How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields.
My favorite David Shields book by far is "Reality Hunger." As it turns out, in many ways, it may be the only book he's written.
On the basis of my excitement over "Reality Hunger," I've gone on to read "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead," an early book of short stories whose title I can't recall at the moment (or even moments later), and this book, "How Literature Saved My Life."
I like what Shields has to say about life and art, and particularly what he has to say about writing. For instance, he says:
"What's 'true'? What's knowledge? What's 'fact'? What's memory? What's self? What's other? I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world."
"The only books I care about strip the writer naked and, in that way, have at least the chance of conveying some real knowledge of our shared predicament."
The problem is that Shields keeps saying the same things in every book and uses many of the same life-stories to do it. He's slicing the salami of his biography awfully thin and making a lot of sandwiches out of it. Maybe you're not supposed to notice this, or remember that he's retelling the same anecdotes, and maybe you don't if you read his books as they come out, spaced out with a year or two in between. But when you read them one after the other like I've done, you do notice it and it bothers you. You want to say, "Yes, David, I know, you told me this story about your dad already." Actually, if it weren't a book, but Shields in the flesh, I'd probably just sit there politely and let him tell the whole story from beginning to end without interrupting and act surprised or amused or whatever the story expected of me when he was finally finished. As a reader, I don't have to be so masochistically polite. I can skim; I can skip. And I do.
If you've read any one of David Shields's earlier books there is much that you can skip in "How Literature Saved My Life." I didn't mind since I borrowed this book from the Brooklyn Public Library. If I paid the hardcover price—$25.95—I'd have minded. A lot.
The old anecdotes aside, you can probably skip the rest of the book as well, because if you've read "Reality Hunger" or "The Thing About Life" you've heard all this before, or, at least most of it, if only stated slightly differently. But if you're inspired, as I am, by what Shields has to say, there's a part of you that sort of wants to hear it again. I like passages like this one, for instance.
"As with action painting, new music, self-reflexive documentary film, and Language poetry, collage teaches the reader to understand that the movements of the writer's mind are intricately entangled with the work's meaning. Forget 'intricately entangled with the work's meaning': are the work's meaning."
"I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive. Acutely aware of our mortal condition, I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time."
Even when he lists the fifty essential books/authors that he feels best exhibit cutting-edge writing today, he's strolling down familiar territory. He discussed his admiration for many of these same authors in "Reality Hunger."
Maybe the problem is that Shields isn't allowing enough time to pass between books. Maybe he isn't doing enough living and changing so that he actually has something new to write about. He's like one of those mystery writers who are under contract to do a book every year. After a while, all the plots start to sound alike; after a lifetime of books, you can't help but imagine that Robert B. Parker's P.I. Spencer, for example, can barely force himself through the requisite motions of solving yet another oh-so-familiar case, (the obligatory fight-scene, love-scene, betrayal, dishing-out-of-justice, etc.) Or that the author can force himself to write the book. Or the reader to read it.
Shields even makes mention of this phenomenon. He calls it the karaoke effect. He claims that many of the greatest writers fall prey to it. They become slaves of their style, their fame, their readers' expectations. They become ossified in literary amber. Or, like trained monkeys, they feel compelled to perform the same crowd-pleasing tricks again and again. Of course, this eventually takes a toll on the monkey. Just note how threadbare and shabby old circus animals always look.
Shields is like a motivational speaker with a successful self-help program. He keeps preaching the same message in lecture after lecture and will keep doing it so long as he's still packing the house. He's going to ride it out to the end. It's a great message. I'm one of the choir. But good grief, enough already. To give him credit, I think he's trying to practice what he preaches in his books, but somehow he doesn't quite pull it off. "How Literature Save My Life," "The Thing About Life Is that One Day You'll Be Dead," are great concepts for books, but they drift away from their ostensible subjects and simply become Shields talking about what a book "should" be. It's like he wants to practice what he preaches but instead he just ends up preaching more than he practices. He hasn't done polemicizing yet. He's writing "Reality Hunger" all over again in every book he writes. In fact, you come to realize that he was writing "Reality Hunger" before he wrote "Reality Hunger"; all the books prior being only warm-ups to the main event.
"I believe in art as pathology lab, landfill, recycling station, death sentence, aborted suicide note, lunge at redemption. You art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself."
I believe this, too. But I don't think his writing is either alive or dangerous in "How Literature Saved My Life." For one thing, I want to hear him say something he hasn't said before. That he secretly enjoyed watching the public fall and humiliation of golf icon Tiger Woods is not enough. Maybe his publisher needs a book every year or two from Shields. Or the terms of his contract with the University of Washington where he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence require that he publish or perish. Maybe it's his bank account that demands a regular infusion of cash. Or his ego needs to see his name on the shelves and the bestseller lists. Maybe it's a matter of striking while the iron is hot. Like Guy Fieri putting his name on everything from salsa to frozen pizzas to cheap cutlery before people get sick and tired of his schtick. Who knows? But as readers we don't need these literary leftovers, whether they're being dished up by Danielle Steele or David Shields.
Maybe David Shields points out better than anyone exactly what's wrong with David Shields. His call for writers to stop "fictionalizing" and to report from the facts of their own actual lives, his insistence, correct, I feel, that real life is stranger than any fiction, that the only thing worth saying is what hasn't yet been said and what hasn't yet been said is what you, as a unique particular consciousness at a unique particular point in eternity still hasn't said doesn't depend so much on a failure of imagination as a neglect to exercise it at all. Well, not quite. According to Shields, you just write what you remember, exactly as you remember it, and the faulty, selective nature of memory itself will force us to use our imagination, to make of even our most "honest," factual, biographic documents a "fiction" by default. In other words, we can't help but use our imaginations if only to lie in all honesty.
Well, yes, he's right. Sort of.
Each of us has only one life. So if we're going to mine that life for our literary output, it had better be a damn interesting life. Either that or it would be helpful to be schizophrenic, or, at least, a master/miser of information conservation. If not, we're basically only going to have one book in us; and, if we insist on writing more than one book, one deck of tattered anecdotes to be dealt out in different combinations over and over. I'm interested in someone else's life but only up to a point. After all, I'm busy living and writing about my own. I think I've reached the saturation point with David Shields and his life. At least for the foreseeable future.
Still.....as compelled as I felt to say these rather harsh things about "How Literature Saved My Life," it surprises me as much as it might anyone else reading this (who, for instance?!)* that I enjoyed this book for what it had to say. Even if it was saying it all again.
*For some time now, I've been aware that a large percentage of people who find their way to this blog do so looking for, of all things, ancient Egyptian pornography. This is because I have a post with that title. It's a photo of some statuary in an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. It is indeed pornographic—literally an ancient Egyptian orgy scene—but I'll bet my camel that it's not at all what some horny Syrian has in mind when he types "Egyptian porn" into his search engine with his least important hand. To these poor guys, whom I have no doubt frustrated and disappointed, led on and misled, albeit unintentionally, I sincerely apologize.
On the other hand, in order to boost traffic here at Gnostic Pigeon, I've considered adding the word "porn" to every post on this blog. Like this one, for instance.
No comments:
Post a Comment