David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

When I can’t sleep, I get up and pull a book off the shelves. There are no more than thirty writers I can reliably turn to in this situation, and Salinger is still one of them. I’ve read each of his books at least a dozen times. What is it in his work that offers such solace at 3:00 A.M. of the soul? For me, it’s how his voice, to a different degree and in a different way in every book, talks back to itself, how it listens to itself talking, comments upon what it hears, and keeps talking. This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity, is the pleasure and burden of being conscious, and the gift of his work—what makes me less lonely and makes life more livable—lies in its revelation that this isn’t a deformation in how I think; this is how human beings think.

How an awful lot of “literature” is to me the very antithesis of life

WE LIVE IN a culture that is completely mediated and artificial, rendering us (me, anyway; you, too?) exceedingly distracted, bored, and numb. Straightforward fiction functions only as more Bubble Wrap, nostalgia, retreat. Why is the traditional novel c. 2013 no longer germane (and the postmodern novel shroud upon shroud)? Most novels’ glacial pace isn’t remotely congruent with the speed of our lives and our consciousness of these lives. Most novels’ explorations of human behavior still owe far more to Freudian psychology than they do to cognitive science and DNA. Most novels treat setting as if where people now live matters as much to us as it did to Balzac. Most novels frame their key moments as a series of filmable moments straight out of Hitchcock. And above all, the tidy coherence of most novels—highly praised ones in particular—implies a belief in an orchestrating deity, or at least a purposeful meaning to existence that the author is unlikely to possess, and belies the chaos and entropy that surround and inhabit and overwhelm us. I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive. Samuel Johnson: A book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it. Acutely aware of our mortal condition, I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time (literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it).

How literature couldn’t possibly save my life in this way anymore

THE SADNESS OF the Yankee fan lies in his knowledge that his gorgeous dream is made of money.

This is America, though: capital of capitalism.

I was once wildly in lust with a girl who was fond of saying it’s not the bulge in front, it’s the bulge in back.

So, too, I’ve lived my life for art, which I know is not immemorial.

Illusion, baby, illusion—whatever the cost.

How literature saved Rick Moody’s life

IN THE EXTREMELY bureaucratized culture in which I now live, I’m inundated by documents: itineraries, instruction manuals, lectures, permit forms, advertisements, primers, catalogues, comment cards, letters of complaint, end-of-year reports, accidentally forwarded email, traffic updates, alumni magazine class notes. What I call “fraudulent artifacts”—pseudo-interviews, faux lectures, quasi-letters, “found” texts, etc.—exact/enact giddy, witty, imaginative revenge on the received forms that dominate and define our lives. These counterfeits capture the barely suppressed frustration and feeling and yearning that percolate about 1/16th of an inch below most official documents. Such forgeries appeal to me—utterly disconnected as I am from the conventions of traditional fiction and having turned to genre-emptying work to reanimate my literary passion.

E.g., Gregory Burnham’s “Subtotals,” seemingly a pointless data sheet of the number of times the narrator has climbed stairs, sent a postcard, received a kiss, etc. It isn’t that at all. It’s a beautiful ode to—if we’re lucky—not finding God or winning a Purple Heart but averting calamity and muddling through in the middle. This is what I do, in any case, so I want to say we all are.

Lucas Cooper, “Class Notes,” on one level a McSweeney’s- style parody of alumni magazine class notes, on another level an anthropology of Reagan-era unfettered capitalism, and on still a deeper level a chart of the transition over the course of a man’s life from hyperaggression to inevitable loss to the bliss of some big quiet thing falling down and locking into place, like a whisper of some weight.

Paul Theroux, “Acknowledgments,” a parody of the acknowledgments in the front of a scholarly book and a brutal commentary on the vampiric nature of the well-funded critic (getting fat on the bones of the obscure poet).

Rick Moody, “Primary Sources,” ostensibly a list of Moody’s favorite works of art while growing up but really a devastating meditation on how, in the absence of his father, he was “looking elsewhere for the secrets of ethics and home.” Join the fucking club, my friend.

How intricately intertwined literature and death are

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY’S The Clock is a twenty-four-hour-long video constructed of thousands of film fragments in which a character interacts in some way with a clock or watch. As each new clip appears, a new narrative is suggested, only to be swiftly overtaken by another one. The video is synchronized to the local time. At any moment, I can look at the work and use it as a clock. There are amazingly few kinds of gestures available in the repertory of human behavior, and yet there’s a comfort that at, say, 5:00 P.M., for most people it’s quitting time. Film (life itself?) is an irreducibly melodramatic medium. Very, very few clips from comedies—would wreck the mood, which is Our birth is our death begun . Many of the actors are now dead. Soon enough I’ll join them (you, too, dear reader …). The seconds are ticking away as I’m watching. I want to ID the clip— I exist —but the fragment and my identification are almost immediately overwhelmed by time, which always wins.

Yeats: “The intellect of man is forced to choose/Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse/A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark./ When all that story’s finished, what’s the news? / In luck or out the toil has left its mark: / That old perplexity an empty purse, / Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.”

Death is my copilot, my topos. Who scratched in ancient clay those first words Love equals death, art equals death, life equals death ? Or perhaps it was a single word. If so, all literature and all philosophy have come from this single word. Plato believes this scratch leads to truth (his belief in the “really real”). Nietzsche believes this scratch leads to impotence (“Without music, life would be a mistake”). Yet both made millions singing the same song. Where did the formula ( love equals death equals art equals life ) come from?

How I once wanted language to save my life

ASTUDENT IN MY CLASS, feeling self-conscious about being much older than the other students, told me he’d been in prison. I asked him what crime he’d committed, and he said, “Shot a dude.” He wrote a series of very good but very stoic stories about prison life, and when I asked him why the stories were so tight-lipped, he explained to me the jailhouse concept of “doing your own time,” which means that when you’re a prisoner you’re not supposed to burden the other prisoners by complaining about your incarceration or regretting what you’d done or, especially, claiming you hadn’t done it. Do your own time: it’s a seductive slogan. I find that I quote it to myself occasionally, but really I don’t subscribe to the sentiment. I’m not, after all, in prison. Stoicism is of no use to me whatsoever. What I’m a big believer in is talking about everything until you’re blue in the face.