“If that's ‘hysterical realism' I'm proud to be on that team”

[Dave Monroe]

The Times
April 4, 2008

Exclusive interview with Salman Rushdie
Two decades after the fatwa, the literary heavyweight tells Kate Muir
that he is tired of politics but intrigued by the sex lives of the
Mughal emperors

SO HERE IS SIR SALMAN Rushdie, Booker heavyweight, walking political
symbol, peculiarly liberated by his new book. The Enchantress of
Florence is resolutely not of this world, a novel that is also a work
of historical research with a long bibliography. The book rolls
lusciously from harem to brothel to the courtesans of Renaissance
Florence via the excesses of the Mughal empire - and it allows Rushdie
to let rip.

[...]


In this new book, Rushdie has also moved away from what the New Yorker
critic James Wood has described as "hysterical realism", a step beyond
magical realism that attempts to convey the raucousness of
contemporary life through outlandish proliferating plots, allegory,
bizarre coincidence and high irony. Authors such as Thomas Pynchon,
Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo are accused along
with Rushdie. "If that's 'hysterical realism' I'm proud to be on that
team."

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape, £18.99; 368pp

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3681048.ece

Tell me how does it feel?

US novelists must now abandon social and theoretical glitter, says James Wood

Saturday October 6, 2001
The Guardian

[...]

Hysterical realism is not exactly magical realism, but magical
realism's next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence. This
kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have
been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on
every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. Recent novels
by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others
have featured a great rock musician who played air guitar in his crib
(Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck and a giant octagonal
cheese (Pynchon); a nun obsessed with germs who may be a reincarnation
of J Edgar Hoover (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the
liberation of Quebec who move around in wheelchairs (Foster Wallace);
and a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with the silly
acronym Kevin (Smith).

Rushdie was at it again in his most recent book, Fury, a lamentable
novel that combined hysterical realism - dolls, puppets, allegories, a
coup on a Fiji-like island, rampant and tiresome caricature, and a
noisy, clumsy prose - with the more traditional social novel. Alas,
the social-novel part of the book was set in Manhattan, and offered a
kind of diary of last year's Manhattan events. We encountered Rudy and
Hillary, J-Lo, the Puerto Rican parade, Bush versus Gore, the film
Gladiator and so on. Of course, the book was already obsolete when it
appeared in early September, just before the terrorist attack. Its
trivia-tattoo had already faded. But now it seems grotesque, a
time-stamped scrap of paper.

It ought to be harder, now, either to bounce around in the false
zaniness of hysterical realism or to trudge along in the easy fidelity
of social realism. Both genres look a little busted. That may allow a
space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell
us not "how the world works" but "how somebody felt about something" -
indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different
things (these are commonly called novels about human beings). A space
may now open, one hopes, for the kind of novel that shows us that
human consciousness is the truest Stendhalian mirror, reflecting
helplessly the newly dark lights of the age.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,563868,00.html

Hysterical realism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_realism