Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914

The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world—in its dramatic as well as its quiet times—we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming. Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?

A literary study of internationalism is particularly well suited to parsing the facts and values of “integration,” one of the most prevalent bywords for describing the social, economic, and cultural effects of globalization today. Of course, the fact/value split is never neutral, a point reinforced by juxtaposing two dictionary definitions of integrate. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition is “To render entire or complete; to make up, compose, constitute (a whole),” whereas in Merriam-Webster, one definition is “to make (something) a part of another larger thing.”¹ The Oxford definition, with its softer phrasing, imbues integration with the traditional values of aesthetic form. “Completion” and “wholeness” suggest a desirable unity, whereas Merriam-Webster’s “make part” intimates the coercion and oppression that both Marxian and biopolitical approaches have, in their differing ways, aligned with life under large systems.

Global capitalism is the largest of those large systems, and if my epigraph from Phil Angelides is to be believed, the most damagingly integrated because the most damagingly concentrated. Banks “too big to fail…too big to manage…too big to regulate…too complex to understand…too risky to exist” were bailed out, as the story goes, in order to save the entire financial system from collapse. According to such reasoning, to use the language of the Occupy movement, the 1 percent’s demise means the 99 percent’s demise as well. That this is a story of injustice goes without saying. That the injustice stems from hypocrisy regarding dependence and distribution deserves more examination.

Economist Branko Milanović has identified the last of these factors, wealth inequality, as the root cause of the global financial crisis, and he argues that it should occasion a debate about the scale at which conversations about inequality operate. Economists usually measure inequality on a national scale because it is the nation-state that distributes access to benefits and entitlement programs to offset that inequality. However, as “the world becomes more integrated,” Milanović argues, global inequality, or wealth disparity between the poorest and the richest people in the world, becomes a more salient category—one that explains events that become paranoid media spectacles in developed countries, such as the rise of piracy in the Indian Ocean, the spread of a flu epidemic that originated in Mexico, and unabated migration to the European Union and the United States.2

Milanović’s study of global inequality invites us to think about how world-systemic problems of poverty make themselves known, and how they continue to be obscured through the metonymic shorthand of nationality in phrases like “Somali pirates” or “the Mexican flu.” The project of international solidarity, so thrillingly displayed in the spread of popular uprisings, bears with it an obligation to reveal the perniciousness of such shorthand and to contend with how global inequality fissures “the 99 percent.” According to Milanović’s numbers, 20 percent of the world’s population enjoys 83 percent of the total world income. While we in wealthy countries can and should protest that global form of income inequality, we also cannot ignore the fact that many of those who belong to the 99 percent, intellectually and emotionally, might also belong to the 20 percent, economically.

Zadie Smith’s fictions are particularly keen on exploring conflicts and continuities of scale alongside communities’ conflicts and continuities of interest. White Teeth, for example, turns a multicultural, national story of England into an international story of the British Empire by turning a painful dental procedure, the root canal, into a metaphor for deciphering the causalities of migration in all their personal and historical complexity. Chapters entitled “The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal,” “The Root Canals of Mangal Pande,” and “The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden” inject recursion into the novel’s largely progressive plot, suggesting that readers who want to understand English community circa the 1970s to the 1990s (the primary setting of the novel) will need to know something about the Eastern Europe of 1945, the India of 1857, and the Jamaica of 1900, respectively. The claim fits well with the epigraph to White Teeth, “The past is prologue,” and with the larger insistence of multicultural British fiction that, in the stuttering words of Salman Rushdie’s Whiskey Sissodia, “The trouble with the Engenglish is that their history happened overseas so they dodo don’t know what it means.”3

But the narrative structure of Smith’s root canals also sits in uneasy relation to the clarifications of framing that “the past is prologue” implies. “Root Canal” chapters pop up to break the time–space unities of the novel, and they interrupt, confuse, and diffuse exposition as a matter of performing it. Dubbed “dizzying in a good way” by Caryl Phillips, “hysterical” in a bad way by James Wood, Smith’s narrative strategies in her first novel establish her ongoing interest in the ambivalence of causality: wanting to know the determinative forces and individual choices that explain the present, and fearing that knowing more will not guarantee understanding more or acting any more rightly.4

In her 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” Smith furnished readers with a much-debated argument about the “future of the Anglophone novel.” The path of lyrical realism, represented by Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, would, however anxiously, evince a belief in the “transcendent importance of form” and in the liberal self, characterized by an “essential fullness and continuity.” The alternative path of the avant-garde, represented by Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, would less anxiously reject philosophical idealism in favor of the poststructuralist critique of totalities. Such a novel would embrace the matter that resists form, with form understood here, in McCarthy’s words (quoted by Smith), as the attempt to “ingest all of reality into a system of thought, to eat it up, to penetrate and possess it.”⁵

Smith gives the edge to McCarthy for bringing readers to the limits of individual consciousness and for inspiring an awareness of conceptual failure amid the sheer materiality of language. In doing so, she also stakes out the legacy of modernism that anticipates McCarthy’s principles—“the negations of Beckett. The paradoxical concrete abstractions of Kafka. The scatological thingy-ness of Joyce at his most antic.” These strategies are examples of what Smith calls “overwhelming narration.” They convey an off-kilter extremity (“There’s too much here, too much to process, just too much”) that is also an epistemological position (“a narration defined by absence, by partial knowledge, for we can only know it by the marks it has left”).

Whatever we think of Smith’s sketches of realism and the avant-garde, her appraisal of McCarthy’s residual modernism reveals something about her own.6 Smith’s formal and conceptual preoccupations are with the excess that signals human finitude (“partial knowledge”) and with the acts of sense-making that arise from those overwhelmed states of being in which a self comes into both consciousness and collapse in the face of unsolvable dilemmas. They draw her oeuvre together, and, because not inherently limited to global capitalism, become remarkably rich roads into the critique of its inequalities and occlusions while also functioning as sharp engagements with the epistemologies of totality used to describe it. Unlike McCarthy, who aligns himself with a more orthodox poststructuralism, Smith imagines totality as a chimera to be preserved and uses the analytical resources of literary form to imagine what an immanent wholeness, a wholeness without transcendence of the structures or obscurities of modernity, might look like.

As Martin Jay’s magisterial study of “totality” established, the term is a contested one within the history of Western Marxism, and it embeds understandings of holism not limited to Marxism.⁷ Generally speaking, totality can refer to the possibility and necessity of complete understanding (a legacy of Enlightenment thought that comes to equate knowledge with mastery and individual self-possession). It can also refer to an underlying reality of which the surface is a symptom (a legacy of Marxism, which comes to privilege systemic causes over individual actions or inactions). Alternatively, it can denote the antimodern organicism of cultures as intact expressions of a people (à la Herder) or refuges from an alienating industrialization (à la Raymond Williams). I use “totality” and “holism” in this chapter to reflect on the interplay between systemic critique and self-critique in Smith’s work. This results in an examination of how her fiction intersects with the thought of Marxian advocates of world-systemic totality, such as Fredric Jameson and Immanuel Wallerstein, as well as how it retains progressive cosmopolitan critique’s focus on the individual’s ethical and epistemological dilemmas in the face of a globalizing world of increasing inequality.

Smith’s root canals, as metaphor and narrative form, portray the global whole as relational, composed in the Saidian terms of overlapping territories and intertwined histories.⁸ As metaphor, they capture the overwhelming project of discerning causality over long distances. As narrative form, they embrace techniques of digression and extraneousness as paradoxically essential sources of literary organization and political reflection. Yet Smith’s root canals as media forms—chapters in a book—also promote the generalization, division, and abstraction of stories into bounded units as necessary tools of meaning-making.

Nicholas Dames has argued that the literary history of the chapter—that plain and perennially overlooked element of the novel form, and of book form more broadly—discloses a whole host of concerns about the art of understanding. On one hand, chapters function as “miniature narratives that observe Aristotle’s ‘unities’ of time, place, and action, and that can be extracted from the stream of life as a whole.” On the other, that extractable holism raises the specter of compromised understanding: “A comprehension of smaller parts rather than coherent wholes might, Locke worried, be a lesser comprehension.”9 Although Dames attributes a fear of partial knowledge to Locke, the attribution is equally applicable, in the context of my argument, to Marxian methodologies that warn against reification, and to Smith herself, who realizes the always present danger of obscuring the whole story while trying to tell it. Smith makes the anxieties of partial knowledge a principle concern of her writing, and her interest in root canals in White Teeth, as both metaphors for long-distance causalities and instances of distinctly bounded chapters, augers her later fiction’s formal experiments with size, scale, and division-drawing.

Smith’s interest in the “partness” of wholes and the wholeness of parts manifests most strongly through her persistent return to northwest London—the site of her most recent novel, NW, and a variety of essays and short fiction. Like Joyce in the early twentieth century, Smith, in the early twenty-first, returns to her home city as part of a proleptic, if not preemptive, act of memorialization. Whereas Joyce contended from afar with the destruction of Dublin in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising, Smith fears the succumbing of northwest London to the privatizing forces of gentrification—forces whose “slow violence” might inhibit the comparison with a spectacular uprising and yet are just as—if not more—erosive of the social fabric.¹⁰ Both writers conceive of their respective homes as marginal and provincial, but where Joyce reckoned all of Dublin as both hospitable and insular, Smith divides London into parts—parts that at times need to be understood as wholes in order to achieve a comprehension that might be described as fuller rather than lesser. Joyce drew our attention to the disparities between the Irish colonial city, British metropole, and European continent; Smith multiplies the cores and peripheries within London and without. She traces London’s internal geography of power as a way of reflecting upon what it means to inhabit a global city, a center of finance capital and culture that is also internally riven by its status.¹¹

Smith’s northwest London fictions apportion to themselves the problem of deciphering wholeness and causality as they range from economically materialist accounts to more local and individual stories. Smith seeks out conflicts of scale because she understands framing as integral to understandings of wholeness. Her fictions work through international realities that look like contradictions from the point of view of national culture alone. For example, they show that dearly held local histories might be the province of recent arrivals to a country, and that class distinctions are often far more inimical to the goals of self-described democratic societies than the conflicts caused by ethnic pluralism. Still, her fictions do not always privilege the global scale as the superior ground of comprehension. Smith’s use of formal strategies to evoke the partiality of knowledge—its framing and its incompleteness—constructs the challenge of rendering the whole as the overwhelming challenge of seeing at multiple scales.

Smith’s root canals may be dizzying, but they are also demotic, illustrative of the everyday realities of interconnection that are masked by commonplace understandings of collectivity, such as the one offered in the first epigraph of this chapter. Although the speaker deems it eminently reasonable to draw “a circle around our attention,” the final interrogative (“But how large should this circle be?”) hints at the need for a messier geometry of collective affiliation.12 I use the word demotic with respect to Smith’s root canals for another reason as well: as a cognate of democracy, it connects styles of ordinary speech, such as clichés, slang, idioms, and adages, to styles of being a demos—that is, a people—civically as opposed to ethnically defined.

Smith’s prose has been celebrated for making multiculturalism seem demotic; her writing reflects and complements England’s status as a “mongrel nation” comprising people from multiple ethnic backgrounds.¹³ Yet, given multiculturalism’s emphasis on ethnicity and nationhood, civic and economic orientations toward democracy have gone comparatively unexamined in her work. James Procter, drawing on Stuart Hall, rightly notes, “As difference gets incorporated, reworked, and pieced out according to the logic of late global capitalism, it is worth asking whether (ethnic) difference is still capable of making a difference.” ¹⁴ By pursuing a more refined understanding of how ethnic and civic culture overlap, Smith’s northwest London fictions bring an analysis of class along with an analysis of scale to the fore in modernist internationalism.

Smith’s fictions share Fraser’s concern with balancing multiple scales of justice, and this is nowhere better illustrated than in her 2013 short story “The Embassy of Cambodia.” Originally published in the New Yorker, the eleven-page story imagines obstacles to justice within liberal democracies that have defined constituencies and across global circuits that do not. Writing in a genre defined by its scale, Smith explores the challenges of scaling that were metaphorized and formalized by the root canal chapters in White Teeth. These challenges include balancing the disruption of boundaries with the necessity of drawing boundaries, properly arraying parts and wholes, and deciphering causality across multiple geographies. For Smith, the short story’s renowned containment becomes an opportunity to visualize the strategies of enclosure and continuity that draw awareness to the inorganic production of wholeness and constituency—in stories and in communities.

“Embassy” explores the relationship between formal wholes and social wholes at the level of structural organization, plot, and narrative voice. The story unfolds in numbered sections of varying length and according to the following format: 0–1, 0–2, 0–3…One reviewer used the term “chapters” in scare quotes, a choice that highlights their oddity through the mixing up of scales: the partitioning vocabulary of long-form fiction strangely applies to short-form fiction.16 Like chapters, Smith’s sections are of varying length, but they are measured by paragraphs instead of pages. Some are several paragraphs long, others one paragraph only, and even if one peeks at the end, the numbers evoke an infinite set within a finite story. This paradox reveals something perhaps so obvious it has gone unnoticed: the short story is a literary form in which the whole is not supposed to have visible parts. Generally read in one sitting, the short story is the preeminent narrative example of a unified and organic whole. Yet Smith insists on partitioning it and displaying its mechanical “pieceness.” By creating so many divisions where none are expected, Smith introduces questions of judgment where they were not previously legible—between sections of the story but also between characters and places represented in the story.

The divided whole is a fitting conceit, given Smith’s focus on varieties of social order, from the microcollectivity of the household to the macro-collectivities of nations and continents. The protagonist of “Embassy” is Fatou, a domestic servant from the Ivory Coast who is living with an upper-middle-class South Asian family, the Derawals, in Willesden, a section of northwest London. Fatou works for room and board, and her employers hold her passport. She has no monetary income. Several times in the story, she compares her situation to that reported in a “discarded” newspaper article about a “Sudanese ‘slave’ ” living in London and wonders if she too is a slave. (She concludes that she is not, but the question hangs in the air.) Smith does not explain how Fatou arrived in London, but we know “her father, not a kidnapper” oversaw her migration from the Ivory Coast to Ghana, where they worked together at a hotel, and then paid for her single passage from Libya to Italy (“Embassy,” section 0–7).

Smith’s incomplete sketch of Fatou’s journey from the Ivory Coast to Willesden traces a migration route that, since 1999, has brought more than two hundred thousand people to the Italian island of Lampedusa, if not to London. Mattathias Schwartz calls Lampedusa a “zone of global limbo, where developed nations decide who is most deserving of a new life on the other side of the wall.”17 The wall here is an allusion to the larger discourse surrounding European Union migration policies, which has won the continent the title of “Fortress Europe.”¹⁸ The moniker forms a linguistic riposte to the European Commission’s European Neighbourhood Policy, the stated goal of which was to create “a zone of prosperity and friendly neighborhood” among member and nonmember states, but which also demanded that nonmembers ramp up their own border security against migrants deemed undesirable within Europe.¹⁹

Smith does not allow the details of such policies into “Embassy,” but she raises the specter of their absence with a narrative voice that declares “we” don’t really want the details anyway. To return once more to the first epigraph of this chapter:

(“Embassy,” section 0–9)

The speaker here is not Fatou. It introduces itself in the story’s second paragraph as “we, the people of Willesden.” The phrasing evokes not just a collectivity but also a demos, which worries for Fatou without making any gesture of inclusion or self-implication in her fate. The choral narration, however, with its repetition of “we” and “our,” slowly draws a circle around the reader as the narrator aligns provinciality with common sense and equates the avoidance of world news with the impossibility of following “the history of every little country in this world.” The narrator’s normative claims naturalize insularity by harnessing scale and number, implying that an impossibly large and single field of attention would be required to care about many little countries. Smith uses the “we” to expose the link between a rhetoric of limited resources (here, of attention) and an ethos of communitarianism, which conceives of belonging as singular and finite rather than multiple and ongoing. That is, the size of the group is more important than multiplying the number and kinds of groups to which one can belong—for example, to Willesden and the European Union.²⁰

The brevity of the short story form would seem to support the narrator’s point of view, but “Embassy” uses the discreteness of numbers against the discreteness of countries. The ability of a short story to absorb the sectioning capacity of long forms suggests that expanding attention is possible but requires changing one’s principle of scale rather than measuring more units with it. In “Embassy,” Smith calls for multiple measures of distance, and she reveals the absurdities of proximity that are overlooked by sharply separating Willesden from “far-off” countries. After all, the Sudanese slave to whom Fatou compares herself lives in London, yet her plight makes no greater claim to the Derawals’ attention (or the narrator’s) than if she had lived in Khartoum. The localism of solidarity here has as much to do with socioeconomic and racial measures of closeness as it does with physical and national measures of distance.

Smith makes this point in various ways throughout “Embassy,” which turns Willesden’s streets into a symbolic landscape of access points, walls, and guarded entryways that recall the neighborhood–fortress dyad of the new Europe. The titular Embassy of Cambodia stands, as a sign of Willesden’s gentrification, on the side of the street with “private residences…[featuring] Corinthian pillars,” thought to be owned by “wealthy Arabs” (“Embassy,” section 0–1). It is surrounded by an eight-foot wall, which blocks the narrator’s view of everything but conspicuously non-Cambodian people coming and going, and a shuttlecock rising above the wall from a game of badminton.21 A kind of objective correlative for prestige (in the form of a walled-off governmental institution) and marginality (directed at a poor country known to the narrator only for the genocide of its people), the embassy casts the shadow of state relations and official hospitality over the lackluster hospitality meted out to ordinary people without means.

Next door to the embassy is a health center, also private, where Fatou goes to swim. In another nod to the inequities of hospitality (more welcoming to the rich than to the poor and to singles than to groups), she gains entry by pilfering her employers’ many unused guest passes. But security tightens when she attempts to bring her own guest, a Nigerian friend, Andrew, to the pool, using two guest passes simultaneously. Smith allows setting to blur the line between elected and enforced forms of partial vision, embedding not just Fatou but also the “we” narrator in a multicultural social hierarchy that it initially seemed to survey from an Archimedean point. Sometimes the voice of “we” is omniscient, capable of entering Fatou’s consciousness through free indirect discourse and recalling memories of her hotel work in Ghana. Other times, it is limited, never able to see over the wall of the embassy. Inconsistency in the narrator’s access seems part of the story’s point, and it gives way to a series of destabilizing revelations. In sections 0–3 and 0–6, “we” slips into “I.” In section 0–13, “I” reveals that it is one of the “distressed souls” in a “dingy retirement home.” By withholding some details of her narrator’s embodied identity (for example, race and gender) and yielding others (for example, approximate age and class), Smith uses multiculturalism’s lessons to bring its less emphasized categories into view.

In Gerard Genette’s definition of the term from Narrative Discourse, metalepsis transgresses the boundaries between “two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (emphasis mine).22 Each world is a level, and to cross between them, as Smith’s narrator does by being seen standing on the balcony, is to cross “the threshold of embedding” that the narrative had established.²³ This crossing over puts the coherence of distinct narrative worlds into crisis in order to cast doubt on the coherence of social worlds. The “we” splits into an antagonistic “you” and a “gormless” “I” that undercuts the authority of the narrator while reasserting the question, posed earlier in the story, about how best to shape and weigh attention. Gormless derives from the English dialect word gaumless, meaning without “heed” or “attention.” By using this rare vernacular word in an otherwise standard English work, Smith suggests that jumping from “I” to “we,” even in the most local communities (“we, the people of Willesden”) is always an act of abstraction, a creation of a deracinated totality where there was none, and thus is an act of collective representation that is no less troubling or inescapable when the relevant whole is local than if the relevant whole were national or global.

Metalepsis thus opens up the possibility of feeling international solidarity by denaturalizing solidarities that conceive of local connections as more real than those at larger scales. Smith’s narrator appropriates the language of representative democracy only to flummox it: “I have been chosen to speak for them, though they did not choose me and must wonder what gives me the right.” The narrative voice contemplates its status as a teller of Willesden tales, and rejects the rationale that being born in a place gives one special purchase on the stories of that place.²⁴

This is not to say that Smith denies the existence or value of local knowledge, but she does contest the legitimacy that nativity confers, especially when so many others were born in that place, too, and would be equally qualified to narrate, according to such limited criteria. It bears mentioning that this anxiety is also the anxiety of leftist intellectuals whose willingness to see the social whole often goes hand in hand with delimiting groups that do not ratify them as their speakers. Such anxiety over representation thus belongs not only to Smith’s narrator but also to Smith herself, who has of late earned the moniker “the bard of Willesden Green.”²⁵

When the narrator in “Embassy” speaks on behalf of “the people of Willesden” while reflecting on what constrains and taints representation, one cannot help but see the relationship forming between authorial identity and a democratic aesthetics that reflects upon Smith herself as a writer and intellectual. In order to broach the always thorny political question of who gets to speak and why, Smith does not pontificate so much as demote her bardic substitute to the status of a nosy neighbor. The air of gossip the story takes on contributes to its political analysis and to Smith’s self-construction, via the narrator, as someone not fully authorized to tell her tale.

Priscilla Wald’s study of authorship and democratic nationhood differentiates between official stories of nation-building, drawn from the law, political speeches, and literary organizations, and unofficial stories of national analysis, drawn from writers whose style oscillates between “conformity and incomprehensibility.”26 Such stylistic oscillation conveys the ambivalence of belonging to a national community and the consequences of pushing the boundaries of a “we” beyond instant recognizability. Smith’s style in “Embassy” is not idiomatically difficult, but it relies on metalepsis and partitioning to align discovery with misunderstandings that can be seen only in retrospect. Transgressing narrative levels reveals our previous understandings about the coherence of Willesden’s community to be not just misplaced assumptions but, to recall Dames’s phrase, lesser comprehensions. Creating an awareness of degrees of understanding, Smith makes reflection on the processes of measurement an active part of reading her short story. Pausing over the distinctions between the world of the narrator and the world of the narrated reveals the gap between the constituted whole “we, the people of Willesden” and the ever-changing dynamics of actually existing groups, as signified by the “Old and New People of Willesden.” This alteration to the ritual language of democratic culture suggests that ongoing processes of migration should revise enduring notions of constituency, and thus it agitates the narrator’s circle of attention but does not explode it.

“Embassy” ends with two more twists that exploit narrative levels: one that readers and Fatou share, and one for readers alone. In the final section of the story, Fatou is fired without explanation. The narrator assures us that she is not fired for taking guest passes, and we identify, however briefly, with the precariousness of a domestic worker’s position. Fatou leaves the Derawal house and waits for Andrew on the street outside the Embassy of Cambodia, where readers, aligned with the choral narrator, return to the privileged position of watching her:

Many of us walked past her that afternoon, or spotted her as we rode the bus, or through the windscreens of our cars, or from our balconies. Naturally, we wondered what this girl was doing, sitting on damp pavement in the middle of the day. We worried for her. We tend to assume the worst, here in Willesden. We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return.

(“Embassy,” section 0–21)

Smith’s creative and varied use of division in the short story, in the form of metalepsis and segmentation, contributes to internationalist thought by multiplying the scales at which attention should be conceived and collectivities should be abstracted, but it stops short of granting literature more agency than it has to change conditions of global inequality. Indeed, the short story’s ending encapsulates a recurring concern about literary realms of representation that Smith first explicitly pondered in the essay “This Is How It Feels to Me,” written just after 9/11 in response to an essay by James Wood calling for a return to interiority in the contemporary novel. She writes: “Does anyone want to know the networks behind those seeming simplicities, the paths that lead from September 11 back to Saudi Arabia and Palestine, and then back to Israel, back further to the second world war, back once more to the first? Does anyone care what writers think about that? Does it help?”27

Pondering the root canals, “the networks behind those seeming simplicities” of terrible events, is exactly what the narrator of “Embassy” finds too unwieldy. It is also what the residents of Willesden cannot do as they focus their attention on Fatou’s individual’s plight without noticing the structural injustices, represented by the badminton game, in which they, too, are embedded. The scale of division in “Embassy”—a short story told in twenty-one parts—suggests that the whole story may inhere within the sum of its parts but that it will also conjure irresolvable remainders. For example, the end of the story/game is the beginning of a crucial gap between the knowledge of the story’s readers and that of its residents. Dramatic irony is what makes “Embassy” disturbing, generative, and poignant in its engagement with democratic language and principles. The story forces us to ask how such principles can survive in a securitized era when citizenries do not understand how little they know, or how little they want to know. This is a question to which I will return in my closing reading of White Teeth.

Smith reaches back into the deep past for her epigraph to NW: “When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?”28 What looks like an evocation of religious etiology against the historical development of social hierarchy is actually an allusion to a defining event in English history. Smith quotes from a sermon given by the Lollard priest John Ball during the Peasants’ Revolt of June 1381. This rebellion marks the first time the lower classes (artisans, laborers, and serfs) marched on London (and elsewhere across England) to protest increased taxation that would disproportionately affect commoners over lords, the policies of serfdom, and various other practices that concentrated wealth among the church and gentry. Ball’s teachings reinforced the connection between the Fall and class hierarchy and advocated the replacement of private property with common ownership.

In the last days of the revolt, Ball was hanged, drawn, and quartered. He remains a central figure in radical histories of England and has been imagined as a distant ancestor to participants of the Occupy movements (ongoing since 2011) and London’s Democracy Village (2010).²⁹ Ball plays such a role in Lindsey German and John Rees’s A People’s History of London, in which they argue that “the London of the twenty-first century is reproducing the conditions that gave rise to radical and socialist ideas in the past.” German and Rees point to higher levels of wealth inequality within London compared to the rest of England, the shortage of affordable housing, and the proliferation of jobs that pay less than the London Living Wage as among the factors that have given rise to increased political activism and social unrest.³⁰

“The North West London Blues” contributes to such a people’s history via a Raymond Williams–style evocation of residual ways of life and their ebbing resistance to the encroachments of capital. The essay considers gentrification and privatization through the particularly painful closing of the Willesden Green Library Centre to make way for “private luxury flats.”³¹ Smith presents the loss of the library center as not just the loss of a public resource but also the forsaking of “a different kind of social reality” in which values beyond the fiscal and wealth accumulation might be perpetuated. That previous reality of the commons, operant under duress in the present, was granted limited room to flourish through the English welfare state. It is an institution to which Smith credits, well, her entire life:

Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage…. To steal another writer’s title: England made me.

In an essay that defends the common space of the library as a form of patriotic Englishness, Smith undercuts the measures of literary culture by which her own work has achieved its place within the canon of British fiction. Smith’s reputation as a writer of multiculturalism regularly places her in a genealogy that begins with the Windrush generation and continues with the likes of Salman Rushdie, Caryl Phillips, Hanif Kureishi, and Andrea Levy, among others.³⁴ Yet her “theft” and recontextualization of Graham Greene’s title England Made Me suggests that the path of black British literary history, with its guiding categories of race and ethnicity, is only half the story. If migrants remade England into an international zone, their interactions with the institutions of the welfare state also brought them into the complicated, because not always inhospitable, fold of English national culture. Whereas Greene coined “England made me” as an indictment of a culture in the midst of imperial decline, Smith reuses it sincerely and fully embraces her indebtedness to a nation that she now too perceives as in decline.

Of course, Smith’s nostalgia is for neither empire nor cultural homogeneity, which is why it is both odd and potent that “The North West London Blues” repurposes the more xenophobic tropes of national decline—the disappearance of cherished institutions and the unrecognizability of one’s environment—to make a case against the invasion of capital rather than of immigrants. By claiming her domestic entanglements with England, Smith is able to protest its complicity in the “new global reality” of neoliberal deregulation. As neo- implies, contemporary globalization embeds a renewal of earlier forms of imperial liberalism, which Smith tends to forget in “North West London Blues,” even as she remembers them elsewhere in her fiction. Yet her claims to English nativity put an interesting spin on postcolonial critique by interjecting attenuated strangeness (though strangeness, nonetheless) and the middle-distance view of history back into its narratives of domination.

Postcolonial critics, like modernist writers, have generally espoused tactics of defamiliarization and unsettlement. Paul Gilroy, for example, argues that bringing colonial history back into the narrative of England’s self-making is valuable not simply as ideological demystification but also as a form of estrangement that induces critical distance from the norms and values of one’s perceived native culture.35 Smith modifies this strategy of estrangement by adopting the viewpoint of a visiting expatriate rather than an alien or migrant. Her neighborhood has changed, as has her class status, and the jarring disjunction is more historical than geographic—Willesden now versus Willesden then. Smith’s reacquaintance with place is a reacquaintance with the effect of government policy on her own success, and her reference points in the near past are what make the threat of permanent austerity under David Cameron’s conservative regime so hard to stomach.

Smith’s willingness to claim her Englishness but to redirect tropes of Englishness—the rural countryside, the bounded village—to a London neighborhood distinguished by its postal zoning, state-sponsored institutions (from the library to council housing), and racial diversity supersedes the canonical dividing lines between devolution-oriented English writing (as represented by Greene, Kingsley Amis, and Philip Larkin) and anti-assimilationist black British writing. By scrambling these subdivisions, Smith’s work makes a sense of English place compatible with a sense of other places, the elsewhere so important to a postcolonial history of the present. It also creates affection for those institutions that help make domesticity compatible with internationalism, at least in some residents’ experiences. As Smith writes of the library, “We find it pleasant to remember that we have as much right to a local history as anyone, even if many of us arrived here only recently and from every corner of the globe.”

NW is Smith’s foray into cultivating that nimble localism, which can bring a 1381 epigraph by John Ball into alignment with the vast world-systemic distances and ideological battles that pervade a “two-mile square of city” (NW, 6). Smith uses northwest London not for its allegorical continuity with the wider nation or world but for its disproportional relation to divisions of space conceived at those larger scales. The modest size and “peripherally core” location of the region disturb, for example, a world-systemic vocabulary of global spatial distinctions, but without receding into a bucolic organicism. NW is a postal code abbreviation, after all—a state-created abstraction. By insisting on a scale largely unnoticed or insignificant beyond London and making it vital to dissecting the dismantling of social democracy, Smith marks out the neighborhoods of NW as danger zones—endangered by the encroachments of privatization and dangerous to the ideology of austerity touted by conservative politicians.

Smith’s novel follows four main characters, Leah, Felix, Natalie (born Keisha), and Nathan, each of whom grew up on the Caldwell Estate (public housing) and find themselves adrift in lives of varying economic security but unvarying personal dissatisfaction. All are restless individuals with fraught relationships to individualism and upward mobility as liberalism’s prevailing mechanism of success. Building on Bruce Robbins’s literary history of the welfare state, Amanda Claybaugh favorably reviewed NW for tapping into the contemporary demise of social democracy’s collective ethos and the complacency that has greeted its loss. Yet the novel fails, in her estimation, to find an antidote to that complacency: “[Smith] wants to restore a vision of the political beyond the personal, but [is] hard-pressed to find one.”36

Claybaugh does not begrudge Smith’s failure to articulate “a politics adequate to our present neoliberal moment,” perhaps because Claybaugh does not hold a wide-ranging oppositional critique of neoliberalism to be the ultimate measure of a novel’s success. Neither do I. But the language of Claybaugh’s review also suggests that she thinks an adequate politics is unachieved because its scope would have to be as comprehensive as neoliberalism itself. A consistent “vision” to match a definable “neoliberal moment”—such is the diction of literary and cultural critique, which, whether intended or not, creates totalities out a host of complex economic processes and political decisions and then demands totality from oppositional stances to them.

I give NW more credit than Claybaugh does as a novel of neoliberal critique, because it takes the comprehensive and the totalizing as objects of analysis rather than analytical givens. It attends to the ways in which the processes designated by neoliberalism are not as coherent as our critical language implies, even if they are aptly described as systematic. As Christoph Hermann has written, in his extensive analysis of neoliberal policies:

Emphasizing a perspective that shuttles between the “international agenda” and “the local struggles and compromises” seems valuable because it recognizes sites of potential resistance to the agenda without overstating them and, with regard to critical parlance, invites reflection on the implications of phrases such as “the age of neoliberalism” or “the era of global capitalism.”³⁸ Such declarations of period serve as rhetorical limit points against which scholars occasion and conceptualize critique. While these limit points are necessary for situating our work and performing analyses of power, they also are homogenizing abstractions that, in creating an undifferentiated horizon, aggrandize the formations they designate.

The unusual scales of Smith’s writing are intent on interrogating and deflating the language of aggrandizement and codification, as is evident in her wry invocation of academic language as it filters into the everyday life of the educated classes:

“I never know what’s reasonable,” said Imran. “Ten percent? Fifteen? Twenty?” Global consciousness. Local consciousness. Consciousness. And lo they saw their nakedness and were not ashamed. “You’re fooling yourself,” said Frank. “You can’t get anything on the park for less than a million.” The mistake was to think that money precisely signified—or was equivalent to—a particular arrangement of bricks and mortar. The money was not for these poky terraced houses with their short back gardens. The money was for the distance the house put between you and Caldwell. “That skirt,” said Natalie Blake, pointing to a picture in the supplement, “but in red.”

(NW, 299–300).

A discomfiting partiality of vision, then, is what defines Smith’s portrayal of privilege in NW—discomfiting to the narrator and to Natalie, who cannot always decide whether she wishes to forget or remember her humble origins. Partiality, here, carries the double meaning of preference and incompleteness and recalls Fredric Jameson’s influential argument that even if postmodern subjects could cognitively map themselves in relation to the impossibly complex totality of “society’s structures as a whole,” it is not clear that they would want to violate “the intimate space” of their “privacy” or “extended body.”39 If “Global consciousness. Local consciousness. Consciousness” had the force the words implied, perhaps they would not be so easy to list off. Whether Smith is directly familiar with Jameson’s argument or not, NW shows an awareness of postmodernism’s lessons—the waning of affect and the depoliticization of the subject—but renders them up to a renewed form of interrogation. Concepts integral to liberalism and phenomenology, such as privacy and the extended body, respectively, become topics that the novel addresses in relationship to large systems.

Take the opening section of the novel—a two-page chapter that features an unnamed woman (we later learn she is Leah) relaxing. I quote at length to capture the flavor of Smith’s prose and because the layering of detail through short, simple sentences, some only one word long, combats excerption. Smith insists on the slow accretion of detail and, like a poet, deploys line arrangement on the page as part of the novel’s form:

There is much to observe in these passages, and I will start with what is most germane to Smith’s skewering of liberal psychology in the production of Englishness: the absence of privacy in the breakdown of the hortus conclusus, or “enclosed garden.” This symbolic space of refuge has long entwined definitions of Englishness (the quintessential English garden) with the values of liberalism (private property facilitates the privacy of the soul). Smith’s opening suggests that this idyll of the liberal-national community is under attack from all sides—the seeming madwoman on the estate whose class status calls up the collectivist racial origins of Englishness (“screaming Anglo-Saxon at nobody”) and the newfound “European” character of Willesden streets, which calls up the foreign influences of the city. Yet the dual assaults of welfare and cosmopolitanism turn out to be red herrings for the real problem, which is, of course, the liberal individualism of Englishness itself, encapsulated in the “good line” turned mangled mantra: “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.” Smith elevates liberal individualism only to bring it crashing down to earth as Leah’s extended body fails her. The pencil cannot write on the magazine’s glossy pages; the hammock sends her tumbling out. If partial vision suggests a preference for incomplete knowledge about one’s place in the world’s hierarchies, a preference that Smith also explored in “The Embassy of Cambodia” and “This Is How It Feels to Me,” the opening of NW insists that the choice not to know is an increasingly unsustainable one.

Smith’s avowed interest in “the networks behind those seeming simplicities” brings her novels into overt engagement with the limits and possibilities of individual consciousness as a mediator of what Jameson has called “the geopolitical unconscious.”40 Smith may reject individualism as an index of English values, as in the passage above, but her approach to structural determination does not preclude the quandaries of self-determination. Rather than replacing “I” with dehumanizing systems as the “sole authors” of the “dictionary that defines me,” she insists on posing the question, however compromised, of what it means to take one’s liberty, and whether it is ever possible to do so without “takin liberties” from someone else. Facing this question, like Leah’s hammock (which we later discover is “communal and so not her hammock” [NW, 21]), tips the balance of what readers might like to think of as earned privilege and what they must see as unearned. It also pits the grubbiness of demotic language against the idealism of liberal democracy.

Of course, there is quite a bit about the opening of NW to keep the reader off balance. Leah’s stream of consciousness (“Viscous black specks. Darting water boatmen, zig-zagging. ZigZag. Red-river? Molten lake in hell?”) offers a pun on free thought: that the bedrock of a liberal-democratic society might be more unorganized, speculative, and impressionistic than principled, exalted, and enduring. Leah is precisely not a visionary, but her wandering mind allows Smith to open up the gap between seeing and knowing, between immediately observed phenomena (“viscous black specks”; “zig-zagging”) and the acts of impulsive imagination that render disparate abstract forms into the particular things (“water boatmen”; “Red-river?”) that might better lend themselves to narrative meaning.

If Smith uses the impressionism of sensory perception and decontextualized detail (what I have called stream of consciousness) against the ossification of conceptual abstractions like self-possession, she also uses it to suggest that seeing objectively entails seeing one’s own failures of perception alongside an external reality. The fourth section of NW, entitled “Crossing,” features Natalie’s desperate night journey back to Caldwell and her childhood haunts in the wake of her husband’s discovery of her marital infidelities. “Crossing” is subdivided into chapters that keep track of her itinerary through NW with cartographic precision.41 For example, “Willesden Lane to Kilburn High Road,” (NW, 360) is followed by “Shoot Up Hill to Fortune Green” (371), yet the naturalist itinerary culminates atop Hornsey Lane Bridge in a cognitive map that layers Natalie’s impressions and symbolic desires upon the physical distances of London:

The view was cross-hatched. St Paul’s in one box. The Gherkin in another. Half a tree. Half a car. Cupolas, spires. Squares, rectangles, half-moons, stars. It was impossible to get any sense of the whole. From up here the bus lane was a red gash through the city. The tower blocks [Caldwell] were the only things that made any sense, separated from each other, yet communicating. From this distance they had a logic, stone posts driven into an ancient field, waiting for something to be laid on top of them, a statue, perhaps, or a platform.

(384)

This passage moves from parataxis to hypotaxis and situates Natalie’s disordered and fragmented sight within the ordered sense of her failure to see, an indication of her forming a reflective impression.⁴² Whereas parataxis erodes distinctions between words, phrases, and sentences, creating syntactic units that fail to comply with grammatical standards of wholeness or completion, hypotaxis supplies a framework into which Smith can situate Natalie’s confusion and differentiate between two ideas of the whole: the whole as objectively real (the fractured totality of London) and the whole as a projection of scale (“From this distance they [the towers] had a logic”). Certainly, Caldwell’s “logic” might be chalked up to Natalie’s agitation and rebellion against her bourgeois lifestyle, but it can also be understood as the finally acknowledged “platform” supporting her upward mobility.

It is no accident that Smith’s twist on the panorama includes a wrought-iron fence, which we are told earlier in the passage was erected by the state to block suicidal jumpers.43 Infrastructure (the bridge and the barrier) both enables and impedes views, locking Natalie into a scene “cross-hatched” by motifs of autonomy and dependence. Read symbolically, this passage offers a mythic portrait of social democracy’s compromises, a suturing of liberalism and socialism with the necessary trade-offs to both. Read literally, it creates a link between perceptible realities and the scale that creates them. The disrupted panorama, as a literary device, does not essentialize parts and wholes. Rather, it fractures at the scale of city while totalizing at the scale of the estate, dramatizing the discontinuities rather than the metonymies of scale. Caldwell, as part, cannot be substituted for the whole of London here. It is its own totality.

Natalie’s panorama, like Leah’s stream of consciousness, slows down the sense-making process to show the aggregation of objects into scenes and the disaggregation of scenes into objects. Producing coherence and incoherence rather than simply capturing them, the disrupted panorama provides a vehicle through which to reflect upon the contingency of collective units (the city versus the estate) as well as upon our own roles in constructing the totalities that we observe. Natalie’s impeded view conveys the finitude of perception (“It was impossible to get any sense of the whole”) and the infinitude of what lies beyond perception in, as Jameson puts it, the “unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.”⁴⁴

Where Smith and Jameson differ is in their definitions of totality. For Jameson, as stated in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, there is only one proper object of totality: the unrepresentable whole of the world-system. For Smith, totalities are the by-products of scale, the cognitive tool by which individuals measure and comprehend units as meaningful wholes. The advantage of paying attention to these units, which mediate between human finitude and systemic infinitude, is a thicker description of the real—its presence is crafted once it is found and its absence is illuminated if the crafting successfully overwhelms (“There’s too much here, too much to process, just too much”).⁴⁵

Smith’s rendering of Natalie’s simultaneous comprehension and incomprehension is reminiscent of a statement from T. J. G. Locher, from which Wallerstein took inspiration in his early formulation of the world-system as his decisive unit of analysis: “One should not confuse totality with completeness. The whole is more than the assembled parts, but it is surely also less.”46 The whole as an agent of both fuller and lesser comprehension is what Smith ponders throughout her northwest London fictions, but with decidedly more anxiety than Locher or Wallerstein. Unlike Wallerstein, who in his first major articulation of the term, deemed the world-system the “correct unit of analysis” because it was the only unit that actually constituted a system, Smith is concerned with reopening the debate over what counts as a proper unit of analysis or agent of causality. This is because Smith is interested in the people caught up in systems and the nontrivial effect that a sense of place can have on our understanding of systems. She makes her own scales to bring northwest London into view and to create a view from it that defamiliarizes London as global financial capital by disaggregating its icons (“St Paul’s in one box. The Gherkin in another.”) and reaggregating Caldwell, the relic of the welfare state.

Smith’s granular account of northwest London offers an alternative to systems theory for thinking about long-distance distributions of power. She affirms the effect of systems on individual lives but is wary of the singular logic that systems thinking can produce, as in Wallerstein’s designation of the world-system as the primary and proper unit of analysis, to which other units are subordinated. Smith’s work addresses at least one gap between the totality of the world-system and the completeness of a world-systems account of global inequality by zeroing in on spaces of contradiction. The internal periphery that NW presents does not subordinate the local or national scales to the global but instead shows their “hit-and-miss convergences,” those sites of overlap and misunderstanding that are, at best, understudied and, at worst, canceled out or abstracted away by the urge to systematize them.⁴⁷

One such site shows the uncomfortable intersection of national and global inequality, which is addressed in NW through the juxtaposition of three black men. The first is Nathan Bogle, a “born and bred” Londoner working as a pimp. The second, Rodney, is the studious son of Caribbean immigrants, who, like his one-time girlfriend Natalie, makes it to college but does not assimilate into its social rituals. He falls short of becoming a lawyer and opens a dry cleaning business instead. The third, Michel, an African-Algerian immigrant, is Leah’s husband and came to England after experiencing a lack of opportunity in France. Like Fatou from “The Embassy of Cambodia,” Michel has crossed the international division of labor; unlike her, he is fully enthralled to liberal individualism. This is a logic that he codes English, not French, and he deems it an escape from the constraints of group identity: “In France, you’re African, you’re Algerian, who wants to know? There’s no opportunity, you can’t move! Here, you can move” (NW, 32).

Michel and Nathan, like Leah and Natalie, are particularly important foils in NW, with Nathan, the native Londoner, voicing a sentiment about England that is opposite of Michel’s: “There’s no way to live in this country when you’re grown. Not at all. They don’t want you, your own people don’t want you, no one wants you” (376). Simplistic alone, Michel’s and Nathan’s divergent appraisals of England are complex together because they call up the friction between competing scales and operations—Michel’s national comparisons and Nathan’s temporal reflections—that cannot be absorbed into a single frame of reference without attenuating the conflict most in need of addressing. Michel’s short-term experiences across several countries highlight the opportunities in England that Nathan’s “born and bred” nativity prevents him from seeing. In turn, Nathan’s nativity points out the latent hostility of the immigrant Michel’s “English dream,” which, as Toni Morrison argued in the U.S. context, is built on the backs of those who have experienced generations of discrimination within the migrant’s host country.48 Both the national and the transnational offer partial visions, but it is their parallax, their multiple perspectives on England from different angles, that tells a more complete and necessarily more complex story. This story does not sanctify the disempowered or create a competition among oppressions, but it shows that no one scale should unquestionably trump another when talking about injustice.

Every character in NW, even those lowest on the class ladder, occupies a position that could be described as exploited or beneficiary, depending on whether a national or an international scale is privileged. Read back into a systems-oriented logic, this finding could be seen as obscuring the totality, but I would prefer to see it as making systemic accounts of the distribution of power more complete. NW brings the parallax of scale into view not to discredit the role of structural determination in people’s and nations’ lives (quite the opposite, given its opening passage) but to make the messiness of its workings and the consequent conflicts of perspective easier to see.

Bruce Robbins has addressed some of these conflicts by broaching the incompatibilities between support for the national welfare state and regard for matters of global inequality. Welfare’s resolutely national scale makes it difficult to imagine extending entitlements or redistribution schemes beyond the nation-state, and the history of empire casts a pall over the financing of welfare institutions in developed nations.⁴⁹ Even so, that very pall is a reminder that politics happens in impure spaces and that moving forward through scalar impasses is often more awkward than elegant. Robbins offers one way through the impasse of the international division of labor by treating seriously what deterministic thinking rarely does: individual people and chance.

Building on the work of Gayatri Spivak and Bernard Williams, Robbins makes a case for transnational upward mobility through moral luck, which denotes a factoring in of conditions beyond one’s control in the making of decisions that will determine the kind of person one will become. Moral luck heightens the recognition of chance and accidents of birth, which give certain people head starts over others, and thus injects fortune (in both senses of the word) into narratives of deservedness, especially among those who have succeeded. It thus introduces a more uniform acceptance of luck’s role in life’s outcomes, which valuably mediates the opposing views that Smith captures in a conversation between the struggling Nathan (“Bad luck follows me”) and the successful Natalie (“I don’t believe in luck”) (NW, 375).

For Spivak, the difference between fortune as monetary privilege and fortune as luck is negligible, and accepting it reinforces one’s complicity with an unequal world. For Robbins, the difference is not negligible. He does not accept moral luck outright but embraces “being unable to say a simple ‘no.’ ”50 It is the equivocation between guilt and luck that turns the compromised condition of complicity, defined by birth or assimilation into a privileged nation, into an occasion for dwelling on the uses of success’s moral ambiguities. If the only way to accept comparative advantage is equivocally, then luck’s morality inheres not just in its unpredictable role in shaping a future self but also in its revelation of the myriad ways in which advantage is conferred beyond the quantifiable. Moral luck thus debunks individualist autonomy in a different way than does structural determination. It interjects uncertainty into narratives of success and failure and, by giving presence to the unknown, intimates that we will never know the full extent of our dependencies.

In NW, luck and guilt rub together, creating the moral friction out of which more social democratic energies might emerge:

“I just don’t understand why I have this life,” she [Leah] said, quietly.

“What?”

“You, me, all of us. Why that girl and not us. Why that poor bastard on Albert Road. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

Natalie frowned and folded her arms across her body. She had expected a more difficult question.

“Because we worked harder,” she said…“We were smarter and we knew we didn’t want to end up begging on other people’s doorsteps.”

(NW, 400)

Retaining, but also disabling, the individual matters, if we want to change the patterns of affiliation that persist under the name of democracy. If a more cynical definition of the democratic would point to the illusions of equality and fairness that underpin actually existing hierarchies, Robbins and, it seems, Smith’s recuperation of luck activates both more uncertain and more prismatic forms of consciousness in which an uncontrollable referencing of other peoples and scenes levels hierarchies of attention and care. The dependencies to which moral luck awaken Leah also turn her attention to peoples and places that seem outside her sphere of control. Leah fails to help Shar, and never had the opportunity to help Felix, yet these two characters still count—through agitated, if not quite uncontrollable, referencing—as part of her sphere of attention precisely because of their resistance to being recast under the safely contained identities of the “needy” or “disposable.” Being more inclusive, as a condition of what Sianne Ngai calls “obstructed agency” rather than beneficent control, is what distinguishes Smith’s democratic impulse from the traditional underpinnings of liberalism.51 It helps us see through the liberal rhetoric of autonomy and self-reliance into the reality of upward mobility as facilitated by various forms of dependence on and complicity with societal structures that exclude radical social transformation.

In this case, the suspension of individual agency among “risen” individuals offers a way of understanding and maneuvering beyond what Wallerstein calls the twentieth-century consolidation of a worldwide liberal “geoculture.” Grounded in Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination for nations, which theoretically attributed formal sovereignty to every state, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s principles of economic development, which promised a limited redistribution of wealth to developing countries in the form of aid, liberal geoculture masked the continued economic subordination of developing countries by endorsing the political autonomy that came with decolonization.⁵² Such a system is commonly understood as neocolonialism, but it can also be phrased idiomatically, if a little crudely, as wealthy nations pulling the ladder of success up behind them. As Doron Ben-Atar has argued, the United States’ industrial growth went hand in hand with its smuggling of European inventions and technologies into its factories. Economic development and piracy complemented one another, yet the United States has been a leading enforcer of strict intellectual property regimes that disavow its own history and retard contemporary developing countries’ attempts to “steal” in their turn.⁵³

By occluding the historical relationship between dependence and innovation in developed nations and stymying it for developing ones, liberal geoculture fosters a global economic climate in which foreign aid produces perpetual debt, and non-Western innovation is greeted as a threat to democracy itself. Yet there is a distinction between democracy as an ideology of Euro-American geocultural hegemony and democracy as a radical leveling of unjust hierarchies through the redistribution of attention, opportunity, and material wealth. Such redistribution responds to the “visitations” (note here that “Visitation” is the title of the opening and closing sections of NW) of the unexpected and unwanted, and in raising questions about deservedness, bears witness to the historical double standards that have inhibited global justice.

Smith adapts Humbert’s speculations about “criss-cross cause and effect,” which he suggests spawn “great and terrible wonder,” to address those scenarios in which pinpointing causality is difficult if not impossible.55 Puzzles of cause and effect are numerous in White Teeth, and, like a wrought-iron fence, the novel’s “root canal” chapters swirl through the main narrative, going backwards in time and outward in space to discern causality:

Apropos: it’s all very well, this instruction of Alsana’s to look at the thing close up; to look at it dead straight between the eyes; an unflinching and honest inspection that would go beyond the heart of the matter to its marrow, beyond the marrow to the root—but the question is how far back do you want? How far will do? The old American question: what do you want—blood? Most probably more than blood is required: whispered asides; lost conversations; medals and photographs; lists and certificates, yellowing paper bearing the faint imprint of brown dates. Back, back, back.

(White Teeth, 71; Smith’s italics)

Smith’s sentences are long and full. They mix statements with questions, repetitions of emphasis (looking “close up” and “dead straight”) with repetitions that turn in unexpected directions (the question of “how far back” dovetails with the “old American question”). Finally, they contain lists that equalize the intangible and the tangible in a gesture toward naming the irretrievable totality of history.

Yet Smith’s interest in the disorder of the past should not be mistaken for resignation in the face of causality’s long distances. If the narrative structure of “The Embassy of Cambodia” suggests that global networks of power have become too shadowy and immense to be fully deciphered by Smith’s characters, in White Teeth her characters make every effort to locate themselves in history and to figure out “a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen” (White Teeth, 4). In pursuing causality, the novel addresses itself to history, but also to philosophy, religion, demography, and genetic engineering.

The novel’s ambition, briefly alluded to at the start of this chapter, was famously and negatively nominalized as “hysterical realism” by James Wood. What is less often remembered about that moniker is that Wood defines hysteria in terms of scale disjunction. He attributes hysteria to novels with sociological ambitions that diminish feeling and cast the genre’s essential humanism into doubt. Wood objects to the unconvincing air of the “big” novel’s “profusion” and “relatedness,” which he argues breeds incredulity in the reader and makes paranoia an intrinsic feature of the subgenre. Going big, for Wood, renders the contemporary novel a pale caricature of the nineteenth-century novel and evades larger “awkward” questions about the limits of “novelistic storytelling.”56 Novels may have the capacity for large-scale representation, but they cannot transcend the individual and still be effective novels. The “inhuman stories,” which Wood attributes to the big novels of Smith, Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, and Don DeLillo, are not aesthetic paradoxes but generic oxymorons.

Wood makes a conservative argument against the stretching of the novel’s form, from portraying the lives of individuals as bearers of beauty and truth (what Smith termed “lyrical realism,” in “Two Paths for the Novel”) to portraying forces that determine or explain individual lives, with or without their conscious awareness. Smith, on the other hand, transvalues inhuman stories for bringing readers to the limits of individual consciousness and for inspiring an awareness of lack amid the sheer materiality of language. Her big novels, in making size visible and palpable—so much so that Wood receives it as a grotesque deformity—compel reflection on the epistemological frameworks and humanistic values that regard them as failures.

In losing Wood’s esteem, the scalar abnormalities of White Teeth draw attention to his criteria for judgment. In particular, they literalize the metaphors of a classically satisfying aesthetic experience—fullness and plenitude—and by doing so, they call attention to satiety as a form of complacency. Smith detangles a meaningful whole from a digestible whole and uses the “too much” of overwhelming narration as a formal obstacle to the reductions of abstraction and synthesis that, read more positively, would be understood as the transcendent achievements of form. Smith is suspicious of such a totality because it forecloses other points of view and disavows the processes that go into making the whole meaningful. But that does not mean she is unsympathetic to the human, all too human desire for answers and, thus, for finished form.