Hysterical realism

Hysterical realism, also called recherché postmodernism or maximalism, is a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization and careful detailed investigations of real specific social phenomena.

History

The term was coined by the critic James Wood in an essay on Zadie Smith's "White Teeth", titled "Human, All Too Inhuman: The Smallness of the 'Big' Novel", which appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of "The New Republic" and was later reprinted in Wood's 2004 book, "The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel". Wood uses the term to denote the contemporary conception of the "big, ambitious novel" that pursues "vitality at all costs" and consequently "knows a thousand things but does not know a single human being."

He decried the genre as an attempt to "turn fiction into social theory," and an attempt to tell us "how the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." Wood points to Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon as the forefathers of the genre, which continues in writers like David Foster Wallace and Salman Rushdie. In response, Zadie Smith described "hysterical realism" as a "painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own "White Teeth" and a few others he was sweet enough to mention."cite news |last=Smith |first=Zadie |url=http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,568381,00.html |title=This is how it feels to me |publisher=The Guardian |date=2001-10-13 |accessdate=2007-03-21] Smith qualified the term, though, explaining that "any collective term for a supposed literary movement is always too large a net, catching significant dolphins among so much cannable tuna."

Wood's line of argument echoes many common criticisms of postmodernist art as a whole. In particular Wood's attacks on DeLillo and Pynchon clearly echo the similar criticisms that Gore Vidal and other critics lodged against them a generation earlier. The "hysterical" prose style is often mated to "realistic", almost journalistic, effects, such as Pynchon's depiction of 18th century land surveys in "Mason & Dixon", Don DeLillo's treatment of Lee Harvey Oswald in "Libra", or Robert Clark Young's treatment of the arcana of U.S. Navy life in "One of the Guys".

This extravagant treatment of everyday events can be found in the work of earlier authors, such as Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita", Harry Stephen Keeler's meganovels such as "The Box from Japan", Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, and Herman Melville's "The Confidence-Man" and "Moby-Dick". Even earlier precursors include "Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne, often cited as the first postmodernist novel, [Margaret Markwick, "Trollope and Women" (London: Hambledon Press, 1997), 3. ISBN 185285152X.] and "The Anatomy of Melancholy" by Robert Burton. A less "hysterical" version of such a juxtaposition of essay and narrative passages can be found in the work of Milan Kundera.

It is interesting to note, additionally, that hysterical realism resembles an older, more established literary tradition: the classic Russian novel. The works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as others, are long epic books about a large ensemble of characters.Fact|date=April 2008 The prose in these novels is rich and thick, going into extreme detail about all manner of things.

Authors described as hysterical realists

* Don DeLillo
* Dave Eggers
* Jonathan Safran Foer
* Jonathan Franzen
* Thomas Pynchon
* Salman Rushdie
* George Saunders
* Zadie Smith
* Laurence Sterne
* David Foster Wallace

See also

* Literary theory
* Magical realism
* Literary realism
* Genre studies
* Postmodernism
* Neosurrealism
* Realism (arts)

References

External links

* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,563868,00.html US novelists must now abandon social and theoretical glitter, says James Wood, "The Guardian"]
* [http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/07/15/peck_wood/print.html Salon.com article in response to Wood's criticism.]
* [http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=article_julavits Believer Mag article that discusses Wood's coined term.]