Hysterical realism

Hysterical realism, also called recherché postmodernism[1], is a term coined in 2000 by English critic James Wood to describe what he sees as a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other.

History

Wood introduced the term in an essay on Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which appeared in the July 24, 2000 issue of The New Republic.[2] Wood uses the term pejoratively 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 readers "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, Wood says, in writers like David Foster Wallace. 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 [Wood] was sweet enough to mention".[3] 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." She also noted "David Foster Wallace's mammoth beast Infinite Jest was heaved in as an exemplum, but it is five years old, and is a world away from his delicate, entirely 'human' short stories and essays of the past two years, which shy away from the kind of totalising theoretical and thematic arcs that Wood was gunning for. If anyone has recently learned a lesson about the particularities of human existence and their separation from social systems, it is Wallace."

Wood's line of argument echoes many common criticisms of postmodernist art generally. In particular, Wood's attacks on DeLillo and Pynchon clearly echo similar criticisms other critics had already lodged against them a generation earlier. The "hysterical" prose style is often paired with "realistic"—almost journalistic—effects, such as Pynchon's depiction of 18th century land surveys in Mason & Dixon, and Don DeLillo's treatment of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra.

Yet as Zadie Smith notes, "People continue to manage this awesome trick of wrestling sentiment away from TV's colonisation of all things soulful and human, and I would applaud all the youngish Americans—Franzen, Moody, Foster Wallace, Eggers, Moore for their (supposedly) small but, to me, significant triumphs. They work to keep both sides of the equation—brain and heart—present in their fiction. Even if you find them obtuse, they can rarely be accused of cliché..." (op. cit.).

Works

Some books described as examples of hysterical realism are:

  • Pynchon, Thomas (1973). Gravity's Rainbow.[4]
  • Rushdie, Salman (1981). Midnight's Children.[4][5]
  • Wallace, David Foster (1996). Infinite Jest.[6]
  • Delillo, Don (1997). Underworld.[4]
  • Pynchon, Thomas (1997). Mason and Dixon.[6]
  • Braschi, Giannina (1998). Yo-Yo Boing!.[7][8]
  • Rushdie, Salman (1999). The Ground Beneath Her Feet.[9]
  • Smith, Zadie (2000). White Teeth.[4]
  • Franzen, Jonathan (2001). The Corrections.[6]
  • Eugenides, Jeffrey (2002). Middlesex.[6]
  • Bolaño, Roberto (2004). 2666.[4]
  • Diaz, Junot (2007). The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.[4][10]
  • Toltz, Steve (2008). A fraction of the whole. New York: Spiegel & Grau. ISBN 978-0-385-52172-7. OCLC 154799771.[11]
  • Braschi, Giannina (2011). United States of Banana.[12][13][14]
  • Kleeman, Alexandra (2015). You too can have a body like mine. New York: Harper. ISBN 978-0-06-238868-1. OCLC 893898032.[15]

See also

References
  1. Yates, Elliot J. (May 2014). The Other Side of Realism: David Foster Wallace & The Hysteric’s Discourse (PDF) (B.A. thesis). University of Melbourne.
  2. Wood, James (24 July 2000). "Human, All Too Inhuman: On the formation of a new genre: hysterical realism". The New Republic.
  3. Smith, Zadie (2001-10-13). "This is how it feels to me". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-03-21. and archived.
  4. "The Hysterical Realism Reading List". ANOBIUM. Retrieved 2018-09-21.
  5. Pégon, Claire (2005-10-15). "Madelena Gonzalez. Fiction after the Fatwa - Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe". E-rea. Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone (3.2). ISSN 1638-1718.
  6. Zalewski, Daniel (2002-12-15). "The Year in Ideas; Hysterical Realism". The New York Times.
  7. Aldama, Frederick Luis; O’Dwyer, Tess, eds. (2020). Poets, philosophers, lovers: On the writings of Giannina Braschi. Place of publication not identified: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-4618-2. OCLC 1143649021.
  8. Popovich, Ljudmila Mila. "Metafictions, Migrations, Metalives: Narrative Innovations and Migrant Women's Aesthetics in Giannina Braschi and Etel Adnan". The International Journal of the Humanities.
  9. Wood, James (20 November 2000). "Hysterical realism". Prospect Magazine.
  10. Grossman, Lev (11 July 2012). "What Ever Happened to Hysterical Realism?". TIME.
  11. Maguire, Emily (17 March 2008). "A Fraction of the Whole". The Age. Retrieved 8 May 2020.
  12. Perisic, Aleksandra (2019). "Introduction: Globalizing the Atlantic". Precarious Crossings: Immigration, Neoliberalism, and the Atlantic. Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8142-1410-7.
  13. Aldama, Frederick Luis, ed. "Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi". University of Pittsburgh Press. Retrieved 2020-04-21.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  14. Riofrio, John (2020-01-28). "Falling for debt: Giannina Braschi, the Latinx avant-garde, and financial terrorism in the United States of Banana". Latino Studies. 18 (1): 66–81. doi:10.1057/s41276-019-00239-2. ISSN 1476-3435.
  15. Gilmartin, Sarah (21 March 2013). "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine review: Suffering single white females". The Irish Times. Retrieved 8 May 2020.

Further reading
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