Just when I’d got over my annoyance at Zadie Smith’s handwringing Two Paths for the Novel essay (why two paths? Why not 100? Who said we have to make a choice?), along comes David Shields with his Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Brimming over with the overwrought language, false oppositions and absurd claims that we’ve come to expect from this genre (Plot is dead! We desperately need a form that reflects what it’s like to live in the 21st Century! Books need to be more like reality TV!) Reality Hunger also demonstrates the same lack of historical awareness and broader context that all these ‘whither the novel’ Jeremiads indulge in.
Forget not seeing the forest for the trees - for most of Reality Hunger, Shields is so busy headbutting the trees that it’s hard to imagine he even knows what a forest is anymore. One never gets the sense reading him that people have been saying similar things about the novel for almost as long as there have been novels – for Shields everything is a revelation and a revolution.
Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped up revelation. Life, though--standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night--flies at us in bright splinters.
Shit – really? Oh my God – that must mean the novel is dead!!
For nearly 250 pages it goes on like this. If you can imagine being forced to listen to a particularly self-indulgent performance artist shouting at you in the midst of a religious revival meeting, you’ll have some sense of what it’s like to plough through Reality Hunger.
Laura Miller over at Salon has done a great job of taking apart Shields’ book and the faulty thinking that lies both beneath it and other ‘the novel is dead’ whines. I just wanted to add a few extra things that I’ve noticed when reading Shields and others like him.
Firstly, every time I read one of these ‘the novel is in crisis’ rants, I always come away with the feeling that it’s not the novel that’s in crisis – it’s the author of the rant. It’s true of Shields and seems particularly true of Zadie Smith in her Two Paths essay. In that essay she goes to great lengths to set up a false opposition which will prove her claim that the novel is currently suffering a crisis of identity. But in doing so the only crisis of identity she truly reveals is her own – both as an author and as an individual in the early 21st Century. Faced with a world that prefers to watch TV and surf the internet, you get a sense that Smith, Shields and co have suffered a collective crisis of confidence. Instead of standing up for the novel, they start thrashing around and end up apologising for its very existence.
Shields is particularly guilty of this and it leads him to then make a claim that a lot of these sort of writers end up making; namely that the contemporary literary novel is irrelevant because as a form it does not reflect the confusion, chaos and uncontrollable messiness of modern life. Because most novels refuse to reflect this messiness at the level of form (the argument goes) the novel can no longer adequately speak to or convey contemporary concerns. This then leads Shields on (as it has led many others) to champion certain techniques such as cut and paste, fictional memoirs, quasi-realism and even plagiarism as a solution.
Some solution.
By confusing form with content, Shields is unable to recognise that despite its 19th Century roots, the contemporary literary novel can still engage with the present in a meaningful way. In fact, I would argue that the contemporary literary novel’s refusal or inability to radically alter its form gives it a power and a place that slavish devotion to fashion would kill off.
And anyway, just because contemporary Western culture has embraced the soundbite and the image, the neurosis of surface and speed, why on earth does the novel need to do the same? If the world has gone mad, does the novel need to go mad too? Maintaining some cool distance and refraining from jumping down the rabbit hole in such a situation is not a sign of irrelevance; it’s a sign of sanity.
But I guess what I think is truly silly about these ‘novel in crisis’ books, essays and manifestos is that in trying so hard to draw lines in the sand, they call on the reader to make choices when none are necessary. There are a lot of exciting innovations going on with the novel and some great new voices working within the form and pushing it in new directions. Like Shields, I love Geoff Dyer’s books. But I also love quite a lot of Ian McEwan, trashy crime novels, Roberto Bolano and Flaubert. For me, the thought of having to pick sides among them seems ridiculous; as I’m sure it would seem to most people.
But for Shields and many like him, everything has to be turned into an either/or, an us-and-them scenario. Like the consumerist society they mimic, Shields and co demand that Choices Must Be Made.
Anyway, I’m so fed up with reading ‘novel-is-dead’ essays and manifestos that I thought I’d put together a half-baked manifesto of my own. I call it:
My Anti-Literary Manifesto Manifesto
Just because you hate Ian McEwan’s Saturday or Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections doesn’t mean that the contemporary realistic novel needs to be done away with
There are more important things in life than form
The conventional realist novel is not an oppressive power structure and championing fake memoirs, cut and paste techniques, plagiarism or non-linear structures is not an act of dangerous subversion. Nor is it ultimately very interesting
Unless you happen to live in the late 19th or early 20th Century, issuing manifestos and declaring that you belong to a literary movement is kind of embarrassing
If you are bored with the novel, perhaps the problem lies with you rather than the novel
If you are bored with plot, perhaps the problem lies with you rather than with plot
The contemporary literary novel is not your father/your mother/God/the state/capitalism/the ‘dominant ideology’
Stop your handwringing, slow down and get some perspective. As much as we love them, these are books we’re talking about; not matters of life and death
There is a reason why Ulysses is a better book than Finnegans Wake
It’s perfectly possible to like the novels of David Foster Wallace and Joseph O’Neill. It’s even possible to like the novels of David Foster Wallace, Joseph O’Neill and Stephen King
If you’re so upset about conventional linear narratives, why are you still clinging to 19th Century notions of progress and development?
Convention doesn’t always mean cliché any more than tradition always means control
Do your homework. If you haven’t read a good smattering of Flaubert, Proust, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens and Hemingway then you really have no right to be issuing manifestos about the novel
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