The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.’
Good manifestoes propagate. Their seeds cling to journals and blogs and conversations, soon enough spawning sub-manifestoes of acclamation or rebuttal. After the opening call to action, a wide variety of minds turn their attention to the same problem. It’s the humanist ideal of a dialectic writ large: Ideas compete and survive by fitness, not fiat.
David Shields’s “Reality Hunger” has just the immodest ambition and exhorter’s zeal to bring about this happy scenario. Subtitled “A Manifesto,” the slim book opens by declaring: “My intent is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media”—from novelists and poets to rappers and stand-up comics—”who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.”
These “chunks” are central to Mr. Shields’s vision: “Reality Hunger” is a composite of 617 discrete passages of prose (further divided, for reasons unknown, into 26 alphabetized chapters). Most of the entries are excerpts from a grab-bag of other writers: epigrams from Wilde or Kierkegaard, paragraphs from essays by Malcolm Gladwell or Margo Jefferson, and so on. Mr. Shields has tampered with the excerpts as he sees fit, melding a quote from Emerson to one from Goethe, for instance, without informing the reader. Or, rather, not revealing the blending except in a small-print appendix, where the rest of the book’s many attributions can be found. “Reality Hunger” often feels like a combination of a commonplace book and an episode of “Jeopardy!”—much of the fun is in trying to guess who is behind each passage. But the burying of sources frustrates the readerly prerogative of debating the author, because you’re never quite sure who the author is.
Keeping the reader off balance is one of Mr. Shields’s goals, of course. He argues for experimental forms of literature that will jolt both readers and writers into a more actively self-conscious relationship with a text. He disdains as clutter any artifice that is not outspokenly aware of its artificiality. He quotes Samuel Beckett condemning grammar and style for being as “irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit.” Plot, Mr. Shields writes, is mere “erected scaffolding” to be torn down, “and what stands in its place is the thing itself.” If he had his way with “Hamlet,” he would “ditch the tired old plot altogether and just harness the voice.”
Here are the sorts of changes he has in mind: Fiction and autobiography would mingle freely; essays and criticism would become lyrical, verse and novels essayistic. The writer would openly plagiarize peers and past masters. And all of it would be rendered in jagged, loosely connected fragments. Why? Because this resembles life, which “flies at us in bright splinters”: “The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.”
There is a certain insouciance in this grandstanding— Mr. Shields must know that the novel’s demise has been announced with alarm-clock regularity for nearly a century. And while he also shows a playful awareness of John Barth and other forerunner advocates of experimental fiction, Mr. Shields’s proposed forms are best likened to the collages of Robert Rauschenberg (duly quoted in “Reality Hunger”), which mix self-portraiture, pages torn from books, defaced photographs and other “available material.”
Experimental work in the arts has over the past few decades often represented healthy reactions to traditional certainties and bred counterreactions that looked back to tradition with refreshed eyes. Some readers, then, will praise Mr. Shields for his full-throated defense of the experimentation being attempted at the outer currents of the mainstream. Surprising, often exhilarating writing can be found online and in small presses, and it deserves public champions.
Alternatively, there will be readers (and I’m among them) who take issue with the way that Mr. Shields divorces a novel’s form from its content. “Reality Hunger” makes virtually no mention of fiction’s capacity for emotional discovery or, as old-fashioned as it sounds, moral instruction. Many people have little interest in reading things that are purely simulacra of anxious everyday disorder; they look to books to escape that disorder or to make sense of it, to stir their deepest feelings or their noblest impulses in ways that real life rarely does.
Ostensibly, the discussion occurring right here is the sort of back-and-forth that Mr. Shields’s manifesto is meant to engender. Yet something about “Reality Hunger” dampened my enthusiasm for debate. The book is packaged front-and-back with glowing blurbs from a formidable roster of well-known writers—including Frederick Barthelme, Patricia Hampl, Jonathan Lethem and Philip Lopate—but a glance at the appendix turns up many of the same names. Of the 14 blurbers, excerpts from work by fully half of them appear in the book itself, meaning that these esteemed authors are in effect heaping praise on themselves.
No doubt in Mr. Shields’s anything-goes view, writers endorsing books featuring their work is just a bit of cheeky marketing, but to the unpersuaded it heightens the sense that “Reality Hunger” is less a manifesto than a narcissistic exercise. By the time you reach entry No. 194 or so, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Mr. Shields is indifferent to perspectives that vary from his own. Instead, because he has a short attention span, so must the rest of the world. In the book’s most dismaying passage, he writes: “When I’m constrained within a form, my mind shuts down, goes on sit-down strike, saying, This is boring, so I refuse to try very hard.” This is not a credo for an anti-novel, but for anti-thought.
Obviously Mr. Shields is perfectly capable of exercising the atrophied part of his mind that shuts down when confronted by traditional books; it takes a curious self-absorption to assume that the burden of change rests with everybody else. And ultimately, despite the interesting provocations in “Reality Hunger,” that’s the impression it leaves: Mr. Shields is espousing a movement that would valorize his own laziness. He’d like literature, and its millions of faithful followers, to conform to his own private version of reality.
Mr. Sacks is an editor of the online arts and literature review Open Letters Monthly.
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