The Reading Endeavour

I have argued before in this blog for a greater role for writers in the debate about how we should read fiction, and here is Zadie Smith taking that role in yesterday's Guardian, and quoting as her mentors those other great writer-critics, Nabokov, Iris Murdoch and Virginia Woolf.

This second half of Zadie's fiction 'tips' takes a little more work from the reader than last week's offering, though that's perhaps fitting in view of what she has to say about the role of the reader, and she is wrestling - with the writerly honesty which last week she advocated - with concepts which are subtle and nowadays unfamiliar.

Readers, she says, have a duty as great as that which she has outlined for writers, and of a similar nature, a duty which she feels they have generally abdicated. She identifies two kinds of contemporary 'failing' reader or critic: firstly the 'system' reader/critic:

In writing schools, in reading groups, in universities, various general reading systems are offered - the post-colonial, the gendered, the postmodern, the state-of-the-nation and so on. They are like the instructions that come with furniture at IKEA. All one need do is seek out the flatpack novels that most closely resemble the blueprints already to hand ... We want [novels] to be wholly sufficient systems of ideas ... to speak for a community or answer some vital question of the day

and secondly, the 'corrective' reader/critic, who more properly relates to a novel on an individual, personal level, bringing to it his own tastes and prejudices, but less properly fails to admit to himself that this is what he is doing and imagines that he is applying universal aesthetic criteria.

Both types of reader are in consequence closed to novels which fail to fulfil their respective preconditions. Ideally, she says,

Both the writer and the reader must undergo an ethical expansion - allow me to call it an expansion of the heart - in order to comprehend the human otherness that fiction confronts them with.

Like Woolf, she concedes that a perfect meeting of minds between writer and readers is of course never possible; we must always fail in the endeavour, and indeed it is this failure which makes each novel, and each reading, individual and fascinating. But it is the willingness to make the endeavour which allows us to 'fail better.'

What Novels Are For

Bournemouth Runner at The Art of Fiction and others were pleased about one particular aspect of Zadie Smith's Guardian article: the fact that she highlights a problem previously discussed on this blog, the problem which the commercialisation of fiction publishing presents for many writers:

By this measure the duty of writers is to please readers and to be eager to do so... Above all, the modern writer has a duty to entertain. Writers who stray from these obligations risk tiny readerships and critical ridicule. Novels that submit to a shared vision of entertainment ... will always be welcomed. This is not a good time, in literature, to be a curio...

...Personally, I have no objection to books that entertain and please, that are clear and interesting and intelligent, that are in good taste and are not wilfully obscure - but neither do these qualities seem to me in any way essential to the central experience of fiction, and if they should be missing, this in no way rules out the possibility that the novel I am reading will yet fulfil the only literary duty I care about ... [novelists'] duty to express accurately their way of being in the world.

The Great Mind of Zadie Smith

Ladies and Gentlemen, fellow bloggers me hearties, I commend to you one of the most serious and insightful minds in the literary world today: that of Zadie Smith.

Today the Guardian publishes an article by Zadie (and which I understand to be extracted from a promised book) on the nature of fiction and the condition, in creative terms, of the fiction writer. At the end of a week of blogosphere dispute about whether fiction writing 'should' be a painful experience or one which is fun, here is Zadie's (to me searingly accurate) view of 'the land where writers live':

...a country I imagine as mostly beach, with hopeful writers standing on the shoreline while their perfect novels pile up, over on the opposite coast, out of reach. Thrusting out of the shoreline are hundreds of piers, or "disappointed bridges", as Joyce called them. Most writers, most of the time, get wet.

As a result, she says, writing fiction can be 'some of the hardest intellectual and emotional work you'll ever do'.

In illustration, she gives us the fictional story of 'Clive', who sets out to write a novel, and finally completes it:

Somehow, despite all Clive's best efforts, the novel he has pulled into existence is not the perfect novel that floated so tantalisingly above his computer. It is, rather, a poor simulacrum, a shadow of a shadow. In the transition from the dream to the real it has shed its aura of perfection; its shape is warped, unrecognisable. Something got in the way, something almost impossible to articulate and Clive must suffer the bleak sense ... that his novel was not only not good, but not true.

And what is this truth which would make for the perfect novel, but which inevitably evades the fiction writer? It is, says Zadie, the truth of the self, the writer's character, a fact little acknowledged by critics writing with the legacy of TS Eliot's injunction to separate the 'personality' of the writer from the writing:

To writers, writing well is not simply a matter of skill, but a question of character ... Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self - vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised. That's why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great.

She is careful here to make the distinction between crude autobiographical facts - an obsession with which, as I am always saying, can get in the way of a reader's receptivity to the writing - and the idea of a writer's personality in the truer sense. Personality, she says, 'is much more than autobiographical detail, it's our way of processing the world', and a writer's style is 'a personal necessity ... the only possible expression of a particular consciouness. Style is a writer's way of telling the truth'. And when a writer fails to find the style which does this adequately - as he or she always must, to a greater or lesser extent - then writing inevitably becomes an endeavour of failure and disappointment.

This is the one duty of writers, she says: 'to express accurately their way of being in the world' and a great novel is one which can do this, however alien to a reader the way of being expressed. The duty of readers is to meet this halfway, she says, and reading too is a skill to be honed:

Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced.

In a week when people have been posting about 'comfort-blanket' books, Zadie reminds us that books are meant to prevent us from what she calls 'sleepwalking through life.'