Two Umbrellas

Reality Hunger by David Shields

It’s been quite a while since I’ve read a book that really made me angry. I’m surprised I finished Reality Hunger by David Shields because throughout my reading I wanted to throw the thing out the window. Usually when a book makes me feel that way I stop reading. I felt compelled to finish it like it was a train wreck. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t not be angry - like that feeling when someone offends you and you spend all day thinking of the best retort, each one getting better and better: Take that, David Shields! Now it’s been a few weeks and I’m over my anger. I’m now reading Freedom, which I’m sure Shields would scoff at (although I bet he’s read it already).

What really angered me about Reality Hunger is Shields’s use of gimmicks to mask his apparent lack of innovative thought. A few examples: letters as chapter indicators instead of numbers (cute); notes that he states he was forced to use for legal reasons but then puts a dotted line in the pages and suggests that you cut them out (what a rebel!); finally, the book itself is a gimmick - a collage of excerpts loosely woven together to form a thesis (too long and, frankly, weak). Unfortunately, the last gimmick has been done before many times. He’s trying to convey a manifesto for our times but it’s written as though no one has ever heard of the Internet. The book is a YouTube mashup in print form. It’s very existence is already a cliche. When, when will people realize that you can’t translate digital form into print form? Yes, content can be transformed but you can’t recreate a digital medium in print. Reading Reality Hunger felt as though Shields was trying to recreate the organic exploratory process of reading content on the web. Unfortunately, it wasn’t fluid - it was obvious when the content was written by Shields (he was good at attempting mediocre aphorisms - sounds like someone wanted to coin the next ‘tipping point’). It didn’t read like an essay; it read like a book of Bartlett’s Quotations.

So maybe comparing it to Bartlett’s Quotations is somewhat unfair. Shields does pull together a thesis, although loose and disjointed. Nonfiction represents reality and reality is what we are searching for. Nonfiction, whether it’s literature, television, or music, he seems to argue is organic, generated from real life or another piece of art (e.g. music sampling). Fiction, on the other hand is too contrived and controlled at the hands of the author/artist. He spends a lot of time assailing fiction as irrelevant because it is too crafted. However at one point he uses reality tv (!) as an argument against fiction - as if reality tv, or any tv for that matter, isn’t crafted/marketed. However, he digs himself a little bit of a hole by circling back on how creative nonfiction is unreliable in that truth is only what we perceive and often we each have our own idea of reality or truths. Shields disregards the problem of the unreliable narrator (or fictionalized truths) by admitting that he prefers this type of artistic experience. Memoir is somehow more enlightened than fiction by trying to investigate reality using reality creatively. I don’t disagree that creative nonfiction is literature, often very good literature. Yet, I can’t sit still and (once again) have fiction declared ‘dead’.

So why do I think fiction is still alive and well? Maybe it isn’t but I want it to be. I still believe in the power of imagination. I still believe that we can become enlightened about our world through our imaginations because our imaginations are rooted in real life. Authors/artists may have gifts but they are still human. Fiction does not strip us of our curiosity or emotions or authenticity.

Shields grapples with what every author struggles with: how do you write when it seems like everything we want to say is already written? The only answer that I can think of is you just write. Unfortunately, for Shields, he chose not to, leading him to say not very much at all.