Hysterical Realism

William Gibson's got the mouth breathers excited over his notion of a "Google aura" around his work. In an interview with Amazon, Gibson says:

"Yeah it's sort of like there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now. Some of it you actually have to type it in to get it, but it's all hyperlinked. It really changes things. I'm sure a lot of writers haven't yet realized how it changes things, but I find myself googling everything that goes into the text, and sometimes being led off in a completely different direction."

This seems an extreme extension of the "Hysterical Realism" that bores James Wood. In fact, this paragraph from Wood's 2001 essay, written right after 9/11, is about the best take-down of Gibson I can imagine:

"Nowadays anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move, filling his or her novel with essaylets and great displays of knowledge. Indeed, "knowing about things" has become one of the qualifications of the contemporary novelist. Time and again novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge...The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result - in America at least - is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very "brilliant" books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being."

Gibson's "Google aura" is a tactic rooted in the notion that the essence of humanity is our stuff--a comforting materialist idea. In this context, however, this notion seems geeky and shallow, the product of someone more comfortable with a laptop than a loved one.

In Wood's essay he imagined that the horrors of 9/11 would put an end to the Delillo/Pynchon et al. style of grand social novels, and predicted a retreat to the intimate, honest portrayals "that tell us not 'how the world works' but 'how somebody felt about something.'" Gibson and his inevitable followers, however, will charge ahead, arming their hysteria with supercharged search engines in a quest to capture the zeitgeist while leaving their modernity-battered feelings behind.

UPDATE: I feel like I've sold out my soul. I actually think hysterical realism is exciting and fun to read. But writing negative reviews is so easy, and Spook Country isn't as good as I wanted it to be. And, fine, Google-auras are cool...I'm a bit of a mouth breather myself. I wouldn't want to throw in my lot with an asshole elitist literary critic when the guys at the comic book store are so sweet.

IMAGE: William Gibson, by Anthony Hare, 2001