That Zadie, what a lady!

[Toby G Levy]

My already high opinion of Zadie Smith rises another notch with the the
discovery of the following, embedded in a long essay on E.M. Forster at

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1074217,00.html

"We have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world, draw our
own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the
error, trying to learn the real function . . . zeroing in on what
incalculable plot?"

I had this quote pinned to my door for the five years in which I wrote
my two novels. I think I felt it issued a kind of ethical challenge to
the composers of narrative, a challenge that I wanted to match as I went
about my own writing, an ideal that I would try to be equal to. I wanted
to be like Pynchon, to be in pursuit of hidden information; I thought it
the novel's responsibility to chase and pin down the ghost in the
machine. In short, I was responding to the ethical vision of another
writer. As a young writer, I took it as my model until I might find my
own.

The quote is from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It is also an accurate
description of the narrative procedures of Gravity's Rainbow , its
literary architecture. And it is an even more eloquent expression of the
kind of ethical attention the style of Gravity's Rainbow applies for
from its readers. It engages your feelings for certain characters and
situations over others, it compels particular hermeneutic procedure, it
asks the reader to "step up to the plate" of its style, to be equal to
it. This is all, for the moment, that I mean by an ethical vision.
Fiction always applies for that same "fine awareness", which Henry James
recognised we must employ in order to fully inhabit our ethical lives;
to become, as he put it "richly responsible". Pynchon is no less a
moralist, under this definition, than Forster or anyone else.

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