Zadie Smith’s NW: Unsettling the Promise of Empathy

Sympathy and the Free Market

I begin my analysis of the role of empathy in NW by tracing its roots back to Adam Smith’s and George Eliot’s idea of sympathy. Only thus can we recognize the fundamental part this central concept has played in the historical development of the capitalist moral economy. This linkage is a precursor to the role of empathy in present-day neoliberalism and helps explain the dialogue between Zadie Smith and George Eliot.

The ability to share the feelings of others has played a central role in theories of ethics from the eighteenth century onward. As Michael Frazer explains, for sentimentalist philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, sympathy is a kind of “bridge . . . the faculty by which inner mental states are shared among individuals” (8). The image of “the bridge” points to the important spatial aspect of sympathy: an imaginative shift of place is required in order to move into the experience of another person. This shift is considered essential for morality, enabling social interactions that advance the general good.⁷

Significantly, the eighteenth-century ethics of sympathy developed hand in hand with the emergence of a dynamic commercial capitalism and the political theories that embraced it. The two form the twin core of Adam Smith’s writings: the first in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and the second in his later Wealth of Nations (1776). Scholars of Adam Smith have long debated the relation between these two treatises, especially questioning the tension between his focus on sympathy in the former and emphasis on self-interest in the latter.⁸ However, current scholarship suggests that far from contradicting each other, these two ideas are actually intimately intertwined (Haakonssen xxiii–xxiv). The sympathetic imagination, as presented in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is the faculty with which “we place ourselves in [another’s] situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments” (12); this offers the ethical foundation for the new political economy that he posits in The Wealth of Nations. As Christina McRorie points out, “it is this imaginative capacity to stand in the place of another that . . . allows us to bargain with each other toward mutual advantage” (688). Note the word mutual: sympathy is necessary for the free commerce of Adam Smith’s rising capitalism, but it also pushes the bargaining toward a balance in which all gain from the final result. His sympathetic imagination is thus not antithetical to the dynamics of the capitalist market, but rather crucial to its proper functioning and to its ethical ideal of general well-being.⁹

The influence of the eighteenth-century concept of fellow-feeling on Victorian literature and its moral mission is well known.¹⁰ George Eliot made sympathy the ethical aim of her realist novels: she wished to cultivate her readers’ ability to share the joy and suffering of a wide variety of human beings.¹¹ The morality of Victorian sympathy was not disconnected from its Smithian political and economic underpinnings: sympathy was assumed to be a social mechanism for appeasing class conflict, “ameliorat[ing] social differences with assurances of mutual feeling and universal humanity” (Jaffe 15).¹² Eliot was immersed in this moral-economic-political discourse, and claimed that when art extends sympathies, “more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower . . . than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations” (Essays 270). In other words, the mutual feeling created by realist fiction is the moral vehicle that supports the functioning of industrial classbased society by tempering social conflicts and producing unity and stability.

This idea of mutual feeling was developed and further emphasized throughout the twentieth century by an array of philosophical and psychological inquiries that dealt with the phenomenon, now called “empathy.”¹³ Even as critics have come to question the connections between empathy and morality (Prinz 211–29), the popular interest in empathy continues to grow, along with a widespread celebration of its ethical merits and political promises. As Carolyn Pedwell asserts, in the twenty-first century “empathy . . . has become a Euro-American political obsession” (ix). In her book Affective Relations, she points to the high prevalence of calls for empathy in different fields and contexts, be they Barack Obama’s political rhetoric, self-help books, business discussions, best-selling science books, or feminist and antiracist debates. However divergent the discursive fields, empathy is presented as the great promise of our time: it is the answer to the pressing problems of the global age, “a significant tool for humanity” (Calloway-Thomas 3).

The public discourse of empathy gained special momentum in the years following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, as many turned to the humanistic legacy of Adam Smith in the search for solutions to the problems of late capitalism—most notably, financial instability and social inequality.¹⁴ This proliferating discussion reveals how empathy—which is linked with the eighteenth-century humanistic promise of mutuality and solidarity—has been updated to become part of contemporary neoliberal culture, presenting an important moral correlative and corrective to the modern political idea of individual freedom. Frans de Waal, for example, announces that “[e]mpathy is the grand theme of our time” (ix), presenting it as “a second invisible hand, one that reaches out to others” (222). As this formulation implies, the “second hand” of empathy is the accompanying apparatus of Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the free market. As such, empathy does not represent a radical, external alternative to market dynamics but rather its necessary complement. Indeed, both “hands” are required for the efficient operation of modern society. There is an underlying, surprising, compatibility between the popular calls for the individual to take advantage of the free market and achieve personal fulfillment on the one hand, and the seemingly opposing calls to activate the empathetic faculty on the other.

Zadie Smith’s NW offers a critical response to this “empathy craze” (to use Steven Pinker’s term [576]). Smith seizes upon the intrinsic but often unnoted connection between neoliberalism and the ethics of empathy, highlighting the problematics of this interaction.¹⁵ Significantly, NW speaks to a post-Thatcher Britain that is deep in the contemporary political implementation of austerity. Its observation is particularly pertinent in this context, as austerity relies on Adam Smith for its moral critique of debt, as well as for its strategic calls for national empathy.¹⁶ As John Clarke and Janet Newman show in “The Alchemy of Austerity,” their illuminating analysis of the rhetoric used in support of the austerity measures after the global crisis of 2008, there is an emphasis on “a recurrent trope of collective pain sharing,” with “a nation united in the face of adversity” (303); people are called upon to feel the suffering of others in order to understand the need for austerity and accept its costs.¹⁷

NW comes to shatter this political myth of a united nation, along with the rhetoric of collective pain sharing. Zadie Smith recognizes that empathy can be used to secure consent for what Clarke and Newman argue are “austerity strategies . . . unequally distributed in profound ways,” as they cut welfare and public services that disproportionally affect the poor (305). In the reality of widening social gaps depicted by NW, empathy is lopsided in damaging ways. Sometimes its costs are extremely high and unbalanced: Felix, for example, pays with his life for acting empathetically to a white woman, while she walks away unscathed. Thus, Smith implies that empathy is “a very limited emotion,” which does not necessarily advance the general good (“This Week”). Worse than that, empathy, the handmaid of capitalism, has become dangerous, playing into neoliberal ideology and involving devastating after-effects.

The Anxious Dynamics of Neoliberalism

Let us now zoom in to explore the specific socioeconomic context of NW—that is, the contemporary neoliberal era. Neoliberalism, as global capitalism is often called, “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2). Daniel Stedman Jones points to the claims of “both intellectual and political neoliberals” to be in alliance with “the heritage of Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment liberalism” typified by Adam Smith’s philosophy (100). He argues, however, that in its development over the past fifty years, the neoliberal political economy has “departed from the classical political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment in its unambiguous view of the free market and its effects.” The neoliberal decisive stress on economic liberties is far removed from the more reserved and ambivalent view of market economy suggested by the Anglo-Scottish liberal thinkers. Nevertheless, despite the radicalization of market deregulation, neoliberal ideology still preserves the classical liberal ethics of the common good by promising general well-being.

In NW, this neoliberal promise of well-being—politically implemented in Britain since the late 1970s—entails an enduring struggle with economic insecurity and social disempowerment. The fragmentary plot of the novel follows the stories of three protagonists: Leah Hanwell, Natalie Blake (formerly Keisha), and Felix Cooper, all of whom grew up in the fictional Caldwell council housing project, situated in the real neighborhood of Willesden. While Leah and Natalie have been friends since early childhood, Felix’s story seems disconnected. The plot lines intersect when Felix is murdered, and Natalie comes to suspect that Nathan Bogle, whom she and Leah knew in school, is one of the murderers.

Rather than being linked through sequence or plot line, the novel is held together by placement. Much like Middlemarch, with its scenes from rural life, NW revolves around the specific district of northwest London. Yet in contrast to the intimacy and interaction of communal life that animates Eliot’s novel, NW is placed in a depersonalized district identified only by a postal code. If Eliot’s lesson in sympathy is set within a quasi-feudal, closely knit society, the modern call to empathy to which NW responds is set in an estranged cosmopolitan world. This is a world tinged with instability and insecurity, where strangers are forced into non-intimate proximity. The novel enacts what Knepper calls “a spatial aesthetics that registers the anxious dynamics of a globalizing neighborhood” (112). These “anxious dynamics” are the result of the uncertainties and fluctuations in the neoliberal economy, and evidence of the contradictory undercurrents of empathy in global capitalism. The socioeconomic dynamics that supposedly encourage an individual’s movement forward and upward are revealed as disrupting the imaginative movement of transference required for empathetic interaction. To use Rae Greiner’s definition in “Thinking of Me Thinking of You,” empathy is “a way for the ego to gaze upon itself and transport itself into the minds and bodies of others” (418). This ability to “transport” appears to be deeply damaged or lopsided in the reality of NW: protagonists are unable to connect with others because they are frightened to move into another’s space, feel invaded within their own space, or else are stuck within their own minds.

NW places these interactions within the context of Jacques Derrida’s ideas of hospitality and its tensions.¹⁸ As Lynn Wells observes, Derrida’s notion of hospitality resonates in the titles of the different sections of the novel—”Visitation,” “Guest,” and “Host” (101).¹⁹ I believe that these titles are more than passing allusions and actually serve to create the conceptual framework of the novel and its critique of the ethics of empathy. Derrida’s analysis of the conflicts and contradictions inherent in hospitality points to different kinds of relations with the other, each with its own dangers—dangers that the ethics of empathy tend to overlook. On the one hand is “visitation,” an unconditional openness to an unknown visitor who might be utterly and radically different. On the other is “hosting,” a restricted and selective invitation of specific guests who share an aspect of similarity and fellowship (Derrida, Of Hospitality 25). The dangers of “visitation” arise from encounters with the unknown in which one “let[s] oneself be overtaken” (Derrida, “Hospitality” 361), while the dangers of “invitation” lie in the parochial exclusion of the unfamiliar (Derrida, Of Hospitality 55). With this conceptualization, Derrida creates a system for analyzing the tensions between similarity and alterity that are so crucial for the operation of empathy—and for its possible breakdown.

Smith’s novel presents intriguing portrayals of these tensions, which are often ignored in the contemporary discourse of empathy. The three sections of the novel exemplify different configurations of similarity and difference, each of which can lead to a different failure of empathy. Some breakdowns stem from the fear of difference. For example, instead of being truly oriented toward the other, empathy may develop in a limited and unequal way only toward those who are similar. Thus, empathy may actually lead to an active rejection of those who—like Nathan Bogle, the novel’s underdog— are not allowed fellowship. In a similar fashion, the fear of difference may hinder the imaginative leap of seeing through another’s eyes: one may instead become locked—as Natalie is—in a position of authoritative host, holding a presumptive “knowledge” of others that assumes that those who are fundamentally different are actually similar. Yet empathy may suffer from an excess of similarity as much as the dread of difference. For vulnerable individuals, like Felix, empathy may act as an overwhelming invasion, destroying their boundaries while immersing them in the suffering of a visitor they cannot escape. Smith explores these dangers against the backdrop of a global society that contains a mix of ethnicities and cult, with deep economic, racial, and social disparities—a society with no clear host or guest, where all are called upon to adopt the empathetic position and feel another’s pain. She suggests that the ethics of empathy, which has always been complicit in capitalism, has become an ideological threat within the radical economic libertarianism of neoliberalism. Rather than creating mutuality or promoting the general good—as Adam Smith and George Eliot believed—empathy births alienation and may even result in brutality and death.

Leah: Visitation and the Horrors of Empathy

The first section of the novel focuses on Leah, whose story is told in stream-of-consciousness narration. From its title onward, the section is in dialogue with the Derridean conception of invitation and visitation, pointing to the anxious dynamics of their operation in the contemporary urban setting of the novel. In the opening chapter, Leah is enjoying the sun in the small garden of her council flat, while ruminating on a slogan she hears on the radio: “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me” (3). This can be read as the presentation of a host, settled in her own home. Yet the slogan is immediately deconstructed, as Leah’s thoughts are interrupted by “a grim girl on the third floor [who] screams Anglo-Saxon at nobody.” The fragmented narrative, which interweaves the girl’s words with Leah’s thoughts sans quotation marks, reflects what Judith Butler describes as “the general predicament of unwilled proximity to others and to circumstances beyond one’s control” (34): there is no sole authorship of a dictionary, no autonomous definition of the self.²⁰ In NW, this “unwilled proximity” is exacerbated by the urban landscape of the Brent Housing Partnership where Leah and her husband, Michel, live—a place where strangers are compelled to share their intimate conversations. Distracted by the girl, Leah loses the “good line” with its assertion of authority, and is disappointed that there is “[n]othing else to listen to but this bloody girl” (4). The beginning of NW thus implies that—contrary to much scholarly theory—it is not necessarily distance and difference that disrupt empathy; sometimes, it is actually unwilled proximity that causes the damage.

The problem of unwilled proximity to others is brought to the fore in the very next chapter, when an unexpected visitor knocks at the door of Leah and Michel’s flat: “a woman is screaming PLEASE and crying. A woman thumps the front door with her fist” (5). The screaming woman at the door is Shar, who claims that her mother has been rushed to the hospital and she needs money for a taxi to join her. The complex dynamic that develops highlights both the attraction that empathy holds for Leah and the threat it presents.

Leah responds to Shar’s tale of woe by inviting the other woman into her home. She wishes to play the empathetic host, to reach out to a woman in need whose “[t]ears shake [her] little body” (6). Oozing benevolence, she makes Shar a cup of tea and orders a taxi, giving her money to pay for it (5–15). Yet despite the generosity that her husband later condemns, there is nonetheless a failure of empathy—the imaginative stepping into the shoes of the other—in this interaction. Indeed, Leah’s kindness is actually based on her inability to enter Shar’s world. Despite the fact that Shar’s lie about her ill mother is “obvious to everyone” (18), Leah cannot penetrate beyond the surface of her pleading, cannot understand how the other woman thinks. Thus, although Leah sees that “[s]omething is wrong with Shar’s face” (9), she posits that Shar “is slow, maybe, and possibly clumsy; or she is traumatized, or distracted” (14). She does not reach beyond these uncertain observations. While she tries to act empathetically, “arrang[ing] her face to signify compassion” (6), she cannot perform the active movement of inhabiting the perspective of the other.

This failure to understand the other woman and share her feelings is not necessarily a fundamental breakdown, except that for Leah—and the neoliberal culture that NW depicts—empathy is intertwined with ethics: it is considered an essential aspect of caring relationships, standing at the basis of social good. Lynn Wells points out that “playing the role of savior of the poor appeals to Leah’s conception of herself as empathetic and benevolent” (105). I would refine this statement by saying that expressing fellow-feelings is essential for Leah’s conception of herself. Leah is obsessed with the promise of empathy. She works for a community charitable organization that plays its moral role in the neoliberal economy: “[h]ere a nation’s bad bets morph into a semblance of the collective good” (NW 34). She believes herself to be “faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of the city as other people are to their families, or their countries,” knowing the people “around here” (6). Deep down, she is aware of a tension between her theory and her practice. When Leah’s Team Leader at work asserts that “This work requires empathy” (34), Leah’s response is cynicism. Trying to embrace the empathetic role toward Shar, she fails. Despite the fact that Shar is part of “this two-mile square of the city,” Leah cannot enter her perspective, nor truly help her. An analysis of this failure highlights the tensions involved in the ethics of empathy in a contemporary context.

In her interaction with Shar, Leah tries to feel and offer fellow-feeling. Nonetheless, she is careful to maintain a sharp distinction between their roles as generous host and helpless guest. Indeed, Leah’s initial gesture of hospitality, when she “releases the chain” (NW 5) of the door and lets Shar in is a performance of power, enacting what Derrida terms the “sovereignty of oneself over one’s home” (Of Hospitality 55). Standing at the front door of her intact flat, Leah sees Shar as a “[w]oman in a war-zone standing in the rubble of her home” (NW 6)—homeless in the face of Leah’s clear possession of a home. This opposition allows Leah to cope with the threat of Shar’s sudden visitation. As Derrida writes, “visitation” is the arrival of an unexpected visitor that unsettles the sovereignty of the host, as it involves a radical exposure to the other (“Hospitality” 361–62). It also involves danger, for the stranger may turn out to be an enemy or an exploitive intruder. Leah tries to resist this deep vulnerability. On one hand, she asserts a clear differentiation between herself and Shar; on the other, she attempts to transform the visitation initiated by Shar into a benevolent invitation, in which she holds a clear position of power.

Yet the defensive denial of vulnerability does not actually protect Leah. For naught her efforts at playing the generous host: they cannot conceal her weakness and her estrangement from Shar. Her frenzied movements reveal her anxiety, as she “turns too quickly, makes irrelevant motions with her hands” (NW 9). Shar’s presence acts as a palpable pressure, impacting not only Leah’s actions, but also her speech. She finds herself unexpectedly telling Shar of her new pregnancy—a secret that she had not yet revealed to anyone, “not having intended to speak of this delicate, unfinished thing” (12). Shar’s response to Leah’s revelation calls attention to the threats of visitation. It is as if her access to Leah’s home also allows access to Leah’s body: . . . She walks back to Leah and presses her hands flat against Leah’s stomach.- Let me feel. I can tell things.

With this decisive movement, Shar threatens to unsettle the hierarchy of host and guest, to take control of Leah and her bodily secrets. Undermined, Leah grows dizzy, “[t]he kitchen slants and Leah steadies herself with a hand to the sideboard” (13). Agitated, Leah runs to the toilet, “closes the door, sits on the floor and cries” (14). Only after escaping to this private, as-yet-uninvaded space, can Leah make an effort to regain her status as authoritative host. Coming out, she parts from Shar with a patronizing “God bless you,” pressing thirty pounds into her hand (16)—thus finalizing Shar’s victory.²¹

Leah’s anxiety in opening her home to a stranger is understandable. The dangers involved in visitation are made chillingly concrete in the social context of contemporary Willesden—”a world,” in David Marcus’s words, “of public housing going wrong, of social planning no longer planned” (70). In this world, the homeless Shar and her drug-addict friends prey on local residents, as Leah later learns (NW 18). Taking in a stranger thus involves potential harm, in which one might be become a victim. Yet it is not the danger of being robbed by homeless intruders that truly frightens Leah. After the meeting with Shar, it is a different threat that looms large: the fear of herself becoming a homeless guest, “an imploring woman in an ancient story” (92). Leah is not scared of being robbed by Shar, but rather terrified of becoming Shar, of changing places with the begging woman who “pulls at her clothes and wails” (6). The bigger threat implicit in the movement of empathy is thus the possibility of reversing the roles of host and guest, of blurring the lines between them. To Leah, this possibility does not seem so remote. Living in a post-welfare state, Leah often paraphrases Margaret Thatcher in order to castigate herself as a failure (48). She lives in a rented council apartment, knowing that future housing is not guaranteed. The fear of being turned out to the streets, exposed to harm, is constant.

This sense of lurking vulnerability runs throughout Leah’s fluid interior monologues, and becomes embodied in the dreaded image of a begging woman on her knees. When Leah opens the door to Shar, she sees that “[t]he stranger’s knees go, she falls forward, crumpling. . . . Woman begging the public for witnesses” (6). This image reappears when Shar and Leah meet again unexpectedly. As Leah tries to reclaim the patronizing position of savior, Shar yells: “What you want from me? Want me on my knees?” (61). Yet later, it is actually Leah who goes down on her knees: when one of Shar’s pimps hits Michel, Leah intervenes by begging (92). After the attack, Leah disassociates herself from the experience, wondering “[w]ho was that woman at the moment of crisis, screaming and weeping, begging on her knees in the street?” (94). She cannot bear to identify with this begging woman, to fall into the debased position that she associates with Shar.

Audrey Jaffe maintains that this scenario of changing places actually underlies many of the “scenes of sympathy” in Victorian realist novels. “Victorian Sympathy,” she claims, “involves a spectator’s (dread) fantasy of occupying another’s social place” (8). What is more, she argues that this dread is intimately intertwined with capitalist economic dynamics: “The threat encoded in the sympathetic exchange is that on which a capitalist economy relies: the possibility that the spectator ‘at ease’ and the beggar might, indeed, someday, change places” (7). In the context of the Victorian novel, empathy acts to solidify the unstable identity of the middle-class sympathizer: the threat of changing places is sublimated into sympathy toward the poor person, who is now set up as a foil. Smith enacts a similar “(dread) fantasy” in Leah’s relation to Shar—a dread that is fueled by the economic instability of the neoliberal order. Yet in contrast to Victorian novelists, Smith exposes the process of sublimation and shows what happens when such sublimation is not successful. When the possibility of changing places cannot be ignored, it does not structure empathy, but rather blocks it. Instead of imaginatively stepping into the shoes of the dreaded alternate version, Leah recoils from the possibility of engaging with a frighteningly defenseless version of herself, a terrifying double.

Indeed, the relationship between Leah and Shar is imbued with Freudian uncanniness. The “uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (Freud 220). Yet as Freud points out, this kind of unwilled proximity leads not to recognition but to alienation: the uncanny “has become alienated from it [the mind] through the process of repression” (241), so that the unacknowledged double “become[s] a thing of terror” (236). For Leah, Shar is a debased social shadow who is both foreign and “long familiar.” Opening the door to Shar, Leah perceives that “[t]hey’re the same age,” and although Shar is a stranger, her “face is familiar” (NW 6). The uncanny similarities continue: it turns out that Leah and Shar attended the same school (10), and that Shar is a friend of Nathan Bogle (13), the boy Leah loved when she was ten years old (50). NW is structured so that Shar is seen only from Leah’s point of view, reinforcing Shar’s role in Leah’s psychic economy.

Leah’s meeting with her uncanny double continues to haunt her after the event, and—as Freud notes—the interaction involves both dread and enchantment, repudiation and desire (245). Leah becomes obsessed with Shar, “[o]n the look-out for her, still, almost a month later. Expecting her out of this shop, from behind this corner, by that phone box” (NW 47). Leah even fantasizes Shar asking her “Shall we run? Are you ready? . . . Leave all this! Let’s be outlaws!” (86). Yet when the two meet, Leah can only repudiate her own attraction, shouting: “Proud of yourself? Thief. I want my money” (45). At the next unexpected meeting Leah “resorts to a reflex emotion: contempt” (60), but then tries once again to play the role of benevolent helper: “Let me help, maybe I can” (61).

Experiencing Shar as an uncanny double, Leah is unable to imagine her as an independent other, with her own perspective and needs. Here again the failure of empathy relates to the forced proximity in Leah’s life, to the overcrowded, non-intimacy of contemporary urban living that creates enforced closeness between socially unequal strangers. In these conditions, Leah cannot make the imaginative leap into the minds of others. Shar, in particular, remains an externalized embodiment of Leah’s unacknowledged fears; Leah vacillates between despising her and patronizing her, but never actually sees her. Peter Goldie, in his discussion of empathy, refers to the possibility of “imagin[ing] being the other person” (302; emphasis added). In the social circumstances that Smith depicts, being the uncanny double of yourself at your most vulnerable and weak is terrifying.

This visceral horror comes to the fore in the final chapter of Leah’s section, when she goes to collect her developed photos at the pharmacy and mistakenly receives Shar’s in their place. On looking through the photos she believes to be hers, Leah finds that “the first is entirely black, and so is the second; the third shows only a red aura, like a torch held beneath a sheet” (NW 108). This description is followed by a line break in the text, which jumps to Leah’s decisive, horrified rejection of the photos: “Look, these aren’t mine, I don’t want these—.” The first sentence of the next paragraph explains, “The fourth is Shar.” For Leah, there is a brief gap between the moment of looking and the moment of recognition, a gap of misunderstanding that leads to an instant of terror in which what is supposed to be her own image turns into Shar’s. This episode represents a symmetric reversal of an uncanny experience recounted by Freud, in which he encountered his double in the looking glass, not knowing that he was looking at his own reflection (248). Leah’s experience is even more dramatic, as the encounter with the uncanny double consists of a momentary illusion of merging with the other. Here, Leah involuntarily undergoes the empathetic shift of imagining being another person and the experience is destructive. Confronted with her deepest fear, Leah loses control: “[s]he is shouting, and people look at her like she is mad” (NW 108).

Leah’s stream-of-consciousness narrative reveals that although she is attached to the ideal of fellow-feeling and preoccupied with “the desperate girl who came to the door” (25), she is deeply frightened by the possibility of changing places. Within a world defined by instability, she does not want to experience change at all (“Why must the moment change?” she asks [28]). Unlike Michel, who is driven by the ideological imperative to “move forward,” Leah literally refuses to move, asking instead “[w]hich way is forward?” This fear of movement separates her not only from threatening strangers like Shar, but also from potential intimacy with loved ones. Turning away from Michel’s dream of moving houses, she also turns away from his deeper dream: Leah refuses to have a child, going through several secret abortions despite Michel’s longing to be a father. She cannot welcome a baby into her body and her life.

Felix: Empathy and the Vulnerable Position of the Guest

With the close of Leah’s section, which explores the fear of invasive “visitation” that accompanies the idealization of hospitable fellow-feeling, the novel turns to the dangers present for the “Guest” who has no home and can never claim the power of the host. The second section follows Felix Cooper on his travels through London on the last day of his life. Felix, who has no home or stability, represents the terrible vulnerability of the guest who must rely on others for shelter. A former drug addict, Felix has “just basically [been] picking [him]self up off the floor from that past few years” (146). Deserted at childhood by his mentally ill mother, Felix knows only instability. He was raised by his father in Garvey House, “[a] mix of squat, halfway house and commune” (121), and then in the Caldwell council housing. At the time of the novel, he is living in the apartment of his girlfriend, Grace. He is, in other words, a “guest”—one who has been invited and welcomed, but with the threat of a rescinded invitation looming above him. As Grace warns, he “[w]on’t be laughing when I kick you out on the street” (114).

Like Michel, Felix dreams of social mobility, modeling himself on the rags-to-riches tales favored by the media. Grace encourages his aspirations by introducing him to self-help books, from which Felix extracts popular mantras like “you just got to be the best you that you can be” (151), or “I’m moving up in the game. And I’m ready for it” (181). As in the case of Michel, who responds to the fervent calls for empathy with decisive rejection, believing that “moving forward” in the capitalist dream of social progress requires separation from the “dramas” of others (32), Felix sees empathy as dangerous. His desire to move upward demands separation. Thus, when Felix comes to break off his relationship with his ex-girlfriend Annie, who “blatantly don’t want to go” to the next level (181), he refuses to let her pain impact his feelings.²² Coming to “the dreaded scene [of confrontation] that had kept him from this place for months,” Felix is on guard to the threat of empathy: . . . the strange thing was how precisely he knew what it was like to be Annie at this moment—he had been in Annie’s role many times, with his mother, with other women—and the more he understood it the more he wanted to escape her, as if losing in the way she was losing right now was a kind of virus and pity the way you caught it.(186)

Significantly, in a passage whose third-person-center-of-consciousness rhetoric clearly invites reader response toward Felix, Felix rejects Annie’s plea for empathy. Like Leah, he is terrified of being infected by the other, of being turned into what he desires to escape. Once again, empathy is presented not as the road leading to mutuality and cooperation but rather to invasion and illness. Once again, it is proximity rather than difference that contaminates empathy. Felix understands Annie’s vulnerable position—and he rejects her plea for empathetic response precisely because he knows “what it [is] to be Annie.” Empathy is like entering an infected home, an act which threatens to imprison the individual. Therefore, when “he heard this woman quietly weeping,” when “she went down on her knees,” Felix does not turn around (188–89). Like the image of the begging woman in Leah’s story, the kneeling Annie becomes the embodiment of vulnerability—a dread specter to be avoided rather than empathetically engaged. In aspiring to make the movement upward, to “shake [him]self free of the negative” (188), Felix rejects the imaginative movement of empathy toward that other who can only be seen as “the negative.” Fearing that an empathetic response will destroy him, he hurries away.

Felix’s dread of the dangers of empathy is sadly prescient. Having fled one scene of dangerous empathy, he continues directly to another. In the next episode, a pregnant woman asks Felix for help, and this time, he does not escape. The sequential plot creates a clear connection between Felix’s empathetic response and his tragic murder by two strangers. It also turns attention to the way racial disparities distort the dynamics of empathy, so that it results in separation and violence rather than cooperation and solidarity.

The chain of events begins when a pregnant woman assumes that Felix is the friend of two black men who have put their legs up on the seats of a subway carriage, making it impossible for her to sit. She requests his help. Felix looks at her and sees “[a] white woman, hugely pregnant and sweating” (193). His response seems to be an involuntary mirroring, as “[l]ooking at her made the sweat break out across Felix’s nose.”²³ Felix’s sweat indicates an almost automatic sharing of the woman’s discomfort. However, it may also reveal his anxious response to the difficult position in which her question—with its racist assumption about his friendship with the two other black men—has placed him. The text does not decisively indicate which of these two options is primary, yet it shows how Felix chooses to act in response: countering the woman’s assumption of his fellowship with the two black strangers, Felix chooses fellowship with her. He turns to the strangers and asks one of the men to let the woman have a seat. The stranger responds furiously: “[I]s it your business, though? Why you tryna make it your business?” This is the danger of empathy: by responding, Felix has inadvertently made the woman his “business,” and he becomes dangerously involved with the two strangers as well. Still taking responsibility for the pregnant woman, Felix offers her his own seat— for the first time, the perennial guest attempts to offer hospitality.

Smith highlights the problematics of empathy by lingering on the dynamics that develop in the subway carriage: No one looked—or they looked so quickly their glances were undetectable. Felix felt a great wave of approval, smothering and unwanted, directed toward him, and just as surely, contempt and disgust enveloping the two men and separating them, from Felix, from the rest of the carriage, from humanity.(194)

With her uncompromising portrayal of social undercurrents, Smith demonstrates that in the contemporary social context of deep economic and racial disparities, empathy is lopsided. Not all people are equally worthy of fellow-feeling—and empathy for one is often an active rejection of the other. Thus, Felix’s empathetic response to the specifically “white” pregnant woman works to dehumanize the two black strangers who did not respond to her. Felix has chosen one side at the expense of the other. In playing “host” to the white woman, in making her his guest, Felix has metaphorically shut the door on the two black men. And it is not only he who shuts the door, but the entire subway carriage: the passengers are all carried away by a fellow-feeling that separates the two black men as objects of disgust. This bears disastrous consequences—not for the two dehumanized men, but for Felix himself. When he gets off the train, the men follow him, mug him, and then murder him in the street. Refusing to play host to these two strangers does not save Felix from the vulnerability of visitation. For Felix was only a metaphorical host. He remained, in reality, a homeless guest. And out on the street, there is no protection.

This closing casts a shadow over the novel as a whole. Felix’s section is the only part of NW that invites a reader response of empathy. Its coherent plot is told through conventional realist narration, much in the mode of Eliot’s naturalist fiction: the representation of the external world is accompanied by a portrayal of the subjective world of the focalizer. Paradoxically, “Guest” is thus the only section to invite the reader into the world of the novel, allowing identification with the hopeful man who is the only one in NW to express empathy. Nevertheless, it is precisely here that Smith forcefully rejects the ethics of empathy that Eliot’s realism aims to advance, showing how flawed it can be. Just when empathy seems to succeed in overcoming social differences and connecting strangers—working almost as an Eliot-like sympathy—it is revealed to be deeply biased, contaminated by social inequalities, and based on the exclusion of those that do not fit the “fellowship.” This is true both in the represented world of NW and in the reading process. To readers, the two black men remain cyphers, their thoughts and feelings unknown and irrelevant. They are simply brutal murderers. Empathy for the protagonist involves disregard for the humanity of the villains.

Natalie: The Longing for Empathy

After the terrible warning embedded in Felix’s section, NW continues to explore the tension between host and guest within the social context of impaired empathy. The novel returns to the interaction between childhood friends Leah and Natalie in order to further explore the frictions that break out in circumstances of socioeconomic inequality. Natalie, a second-generation Caribbean of working-class background, has become a wealthy barrister and owns a “beautiful house” (71), where she and her husband host dinner parties. When Leah is invited to attend one of these parties in the first section of the novel, she is (as always) sensitive to the dangers involved in hospitality—this time from the point of view of the needy guest. Natalie’s house makes Leah “feel like a child” (74); resentful and on edge, she criticizes Natalie’s “bourgeois existence” (75). Yet as revealed in the third section, underlying Leah’s jealousy and scorn is a breakdown of empathy—she has completely failed to enter into Natalie’s mind. Her blindness is exposed when the narration shifts to Natalie’s point of view. Whereas Leah sees pride and serenity, believing that her friend has forgotten “where she came from” (70), it becomes clear that Natalie has not deleted her past, and does not feel the pride and authoritative serenity that Leah projects. The two friends act as foils, each highlighting a different facet of (dis)functioning empathy.

In contrast to Leah, Natalie does not recoil from the capitalist demand to “move forward,” but embraces it. The slogan of “the sole author”—which opens Leah’s section only to be drowned out by the neighbor’s invasive proximity—reappears several times in Natalie’s section (247, 251, 263). Unlike Leah, Natalie tries to implement this idea, and to be the “author” of her life. Yet despite her openness to change, Natalie—like Leah—fails at the imaginative movement of empathy. In writing her own story, she has become incapable of reading the stories of others.

By focusing on the price of self-actualization and “moving forward,” Natalie’s section broadens NW’s critique of empathy, hinting that its problematics reach back to the Enlightenment conception of progress. This concept, which animates Adam Smith’s political economy, is at the root of the capitalist notion of the self-made man, one of the founding myths of neoliberal culture. Natalie is a female model for this capitalist success story, achieving the social mobility of which Michel and Felix only dream. Her section consists of a collage of 185 numbered segments, whose progress reflects her decisive movement up the social ladder. However, these segments also reveal how empathy gradually becomes impossible for her. This breakdown points to a larger crisis of the Enlightenment idea of progress.

“Natalie Blake was crazy busy with self-invention” (247), we are told. Yet even as she works at self-achievement, what she experiences is self-alienation, an internal “breach” (208). The sense of estrangement is reinforced by the third-person mode of narration, as well as by the frequent use of her full name, which creates the impression that she is a character in an external drama: “Natalie Blake, being strong, decided to fight” (313). It is as if Natalie does not have an “I” with which to think. At one point she acknowledges this sad fact—once again speaking in the third-person: “Ms. Blake [has] no self to be, not with Leah, or anyone” (246). Having “no self to be,” Natalie cannot make the empathetic shift: with no self she cannot imagine another self, cannot imagine herself into another’s mind.

Yet Natalie longs for this movement into others. Here, too, Leah and Natalie act as foils. If for Leah the movement of empathy is threatening, what frightens Natalie is its opposite: the inability to move outside her own drama. She longs to enter another person’s experience: Walking down Kilburn High Road Natalie Blake had a strong desire to slip into the lives of other people. . . . “Slip into” is an imprecise thought. . . .Listening was not enough. Natalie Blake wanted to know people. To be intimately involved with them.(334)

Natalie, an authoritative host in her beautiful home, yearns to be a guest in other people’s lives. Not just a voyeur that peeps from the outside, but one who slips into the minds of others. Her yearning for such intimate involvement with strangers points to a lack of intimacy in her involvement with her husband, her two children, her friends. More than that, it paints the movement of empathy as almost larcenous, making the praised stepping into another’s mind a transgressive sneaking. This desire drives Natalie to engage strangers over the Internet, which ultimately breaks up her marriage. There is a terrifying emptiness at the heart of her story.

The crisis of empathy comes to a head at the close of the novel, when Natalie’s husband discovers clues to her infidelity on the computer and their marriage collapses. This breakdown is echoed in a simultaneous crisis in Leah’s marriage, which is also torn apart by an explosive discovery: Michel finds the contraceptive pills that Leah has been taking surreptitiously while claiming that she was trying to conceive. The closing of the novel exposes the lack of intimacy at the core of both Leah’s and Natalie’s marriages. The two stories come together when Michel calls Natalie and blames her for collaborating in Leah’s deception, as her name is on the pill box. Natalie’s instinctual reaction is defensive. Yet suddenly, something strange happens to her. Battered by crises, her carefully fabricated persona breaking apart, for the first time she can “almost imagine” feeling empathy for another: as she spoke her mind traveled to what felt like open ground, where she was able to almost imagine something like her friend’s pain, and, in imagining it, recreate some version of it in herself.(396)

This “almost” empathetic experience is described as a metaphoric spatial movement that is unsettling for Natalie—like traveling to an “open ground.” Yet in almost recreating her friend’s pain, she feels exalted. Instead of feeling blocked, looking in at strangers, she feels “[c]larity. Bright, blinding, free of judgment, impossible to contemplate for longer than a moment, and soon transfigured into something else. Still, for a moment it was there” (396).

Notably, this moment seems to reproduce the crucial emotional arc that is typical for Eliot’s sympathetic realism, in which, as Smith writes in her essay on Middlemarch, a character comes “to feel another’s pain as if it were his own” (“Middlemarch” 38). Likewise, the moment points to the ethical promises of empathy: an individual’s awakening to others, and the possibility of interpersonal bonding. Indeed, for the first time Natalie not only understands Leah, but is also able to share her understanding with Michel: “Leah loves you. She always has. She just doesn’t want to have a baby” (NW 396). Michel responds in turn, pleading for further connection and help: “Please come.”

Yet the dialogue with Eliot is ironic. For when Natalie “come[s],” the communion and connection break down. Empathy is not only short lived; it does not lead to an ethical apex. The empathetic experience does not change Natalie, does not make her a better person, does not enable her to help Leah, does not create mutuality and sharing between them. Instead, all that Natalie can do is “offer[ ] her friend [Leah] a selection of aphorisms, axioms and proverbs the truth content of which she could only assume from their common circulation, the way one puts one’s faith in the face value of paper money” (398). Even as Smith undermines Eliot’s promise of sympathy, she highlights the political aspect that has made empathy dangerous. Natalie returns to the façade of “paper money” and the truisms of the neoliberal market, parroting the trite: “Honesty is always the best policy. Love conquers all. Each to her own.” For Leah, who is haunted by the capitalist logic of circulation, these supposedly comforting aphorisms only raise the dreaded specter of changing places: “I just don’t understand why I have this life . . . Why that girl [Shar] and not us. Why that poor bastard on Albert Road [Felix]. It doesn’t make sense to me” (399–400). Natalie once again returns to her neoliberal catechism and her belief in “paper money”: Because we worked harder. . . . We were smarter and we knew we didn’t want to end up begging on other people’s doorsteps. We wanted to get out. People like Bogle—they didn’t want it enough.(400)

Natalie can only offer Leah a flawed empathy, a reconstruction of the perspective of another person according to ideological maxims. This stereotypical view of others is exemplified in the reality show that Natalie’s family watches, in which “poverty was understood as a personality trait” (317). Here, there is no need to make the effort of stepping into another’s shoes. It is enough to estimate the face value of these shoes in order to know the person who wears them.

Both Natalie and Leah feel how “automatic” Natalie sounds, how unconvincing is her knowledge (400). The potential for true communion breaks down to once again playing a part by rote. The brief instant when Natalie could “almost imagine something like her friend’s pain” collapses (396). Instead, the childhood friends can bond only by opposing themselves to an externalized enemy: Nathan Bogle, whom they will later blame for the murder of Felix in a phone call to the police (401). It appears that the only model of solidarity in modern society is uniting against an out-group whose inner perspective is totally ignored or misinterpreted.

In her essay “Love Actually,” Zadie Smith notes how different writing styles can embody different ethical claims. Looking to E. M. Forster’s relation to Jane Austen, she argues that there is an essential ethical divergence. Although Forster’s “work is . . . heavily influenced by Austen,” it turns away from her moral realism that embodies the “educated heart” for whom “the training and refinement of feeling plays an essential role” (Smith, “Love Actually”). Instead, his innovative, messy style “goes further in showing us how very difficult an educated heart is to achieve”—a different realization that embodies a differing ethical value. In NW, Smith makes a similar move of differentiated influence in regard to Eliot’s realism, moving away from Eliot’s writing of sympathy in order to immerse readers in a reality that simultaneously celebrates and frustrates the empathetic connection. This differentiation extends into the reading experience. Unlike Eliot’s Middlemarch, which is structured so that readers experience fellow-feeling in correlation with the characters’ trajectory, NW extends the crisis of empathy into the reading process itself. Only in the novel’s middle section is the reader tantalized with the possibility of empathy—a possibility whose ethical import is undercut by the exclusion and violence that follow. In its framing first and third sections, by contrast, readers are left feeling locked out, unable to identify or empathize with either Leah or Natalie. Despite the presence of interior monologues and stream-of-consciousness narration, the two women remain impenetrable. As Eric Banks notes in a review of NW, readers “never really get a solid sense of just who they are or what motivates their actions” (“Lost in London”).

I believe that Smith deliberately constructs this reading experience, and that it is the conscious result of her experimental mode of narration. The pace of the narrative is jarring, continuously throwing the reader from one mode of reading to another: interior monologues turn into direct speech or several-person conversations; Google driving directions (41) are followed by subjective visual impressions seen from a bus (42–43). This frantic narrative movement, with its multiple, and sometimes mechanized, narrators, reflects the sociological context of the novel, with its technologized neoliberal free market, in all its transformations and disorders. The rapid and abrupt shifts reflect the reality of contemporary life, with the fluctuations of the capitalist market. Indeed, the unsteady market permeates the novel like a hidden character, whether in the references to the “[b]oom and bust” of modern life (52) or to the 2008 financial crisis (73, 326). The location that serves to unify the novel is characterized by lack of continuity, as a “[l]ow-down dirty shopping arcade [turned] to mansion flats” (43), and shops feature a globalized mixture of “Polish paper, Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World” (42).

NW’s narrative experiments are innovative and exciting, embodying and expressing the modern dynamics of contemporary London, so different from quiet, nineteenth-century Middlemarch. Yet even as they push form to embody a new type of place, these experiments also problematize imaginative identification with the characters. If Eliot’s readers are given a guided lesson in empathy as they follow the characters’ growth in fellow-feeling, Smith’s readers are made to feel the characters’ blockage—or, in Felix’s case, to recoil from the dangers empathy embodies. Readers thus become implicated by the same reality that obstructs the empathetic processes of the characters.

NW challenges the tradition of ethical realism that has dominated the Anglophone novel from the nineteenth century onward, a tradition that offers readers a sense of ethical elevation by expanding their understanding of humanity and opening their eyes to new perspectives. It thus continues Smith’s earlier interrogation of this literary tradition in her essay “Two Directions for the Novel”— which, as David James points out, “owns a strikingly predictive relationship to NW” (205). Smith’s essay, which concerns “the future for the Anglophone Novel” (72), questions the “credos” (74) of nineteenth-century “lyrical realism” (73). Smith argues that the traditional novel, given its insistence on “the authentic story of a self” (82), is “a literary form in long-term crisis” (74); nonetheless, “[a] breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked” (73). Troubled, she asks: “Is [lyrical realism] really the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most?” (74).

Smith’s essay does not directly address the centrality of empathy in the tradition of lyrical realism. Nonetheless, its skepticism toward this tradition relates to NW’s skeptical approach to the ethical reward of empathetic realism. In NW, Smith refuses to tell a comforting “bedtime story.” Instead she chooses a more nightmarish model for representing “our condition.” In this model, the frequent calls to empathy advance a useful cliché rather than a real movement toward the other—empathy is simply a slogan that accompanies other neoliberal catchwords. Leah underlines this realization by ironically noting down, as she works, “I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY” (37), adding decorative flourishes, in a personal commentary on the professional preaching regarding being empathetic (34). Despite her cynicism, however, Leah tries hard to believe that there is some truth in the ethos of fellow-feeling, rejecting Michel’s “[c]ruel opinion” (4) that “not everyone can be invited to the party. Not this century” (3–4). Yet Smith suggests that Michel’s opinion is true: in the contemporary neoliberal “party,” fellow-feeling is a hollow saying, and some underdogs can never be invited in. Unlike Eliot, who presents a picture of provincial society in which the underprivileged are also part of the “threads of connection” (Middlemarch 94), alienated post-Thatcher London offers no framework of community. Individuals only band together when united against an other who can be clearly labeled as an outsider, thus creating the brief solidarity of an in-group.

It is Nathan Bogle who gives voice to this hard truth. After Natalie’s marriage falls apart, she spends a dark night of the soul wandering the streets with Nathan, who offers her these words: “There’s no way to live in this country when you’re grown. Not at all. They don’t want you, your own people don’t want you, no one wants you” (NW 376). It is this urban outcast, who may have murdered Felix, that voices the underlying vision of exclusion and non-hospitality. When Natalie tries to soften Nathan’s unequivocal statement, he insists on her inability to see things from his perspective: “That’s how it is in my eyes. . . . What do you know about my life? When you been walking in my shoes?” (376–77). Natalie has no right to speak to him, Nathan implies, because she cannot share his pain. However, Smith makes it clear that this kind of sharing would not help Nathan. Neoliberalism does not invite all guests, and those who are left with “no way to live in this country,” who become ever more marginalized, ultimately become dangerous and make empathy not only ineffective, but dangerous for all.

The conclusion of the novel is dark: Empathy is not a mechanism that can help vulnerable underclasses, nor does it make novel reading an ethical practice. NW offers its readers no moral bliss. Instead, Smith invites them to engage in a complex critical activity: what Palumbo-Liu describes as reading that “attempt[s] to ascertain how and why our relationship to others is not natural or immutable, but rather the result of a number of complex and often contradictory forces, some that draw us closer, others that drive us apart” (14). NW highlights the contradictory forces that run through modern society, which idealizes the humanistic promise of fellow-feeling even as it thwarts or deeply distorts the imaginative movement of entering the perspective of another person.

Zadie Smith seems to be wary of the way neoliberalism has embraced Adam Smith’s optimistic entwining of the free market and sympathy. While she develops Eliot’s aesthetic legacy of reshaping the novelistic form, she also sounds a warning that Eliot’s ethics of sympathy has become a dangerous ideological delusion. Using Derrida’s conceptualization of hospitality and the possible relations between invitation and visitation, guest and host, Smith demands that readers face the critical question of “what enables or disables certain modes of connection” (Palumbo-Liu 15) under the conditions of contemporary neoliberalism. In this context, she implies, it has become urgent to acknowledge the fallacy of empathy, rather than experience an Eliot-like lesson in empathy. In a similar vein, I argue, it has become urgent for literary scholarship to examine critically the discourse of ethical criticism rather than embrace and develop its existing strands.

The Open University of Israel