Every man’s work—whether it be literature or music or
pictures or architecture or anything else—is always a portrait of himself.
Nothing is going to happen in this book.
I am quite content to go down to posterity as a
scissors-and-paste man.
If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to
break the forms.
More David Shields. Or, really,
more David Shields plagiarizing other people.
Maybe I agree with those things. Emphasis on maybe.
I recently read Wodehouse, Doctor Sally. That is
true. Does that mean that what I am
about to write about it is also true?
It’s trivially easy to write in cryptic epigrams.
It’s even easier to read cryptic epigrams.
Maybe you learned something from reading that last paragraph. Maybe I just said something about myself. Is this paragraph an autobiography?
Doctor Sally is
about as formulaic a Wodehouse novel as there ever was. Then again, I suppose that could be written about
every Wodehouse novel. You could write the entire plot by the end of the second
chapter and you wouldn’t have missed a thing.
That is, of course, the beauty of Wodehouse. One part of me stands aside his books simply
admiring his ability to take a perfectly predictable plot with perfectly predictable
jokes and turn it into yet another masterpiece.
The lack of variety is part of the very joke woven into the novel. “The male mind did not appear to be able to
grasp immediately that a woman doctor need not of necessity be a gargoyle with
steel-rimmed spectacles and a washleather complexion.” I am not at all sure why that quotation was
just put in at this point in the paragraph.
Which is, in a nutshell, the
problem with reading David Shields. If he
is right, then it makes no difference what follows what and in what order it
all comes and how it is all phrased. It doesn’t
even matter if that is really a quotation form Doctor Sally or not. Shields
is a literary nihilist. Wodehouse is
not.
I sat down to write and saw Wodehouse and Shields sitting
side by side—I hadn’t reshelved Shields yet from yesterday’s ruminations, which
is exactly the sort of meaningless trivial detail which has absolutely no
possible relevance to anyone and yet is an accurate summary of the
situation. Gissing (if I recall
correctly) once wrote a novel having a character in it who was a novelist (following
me?) whose goal was to write the most realistic novel ever by making it so
boringly realistic nobody could ever read it.
Life is like that. Just boring
details. A blog cataloging boring details,
like the location of the books in one’s office, would serve no purpose
whatsoever. And yet, here I am writing
about it. And even worse, you Dear
Reader, are reading about it.
I now know what I set out to discover: I enjoyed reading
both Wodehouse and Shields. Yet, only
one of them is saying something True.
And it is the writer of fiction. Doctor Sally reminds us once again that
life is a comedy; it is full of improbable events and the only proper reaction
to living in this vale of tears is to laugh and laugh and laugh. Any other way leads to madness. Shields, despite being funny, has forgotten
to laugh. He takes this whole writing business
far too seriously; he wants writing to dig deep and expose one’s soul in some
sort of autobiographical auto-da-fe, all the while arguing that there is really
no way to do so. Again, despite being
funny, Shields has written a very grim book.
If my library was not ordered alphabetically (look—another detail about the
location of books in my office!), I would put Shields’ Reality Hunger next to The Anatomy
of Melancholy in the hopes that the latter would somehow teach the former
that a book with nary a joke in sight is both funnier and a better picture of
the human soul than the funny book with the nihilistic view of life and literature.
Come to think of it—this idea of ordering the books in my
office by determining which books really should get together for a talk over
coffee has staggering implications.
Where would Doctor Sally
go? Next to this, I suppose.
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