M&D Chapter 12 - pages 118-119

Sat Feb 28 10:58:35 CST 2015

Becky, your reference tent me back to re-read for the fifth or sixth time
Wood's 2001 "Human, All Too Inhuman" (the "hysterical realism" review of
Zadie Smith's White Teeth). I'm finally getting a handle on what has
bothered me about it all along. A sample follows, although I commend the
entire piece to anyone who hasn't read it (or re-read it lately in the
context of M&D)
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman

--
"A genre is hardening...

The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to
have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness,
as if ashamed of silence—as it were, a criminal running endless charity
marathons. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels
continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this
culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs.
Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned...

...Recent novels—veritable relics of St. Vitus—by Rushdie, Pynchon,
DeLillo, Foster Wallace, and others, have featured a great rock musician
who, when born, began immediately to play air guitar in his crib (Rushdie);
a talking dog, a mechanical duck, a giant octagonal cheese, and two clocks
having a conversation (Pynchon); a nun called Sister Edgar who is obsessed
with germs and who may be a reincarnation of J. Edgar Hoover, and a
conceptual artist painting retired B-52 bombers in the New Mexico desert
(DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec called the
Wheelchair Assassins, and a film so compelling that anyone who sees it dies
(Foster Wallace). Zadie Smith's novel features, among other things: a
terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (kevin),
an animal-rights group called fate, a Jewish scientist who is genetically
engineering a mouse, a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston,
Jamaica, in 1907; a group of Jehovah's Witnesses who think that the world
is ending on December 31, 1992; and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in
London, who both break their noses at about the same time.

This is not magical realism. It is hysterical realism. Storytelling has
become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and
drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished
but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then,
objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of
morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks
reality—the usual charge against botched realism—but because it seems
evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself. It is not a
cock-up, but a cover-up..."

--

I respect and admire Wood greatly as one of the best critics of our time
(even at book-review depth, or rather enforced shallowness). I think he's
entirely right in tracing much of the fiction he's talking about, directly
or indirectly, to Dickens: he quotes E.M. Forster on Dickens' "caricatures"
from the "flat and round characters" passage in Aspects of the Novel, which
also comes up often here on the P-list:

https://catalyst.uw.edu/workspace/file/download/b3babc90fd75d98bc0147d086ad3068f6aeced8b2f8b089e9d5a4036700810c5
<https://catalyst.uw.edu/workspace/file/download/b3babc90fd75d98bc0147d086ad3068f6aeced8b2f8b089e9d5a4036700810c5?html=1&url=https://catalyst.uw.edu/workspace/file/download/b3babc90fd75d98bc0147d086ad3068f6aeced8b2f8b089e9d5a4036700810c5>
.

What I noticed much more this time around was Woods'strongly (but usually
implied, tacit) *normative* stance. Literary realism of the non-hysterical
kind is not simply credited but *identified*  with engaging reality... with
the capability of expressing tragedy or anguish... with real human
experience, real human connection... with life, with depth... in short,
with almost every Good Thing one could want from narrative art. Well,
jeez... who wouldn't want all those those?

But, jeez... do I really believe that the realist novel -- more
specifically, novels broadly descended from  the 19th-century English
core (Austen,
Eliot, James, Conrad) identified as "The Great Tradition" by F. R. Leavis
-- is now and forever the only, or the best, way to get them? Nope. The
label "realism" has always been a lousy one, quietly implying vast
philosophical claims. Writers were getting at trad=gedy, connection, depth
and All That (and at other aspects of experience that character- and
relationship- and individual-consciousness-centered realist novels *don't*
get at very well) long before realism developed, and have been doing so
right through the realist reign. They aren't "exhausting" or "overworking"
or "evading" anything -- they're doing something else. And often enough, in
ways that matter to me,  something more.

--

PS - Encountered along the way, an article on the novel that reminds us of
its, uh, parochial origins and probable transience:

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2015/marapr/novel-as-protestant-art.html
<http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2015/marapr/novel-as-protestant-art.html>

If you can't keep all those murderous Near Eastern sects straight and
prefer to Weberize the title as "The Novel as Post- Enlightenment
 Fast-Urbanizing Individualist Commercial/Industrial/Capitalist Art", that
works too.

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:

> Another day,  another couple pages:
>
> Maskalyne likens St. Helena to a gothic novel and says
>
> "Six months I’ve been here - too many idle Minutes soon pile up, topple
> and overwhelm the Healthiest Mind.”
>
> (A little foreshadowing there? -  Suspicions that Mason might go
> completely mad?  Pynchon doesn’t really go in for a lot of foreshadowing to
> keep up suspense or whatever - just as well,  it would take the whole thing
> overboard, overdone, too much.)
>
> ** “Sirius Business,” cackles the Proprietor. -  another groaner gag.
>
> This novel has some very serious themes, but told with a LOT of humor -
> not just humor to lighten the atmosphere -there’s actually a comic tone.
>
> "But I also noticed that the book’s  (M&D’s) humor was more thoroughly
> interwoven with melancholy and a sense of mortality than ever before in
> Pynchon's work."
> http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/mason.html
>
> "Mason & Dixon represents an impulse to write history through the
> imaginary field, to crosshatch its narrative with a realization of
> culture's desire to find its identity in the realm of the imagination. It
> thus argues, implicitly, for the importance of artistic imagination
> alongside scientific and historical work. Pynchon rejects the harsh realism
> and more cynical parodies employed by many contemporary authors, using
> HUMOR (my caps)  and even magic as modes of transformation.[17] Talking
> dogs, sexually aroused mechanical ducks, and nighttime apparitions and
> ghosts haunt Mason and Dixon in America; perhaps the country that combines
> technical invention with capitalistic enterprise might be equallymythologic
> in Pynchon's ambivalent history."
> http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.903/14.1burns.html
>
> Thoughts on the humor and how it adds to the mix of history, themes,
> story, whatever -  do you laugh? Why?
>
> **********
> And then, ta-da - it’s Maskelyne’s birthday - (which would tell us it’s
> October 6, 1761 and that he’s 29 years old - born Oct. 1732) and he makes a
> big deal of impending doom (age 30 is coming).
>
> The phrase "Stygian mists”  is from "To Chloris”  in "Madrigals and
> Epigrams” by William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649) Scottish poet.   a
> little chunk of the poem -  http://www.bartleby.com/337/285.html
>
> Mason:  (but 30 is)  “… a Number divisible,- penetrable! - by 6 numbers!”
>   (eeks?  why?  - numerology of some kind I guess.)
>
> ***  Narrator:    “...dismal apostrophes...”    -
>  And in this case the word apostrophe means exclamations,  not the
> punctuation symbol.
>
> **** Now Dixon is leaving for South Africa to take care of Maskelyne’s
> "Sisson instrument”  which is probably a quadrant of some sort,  a device
> for measuring angles.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Sisson
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrant_(instrument)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mural_instrument
>
>         If the measurement device is off by a hair - then that slight
> error is multiplied exponentially and Maskelyne has invested more than time
> and his career in the instrument ($$?) .  Dixon is the field rep for Johnny
> Bird’s instruments?  -  lol - but …
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bird_(astronomer)
>
> Why are the various measurements of time and space inaccurate?   Errors in
> measurement - 1.  human error - the time of the Transit (because M&D
> started/ stopped at different places) and, 2.  device error (plumb line
> screwed up on quadrant).
> **********
> Is there really so little on these two pages?    Or is this “so little?”
>
> So here’s an added little morsel for the Learn’d Dogs amongst us - James
> Wood, in a now “classic” essay soundly criticized Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
> for it’s “hysterical realism” and lambasted a few others in the process
> (M&D, etc).
> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-all-too-inhuman
>
> And this is a rather interesting little Wiki article on the subject:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_realism
> (interesting little piece)
>
> Becky
> the humor bit reminded me of hysterical and that took me on the little
> semi-side trip to Wood and Wiki -
>
>
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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