Reality Hunger (49 page)

Authors: David Shields

There is properly no history, only biography.

All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.

I place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. In the chamber is a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will break the vial and kill the cat. I can’t know whether an atom of the substance has decayed and, consequently, can’t know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since I
can’t know, the cat is—according to quantum law—both dead and alive, in a superposition of states. Only when I break open the box and learn the condition of the cat is this superposition lost and the cat dead or alive. The observation or measurement itself affects the outcome; it can never be known what the outcome would have been were it not observed.… The writers I love tend to have Schrödinger’s Paradox tattooed on their forehead: the perceiver by his very presence changes what’s perceived. A work without some element of self-reflexivity feels to me falsely monumental. Without this gesture, this self-scrutiny, I don’t see how anyone can even pretend to be thinking.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

In
On Moral Fiction
, John Gardner explains that “the morality of art is far less a matter of doctrine than of process.” He’s careful to distinguish between didactic art, which teaches by “authority and force,” and moral art, which “explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. The artist who begins with a doctrine to promulgate, instead of a rabble multitude of ideas and emotions, is beaten before he starts.” He cautions that “the subversion of art to the purposes of propaganda leads inevitably to one or the other of the two common mistakes in bad art: overemphasis of texture, on the one hand, and manipulative structure, on the other.” In
Vlemk the Box-Painter
, Gardner’s first novel following his critical call to arms, he doesn’t overemphasize texture—the fablelike quality of the book makes for a very simple prose—but he does manipulate structure.
Vlemk the Box-Painter
is an illustration of a thesis, a step-by-step argument for the aesthetic program presented in
On Moral Fiction
. Gardner clearly conceived
Vlemk
as the dramatization of a doctrine. He didn’t discover his material in the process of creation; he began with a theory.
Vlemk
is a didactic rather than moral work of art, and Gardner’s aesthetic would appear to be suspect if it can’t accommodate his own fiction.… This review is the first thing I ever published. Its line of argument still seems to me essentially correct—John Gardner’s philosophy of fiction is impossibly programmatic—but that seems pretty obvious, and all I care about now is its secret subtext: on the surface a quite standard book review, it was really my attempt to put as much ground as I could between myself and my parents’ engagé moralism. Growing up in a Bay Area suburb in the 1960s and ’70s, I was instructed by my mother and father to write denunciatory editorials about the (only very mildly) dictatorial high school principal; I was dragged into the city for antiwar marches what seems in memory every third weekend. In
Against Interpretation
, Susan Sontag says that the two primary, opposing artistic stances of the twentieth century are—were—Jewish moralism and homosexual aestheticism. I see my first published piece as a desperate effort to free myself from Jewish moralism; the effort shows. In college, my (Jewish) creative-writhing teacher—David Milch, who went on to cowrite and coproduce the television shows
Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue
, and
Deadwood
—told me my work suffered from the malaise of my (his) “race”: a preoccupation with “narrowly moral” rather than “universally human” concerns. I was, as he hoped I’d be, near suicidal for the remainder of the term.