James Wood & "hysterical realism"

[jbor]

Strange that Wood seems to be taking issue with a genre of the novel which
also encompasses _Don Quixote_, _Moby Dick_ and _Ulysses_, and which reached
its zenith in the 19th C. with authors like George Eliot, Thomas Hardy,
Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Henry James.

And while it's no surprise to see the Sept 11 2001 terrorist attacks on the
US being used, inaptly and inappropriately, as the pretext for some
self-aggrandising lit crit flamebaiting, I did wonder what (and who) Wood
was advocating as the antidote to the type of "hysterical realism" he is so
dead set against. Biographical "realism"? Please.

I think Zalewski's concluding observation is spot on. The best of the
current crop, such as Pynchon's *historical* fictions in _GR_ and _M&D_, do
"tell us 'how somebody felt about something'", many times over, and how this
led to many other somebodies feeling similarly or differently, and how it
thus translates (or became translated) into social and cultural phenomena.

best



"Wood has even used 9/11 as a pretext for waging his war against hysterical
realism. Writing in _The Guardian_, he exhorted novelists to stop trying to
explain "how the world works" - the terrorist attacks proved, he argued,
that there is no way for mere novelists to keep up with today's seismic
events - and instead tell us 'how somebody felt about something'.

Wood has a point when he notes that novelists often ignore character in
favor of spiraling subplots and half-baked musings on chaos theory. But his
utopian vision of a literary world organized around Chekhovian contemplation
is arguably just as limited. Indeed, if novels are meant to reflect the heat
of a culture, it seems appropriate for at least some of them to be
anxiety-riddled, emotionally confused and intellectually scattershot - in a
word, hysterical." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/magazine/15HYST.html
'Hysterical Realism'
by Daniel Zalewski
_New York Times_, 15 December 2002

> "James Wood, the very smart and very grouchy literary
> critic for The New Republic, has become increasingly
> exasperated with those enormous, encyclopedic novels
> like The Corrections  that contemporary writers keep
> churning out. These show-offy books -- all longer than
> Ulysses and teeming with zany-yet-brilliant characters
> whose improbably interlocked stories are punctuated by
> smarty-pants digressions on arcane topics like
> earthquake detection, Quebecois exceptionalism and the
> semiotics of hot-dog stands -- are, Wood says,
> 'perpetual motion machines' that are 'ashamed of
> silence' and pursue 'vitality at all costs.' He has
> even coined a damning phrase for the genre:
> 'hysterical realism.'  In hyperdrive novels like David
> Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Thomas Pynchon's
> Mason and Dixon, Wood complains, 'the conventions of
> realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary,
> exhausted and overworked.'  In other words, today's
> novelists suffer from the literary equivalent of
> attention-deficit disorder, and it's way past time for
> the Ritalin. " 
>