Misguided Reality Hunger leaves reader with sensibility hunger

David Shields lost me with little more than this: “(!?)”

In his new book (and I use the term “his” loosely, as will become clear in a moment), he makes the case that fiction is dead, and that nonfiction, specifically something he calls the “lyric essay” is the new best way to communicate. In making his case, he decided to construct the book largely through the work of other people. More than half of the 618 numbered paragraphs in the book are drawn wholesale from other sources, and are thus the words of other people.

“A major focus of Reality Hunger is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean,” he writes. “I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it.” What he wanted to do was to simply have these lifted bits intermingle with his own, without attribution. His publisher thought otherwise, and forced him to include a list of credits. He asks the reader to ignore this, even to cut these pages from the book. “Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of culture? We do – all of us – thought not all of us know it yet,” he writes.

So, how did that blip of punctuation above derail his argument? In a chapter headed “reality,” he includes a bit about the Stevie Wonder Song “Fingertips – part 2,” and how it is so real because someone in the band yells out a question about what key the song is in. Thing is, this isn’t Shields’ sentiment, but that of John Mellencamp. The snippet felt out of place and not in Shields’ voice, so I looked it up and found the following credit: “John Mellencamp (!?)” I can only interpret the part after Mellencamp’s name as snark, as in, “can you believe this guy thought that deeply about something?” If the source of a comment truly didn’t matter, if Shields’ reappropriation the context in which it appeared was the only thing I needed, then why did Shields’ feel the need to add that little hipster wink to the credit? It’s because he wanted to communicate that he was cool enough to join you in your surprise that Mellencamp would utter something so, well, real. As such, the source does matter. It matters a great deal.

That is far from the only flaw here. Shields has crafted an extremely thought-provoking argument here that explores the notions of fiction, non-fiction and reality that had me rethinking many long-held beliefs. The problem is that he writes in the same sort of absolutes that I’m sure bug him about people against whom his views differ. In a section about appropriating parts of the culture to reassemble them and say something new, he writes, “Anything that exists in the culture is fair game to assimilate in to a new work, and having preexisting media of some kind in the new piece is thrilling in a way that ‘fiction’ can’t be.” He’s certainly entitled to such a view, but to state it so definitively, to say, in essence, that fiction can’t be thrilling, is just dead wrong.

And that is just one of many instances where Shields circles back around to make that same point. He can’t imagine writing fiction any more, and can’t bring himself to read it, either. Fine, but in doing so, he is cutting himself off from a lot of great new work. God forbid we allow fiction and non-fiction and whatever new style Shields deems worthy to coexist, to march in zigzagging parallels toward the future, each adding something to the culture and to people’s enjoyment of it. In stating things so emphatically, Shields has joined the disturbingly growing group of people who have found that stating anything with enough volume, bluster and lack of room for argument makes people listen to you. In this, he is no different from Bill O’Reilly or Jeff Jarvis or anyone else bold enough to declare “that” is dead and “this” is the only sensible way forward. Call it the dick move; if you’re a big enough dick about things, you’ll energize your base and those against you in enough volume to create the kind of tension between the two camps that ultimately solves nothing.

It’s too bad, because Shields is clearly on to something. His notions of appropriation and repurposing leave a lot of room for exploring new ways to make literature and other communicative media take a leap into uncharted, exciting new territory. Seeking a way to do with writing what hip hop has done with music is certainly a worthwhile pursuit. But while no one would deny that as exciting as new music forms can be, sometimes a guitar-bass-drums combo can scratch an itch in a way that nothing else can, Shields seems to suggest that his new way is the only way. That’s a ludicrous argument. It’s no surprise. A look at Shields bibliography shows some of his motivation. After three well-reviewed but commercially dead works of fiction, he found his niche writing non-fiction that was as much about himself as his putative subject. If his forays into fiction failed, why not declare the entire form dead?

Anyone falling for that argument would, of course, but cutting off their nose to spite their face, ignoring the work of innovative fiction writers like Jonathan Lethem, J. Robert Lennon and David Mitchell, who continue to, yes, thrill as they seek new forms. I’m glad Shields is out there doing what he does, much as I’m glad the above writers and thousands more continue doing what they do. Contrary to Shields argument, all are contributing mightily to our culture.