It’s been almost twenty years ago now since James Wood penned (metaphorically speaking, of course, since I’m sure he used a computer) his famous critique of a genre of literary novels he termed “hysterical realism,” specifically those big, complex, ambitious novels by writers like Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith (if you’ve read some of my previous posts, you know this is basically a list of my favorite writers), novels which Wood argues are written in style that’s too madcap, wild, and unhinged, novels which “flourish their glamorous congestion” and novels in which “the conventions of realism” are ultimately “exhausted and overworked.” “Human, All Too Inhuman” was what he titled his essay (an extremely subtle of way of broadcasting that he’s read Nietzsche), and his central argument is essentially that these novels, because of their “hysterical” (his word) literary style, ultimately lead to fundamentally unrealistic and inhuman characters.
As a caricature of the kind of “hysterical” novel he has in mind, Wood gives the following satirical description:
If, say, a character is introduced in London, call him Toby Awknotuby (that is, “ To be or not to be”—ha!) then we will be swiftly told that he has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt, which is an anagram of Toby, of course), who, like Toby, has the same very curious genital deformation, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell’s Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell’s Angels group it is, devoted only to the fanatical study of late Wordsworth), and that Toby’s mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979 and has not spoken a word since. And all this, over many pages, before poor Toby Awknotuby has done a thing, or thought a thought!
As the essay progresses, Wood eventually focuses his critique on Zadie Smith’s White Teeth as the most notable example of “hysterical realism” (Isn’t it funny that he picks the one woman on his list as the exemplar of such a gendered term?)—but the satirical passage about “Toby Awknotuby” is very clearly a parody of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 Booker Prize winning novel Midnight’s Children, which features a central character, Saleem Sinai, who, like the invented Toby, was born coinciding with a specific historical moment, midnight August 15, 1947, the exact moment India became independent, and who likewise spends about a hundred and thirty pages describing his grandparents, his parents, several other related characters, and the broader socio-political context of early-twentieth-century South Asia before he even gets to his own birth—or, as Wood puts it, before he “has done a thing, or thought a thought!”
Without question, Midnight’s Children is definitely written in the style that Wood describes in his article—Saleem is an extraordinarily baroque, loquacious, garrulous, exuberant, bombastic, and ultimately hysterical narrator, never using one word when ten will do and dropping parenthetical asides and long digressions like a postmodern Tristram Shandy. But at the same time, it feels absurd to conclude that this style makes Saleem inhuman—to me, Salem is one of the most human characters I’ve ever encountered in literature, a brash young man whose excessive confidence in his own words very clearly masks the deep-seated anxiety of a character who routinely suffers the slings and arrows of history. Over the course his thirty years of life, after all, he moves all over the Indian subcontinent, from Bombay to Rawalpindi to Karachi to Dhaka to Delhi, along the way witnessing—and in several cases participating in—the major events of South Asia’s post-independence history, from Ayub Khan’s 1958 coup in Pakistan to the 1971 war and genocide in Bangladesh to Indira Gandhi’s 1975 Emergency, all while, of course, discovering magical powers associated with his providential birth, struggling to control them, understand them, and use them for good, and trying to bring together the thousand and one other Midnight’s Children born in the first hour of India’s independence, who he discovers have powers like him. Far from distancing us, the hysterical narration instead feels like the only way to convey such a wild story, and if anything, the hysteria is what ultimately makes Saleem feel human.
There’s a moment near the end of Midnight’s Children (page 514 out of 533 in my copy) when Saleem stares up at himself in “an angled mirror above the entrance to [a] bus garage.” This is after the worst has been done to him and all his ambitions for the Midnight’s Children have failed. “Looking upwards into the mirror,” he says, “I saw myself transformed into a big-headed, top-heavy dwarf; in the humblingly foreshortened reflection of myself I saw that the hair on my head was now as grey as rainclouds… nine-fingered, horn-templed, monk’s-tonsured, stain-faced, bow-legged, cucumber-nosed, castrated, and now permanently aged, I saw in the mirror of humility a human being to whom history could do no more, a grotesque creature who had been released from the pre-ordained destiny which had battered him until he was half-senseless; with one good ear and one bad ear I heard the soft footfalls of the Black Angel of death.”
How is this not a profoundly human moment? Saleem, that brash narrator whose tale we’ve followed for five hundred pages, staring up with profound despair at his grotesque reflection. What kind of critic can read that and not feel overwhelmingly moved by the awful humanity of Saleem Sinai, “a human being to whom history could do no more?” Perhaps James Wood wanted a more realistic reflection, not a character to whom so many unbelievable things have happened. But that is the power of postmodernism and magical realism—they don’t offer a straight mirror, but instead an angled one, like the one Saleem gazes into, and they force us to realize that even in that warped reflection, there is still a human being gazing out at us through the pages.
For someone who’s lived a life of privilege and for whom history and the personal have never intersected, perhaps there really is nothing moving about Saleem. If for your whole life “the political” and “the historical” have been categories outside your private experience, things that happen on the television or Twitter a hundred miles away and to people unlike yourself, then yes, I can see why you might not feel anything when Saleem gazes up into that mirror. But if you’re a literary critic, then part of your job is to understand how literature affects all kinds of people, not just people like you—and for a large number of people, history and politics are not abstract categories distinct from private life, but real things that profoundly shape their humanity.
Wood criticizes writers like Rushdie and Zadie Smith for not adhering to his myopic idea of realism, for not writing characters who are more like those of Flaubert or Dickens, “Mr. Micawber and David Copperfield, so uncovered by theme and idea, so uninsured, weeping together in an upstairs room.” He criticizes Zadie Smith specifically for saying in an interview that her main concern is with “ideas and themes” and that it’s the writer’s job “to tell us how the world works” instead of simply “how somebody felt about something.” What he doesn’t realize is that for many readers, especially readers of color, minorities, immigrants, or anyone who’s felt the weight of history, there is often nothing more emotionally powerful, nothing that makes somebody feel something about something, than a writer showing us how the world works.