…seems like I’ve failed already. (The moratorium on Wood begins after this post!)
In my defense, it’s hard not to talk about Wood when he’s lauded as “our best critic,” (Ozick) and occupies a certain position on literature that I find myopic and somewhat conservative. He is certainly an extraordinary reader, and he takes literature very seriously; and it is his love of literature that makes him simultaneously so compelling, and so frustrating. Compelling because his arguments are passionate, opinionated and well-evidenced; frustrating because they seem to ignore the literary trends of the last 50 years.
In his essay “Hysterical Realism (which, by the way, I’ve spoken about way too much, and will be glad to leave behind, when and if that ever happens), Wood takes to task a number of writers through a close reading of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. To paraphrase what is a fairly brilliant (though disagreeable) essay, Wood argues that the contemporary “big, ambitious novel” is no longer the grand, social critique of Dickens, or the penetrating exegesis of human consciousness of George Eliot, but rather an inevitably parodic attempt at self-aggrandization. The author wishes to show how smart he or she is, and packs their novel with information, characters and stories. (Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest would be a prime example of this tendency.) Wood accuses these novels of being “evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself.” What I would like to propose is that the realism Wood describes pejoratively as “Hysterical” is in fact a newer, more vital realism. The “big, ambitious novel” attempts to encompass our shattered reality, with its technological advance, omnipresent stimuli and ever increasing mediations, into what has become an antiquated and almost irrelevant medium: the book.
In order for the book to stay relevant, it must adapt to the reality it faces. Contemporary reality is the amalgam of a constant influx of information: walk through Times Square and be bombarded by bright light advertisements before retreating to the relative calm of your TV (with its constantly scrolling information bar) and your computer (with its internets [sic]). The silence and stillness Wood longs for in the novel is now rarely a facet of reality. The novel is no longer an arbiter of morality, or a device for disseminating information, as it was in the 19th Century. What it can do is tie things together, show connections where we thought there were none. (Dickens did this as well, though in a less fragmentary milieu; DeLillo is the current sufferer of the acute paranoia of connection.)
Wood sees these contemporary efforts at mimesis as “cartoonish.” He claims there are no real people in these novels. Yes, but when has there ever been? The problem of representing human character and consciousness on the page has been discussed at least since the modernist era (Wood acknowledges this), and in essence it is all an exercise in illusion. The reader must suspend his or her disbelief (not only are these characters not real, but what am I actually doing? I’m looking at words on a page…), cede the writer the authority to create a consciousness on the page, and then the reader must allow him- or herself to imagine the character, its thoughts and actions. Some contemporary writers acknowledge the immense amount of complicity needed to create fiction, and therefore call attention to their creations as fictions. Hence, the cartoonish aspects in Rushdie, and White Teeth.
Then, the kicker: what Wood fails to acknowledge is that in our postmodern epoch, people are constantly fictionalizing themselves. (Not that self-delusion is anything new.) With the advent of dating websites, Facebook, Myspace, instant messenging, email, and all the substitutes for actual human contact, human beings are constantly resorting to fictions and mediations to represent themselves to one another. One immediately thinks of emoticons, the cartoon symbols representing various moods and reactions.
As the virtual avatars of human beings increase in importance — job interviewers have reportedly viewed the Facebook pages of prospective candidates — so too does the “unrealistic” aspects of their character. Suddenly, the fictionalized construct — the Myspace/Facebook page — supersedes the actual person. (Baudrillard would have a field day with this.)
So Zadie Smith’s image of Samad, the culturally and morally conflicted Bengali patriarch, being “prised…off the hot glass with a spatula” (a scene at which Wood takes particular umbrage), is slapstick, is cartoonish, but is not necessarily an abandonment of realism; rather, it is the acknowledgement of a fictional image (maybe Wily E. Coyote, smacking into a wall after being once again evaded by Roadrunner) infiltrating reality.
I think these “big, ambitious novels” boast a theory of egalitarianism that is laudable. These novels boast streams of information and intelligence, tons of characters both major and minor; it is as if these authors have a self-flagellating will to inclusion. This can of course be daunting (the novels just keep getting longer!), but it is also an act of realism. With a world of information at one’s mouse-gripping fingertips, how must the novel compete? By echoing the bricolage world in which we live, where illusions and reality coexist and conflate and where coherent moral views are diluted; where the reader will find something not cartoonish, not hysterical, but intensely familiar.
