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Zadie Smith

— I think the binary thinking of that essay has been elegantly exploded in variety. Just looking around my desk I wouldn’t know where to place, in the terms of that essay, Daniel Kehlmann, Jenny Erpenbeck, Elena Ferrante, Ben Lerner, Ma Jian, Peter Stamm, Michel Faber, Joshua Cohen, Nikita Lalwani, Teju Cole, Katie Kitamura or indeed the latest Joseph O’Neill. Despite the shrinking of our industry some really extraordinary writing is being done, and because many writers now have pseudo-academic jobs by which they live, I suspect one positive consequence of this is that they may feel a little freer than before to write as they like. It’s the same freedom poets have always had: the freedom of being irrelevant within the market (when compared to J. K. Rowling, E. L. James, Jamie Oliver and so on). My view on that essay now is, I guess, that polemics are temporal, good for shaking things up at a particular moment, but that they wilt and fade beside the incommensurable reality of individual books. I’d rather read any of the writers mentioned above than ever look at that essay again.

 

Another thing I feel has changed since 2008 is that the fashionable argument against ‘realism’ has become a bit simple-minded. The now familiar idea that realism ‘is just another literary genre’ or that realistic writing is always and everywhere unexamined and unconsidered – a form of philosophical naïvety – is in itself, in my opinion, somewhat over-stated. In fact I think we are rather sophisticated in our understanding of the limits and illusions of language, and that this is again largely due to our familiarity with the literary uses of language in everyday life. When you hear, for example, two girls at a bus stop and one is telling the other a ‘story’ – ‘and she was like… and I was like… and they were like’ – the story-telling girl is not doing this because she imagines that with this act of mimesis, with this ‘realistic’ re-telling, she has fooled her listener into believing that what she is presenting is ‘authentic’ or an unvarnished truth, in some sense essentially ‘real’ – no. She is performing a speech act in which both parties understand, at least to some degree, that what is happening is a form of ‘performance’, a bracketed and partial reality.

 

The problem with the argument that all realism is naïve is that it assigns to both parties in the literary exchange – the reader and the writer – an almost childlike innocence in the face of literary artifice. I’ve been guilty of this myself. As if only writing that calls attention to its own constructed and artificial nature can be considered writing-without-illusion. Behind this idea lurks a puritan instinct that I think abhors the mixed and fundamentally impure material we work with: language. Like many writers I definitely have this puritan instinct within me, this dream of a writing that would be pure form, or pure sound, or purely logical, or purely refer to itself. That would never smuggle values and prejudices through the back door: a language that is clear-eyed, stripped of ‘belief’, utterly material. But as I get older and keep writing I find this dream, too, to be a kind of illusion, and perhaps just as large an illusion as the dream of perfect Stendhalesque mimesis, that is, of believing your prose could be a pane of glass through which reality is perfectly reflected.

 

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Zadie Smith

— Explicitly. That’s what the novel is about, the end of exactly that social compact. It was in large part directly inspired by a sentence of Tony Judt’s which I must have read in the NYRB – or maybe in one of his essay books – about Judt feeling himself to be a representative product of a meritocratic experiment that began in 1945 and ended, as a positive project, around 1975. I was born in 1975, and I wanted to add an addendum to that; I felt that my generation was really the last of the last. Throughout my childhood (though I didn’t really understand this until much later) there was a fierce war going on to remove precisely the safety nets and ladders I was at that very moment using. I was incredibly lucky to get through before they all got pulled up. Free schooling, free healthcare, and then free university – coincidentally at the same college Tony went to: Kings, Cambridge. By the time White Teeth was published and I looked behind to see if the kids were coming up behind me it was already mostly finished. NW for me was an expression of my own heartbreak at the end of one version of England, the one I knew, and the beginning of another. It could just as easily be called Goodbye to All That.