What Is the What

"This sort of joke is typical for Eggers. His first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius , similarly plays with our expectations from the very first page, where you normally find publisher’s notes and information for classifying the book. This book switches from autobiography to fiction. He says that writing fiction was like imagining wearing a clown’s suit; initially he could not do it, but he learnt. What is the What is a similarly strange mixture of a book. You might say it was ghostwritten by Dave Eggers, but his name is on the front cover as a writer. You might say that it is a novel that is true to life, but it is also an autobiography: Achak Deng is telling his story. When you read it alongside other of Dave Eggers’s books, you realise that although it is about Achak Deng, it is unmistakably by Dave Eggers, in its style and form. The title alone is supposed to make you a bit anxious. What’s going on? How far can we trust this story about Achak Deng’s life in Sudan and as a migrant in America? What has been left out? So the title is a sort of a joke, but it is also a sort of a question. The American critic David Shields wrote a book called Reality Hunger , in which he diagnoses a relatively new hunger for reality that has appeared right the way across the arts. This hunger manifests itself in reality TV, and the ‘misery memoirs’ that were popular a few years ago. But of course, Shields says that reality TV isn’t real. It gives the impression of being real but it is not real. He talks about different ways in which ‘the real’ is made to appear real. Dave Eggers plays with the relationship between reality and fiction. What is the What might be thought of as containing ‘chunks of reality’. For example, there is a scene in the desert, in which a character who used to be a teacher gives a four page lecture on the history of Sudan. The novel comprises two parts. In the first, the narrator Achak Deng recounts his experience of being robbed violently in his house in the US. He has constant flashbacks to his life in southern Sudan. So the violence of America is contrasted with the violence of Sudan. In the second part, the robbery is over, and he has to go to work, despite being traumatised by being beaten up. He works three jobs. At the sports club he works in, his boss notices his black eye, but nobody else pays him any attention. He thinks that if only people knew his story, they wouldn’t treat him with such disregard. This second half is about how he is ignored in America, and how the world ignores Sudan. Yes, it is. More generally, Dave Eggers is interested in novels that not only raise awareness about political issues, but also have real-world consequences. When I teach this novel, I put up a webpage of the non-profit organisation so that students can look at it. We talk about all the things that Eggers actually does. He is a publisher, and he runs various charities. He is very engaged. This constitutes one type of cross-over between fiction and reality. Postmodernism was animated by the sense that fiction was terribly important. Supposedly, fiction was shaping the world. If you only read a particular novel correctly, your whole version of the world would collapse: the world would change. Since then, there has been a new humility in fiction. Whereas the novel was the preeminent art-form in the nineteenth century, it now competes with films, computer games and TV series. All of these forms have the power to shape the world through narrative. So the novel is no longer the king of the jungle. Novelists are not the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

"Three of my favorite books focus on characters who have come to the States under difficult circumstances: the Sudanese refugee of Dave Eggers's "What Is the What.""

"I read about Sudan every day, and I didn’t understand what was going on there until this book. Dave Eggers tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who walked across the country, the largest in Africa. And then Deng spent 13 years in refugee camps before being resettled in Atlanta. It’s a powerful story of what he survived. There are lighter moments in the book: He and his roommates buy a tampon box because they think it’s so pretty. And there are less-kind inst..."