David Shields and the death of the "Novel"

1. I just finished reading David Shields' Reality Hunger: A Manifesto for my Experimental Memoirs class. It was written in numbered points like this. What follows are a few of the endless thoughts I had while reading his personal manifesto:

2. Why is it that everyone insists the novel is a dead form? There are obviously those who still practice it; there are still published books, and there are still writing classes offered here and at other Universities. Forms change, yes, expression changes,  but does it ever die completely?  I think it's more of a continual morphing/evolution than a death.

3. Does this mean I've just wasted the last four years of my life on a so-called "poverty degree"?

4. Shields: "Memory: The past rewritten in the direction of feeling." What is memory, really? What is fiction? "Consciously or unconsciously, we manipulate our memories to include or omit certain aspects. Are our memories therefore fictions?" Can we make a distinction between what we remember and what we imagine? When we retrieve a memory, to we ever really see it again, or merely percieve it in terms of what we experienced and how it affected us? "It is difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen." Difficult certainly. But is it possible at all? Is there any reality left in the world?

5. No, I haven't squandered my time with this degree. As I prepare to convocate, I reflect on what I have learned. What has shaped me, what has transformed me, and what has been gained and lost in the process. There are pieces of information, bytes of data that I have so internalized that they have become a part of me. If I had never been exposed to this information, I would not be who I am.

6. What does Shields mean when he says "True essayists rarely write novels"? Can someone not write both? Or even more than both? I enjoy and (if I may say so) am quite accomplished at writing essays; does this mean that all the stories I have written, have conceived of, and have yet to conceive of, are utter crap?

7. Do what you want to do, they say. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
    I want to write novels for a living.
    Oh, well don't do that.

8. What am I to do when I graduate University if I had dreamed of writing a novel and the novel has perished in the bitter, scorching flames of the scatterbrained postmodernist? Am I to adapt? Survival of the fittest, you say, change and flourish? I know. I'll write all my ideas in short, choppy sections, forming a veritable, highly sensationalized collage of my percieved reality. Oh wait, that's called poetry.

9. Isn't poetry supposedly dead, too?

10. What is the purpose of everybody writing their own unique realities now? No one seems intent on taking anyone else's side at all.

11. There is no point or plot to this post at all. If you are looking for one, you will be disappointed. I should have told you sooner.

12. I have always known that I am not going to be wealthy in my life. When I was younger, I wanted to be an artist, and live in a (most beautifully painted) box on the streets of Regina. Later, I wanted to travel the world and stay in hostels, albeit hostels in beautiful, culturally rich places. Currently, I want to write idea to idea in a rented room I can barely afford, lit by candles, sipping cheaply bought Walmart brand espresso, looking out a dingy window at the beautiful sunsets of Saskatchewan. What I have gathered from writing these wishes down is that I am on some sort of epic quest in search of Beauty that is doomed to fail before it begins (how exactly does one hunt down and caputure an ideal?). I am never going to follow the prototypical life path for a successful person. I will most likely live in some form of a box. I will be happy anyway.

13. Why can't something evolve into something else without everyone causing an uproar about it? What's so remarkable about consistancy?

14. It seems to me that writing in any form, from novel to essay to poem to memoir to sentence to word, to painting to performing to walking down the street to ordering your favourite coffee at your favourite coffee shop, is just a series of behaviours that reach a level of meaning (different meanings) in context (different contexts). We are all in the midst of writing reality according to how we want it to appear. We script and direct ourselves into roles governed by rules and conventions on a daily, mainly unconscious, basis. But, at any point, there is a chance to break free of those scripts and take off in an entirely new direction, unforeseen by any previous to ourselves. We should embrace this novelty, this idea that we are full of potential and possibility. We must evolve. We must adapt.

15. I am not sure I like who I am right now, but I am less sure I would like who I would be if  had  gone in a different direction with my life.

16. Right now, I intend to do what I feel that I must do.

17. I must write.