Life As Fiction

Cervantes on “Hysterical realism”

When James Wood penned that famous article where he coined the term hysterical realism (a catch-all phrase to describe —or perhaps circumscribe— the sprawling post-modern novel packed as it is with digressions, anecdotes, intertextual exegesis, social analyses, and so forth) I assumed that he had stumbled upon an original insight. He had found a way to say what we were all vaguely thinking and feeling but couldn’t articulate. He reminded us of Zadie Smith’s pronouncement that,

“…it is not the writer’s job “to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works”. She has praised the American writers David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers as “guys who know a great deal about the world. They understand macro-microeconomics, the way the Internet works, maths, philosophy, but… they’re still people who know something about the street, about family, love, sex, whatever.” ¹

James Wood’s definition of hysterical realism is encapsulated, I think, when he says,

The DeLilloan idea of the novelist as a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer - a cultural theorist, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry…Nowadays anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move, filling his or her novel with essaylets and great displays of knowledge. Indeed, “knowing about things” has become one of the qualifications of the contemporary novelist. Time and again novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge. (Richard Powers is the best example, but Tom Wolfe also gets an easy ride simply for “knowing things”.) The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result - in America at least - is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very “brilliant” books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being.

It is therefore interesting to see that Cervantes made a similar observation almost four centuries prior, an observation that sounds uncanny in its similarity to a description of hysterical realism. In the preface to Don Quixote he notes:

Other authors can pass upon the public, by stuffing their books from Aristotle, Plato, and the whole company of ancient philosophers; thus amusing their readers into a great opinion of their prodigious reading…And then the method of these moderns is so wonderfully agreeable and full of variety, that they cannot fail to please. In one line, they will describe you a whining amorous coxcomb, and the next shall be some dry scrap of a homily, with such ingenious turns as cannot choose but ravish the reader…

He finds the extents to which authors go to show their erudition remarkable:

I have neither marginal notes nor critical remarks; I do not so much as know what authors I follow, and consequently, can have no formal index, as it is the fashion now, methodically strung on the letters of the alphabet, beginning with Aristotle, and ending with Xenophon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis…

It seems as though in literature, education, and perhaps any other field glutted with youthful enthusiasms, the new complaints are practically the same as the old complaints. The world turns and everything stays the same.

A.O. Scott of the New York Times promotes Teju Cole

In an otherwise useful review of the new documentary on would-be Nobel laureate W.G. Sebald, A.O. Scott writes,

So “Patience (After Sebald)” may not, in the end, offer much in the way of explanation. It does not solve the puzzle of an oeuvre that, as it made its way from German to English, established its creator as a major and unique force in world literature. Once you read him, you may discern traces of his influence everywhere (in a book like Teju Cole’s “Open City,” for example) and may find yourself collecting thoughts and perceptions that qualify as Sebaldian. Whatever that might mean.*

Those last two sentences are jarring aren’t they? Initially, A.O. Scott dithers saying,

The only problem — or, rather, the characteristic paradox — is that “Sebaldian” would have to mean something like “systematically resistant to classification.”

However, the whole point of his review is that there is something describable and identifiable as quintessentially, and meaningfully, Sebaldian, a puzzle which remains partially unsolved, he says.

What then is the point of mentioning that Teju Cole’s methods and effects are Sebaldian? No sooner has he done so than he abdicates responsibility for any meaningful answer - that he does not give but only suggests - he may have to the question “What qualifies as Sebaldian?”.

“Whatever that might mean,” he says, so that we don’t hold him responsible for his words. Is anything Sebaldian? Or is everything? Or just Teju Cole’s Open City?

I’m inclined to believe that Mr. Scott doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. I’m further inclined to believe he merely read James Wood’s review of Open City in The New Yorker where Wood points out that,

[“Open City”] does move in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work. While “Open City” has nominally separate chapters, it has the form and atmosphere of a text written in a single, unbroken paragraph: though people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not marked by quotation marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable from the narrator’s own language. As in Sebald, what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing). The first few pages of “Open City” are intensely Sebaldian, with something of his sly faux antiquarianism. *

James Wood takes a stand on the matter of defining what is Sebald. He shows some conviction, which only makes the last lines of A.O. Scott’s review more distasteful and almost entirely promotional without the compensation of any real insights: “you may discern traces of his influence everywhere,” A.O. Scott says, yet he only gives a single, solitary example which he then immediately disavows.