Allusions: Shield’s Insight on the Topic

                David Shields uses several allusions throughout Reality Hunger in order to exemplify certain important ideas. Since his book is written in the form of a collage and a mixture of components gathered from different authors, Shields has deciphered a very effective way to bring them together and make them transmit the ideas he wants to about art, literature, and writing. One of the allusions he uses is Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. This is a novel written in seven volumes by the French author which is especially characterized by its theme of involuntary memory. Marcel Proust makes it seem as if he did not want to remember certain events in his past but anyway the situation he faces in his everyday life forced him to remember. Shields uses this allusion in order to exemplify the ambiguity between reality, imagination, and fiction.

Shields depicts this when he states, “In Search of Lost Time begins and ends with the actual thoughts of the author; its the manifestation of what the author must think, base don what he does in fact think” (p. 39). He wants to transmit the message that every individual has the right to think what he wants and the ideas that come to his mind are his reality and therefore he can state that he is not making things up. This allusion helps Shield proove his point by analyzing a famous novel in which the author has the same conflict that the one being discussed. Proust said that he was not inventing things, he was just writing what he remembered and what he thought. Therefore, Shields is able to conclude that the definition of reality is not the same as the one we have been used to hearing in the past. It is through this allusion that Shields shows us his theory on a practical level with a novel that exists. He prooves his messages not only with reasoning, logic, and his perspective, but with evidence from widely recognized literature, such as In Search of Lost Time.