Reclusive Author Asserts That All Novels Make Moral Arguments

All novels make moral arguments, although some of them are more subtle than others, according to novelist Zadie Smith, who spoke at Agassiz Theater yesterday.

Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, catapulted the 27-year-old author into stardom in 2000.

In that book, she wrote about cross-cultural relationships in contemporary London.

Latecomers were turned away from the packed theater yesterday as people flocked to see the notoriously private London-born author.

Smith attempted to debunk what she called the myth that only formidable texts on moral philosophy can speak to issues of morality.

She said that the lecture coincided with a book of essays she is writing as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

According to Smith, novels lend themselves to investigations of morality.

“My generation liked to be in some pain when we read. The harder it is, the better we feel about ourselves,” she said. “We rejected the idea that the novel could do us any good.”

Smith disputed this idea with examples from Jane Austen and E. M. Forster.

“Novels don’t share the epistemological privilege: that view from nowhere that moral philosophy has,” Smith said. “A novel never claims to be a view from nowhere; this is why we love them.”

Thus, Smith argued, novels always have an implicit moral stance.

Smith took her audience on a walking tour E. M. Forster’s book A Room With a View, and through various scenes out of Jane Austen books.

Smith summed up Austen as being the greater of the two authors, but criticized her as being two-dimensional in her treatment of morality.

Austen’s characters tend to be caricatures of virtues and vices, according to Smith.

“Jane Austen wears the ethics of reading on her sleeve,” she said.

She described Forster as having greater gradations in his treatment of morality. He is “sympatico” she said.

Unlike Austen, Forster delved into the complexity of the “human muddle” Smith said.

“Forster’s characters cleave unto the world, body and soul,” she said.

Smith linked the emotional effect of novels with their moral stance.

“When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various and not quite like us. And this is good,” she said.

Smith was introduced by Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language Homi K. Bhabha, who is chair of the history and literature committee.

“Zadie Smith follows Forster’s passion to connect,” Bhabha said. “She reads between crossed lines and plurality and emerges in the midst of human muddle.”

“Zadie is so much of a presence,” said Dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study Drew Gilpin Faust. “She has this wonderful ironic sense of the world, but an ironic sense steeped in a deep moral commitment.”

Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award.

The talk concluded the Radcliffe Institute’s Dean’s Lecture Series for the year.

—Staff writer Ella A. Hoffman can be reached at ehoffman@fas.harvard.edu.