David Shields
>Culture Remix 2
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David Shields, novelist, non-fiction writer, editor, verbal collagist, has published a book called Reality Hunger, which he calls (while impugning the notion of genre) “a manifesto.” Shields the novelist has lost his mode d’emploi, and his loss could become our loss because Shields the collagist would remove from use the very wherewithal of the novel’s existence, if he can. But his loss also becomes our gain because Shields gives us a house of mirrors comprised of provocative thoughts from a wide variety of sources, addressing the inadequacy of thinking in terms of fiction or non-fiction, providing not simply a reconsideration of genre or labeling but a critique aimed at the relation of the author to the written self, and of the reader to the read text.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )“My medium is prose, not the novel.” What do we expect of a manifesto? The work should “manifest” something, and that “something” is generally a new aesthetic, e.g., the Surrealist Manifesto professed the tactics of a radical approach to painting and language. Though I would argue that Shields’ books is primarily a confession, confessing his dissatisfaction with reading and writing fiction and with the notion that non-fiction should be demonstrably factual, Shields claims he is calling for a new form, something that falls between fiction and non-fiction. It has to be autobiographical and personal (which neither fiction or non-fiction has to be), and as immediate as the mind of the writer, which has become in Shields’ case, and, he strongly implies, for all of us, a tissue of quotations and borrowed phrases.
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