Nonfiction squabbles (Part One?)

Steven Colbert's interview with author David Shields earlier this week has spurred me to do some more thinking about how I understand the nonfiction genre and how my practice of it compares to the kinds of things Shields and John D'Agata are after in their respective efforts to carve out for the essay form an equal (or even superior, in Shields' view?) place within contemporary literature.

Colbert (whose ability to marry humor with the utterly troubling and serious continues to compel me) certainly didn't take it easy on Shields in his questions about Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Shields' treatise that praises the potentials of essays while putting down both novels and memoirs as past their meaningful prime. Colbert focused the interview on Shields' decision to fill his book with the words of other writers without acknowledging those words to be the words of others. While citations do appear in the back of the book because of the publisher's insistence, Shields told Colbert that he hopes readers will cut out those final nine pages of notes so that Reality Hunger is read "the way that I want it to be read."

Whether Colbert's playful yet hard-hitting questions about plagiarism and "sampling" were primarily sincere or in some way mocking the criticism Shields' volume has already encountered, Shields looked less than heartened by Colbert's singular attention to this aspect of the book.

"Are you the Vanilla Ice of novels?" Colbert asked.

"Precisely," Shields said. "Why can music get away with these exciting moves, why can the visual arts do it, why can you do it? Why is writing weirdly [bound] to nineteenth-century novelistic forms?"

"Why are you bound by the nineteenth-century convention of book?" Colbert went on to ask. "Why didn't you just put this on a Web site, or like Xerox it, and like pass it out on street corners wearing a trash bag for a dress?"

Shields seemed visibly frustrated, defensive, and even sad. And I kind of felt for him. But what I've read of his ideas in interviews and excerpts from Reality Hunger has left me less than convinced of his perspective.

On one level, I really relate to Shields' (and, I think, D'Agata's) desire for "a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation," one that ties stories to "an idea, a philosophical description." After all, I've described my own thesis project (a book-length essay) as a combination of philosophical musings, exegesis, literary criticism, reportage and memoir. And I've written it in first-person, uninterested in somehow disguising or distancing author and speaker and voice. These characteristics to some extent, I think, align my work with the sort of stuff that the Shields camp purports to hunger for.

Shields writes in the 599th numbered paragraph of his manifesto, "I want the veil of 'let's pretend' out. I don't like to be carried into purely fanciful circumstances. The never-never lands of the imagination don't interest me that much. Beckett decided that everything was false to him, almost, in art, with its designs and formulae. He wanted art, but he wanted it right from life. He didn't like, finally, that Joycean voice that was too abundant, too Irish, endlessly lyrical, endlessly allusive ... He wanted to directly address desperate individual existence, which bores many readers. I find him a joyous writer, though; his work reads like prayer. You don't have to think about literary allusions but experience itself. That's what I want from the voice. I want it to transcend artifice."

His terms there at the end--"to transcend artifice"--are terms I'll have to think about for a while. To transcend artifice seems like a wise and interesting idea, but I'm not sure that the forms and novelists (e.g., Jonathan Franzen) that Shields dismisses in Reality Hunger are not doing this sort of thing too. Are most successful literary novels really embodying Shields' simplistic description of them in one interview as tomes that go on and on "in unending chapters" detailing this or that breakup, this or that catastrophe?

"A novel," Shields says in the same interview, "is basically a story-telling mechanism that exists to hold the reader riveted ... it's there to sell a book." Is that truly what a "story" boils down to? Entertainment for those of us more easily enraptured and amused?

"We need to write compressed stories that produce a tone of thought rather than elaborate stories that produce none," Shields goes on to say in the same interview. I guess I just don't see the product, or meaning, of a lot of stories and novels out there in the same dissatisfied way. I've found that many novels do manage in some way to "directly address individual desparate experience" as a human even as they excel at absorbing my imagination and attention as a reader.

Having just finished D'Agata's About a Mountain, I'm still processing what's most promising in these recent nonfiction works. Both D'Agata and Shields cross unexpected lines, whether it be deeply ingrained, cultural expectations about appropriation of the work of others or about how closely an account of real events must stay to the facts. The foggier choices the above authors have made with regard to such issues turn me off to otherwise great work on their part. But are those choices in some ways necessary to that work being what it is? I'm not yet sure what I think.