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Chance and Gesture in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and The Autograph Man

2006; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0021989406068733

1741-6442

Jonathan P. A. Sell,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

After showing how White Teeth enacts a dialectic between determinism and chance from which the latter emerges as the winner, the article investigates how such a metaphysic affects Zadie Smith's notion of identity in The Autograph Man where identity becomes a series of gestures through which, individually, we make pragmatic self-presentations. At the same time, an identity is also produced for us socially, which never matches our own self-presentation. Thus social relations are informed by a dynamic of chance and instability and conducted through a process of interpretation and misinterpretation which, dependent as it is on communication, may actually enhance the prospect of social communion. While this model of identity is particularly fitted to postmodern, multicultural society, its origins in Epicureanism and its literary affinity with comedy suggest that Smith's notion of identity owes more to the comedic inclination of novels than to any political imperatives.