Reality Hunger is a 205-page compilation 618 numbered paragraphs, only a handful of which are written by Shields. The rest are quotes from a wide range of writers, entertainers and thinkers: everyone from Homer to Herzog. It may take a while to realize this, as the paragraphs lack attribution (although they are listed in the back by the order of “Random House lawyers”). Shields sums up his intent thusly: “My interest is to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media (lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film, television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy) who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work.”
I don't understand this fascination with not attributing quotes in writing. What is gained from this (besides avoiding looking like Bartlett's Famous Quotations, as the reviewer notes)? Maybe I'm missing the point, not having read Reality Hunger, but having thought about it, I've soured on Hegemann's argument for including paragraphs of other people's books into her own -
“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Hegemann in response to accusations of plagiarism.
...
If a d.j. can thread together twenty different songs and package the end product as her own, why can’t a writer? This seems to be the question Hegemann is using as a defense.
I never really bought the justification, but ignored it since the only included example in the article was a character who quoted from a blogpost and the book never mentioned that the character was quoting somebody, which I think is alright, although the utility of having a character quote somebody is only gained when the reader is aware that the character is using somebody else's words and then thinks, "This character is the type of person who memorizes quotes from (wherever) for use in conversation." It would make sense that a professor of Shakespeare might use quotes from Shakespeare in daily conversation without attribution, but nothing is gained for the reader if the reader is unaware of it or the reader will start wondering why this character speaks in iambic pentameter in the year 2010. Books don't need to change to stay modern. What is happening is that the remix culture of movies and music is giving movies and music stylistic choices and forms that books have always had. It's not just because of technological advances that allows mash-ups but also the accumulation of the language of film into our culture. Here is Julian Sanchez on remix culture using the brat-pack/Lisztomania mash-up that progressed to the kids in Brooklyn 'covering' the video to the San Francisco hipsters who make a similar video in response as an example of "how remix is becoming a platform for collective expression by—and conversations between—social groups" -
Or, a more filmic representation of the same argument, here is a scene from Swingers that is itself a comment on how the characters in Swingers wish to see themselves as cool as the characters in Reservoir Dogs -
Paraphrasing Sanchez, when we live in a world saturated with digital media, copyrights are no longer just about incentivizing the creation of new work, but about how much control we get to have over our social reality, and that's where the argument for the unattributed co-option of other people's words into books falls apart because the point of mash-ups or remixes is not to diminish the role of the original author, but to highlight how this art has succeeded in influencing and being subsumed into our culture and even our personalities. Books have always had the ability to convey that truth through stylistic voices, like if a kid in a book kept on using the word 'phony' we'd know that the kid probably sees himself as an heir-apparent to Holden Caulfield. Authors shouldn't be looking towards mash-ups as the future form of the novel, but towards how the people who make and relate to remixes and mash-ups see, identify, and communicate their world. The challenge is that so much of the vocabulary we use to place ourselves in the world is through images rather than language. It doesn't mean that the most truthful/honest way of representing our reality is through film or television, but that the words authors use to present character's inner lives need to identify back towards cultural images as opposed to words. James Joyce could use a "style that borrows from (and parodies) the prose of both moralizing, sentimental literature and consumer-oriented women’s magazines" to convey the inner life of a girl, Gerty MacDowell, in the Nausicaa section of Ulysses. The tv show, The Hills, might serve a similar use for a current author who wanted to define how a girl sees herself in the world today, but the author would have to create the vocabulary to communicate that reality to the world - there is no prose to borrow/parody in The Hills - but I think an author has the ability to communicate that view of the world in such a way that the reader is aware of what the author is doing without the author having to resort to explicitly referencing The Hills like, "Gerty sat in the restaurant discussing her crush on Brody to Angela with the intensity learned from hours studying Lauren Conrad." Going back to Hegemann, an author could show that a girl relates to Lauren Conrad by having her read her book and then blockquoting a passage of Conrad's book into the other book, but why would you not attribute the source of the quote if the whole point is to show that the girl relates to Lauren Conrad? I'm at a loss, maybe I need to read one of these books I think about all the time.
Anyway, whatever. This is all probably self-evident for you, but I promised Scott I'd write about something besides baseball today.
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