The End and Continuation of History: Zadie Smith’s Critique of Francis Fukuyama in White Teeth

ABSTRACT

Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth has generally been read through the lens of postcolonialism: as a critique of nationalism and as an attempt to give literary form to an emerging multicultural Englishness. Yet postcolonial readings tend to overlook the extent to which the novel’s characters are dysfunctional and struggle with themselves and with each other. Moreover, the extensive focus on multiculturalism has meant that critics have paid little attention to the novel’s rejection of overly optimistic views of history. Throughout the novel, Smith’s narrator mocks characters, time and again, for believing that History (with a capital H) can arrive at a happy ending. Tellingly, however, almost no critics have noted that the novel makes direct reference to Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. The present essay sets out to show how White Teeth develops a subtle and nuanced critique of Fukuyama’s progressive view of history. It thus presents an overview of Fukuyama’s main hypotheses followed by a close reading of White Teeth. Finally, the article aims to illustrate how Smith’s critique of Fukuyama has turned out to be remarkably prescient, since the identity struggles depicted in White Teeth have anticipated the current crisis of liberal democracy.

Acknowledgments

This article was written while I was a visiting research student at the University of Melbourne. I want to express my thankfulness to Professor Peter Otto and Professor Simon During for inviting me to the university and for taking time from their busy schedules to discuss my project. I must also thank Newman College for providing me with a place to stay, while I was in Melbourne. Finally, I would like to thank my PhD supervisor Adam Paulsen from the University of Southern Denmark for his helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Shortly after the publication of White Teeth, Moss brought an overview of the novel’s critical reception from which I quote here. The article is available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jan/26/fiction.zadiesmith.

2. This is not an unusual objection to The End of History and the Last. For instance, in Specters of Marx Jacques Derrida writes: “This end of History is essentially a Christian eschatology.” (60) And a similar claim has been made by the British philosopher John Gray. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Gray writes: “In thinking of history in teleological terms, Christians believed it had … a pre-determined endpoint, and when that was achieved it would come to a close. Secular thinkers such as Marx and Fukuyama inherited this teleology, which underpins their talk of ‘the end of history’.” (6).

3. It should be noted that White Teeth firmly undercuts Marcus’s faith in science, progress and the imminent arrival of a new phase in human history. For instance, the novel indicates that the possibility of perfecting the human genome will not be put in the service of human happiness. As one character points out: “if somebody knows how to eliminate ‘undesirable’ qualities in people, do you think some government’s not going to do it? I mean, what’s undesirable? There’s just something a little fascist about the whole deal.” (418) Fittingly, Marcus’s mentor, Dr Marc-Pierre Perret, happens to be a former Nazi eugenicist.

4. There is one subject, which I leave out of my argument even though it is interesting. The critic Jonathan Sell has persuasively argued that: “White Teeth enacts a dialectic between determinism and chance from which the latter emerges as the winner” (27). That White Teeth rejects the idea of determinism is relevant to its critique of Fukuyama, but to address this issue here would no doubt lead too far.

5. This theme is connected to the novel’s continuing use of metaphors and symbols that involve teeth: white teeth, tooth loss, dental hygiene, root canals etc. As Gen’ichiro Itakura has shown in a thought-provoking article on this issue: “[Smith] associates the motifs of tooth loss and partial dentures with the (re-)formation of identity. [And] the metaphors of toothbrushing and root canal therapy … foreshadow the protagonists’ strategies for self-identification in the multicultural landscape.” (126).

6. For interpretations that view Archie as the novel’s hero, see Sell; Bentley; and Gustar. Postcolonial critics have found it hard to explain, why Zadie Smith has chosen Archie as the novel’s hero, since he is one of the few characters in White Teeth who are entirely English. Nick Bentley thus argues that the central aim of the novel is to challenge old-fashioned ideas about what it means to be English but is forced to admit that Archie – the hero – is in fact English in this old-fashioned sense. As he writes: “That Archie emerges as an unlikely hero … supplies the novel with a residual form of national identity that is incorporated, rather than rejected by Smith’s model of an emergent, multicultural Englishness.” (498) In my view, Archie’s Englishness (as well as his standard English name) is part of his almost unusual normality. As his name suggests, he is the archetypal Mr Jones.

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Leander Møller Gøttcke

Leander Møller Gøttcke is a PhD student at the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. Apart from holding a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern Denmark, he has studied French literature at the Université Paris Nanterre in 2012, and he has been a visiting research student at the University of Melbourne from 2018 to 2019.