Book of essays examines the power of free will
Book of essays looks to remind the reader we all have free will
Writers gonna write. And with all the words coming out of this pandemic, few are as welcome — or as relevant — as U.K. writer Zadie Smith’s. Which makes her just released (small) book of essays titled “Intimations” must-reading. The six pieces inside are personal and have the feel of thinking things through, trying to figure things out — the way we’ve all been trying to come to terms with these months of lockdown.
Given time zones and sleeping kids, we decided that I’d send her some questions and she’d answer when she got some writing time. Here’s what she had to say.
The last time we spoke, last fall on the publication of “Grand Union,” you said you weren’t writing any more books, but were taking time off to spend with your children. What changed your mind?
Ha! An enormous amount of time with my children … I guess the best way to explain it was I had no idea I was writing a book. I wrote the first essay for myself and then the second, and then I just continued. Then it occurred to me that the uselessness I was feeling could be countered by making it a book and directing the money to useful causes. So that’s what I did.
You write in your foreword that you turned to reading Marcus Aurelius “with the same attitude I bring to the instructions for a flat-pack table — I was in need of practical assistance.” Did it help you? How?
More than anything, he helped remind me that there are other ways of thinking than reactively, or in response to preordained stimulus (“the news” or “the notification”) or in 140 characters. I needed to know it was still possible to decide for yourself what you wanted to give attention to, and what you wanted to think about. That it was still possible to “reflect” and not simply to “respond.”
How do you hope those who turn to these essays react to them or use them? Do you hope they’ll help them?
It’s the same as always for me. I don’t need people to agree with me or to submit to one argument or another. It’s more like a model of a way of thinking. The cover of the American book shows a curving road, the end of which you can’t see. That’s all I hope for when I write. I’m saying to the reader: You don’t have to move the way they tell you, you don’t have to be nudged, you don’t have to move at the speed they say is “natural” … To me all radical change comes from the realization that what you’ve been told is “just the way things are” is, in fact, not nature but ideology. Ideology obscured. By habit. By supposed “necessity.”
Right now, above and beyond all arguments on the right and the left, the emergency is that both sides have accepted that our present mode of discourse — owned by unseen actors, directed by unseen actors, hugely renumerative for unseen actors — is just “the way things are.” It’s just “technology.” But the modes of discourse we’re being forced into and the behaviour modification that is the result is far from “natural.” Tech is neutral: It can be used in many ways. It’s misused presently. If our brains are open land, they are being exploited and stripped by ruthless capitalist colonizers. But this time it’s not tobacco or cotton or gold they’re after, it’s our attention. And the consequences are not limited to the digital realm. The results are all around us.
My writing is an attempt to resist that. It’s an attempt to remind the reader: You’re a human being and you have a free will, if nothing else. So it’s sort of like: I’m walking this way. Come with me for a while. But where the road turns, I can’t follow: The rest of it is up to you.
These essays haven’t undergone a year of editorial process, meaning they’ve got a sense of immediacy, they’re somewhat raw. There’s something vulnerable and very intimate about that. Why embrace that?
I didn’t feel like being decorative. I felt like telling the truth, as unvarnished as I could manage it. Whenever I read anyone doing that I feel liberated. I wanted to feel liberated and sort of pass on the feeling.
There’s a love-hate relationship with the importance of writing — it’s “something to do,” filling time the way baking banana bread does for some people — that comes up in various iterations throughout these essays. Do you really believe that?
Honestly, yes. I think the traditional “feminine” arts of homemaking or dressmaking or whatever are shamefully undervalued. They’re doing what I’m doing: making a space for another person to be in. Creating an architecture for life. There’s no greater task, but also no more mundane one.
“Screengrabs” is a series of vignettes that are anything but remote, as the title might suggest: they’re intimate, personal and bring individuals to life. What does writing these portraits say or provide that writing about ideas can’t?
I was very struck these past few years that though there is so much talk about social justice in the abstract, the actual subject of social justice — human beings — are rarely spoken about in any detail or with any texture or genuine interest.
If we are committed to social justice, as we claim to be, it seems to me we should be very compelled by the subjects of that justice — that is, people. My job is people. Not as generalizations or members of groups, but as themselves. I’m sure if the world was run by novelists no useful political action would ever occur because to act politically you have to think of the group, and to think collectively. But perhaps to act well politically it helps to remember what an actual single being is — what a universe each and every human contains. Remembering that might help when the big decisions get made.
The last piece, “Debts and Lessons,” isn’t really a piece in the conventional sense; it’s a list of names and — against each — why, presumably, you feel a debt to them or what you’ve learned from them: liberty; compassion; how to love. In the totting up there seems something very final but also hopeful. What were you trying to get at?
There is a strong libertarian, individualistic philosophy in America. People make themselves or think they do. A quote I once heard an American movie star say on the radio: “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.” I was so horrified by it! I put it in (my novel) “NW” imagining every reader would feel the same … instead I often see it quoted online as a kind of personal credo. It’s funny. I grew up in a more or less social democracy in which I understood very early on that my life was a collective project, that I was in no way it’s “sole author.” I owe my life to my family, obviously, but also to that postwar British state — that provided, at that time, clean and decent housing at a reduced rate — not to mention my free local school, my free health care and, finally, my free university.
I was not immune to the various kinds of prejudice and inequality that punctuated that journey, but nor was I blind to the basic conditions that made my childhood so different from either of my parents.
When supportive structures exist — however imperfect — the citizen has a chance to look at his fellow citizens with appreciation, gratitude, even love. When hardly any such structures exist and each day is an existential battle for survival precisely against your fellow citizens — which seems to me more or less the American situation — then naturally you feel no gratitude and no debt. You feel fury. Why shouldn’t you?
We’ve all been tested in the past four-and-a-half months: financially, emotionally, morally, mentally, physically. Do you think we can take this trial and do something positive with it?
I think in the U.S. it exposed the absolute non-existence of the commons in that country. Everything was confronted piecemeal and with money as the final motivation and regulator — even the procuring of ventilators. In Europe, sadly, it revealed that our postwar social compact is hanging by a thread.
I think the most positive thing that could come out of this trial is that the postwar social compact is remade, but this time with the greatly expanded conception of a citizen that this young generation have successfully created, that is, a conception of the citizen that includes, and equally provides for, the non-white, the nonbinary, the nonstraight and the differently abled.
If you could do that and also take the lessons of lockdown’s effect on the environment to create a revolutionary new green deal … It’s an enormous challenge. I have no idea if we can do it. But the hope is this year will put these ideas on the table in a permanent way.