Social (im)mobility in the city: reading the London of Charles Dickens and Zadie
Smith through a Bourdieusian lens.
Arianne Brooks
12334715Master’s Thesis in English Literature and Culture, University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Humanities
Statement of originality
This document is written by Arianne Brooks who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.
I declare that the text and work presented in this document are original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it.
Table of contents
Abstract 4
Introduction 5
Chapter 1 – Contexts and Theory 8
Chapter 2 – Charles Dickens and Little Dorrit 20
Chapter 3 – Zadie Smith and NW 37
Conclusion 56
Abstract
Charles Dickens and Zadie Smith are both writers of the modern city and this thesis places both novelists as two notable pillars in regards to representations of London in literature. Sharing several common interests in their writing, both Dickens and Smith often explore the less monumental spaces of the capital and the lives and social issues of those who occupy these spaces, as is the case in both Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Zadie Smith’s NW. By reading these two texts together this thesis will draw connections between the two writers by exploring specifically the issue of social (im)mobility within the city, using the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as its theoretical framework. This thesis argues that through a shared anti-totalising approach to writing and presenting the city, both Dickens and Smith are able to reveal the complex ways in which the power structures of both nineteenth and twenty-first century society limit the mobility of their lower status characters, and that ultimately both writers call for a disruption of these structures.
Introduction
London life has long been an interest in the imagination of novelists, with many fictive depictions of the city and its inhabitants continuing to occupy literary works today. Like London itself which is compiled of layers of histories and narratives, the literature of London also encompasses a multiplicity of histories and narratives, or as Kevin R. McNamara puts it, “The history of the city in literature is as lengthy and rich as the histories of literature and cities themselves” (1). This thesis places Charles Dickens and Zadie Smith as two significant pillars within London’s rich literary history. Dickens is a novelist whose fictional explorations of the city have left a lasting influence on modern literary depictions of London. According to Rosemarie Bodenheimer, “Mid-nineteenth-century London acquired its breadth, depth, and density as a fictional space almost entirely through the work of Charles Dickens […] Dickens took hold of a vast, heterogeneous city with an evocative power that continued to influence fictive Londons well into the twentieth century” (142). This influence extends into the twenty-first century also, and is palpable in the representation of city life in the contemporary novels of Zadie Smith. In most studies that focus on the city in literature Dickens is a prominent figure, particularly when considering the city of London. As a modern-day writer of London, reviewers of Smith’s fiction often remark on similarities between the two novelists. Zenga Longmore, for example, comments that, “many reviewers have compared Zadie Smith to Dickens; I will add my name to the list. Like Dickens, Smith not only has a playwright’s gift for dialogue, she also employs a powerful social outrage with great humour to create thrilling works of literary fiction” (Longmore 2012). While such similarities have been noted by critics, this thesis aims to more thoroughly and comprehensively
draw connections between the two novelists who share similar ways of portraying the city and the lives of its inhabitants and will focus specifically on the novels Little Dorrit and NW.
Dickens’s Little Dorrit, published originally in serial form between 1855-1857, is partially set in the Marshalsea prison in London and follows the life and social ascensions/descensions of the Dorrit family. Smith’s NW published in 2012 is set in northwest London (to which the eponymous post code refers), largely on the Caldwell Estate. Smith’s novel traces the lives of four central characters, paying particular attention to their social trajectories and the diverging paths their lives take once leaving the estate. Both employing the model of literary realism, Dickens and Smith are writers interested in exploring social issues within their fiction, particularly those pertaining to the urban environment and how they affect those who inhabit it. In both Little Dorrit and NW, the narratives are largely located in what could be regarded as subaltern city
spaces, populated by those who occupy disadvantaged positions in society. In both novels, social mobility within the city is central to the narratives and both authors trace their characters’ progressions, and regressions, through the social sphere. By applying the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this thesis will reveal how Dickens and Smith explore the detailed and intricate ways in which the social structures are manifest in the lives of their characters.
Bourdieu’s framework is particularly useful for reading the social environment of Dickens and Smith’s London as it turns away from totality and focuses on the more intricate, minute and varied factors that contribute to power structures and social standings. This anti-totalising perspective, I argue, is the approach both Dickens and Smith employ to portray the city also. Dickens and Smith’s exploration of the more minute as opposed to monumental spaces of the city offer a partial perspective of the metropolis, presenting it as a fragmented and varied space.
This multifaceted exploration of social structures and the city prevalent in both Dickens and Smith’s work, is more widely detectable in their construction of the realist novel also. As this thesis will explore further, Dickens and Smith both construct a version of realism that resists singularity and encompasses a range of different styles and techniques in order to reflect real life. This thesis will argue that through their anti-totalising approaches to writing, Dickens and Smith take a more detailed and varied view of the world around them and are therefore able to unravel the power structures of the city within their fiction.
The first chapter seeks to establish clearer links between the two novelists, outlining similar critical responses to their fictions. Chapter one also outlines the key concepts of Bourdieu’s theories which will be used as a lens for reading Little Dorrit and NW to investigate the ways in which their characters navigate the social sphere. Chapters two and three will then give close readings of Little Dorrit and NW respectively. Chapter two and three both begin with an analysis of Dickens and Smith’s approaches to realism, through which comparisons will be drawn, particularly in regards to their amalgamation of different styles. These chapters will then go on to draw connections between both author’s representations of the city which, this thesis argues, are depicted from an anti-totalising, partial perspective. Finally, by applying the theories of Bourdieu, both chapters will analyse the ways in which the characters in Dickens and Smith’s novels navigate the city and are (im)mobile, or (un)successful in their accessions through the social sphere. Ultimately, this thesis aims to draw connections between the two novelists, underlining how their similar approaches to realism as a literary genre shape their representations of the city and its societal power structures. Using Bourdieu’s theories as a framework to analyse the way in which Dickens and Smith present social mobility (or lack thereof)
within the city, this thesis argues that both writers communicate the need for a disruption of the social systems of both the nineteenth and twenty-first century.
Chapter 1 – Contexts and Theory
Writing for The New Republic, in a review of Smith’s first novel White Teeth, critic James Wood coined the condemnatory term ‘hysterical realism’, referring to a new style of contemporary fiction which Wood claims is distinguished by an abundance of characters, plots and sub-plots but lacking in human feeling and emotional integrity. According to Wood:
It is hysterical realism. Storytelling has become a kind of grammar in these novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality—the usual charge against botched realism—but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from realism itself (Wood 2000).
The emergence of this novelistic style, Wood claims, can be attributed to Dickens’s influence on contemporary novelists. While reviewers have remarked on the similarities between Dickens and Smith in regards to their chronicling of London scenes, Wood is perhaps the first to most comprehensively draw attention to Dickens’ influence on Smith in regards to form, content and style also. On the emergence of the literary genre ‘hysterical realism’ Wood claims “it is becoming easy to describe the contemporary idea of the ‘big, ambitious novel.’ Familial resemblances are
asserting themselves, and a parent can be named: he is Dickens” (Wood 2000). Yet Wood also ascribes to Dickens the integral aspects of realism he believes contemporary novelists such as Smith have left behind:
Put bluntly, Dickens makes caricature respectable for an age in which, for various reasons, it has become hard to create character. Dickens licenses the cartoonish, coats it in the surreal, or even the Kafkaesque (the Circumlocution Office). Indeed, to be fair to contemporary novelists, Dickens shows that a large part of characterization is merely the management of caricature. Yet that is not all there is in Dickens, which is why most contemporary novelists are only his morganatic heirs. There is in Dickens also an immediate access to strong feeling, which rips the puppetry of his people, breaks their casings, and lets us enter them (Wood 2000).
This ‘botched’, faux-Dickensian realism Wood has accused the likes of Smith and other contemporary writers of, fails to enable readers to ‘enter’ the characters. Hysterical realist writers, according to Wood, initially succeed in presenting characters who are convincingly human in a world in which the degree of verisimilitude is not called into question. As the novel progresses however, the plots and subplots ceaselessly spiral, taking precedence over the emotional depth and development of the character. The profuse situations and interconnecting network of events the characters find themselves in eventually render these characters less credible. This deviation from the Dickensian creation of character leaves the reader with merely caricatures in the place of authentic human beings.
Wood’s criticism of White Teeth has been directly responded to and defended by Smith herself. In an article in The Guardian, Smith addressed the term hysterical realism, stating that “It is a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth”, later justifying this ‘hysterical’ style with the statement, “These are hysterical times” (Smith 2001). As Smith acknowledges, Wood’s argument concerning hysterical realism, while scathing, is somewhat convincing in regards to her earlier works such as White Teeth (2000), and Smith’s novel that succeeded it, The Autograph Man (2002). NW, however,
marks a definitive shift away from the frantic, kinetic, hyperbolic style Smith adopted to portray the heterogeneous London streets in her earlier works. This shift sees a move towards a more hard-hitting, cynical realism, and a more pessimistic view of life in London, with characters that, like Dickens’s, feel authentically human. Despite this stylistic shift however, Smith still radically experiments with form in NW. In an essay titled “Two paths for the novel” in the New York Review of Books, Smith states that, “A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for
some time now, with most other exits blocked” (Smith 2008, 89). This ‘lyrical realism’ that Smith attributes to the likes of Flaubert and Balzac refers to the nineteenth century style of literary realism. The other ‘path’ to which the essays title refers, Smith defines as those novels that present “avant-garde challenges to Realism” (Smith 2008, 99), in the essay Smith hails Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005) for this very reason. Somewhere between these two paths laid out by Smith, is the route NW travels, with its amalgamation of modernist and postmodernist stylistic features whilst also maintaining traditions of realism (Guignery ch. 8). David Marcus recognises Smith’s experimental merging of literary styles and this shift from ‘hysterical realism’ to what he coins “post-hysteric fiction of austerity” (Marcus 2013). According to Marcus, NW provides “a
more sociological and also more experimental realism […] the novel boldly returns to the metafictional and maximalist experiments of her early years—it is, however, a catalogue of economic austerity” (Marcus 2013). This overt move towards a more sociological realism, as well as the noticeably more oppressive view of London in NW, can be usefully compared with Dickens’s attitudes towards London and society in Little Dorrit. According to Peter Preston, the “disenchanted and politically subversive dimensions of [Little Dorrit]” (V) are due to Dickens’s increasing awareness that “the blame for the condition of England lay not with any individual but with the system” (VII). Although Smith’s NW is still infused with the exuberance of her earlier works, the move towards a more experimental, sceptical and social realism littered with characters who do allow us to enter them, arguably sees Smith no longer as Dickens’ “morganatic heir” (Wood 2000) but has critics hailing her instead as “Dickens's legitimate daughter” (Tonkin 2012).
Another of Wood’s criticisms of hysterical realism stems from the genre’s insistence on capturing the vastness and the interconnectedness of human life through the profuse relatedness of spiralling plots and subplots. According to Wood, “Such recent novels as […] White Teeth overlap rather as the pages of an atlas expire into each other at their edges. A landscape is
disclosed—lively and varied and brightly marked, but riven by dead gullies” (Wood 2000). Again, it appears that Wood feels the conventions of realism are being pushed to the extreme. In the same vein as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, hysterical realist writers like Smith, according to Wood, attempt to give a panoramic view, but litter that view with inhuman characters whose interconnectedness lack meaning. However, in NW Smith is not attempting to capture an all-encompassing, atlas-like image in regards to realist representations and this is arguably true of
Smith’s portrayal of the city also. Smith’s experimentation with regards to realism illustrates her lack of interest in portraying a totalising, concrete view of the world we live in. Instead, in NW Smith zones in on particular parts and people to present a fragmented and varied image, NW being described by Tonkin as “fierce and fractured poetry” (Tonkin 2012). This is reflected also in her representation of London, which gives readers a partial, as opposed to total, view of the city. NW, as the title suggests, focuses on the northwest corner of the city – a location peripheral to the centre. Molly Slavin points to the significance of northwest London as a marginal location, and the ambiguity of the title’s initials, that could be taken to mean both ‘northwest’ and ‘nowhere’ (98). Slavin draws attention to the fact that northwest London is a place regarded by many as extraneous or tangential when thinking about London. Furthermore, the novel’s geographic centre within NW is the Caldwell Estate, which, according to Lusin functions as “a prototypical signifier of social disadvantage” (250). Due to the peripheral location of Smith’s characters, and their lower social standing “their geographies may not be seen as central or necessary to the functioning of the city - certainly not like the geography of a white male banker living in Marylebone, for instance” (Slavin 99). However, these narratives should not be seen as less significant or central, when reading the city. Smith’s focus on this specific corner of the capital re-writes the city against the typical, more central and monumental depictions of London in literature.
Dickens also wrote about the spaces of the city that were less often explored in nineteenth century depictions of London. As David Michael Vincent puts it “[Dickens’s] service to his readers was to broaden their more limited neighbourhood experience and invite them to consider the contrasts of situation and opportunity” (Vincent 2018, ch. 29). Through introducing
these subaltern spaces of the city (such as the slums and workhouses) to his narratives, Dickens arguably also wrote against this monumental depiction, instead presenting the capital as a space formed by many, often contrasting spaces that make up a vast unknowable whole. By exploring the narratives of characters from various margins of the city, who are usually those in the lower echelons of society, both Dickens and Smith make these voices just as central and necessary to the fabric of life in London than those who occupy its higher ranks. Similarly to Smith’s fictional London, to read Dickens as an attempt to depict a total view of the city would be to overlook his ingenuity in depicting London as a sprawling, fragmented metropolis with hidden parts and unheard voices. Acknowledging Dickens’s varied and fractured portrayal of the city, Murray Baumgarten posits that:
“[C]ity life in Dickens makes its impact not as a completed image but as a fragmented experience […] this city is not single or whole, but differs at different times and places for narrator and reader, just as it does for different characters who experience it variously as labyrinth, marketplace, prison, and redeemer” (112).
Dickens’s partial, constantly shifting view of the city which resists being read as a total image is echoed in Smith’s novels. Ged Pope’s Reading London’s Suburbs: From Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith identifies Dickens and Smith as two ends of a history of literature set in the
suburbs. Pope posits that, “the suburb has long been considered in a dominant strand of fiction and other cultural work, as not at all the kind of place that could ever be called home” (1). Furthermore, suburbs, by their very definition, are places that exist on the outskirts, locations that allow for a partial view from the periphery. Both Dickens and Smith are concerned with exploring the hidden corners and crevices of the capital, interested in the minute as opposed to
the monumental, presenting readers with an assortment of vibrant and fragmented observations of city life instead of defining the whole. Wood criticised Smith’s fiction for its excess of storylines and her depiction of city life as intensely interconnected. Dickens too faced criticism for the profusion of plotlines, yet, it was the disjointed, loose ended London life in Dickens’s writing that Walter Bagehot criticised, stating “London is like a newspaper. Everything is there, and everything is disconnected” (qtd. In Bodenheimer 2011, 143). Bodenheimer explains how Bagehot’s feelings towards Dickens have made a lasting impact, resulting in:
a critical heritage divided between those who celebrate the variety, accuracy, and imaginative play in Dickens’s streetwise observations, and those who argue for more totalising views of the city […] Such differences in emphasis are tied together by a fundamental question that comes into play whenever representations of the city are discussed: in what sense, if at all, can a metropolis like London […] be known, understood, or viewed as a whole? (144).
Bodenheimer’s reflections echo Henri Lefebvre’s sentiment when he questions “to what extent may a space be read or decoded? A satisfactory answer to this question is certainly not just around the corner” (17). Indeed, both Dickens and Smith appear to emulate this sentiment through their depiction of a city that resists being read as a total image. As Lefebvre notes, a definitive reading of any given space is not ‘just around the corner’, yet both writers, through their exploration of these concealed corners of the city, allow us to read the metropolis as a varied and fragmented space.
The work of sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu is the framework this thesis will use to explore the ways in which Dickens’s and Smith’s characters navigate the city and its spaces both physically and socially. Bourdieu’s work is particularly illuminating in that it is interested in analysing the subtle and varied ways the social order is constructed and maintained. Bourdieu’s framework enables us to turn away from totality, and instead towards seeing the ways in which the existing social order is perpetuated, and at times disrupted, through partial and mobile networks, and how the interrelation of different factors determine our social standing. Rather than explaining social structures with a solely economic theory, Bourdieu looks at the subtle symbolic and cultural aspects of power which vary from person to person and place to place. His theories also help us to understand how the spaces we inhabit, and the surroundings from which an individual has come, play a significant role in shaping the people they are and the types of lives they may lead. Both Dickens and Smith’s texts feature characters who are intrinsically bound to the places in which they grew up, and show how the influences from these places have dictated the trajectory of their lives.
There are several key concepts of Bourdieu’s work which are useful for establishing a framework for reading Little Dorrit and NW. These include; the different forms of capital posited by Bourideu, (economic, social and cultural), habitus, and fields. Ultimately Bourdieu’s theory is designed to help us understand how power and class operate in society. It attempts to make a break from traditional (and often Marxist) understandings of power which concentrate almost exclusively on the role of economic capital in power relations. Bourdieu argues that power is constructed not only through economic capital, but also culturally and socially through the interactions between individuals and the structures around them. Nick Crossley explains that for
Bourdieu, “power and dominance derive not only from possession of material resources but also from possession of cultural and social resources” (86). As well as economic capital, Bourdieu introduces two additional forms of capital, that I will be focusing on, which nest under the term 'symbolic capital'; these are social and cultural. This allows Bourdieu to construct what he argues is a more comprehensive understanding of power. His explanations of these two forms of capital and how they operate are complex and detailed. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this thesis I will give a basic explanation.
Social capital is defined as “the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 119). It is the people we meet, the social circles we operate in and the social groups we form over time. Put simply, it is 'who you know'. The social capital an individual accumulates can increase opportunity and therefore social mobility, in other words, “who you know can be a resource just like a bank account” (Calhoun 380). For example, in NW, because Natalie does not possess the economic capital to pay for it herself, her law degree is funded by the family of her partner whom she meets at university – this is an example of social capital in action. One of the key factors of Bourdieu’s theory of social capital is that these networks we form throughout our lives are ‘more or less institutionalised’. This is important because it highlights the semi-permanent nature of these networks, but also that they can be exclusive or inclusive.
If social capital is who you know, cultural capital can be described as ‘what you know’. Bourdieu divides cultural capital into two component parts; the “embodied state” and the “objectified state” (Bourdieu 243). The embodied state can be found “in the form of long-lasting
dispositions of the mind and body” (Bourdieu 243). This includes the knowledge of the world we learn over time but also things like accent, our body language, and the vocabulary we use (Rob Moore 102). As well as the facts and skills we learn at school or in the workplace, it is also the subtle and nuanced characteristics we inherit from our environments. A young woman living on council estate exhibits a very different embodied form of cultural capital than a young woman living in a boarding school for example. The ‘objectified state’ in essence, are the physical forms of cultural capital that compose an individual's social world. These include “pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines” (Bourdieu 243).
Just as economic capital can be accrued by the individual (for example via income, property or other assets), cultural and social capital can also be accumulated. Just like economic capital can assist or circumscribe an individual’s ability to become upwardly mobile, so too can social and cultural capital. These types of symbolic capital, just like economic capital, order society and create the structures around us. Bourdieu recognises that often the possession of economic capital assists the acquiring of cultural capital, yet makes clear that “socio-economic status and cultural capital can vary independently and the latter cannot simply be collapsed back into the former” (Moore 110).
There are two further concepts Bourdieu uses to develop his theory which will be particularly illuminating when analysing how Dickens’ and Smith’s characters navigate the city space. These are ‘fields’ and ‘habitus’. The idea that what we know (cultural capital) and who we know (social capital) are instrumental in helping us to navigate the social structures becomes more complex when, as Bourdieu acknowledges, these social structures vary depending on place.
According to Bourdieu, life is made up of different ‘fields’, which are in other words, the different arenas in which social life takes place. Richard Jenkins defines a field as such:
“A field, in Bourdieu’s sense, is a social arena within which struggles or manoeuvres take place over specific resources or stakes and access to them […] A field, therefore, is a structured system of social positions—occupied either by individuals or institutions—the nature of which defines the situation for their occupants. It is also a system of forces which exist between these positions; a field is structured internally in terms of power relations” (52-53).
Fields can vary in size and often overlap, for example a university is one field, a specific department within that university is also a field. Within any given field, the symbolic capital an individual has is key to their ability to successfully navigate that field. Within the field of a city like London, there are numerous others fields in which the structured social system varies dramatically despite the close proximity of these differing social arenas. Take for example William Dorrit. Within the prison walls he is held in high regard, yet he only has to step a few feet outside the gates of the Marshalsea, and therefore into a different field, to find the social and cultural capital he possesses operates in an entirely different way.
Thinking about how symbolic capital interacts with these fields brings us to the last key component of Bourdieu’s theory, which will help to explore the social mobility of the characters in Little Dorrit and NW: ‘habitus’. “Habitus […] refers to the way we intuitively, unconsciously position ourselves in the world and relate to the environments around us. It is formed through a learning process by which experience comes to be embodied so that it shapes our action
unconsciously” (Calhoun 378). Habitus is a combination of social and cultural capital: our personal history and background, our education, our experiences in life, the people we have met and know and so on. Our habitus plays a large part in determining how successfully we navigate a given ‘field’. It is important to note that Bourdieu is not suggesting that we are pre-programmed beings whose actions are solely dictated by our upbringing. Instead, Bourdieu stresses that the nature of the field in which the habitus is operating is also a crucial factor, and it is the relationship between the two that determines how well an individual is able to navigate that field (Karl Maton 50).
Bourdieu’s ideas have been hugely influential on sociological thought and our collective understanding of how power operates in society, so much so that cultural and social capital are not unfamiliar phrases in modern parlance. His framework can also be applied to literature. Both Dickens and Smith present characters who occupy disadvantaged positions in society. These characters are constrained by the power structures around them, not just because of their financial standings but because there is more to their disadvantage than solely economics. Both writer’s characters are operating within the city of London, a space which presents them with a collection of varied and complex social arenas to navigate. As this thesis aims to show by applying Bourdieu’s framework, the work of Dickens and Smith, whether intentionally or not, through their anti-totalising approaches to writing, reveal the ways in which symbolic capital and habitus shape the lives of their characters, either working to enhance or limit their ability to become upwardly mobile within the city. Bourdieu’s theory works particularly well in the study of literature because it is nuanced and, in many ways, intuitive. Literature is not a scientific study of society but an interpretation that often sheds light on the world around us.
Chapter 2 - Charles Dickens and Little Dorrit
In the much-quoted preface to Bleak House (1852-3) Dickens states that, “In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things” (XXXIV). In this, Dickens appears to be addressing his approach to writing realism, which sees the unusual combination of both the realistic and the fantastic, or what W.F. Axton calls the “antithetical, modes of fact and fancy, empirical realism and imaginative fantasy” (311). Although, as Caroline Levine argues, critics have reached no fixed consensus on the necessary components of the realist novel (84), Dickens is clearly interested in amalgamating different styles in order to create his interpretation of realism. According to Wendy Parkins, “a realist novel of the mid-nineteenth century may well include sentimental elements, as well as, say, aspects of melodrama or satire” (Parkins 2018, ch. 33). This inclusion of aspects from multiple genres is evident in Dickens’s writing and it is clear that he is conscious of this stylistic tendency. In Oliver Twist (1837-9) Dickens self-referentially mentions the melodramatic aspect of his own prose, “It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon” (OT 106). Later adding, “such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight” (OT 106). Dickens seems to be attesting that melodrama and ‘real life’ are closely linked, and that part of the structure of his realism is to include these melodramatic moments, that are not ‘unnatural’ occurrences in life. This idea that these melodramatic extremities are a part of the very fabric of real-life chimes with hysterical realism’s presentation of realism, in that often real-life itself is hysterical or melodramatic.
As well as in the preface to Bleak House, another quote can be found in the first issue of Household Worlds (1850) where Dickens again references his ‘romantic’ stylistic choice when he
states that “in familiar things, even in those which are repellent on the surface, there is Romance enough, if we will find it out” (qtd. in Vanfasse 2004, par. 30). This romanticism is palpable in Dickens’s descriptions of his heroines, as is the case in regards to the characterisation of Little Dorrit:
A woman, probably of not less than two-and-twenty, she might have been passed in the street for little more than half that age. Not that her face was very youthful, for, in truth, there was more consideration and care in it than naturally belonged to her utmost years but she was so little and light, so noiseless and shy, and appeared so conscious of being out of place among the three hard elders, that she had all the manner and much of the appearance of a subdued child (LD 52-4).
Little Dorrit’s “innocence, [and] her solicitude for others” (LD 96) appears to extend beyond her good nature and takes physical form in her child like appearance and delicate frame. Constant references to Little Dorrit’s “diminutive” and “fragile” (LD 165) physical presence all contribute to this sentimental image of her character. This attraction to the romantic aspects of the familiar however, has generated criticisms. On Dickens’s creation of character, George Eliot felt that:
We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character — their conception of life, and their emotions — with the same truth as
their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies (236-237).
Eliot sees Dickens’s idealising and romanticising as lacking in psychological authenticity. To Eliot, Dickens’s characters are merely outward facing images, the inward, psychological facets of his characters are not adequately enough explored, leaving them hollow. James Fitzjames Stephen is another contemporary of Dickens who opposed his sentimental, caricatured depiction of people in his novels. In one particularly scathing review Stephen wrote:
Mr Dickens was led by nature as much as by art to mix up a very strong dose of sentiment with his caricature. From first to last, he has tried about as much to make his readers cry as to make them laugh; and there is a very large section of the British Public — and especially of the younger, weaker, and more ignorant part of it — which considers these two functions as comprising the whole duty of novelists. […] There is a sex in minds as well as in bodies, and Mr Dickens’s literary progeny seem to us to be for the most part of the feminine gender. (qtd. in Carney 2012)
This criticism echoes Wood’s response to Smith’s fiction that it is too ‘hysterical’, not least because of the etymology of the word ‘hysterical’ in relation to the female gender. Undoubtedly, Wood’s use of the word was due to its more modern meaning ‘uncontrollable’ and not in relation to gender. Nonetheless, these criticisms echo each other in that there is a sense that in both Dickens and Smith’s writing, there appears to be an abundance of realism to the point of hysteria or sentimentality, resulting in a lack of characters who feel authentically human. Wood’s feeling that in Smith we see that “the conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the
contrary, exhausted, and overworked” (Wood 2000) could arguably be applied to Dickens’s writing and his perhaps overly romantic or sentimental depiction of life.
Yet despite this often-emphatic romance, Dickens’s dualistic interest in both the romantic and the familiar communicates his view of realism as a genre that resists singularity. According to Newsom, Dickens’s “fascination is for neither the ‘romantic’ nor the ‘familiar’ singly, but for both together. Or, we could say, his fascination is for the interplay generated by his own profound conflict about them” (9). Rejecting a singular or totalising take on writing realism is also something we can detect in Smith’s writing. In White Teeth Smith merges the realistic and the incredible, or ‘hysterical’. Take for example the array of characters that can be found in Smith’s fictional northwest London:
Now the children knew the city. And they knew the city breeds the mad. They knew Mr White-Face, an Indian who walks the streets of Willesden with his face painted white, his lips painted blue, wearing a pair of tights and some hiking boots; they knew Mr Newspaper, a tall skinny man in an ankle-length raincoat who sits in Brent libraries removing the day’s newspapers from his briefcase and methodically tearing them into strips; they knew Mad Mary, a black voodoo woman with a red face whose territory stretches from Kilburn to Oxford Street but who performs her spells from a bin in West Hampstead […] (WT 174).
Smith’s realism incorporates a London that borders on the ridiculous, filled with cartoon-like characters. In NW, Smith continues this pluralist approach to realism that is not determined by
any fixed definition and amalgamates different genres. The opening chapters of the novel, for example, adopt a stream of consciousness style:
Doorbell! She stumbles through the grass barefoot, sun-huddled, drowsy. The back door leads to a poky kitchen, tiled brightly in the taste of a previous tenant. The bell is not being rung. It is being held down. In the textured glass, a body, blurred. Wrong collection of pixels to be Michel (NW 5).
Smith then moves away from this more modernist style to a more post-modern style in the part of the novel titled ‘Host’, which experiments with form by dividing the text into 185 numbered sections. Through their writing, and Smith’s response to Wood that “these are hysterical times” (Smith 2001) and Dicken’s assertion that “in familiar things […] there is Romance enough” (qtd. in Vanfesse 2004) both writers make it clear that their versions of realism leave room for the hysterical or romantic, and reject any single definition of realism.
This anti-totalising view of realism extends beyond both writers’ experimentation with style and is also apparent in their representation of the city. According to Levine, “on the one hand, in its struggle to capture social relations, realist fiction strives to give an overarching view, understanding particularities as elements that signify within a larger whole […] On the other hand, realist texts evince an ongoing skepticism about overarching and totalizing perspectives” (98). While Dickens and Smith are both interested in capturing social relations, and the vast impact of these relations, both writers dismiss totalising perspectives when it comes to writing the city. Instead of depicting London as a space that can be conceived or seen as a whole, both writers instead present fragmented, partial perspectives. This partial view is largely due to the
exploration of the parts of London less explored by literature of the time. Dickens sought to “defamiliarize urban experience, removing the veil of habit to reveal an otherness that disturbs any complacency of perception” (Bowen and Pattern 171). The exploration of these less monumental, de-centralised spaces of the capital inevitably meant exploring the lives of those who occupied them, who were usually those on the lowest rungs of the social ladder.
In Little Dorrit, as in many of Dickens’s novels, the narrative traces character’s ascensions, or descensions, in the social sphere. Initially Little Dorrit received a less enthusiastic reception from readers and critics than Dickens’s other novels. In recent decades however, Little Dorrit has garnered more critical attention (Francesca Orestano 1). The bleak and oppressive atmosphere of Little Dorrit is often remarked on and although initially the overwhelming graveness may have caused the lack of interest, this very quality of the novel, and what it may represent, later attracted a new found critical interest. This dark tone is often attributed to both the prison motif and more widely, the negative political and social stance the novel supposedly signifies. Within the novel the prison exists in actuality as the Marshalsea, and this notion of imprisonment (both literally and symbolically) pervades throughout the text serving to reflect the oppressive nature of society. Hilary Schor argues that, “the social sphere [is] not infinitely expansive but terminally reducible to carceral metaphor” (70), alluding to the way the social systems and institutions in Little Dorrit, most notably the Circumlocution Office, make it almost impossible for any of the
characters to attain any level of autonomy. Lionel Trilling states that, more so than any other of Dickens’s novels which are all, to some extent, about society, Little Dorrit “is about society in its very essence” (577). This view of society as imprisoning and hostile is palpable in the novel’s
depiction of London also, as apparent in the first of many passages within the text that conjures up a view of the capital:
It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of dire despondency (LD 31).
This ominous scene marks Arthur Clennam’s arrival in London after his time away in China. According to Baumgarten, “London arrival scenes entail both danger and opportunity for the character through whom the city is focalized. They invariably mark an important stage in the characters’ lives” (220). Whilst being a significant moment of Arthur Clenam’s life, this initial dismal description barely hints at opportunity, and is perhaps indicative instead of the repressive nature of the city and forebodes the constrictive force of social structures that await.
Dickens’s criticisms of society are most explicit in the representation of institutions such as the Circumlocution Office, the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and Merdle’s financial system. Dickens’s satirising of these social institution’s shortcomings, as Schor notes, encourages us to read Little Dorrit as “social doctrine” (64), but to what extent Dickens was a radical social commentator or not divides critical opinion. When reading Little Dorrit today, due to the specific grievances rooted in specific historic institutions, the novel could arguably be rendered outdated in its relatability to contemporary society. According to Trilling however:
As the particulars seem less immediate to our case, the general force of the novel becomes greater, and Little Dorrit is seen to be about a problem which does not yield easily to time. It is about society in relation to the individual human will. This is certainly a matter general enough - general to the point of tautology, were it not for the bitterness with which the tautology is articulated, were it not for the specificity and the subtlety, and the boldness with which the human will is anatomized (578).
I agree with Trilling’s observation that Little Dorrit presents an insightful view of society in its relation to the individual will, and more specifically, it’s stifling of the individual will. Little Dorrit raises questions about the individual’s agency versus the societal power structures that surround them. This is most accentuated if we look at the character’s attempts to progress socially and transcend their original positions dictated by the hierarchical order of nineteenth century society in England. While some characters are able to climb the social ladder, and others are unable to progress at all, no one within the novel is entirely accomplished in their progression. Even within the context of Victorian England, applying Bourdieu’s theories, which attempt to explain the construction, as well as the endurance of social divisions, can help us to read the varied, systematic ways in which individuals are unable to progress.
Money, or economic capital, plays a large part in Little Dorrit, and the novel itself is divided into two sections named ‘poverty’ and ‘riches’. Debt is the reason for the family’s imprisonment and when the Dorrit family inherit a large sum of money they are propelled to a higher social standing. While undoubtedly economic capital is a key component in the social ascension/descension of the Dorrit family, it is not the only factor that determines their social
standing. Bourdieu stresses the importance of different types of capital in being instrumental to the structure of the social world:
The structure of the distribution of the different types and subtypes of capital at a given moment in time represents the immanent structure of the social world, I.e., the set of constraints, inscribed in the very reality of that world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success for practices. It is in fact impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one re-introduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognized by economic theory (Bourdieu 242).
Bourdieu turns away from the idea that in the social world, power is constructed almost exclusively via economic capital. Little Dorrit is interesting in that while it focuses on the importance of money, it simultaneously explores an individual’s place in the social order based on other forms of capital also. Take for example the position of the Dorrit family within the Marshalsea prison, in particular the patriarch of the family William Dorrit. Imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea, the aggregation of William Dorrit’s economic capital amounts to almost nothing. Yet, despite this he is still able to attain an elevated position and exert power in the ‘field’ (to use Bourdieu’s term) that is the prison. Heralded the “Father of the Marshalsea”, a title he “grew to be proud of” (LD 65), William Dorrit maintains a position of authority within the Marshalsea, even instating customary procedures, “all newcomers were presented to him. He was punctilious in the exaction of this ceremony” (LD 66). Although, due to the absence of economic capital, one would expect the Marshalsea to alleviate class boundaries and social hierarchies, this is not the case. Instead, the Marshalsea is arguably a microcosm of society in regards to its power
structures, even without the distinctions that economic capital imposes. This is due to the other forms of capital that help to establish power structures. According to the turnkey of the Marshalsea, Mr Dorrit was:
Brought up as a gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed’cated at no end of expense. Went into the Marshal’s house once, to try a new piano for him. Played it, I understand, like one o’clock - beautiful! As to languages – speaks anything (LD 64).
All of this acquired cultural capital can be used as currency in the social arena, as is the case with William Dorrit. Of course, there is also a heavy dose of delusion when it comes to William Dorrit and his self-image. Nonetheless, the cultural capital, both in the embodied and objectified state, he has acquired throughout his life (and before his imprisonment) has enabled him to exert authority over those in the Marshalsea who maintain a lower position in wider society. Take, for example, William Dorrit’s treatment of Old Nandy (Mrs Plornish’s father):
the relishing manner in which he remarked on the pensioner’s infirmities and failings. As if he were a gracious Keeper, making a running commentary on the decline of the harmless animal he exhibited (354).
According to Lisa-Marie Teubler, William Dorrit’s undermining permits him to “re-establish the appropriate power structure” (46). Thus, in the field that is the Marshalsea, the wealth of symbolic capital William Dorrit possesses enables him to occupy a higher position. It is hard to imagine a character such as Mrs Plornish’s father from a lower social rank, who would therefore not possess the cultural capital that William Dorrit does (such as a good education, the ability to
speak multiple languages or play musical instruments), would be able to achieve the status of ‘Father of the Marshalsea’.
Moreover, William Dorrit also manages to use this elevated position to acquire economic capital. As Bourdieu informs us “cultural capital […] is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital” (243). For the Father of the Marshalsea, “it became not unusual circumstance for letters to be put under his door at night, enclosing half a crown, two half-crowns, now and then at long intervals even half a sovereign […] he received the gifts as tributes, from admirers, to a public character” (LD 66). The cultural capital William Dorrit acquired from his life before the Marshalsea has contributed to his highly regarded position within the prison, which in turn has led to the acquiring of money. William Dorrit is deluded about the reality of his situation as an inmate in a debtor’s prison, choosing to view what could arguably be called charity instead as ‘tributes from admirers’. Yet, it is not entirely delusion as he does hold a position of authority within the prison, and this is due to his “embodied capital, external wealth converted into an integral part of the person, into a habitus” (Bourdieu 244-5). William Dorrit exemplifies how economic capital is not the only determining factor when it comes to power relations in society and also that other forms of capital are beneficial for economic gain.
In regards to Little Dorrit, it is the difference in ‘habitus’ that distinguishes her greatly from William Dorrit despite both of them living in the Marshalsea and therefore occupying a relatively similar position within society. Unlike all the other members of the Dorrit family, Little Dorrit is the only one to have been born within the Marshalsea prison, and has therefore known no other way of life. The frequent mentions of her being born within the Marshalsea throughout the novel highlight the importance of this fact as a defining part of her character. Little Dorrit’s
birth within the Marshalsea, and her subsequent inability to adapt to her new position after the improvement in her economic situation, communicates Little Dorrit ‘s exploration of the determined nature of social inequality. Little Dorrit not only offers a partial view of the city from its peripheral spaces (like the Marshalsea) that details the lives of those on the periphery of society (like the incarcerated Dorrit family) but also looks at the partial and varied ways that societal power structures can limit opportunity and dictate the life of an individual.
Schwarzbach has noted Dickens’s interest in the “relation of identity between dweller and dwelling” (155) in Little Dorrit, and argues that in earlier novels such as Dombey and Son, Bleak House and Hard Times, “[T]he relation had developed into a tool for exploring the way the social
system was manifest in the lives of individuals. In Little Dorrit the equation again takes a central place in the novel’s structure, but with new and profound reverberations of meaning” (155). Dickens is clearly interested in the effect one’s surroundings have on a person. The Marshalsea, being all she has ever known, has an enduring impression on Little Dorrit and the novel explores this psychological effect in great depth, particularly in its relation to one’s ability to become upwardly mobile. The lasting psychological impacts the Marshalsea holds over Little Dorrit are perhaps indicative of Dickens’s own feelings regarding the prison as, like the eponymous character, Dickens’s father too was imprisoned in the debtor’s jail for a time. The Marshalsea appears to cast an inescapable shadow over its inhabitants, even after they have been freed, altering the way they are able to move forward with their lives both physically and socially. Even Arthur Clennam, who in the first part of the novel is not imprisoned in the Marshalsea, feels the debilitating effects of it after having to spend just one evening there:
The walls were so near to one another, and the wild clouds hurried over them so fast, that it gave him a sensation like the beginning of sea-sickness to look up at the gusty sky. The rain, carried aslant by flaws of wind, blackened that side of the central building which he had visited last night, but left a narrow dry trough under the lee of the wall, where he walked up and down among waifs of straw and dust and paper, the waste droppings of the pump, and the stray leaves of yesterday’s greens. It was as haggard a view of life as a man need look upon (LD 88).
This passage conveys the claustrophobia of the prison walls that seem to engulf the inhabitants both literally and metaphorically. While communicating the dismal conditions and ‘haggard’ view the prison offers those within it, this passage also simultaneously hints at the impossibility of life outside of the prison. The glimpse of the clouds and the sky, or that which is beyond the prison walls, installs a nauseating feeling - not only does the prison limit a person’s physical space but it also limits their ability to navigate or make sense of the world outside of it. Furthermore, it reflects Dickens’ depiction of London in the novel more widely, in that it favours a partial, peripheral, more comprehensible view. Any attempt to look beyond, to a more total view is disorienting and inconceivable.
This notion of life outside the prison being unknowable is most apparent in Little Dorrit herself and renders her unable to ever feel completely fulfilled even after the family’s ascension to wealth. Little Dorrit’s inextricable connection to the Marshalsea is particularly evident when she is locked out of the prison one evening, “They went to the closed gate, and peeped through into the courtyard. ‘I hope he is sound asleep,’ said Little Dorrit, kissing one of the bars, ‘and does not miss me.’ The gate was so familiar and so like a companion […] (LD 165)”. Despite the prison
and its gates being a very tangible source of oppression within Little Dorrit’s life, it is also paradoxically the site of comfort and safety. So much so, that the London streets outside of it cause immobilising trepidation:
’It is the first night,’ said Little Dorrit, ‘that I have ever been away from home. And London looks so large, so barren, and so wild.’ In Little Dorrit’s eyes its vastness under the black sky was awful; a tremor passed over her as she said the words (LD 162-3).
Little Dorrit’s inability to feel fulfilled or content once the family enter an economically advantageous position can be understood using Bourdieu’s theory of habitus. “Simply put, habitus focuses on our ways of acting, feeling, thinking and being. It captures how we carry within us our history, how we bring this history into our present circumstances, and how we then make choices to act in certain ways and not others” (Maton 54). Habitus, therefore, helps us to understand how our personal histories and the dispositions we obtain from these past experiences, can influence how an individual may act in the social arena. Habitus also works in relation to the field in which the individual is in, and can therefore vary depending on the field. In the second part of the novel ‘riches’, Little Dorrit’s struggle to enact her new identity is due to her habitus. Thus, she brings her history, or the Marshalsea, into her present circumstances so that in her mind “only the old mean Marshalsea [is] a reality” (LD 440), her new life of riches seeming instead like a dream. Although Little Dorrit’s social trajectory is upwardly mobile, this inability to feel at ease in her new position arguably sees her enter a state of stasis, “With a remembrance of her father’s old life in prison hanging about her like the burden of a sorrowful time, Little Dorrit would wake from a dream of her birthplace into a whole day’s dream” (LD 440). Going about her days of wealth in a dream-like state, unable to enjoy life, or even comprehend
it as any kind of reality communicates the challenges, beyond the economic, of becoming upwardly mobile if you are from a lower social background. In other worlds, Little Dorrit’s habitus has left her unequipped to deal with most fields that are not the Marshalsea. Although Little Dorrit was able to move freely in and out of the Marshalsea, the limited space defined by the prison walls where she spent the majority of her early life has skewed her ability to see anything outside of the prison as a concrete, comprehensible reality. This again raises the question of totality, as Little Dorrit is only able to fathom a more partial view of the world that is limited to the prison walls. Outside of this, a glimpse at a more total or whole view of the world is inconceivable.
Despite initially adapting to life outside of the Marshalsea, similarly to Little Dorrit, William Dorrit “is doomed to carry his prison with him wherever he goes” (Schwarzbach, 163). Although William Dorrit possessed the appropriate symbolic capital, and maintained the pretense of occupying a higher social standing whilst in the Marshalsea, he too is unable to escape its metaphorical imprisonment. This eventually culminates in a short episode of madness before his death, in which William Dorrit believes he is back in the prison:
Ladies and gentlemen, the duty—ha—devolves upon me of—hum—welcoming you to the Marshalsea. Welcome to the Marshalsea! The space is—ha—limited— limited—the parade might be wider; but you will find it apparently grow larger after a time—a time, ladies and gentlemen—and the air is, all things considered, very good (LD 612).
The limited space of the Marshalsea does indeed ‘grow larger after a time’ eventually becoming all-encompassing in William Dorrit’s mind, as he is unable to differentiate between reality and illusions of the Marshalsea. It is simultaneously limiting in that it has left him unable to make sense of his identity as someone who has been both a prisoner in the Marshalsea and someone who now lives the life of a wealthy gentleman. These two now incongruous identities (prisoner and gentleman) are first brought together when John Chivery, the turnkey’s son, pays a visit to William Dorrit after his release. This results in an aggressive outburst in which William Dorrit tells John Chivery “Your coming here is an affront, an impertinence, an audacity. You are not wanted here” (LD 598). John Chivery not only represents the merging of William Dorrit’s past and present, but also the coming together of what Bourdieu calls ‘fields’. “Each field has its own set of positions and practices, as well as its struggles for position as people mobilize their capital to stake claims within a particular social domain” (Routledgesoc). The field of the Marshalsea, and the field William Dorrit now occupies, have their distinct set of positions and practices, the overlapping of which disrupts William Dorrit’s view of reality, which he can only comprehend in separate parts. When these two fields eventually fully merge in William Dorrit’s mind, to create a more total or whole image of his reality, of both his past and present, the result is a mental breakdown. Ultimately, like Little Dorrit, William Dorrit is unable to navigate life outside of the Marshalsea.
Both Little Dorrit’s and William Dorrit’s inextricable link to the Marshalsea, their struggle to adapt once they have become upwardly mobile, and their subsequent descents not only convey the lasting psychological impacts of poverty and imprisonment but also the anxiety of inertia in Victorian society and the difficulties of progressing through the social sphere. The
structure of the novel captures this very notion of immobility as at the end we see Little Dorrit once again return to the Marshalsea, where the novel began. Ultimately Little Dorrit’s happiness is limited, and although we may be granted what could be regarded as a happy ending in that she achieves domestic happiness, it appears that is all one could hope for in a social system where becoming successfully upwardly mobile is implausible. The final lines of the novel read as such:
They went down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and in shade, the noisy and eager, and the arrogant and the forward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar (LD 778).
In this final passage, Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam return to the bustle of the London streets and into “a modest life of usefulness and happiness” (LD 778). As we have seen, social advancement does not provide a happy, fulfilling life and there is not one wealthy character towards the end of the novel who achieves a happy ending. Marital success is the only real comfort as the pair return to the same London streets that seem unchanged, communicating that the oppressive social structures still remain, everything as it was. On these final moments of the novel, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst posits that:
It is a span of thought which offers one of [Dickens] most assured and subtle demonstrations of the art of the novel, in which figures are plucked from the crowd, meaningful structures are assembled from the chatter of everyday life, and events are given a narrative shape even as the writing is quietly acknowledging that such tidiness is a fiction of our own choosing. The real world is far messier, far noisier, far
more crowded, and it is Dickens’s genius to create a version of it on the page that seems complete in itself while always suggesting there is more to be said (145).
Bowen’s observations also take us back to this notion of totality. As Little Dorrit and Arthur Clenam re-join the vast, unknowable whole that is the city, readers are reminded that their story is one among the many that resonate throughout the metropolis.
Chapter 3 – Zadie Smith and NW
Clearly an advocate for more experimental forms of fiction, Smith is a writer whose body of literary work continually seeks to address and reexamine the construction of the realist novel. Implicitly within her novels, and more explicitly in her non-fiction essay collections, Smith engages in discourse surrounding the current state of the contemporary novel. From the ‘hysterical realism’ of her earlier works such as White Teeth and The Autograph Man (2002), to the “ethical profundity” (David James 204) of the Forster-inspired On Beauty (2005), it is clear Smith does not circumscribe her writing to any singular style or form. In an essay titled “Middlemarch and Everybody”, featured in Smith’s collection of essays Changing My Mind (2009), Smith celebrates George Eliot, stating “what twenty-first-century novelists inherit from Eliot is the radical freedom to push the novel’s form to its limits, wherever they may be” (32). In her fourth novel NW, Smith is undoubtedly interested in pushing the ‘novel’s form to its limits’ as she opts for a more hybridized realism, incorporating multiple literary techniques and forms.
NW is divided into five sections, each section bringing with it a distinct style reminiscent
of previous novelistic traditions or writers. The first section titled ‘Visitation’, which follows one of the protagonists Leah, introduces a stream of consciousness style in a typically modernist tone:
She unfurls her fist, lets the pencil roll. Takes her liberty. Nothing else to listen to but this bloody girl. At least with eyes closed there is something else to see. Viscous black specks. Darting water boatmen, zig-zagging. Zig. Zag. Red river? Molten lake in hell? The hammock tips. The papers flop to the ground. World events and property and film and music lie in the grass. Also sport and short descriptions of the dead (NW 4).
According to Nick Bentley, this first section of NW is “reminiscent of Woolf in terms of its use of interior monologue and rhythms; and Joyce and Eliot with respect to its references to popular culture and snippets of overheard language” (737). Within this first section of the novel Smith also presents readers with unusual, innovative snippets of text, such as the sentence that reads “tooth gold tooth tooth gap tooth tooth” (NW 31) with the words on the page shaped to resemble a mouth. Or in the same fashion, the page detailing a poem about (among other things) an apple tree with the words strategically placed to replicate the outline of a tree (NW 28).
The second section titled ‘Guest’ then shifts stylistically, moving away from the merging of modernist and postmodernist techniques featured in ‘Visitation’. Following a day in the life of one of the other protagonists Felix, this second section ‘Guest’ with its third person, omniscient narration takes on a style that is perhaps more aligned with the traditional realist mode of writing, for example:
On the only chair his clothes from the night before had already been folded and placed in a pile. The pink telephone on the glass dresser shone, and so did the glass dresser. He had known many women: he didn’t think he had ever known anyone quite so female. ‘Lift!’ He raised his backside so she could retrieve a sock (NW 99).
The rest of this section continues in much the same manner before the novel again takes a stylistic turn towards a more distinctly postmodern approach in ‘Host’, the third section, which focuses on another protagonist Natalie (formerly Keisha). Broken down into what resembles a numbered list, with some entries spanning over pages and others comprising of a sentence or two, ‘Host’ maps out the life of Natalie Blake. The numbered segments that comprise this part of the novel, although in a clear sequential order, are fragmented and varied, reflecting the identity crisis Natalie experiences (Guignery 2014, ch.8). Bearing on ontological questions and adopting a more experimental form, this section of the novel moves away from the more traditional realist mode of ‘Guest’ and resembles instead a more postmodern text. According to Vanessa Guignery “[Smith] combines modernist strategies with a typically postmodernist tendency to draw attention to the mechanisms of novel-writing, without letting go completely of the road of realism” (Guignery 2013, ch. 8). Like Dickens, whose realism incorporates a number of other genres and styles, Smith too is interested in amalgamating literary techniques in order to form her version of the contemporary novel that, as Guignery posits, is still interested in retaining elements of realism.
As her aptly named essay collection Changing My Mind suggests, Smith is a writer interested in exploring these diverging stylistic avenues, and this indecision about the type of novel she wants to write seems to take place within the very pages of NW, shifting from section
to section. This is at least how critic James feels about the novel, stating “[NW] appears to be attempting so much, on so many formal and thematic fronts, that it can’t decide what it wants to be” (204). This fragmented and interrupted form, which drastically shifts in its tone and style from section to section, has seen critics such as James pick up on the lack of stylistic coherence. These criticisms seem to echo George Orwell’s musings on Dickens, who he believed was a writer “whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is all fragments, all details — rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles (454)”. The ‘architecture’ of NW does take a fragmented, anti-totalising approach yet this seems fitting as it mirrors more widely both Smith’s approach to realism and her depictions of the city. Citing it as one of his ‘books of the year’, James Wood is clearly in favour of Smith’s move away from ‘hysterical realism’ to a more experimental realism. Reviewing NW, Wood states that amongst the “decentered and interrupted form” lies:
a marvellous, implied center to this novel’s style—or perhaps current would be a better word than center: underneath the formal experimentation runs a steady, clear, realistic genius. Smith is a great urban realist. There may be two paths to the novel, as Smith has suggested in a noted essay, or, more likely, there may be fifty-two paths (as her own fiction suggests), but there is also the single “blue river of truth,” as Henry James put it […] and Smith negotiates that grand channel as well as any contemporary novelist. This novel bursts with the imagined, lived, tragic-comic, polyphonic reality of London (Wood 2012).
Like Dickens, whose fiction incorporates elements of the melodramatic or sentimental which constitute the structure of his realism, Smith too experiments with other styles and forms, all the while maintaining a through-line that is the realistic. This affiliation with more traditional modes
