Zadie Smith's NW: Unsettling the Promise of Empathy

At the end of her essay "Middlemarch and Everybody," Zadie Smith praises George Eliot as a novelist who "was on the border of the New," pointing to her aesthetic legacy: "What twenty-first-century novelists inherit from Eliot," Smith argues, "is the radical freedom to push the novel's form to its limits" (41). Smith's novel NW (2012) takes up this inheritance, pushing form to create "a highly experimental, revisionary late modernist novel" (Knepper 112), while still adhering to the realist commitment to reflect—accurately and convincingly—the reality of "ordinary human life" (to use Eliot's terms).¹ This formal challenge, I argue, is also an ethical one. NW confronts and reexplores the prominent value associated with the realist novel as a genre, and with George Eliot's novels in particular—empathy. NW's formal experimentation serves to question the promise of empathy, both as a social mechanism that can create solidarity and help vulnerable underclasses, and as an aesthetic mechanism that makes novel reading an ethical practice.

Empathy, or what Victorian novelists like Eliot refer to as fellow-feeling or sympathy, is the human faculty of feeling with others through imaginative transference: it is a process whereby a person emotionally places him- or herself into a situation experienced by a fellow human being, thus mentally sharing an aspect of the othe person's internal reality.² Eighteenth-century philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith enshrined this facility, seeing in it the basis of morality. They also believed that sympathy played a political function, in that it tempered individual emotions to allow social cooperation (Forman-Barzilai 12–13). Eliot shared this approach, famously referring to the importance of the role of art in "the awakening of social sympathies" (Essays 271).³

Significantly, the focus on the ethical and political potential of empathy is not a historic footnote; empathy has recently returned to the center of the stage, appearing in scholarly inquiries, sociopolitical debates, and a vast range of best-selling books.⁴ I will refer in more detail to some of these publications in the next section. Here, I will mention only one important aspect of this renewed interest: in updating the sentimentalist idea of feeling with others for the neoliberal present, the popular discourse of empathy emphasizes its importance for twenty-first-century society. Empathy is seen as a tool for counterbalancing the market-based norms of impersonal competition with a sense of solidarity. In what follows, I argue that NW's critical engagement with empathy highlights its role in the moral infrastructure of neoliberal politics. The novel implies that the neoliberal moral paradigm consists not only of the much-vaunted value of individual freedom, but also, implicitly, of the value of empathy, with its eighteenth-century promise of pro-social action and cooperation. Empathy theoretically serves as the counterbalance to radical freedom, creating a safety net for those who might be damaged by the effects of the free market. NW criticizes the ethics of empathy and rejects its politicized role. For Zadie Smith, the moral economy of neoliberalism cannot work. It is not simply that feeling with others does not—and has never—guaranteed any individual or collective good. Smith makes the more fundamental argument that once a human being has been transformed into "an ensemble of entrepreneurial and investment capital" (Brown 36), the ability to empathize is severely damaged. As the market becomes more and more dominant, empathy becomes less and less functional. Rather than offering a counterbalance to the excesses of the free market, as promised, empathy brings only alienation and even violence. Thus, in a neoliberal context, empathy is not only ineffective, but actually becomes dangerous.⁵

In focusing on NW's critique of the link between neoliberalism and empathy, my reading joins current scholarly debates about the ethics of contemporary fiction. The eighteenth-century idea of fellow feeling continues to hover above these debates, which, as C. Namwali Serpell writes, split into two "divergent views on the proper relation of the self to the other" (71–72). On the one hand...