In 2019 the great writer Zadie Smith wrote about this in the New York Review of Books knowing she was on shifting sands - but moved by your reflections I have to quote her on your (and my behalf): " .... At some point during this inconsistent childhood, I was struck by an old cartoon I came across somewhere. It depicted Charles Dickens, …
In 2019 the great writer Zadie Smith wrote about this in the New York Review of Books knowing she was on shifting sands - but moved by your reflections I have to quote her on your (and my behalf): " .... At some point during this inconsistent childhood, I was struck by an old cartoon I came across somewhere. It depicted Charles Dickens, the image of contentment, surrounded by all his characters come to life. I found that image comforting. Dickens didn’t look worried or ashamed. Didn’t appear to suspect he might be schizophrenic or in some other way pathological. He had a name for his condition: novelist. Early in my life, this became my cover story, too. And for years now, in the pages of novels, “I” have been both adult and child, male and female, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, funny and tragic, liberal and conservative, religious and godless, not to mention alive and dead. All the voices within me have had an airing, and though I never achieved the sense of contentment I saw in that cartoon—itself perhaps a fiction—over time I have striven to feel less shame about my compulsive interest in the lives of others and the multiple voices in my head. Still, whenever I am struck by the old self-loathing, I try to bring to mind that cartoon, alongside some well-worn lines of Walt Whitman’s:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I’m sure I’m not the first novelist to dig up that old Whitman chestnut in defense of our indefensible art. And it would be easy enough at this point to march onward and write a triumphalist defense of fiction, ridiculing those who hold the very practice in suspicion—the type of reader who wonders how a man wrote Anna Karenina, or why Zora Neale Hurston once wrote a book with no black people in it, or why a gay woman like Patricia Highsmith spent so much time imagining herself into the life of an (ostensibly) straight white man called Ripley. ....."
Imagine: a person who grew up as an only child should be forbidden to write about characters with siblings; a person who lives in NYC should never dare to set a work in Paris or Kentucky. A person who never owned a pet shouldn't imagine the mental state of a guinea pig or a tiger. But how about:
In 2019 the great writer Zadie Smith wrote about this in the New York Review of Books knowing she was on shifting sands - but moved by your reflections I have to quote her on your (and my behalf): " .... At some point during this inconsistent childhood, I was struck by an old cartoon I came across somewhere. It depicted Charles Dickens, the image of contentment, surrounded by all his characters come to life. I found that image comforting. Dickens didn’t look worried or ashamed. Didn’t appear to suspect he might be schizophrenic or in some other way pathological. He had a name for his condition: novelist. Early in my life, this became my cover story, too. And for years now, in the pages of novels, “I” have been both adult and child, male and female, black, brown, and white, gay and straight, funny and tragic, liberal and conservative, religious and godless, not to mention alive and dead. All the voices within me have had an airing, and though I never achieved the sense of contentment I saw in that cartoon—itself perhaps a fiction—over time I have striven to feel less shame about my compulsive interest in the lives of others and the multiple voices in my head. Still, whenever I am struck by the old self-loathing, I try to bring to mind that cartoon, alongside some well-worn lines of Walt Whitman’s:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I’m sure I’m not the first novelist to dig up that old Whitman chestnut in defense of our indefensible art. And it would be easy enough at this point to march onward and write a triumphalist defense of fiction, ridiculing those who hold the very practice in suspicion—the type of reader who wonders how a man wrote Anna Karenina, or why Zora Neale Hurston once wrote a book with no black people in it, or why a gay woman like Patricia Highsmith spent so much time imagining herself into the life of an (ostensibly) straight white man called Ripley. ....."
I love that Zadie Smith essay!
And Smith's "the Fraud" is her best one yet. It's Dickensian and her protagonist is a white Scottish Catholic bisexual woman. That'll show 'em!
Imagine: a person who grew up as an only child should be forbidden to write about characters with siblings; a person who lives in NYC should never dare to set a work in Paris or Kentucky. A person who never owned a pet shouldn't imagine the mental state of a guinea pig or a tiger. But how about:
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night . . . .
What would the Woke say to William Blake?