Hysterical Realism

[dreamer_easy]

"It is now customary to read 700-page novels, to spend hours and hours within a fictional world, without experiencing anything really affecting, sublime, or beautiful. Which is why one never wants to re-read a book such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet, while Madame Bovary is faded by our repressings. This is partly because some of the more impressive novelistic minds of our age do not think that language and the representation of consciousness are the novelist's quarries any more. Information has become the new character. It is this, and the use made of Dickens, that connects DeLillo and the reportorial Tom Wolfe, despite the literary distinction of the former and the cinematic vulgarity of the latter."

I dunno if I agree with what this 2001 review says (I'm not even sure I'm qualified to completely understand it, having read only one of the novels mentioned, White Teeth) ie, essentially, that a novel can't be both silly and moving. Nonetheless it's kind of exploding my mind: "language and the representation of consciousness"! "information"! (Is he describing the shift from modern to post-modern there?)

ETA: "It seems only a step from here to exploding condoms and the like."

ETA ETA: Zadie Smith's response. "When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life." ETA ETA ETA: "these image-led, speechless times".

Comments

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

God forbid that we should laugh, be moved and learn something atteh same time.

[john beven (from livejournal.com)]

I think there's a belief in the storytelling community these days that the main way to move people is with stories of tragedy, pain, loss, dysfunctionality, woe, and other elements of what I would consider the dark side (e. g. Torchwood "Children of Earth"). I haven't seen a lot of stories lately that try to move people with undiluted love, joy, beauty, happiness, humor, fun, or any other good thing that I would want to be moved by.

Jack Beven

[murasaki-1966.livejournal.com]

Stories of pain, loss etc is why I gave up on "realistic fiction" at an early age and headed for the fields of myth and the mountains of fantasy. I prefer dwelling in the Inner Lands.

[stuberrymuffin.livejournal.com]

I do agree. There is a basic tenet nowadays that everyone is driven by biological impulses and is given to being selfish, even when they're doing something good. It's believed to be realism, but it isn't really.

But then I think the writers like Rushdie are trying to say something about contemporary society and send out warnings like Orwell did. Or just be coolly intelligent and intense. It feels more worthy somehow?!

[dreamer-easy.livejournal.com]

I've not read any Rushdie, but I take it you wouldn't agree with the reviewer's assessment that he (and several other contemporary novelists) are just too darn silly?

[lonely-otter.livejournal.com]

It seems to me--and the passage isn't written with any great clarity--that the writer is complaining about the contemporary sophisticated novelist's credo (which I suppose you could call post-modern, which is that "character" and "consciousness" are false constructs of bourgeois society and therefore it's dishonest to reality to attempt to write about them. The only true subject for the artist is artistic form and the biased ways in which we process information.

The snobbish implication is that to like story and character is to be hopelessly unsophisticated and possibly fascist.

I'm not up on my DeLillo (can't read him) but Tom Wolfe has often protested against this abandoment of the traditional forms of novel-writing. He tried to correct this in his novels, but unfortunately his considerable gifts are for recording and reporting, and his characterizations aren't very compelling.

This battle was fought long ago in painting, with first the Impressionists and then the Cubists declaring that a painting should record the way we perceive, either physically or psychologically, and not just be a more-or-less realistic "picture of something,' like the Mona Lisa or The Night Watch. As you can feel when you see Impressionist and Cubist paintings, this approach was at first immensely freeing and released a lot of energy, but it's pretty much run dry by now, a century later.

In my opinion, non-representational art like that of abstract expressionism can be terrifically powerful and moving. But the more abstract the novel became/becomes, the more it has lost its popular audience (it's also trying to usurp a form of literary expression that poetry already does quite well and that, in narrative terms, movies and plays can do better). Some people have argued that the "real" literature of the late twentieth century is found in genre writing, which still emphasizes character, plot and sometimes ideas.

Yrs pedantically,
L.O.

[dreamer-easy.livejournal.com]

You make me feel a lot better about myself, LO. *pats*

[lonely-otter.livejournal.com]

*smiles seraphicly as is my wont*