Asides

Two short notes:

Firstly, on the title of this journal. It is more or less entirely a reference to this Pictures For Sad Children comic. I like the idea of a piece of art made out of pages from books; even moreso, I like the idea that every person is a collage or a papier mâché sculpture made from the pages of the texts that we've read and incorporated (incorporated-- embodied, made part of our selves). I think it would be very cool to make a sculpture like that. I've started including the names of the people who have recommended these books to me, because I like that image as well-- it is as if, in reading a book someone else has recommended to us, we take the pages from that book, with our friend's marginalia, and add them to the papier mâché sculpture that is our self, and so there is a beautiful continuity of words and texts linking us together as we read the books that our friends have read.

Also webcomics are the best.

Secondly, apparently there is a word for the type of books I described earlier as "sprawling" and "breathless." According to this Wikipedia article it is called hysterical realism, or, recherché postmodernism (I suppose the literal translation is "researched", or, "re-searched", postmodernism?), or literary maximalism. The article cites both Salman Rushdie and Dave Eggers as examples of hysterical realism, as well as certain passages of Kundera. Having read about half of one Kundera novel, I can't really comment on that, but sure, why not. Critic James Wood, writing about Zadie Smith's White Teeth, criticises hysterical realism for attempting to turn literature into social theory, for ""know[ing] a thousand things but... not know[ing] a single human being" and for depicting "how the world works rather than how somebody felt about something." I am not really sure I like hysterical realism aesthetically-- I prefer extremely understated, unadorned, straightforward prose-- but I am not sure that telling us how the world works rather than how someone felt about something is really a pitfall of a certain genre of literature. For one thing, I don't even think it's true; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, while incredibly self-conscious and, at times, painfully clever, is pretty much entirely about how Eggers feels about things; I would say an important feature of Midnight's Children is how Saleem Sinai feels about himself, being a fairly unreliable narrator and hence making the story as much or more about how he feels about the world rather than how it objectively works. Secondly, even if that were the case, is that a bad thing? I can't help feeling that telling us how the world works (whatever that means) makes literature more politically relevant than self-involved. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, if literature isn't social theory, then there is no reason to read it.

UPDATE: So I have now read about three-quarters of the article, and I don't think it is very good. Knowing nothing about James Wood, I would peg him as a fairly conservative, old-fashioned literary critic. He claims his "hysterical realism" is not the same as magical realism, but I don't quite see the difference; given the claims he makes in this review, his argument is necessarily that the function of art is to be the mirror of life. Which makes art, ultimately, vanity.

Anyway, I discovered all of this at work yesterday while looking up Jonathan Franzen, who is a pretty big deal, but I don't think I'll put him on the list-- white North American male writing big sprawling novels about family? Doesn't sound like the sort of thing I'd enjoy. White Teeth, on the other hand...