TURBINE | KAPOHAU

David Shields’ has views against the novel. I first came across these in Joe Moran’s 2017 essay Walking with a purpose and excerpts from Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which we read for class. I didn’t know how strong of a reaction these ideas would bring up in me, particularly in defence of the novel (or rather, against dismissing entire genres of writing outright). This is a rough sum of my thoughts. 

The lyric essay, [Shields] wrote, was a form suited to the fluidity and miscellaneousness of contemporary life, unlike most modern novels, which carried on deploying an elaborate, overbuilt stage set of narrative conventions which could no longer sate our hunger for reality. For Shields, the most vital new writing dispensed with this obsolete fictional apparatus to explore the more urgent drama of an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive.

It seems to me to work against literature to categorically dismiss entire forms rather than evaluating individual works of writing on their own terms. It’s dismissive of the content and quality of writing, which is found uniquely in each individual piece of work, no matter what form it’s in. I don’t dismiss that form is highly important to a piece of work – that its individual tendencies influence content. But there are bad lyric essays and good novels; there are good lyric essays and bad novels. We can determine this by reading each piece and considering it. Certainly, form should be included in our considerations. And, I can see that over time, a particular form may no longer suit the contexts it’s used in, and habit or tradition leads to its overuse, rather than favouring new, exploratory means of capturing the world – this seems to be Shield’s view of the continued use of the novel form. But casting a judgement against an entire form outright seems to deny the ability for writers to not only capture our world in existing forms, but also simply, to write well. 

Much lit-fic popular in the 2020’s seems to lean towards plotless meandering rather than hitting highly plotted beats, or ‘deploying … elaborate, overbuilt stage set[s] of narrative conventions’. Woolf’s fiction enacts the rich intensity of phenomenological interiority, by no means sacrificing this in order to kneel at the ‘altar of plot’. Morrison’s Beloved is full of the ‘urgent drama of an active human consciousness’ – in particular, the aftershocks of memory – in visceral and lyrical prose, and with no simple nor linear plotted narrative. In essence, Shields’s view seems to fail to appreciate the capability of the novel to enact what he believes only the lyric essay can – the richness of reality – and condemns it from even trying. 

In some ways, I have a suspicion that writing a lyric essay and writing a novel are more similar to each other than Shields might admit. The emphasis in creating, selecting and ordering fragments to create ripe spaces for dwelling and to weave a tapestry of (dis)connection in a lyric essay doesn’t seem dissimilar to writing a novel – it is just perhaps more abstract and varied in context. I like this about the lyric essay: the weird zipping between contexts that allows for juxtaposition and difference and similarity to emerge. In both forms, the writer chooses what to include, they take great care to write about it, they order elements, they shape language. Either way, form is a mere idea that the writer has all of the freedom in the world to do what they please with – take what you want and screw the rest. The novel and the lyric essay are as malleable as the writer is willing to mould, and as capable as capturing the texture of living as the writer is. Bowing down to any form as the holy grail, without questioning the individual needs of a project, seems to take a crucial aspect of your autonomy as an artist away from the process. Writers create art. We must make decisions that serve it. 

I do understand that the internet has drastically fragmented experience since it’s taken root (it’s an integral part of life etc etc, that stream of images and text disembodied and washing over our screens). But, to be honest, I still don’t find the rapid uptake of digital life to require of an author any particular form. As in the history of all art, having a consciousness and interacting with others with consciousness, having memory and interacting with others with memory, seem to be the most interesting conditions we live with, whatever their context may be. Certainly, the internet has changed the way we interact with one another, how we receive and move in the world, but the concerns and tribulations of those interactions remain much unchanged despite them now happening in pixels and over feeds/messages/DMs/comment sections – we still care about finding community, expressing ourselves, learning, loving, trying to be good people. The location (or ‘site’, haha) has changed, but the core of those interactions remains unchanged. I suspect they will so long as we are human. Individual works of writing may or may not explore our conditions well, regardless of form. That’s up to the writer.

And while the world may feel fragmented and episodic, we make decisions, take jobs that move us to new towns, meet people who introduce us to future partners, have complicated relationships with friends, family, scroll across adverts for concerts that lead us to attend. We take the world into ourselves and move ourselves based on it. We recount how the circumstances of our decisions came about, and narrate life based on this. Listen to how you and your friends recount anecdotes – we are always telling stories. When I see my friends after some time apart, I learn of new happenings in ongoing sagas, whether that’s the interior dynamics of a flat or how they came to lose the book they were reading on the bus. These recounts are almost always impassioned and rich in the minutiae of human experience and sacrifice nothing to the mere fact of a series of events taking place. It’s true that novels may suffer from the lack of truly integrating the abundant, varying and frenetic happenings of human consciousness. These novels can bore me, leaving my mind stranded in an untextured simulation of the world. But I don’t think this relies on the presence or absence of plot, and the novel form doesn’t necessitate such a mode of writing. There are, as I said with reference to Morrison and Woolf, great novels that simply don’t have this problem.

On plagiarism, I have less to say to Shields (whose Reality Hunger is compiled of quotations, adapted and collaged, organised as an index of aphorisms which he encourages to be read without considering their source). I think it’s fine to create new things from what already exists. All that I’ll say is that it is interesting and can contribute to a piece of writing to know who said what when, and in response to what – this tells us about history as well as what the writer reads. Simply, there is a usefulness in knowing.

While I am prone to thinking we make the world new each moment, the languages we use are covered in fingerprints—fingerprints which led us to those languages—so we might create with them ourselves. Tracing those fingerprints might be fruitful or not, that is up to us to decide; but at the very least it can lead us to new rivers, rivers of words which others found to flow instead of sink.