How Literature Saved My Life

by David Shields

  What I would give to see this film.

  Life/art

  THE ISOLATION of the widely spaced sans serif characters on the hardback jacket of my novel-in-stories, Handbook for Drowning, is the isolation of the characters in the book. The clean lines on top contrast with the water bleeding. The T-shirted boy’s eyes are covered and thus he is Everyboy. The title is a kind of impossibility (for whom would such a manual be intended? who would bother to compose such a gloomy guide?), as is the photograph: unreadable, paradoxical. Is he sinking or ascending or, somehow, perhaps, doing both simultaneously? People in bookstores couldn’t abide the endlessly falling figure and tended to turn the book “right side up”—upside down (this edition is long out of print). Who knows how to write about happiness (which, famously, is white and doesn’t stain the page)? I took my largely happy middle-class life and pulled out all the consolations. I had no wisdom, so I faked it by sounding dire (still the case? Maybe …).

  The liner notes of many grunge rock CDs contained heartbreaking photos of band members as little kids. All that hope and energy and innocence in photos of Kurt Cobain at age eight were an implicit rebuke to what had happened to the lead singer–protagonist by age twenty-seven. I was and am interested in that contrast—where did all that light in my eyes go?

  Not only do so many films have a real-life basis to them, but almost every film is promoted by having the stars and director pretend that the film set reproduced the very psychodrama that the film supposedly explores, e.g., The Beaver, which in many particulars echoes Mel Gibson’s real-life meltdowns. Harrison Ford says about his Cowboys and Aliens costar, Daniel Craig, “See how he has my back?” In other words, there’s no fiction: it starts as fact and ends as fact and in between is just a little semi-imaginary construct, which is the vehicle to get us from one fact (the originating episode) to another fact (the gossip about the set). This is very different from how people responded to Gone with the Wind.

  I noticed this ambivalent embrace of autobiography first, I think, when visual artists I met at artists’ colonies talked about the factual and the real in a way that was related to autobiography but clearly different, more ironic, more ontologically inquisitive. The sources of the trend seem varied and complex: Metafiction’s existential questions recontextualized in a minimalist, i.e., factual, mode. The twitterization of the culture, turning personality into a cult and gossip into the only acknowledged platform. The nonfiction novel of the ’60s, only turned sideways now, so not poetic reporting about the march on the Pentagon, but taking the traditional material of modernist fiction—the interior self—and conducting a kind of art criticism or high journalism on it. All the deconstructive questioning of the existence of the self as anything other than text. The writers I like tend to present the ambiguities of genre as an analogue to the ambiguities of existence. Two things that Spalding Gray did so well—place himself in harm’s way and reveal the process by which each work got made—are crucial to me.

  I think, too, that this whole theme of life and art has always been everything to me (for what I hope are, by now, painfully obvious reasons). And yet I’m also very skeptical of easy modernist claims of art’s refuge from life’s storms. I’m very drawn to the way in which a life lived can be an art of sorts or a failed art and a life-lived-told can be art as well. I often seem to be defending the ineluctable modality of the real.

  Negotiating against ourselves

  WHEN I CHAIRED the nonfiction panel for the 2007 National Book Award, the other panelists and I got along perfectly well—for the first several months. We made the usual jokes about how we would make it up to our respective mail carriers, how the floorboards and Ping-Pong tables in our apartments and houses groaned under the weight of so many books, what in the world we were going to do with so many tomes. However, throughout the final lunch at which we determined the winner, we quarreled, we tussled, we cajoled, we pleaded, we slammed phones, we left behind purses, we walked out, we walked back in. But so what? Ishmael Reed: “Writin’ is fightin’.” I’ve never felt more directly and vividly that books matter.

  And yet, in 1987, after the fiction panel didn’t name Toni Morrison the winner, she approached the committee’s chair, my former teacher Hilma Wolitzer, and said, “Thank you for ruining my life.” If your life depends on winning an award chosen by a few people over lunch, there’s something wrong with your life.

  Real life

  MANY OF MY favorite books contain numbered sections: to name just a few, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing, Amy Fusselman’s 8. The numbers gesture toward rationality of order; the material empties out any such promise. The exquisite tension of each work derives from these two competing angles of vision. So, too, I love the listlike pseudo-foundness, the extraordinarily artful “artlessness” of, say, Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale,” Leonard Michaels’s “In the Fifties,” John D’Agata’s About a Mountain. The list evokes the randomness of the world, its heterogeneity and voluptuousness. Erasing the line between “art” and “life,” the list is the world, reframed as art.

  Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled

  AM I MISSING the narrative gene? I frequently come out of the movie theater having no idea what the plot was: “Wait—he killed his brother-in-law? I didn’t know he even had a brother-in-law.”

  In the classic, epiphany-based short story, there is a text, or plot, beneath which plays subtext or subplot. By story’s end, the dominant image takes on metaphorical properties, i.e., becomes theme-carrying. Subtext penetrates the surface. The story’s “aboutness” outs: plot and theme come together.

  Collage—in which tiny paragraph-units work together to project a linear motion—gets rid of this slow burn. Its thematic investigation is manifest from the beginning. As with action painting, new music, self-reflexive documentary film, and Language poetry, collage teaches the reader to understand that the movements of the writer’s mind are intricately entangled with the work’s meaning. Forget “intricately entangled with the work’s meaning”: are the work’s meaning.

  A reviewer, overpraising an early, autobiographical novel of mine, said, “Why do we read a book—only to escape on the wings of imagination, or to experience the deeper pleasure of actually entering the author’s mind? With this book, we experience the latter.” Nabokov: in a truly serious novel, the real conflict is not among the various characters but between the reader and writer. In collage, this is overtly the case.

  According to Tolstoy, the purpose of art is to transfer feeling from one person’s heart to another person’s heart. In collage, it’s the transfer of consciousness, which strikes me as immeasurably more interesting and loneliness-assuaging. The collage-narrator, who has the audacity to stage his or her own psychic crisis as emblematic of a larger cultural crux and general human dilemma, is virtually by definition in some sort of emotional trouble. His or her voice tends, therefore, to be acid, cryptic, antic, hysterical (though hysteria usually ventriloquizing as monotone). I read to get beneath the monotone to the animating cataclysm. No wonder I’m a fan of so many collage books: they’re all madly in love with their own crises.

  This American Life, say. At its least ambitious, okay, here is a bunch of audio about money. At its best, each segment hands the baton to the next segment, and by minute 48, you’re in a significantly different and more interesting locale than you were at minute 17.

  I wonder what it is about white space that’s so alluring. I find that I almost literally can’t read a book if it’s unbroken text. What does such seamless fluency have to do with how I experience anything? (Collage = stutter text.) Whereas the moment I see the text broken up into brief fragments, I’m intellectually and aesthetically and almost erotically alert. Louise Glück: “I’m attracted to the ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. Often I wish that the entire poem could be made in this vocabulary.” Why wish? Why not do it?

  The traditio
nal novel is a freeway with very distinct signage, while collage is surface street to surface street—with many more road signs, and each one is seemingly more open to interpretation, giving the traveler just a suggestion or a hint. One reader might think he’s going through the desert; the next, that she’s driving to the North Pole. The traditional novel tells the reader pretty much where he’s going. He’s a passenger, looking at the pretty sights along the way. Collage demands that the reader figure out for herself where she is and where she’s going (hint: she’s going somewhere quite specific, guided all along by the subterranean collagist).

  In quantum physics, electrons “test out” all possible paths to a destination before “choosing” the most efficient path. For instance, during photosynthesis, electrons in a green leaf perform a “random walk,” traveling in many directions at the same time. Only after all possible routes have been explored is the most efficient path retroactively chosen.

  A cloud of gas is really just particles of hydrogen and helium floating in empty space; transformed by gravity, the particles collapse from wild amorphousness into a thread being spun by its own increasing density into the shape of a giant star.

  Manguso again: “White space signifies certainty that at least something has been said, that something has been finished, and that I may pause, digest, and evaluate. I fear being fooled into reading strikingly imperfect books. I don’t want to have to hold my breath until the very end and then find it wasn’t worth it.”

  I sometimes stop reading front to back and read the book backward. I can’t predict which books it will happen to me with, but this reverse reading will tug on me like a magnet about halfway or two-thirds through. It occurs most often with books that I love the most.

  In such books, the writer (the reader, too, for that matter) is manifestly aware that he or she will pass this way but once, and all possibilities are available. We’re outside genre and we’re also outside certain expectations of what can be said, and in this special space—often, interestingly, filled with spaces—the author/narrator/speaker manages, in hundreds of brief paragraphs, to convey for me, indelibly, what it feels like for one human being to be alive, and by implication, all human beings.

  Life is short—art is shorter

  A REVIEWER SAID about my third book, the novel in stories whose cover I mentioned a few pages back, that if I kept going in that direction, i.e., toward concision, I’d wind up writing books composed of one very beautiful word. He meant it as a put-down, but to me it was wild praise.

  “Honestly,” Natalie said, “most people my age don’t have the attention span to sit down and watch a two-hour movie, let alone read a book.”

  In J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand, “A local novelist spent ten years writing a book about our region and its inhabitants which, when completed, added up to more than a thousand pages.… Exhausted by her effort, she at last sent it off to a publisher, only to be told it would have to be cut by nearly half.” The final manuscript in its entirety: “Tiny upstate town/Undergoes many changes/Nonetheless endures.”

  Manguso, to me: “When I read a poetry collection, I read the book ‘in order,’ which is to say in order of length. I read the shortest poems first, then the slightly longer ones. I skip any that are more than two pages. No time. My taste for small art might be related to my apparent short-term-memory problem involved with long narrative (or length in general).”

  A friend gave me a ticket to a seat in the first row at a Blazers-Mavs playoff game. I was stunned by what the game looked like up close. Given the height, width, wingspan, speed, quickness, and strength of the ten players on the court, only about five hundred people in the entire world could even dream of operating with any efficiency in the 20′ by 20′ space in which nearly the entire game was conducted. In order to get open for a shot, a player had to improvise at warp speed.

  It’s nearly impossible now to tell a story that isn’t completely familiar and predictable. You have to cut to the part we haven’t heard before. See David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, which consists of forty very brief descriptions (mostly in the second person) of afterlife scenarios. Each “tale” feels less like a “story” than a hyperextended, overly literal joke or the explanation of the rules to a complex video game or role-playing game.

  The point is often lost upon me in longer works, which may be “well made,” but what I can pull from them remains obdurate. In some prose poems/lyric essays/short-shorts, I’m told a simple and clear “story,” but the writer has figured out a way to stage, with radical compression, his or her essential vision. Such works are often disarming in their pretense of being throwaways. At first glance, they may feel relatively journalistic, but they rotate toward the metaphysical. Working within such a tight space, the writer needs to establish tension quickly, so he often paints a sexual tableau. Said differently: prose poems/lyric essays/short-shorts frequently hold the universal via the ordinary.

  I love infinitesimal paintings, the more abstract the better. (Not without exception, but in general, as one moves east, the orientation of art schools gets less abstract, more traditional, more commercial.)

  Manguso, for the nth time: “In college I was once accused of owning only six objects. In my dating days, as soon as I anticipated going to bed with someone, I found it absurd, irrational, to further resist the inevitable. If there’s a good line in a book, I’ll happily copy out the line and sell the book to the Strand. Jettisoning content—temporal, material, or textual—makes me feel good all over. There’s no time to relax in a short text. It’s like resting during the hundred-yard dash. It’s ridiculous even to consider. One should instead close the book and just watch television or take a nap. Kafka, who was unusually susceptible to textual stimuli, read only a couple of pages of a book at a time, he read the same relatively few things over and over, his reading habits were eccentric, and he wasn’t a completist. One good thing about my impending death is that I don’t need to fake interest in anything. Look, I’m dying! In Joseph Heller’s memoir, Now and Then, there’s a scene in which Mario Puzo, after visiting Joe in the hospital, says with marked envy that Joe would be able to use the diagnosis as a social excuse for the rest of his life.”

  My father’s favorite joke: Two prisoners told each other the same jokes so many times that they resorted to numbering the jokes and just mentioning numbers. One prisoner turned to his bunkmate and said, “Hey: number twenty-seven.” The other one didn’t laugh. “Why didn’t you laugh?” “I didn’t like how you told it.”

  My former student Tara Ebrahimi, who has battled manic depression and suicidal longings (we bonded like bandits): “I don’t want to be bogged down by the tangential, irrelevant, or unnecessary. Stick a spear straight to my heart—stick it straight to my brain.”

  The question I’ve been trying to ask all along

  DO I LOVE ART ANYMORE, or only artfully arranged life?

  8

  HOW LITERATURE SAVED MY LIFE

  How it didn’t.

  How literature has no chance whatsoever of saving my life anymore

  VONNEGUT: Contemporary writers who leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorian writers misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

  “Seattle’s downtown has the smoothness of a microchip,” Charles Mudede says. “All of its defining buildings—the Central Library, Columbia Tower, Union Square towers, its stadiums—are new and evoke the spirit of twenty-first century technology and market utopianism. If there’s any history here, it’s a history of the future. The city’s landmark, the Space Needle, doesn’t point to the past but always to tomorrow.”

  Most new technologies appear to undergo three distinct phases. At first, the computer was so big and expensive that only national governments had the resources to build and operate one. Only the Army and a handful of universities had multi-room-sized computers. A little later, large corporations with substantial research budgets, such as IBM, developed computers. The computer mad
e its way into midsized businesses and schools. Not until the late ’70s and early ’80s did the computer shrink enough in size and price to be widely available to individuals. Exactly the same pattern has played out with nylon, access to mass communication, access to high-quality printing, Humvees, GPS, the web, handheld wireless communications, etc., etc. (Over a longer timeline, something quite similar happened with international trade: at first, global interaction was possible only between nations, then between large companies, and only now can a private citizen get anything he wants manufactured by a Chinese factory and FedExed to his shop.)

  The individual has now risen to the level of a minigovernment or minicorporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mininetwork. The trajectory of nearly all technology follows this downward and widening path: by the time a regular person is able to create his own TV network, it doesn’t matter anymore that I have or am on a network. The power of the technology cancels itself out via its own ubiquity. Nothing really changes: the individual’s ability to project his message or throw his weight around remains minuscule. In the case of the web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience—a few more people slide through the door—but Facebook is finally a crude personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away.

  Moore’s Law: the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit—essentially, computational speed—doubles every two years. Most of humanity can continuously download porn (by far the largest revenue generator on the web) ever faster and at ever higher resolution. The next Shakespeare will be a hacker possessing programming gifts and ADD-like velocity, which is more or less how the original Shakespeare emerged—using/stealing the technology of his time (folios, books, other plays, oral history) and filling the Globe with its input. Only now the globe is a billion seats and expanding. New artists, it seems to me, have to learn the mechanics of computing/programming and—possessing a vision unhumbled by technology—use them to disassemble/recreate the web.