Information and Emotion: On the Ambitions of Contemporary Fiction

"Information has become the new character." James Wood, "Hysterical Realism" Critic James Wood, in a review of Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, objects to such features as "a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with a silly acronym (KEVIN) ... a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica in 1907, a group of Jehovah's Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992, and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time." These are among the signs, he says, that "a genre is hardening," the genre of "the big ambitious novel." I quote: "A parody would go like this. If a character is introduced in London (call him Toby Aknotuby, i.e. "To be or not to be"--ha!), then we will swiftly be told that Toby has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt: an anagram of Toby, of course) who, like Toby, has the very same 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, devoted only to the fanatical study of very late Wordsworth), and that their mad left-wing aunt, Delilah, was curiously struck dumb when Mrs Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, and has not spoken a word since." He then asks: "Is this a caricature, really?" It is quite a good caricature, I think--so good that I would like to claim it as a piece of perhaps unintended intertextuality, in other words as an application for membership in the genre it caricatures. (This is hardly an outlandish claim given that Wood names Dickens as the "parent" of this genre and adds that "Dickens makes caricature respectable in an age in which, for various reasons, it has become hard to create character." In other words, Wood knows that in offering a caricature he himself is doing what he accuses the genre of doing.) When Wood complains that this kind of writing is incompatible with "tragedy or anguish," that it does not do "scenes," that it is awkward in its representation of "character," that its stories are "inhuman stories," one feels a certain formal and moral banality in the criticism, and one might be tempted to dismiss it as a banal anti-modernism that has not been new or enlightening since it first scoffed at Woolf and Joyce. What distinguishes it, and provokes me to think of Wood as keeping company with his targets, is the common ground of realism. It is within what he calls "the conventions of realism" that Wood places his targets, whom he accuses not of "abolishing" those conventions but merely of "overworking" them. And it's within the conventions of realism that we would have to place his own criteria. Wood is not merely ranting in a familiar way about modernism or postmodernism; he is talking about the requirements of realism to novelists who clearly intend to do realism. As he notes, these realists are trying to do something that is usually considered morally impeccable: trying to follow Forster's dictum "only connect." For Wood, it just doesn't work. To summarize a long argument: we get information about how we are all connected, but we don't get to feel those connections. Is it simply too ambitious to aim at investing a reader's feelings in connections between people who are separated by half a planet? Is this an ambition that novelists should renounce as beyond their technical means? The same argument is of course made not just about the novel but about cosmopolitanism itself, which is judged to be an impossible and misguided ideal. It is difficult enough to function as the citizen of a given nation, it is often repeated; no one can be a citizen of the world. The feeling of connectedness will not stretch so far. And yet it is unclear that one can be even a half-decent citizen of a nation like the United States if one does not make some effort to be more than a US citizen. …