The recent contretemps involving the putatively fictional elements in James Frey's memoir A Million Little Pieces—and the resulting maelstrom in journalistic/literary/art circles—exposed a culture-wide debate about provenance, appropriation, quotation, "truth," genre-prison, and emancipation from same. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto goes to the center of this debate. When an excerpt was published in March 2006 in the Believer, it generated a huge amount of reader response. So, too, the précis of the book I presented the summer of 2006 at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference was the occasion of fierce discussion.
An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as yet unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness. "Raw" material, seemingly unprocessed and unprofessional. Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity. Plasticity of form, pointillism. Artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation. Criticism as autobiography, self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography. An overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture. The erasure of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction—the lure and blur of the real.
"Who owns the words?" asked a disembodied but very persistent voice throughout much of William Burroughs's work. Who does own them now? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it, yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted. Living as we do in an unbearably manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the "real," semblances of the real. We want to pose something nonfictional against all the fabrication: autobiographical frissons or framed or filmed or caught moments which, in their seeming unrehearsedness, possess at least the possibility of breaking through the clutter.
Most artistic movements are attempts to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. So, too, every artistic movement or moment needs a credo, from Horace's Ars Poetica to Lars von Trier's Dogme 95. My intention in this book is to produce the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but disconnected artists in a variety of forms and media who are breaking larger and larger chunks of "reality" into their work. I argue that the lyric essay is the literary form that gives the writer the best opportunity for rigorous investigation, because its theater is the world (the mind contemplating the world) and offers no consoling dream-world, no exit door.
“I’ve just finished reading Reality Hunger: A Manifesto and I’m lit up by it—astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. It’s a pane that’s also a mirror: as a result of reading it, I can’t stop looking into myself and interrogating my own artistic intentions. It will be published to wild fanfare, because it really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.”—Jonathan Lethem
“Reality Hunger is a manifesto on behalf of a rising generation of writers and artists, a ‘Make It New’ for a new century, an all-out assault on tired generic conventions, particularly those that define the well-made novel. Drawing upon a wide range of sources both familiar and unfamiliar, David Shields takes us on an engaging and often exhilarating intellectual journey. I enjoyed Reality Hunger immensely and found myself cheering Shields on. I, too, am sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings. I, too, am drawn to literature as (as Shields puts it) ‘a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking.’ I, too, like novels that don’t look like novels.”—J.M. Coetzee
“I simply could not have read Reality Hunger at a better time, or in a better state of mind, to get more out of it. I read it a week ago and am still thinking about it continuously. Shields’s work has collided with my own arcs of thought, and for the last week, I’ve been watching the most amazing sparks get cast off in all directions. Lots of fires everywhere. To begin with, I taught an independent study on precisely this topic last year, and I have been in the process of using that course as a foundation for a more extensive seminar on, well, call it the hybrid-sampled-mongrel-interstitial blurring of fiction and nonfiction that I will be teaching at the Free University of Berlin next spring. Shields’s book has shot instantly onto my reading list, and in fact, I’m thinking of ways of building the course so that Reality Hunger is the central organizing text of the semester. I experienced most of the available emotional reactions in my palette while reading, not to mention many rich blurrings of old and new idea. I’m in the process of copying all kinds of quotes (and quotes of quotes) into my notebooks for future pinching, as well as for my own private montages. Naturally, I loved reading a book that made virtues of the many vices I’ve often been faulted for over the years. But more than that: this assemblage has challenged me to think anew about all the triangulation that goes on between those inseparables (that others way too glibly separate), Showing and Telling. Reading Reality Hunger has already had an effect on my novel-in-progress, and more importantly, it has helped mature some inchoate ideas that I’ve been forming about how I want to move forward as a writer and what kind of writing I might want to indulge for the rest of my life. I’m grateful for the great charge and challenge Shields has handed me. It will be fascinating to see how this incendiary device gets picked up and handled out in the literary streets. It will rile up lots of folks and excite just as many.”—Richard Powers
“I’m fascinated by how Reality Hunger denies what it asserts and asserts what it denies—one of the many ways in which it’s a satisfyingly slippery and vertiginous book. For instance, the quotes without quotation marks. It’s Pierre-Menard-Writes-Don-Quixote time: David Shields writes Robert Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Wittgenstein, Pater, etc. The technique shadows the entire book. As most readers will, I spotted only a handful of the most obvious quotations, knew that a lot of paragraphs were quotations though I couldn’t place them (as when the ‘I’ of the piece has a recognizably different biography from Shields’s own, or the phrasing is in the language of another century), and came to regard the first-person singular whenever I met it as a floating, umbrella self, sheltering simultaneously one voice (Shields’s) and multiple voices. The possibility that every word in the book might be quotation and not ‘original’ to the author very nicely and suitably arises. I enjoyed my feeling of almost continuous uncertainty. This constant ambiguity is both unsettling and enthralling, making the reader feel on his own pulse the dubiety of the first-person pronoun: it’s Shields (I thought it was); no it’s not, it’s Leiris; no, in an important sense, it’s neither. The book’s best reader isn’t going to be a quote-spotter but rather somebody who grasps and relishes the ambiguous authorship of the whole text. Disagreement with it—sometimes with the main thrust of the argument, sometimes with the details—is part of the pleasure of this text. One finds oneself wrangling back. William Empson, an atheist with the temperament of a theologian, liked to use the word ‘argufying.’ Reality Hunger is a terrific piece of argufication. And it’s one of those works that does what it says and says what it does. It’s an engrossingly interesting performance.”—Jonathan Raban