The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

by Lynne Tillman, M. G. Lord (Introduction)

The complete art world story/essays of the fictional Madame Realism, collected for the first time. The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories gathers together Lynne Tillman's groundbreaking fiction/essays on culture and places, monuments, artworks, iconic TV shows, and received ideas, written in the third person to record the subtle, ironic, and wry observations of the playful but stern “Madame Realism.” Through her use of a fictional character, Tillman devised a new genre of writing that melded fiction and theory, sensation, and critical thought, disseminating her third-person art writer's observations in such magazines as Art in America and in a variety of art exhibition catalogs and artist books. Two decades after the original publication of these texts, her approach to investigation through embodied thought has been wholly absorbed by a new generation of artists and writers. Provocative and wholly pleasurable, Tillman's stories/essays dissect the mundane with alarming precision. As Lydia Davis wrote of her work, “Our assumptions shift. The every day becomes strange, paradox is embraced, and the unexpected is always around the corner.” This new collection also includes the complete stories of Tillman's other persona, the quixotic author Paige Turner (whose investigation of the language of love overshoots any actual experience of it), and additional stories and essays that address figures such as the “Translation Artist” and Cindy Sherman.

Genres: Essays, Art, Nonfiction, Short Stories

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Here’s an Author’s Bio. It could be written differently. I’ve written many for myself and read lots of other people’s. None is right or sufficient, each slants one way or the other. So, a kind of fiction – selection of events and facts.. So let me just say: I wanted to be a writer since I was eight years old. That I actually do write stories and novels and essays, and that they get published, still astonishes me.

My news is that my 6th novel MEN AND APPARITIONS will appear in march 2018 from Soft Skull Press. It's my first novel in 12 years.

Each spring, I teach writing at University at Albany, in the English Dept., and in the fall, at The New School, in the Writing Dept.

I’ve lived with David Hofstra, a bass player, for many years. It makes a lot of sense to me that I live with a bass player, since time and rhythm are extremely important to my writing. He’s also a wonderful man.

As time goes by, my thoughts about writing change, how to write THIS, or why I do. There are no stable answers to a process that changes, and a life that does too. Writing, when I’m inhabiting its world, makes me happy, or less unhappy. I also feel engaged in and caught up in politics here, and in worlds farther away.

When I work inside the world in which I do make choices, I'm completely absorbed in what happens, in what can emerge. Writing is a beautiful, difficult relationship with what you know and don’t know, have or haven’t experienced, with grammar and syntax, with words, primarily, with ideas, and with everything else that’s been written.

Reviews

[Bookforum Magazine]

"There's a refusal to shape a true, victorious "ending"; the writing slouches off into a vague digression before the passive denouement of sleep. There is no summation, no struggle or anxiety or heroics. Madame Realism dissembles, shrugging off her potential authority authority and any emotional attachment to her observations.

We read because we are looking for something, and the way we look at the world is a way of reading, too. These fiction-essays ask what our readings are good for, what comfort or pleasure or knowledge they bring us, how they shape our lives."

–Prudence Peiffer on Lynne Tillman's The Complete Madame Realism and other Stories in the April/May 2017 issue of Bookforum

To read the rest of this review, please go to Bookforum:
http://bookforum.com/inprint/024_01/1...

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one hovered pretty solidly between 3 and 4 stars. Half of the book is taken up by Madame Realism (MR) "stories." Many of these were written more than 20 years ago using the MR fictional persona to blend criticism and essays with fiction. (As an aside, I've always wondered if there was any relationship or inspiration between MR and David Foster Wallace's Madame Psychosis. Thus far, I haven't been able to find any.) The reader essentially gets to experience art through this third person narrator like walking through a museum with an idiosyncratic savant masquerading as a docent sharing their personal thoughts. MR explores meaning, symbolism, culture...

Cultural production was centered on humans by humans. Art, novels, histories, movies, talk shows, sports, human studies were limitless; motives, reasons, interpretations endless. All versions were marked by irrationality, fantasy or contradiction. Much more was hidden than apparent. And, Madame Realism reflected, humans lie, animals don’t. Probably. Too unaware to make themselves wholly readable in any form, humans were tar-pits of self-reflection, streaming subjectivities.

If you like theory, art, or criticism, you'll probably enjoy these engaging shorts. In one, MR actually turns into an art exhibit catalog. In another, she captures human yearning with sentences like "They went in search of shooting stars and other necessary irrelevancies."

The second section of the book is about half as long and deals with three stories under the character Paige Turner who delves into love using a somewhat similar-but-different approach as MR in terms of meshing personal reflection and art/philosophy. There is always a fair amount of dry humor in Tillman's writing and/or her selection of quotes by others such as when Turner's thoughts are interspersed with Warhol's:

When people used to learn about sex at fifteen and die at thirty-five, they obviously were going to have fewer problems than people today who learn about sex at eight or so, I guess, and live to be eighty. That’s a long time to play around with the same concept. The same boring concept. -- Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

The last 50 pages of the book collect an assortment of stories/essays that deal with art, translation, and particular artists like Cindy Sherman, Joan Jonas, and David Wojnarowicz. These function as brief explorations as to how different individual approaches to life and meaning reveal different aspects of the human experience.

Along the way Tillman manages to touch on everything from immigration to slavery. The range and depth she achieves are remarkable, yet so loosely tied together by these fictional personas and a shared spirit of confusion and inquiry. It's a testament to how much I like Tillman that I don't even hold it against her that she foregoes the Oxford comma (although, I must admit a fierce personal struggle not to force it upon some of the passages I quoted).
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WORDS I HAD TO LOOK UP
hypnagogic | heteroglossia | prosopagnosis | inchoate | Kuleshov Effect (brief video)

[Tom Buchanan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading these all in a row was a bad idea. Honestly Lynne Tillman, I don't get. American Genius was so good and then I read Cast in Doubt and it was so busted. I dunno.

[Ruby · Rating 3 out of 5]

found this almost impossible to push through despite mostly enjoying it. sometimes i think collections can be tricky to read when they’re so cohesively designed thematically yet each piece fails to strike as strongly as each other. really enjoy the breaking down and blurring of lines of critique/fiction; sometimes it worked much better than others. the only real standout piece to me was “the museum of hyphenated americans” and maybe the paige turner piece on love, because the writing was so evocative there.

[a l n · Rating 4 out of 5]

a sly and slant, almost cheekily ekphrastic short story collection that contemplates the relationship between art and social/political life with a grin of lightness