David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

HEMINGWAY: “Hürtgen Forest was a place where it was extremely difficult for a man to stay alive, even if all he did was be there. And we were attacking all the time and every day.”

FUSSELL: “Second World War technology made it possible to be killed in virtual silence, at least so it appeared.”

Not a Quaker per se but sympathetic to Quaker pacifism, Nicholson Baker wanted to give himself the toughest possible case to make. In Human Smoke , he takes hundreds of passages from innumerable sources and positions them in such a way that an argument clearly emerges. War, even WWII, is never justified. All deaths are human smoke.

When the war was winding down and the draft was over, I registered as a conscientious objector .

A day like any other, only shorter

WHENEVER U.S. SOLDIERS in Vietnam saw the horror show revealed with particular vividness, they’d often say, flatly and with no emphasis whatsoever, “There it is.” Michael Herr’s Dispatches: “ ‘There it is,’ the grunts said, sitting by a road with some infantry when a deuce-and-a-half rattled past with four dead in the back.” Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers: “Sooner or later the squad will surrender to the black design of the jungle. We live by the law of the jungle, which is that more Marines go in than come out. There it is.”

The movie version of No Country for Old Men , ostensibly a thriller, gets at something profound—namely, in the absence of God the Father, all bets are off. Life makes no sense. How do I function when life has been drained of meaning?

Love and theft

IN STANDARD ERASURE POETRY, the words of the source text get whited out or obscured with a dark color, but the pages in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes have literally gone under the knife, rectangular sections physically excised using a die-cut technique that resembles X-Acto artistry. The result: chinked, rectangular cutouts around which remaining text floats, reminding me of the shape of floor plans (albeit for buildings made of nothing). The cutouts produce windows and doorways to portions of up to ten successive pages of text at a time. Words and phrases get revealed, repeated, then covered up. Language waves at me through these X-Actoed text windows, disrupting the surface texture of the page. The composition not only interrupts normal eye movements but in effect forces me to read the book back to front at the same time I’m reading it front to back.

Lifting the pages up one by one, I discover a lyrical seminarrative delivered by a single narrator, characters (a mother and father), a single plot point (the father’s death), and a shift in setting (the movement from an Eden-like garden to an urban frontier). Futzing with Bruno Schulz’s book The Street of Crocodiles , Foer gets intimate with the Polish writer; Foer is writing a book with, through, and for Schulz by unwriting the original. There’s much debate about the relevance of books to our byte-obsessed culture, but I’ve yet to come across any assemblage of text, hyperlinks, images, and sidebar ads that presents a more chaotic and multidimensional reading experience than this book.

“I felt light,” says the narrator midway through Tree of Codes . At this point I think, too, of the book itself, which, composed of half-empty pages, feels to the touch too light. When I pick up the doctored book-object, it weighs less than the eye says it should. So, too, when I separate the delicate pages one by one and examine not just the words written on each page but also the space through and past these pieces of paper, I have the uncanny experience of looking through empty picture frames.

Turning pages, my hand (accustomed to a physical understanding of the page) literally measures subtracted weight. This tactile emptiness lies at the heart of the book’s attempt to plumb antispaces—landscapes unrecoverable at the levels of text, paper, geography, and memory—which are excruciating to Foer, whose oeuvre is simultaneously an attempt to recover, through art, the dead bodies of the Holocaust (his mother’s parents were survivors) and a demonstration that such an attempt is not only impossible but also wrong (“to write a poem after Auschwitz,” etc.). The book is both hospital and crypt: the thousands of tiny rectangular spaces are both beds and graves.

No one from my immediate or extended family died in the Holocaust, and yet in a way that’s difficult to explain, it was the defining event of my childhood…

Our ground time here will be brief

BUILT TO SPILL’S “Randy Described Eternity” is a launching pad for the empty space between your body holding your guts (built to spill onto the pavement) and the vast cavern of forever-land eternity. Doug Martsch manipulates the thin, hollow body inside his electric guitar toward both extinction and monument, marking our inability to hold the dual concepts completely in mind. This isn’t thrill-seeking exploration or death taunt. It’s a slow plod toward guitar inexpressible. No benedictions or apologies, just a few shafts (I can always hope) of illumination. Electric guitar solos simultaneously battle against postmodernity and worship it—feedback jamming the alternating currents into sound sculptures of pain and ecstasy. White-boy field hollers: slow it down, add pedal steel guitar, and you have a country song. Keep the guitar/drums setup, add a light show, and you have the rock existential thing. Martsch doesn’t really close in on death, but hey, his guitar’s alive.

A day like any other, only shorter

PHILLIP, WHOSE MFA thesis I’d just directed, died in a freak accident. He was walking his dog, lightning struck a tree, and a heavy branch hit his head. At the funeral, many of his classmates and teachers told standard stories: funny, sad, vivid, delicately off-color. I praised him fulsomely, thereby casting a warm glow back upon my own head. Another professor, trying to say something original, criticized his fledgling work. I upbraided her for her obtuseness, but I felt bad about badgering her and made it worse by harrumphing, “Words are famously difficult to get right. That’s why being a writer is so interesting.” Worse still by adding, “Who among us doesn’t get the words constantly wrong?” She said she would write Phillip’s widow an explanatory and exculpatory note, but it came out wrong, too, I promise. Because language never fails to fail us, never doesn’t defeat us, is bottomlessly… —But here I am, trying to paper over the gaps with dried-up glue.

Our ground time here will be brief

WITHOUT RELIGION, no one knows what to say about death—our own or others’—nor does anyone know after someone’s death how to talk about (think about) the rest of our lives, so we invent diversions.

In Bruges is a film about two English hit men who are sent to the medieval Belgian town of Bruges, where they have to while away the days, knowing they’re next. Given death’s imminence, is any particular activity of any greater significance than any other activity? Good question.

Lance Olsen’s novel Calendar of Regrets is concerned with tourists, travelers, cafés, voyeurism, the lure and illusion of art, what happens when we die: “Movement is a mode of writing. Writing is a mode of movement.” Every major character moves from existence to (literal or figurative) nonexistence. “I’ve been dreading the disengagement one experiences upon arriving home. You end up maintaining a fever-distance between where you are and where you’ve been. As if you’re recovering from some sort of illness.”

Vladimir Posner says that when a Russian is asked how he’s feeling, he tends to go on and on about how he’s actually feeling, whereas when an American is asked the same question, he invariably answers, “Fine.” We’re doing fine, making progress, moving ahead, living the dream, it’s all good…