In How Literature Saved My Life, I found some interesting insights into books I’ve already read and into some that I might want to read some time in the future had I not read this book. These things are exactly what I hoped to find in the book and what I like about other similar books. But the book has some egregious flaws enormous enough to compel me to include it on my “Sorry I Bothered” bookshelf.
The first of these flaws centers around the general tone of the book. Rather than being a collection of book reviews and insights, the book is actually an extended self-congratulatory essay designed to say to readers, “Look at all I’ve read and how smart I am. I’ve managed to say interesting and frequently negative things about lots of high brow books. I’m impressed with myself and you should be impressed, too.” Thus the book is not so much about other books as it is about the author and his ego, a point he himself alludes to early in the bookand should have emphasized a lot more.
The second flaw is the larger and more serious one.
This book in its 200 pages uses more parenthesis and makes more parenthetical remarks than the combined total of such remarks found in any 15 books resting on a library’s bookshelf. It is as if in the writing course that author Daniel Shields took (apparently in an unaccredited night school), the instructor (a substitute teacher from the janitorial trade school across the street) never pointed out that good writing (that is, writing that is publishable) uses neither parenthetical remarks nor exclamation points! (!!!!)
Shields’ editor apparently took the same course Shields took and did not bother to help Shields write a good book by taking out the (gosh darned and unnecessary) parenthetical remarks.
Moreover, Shields only uses these parentheticals to amply his own commentary with further commentary (usually remarks about his own writing) (sometimes, an even further remark about his own writing). Why didn’t he just polish up his original writing so that it included his insights as parts of the narrative rather than interrupting the narrative to include them as afterthoughts?
The biggest things a reader will get from this book are: why it is important not to use parenthesis, how very smart David Shields thinks he is and how very important it is for a writer to hire a good editor. ( )

Veers between the enlightening and the interminable. ( )

In How Literature Saved My Life, I found some interesting insights into books I’ve already read and into some that I might want to read some time in the future had I not read this book. These things are exactly what I hoped to find in the book and what I like about other similar books. But the book has some egregious flaws enormous enough to compel me to include it on my “Sorry I Bothered” bookshelf.
The first of these flaws centers around the general tone of the book. Rather than being a collection of book reviews and insights, the book is actually an extended self-congratulatory essay designed to say to readers, “Look at all I’ve read and how smart I am. I’ve managed to say interesting and frequently negative things about lots of high brow books. I’m impressed with myself and you should be impressed, too.” Thus the book is not so much about other books as it is about the author and his ego, a point he himself alludes to early in the bookand should have emphasized a lot more.
The second flaw is the larger and more serious one.
This book in its 200 pages uses more parenthesis and makes more parenthetical remarks than the combined total of such remarks found in any 15 books resting on a library’s bookshelf. It is as if in the writing course that author Daniel Shields took (apparently in an unaccredited night school), the instructor (a substitute teacher from the janitorial trade school across the street) never pointed out that good writing (that is, writing that is publishable) uses neither parenthetical remarks nor exclamation points! (!!!!)
Shields’ editor apparently took the same course Shields took and did not bother to help Shields write a good book by taking out the (gosh darned and unnecessary) parenthetical remarks.
Moreover, Shields only uses these parentheticals to amply his own commentary with further commentary (usually remarks about his own writing) (sometimes, an even further remark about his own writing). Why didn’t he just polish up his original writing so that it included his insights as parts of the narrative rather than interrupting the narrative to include them as afterthoughts?
The biggest things a reader will get from this book are: why it is important not to use parenthesis, how very smart David Shields thinks he is and how very important it is for a writer to hire a good editor. ( )

David Shields is a contemporary essayist and fiction writer. His first novel, Dead Languages, is notable, as are his collections of essays. I chose to read this book with the expectation that the main focus would be on literature. I was frustrated with some aspects of the book in the early going, but ultimately found Shields personal views on literature and its ability to save (or perhaps not save) his life to be challenging and valuable. Throughout the book he turns quotation, memory, anecdotes and considerations of film, literature, love and death into a collage that enables introspection.

Shields is as concerned with methods of construction and questions of genre as with subject, and in doing so he meters out nuggets of revelation amid explications of both classical and popular subjects, from Prometheus to Spider-Man. He uses a circuitous approach that sometimes frustrated this reader and may do so for others. However, his apparent failure to articulate the ways in which "life and art have always been everything" to him often proved fascinating to contemplate.

David Shields stuttered throughout childhood, and initially regarded writing as an ideal outlet; now, in his mid-50s with more than fifteen books to his credit, he writes “to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else,” he has connected with his readers. He uses a frequently self-deprecating yet engaging tone, while employing the act of accrual in hopes of guarding against “human loneliness,” and in doing so, creates a type of personal, modern version of a commonplace book. For readers like myself, references to authors such as Ben Lerner, E.M. Cioran, Jonathan Safran Foer, Annie Dillard, Sarah Manguso and David Foster Wallace, among others, may be interesting or even appealing. He mixes references to books while interpolating quotes as voices intersecting on the page. For readers unlike myself who are creative-writing practitioners, how Shield fashions his own anxieties and persona into brief essays provides an alternative model for writing on self-hood, revealing the his struggle in oblique ways.

The book defies easy categorization (as have others of Shields’ works): It is both a paean to the power of language and a confrontation with the knowledge that literature can't, after all, fulfill deeper existential needs. It is a work of contradictions, subversion, depression, humor and singular awareness; Shields is at his best when culling the work of others to arrive at his own well-timed, often heartbreaking lines. His list of "Fifty-five works I swear by:" is one of the most fascinating and useful sections of the book (Part 6, pp140-156). I would recommend this book for those who hope that reading literature may save your life and have the persistence or potvaliance to persevere when the book veers into unknown territory. The author always brings it back to literature. ( )

I'm trying to write an actual paper incorporating my complaints about this book. For now, here's a first draft of those complaints. This is absolutely not the place for such a piece, but I don't want to write another version of it specially for goodreads:

David Shields, Art and Life’s Big Problems

The misuse of words

I, and people like me, get more pleasure from learning a thing’s name than from learning about the thing itself. When my then girlfriend offered me a potato pancake, I wasn’t too impressed, even though she told me all the history behind it. When she called it a latke, on the other hand, I was thrilled. The same thing happened when I read, in my college’s listings, the course title ‘Literature and Phenomenology.’ I had no idea what the latter was, and it turns out I’m not interested in it, but the word, phenomenology, stunned me. The more useless and obscure the thing I’m learning about, the more this effect is heightened. Take the jargon of rhetoric: anacoluthon, antanaclasis, asyndeton. Soraismus. Captatio benevolentiae. Lovely.

I suspect that David Shields, the author of How Literature Saved My Life, is this kind, my kind, of person. Consider his claim that David Foster Wallace’s essayistic technique is an example of what Adorno calls immanence: a particular artistic or philosophic relation to society. Immanence, or complicity, allows the writer to be a kind of shock absorber of the culture, to reflect back its ‘whatness,’ refracted through the sensibility of his consciousness.

‘What Adorno calls immanence’ is like saying ‘this is what we here in Los Angeles call a hamburger.’ All philosophers mean by ‘immanent’ something like ‘does not exceed whatever it’s based in.’ Shields’ claim then develops into something nonsensical. Immanence is no more complicity than a hamburger is a laptop. Shock absorbers do not reflect. But these glorious words: immanence, complicity, refracted…

Shields also loves phrases. He uses Wittgenstein’s “the world is everything that is the case”—the idea that philosophy should be limited to the study of how logical propositions relate to each other—to mean something like ‘I can write however I want.’ Wittgenstein changed his mind, of course; his later project was to show his readers that the big philosophical problems are more or less made up by philosophers. There are no Big Problems, no ultimate solution to Life, only life, a bunch of overlapping concepts and the way we go on using them. Adorno went a little further, arguing that the big philosophical problems are just ways of (at best) ignoring actual problems or (at worst) contributing to them; the real problems, the hard problems, are historically specific injustices. They’re not part of some inescapable condition; they’re our fault.

Clearly, Shields finds how these philosophers write, rather than what they say, appealing: the glorious words. But he’s all about The Big Inescapable Problems, working in the traditions of
i) existentialism. HLSML is an impassioned cry for a literature that “foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.”
ii) pessimism. The best explanation for a phenomenon isn’t the simplest one, but rather the one with the most depressing implications: “Death is my copilot… love equals death, art equals death, life equals death… all literature and all philosophy have come from this [formula].”
iii) and, in terms of form, the fuckshitup manifesto. Shields demands books that are “ready to break the forms” of literature itself, doing whatever they can “to vanquish the numbness that is a result of… expectation.”

Shields says ‘all philosophy and literature come from the formula life = death’ because if he said the much more sensible and true ‘my literature and philosophy,’ his readers would be able to tell that he’s working within these narrow, conventional traditions. And copping to those traditions would clash with his individualistic, formally imaginative, fuckshitup thing.

This move, deducing, from ‘I feel sad,’ ‘The world is fucked,’ is characteristic of Shields’ book in general, e.g., “I feel so remote from things… we’re existentially alone on the planet”. The move is not unique to him, indeed, it’s essential to the traditions in which he’s working. To know the world, one need only look into oneself with sufficiently clear-eyes. That means seeing through things that we mere mortals take at face value, like morality and how much we enjoy ice-cream. Twentieth century thinkers in this tradition know that “cognitive science and DNA” are the ultimate explanations of The Human Condition (yes, this is completely at odds with actual existentialism). They know that you don’t really like ice-cream, that it’s just brain chemistry and the survival of the fattest. These (almost always) men know that the most recent ‘scientific’ knowledge is true, and that is no truth, except for moral relativism. We know that moral relativism and ‘science’ are true because there’s something depressing about them. Truth, you see, is not something which demands our rational assent. It’s something we feel. And it feels bad to me. Therefore, the world is fucked.

Literature, Shields suggests, should help us deal with this sadness by treating the existential loneliness that is tied up with it. When he reads, he wants “to feel as if, to the degree anyone can know anyone else, I know someone—I’ve gotten to this other person.” He wants “loneliness-assuaging” literary works that ‘transfer consciousness’ from the author to the reader. He wants immediacy, a promise of unmediated reality, raw nerve endings, and naked feeling. He wants, as much as possible, to gain unfiltered access to other people’s pain.

Now it seems to me that if you want access to other consciousnesses, you should start by accepting that other consciousnesses have something to offer you. But Shields is uninterested in this, so he uses Wittgenstein’s and Adorno’s words, but not their meaning. As I read through HLSML, it became obvious that, far from wanting access to other consciousnesses, Shields wanted only the reflection, or possibly refraction, of his own.

What he does very well is present the contemporary middle aged intellectual: journalist parents, grew up post-hippie, studied semiotics at Brown, MFA at Iowa, taught writing, undergoes a crisis, demands both complete autonomy (I can use other people’s words however I like), and complete access to others (give me your raw nerve endings).

This strange conjunction of demands makes more sense when you consider that the men and women of Shields’ generation are the last for whom post-structuralism/semiotics was an unchallenged epochal event. Post-structuralism was very good at pointing out that some x, previously believed to be certain and unshakeable, was in fact not certain or unshakeable. The method, in general, was to take a (in the broad sense) text and show that the author was making certain assumptions. This undermined the text’s own claims, which is politically radical. That’s a great liberator if you’re in the grip of structuralism (wait, systems of meaning aren’t miraculously closed monoliths? Words don’t map perfectly onto the world?!?!?) or the French Communist Party (we shouldn’t go all for Stalin?!?!). But when you’re dealing with anything that doesn’t make wildly implausible claims about its own certain and unshakable foundations, it just seems strange. Pace post-structuralism itself, that means that it makes very little sense of human life in general.

One has to take a lot for granted before the post-structuralist project seems compelling, and post-boomer, post-avant-garde American public intellectuals embrace these assumptions. I offer an incomplete list: there is something deep within me that I’m inherently unable to express. Life has been drained of meaning. The human animal never gets what it wants. Anything we put into language is inevitably distorted. We’re all terrified of death. All ‘truth’ is ‘relative’. The Internet Blogs MySpace Texting Facebook Smart Phones Twitter Cloud Computing Instagram have has fundamentally changed the world, which is why nobody reads anymore. Short attention spans. We want unmediated reality, but can’t get it, and that’s tragic. We want to connect with reality. Self-consciousness is the only way we can think, but it also stops us from connecting with reality. Our time is uniquely chaotic and everything has to change in order to accommodate itself to that chaos.

Only these widely held, wildly implausible beliefs about human life could lead you to say something like “language never fails to fail us.” Only if you fiercely believe in certainty and immediacy to begin with will you be upset when you discover that there’s no such thing – nobody ever had an existential crisis when they discovered that unicorns don’t exist. The right response, as Wittgenstein and Adorno taught us, is to realize that language only fails you if you’re expecting it to do something impossible, say, transport someone’s brain into your skull. If you try your best, and don’t embrace irrationality, it’ll usually work out okay, and when it doesn’t, don’t blame it on language. Our cravings for certainty and immediacy are more or less juvenile, and we can outgrow them.

But this generation has had a lot of trouble growing up. At the age of 30, Shields read Kundera’s claim that it’s not hard to write “about the intersection of personal and political lives… when you go to the grocery store and the cannon of a Soviet tank is wedged into the back window.” He decided that the American version of that tank was “the ubiquity of the camera, the immense power of the camera lens on our lives, on my life, on the way I think about life.” Because there’s no original now, it’s just simulacrum, the signified has been split from the sign etc etc… What must he be like, I wonder, that he responds to Kundera’s self-aggrandizing, but moving claim by immediately wondering how he could answer that question? First, he must believe that art, like truth, is produced by suffering. Second, he must be jealous of the high degree of suffering undergone by artists in the Sovietish republics. Third, he must note that he himself is, in truth, also suffering, and honestly believe that his own suffering is as deep as the suffering of others. If you’re thirty and can’t tell the difference between a) choosing to watch lots of television and b) brutal military repression, you have some problems. But you can outgrow them.

Sadly, to judge by their writing, many writers and scholars continue to live in this bubble. Their world, like their problems, is entirely immaterial. They worry not about North Korea, the ongoing destruction of European economies or the horrors of the Middle East. They worry about twitter. This is what is so contemporary about Shields’ work: he says he wants access to other consciousnesses, but he wants to use only his own resources to get it. He doesn’t want to learn anything, doesn’t want to open himself up to ideas from other people, or to see what other people are really doing to each other, every day. He wants “to be equal to the chaos and contradiction of the cultural wiki ” but won’t actually use wikipedia.

Adorno, on the other hand, embraced the fact that art gets between us and society, and scorns the idea that it offers some direct, ‘immediate’ contact with the world. He didn’t yearn for that direct contact, because it doesn’t and cannot exist. That’s not something to be sad about, any more than you should be sad about the fact that you’re going to die. You have no option. Abstract sadness about your own death, abstract sadness about your own inability to feel or connect, is just self-deceit. Your life is amazing. If you feel shit, it’s because you live in a world that gives you an amazing life, but causes suffering for billions of people. You won’t feel better by wallowing in the ‘cultural wiki.’ You need to imagine a better world: the kind of world that we see, although falsely, in perfectly formed works of art.

Shields wants books that “coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes,” he likes “art with a visible string to the world.” But what he means by ‘the world’ is so attenuated that it’s difficult to see how it could connect to what most people mean by it. With no apparent self-consciousness, he suggests that “the sadness of the Yankee fan lies in his knowledge that his gorgeous dream is made of money. This is America, though: capital of capitalism.” If you’re a 57 year-old who believes that the injustice of capitalism = the absence of a salary cap in baseball, and that resistance = being a Mets fan, it might seem like a good idea for art to replicate the world. But what if you’ve actually learned something over the last 15 years? Contemporary culture isn’t blogs and university courses. It’s a broken economic system, widespread war and increasingly inequality. Why do we want to replicate that? Because the word-world link is so problematic?

No. We want to replicate it because we’re the winners. How Literature Saved My Life is a perfect image of liberal, triumphalist, pessimistic American academics. ( )