Snow is story. Snow can be an interruption and annoyance, but it is difficult to not appreciate a child’s awe for the white flakes. Snow clogs and closes roads, but it also turns lonely hills into slopes for sledding. Snow is the possibility of a new landscape, if only until for an hour, a day, or a week.
I was born during an Ash Wednesday snowstorm. My father rushed my mother to Morristown Memorial Hospital while white cloaked the streets. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I scoped side roads for hills and banks. The best routes had speed and a smooth finish, and though I would drift to a stop, I would stare into the sky, and not care that I was cold. I listened for school closings on a Sansui, my face lit by the dial. Now I refresh the National Weather Service website as watches become warnings, and still pine for storms.
That white world has influenced my writing: my novella,
This Darksome Burn, begins during an Oregon storm, and one of my poems, “
The Mailman,” laments undelivered mail. Snow has also become a refrain in my reading. Snow fractures storylines and complicates characters. Snow forces writers to capture atmosphere and mood, and to uniquely describe a common event. Although we may experience many snowstorms in our lifetimes, each fall must be prepared for, dealt with, and, possibly, appreciated. I’ve noticed that writers often raise their descriptive bar when representing this winter world. What follows is a list of snow in poetry, fiction, and film. The usual suspects are mentioned, but my focus is on lesser-known gems. There’s enough reading and watching to keep you busy during the next polar vortex, blizzard, or even onion snow.
I. Snow in Poetry
“
Antarctica” by
James Hoch (2007)
Friends kneel on the dirt floor of a baseball dugout. They pop nitrous canisters “into the communion shapes / of our mouths, slipped inside where / everything seemed to be falling snow.” The poem continues with that steel-like chill, as some boys drift toward further abuse, and even death. Hoch never glorifies drug use, but, like the blur of side-falling snow, he muddies the space between regret and nostalgia. The grown narrator sees kids “running in the heat of a taillight / swirling behind them,” and recalls his own youth, when he and his friends “wanted only to quiet our bodies, their / unnatural hum, a vague pull inward, / some thin furrows gliding over the snow.” Hoch’s poem appeared in an issue of
Painted Bride Quarterly, but I prefer the version that was included in his second book,
Miscreants.
“
A Winter’s Tale” by
D.H. Lawrence (1916)
Snow and love are commonly intertwined, but Lawrence begins this poem in the “grey” past, where the woman’s footsteps document her existence. She is gone: “I cannot see her, since the mist’s white scarf / obscures the dark wood and the dull orange sky; / but she’s waiting, I know, impatient and cold, half / sobs struggling into her frosty sigh.” Yesterday, she had rushed to meet the narrator for their “inevitable farewell; / the hill is steep, on the snow my steps are slow-- / why does she come, when she knows what I have to tell?” No warmth in this storm.
“
Invocation” by
Denise Levertov (1969)
In 1994, Levertov wrote “
Swan in Falling Snow,” based on the photography of her friend,
Mary Randlett. Although the title sounds pleasant, the poem is not: the swan is nearly dead, a “barrel-sized, heart-shaped snowball.” Levertov uses commas as knives: “splayed feet, balanced, / weary, immobile.” Yet Levertov had long been interested in snow’s ability to turn a narrative. “Invocation” is a sparer piece, resembling patches of dirt on a snowed page. The collective narrator is about to leave home, and each line in the first stanza is its own sentence, building the anticipation. Here, snow is not worried over, but wished for: “Deep snow shall block all entrances / and oppress the roof and darken / the windows.” Only snow can shutter a home and prevent entry. And that is fine, because the narrator hopes Lares will “guard” the “profound dreams” between the walls, so “that it return to us when we return.” It also contains my most favorite line in all of poetry: “The house yawns like a bear.”
“
Early October Snow” by
Robert Haight (2013)
A nor’easter slammed New Jersey the day before Halloween, 2011. Trees snapped power lines as some counties saw nearly 20 inches of accumulation. Haight’s poem brought me back to that moment: “this morning we wake to pale muslin / stretched across the grass.” The narrator knows the snow will not stay, but the blanched landscape still fascinates him. I love a poem that isn’t supposed to happen. Snow should wait its turn, but Haight makes this early fall so believable, from the pumpkins that look like “planets / shrouded by clouds” to “leaves, still soldered to their branches / by a frozen drop of dew, splash / apple and pear paint along the roadsides.”
“
Ash-boughs” by
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1885)
Hopkins’s final sonnet, “
To R.B.,” is a lament about the narrator’s inability to experience “the fine delight that fathers thought:” inspiration to write poetry. “R.B.” is
Robert Bridges, poet laureate of England, but more importantly, Hopkins’s friend and posthumous publisher. The pair met at Oxford, and agnostic Bridges was the perfect contrast to Hopkins, a Catholic convert who became a Jesuit priest. Bridges named this fragment “Ash-boughs” when he published Hopkins’s
Collected Poems in 1918. A curtal sonnet, one of Hopkins’s idiosyncratic 12 line variations of the form, the poem begins with a narrator’s wonder at “a milk to the mind:” the branches of ash trees. He enjoys their shapes, reach, and color: “ May / mells blue and snowwhite through them, a fringe and fray / of greenery.” The tree reaches through the memory of snow to the promise of spring and light.
Hopkins had always connected snow and ash trees, and used their intersection to present his central poetic theory, inscape. Hopkins once explained to Bridges that “no doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness.” His theory of inscape is equally unusual: “the essential and only lasting thing...species or individually-distinctive beauty of style.” The theory became the core paradox of Hopkins’s poetry and life, which Bridges observed as “the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism,” and what
W.H. Gardner calls the “tension between the inborn creative
personality of the artist and the acquired religious
character of the Jesuit priest.”
That one of our most inventive poets synthesized his poetic and personal theories using snow brings me joy. From his notebook, in February and April, 1873: “In the snow flat-topped hillocks and shoulders outline with wavy edges, ridge below ridge, very like the grain of wood in line and in projection like relief maps...All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose: looking out of my window I caught it in the random clods and broken heaps of snow made by the cast of a broom...[in April] the ashtree growing in the corner of the garden was felled. It was lopped first. I heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more.”
Further Reading
A great list of snow poems appears in the essay “Turning Up the Gravity” by
Floyd Skloot. After a bad storm, Skloot heads inside and envelopes himself in winter verse: “
Snow-Bound” by
John Greenleaf Whittier, “
Snowflakes” by
Howard Nemerov, “
Snow Light” by
May Sarton, “SNO” by
e.e. cummings, “
The Snow on Saddle Mountain” by
Gary Snyder, “Snow” by
Charles Wright, “
Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” by
Robert Bly, “
Snow” by
Philip Levine, “
Winter Poem” by
Frederick Morgan, “
Snow” by
Louis MacNeice, and “Desert Places” by
Robert Frost: “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow / With no expression, nothing to express.” I would also add “
Snow” by
Mary Ruefle, “
A Winter Without Snow” by
J.D. McClatchey, “
[Like brooms of steel]” by
Emily Dickinson, “
February Snow” by
Francisco Aragón, “
The Snow-Storm” by
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “
Letter from the Ice Field, December” by
Sara Eliza Johnson, and, of course, “
The Snow Man” by
Wallace Stevens, which ends: “For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
II. Snow in Fiction
The Pedersen Kid by
William Gass (1961)
Gass wrote his novella “to entertain a toothache;” I first read it while sitting in the waiting room at the dentist. Within his plans for the story’s draft, he explains his goal to “present evil as a visitation --sudden, mysterious, violent, inexplicable,” bringing to life a line spoken in the text: “nobody’s ever ready for snow.” Gass’s cast is full of effective caricatures: drunken Pa, confused Ma, conniving farm-hand Big Hans, and young Jorge, the first person narrator. Snow appears in the second sentence: in the midst of a North Dakota blizzard, Big Hans discovers a child, the Pedersen kid. The child is resuscitated but delirious, and the family attempts to discover why he is there. Armed with shotguns, sandwiches, and coffee, the men of the home cross snow to hunt the man with mysterious “yellow gloves:” assumedly, someone who has killed the rest of the Pedersen family.
In a story that both parodies and praises the adventure genre, the men experience horse troubles and shudder from cold. Pa loses his whiskey bottle in the snow, and Gass spends several pages on Pa’s obsessive search, leading to Jorge’s conclusion: “It was frightening -- the endless white space.” The horse ultimately shatters the bottle, and the “brown stain spread,” the “snow bubbling and sagging.” Big Hans laughs, and Jorge thought they “could melt and drink the snow.” Jorge hates Big Hans; would hate him “forever -- as long as there was snow.” A
Beckett-style scene unfolds. Snow and storm create a maniacal world that is equal parts caricature and deadly real. The men reach the Pedersen barn, and Jorge hears gunshots. In the novella’s final psychotropic pages, Jorge feels reborn in the abandoned Pedersen home, though the killer might near: “More and more, while we’d been coming, I’d been slipping out of myself, pushed out by the cold maybe.” His thoughts drift toward “a movie where the months had blown from the calendar like leaves. Girls in red peek-a-book BVDs were skiing out of sight.” He sees his motionless father being buried under new snowfall, and realizes there is nothing he can do until spring: “There was no need for me to grieve...The snow would keep me.” He accepts that the “winter time had finally got them all.”
“Wickedness” by
Ron Hansen (1988)
From the introduction to
Ted Kooser’s book of poems,
The Blizzard Voices: “[these poems were] snagged...from actual reminiscences, recorded in old age, of people who survived the most talked about storm in American history, the Blizzard of 1888, also known as the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard because of the many children and their teachers who were trapped in rural schools on the bitterly cold days of January 12 and 13.” Hansen’s fictional dramatization of the blizzard is frightening. “Weather in Nebraska could be the wickedest thing she ever saw:” wicked suggests snowfall as sentient villain. The storm took most by surprise: “Weeds were being uprooted, sapling trees were bullwhipping, and the top inches of snow and prairie soil were being sucked up and stirred like the dirty flour that was called red dog.”
Animals are thrown about: “Cats died, dogs died, pigeons died.” Humans appear to lose their minds. “Ainslie Classen” (Hansen’s usage of proper names lends a dated census-like feel to the narrative) “work[ed] his hands into the pigs’ hot wastes, and smeared some onto his skin.” Mathias Aachen’s house is in disarray: “When a jar of apricots burst open that night and the iced orange syrup did not ooze out” the father of the house promises that “every one of us will be dying of cold before morning.” Aachen doesn’t wait for the storm: “he tilted hot candle wax into his right ear and then his left, until he could only hear his body drumming blood. And then Aachen got his Navy Colt and kissed his wife and killed her. And then walked under the green tent cloth and killed his seven children, stopping twice to capture a scuttling boy and stopping once more to reload.”
The wicked storm kills “a Harrington woman,” “an Omaha cigar maker,” “a cattle inspector," “a Chicago boy,” “a forty year-old wife,” and many more. This is certainly no ordinary storm based on volume alone, but Hansen redoubles the almost mythical convention of snow through description: “Everything she knew was no longer there. She was in a book without descriptions. She could put her hand out and her hand would disappear.” Hansen makes snow a legend.
“Time and Again” by
Breece Pancake (1977)
Although she deemed the story “relatively weak” and having a “sort of comic book Gothicism” in her 1983
review,
Joyce Carol Oates anthologized Pancake’s morbid story in
American Gothic Tales. I assume her appreciation increased with subsequent readings. I was sold on my first reading. Pancake’s story begins indoors: “Mr. Weeks called me out again tonight, and I look back down the hall of my house. I left the kitchen light burning. This is an empty old house since the old lady died.” The sentences lean forward; they are blinks of an eye, individual shots, appended with heavy periods.
The narrator’s son has been gone for years. This lonely man keeps hogs, “old hogs. Not good for anything,” but makes his money driving the plow for Mr. Weeks. Besides a loud clue -- “the lug wrench is where it has always been beside my seat” -- the narrator first seems more cantankerous than murderous: “The snow piles in a wall against the berm. No cars move. They are stranded at the side, and as I plow past them, a line falls in behind me, but they always drop back. They don’t know how long it takes the salt to work. They are common fools. They rush around in such weather and end up dead.” He soon picks up a hitchhiker, “a polite boy,” who reminds the narrator of his son. The talk reaches the man’s hogs, and he says they die hard, much harder than men in war. Death remains the topic of discussion: they talk of a serial killer who prays on local hitchhikers. The narrator then talks of snapping the necks of German soldiers in a French farmhouse during a World War II snowstorm. “People die so easy,” he thinks; unspoken words, but heard by the reader. He grips the lug wrench, and asks the boy to look under the seat for his flashlight. But the killing strike never comes. He spares the boy, and drives up the mountain. He tries to think about all the men he killed in France, but can’t think past that night in the storm. He returns home, and Pancake hints at what the narrator usually feeds the hogs. This time, they are unhappy.
“
How to Talk to a Hunter” (pdf) by
Pam Houston (1990)
Besides “Forever Overhead” by
David Foster Wallace, I haven’t found better usage of second person narration. The unnamed main character has fallen for the hunter, who “won’t play back his messages while [she is] in the room.” She is attracted to him, but also to the comfort of a warm body in bed during the winter. She imagines that it will snow for “thirteen straight days,” and that they will spend the hours together.
She soon learns that those unchecked messages are from another woman. Houston’s second person narrator outlines a hypothetical storyline: the other woman will bridge the distance from Montana and bring heavy snow with her. Closed highways will snowbound them, and the main character will realize that this man is like all the others: he is his needs and wants, and nothing more. Although not a drop of this storm actually falls, Houston absolutely convinces the reader that this character can worry herself frozen. In fact, by the end of the story there is little discernment between past, present, and possibility, except the realization that the “nights are getting shorter now,” but no less painful.
“A Change of Season” by
James Bond (1984)
Bond’s story was anthologized in
Best American Short Stories, and he also published fiction in
Willow Springs (“Whiskey Sunday Refusal” and “Fools Fall”), but has disappeared from the literary radar. This is both surprising and not. The story torques its authentic tension through a rotating first person narration, yet it feels somewhat provincial on a first read. Two logging families, the Yanceys and Davazs, are in the midst of a competition for timber and pride. Both think the other clan is unfit for this work, but both agree “if a man can last the winter here he’s got a chance; if he can beat the winter here, he’s somebody.” Buck Davaz claims the Yanceys are “scared of snow:” the second they see fall, they “grab up everything and run, axes, tractors, trucks, saws, and what they can’t carry they throw ahead of them.” Randall Yancey, one of the sons, says Buck “didn’t know winter.”
But Buck needs Bill Yancey’s help. His Snowcat is stuck up on the mountain, and he’s got forty to sixty thousand feet of timber that he’s willing to “pay a pretty penny for help hauling.” Yancey hates scaling the mountain during a fall, but money talks, so he agrees to help. Buck needs the help but revels in Bill’s poor driving in the snow. They load and chain the Snowcat to a truck, but Bill’s towing truck slides before getting stuck. The narrative shifts perspective but never relents, as each man criticizes the other, before Buck ultimately gets his own ride stuck. Angry and frustrated, Buck smashes the windshield with a maul, and strides toward the Yanceys, wielding an axe in his other hand. Each time I read this story, I expect the worst possible ending, but Buck only walks past them, echoing a maxim he speaks earlier in the story: “Knowing when to stop fighting, that’s a side of strength most never learn.”
Further Reading
“The Hermit’s Story” by
Rick Bass (as well as his non-fiction,
Winter: Notes from Montana), the haunting conclusion of “Master and Man” by
Leo Tolstoy, the “Snow” chapter in
The Magic Mountain by
Thomas Mann,
Ethan Frome by
Edith Wharton,
The Grace That Keeps This World by
Tom Bailey;
Snow by
Orhan Pamuk,
The Call of the Wild by
Jack London,
Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by
Peter Hoeg, “
Hunters in the Snow” by
Tobias Wolff, and, of course, “
The Dead” by
James Joyce (“And he [wrote the story] when he was twenty-five. The bastard.” -- Mary Gordon).
III. Snow in Film
Pontypool (2008)
A horror movie about linguistics, radio stations, and snow? It exists, and begins with a riddle that includes
Norman Mailer, the
JFK assassination, and how “physical details spasm for a moment” after a tragic event. Shock-jock Grant Mazzy (
Stephen McHattie) is unhappy with his new assignment in a small Ontario town: "These late winters I feel like I'm living in the basement of the world." On his way to work on Valentine’s Day morning, Mazzy encounters a distraught woman who smacks against his window, says the word “blood,” and then disappears into the snow. And that fall is only beginning: the storm is about to last all day. Local news reports of a hostage situation and gunfire flame into a zombie attack. Their virus is language. The film’s director,
Bruce McDonald, calls them “conversationalists.” Cult followers of the film (and its novel basis, by
Tony Burgess) point to an essay by
William S. Burroughs, “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars:" “the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.”
This virus begins as a repetition of a word, like a broken record. The album is love: this is Valentine’s Day, so those infected repeat terms of endearment. The repetition devolves into fracture, and words break down. During the final stage, the medium swallows the message: “you become so distraught at your condition that the only way out of the situation you feel, as an infected person, is to try and chew your way through the mouth of another person.” Soon the entire town of Pontypool is placed under quarantine. Mazzy steps outside into the blizzard, but the snow pushes inside, just as the infected pound against doors and windows. Mazzy shifts from sarcastic to serious as he recounts obituaries for those killed and who kill each other, shown in a snow-white and black interlude that recalls
Wisconsin Death Trip. Soon the infected smash their way into the studio, and the snow follows, blown like wavering lines of stereo sound.
The Shining (1980)
Disciples of
Stanley Kubrick have been mining this film long before
Room 237 (2013) made basement theories mainstream, but its depiction of snow also deserves mention. My first viewing was a version recorded from WPIX in the late 1980’s. There was no audio during the opening sequence (the Torrance family driving to the interview at the Overlook Hotel, with scrolling, aqua-colored credits breaking beautiful scenery), but the sound kicked-in like a shock. The film is suffused with snow. When Jack (
Jack Nicholson) is being interviewed for the caretaker position, the window behind the manager beams light, as if the sun is burning off snow. The manager explains that the hotel closes until May, since the cost to plow the collected 20 feet of winter snow is prohibitive. A former schoolteacher and hopeful novelist, he longs for the isolation afforded by this job. He lives in Boulder, but is from Vermont, a place of snow, and claims his wife, Wendy (
Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny (
Danny Lloyd), will love the change. He also claims that his wife will be entertained, not frightened, by the manager’s revelation that a former caretaker murdered his family before committing suicide. The eccentricities of the Torrance family are nothing compared to Danny’s psychic powers.
Jack gets the job, and the snowfall doesn’t disappoint. Phone lines are down during a storm early in the film, so Wendy contacts the forest service on a radio. The ranger says it is one of the worst storms they’ve had in years. A shot of the heavy fall precedes Danny’s wandering into the forbidden room 237. The hotel’s cook, Dick Hallorann (
Scatman Crothers) shares Danny’s psychic powers, and realizes that Jack’s eccentricities have descended into violence. Dick flies from Miami to Colorado, and then drives along a highway littered with overturned trucks and spun-out cars, a white graveyard. He is on the way to the hotel, but his well-intentioned help is not enough.
During the climactic scenes, Wendy has locked herself and Danny in the bedroom to hide from Jack’s wrath. She is only able to open the window halfway. She lifts Danny through, and he slides down a gentle hill of snow to the ground. Wendy can’t fit, so, knife in hand, she waits for Jack to reach her. He axes through one panel of the door, but stops when he hears Dick’s Snowcat nearing the hotel.
The film’s infamous final sequence occurs in the hedge maze, where Danny knows snow holds the key to his survival. The curious photograph at the film’s conclusion hints that, like snow, evil always returns.
Further Viewing
Snow’s power as a visual backdrop makes it ubiquitous in film, but here are some particularly notable whiteouts:
The Ice Storm (1997), based on the 1994 novel by
Rick Moody;
Ang Lee’s representation is beautiful, but Moody’s prose is tough to top: “The ice had built up on every surface, on roofs and shrubs and avenues and cars and waterways. It formed a glittering and immense cocoon on tree limbs and power lines, a cocoon of impossible mass. The sound of tree limbs giving out under this weight was like the crackling of gunfire. Mike Williams, who was wandering around in the earliest part of dawn, heard these explosions in the stillness and laughed giddily at them. He was up really late. The threat of heavy weather impelled him out into the elements. To watch.”);
Fargo (1996), where snow is present in the first and climactic scenes, and almost everywhere in-between;
The Thing (1982), Antarctica is the perfect place to have a showdown with shape-shifting aliens;
The Virgin Spring (1960), where a soft snowfall pierces the viewer’s already wounded heart;
Black Christmas (1974), watch it for
Keir Dullea’s maniacal destruction of a piano,
Olivia Hussey’s authentic screams, and
Margot Kidder’s dirty-mouthed sarcasm, but snow completes this precedent for
John Carpenter’s Halloween;
Road to Perdition (2002),
Sam Mendes’s dramatization of a former mafia hitman’s (
Tom Hanks) revenge was renowned cinematographer
Conrad Hall’s final film, and is marked by rain and snow;
A Simple Plan (1998), an unusual film in
Sam Raimi’s catalog, where friends discover a small plane that had crashed into a snowy forest, with 4 million dollars in tow;
Antichrist (2009), the appeal of snow brings a child to an open window, leading to tragedy in the film’s opening minutes;
Snow Angels (2007), based on the
Stewart O’Nan novel, is an incredibly moving drama about a fractured family that cannot escape pain, and a girl’s wayward walk in snow;
Frosty the Snowman (1969), because cinematic snow does not always need to equal sadness.
Image Credit:
Wikipedia
Each year, the course packet became less unwieldy, less full of repetitions and typographical errors, contained more and more of my own writing, and I saw how I could push the statements—by me and by others—into rubrics or categories. All the material about hip-hop would go into its own chapter. So, too, the material about reality TV, memory, doubt, risk, genre, the reality-based community, brevity, collage, contradiction, doubt, etc. Twenty-six chapters; 618 mini-sections. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto has created quite a lot of controversy, so this may sound disingenuous on my part, or falsely ingenuous, but all the book really ever was to me was that blue-binder life-raft: it was a book in which I was articulating for myself, and my students, and my peers, and any fellow-travelers who might want to come along for the ride, the aesthetic tradition out of which I was writing. It wasn’t the novel. And it wasn’t memoir. It was something else. Hard to define, but it had to do with the idea that all great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one; if you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms; it’s a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many really do?
Is anyone else tired of Mr. Shields’ desperate and defensive attempts to justify his “manifesto”? Granted, he’s created enough controversy to move his product, so I’ll give him credit there. But grandiose statements like “The novel is dead” are just laughable and make it hard to take him too seriously.
“We live in a post-narrative, post-novel world. Plots are for dead people. Novelly novels exist, of course, and whenever I’m on a plane, it’s all I see everyone reading, but they function for us as nostalgia: when we read traditional novels, we get to pretend that life is still coherent.”
This paragraph gave me pause. An angry pause. But that was before I realized that this wasn’t an informative, interesting post, but rather a pretentious, self-serving ploy.
I don’t think that David is the anti-Christ. I’m just bored by much of what he has had to say now. Haven’t we moved on? I thought that the humiliating Colbert appearance pretty much killed the REALITY HUNGER momentum. This continued posturing does both David and his interesting book a disservice. The time has come to shine the Kliegs upon Ander Monson’s VANISHING POINT, which David reviewed favorably and which doesn’t need sweeping statements like “The Novel is Dead” to make similar points. (Nor, for that matter, does Adam Thirlwell’s THE DELIGHTED STATES.)
Edward Champion,
Nor, for that matter, does mostly any work in the list given in his other post. I still need to read the book, if only just because I like to be more knowing of what I disagree with and because of its importance, or at least potential importance, right now. (I’m thinking about just stealing it and calling it collage of the mind or something.) It’s like he somehow fails to realize that lots of works have given up plot, have collaged in some way, have done interesting, non-traditional novel work, without just lazily slapping together as much of other people’s work as possible, then finding a way to self-agrandize.
Then, in the end, you really, really get the feeling that this is all just his response to his own failure to do the type of work he admires.
I like collages. I like David Markson. I would hate a world that has only that to offer. Wake me when you’re done pretending this is a post-narrative world.
To add to the discussion, consider Richard Powers on why novels matter (more, perhaps, even than anti-novels): “A chemist can say how atoms bond. A molecular biologist can say how a mutagen disrupts a chemical bond and causes a mutation. A geneticist can identify a mutation and develop a working screen for it. Clergy and ethicists can debate the social consequences of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. A journalist can interview two parents in a Chicago suburb who are wrestling with their faith while seeking to bear a child free of inheritable disease. But only a novelist can put all these actors and dozens more into the shared story they all tell, and make that story rearrange some readers’ viscera.”
I’m still very curious as to why Shields argues against “narrative” in the same book he rapidly defends memoirs, even dishonest fictionalized memoirs. Are memoirs not narratives? Or is narrative only bad when it is in novel form? Isn’t most creative non-fiction narrative driven?
The book seems to argue that narrative and non-fiction are separate things, which does not make any sense to me.
Thank God he’s not teaching fiction any more.
Ugh. Stop, collaborate and listen; Shields is back with the same old edition. I can accept a cult of personality to some extent, but you’ve got to back your play. This “essay” only makes Shields seem desperate.
Henry Miller beat you to it about 80 years ago. First page of Tropic of Cancer says it all.
Read the book. If nothing else, it’s thought provoking.
Otherwise, these comments sound like they’re all coming from a bunch of uninformed reactionaries.
Here is my take on the book (and I’m obsessive and passionate about writing fiction): http://robertmdetman.blogspot.com/2010/04/reality-hunger-refraction.html
I read it, so I suppose that makes me an informed reactionary.
If Shields wants to parade his “numerous bloggers appear to think I’m the anti-Christ” straw man around town in an effort to drum up some publicity, the least he could do is respond to what they’re actually saying, instead of just portraying himself as some embattled truth-seeker.
“But the novel is dead, both in France and in England, for the simple reason that the story-writers have lost the art of telling stories.” — William Thomas Stead (1905)
“The novel is dead. As dead as alchemy.” — John Fowles, THE MAGUS (1966)
“Nowadays the fashion for saying the novel is dead is itself dead.” — Brigid Brophy (1966)
“It is sometimes said by literary people that the novel is dead. What they mean by this is that the form has run itself into the ground or is somehow no longer relevant to the present age. This of course is nonsense.” — Gabriel Josipovici (1971)
“If the novel is dead, the corpse remains oddly fertile.” — Malcolm Bradbury (1977)
“The novel is dead! Honor is dead! God is dead! Aargh, they’re all alive, and they’re coming after us!” — Salman Rushdie, THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET (2000)
“In France a poor everythingplegic wrote a novel with his eyelid. And they say the novel is dead.” — Will Self, HOW THE DEAD LIVE (2001)
“The novel is dead, long live the novel!” — Umberto Eco (2004)
Or one of my personal favorites from Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “If you say the novel is dead, it is not the novel. It is you who are dead.”
Seeing as how claims about the novel’s death have been going on for some time, who’s really the one being reactionary here?
I think Stephen Colbert’s treatment of Shields’ “manifesto” was an act of comedic art. David Shields is nothing more than a dried-up hack who dresses up his acts of plagiarism with layers of b.s. When will his 15 minutes be over.
I don’t think it is reactionary to, based on interviews and other smaller pieces, make a similar point to that which L. made, but to take it a bit further to include the works Shields does list as having value. Many of the works in the other post are some of my favorite pieces of literature, but I don’t understand how they fit in with what Shields is against, or what he proposes. They hold to some narrative, they do have story, they pull in other sources while adding their own ideas and prose (think his inclusion of Sebald, Sebald deals with fragments, deals with collage, but the attempt for a story, the importance of tracing these fragments, of tracing sources is incredible for him)…It seems that Shields wants to encourage more work like them, and wants to be against not so much the novel and plot and narrative as boring, cliched, unoriginal plot and narrative, but that’s not enough to write a book about anymore, because those books have been written, and more importantly, the actual work is being done, so he has pursued this much more controversial take on it all.
“Plots are for dead people.” There’s a kernel of truth in that; DeLillo famously writes in ‘Libra’ – in reference to conspiracies both general and particular – “Every plot tends toward death.” In the context of a novel – yes, a novel! – that treats a specific non-fictional event (The plot to kill Kennedy) through the author’s prism of the historical sublime, it’s precisely that foreknowledge of ‘death’ that keeps the reader plowing forward to the endgame. DeLillo knows and understands perfectly well that the primal 20th century American tragedy is ultimately a cipher, an inscrutable event, but his book is about the necessary struggle of art and ‘history’ to try, that human effort that maintains and nourishes us all – the formation of narratives. How can we live in a post-narrative world? That would be the sociological equivalent to living in a gravity-less world. “The novel is dead” is an ideological statement of unfathomable narcissism. And if the integrity of Narrative is threatened, ideology in the public square is the man holding the gun.
Saul Alinsky said it best: ‘Academic is just another word for irrelevant.’
The kind of writing the author describes drowns in incestuous self-reference. Authors and professors like this do their best to stifle the vitality of fiction writing while the novel carries happily on.
OK, David, if you really want the death of Copyright, how about this. Please stop attributing your writing to yourself (what’s the point in authorship if not for financial gain or reputation). No pseudonyms either. And make sure you don’t collect any money for your writings. Furthermore, I advise all your followers that one of them should be nominated to purchase any new book you put out…that person will copy the book, remove your name and distribute it to anybody else who wants it. He or she can also claim authorial credit if they’d like. In fact, hey, why not…I’ll even say they can charge people for the books (just make sure it comes in a few dollars under your books). As long as others can also copy and distribute the work for free and claim authorship. Yes, what a wonderful world it will be…
“We live in a post-narrative, post-novel world. Plots are for dead people. Novelly novels exist, of course, and whenever I’m on a plane, it’s all I see everyone reading, but they function for us as nostalgia: when we read traditional novels, we get to pretend that life is still coherent.”
But when was life ever coherent? This world has always been a chaotic mess. Why, when we’ve been telling one another stories since the beginning of language, would this world suddenly be “post-narrative”? We write and read novels for the same reasons we always have. I’ve read novels published within the past twelve months that have shocked me with their brilliance and changed the way I see the world.
I’m an admirer of Mr. Shields’ work. I’ve read Remote a dozen times; the dust jacket has long been lost, and I’ve carried it with me from city to city. But with respect, and at dire risk of stating the obvious: just because a given author doesn’t want to write traditional novels anymore doesn’t mean that the form is dead.
Perhaps it is not that the “novel is dead” but that the “novel is dead for you” — there is a difference. For many of us, it is still alive and kicking mightily. I hope I never lose the pleasure of reading novels, because I am not sure life will be worth living at that point.
Filling out one of the quotes Ed Champion posted makes it even more relevant to Shields’ delusion:
“The intellectual is the worst thing there is. He invents things and then he believes them. He decides the novel is dead but then he finds a novel and says he discovered it. If you say the novel is dead, it is not the novel. It is you who are dead.”
– Gabriel García Márquez
David Shield suckered virtually all commenters into playing David Shield’s game, which is based on the premise that novels exist, that they have objective reality.
They don’t; What exists are ideas that permutate in different stylistic as well as physical forms, fractal-like, all being presentations to the reader, achieving levels of acceptance or rejection, depending on what shape/form the presentation coagulates into. At that point, the fractal stops permutating and gets marketed.
Also, Shields is ignorant to say that he does not know what his non-novel product is, yet he has the hubris to imply that he is teaching that non-novel product.
p.t.smith:
I’ve read Shields’ book and am responding directly to claims from the book. I think my question is pretty fair. It is silly to say any criticism is “reactionary.” It is equally sillier for Shields to pretend that everyone is calling him the anti-christ or that his foes are feeble “dinosaurs” (the term he used last time on here) “genuflecting at the altar of the novel.”
Really, this is Sarah Plain style argument. Its just all lamestream media and gotcha journalism to David Shields I guess?
It would be more interesting for Shields and his defenders to engage his critics on their actual arguments. Isn’t the point of this book to start a dialogue?
I think that Shields is right in spirit: We are just beginning to glimpse the incredible things that can be done with appropriation, collage, juxtaposition, etc, where the language is the plot. And it’s important that writers be able to experiment with such techniques without fear of litigation (as DS points out, Shakespeare himself plagiarized–for instance, some excellent lines in The Tempest are cribbed from Montaigne).
However, the book doesn’t live up to its own high standard; for that, we need to turn to folks like Ander Monson, Susan Howe, and…well…David Shields, in this AMAZING little piece called “Life Story,” where he leads us from crib to abyss solely with bumper-sticker slogans (scroll down halfway):
http://www.davidshields.com/excerpts/ExcerptRemote.html
My problem with this essay is its all-or-nothing take on the novel. Why can’t literary collage exist at the same time as the novel? As a comparison, Girl Talk, who makes new songs based entirely on samples from top 40 style music, exists at the same time as the musicians he samples. Girl Talk’s existence doesn’t make the musicians he samples irrelevant. David Shields’ Reality Hunger can exist at the same as novels, one doesn’t have to die for the other to live. They are not mutually exclusive.
What I love about Reality Hunger is something that Shields is getting at in this essay; in many other genre’s of art, remixing and remashing, playing with genre, is far more present. That isn’t to say that it hasn’t gone on in literature before (Kath Acker’s Great Expectations, anyone?) – but Shields is right to defend his book like this: “I love the work of a lot of contemporary visual artists whose work is bound up with appropriation—Richard Prince, Sherry Levine, Cindy Sherman, Elaine Sturtevant, Warhol. And I’ve been listening to rap for thirty years. Why in the world would contemporary writing not be able to keep pace with the other arts?”
1. As long as humans have been human, we’ve told stories to make sense of our lives. The basic stories repeat–a stranger comes to town, or someone goes on a journey–but what makes them fresh is the relationship the stories have for the people grounded in a specific time and place. We’re not post-human; we have the same basic needs today that we’ve always had. Some of those stories, most of those stories, will not qualify as “great literature,” which creates a new form of art or narrative. But is that the criterion against which we measure what literature ‘should’ be written? Not for me. 2. The fragmented post-post-modern (? would this be a sufficient label? for what Shields is trying to point toward?) perspective is a wealthy, priveleged western take on the vast category of ‘literature,’ reinforced by his largely similarly populated list of model texts. Much translated literature from Dalkey, Archipeligo, Open Letters, New Directions, involve experimentation, but probably not up to the measuring stick that Shields uses…yet these voices from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe are meaningful narratives. 3. Shields in his methodology is probably in part trying to avoid falling back on linear narrative account of his argument, but it can’t stand as such. The pointilist quotations aren’t going to add up to some direct apprehension; what is still needed by Shields here, and anyone trying to talk with any sense about Reality Hunger, is a version of traditional narrative. There is significant irony here. 4. If Warhol and C. Sherman in their mediums are the equivalent Shields seeks in literature, then I’ll just stop reading. They were/are interesting in their tricks, but are dead ends, more easily characturised than repeated and built upon.
Well, I’m not sure whether that was supposed to be a response to my post or not.
“I love the work of a lot of contemporary visual artists whose work is bound up with appropriation—Richard Prince, Sherry Levine, Cindy Sherman, Elaine Sturtevant, Warhol. And I’ve been listening to rap for thirty years. Why in the world would contemporary writing not be able to keep pace with the other arts?”
(Keep pace with the other arts?? Quotation has been a staple of literature for many years, poet ape…)
A couple of final comments:
A.) Shields HAS a publisher. Shields lives as a writer and teacher. He is not a carpenter, a wine-maker, a sailor, a soldier, or a banker. He lives off of the intellectual property he is so quick to dismiss as free trade–he contributes little else to the world. The same is true of all those artists (except Cindy Sherman…who, btw, does not really utilize appropriation much, but hey, who needs accuracy?). All of Richard Prince’s books, of late, bear copyright notification. I sure Shield’s do too. This is all lip service designed to sell nothing more than David Shields. His search for an audience belies an artist sans merit who is merely trying to distill the chatter of our time into a marketable form. If you really care about literature, Mr. Shields, donate all of the money you make from your writing to publishing others…and stop publishing.
B. Kafka published just about nothing in his life–he instructed his best friend to burn all of his writings after he died. The invocation of Kafka is pure BS. Such posturing reveals Shields to be nothing more than a confidence man. Likewise, his invocation of the COOL artists of our time (invoking rap…oho, so he’s aware that Jay-Z has become a major collector on the scene…ummm, and that said, although there’s plenty of rap that utilizes sampling…they PAY to do that…). Sorry Mr. Shields, you’re no Kafka (who already gave us The Castle and several other works that trump yours without trying). As one apt commenter identified…you’re much more like the Girl Talk of contemporary literature.
I’d really love to be inside Shields’s head when he reads this kind of stuff. I wonder if he thinks, “My ploy is working! Look at all this press!” Or is it more like, “No one understood any great man during his own time!” Then again, maybe he’s thinking, “Oh shit! I think I just screwed up my career.”
We’ll never know, but it’s fun to think about.
I despise the ideas of David Shields, but I must say, I’m almost starting to feel sorry for the guy. Sure, I think he’s wrong, but what’s happening here and what happened on the Colbert Report do make me cringe a bit. But at the same time, I agree with John Gardner when he says, In “the Art of Fiction,” that we should seek out fake art and attack it with everything we’ve got. And so far I’ve not come across anyone that agrees with that statement more than I do, except perhaps Mojo Nixon. (I think most fans of literature are far too passive in terms of attacking crap.)
And though I think that it’s incredibly fun to attack Shields, I think it’s even better to completely ignore him and his ideas. (This guy has sold ten times as many books simply because of discussions like this. We should’ve shrugged this off the same as we do a Nicholas Sparks book.) If his book were actually a danger to fiction, I’d say we should lob every grenade we have. But it’s not. It’s just another book from another dilettante, and one that no one is really even taking seriously.
David Shields’s book is dead. And if you don’t believe that, try to find a copy in five years.
Mr. Shields’ piece starts off with the personal–his becoming a novelist as a “rebellion” against his parents. We are human, like Mr. Shields, and so, as readers who care about other humans, who read because we want to connect with other people’s humanness, we start down his narrative arc, journeying from his breaking up with plot to his finding that narrative collage makes him hum to discovering that traditional narrative just doesn’t resonate for him. And then, on to the second paragraph…where he announces that narrative is for chumps. Chumps like us. *We,* it turns out, unlike post-epiphanic Shields, are just folks who like to “pretend that life is still coherent,” followers of an unevolved form. Gosh, Mr. Shields, I rode your arc and got called stupid for it.
Mr. Shields complains here that bloggers are being mean to him, knocking him around for having *a* point of view–one that challenges conventions, one he feels is uniquely unique. But, in fact, they’re knocking him around for positing that he has *the* point of view–a stance that implies negation, or at the very least debasement, of most everyone else’s.
Recently, in talking to my five-year-old about religion, I explained that different people’s beliefs about God co-exist. (In a not-entirely-unrelated discussion, I explained the difference between saying, “I don’t care for Brussels sprouts” and “Brussels sprouts are yucky and nobody should ever eat them.”) Reading and writing, for many of us, are tantamount to religion in the way they reflect our belief systems. I can support the truth and beauty in Mr. Shields’ collages, even if it is truth and beauty that is invisible to my eye. What I don’t quite understand is why he needs to declare my belief system–the traditional novel–to be dead and its practitioners to be wasting our time with a form that is “tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless.” Perhaps he’s just pissed off that he can’t kill it.
I believe, Mr. Shields, there’s a rather conspicuous metal glove lying on the ground just in front of you.
File under: reasons I get a little nauseous thinking about signing up for an MFA. Or for anything further in academia, for that matter.
I’m thinking I might pick bits and pieces from all of these comments, compile them into a new piece of art, and declare commenting as a form of art to be dead.
Perhaps it’s the print media which are dying?
More than two-thirds—68 percent—of public school children do not read proficiently by the time they finish third grade, according to a new report to be released on Tuesday, which uses the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress as its benchmark. “Early Warning: Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters” will be released by the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation, which is working to draw attention to the problem and to push for stronger learning standards across the country. The end of third grade represents “a pivotal milestone when material becomes more complex and children are more likely to slip behind,” according to the report, which draws links between early literacy and future economic success. “The concern about reading is reaching a critical point,” Ralph Smith, executive vice president for the foundation responsible for the report, told the Washington Post. “Our ability to compete in a global economy is severely compromised if we don’t improve these literacy rates.” Smith’s foundation believes that access to early-childhood education needs to be improved while the educational community also works to combat chronic absences. “Susan B. Neuman, a professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in early-literacy development, said it’s a key time to raise awareness,” the Washington Post reported. “Foundation and federal funding have been drained in recent years from some established early-reading initiatives. And unemployment and poverty are growing, setting more children up for learning challenges.”
Read original story in The Washington Post | Tuesday
Wow, talk about a variety of reactions! As so many have pointed out, talk about the death of the novel is nothing new. And I’m not really sure that what Mr. Shields is doing, or attempting to do, is really anything new, either. This sounds a lot like some of the experimentation done in the early 20th century by the Surrealists and Dadaists, etc. And what Mr. Shields is doing my just be one of those blind alleys that artists sometimes find, and that really don’t go anywhere. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
There are two other quotes that come to mind, that no one else has mentioned. The first is from Anthony Burgess, writing about Bernard Malamud’s novel, Dubin’s Lives: “There is no real ending to the book, which is a grave fault. This is life scrupulously rendered, but Malamud is perhaps too honest to give it artistic shape. Yet shape is the essence of the novel.” This is from Burgess’ book “99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1984” for those who want to look it up. The second is from Annie Dillard’s Living By Fiction:
To complete the quote from Annie Dillard: “Which shall it be? Do art’s complex and balanced relationships among all parts, its purpose, significance, and harmony, exist is nature? Is nature whole, like a completed thought? Is history purposeful? Is the universe of matter significant? I am sorry; I do not know.”
Certainly questions that are well worth asking, and attempting to answer, by any means necessary.
(Sorry about that–I must have hit the wrong key. My comments above were posted earlier than they should have been.)
I guess that I have a few more random thoughts on this subject. I think that Mr. Shields may be on to something here, at least partially. I do like those aphorisms at the end. “The novel is dead. Long live the anti-novel, built from scraps.” This is, indeed, a manifesto. When I was 19, and student at the university, I probably would have been thrilled at this. Now, at 49, it makes me yawn. I have seen this before. I believe that Alain Robbe-Grillet was writing what he called anti-novels in the 1950’s, but the few that I have tried to read have been rather boring. Experiments with plot or structure are nothing new–again, this was something that the members of Oulipo attemtped, sometimes with great success (Cortazar’s Hopscotch and Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual come to mind). And the third sections of Hopscotch (From Diverse Sides) also contains something of a collage of quotes from authors as diverse as Jonathan Swift and Claude Levi-Strauss, as well as fictional memoranda from one of the minor characters in thebook, a novelist named Morelli, who mentions many other books, from Tristram Shandy to Ulysses and the Lord Chandos Letter. This actually adds a very rich overlay to the book–read separately, they would probably be meaningless, but add great depth when read in context, and makes Hopscotch something akin to Tristram Shandy–a novel about writing a novel.
To change subjects here rather awkwardly, the quote from Kafka in the above piece got me thinking. Nadine Gordimer, writing from the periphery of Western Civilization, in Johanesburg, South Africa, wrote an essay called “The Essential Gesture” which I would like to quote from. Her perspective is rather interesting, I think: “Kafka was also a seer, one who sought to transform consciousness by style, and who was making his essential gesture to human destiny rather than the European fragment of it to which he belonged. But he was unconscious of his desparate signal…..He was unaware of the terrifyingly impersonal, apocalyptic, prophetic nature of his vision in that ante-room to his parents’ bedroom in Prague. Beckett, on the contrary, has been signalled to and consciously responded. The summons came from his time. His place–not Warsaw, San Salvador, Soweto–has nothing specific to ask of him. And unlike Joyce he can never be in exile wherever he chooses to live, because he has chosen to be answerable to the twentieth-century human condition which has its camp everywhere and nowhere–whichever way you see Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky.”
Besides, there are other examples of works made from this kind of collage: Eliot’s The Wasteland, for example. I think that Mr. Shields will find that, rather than being formless, that collage does, also, take on a form. Has anyone seen the film How to Draw a Bunny, about the artist Ray Johnson, who worked in collage? Very interesting. I recommend it.
Mr. Shields has obviously written what used to be called a commonplace book. And like many authors of such things, madly scribbling the pithier excerpts of others’ works (often novels) that enrich their own thinking, he has left off the attributions–well, he tried to. Ho hum. I’d rather write my own commonplace book.
All good points, Michael, and yes Dada with it’s Anti-Art, already tread all of this ground many, many years ago (and had their literary equivalents). Beckett, too, eliminated narrative…even Melville…Moby Dick, though adhering to a larger narrative, utilized any number of verbal collage elements–Bartelby hardly had a traditional narrative…. Heller, Coupland…even Timequake (by Vonnegut)…there is nothing new in the theories that Shields is expounding. Which is why I’m really annoyed that, at it’s basis, Shields books is mostly a purposeful attempt to try to justify stealing…an anti-thesis against intellectual property, as it were (since all of the literary techniques and ideas he’s touching upon have already been discovered). And herein is the problem. Shields is not a genius. He doesn’t see a new way to find a path to writing a novel. And yet, he self-identifies as a writer and want to make money. So…he grabs a bunch of quotes, swirls them together and…there you a go…a new form of literature is born!
NO…all that happens is it is revealed that Shields is not a genius–to hide that lack of true ingenuity, he has stolen from others to give his feeble ideas a “voice”. Richard Prince is guilty of the same, underhanded strategy. I for one, would like to preserve intellectual property for the next genius who comes along…. Otherwise, when they do come along (and they will, never fear detractors…every age thinks they’re at the end of history) , Shields and others will just steal from them, and will easily get away will it, firmly ensconced in the publishing mechanism as “established authors”–there will be nothing to keep them from doing so. Shields should just find another way to support himself and stop thinking he is anything like Kafka and the rest.
Oh, BTW, think I’m wrong (about such predatory practices)? Take a look at Richard Prince’s body of work. More recently he was sued by a photographer for stealing a massive amount of photographs…and the fraud makes millions of dollars selling cowboy photos made with the blood, sweat, and tears of other photographers… There’s a very telling video on youtube from Sam Abell…one of the primary cowboy photographers.
The novel is dead. I heard that God is, too. Someday, I hope, Shields’ writing career dies, too.
If the novel is dead THEN ALL MY READERS ARE ZOMBIES. ZOMG RUN.
Collage and cut ups as a literary form is not a new concept. My problem with Sheild’s is his complete disregard for any women. It’s offensive to scan his reading list and see so many women overlooked: HEY SHIELDS: WHERE ARE THE WOMEN? You have forgotten about the headmaster of appropriation and cut ups Kathy Acker. What about the anti-logic lesbian movement that turned the novel on it’s flaccid head a la Monique Wittig and what about Dodie Bellamy with her “Cunt Ups” and “Letters to Mina Harker” and what about the performance artists who were alongside Cindy Sherman (photographer who did provocative self portraits not a writer) like Jenny Holtzer, Karen Finley and Diamanda Galas? I’m sick of women being excluded from panels (LA festival of books) and being dismissed from literary movements.
There are more than 20 works by women included in his reading list. That does not demonstrate a “complete disregard for any women.”
A short list of pre-2009 fiction and non-fiction books that use appropriation, collage, juxtaposition, unattributed borrowings and fragmentary forms–lest Mr. Sheilds, or anyone else, think that Reality Hunger is the first to dismantle traditional, linear narrative and argumentative modes:
The Satyricon, Petronius (late 1st century)
The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton (1638)
The Complete Angler, Izaak Walton (1653)
Urn Burial, by Sir Thomas Browne (1658)
A Tale of a Tub, by Jonathan Swift (1689-1712)
A Voyage Round The World, or, A Pocket Library, John Dunton (1691)
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1711)
A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe (1722)
A Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke (1755)
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne (1759)
Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)
The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot (1922)
Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce (1939)
The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly (Palinurus) (1945)
Minima Moralia, Reflections from Damaged Life, Theodor Adorno (1951)
The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald (1995)
Octavian Nothing, M.T. Anderson (2006)
The Whale (or Leviathan), Philip Hoare (2008)
A lot of what appears in this essay, and the book, appears to be self-promotion for the type of writing he does, what he has written. Parts of the book mention that it is memoir, which he so vehemently props up as the “real” art of the moment. Of course subsequent essays would continue to push the kind of work he wants people to read: his own.
Edward Champion, thanks for the list of quotations about the death of the novel. A friend and I were just discussing this antiquated proclamation yesterday.
“My literary sea was frozen, and this book was my axe.
Art, like science, progresses.”
These two statements are logically completely unconnected to each other. Shields’ struggle with his inability to write might be praiseworthy, inspiring, productive of excellent works. It does not constitute a literary revolution. No man is an island, but neither is any man the universe.
I outgrew my alphabet primer long ago, but you don’t see me claiming that we live in a “post-alphabet” world.
Isn’t it funny to proclaim narrative is dead, that we live in a “post-narrative” world, by writing one–one with a beginning, middle, and end. This essay is a biography, a memoir, a narrative of ideas with which David Shields wishes to garner a reader’s attention, empathy, anger. He wants to reach across a divide. He wants to speak. He wants someone else to listen. This isn’t post–anything. Even if you took everyone of my sentences here and scrambled their order, nothing substantial would change. Wallpaper, doesn’t make a house, and so on. We should all be happy (and maybe a bit amazed) that one of the best to get attention for the novel is to announce someone, somewhere is killing it! Aren’t we so….Aren’t we?
Is the novel dead or is this just an excuse for not being able to write one? He says art forms evolve. But isn’t that a slight contradiction to the overall thesis of his argument? Is the novel dead or has it evolved? Evolution is something adapting to survive the times. Death is something ceasing to evolve because it cannot survive the times. So, either the novel is dead or extinct because it is not one of the “fit” in the Darwinian sense of the word, or it is evolving into something else.
Gotta ask, which one is it, DAVE?
The novel has already evolved more times than any of us care to count. It isn’t dead, it is just in need of a new evolution. Perhaps we should take Mr. Shields’ argument as a call to arms, a challenge to break with cliche and start something fresh.
Writing has become a formulaic system. It isn’t the novel’s fault, it is the fault of what is being published and read. As we do in so many facets of life, we create patterns in order to ensure success. But art and formulas have never been polite bedfellows.
It comes down to a choice, either we fabricate what can be made swiftly, cheaply with the greatest assurance of what sells or we make something fresh, evolved, unusual and risky. This is the essential difference between the manufactured homes on every carbon-copied street of Suburbia versus the crafted architecture of uniquely modeled houses that make the cover of art and architectural magazines. This is also the paramount difference between the manufactured novel and a work of genius.
Maybe we just need to say that the old, trite, cliche novel is dead?
I have to say, that while my agreement with Shields is partial at best, the shrill–at times, hysterical–tone of some of these comments go a long way towards proving the guy’s salience. Not for an instant is Shields suggesting what he’s doing is “new” (he’s well aware of working out of a tradition, and many of the excellent books noted by Emily Wilkinson above are cited–or I suppose, “referred to”–by Mr. Shields in Reality Hunger and elsewhere.) You can quibble with the not-very-interesting proclamation that ‘the novel is dead,’ but it seems to me Shields has written a book that’s far more slippery than that, and to say, for example, that “Shields is not a genius” is to miss the whole point by a significant margin. Likewise, the question of whether the novel’s moribundity belongs to Shields himself or to the form: I don’t think it’s all that arguable that the novel’s cultural currency has decreased. Likewise, I don’t think it’s arguable that there are a significant number of people–us lot, who read The Millions–who care passionately about the form, past present and future. It seems to me that beyond a certain penchant for rhetorical overstatement, Shields is merely collating and arranging some ideas that worth considering: that ‘narrative’ alone isn’t necessarily the paramount virtue, that forms can still be exploded, and that what Shields calls “novelly novels” (we can define this by our own respective lights, but I take it to refer to a certain mandarin tendency, a wrought narrative caution–I won’t name names here) might frequently be just a tiny bit…boring?
Not new ideas, and nowhere does Shields suggest they are: they’re merely considerations, or even provocations, that prompt comparisons to Sarah Palin, accusations of being a “con artist” or a “hack,” and even the disingenuous intimation that the book “isn’t dangerous.” (Really, an astonishing rhetorical fillip, if you think of it.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was a student of Shields’ at one point. We disagreed heartily, about all kinds of stuff, but I found him–as I find this book–exceedingly generous, argumentative only in the most stimulating and encouraging ways, and delightful through and through.
To each their own, though.
Nathaniel,
The juxtaposition of the statements at the end of this little diatribe…science progressing, the novel is dead, etc… all carry the clear inference that something new is emerging out of Shield’s work…in fact, I’d say, by specifically invoking, more or less, “the king is dead, long live the king” (ever so slightly modified) Shields is specifically trying to argue his new form of the novel is THE new form.
This however, is all pedantic, and I agree entirely that it’s beside the point (except to note that the ideas he’s collating have all been collated before–Shields apparently has some value as an educator…but that doesn’t mean he concomitantly has any value as a writer…the book should probably never have been compiled from seminar form).
But the objectionable part of the book is not the form. It’s the process. Shield’s form is fine…the novel has no form (which is why this work is nothing new). He can run around all day and proclaim the novel dead all he wants…the next JK Rowling will come along with intellectually questionable and easily digestible and will make far more money than Shields can imagine. It’s his process that’s flawed. (And, to make matter’s worse, his process isn’t new either). Compiling quotes isn’t writing…arguing that the quotes needn’t be cited or acknowledged, even worse…
Out of curiosity, do you think Shield’s would have been OK with it if you had carved out portions of his own books and handed those extractions in as an academic paper? What about all the online students that purchase papers off of the internet and copy and paste whole term papers? I don’t think this is the right direction for humanity. If I’ve learned anything from the artwork of Richard Prince it’s that when the rules don’t apply (Richard’s use of the cowboy photos don’t violate the artists’ original copyright and he apparently settled a suit with Phillip Morris), there is no more incentive to actually come up with new ideas–Prince just made copies of other shots (and then borrowed Barabar Krugers theory of media to justify the theft). Shields isn’t killing the novel, he’s killing creativity and imagination…it’s potentially predatory and is not a whorthwhile idea…this is happening all over the country already…it doesn’t need to be encouraged.
it makes me wonder how Shields runs his classroom.
James,
(Nice name, by the way. And entirely germane to any discussion of sampling.)
Having a legitimate philosophical beef with appropriation is one thing. (I don’t, but only because I think it merely makes explicit something that’s implicit in every piece of writing ever committed.) But well over half of Reality Hunger (I think–I haven’t kept count, but approximately half at a bare minimum) consists of Shields’ own writing. I feel that to say so is both to violate the spirit of the book (“Shields'” “own” both become misnomers, in this context) and a form of nitpicking, but it’s not as if RH is some pure exercise in sampling. It’s thinking, in a way that interpolates the thinking of others, and it’s worth wondering to what extent attribution matters. Does an idea ‘mean’ more for originating (allegedly, ‘originating’) with Stendhal than if it does with Shields? I hate this argument–it feels legal, whereas obviously the test of the book rests with how it sits with the reader. Some, obviously, attribute to Shields a set of cynical motives I’m confident are not there. And I’ll stop on that point, because a personal defense really isn’t useful, or mine to offer. But I’ll remain uncertain as to how Shields’ gestures amount to “killing” anything at all. I’m a novelist, and my own works are very much in (non-pseudonymous) print. The idea of being–not straight plagiarized (which really would only bother me as exhibiting a failure of imagination) but plundered, expropriated and redistributed is really rather a pleasant one. It doesn’t cause me anxiety in the slightest. Perhaps–ahem–I would feel otherwise if it had happened more extensively than it already has, but I rather doubt it.
In any case, there’s a world of difference between Sheilds’ project and straight plagiarism; about as much, in fact, as there is between lived experience and fiction making. So it seems to me.
Nathaniel,
I think the problem is, without the original material in front of you, how do you tell what’s been appropriated versus what’s original thought in front of you. Certainly, people inadvertently paraphrase others, but in that transcription something may be gained or lost…and those subtle changes can impact both the text and subtext profoundly. But, this is a very slippery slope. At the end of the day, I’ve got very little problem with appropriation (though, as stated, using appropriated material is an old, old practice…I don’t consider this the next step in evolution for literature…)…my problem is the step further saying that there needn’t be attribution. From what I’ve read of Shields I’m not all that impressed…he’s interesting, but not that interesting. I sympathize with exploring new processes and strategies to compose text…but I’m not keen on this non-attribution issue. The kids purchasing their papers online and submitting without alterations are a clear problem…but what about the kids that download a paper and re-write half of it…should they still receive academic credit for the other half? …Now extend that to a novel. Now remove attribution. How do you tell how much a novel is really the product of the author? The legal side of things is what keeps people in line…look at Napster. I know any number of people who still think they’re being ripped off for having to buy music…but I also know musicians and have hung out in studios for hours listening to people laying down tracks. Appropriation is a lazy process and if there’s no oversight I just don’t think literature will benefit.
In a certain sense, editors also muck this up (sometimes), and I’m not wild about that either, but there you go–consider them the producers of the art world and the best of them work with authors to hone their craft without loosing the essential verve…it’s different..
I’m glad you don’t feel apprehensive about this, but you’re also an established author. The reality, though, is I’m not so concerned about you–I’m much more concerned about the generation of writers that emerge ten years from now. I know it’s a “legal” argument but as with so many thing in life involving money, it has to be. Shields has made some very grandiose statements (and therefore elicited vehement responses)…I don’t think the novel is dead, I don’t see this as progress (Burroughs “Ghost of Chance” wasn’t published all that long ago), and I don’t think Shields is really adding anything to the dialogue other than adding his voice to the anti-copyright contingency. I can’t see any reason for him to do so except he thinks it’s “cool” and he’s promoting his book…which more or less undermines the message he’s promoting (since, if there is no copyright, how do you sell books or published materials…the technology to copy and reproduce is ubiquitous)…
in a poem in Angle of Yaw, ben lerner writes something along the lines of “i’ll concede that the world doesn’t need another novel if you concede that the novel doesn’t need another world”.
Pop Serial magazine, free download (http://www.mediafire.com/?hdykh1d1tmt), features Tao Lin, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Zachary German, Joshua Cohen, and others. Includes a piece entitled “Some Trembling Melody” that “samples” David Markson’s “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” and appears to be ambiguous re: “literary genre.”