Zadie Smith on Creative Writing!

A lovable, much adorable manual on Creative Writing - Adele Ramet has given us all!

And so has Hazel Smith!

And so has Patti Smith!

And so has Umberto Eco!

And so has Stephen King’s wondrous book On Writing, born out of decades of trial and error on the field, from which he gives budding writers his TOP 20 Rules for Writers.

Yet! Yet! Yet! Zadie Smith stands out tall’est from amongst ‘em all! and how!

Thanks to a brilliant lead by Dr. Aparna Srinivas on Zadie Smith, which gave me an impulsive inspiration of sorts!

This feature takes for its point of departure, from off Zadie Smith’s insights. I have divided the feature into three parts, basing ‘em all exclusively on Zadie’s impactful observations.

Well, here goes…

Zadie Smith on Massive Cultural Currents: “We forget that our particular moment, with all its tribulations and triumphs, is not neatly islanded in the river of time but swept afloat by massive cultural currents that have raged long before it and will rage long after.”

Well, John Corner’s observations merit a citation here. To him, this cultural current is “energetic & dynamic” and something that’s always on the flow – on the move! It never ain’t static! Says he: “In any period of human history a culture and society are partly sustained by the tension between that which is thought to be of value, inherited from the past, and that which is the product of energetic, dynamic, and deliberate innovation.”

Honore de Balzac too merits a retell here: And well, he wanted to be called the ‘Secretary of his Age,’ and his realist novels and plays have intensely focused on the milieu of French society after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte!

His masterpiece La Comedie humaine (1842–1850), a multivolume work involving about one hundred interwoven novels and stories, has had a tremendous influence on big names in the publishing industry - like Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, and Henry James!

Balzac’s The Girl with Golden Eyes is a fine piece of craftsmanship that attests to this aura of the cultural currents within its texture.

Again, to Hippolyte Taine, as with Zadie Smith, “Literature, did not come out of the air. It was conditioned by three earthy elements: race, milieu, moment.”

Sutherland adds to say, “English, however, has no exact equivalent term for milieu. It means, loosely, “socio-literary context.” In other words, ‘cultural currents’ that define an age!

Scott Fitzgerald has invented a wonderful term - “the Jazz Age” – to sum up the cultural currents from which The Great Gadsby emerged!

Interestingly, Zadie Smith’s ‘cultural currents’ also find resonance in Gertrude Stein’s wonderful coinage – the “Lost Generation” – a term which was popularized much by Ernest Hemingway!

Well, apart from the ‘cultural currents’ that define the milieu of a particular epoch, there are also cross-currents or crosscultural currents, or cultural undercurrents that also go a long way in informing and impacting the text of a particular epoch.

The Harlem Renaissance is a case in point. It was indeed a huge cross-cultural current that impacted African American artists to assert pride over their African heritage. Harlem subsequently became the Mecca for most inspirational African Americans.

Badal Sircar’s concept of the pioneering Third Theatre in the Indian scenario is another noteworthy example. It was, by all means, a ‘cross-cultural undercurrent’ aka ‘antiestablishment,’ that swept through the whole of the theatrical domains in the heart of India.

This Zadie Smithian quote also lends itself admirably to the now proverbial Montrosian quote, that New Historicism deals with the “textuality of history and the historicity of texts,” wherein the text is studied against the backdrop of its milieu – the cultural currents, crosscultural currents and cultural undercurrents that make up the ‘specifics’ of a text.

Indeed, new realities come out by the dozen, by resituating the text in its context, and how apt of it, we feel, when the Tennysonian ‘Ulysses’ rightfully observes, “I am a part of all that I’ve met!”

The social milieu in which Naipaul sets his novel A House for Mr. Biswas is glorious testimony to Zadie’s blessed chant, what with his insightful observations on the immigrant community on the island of Trinidad! And the list goes on! [Now that I’ve cited Naipaul, Prof. Rasheeda Madani will be a blissfully contended person, I bet!] J

Yes! as John Sutherland vouches himself, “Milieu roots literature in the soil from which it grows!”

To be contd…

Next: Part II in the Series: Zadie Smith on Critical Thinking and Hope

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