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RESEARCH PRODUCT

‘Just keep on walking in a straight line': allowing for chance in Zadie Smith's overdetermined London (White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty)

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International audience; Zadie Smith's three novels signal a sullen yet coherent evolution in the representation of both real and fictional London. Each of the three texts reveals a threefold failure in the way the city can become the ideal place for the characters to know and fulfil themselves. London is first a mere topographical and cultural gridlock: its neighbourhoods are overdetermined in a way that leads to the negation of the individual, leaving no space for action and banning any type of self-improvement. Yet Smith's London in White Teeth is not as coded as often claimed, and may provide some tools to pervert this conditioning of places and people. The novels indeed examine the dynamics between place and action, description and narration, or between space and time. One way to free oneself from this geographical determination is thus to act and search in space for the traces of one's past to let one's future emerge. And again the characters have to pervert the “straight line” and follow more oblique ways to be allowed to do something by themselves. Leaving both space and time for the event to happen leads to a first recourse to chance and randomness. London's second failure lies in its intrinsic overdetermination: life is eventually more important than place, and people more powerful than the city. Walking aimlessly or not across London is what enables the characters to meet and “connect”, to find their own ways of living and being, and to design a new urban pattern allowing for chance. The three novels will reverse their initial representation of London with a network of movement and transfer of energy. The bus and Tube meshes then map a new city in which chance overcomes determination. Yet the final failure in this writing of London underlines how vain and fruitless this movement may be. While The Autograph Man suggests that it is only within the space and time of movement that one can really free oneself from determination and find the real London, in On Beauty Smith lays the groundwork for her fiction to come. By revisiting Forster's Howards End, Smith resorts to an exceedingly polarized world and implies that though extremes never change, in-between there is space for chaos and for a new literary grip on contemporary places and people, London and Londoners above all.