Other Voices, Other Selves

By PANKAJ MISHRA

CHANGING MY MIND

Occasional Essays

By Zadie Smith

306 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95

“To write critically in English,” Zadie Smith asserts in the opening essay of “Changing My Mind,” “is to aspire to neutrality, to the high style of, say, Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson.” Praising Zora Neale Hurston, Smith complains that the mandarin critical mode elevates the experiences of white people to the norm while making “black women talking about a black book” look sectarian. Smith’s own way of escaping this narrow assumption is to declare boldly, “Fact is, I am a black woman.” A writer like Hurston, Smith adds, makes “ ‘black woman-ness’ appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals.” Hurston also allows Smith “to say things I wouldn’t normally — things like “She is my sister and I love her.”

After this sonorous declaration, you might expect Smith to reclaim writers and books on behalf of millions of complex individuals whose experiences are misrepresented, insufficiently written about or simply ignored. But she means for us to take the title of her book seriously. “Ideological inconsistency,” she writes in her foreword, “is, for me, practically an article of faith.” The essays that follow discuss some prominent dead white writers (George Eliot, Kafka, E. M. Foster, Nabokov, Barthes, David Foster Wallace), but they display no Edward Said-style counterreading of canonical texts. Their quirky pleasures derive from Smith’s own critical persona — always bold, jauntily self-reflexive and amusing — and her inspired cultural references, which include both Simone Weil and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

There is little hint of Smith’s culturally diverse background in her essays on (mostly Hollywood) movies and stars; they belong recognizably to an Anglo-American tradition of writing about cinema that alternates between masochistic reverence and slash-and-burn japery. And Smith resembles a French avant-gardist of the 1950s and ’60s rather than a postcolonial writer in her most ambitious essay, “Two Directions for the Novel,” which attacks the metaphysical pretensions of the “lyrical-realist” tradition that evidently dominates “Anglophone” fiction.

In this essay (which compares Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” with Tom McCar­thy’s “Remainder”), Smith passes over the many novels from outside the West that have helped expand traditional bourgeois notions of self and identity. Yet her essay on Barack Obama is replete with the postcolonial-cum-postmodernist themes — hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence — that professors of literature and cultural studies commonly employ in American and British universities. Smith’s hope that Obama’s “flexibility of voice” may lead to “flexibility in all things” derives not so much from hardheaded political analysis as from academic high theory, which assumes that those who live between cultures best represent and articulate the human condition today. According to Smith, the moral of Obama’s story is that “each man must be true to his selves, plural.”

On this point, at least, Smith is ideologically consistent. In fact, the idea that “the unified singular self is an illusion” could be the leitmotif of this collection. It allows Smith to revisit her own early assumptions and to question such essentialist notions as “black woman-ness.” Reflecting on Kafka’s ambivalence about his ethnic background, she writes: “There is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with Jews?’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.”

This may sound a bit melodramatic. But then — as Salman Rushdie and other practitioners of postcolonial postmodernism have stressed — ambivalence, doubt and confusion are essential to forming dynamic new hybrid selves. Smith seems to bring to this now entrenched critical orthodoxy the particular weltschmerz of today’s bright, successful but sad young writers. This is most evident in the collection’s final essay, a long and passionately argued panegyric to David Foster Wallace in which Smith diagnoses the central dilemmas of her own increasingly lost generation. These are dilemmas, she argues, that Henry James, who assumed awareness leads to responsibility, never encountered: “the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse and philosophy’s demotion into a branch of linguistics.”

Smith writes with a beguiling mix of assurance and solemnity, borrowing her vocabulary from many intellectual and cultural sources. But a few of her readers may still pause to wonder if the growing irrelevance of academic philosophy is as strong an influence — even on people at university campuses — as the ravages of “late capitalism.” For someone so apparently world-weary, Smith can often appear profoundly unworldly. Writing about a trip to Liberia organized by Oxfam, she wavers distractingly from the arch (“There are such things as third-world products”) to tourist-brochure blandness (“Bong country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze”) to stock atrocity journalism (“A narrow corridor of filth, lined on either side with small dwellings made of trash, mud, scrap metal. Children with distended bellies, rotting food, men breaking rocks”).

Compiling an assortment of details, Smith declines to fit them into a pattern. Her essay called “Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend” has the shapelessness implied by its title. Smith visibly moves with greater ease through the decipherable world of texts, but here she often gets bogged down in over-interpretation. The work of David Foster Wallace, an estimable writer of undoubtedly great unfulfilled promise, can’t bear the weight of meaning Smith bestows on it, deploying references that range from Zen koans to Noam Chomsky. Lines like “How to be in the world when the world has collapsed into language?” bear too much resemblance to the effusions of an aspirant for a Ph.D. in philosophy.

When writing out of her own memory and experience, Smith can quickly cast a spell: her essay on British comedy, which movingly commemorates her father, is among her best. But her preferred stance as a literary and philosophical insurgent, with its related weakness for rousing manifestos, often yields a disconcerting intellectual and moral imprecision. Far from being a complacent purveyor of a triumphant “white” culture, Edmund Wilson wrote feelingly about the Iroquois and Zuni Indians and other endangered minority cultures. We may all be insects now, but a Muslim insect in England doesn’t lurk in the same hole as a non-Muslim one.

Smith’s broad-brush pronouncements underscore the limitations of the academic theories she often rehearses. Having hybrid identities, not belonging anywhere or indeed belonging everywhere, may have its advantages, but these attributes must still contend with pressing circumstances like the voraciousness of 21st-century capitalism. Far from floating free in a state of unbelonging, most people are trapped in predetermined social and political positions; they must act within the history that surrounds them. The possession of multiple selves and voices doesn’t seem to be helping — and may even be inhibiting — Barack Obama. The victims of the seemingly endless violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan would draw scant comfort from the knowledge that the present occupant of the White House has an ear for different accents and can mimic everyone from a white Harvard nerd to a Ken­yan elder.

Smith’s intellectual ambitions are remarkably consistent with those of the postcolonial writers and academics who have settled into the abstractions of a posh postmodernism. “Changing My Mind” displays many of its virtues: a cosmopolitan suavity and wit that often relieves intellectual ponderousness. Smith’s native intelligence, however, seems so formidable that you can’t help hoping she’ll change her mind yet again.

Pankaj Mishra is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/books/review/Mishra-t.html?ref=books