Shield's Modernist Manifesto Arrives a Few Decades Too Late

Like a scarlet letter, an accusation of plagiarism is perhaps the most devastating fate that can befall a man or woman of letters. Doris Kearns Goodwin, for instance, will never quite enjoy the same reputation she had before scandal erupted over an unquoted passage in “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys;” Stephen E. Ambrose, who copied from no fewer than twelve sources over the course of writing seven books, may as well be known as academia’s Samuel Mudd.

In an era that vilifies writers like these, it goes without saying that defenders of plagiarists are few and far between. Few, for instance, would dare defend a writer like Kaavya Viswanathan ’08, whose novel—“How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life”—borrows more than just a few words from several previously published books. Few, that is, except for David Shields, who, in “Reality Hunger,” maintains that Viswanathan must be considered an artist precisely because—and not in spite—of her obvious plagiarism.

Referencing Viswanathan’s novel in one of the 618 numbered vignettes that constitutes “Reality Hunger,” Shields reveals his disappointment at the media’s smear-campaign against the young author, then a Harvard sophomore: “Excuse me, but isn’t the entire publishing industry built on telling the exact same stories over and over again?” he asks. “I don’t feel any of the guilt normally attached to ‘plagiarism,’ which seems to me organically connected to creativity itself.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the exactly sort of the statement—somewhat provocative and intentionally theatrical—that has made “Reality Hunger” into a topic of conversation since its publication. The book, a self-proclaimed “manifesto,” is as elusive of genre classification as it is resistant to a simple encapsulation. At once a meditation on the idea of truth in art, “Reality Hunger” also comes off as rallying cry for what Shields describes as “an organic and as-yet-unstated” artistic movement—the idea of the collage, a blend of media forms welded together that can shed far more light on the mysteries of existence than can the sort of simple, reductive plot that governs most novels and films.

In other words, collages are “real” in that they do not attempt to distort or to reduce the absurdity of the universe into palatable packages for the viewer to take away; they are “real” because they help to explain that absurdity to a viewer who is all too often deceived into believing that some easy, take-away message exists in every inexplicable situation.

Of course, “Reality Hunger” itself is meant as an example of the sort of collage for which Shields so loudly clamors throughout the book: it has no narrative structure whatsoever, is told in a series of dubiously related vignettes—some like essays, others like haikus—and draws upon a wealth of examples from culture as highbrow as Proust and as lowbrow as reality television shows. “Nothing is going to happen in this book,” Shields writes.

And while Shields’s decision to construct “Reality Hunger” in the style of the art he most values supplements the reader’s ability to grasp some of the more confusing propositions in the text, the book’s status as a “manifesto” is ultimately problematic, since it is unclear for what exactly “Reality Hunger” can be said to be a ‘manifesto.’ The term implies the creation of an innovative world view, philosophy, or theory—basically, the advent of something new. And although Shields certainly believes his book to elucidate the development of a new art form, one that blurs to the point of invisibility the “distinction between fiction and nonfiction” as per “the lure and blur of the real,” what he advocates is not exactly new, and, as such, does not—at least in terms of content—earn its status as such.

“If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms,” he tells us. As an artist, one must understand that what matters is not some artificial plot but rather the truth—or, in other words, the “reality”—one conveys. Shields writes, “[It’s] not the story. It’s just this breathtaking world—that’s the point.” If these are the foundations of Shields’ manifesto, has all of this not been said before? Can Shields be given credit for tracking the development of a “new” art form that, considering the work of artists as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett—both of whom Shields references extensively throughout his book—can be said to have developed along with the rise of modernity?

Woolf and Beckett should not be considered as artists in pursuit of the same common goal, but according to Shields, the work of each nevertheless demonstrates certain aspects of the “reality” Shields demands in art: the replacement of traditional plot structure for the uninhibited emotional current of stream-of-consciousness narration in one and the fixation on the absurd in the other. However, Woolf, Beckett, and countless others who practiced these techniques wrote generations before “Reality Hunger” ever hit the shelves. To that end, what good is a manifesto if it appears almost a century after the “innovations” it champions first began to appear?

Although Shields has given voice to the artistic controversies of recent years—Oprah Winfrey’s war on James Frey, the prevalence and popularity of reality television, the question of whether people still want to read novels in the Information Age—“Reality Hunger,” with its fixation on literary and artistic forms that developed long before Shields ever came of age, seems a bit out of sequence. While the ideas Shields espouses—a greater emphasis on truth instead of the artificiality inherent in traditional narrative structures—are valid, they seem to be ideas that most students of literature will have encountered at some point or other in their career. In other words, it is the novelty Shields believes his book to carry—the fact that he considers it a manifesto to herald in a new age that seems to have arrived long ago—that is the problem.

—Staff writer James K. McAuley can be reached at mcauley@fas.harvard.edu.