Abstract
This article explores the legacies of Virginia Woolf’s modernist lens in Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW through a joint queer and postcolonial reading. Although critics have so far pointed out the connections between Smith’s fiction and modernist and postmodernist precursors, this article examines the unexplored relationship between NW and Mrs Dalloway. It argues that Woolf’s novel provides NW with a model of queer modernist dissidence that NW enacts in the equally frustrated relationship between two of its main characters, Leah and Natalie, whose dissatisfaction with the binaries of heteronormative patriarchy are intertwined with issues of class and ethnicity. Yet the article also proposes that what remains at the heart of Smith’s enterprise is the frustrated connection between queer sensibilities, which belies larger issues of British national identity and of diasporic subjects’ forging a sense of belonging and place in the postcolonial nation.
Keywords
The publication of a new novel by Zadie Smith is a literary event as eagerly awaited as it is quickly followed by a long line of lukewarm or downright disappointed responses from book reviewers. 1 This has been the fate of her latest full-length work, NW, published in 2012, a book that, because of Smith’s return to her expected literary “home” — invariably multicultural London — has been built up as a prodigal pilgrimage, a decade later, to the ground covered by her popular début, White Teeth. Each new long piece of prose by Smith — such as The Autograph Man and On Beauty — has been compared, even a priori, with her first. This is a critically misguided attitude to take with the work of a writer whose fiction always entails a systematic departure from her previous formal endeavours. As Fiona Tolan (2013) surveys, Smith’s fiction to date is not only permeated with references to her explicitly disclaimed literary forefathers, such as E.M. Forster, 2 but is also peppered with more oblique allusions to the influential work of British, British Asian and American writers such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. In the same vein, NW enacts the imprint of previous literature, in this case the persisting legacies of a modernist envisioning of London after the First World War. The city is now transfigured into a multicultural — but no less troubled — space of intersecting personal narratives which, as I will argue, remain at odds with their position in the nation whilst attempting to create new ways of belonging, often involving issues of race and class. In light of these debates, far from being an elitist, experimental effort too closely focused on the formal workings of the text, NW is still a so-called multicultural London novel that adopts a modernist lens to foreground issues of social and identitarian fragmentariness still firmly rooted in histories of migration to Britain.
Smith’s retrospective gesture in NW to the early twentieth-century avant-garde has been hailed by critics such as David James and Urmila Seshagiri (2014) as contributing to a general trend in contemporary Anglophone fiction. According to them:
A growing number of contemporary novelists — among them Julian Barnes, JM Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Cynthia Ozick, Will Self, and Zadie Smith — place a conception of modernism as revolution at the heart of their fictions, styling their twenty-first century literary innovations as explicit engagements with the innovations of early-twentieth-century writing. At a moment when postmodern disenchantment no longer dominates critical discourse or creative practice, the central experiments and debates of twentieth-century modernist culture have acquired new relevance to the moving horizon of contemporary literature. (James and Seshagiri, 2014: 87−88)
Arguably, there is still a significant amount of postmodern disenchantment in Smith’s depiction of the fortunes of second-generation migrant citizens in the old “motherland”. Their equivocal position in their country of birth and their conflicted identities, affected by the British class system — long subservient to retrogressive ideas of ethnic purity and nativist belonging — provide the book with a socially and psychologically frustrated core. Such frustration is formulated as a simultaneous reflection and refraction (or change in direction) of previous modernist mappings of London. Smith’s novel hence places itself in dialogue with inherited representations of the metropolis, yet in full awareness of important changes in the city’s human tapestry. NW posits the forging of new ways of belonging and connecting across restrictive man-made barriers, a constant by now in Smith’s work, and reflected stylistically in her persistent grappling with received ways of seeing.
As I will argue here, NW uses metamodernist characteristics (that is, a commitment to psychological accuracy, affective detachment from totalizing ideologies and stylistic experimentation) 3 to resist a monolithic conception of Britishness. This resistance to normativity is articulated at the crossroads between postcolonial and queer discourses, a joint battleground that dissolves a singular envisioning of national identity by favouring the mixing of cultural perspectives and sexualities. In light of this, my argument will be broadly located within the nascent field of postcolonial queer studies, whose combined interests in postcolonial histories and in sexual resistance has lately entailed important cross-pollination between these fields. The postcolonial queer focuses on both nationally specific literatures and on more global or diasporic experiences of queer postcoloniality, whose very existence is dependent on the intertwining of ethnicity and sexuality. As Gayatri Gopinath observes, “[q]ueer desire does not transcend or remain peripheral to these histories [of colonialism, postcolonialism and migration] but instead it remains central to their telling and remembering” (Gopinath, 2005: 2). In addition, Donna McCormack (2014) suggests that postcolonial queer texts “give voice… to characters who have survived trauma by having them articulate their histories without sole recourse to linguistic forms or narrative structures. These histories are expressed through subtle bodily gestures, ex-centric sexual acts and a melange of sensory evocations” (McCormack, 2014:2).
My reading of the postcolonial and queer relations of Smith’s NW will focus on both narrative expression and subtle suggestion in order to tease out not only its subtle articulation of queer desire across ethnic divides but also its understated relationship with previous models of queer dissidence. The comparison established in this article is transhistorical, yet the postcolonial queer can also benefit from a global and comparative impetus. According to Jarrod Hayes et al. (2010), “[i]f queer differs from context to context, it might nonetheless be considered a concept capable of crossing both time and cultures. But if we are going to allow the queer to travel in such a way, we should deploy it comparatively” (2010: 2). Following this ethos, the article will remain as attuned to queer resistance within postcolonial contexts as to the echoes between different texts arising from different sociopolitical locations, a comparative methodology that allows us to uncover the so-far understated connections between the modernist canon and contemporary experimental fiction depicting the fortunes of second-generation migrant citizens in postcolonial Britain.
In essence, NW is the story of two friends: Leah Hanwell and Natalie — formerly known as Keisha — Blake, two young women who grew up together in Caldwell, a fictional council estate in northwest London. 4 The novel charts the women’s friendship through a modernist merging of past and present, and focuses particularly on their detachment from each other in later life, when Leah gets married to the black Algerian Michel and Keisha — now self-fashioned as Natalie — to Frank, a man of mixed Italian and African heritage. Roughly speaking, this is a novel about Natalie’s outgrowing of her humble beginnings in northwest London by becoming a barrister and about Leah’s desperate attempt at keeping a sense of self in their place of origin, where she does charity work. Despite the contrast between Natalie’s social climbing, which takes her away from her original class position, and Leah’s traumatic struggle with a sense of belonging that is rooted in her place of birth, Michael Miller observes that “Zadie Smith’s NW… offer[s] close-ups of characters so overwhelmed by their inauthenticity… that they begin to unravel” (Miller, 2013: 184). This unravelling of identities is intimately connected with issues of British national identity, since, as I will suggest, neither character fits a singular notion of Britishness. However, I also argue that this unravelling is linked to their sexualities, for both characters defy conceptions of sexual fixity imposed by social expectation of binary self-definition, and even use sexuality as a release from a sense of social inadequacy. It is in fact this addition of “alternative” sexualities to black British fiction’s more familiar explorations of racial identity and class mobility that allows us to approach NW from the double-edged perspective of the postcolonial queer, for transgressing heteronormativity becomes here inalienable from the experience of migrancy.
The novel contains other prominent characters who provide haunting moments of personal interconnection, such as the drug addict Shar, who manages to reawaken Leah’s attraction to her own gender; the black teenage heartthrob Nathan Bogle, who has dramatically come down in life; and, more extensively, Felix Cooper, a black man whose death at the hands of two youths offers a refracted fictional counterpart to the real stabbing of Stephen Lawrence. 5 The overall narrative contains multiple sections, some built around significant London postcodes, others being numerically arranged, as David James (2013) suggests, in homage to James Joyce. James persuasively argues that, after the murder of Felix Cooper, there is a switching of perspectives for the section entitled “Host”, “whose numbered and thematized subsections implicitly salute Joyce’s “Aeolus” chapter [from Ulysses]” (James, 2013: 206). Whereas James focuses on the formal modernist precursors of the text, I will focus here, instead, on the legacies of a different modernist text whose structures of feeling are implicitly saluted in Smith’s work, namely Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; I will read NW through its echoes of Woolf’s novel in order to suggest that Mrs Dalloway provides NW with a similarly frustrated model of queer resistance to sexual normativity whilst simultaneously concentrating on human connection across ethnic divides, hence infusing her queer, metamodernist envisioning of London with its distinctive postcolonial dimension.
A preliminary link to both modernism and postmodernism is NW’s concern with death and memory, themes that are also connected to migrant identity and community. Paul Giles dwells on Smith’s appraisal of David Foster Wallace’s fiction, when he writes:
Zadie Smith described it as characteristic of Wallace’s generation of writers that they amalgamate a bright surface world of corporate images and media savvy with underlying anxieties about accident, catastrophe, and death, and it is exactly this blend of knowingness and insecurity that galvanizes Wallace’s fiction. (Giles, 2007: 339)
This ambivalent focus on the image-laden surface of life and its deep disturbance by fortuitous death indeed permeates not only the work of Wallace, one of Smith’s most direct postmodern precursors, but also that of her earlier modernist models, Forster and Woolf, whose fiction is also suffused with instances of unexpected death that force their characters to confront their own mortality. 6 Susan Dick argues that Woolf’s return to the past underlines “the characters” awareness of the fugitive present’ (Dick, 1983: 187). Clarissa’s insistence on enjoying the present belies her constant obsession with the past, to which Dick concludes that “[t]o remember is to confirm one’s mortality” (Dick, 1983: 187).
NW is similarly concerned with the past and memory, as well as with death. As I will show now, Smith’s two protagonists’ initial bonding is effected through an episode of near-death that is recounted retrospectively, and which highlights their different ethnic identities. During a kid’s pool party, Keisha Blake saves Leah’s life:
There had been an event. To speak of it required the pluperfect. Keisha Blake and Leah Hanwell, the protagonists of this event, were four-year-old children. The outdoor pool — really a shallow trough in the park, one foot at its deepest end — had been full of kids, “splashing all ways, causing madness”. … “I’ve got Cheryl acting wild in one corner, I got Jayden in my arms bawling, and I’m trying to see where you are, trying to keep it all together…” It was in this ellipsis that the event had occurred: a child nearly drowned. Yet the significance of the event lay elsewhere: “You rose up with these red pigtails in your hand. You dragged her up. You were the only one who saw she was in trouble”. After the event, the mother of the child, an Irish woman, thanked Marcia Blake many times, and this in itself was a kind of event. “I knew Pauline to look at but not to speak to. She was a bit snooty with me back then”. Keisha could neither contradict nor verify this account — she had no memory of it. However, the foreshadowing could be considered suspicious. (Smith, 2012: 151)
The playful narrator, who is comfortable drawing attention to figures of speech such as ellipses and verbal tenses, does not deal here with Keisha’s direct memory, but with how her mother’s personal narrative recreates for her an important moment in her life, one that points in an important manner to persistent social divisions within the migrant communities in London, a crucial strategy in Smith’s refraction of Woolf’s charting of the city. Following her instinct, Keisha saves Leah’s life; also instinctively, she has served to embody comradeship across both racial and ethnic divides. In fact, Keisha’s act manages to disturb, at least momentarily, the suspicion between the African and Irish sectors of London’s migrant population. Leah and Natalie come to embody metonymically the need for different migrant communities to come together in spite of the deep-seated racial prejudice that could make them mutual strangers. Arising from modernism’s insistent focus on death and mortality, Smith’s metamodernist reflection focuses on migrants’ need for interdependence and survival in a hostile environment that encourages suspicion, giving a political dimension to her metamodernist experiments with figures of speech and perspectivity.
By allowing these two characters to connect through memory and death, Smith is building a bridge between different experiences of migration to the metropolis that are only deemed dissimilar because of persisting perceptions of racial difference. Paul Gilroy famously argues via the work of Errol Lawrence that “[t]he absolutist view of black and white cultures, as fixed, mutually impermeable expressions of racial and national identity, is a ubiquitous theme in racial “common sense”, but it is far from secure” (Gilroy, 1987: 161). Indeed, although both the Irish and African diasporas were the object of similar forms of social discrimination in postwar Britain, 7 there is a sense here that Leah’s Irish mother Pauline’s reticence to engage with Keisha’s African mother, Marcia, is motivated by this “racial “common sense””. Such an implicit racial bias is problematized in the novel, for Pauline’s and Leah’s race is far from being uncomplicatedly white, Leah’s “red pigtails” pointing to her own difference, highlighting her Irish descent. The blossoming relationship between Leah and Keisha offers a case for intercultural connection, one that does not go unchallenged but that the novel seeks to rekindle following their estrangement as adults. In this sense, far from being a depoliticized and aestheticized version of contemporary London, as commonplace assumptions about modernist fiction might suggest, Smith’s novel portrays postcolonial London as a space where race and ethnicity are still important epistemic realities in need of continued interrogation.
Nonetheless, after a consideration of polarized racial perspectives, Smith’s eye is then strategically redirected towards sexual issues, which brings her closer to Woolf’s prior queer model. Leah’s identity crisis in the book and her constant obsession with the past, as well as her persistent dissatisfaction with her marriage to Michel, are intimately connected with the topic of repressed sexuality, a central issue inherited from the queer and modernist model provided by Mrs Dalloway. In Woolf’s novel, Clarissa’s marriage is totally sexless:
Narrower and narrower would her bed be. … Richard insisted after her illness that she must sleep undisturbed. … So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. (Woolf, 2000: 33−34)
The narrator implies here that, although Clarissa has had to have intercourse with Richard for the purpose of bearing Elizabeth, her marriage remains chaste, and she in fact considers herself to be a virgin despite their formal union. As a refraction of Clarissa Dalloway, Leah Hanwell’s means of asserting her sexuality is a chemically driven and passionate sex life with her partner and then husband, Michel. As Smith’s narrator tells us: “When they met, the man and the woman, the physical attraction was immediate and overwhelming. This is still the case. Because of this unusual, acute attraction, their chronology is peculiar. The physical came first, always” (Smith, 2012: 20). At first glance, it would appear Clarissa and Richard’s relationship is on the opposite extreme to that of Leah and Michel. This contrast is accentuated by Clarissa’s obsession with the symptoms of her menopause and its impact on her fertility, which contrasts with Leah’s compulsive termination of her subsequent pregnancies, in itself revealing a wish for deferral of her identity’s formation. What unites both characters is the way that their exclusive relationships with their husbands, sanctioned by the — at least at the time of writing — heteronormative institution of marriage, have circumscribed their emotional and sexual relationships with women. The quenching of female homosociality is as central to NW as it is to Mrs Dalloway, and it points to a useful critical link between Smith’s and Woolf’s novels in spite of historical distance and the disparate socioeconomic situation of their central characters, who are at different ends of the colonial experience.
Clarissa’s dissatisfaction with her marriage drives her to question her choices in life, and to remember all the more acutely the youthful romance she enjoyed with her friend Sally Seton, before both of them submitted to society’s expectations and succumbed to marriage. In her stream of consciousness, Clarissa ponders: “But this question of love (she thought, putting her coat away), this falling in love with women. Take Sally Seton; her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?” (Woolf, 2000: 35). Woolf’s outspoken defence of love between women articulated via Clarissa is followed by the recollection of an equally honest intimate moment between her and Sally: “Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a strong urn with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The whole world might have turned upside down!” (Woolf, 2000: 38). It is significant that this moment of sensual intimacy between two women should constitute “the most exquisite moment of [Clarissa’s] whole life”, for it reveals that her marriage to Richard Dalloway and Sally’s subsequent marriage to a rich entrepreneur are, to Clarissa’s mind, a betrayal of their youthful communion. Indeed, upon their first meeting in years, Clarissa exclaims internally: “It was Sally Seton — the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in the large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!” (Woolf, 2000: 79). This is a passionate response to Sally’s conventional fate. However, Sally’s disheartening collusion with normativity is mirrored by Clarissa’s own trajectory, from potential youthful transgressor to conventional middle-aged wife.
Rachel Bowlby suggests that “Sally’s passionate kiss, interrupted by Peter and another man, is centred… as representing the impossible and abandoned alternative to the nun-like chastity Clarissa has instead adopted in becoming Mrs Richard Dalloway” (Bowlby, 1988: 88). This “impossible” and “abandoned alternative” is that of female conjugality, or homosexual partnership. As Kaley Joyes suggests more recently, “identity’s performance can require suppression of the private soul’s desires […] [Clarissa] herself gave up intellectual leanings and homosexual desire in order to succeed within heteronormative patriarchy” (Joyes, 2008: 83). Indeed, both Clarissa and Sally chose social success over their personal, homosexual leanings, and their potential for queer dissidence is short-lived. Similarly, fractured identities and conflicted feelings about personal trajectories have a root in sexuality in Smith’s NW, which articulates a comparable frustration with “heteronormative patriarchy”. Leah embodies this dissatisfaction with the binary possibilities offered by British society, as her choice of a male partner does not give full expression to her fluid sexuality.
Leah’s various encounters with the scamming drug addict Shar, following an early incident in the novel, plunges her in a soul-searching mood that makes her revisit her adolescent attraction to women. Her marriage does not fulfil all her sexual and emotional needs, and hence, like a latter-day Clarissa Dalloway, she is forced to confront the memory of her discarded youthful desires. Leah encounters Shar yet again in the company of Michel, and in her internal world she starts fantasising:
A neat waist you want to hold. She is something beautiful in the sunshine, something between boy and girl, reminding Leah of a time in her own life when she had not yet been called upon to make a final decision about all that. Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical. (Smith, 2012: 36)
In Leah’s sexual surveillance of Shar, Smith is drawing attention to the “final decision[s]” that society forces upon people: between loving men or loving women; between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Leah mourns an earlier time in her life when she did not have to choose between her attraction to women and her attraction to men, when she could revel in unfixed queer desires. The encounter in this section is followed by a direct flashback to the past: “Lying in bed next to a girl she loved, years ago… She once was a true love of mine. Now that girl is married, too” (Smith, 2012: 37). As we gradually learn through fleeting clues like this stream of consciousness, which shifts seamlessly from the third to the first person, the girl Leah used to love is her friend Natalie. Like Sally Seaton, Natalie eventually chose to marry and sought external social validation over the fulfilment of her personal desires, even if her own attraction to Leah is much more ambivalently deployed in Smith’s book. In a way, it could be argued that Leah’s choice of a black husband and Natalie’s final commitment to a man of mixed cultural heritage constitute heterosexual sublimations of each other’s personas, or substitutes for their “impossible” and “alternative” relationship, which would have offered queer dissidence to heteronormative patriarchy. I would argue it is this lack of a clear challenge to British society’s old strictures that ultimately troubles both Leah and Natalie, and that renders the novel’s overall tone so elegiac and disenchanted, much more so than the narrative’s ambiguous message about social advancement and class mobility, which feels like a purposeful sociohistorical rationalization of the characters’ deeply embedded personal frustrations.
Although, as I have suggested, Natalie’s attraction to Leah is not given full expression in the novel, her own sense of inadequacy is also sexually articulated, following an identity crisis that is initially attributed to issues of race, class and social mobility. Natalie, who left her name “Keisha” behind in her native northwest London, feels dislocated from her initial social background due to becoming a successful female barrister. Her awareness of her own socioeconomic privilege makes her feel at odds in society, inexorably removed from the experiences of the black and working-class people she grew up with in Caldwell. This triggers an identity crisis, one that becomes manifest in her creation of an online persona, with the candid email address “
Her being “caught” — in the eponymous vignette, number 184 in the “Host” section — triggers Natalie’s desertion of her family and her crazed wandering around London, and it is this troubled walk that ultimately points to the constant and precarious search for an idea of home of second-generation migrants in Britain. The concept of home is formulated by Avtar Brah (1996) in relation to diasporic experience:
Where is home? On the one hand, “home” is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense it is a place of no return even it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place of “origin”. On the other hand, home is also the lived experience of a locality. Its sounds and smells […] all this, as mediated by the historically specific everyday of social relations. In other words, the varying experiences of pains and pleasures, the terrors or contentments, or the highs and humdrum of everyday lived cultures. (Brah, 1996: 192)
For Natalie Blake, her place of origin is not an idealized Africa, but London itself, even if her late experiences of social alienation, aggravated by the changes in social status that are the consequence of her education and profession as a barrister, mean she experiences her “home” with a mixture of pain and pleasure, terror and contentment. The city’s geography is not enough to give her a sense of location, and her identity crisis forces her to experience the metropolis’s sights, sounds and smells directly, as a means of reasserting her position in it, in simultaneous reflection and refraction of Clarissa Dalloway almost a century later.
Clarissa is plagued by a sense of personal disconnection from other people, most particularly from Peter Walsh; for her, the sensual experience of the city allows her to forge a connection with the place and its people more stable than that of interpersonal relations:
Clarissa had a theory in those days — they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not “here, here, here”; as she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter — even trees, or barns. (Woolf, 2000: 167 [my italics])
Here, Clarissa is staving off anonymity by allowing herself to connect with London and its inhabitants transcendentally, through sensual experience and unspoken communion. It is significant that, as opposed to her dissatisfaction with human relations and the impossibility of truly knowing anyone, the city provides a space that allows Clarissa to feel her own self “everywhere”. However, we should not forget that this modernist epiphany about the self in the city comes to fruition in the privileged spaces of Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of central London, a place that best mirrors her own socioeconomic background, and that hence allows her to become “all that”. In this almost perfect alignment of the self with its surroundings, Clarissa can claim a sense of place and ownership in early twentieth-century London that transcends the more precarious realm of interpersonal relations.
Such a transcendent act of geographical connection with the city cannot be as unproblematically carried out by Natalie Blake a century later, due to her conflicted identity as a black British citizen whose claims to London’s ownership paint a complex picture, after Brah, of pains and pleasures, terrors and contentments. In an attempt to escape her embarrassment and sense of inadequacy following her husband’s discovery of her double life, Natalie spends some time with Nathan Bogle, the popular boy at school who, as Natalie now suspects, has become a homeless pimp; their conversation eventually turns awry, mostly due to his impression that she has risen far above him socially and that she no longer understands his plight. The result of this interpersonal disconnection leads to Natalie’s own metamodernist revelation about the city, imbued with psychological pathos and awareness of the arid material conditions of the postmodern metropolis:
They walked for a time without speaking. Nathan kept close to the walls, never taking up the centre of the pavement. It struck Natalie that she was no longer crying or shaking, and that dread was the hardest emotion in the world to hold on to for more than a moment. She couldn’t resist this display of the textures of the world: white stone, green turf, red rust, grey slate, brown shit. It was almost pleasant, strolling to nowhere. They crossed over, Natalie Blake and Nathan Bogle, and kept climbing, past the narrow red mansion flats, up into money. The world of council flats lay far behind them, at the bottom of the hill. Victorian houses began to appear, only a few at first, then multiplying. Fresh gravel in the drives, white wooden blinds in the windows. Estate agent’s hoarding strapped to the front gate. (Smith, 2012: 273 [my italics])
This passage rings with issues of ownership — homeless Nathan suitably never “taking up the centre of the pavement” — and with a modernist sensory experience of London that is, according to Natalie’s consciousness, “almost pleasant”, indicating that despite her late misfortunes, she cannot help but feel a sense of bonding with the city’s grim urban landscape, its multiple surfaces simultaneously alienating her and making her feel at home in the postmodern city. In this episode of spatial connection, she is a refraction of Clarissa Dalloway: whereas Clarissa felt herself “everywhere”, Natalie is going “nowhere”; yet she also looks to the city as a place in which to strengthen a sense of self despite its polymorphous, almost paradoxical shape. Unlike Clarissa’s Shaftesbury Avenue, her walk from Shoot Up Hill to Fortune Green reveals a far more economically variegated place, where council flats and Victorian mansions are almost morbidly coterminous; where estate agents’ signs never let the passers-by forget about money and privilege. For Natalie, her “home”, twenty-first century, is a postmodern place of accentuated contrasts and conflicting surfaces, one which she, from her perspective as a black British citizen, can only experience with an ambivalent sense of pain and pleasure, demonstrating the complication of forging a stable concept of home, and instead showing an awareness of insoluble difference in the city’s conflicted economic landscape, one which bears witness to but does not sentimentalize the city’s immigrant population.
Both Mrs Dalloway and NW are invested in the idea that, in order for the self to transcend its own sociocultural milieu, there must be a connection with “Other” figures, even when these are forged in absentia, and that these connections must entail important lessons about life that are relevant to their characters’ positions in society. Clarissa establishes a subjective modernist connection with Septimus Warren Smith through space and time after news of his death during her party:
A young man had killed himself. […] He had killed himself — but how? Always her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenty, of an accident; […] He had thrown himself out of a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering, bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But why had he done it? … The young man had killed himself; but she did not pity him, with all this going on. … what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him — the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living. (Woolf, 2000: 201−202, 204)
Clarissa experiences in her mind, first of all, the bodily experience of Septimus’s suicide, while pondering his reasons, eventually reconciling herself with his choice, without a touch of sentimentality about his motives or his death. Annalee Edmondson (2012) suggests that “Mrs. Dalloway, as a result of her typical affective responsiveness, has uncannily approximated both what Septimus said and thought at least partly because she is able to imagine what feelings might have motivated his thoughts and statements.” (Edmondson, 2012: 30 [original italics]) Clarissa may not be politically minded or socially engaged, yet her sensibility reaches out towards characters outside her own immediate sensorial milieu, in a manner that is uncannily successful at approximating their feelings.
If this instance of interpersonal connection may seem a subjective or impressionistic bond between characters devoid of real empirical substance, it could also be constructed as a communal lesson across social boundaries. As Gillian Beer (2007) observes, “the contacts between Septimus and Clarissa are oblique and communal” (Beer, 2007: 54). According to Beer’s reading, both Clarissa and Septimus share the same British history, the same day in London, the same class system and social mores, and that makes them commune with each other in spite of forces that consign them to different social classes, unable to meet. What shines through Clarissa’s psychologically acute connection with Septimus is an affective lesson that challenges her fear of death and mortality and that teaches her to appreciate life more, to see human existence differently, in a moment of subjective illumination. This individual connection between two people of different social classes over the transcendent issue of death is removed from the world of politics and fashions a form of connection that is at once individual and communal, belonging to the same place and the same history, but stripped of a sturdy political agenda. This lack of ideological commentary may evade a more engaged justification of Septimus’s death over Clarissa’s, which if probed might prove to be class-related.
In twenty-first century London, differences in class are all the more relevant, and characters are encouraged to think across these lines when pondering the meaning of their existence in the postcolonial metropolis. As a latter-day Septimus, Felix Cooper, not a poet but a film-maker in Smith’s novel, composing visual sequences of life in London as he walks through Soho, also haunts Leah’s mind, and through Leah he also challenges Natalie’s ideas about the British class system. In the novel’s closing, Leah confronts her dissatisfaction with heteronormativity and socially restricting class boundaries. Conversing in NW’s final section, when Natalie has come to help her come to terms with her life, Leah responds:
“I just don’t understand why I have this life”, [Leah] said quietly. “What?” “You, me, all of us. Why that girl and not us. Why that poor bastard on Albert Road. It doesn’t make sense to me”. Natalie frowned and folded her arms across her body. She had expected a more difficult question. “Because we worked harder”, she said, laying her head on the back of the bench to consider the wide-open sky. “We were smarter and we knew we didn’t want to end up begging on other people’s doorsteps. We wanted to get out”. (Smith, 2012: 292−293)
Like Clarissa Dalloway, Leah Hanwell is pondering why she has been personally spared, whilst characters such as Shar and Felix Cooper — the referents for “that girl” and “that poor bastard” — have been either drawn to drug dependency or unjustly murdered, victims of a social system that has drawn them to racially motivated stigmatization. In a manner similar to Clarissa’s, Leah connects across social and spatial boundaries in order to understand the accidents of life that bring fortune or misfortune to her fellow Londoners. Natalie’s self-assured answers belie her own sense of dissatisfaction, which has been so routinely masked and redirected in other parts of the novel, and which has already triggered a major identity and subsequent family crisis. The ideological line of “working hard” for social advancement does not ring completely true and seems an easy answer for a complex issue affecting Natalie herself, for it is not socioeconomic betterment that seems at stake here, but the collusion of class with ethnicity, heterosexual monogamy with normalcy.
In fact, in spite of the ethnic and class issues inherent to the narrative’s postcolonial agenda, the centre of affective gravity in the novel’s closing shifts from a postcolonial disquisition of diasporic identities to Leah and Natalie’s renewed homosocial communion. Regarding Felix’s murder, Natalie states “I think I know what happened in Albert Road” (Smith, 2012: 293), probing preliminarily the connection between Felix and Nathan Bogle. As they obliquely put together the sequence of events that led to the murder, the two women work in intimate bond, “two heads pressed together over a handset” (Smith, 2012: 294). Here, we find Smith’s counterpart to Woolf’s “moments of being”, a model of epiphany that connects Smith’s novel with its modernist precursor. This remains also in keeping with Smith’s continued literary investment in private reconciliation between individuals over communal disquisitions, a technique that flouts communitarian identities and societal prescription. In this case, Felix Cooper’s murder is the trigger of Leah and Natalie’s rekindled friendship in a moment that prizes interpersonal communion and individual epiphany. His stabbing was not racially motivated, by contrast with Stephen Lawrence’s real case, but belongs to a narrative of black empowerment and social stigmatization that creates a gap between Felix and his murderers, whom he had pitied right before being stabbed: “he remembered when being the big man was all that mattered” (Smith, 2012: 148). He does not fear his assaulters but sympathizes with them, revealing a postcolonial sensibility that sees through the racially segregated social system driving these youths to violence. Ultimately, his death is a catalyst of Leah and Natalie’s epiphanic reunion, in a final merging of postcolonial debates over class and social exclusion and queer bonding articulated in a new engaged mode that recalls Clarissa and Sally’s youth in Mrs Dalloway, when they cared about social causes in homosocial transgression.
Woolf famously argued in her essay “Modern Fiction” (2008a) that the purpose of the modern novel was not to chart human experience in an orderly manner focused on external detail, an aesthetic “sin” she ascribed to a highly simplified realist tradition, but mimicking the perception of reality in a lifelike fashion that highlights life’s subjective impressions and discontinuities. Following this very instinct, NW also tries to do away with realist resolution, and so we leave the novel in “mid-party”, in a manner comparable to the open ending of Mrs Dalloway. After her epiphany about Septimus’s death, Clarissa returns to her guests, and the narrative tails off with Peter Walsh’s thoughts about the terror and ecstasy Clarissa brings to the room, “[f]or there she was”. (Woolf, 2000: 213) As Vereen M Bell (2006) argues, “[a] novel that is true to this understanding of life will simply stop, as this one does, leaving those whorls and currents of thought and feeling set loose in its pages to flow on beyond them” (Bell, 2006: 111), eventually flowing into the everyday thoughts of its readers. As a modernist response to the allegedly tidy endings of realist novels, Woolf’s novel simply pauses, letting the unresolved issues in the text echo in the pondering of its readers, who try to make sense not merely of the novel itself, but also of their own lives. NW leaves Felix’s murder unresolved and for the interested readers to piece it together outside the novel’s bounds; the rekindled friendship between Leah and Natalie is also abandoned in a new stage of (re)development, flouting homosexuality and heterosexuality, avoiding also a final word on the plight of multicultural Londoners.
James (2013) asserts that “Smith’s mission is to slip the noose of classification and assume a temperament of her own making” with a novel that is “something more rugged yet just as compositionally beautiful, rougher round the edges though still as particularist as ever” (James, 2013: 213). Such is the result of a narrative effort that, under the auspices of metamodernism, postcolonialism and queer dissidence prizes identitarian fragmentation and psychological truthfulness while probing ethnic, sexual and class distinctions in contemporary London through enmeshed individual perspectives. That Smith refuses, once again, to offer a strong critique of the promises and pitfalls of multiculturalism is testament to the lifelike nature of her narrative project in NW, which, echoing Brah’s work on diasporic identity, aims to illustrate the “highs and the humdrum of everyday lived culture” (Brah, 1996: 192), in a manner that dissolves binary thinking and facile assumptions about race, ethnic, class or even sexual identities. This is a novel in which the personal conundrums posed by postcolonial histories go hand in hand with queer resistance to heteronormative patriarchy. In dialogue with important modernist models, NW is not an elitist or merely formalist exercise, but wears its worldliness on its sleeve, in a manner that permeates and exceeds the text, prompting us to consider the queer intersections at work in identity-making, at the crossroads between ethnicities and sexualities, pains and pleasures.