Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2010

Zadie Smith's autonomous writing commitments to E.M. Forster

Résumé

Though Zadie Smith has published only three novels so far, her fiction seems to follow some astonishing path from standard social commitment to the world to a more aesthetic and ideological commitment to Forster's Edwardian Howards End. In White Teeth Smith writes the story of today's multicultural London in a committed way, though soon enough her particular view of the past and its aftermath signals some tension between literature and history. The logic of chance and randomness provides a first hint of the autonomy of fiction for Smith: fiction allows the past and history “to have happened”. On Beauty may forget the world in the same ambiguous way as Howards End did, eventually more poetic in its language than the traditional committed novel of 1910 London the critics have often claimed it was. Does her rewriting of Forster's novel echo or stem from her initially more political writing? Beyond the structure, plot and characters revisited here, the aesthetics of autoreferentiality informed by the philosophy of Zeno in White Teeth herald the autonomy of Smith's writing in On Beauty—time and space are now interwoven in a new self-regulating frame allowing the past (and Howards End) to be actualised (in the linguistic sense) in today's world and words. Yet Smith's writing may eventually drift towards emptiness and nothingness when leaving blank spaces on the page. But this fundamental dimension of her style is another sign of her thorough commitment to Forster. Just as Forster claimed that speaking before thinking is creation's motto, that meaning can only follow events and words, Smith's novel disappears behind its model and the void on the page is nothing but a visual trace of the return of the past, nothing but evidence of Smith's now purely aesthetic commitment to Forster's own aesthetics. In On Beauty an original definition of autonomy through commitment crops up in the way the author revisits former theories and puts them into practice in her own complex way. Such is the last and latest autonomy and new postmodernism of Smith's novels: a personal and unprecedented relation to history and style setting up an autonomous word-system to further Forster's approach to creation and at the same time define her own vision of a committed XXIst-century literature.

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Dates et versions

halshs-00475225 , version 1 (21-04-2010)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-00475225 , version 1

Citer

Laurent Mellet. Zadie Smith's autonomous writing commitments to E.M. Forster. Autonomy and Commitment in Contemporary British Literature, PULM, 2010. ⟨halshs-00475225⟩
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