Everything about Hysterical Realism totally explained
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.
The term was coined by the critic
James Wood in an essay on
Zadie Smith's
White Teeth, titled "The Smallness of the 'Big' Novel: Human, All Too Inhuman", 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 doesn't 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 survives 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." 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, 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. The prose in these novels is rich and thick, going into extreme detail about all manner of things.
Authors described as hysterical realists
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