My initial thoughts upon reading Reality Hunger by David Shields

Really intellectually stimulating. Perhaps in part because I was trying to guess where he got his material from. (He actually requests that you don’t look at the endnotes in the back of the book - that you cut them out with scissors on the dotted line and throw them away).

He writes about how straightforward fiction - narrative, story - just doesn’t do it for him, how memoir is part fiction always anyway, how the line between fiction and nonfiction is blurred, how he likes literature of fragments, and on the superiority, for our time, of the lyric essay as the prime artistic literary form.

I love story and imagination. He admits he lacks imagination. I think there’s something that flat-out fiction can accomplish that the lyric essay, memoir, nonfiction, reportage, etc would be hard-pressed to accomplish.

Here’s a translation of a few lines from the poem “Autospychography” by Fernando Pessoa:

Poets pretend

They pretend so well

They even pretend

They suffer what they suffer

But their readers feel

Nor the pain that pretends

Nor the pain that is

But only their own that isn’t real.

Shields wants the discursive, the intellectual, and in that lies the aesthetic. But some aesthetics have to be felt. The fake of fiction isn’t inauthentic just because it’s imaginary therefore not as bound to reality, or even (as he so interestingly put it) is not as ambiguous as reality. Sometimes literature has to get past the propositional statement, past our filters, and sometimes - not always, but sometimes - imaginative literature, fiction, narrative, is totally the way to go.

You see, sometimes great authors have made me feel a point, feel a realization, feel an intuition of an idea in situations or in areas where I would have rejected or misunderstood the point in an essay.

So, enough defending of fiction. He is right that it is not as central to our culture as it once was, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have it’s place. It just doesn’t interest him.

Moving on.

His discussions of nonfiction, of the looseness of reality, of the fictions created by memory and therefore of memoir, of the value of the essay… all this is incredibly cool, and isn’t stated often enough. This book is absolutely worth reading for the thought it stimulates, for the aesthetic is shares, for its sensibility, for its grasp of issues at the cutting edge of literary art, and for the mere enjoyment (he may take issue with this) of the writing itself.

Excuse me while I now go off to steal all of his thoughts and make a collage of them.