Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity David Marcus ▪ Spring 2013 Robin Hood Gardens Council Estate in East London (Amanda Vincent-Rous/Flickr) The nineties were strange years. For a decade after history had purportedly “ended” a lot happened. The Soviet Union dissolved, seemingly in days and without a gunshot. A bloody war broke out between rival ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia. The United States and much of the West were experiencing a burst of economic activity after decades of stagnation, and a revolutionary new mode of communication had emerged: the Internet. But running alongside the monumental was the downright absurd. Americans, it seemed, had not only grown prosperous in the years after the Cold War but also preposterous. In the midst of a government shutdown, the president of the United States ate pizza while he cavorted with an intern only slightly older than his daughter. The Internet turned out to be a blessing and a curse. Life felt diffuse, centrifugal, spread thin. We could trace a track-pad finger across the globe, and yet there was often nothing to touch, nothing to see, and nothing to feel. In an increasingly postindustrial age, our lives felt more and more disconnected, our labor more and more abstract. Billboard hits rang with paralyzed irony. “How bizarre”—as one particularly catchy refrain went—“how bizarre, how bizarre.” 1 Fiction followed suit. The literature of the 1990s and early 2000s was a catchall of voices and styles: experimental and staid, high and low, monumental and grotesque—often all at once. While an older generation of novelists—Peter Carey and Philip Roth, J.M. Coetzee and Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison and Barry Unsworth—retreated to history, choosing to fictionalize the past rather than be consumed by the present, a new group of avant gardists—Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, and Zadie Smith—tried their hand at the now. Inspired by the speculative fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, they sought to write the next BIG NOVEL: fiction capacious enough to contain the wide girth of post–Cold War capitalism. But if the literature of the turn of the twentieth century appeared to be a frenzy of new voices and styles, it was also oriented toward a common goal. For unlike their predecessors, this new generation sought to rebuild the world rather than deconstruct it. While Pynchon and DeLillo emphasized the unseen networks of government agents and advertising executives that limited our everyday lives, the new group tried to map out more local, more empowering connections: to mine the present for those rare, fragile moments of contact—those brief human intersections that remind us that while we are all each desperately unknowable and alone we are also in this together. As Wallace put it in an early interview, “We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible.” But “a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain. This is nourishing, redemptive.” This is why one writes and reads: to “become less alone inside.” There was, of course, a lasting irony in this ambition. For although Wallace and his contemporaries were spurred by the Forsterian imperative—“Only connect!”—they also ended up writing novels that felt far from any real human connection. Kinetic, fractal, encyclopedic in detail and entropic by design, they often spoke too loudly, too feverishly, too cleverly and chaotically. In their effort to seek out the human, they drew too much in. Instead of transcending those dull noises that drone out the simpler, more humane frequencies of everyday life, they often found themselves adding to the sonic distortion. Take, for example, an excerpt from one of Wallace’s many chapter-long digressions in Infinite Jest, a passage in which the description of how we experience a thing—in this case, the videophone—loses itself to a seemingly endless discursion of fact and footnote. WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, [HAD] THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE FOR ‘VIDEOPHONY’ SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT, BY THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER 2 DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES […AND…] THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECID[ED] S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOWTECH BELL-ERA VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUND-FLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES’ RETIREMENT SYSTEM’S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR’S MISTRESS’S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANICALLY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE- TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR…AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONING? In describing a world in which we are frequently estranged—a world in which loneliness is, as Wallace once put it, “what we have in common”—his own act of communication stretched our everyday experiences so thin they had become translucent, almost invisible. James Wood perhaps best captured this line of criticism in his 2000 review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The problem with “hysterical realism,” as he called it, was not only that it imitated the world around it too closely but that it also confused motion for vitality, narrative acrobats for emotional complexity, catalogues of facts for the drama of knowing. “The conventions of realism are not being abolished,” Wood argued, “but, on the contrary, exhausted.” The hysterical novel failed not “at the level of verisimilitude, but…morality.” It reproduced the chaos it hoped to resist, replacing meaningful self-discovery with the solitudes of self-consciousness. It knows, Wood concluded, “a thousand different things— How to make the best Indonesian fish curry! The sonics of the trombone! The drug market of Detroit! The history of strip cartoons!—but [not] a single human being.” Zadie Smith was one of the first to be labeled a hysterical realist and, fittingly, she was also one of the first to rebel against its growing orthodoxies. After publishing White Teeth—a novel that mapped out the antic soul-seeking and comedic, if also often tragic, misunderstandings of melting-pot London—she went on to publish Autograph Man: an even more hysterical novel that tracked the life and times of one Alex-Li Tandem as he “lurched from one ill-fitting ‘identity’ to another” in a desperate search for a stable self. The new group tried to map out more local, more empowering connections: to mine the present for those rare, fragile moments of contact—those brief human intersections that remind us that while we are all each desperately unknowable and alone we are also in this together. But the world was changing. The moral excesses of dot-com prosperity were fast becoming the fretful anxieties of our brave new “age of horrorism”—as one British novelist put it. And if there were any question about the profligacy of the 3 Anglo-American novel at the end of the millennium, then the bombed-out days after September 11 seemed to confirm, once and for all, its negligent decadence. Writing a week after the attacks, Wood argued—not without some smug satisfaction—that what we now needed was not exuberant experiment but empathy: fiction that told “us not ‘how the world works’ but ‘how somebody felt about something’—indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings).” Smith, remarkably, agreed. “These are hysterical times,” she confessed. Any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped….Actually, I am sitting here in my pants, looking at a blank screen, finding nothing funny, scared out of my mind like every-body else….Most mornings I think: death of the novel? Yeah, sure, why not? And while she did not give up the novel altogether, she did exchange the maximalist experiments of her early work for a more disciplined and more sober realism. Written in a skillful but familiar third person, Smith’s 2005 On Beauty updated one of the least modernist of modernist novels—E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End—for contemporary Anglo-America. A weave of parlor-room drama and intrigue, it knitted together the transatlantic goings-on of two academic families as they negotiated the ups and downs of love and death, success and failure, over- education and prejudice. In many ways, it was everything Wood had called for: a novel that gave up giddy experiment for psychology, perpetual motion for ponderous ambiguity, a work of fiction that focused less on “how the world worked” than on “how it felt”—at least, how it felt for the Anglo-American bourgeoisie. In a 2003 essay on Forster’s novels, Smith clarified her turn from style to ethics and from exuberant self-expression to restrained empathy. When “you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics.” A novelist cannot merely manufacture “an exquisitely worked game”; he or she must also create a world complex enough to preserve the often-muddled ambiguities of human experience. As Howard Belsey—one of Smith’s often- muddled characters in On Beauty—was to put it to a classroom of soon-to-be bankers: “What we are trying to…interrogate here…is the mytheme of artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human.” Of course, there was a glaring gap in the turn from hysterical to empathetic and ethical realism—one that was a bit naïve, especially for someone who grew up in the public housing of Northwest London: Smith had stopped interrogating the very question of whether one can exist as autonomous individual in an age full of soon-to-be bankers.