I’m reading a really great book at the moment – which is to come out in February. It’s an uncorrected advance proof, and according to a note by the publisher, “under no circumstance may it or any of its contents be reproduced before publication” without permission.
So, even though I feel like quoting lots of it, I can’t. It’s David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. And I think it has the potential to be era-defining. That’s how good it is. At first you feel slightly discomfited by a book that calls itself a manifesto, making grand historical and artistic claims, speaking in aphorisms. But then you suddenly (it happened for me around page 50, which is sort of embarrassing – but nobody had told me anything about it beforehand), you realize Shields has written almost none of it. They are all quotes he’s stitched together in a narrative that is not only coherent but completely suspenseful.
Zadie Smith wrote a piece in the Guardian in which she misunderstood, misrepresented, and underestimated it, in part because one of Shield’s arguments in Reality Hunger is that the novel, though far from “dead,” is no longer society’s vital link to an understanding of itself, and for Zadie Smith to allow this to stand uncontested – though it is completely true – becomes an admission that she is historically irrelevant. And that is exactly what a novelist cannot bear.
She writes:
Shields’s skill that we remain unsure whether the entire manifesto is not in effect “built” rather than written, the sum of many broken pieces of the real simply shored up and left to vibrate against each other in significant arrangement. The result is thrilling to read, even if you disagree with much of it, as I do.
My guess is that there are people who agree with Smith and always will, and people who agree because they simply haven’t thought about their interest in novels as an absorption of imitative, derivative, dangerless experiences about puppets, and then there are people who have already left the argument behind.
It’s not about declaring the novel dead. It’s about not writing shit novels.
I’m reminded of a quote that went like: It makes no difference whether Jonathan Franzen’s novel [The Corrections] is good or bad. I won’t read it. I can no longer yield to the honest embrace of the novelistic form.
The last great novel I read was Barry Hannah’s 1980 Ray. And it wasn’t even really a novel. Of course, I didn’t read it in 1980. I was six. But I have read a lot of novels in my life that were published after 1980, and I regret every second I spent reading them. All great works of literature dissolve genres or create new ones. This is no longer happening in novels. It can, but it is not.
For about three weeks this autumn, I thought I might start a novel. I sat at a little café near the building where I teach in the evenings. I had an hour to kill anyway. I started making stuff up. I jotted down sentences. I never got more than a few hundred words in. After three weeks, it occurred to me that I am utterly uninterested in writing a novel. I thought: Why am I talking in these funny voices? Why don’t I put down these puppets and say what I want to say?
Actually, that is not true. I simply never proceeded. If somebody had asked me, Why do you want to write a novel, the answer would have been: Because I’ve written a collection of essays/a memoir and a collection of short stories after that, and I felt that a novel would be at least something different. And I am sick of the tendency by authors to keep writing the same thing. The reason this happens is because publication engenders self-love in authors, and in order to write something new you must necessarily work not only to discredit your previous book but discredit your whole life.
Or, you know, you can keep writing the same books over and over and go to launches and parties and be feted and superficially matter to others even though you are irrelevant to yourself.
Anyway, I started reading Shields’s book – from which I’ve just quoted indirectly a number of times – and realized that I am not interested in writing four hundred pages about a guy who does not exist. Five pages, yes, even a hundred pages. But not four hundred. Not even three hundred. Fiction is not the problem. Novelists are.
"Greg Baxter is an essayist and fiction writer with a mission: to get Dubliners reading good literature." 
This might be a bit much for a humble comment, but you might like the following piece called “Grand Tome”.
Here’s another grand tome produced, presented, placed proudly but sternly on the publisher’s desk. It creaks under the weight. Another vital part of the oeuvre. I present it to the world, all fifty million fucking words of it. May the world prove itself worthy.
Fifty million – an exaggeration. Perhaps only half a million, or even less again. But anyway, either way, such credible characters, such distillations. But are we really so lacking in credible characters that another few microscopically examined bores are some invaluable addition to our lives?
Perhaps if one reads enough credible characters one might become one oneself. That might be what it’s all about. Either that or the sheer volume of words has a beneficial effect.
“Ah but it’s not just the sheer volume of words. It’s the order he places them in.”
Yes, there is that. But imagine if someone was to lift up this book, a manuscript rather, the spine held in the hand, and the hand gives it a good shake and down tumble all the words, shaken loose from the hundreds of pages. Imagine the effort re-assembling them.
“My God, what’s happened to my manuscript?!”
“Don’t worry about your manuscript. Your manuscript’s fine. It’s the words that were in it that’s the problem. They’re all over the place. Can you remember what order they were in?”
The author, the great man- accept that it’s a man – is dumbfounded. “The order…the order…” he mumbles. “No, no…I could never remember the precise order. At least I think not. Some sections are embedded, yes here,” pointing to the heart. “No here,” – the head. “But this was the final draft. The only one.”
Final draft? It seems all these words have been whittled down. Revised and refined. Again and again. He’s written out this whole thing several times – without killing himself! It’s amazing what man can endure.
I presume that there is polemical intent to your piece — but, nevertheless, I can’t help but rise to it in the spirit of debate.
When you say , that you are “utterly uninterested in writing a novel” and wonder why “don’t I put down these puppets and say what I want to say?” you tell us that you are not and never will be a novelist. Your reason for considering writing a novel is, to do “something different” Nobody who cares about their work writes for these reasons. You can say what you want to say through this blog and, if you’re interesting enough, through various printed media outlets. That’s fine and good luck to you. But don’t extrapolate from your disillusion with the novel to the general thesis that all novels written since 1980 are a waste of time.
You say, “All great works of literature dissolve genres or create new ones” but you don’t give a single argument to support this contention. What might this statement mean? I dissolve genres if I write a love story where a gay detective hunts for a unreliable narrator and ends up inside a computer game — great, must remember to do up the synopsis for that one. Genres are not important, more a marketing tool than a legitimate way to map the writing landscape, but integrity and courage are. Perhaps it’s an inauthenticity that you detect in recent novels that troubles you. If so, why not name it and back it up.
For me, the art of the novel is not to say what I think — it makes for a dull read and, anyway, the novel-reading public are too savvy to stomach that — but rather to bring alive in a narrative situations that require moral action with characters that have conflicting bundles of beliefs and unresolved ideas about their role in the world. They don’t voice my views but they do encounter issues and circumstances that interest me, that I care about. Giving up after a few hundred words? Come on! Once you really engage with your characters they surprise you, they become alive, they say things you hate, they suggest truths you abhor; they defy and confound you and make you think twice about putting your name to their thoughts and actions. You might try and put words in their mouths but they spit them back at you and only subvert your purpose all the more. Essentially, an honest, uncensored novel reveals truths about you that only an analyst might ever play back to you.
You will never get to this place with confessional, dirty realist memoir. Courageous as it may seem to write the ‘truth’ about your life, there’s nothing in writing as risky as allowing the free play of ideas and unconscious desires and fears that is the literary novel.
And brevity — ah yes… Looking forward to the SBA party tomorrow:-)
Heroic defense of an undeserving city in ruins. Not the first one. You cannot say these things as though they’re still true only because they once were. Everything you say about the ‘literary novel’ you love is true, except you’re talking about the Brothers Karamozov, not The Corrections.
A man walks into a bar with a wheelbarrow full of putrid yellow shit and says: “this brings alive narrative situations that require moral action with characters that have conflicting bundles of beliefs and unresolved ideas about their role in the world.”
“Once you really engage with your characters they surprise you, they become alive, they say things you hate, they suggest truths you abhor; they defy and confound you and make you think twice about putting your name to their thoughts and actions. You might try and put words in their mouths but they spit them back at you and only subvert your purpose all the more. Essentially, an honest, uncensored novel reveals truths about you that only an analyst might ever play back to you.” – This IS possible in autobiography. The fact that you do not know this means you have not read enough. I don’t mean that in a mean way. I mean that in an obvious way.
“Nothing in writing [is] as risky as allowing the free play of ideas and unconscious desires and fears that is the literary novel.” – I don’t follow this. What is your definition of risk? That one might turn out to be as naive as one fears?
“Your reason for considering writing a novel is, to do “something different” Nobody who cares about their work writes for these reasons.” – Bullshit. Everything that is not an act of self-annihilation is a defense of convention. You either believe this or you don’t. If you don’t, that’s cool. We’ll all be dead one day anyway.
“But don’t extrapolate from your disillusion with the novel to the general thesis that all novels written since 1980 are a waste of time.” – a) What else have I got but my disillusion? b) I have a wheelbarrow full of three decades of shit to show you. What have you got?
It is easier to appreciate mediocrity because it allows us to accept it in ourselves. You want to write? You must learn to hate mediocrity. And hate yourself.
I’m not sure if what I have to say is interesting enough to be published in various media print outlets.
Your notion of ideal art for now seems to be, SBA, a Calvinist self-loathing confession-box. You seem to be saying that imaginative creation, which is clearly a natural emanation of many of our beings, is now a false form, or tyranny, & has now to be exchanged for an autobiographical form. That for very many would be a far greater self-enclosing tyranny over the self.
The very obsession with form & overcoming it means one is wholly tethered to that obsession. The words of the Russian writer Victor Pelevin seem to parallel this:
“The first Bulgakov book I read was The Master and Margarita. As for the lessons I drew, I’m afraid there were none, though it overturned all ideas I had about books before…However, the effect of this book was really fantastic. There’s an expression “out of this world.” This book was totally out of the Soviet world. The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination). The Master and Margarita was exactly this kind of book and it is very hard to explain its subtle effect to anybody who didn’t live in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.”
No real art results from obsession with form, & if one is obsessed with a conscious determination to break free from some perceived tyranny rather than art pouring forth organically from the being of the artist in whatever form that is, then one is conceding oneself to be a slave – trying to attain freedom, & a living being is only a slave if it falsely imagines itself to be so.
What I mean to say is a work of art is the form of itself. And because a work of art is the form of itself, the idea of it freeing itself from form is nonsensical. It makes about as much sense as conceiving a chord structure to be a tyranny- & this stupid self-defeating mirrors the ‘progression’ of much art within the neurotic West in the last century or so. Form is imagined to be tyranny, freedom from form liberation, & all that results is the art in the hands of such zealots commits suicide. ANd all having as a deeper source diseased notions of reality as debased, impure, from which one has to liberate oneself into some Platonic ideal realm apart from this perceived-to-be false world.
And as a further consequence when no inner liberation occurs form following this false path, one merely arrives at the dead destination. The path of slavery leads to the slave, who is now convionced that there is no release, just self-loathing slavery – and so the neurotic self is triumphant.
A man walks into a bar and orders a drink. Noticing that the bartender is a horse, he can’t resist asking, ‘Why the long face?’
The horse stamps his hoof. ‘You cannot say these things as though they’re still funny only because they once were.’
The man considers his drink a moment. ‘Lighten up. Do you know any jokes?’
‘Everything that is not an act of self-annihilation is a defense of convention.’
The man smiles. ‘Not bad.’
The horse frowns and points towards the far end of the bar. ‘I have a wheelbarrow full of three decades of shit to show you. What have you got?’
The man shakes his head politely. ‘I think I got the wrong bar.’
The horse sighs, he’s been here before. ‘The fact that you do not know this means you have not drank enough. I don’t mean that in a mean way. I mean that in an obvious way.’
The man nods. ‘Perhaps. I used to drink a lot more but don’t you agree that it can lead to depression and feelings of self-loathing and ultimately destroy your creativity?’
The horse neighs emphatically. ‘You must learn to hate yourself.’ He looked around. ‘And anyway, where’s your wheelbarrow full of putrid yellow shit?’
‘There is no wheelbarrow. What are you talking about?’
The horse’s eyes widened momentarily, then he leaned close. ‘Sometimes, I think I’m just a puppet, you know.’
The man shook his head. ‘How can that be possible? This is creative non-fiction.’
Steven, thanks for the prompt comeback. We’ve moved on to Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, though. What do you think about paying 250K for a typewriter?
I’m hopeless without a deadline.
Makes you wonder what we’d get for those wheelbarrows on ebay. Could they qualify as a literary artefacts?