Enrique Vila-Matas and David Shields
While I wait to hear back from MFA fiction programs — I am expecting nine more rejection letters — I am not writing short stories, barely reading, and the New Yorker bill has laid to waste. My reading list is following suit. Afraid of being told I can’t write, lately I’ve been reading books that question writing’s value. In the midst of writing a story I often consult a shelf of ‘Why Literature Rules’ but as I await rejection I have moved those books over for a stack of ‘Why Literature Sucks’ and haven’t looked back. It’s a great comfort to find in Bartleby & Co., by Enrique Vila-Matas, that “Robert Walser knew that writing that one cannot write is also writing.” Sometimes the best kind of self-help is commiseration, gloom, and Schopenhauer.
Enrique Vila-Matas’ Bartleby and Co. and David Shields’ Reality Hunger posit my aversion to fiction-writing — what I tended to call self-doubt — as aesthetic maturation. Both the narrator of Bartleby and Co. and Shields published books years ago but haven’t (been able to) since. Fittingly, the books are not cohesive narratives, but collages of paragraphs — long stories and quotes, like tumblr. At the end of his life, Oscar Wilde uttered inspiring words for the non-writer, something like: “When I did not know life, I wrote; now that I know its meaning, I have nothing more to write.” The book is littered with successful failures: “Duchamp’s life was his finest work of art. . . Duchamp abandoned painting for over fifty years because he preferred to play chess. Isn’t that wonderful” Bartleby and Co. is not “Writing for Dummies” but rather “Writing is for Dummies.”
Similarly, David Shields’ Reality Hunger: a manifesto, with its 600+ uncited quotations, tears down genre-loyalty, especially to the novel, in favor of visceral and direct writing that takes in “larger and larger chunks of ‘reality.’” He riffs on poetic non-fiction, collage, rap, lyric essay, memoir. A writing instructor and graduate of Iowa himself, Shields disavows the hubristic fiction the public loves. See #321: “Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, ‘No, it doesn’t.’”
With no will to write and little reason to read, I passed my purgatory happily befriending Vila-Matas and Shields. I am no longer beholden to the version of myself that wanted to go to graduate school! The uncreative man, according to Vila-Matas, “has the power to create and, at the same time, the power to decide not to.”
But of course, part of me does want to get into just one MFA program, any of the ones I spent months, I must admit, applying to. I endured the sadism of writing an essay on why I want to write (I realize now that I should have compiled a list of quotes, like “I have never begun a novel without hoping that it would be the one that would make it unnecessary for me to write another” from Francois Mauriac or Hemingway’s “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.”) And thus do I find myself browsing bookstores, purchasing a book on writing, full of literature-hope and fiction-thirst: The Writer’s Chapbook edited by George Plimpton, thematically organized selections from the Paris Review interviews. This should be the opposite of Bartleby and Co. and Reality Hunger, quoting John Gardner and William Faulkner instead of Pessoa and D’agata — and at times, it is. However, writers paraded in the Paris Review have their doubts too. “I have always regretted having gotten involved with literature up to my neck. I would have preferred to be a monk; but, as I said, I was torn between wanting fame and wishing to renounce the world.” — Eugène Ionesco.
Next, I went to Lewis Hyde’s The Gift expecting optimism and inspiration, but again found a new angle on the argument between art-making and resignation. Hyde’s artistic icons turn away from their creative gift in order to receive it. Being lazy is creative. “Fecundity is idle.”
Two Monoliths of Creative Idleness
Gary Snyder said, “I just dropped poetry. I don’t want to sound precious, but in some sense I did drop it. Then I started writing poems that were better. From that time forward I always looked on the poems I wrote as gifts that were not essential to my life; if I never wrote another one, it wouldn’t be a great tragedy.”
The two bookshelves were becoming one. Writers enjoying success hate writing as those pissing on literature love it. After all the glorification of fiction’s futility, Shields and Vila-Matas encourage writers to write about our extra-literary lives — the moments that are post-epiphanic, seemingly unpoetic, lost in the wind but curious to the eye.
Finally, a short story broke my spell of non-reading, the original Bartleby. Melville’s Bartleby refuses to do anything. A non-conformist with no set of ideals, he merely doesn’t. And yet, the relentless bafflement of the narrator, Bartleby’s employer, is so funnily rendered that I felt myself wanted to write, despite all of Vila-Matas’ valid points about the superiority of abstinence.
Ultimately, no book about writing neglects to mention its travails, and likewise, books that try to criticize literature chip at a block that reveals a better form. Like the ourobouros, refusal can’t eschew creation.
In other words, being discouraged from writing shouldn’t be seen as a barrier but as a gateway. If only I convince myself of any one thing from these books, I’ll have more and better writing on my hands, even if that conviction is to not write.
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