Collage is Not a Refuge for the Compositionally Disabled by David Shields / Features / Untitled Books

'"In collage, every fragment is a capsule: I’m on my way to the moon on every page.'"

Collage is Not a Refuge for the Compositionally Disabled by David Shields

David Shields' new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, calls on writers, artists and all working in the creative fields to be ever more mindful of reality in their work. In an increasingly manafactured world, he argues, it is the unadorned truth that must take precedent in the arts. Here he chooses a selection of books that have been stripped of artifice and lay bare their essential message.

I'm not drawn to literature because I love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters' names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. It's not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I'm drawn to literature as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking. What I like about works that are thematically rather than narratively organized is that they're focused line by line and page by page on what the writer really cares about rather than hoping that what the writer cares about will magically creep through the cracks of the narrative, which is the way I experience most stories and novels. Collage-works, thematically organized works, are "about what they're about." Which may sound a tad tautological, but that is the way I often put it to myself. When I read a book that I really love, I experience the excitement that in every paragraph the writer is manifestly exploring his subject.

My former student Nina Goss put it like this, "As a moon rocket ascends, different stages of the engine do what they must to accelerate the capsule. Then each is jettisoned until only the capsule is left with the astronauts on its way to the moon. In linear fiction, the whole structure is accelerating toward the epiphanic moment, and certainly the parts are necessary for the final experience, but I still feel that I and the writer can jettison the pages leading to the epiphany. They serve a purpose and then fall into the Pacific Ocean, so I'm left with Gabriel Conroy and his falling faintly, faintly falling, and I'm heading to the moon in the capsule, but the rest of the story has fallen away. In collage, every fragment is a capsule: I'm on my way to the moon on every page."

A few of my favorite examples:

Renata Adler's Speedboat consists of hundreds of discrete, free-standing, seemingly unrelated paragraphs, all registered in a tone of extraordinarily well-modulated irony. Some of the episodes consist of only a couple of sentences; others are five pages long; most are about half a page. The book is an education in Adler's astringent sensibility, her brutal intelligence. I read her scenes not to find out what will happen but to see if I understand yet what, in Adler's view, constitute the crucial thematic elements of a scene. She repeats the schema over and over until she has taught me how to think about a certain nexus of concerns the same way she does: Language, culture, politics, media, travel, technology are all different kinds of "speedboats"--exciting, unpredictable, powerful, and dangerous in their violent velocity. And just when I've grasped it, the book is over: "It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime."

As is Speedboat, George W.S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context is an assemblage of unconnected paragraphs, narrated in a tone of almost fanatical irony, and perhaps best understood as an anthropological autobiography (a term Trow once used to describe his work). In other words, its ostensible accomplishment--a brilliantly original analysis of the underlying grammar of mass culture--is, in a sense, only a way for him to get at his real subject: the world he inhabits (one of absolute irony: no context) and the world his father, a newspaperman, inhabited (one of absolute sentiment: context).

In the book's final paragraph, Trow says of his father, "Certainly, he said, at the end of boyhood, when as a young man I would go on the New Haven railroad to New York City, it would be necessary for me to wear a fedora hat. I have, in fact, worn a fedora hat, but ironically. Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned--not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me."

The first piece in Bernard Cooper's Maps to Anywhere was selected by Annie Dillard as one of the best essays of 1998, but the book as a whole won the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first novel of 1990, while in the foreword to the book Richard Howard calls the chapters "neither fictions nor essays neither autobiographical illuminations nor cultural inventions." The narrator--Howard calls him "the Bernard-figure (like the Marcel-figure, neither character nor symbol)"--is simultaneously the "author" and a fictional creation.

From mini-section to mini-section and chapter to chapter, Bernard's self-conscious and self-conscious attempts to evoke and discuss his own homosexuality, his brother's death, his father's failing health, his parents' divorce, and southern California kitsch are delicately woven together to form an extremely powerful meditation on the relationship between grief and imagination. "Maps to anywhere" comes to mean: When a self can (though language, memory, research, and invention) project itself anywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self? The book's final sentences--perfect final sentences particularly important to achieving closure in collage--is an articulation of the melancholy that the narrator has, to a degree, deflected until then: "And I walked and walked to hush the world, leaving silence like spoor."

Douglas Coupland's Generation X is, as is Maps to Anywhere, set in southern California, but Coupland is fifteen years younger than Cooper, and the texture of their books is extremely different. Graphics, statistics, and mock-sociological definitions compete, as marginalia, with the principal text, which consist of "tales" only loosely connected by the same cast of characters, but very tightly organized around the inability of any of the characters to feel, really, anything. The mixture of nonfiction and fiction--information crowding out imagination--in Generation X effectively embodies the idea that these characters, bombarded by mall culture and media, feel that that have McLives rather than lives.

As are Speedboat and Within the Context of No Context, Eduardo Galeano's The Book of Embraces, Eduardo Galeano's The Book of Embraces consists of hundreds of extremely short sections; as is Maps to Anywhere, it is an ode to the creative imagination's embrace of everything. A mix of memoir, anecdotes, polemic, parable, fantasy, and Galeano's surreal drawings, the book might at first glance be dismissed as an authorial dumping-ground, but upon more careful inspection, The Book of Embraces reveals itself to be virtually a geometric proof on the intertwined themes of love, terror, and imagination, perhaps best exemplified in this extraordinary mini-chapter: "Tracey Hill was a child "Tracey Hill was a child in a Connecticut town who amused herself as befitted a child of her age, like any other tender little angel of God in the state of Connecticut or anywhere else on this planet.

"One day, together with her little school companions, Tracey started throwing lighted matches into an anthill. They all enjoyed this healthy childish diversion. Tracey, however, saw something which the others didn't see or pretended not to, but which paralyzed her and remained forever engraved in her memory: faced with the dangerous fire, the ants split up into pairs and two by two, side by side, pressed close together, they waited for death."

Brian Fawcett's Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow also blurs fiction and essay. On the top of each page appear parables--some fantastic, others quasi-journalistic--all of which are concerned with media's colonization of North American life (both Fawcett and Coupland are Canadian). On the bottom of each page, meanwhile, runs a book-length footnote about the Cambodian war. The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett's central motif: wall-to-wall media represents as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge.

In U and I, Nicholson Baker writes, "I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers; the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage-points of passage." This is a useful description not only of Baker's first novel, The Mezzanine, but of all of these books. Narrative progression is an apparent contradiction of literary collage, which compels instead by thematic orchestration, internal investigation, and the rubbing together of the author-narrator's emotional trouble with cultural cataclysm of some sort.

No wonder I'm such a fan of the form and of these books in particular: they're all madly in love with their own crises.

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Some other collage works that may be of interest:

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I love how this book can go and does go wherever it wants and needs to go. A crucial excitement for me of collage: unmoored by narrative, it explores the byways to get at the deeper roads underlying everything. It's also utterly unclassifiable generically--often true of collage.

Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot. Barnes's best book by far, for me. A great meditation on the relationship, vexed, between life and art.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke. Pseudo-neutral paragraphs organized into a fierce pacifist polemic.

Grégoire Bouillier, Report on Myself. Not as great as his later The Mystery Guest, but the template from which the latter book derived and extraordinary in its own right.

Joe Brainard, I Remember. Ostensibly, a series of random memories; in fact, beautifully organized around themes of conformity and rebellion.

Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America. A badly undervalued book. Here, too, the book is thought to be a random gathering, but it has real power and momentum, derived from the pressure Brautigan puts upon the relation between trout fishing (pleasure) and America (commerce).

Anne Carson, Plainwater, especially the long essay "Essay on the Difference Between Women and Men," which ranges everywhere from songs on the radio to ancient Chinese history and gets very deeply at the endless war (sexes).

John Cheever, Journals. Far and away Cheever's best book. Geoff Dyer's introduction to the British edition expresses beautifully what makes this book so great.

E.M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist. Any and all Cioran is for me thrilling. The paradox that drives his work is that through expressing exquisitely the anguish of existence he radiates enormous joy. Cf. Beckett.

J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello. For me, far and away his best--that is to say, most formally exciting--book.

Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain. Beautifully translated by Julian Barnes. A gorgeous meditation on dying, rendering in mini-obituaries for self.

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being. See Daudet.

Marguerite Duras, The Lover. I love how brief and focused and seemingly casual and tossed-off this book is. The collage nature of the work intensifies the narrative for a certain kind of reader, e.g., myself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up. Easily Fitzgerald's best, most human, most unmoored (seem to like that word) book.

Amy Fusselman, The Pharmacist's Mate and 8. This will sound too much, but her works are written in love, with love, but laced with blood. I can't imagine higher praise.

Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries. All four volumes. A massive achievement.

Barry Hannah, Boomerang. A little known book of his, beautifully difficult to locate generically and with immense emotional reverb.

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights. Beautifully modular book which in its very form seems to embody sleeplessness.

Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing. More polemical than most of the other books on this list, but utterly great, utterly discombobulating.

Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip. Other people's photos and newspaper articles rearranged to tell virtually all about American dream.

Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay. Drowning in feeling but never in sentiment.

David Markson, His last four books--This Is Not a Novel, Reader's Block, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel--take other people's quotations and reorder them as meditations on specific themes: life/art; 9/11; etc. Great, great work. Immensely influential on my own attempts.

Carole Maso, The Art Lover. Wonderfully quote-crazy.

Leonard Michaels, Shuffle, esp. the 60-page "Journal," which gets deeper at M/F than almost any full-length book I can think of.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets. Meditation on the color blue, which turns into an investigation of the melancholy at the center of human animal.

Friederich Nietzshe, Beyond Good and Evil.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées.

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy.

Jean Toomer, Cane. Extraordinary mash-up of different genres, different forms, different feelings.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, especially the long introduction--the best 20 pages Vonnegut ever wrote.

Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy's. See G.W.S. Trow.

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David Shields lives in Seattle where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto is published by Hamish Hamilton.

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Thursday, 25 February, 2010