The Ancient Greeks believed the uterus was a living creature which could attack other organs in the body—the brain in particular—unless satiated by semen. This is how we got the word “hysteria”: it comes from the Greek word for the uterus, hystera. The Greeks believed that certain patterns of behavior in women could be attributed to havoc afflicted on the body by the uterus, and would apparently treat hysteria by putting strong-smelling substances on the patient’s vulva, under the belief it would scare the uterus back into its proper position.
Fast forward a few hundred years. The Christians come up with a more chaste explanation for the behaviors associated with hysteria: sin and demonic possession. So, hysteric women in the Middle Ages were treated with prayers, amulets, and exorcisms. Many women perceived as hysteric were understood to be witches, and were the victims of torture and execution. This is all from the Wikipedia page on hysteria, which also lists “regular marital sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and orgasms” as historical treatments for hysteria. It also points out that hysteria is no longer understood to be an actual medical condition. Instead, we use the word “hysterical” to describe a more casual condition of being temporarily irrationally upset, overly emotional, or frantic (and I think it has made its way into an exclusively sort of an ironic usage). We also sometimes use the word to describe things we find extremely funny, as in “invoking hysterical laughter.”
It suffices to say that the concept of hysteria was historically merely a way to oppress women, and it is not taken seriously anymore. Which is why it is so bizarre to me that literary critic James Wood decided to coin the derogatory term “hysterical realism,” his ire stoked by Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth, in a piece he wrote for The New Republic titled “Human, All Too Inhuman”:
This is not magical realism. It is hysterical realism. Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality—the usual charge against botched realism—but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself. It is not a cock-up, but a cover-up.
But White Teeth, to me, didn’t feel overly emotional, irrational, or frantic. Just… emotional. As all art should be. Other novels he cites as examples of hysterical realism include Infinite Jest (which, to me, if anything seems underly emotional) and Underworld (seems a-emotional and overly aesthetic). I wouldn’t even put these three novels in the same category.
So I’m not sure if hysterical realism is something that exists outside of James Wood’s own hysteria. Why he was so mad about White Teeth is beyond me. The sexism angle is obvious (“But it is really Smith’s hot plot which has had its way with her,” Wood says—it’s like he also read the Wikipedia page before sitting down to write his essay, oblivious to the obvious sexism he was presenting), and has been argued before, but I think Wood’s main problem isn’t sexism—it’s cynicism. Putting aside the question of the merits of Zadie Smith’s style, White Teeth and the other “hysterical” novels are worth considering for their unique qualities, the response they have generated, and their roles in the development of literature. Because it’s all a part of the movement, isn’t it? We like to pretend we are outside of postmodernism or hysterical realism, looking in, when we talk about it—but we’re all engaging in the same activity, more or less. Zadie Smith, James Wood, and you, and I are all “doing” literature; and “Human, All Too Inhuman” is itself an example of hysterical realism, just one that isn’t particularly self-aware.
In other corners of Substack, Erik Hoel and Charles Schifano have both written about a depressing trend in literature (and I think it’s worth pointing out that these concerns might never be voiced but for Substack, because the only other people who would voice them would be the cynical critics such as Wood or the lobotomized novelists themselves). This trend seems to be exactly the opposite of the problem that Wood was worried about. Wood was worried about overly emotional literature, literature that felt “hysterical,” crazy, beyond real. But twenty years later, the problem seems to be that literature has been lobotomized: homogenous, unfeeling, boring, dead, perhaps in attempt to cure the hysteria (I am reminded of the chilling fact that more lobotomies were performed on women than on men), perhaps as an evolution of it (Wood also describes an emphasis on a moral message in hysterical realism, which is an aspect that continues in contemporary literature)—whatever the case, I think now what we should be doing is appreciating and investigating books like White Teeth, Infinite Jest, and Underworld as what are apparently the last examples of ambitious literature. For what is the most recent book to have come out that is as charged as White Teeth (2000), as lucid as Underworld (1997), or expansive as Infinite Jest (1996)?
What’s interesting, is that all James Wood, Charles Schifano, and Erik Hoel all seem to agree on the fundamental motivation of literature. Wood says:
This is partly because some of the more impressive novelistic minds of our age do not think that language and the representation of consciousness are the novelist’s quarries any more.
Implying that he sees the representation consciousness as fundamental to the aim of the novel. Meanwhile, Charles Schifano makes a similar implication, and Erik’s new book makes this point explicitly, and develops the argument even further, including a retrospective on the development of literature all the way up to modernism and stream-of-consciousness works like Ulysses, citing the protagonist’s reaction to a dog:
Perhaps nothing better sums up the historic development of the intrinsic perspective than this journey from an emotionless reaction to the most fantastical of beasts, all the way to a fantastical internal reaction to the mere sight of a common dog and its owner. Humans, by finding our depths, learned to dramatize our internal lives through literature, and in doing so we learned how to make the mundane extraordinary.
It’s exactly the character’s “hysteria” that makes Ulysses good. So Wood is confused—the aspects of literature that he seems to despise are the ones that give rise to the representation of consciousness.
But maybe that’s just because literary criticism has firmly established the reflection of consciousness as the goal of good literature (so it’s easy for Wood to parrot this), and we are only disagreeing about what that means, or how to accomplish it. Which is a better representation of consciousness: Madame Bovary, Ulysses, or White Teeth? Ulysses is famous for this; but Knausgard said reading Madame Bovary is like wiping off a window and finally seeing clearly for the first time. I have the feeling that Wood would agree. Personally, for whatever it’s worth, I feel that the so-called “hysteria” of books like White Teeth—the quantity of details, the constant effort to make connections, the unreality of it, the obsessing, the rushing, the anxiety, the strain, the confusion, and the sheer brimming emotion—makes for an even better representation of human consciousness.
Appendix
Quotes from “Human, All Too Inhuman” meant to deride hysterical realism, but that could just as well describe actual human consciousness (the only changes I’ve made are changing third-person plural, when it refers to characters in examples of hysterical realism, to third-person singular):
It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence
it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself
a soothing sense that it might never have to end
the drama of vitality
forever seeing connections and links and plots
As realism, it is incredible; as satire, it is cartoonish; as cartoon, it is too realistic
without experiencing anything really affecting, sublime, or beautiful
lacks moral seriousness
both funny and moving
It justifies itself.
It has a pertness, but it squanders itself in a mixture of banality and crudity.
And so it goes on, in a curious shuffle of sympathy and distance, affiliation and divorce, brilliance and cartoonishness, astonishing maturity and ordinary puerility.