Friday, November 12, 2010
Book Talk: Reality Hunger-A Manifesto by David Shields
I am not going to tell you to race out and buy this book. I am not going to say that spending $24.00 on this hardcover will make this a book well worth keeping for the rest of your life. I am not even going to say this is a good book. It's not. Or perhaps it is. Frankly, it's one of the most confusing books I've ever read because I can't quite tell what it is supposed to be.
Check it out from the library, that's what I did.
Here is, in part, what a review in the L.A. Times had to say: "Reality Hunger" is a manifesto, a closed fist. A manifesto says enough is enough, it's time to change things. A manifesto is fueled by varying degrees of anger. David Shields believes that literature has come to a critical point. Old forms are no longer relevant. Readers are abandoning print media because they are outdated: "What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal media. The only way for books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to wire texts into this library."
Shields, to his credit, is not just whining. He is hopeful: "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, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional." He is not the first to write a media manifesto, and he won't be the last.
I do not understand what Shields is saying at all. Literature is in trouble? Since when? According to whom?
With so much true crisis in the world, namely things like social injustices against woman and children and very real issues of the environment, I can't get all fired up about "literature endangerment" due to the technological age. But that's just me. I also don't understand most of what is reported on the national news and find more reliable reporting on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart! Again, that's just me. My mind cannot seem to access the point Shields is trying to make.
Instead, I looked to Reality Hunger as a source text for a large critical paper I wrote on memoir in the 21st century.
These passages gave me such a clear sense of the genre that I have been writing in, intuititvely, for two decades that I have to include them here.
1) In English the term memoir comes direction from the French for memory, memoire, a word that is derived from the Latic for the same, memoria. And yet, more deeply rooted in the word memoir is a far less confident one. Embedded in Latin’s memoria is the ancient Greek mermeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian mermara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mer-mer, “to vividly wonder,” “to be anxious,” “to exhaustingly ponder.”
2) Michael Gladwell, in The New Yorker, writes: Memoir is a genre in need of an informed readership. It is a misunderstanding to read memoir as through the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy is that is owed in newspaper reporting. Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not journalism. 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.
3) A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom. Truth in memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it’s achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer isn’t what matters; what matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.
These are the passages that matter (to me) and that make sense (to me) and why I print them here in this weblog posting.
Finally, finally, Shields does a service by providing a concise way to speak to what a memoir is about and what a memoir writer is called to do.
To all writers of memoir, cut these passages out and put them over your computer. This is what you are doing, when you write your life. Remember because it is so damn easy to get lost.
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3 Comments:
Thanks for that post Jennifer. I am in the process of reviewing your website in preparation for talking with you about my current writing issue of truth and reality versus taking time for insight to develop when blogging. Jennifer, I have written a childhood memoir and have been unable to interest an agent in it after an exhaustive attempt to engage someone. All I can conclude is that it must need more work. I like the passages that you have highlighted that guide you.I am impressed with your professionalism as a writer.
Tried to read this book on Kindle. Was at times dazzled (like with your quoted passages) and wanting to "mark up" my copy, then irritated that it is such a clunky process to take notes on Kindle. Also irritated that Shields began losing me. Began to think I should buy the book in hardback so I could see more fully the "manifesto's" formatting - as if that would make clear how his observations related to one another and to memoir. But who wants to buy a book twice when it is hard to judge its merit in the first place? Now you've given me the right idea: the library. Best place to acquire this, I agree.
I appreciate hearing your take on this, Jennifer. A pleasure.
Jennifer, I'm just trying to post to see if it works.
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