How Literature Saved My Life (12 page)

My own failure of imagination? Sure, but as Virginia Woolf said in a passage that I reread dozens of times in the fall of 1991, “The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what
you want to say. This proves that a book is alive: because it has not crushed anything I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.” The novel for me was nothing but crushing alteration. Desperate, I thought of asking a former student if I could use some passages she’d written—as ballast for a ship I couldn’t get out to sea. When I thought I would never be able to write anything again, Natalie was born and the physical universe suddenly seemed unforgivably real. I newly knew that the digressions were the book. The seeming digressions were all connected. The book was everything in front of me. The world is everything that is the case.

This book became
Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity
, which was my Natalie-down-the-rabbit-hole moment. I’ve never touched terra infirma again. Everything I’ve written since has been collage (from the French
coller
, “to glue”).

By the late ’90s, my early forties, I’d stopped writing or reading much if any fiction. I was weary unto death of teaching fiction writing. I would teach standardly great stories, and I would admire them from afar, and sometimes students would love the stories, but I had no real passion anymore for, say, Joyce’s “The Dead.” (The ending of that story is usually interpreted as Gabriel Conroy’s unambiguous, transcendental identification with love and mortality, but to me it seemed more plausible to read the last page or so as an overwritten passage
that conveyed emotional deadness taking refuge in sentimentality. “Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.” Gabriel is thinking about the passion of his wife’s ex-suitor, but the word “generous” appeared—to me, at the time; now, too?—to suggest Gabriel’s confusion of self-pity with selfless love. I figured that if Joyce had meant the last sentence of the story to be truly beautiful, he wouldn’t have used “falling faintly” and “faintly falling” within four words of each other. This repetition created discord at the very climax of the rising hymn; even as Gabriel believed he was liberating himself from egotism, his language for compassion was self-conscious and solipsistic. Neither in memory nor in fantasy was he capable of imagining union, completion, or even shared intimacy. That was my interpretation.)

I could see what made stories like Joyce’s “great” or good or at least well made, but I had and have zero interest in doing something similar. I was watching a lot of self-reflexive documentary films (e.g., Ross McElwee), reading a lot of anthropological autobiographies (e.g., Renata Adler), listening to a lot of stand-up (e.g., Rick Reynolds), and watching a lot of performance art (e.g., Sandra Bernhard). This was the kind of work that excited me, and there was a radical disjunction between the books I was pseudo-espousing in class and the books that I loved reading outside class and was trying to write on my own.
The teaching—the falsity of the teaching—forced me to confront and find and define and refine and extend my own aesthetic. It was thrilling. I once was lost and now am found. (Now I’m lost again, but that’s another story, which I’ll talk about a little later.)

I felt as if I were taking money under false pretenses, so in order to justify my existence to myself, my colleagues, and my students, I developed a graduate course in the self-reflexive gesture in essay and documentary film. The course reader was an enormous, unwieldy, blue packet of hundreds upon hundreds of statements about nonfiction, literary collage, lyric essay. That packet was my life raft: it was teaching me what it was I was trying to write.

Each year, the packet became less unwieldy, less full of repetitions and typographical errors, contained more of my own writing, and I saw how I could push the statements—by myself and by others—into rubrics or categories. All the material about hip-hop would go into its own chapter. So, too, the material about reality TV, memory, doubt, risk, genre, the reality-based community, brevity, collage, contradiction, doubt, etc. Twenty-six chapters, 618 minisections. All
Reality Hunger
ever was to me was that blue life raft: a manuscript in which I was articulating for myself, my students, my peers, and any fellow travelers who might want to come along for the ride the aesthetic tradition out of which I was writing. It wasn’t the novel. And it wasn’t memoir. It was something else. It was the idea that all great works of literature
either dissolve a genre or invent one. If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms. It’s a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many really do? Coetzee on his own work: “Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing.”

And here was the big break: I realized how perfectly the appropriated and remixed words embodied my argument. Just as I was arguing for work that occupied a bleeding edge between genres, so, too, I wanted the reader to experience in my mash-up the dubiety of the first person pronoun. I wanted the reader to not quite be able to tell who was talking—was it me or Sonny Rollins or Emerson or Nietzsche or David Salle or, weirdly, none of us or all of us at the same time?

Until that point, I hadn’t thought a great deal about the degree to which the book appropriated and remixed other people’s words. It seemed perfectly natural to me. I love the work of a lot of contemporary visual artists whose work is bound up with appropriation—Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Elaine Sturtevant, Glenn Ligon. And I’ve been listening to rap since Grandmaster Flash in the late ’70s. Why in the world would contemporary writing not be able to keep pace with the other arts?

Most readers of the book-as-intended would have spotted only a handful of the most well-known quotations,
suspected that a lot of the paragraphs were quotations (even when they couldn’t quite place them), and come to regard my
I
as a floating umbrella-self, sheltering simultaneously one voice (“my own”) and multiple voices. The possibility that every word in the book might be quotation and not “original” to the author could have arisen. The whole argument of that version of the book was to put “reality” within quadruple quotation marks. Reality isn’t straightforward or easily accessible; it’s slippery, evasive. Just as authorship is ambiguous, knowledge is dubious, and truth is unknown or, at the very least, relative. (This entire paragraph is cribbed from an email Jonathan Raban sent me.)

My publisher, Knopf, which is a division of Random House, which is a subset of Bertelsmann, a multi-billion-dollar multinational corporation, didn’t see it the same way. I consulted numerous copyright attorneys, and I wrote many impassioned emails to my editor and the Random House legal department. At one point, I considered withdrawing the book and printing it at Kinko’s (now subsumed into FedEx office). Random House and I worked out a compromise whereby there would be no footnotes in the text, but there would be an appendix in the back with citations in very, very small type (if you’re over fifty, good luck reading it). Quite a few of the citations are of the “I can’t quite remember where this is from, though it sounds like fourth-generation Sartre; endless is the search for truth” variety.

Some people seemed to think I was the Antichrist because I didn’t genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property (there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one). I became, briefly, the poster boy for The Death of the Novel and The End of Copyright. Fine by me. Those have become something close to my positions. The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms. You can work within these forms or write about them or through them or appropriate the strategies these forms use, but it’s not a very good idea to go on writing in a vacuum. The novel was invented to access interiority. Now most people communicate through social media, and everyone I know under thirty has remarkably little notion of privacy. The novel is an artifact, which is why antiquarians cling to it so fervently. Art, like science, progresses. Forms evolve. Forms are there to serve the culture, and when they die, they die for a good reason—or so I have to believe, the novel having long since gone dark for me …

The only books I care about strip the writer naked
and, in that way, have at least the chance of conveying
some real knowledge of our shared predicament
.

Y
EATS SAID
that we can’t articulate the truth, but we can embody it. I think that’s wrong or at least beside the point. What’s of interest to me is precisely how we try to articulate the truth, and what that says about us, and about “truth.”

What separates us is not what happens to us. Pretty much the same things happen to most of us: birth, love, bad driver’s license photos, death. What separates us is how each of us thinks about what happens to us. That’s what I want to hear.

Texting: proof that we’re solitary animals who like being left alone as we go through life, commenting on it. We’re aliens.

Updike: “I loathe being interviewed; it’s a half-form,
like maggots.” Gertrude Stein: “Remarks are not literature.”
Um
is not a word, but I like how people use it now to ironize/mock/deflate/put scare quotes around what comes next. The moment I try not to stutter, I stutter. I never stutter when singing to myself in the shower.

The perceiver, by his very presence, alters what’s perceived: Plato,
Dialogues of Socrates
. Eckermann,
Conversations of Goethe
. Boswell,
Life of Johnson
. Malcolm,
The Journalist and the Murderer
. Schopenhauer: “The world is my idea.” We don’t see the world. We make it up.

Ancient Sanskrit texts emphasize the ephemeral nature of truth. Sanskrit writers use fiction, nonfiction, stories within stories, stories about stories, reiteration, oral history, exegesis, remembered account, rules, history, mythological tales, aphorisms to try to get to the “truth,” often dressing it up in narrative as a way to make it appear comprehensible, palatable. Sanskrit works revolve around the question “Who is the narrator?” Subjectivity is always present in the recitation: the nature of reality is ever elusive. We spend our lives chasing it.

When playing an electric guitar, instead of plugging the cord straight into an amplifier, you first plug it into a little electronic stomp box called a pedal. A second cord takes the altered sound from the pedal to the amplifier. The sound coming from the guitar to the pedal is “clean”—as true to life as a given electric guitar can be (which is a whole other debate). There are hundreds of different guitar pedals you can buy, each one altering the
“true” sound of the instrument. One “clean” note from your Telecaster can become a crescendo of sound (if sent through the right effects pedal).

In
Amadeus
, Salieri says re Mozart’s score, “I am staring through the cage of his meticulous ink strokes at an absolute beauty.”

In Ron Fein’s
Drumming the Moon
, the flute assumes a pitch and sound somewhere between the tonality of human expression and wolf howl, never quite sure of its place in the world, negotiating its own survival.

I recently reread Renata Adler’s novel
Pitch Dark
and felt like I finally got it. The three sections are thematic sculptures. The first section is about how love is a mystery, a sadness, an absence, a darkness. The second section takes place in Ireland, where the Adler figure gets in a car accident: the misunderstandings between her and everyone she meets are represented as utter epistemological darkness. And the third section is this darkness writ large, into society and civilization as a whole—every human interaction is conducted in pitch dark.