hysterical realism / encyclopedic novels

haha i have a friend who says "the problem with pynchon is that he writes like someone who smokes too much dope" => i haf no idea what this means

I don't know if the genre per se could exist, but it seems like a logical enough approach. But I'd almost think that it's an approach that's potentially one which could flower more in a non-linear format on the Net or something. There's still a page one and a final page with printed books, and as Kris sagely noted there's something to the idea of not following that path.

Pynchon re-inscribes the present on the past (or more accurately traces the outlines of things to come) while Rushdie reduces the present to the past and DeLillo views the past through the deadening lens of the current theoretical constructs of the world as it is and Wallace is perhaps the only true hysterical realist viewing the future as a fever-dream of the neuroses of the now as science fiction classically has.

Wood simply argues that they all have "weird stuff" in them -- but so have most novels historically absent the period of deadening social realism imposed by righteous-thinking Lukas-brains and other conservatizing forces.

Would he make the same "hysterical realist" jab at Kundera? Or hell, at Gogol?

Yes, I thought White Teeth was terrible too.

Doesn't a medium inevitably shift toward whatever sort of expression it's most suited to at the moment? Long books because the very act of reading a book is now a vote for length and weight and something narratively vaster and more complex and television or cinema can economically offer. Giant talking reincarnated cheese in wheelchairs because the very act of reading a book can be a vote for something other than the constant (and necessary!) bows to reality in visual-narrative media. (Add to which increasingly texty writing -- whether it's OuLiPan formalism or Cormac McCarthy puking all over the pages -- because more than anything text is no longer a medium of necessity, it implies a choice to read text in a world where it's thousands of times easier to get information and narratives from other sources.)

That said, I hate that sort of fabulism when it's done in the pseudo- pomo complaint-about-consumer-culture style (My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, most recently Bear vs. Shark, which was the only book in the past 5 years that I have deliberately stopped reading as a protest to its being, well, basically evil if you ask me, a result of the sickening and saddest and most cowardly artistic impulses ever collected between two covers) -- the text point I think I'm trying to make above is if not akin to magic realism then some sort of a highly-organized symbolic fabulism, something that recognizes the fact that the beauty of text in a visual world is that it can completely mix together the abstract and the concrete ... a fabulism, I suppose, that's not involved in its own being fabulism but rather simply takes every liberty that text still offers to get at something else.

And NB Underworld was not in the least hysterical, just an historical novel that takes the usual historical-novel liberty of connecting the vast sweep of history to a small set of characters. And DeLillo does that without even getting near the grating level of forced-coincidence most fiction-about-history winds up using (which is itself still maybe 2% of the forced-coincidence level of Don Quixote).

the duck is historical and so is its maker, but obv these stories abt it aren't: m&d is about loss (and then some) -> in this instance, possibilities that are being lost by the encroachment of actual science & cultural unity of understanding (as signified by the latitude grid) => duck = fortean-type anomaly on the cusp point (couldn't exist before since no technology/couldn't exist after since everyone knew it was impossible)

kind of like what's lost to us now we know abt spacetravel, which to ppl in 1955 was still open and possible, but to ppl in 1915 wasn't yet on the menu

MACK
returns to seat holding large bag of popcorn
So what happened?

JASON
They searched for happiness.

MACK
sighing
No, really, what happened?

JASON
Well alright what really happened was that postcapitalist culture made machines out of everyone.

sorry, thought this was the dennis cooper thread.

GA was/is a famous london-based film reviewer, of the art-movies only variety, esp.if french: he arrived late at a screening in the early 80s, asked the guy next to him in a whisper what had happened so far, and got told => afterwards in the bar he complained loudly, "When I ask, 'What happened so far?' why is it assumed that I want the PLOT retold? Perhaps I wanted a resumé of the mise-en-scène?"

Collapse of entire bar into ribald guffaws: GA teased abt this at screenings for years to come...

(i used to really like GA's reviews a few years back, but really went off him when i read him banging on about how all pop music was unlistenable rubbish. also his claim that the beer drinking scene in rosetta was worth the price of admission on its own was clearly false.)