"Genre is a maximum security prison": David Shields Talks to Heidi Broadhead Somewhere Else

Heidi Broadhead doesn't do all her good blogging for us: she's also the "Arts Nerd" over at our local politics/culture/etc. blog, Publicola, and yesterday she posted an excellent interview with David Shields (also local) about his new literary "manifesto," Reality Hunger. The book has often been seen as an argument against fiction (which it is in some ways) but here's a section from the interview that explains that it's really an argument against genre:

AN: And I wanted you to talk a little bit about the—wait, I wrote it down—”the reality continuum”—somewhere between J.R.R. Tolkien and a list of facts.

DS: Right. I talk about this guy who actually died a year or two ago named Shields who live in Eastern Washington. He kept the longest-running journal ever. He kept a journal of every single thing of every day. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pages. That would be close to something quasi-real. And someone like Tolkien is obviously quite fantastical and even there, people who knew him say how unbelievably autobiographical that book is if you know how to read it, because it all just tracks very closely to his own life in a strange way....

It’s taken me a long time, but some of the work I love has a nonfictional frame to give the work a sense of urgency or risk or discomfort or nakedness or authenticity. So many of the works I love the most want to investigate the world rather than entertain the reader.

But I’m just as much opposed to, say, a straight-ahead memoir as I am to a conventional novel because they both seem to me to be way too comfortable with conventions of genre. There’s a line in the book where I say, “genre is a minimum security prison.” And also there’s a wonderful line by Walter Benjamin in the book, “All great works of literature either invent a genre or dissolve one,” which I really love.

To me, what happens when you dissolve a genre, you get to this: “When we are not sure, we are alive.” The ones that really knock me out are works in which we’re sort of off the click track and we don’t know where we’re going. Again, going back to Maggie Nelson’s book (which we had been talking about earlier): What is that book? Is it a memoir? Is it a philosophical meditation? Is it a history of the color blue? Is it a cri de coeur about her breakup? Is it art criticism? You don’t know where you’re going from paragraph to paragraph. All that you do know is that you’re going deeper into, you know, a human heart. I just love that feeling, and I think the best books have that quality. I’m interested in work that hovers between things because when you hover between things you can go anywhere you want and your loyalty as a writer becomes investigating something rather than going through the paces.

One thing that's striking to me: this "manifesto" has to this moment received 21 customer reviews on Amazon: all 5 stars. That unanimity is rare for any book, but especially one that aims to be provocative. I know customer reviews are a noisy piece of data--maybe they're all friends and family of Mr. Shields (surely he has one enemy out there somewhere!)--so I'm not sure what it means, if anything, but I wonder if his provocation is in fact so consistent with the cultural moment that no one disagrees with it (at least no one of the sort who will buy and read a literary manifesto right when it comes out).

Meanwhile, here's the "author video" we have on the site for the book, which captures a bit of Shields's mashup style and his taste for autobiographical reality:

--Tom

Update: My friend Brad Parsons points me to another Shields interview that GQ has just posted. It's a good one too. Here's a bit:

GQ: What I was really getting at, though, is that a lot of nonfiction writing still happens in monthly magazines, and always has. You mention Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail '72, and I can think of a lot of stuff from that same period that falls into that same category, like Tom Wolfe's nonfiction. These stories are seen as high points for literary journalism, but I wonder if any of them would pass the fact-checking test today. I feel like a lot of those Hunter Thompson pieces would basically fall apart under the slightest scrutiny from, say, the research department of this magazine.
Shields: Well, but think of Wallace's piece on McCain, which began as a Rolling Stone piece and turned into a small book. I love that piece. To me, it's as good a thing as he ever wrote. Wallace's nonfiction, to me, is leagues better than his fiction.

GQ: I'm really glad to hear somebody else say that.
Shields: I mean, his fiction is so overvalued, it's ridiculous. He's a wonderful writer whose best works are the two collected books of essays. But the novels are just not good. A few of the stories are okay. But it's the essays, it's the articles, that he's fantastic at.

GQ: I feel like I never saw anybody really saying that, in all the tributes that came out after he died. Everyone treated his death as this great loss for modern fiction, and the nonfiction was generally dismissed as something that took his time and energy away from his true calling. I thought that was insane. 
Shields: It was unbelievable. And Wallace contributed to that. He always disparaged his nonfiction, for reasons I don't totally understand. There's a part of my book where I talk about how so many of the best works by fiction writers are in fact their works of nonfiction. I'm in the middle of preparing a talk, 'cause I'm going to go around and give a bunch of readings in the next month, so I'm sort of turning the book into a 45 minute talk, and part of it is the list of 50 writers who, for me, are far more exciting as nonfiction writers while they're primarily known as fiction writers. Whether it's Nathaniel Hawthorne, the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, which sort of dwarfs the rest of The Scarlet Letter for me, to Wallace, to Simon Gray, to Leonard Michaels, to Zadie Smith. And this is just my opinion. Who am I to say this? But that's my view, that these people come most alive as nonfiction writers.

Shields seems to be as nutty a listmaker as I, so if I can track that down that list of 50 I'll share it. One side note: funny to see Zadie Smith on his list, since she wrote a piece for the Guardian (whose copyright has apparently run out to host it) in the fall that, if I remember correctly, was appreciative of Shields's book but still argued fiction had more life in it than the essay.