissenting opinions still grudgingly acknowledge that reality hunger is a formidable and thought-provoking achievement.
but the thing is, it’s not. like i said, it’s shitty and cynical.
maybe i should explain the concept before i make my case with very little direct reference to the book (because, like i said, i’m interested in the phenomenon and also because the book doesn’t merit it).
reality hunger is composed of 26 chapters, each represented by a letter (a-z) and a concept (mimesis, reality, hip hop, etc.) and composed of aphorisms and anecdotes, most of which are appropriated from other texts without attribution in the book proper. the concept is neither good or bad, nor is it new (to his credit, shields doesn’t say it is, though you get a nagging sense while reading it that he hopes you’ll think it is, anyway). this structure is used to promote what he seems to think is an artistic (though it just as often seems explicitly anti-artistic) agenda focusing on what people have been calling the “lyric essay.”
the best lyric essays i’ve read read a lot like essays, the kind montaigne wrote, which were awesome. the essay got denatured over time, which is probably why they added “lyric” to it. also so that they could add things that just weren’t essays, like joe wenderoth’s letters to wendy’s and sebald and whatnot.
i’m cool with all of this, but be honest: does this add anything to what john d’agata and ben marcus (in that essay in the believer a long time ago) have written on the subject? of course not.
so shields needed to make a contribution, and his contribution seems to be to include in the genre “lyric essay” everything he likes. so throughout the book, terms like “lyric essay,” “fragment,” “reality,” “sample,” “epiphany,” and “prose poem” are used interchangeably. i don’t mean they’re meant to be related. i mean they’re used as synonyms. if you accept those conflations, you can’t fight them; if you don’t accept them, what’s the point of addressing them any further?
okay i won’t.
so now i’ve said enough to tell you what i mean about the phenomenon:
you should have a healthy fear of us.
1. the fundamental premise is misguided.
you can’t say anything directly (i understand the irony inherent in my saying this — the point is, i shouldn’t need to say it). like i said in my last post, language ironizes reality. fiction’s ironizing of language has the potential to bring you closer to reality or truth than news clippings do. i’m not going further with this here but will gladly explain it over a beer if you’re not getting the full sense.
2. this is really an economic argument.
one of the more insidious issues with the book is the way it avoids acknowledging economics and class. this is most clear with regard to its inane treatment of hip hop. if you read the book without context, you would think that hip hop began when jamaicans started spinning records at parties because they couldn’t play american-style r and b “authentically,” and then they brought the dj party concept to america where everybody loved it because it was awesome. shields leaves out the parts about how hip hop comes from poor people having a good time with the means available (in his world, you’d almost think that cool herc had a les paul and a marshall stack sitting in the corner of his bedroom, but decided to work on his turntable skills anyway).
he takes it a step further when he applies it to radiohead and weezy (without making a distinction between means of production qua art and means of production qua distribution — an example of the kind of laziness in the book — which shows that he can’t distinguish between art and commerce) (that last clause is only defensible if you change “can’t” to “doesn’t” and demonstrate an awareness of the difference).
side note: don’t even get me started on the racial implications of the section on hip hop. it’s pretty close to suggesting that the culture just borrowed and stole, ie, was incapable of making stuff up. it’s interesting how a chapter on hip hop treats the emcee as an afterthought. biggie and slick rick, for just two examples, told some of the better (fictional) stories of our time, and are much better known than lee perry, for better or worse. (better, all due respect to perry)
3. this is really a meta-economic argument.
think about how convenient this is for david shields by putting yourself in his place: your main source of income as a professor in an mfa program is to improve student writing. but there aren’t enough geniuses in the world to keep you entertained, and worse, you’re encouraging people you know you shouldn’t encourage. you can either acknowledge to yourself and them that there are not x number of literary geniuses in every mfa generation (where x stands for the number of students in your program or all students in all programs everywhere), or you can essentially turn the mfa into an ase (which would stand for “adequate at self expression”) and pretend that the point all along was to professionalize scrapbooking. perhaps you’ll strike gold (get a deal with knopf, even, while it seems fresh), maybe one of your students will, too, before everyone catches on, but in the long run what you’re doing is reducing all writers to a niche of themselves plus their friends and family (unless that writer had something else to recommend him or her, like being attractive or wild, which puts writing directly in the realm of reality television) (or most memoir).
but let me talk about the bad stuff.
4. emotions are fine. emotionalism, to the exclusion of intellectualism, is not.
here’s a quote from the book. one that was written by shields:
Why do I so strenuously resist generic boundaries? Because when I’m constrained within a form, my mind shuts down, goes on a sit-down strike, saying, This is boring, so I refuse to try very hard. I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unself-consciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now.
this would have been slightly less obnoxious if i looked in the acknowledgments section and found that it had been written by a bright but lazy college freshman. but this was written by david shields. the worst part is how he phrases his “struggle” in such heroic diction: “strenuously” “constrained” “refuse”. truly he is a martyr for our time, even unto the scale of sarah palin (i’m not joking you smarmy fucks). and then there’s that great passage where he explains to us that “wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on the individual memory as the Khmer Rouge.” first world problems, dude.
5. first world problems can lead to demagoguery.
Living as we perforce do in a manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the “real,” semblances of the real.
whoever is reading this — beware the person who tells you your experiences and your world aren’t real. that person is either crazy, trying to swindle you, or a 15-year-old (woe to you if it’s all three).
speaking of 15-year-olds:
6. the title.
it sounds like a poem written by one of them.
listen, i don’t mind the previously published work shields recommends. in fact i love some of it. and i hate much of what he hates. and i would imagine he would actually like a good deal of my work. but the book is bullshit. just be glad i didn’t do a close reading of the section on his dad’s writing workshop.
as an expert on hip hop, he’ll understand my closing with a line from aesop rock: “shut the fuck up and recognize, what you’re holding ain’t really broken.”
“honestly what are you saving!?”
wouldn’t have minded the father section, but i guess it only underlines what a lightweight shields is, and would make you look like a bully. (is it a strawman if you’ve secretly written this book to strike it down? or worse this book was written by larry the cable guy and like bernard-henri levy yr looking like a kunt?)
anyway, soothe my soul and write the elegy for barry hannah please.
re: shields –
yes, it wouldn’t be fair to go any further unprovoked.
re: hannah –
soon, brother. he was important enough to me that i need time to absorb it.
great post. saved me the time of checking out the book. I’m gonna go read Montaigne instead.
thanks, gabriel. you’ll never go wrong with montaigne.
I should probably read this before I get officially angry about it, but from your description and the subsequent reviews I’ve read, I will be. Also? Manifestos are for teenagers and Communists.
hehe, i wouldn’t bother reading it or getting angry about it. just review your notes from modernism ii.
you’re right about manifestos, though — they are only for teens and communists. shields definitely ain’t no communist (as my response implies, he seems mostly like a shill, if unwitting), but he sounds oddly like a teen. a very old and out of touch teen.
the thing is, it’s not really a manifesto.
i do, however, recommend checking out the acknowledgments page and reading the people he got his material from.
An audio interview with David Shields:
http://www.edrants.com/segundo/david-shields-bss-326/
In which Mr. Shields sounds like a talkative student who has only read a chapter of an assigned book but tries fool the teacher into thinking he read the whole thing. It’s entertaining for this reason, for his lame complaints about Lolita, and the way he seems to not know where anything in his own book is.
i’m a huge fan of the bat segundo show, and i thought ed champion asked good questions in that one, but i finally shut it off about halfway through. it was too much. when i read the book and wrote the post i really did think shields was being cynical. now i’m more inclined to think he’s just dumb. although the total incoherence of his responses in the interview backed up my impression that he’s the literary equivalent of sarah palin. particularly the weird tic of saying “finally” all the time, as though that would give his answers a sense of finality.