Greatest Hits - Track 6 'Zadie Smith'

The last tune from this posts' compilation is the thirteenth installment of British author Zadie Smith's essay 'What Makes A Good Writer?', which was uploaded weekly on my blog between September and December last year. This was probably my favourite part, although as readers and fellow bloggers will remember the whole series was both challenging and thought-provoking. I hope you'll enjoy it again. Many thanks.

Corrective criticism, AKA failing to be the sort of thing I rather like

Far from the system critic there is another critic, let's call him the corrective critic, who prides himself on belonging to no school, who feels he knows his own mind. He is essentially meritocratic, interested only in what is good, and good for all time. If a reputation is artificially inflated he will deflate it if another is unrecognised he will be its champion, regardless of fashion. He is not, as Kingsley Amis once accused his son of being, a leaf in the wind of trend. His criticism is the expression of personal taste and personal belief - the most beautiful kind of criticism, in my opinion. But there is something odd here: he fears that his personal taste is not sufficient. It is not enough for him to say, as the novelist has, this is what I love, this what I believe. He must also make his taste a general law. It is his way or the highway. To understand the problem with corrective criticism, we have to return more fully to the idea of a writer's duty. I said earlier that it was each writer's duty to tell the truth of their conception of the world. It follows that each writer's duty is different, for their independent visions must necessarily each have a different emphasis, a different urgency. In his Varieties of Religious Experience William James, while discussing religious subjectivity, gives a piece of advice the corrective critic would do well to heed: Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us must soften himself, another must harden himself one must yield a point, another must stand firm, - in order the better to defend the position assigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely.

This is really a posh way of saying different strokes for different folks, a simple enough truth and yet one the corrective critic refuses to recognise. He has decided there is only one worthy mission in literature. It is a fortunate coincidence that it happens to coincide with his own prejudices and preferences. The pointlessness of penalising Bret Easton Ellis for failing to be Philip Roth, or giving Thomas Bernhard a rap on the knuckles for failing to be Alice Munro, does not occur to him. All he sees are writers who lack the qualities he has decided are the definition of good literature. But while it may be true that Douglas Coupland understands little of the pastoral, Coupland understands the outlines of a cubicle perfectly, and his failure to comprehend the first is his illumination of the second. And although it's certainly the case that Philip Larkin was incompetent when it came to the idea of women, it happens that women were not his business - his business was death.

If the corrective critic were not so intent upon looking for one quality through it all he would notice that these apparent lacks are also aspects of each writer's strength - but he seeks the sentence of literature, not the syllables. Committed to his theory, he defines his theory as"literature" itself, recasting his own failure of imagination as a principle of aesthetics. And while there is nothing wrong with believing in a certain quality in novels over any other quality, it is vitally important that one recognise one's own beliefs. The corrective critic is like one of William James's cocky atheists, believing everything else is subjective belief except his own objective atheism. It is important that we recognise, for example, that the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani fundamentally does not believe the world to be as David Foster Wallace believes it to be. That's what Wallace Stegner meant when he called the novel the"dramatisation of belief". And a response to a novel, a piece of literary criticism, is also a dramatisation of belief. We are honest about our literary tastes when we recognise that if a piece of fiction appears to fails us, if we reject it, part of what we are rejecting is what that fiction believes.

Copyright 2009

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (15th and Final Part)

And after fifteen weeks of reading about, probing into and analysing that marvellous art we call writing, this is the final instalment of Zadie Smith's eye-opening and exquisite essay 'What Makes a Good Writer'. Once again, I would like to thank Ginny Hooker from The Guardian for making this text available to me and by extent to all my fellow bloggers, followers and writers who visit my cyber-house. I would also like to thank Garrincha for his commitment to provide the witty and humorous images accompanying each post. It's been a ball for me looking forward to his regular e-mails. And last but not least I would like to thank the British writer Zadie Smith herself without whose brilliant intellect this fifteen-part series would not have happened. Zadie has a new book out, a collection of critical texts called Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. I, for one, will be adding it to my amazon's wishlist very soon. And on the strength of the final part of her essay 'What Makes a Good Writer?' tonight, I would advise you to do the same. Many thanks. For parts 1-14, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. here, here, here and here.

In conclusion I have tried to make a case for the special role of writer-critics, as it is in my interest to do. There is a suspicion that writers who become critics retain too much of the sentiment and mysticism of their craft to be capable of real critical thought - maybe I am evidence of that. But Roland Barthes is a good exception to that rule. He had both a sensuous understanding of the creative artist and an unimpeachable critical skill. Most of all, he understood that the critic's job is a non-cynical truth-seeking exercise, deeply connected to the critic's own beliefs, values and failures. "Each critic," he says, "chooses his necessary language, in accordance with a certain existential pattern, as the means of exercising an intellectual function which is his, and his alone . . . he puts into the operation his 'deepest self', that is, his preferences, pleasures, resistances, and obsessions." That's what I want to hear and feel from critics and readers, this deepest self . Maybe we have to get out of the academy and away from the newspapers and back into our reading chairs to regain access to this feeling. Listen to Virginia Woolf, my favourite writer-critic, speaking of the experience of evaluating fiction from the comfort of her reading-chair: 'It is difficult to say, "Not only is this book of this sort, but it is of this value, here it fails, here it succeeds, this is bad, that is good". To carry out this part of a reader's duty needs such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive of any one mind sufficiently endowed, impossible for the most self- confident to find more than the seeds of such flowers in himself . . . [Yet] even if the results are abhorrent and our judgements are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant. We learn through feeling we cannot suppress, our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it.'


Writers learn through feeling, too, and the novels we love exercise our sensibilities: they educate and complicate those parts of us that feel. This is what separates them from philosophical treatises or laws or newspapers. The Trial , a novel about justice, works upon us in a fundamentally different manner than John Rawls's essay "A Theory of Justice", or Judge Judy shouting at us about justice through the television. The Trial properly translates as The Process , and reading it and all novels is a process like no other. Both the writer and the reader must undergo an ethical expansion - allow me to call it an expansion of the heart - in order to comprehend the human otherness that fiction confronts them with. Both fail in varied, fascinating ways to complete this action as ideally as it might be completed. But if it were ideal, if the translation from brain to page were perfect, then of course all idiosyncrasy, as Woolf suggests, would indeed be impoverished: the novel would not exist at all. There would be no act of communication, no process, no gift - we would simply be speaking to ourselves. Fail better.

What a strange business we are in, we writers, we critics, we readers! Writing failures, reading failures, studying failures, reviewing them. Imagine a science institute that spent its time on the inventions that never actually do what they say on the tin, like diet pills, or hair restorers or Icarus's wings. Yet it is literature in its imperfect aspect that I find most beautiful and most human. That writing and reading should be such difficult arts reminds us of how frequently our own subjectivity fails us. We do not know people as we think we know them. The world is not only as we say it is. "Without failure, no ethics," said Simone de Beauvoir. And I believe that.
Copyright 2009

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here

Next Post: 'La Historia Oficial/The Official History' (Review), to be published on Thursday 17th December at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (14th Part)

Can writers ever fail themselves, or do they just disappoint readers? Zadie Smith again posing difficult questions this week. For parts 1-13, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. here, here and here.

Imagining better readers, better writers

But if the real duty of writers is to themselves, how can they ever fail? Are we advocating a new "nice" criticism, where all writers get off the hook just because they tried hard, were in good faith? No. What I am imagining is, I hope, a far more thorough reader. My reader holds writers to the same account as the rest of us, my reader does not allow writers to transcend the bounds of the human, because my reader recognises that writers exist like the rest of us, as ethical individuals moving through the world. One critic-practitioner, Iris Murdoch, understood this well. She insisted on the idea that art-making was a test not only of a skill, but of one's entire personality. Here she is making a high-wire connection between what it takes to make good art and what it takes to live well: 'The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one . . .' This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals. For a writer, that's a fascinating, terrifying idea. What if the personal qualities we need to recognise the Good in life do indeed bear some resemblance to the literary tools we need to write well? It is, Murdoch once said, incredibly hard to make oneself believe that other people really exist in the same way that we do ourselves. It is the great challenge of art to convince ourselves of this fundamental truth - but it's also the challenge of our lives.

Writers, just like everyone, are prone to the belief that all the world's a movie, in which they are the star, and all the other people, merely extras, lingering on set. To live well, to write well, you must convince yourself of the inviolable reality of other people. I believe that, and I believe further that this relationship can be traced at every level - a sentence can be self-deluded, can show an ulterior motive, can try too hard to please, can lie, can be blind to anything outside itself, can believe itself to be of the utmost importance. To see things as they really are . . . to me this is always and everywhere, in writing, in life, a matter of morals. But that's just me. I'm sure there are many other, more radical ways to trace the relationship between our experiences and the demands that narrative makes on us as many ways as there are shapes of narrative. Wouldn't this be an interesting project for a new generation of critics to undertake? Every critic is an artist in this fantasy literary republic I'm envisioning, every critic is doing as much imaginative work as the novelist, probably more. A great critic is, in the end, imagining the novelist . He is piecing together, retroactively, the beliefs and obsessions and commitments that powered the novel into existence in the first place. And as he does so he reveals his own beliefs, obsessions, commitments. He speaks the truth about an individual experience with a novel.

I have said that when I open a book I feel the shape of another human being's brain. To me, Nabokov's brain is shaped like a helter-skelter. George Eliot's is like one of those pans for sifting gold. Austen's resembles one of the glass flowers you find in Harvard's Natural History Museum. Each has strengths and weaknesses, as I apply them to the test of my own sensibility. I can slide down Nabokov, but not slowly, and not fully under my own control. I can find what's precious with Eliot, but only hidden among mundane grey stones of some weight. Austen makes me alive to the Beautiful and the Proportional, but the final result has no scent and is cold to the touch.This is my private language for a private understanding. It is the critic's job to formulate a public language that comes close to their own private understanding, and which, if it is acute enough, will find its companions in a community of like-minded readers. And if you read with the wideness and flexibility Murdoch describes, with as little personal fantasy and delusion as possible, you will find fiction opening up before you. To read The Virgin Suicides followed by The Idiot followed by Despair followed by You Bright and Risen Angels followed by Bleak House followed by Jonah's Gourd Vine followed by Play it as it Lays is to be forced to recognise the inviolability of the individual human experience. Fiction confronts you with the awesome fact that you are not the only real thing in this world.

Copyright 2009

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here

Next Post: 'Living in a Bilingual World', to be published on Thursday 10th December at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (13th Part)

I think this is definitely one of my favourite parts by far. For parts 1-12, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. here and here.

Corrective criticism, AKA failing to be the sort of thing I rather like

Far from the system critic there is another critic, let's call him the corrective critic, who prides himself on belonging to no school, who feels he knows his own mind. He is essentially meritocratic, interested only in what is good, and good for all time. If a reputation is artificially inflated he will deflate it if another is unrecognised he will be its champion, regardless of fashion. He is not, as Kingsley Amis once accused his son of being, a leaf in the wind of trend. His criticism is the expression of personal taste and personal belief - the most beautiful kind of criticism, in my opinion. But there is something odd here: he fears that his personal taste is not sufficient. It is not enough for him to say, as the novelist has, this is what I love, this what I believe. He must also make his taste a general law. It is his way or the highway. To understand the problem with corrective criticism, we have to return more fully to the idea of a writer's duty. I said earlier that it was each writer's duty to tell the truth of their conception of the world. It follows that each writer's duty is different, for their independent visions must necessarily each have a different emphasis, a different urgency. In his Varieties of Religious Experience William James, while discussing religious subjectivity, gives a piece of advice the corrective critic would do well to heed: Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner. One of us must soften himself, another must harden himself one must yield a point, another must stand firm, - in order the better to defend the position assigned him. If an Emerson were forced to be a Wesley, or a Moody forced to be a Whitman, the total human consciousness of the divine would suffer. The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature's total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely.

This is really a posh way of saying different strokes for different folks, a simple enough truth and yet one the corrective critic refuses to recognise. He has decided there is only one worthy mission in literature. It is a fortunate coincidence that it happens to coincide with his own prejudices and preferences. The pointlessness of penalising Bret Easton Ellis for failing to be Philip Roth, or giving Thomas Bernhard a rap on the knuckles for failing to be Alice Munro, does not occur to him. All he sees are writers who lack the qualities he has decided are the definition of good literature. But while it may be true that Douglas Coupland understands little of the pastoral, Coupland understands the outlines of a cubicle perfectly, and his failure to comprehend the first is his illumination of the second. And although it's certainly the case that Philip Larkin was incompetent when it came to the idea of women, it happens that women were not his business - his business was death.

If the corrective critic were not so intent upon looking for one quality through it all he would notice that these apparent lacks are also aspects of each writer's strength - but he seeks the sentence of literature, not the syllables. Committed to his theory, he defines his theory as"literature" itself, recasting his own failure of imagination as a principle of aesthetics. And while there is nothing wrong with believing in a certain quality in novels over any other quality, it is vitally important that one recognise one's own beliefs. The corrective critic is like one of William James's cocky atheists, believing everything else is subjective belief except his own objective atheism. It is important that we recognise, for example, that the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani fundamentally does not believe the world to be as David Foster Wallace believes it to be. That's what Wallace Stegner meant when he called the novel the "dramatisation of belief". And a response to a novel, a piece of literary criticism, is also a dramatisation of belief. We are honest about our literary tastes when we recognise that if a piece of fiction appears to fails us, if we reject it, part of what we are rejecting is what that fiction believes.

Copyright 2009

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here

Next Post: 'An Angel At My Table (Review)', to be published on Thursday 3rd December at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (12th Part)

In this week's installment, Zadie asks us to become our own intrepid Marco Polos, our own courageous Columbus and set off on the unknown waters of literature. For parts 1-11, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. and here.

Becoming your own cartographer

When it comes to reading, it's a Kierkegaardian level of commitment that we've forgotten about: intimate, painstaking, with nothing at all to do with Hegelian system-building or theoretical schools, and everything to do with our ethical reality as subjects. You have to make the map of Copenhagen yourself. You have to be open to the idea that Copenhagen might look and feel completely different to what you expected or believed it to be. You have to throw away other people's maps. For example, if you read exclusively in the post-colonial manner, then only a limited number of books will interest you and even those that you are promised are within the genre will often disappoint and irritate, failing to do all the things you had expected they would.

And then it will come to pass that some writers, knowing your taste, will begin to write novels to please you - novels that feel almost as if they have been written by committee. These are the big idea books and for the young particularly, armed with the reading systems for which they paid good money in college, such books look awfully tempting. A success, on these terms, is one that fulfils the model failure, the book that refuses wider relevance. System readers create system writers, writers who can unpack their own novels in front of you, pointing out this theme and that, this subtext, this question of race, this debate about gender. They have the Sunday supplements in mind and their fiction is littered with hooks, ready made for general discussion, perfect for a double page feature.

But what of the novels that don't give themselves easily to such general public discussion? Sometimes it feels like the qualities readers and critics most want to find in novels are those that are antithetical to the writing of a good one. We want a novel to be the "last word" on what it is to be a young Muslim, or an American soldier, or a mother. We want them to be wholly sufficient systems of ideas. We want one man to symbolise a nation. We want a novel to speak for a community or answer some vital question of the day. Like good system-makers, we want a view from nowhere, a panopticon, hovering above the whole scene, taking it in, telling us "how it is".

The problem is, our lives, as good novels well know, are always a partial, failing, view from somewhere . Nabokov wrote a book about an individual child called Lolita, but he correctly predicted it would be read as a general allegory of "Old Europe ravishing young America" or "Young America seducing Old Europe". He survived communist Russia: he knew all about the collectivisation of thought. In the end, Lolita is easy to read if you believe in symbols. It's only an emotional education, only a going-through, only a transformative experience, when you submit to Nabokov's vision, and let Lolita be individual child, not general model.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here

Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Food, Music, Food, Music, Food, Music, Ad Infinitum...', to be published on Thursday 26th November at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (11th Part)

Individual vs General, or Uniqueness against Mass Production? For parts 1-10, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

System readers, system writers

"A work of art," said Nabokov, "has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me."

A writer with such strong opinions would find it hard to survive in the present literary culture, the idea of the "individual reader" having gone into terminal decline. In writing schools, in reading groups, in universities, various general reading systems are offered - the post-colonial, the gendered, the postmodern, the state-of-the-nation and so on. They are like the instructions that come with furniture at IKEA. All one need do is seek out the flatpack novels that most closely resemble the blueprints already to hand. There is always, within each reading system, an ur-novel - the one with which all the other novels are forced into uncomfortable conformity. The first blueprint is drawn from this original novel, which is usually a work of individual brilliance, one that shines so brightly it creates a shadow large enough for a little cottage industry of novels to survive in its shade. Such novels have a guaranteed audience: an appropriate reading system has been created around the first novel and now makes room for them.


This state of affairs might explain some of the present animosity the experimentalist feels for the realist or the cult writer or the bestseller - it's annoying and demoralising to feel that readers are being trained to read only a limited variety of fiction and to recognise as literature only those employing linguistic codes for which they already have the key. The upshot of this is that the intimate and idiosyncratic in fiction is everywhere less valued than the ideologically coherent and general. When the world is nervous, state-of-the-nation novels bring great comfort. The Nobel went to Pasternak, not Nabokov. But then how should we read? What does one tell a young reader struggling to choose from the smorgasbord of theoretical reading "systems" that are put before him or her in an average undergraduate week? Soren Kierkegaard has a useful piece of analogous advice, given to sceptical youths approaching philosophy for the first time: "The youth is an existing doubter. Hovering in doubt and without a foothold for his life, he reaches out for the truth - in order to exist in it."

That's how young readers are, too, when they start out. They are doubters and seekers. They are living in a negative, as Kierkegaard explains it, and so naturally are very susceptible to those who come offering positives like - in the case Kierkegaard is considering - the overwhelming positive of Hegel's "System". But, he warns, whole systems that concern themselves with the experience of being a self will not lead us to truth, for the cogent reason that we cannot fully exist in systems, but only within our own skins. "A philosophy of pure thought," he argues, "is for an existing individual a chimera, if the truth that is sought is something to exist in. To exist under the guidance of pure thought is like travelling in Denmark with the help of a small map of Europe, on which Denmark shows no larger than a steel pen-point - Aye, it is still more impossible."

When we are confronted with a delicate, odd little novel, that pretends to no encyclopaedic knowledge of the world, that offers no journalistic signposts as to its meaning, that is not set in a country at war, or centred around some issue in the papers, we seem to have no idea how to read it. We have our map of Europe and this novel is Denmark, maybe even just Copenhagen. But we've forgotten how to walk round Copenhagen. Frankly, it seems a pointless activity. If fiction is going to be this particular and inimical, we'd rather give it up and read something useful and real like a biography of Stalin.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here

Copyright 2009

Next Post 'Half of a Yellow Sun' (Review), to be published on Thursday 19th November at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (10th Part)

Ha! And did you think that Zadie Smith was going to let us, readers, off the hook? Cracking analysis this week. For parts 1-9, click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Note to readers: a novel is a two-way street

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music.The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason.

The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park. What I'm saying is, a reader must have talent. Quite a lot of talent, actually, because even the most talented reader will find much of the land of literature tricky terrain. For how many of us feel the world to be as Kafka felt it, too impossibly foreshortened to ride from one village to the next? Or can imagine a world without nouns, as Borges did? How many are willing to be as emotionally generous as Dickens, or to take religious faith as seriously as did Graham Greene? Who among us have Zora Neale Hurston's capacity for joy or Douglas Coupland's strong stomach for the future? Who has the delicacy to tease out Flaubert's faintest nuance, or the patience and the will to follow David Foster Wallace down his intricate recursive spirals of thought?



The skills that it takes to write it are required to read it. Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers. Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it's a conjurer's trick within a far deeper magic. To become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here.

Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Living in a Bilingual World', to be published on Thursday 12th November at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (9th Part)

True or false? That was my first reaction to Zadie Smith's statement this week. For parts 1-8, click here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

The dream of a perfect novel drives writers crazy

There is a dream that haunts writers: the dream of the perfect novel. It is a dream that causes only chaos and misery. The dream of this perfect novel is really the dream of a perfect revelation of the self. In America, where the self is so neatly wedded to the social, their dream of the perfect novel is called "The Great American Novel" and requires the revelation of the soul of a nation , not just of a man . . .

Still I think the principle is the same: on both sides of the Atlantic we dream of a novel that tells the truth of experience perfectly. Such a revelation is impossible -it will always be a partial vision, and even a partial vision is incredibly hard to achieve. The reason it is so hard to think of more than a handful of great novels is because the duty I've been talking about - the duty to convey accurately the truth of one's own conception - is a duty of the most demanding kind. If, every 30 years, people complain that there were only a few first-rate novels published, that's because there were only a few. Genius in fiction has always been and always will be extremely rare. Fact is, to tell the truth of your own conception - given the nature of our mediated world, given the shared and ambivalent nature of language, given the elusive, deceitful, deluded nature of the self - truly takes a genius, truly demands of its creator a breed of aesthetic and ethical integrity that makes one's eyes water just thinking about it. But there's no reason to cry. If it's true that first-rate novels are rare, it's also true that what we call the literary canon is really the history of the second-rate, the legacy of honourable failures. Any writer should be proud to join that list just as any reader should count themselves lucky to read them.

The literature we love amounts to the fractured shards of an attempt, not the monument of fulfilment. The art is in the attempt, and this matter of understanding-that-which-is-outside-of-ourselves using only what we have inside ourselves amounts to some of the hardest intellectual and emotional work you'll ever do. It is a writer's duty. It is also a reader's duty. Did I mention that yet?

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here.

Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Moolaadé' (Review, to be published on Thursday 5th November at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (8th Part)

And so, free from duties, can writers, then, write great novels? Zadie Smith, again posing difficult questions. For parts 1-7, click here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

We refuse to be each other

A great novel is the intimation of a metaphysical event you can never know, no matter how long you live, no matter how many people you love: the experience of the world through a consciousness other than your own. And I don't care if that consciousness chooses to spend its time in drawing rooms or in internet networks, I don't care if it uses a corner of a Dorito as its hero, or the charming eldest daughter of a bourgeois family I don't care if it refuses to use the letter 'e' or crosses five continents and two thousand pages.

What unites great novels is the individual manner in which they articulate experience and force us to be attentive, waking us from the sleepwalk of our lives. And the great joy of fiction is the variety of this process: Austen's prose will make you attentive in a different way and to different things than Wharton's. The dream Philip Roth wishes to wake us from still counts as sleep if Pynchon is the dream-catcher.A great piece of fiction can demand that you acknowledge the reality of its wildest proposition, no matter how alien it may be to you. It can also force you to concede the radical otherness lurking within things that appear most familiar. This is why the talented reader understands George Saunders to be as much a realist as Tolstoy, Henry James as much an experimentalist as George Perec.

Great styles represent the interface of "world" and "I", and the very notion of such an interface being different in kind and quality from your own is where the power of fiction resides.Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry- we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing - great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian: the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here.

Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Review)', to be published on Thursday 29th October at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (7th Part)

What are a writer's responsabilities, if any? That's Zadie Smith's question this week. For parts 1-6, click here, here, here, here, here and here.

Do writers have duties?

All this talk of authenticity, of betrayal, presupposes a duty - an obligation that the writers and readers of literature are under. It is deeply unfashionable to conceive of such a thing as a literary duty what that might be, how we might fail to fulfil it. Duty is not a very literary term. These days, when we do speak of literary duties, we mean it from the reader's perspective, as a consumer of literature. We are really speaking of consumer rights. By this measure the duty of writers is to please readers and to be eager to do so, and this duty has various subsets: the duty to be clear to be interesting and intelligent but never wilfully obscure to write with the average reader in mind to be in good taste. Above all, the modern writer has a duty to entertain. Writers who stray from these obligations risk tiny readerships and critical ridicule. Novels that submit to a shared vision of entertainment, with characters that speak the recognisable dialogue of the sitcom, with plots that take us down familiar roads and back home again, will always be welcomed. This is not a good time, in literature, to be a curio. Readers seem to wish to be "represented", as they are at the ballot box, and to do this, fiction needs to be general, not particular. In the contemporary fiction market a writer must entertain and be recognisable - anything less is seen as a failure and a rejection of readers.

Personally, I have no objection to books that entertain and please, that are clear and interesting and intelligent, that are in good taste and are not wilfully obscure - but neither do these qualities seem to me in any way essential to the central experience of fiction, and if they should be missing, this in no way rules out the possibility that the novel I am reading will yet fulfil the only literary duty I care about. For writers have only one duty, as I see it: the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. If that sounds woolly and imprecise, I apologise.

Writing is not a science, and I am speaking to you in the only terms I have to describe what it is I persistently aim for (yet fail to achieve) when I sit in front of my computer. When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warped experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel: one person's truth as far as it can be rendered through language. This single duty, properly pursued, produces complicated, various results. It's certainly not a call to arms for the autobiographer, although some writers will always mistake the readerly desire for personal truth as their cue to write a treatise or a speech or a thinly disguised memoir in which they themselves are the hero. Fictional truth is a question of perspective, not autobiography. It is what you can't help tell if you write well, it is the watermark of self that runs through everything you do. It is language as the revelation of a consciousness.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here.

Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Killer Opening Songs' to be published on Thursday 22nd October at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (6th Part)

This time Zadie Smith's question is whether we should follow the norm or rebel against it. For parts 1-5, click here, here, here, here and here.

Writing as inauthenticity

Here is another novelist, in another email, answering the question: "How would you define literary failure?"

"I was once asked by a high-school student in an audience in Chennai: 'Why, sir, are you so eager to please?' That's how I tend to define failure - work done for what Heidegger called "Das Mann", the indeterminate "They" who hang over your shoulder, warping your sense of judgment what he (not me) would call your authenticity."

That novelist, like me, I suppose like all of us who came of age under postmodernity, is naturally sceptical of the concept of authenticity, especially what is called "cultural authenticity" - after all, how can any of us be more or less authentic than we are? We were taught that authenticity was meaningless. How, then, to deal with the fact that when we account for our failings, as writers, the feeling that is strongest is a betrayal of one's deepest, authentic self?

That sounds very grand: maybe it's better to start at the simplest denomination of literary betrayal, the critic's favourite, the cliche. What is a cliche except language passed down by Das Mann, used and shop-soiled by so many before you, and in no way the correct jumble of language for the intimate part of your vision you meant to express? With a cliche you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange. It is an aesthetic and an ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth.

When writers admit to failures they like to admit to the smallest ones - for example, in each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence - a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same. To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life. But it is easy to admit that a sentence makes you wince less easy to confront the fact that for many writers there will be paragraphs, whole characters, whole books through which one sleepwalks and for which "inauthentic" is truly the correct term.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here








Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Nowhere in Africa' (Review) to be published on Thursday 15th October at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (5th Part)

This week, the question Zadie asks us is: Are we disloyal to ourselves when we write? For parts 1-4, click here, here, here and here.

Writing as self-betrayal

Back to my simple point, which is that writers are in possession of "selfhood", and that the development or otherwise of self has some part to play in literary success or failure. This shameful fact needn't trouble the professor or the critic, but it is naturally of no little significance to writers themselves. Here is the poet Adam Zagajewski, speaking of The Self, in a poem of the same title:

It is small and no more visible than a cricket in August.
It likes to dress up, to masquerade, as all dwarves do.
It lodges between granite blocks, between serviceable truths.
It even fits under a bandage, under adhesive.
Neither custom officers nor their beautiful dogs will find it.
Between hymns, between alliances, it hides itself.

To me, writing is always the attempted revelation of this elusive, multifaceted self, and yet its total revelation - as Zagajewski suggests - is a chimerical impossibility. It is impossible to convey all of the truth of all our experience. Actually, it's impossible to even know what that would mean, although we stubbornly continue to have an idea of it, just as Plato had an idea of the forms. When we write, similarly, we have the idea of a total revelation of truth, but cannot realise it. And so, instead, each writer asks himself which serviceable truths he can live with, which alliances are strong enough to hold. The answers to those questions separate experimentalists from so-called "realists", comics from tragedians, even poets from novelists. In what form , asks the writer, can
I most truthfully describe the world as it is experienced by this particular self?

And it is from that starting point that each writer goes on to make their individual compromise with the self, which is always a compromise with truth as far as the self can know it. That is why the most common feeling, upon re-reading one's own work, is Prufrock's: "That is not it at all . . . that is not what I meant, at all . . ." Writing feels like self-betrayal, like failure.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here

Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'National Poetry Day in the UK' to be published on Thursday 8th October at 11:59pm (GMT)

What Makes A Good Writer? By Zadie Smith (4th Part)

This week Zadie tackles one of the more pressing concerns for aspiring writers. For parts one, two and three click here, here and here.

Tradition versus the individual talent

But before we go any further along that track we find TS Eliot,that most distinguished of critic-practitioners, standing in our way. In his famous essay of 1919, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot decimated the very idea of individual consciousness, of personality, in writing. There was hardly any such thing, he claimed, and what there was, was not interesting. For Eliot the most individual and successful aspects of a writer's work were precisely those places where his literary ancestors asserted their immortality most vigorously. The poet and his personality were irrelevant, the poetry was everything and the poetry could only be understood through the glass of literary history. That essay is written in so high church a style, with such imperious authority, that even if all your affective experience as a writer is to the contrary, you are intimidated into believing it. "Poetry," says Eliot, "is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." "The progress of an artist," says Eliot, "is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

These credos seem so impersonal themselves, so disinterested, that it is easy to forget that young critic-practitioners make the beds they wish to lie in, and it was in Eliot's interest - given the complexity and scandals of his private life and his distaste for intrusion - ruthlessly to separate the personal from the poetry. He was so concerned with privacy that it influences his terminology: everywhere in that essay there is the assumption that personality amounts to simply the biographical facts of one's life - but that is a narrow vision. Personality is much more than autobiographical detail, it's our way of processing the world, our way of being, and it cannot be artificially removed from our activities it is our way of being active.

Eliot may have been ruthlessly impersonal in his writing in the superficial sense (if by that we mean he did not reveal personal details, such as the tricky fact that he had committed his wife to an asylum), but never was a man's work more inflected with his character, with his beliefs about the nature of the world. As for that element of his work that he puts forward as a model of his impersonality - a devotion to tradition - such devotion is the very definition of personality in writing. The choices a writer makes within a tradition - preferring Milton to Moliere, caring for Barth over Barthelme - constitute some of the most personal information we can have about him.

There is no doubt that Eliot's essay, with its promise to "halt at the frontiers of metaphysics or mysticism", is a brilliant demarcation of what is properly within the remit of, as he puts it, "the responsible person interested in poetry". It lays out an entirely reasonable boundary between what we can and cannot say about a piece of writing without embarrassing ourselves. Eliot was honest about wanting both writing and criticism to approach the condition of a science he famously compared a writer to a piece of finely filiated platinum introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. This analogy has proved a useful aspiration for critics. It has allowed them to believe in the writer as catalyst, entering into a tradition, performing an act of meaningful recombination, and yet leaving no trace of himself, or at least none the critic need worry himself with. Eliot's analogy freed critics to do the independent, radically creative, non- biographical criticism of which they had long dreamt, and to which they have every right. For writers, however, Eliot's analogy just won't do. Fiction writing is not an objective science and writers have selves as well as traditions to understand and assimilate. It is certainly very important, as Eliot argues, that writers should foster an understanding of the cultures and the books of the past, but they also unavoidably exist within the garden of the self and this, too, requires nurture and development. The self is not like platinum - it leaves traces all over the place. Just because Eliot didn't want to talk about it, doesn't mean it isn't there.

Image by Garrincha. To visit his online shop, click here






Copyright 2009

Next Post: 'Road Songs (Special Edition)' to be published on Thursday 1st October at 11:59pm (GMT)