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ABSTRACT
Zadie Smith’s latest collection of non-fiction, Intimations (2020), walks her readers through the burning blaze of the pandemic with what this article calls “cooling down”. Embracing both aesthetics and affect, the concept of cooling down is not new to Smith’s oeuvre. Indeed, its signature characteristics that include a calm authorial voice, controlled pace of prose, a self-aware narrator, and an insistence on reflection appear in all of Smith’s work, including novels such as White Teeth (2000) and Swing Time (2017) and non-fiction, such as Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2010) and Feel Free (2019). This article examines narrative structure, affective appeal, and political commentary as the three cooling-down registers deployed in the “pandemic” essays of Intimations. Reading against the organizational grain of the collection, the article is organized by discussing them out of sequence to emphasize an alternative juxtaposition that renders Smith’s intervention through form, affect, and/or politics most accessible.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. I would like to thank Michael Bibler and Alexandra Chiasson for reading this essay. The CFP for this Special Issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing quotes cultural critic Byung-Chul Han as describing the post-COVID world as a “burnout society”.
2. John Williams (Citation2020) sees this as a collection of “ultra-timely essays (several written in the past few momentous months) [that] showcases her trademark levelheadedness”.
3. For example, see the many blogs and websites dedicated to publishing poetry in the wake of the pandemic, such as “Mediation Beyond Borders” (https://mediatorsbeyondborders.org/pandemic-poetry-calming-words-in-the-midst-of-chaos/).
4. Indeed, in “Peonies”, Smith wryly comments that “the part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department” (Citation2020, 6).
5. My use of the word “dance” deliberately suggests the relationship between direct naming of the catastrophe and its oblique representation – as sashay and counter-sashay within the graceful synchrony of the formal structure of a dance. As Kate Rigby (Citation2015) argues, “one aspect of what it means to dance with disaster [ … is ] to develop modes of personal and collective comportment that are no longer premised on certitude [ … ] but that instead presuppose the unforeseeable. The dance I have in mind in here would therefore have to be largely improvisational” (5; emphases added). Terms such as Rigby’s “dance with disaster” and “slow-burn” are an extrapolation and expansion of some of the ideas in Postcolonial Disaster (Rastogi Citation2020).
6. Marcus Enquist and Anthony Arak (Citation1994) state that “[h]umans and certain other species find symmetrical patterns more attractive than asymmetrical ones” (169).
7. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (Citationn.d.), “intimations” derives from “Mid-15c., ‘action of making known,’ from Old French intimation (14c.), from Lat Latin intimationem (nominative intimatio) ‘an announcement,’ noun of action from past-participle stem of Latin intimare ‘make known, announce, impress’ (see intimate [adj.). Meaning ‘action of expressing by suggestion or hint, indirect imparting of information’ is from 1530s” (n.p.).
8. In “Hovering Young Man”, Smith articulates the necessity of tethering. “It is easy to despise institutions, to feel irritated or constrained by them [ ... ] but confronted with the style of Cy I felt glad he was at least tethered to an institution, like a red balloon caught in a tree” (Citation2020, 55).
9. The essay starts from an evocation of female fertility and ends on the death of a young girl, the screengrab circling back to the opening and closing moments of the human life cycle.
10. As Smith says, “is it possible to be as flexible on the page – as shamelessly self-forgiving – and ever changing – as we are in life? We can’t seem to find the way. Instead, we write to swim in an ocean of hypocrisies, moment by moment. We know we are deluded, but the strange thing is that this delusion is necessary” (Citation2020, 8).
11. Smith’s “whimsy” may be seen as self-critique and an acknowledgement of her own privilege. According to Frenkel, “ ‘Something to Do’ exhibits the privileged positioning of Smith (and others like myself) amid the uncertainties of pandemic life [ ... ]. As someone who was not hampered by food scarcity or under-resourced living conditions, Smith articulates a restless languor that marked the COVID-19 affectivity of lockdown” (Citation2021, 215). But since Smith is replicating the very privilege she critiques (of not being an essential worker) in the act of critiquing it, the self-awareness can ring a little hollow.
12. “Although the most powerful art [ ... ] is an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself” that animates a work of art. (Smith Citation2020, 27).
13. See, for example, Arundhati Roy’s comment on God of Small Things (quoted in Rastogi Citation2020, 237–238).
14. A Black British writer of Jamaican origin identifying post-war Europe as a model to create an equitable social order is ironic, but also reveals the extent of the malaise in US society. Even post-war Britain did better for its battle-scarred citizenry.
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Notes on contributors
Pallavi Rastogi
Pallavi Rastogi is a professor of English at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century (2020) and Afrindian Fictions: Diaspora, Race, and National Desire in South Africa (2008). She has edited Vulnerable South Asias: Precarities, Resistance, and Care Communities in South Asia (2020), and co-edited Before Windrush: Recovering a Black and Asian Literary Heritage within Britain (2008).