Zadie Smith’s Style of Thinking

Form, writes Ali Smith, can be "a matter of need and expectation," offering "clear rules and unspoken understandings." But in practice, she adds, form is "also a matter of breaking rules," producing "dialogue and argument," exercising its powers of "persuasion."1 Form's persuasive solicitations of pity and identification, in particular, have proven irresistible to critique. Beguiling "literary appeals to the emotions," as Richard Walsh calls them, have long afforded opportunities for inquisition: once form is seen as an enticing yet potentially coercive agent of affective involvement, the cogs of interrogation are set firmly in motion.2 What could be more entertaining for professional critics than keeping those cogs well oiled? How gratifying it can be to dissect our susceptibility to the emotional pull and caprice of form, especially if that allows us to exhibit just how keen-eyed we remain about our own readerly dispositions.

To be sure, myriad episodes of affective ambush can make us wary. Manipulative endings, kitsch consolations, unexpected tenderness for dubious characters — each has the power to rekindle our relish for cool detachment, for the intellectual security of self-composed circumspection. And few forms make donning this armor of dispassion more attractive than sentimentalism, a mode that in fiction has historically performed vital political work and whose contemporary recalibration will occupy my focus here. Sympathetic identification, perhaps most notoriously, has remained at the heart of sentimentalism's contestability — both as the root of ethical controversy over whether sentimental engagement elides historical or cultural difference, and as its condition of possibility in the context of feminist, queer, and antiracist activism.3 Yet circumstances where identification is the primary reward are not the only circumstances that occasion cathexis.4 I want to consider some of the alternative contours of the sentimental by turning to a work that asks us, at times, to back off. Here is a story whose central scenario of imminent destitution would appear, at first glance, to solicit our all-consuming sympathy but whose formal strategies (voice, register, perspective) mediate and adjust that level of involvement — distancing us just enough to provoke reflection on what the pathos produced by a tale of extreme precarity might be for.

To pursue this line of inquiry, I'll turn to Ali Smith's namesake. Since the earnest, stylistically lush performance of novelistic ethics in her 2005 On Beauty, Zadie Smith has become quite a different writer, seeking in recent years to ask more of her readers than compassionate generosity and moral vigilance alone.5 In particular, she has become watchful of the self-gratifying process of claiming and cultivating empathic connections to those characters we accompany through social or personal trials we've never experienced ourselves. The Embassy of Cambodia (2013) offers one of Smith's most vivid attempts yet to eye the legitimacy of sentimental reactions to depictions of inequity and chronic isolation. In so doing, though, she doesn't entirely outlaw those reactions but rather encircles them in a zone of further cross-examination. If "sentimentalists' sympathies," in Naomi Greyser's account, "cherish intimacy as formal technique" and as "social solution" for a "palpable, material relation," then Smith helps us to spot the consequences of deemphasizing that intimacy without disqualifying sympathetic involvement outright.6 In compelling us to feel beyond pity, Embassy never obliges us to disavow the compulsions of identification or traduce its complexity as a tensile, sometimes-turbulent upshot of being moved by scenes of duress. Rather, the text serves as a kind of creative companion to Smith's critical complaint that "we're living in an age where people feel that pathos is all you need when you make an argument — as in, 'I feel it, and so it is true.' However, an argument is not just an emotion. You can feel something with incredible strength, but that's not enough."7 Well-meaning sentiment alone is not enough, as Embassy makes clear. Yet over the course of this text, Smith insinuates that a righteous rejection of the claims literary pathos has upon readers won't do either, inviting instead a series of deliberative reflections on how sentiment might productively inform active (rather than ameliorative or acquiescent) responses to Embassy's story of inescapable poverty.

While I will not rehearse the long critical history of sentimentalism's literary misdemeanours, I do hope that the coming pages will complement the recent efforts of scholars in feminist modernist studies and African American studies to reassess the political potential of sentimental structures of feeling and their capacity for challenging normative forms of gendered and racial representation. In particular, I reciprocate the need to question the way those "critiques of 'false feeling,'" upon which indictments of sentimentalism's ineffectuality often rest, recycle a blanket concern with "how the depiction of feeling," as Rebecca Wanzo observes, "is often about sympathetic identification."8 The implication is that the more readers dispute or resist such identification — and the more a text enables them to do so — the sharper the political vigilance of their responses will be. As we'll see, Smith foils this logic of affective refusal and its underlying assumption that writers who cultivate sentiment inevitably "treat feelings and intimacy as substitutes for critiques of power structures and political change" — as though texts that richly solicit our compassionate absorption automatically encourage us to capitulate to the status quo.9 Specifically, I argue that Smith refuses to facilitate the critic's self-congratulatory resistance to the pathos of the socioeconomic and ontological impoverishment she describes. And later, I'll show that this refusal is central to her effort to refine rather than prosecute sentimental engagement, as Embassy articulates the brute experience of poverty in a manner that compels readers to deliberate without dismissing the sufficiency of the very compassion it induces.

Compassion, Detachment, and Affective Criticism

What might it mean, Smith seems to ask, to entertain compassionate identification through fiction without either commending our own sympathetic intelligence or spurning such a response for its impotence or unethical presumptuousness? Suppose fiction could model an encounter with suffering that affirmed neither the outright virtue of identification nor the virtue of shunning such identification in the name of pristine detachment. Could such an encounter encourage a kind of knowledge work about what we think we ought to feel toward those ineluctably unjust worlds of pain that literature is especially well-equipped to communicate? And in responding to the pathos of those worlds, might the dialectical imbrication of assent and demurral, involvement and withdrawal, amount to something like a responsibility in its own right - pointing to a tougher, more unpredictable route for readers than those offered by the pieties of antiseptic equability or the veiled self-importance of analytical "distance." Locating these questions in the formal sinews of Embassy's brief chronicle of poverty, I take stock of how Smith's narrative appears at first sight to obstruct her reader's avenue to familiar, all-consumingly sympathetic responses to racial injustice and material privation; but I then argue that her style in fact piques our sense of the adequacy and utility of those responses to initiate a more faceted contemplation of what the solicitations of sentimental writing actually entail.

By offering that, Smith reroutes the sentimental through its originary form - as sentire in mente, "feeling in idea." What feelings in literature do to our ideas about feeling in social life is something she has long set out to explore. In Embassy, she extends that pursuit in peculiarly disruptive ways: through language, scenic structure, and perspective, she asks us to scrutinize the very ethics of fellow feeling, even as she choreographs moments of pathos that precipitate our indignation toward inequity. When invoking the sentimental, therefore, I partly refer to what Naomi Greyser calls "a rhetorical vehicle used to express or evoke sympathy," a vehicle that revolves around the idea that "to affect and find oneself affected by the world is to be moved . . . emotionally, to action."10 By tying sentimental expression to provocation and social incentivization, we can begin to see that although Embassy ratifies Smith's assertion that "an argument is not just an emotion," it also proposes that fiction can productively argue with its own emotional valences — along with the critical purposes they might serve. Proving her own admission that, ultimately, she's "less interested in convincing people of an argument than in modelling a style of thinking," Smith deploys a style in Embassy that undertakes a type of epistemological work of its own: stimulating a rethinking of the attitudes, objectives, and aesthetic practices we associate with sentimentalism's ambivalent efficacy.11 In this way, style actively implicates us in the contentiousness of our own affective involvement: asking us to track how fiction can allow us to perceive and apprehend something about the inner life of poverty, without suggesting that we simply condemn vicarious intimacy under the assumption that it elides sociohistorical and cultural difference.12 By inviting us to distinguish the epistemic itineraries of form from the feelings she diegetically arouses, Smith helps us to reckon anew with the assembly of pity, sympathy, and compassion we might expect to experience as readers of hardship, without then allowing us self-confidently to write them off for their political insubstantiality.

Sympathy's Circumference

Having originally appeared as a New Yorker story in early 2013, Embassy was released later that year as a miniature hardback. Centering on abuse between immigrants, it follows the plight of Fatou, an unpaid servant who is routinely treated with indifference and contempt by the Derawals, the middle-class Pakistani family in Willesden that employs her. After a fraught and itinerant path to the UK — travelling with her father from the Ivory Coast to a stint working in an Accra hotel (where she is raped by a Russian guest), before reaching Italy via Libya — Fatou finds herself in a situation tantamount to domestic slavery. These abhorrent circumstances are conveyed by a commentary operating from a relative distance, couched in the register of a chorus prone to metaleptic evaluations of its own position, legitimacy, and coverage. Tracking events with what initially feels like a mix of curiosity and impartiality, the chorus represents a collective "we" comprised of local Willesdeners (who "are not really a poetic people," with "minds" that instead "tend towards the prosaic"). The chorus informs us that Fatou's wages are "retained by the Derawals to pay for the food and water she would require during her stay."13 Despite all that's set against her, Fatou manages to insert her own modest freedoms into the monotony of household service. Making use of the family's forgotten batch of guest passes, she seeks respite from a routine of shopping and cleaning by swimming at the local health club. The route there takes her past the eponymous embassy where, inexplicably, a shuttlecock passes back and forth behind its perimeter brick walls:

Since 6 August (the first occasion on which she noticed the badminton), Fatou has made a point of pausing by the bus stop opposite the embassy for five or ten minutes before she goes in to swim, idle minutes she can hardly afford (Mrs. Derawal returns to the house at lunchtime) and yet seems unable to forgo. Such is the strangely compelling aura of the embassy. (9)

With this keenly observational mode of exterior commentary, Embassy possesses a tonal "aura" that establishes a colloquial rapport with the reader, addressing us as fellow spectators of Fatou's intermittent efforts to offset her precarity with consoling outings to the pool.

Not that this spectatorship alleviates readers of that sense of ethical accountability that comes with being a sympathetic witness. In one of its virtually standalone asides, the chorus obliquely implicates the reader as fellow onlooker by strategically abstracting the very notion of social attention. How, the chorus seems to ask - of itself, of fellow Willesdeners, of the reader inclined to pity Fatou's situation for the few rewards her routine affords - do we determine the appropriate scale of our attention to the myriad geographies and genealogies of others who may challenge projected suppositions about the ontology of unfreedom?

No doubt there are those who will be critical of the narrow, essentially local scope of Fatou's interest in the Cambodian woman from the Embassy of Cambodia, but we, the people of Willesden, have some sympathy with her attitude. The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world — in its dramatic as well as 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? (23-24)

Smith invites us to scrutinize what it is we seek to learn — and by extension, what fiction helps us to learn — from closely watching, and imaginatively securing sympathetic connections, to unfathomably diverse conditions of subjecthood and subjection at the global scale. In a meta-hermeneutic gesture, the chorus stages a brief inquiry into the very attentional responsibilities and scalar adequacies of critical reading itself, which offers in turn a scrutiny of sympathy's priorities and range. Here it's tempting to sense an allegiance between the chorus and Adam Smith's sentimental prototype: the impartial onlooker, who extracts sympathy from overwhelming pity in order to plot its radiating lines of social consequence. In Rae Greiner's account, "social environment" is crucial for this spectator's "sympathetic protocols," as indeed it seems for Embassy's periodically exteriorized commentator. As such, "the inability to share others' feelings is a blessing." An antidote to the kind of "emotional contagion" we typically associate with sentimental identification, the sympathy exercised by "impartial spectatorship" "describes a way of thinking and feeling with others who are, like fictional characters, nowhere in sight."14

But isn't that the very thing that unsettles Smith's chorus in the passage above? Isn't spectatorial self-containment the troubling bedfellow of indifference disguised as impartiality? With its dangling final question, doesn't the chorus implicitly spotlight the very conundrum facing a detached onlooker, who must decide how appropriate, let alone accurate, any given scale of attention is? And what does the rhetorical form of this chorus imply about the curation and sustainability of sympathy's "protocols"? Which is to say, does this "plural, communal narrative voice, a 'we' narration" — to borrow a narratological query posed by Suzanne Keen — "bring people into a perceptive circle in which empathetic reactions are more readily available"?15 Smith's answer seems to be: sometimes, but not always. And she puts that unpredictability of voice's correlation with affective reaction into play throughout the text for strategic ends, as we'll later see. Ultimately, the question of how large that circle of sympathetic awareness should be isn't made easier by the prospect of remaining impartial or removed from shareable feelings. The same question resonates for Smith herself, as she navigates the shifting responsibilities — those "necessary tasks" — of scope and relevance. For in this instance, we're asked to ponder how fiction's capacity to model different scales of sentimental connection might matter; and to ponder in turn whether stepping back into self-protecting equitability could in fact be more comforting, if not tacitly self-serving, than submitting to a burgeoning sense of compassionate rapport.

By hosting this debate about sentiment and scale, Embassy touches on matters familiar to critics caught up in the "throes" of what Rita Felski calls literary studies' "legitimation crisis," where conversations about disciplinary survival and measurable impact orbit the blunt question of "[w]hy, after all, should anyone care about literature?"16 Smith obviously wants us to care, but not exactly in the ways one might assume. Embassy, likewise, wants us to care about the social privation, everyday racism, limited opportunity, and the horrifying lack of systemic security affecting economic migrants and asylum seekers in Britain. As a work of sentimental activism, however, it also offers something other than a plangent record of desolation and discrimination that compels us to feel pity as an end in itself. In a more proactive address to pain, that is, Smith presents a forum for contemplating through the act of reading the limits — the circumference, to echo her image — of sympathy. It's not that Embassy doesn't nourish pathos as a trigger for intensifying our critical participation (pity, after all, isn't intrinsically pacifying). Rather, it invites us to wonder how individuated — how "essentially local" —that participation can remain. Getting us to take another look at sympathy's conventional supply chains is all part of Smith's advocacy for fiction's role in enabling an "extension away from yourself, into other people." In her view, this is something "fiction could model as a kind of citizenship behaviour," forging in the process a "coalition across difference."17 It's this apparent endorsement of reading-through-and-beyond-sympathy as an ethically laudable means of reading-across-difference that's both staged and probed by the affective solicitations of Embassy's form. The coexistence of these forking solicitations is a signature of Smith's "style of thinking," where sentimental response and social critique productively coincide despite time-honoured rumours of their mutual antagonism.

Reading Poverty with a Sentimental Humanist

Composed, anonymous, cultivating a sort of civic solicitude as one its "necessary tasks," Smith's commentating chorus could be read rather differently — namely, as a showcase for detached concern. Construing the chorus in this way would align Embassy with what Walter Benn Michaels commends as a "form that refuses the politics of personal involvement." Channelling Brecht, Michaels contends that such a form shifts "our affective relation" toward the "social structures" of suffering that inequality perpetuates. Crucially, the "objective conditions" of systemic inequity are made "visible" by a work's indifference to its readers'/viewers' sympathetic identification with the sorrow arising from those conditions.18 On this model, art is politically potent when it remains purposefully indifferent to our affective involvement, and when it compels us to confront form's dissociation from the sentimental credo of interpersonal connection that would otherwise (allegedly) inhibit our social comprehension.

Without wishing to undermine my own case for appreciating Smith's effort to repurpose the sentimental, I do acknowledge that Embassy to a certain extent accords with this account of the ongoing utility of Brechtian distancing. The chorus, for one, periodically interrupts our affective engagement with a story that implicitly indicts the system which sustains Fatou's insecurity and disenfranchisement, and these interruptions insinuate a degree of remove — a means of perceiving Fatou's circumstances independent from some morally self-affirming sense of "personal involvement." This not only befits Smith's view that "empathy is a very limited condition," despite the fact that "in the West we romanticize its power — especially in literature!"19 It also has something in common with Brecht's warning that art's affective transport — its "power to release, sweep away, uplift" — can operate at the expense of "a new contract" with its audience, one that becomes "possible on a basis other than sympathetic understanding" alone.20

This alternative contract is trialled toward the end of Embassy, where Smith juxtaposes a brief moment of respite (the penultimate chapter closes with Fatou sharing one of her swimming sessions with her Nigerian friend, the devout Christian Andrew) with the news that opens the book's final sequence:

That same evening, Fatou was fired. Not for the guest passes — the Derawals never found out how many miles Fatou had travelled on their membership. In fact, it was hard for Fatou to understand exactly why she was being fired, as Mrs Derawal herself did not seem able to explain it very precisely.

"What you don't understand is that we have no need for a nanny," she said, standing in the doorway of Fatou's room — there was not really enough space in there for two people to stand without one of them bring practically on the bed. "The children have grown. We need a housekeeper, one who cleans properly. These days, you care more about the children than the cleaning," Mrs Derawal added, though Fatou had never cared for the children, not even slightly. "And that is of no use to us."

Fatou said nothing. She was thinking that she did not have a proper suitcase and would have to take her things from Mrs Derawal's house in plastic bags. (64-65)

Having been alienated from our own desire for sympathetic identification and tragic involvement, according to Brecht, we can appreciate that lived "conditions . . . are capable of being presented in other ways than as they are." The end-goal at least of this technique is accomplished here: we've seen what's possible for Fatou in fragile intervals of relief from drudgery; now we witness the casual violation of her efforts to become something other than what inequality and displacement have compelled her to be. Smith structurally — and starkly — juxtaposes the intermission of swimming with Andrew with the outrage in this scene of Fatou's abrupt dismissal. While we've glimpsed her resistance (as Brecht might have hoped) to being regarded as "unchangeable, unadaptable, and handed over helpless to fate,"21 the structural mechanism of precarity now returns her to yet another threshold of helplessness, capsizing a momentarily-stabilized life which she'll now have to pack up in "plastic bags."22

And yet, distantiation doesn't exactly dissipate sentiment. We're still left more appalled than alienated; there's no getting away from the outrage this brisk reduction of Fatou to "no use" ignites. Even after the jarring effect of switching between these juxtaposed scenes — shorn as both scenes are of extensively focalized reactions and of the poignancy pointers of an intruding narrator — readers are unlikely to feel any less infuriated. Instead of entirely undercutting sympathetic involvement, then, Smith invites us to occupy a position of incensed remove, such that our recognition of the structures of social determination coincides with the distress of noting the austerity with which a financially comfortable parent can suddenly decide that she has "no need for a nanny." With its heartless cadence, the phrase is heart-rending. And it's through that sentence's affecting finality that Smith compels us to notice how Fatou's situation is "engineered by a regime of power," in Hal Foster's words, "that the precariat depends on for favor." Construed in these terms, Embassy's mission "is not only to evoke the perilous aspect of this condition, but also to intimate how and why its privations are produced." The rough juxtaposition knitting together the book's final two chapters remains crucial to that mission because it enables a certain kind of knowledge — a style of thinking — about what feelings might be possible with and beyond engulfing sympathy toward Fatou's hardship. Through rather than in spite of the pathos and outrage they together curate, these collocated scenes thus enjoin the reader's prevailing sympathy in the analytical work of "implicat[ing] the authority that imposes" the inequality which perpetuates a life so deprived.23

Smith never asks us to deprioritize pity in the interests of social critique. Instead, she audits the very assumption that it's intrinsically virtuous for a text to frustrate and interrupt sympathetic connection in its effort to do frank and effective justice to poverty. Perhaps this accommodating position toward the critical potentiality of sentiment befits Smith's description of her own sensibility. As a "sentimental humanist," she holds that "art is here to help, even if the help is painful — especially then."24 This time-honored pledge comes from perhaps the most ancient branch of theorizing concerned with the emotional affordances of form. On this model, the reader's/viewer's vicarious involvement offers a gateway to compassionate intimacy, instruction, even catharsis. Smith glances at this Aristotelean backstory as it rewinds through Renaissance art: "the replication of nature at its most beautiful — beloved technique of Italian masterpieces — is the art best suited to sentimental humanism, allowing, as it does, the viewing subject to feel pity and empathy; to weep for all the beautiful people who have become or will become corpses (excluding me)."25 In Embassy's case, it would be tempting to suggest that Smith does not allow us to weep so easily; but as we've just seen, sentiment and indictment become dialectically interdependent in episodes whose very form and articulation oblige readers to deliberate on the quiddity of their affective responsiveness to a pain produced not by fate, but by a unjust system.

Agitational Sentiments

Smith's principal "business" as a sentimental humanist "concerns the intimate lives of people."26 Yet the "hidden content of people's lives," she concedes, "proves a very hard thing to discern." Given this perceptual shortfall, fiction's capacity to access interiority has long been one of its aesthetic compensations — correcting the sense that when encountering vulnerable subjects in daily life "all we really have to go on are these outward, manifest signs."27 In Smith's creative practice, this concession can be felt in the humility with which she states and then qualifies the priority she affords to evoking "the way of things in reality, as far as I am able to see and interpret them, which may not be especially far."28 Does the hope that fiction might remedy this interpretative deficit — including the deficits intrinsic to sympathy for suffering others — help to explain Embassy's qualified uptake of the sentimental? Does its form of detached intimacy and distanced concern, in other words, demonstrate that it can know something about the experience of poverty without having to offer readers a sensation of direct identification? Is this why the book's perspective, however externalized it sometimes feels, intermittently alternates with sequences of free indirect style, as the spectating chorus draws in? Switching in this way from reportorial exteriority to Fatou's focalization leads readers into the "hidden" affective vicinity of her unrelieved precarity; meanwhile, each switch back to the chorus works precisely to unsettle our overreliance on psychological proximity to Fatou as an easily accessible source of pathos. Aided by these affective oscillations, Smith really does want to make her readers work: we're made to participate in a style of thinking that's alert to the perils of pity, but doesn't congratulate itself with the premise that refusing pity and cultivating detachment completes our work.

By never letting her readers rest in this way, Smith enables us to reconsider the formal conventions of, and conventional preconceptions about, sentimental narrative: first, in terms of how particular stylistic strategies convey pathetic situations to solicit self-critical varieties of involvement; and second, in terms of the way such situations prompt readers to reflect on the adequacy of their own affective responses. Smith's style, I've argued, is thereby also a style of deliberation in its own right — one that generates, modulates, and agitates our grasp of how we're reacting to the pathos of what we witness. Operating as such, even a book as unassuming as Embassy demonstrates that we "can locate in the form of any given work," in Jonathan Flatley's account, "an image of the aesthetic experience that work hopes to create, an aesthetic experience that itself offers a mediated reversal of social norms regarding affect and emotion and of the experiences those norms are trying to regulate." When Smith addresses a contemporary moment in which the merits of empathy (in her view) are overstated, she shows that "in seeing how a particular formal practice addresses itself to a collective of readers whom it is trying to affect, we can also see how it contains a theory of those readers and the historical situation they find themselves in."29 Refracting the depiction of precarity to adjust the priorities and misgivings we associate with sentiments like pity and compassion, Smith proves that "aesthetic practices," as Flatley reminds us, "constitute an archive of efforts not only to present moods but also to address and change them."30These efforts are captured in miniature at the very end of Embassy. If the "mood" here seems forlorn, the language somehow withheld, then that's deliberate: Smith's denotative style complements what Flatley calls "the mostly flat, almost evidentiary tone of some effective agitational writing" — his example being Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). This "mode of writing" aptly characterizes a closing sequence that "achieves its evident affective force through neither emotional expressivity nor exhortation, but through description."31 As we shadow Fatou, weighed down with her bagged belongings in the late-afternoon gloom, that "agitational" form of description builds:

Walking out in the cold grey, Fatou felt a sense of brightness, of being washed clean, that neither the weather nor her new circumstances could dim. Still, her limbs were weary and her hair was wet; she would probably catch a cold, waiting out here. It was only four thirty. She put her bags on the pavement and sat down next to them, just by the bus stop opposite the Embassy of Cambodia. Buses came and went, slowing down for her then jerking forward when they realized that she has no interest in getting up and on. 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 the 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. (68-69)

Normally Fatou suffers from time-poverty, hustled along by a labor schedule that's scarcely of her own making; now she suffers from the temporal surplus of uncertainty, caught as she is in precarity's waiting room on the brink of outright destitution. If the "brightness" leftover from swimming momentarily counteracts the "cold grey" afternoon and the "new circumstances" of homelessness that await her, this protean uplift doesn't last. After informing us how early the day still is, how long Fatou would therefore have to wait before Andrew's (by no means definite) refuge, the narratorial perspective withdraws. From the interior details of how "washed clean" she feels, the voice backs away into that recognizably solicitous yet detached position we've come to associate by now with an accompanying chorus, who turns out to be an elderly onlooker claiming to "have been chosen to speak" for a community who "did not choose me" (40). Drawing to a close, narrating turns into a mode of medial perception: from the mid-distance elevation of balconies; from the mid-range cocoon of passing cars; from the momentarily close yet transitory vantage point of a bus. From all these positions, the passing chorus of citizens "worried for her" — at least, that is the wistful hope. This syntactically clipped disclosure of care sounds sincere enough. But it's soon overtaken by a more impersonal account that watches Fatou watching: the specificity of the chorus' charity dissipates into an admission of prevailing habit, what they "tend to assume" about the poor. The particularity of sympathy's traction thereby weakens because this collective voice of concern universalizes the outcome of such scenes of noticing and acknowledgement — scenes in which the extension of pity typically turns into an exercise in summarizing "the worst."

For Smith's readers, taking part in this universalism is likely to prove uncomfortable. Our unease is further compounded by the abstraction of her closing imagery, which seems to sum up almost too neatly the bifurcating reactions her ending invites. In a schematic division of fortunes, we're left suspended between the suspicion that miseries of impoverishment will only continue for Fatou and the buoying prospect of Andrew's "hopeful return." But this sense of apprehensive irresolution seems a less forceful takeaway than what Smith tells us about the limits of affective attachments per se, be they grim or auspicious. "You need to protect the weak," she asserts, "ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy."32 It's this bald assertion that Smith stress-tests with the aid of Embassy's choric perspectivism, as it ruminates on what "tend[s]" to result from its own detached concern, thereby "modelling" its own "style of thinking" when simulating the practice of closely reading poverty at some intangible and constantly adjusting degree of emotional remove.

As a proactively self-investigative work, Embassy reflexively includes its audience in these perpetual adjustments, leading us to question the immediate gratifications of sympathetic entanglement without allowing us to feel critically superior about eschewing them. In this way, Smith offers a dual-pronged reconfiguration of sentimentalism not only as a comportment of style, but also as a component of how style can make us deliberate over the time-honoured qualms about the perils of pity obscuring political knowledge — giving us the incentive to embark on the more taxing job of correlating the engrossing labour of vicarious solicitude and the prosecutorial labour of social critique. The affective experience that comes with a narrative like this is thereby also an epistemic one, contoured not simply by our sympathetic reaction toward depicted suffering but by the obligation to consider our material relation to suffering that this process of pathetic solicitation sets in motion. And the stakes of that relation may actually depend less on the affectively incontestable impact of witnessing suffering as such — which is to say, on how Fatou's despairing outlook so patently kindles outrage — than on recognizing our privilege as the condition of critically relating to the very sentiments that suffering elicits. Writing on the widespread social isolation caused by COVID-19 lockdowns, Smith has recently argued that whereas "[s]uffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual," privilege "can at least be brought to mind; acknowledged, comprehended, even atoned for through transformative action." Over the course of "comparing your relative privilege with that of others you may be able to modify both your world and the worlds outside of your world - if the will is there to do it."33 Embassy puts that will to the test.Smith reconfigures the sentimental mode, then, not as a supplier of disproportionate feeling (as it has traditionally been conceived) but rather as a reason to contemplate the ethical expectations and political destinations of our own responsiveness - including our own inclination to act in response to whatever privileges critical practice itself allows us to exercise. Which leads me, inevitably, to matters of method. Lauren Berlant was right to observe in 2004 how the concern "that critique seeks to befoul its object" becomes "especially acute in response to writing on what we might call the humanizing emotions: compassion, sentimentality, empathy, love."34 In noticing this tendency, she anticipated subsequent postcritical commentators who have contended that by forgoing "hypervigilance for attentiveness," in Heather Love's words, we can reclaim practices of "descriptive richness" that avoid critique's "powerful reductions" by "preferring acts of noticing, being affected, taking joy, and making whole."35 But what Smith seems to enable in her writing and summon from her readers is something a little different. Reaching beyond the schism between compassionate involvement and unsentimental critique, between affectual description and agonistic prosecution — as though feeling moved and being interrogative were axiomatically irreconcilable, as though being affected by suffering invariably blocks a social understanding of its contingently entangled causes — she facilitates an experience of form that confronts us with the unglamorous "truth," in her words, that "empathy gets turned on and off as needs be."36 Yet even here, although it's clear that empathy can be overrated, it's less clear how readers should go about avoiding empathy categorically, and what ethical reprimands or intellectual deficits they'll face for not doing so. In the compassionate outrage that Fatou's dismissal engenders, empathy is not dispelled outright so much as the terms by which it is both lauded and faulted are held up for examination. This probe seems well worth undertaking, given how tempting it can be to overstate the value of fiction by judging its political efficacy according to how far it deprives the reader's hunger for empathic connection.

Smith won't let us get away with leaving the adequacy of sympathetic disquiet or empathic affiliation unquestioned; but at the same time, she also encourages us to pause before greeting with self-contented suspicion fiction's knack for affording imaginative contact with the "hidden content" of vulnerable lives. While Embassy dissuades us from conflating that sense of contact with some heroic capacity for compassion, neither can the level-headed refusal of such affective intimacy become an excuse to ordain the sobriety of estrangement as a more appropriate proviso for critical practice. This dispositional latitude feels instructive, enriching our sense of how robust the epistemic ligaments of sentimental form can be in contemporary writing. It's especially instructive when prominent assessments of sentimentalism seem already to have decided that to "talk about the emotional costs of injustice" is to neglect "the material ones."37 For why should the sentimental be routed through, and reducible to, stories of "the personal impacts of not changing," as Berlant describes them? Must the mode be complicit in that generalization of "vulnerability and suffering" which results in "the ethical imperative toward social transformation" being "replaced by a passive and vaguely civic-minded ideal of compassion"?38 Smith's chorus is indeed rather passive, at times; but that notionally collective voice is nothing if not particularizing in its depictions of Fatou's everyday moments of fortitude and undemonstrative defiance, captured most poignantly in her outings to the pool which offer, as we've seen, "occasional pleasures" as an antidote to her constant string of "necessary tasks" (28). If these treasured trips to the leisure center really do typify "the social tragedy of the attrition of life in which . . . folds of potentiality are enjoyed," do these necessarily prove that "finding satisfaction in minor pleasures" epitomizes the compromise that sees people becoming interested "less in changing the world than in not being defeated by it"?39 Smith may well leave us on the verge of defeat by the close. As endings go, it's undoubtedly steeped in pathos, saturated by the sorrow of observing a life worn down, as the chorus withdraws slightly and reflects back on how "[w]e worried for her." But it's the same interval of pathetic intensification that agitates the very notion that avoiding or forestalling sentiment is somehow politically and ethically virtuous. For the chorus's worry is also an affective portal through which to discern the chronic structure of destitution as a scandal presently endured by a largely abandoned multitude, for whom "sitting on the damp pavement in the middle of the day" is the foundation of ordinary subsistence.40 Nothing in Smith's ending inoculates us from the heightened sentiment that would allegedly contaminate this structural feeling of social inequity and systemic neglect. Art's capacity to hurt might yet be a measure of its capacity to help.

 

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David James is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. His most recent books include Discrepant Solace: Contemporary Literature and the Work of Consolation (Oxford, 2019) and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (Cambridge, 2015) and Modernism and Close Reading (Oxford, 2020). An associate editor of Contemporary Literature, he also co-edits the Columbia University Press series Literature Now. His work has appeared in such venues as New Literary History, diacritics, PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature and Public Books. He is currently completing Sentimental Activism, forthcoming with Columbia University Press.

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In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

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Banner Image by Victoria Feliniak is licensed under Unsplash

 

References