The term ‘hysterical realism’ was supposed to be the first salvo in a literary feud. While the feud never really took off, the term itself, despite being intended in a pejorative sense, has gained currency as a useful descriptor of a certain kind of contemporary fiction. It was coined by the English critic James Wood in a 2000 essay in which he lamented a literary tendency to cover up a lack of something primary with an excess of many things secondary.
These novels – Wood invoked Zadie Smith’s White Teeth , Salman Rushdie’s Fury , Don DeLillo’s White Noise and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest , among others -- were typically marked by an overabundance of cartoonish characters, a profusion of stories, and a surfeit of information about obscure things, all rendered in glittering prose running into 1,000 pages or more. For Wood, a conservative who believes that a novel’s mandate is to explore individual consciousness, these works were “brilliant cabinets of wonders” that hid a profound lack – “the human”. As he put it, in the hysterical realist novel, “the conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, over-worked. One’s objections are made not at the level of verisimilitude but at the level of morality: the style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality -- the usual charge -- but because it seems evasive of reality, while borrowing from realism itself. It is not a cock-up but a cover-up.”
Wood’s essay was so closely argued that even Smith, the immediate target of his critique, was forced to acknowledge that hysterical realism was a “painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth ”. Her defence was that novelists write not what they want but what they can.
From the vantage of literary history, the rise of hysterical realism is only a recent wrinkle in the vast canvas of realism that began that began to dominate prose fiction in the mid-18th century. Realism, simply put, denotes fiction that faithfully mirrors reality. It evolved in opposition to romanticism, where it was not reality but dramatic or genre conventions that dictated content. There are many types of realism, depending on which aspect of reality gets priority. For instance, social realist novels dwell on the lives of the working classes, whereas psychological realism focuses on character motivation. Then there is magic realism, which blurs the line between reality and fantasy.
To the lay reader may not be conversant with literary theory, realism might seem like the ‘obvious’ framework for fiction writing. After all, the most ‘commonsensical’ criticism of a novel (or even a film) is that it is ‘unrealistic’ or ‘not believable’. But things are not so simple. Realism is one response to a problem of literary aesthetics, which we can define as follows: if creation is an exercise in autonomy, then what is the nature of the relationship between text and reality?
If the subjectivity of the author is at one end of the spectrum, denoting absolute autonomy of the text, and objective reality is at the other end, then the kind of realism one finds in a novel reflects the nature of the relationship between the text and the world. So, for instance, the Harry Potter series of novels is a complete fantasy, whereas Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude , which too has fantastical elements, isn’t -- it is magic realism. Practitioners of hysterical realism – while they may not particularly like the term – might argue that how a human being experiences reality in the age of the internet is best depicted in the ‘hysterical’ mode, for that is the effect of hyper-mediated reality on human consciousness.
