Zadie Smith on Politics, Turning Fifty, and Mind Control

0:05You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.

0:16This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

0:29A new novel by Zadie Smith isn't just a book, it's a real event, and everyone who cares about fiction reads it and talks about it. That's been true since her very first novel, White Teeth. From page one of that book, you heard a new voice, a bold and original voice, and a 25th anniversary edition of White Teeth just came out this year. It's a classic by now, which seems astonishing to say. But if you only know Zadie Smith as a novelist, you're actually kind of missing out because she also writes some of the very, very best essays out there. She thinks with enormous nuance about the way we live now and how to read, about literature, technology, gentrification, politics, is really not a topic that wouldn't benefit from her insight.

1:17Zadie Smith's new book gathers some of those essays, from The New Yorker and elsewhere, in a collection called Dead and Alive.

1:29This year marks the 25th anniversary of White Teeth. And, you know, some novelists, they begin with kind of some warm-up books, some imitative books, and then they find their stride and they become themselves. White Teeth was this blazing, white-hot debut. And somewhere along the line in this book, you indicate that you don't completely recognize the Zadie Smith that is behind White Teeth. What do you mean? I think it would be really strange to feel very close to your 25-year-old self when you're 50. I think for anybody that would be a strange relation. But I have nothing but warm feelings. First of all, I'm grateful to that girl because she wrote a book which enabled my life.

2:16It gave me license to write as I like, when I like, which I don't think I would have had without that kind of initial hit. And I love the energy of that book as I love the energy of all debut novels. But as you get older, you have a different kind of feeling about the world. It gets quieter inside. You know, I am quieter inside than that person. She was really like, I always think of it like Gene Kelly, like running into New York, like, gotta dance. That was my vibe. And I'm just not there anymore. You know, I have lots of excitements, but yeah, a little less energy for sure. Zadie, when John Updike was alive and living in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, he lived in a captain's house and it had three little offices.

3:04One was used for writing novels, one was used for paying bills and correspondence, and one was for writing essays, you know, and he jumped from room to room. I don't imagine with real estate prices being what they are, you have three studies. No, no, it all happens in the same chaos, pretty much. But now you've published a book of essays and not for the first time. What role does the essay have in your writing life? What are they for? I think it's about spending a lot of time listening. Because I'm not often in the kind of thick of things, the way people are these days. When you say you're not in the thick of things, what does that mean?

3:45I think I keep up. Like I am, I'm basically living in 2003, right, in terms of my media diet. I listen to things, I read things, I watch television, but I'm not in this kind of daily diet of constant information. So it's a little bit, everything that I do, I guess, is a bit slower or feels slower to me. So you're not posting, you're not doom scrolling. No, no. And you don't feel obliged to respond to the political outrage of the moment. Oh, I feel plenty of outrage, but I just think about individual human capacities and what a human brain is designed to take in, or what my brain can take in. And it's just, I'm like the slow food movement of writing.

4:33It just takes me a minute to think. Sadie, one of the most important essays in this book, I think, is called Fascinated to Presume in Defense of Fiction. It's about the question of representation, which has been a focus of so much talk in the literary world in recent years. In other words, who gets to tell what story, how much a fiction writer is allowed to imagine about people different from himself or herself. Wasn't that the anxiety you were responding to? Partly of speaking for others, speaking in the place of others. I don't think those are ridiculous concerns. But what I was trying to untangle in that essay is different kinds of discourse.

5:18Because I thought the language of representation, for example, political representation, was seeping into an area where it's not a point for point relation. The voice of fiction doesn't come from a single legal entity who can be stood up in court and defended. The voice of fiction is diffuse anyway. Zeddy, let me read to you a passage from the same essay. The old and never especially helpful adage, write what you know, has morphed into something more like a threat, stay in your lane. This principle permits the category of fiction, but really only to the extent that we acknowledge and confess that personal experience is inviolate and non-transferable.

5:58It concedes that personal experience may be displayed very carefully to the unlike us, to the stranger, even to the enemy, but insists it can never truly be shared by them. This rule also pertains in the opposite direction. The experience of the unlike us can never be co-opted, ventriloquized, and so on. The one thing about talking about essays is you find yourself saying the same thing, but worse. Without the commas. But one thing I would add to it is partly it's my pride. Like I really noticed, like, for instance, when I was on tour with On Beauty, that nobody, not one person in any interview ever said to me, you know, writing Howard is an act of cultural appropriation.

6:42Howard is a kind of white middle-aged professor. And my pride is hurt by that. I am hurt by the idea that there's nothing you can take from a white man. There's no way you can appropriate from him. And I apparently don't have the power to do it. But anyone can take anything from me at any second. and I'm meant to be vulnerable like a child in front of any reference to myself. I find that offensive, to be honest. If I'm going to appropriate, I hope I should be able to appropriate from a middle-aged white man that I'm able to take him, make him, create him. That's part of my M.O. as a novelist. And it just struck me that the conversation only ever went in one direction.

7:22And I understand the argument is that such a person has power and you can do nothing to harm him. But, you know, in that novel, I was kind of trying to harm him. I did my best. And, you know, he's ridiculed in parts and he's silly in parts and more than anything, he's human. And that is my job. That's where fiction lives. But if someone's saying to you, and sometimes I would have this reader say to me, I don't like that idea of fiction. I don't enjoy that kind of fiction. What are you going to do? Argue with them? If you don't like that kind of fiction, that's cool. You don't have to read it. There's plenty of other kinds of fiction to read, science fiction or the kind of autofiction that stays very close to the human person who's writing it.

8:05Those are all options. My fiction may indeed be out of fashion, and that happens in fiction. How do you mean? Well, trends pass. There are periods in fiction, I don't know if you try and read novels from the 70s, that always interests me. Like there's a certain kind of overwrought 70s, often American novel, actually, which is almost unreadable now because it's so close to its moment, to its time, to the various psychedelics that were being taken that it's literally almost in a different language. That happens. And I think that happens to every generation of fiction. And I'm always trying to move forward.

8:44I wouldn't write on beauty again now just because I get bored easy. So I'm always trying to look for a new form, a new way of approaching something. But I love the life in that book, the people in that book, the variety of them. And I think there are readers who love that kind of fiction. I think you know, because I complain to you all the time about this, that I love when you write your essays for The New Yorker. and weep into my pillow when I discover you somewhere else. And one of the best essays you wrote for the New York Review of Books was your response to the film Tar, about an imperious conductor in Germany.

9:27And you write this. It was really interesting. I'm the one severely triggered by statements like Chaucer is misogynistic or Virginia Woolf was a racist. Not because I can't see that both statements are partially true, but because I'm of that generation whose only real shibboleth was, is it interesting? Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fitted, not because you agree with them personally, but because they had the potential to be analyzed just like anything else. What were you responding to in the cultural air there, beyond just the film itself? I think it's just a sensibility thing.

10:04I think when I was writing that tar essay, I was reading all of Virginia Woolf's diaries. That's a lot of Virginia. Like that took me from September till Christmas. And there's so much in Virginia to object to. She can be absolutely atrocious, an unbelievable snob. She can be such a snob. She can be racist at times. She is oddly apolitical, given that Leonard is out there every day working for the socialists. and Virginia is mostly picking mushrooms or thinking about some reviews or the next novel. But I just don't, there's nothing about, there's very few things about a person which makes me turn away completely.

10:49Like there's so much to love in Virginia, so much to value, so much vulnerability, so much sadness, so much heroism, like such an extraordinary feminist, a beyond icon, I need another word for it. She kind of created a mode of thinking in me and so many other women. And then there are all these blind spots. But as a human... What was the mode of thinking? Forgive me for interrupting, but what does that mean?

11:21Virginia thought structurally, like the essay Room of One's Own, It's one of my favorite essays that's ever been published. When she goes to, I believe it's King's College, my old college, she's walking through it on the way to have dinner at a women's college and she sees in King's College the structural advantage that men have, that the meal in the men's college is delicious and there are many courses and there's a lot of wine and there is free time and there is all of this money, superstructure, supporting the genius of men. And then she goes to the women's college, only recently opened, and finds it narrow and cold and hardly any food and hardly any wine.

12:00And she understands that this is not an accident, that the structural situation you make around people to allow or disallow their flourishing is everything. So she is a feminist, but it's not of an individual kind. It was always structural. She understood that. And when she makes that early comparison between Shakespeare and his imagined sister in her mind, Judith, that's a central question. If a woman with the same amount of genius, with the same talent, with the same verve, is born at the same moment, what happens? And she was able to think in that kind of global way. It's not about Judith. It's about the situation into which she's born, which, of course, is now as obvious to us as the sky is blue.

12:40but was a new idea and one which really struck me when I first read that essay.

12:51I'm speaking today with the writer Zadie Smith. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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14:05This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and I'm speaking today with the writer Zadie Smith. Smith's new book, Dead and Alive, collects her essays on a number of topics, including politics. I really love reading Zadie on politics because while she's certainly on the left, she's the kind of thinker who is capable and even insists on letting multiple facts and multiple arguments enter the picture. What you experience when you read her is someone thinking, someone coming to their convictions, and she's never writing out of a sense of fear or the amen chorus. I wanted to hold off on politics as much as we possibly could, but you raised Virginia Woolf's politics and it reminds me of this moment in an essay called Trump Gaza Number One, and you say this.

14:58And it's near to a credo, a political credo, as I think you've come, if you'll forgive me for saying so. Just this little passage. the pressing job of the left right now is to expose this illusion, to insist that this is, in fact, one world we are living in, one in which universal regulatory measures capable of protecting all human life are still possible. To do this, we must need transnational institutions which, however imperfect, persist through time and can't be unilaterally destroyed by the group of ideological gangsters presently occupying the White House. Now, you've written a lot about politics, but you rarely use the words like should and must and so on.

15:42That kind of mode of political writing is usually not yours. No, that's true. You don't write for posters. Can you flesh this out a bit and tell me about the moment at which this was being written and what you're getting at here? I think what I've learned the past few years, which I didn't understand when I first came to America, is the gulf between... It's a kind of historical consciousness gulf about what the left means. And I was thinking about it when I heard you interview Momdani, where you were kind of dragging him over the coals a bit about this phrase democratic socialist. The focus of our campaign has been on housing.

16:32It's been on childcare. It's been on public transit. And in some senses... Forgive me for interrupting. So what you're saying is anything that's a necessity, housing, food, education, should not ever be given over to market instability or prices. It has to be there. It has to be free. No, I think that it has to be a fixture in each and every person's life. I was swimming at the time, so you were in my ears. I was listening to this. I don't have that kind of headphone, yeah. It's so odd to me that his politics are considered in a New York contest radical, where what you are describing is basically the very least that we imagined in 1946 all over Europe.

17:17That social compact that he was trying to describe of decent housing, equal and free education and free health care, is what I grew up in. And I grew up in a context where even somebody like Churchill, his phrase, cradle to the grave, that is the phrase of a Tory in 1943. So it's always amazing how far from what I would call the very least we could do, we have moved. So to call someone like him a communist is mind-blowing from a European perspective. This is Trump's phrase. Yeah. And to hear democratic socialism described as if it is radical left politics, when to me, it's not even far from the center.

18:02That is continually surprising to me. So I guess when I was writing the Trump Gaza piece, I was just trying to reestablish, are we talking about the same thing? On the left, are we talking about the same thing? Because these things to me, which are basic, without which a human society can't flourish. I would not name democratic socialism to us in Europe is just what was until the arrival of Thatcher and Blair and everything that came after it that was what we call government around here so I'm always trying to remember that about my American audience that they've no reason to know that they've never lived in it right apart from the small pockets of what I would call an attempt at social justice after the New Deal.

18:48It's always new as a concept in America, but it's kind of an old one here. All I was drilling down on, and not to get in a defensive crouch, is what is the difference in his mind between democratic socialism or being a social democrat or being a liberal who believes in high social spending? There are shades of difference, and it was worth exploring. There are shades of difference. And I guess I was surprised from my little British perspective about how much defense in the American context you have to make about ring fencing these areas of human flourishing away from the market. I'm always surprised.

19:27It barely exists here. It barely exists in America. And that's what I learned living in New York. And I'm not sure it exists to such a great degree beyond the health care system in Britain. No, it's been unpicked. It's been a 20-year project of unpicking it. I'm always trying to remind myself and to remind other people it's not a fantasy. It is possible. Of course, the dark knowledge, which I'm sure you share with me, is that what made it possible? The absolute ruins of the Second World War. That's a terrifying thought. And that's my most pessimistic thought, that it takes something close to apocalypse for the kind of social compact I'm talking about to be built from the ruins.

20:10So to me, the job of the left is, can we create a discourse which argues for this compact without the necessity of apocalypse? That doesn't seem a very extreme thing to want or say, but it's surprising how hard it is to gather people under that umbrella. On Election Day 2024, you wrote an essay called The Dream of the Raised Arm. And in it, you look at a book that's an account of real dreams that people had during the early days of the Third Reich. And it's written by Charlotte Barat. Many people here in the U.S. had a difficult time or refused to conceptualize Trump's win as a possible advance of authoritarianism and even or a totalitarian impulse.

20:58The line was at that time that if you were wise, the journalists had a tendency to take Trump literally but not seriously and that wise, ordinary people were taking him seriously but not literally. But now it's a year later. Yeah. Now it's a year later. And that essay that you wrote and I'm going to ask you to read from seems devastatingly prescient. I wish you'd read a passage from it if you don't mind. With pleasure, kind of. These dreams of auto-imprisonment in language, Barat argues, illustrate the dark shape that these people's consent takes. They show how people, in blind fear of the hunter, start to play the hunter themselves, as well as the prey.

21:47How they secretly help set and spring the very traps that are meant to catch them. Propaganda posters, megaphones, the radio, such devices appear in these dreams over and over. And such were the paltry propaganda tools Hitler turned to his advantage in spectacular fashion, though they were like crayons on paper compared with what a man like Elon Musk now has at his disposal. So tell me how you would compare those two periods, It's the 30s there and the right now here in the United States and beyond.

22:28I think for me, everybody has a different emphasis on Trump and what's going on. My emphasis has been on, to put it boldly, mind control. I think what's been interesting about the manipulations of a digital age is that it is absolutely natural and normal for people to be offended at the idea that they are being manipulated. None of us like to feel that way. and I think we've wasted about whatever it's been since the invention of the iPhone trying to bat away that idea, calling it a moral panic, blaming each other, talking about it as if it were an individual act of will and I've had a lot of that because I don't have the phone, people talking to me like it's an ethical, I don't know, like I've done something amazing by not having this phone.

23:25when you make it a question of individual morality you forget again the structural context which is that we are all we are all being manipulated me too i have my laptop i'm online a lot of the time i think once you can we can all admit that on the left and the right then we can kind of direct our attention to who's been doing this and to what advantage what to enormous economic advantage. From the very beginning, it was always everything digital, everything online has been talked about as if it's not ideological, as if it's neutral. These are neutral tools, and then we'll do our politics on them.

24:01But it was never neutral. Something that is colonizing your attention, manipulating the way it's directed is not neutral. And when people talk about radicalization on the internet, they like to talk about, you know, radicalize to the right and radicalized to the left. As far as I'm concerned, if you now find it normal for your child, for example, to look at a screen for up to six hours a day, you have been radicalized. You've been radicalized in the idea of what is normal and sane and healthy for a human consciousness to be occupied with. That radicalization is general. But I feel so optimistic because I don't feel like a crazy person saying these things anymore.

24:40Like if we were talking just after I wrote the Facebook essay, I genuinely remember walking into my NYU class and my students were like, it was like they were like patting me and rolling their eyes like, oh, poor Nana, the sad Luddite, who's embarrassed herself saying that Facebook isn't the greatest thing in the world. You know, that's what it was like for a long time. In one of the essays in this book, you mentioned a talk that you gave recently in Barcelona to a group of 14-year-olds in which you told them that to seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies to achieve that right now, all you guys would need to do is look away and thus give a new meaning to the word woke.

25:25It's happening. People are conscious of it. Really? 14-year-olds in the audience, either really or metaphorically, are looking away? I think the thing I find most depressing is that like all of these things, it's class based. So middle class, upper middle class kids, you know, they get the message from their parents. They try and create screen time. They try and control themselves. Well, you know, great. But for me, it has to be much broader than that. I mean, one story which really chilled me very early on in this, my mum was a social worker until fairly recently, and she would go into these houses in our neighbourhood, sometimes with nine, ten children in them, new immigrant families, big families, and it would be a boisterous, noisy place.