Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,41
assassin, to kill the novel stone dead. I think it means rather to shake the novel out if its present complacency. It clears away a little of the deadwood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward. We could call this constructive deconstruction, a quality that, for me, marks Remainder as one of the great English novels of the past ten years.
Maybe the most heartening aspect of Remainder is that its theoretical foundations prove no obstacle to the expression of a self-ridiculing humor. In fact, the closer it adheres to its own principles, the funnier it is. Having spent half the book in an inauthentic building with reenactors reenacting, the Reenactor decides he needs a change:One day I got an urge to go and check up on the outside world myself. Nothing much to report.
A minimalist narrative refusal that made me laugh out loud. Remainder resists its readers, but it does so with a smile. And then, toward its end, a mysterious “short councilor” appears, like one of David Lynch’s dwarfs, and finally asks the questions—and receives the answers—that the novel has denied us till now. Why are you doing this? How does it make you feel? In a moment of frankness, we discover the Reenactor’s greatest tingle arrived with his smallest reenactment: standing in a train station, holding his palms outward, begging for money of which he had no need. It gave him the sense “of being on the other side of something. A veil, a screen, the law—I don’t know. . . .” One of the greatest authenticity dreams of the avant-garde is this possibility of becoming criminal, of throwing one’s lot in with Genet and John Fante, with the freaks and the lost and the rejected. (The notable exception is J. G. Ballard, author of possibly the greatest British avant-garde novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, who raised three children single-handedly in the domestic tranquility of a semidetached house in Shepperton.) For the British avant-garde, autobiographical extremity has become a mark of literary authenticity, the drug use of Alexander Trocchi and Anna Kavan being at least as important to their readers as their prose. (The INS demands “all cults of authenticity be abandoned.” It does not say what is to be done about the authenticity cult of the avant-garde.) In this sense, the Reenactor has a true avant-garde spirit; he wants to become the thing beyond the pale, the inconvenient remainder impossible to contain within the social economy of meaning. But no: it is still not quite enough. The only truly authentic indivisible remainder, the only way of truly placing yourself outside meaning, is through death, the contemplation of which brings Remainder, in its finale, to one of its few expressionist moments. It also enacts a strange literary doubling, meeting Netherland head on:Forensic procedure is an art form, nothing less. No I’ll go further: it’s higher, more refined, than any art form. Why? Because it’s real. Take just one aspect of it—say the diagrams . . . They’re records of atrocities. Each line, each figure, every angle—the ink itself vibrates with an almost intolerable violence, darkly screaming from the silence of the white paper: something has happened here, someone has died.
“It’s just like cricket,” I told Naz one day.
“In what sense?” he asked.
“Each time the ball’s been past,” I said, “and the white lines are still zinging where it hit, and the seam’s left a mark, and . . .”
“I don’t follow,” he said.
“It . . . well, it just is,” I told him. “Each ball is like a crime, a murder. And then they do it again, and again and again, and the commentator has to commentate, or he’ll die too.”
In Netherland cricket symbolizes the triumph of the symbol over brute fact (cricket as the deferred promise of the American Dream). In Remainder cricket is pure facticity, which keeps coming at you, carrying death, leaving its mark. Everything must leave a mark. Everything has a material reality. Everything happens in space. As you read it, Remainder makes you preternaturally aware of space, as Robbe-Grillet did in Jealousy, Remainder’s obvious progenitor. Like the sportsmen whose processes it describes and admires, Remainder “fills time up with space” by breaking physical movements, for example, into their component parts, slowing them down; or by examining the layers and textures of a wet, cambered road in Brixton as a series of physical events rather than emotional symbols. It forces us to recognize space as a