Give me your answer, do …
Zadie Smith has suggested that when she talks about the state of the nation, she gets in trouble.
The reality is that when Zadie talks about the state of the nation, no-one outside of a few people who read The Guardian, TLS or her books gives a stuff.
This isn't a throwaway comment about Zadie Smith.
It's a comment on a reality.
Zadie’s statement comes from a place of thinking that she's still important, which she's entitled to do; as well as a place of thinking that the novel is still important - as if what novelists say and do in their work has any impact on social, cultural and economic realities.
The first is to be applauded. Zadie Smith should think that she's important. We all should. We should all have a healthy sense of self-worth and self-regard, if only because it's helpful for our mental, emotional and physical health. Believing that who we are and what we choose to do are valid is vital for our sense of ourselves and our agency in the world.
The second rests not on whether art and artists are important (they are) or whether or not they have influence (they don’t. From Shelley’s unacknowledged legislators of the world to the Haight-Ashbury hippies, nothing changed. You just gave us something to whistle on our way to work).
No, it rests instead on the idea that the novel is still a valid form - or at least that the novel as a trenchant form of commentary or mechanism of change is valid. It comes from a place of believing that literature, in inverted commas, is important and the idea of the literary tradition, in which the state-of-the-nation or condition-of-England novel is a recognised theme. The Sword in the Stone - the originator of the magical education story - is one, for example, taken on by White in the interbellum to address why the world’s largest empire was faltering. Amis attempted something similar, not just in Lionel Asbo: State of England (the clue was in the title), but in more celebrated work such as Money and London Fields - the zenith of novels as style.
The reality is that such things are important to people who believe that literature, in inverted commas, is important. But the vast majority of people who still read books of any genre don’t do so with any apprehension or sense of the literary tradition. People who still read do so for new perspectives, sure, and out of interest, certainly, but most of what’s consumed in terms of fiction and non-fiction is consumed as entertainment, displacement and distraction.
The last two aren’t meant pejoratively. Long before we realised that the modern world was making us sick, displacement and distraction were recognised as vital for our physical and mental health. Art, literature, music … all come originally from our desire to communicate, sure, but also as means of taking us out of ourselves too - so, displacement and distraction.
The idea that there were common Western cultural traditions that stretched back through history was a similarly common one. Even without the help of the right background or education, we have a general cultural sense that after the Renaissance came the Early Modern Period and then the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution, just as we have a sense that each represented an evolutionary step on from what had come before it (at least we do if we think of history as being progressive).
If there was ever any truth in these ideas, it was blown to shreds by the continent-wide cataclysms of Two World Wars. It’s hard to maintain a representative culture when genocide has killed those who represent it and total war has levelled the institutions that preserved it.
Some people still clung to the ideas of continuity that they suggested, though, and the value systems they represented.
I remember reading the criticism of Clive James, largely because I found him a well-read, insightful and trenchant critic. Even allowing for the reality that we value others when we see in them the things we value ourselves, his criticism and his memoirs are often sparkling examples of the form. His ranking of writers and artists on what he thought their merits were and where they stood in relation to others that he valued / ranked and what he thought literature or art were always struck me as pissing in the wind, however.
First, it assumed that there were criteria by which these things could be measured; and secondly that these measurements meant anything at all.
I realise that in saying the above, I’m laying myself open to exactly the same charge.
Fair enough.
After all, I’ve just judged him.
But the idea that anyone outside of the small groups he operated in cared about what they cared about is pertinent. The worth of a culture does not lie in what those who hold themselves to be its guardians think. It lies in what the majority engage with - otherwise we aren’t talking about representative culture. It is with this in mind that I’ve written elsewhere that the representative culture of the sixties wasn’t The Beatles, The Stones, The British Blues Invasion and Swinging London. It was Helen Shapiro, Cliff Richards and Englebert Humperdink - just as the representative culture of 1976-77 wasn’t The Sex Pistols and Anarchy in the UK but Mull of Kintyre and Living Next Door To Alice. The realisation that what they think is important most don’t comes as a blow to most critics / experts - which is why they tend not to acknowledge that fact as a reality. However, people don’t like what they’re told is good and worthy and has value. They like what they like and if they like it, it is good and worthy and has value to them.
It twas ever thus - history is full of artists who complained that the world didn’t understand them or get their work while people they and perhaps others judge to be lesser got the fame and the fortune. What gets recognised is what gets recognised and there’s often no rhyme or reason to it otherwise we’d all be able to engineer material and cultural success. This is why whatever you do has to fulfil you first before it fulfils anyone else.
Coming back to Zadie’s comment, while books have continued to be published - and some have made reasonable careers out of being seen as producing ‘literature’ - and paintings have been painted - and some have made reasonable careers and large fortunes from being defined as producing art - and people have continued to talk about the idea of culture as accretion and hierarchy - where so and so's Hamlet / Macbeth / book / work / etc are placed in relation to the ones that have gone before it and judged and weighed and discussed and ranked accordingly - the reality is that the actual works and realities of cultural production are happening in a great big sea of content in which these ideas represent small islands. It’s happening now, in the moment, before being updated and replaced a moment later by new content.
In this context, the idea that a novel can comment is a false dichotomy.
It can.
But the mechanics of writing and publishing mean that it took two years to write and then another two years before it came out. It can comment, sure, but whatever it thinks it was commenting on has long gone by the time it comes out.
The reality is that the novel barely had a social function back when the idea that it had one and had agency was in its heyday. People talk about Dickens as social reformer - and his books did have impact, but their impact was intensified and compounded by his daily work as a journalist and his leverage of his social and cultural position. Did Dickens work as a social reformer actually change anything? Yes, of course it did. But the reality is that Britain remains a hideously class-bound and unequal society 150 years on so it didn’t change that much.
So, Zadie Smith should be congratulated on writing another book and getting it out. Books take stamina to write; and sustaining a publishing career in the age of free content is a neat trick.
But you aren't going to get in trouble for writing one or what it says.
©℗ A. I. Jackson
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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.
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