Shields the bricoleur selects, arranges, remixes, constructing a work out of parts of other works. His debt to David Markson must be significant.
Hybrid genres, repetition, fragments, structure, the overlap between "truth" and fact in true stories, collage - these have always appealed to me.
But Shields's lack of attribution is problematic. In the first third of the book, I wanted to know which of these is Shields, and which are other voices - I wanted the honesty of attribution. (I prefer the "remix" - annotated version, rather - by a third party that reinstates the citations.) And then, that concern faded. I accepted that if he is going to edit, graft or suture unattributed quotes together, then his magpie bricolage can subsume authorship.
So the author disappears, there is only text, you travel over a patchwork collagescape. Which surely isn't Shields' intent: he believes very strongly in the Author, in (paraphrasing Donald Brown) text as the direct conduit to real consciousness and reality, through the means of selecting and mixing text.
Shields is bored of narrative and novels, which fall short of realism (here he follows Barthes), and also of straight memoirs, which fail to lyrically engage and transport us. He advocates the hybrid middle ground, the lyrical essay.
He finds good qualities in Tristram Shandy, The Wasteland, Markson (to which might be added Ulysses, Wittgenstein's interlocutor in Philosophical Investigations, John McPhee and many others), but the the argument against narrative and fiction seems a bit shrill. He's bored of fiction, and convinced that it can't properly access reality, but I'm not.
I found it interesting and highlighted lots, but wasn't entirely convinced.
More reading:
- Shields would like this advice by W.G.Sebald (and also probably its uncertain status as a quote): "I can only encourage you to steal as much as you can. No one will ever notice. You should keep a notebook of tidbits, but don’t write down the attributions, and then after a couple of years you can come back to the notebook and treat the stuff as your own without guilt."
- James Wood review: "Strangely enough, using Shields’s aesthetic terms and most of his preferred writers (along with some of those he seems not to prefer), a passionate defense of fiction and fiction-making could easily be made." Of course, Wood wrote that book himself, How Fiction Works in 2008, and it addresses much the same topics - narrative, metaphor, plot, character etc all in service of realism.
- Donald Brown review
- Hedley Twidle review: "the fiction / non-fiction divide is entirely inadequate and endlessly porous [...] At the same time, though, it is inescapable. Provoking the complex play of responsibility and irresponsibility that lies at the heart of reading and writing [...] Shields’s work is a brilliantly provocative meditation in the first mode. About the second it has precisely nothing to say."
--
Highlights
Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. Zola: “Every proper artist is more or less a realist according to his own eyes.” [Location 129]
The (completely fictional) International Necronautical Society’s (utterly serious) “Declaration of Inauthenticity.” [Location 148]
What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 film of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, [Location 159]
reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real. [Location 161]
It is out of the madness of God, in the Old Testament, that there emerges what we, now, would recognize as the “real”; his perceived insanity is its very precondition. [Location 193]
Plutarch sometimes bulleted his essays with as many as a hundred numbered sections, eschewing narrative completely and simply listing. [Location 201]
The novel feasted on the unimportant, mimicking reality. Moll Flanders and Clarissa Harlowe replaced Medea and Antigone. Instead of actual adventures, made-up ones were fashionable; [Location 245]
The techniques of fiction infected history; the materials of history were fed the novelist’s greed. Nowhere was this blended better than in autobiography. The novel sprang from the letter, the diary, the report of a journey; it felt itself alive in the form of every record of private life. [Location 250]
I see writers like Naipaul and Sebald making a necessary post-modernist return to the roots of the novel as an essentially Creole form, in which “nonfiction” material is ordered, shaped, and imagined as “fiction.” Books like these restore the novelty of the novel, with its ambiguous straddling of verifiable and imaginary facts, [Location 271]
Some Graham Greene novel has the disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction. No person in it bears any resemblance to any actual person living or dead, etc., etc. London does not exist.” [Location 275]
To tell a story became strictly impossible. [Location 330]
“Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting.” This is the single most useful definition of artistic greatness I’ve ever encountered. [Location 346]
Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground. The sound of voice alone grew less compelling; the longing for narration rose up again, asserting the oldest claim on the reading heart: the tale. [Location 363]
Painting isn’t dead. The novel isn’t dead. They just aren’t as central to the culture as they once were. [Location 374]
In 1963, Marguerite Yourcenar said, “In our time, the novel devours all other forms; one is almost forced to use it as a medium of expression.” No more. Increasingly, the novel goes hand in hand with a straitjacketing of the material’s expressive potential. One gets so weary watching writers’ sensations and thoughts get set into the concrete of fiction that perhaps it’s best to avoid the form as a medium of expression. [Location 376]
they narrow the gap that exists between fiction and autobiography, a gap that is artificial to begin with. [Location 390]
The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett’s point: wall-to-wall media represent as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge. [Location 408]
How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? [Location 411]
Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted. [Location 466]
we are all rotting, rotting, even as we write. [Location 536]
What I’m interested in: the startling fragment, left over from the manufactured process. Not the work itself but the story of the marketed incident, the whole industry surrounding a work’s buzz. [Location 545]
The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of minor differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence. Trial by Google. [Location 576]
What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand. A memoir is a tale taken from life—that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences—related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story: to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader. [Location 598]
What I want to do is take the banality of nonfiction (the literalness of “facts,” “truth,” “reality”), turn that banality inside out, and thereby make nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological questions. 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. [Location 602]
Attention equals life or is its only evidence. [Location 711]
All the best stories are true. [Location 768]
It was Bacon’s insight that it is precisely such seeming detachment—the rhetoric of the documentary, the film strip, and the medical textbook—that has provided the elegiac language of the last forty years. [Location 781]
not flattening it out with either linear narrative (traditional novel) or smooth recount (standard memoir). [Location 793]
Tell the story of your life that is the most emotionally cathartic; the story you “remember” is covering the “real story,” anyway. [Location 809]
Reality takes shape in memory alone. [Location 811]
Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however [Location 813]
Memories have a quasi-narrative structure, constituting a story or a scene in a story, an inbuilt successiveness strong enough to keep the narrative the same on each act of remembering but not strong enough to ensure that the ordering of events is the ordering that originally took place. [Location 826]
We tend to think of our memories as having been tucked away for safekeeping in, say, file cabinets or dusty old boxes in the backs of closets or filed away on the hard drives of computers, where they can easily be accessed by the click of a button. [Location 840]
In a sense, all memories have been forgotten. Memories are predicated on loss. [Location 844]
Fiction doesn’t require its readers to believe; in fact, it offers its readers the great freedom of experience without belief—something real life can’t do. Fiction gives us a rhetorical question: “What if this happened?” (The best) nonfiction gives us a statement, something more complex: “This may have happened.” [Location 864]
We dream ourselves awake every minute of the day. “Fiction”/“nonfiction” is an utterly useless distinction. [Location 889]
The moment you start to arrange the world in words, you alter its nature. [Location 912]
I see every art as importantly documentary. Everything is always already invented; we merely articulate, arrange. [Location 952]
Just as out-and-out fiction no longer compels my attention, neither does straight-ahead memoir. [Location 984]
Why are certain kinds of knowing favored over others in a genre in which veracity carries weight? [Location 998]
We are all in flight from reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens. [Location 1004]
It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living. [Location 1051]
We like nonfiction because we live in fictitious times. [Location 1165]
My taste for quotation, which I have always kept—why reproach me for it? People, in life, quote what pleases them. Therefore, in our work, we have the right to quote what pleases us. [Location 1231]
In each case, her decision to start copying an artist happened well before the artist achieved wide recognition. [Location 1235]
Karaoke is a generic version of live hip-hop. Little skill or equipment is needed to allow people to perform, but no matter how bad or ill-advised the karaoke singer is, he or she is using existing material for means of self-expression, and the audience accepts the fact that there is no [Location 1281]
Most of the passages in this book are taken from other sources. Nearly every passage I’ve clipped I’ve also revised, at least a little—for the sake of compression, consistency, or whim. You mix and scratch the shit up to the level your own head is at… [Location 1401]
Collage is a demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge upon it. [Location 1497]
Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data. [Location 1534]
Renata Adler’s collage novel Speedboat captivates by its jagged and frenetic changes of pitch and tone and voice. [Location 1535]
Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp’s “Fountain”—urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. [Location 1558]
I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking. [Location 1571]
The very nature of collage demands fragmented materials, or at least materials yanked out of context. Collage is, in a way, only an accentuated act of editing: picking through options and presenting a new arrangement (albeit one that, due to its variegated source material, can’t be edited into the smooth, traditional whole that a work of complete fiction could be). The act of editing may be the key postmodern artistic instrument. [Location 1584]
Such an act of editorship is bound to reflect something of the individual doing the editing: a plaster cast of an aesthetic—not the actual thing, but the imprint of it. 351 —the transformation, through framing, of outtakes into totems. 352 This project must raise the art of quoting without quotation marks to the very highest level. Its theory is intimately linked to that of montage. 353 I hate quotations. 354 In collage, writing is stripped of the pretense of originality and appears as a practice of mediation, of selection and contextualization, a practice, almost, of reading. [Location 1589]
My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe. [Location 1605]
The problem of scale is interesting. How long will the reader stay engaged? I don’t mean stay dutifully but stay charmed, seduced, and beguiled. Robbe-Grillet’s Ghosts in the Mirror, which he calls a romanesque, is a quasi-memoir with philosophical reflections, intimate flashes, and personal addresses to the reader. About this length, I think: 174 pages. [Location 1615]
Nothing is going to happen in this book. [Location 1620]
The gaps between paragraphs the gaps between people (content tests form). [Location 1631]
Nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I’ve ever wanted. [Location 1648]
How much can one remove and still have the composition be intelligible? This understanding, or its lack, divides those who can write from those who can really write. Chekhov removed the plot. Pinter, elaborating, removed the history, the narration; Beckett, the characterization. We hear it anyway. Omission is a form of creation. [Location 1686]
Essays, unlike novels, emerge from the sensations of the self. Fiction creeps into foreign bodies: the novelist can inhabit not only a sex not his own but also beetles and noses and hunger artists and nomads and beasts. The essay is personal. [Location 1748]
One of the tricks in writing a personal essay is that you have to develop a dialogue between the parts of yourself that in a way corresponds to the conflict in fiction. You cop to various tendencies, and then you struggle with these tendencies. [Location 1789]
To what degree do linked stories seem to be about pattern, about authorial obsession, about watching a writer work and rework his material until he simply has nothing more to say about it? [Location 1838]
in the work of my favorite writers, the armature of overt drama is dispensed with, and we’re left with a deeper drama, the real drama: an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive. [Location 1864]
Maybe the essay really is just a philosophical investigation; [Location 1885]
The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing. [Location 1888]
“Do your own time”: a seductive slogan. I find that I quote it to myself frequently, but really I don’t subscribe to the sentiment. I’m not, after all, in prison. Stoicism bores me. What I ultimately believe in is talking about everything until you’re blue in the face. [Location 1920]
So: no more masters, no more masterpieces. What I want (instead of God the novelist) is self-portrait in a convex mirror. [Location 1958]
In a larger sense, all writing is autobiography: everything that you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it. The real question is: this massive autobiographical writing enterprise that fills a life, this enterprise of self-construction—does it yield only fictions? Or rather, among the fictions of the self, the versions of the self, that it yields, are there any that are truer than others? How do I know when I have the truth about myself? [Location 1971]
A work without some element of self-reflexivity feels to me falsely monumental. Without this gesture, this self-scrutiny, I don’t see how anyone can even pretend to be thinking. [Location 2011]
I’m not interested in myself per se. I’m interested in myself as theme carrier, as host. [Location 2069]
In graduate school, when I studied deconstruction, it all seemed very self-evident. Language as self-canceling reverb that is always communicating only itself? I knew this from the inside out since I was six years old. [Location 2169]
“The true poem is the daily paper.” Not, though, the daily paper as it’s published: both straight-ahead journalism and airtight art are, to me, insufficient; I want instead something teetering excitedly in between. [Location 2171]
I’m hopelessly, futilely drawn toward representations of the real, knowing full well how invented such representations are. [Location 2264]
When I read fiction, I look for what’s real, try to identify the source models. When I read nonfiction, I look for problems with the facts. [Location 2286]
one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. [Location 2318]
Beckett decided that everything was false to him, almost, in art, with its designs and formulae. He wanted art, but he wanted it right from life. He didn’t like, finally, that Joycean voice that was too abundant, too Irish, endlessly lyrical, endlessly allusive. He went into French to cut down. He wanted to directly address desperate individual existence, which bores many readers. I find him a joyous writer, though; his work reads like prayer. You don’t have to think about literary allusions but experience itself. That’s what I want from the voice. I want it to transcend artifice. [Location 2551]
Nowhere do you get the feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. [Location 2559]
Novel qua novel is a form of nostalgia. [Location 2568]
They’re journeys, pursuits of knowledge. One could say that fiction, metaphorically, is a pursuit of knowledge, but ultimately it’s a form of entertainment. I think that, at the very least, essays and poems more directly and more urgently attempt to figure out something about the world. Which is why I can’t read novels anymore, with very few exceptions, the exceptions being those novels so meditative they’re barely disguised essays. David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, The Last Novel. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Kundera’s Immortality. [Location 2577]
The kinds of novels I like are ones which bear no trace of being novels. [Location 2583]
It’s no accident that the only novels deserving of interest today are those in which, once the universe is disbanded, nothing happens—e.g., Tristram Shandy, [Location 2588]
What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, while from the personal essay it takes a wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments. [Location 2591]
A lyric essay is an oxymoron: an essay that’s also a lyric, a kind of logic that wants to sing, an argument that has no chance of proving out. [Location 2596]
Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one. [Location 2604]
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