Trompe-l'esprit Realism

Mary Holland was one of the first scholars to write about David Foster Wallace and focus on the issues of "gender and communication," "narcissism," or "mediated immediacy" in his fiction. However, the range of authors on which she conducts her research is much broader than this single writer, as it also includes Don DeLillo, A. M. Homes, Mark Danielewski, Steve Tomasula, and Jonathan Safran Foer. In 2013, she was somehow responding to what Stephen J. Burn had conceived in his monograph on Jonathan Franzen as the "end of postmodernism" by seeing, rather than its "end," "its belated success," hence the double entendre in the title of her book Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature. A fine and close analysis of several American novels written in the twenty-first century allowed her to grasp in them a resistance to the disaffected solipsism bred by the post-cultural culture of mediation and simulation and to anchor late postmodern fiction in a long humanist tradition respectful of individuals and communities. Her new book, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism, extends the hypotheses put forward in 2013 from the perspective of Realism, challenges the idea of a break in postmodern metafiction with nineteenth-century realism, and erases the distinction between realistic writing and the so-called "experimental" or "conceptual." Before studying a number of contemporary authors, Mary Holland offers a brilliant and scholarly theoretical synthesis of realism in America from Henry James's "air of reality" through Auerbach's Mimesis and George Lukács's "socialist realism" down to linguistic approaches, such as Roland Barthes's "reality effects," or M. H. Abrams who "reserve[s] the term 'realist' for writers who render a subject seriously." Taking sides with Steven Moore's "alternative history of the novel" rather than Pam Morris's recent opposition between "the democracy of realism" and the "nihilistic, individualistic elitism of postmodernism" that resonates with Jonathan Franzen's distinction between "Contract" and "Status" models, she then offers an extremely interesting list of all the types of Realism that have been named and theorized over the past twenty years—dirty, traumatic, tragic, figural, hysterical, agential, capitalist, metonymic, ecocritical and relational—before identifying three realisms of her own—metafictive, material, quantum—and setting the following fruitful questions at the end of her introduction: "how exactly is the literature of these new realisms related to nineteenth-century realism? What is it doing that is new, and how, and why? What is the role of realism in shaping 'post-postmodern' literature?"

The three new types of Realism are illustrated in the following chapters devoted to authors such as David Foster Wallace, Steve Tomasula, Ted Chiang, Ruth Ozeki, Don DeLillo, and an impressive number of other writers that testifies to Holland's broad and erudite knowledge of the literary production of the new millennium. Metafictive realism best applies to Wallace who was able to make present in his texts the multiple perspectives, dimensions and planes of the postpostmodern world and to render the "confusion and fragmentation" of a "heavily mediated and overinformed era." In place of the old trompe l'oeil realism of yesteryear, which meant to give the illusion of reality, like Stendhal's mirror traveling down the road, Wallace has substituted what Holland coins as a trompe l'esprit realism "mimicking the mind's perception of the real world rather than the eye's." While the first metafictionalists such as John Barth used an "internal reflection" toward "the text and the self," Wallace has shifted the focus to its outside, namely the reader, and turned metafiction "into the service of emotion, connection and human need rather than cleverness of 'art.'" This new metafiction has consequently become more "moral" than its ancestor. Three major strategies serve this goal: "dialogism of perspective" analysed in some of the stories, "the endless binary," and finally "countrapuntal metafictive realism" best enacted in The Pale King (2011) which is a novel not only "aware of itself but aware of awareness itself." Using...