Real life and all that jazz: reading David Shields' Reality Hunger

So I've been reading David Shields' Reality Hunger, a book I picked up (from the street) during my mooching about during the dog days of the coronavirus lockdown. Know it? It's a sort of manifesto for new forms of writing. A polemic against the novel (largely written off as "boring" and outdated), it argues for a major re-appraisal of the essay. Shields reckons the essay form -  including memoirs and other hybrid genres that blend invented stuff and real events, creating something indeterminate and ultimately more intellectually bracing and somehow "real" - is effectively the future of creative neo-fictional writing.

Reality Hunger: this not a real book

All very interesting, but this is a music blog so I'm gonna skip (thank god, you say) any half-baked attempt to appraise Reality Hunger as a book of literary criticism-cum-philosophy (which seems to be roughly what it is). Instead, I'll launch into ... a half-baked appraisal of something else! Yep, here come a few rambling thoughts on the musical references in the book. Music pops up only a few times in Reality Hunger, but to fairly interesting effect. There are a couple of mentions of rap/hip-hop. Shields thinks rap "cuts to the chase", likening it to soundbites or bumper stickers in its punchy brevity. It's compressed and hits home, something like a short story. Rap also gets a mention for the way that some artists have extolled "realness" as a special quality. Not reality itself, but a thing which means something like: "We are people whose lives (or backgrounds, or ethnicities) are characterised by hardship and a heightened awareness of the realities of the 'street'/modern life, and because we're talented people we can incorporate this realness into our best-selling rap albums etc". Rap braggadocio as a representational tool. So OK, rap's brevity and directness, and rap's claimed social authenticity (or whatever). What else is in Shields' musical locker? There's jazz. It's only a paragraph (one of Shields' numbered paragraphs which run throughout the book, #592 in fact), but what he says is fairly striking:

"Jazz as jazz - jazzy jazz - is pretty well finished. The interesting stuff is all happening on the fringes of the form where there are elements of jazz and elements of all sorts of things as well. Jazz is a trace, but it's not a defining trace ..."

Jazzy jazz written off just like that? Oh dear! Of course I can see the point. He's clearly throwing in the "death of jazzy jazz" idea as another way of pushing a thesis about the death of the novel (the novelly novel, you might say). Shields' book is like this throughout. Major claim, tersely made, before a rapid onward movement. It's a ground-clearing operation, and he's quite prepared to use a few explosive to speed up the process if necessary. Which is a good moment to mention Lou Reed! He pops up via Metal Machine Music as an example, as Shields sees it, of an artist who "kills his characters", destroying the artfully-wrought story of the Velvet Underground with the razed earth-like blast of a hard-to-listen-to album designed to get him out a record contract (an "essayistic impulse", says Shields). Hmm, I don't know though. Does this cherry-picking of music stuff really work? Does it effectively forward his main argument (forget old-style fiction and the novel, make way for the new forms of quasi-essay)? And are the music points he brings in even true in themselves? I'm sceptical. At paragraph #279 Shields says he was himself in a rock band in Seattle for a few years when he was young but "at some point I felt there was nothing else - nothing more - to be done with the standard rock format". He says he dropped rock music per se and began to dabble with rock/hip-hop fusions. 

Fine, but - perhaps as with the "death of the novel" notion - this isn't necessarily either true or fair. Having listened to quite a lot of rock music in what Shields calls the basic "Beatles/Nirvana" mould, I still think music of this kind being made in 2020 is (or can be) interesting, exciting, moving, "real" (in the very qualified sense that art is ever real), and all the rest. If it's any good, that is. I don't listen to much contemporary jazz, but I'd be surprised - even with a form that is much older than rock music - if this wasn't also true of jazz, including "jazzy jazz". Meanwhile, though he's happy to wax lyrical about rap here and there, he also boldly proclaims that hip-hop is "stagnant" (of course even stagnancy is denied rock, which is just straight out "dead"). I'm doubtful about how much he genuinely pays attention to music anyway: he says, for instance, Reed's MMM came out after "two decades" of Reed "playing rock 'n' roll". Which is a stretch, given the LP came out in 1975 and his proto-VU stuff dates from about 1964. Basically, I think Shields overreaches with his music points. And, for that matter, I think he's also overdoing it with his attacks on the novel. Just because an artistic formation has been around a long time doesn't means it's somehow automatically invalidated. I'm constantly amazed, for example, at how something as "primitive" as one person singing and playing an acoustic guitar can be incredibly rich and textured, and yes, somehow vital and "new". Jettisoning entire fields of art because they're deemed to be no longer necessary or relevant in the modern world is blinkered and depressing. I think there's a touch of nihilism in Shields' book which is disheartening and even slightly unpleasant.   

Which is not to say I don't have some basic sympathy with the ideas Shields is throwing around. Shields talks - rhapsodises almost - about things like "the interstices between life and art". We have "a thirst for reality", he says. Not our own deadly boring reality, but "other people's reality, edited". What we want from art, he reckons, is "reality, mysteriously deepened". All probably true, at least to some degree. When he praises Proust and Beckett (and less celebrated people like Simon Gray, author of The Smoking Diaries), I tend to agree. These are excellent writers, great artists even. Hard-to-pinpoint hybrid forms can be amazingly good and - as Shields rightly says - there's no such thing as a memoir or an autobiography that isn't itself partly invented (or re-imagined, finessed, altered in the act of remembering, altered again in the act of writing etc etc). In this sense these are "fiction" as well. Fine, David, fine. I agree. And it's why the book is worth reading. It also got me thinking about that master of musical artifice - Howard Devoto! All Shields' talk about "real life" and how we supposedly crave it, but only if it's an ersatz, treated version - it's classic Magazine. "So this is real life / You're telling me": Devoto was aware that we're all trapped in a made-up reality and none of us can act naturally even if we wanted to. To Shields this is doubtless boring old post-punk music (a dead genre etc), but I hear a note of Devoto-esque irony and self-awareness in dozens of newish bands these days. Who cares if they're "generic" if they're also genuinely good? So, bye bye Mr Shields and don't write off the old too quickly. After finishing your book I'm about to start Andreï Makine's Le Testament Francais. Not sure if you'd approve, though it does include an epigraph from Proust: "I have used their real names". Good old Marcel! La vérité. Found at last!