Source of book: Borrowed
from the library.
I read one of Zadie
Smith’s novels, Swing Time (a fictionalized story
involving a Madonna-like pop-star) about four years ago, and have a couple of
Smith’s other novels on my list. However, I ran across this collection of
essays while looking for something else, and decided to grab it.
Changing My Mind
is a rather assorted collection of mostly unrelated essays and articles written
through 2009, and cover a rather wide range of topics. They are roughly grouped
into five sections of related essays: one on books, one on movies, one about
her father, one with a long essay about David Foster Wallace, and one that is a
trio of ones that she calls “Being,” but which seem mostly connected by being
in some way about herself.
For background, Zadie
Smith is a British author, the product of a marriage between her older white
father and her much younger Jamaican-immigrant mother. She grew up kind of
between worlds, and this plays into both her fiction and into these essays. I
also discovered that she was the first to get a college degree, and thus found
herself in a different social class than her parents. (Her essay, “Speaking in
Tongues” was particularly illuminating on this score - the way her speech
literally changed over time, even though she could switch back and forth.) That
issue resonated with me a good bit, actually. My own family has gone from rural
farmers to city folk to - in my generation - college educated, and I feel a
definite generation gap that is not the same as (but related to) the political
one, just by virtue of a broader range of reading and base knowledge. I think
it is fair to say that the current gap (and estrangement) between me and my
parents falls pretty much right on the line between “low education whites who
support Trump” and “college educated whites who vote Democratic.” It isn’t that
simple on every issue, and my parents got college degrees later in life.
But the class difference feels very real right now, and the central question is
how we obtain and evaluate information. (Man, that could be a whole post in
itself.)
But I digress.
Probably the best way to
jump in, is just to go in chronological order. Smith starts out with noting
that the title was chosen because she herself can see that she has changed her
mind on some issues since writing these essays. I have my speculation as to
which ones, but she never entirely says. All of us - at least if we choose to
grow and mature as we grow older, rather than ossify - find we are not the same
people we were earlier in our lives.
The first section is on
books, and I really enjoyed reading these. There are six total essays in this,
the largest of the sections. Since Smith was an English major, many of the
usual things come up for discussion: Derida and literary theory, of course, and
the direction of modern fiction. But the choice of authors in these essays also
fascinated me.
First up, Smith discusses
Their Eyes Were Watching God. I can’t believe it has already been a
decade since I read that book, but it is still fairly fresh in my mind. It was
that good. Smith brings out a wealth of rich analysis in her essay, which I
strongly recommend reading - but after you read the book.
Smith takes aim at the
white “norms” of literary fiction, the assumption that white novelists are
just…novelists, while non-white novelists, particularly if their characters are
likewise non-white, are somehow a subcategory, and not the norm. Smith recalls
reading the book for the first time at age 14 - her mother wanted her to read
it, but she resisted before finally reading it very skeptically. She
found a level of identification that she wasn’t expecting.
At fourteen I couldn’t find words (or words I liked)
for the marvelous feeling of recognition that came with these characters who
had my hair, my eyes, my skin, even the ancestors of the rhythm of my speech.
These forms of identification are so natural to white readers - (of course
Rabbit Angstrom is like me! Of course Madame Bovary is like me!) - that they
believe themselves above personal identification, or at least believe that they
are identifying only at the highest, existential levels (His soul is like my
soul. He is human; I am human). White readers often believe they are
colorblind.
Thus, the idea of a book
being, as she puts it, soulful, is that sort of identification that is
so easy as to be invisible to us white readers (and white moviegoers, and
television watchers, and so on.)
The next essay is on E.
M. Forster, another author I haven’t read in far too long. (Although I loved Howard’s
End.) Forster is an author that is…well, maybe I should just let Smith
describe him.
In the taxonomy of English writing, E. M. Forster is
not an exotic creature. We file him under Notable English Novelist, common or
garden variety. Yet there is a sense in which Forster was something of a rare
bird. He was largely free of vices commonly found in novelists of his
generation - what’s unusual about Forster is what he didn’t do. He
didn’t lean rightward with the years, or allow nostalgia to morph into
misanthropy; he never knelt for the pope or queen, nor did he flirt
(ideologically speaking) with Hitler, Stalin or Mao; he never believed the
novel was dead or the hills alive, continued to read contemporary fiction after
the age of fifty, harbored no special hatred for the generation below or above
him, did not come to feel that England had gone to hell in a handbasket, that
its language was doomed, that lunatics were running the asylum or foreigners
swamping the cities.
He was, as Smith notes,
pretty middle of the road, although progressive in “matters of pacifism, class,
education, and race” despite his conservative temperament. He was, well, mild.
She entitles the essay “E. M. Forster, Middle Manager” which kind of fits.
The main focus of the
essay isn’t his novels, however, but The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, which
sounds more fascinating in Smith’s description than the title implies. I had no
idea these existed, but I am curious to read them now. He sounds like the exact
sort of mild character he was - I guess he pretty much played himself in a
self-deprecating manner. He seemed to think that the audience for his books
wasn’t entirely friendly - and indeed resembled some of his more condescending
characters.
Forster’s novels are full of people who’d think twice
before borrowing a Forster novel from the library. Well - they’d want to know -
is it worth the bother or not? Neither intellectuals nor philistines, they are
the kind to “know what they like” and have the “courage of their convictions,”
though their convictions are not entirely their own and their courage mostly
fear.
Oof. I think we all know
people who talk a lot about the “courage of their convictions” - “convictions”
they got straight from whatever religious or political charlatan they presently
adore, and whose “courage” is all about the fear stoked in them directed at
those different from them.
Related is a quote from a
book that Forster recommends during one of the talks, As We Are, a
memoir by E. F. Benson. (I’d never heard of him, but now
that I check his Wikipedia page, maybe I read a short story or two once?) In
any case, Forster quotes a great paragraph by Benson:
Unfortunately there comes to the majority of those of
middle age an inelasticity not of physical muscle and sinew alone but of mental
fibre. Experience has its dangers; it may bring wisdom, but it may also bring
stiffness and cause hardened deposits in the mind, and its resulting
inelasticity is crippling.
Wow. That is a perfect
description of a generation. At least most of a certain generation. I feel my
parents lost their mental and moral elasticity sometime in their late
30s, which is why Bill Gothard appealed so much. He offered inflexible
certainty, and the promise that one never had to think or wrestle or learn
again - he had the formulae, and that was enough.
The next essay is all
about Middlemarch. I am a fairly new reader of
that marvelous book, although I have loved George Eliot generally since high
school. Apparently, I missed out on the whole sexist dismissal of the book in
certain academic circles - for me, it was more notable to find someone who had
actually read the book than anything, and most of those who had read it
thought it was good. I guess I probably hang out with the sorts of readers who
read Victorian novels for fun, not for academic reasons.
But there was a lot in
this essay that was fascinating. I did not realize (although maybe I should
have guessed?) that Spinoza was a big influence on Eliot’s thought. (Also, I
think Smith is correct that the usually perceptive Henry James blew it completely
in thinking Fred Vincy is an unimportant character in Middlemarch. The
opposite is true.) In any case, lovers of the book will find this essay
fascinating.
I enjoyed reading the
next essay, but will admit that, unlike the previous three, I couldn’t directly
relate to it. Smith contrasts Roland Barthes with Vladimir Nabokov, in
discussing the question of the author. And whether the author matters. I’ll
mention here that a lot of what I know about literary theory and authorship
versus the text versus the reader originated in David Foster Wallace’s wonderful essay on the subject.
He explains it really well, just as Smith in this essay illuminates both sides
of the debate lucidly. I won’t even attempt to summarize this, as I would
bungle it. I do want to quote a footnote, however.
Another way of thinking about the distinction might
be: there is a style that believes writing should mimic the quick pace, the
ease, and the fluidity of reading (or even of speech). And then there is a
style that believes reading should mimic the obstruction and slow struggle of
writing. Raymond Carver would be on that first axis. Nabokov is way out
on the second. Joyce is even further.
This was all very
fascinating. Except that I have yet to read Nabokov or Barthes. I have only
read an excerpt of Joyce (I need to remedy that), and maybe a short story of
Carver. So much to read…
The next essay is on
Kafka, which, again, is someone I haven’t really read. It is interesting to
know some of the history of Kafka’s work, much of which wasn’t published during
his lifetime. His friend, Max Brod, preserved Kafka’s writings against his
wishes - he literally defied the will, which ordered that all his works be
burned. For what it is worth, Brod claimed that Kafka picked him knowing he
wouldn’t actually destroy anything. Which, well, sounds like an actual Kafka
story or something, doesn’t it?
I had to smile at a line
from one of Kafka’s letters, which asked a correspondent, “Don’t you get
pleasure out of exaggerating painful things as much as possible?” It is hard to
know how firmly the tongue was in the cheek on that one.
The most painful part of
the essay, though, is on the problems faced by Kafka and all Jews in
early 20th Century Europe. Smith points out that there were really two parallel
“Jewish Questions,” both of which are still being asked about all minority
groups today. The first is the external one - Gentiles asking “what is to be
done with the Jews.” And, as we know, the answers are the horrifying “persecute
and/or exterminate them” and the still unacceptable, if less bloody
“toleration.” Note that “fully embrace” is not one of the options usually
offered.
The second question,
though, and one that Kafka, a German-speaking, very “Western” Jew asked is, “Am
I really a Jew, and do I have much in common with other Jews?” This is the
existential question of identity. And I see it asked by non-white immigrants to
the United States, Europe, and other - often colonized - white-ruled states. Is
one truly [fill in the blank ethnicity] if we have been assimilated for
generations? In the meantime, the dominant ethnicity/color refuses to fully
accept and embrace. Kafka concluded that “The choice of belonging to a people,
of partaking in a shared nature, was no longer available to him.”
For related but different
reasons, I have felt the same way over the last decade. My belonging to a
particular “people” - in my case, white evangelicals - has been destroyed. My
place in my birth family, and my place in my extended family, no longer really
exists, because political affiliation turns out to be far stronger than
blood.
The final essay about books
is “Two Directions for the Novel.” In it, Smith contrasts Netherland by
Joseph O’Neill, and Remainder by Tom McCarthy. I have not read either,
or anything by either author. So, for me, the interest in the essay was in
Smith’s contrast in the directions the two point. For Smith, Netherland
is in the modern “lyrical realism” style, which she argues can tend to reuse
the neural pathways we expect, and become some sort of comforting bedtime
story. Not that she hates the story, or lyrical realism generally - she notes
she has written in that style. She just thinks it tends to get too comfortable,
too self-focused. Remainder is much more experimental, and honestly
sounds really intriguing to read.
The best line in the
essay, though, is regarding the fact that both authors come from the same
elitist class.
For though these novels seem far apart, their authors
are curiously similar. Similar age; similar class; one went to Oxford, the
other, Cambridge; both are by now a part of the publishing mainstream, share a
fondness for cricket and are subject to a typically British class/race anxiety
that has left its residue. A flashback-inclined Freudian might conjure up the
image of two brilliant young men, straight out of college, both eager to write
the Novel of the Future, who discover, to their great dismay, that the
authenticity baton (which is, of course, entirely phony) has been passed on.
Passed to women, to those of color, to people of different sexualities, to
people from far off, war-torn places…The frustrated sense of having come to the
authenticity party exactly a century late!
That’s pretty funny, of
course. And there is that question of how much we need (or even want)
more novels by white guys - maybe it is someone else’s turn. But Smith is right
as well that good literature is good literature regardless, and I don’t think
there is any serious risk of some great work by a white guy being overlooked in
the long run. At least any more than there ever was.
The next section in the
book is the one with the most variety. The first essay is a revised lecture
given to Columbia University’s writing program in 2008. I found her description
of the “macro planner” versus the “micro manager” writing styles to be amusing.
She is a micro manager, in case you hadn’t guessed.
I am a micro manager. I start at the first sentence of
a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among
three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of the ending
until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels.
Also amusing is her
description of the way all writers go from imitation of others to finding their
voice. She recounts a young novelist who was horrified that she planned to read
his first novel.
“Oh please don’t! Back then, all I read was Faulkner.
I had no sense of humor. My God, I was a different person!”
Even as an amateur
blogger, there are times I feel that way about my earlier posts. (Although I
have kept them the way they are, rather than update, as I think they are a good
record of my own changes over time.) I haven’t read enough Faulkner to be sure, but I do think humor is
perhaps not his strong suit. In any case, this essay was a fun look at the
process of writing from the point of view of one author.
Next up is a far less
light-hearted essay, “One Week In Liberia.” The tragedy of much of
post-colonial Africa is well known. The withdrawal of the colonial governments,
only to see the nascent movements toward true democracy crushed by
autocrats funded and armed by the same colonialist powers,
this time seeking to plunder the resources to enrich Western
corporations.
Liberia is one of the
most tragic, as it was founded with some good intentions - to provide a place
for the formerly enslaved to return. Yes, it was for some a way to Make America
White Again and erase the evidence of our national sin. But for many African-Americans,
Liberia meant hope, and the fact that it was not realized makes me sad indeed.
The whole essay is pretty depressing, but there are some perceptive
lines.
I found the description
of the many problems Liberian women face to be pretty emblematic. From genital
mutilation to child marriage, to the general ownership of women by their
husbands, the whole laundry list of patriarchy is there. The one that was the
weirdest, though, was the way that in some tribes, husbands would essentially
pimp out their wives - they got to charge the other man an “infidelity tax,”
payable to the husband, of course. So, essentially unpaid sex work. We tend to
forget that “adultery” has, historically, meant a wife seeking sexual pleasure
on her own terms, and that no concept of “faithfulness” prevented a man from
lending out his woman, with or without consent.
There is plenty of
horrifying information about corporate exploitation as well. These large
companies would wait for civil unrest, then sign a contract with whichever
current dictator needed the money to finance his army - a contract that would
last for dozens of years. As the group Global Witness puts it:
[M]ultinational corporations seek to maximize profit
by using an international regulatory void to gain concessions and contracts
which strongly favour the corporation over the host nation.
Gee, you think? This is
why I get irritated when people claim that the third world is poor because the
people or the culture or something is just inferior to that of the first world.
While ignoring the flagrant exploitation and fomenting of unrest.
I did have to laugh at
Smith’s description of one NGO worker who showed her around.
Patrick Alix is thirty years old. He is distinctly
aristocratic looking, half French, and so unrelievedly serious the urge is to
say stupid things in his presence.
A lot less funny is the
fact that in many of the schools, the teachers have to deal with the fact that
most of the children are ex-combatants from the civil wars. As in literally
children, some of whom killed their own families as part of the war. That’s
trauma that is nearly impossible to fix, and a further example of why
rebuilding the colonized third world isn’t a short term or easy job. And it certainly
isn’t a matter of exporting Western Christianity.
I’ll mention “Speaking in
Tongues” for its wonderful exploration of language and identity. Along the way,
Smith moves from her own code switching to the way that two notable figures did
the same. Barack Obama, coming from both black and white, and from a complex
class background, did a remarkable job of speaking to all sides. (Although this
also earned him the passionate enmity of the MAGA crowd. I know. I spent the
Obama years in Evangelicalism.)
The other, though, is
Shakespeare. As Smith points out, he too was caught between two warring
cultures - in this case, the Protestant/Catholic transition in England
under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. His father hid a signed profession of
Catholic faith, at the same time he was overseeing the redecorating of churches
to purge them of all vestiges of Catholicism. As Smith puts it:
John Shakespeare was a kind of equivocator: it’s what
you do when you’re in a corner, when you can’t be a Catholic and a loyal
Englishman at the same time. When you can’t be both black and white. Sometimes,
in a country ripped apart by dogma, those who wish to keep their heads - in
both senses - must learn to split themselves in two. And this we still kow,
here, at a four-hundred-year distance. No one can hope to be president of these
United States without professing a committed and straightforward belief in two
things: the existence of God and the principle of American exceptionalism. But
how many of them equivocated, and who, in their shoes, would not equivocate,
too?
This is a good point, and
one that makes a lot of sense. We tend to glorify those who die for their
beliefs, but should we? On the one hand, I find it noble to stand up for other
people, to preserve those that the (theo)fascists would sacrifice to their
dogma. Definitely protect the Jews from the Nazis, and gays from the
fundamentalists. But while I do not believe in penal substitutionary atonement,
I wouldn’t be inclined to die for that position.
The next section in the
book is a group of four on movies. The first one is about Katherine Hepburn and
Greta Garbo. I will say straight up that Kate Hepburn is one of my favorite
actors of all time, and I crush hard on her feminist style. (My wife resembles
Kate in more ways than one.) So I really loved this half of the essay. I was
less familiar with Garbo - the silent era isn’t one I have seen much of,
honestly. But that too was fascinating.
I particularly have to
mention the anecdote Smith shares about Adam’s Rib. For those not
familiar with it, it takes an ethical impossibility - two lawyers both married
to each other and representing opposite sides in a case (ethics rules forbid
this sort of thing, so it would never happen in real life) and turns it into a
marital drama and exploration of gender roles and feminism. Zadie Smith writes
that she has watched it with two different lovers and in both cases, ended up
sleeping in separate bedrooms afterward. And yes, it is painful at times -
Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (real life lovers) have an obvious chemistry and
frisson, and one has to wonder if they too had spats about the gender
wars.
My own story? My wife and
I watched the movie together, I believe while we were dating. And while, for a
variety of reasons, we did indeed spend the night in separate bedrooms
(separate houses too), we actually found we bonded over that movie. It
was one way we knew we had a shot at a weird sort of marriage, one of equals,
one where I never presumed on her, and she never felt the need to coddle my
fragile masculinity. But I can very much see why other couples would find it a
tough one.
The Garbo section was
fascinating for many reasons, but the most completely unexpected was the
revelation that Garbo was, off screen, very masculine. As in, masculine enough
that she might identify as transgender now. I know that the arts have always
been a place that sexual and gender minorities have gravitated - a kind of acting
that didn’t carry the dire consequences of trying to “pass” among other things.
But Garbo was not the one I would automatically have thought of. Proof that
transgender and androgynous people have always existed, despite what the
Fundies claim.
The essay on Bellissima
was probably the least interesting, just because it dealt with the details
of a movie I have never seen. So I’ll skip over that one, and move on to the
collection of movie reviews. For 2006, Smith reviewed movies for a magazine,
and got to snark at length - or at least a short length - about some of the
dreck that came out. I don’t think I saw any of those movies. That year, we had
children aged two, one, and zero, and got very little sleep. The chances of
getting away to a movie were only slightly more than the chance we would have
been up to it. The reviews are pretty funny and perceptive though.
There is also the one bit
that I wonder if she regrets now. In a review of Transamerica, she makes
some statements that, 16 years later, seem a bit off. She isn’t transphobic,
and not toxic in the J. K. Rowling vein - certainly no “transwomen are
predators” crap. Rather, she asks questions about the nature of being
transgender or transsexual that fall more into the ignorant or insensitive
category - essentially questions that should probably be left alone by
cisgender people. But, as I said, not in the category of transphobic.
And where she lands is mostly that we have a societal problem where masculine
and feminine are rigid categories, which I very much agree with.
The last essay is an
account of her coverage of the Oscars. It’s quite funny, and captures the
disconnects in the LA scene that those of us natives know. First, real
movie stars don’t look like you think they do up close. The fact that I am
taller than Tom Cruise is just one truth. But there are a lot more
“imperfections” than you would expect, and, as Smith points out, real actors
have natural boobs. So, the “Hollywood LA” tanned and plastic surgery-ed to
death bottle blonds that get attention are not actual stars, and natives know
that. More likely, they are trophy wives for professional sorts. Likewise, real
Hollywood parties are as much of yawners as any office party. Seriously.
Anyway, this is a great opening paragraph:
Hollywood is vulgar. Every Englishman knows that. He
knows it as he knows there is no comedy in Germany, as he knows that the
Italians “get it right,” if “it” includes food, marriage, weather, and
landscape but excludes governance, work, driving, and God. David Hockney’s
aquamarine L. A. swimming pools strike the correct English attitude to Los
Angeles: affectionate contempt for sparkling surfaces. La La Land! Red carpets;
semisacred actors in an exclusive Valhalla; parties beyond imagination; jewels
beyond price. Over Oscar weekend, an automatic journalism rehashes these
eternal ideas, the accounts in newspapers precisely matching the tall tales of
the cab driver who brings you in from the airport.
I’m an LA native, so I
love this description of the fable, the myth, the media creation. You want to
see LA? Don’t think Hollywood, but instead go find the legendary diversity, the
mixing of cultures and languages. Check out the food scene, the arts scene, the
swap meets and the street vendors. It’s a complex place, like any big city, a
huge messy aggregation of humanity. I don’t miss the traffic or the insane
housing prices. But I do love to visit.
In one of the scenes she
portrays, the media and some Oscar nominees go hang out at Canter’s,
the legendary Jewish deli in La Brea. Open 24 hours a day, it is not just
atmosphere, but an experience. Smith mentions the matzo ball soup - which is
excellent - and the corned beef and pastrami made in house. We have gone there
when we visit museums in the area (the La Brea tar pits, or LACMA, for example)
and it is definitely on the “must visit” list for foodies.
Anyway, a fun
essay.
The three essays about
Smith’s father are really poignant and lovely. I didn’t write down any quotes,
because it is all about context. The family Christmas gatherings, already
awkward because of her parents’ failing marriage. His account of his experience
on D Day - he made sure she wrote that he wasn’t a hero. And his last illness
and death, combined with her brother’s career as a comedian - and yes, these
absolutely fit together. These are beautiful portraits of a man that she loved,
and that loved her, even though they grew apart in certain ways with time. I’ll
just say that I loved these essays, and can’t recommend them enough.
The final work in the
book is a long review of David Foster Wallace’s short story collection, Brief
Interviews with Hideous Men.
Smith is a fan of DFW, so
the review is definitely positive. My reading of DFW is pretty limited,
although I must say that his nonfiction collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
was excellent. (I noted the essay on literary theory above.) So, I suppose I
too am a bit of a fan, although I haven’t read that much. The quotes from him
in this essay alone are superb, and the short stories themselves sound
fascinating. In fact, I ended up putting the collection on my wish list,
because our library system doesn’t carry it. Boo!!! Did we really need
those 35 copies of Eat, Pray, Love and couldn’t afford this one?
Anyway, a DFW quote to
start this off. (Side note: my dad was an air traffic controller, so “DFW”
means “Dallas-Fort-Worth airport” to me. But typing out “David Foster Wallace”
is a pain in the ass, so I am recycling the acronym.)
I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s
job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big
part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is
sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other
selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of
what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a
vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does
this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empath’s
impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify
with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others
identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone
inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film
and most kinds of “low” art - which just means art whose primary aim is to make
money - is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100
percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51
percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money
out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard
to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is
usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art
audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100
percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and
appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s
readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art
culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it
makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually
unprecedentedly hard.
I agree with about 90
percent of that. But I think DFW accidentally spelled “Baby Boomers” to read
“young audiences.” He was my generation - Gen X - and saw some of this is our
generation. He wasn’t wrong, per se - superficiality exists in Gen X. But the true
“raised on television and effortless gratification” generation is the Baby
Boomers. Which is why they are the core demographic for Fox News. My experience
of Millennials (which read a lot more than Boomers, by the way) is that they do
understand the pain of life, and are willing to think more deeply. (Which is
why the Boomers hate them so much.) And then there is Gen Z, my own kids’
generation. They have thought so much that the older generations (my generation
and my parents’) seem determined to censor books, muzzle teachers, and scream
into the void about how horrible it is that the young people are browner,
gayer, and don’t agree with them! Where the hell do you think the “don’t
say gay” laws are coming from? Or the “teach only wytewashed history” crap? It
isn’t Gen Z, I can tell you that. Likewise, who is calling for gun law reform,
who is standing up to anti-LGBTQ bigotry, who is pushing for a reckoning for
past and present systemic racism? Oh, that would be those damn Millennials and
Gen Z.. So yes, I agree with DFW that many people have been trained to expect
easy gratification. (And I think this was a problem before TV, too.) But it
isn’t the young folk primarily.
Oh, and here is another
fantastic DFW quote, I believe from the story “The Depressed Person.”
There’s always been a strong and distinctive American
distaste for frustration and suffering…It seems distinctly Western-industrial,
anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that’s
causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign
that your nervous system knows something’s wrong. For these cultures, getting
rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off
the fire alarm while the fire’s still going. But if you just look at the number
of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country - from
fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals
during the Depression - you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard
pain itself as the problem.
Man, that is so spot on.
And I can see it in my own family, unfortunately. Because I was the scapegoat,
the difficult child, the black sheep, my pain and unhappiness was always put
down to a flaw in me, never in circumstances. I was rebellious. Or I just “say
mean things.” We have never been able to get past the symptoms to causes. Just
like in society, we continue to treat the symptoms of inequality and oppression by more and more
policing.
One final thought from
this essay: Smith draws a line from Kant to Simone Weil to John Rawls with an
argument against the unholy marriage of individualism with profit-obsessed
capitalism and in favor of a more humanistic ethic. Smith discusses this in a
great footnote.
All three [Kant, Weil, and Rawls] having in common the
idea that the business of ethics properly concerts good relations between
people rather than the individual’s relation toward some ultimate goal or end.
For Kant, all people are ends in themselves; for Weil they are sacred in
themselves. For Rawls they are communal individuals whose differences are to be
respected and yet not counted as relevant when it comes to justice, which must
concern itself with fairness. In Rawls’ view, if we were to choose the
principles of a just society, we would have to be placed under a “veil of ignorance”
in which we knew nothing of one another’s (or our own) personal qualities, that
is, race, talents, religion, wealth, class, gender - an awesome idea that
reminds me of Wallace at his most parabolic. Let’s say it’s your job to choose
the “role of women” in this society, a society in which you’re going to live.
But as you make the decision you don’t know if you yourself are to be a woman
or not. So decide!
This is a thought
experiment I have often considered as the crux of the issue with ALL social hierarchies.
I suspect we all would make different decisions about how to order society if
we had no way of knowing if we would be man or woman, white or black, rich or
poor. I have long believed that the only reason so many Fundies idolize the
Victorian Era is that they imagine themselves as the aristocracy, never as a
child laborer dying in a coal mine at age 9. And the doucebag theo-bros who
insist that vagina people can’t do theology are mostly terrified that if they
did, they would not only strip nasty men of their power, but they would be really, really good at theology. I
think this is also why the American White Right - the MAGA crowd - is terrified
of immigration. They realize (probably correctly) that their lazy and often
stupid white asses will be exposed by meaningful competition. I myself am well
aware that I am a Mediocre White Man™, and I am okay with it. Which is why I
realize that a society that benefits everyone will ultimately benefit me. I
need not fear women, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people - ultimately, it is
only those who seek to use power to oppress others who are the threat to the
wellbeing of all of us - and society.
Lots of great stuff in
this book. I love Zadie Smith. She is a thoughtful writer, and wears her heart
on her sleeve in a way that I find to indicate a kindred spirit, despite our
differences in background, nationality, and more. This essay collection is a
gem, and worth seeking out.
