“Reality is the one word that is meaningless with quotation marks.” Vladimir Nabokov

What do the hair depilation scene in The 40-Year Old Virgin, Todd Haynes’ Superstar, and Sarah Manguso’s stunning, lyrical memoir The Two Kinds of Decayhave in common? According to David Shields, author of the book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, these seemingly disparate art objects all share a commonality in that, while they are works of the imagination, they also toe the line between “reality”(a word that Nabokov claimed should always be in quotation marks) and fiction in a wholly new way. “Art is theft,” begins the book, with a quote from Picasso—one of the only quotes out of hundreds actually attributed, in the text, to the original speaker, and Shields spends the next 205 pages making just that argument.

Taking a clue from hip hop–particularly sampling–Shields “borrows” from other sources as a way to build a new kind of collage.  Each chapter of Reality Hunger contains short numbered vignettes, entire passages taken from other sources, without citing (on the page) the original source. Curious readers can flip back and forth between the body of the book and the appendix–which publisher Random House insisted be included to avoid legal ramifications—but Shields suggests that the reader instead grab a sharp pair of scissors and remove the pages by “cutting along the dotted line.”

While I didn’t heed Shield’s advice to cut out the appendix (it was a damn library book for god’s sake!), I did control my urge to flip back and forth between the appendix and the vignettes, an act that took a shocking amount of self-control on my part. In this action, I felt like I was actually interacting with the book in an intriguing way, one that got me thinking the assumed lines between attribution and originality, between myth, memory, and truth. Soon, the reading felt liberating. I have been struggling to finish a series of short stories for the past three years, trying to finesse them into something that resembles what I think they should look like, something so wholly fiction that the seams are hidden, like a fine couture dress. Shields book helped me to think about the “reality” that often times, I am more drawn to writing in which the seams are ragged and transparent, than those stories that are polished to perfection; while I do enjoy sinking into a nice work of fiction, the older I get, the more I enjoy books that challenge genre without adhering slavishly to the guidelines monitoring fiction.  Examples include the Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstrom, and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

“This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature,” writes  Shields (see, I can’t help but give the guy credit) just before he suggests cutting out the appendix with a box cutter.

Why all this trouble to “steal” from other sources, to muddle the reader’s expectations of truth and fiction? Well, Shields is writing a manifesto, one that forefronts the argument that an artistic movement is forming, one that shares certain key components.

1. A deliberate unartiness; “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, unensored, and unprofessional. Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity,; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; self-ethnography; anthropological autobiography; a blurring ( to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction; the lure and blur of the real.

In short, Shields declares that the novel is dead, or in the process of dying a slow and painful death. The time of the seamless Tolstoyan dream has ended, to be replaced by a mixed, hybrid form. In fact, he argues that this is not so much a replacement, as a return to original form. And while I find these ideas intriguing and freeing, as a so-called “fiction” writer, I am even more intrigued by the interaction between art and “reality.”

I started thinking about this while listening to the new Charlotte Gainsbourg album. I find Gainsbourg to be endlessly fascinating, ever since seeing her in a 1996 movie production of Jane Eyre—a book that I have read five times, thank you very much. The actress plays the patron saint of homely and disenfranchised girls with a confused, bemused energy, her lopsided mouth a perfect representation of the Jane Eyre’s homeliness. Gainsbourg is also a singer and her latest album is titled  IRM, the French acronym for an MRI scanner. In interviews, she has talked becoming intimately familiar with the IRM machine after a water-skiing accident led to a brain hemorrhage in 2007. The title track captures the experience of being in a hospital, undergoing tests, wondering if you are going to die. As I listen, I’m not sure if it is the actual song that I am drawn to, or if I am so fascinated with the history behind the song that I’m filling in the meaning, making it into an experience outside of the art object itself. Many albums are autobiographical, but this one in particular has got me thinking about the increasingly blurred lines (reality television has something to do with this) between what is made up and what is “reality,” and the importance of what both the artist and the reader (or listener) bring to the table. “Urgency attaches itself now more to the tale taken directly from life than one fashioned by the imagination out of life,” writes Shields –or not Shields. This not only explains the popularity of the Real Housewives franchise, it also gives liberty to writers and artists to pull unabashedly from their own experience, to break genre, to wallow in the freedom of being able to be both the “I” and not the “I” all at the same time.