David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, on ‘Genre’
I’m just as much opposed to, say, a straight-ahead memoir as I am to a conventional novel because they both seem to me to be way too comfortable with conventions of genre. There’s a line in the book where I say, “genre is a minimum security prison.” And also there’s a wonderful line by Walter Benjamin in the book, “All great works of literature either invent a genre or dissolve one,” which I really love.
To me, what happens when you dissolve a genre, you get to this: “When we are not sure, we are alive.” The ones that really knock me out are works in which we’re sort of off the click track and we don’t know where we’re going. Again, going back to Maggie Nelson’s book (which we had been talking about earlier): What is that book? Is it a memoir? Is it a philosophical meditation? Is it a history of the color blue? Is it a cri de coeur about her breakup? Is it art criticism? You don’t know where you’re going from paragraph to paragraph. All that you do know is that you’re going deeper into, you know, a human heart. I just love that feeling, and I think the best books have that quality. I’m interested in work that hovers between things because when you hover between things you can go anywhere you want and your loyalty as a writer becomes investigating something rather than going through the paces.
