On Hysterical Realism

As I progress writing my novel, I find that my writing undeniably employs the devices used by the hysterical realists. This comes as no surprise given my literary preferences, yet it is a trait I must acknowledge nonetheless. I will now take a moment to congratulate myself for being sufficiently mature to admit that I am not forging a new school of literature with my first, amateur bit of writing. I am also unable to restrain my analytical impulses, so I’ve spent some time trying to analyze the meaning and constituent elements of hysterical realism and the hysterical realists. I’ve also developed some concerns regarding the implications of the usage of these devices.

The lineage of my introduction to hysterical realism was standard: Pynchon to Wallace to Eggers to Foer. Despite undeniable preferences between the authors, I enjoyed all of their work and not once felt cheated. The meanderings and microscopic detail are relevant to contemporary perspectives – everything is explicable, everything is relative, and unexpected connections between objects, people, and events abound. As Foer constructs a detailed fictional history of a shtetl, every nuance has its human collateral explained. Many characters are mentioned only once, and only in passing, as a detail’s related effects on a given character are explained. Wallace is able to conjure minutely detailed thought-processes of his characters, accounting for every ingredient of a character’s psychology, both their past and current circumstances and traits. These authors are attempting to create closed narrative systems – every action has a reaction and the stoichiometry of each chemical reaction is explicitly explained. Describing the chains of causality and effect is like defining the philosophical and moral physics of the author’s world. And the integration of these details is elegant – if one were to diagram this style of diegesis, it would appear as a line with a series of loops branching off of it. Each loop is one of the meanderings or sub-atomic analyses, at once increasing the apparent size of the author’s world and showing the course of a given chemical equation.

When I expanded my reading in the genre to lesser authors, in part to know my competition, in part to find easily deconstructed text, I began to feel that the mode of hysterical realist writing is easily misused. (I’ll refrain from mentioning any writers lest I prematurely burn bridges.) The primary difference is that these authors appear to provide details for the sake of details. A gun used to shoot someone is described beyond the make, beyond the model, all the way down to the geolocation of its specific production. Yet that history and that location are irrelevant to the story and explain none of the constituent forces driving or holding together the element’s of the author’s world. Unlike the authors mentioned above, this story would map like a branch with sticks jutting out. Though these sticks increase the overall area of the total story, they frequently fail to reconnect and add to the primary narrative.

This usage of excessive details has uncomfortable corollaries – one could argue that detail for the sake of detail, that is, meaningless maximalism, cheapens the art of writing and devalues the reader. A strength of writing is that the author has extremely fine-grained control over how much information the reader is given, arguably moreso than in other forms of expression. Constantly writing with detail at full bore (pun intended) is like composing music without rhythm or dynamics. Worse still is that it allows the reader less agency. Law and Order, by its philosophy and its medium, is intended to be as representational as possible and allow no questions on the part of the viewer – the viewer is allowed to stop thinking and witness melodrama with absolute resolution and justice. Maximalism ideally should give the reader more to consider; misused it thinks for the reader and replace’s the reader’s imagination. Consider the reader. Consider the reader’s mind.