David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

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 traditional 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.