Zadie Smith makes you do things.
“Imagine being a corpse,” she says, in an essay titled, ‘Man versus Corpse’. I try. All I manage is to imagine myself a zombie, not unlike the mall-struck corpses of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead . I see myself walking the aisles of Marks & Spencer, trying on an expensive jacket, surrounded by a hundred other corpses.
When my eyes refocus on the page, I read, “a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses... will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.” This world of illusion is recognisably our own world, and these words, the distillation of Smith’s meditations on a painting by Luca Signorelli, titled ‘Nude Man from the Back Carrying a Corpse on His Shoulders’.
Many anxieties
The essay, typical of the best in Feel Free , begins on a personal note, with an account of her scampering home in the rain barefoot, fearful that she may have contracted hepatitis, a potentially life-threatening disease. It segues into iPhone-related anxieties, Rothko, Warhol, zombies, the tricks of portraiture, the relationship between death and time (“the future in which I am dead is not a future at all”), before returning to the original subject — the menace lurking in Signorelli’s painting.
It concludes on a brutal note: “I am not a woman looking at a man carrying a corpse. I am that corpse... I will be that corpse for infinitely longer than I have ever been an individual woman with feelings and ideas and arms and legs, who sometimes looks at paintings.” So, this is what it is to imagine being a corpse.
I must clarify that the grim subject matter of this essay is not representative either of the themes covered in this volume or of Smith’s general disposition as an essayist. Her interests follow her curiosity, which is limitless. They range from the purely literary (books, writers, and writing) to music, art, photography, cinema, travel, gardens, writing, comedy, feminism, parenting, history, philosophy, language, politics, and Justin Bieber.
Her style is best described by a term she applies to Geoff Dyer’s essays, “the conversational sublime.” It is a mode that combines the intimacy of a personal conversation with a light philosophical touch, and a sensibility sharpened by a deeply political engagement with the world.
The essay on Bieber, titled ‘Meet Justin Bieber!’ is the exemplar of “the conversational sublime.” Like the corpse essay, this too starts with existential curiosity: what is it like to be Bieber? Smith’s way of answering this question requires her to imagine a meeting between Bieber and the Austrian philosopher Martin Buber, who died in 1965. She is delighted to inform us that ‘Bieber’ and ‘Buber’ are alternative spellings of the same German surname, and before we know it, Smith has moved on from a meeting between the two men to the meaning of meeting itself, not least because Buber is an expert on this subject, and thence to the question of how we experience other people. In the process, she has made you do something else: Google the lyrics of ‘Boyfriend’, a Bieber chartbuster.
Acute insights
An essay on her childhood home’s bathroom becomes an occasion to reflect on the modest victories that come with class mobility — in this case, her parents’ rise from working class to lower middle class, and her own move, thanks to the commercial success of her first novel, from lower middle class to middle class.
Smith writes with acute insight about the intersections of class and personality, on how class shapes motivations and choices, including career choices, that a person steeped in the individualist ethos of liberal capitalism may believe to be completely self-determined. As she writes, “to be born solidly middle class in England is still one of the safest bets in the world” and “To truly fall out of the British middle class, when I was a child, you really had to do something pretty spectacular, like become a heroin addict.”
Her essay on rapper Jay-Z has some brilliant riffs on how a billionaire black celebrity negotiates, both as a person and as an artist, the contradictions between his humble, often violent, and vigorously anti-establishment origins and his current perch in the lap of a racist white establishment.
My favourite essay, perhaps because of the current developments beyond the page, is ‘Generation Why?’.
Writing about Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook generation, Smith strikes an elegiac note, “I fear I am becoming nostalgic. I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and — which is more important — to herself.”
Well, Facebook is all about rendering this mystery as data, forcing people to reduce themselves to fit the algorithmic imagination. “It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.” And that’s the last thing Smith got me to do: deactivate my Facebook account, at least temporarily.
Feel Free: Essays ; Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, ₹699.
