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| (Bloomsbury.) |
“We know that hyperbole is first of all a rhetorical figure of exaggeration but it is more fundamentally a moment of hubris. Hyperbole implies a risk that is in fact fantastic and fictional: that if I push it too far, I will become mad.”
--Marc Richir, 2015
In some very tangible ways, this new book by Samir Sellami, Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon’s and Bolaño’s Late Maximalist Fiction. is unavoidably elegiac, and rightly so, given that Robert Bolano was taken from us far too soon by a liver ailment in 2003 at only 50 years of age. But it’s also rather celebratory, since the erstwhile Thomas Pynchon has just released his ninth novel Shadow Ticket, and his first in a decade, at 88 years of age, on October 7 of this year. He thus carries the torch of challenging literature forward in a way that illustrates, as Sellami’s critical study shows so well, how important his labours and those of Bolaño have been down in the mines of innovation fiction. I readily admit that I prefer reading supposedly difficult books by supposedly difficult authors. Of course I concurrently acknowledge the skillful means of such masters as Dickens, Chekhov, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, as well as the rest of the canon of pared-down-to-essentials normalcy. However, I just feel that somehow it’s a better use of my limited time and energy to forgo the dining and laundry lists of quotidian narratives and instead plunge headlong into the intense dreamtime of Joyce, Stein, Faulkner and Burroughs.
To some ironic extent, both clusters of great authors are still mimetic in tone, nobly maintaining a storytelling ethos as old as Gilgamesh, but the latter group uses their literary mirrors in more of a prismatic fashion that paradoxically reflects everyday life in a far more realistic manner, for me, than the more linear tellers of tales. Historically, of course, the heady origins of hyperbolic realism stretch from Cervantes with Don Quixote in 1605 to Jonathan Swift with A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books in 1704, to Laurence Sterne with Tristram Shandy in 1759. Joyce was the maximalist king of the modernist variety with Ulysses in 1922 and Finnegans Wake in 1939, and his consort was the queen, Gertrude Stein, with her stunningly hypnotic The Making of Americans in 1925. Along the way, the stylistic gears shifted into what we often mistakenly call the postmodern era, stretching from John Barth in the 60’s, with his 1968 Lost in the Funhouse, all the way up to the late great David Foster Wallace in the 90’s, with his maximal 1998 masterpiece Infinite Jest (which in some ways is an epic Quixote and Shandy sandwich on steroids).
I say “mistakenly” because modernism didn’t just suddenly end in about 1960; it merely shifted into its late mature phases of self-reflexivity and deconstructed before our eyes, just as it was originally designed to do. It did so in all the arts at once, from painting and installation to film and theatre, music and dance, architecture and literature, et al. But it is perhaps most noticeable as a movement, or anti-movement, saturated by hyper-subjectivity, ambiguity and the absence of authorial authority, in the literary arts. This is especially the case in the novel of ideas, where these sentiments are superimposed over all narrative actions to a degree only dreamt of by Cervantes, Sterne and Joyce (though Joyce did arrive at the doorstep of the inexplicable first and without any peers, save maybe for his acolyte Beckett). Now, the Berlin-based literary critic Samir Sellami has done all of us maximalists a sweet service by giving us a profound meditation on eschewing the limits of literary decorum (so to speak) with his masterful new book from Bloomsbury.
While I’m already busily making unsolicited admissions, I can comfortably confirm what has likely already been surmised by my readers: I am indeed a maximalist and even hyperbolic critic (much to the occasional chagrin of some of my editors), and am constitutionally prone to seeking over-the-top ways to express ekphrasis, the literary expression of intense emotions provoked by works of art. Which is naturally why my taste inclines toward two precisely aligned domains: that of the hyperbolic realist novels explored so astutely here by Sellami and that of works that send me, as we used to say. Life is too short, I decided once it was rapidly becoming shorter and shorter, to spend words telling people what did not succeed, what failed, what wasn’t worth reading or watching or listening to.
So, here we are, then, enjoying a skillful joyride choreographed by Samir Sellami and fueled by the genius of Thomas Pynchon and Roberto Bolaño, among others, as he conducts a personally guided tour of what one editor, Irmtraud Huber in Reconstructive Fantasies, chose to call "what comes after postmodern literature?" The answer, naturally enough, is "more." But more of what exactly? Sellami reminds us that maximalist literature has always been with us in some joyfully anarchistic form, as early as François Rabelais and his spellbinding satire Gargantua and Pantagruel in 1535. And he also focuses ably, as I firmly believe he should, on the stylistic structure of the postmodern rather than merely the historical chronology which would too easily locate it after modernism (roughly 1840-1960). Thus we are assured that the postmodern actually had plenty of antecedents, some even before the modern era. Indeed, I myself believe that, as incongruent as it might seem, Aristophanes extolled a precursor to the postmodern style when he literally invented comedy in classical Greek theatre.
His Clouds, Birds, Wasps, and Frogs in the 420’s BCE all subverted the official classical notion that comedy was merely a tragedy with a happy ending, insisting instead on the oddly postmodern insight (later re-expressed by Dorothy Parker) that the proper definition for comedy is that it equals tragedy plus time. Aristophanes declared to the Athenian citizens that they were a disaster, for which they rewarded him with annual theatre prizes, just as our contemporary world would acclaim Gravity’s Rainbow and The Savage Detectives. Such dramatic insight into the architecture of laughter could easily have been expressed by both Pynchon and Bolaño, and it actually was, in Bolaño’s posthumous 2004 epic enigmatically titled 2666 and Pynchon’s grand folly Against the Day, in 2006. And there is no doubt at all that both Aristophanes and Rabelais would have gleefully approved of the erudite vulgarity and darkly satirical tones flowing through the verbal veins of Bolaño and Pynchon.
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| (Vintage.) |
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| (Picador.) |
Of special interest are what Sellami singles out as
...their linguistic and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty. Faced with a reality that is in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon’s and Bolaño’s late maximalist fiction reacts to the excesses and distortions of later modernity with equal poetic excess.
The result is not an escape from but rather a carefully considered plunge back into reality, a stunning oneiric voyage delivered via fiction at maximum volume and with a minimum of restraint. Sellami’s detective work here is just as carefully considered as the authors whom he chooses to recognize as exceptional.
Certainly, from an official calendar point of view, the first technically postmodern novel might be The Cannibal by John Hawkes in 1949, but it passed way below everyone’s radar, while the masterpiece in this genre that caused a huge wave was likely The Recognitions by William Gaddis in 1955. Gaddis kicked open the literary back gate by encoding the kind of specific gravity and statistical density which would become hallmarks for all those who followed, especially Pynchon, Bolaño and Wallace. This fabulous Sellami book about other fabulous books in the hyperbolic fiction mode asks many obvious but still somewhat oblique and open-ended questions. Most notably, perhaps: why do we still read long, slow, difficult novels, those encyclopedic, complex, exuberant books that come closest to an adequate representation of the really real?
Both of the gifted authors under examination here were, while operating in the parallel cultural domains of New Chile and Old America, easily the two most fascinating authors of the end of a century of fascinating literary achievements. They both elegiacally capped off that most incendiary of stylistic booms, postmodern literature, in a way that still reverberates in the corridors of our own rather paltry century, and is likely to do so for some time to come. In the meantime, our road map to grasping their true stature, especially Bolaño’s, has been clarified somewhat by three related concepts: spectral realism, the global neo-baroque, and Sellami’s present notion of hyperbolic realism, though he also synchronistically shares a semblance of the British critic James Wood, who characterized certain fabula as hysterical realism.
For all of these cogent literary observers, however, their foundational touchstone is located in the seminal work of the landmark study by Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). In this masterful opus he managed to isolate and analyze several of the key subjects and issues inherent to the American literary voice, with particular emphasis on the curious obsession with love, sex, depression and death that seems to haunt the American idiom (both North American and Latin American). Love and death, eros/thantaos, is a lingering fixation that reaches back into antiquity and stretches out in front of us in the form of the next Pynchon and Bolaño. A corrective is needed at this point, however, since in unique cases such as those of these two titans, of course there is no next. Thus, a return to one of the key themes Sellami undertakes: if an artist is experimental and radical because they challenge the form (as in the formal elements of any medium, in this case literature) then once their challenge becomes the form, what are they left with as a creative strategy?
Certainly, from an official calendar point of view, the first technically postmodern novel might be The Cannibal by John Hawkes in 1949, but it passed way below everyone’s radar, while the masterpiece in this genre that caused a huge wave was likely The Recognitions by William Gaddis in 1955. Gaddis kicked open the literary back gate by encoding the kind of specific gravity and statistical density which would become hallmarks for all those who followed, especially Pynchon, Bolaño and Wallace. This fabulous Sellami book about other fabulous books in the hyperbolic fiction mode asks many obvious but still somewhat oblique and open-ended questions. Most notably, perhaps: why do we still read long, slow, difficult novels, those encyclopedic, complex, exuberant books that come closest to an adequate representation of the really real?
Both of the gifted authors under examination here were, while operating in the parallel cultural domains of New Chile and Old America, easily the two most fascinating authors of the end of a century of fascinating literary achievements. They both elegiacally capped off that most incendiary of stylistic booms, postmodern literature, in a way that still reverberates in the corridors of our own rather paltry century, and is likely to do so for some time to come. In the meantime, our road map to grasping their true stature, especially Bolaño’s, has been clarified somewhat by three related concepts: spectral realism, the global neo-baroque, and Sellami’s present notion of hyperbolic realism, though he also synchronistically shares a semblance of the British critic James Wood, who characterized certain fabula as hysterical realism.
For all of these cogent literary observers, however, their foundational touchstone is located in the seminal work of the landmark study by Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). In this masterful opus he managed to isolate and analyze several of the key subjects and issues inherent to the American literary voice, with particular emphasis on the curious obsession with love, sex, depression and death that seems to haunt the American idiom (both North American and Latin American). Love and death, eros/thantaos, is a lingering fixation that reaches back into antiquity and stretches out in front of us in the form of the next Pynchon and Bolaño. A corrective is needed at this point, however, since in unique cases such as those of these two titans, of course there is no next. Thus, a return to one of the key themes Sellami undertakes: if an artist is experimental and radical because they challenge the form (as in the formal elements of any medium, in this case literature) then once their challenge becomes the form, what are they left with as a creative strategy?
Sellami’s book tackles these perplexing questions boldly, going way, way beyond nostalgia for lost literary traditions, to a condition called aneomoia, a nostalgia for something one has never experienced at all, in a venture towards an actual human hunger for the tangible haptic realm, by exploring two zones: realism itself, in all its aspects and aesthetic territories, as well as hyperbolic realism, specifically in the over-abundance and yes, the mind-numbing gravitas of sheer volumetric talent. This is the sort of grandiose talent, embodied in the quantum of literary skill that both Pynchon and Bolaño, and to a certain extent Wallace as well, possess in such overwhelming quantities that they put to shame the large-scale solipsistic self-confidence of Steinbeck, Dos Passos or Mailer. Sellami calls his close-reading technique untamed, or wild reading, and if you can loosen the controls of the reading vehicles you customarily drive through even the greatest novels (say of a Dostoevky, Flaubert or Tolstoy) his ekphrastic exuberance will simply charm the pants right off you.
“Against all odds,” Sellami assures us, “the long and difficult novel has managed to survive, as a ritual object for a loyal circle of readers whose devoted attention operates both within and against the all-encompassing digital condition of fragmented realities and fleeting perception.” That is an extremely accurate conceptual weather report if ever there was one. A second set of questions arises enclosed within the first: what is it that exceeds nostalgia for the analog domain and operates so actively inside the present digital era’s ongoing, and maybe even ever-expanding, interest in maximalist literature.
“How can books like Wallace’s Infinite Jest, or Bolaño’s Savage Detectives,” Sellami queries on our behalf, “still serve as a major point of reference for whole generations; how does the long and difficult novel survive and maintain the interest of a reader who has been raised in a post-literate age of ever declining attentions spans?” In the end, the crux of Pynchon and Bolaño’s secret pact with the problem of beauty was this: beauty does not become more beautiful as it ages; instead it becomes vintage. Bolaño was typically succinct in his summary of his own vocation: “The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living in it from day to day.” As usual, his perspicacity gives new meaning to the notion of the subtle yet sinister simulacra within which we all currently seem to dwell.
– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.
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