The Art of the Impersonal Essay, by Zadie Smith
If it were up to me, for example, I would very happily switch that rickety, always ill-fitting term “humanism” with something broader, more capacious. A bright, shiny neologism that would still place human flourishing at the center of our social and political processes, but which also encompassed the supremacy of all living things—including the natural world. As a philosophy, it would stand in pointed opposition to the current faith in the supremacy of machines, and of capital. Philoanimism? But the name is not good. (I’d be glad to hear alternative options!) It would be the work of many hands, this discourse, and it would understand that in these fractious times, although our commonalities may prove dispiritingly tiny or difficult to locate, they still exist. We’ve managed to locate them before, and not so long ago, using language as our compass. For example, the most inspiring (to me) political slogan of the past twenty years managed to create a common space in a single phrase: “the ninety-nine per cent.”
Sometimes the very act of seeking solidarity is characterized merely as the pursuit of “common ground,” a destination easily disparaged as a middling, nowhere, apolitical place. At other times, it is suspected of being a happy-clappy zone of magical thinking, where people have to pretend to be the same and to have experienced identical things in order to work together. I’d rather think of it as “the commons.” And when I sit down to essay I find it helpful to remind myself of the radical historical roots of that concept. I picture the blasted heath of the nineteenth century, a piece of open land that is about to be fenced in by the forces of capital, but upon which a large crowd has gathered, precisely to protest the coming enclosure. But not only that. A variety of overlapping causes are represented in that space, although they are all fundamentally concerned with freedom. Abolitionists, suffragists, trade unionists, working people, and the poor are present in abundance, alongside some land-reform radicals you might call socialist Christians, and, yes, O.K., a few old Chartists. Plus some anti-vaxxers, a smattering of Jacobites, and a couple of millenarians. (That’s the trouble with no fences: anybody can turn up.) Today, on the commons, all of these people have gathered to oppose a common enemy—the landowner—but disputation and debate are still everywhere, and you, the next speaker to get on the platform, must now decide how to address this huge crowd. You might have a very specific aim in mind: a particular argument, a singular cause, a deep desire to convert or sway. But you are not in your living room, your church, your meeting hall, or your corner of the internet. You are on a soapbox on the commons; anybody might be standing in front of you. Will you be so open and broad as to say not very much at all? Or so targeted that you are, practically speaking, talking to yourself? It’s complicated. Some rhetoric will definitely be necessary. You’ll need to warm them up before you lay it on ’em. And you can never forget that all around you is an explosion of alterity: people with their own unique histories, traumas, memories, hopes, fears. But this multiplicity needn’t shift your commitments—it may even intensify them.
Imagine, for example, an early-nineteenth-century lady abolitionist, standing in cold weather, listening to a labor activist. He is arguing for expanding the franchise from a propertied élite—male, of course—to all workingmen, but not once does he mention the vote for women. My imagined abolitionist grows colder—and angrier. But the gentleman’s blinkered position might also prompt her into a new form of solidarity, nudging her toward the realization that arguing for the mere “liberty” of the enslaved, as she does, is insufficient: her call, too, must include a demand for their full enfranchisement. The next time this lady abolitionist of mine steps onto the commons, she may find herself more willing to stand on her rectangular box and make the connection between many forms of disenfranchisement, which, though they may appear dissimilar, have their crucial points of continuity. After all, one thing workingmen, women, and almost all of the enslaved had in common, on the commons, was the fact that none of them could vote. (A point of convergence that Robert Wedderburn—essayist and preacher, and the son of an enslaved Jamaican woman—noted frequently.)
What kind of discourse can draw out such analogies while simultaneously acknowledging and preserving difference? (An enslaved man is not in the same situation as a laboring peasant.) What kind of language will model and leave open the possibility of solidarity, even if it is solidarity of the most pragmatic and temporal kind? The speaker will have to be open, clear, somewhat artful. They’ll have to be relatively succinct, making their argument in no more than, say, six sections. Their speech will be impassioned but expansive, and I think it helps a bit if it has a little elegance, enabling arguments to glide straight past the listener’s habitual defenses, although this gliding—like a duck crossing a pond—will usually involve a lot of frantic paddling down below, just out of sight. A complex performance, then. Because the crowd is complicated. Because life is complicated. Any essay that includes the line “It’s really very simple” is never going to be the essay for me. Nothing concerning human life is simple. Not aesthetics, not politics, not gender, not race, not history, not memory, not love.
“To essay” is, of course, to try. My version of trying involves expressing ideas in a mode open enough, I hope, that readers feel they are trying them out alongside me. While I try, I am also striving to remain engaged (and engaging) yet impersonal, because although the personal is certainly interesting and human and vivid, it also strikes me as somewhat narrow and private and partial. Consequently, the word “we” appears in my essays pretty frequently. This isn’t because I imagine I speak for many, or expect that my views might be applied to all, but because I’m looking for the sliver of ground where that “we” is applicable. Because once you find that sweet spot you can build upon it. It’s the existentialist at my desk who is best placed to find that spot. She says to herself: Almost all of the people I know (and I myself) have experienced pain. And absolutely all of the people I know (and I myself) will die.
These two facts, one almost total and the other universal, represent the firmest “we” I know, and have occupied my imagination since I was a teen. That was the moment when the fact that we were all death-facing and pain-adjacent first dawned, and seemed to make it perfectly obvious, for example, that the death penalty was a monstrosity, and prison usually a conceptual mistake, in which the most common crime was poverty. It was not until I got to college that I met people who, facing the same fundamental facts—pain, death—had come to what they considered to be perfectly reasonable but very different conclusions. I met people who believed in such a thing as “the criminal mentality.” I met people who thought poverty was primarily a sign of laziness or a lack of ambition. What once appeared simple turned complex. My beliefs remained, but the idea that they were or should be “perfectly obvious” to all—that’s what evaporated.
Aside from the fact that I never meant to be an essayist in the first place, one detail that has surprised me most during the past twenty years is that I have, in fact, written more personally in the essay form than I ever expected or intended. Still, as I look back on my “I,” across so many essays, I notice that the person typing out this “I” remains very hard to pin down, even for me. For starters, it’s never quite the same “I” who’s typing the word “I,” because of the way time works. Because of the way life is. I have been, for example, very single and very married. I’ve been poor, middle class, and wealthy. I’ve loved women, I’ve loved men, but loved no one for their gender specifically—it’s always been a consequence of who they were. Sometimes I’ve sat at my desk dressed like Joan Crawford. Other times, like someone who has come to fix your sink. I’ve sat there utterly childless and then very much full of child, or with a child in a Moses basket at my feet. I’ve been the mother of a British citizen and then the mother of an American. As a semi-public person, I’ve been the subject of various projections, and watched unrecognizable versions of “me” circulate in the digital sphere, far beyond my control. But I also remain who and what I have always been: a biracial black woman, born in the northwest corner of London, to a Jamaican mother and an English father. I personally feel like an outsider who belongs nowhere—and have never really minded this fact—but in the commons of my essays I understand that many or even most of my readers feel otherwise about this thorny matter of “belonging,” so I am often trying to write the kinds of sentences that remember this key fact, too.
If my own “I” remains a various thing—as I have written about too often—it is its very variousness that forces me to acknowledge the points of continuity: the fundamentals. What I honestly believe, as a human being. Every version of me is a pacifist. Every version believes that human life is sacred—despite the fact that the word “sacred” is most often used as a weapon in the arguments of conservatives, and remains basically inadmissible within the four isms that have done the most to form me. (But that’s a novelist for you. We can’t function on isms alone.) Every version of me knows that education, health care, housing, clean water, and sufficient food are rights and not privileges, and should be provided within a commons that is itself secured beyond the whims of the market. Yet to say these things is (in my view) really to say the bare minimum: it is almost saying nothing at all. The only significance of these beliefs, to me, when I am essaying, is that they are pretty much immovable, and whether I am reviewing a movie, describing a painting, arguing a point, or considering an idea, they represent the solid sides of my damn rectangle, no matter what the title in the center turns out to be. ♦
