“Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we’re in need of at the time we’re reading.”
Reality Hunger, by David Shields.
I liked the book for reasons that have nothing to do with the author’s main thesis, but that isn’t the sort of thing that would bother Shields in the least since part of his thesis is that I probably shouldn’t agree with his primary thesis.
The quotation at the outset is from his book, though he would frown on the fact that I put it in quotation marks and am noting the source.
Part of his thesis is that I should just steal everything I want to use—plagiarism is not a crime in Shields’ world—it is something to be done proudly.
(Students: Don’t try this at home. Really. Do not plagiarize. Shields is wrong.)
Shield’s primary thesis, for those who are interested, is that the rash of “memoirs,” some fake, some not, are the best thing going in literature—after all, all writing is fiction and so fake memoirs are fiction masquerading as reality because after all reality is nebulous anyway, but we all want more reality and…well, I could keep going, but his argument is deliberately opaque and wandering and probably self-contradictory and Shields likes it that way, thank you very much, so to start trying to carp about the idea that it is impossible to summarize a book which Shields would not want summarized in the first place is one of those things not to be done, especially since Shields would undoubtedly be quite happy that the book generated a tediously long “Sentence” (Shields is also not a fan of grammatical stricture) which just wanders all over in an attempt to capture a meditation, or dare I say compose an essay (essai) about something which may or may not be what Shields was discussing. Suffice it to say; Shields’ book was fun to read—nice style—all numbered paragraphs—he, like Nietzsche, likes apothegms.
Wandering, tangential ruminations about things. I liked it. (Hard to believe, I know.)
The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.
Every man’s work—whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else—is always a portrait of himself.
Nothing is going to happen in this book.
I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.
That is more David Shields. Or, really, more David Shields plagiarizing other people.
Maybe I agree with those things. Emphasis on maybe.
I recently read Wodehouse, Big Money. That is true. Does that mean that what I am about to write about it is also true?
It’s trivially easy to write in cryptic epigrams.
It’s even easier to read cryptic epigrams.
Maybe you learned something from reading that last paragraph. Maybe I just said something about myself. Is this paragraph an autobiography?
Big Money is about as formulaic a Wodehouse novel as there ever was. Then again, I suppose that could be written about every Wodehouse novel. You could write the entire plot by the end of the second chapter and you wouldn’t have missed a thing.
That is, of course, the beauty of Wodehouse. One part of me stands aside his books simply admiring his ability to take a perfectly predictable plot with perfectly predictable jokes and turn it into yet another masterpiece. The lack of variety is part of the very joke woven into the novel.
“The male mind did not appear to be able to grasp immediately that a woman doctor need not of necessity be a gargoyle with steel-rimmed spectacles and a washleather complexion.” I am not at all sure why that quotation was just put in at this point. Which is, in a nutshell, the problem with reading David Shields. If he is right, then it makes no difference what follows what and in what order it all comes and how it is all phrased. It doesn’t even matter if that is really a quotation from Big Money or a different Wodehouse novel. Shields is a literary nihilist. Wodehouse is not.
I enjoyed reading both Wodehouse and Shields. Yet, only one of them is saying something True. And it is the writer of fiction.
Big Money reminds us once again that life is a comedy; it is full of improbable events and the only proper reaction to living in this vale of tears is to laugh and laugh and laugh. Any other way leads to madness.
Shields, despite being funny, has forgotten to laugh. He takes this whole writing business far too seriously. He wants writing to dig deep and expose one’s soul in some sort of autobiographical auto-da-fe, all the while arguing that there is really no way to do so. Again, despite being funny, Shields has written a very grim book.
If my library was not ordered alphabetically, I would put Shields’ Reality Hunger next to Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy in the hopes that the latter would somehow teach the former that a book with nary a joke in sight is both funnier and a better picture of the human soul than the funny book with the nihilistic view of life and literature.
Come to think of it—this idea of ordering the books in my office by determining which books really should get together for a talk over coffee has staggering implications. Where would Big Money go?
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