"Reality," contended Vladimir Nabokov, "is one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes." Yet virtually every new artistic movement marches under the banner of "realism" while dismissing its predecessors as frauds.
Reacting against the artificial constraints of neoclassical verse, William Wordsworth prided himself on using "the real language of men." However, a younger generation dismissed Wordsworth and his contemporaries with the epithet "Romantic," sneering at their failure to be "realistic" in the manner of the gritty fiction and stark poetry published later in the 19th century. For Nabokov himself, reality was a privileged childhood within the czarist aristocracy, though his reality later morphed into a scrambling émigré's struggle to make ends meet. "A naked lunch is natural to us," wrote Allen Ginsberg, "we eat reality sandwiches." But though, as David Shields contends in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), the human species is hungry for reality, the ingredients of the sandwiches that slake that craving vary by nation, era, and personal taste. The dietary demands of a Sufi mystic differ from those of a gangsta rapper or a microbiologist.
Shields began his publishing career with three works of fiction—Heroes (Simon & Schuster, 1984), Dead Languages (Graywolf Press, 1989), and Handbook for Drowning (Knopf, 1991). The seven books that have followed would, under the Dewey Decimal System, have to be shelved with "nonfiction," but they are fluid amalgams of journalism, memoir, essay, and fabrication. "'Fiction'/'Nonfiction,'" insists the author in Reality Hunger, "is an utterly useless distinction." That distinction is utterly useful to voters scrutinizing campaign ads and to jurors weighing courtroom testimony. However, Shields writes during the epoch of a biracial president, when the hunger for reality is sated by fusion cuisine, when multiculturalism, hybridity, and mestizaje are virtuous shibboleths, not symptoms of vile impurity.
The label "interdisciplinary" is a magnet for grants, and multimediation is the summit of artistic accomplishment. "To be alive," Shields contends, "is to travel ceaselessly between the real and the imaginary, and mongrel form is about as exact an emblem as I can conceive for the unsolvable mystery at the center of identity." He feigns nonchalance about the specious memoirs of James Frey, JT Leroy, Misha Defonseca, Margaret Seltzer, Herman Rosenblat, and Binjamin Wilkomirski, hoaxers who abuse readers' trust by peddling fantasy as history. For Shields, the brouhaha over false memoirs merely confirms our era's hunger for reality: "The whole huge loud roar, as it returns again and again, has to do with the culture being embarrassed at how much it wants the frame of reality and, within that frame, great drama."
In the first of 617 brief, numbered sections that constitute Reality Hunger, Shields declares his intention "to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media (lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film, television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy, graffiti) who are breaking larger and larger chunks of 'reality' into their work." But is "reality" a basket of bulky croutons that artists insert into their bouillabaisse? Is a clear consommé less "real" than a lumpy ragout? Affirming affinity with a motley group, including Renata Adler, Sandra Bernhard, Spalding Gray, Denis Leary, Ross McElwee, Rick Reynolds, Chris Rock, Art Spiegelman, and George W.S. Trow, Shields praises their "confusion between field report and self-portrait; the confusion between fiction and nonfiction; the author-narrators' use of themselves as personae, as representatives of feeling states; the antilinearity; the simultaneous bypassing and stalking of artifice-making machinery; the absolute seriousness, phrased as comedy; the violent torque of their beautifully idiosyncratic voices." He equates straddle and muddle with "reality," and "reality" with the essential nutrient of artistic gastronomy.
One should not expect cogent argument from a writer who embraces confusion and antilinearity or be bothered by the inconsistency between his praise of brevity and his admiration for the prolix masters William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. Yet Reality Hunger is subtitled A Manifesto, and the most famous manifestoes—by Thomas Jefferson, Simon Bolívar, Karl Marx, F.T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and André Breton, among others—are public manifestations of the urgent need for revolution. In one of several Dadaist manifestoes, Tzara states that a manifesto is "a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretension is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis. It may be pleasant, and good-natured, it's always right, it's strong, vigorous and logical." By that wry definition, Shields's book, which lacks a recipe for curing reality hunger, is not a manifesto. The Declaration of Independence, by contrast, begins with a statement of fundamental inalienable rights, proceeds to an enumeration of grievances against the British monarch, and arrives at the logical conclusion that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States." Unlike Jefferson's persuasive document, Reality Hunger is not a systematic polemic. It is not even revolutionary.
Shields's pronouncement that "the novel is dead" has been a staple of literary chitchat for more than a century. His is a belated obituary for a durable genre long vivified by awareness of its own mortality. Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot anticipated by two centuries the death of the novel enacted within novels by Samuel Beckett and David Markson. As far back as the second century B.C., Apuleius' Golden Ass was already laying bare its own fictional devices, undermining the illusions of narrative. The fact that the devouring of inane romances launches Don Quixote into his preposterous career as knight-errant makes Cervantes's reader mindful of the hazards of made-up stories. When, at the beginning of Part Two of Don Quixote, the title character reads Part One, it is a stunning metafictional moment.
However, embracing narrative reflexivity as unique to current culture, Shields salutes the TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm for its subversive self-consciousness without noting that Ferris Bueller spoke directly to his audience two decades earlier, 40 years after George Burns regularly destroyed the fourth-wall illusion with sardonic asides, not unlike those of Hamlet. The theatrical tradition reaches back through Pirandello to Shakespeare to intrusive commentary by ancient Greek choruses. And in cinema's very infancy, in 1903, Edwin S. Porter was doing violence to the conventions of passive, detached spectatorship; The Great Train Robbery concludes with a bandit firing his pistol into the camera.
Nevertheless, Shields wants to celebrate the birth of a new art. He identifies its most salient traits as reflexivity and an openness to randomness, qualities already evident in the 18th century in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist. As distinctive qualities of the new art, he also names "a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction," though that blurring was commonplace in the 1960s in "nonfiction novels" such as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, themselves latecomers to what Daniel Defoe did in 1722 with A Journal of the Plague Year. Moreover, Shields's claim that "some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction" could also have been made 50 years ago, when Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, George Plimpton, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and others were practicing New Journalism, appropriating novelistic techniques for reportage. Shields echoes Terence echoing Ecclesiastes when he quotes the Latin author's epigram: "There's nothing to say that hasn't been said before."
If there's nothing new under the sun, including that insight, then the genre of revolutionary manifesto is more moribund even than the novel. Ultimately Reality Hunger is less significant as a manifesto than as evidence of a talented novelist's crisis of vocation. "I doubt very much that I'm the only person who's finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels," Shields confesses. Moreover, his urge to cross boundaries also leads him to skepticism over intellectual proprietorship.
Wary of individual authorship, he revels in the contemporary culture of bricolage—hip-hop sampling, Warholian recycling of familiar images, and rampant quotation. (Of course, Shakespeare was a master thief, and the Bible is a tour de force of cut-and-paste.) So, instead of writing a novel, he has created a collage; more than half the book's 617 sections are verbatim transcriptions of other authors' words. "Genius borrows nobly," reads the entirety of Section 259, borrowed from the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. At least a dozen pages are lifted verbatim from Shields's own 2002 book, Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography. At the back of the new book are nine pages of citations, inserted, he explains, at the insistence of his publisher's lawyers and despite his opposition. "Reality cannot be copyrighted," he proclaims, still hungry for "reality."
Rather than a manifesto, a statement of principles and purposes, Reality Hunger is a performance, a polyphonic document whose multiple voices contradict one another. "I have a strong reality gene," Shields declares, but other sections of his book offer chromosomal variation: T.S. Eliot's claim that "human kind/ Cannot bear very much reality," and John Fowles's insistence that: "We are all in flight from reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens." Reality Hunger is a stimulating anthology of thoughts about genre, mimesis, and originality, but the book itself ends up saying nothing. Surprisingly omitted from Shields's magpie assemblage is John Lennon's quip, "Reality leaves a lot to the imagination." That is where it must be left. Despite his best efforts to get at "reality," Shields's lively compendium leaves this reader hungry.
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