Free How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields Page A

the attack, wandered among the bomb craters, shouting, ‘Bastards, bastards.’ ”
    DOUGLAS BOND (PSYCHIATRIC ADVISER TO THE U.S. ARMY AIR FORCE IN BRITAIN DURING WWII): “Unbridled expression of aggression forms one of the greatest satisfactions in combat and becomes, therefore, one of the strongest motivations. A conspiracy of silence seems to have developed around these gratifications, although they are common knowledge to all those who have taken part in combat. There has been a pretense that battle consists only of tragedy and hardship. Unfortunately, however, such is not the case. Fighter pilots expressing frank pleasure following a heavy killing is shocking to outsiders.”
    HEMINGWAY: “Hürtgen Forest was a place where it was extremely difficult for a man to stay alive, even if all hedid was be there. And we were attacking all the time and every day.”
    FUSSELL: “Second World War technology made it possible to be killed in virtual silence, at least so it appeared.”
    Not a Quaker per se but sympathetic to Quaker pacifism, Nicholson Baker wanted to give himself the toughest possible case to make. In
Human Smoke
, he takes hundreds of passages from innumerable sources and positions them in such a way that an argument clearly emerges. War, even WWII, is never justified. All deaths are human smoke.
    When the war was winding down and the draft was over, I registered as a conscientious objector
.
A day like any other, only shorter
    W HENEVER U.S. SOLDIERS in Vietnam saw the horror show revealed with particular vividness, they’d often say, flatly and with no emphasis whatsoever, “There it is.” Michael Herr’s
Dispatches:
“ ‘There it is,’ the grunts said, sitting by a road with some infantry when a deuce-and-a-half rattled past with four dead in the back.” Gustav Hasford’s
The Short-Timers:
“Sooner or later the squad will surrender to the black design of the jungle. We live by the law of the jungle, which is that more Marines go in than come out. There it is.”
    The movie version of
No Country for Old Men
, ostensibly a thriller, gets at something profound—namely, in the absence of God the Father, all bets are off. Life makes no sense. How do I function when life has been drained of meaning?
Love and theft
    I N STANDARD ERASURE POETRY , the words of the source text get whited out or obscured with a dark color, but the pages in Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Tree of Codes
have literally gone under the knife, rectangular sections physically excised using a die-cut technique that resembles X-Acto artistry. The result: chinked, rectangular cutouts around which remaining text floats, reminding me of the shape of floor plans (albeit for buildings made of nothing). The cutouts produce windows and doorways to portions of up to ten successive pages of text at a time. Words and phrases get revealed, repeated, then covered up. Language waves at me through these X-Actoed text windows, disrupting the surface texture of the page. The composition not only interrupts normal eye movements but in effect forces me to read the book back to front at the same time I’m reading it front to back.
    Lifting the pages up one by one, I discover a lyrical seminarrative delivered by a single narrator, characters(a mother and father), a single plot point (the father’s death), and a shift in setting (the movement from an Eden-like garden to an urban frontier). Futzing with Bruno Schulz’s book
The Street of Crocodiles
, Foer gets intimate with the Polish writer; Foer is writing a book with, through, and for Schulz by unwriting the original. There’s much debate about the relevance of books to our byte-obsessed culture, but I’ve yet to come across any assemblage of text, hyperlinks, images, and sidebar ads that presents a more chaotic and multidimensional reading experience than this book.
    “I felt light,” says the narrator midway through
Tree of Codes
. At this point I think, too, of the book itself, which, composed of