Beautiful Snowflakes

            While we would like to think of ourselves as wholly unique entities unmarred by corrupt society or creative literary figures or general acquaintances, we’re not. Like Chuck Palahniuk said, nothing of us is original, we are the combined effort of everyone we’ve ever known. Because by being human we are exposing ourselves to the craving of companionship, to the seeking of comfort in literature, art, people. And those begin to influence us, subtly. You may call yourself an anti-communist and then read Karl Marx’s and insist that the elimination of social classes requires a revolution and that capitalism is inherently unstable. In favor of your case though, Marx just might happen to be a convincing little genius. The point of the matter is that we are not all just born with stone-set ideas that endure until our sad ends. We form ideas that are being constantly contradicted or amalgamated with tweaks here and there, our surroundings being the ones that incite those tweaks. So there’s always going to be the question of whether fiction or other works of art, are truly one perspective of individual creativity, or if even the most “original” of works is half massed by a history of influences that are not just that, but participants of the work.

            David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, addresses this subject by questioning the reality of modern literature, TV, radio, etc. He’s had enough of the fixed plots and planned scenarios, artificial essence of it all, the unrealistic aspect to it. He says that “an artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional.” He’s calling out to the public in an attempt to bring forth this view of art as something holy universal, not unique in its own right, proof of the unrealistic view of creativity and also of the lack of realism found in said works of art. His is a questioning of reality in art, of how every great writer wants to transpose reality, clear and authentic, into their work, but somehow fail because very few things are reality at all. “As Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, “reality” is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks.”

            While Hunger Manifesto addresses the lack of reality in everyday art and the lack of movement beyond comfort zones, The Futurist Manifesto by F.T Marinetti tackles a literary world that has to be liberated from past works of art and use its newfound speed to create something new. According to Marinetti, “We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.” He uses speed to build on his point of moving forward and not looking back. Because the past is just that, the past. And so he comments about the urge to glorify war as a means to get to cure the world, to eradicate all the past notions like a plague that kills off population and breeds a newer, more sophisticated populace. In founding Futurism he plans on delivering “Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.” The listed above all share one thing and that is the building and analyzing of the old, those that focus on the past. An example he uses to convince the reader about his point is that of an old picture in a museum, and the question of what can you find in it except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers that keep him from fully expressing his dreams. “To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action.” He asks of the reader if he’d rather waste time admiring art of the past instead of using the passion to move forward in creation of his own. His is a call to the people to not let the past drag them, keep them halted, when they can rejoice in speed and move forward with brand new ideas.

            Both of these are calling out, preaching a political view on art, manifestos in their own way. While Shields focuses on reality in fiction and the origin of creativity and ideas, Marinetti focuses on the hindering past and that old works are to be eradicated so as not to be fixed on them and have the courage to move on into higher realms of art. In a sense, both are looking at art in the past, and while one is analyzing its effects, the other knows the effects and proposes a course of action to get rid of it.