But Local.

I enjoyed all of Edward Mendelson’s NYRB review (archived) of Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (a riff on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath); here I will excerpt a section on a topic dear to my heart, the importance of a clear personal voice in any literary writing:

The play’s comic and transhistorical virtuosity arises in part from a half-concealed argument—which Smith makes everywhere in her work—about the moral significance of a personal voice. “From the moment Alyson opens her mouth” in The Canterbury Tales, Smith recalls in her introduction,

I knew that she was speaking to me, and that she was a Kilburn girl at heart…. Alyson’s voice—brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic—is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playgrounds of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road, any day of the week. The words may be different but the spirit is the same.

Like everyone in the modern world, Alvita constructs her voice by amalgamating scraps and fragments of other voices into something uniquely her own. A stage direction reports: “Her accent is North Weezy [i.e., Northwest London] with moments of deliberate poshness as well as frequent lapses into Jamaican patois and cockney for comic effect.” In one of the paradoxes of personhood, Alvita becomes herself by containing multitudes, which is what makes possible her connection across the centuries with the unique voice and spirit of Chaucer’s Alyson.

“Voice,” for Smith, is a word of power, something like a secular analogue of the sacred logos, the word that created the world. A voice can be true or false, and one person can speak with many voices. A true voice, in Smith’s world, speaks in the first person and can’t be mistaken for anyone else. A false voice speaks impersonally and sounds like anyone. Almost everything Smith writes makes a contrast between someone’s personal voice and the impersonality of all collective voices. Virginia Woolf, reviewing Hemingway in 1927, described people who speak in a fashionable slang—people “of an unreal type”—as seeming “much at their ease, and yet if we look at them a little from the shadow not at their ease at all, and, indeed, terribly afraid of being themselves, or they would say things simply in their natural voices.”

Repeatedly, the decisive moments in Smith’s novels occur when her characters become brave enough to speak in their natural voices. A stage direction in The Wife of Willesden describes personal voices and dictions bringing together self, speech, and truth:

We are surprised to find the women with the deepest thoughts are people we’ve hardly noticed up to now…. They all now stand to speak, and with an intensity that changes the atmosphere in the pub. They speak in their natural accents…but the words themselves seem to come from a transnational sacred text of rights and duties. These women are bearing witness to a truth.

The human being is, in Aristotle’s phrase, a social animal. Smith’s play, like much of her fiction, celebrates the collectivity that emerges among human beings who share a sense of place. In “The General Lock-In,” the framing scene at the start of the play that substitutes for Chaucer’s “General Prologue,” a character identified in the dramatis personae as the Author (“a brown woman in a headwrap”) sits in a quiet corner with her laptop and recalls:

We had all types of people in that night,
Young and old, rich and poor, black, brown and white—
But local: students, merchants, a bailiff,
People from church, temple, mosque, shul.

“But local.” The shared experience of something local has the effect of nurturing individual voices. Most of the play rewrites Chaucer, but Smith’s voice is what it speaks with throughout, and as in all her work a voice can bear witness to something “transnational” only by speaking in its local accent.

That’s why I love reading Smith even when her novels aren’t up to her highest standard — her voice is always clear, convincing, and enjoyable. And that’s one of my favorite things about Russian literature, which places such a high value on exactly that; cf. Val Vinokur on “translating marked voices” (“So I try to keep that awkwardness, that it sounds both idiomatic and idiosyncratic at the same time, really”) and Eagleton on Bakhtin (“The enemy is what Bakhtin dubs ‘monologism’, meaning the kind of meta-language which seeks to subdue this irrepressible heterogeneity”). Vive la différance!