‘Sampling, collage, remixes and cover-versions’ – Reality Hunger by David Shields

Reality Hunger is subtitled ‘A Manifesto’ – it’s David Shield’s call to arms for those like himself who feel that the novel is past its sell-by date; it is time, he says, for the rise of non-fiction – verisimilitude is dead.  Shields argues in favour of the essay and the memoir as forms of writing that fall between the cracks of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ – he’s interested in points where these categories collapse, where what he terms ‘reality’ begins – and this reality is not the coherent, narrative-driven journey of the hero, carefully and deliberately constructed by a single author, but the genre-bending, interstitial moments, where uncertainty and  possibility rule, where works hover in the gaps between fiction and non-fiction.

Shields waxes rhapsodically about sampling, collage, remixes and cover-versions, and parts of the book are concerned with music, particularly hip-hop and DJ culture, as a case-study for the potential future of prose.  It’s appropriate then, that much of this book isn’t written by him at all. Reality Hunger is a collection of aphorisms and quotations, subdivided by letter into vague thematic sections (mimesis, memory, genre, contradiction…) and these samples of other people’s writings remain unattributed in the body of the text.  The lawyers at Shields’ publishing house, Hamish Hamilton, forced him to include an appendix with the appropriate referencing information, but he not only added a note that encourages the reader to snip out the offending codicil, but he also provided a handy dotted line to guide the way.  The references, anyway, give the reader minimal information; one reads ‘I’m pretty sure these lines, or something close to these lines, were spoken by Terry Gilliam in an interview, but I can’t for the life of me find the source.’  Another says ‘Naipaul? Nabokov? The human condition?’  Shields’ unwillingness to adhere to the typical academic or non-fiction rules of copyright infringement or ownership of ideas is consistent with his argument in the text that this is antithetical to creativity; he says that people have always worked with pre-existing ideas, and to be precious about them is regressive.  He seems to see himself more as a creative editor than a writer.  The set of sentences and paragraphs that together comprise his ‘manifesto’ is certainly seamlessly stitched together, and the result is invigorating and exuberant to read.

Leafing through the book, you get an accumulation of ideas and opinions and statements and arguments that press the idea that in this media-saturated, narrative-rich age, we are hungry for reality, and what we need is not a stable, self-contained plotted novel, like, say, Franzen’s The Corrections (Shields refuses to read this), but the bastardisation and confusion of fact and impression and form and genre that he finds in memoir and the lyric essay.  The word ‘essay’, he reminds us, means ‘to try’, and he reckons that writers and readers of traditional mimetic novels have simply stopped trying.  James Frey, with his controversial semi-fictional memoir, A Million Little Pieces, is referenced time and again – Shields wants every boundary blurred and every rule broken, and Frey is a Messiah for the new technique. 

The problem, for me, is that Shields’ call to arms, this new ‘ars poetica’, as the cover blurb calls the book, isn’t new at all; it’s decidedly old hat. If you skim through the references at the back, you’ll see mentioned Robbe-Grillet, Walter Benjamin, John Fowles, Virginia Woolf, Picasso and Nietzsche, alongside Lethem and Raban – Shields isn’t saying or quoting anything here that hasn’t been suggested or tried ad nauseum in the past.  It’s not that his points are invalid, but neither are they shocking or revolutionary.  His evidence that the novel is dead – and how many times has it died, now? – seems largely based on his own reading preferences; one might otherwise think that there’s room for a variety of writing styles in the whole wide world.

That’s not to say that I didn’t appreciate his argument.  An inveterate, un-remorseful and insatiable lover of narrative am I; but I also enjoy the experimental, the hard-to-classify, and the downright peculiar.  I like a memoir where the writer admits to contradiction and uncertainty in his remembered version of events; I enjoy a rambling and disjointed essay.  Who doesn’t like a bit of self-reflexivity and metafiction now and then?  Although Shields isn’t presenting an argument that I haven’t heard before, the form of his thesis – the onslaught of opinions and examples and ranting diatribes – is an overwhelmingly compelling example of why this type of writing deserves our attention.  Though I won’t be binning my Tolstoy or my Stephen King,  I’ll certainly buy into Shields’ brand of non-fiction.  In Reality Hunger, form and content are well-matched.

Any Cop?:  Reality Hunger is one to be gulped whole in an exhilarating rush, not dipped randomly into; its power comes from its tidal wave of theories.  Read it with an open mind – but avoid it if you’re looking for plot and a tidy narrative arc. 

Valerie O’Riordan