White Teeth by Zadie Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an extraordinarily ambitious book, especially for a book of fiction.
Books that deal with big ticket items, such as family, immigration, race, legacy — ultimately deals with people’s place in the world due to such contingencies such as race, social status and the like. Such themes become transcendental filters that limit who a character is (where they are located in terms of these contingencies). And as such, Smith needs her characters to be foils for each other. Yet the modern reader insists that a character become full, be about a particular someone — so we can dive into their minds and souls and know them — so they can be rounded, we end up expanding who someone is beyond those defining characteristics… yet in a writer who is as aware as Smith is, who is aware of a characters strengths, faults and points of view, inevitably in order to focus on such filters, characters who would ‘step out of those limits’ end up being re-inscribed in those transcendental limits, in order to fulfill the exemplification of those boundaries.
This is very much like what happens in real life. If you are defined as being a nerd, or somehow limited in your person, any creation of yourself as such would need to address how others see you. You would have to occupy a position, a consistency of your self image that addresses the stereotype that others perceive you as being. Even a rejection of that self image would require an incorporation of what you are not so that you constantly find yourself located somewhere in the middle between two extremes. Millat and Magid as immigrant twins find themselves located in the middle — though that middle becomes an extreme middle for each, as Millat in the UK has a different middle to address than Magid who probably lives in Bengal as some kind of return of the prodigal son. In fact, Magid adopts the same kind of heir to the Enlightenment rationalism, the claim to pure awareness that Marcus so adheres to, whose expression of “Chalfenism” is a reflection of this rationalist attitude which is in a way, an insistence of principle, a death drive, as Freud would call it… whereas Millat embraces his own middle as the negatively defined Islam extremist sect through the oppression and violence of capitalist fantasies (not his dad’s Islam, not the rationalist attitudes of the Enlightenment, but some kind of Frankenstein of both, the rejected underbelly of both, the non-law in the Law as Zizek would but it, the death-drive of both, the insistence of principle)..
I won’t try and take apart of the novel, but in the example above, you see how characters thus defined through principle become examples of principles. Claim that they are inhuman? That they are flat? Perhaps, if they adhere too much to a principle, they seem so flat. But the structural climax of the novel, the intersection of so many different characters whose reaction to their lessened class status as poor immigrants demands that Smith split her attention in so many different ways. Each immigrant (even 2nd generation immigrant, whose futures the story revolves around) responds to their poverty through a different means… religion, family legacy, capital practicality… and these different attitudes, this in-fighting, this verbal abuse, can not be resolved.
In fact, you wish for it to be resolved, but it won’t be. Because Marcus, the scientist with the Romanesque name, wishes through his use of science to remove the very boundaries of what makes them who they are… by programming the genetic legacy of one mouse, for cancer research, he inadvertently suggests that their contingencies, the very things that under the transcendental filter of these big themes makes them who they are, locates them on the skin of social totality as being in their middle, is in fact a joke. That they can’t be themselves, that they are mechanical, defined by contingencies that are not due to their own person, their own choice. The hysteria surrounding some genetic research today is rightly parodied in the book. Ironically, the response to this possibility of being nothing more than a genetic program, that can be manipulated through Western irregard for non-Western logic, amounts to the messing with the external markers that solidify the transcendent filters that define these characters in their confusion. This is because, as much as these characters suffer through the poverty of their British existence so too do they hang onto the beyond of their past glory… so that changing the coordinates of their biology by analogy threatens to change the coordinates of their past glories. Genetic manipulation, in this novel, acts as a locus of the ‘beyond’ that hangs their Real in place. By proxy, they lose their place in the world by losing the essential difference that makes them who they are… the last essential difference that poverty can’t take away from them.
There are of course, far richer details that can go into this reading. Smith though, chooses an odd angle, genetics, to stir the pot as it were, rather than concentrating on religion itself, or economics itself… both of which could be read as responses to one another, although perhaps not so much in this book. Overall, I thought she did a good job of balancing personal characters with the themes/motifs that she sought to illustrate. It is hard to draw the je ne sais quoi of each character, a kind of mythical image that can assume its own form… in a book, as all we get are words that exemplify something else. But it was beliveable for me. Characters who have so little, like people who have so little, will often hang onto the most abstract of principles/fantasies. That much is true.
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