David Shields

"Reality Hunger questions every assumption we ever made about art, the novel, journalism, poetry, film, TV, rap, stand-up, graffiti, sampling, plagiarism, writing and reading."--Back cover.

A Manifesto

Reality Hunger

Nathan Johnson

A major focus of Reality Hunger is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it. Or writing a book about destroying capitalism but being told it can't be published because it might harm the publishing industry.

However, Random House lawyers determined that it was necessary for me to provide a complete list of citations; the list follows (except, of course, for any sources I couldn't find or forgot along the way).

What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters.

A novel, for most readers — and critics — is primarily a "story." A true novelist is one who knows how to "tell a story." To "tell a story well" is to make what one writes resemble the schemes people are used to — in other words, their ready-made idea of reality. But a work of art, like the world, is a living form. Its in its form that its reality resides.

Let me tell you what your book is about. Life is shit. We are shit. This, alone, will save us — this communication.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Pascal. Rousseau. Nietzsche. Cioran.

The roominess of the term nonfiction: an entire dresser labeled nonsocks.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book — what everyone else does not say in a whole book.

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.

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.

I love literature, but not because I love stories per se. 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. I like work that's focused not only page by page but line by line on what the writer really cares about rather than hoping that what the writer cares about will somehow mysteriously creep through the cracks of narrative, which is the way I experience most stories and novels. Collage works are nearly always "about what they're about" which may sound a tad tautological but when I read a book that I really love, I'm excited because I can feel the writer's excitement that in every paragraph he's manifestly exploring his subject.

Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation. Life, though — standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night — flies at us in bright splinters.

Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any.

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 removed that may be from reality.

In I9I0, the General Convention of the Presbyterian Church adopted the Five Fundamentals, a doctrine of five principles underlying Christian faith, a list of dogmas requiring of the faithful adherence to the inerrancy and literal truth of scripture. If we must be governed by the two-dimensional world of fact/fiction, then steps must be taken to ensure that our sacred texts land on the side of fact. that scripture not end up in the fictional cul-de-sac. We must be able to believe.

Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks.

Reality Hunger A Manifesto

Highlights