changing my mind occasional essays pdf

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Other Voices, Other Selves

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By Pankaj Mishra

• Jan. 14, 2010

“To write critically in English,” Zadie Smith asserts in the opening essay of “Changing My Mind,” “is to aspire to neutrality, to the high style of, say, Lionel Trilling or Edmund Wilson.” Praising Zora Neale Hurston, Smith complains that the mandarin critical mode elevates the experiences of white people to the norm while making “black women talking about a black book” look sectarian. Smith’s own way of escaping this narrow assumption is to declare boldly, “Fact is, I am a black woman.” A writer like Hurston, Smith adds, makes “ ‘black woman-ness’ appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals.” Hurston also allows Smith “to say things I wouldn’t normally — things like “She is my sister and I love her.”

After this sonorous declaration, you might expect Smith to reclaim writers and books on behalf of millions of complex individuals whose experiences are misrepresented, insufficiently written about or simply ignored. But she means for us to take the title of her book seriously. “Ideological inconsistency,” she writes in her foreword, “is, for me, practically an article of faith.” The essays that follow discuss some prominent dead white writers (George Eliot, Kafka, E. M. Forster, Nabokov, Barthes, David Foster Wallace), but they display no Edward Said-style counterreading of canonical texts. Their quirky pleasures derive from Smith’s own critical persona — always bold, jauntily self-reflexive and amusing — and her inspired cultural references, which include both Simone Weil and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

There is little hint of Smith’s culturally diverse background in her essays on (mostly Hollywood) movies and stars; they belong recognizably to an Anglo-American tradition of writing about cinema that alternates between masochistic reverence and slash-and-burn japery. And Smith resembles a French avant-gardist of the 1950s and ’60s rather than a postcolonial writer in her most ambitious essay, “Two Directions for the Novel,” which attacks the metaphysical pretensions of the “lyrical-realist” tradition that evidently dominates “Anglophone” fiction.

In this essay (which compares Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” with Tom McCar­thy’s “Remainder”), Smith passes over the many novels from outside the West that have helped expand traditional bourgeois notions of self and identity. Yet her essay on Barack Obama is replete with the postcolonial-cum-postmodernist themes — hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence — that professors of literature and cultural studies commonly employ in American and British universities. Smith’s hope that Obama’s “flexibility of voice” may lead to “flexibility in all things” derives not so much from hardheaded political analysis as from academic high theory, which assumes that those who live between cultures best represent and articulate the human condition today. According to Smith, the moral of Obama’s story is that “each man must be true to his selves, plural.”

On this point, at least, Smith is ideologically consistent. In fact, the idea that “the unified singular self is an illusion” could be the leitmotif of this collection. It allows Smith to revisit her own early assumptions and to question such essentialist notions as “black woman-ness.” Reflecting on Kafka’s ambivalence about his ethnic background, she writes: “There is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (‘What have I in common with Jews?’) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.”

This may sound a bit melodramatic. But then — as Salman Rushdie and other practitioners of postcolonial postmodernism have stressed — ambivalence, doubt and confusion are essential to forming dynamic new hybrid selves. Smith seems to bring to this now entrenched critical orthodoxy the particular weltschmerz of today’s bright, successful but sad young writers. This is most evident in the collection’s final essay, a long and passionately argued panegyric to David Foster Wallace in which Smith diagnoses the central dilemmas of her own increasingly lost generation. These are dilemmas, she argues, that Henry James, who assumed awareness leads to responsibility, never encountered: “the ubiquity of television, the voraciousness of late capitalism, the triumph of therapeutic discourse and philosophy’s demotion into a branch of linguistics.”

Smith writes with a beguiling mix of assurance and solemnity, borrowing her vocabulary from many intellectual and cultural sources. But a few of her readers may still pause to wonder if the growing irrelevance of academic philosophy is as strong an influence — even on people at university campuses — as the ravages of “late capitalism.” For someone so apparently world-weary, Smith can often appear profoundly unworldly. Writing about a trip to Liberia organized by Oxfam, she wavers distractingly from the arch (“There are such things as third-world products”) to tourist-brochure blandness (“Bong country is beautiful. Lush green forest, a sweet breeze”) to stock atrocity journalism (“A narrow corridor of filth, lined on either side with small dwellings made of trash, mud, scrap metal. Children with distended bellies, rotting food, men breaking rocks”).

Compiling an assortment of details, Smith declines to fit them into a pattern. Her essay called “Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend” has the shapelessness implied by its title. Smith visibly moves with greater ease through the decipherable world of texts, but here she often gets bogged down in over-interpretation. The work of David Foster Wallace, an estimable writer of undoubtedly great unfulfilled promise, can’t bear the weight of meaning Smith bestows on it, deploying references that range from Zen koans to Noam Chomsky. Lines like “How to be in the world when the world has collapsed into language?” bear too much resemblance to the effusions of an aspirant for a Ph.D. in philosophy.

When writing out of her own memory and experience, Smith can quickly cast a spell: her essay on British comedy, which movingly commemorates her father, is among her best. But her preferred stance as a literary and philosophical insurgent, with its related weakness for rousing manifestos, often yields a disconcerting intellectual and moral imprecision. Far from being a complacent purveyor of a triumphant “white” culture, Edmund Wilson wrote feelingly about the Iroquois and Zuni Indians and other endangered minority cultures. We may all be insects now, but a Muslim insect in England doesn’t lurk in the same hole as a non-Muslim one.

Smith’s broad-brush pronouncements underscore the limitations of the academic theories she often rehearses. Having hybrid identities, not belonging anywhere or indeed belonging everywhere, may have its advantages, but these attributes must still contend with pressing circumstances like the voraciousness of 21st-century capitalism. Far from floating free in a state of unbelonging, most people are trapped in predetermined social and political positions; they must act within the history that surrounds them. The possession of multiple selves and voices doesn’t seem to be helping — and may even be inhibiting — Barack Obama. The victims of the seemingly endless violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan would draw scant comfort from the knowledge that the present occupant of the White House has an ear for different accents and can mimic everyone from a white Harvard nerd to a Ken­yan elder.

Smith’s intellectual ambitions are remarkably consistent with those of the postcolonial writers and academics who have settled into the abstractions of a posh postmodernism. “Changing My Mind” displays many of its virtues: a cosmopolitan suavity and wit that often relieves intellectual ponderousness. Smith’s native intelligence, however, seems so formidable that you can’t help hoping she’ll change her mind yet again.

CHANGING MY MIND

Occasional essays.

By Zadie Smith

306 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95

Pankaj Mishra is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

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Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith

F or Zadie Smith , criticism is a bodily pleasure, not an abstracted mental operation. Reading, like eating, caters to her ravenous but discriminating appetite: she finds the essence of Kafka in a sliver of words from his diary, carved, she says, as thin as Parma ham and containing the creator's "marbled mark". She doesn't need a snack when watching a film, because her eyes are feeding on the images: Brief Encounter is, for her, a chunk of Wensleydale cheese, inimitably English. The critical arguments in which Smith engages are as vital and as potentially violent as sexual wrestling matches, and in an essay on Katharine Hepburn she recalls that she ejected two lovers from her bed – on separate occasions, I should explain – because they disagreed with her about the relationship between Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib .

Smith consumes books and films, by which I mean that she absorbs them, seizing on them with all her acute, avid senses. When she was 14, her mother gave her Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God to read. The aim was to raise Zadie's biracial consciousness, though the result, vividly described in the first essay in this volume, was more intense and more transformative. "I inhaled that book," Smith recalls (like an oenophile, she reads through her nostrils). It took her three hours to finish the volume and she expressed her critical judgment on it in a fit of grateful, ecstatic tears. When her mother called her to dinner, she took the book to the table, not because she intended to discuss it but because it was in itself a meal, offering her communion with the nutritious blood and body of its author.

This is not the way critics are supposed to comport themselves. Smith's enthusiasm is almost shocking; she breaks the rules established by the black-gowned, gruel-blooded nerds in universities who murder books by dissecting them, reduce poems and novels to texts which are no more than snarled networks of verbal signals and revenge themselves on the literature they secretly hate by writing badly about it.

Reading for Smith is a mind-changing, life-giving, soul-saving affair and her criticism has a missionary urgency. In a long and brilliant study of Middlemarch – which persuaded me to change my mind about a novel I've always considered tiresome – she avows that "love enables knowledge, love is a kind of knowledge". She is referring to George Eliot's Spinozistic union of emotional experience and moral perception, but she might also be articulating her own creed as critic. The intellectual revelations Smith purveys derive from and are ignited by her love for the books she has read.

In her first novel, White Teeth , she called tradition "a sinister analgesic", as deeply embedded and degenerate as dental caries. She has changed her mind about that, because for her, as the title of her collection implies, criticism is a record of the mind's growth and its game-playing versatility. Her review of a collection of EM Forster's radio book chat exactly defines Smith's newly congenial attitude to the literary past. Forster made her the gift of his talent – she used Howards End as the model for her most recent novel On Beaut y – and she is repaying his generosity, just as he settled his debts to his predecessors in those broadcast talks.

He refused, Smith notes, to call what he did "literary criticism, or even reviewing"; he was making "recommendations", like a "chatty librarian leaning over the counter". His modesty was "peculiarly English", a sly way of appeasing the country's hostility to culture. Smith has fewer misgivings about her own impassioned intelligence, but she is engaged in the same activity.

Her task, however, is harder than Forster's was, because as well as disarming popular anti-intellectualism, she has to confront the over-intellectualised commissars of academic criticism. In a superb essay on Nabokov and Barthes, she explores the battling claims of writer versus reader, creator versus theorist, acknowledging that the dispute is being fought out inside her. As a student, she delighted in Barthes's obituary for authorship, which licensed readers to rewrite texts and use them as alibis for indulging political gripes and sexual kinks.

Surely this libertarian practice was preferable to Nabokov's snooty expectation that readers should be worshippers, in awe of the author's genius? Smith's experience as a novelist persuaded her, once again, to change her mind and her essay restores faith in "the difficult partnership between reader and writer".

Hence her knowing use of a theological word when she says that in Middlemarch Eliot makes "literary atonement" for our isolation by filling her book "with more objects of attention than a novel can comfortably hold". That thronging abundance is the delight of White Teeth . The narrator of Ian McEwan's Atonement worries that art can't atone for the errors and crimes of art, because its solutions are fictional and illusory; Smith at her most fervent has no such doubts. An author, in her view, is not a despotic Nabokovian god. In a wonderful aside about the indeterminacy of meaning in Shakespeare, she remarks that "the idea of a literary genius is a gift we give ourselves, a space so wide we can play in it forever". This makes me want to throw a ball to her and bounce up and down in the hope of catching it when she retaliates.

Changefulness is Smith's theme throughout this collection. A lecture delivered at the New York Public Library remembers how she changed her voice, advancing from the glottally stopped argot of Willesden to the posher, plummier vowels she imbibed at Cambridge – though her aim, as she admits, was to be polyvocal, to alternate between those idioms, and she praises Obama, "a genuinely many-voiced man", for possessing the same flexibility. (Her homage to the new president dates from soon after his election, when her "novelist credo" led her to hope that his command of different vocal registers would lead to "a flexibility in all things". A year later, Obama is beginning to look merely slippery, flexing himself by inconclusively running on the spot.)

Elsewhere, Smith praises fluidity, another name for the same virtue. She finds it in the languid grace with which Robert De Niro opens a fridge door in Mean Streets , in the "elastic" expressiveness of Claire Danes in Shopgirl as against the "unmoving, waxy face" of the Botoxed Steve Martin and in the athleticism of Raymond Carver's prose. For a writer, fluency is "the ultimate good omen": if the words are pouring out, they're probably good words. Its opposite is fixity, a calcification that sets the mind in stone and prepares the body for rigor mortis. This Smith detects in Wordsworth when he reneges on the revolutionary idealism of his youth, in the elderly bigotry of Kingsley Amis and in the defeatism of all those who, having reached the age of 50, stop reading contemporary fiction. These justified digs made me check on the state of my own stiffening joints and hardening arteries, my calcium-encrusted dogmas and sclerotic orthodoxies. It's good to know that, while my body rusts, I can keep my mind stretched and nimble by reading Zadie Smith.

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Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays Background

By zadie smith.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays is a collection of essays written by Zadie Smith and was first published in 2009. Smith is a British author, essayist and professor of creative writing. She is known for numerous best-selling novels, perhaps most famously White Teeth .

In terms of focus, Changing My Mind centers on Zadie Smith and her extreme passion for reading and how her way of thinking and absorbing information has changed over time. She criticizes the way people analyze novels and turn them into long boring essays and writing that everyone hates to read. Smith describes how she gets so absorbed in any book she reads and how that habit was in her since childhood. She says that she "inhales books" and takes them with her in dinner time because she feels that they are a meal in theirselves. Smith also states some of her personal characteristics that made her who she is. She offers the essays through different topics in her unique point of view.

The collection received many positive reviews. For one, Goodreads rated it as 3.8 out of a 5-star rating. Peter Conrad in his book review in the Guardians said: "It's good to know that, while my body rusts, I can keep my mind stretched and nimble by reading Zadie Smith." Time newspaper wrote: "She has the gift David Foster Wallace had: the mere act of watching her think — about Kafka, Buffy , her father, her writing habits, whatever attracts her critical intelligence — makes you feel smarter." True to its title, Zadie Smith's essay collection may change your views about various things. Her way of writing is unique and intriguing, and infused with a healthy dose of skepticism and sarcasm.

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Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays study guide contains a biography of Zadie Smith, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith.

• Zadie Smith, The Universal Writer: Techniques in Three Essays
• Plato’s and Smith’s Differing Epistemologies: Assessing "Phaedrus" and "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov"

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Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays Paperback – October 26, 2010

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 306 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Books
• Publication date October 26, 2010
• Grade level 12 and up
• Reading age 18 years and up
• Dimensions 8.39 x 5.55 x 0.72 inches
• ISBN-10 0143117955
• ISBN-13 978-0143117957
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (October 26, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 306 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143117955
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143117957
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.39 x 5.55 x 0.72 inches
• #826 in Essays (Books)
• #2,980 in Short Stories Anthologies
• #15,627 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Zadie smith.

Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations, and a collection of short stories, Grand Union.

White Teeth won multiple awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

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