Is there any ideological vector more implacable than a novel, as long as it is masterful – and this one is? The Imposture is, by far, Zadie Smith’s most essentially political work. On paper, it is a historical novel – the first of its kind for the British writer of Jamaican origin – built around an affair which inflamed Victorian England, the so-called Tichborne affair: a man returned from a long journey to Jamaica which, in 1866, announced itself as being Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir of a great lineage who had disappeared in a shipwreck twelve years previously. The mother “recognizes” him, as does Andrew Bogle, a former slave from Jamaica, a key witness at the trial and who will die convinced that “the applicant”, as he is called, is indeed “Sir Roger”. A “ petitioner” for which the popular classes, exhilarated by this social struggle, will take up the cause, whether or not they are as convinced as Bogle.
Book: “Still standing”, Khan humor gets involved
Zadie Smith doesn’t even pretend to want to fit her prose into the tight corset of the Dickensian novel. Maliciously she explodes the codes, the framework, the temporality; the chronology is not the point, it’s even the opposite, as if it had to be mishandled to bring out the truth, the chapters are fragmented, sometimes just a scathing paragraph, our novelist has the art of deconstruction and the ellipse. But what needs to be said is. Moreover, the writer only revisits this 19th century where slavery is unsaid to better say everything, everything, everything. She found a heroine equal to this ambition, this anger: Mrs Touchet, Eliza by her first name, “the defender of slaves”, “a strong spirit in no way restrained by prudence”, watched by cynicism, and also by grace, widow, governess, confidante, lover, loving – of freedom and of the one she is the only one to call Frances, the first wife of the cousin with whom she lives and of whom she is the mistress, William Harrison Ainsworth – a failed writer fallen into oblivion who really existed, really published forty-one novels, many of which were successful.
Mrs Touchet is the conscience of the novel; through his keen eye the pretenses and other lies that cover the small world of London letters and this Victorian society refusing to see what is happening in Jamaica are brought to light. It is Mrs Touchet, obviously, who will take us, along with the second Mrs Ainsworth, to the courtroom. She who will invite old Bogle to dinner and who will ask the former slave to tell her about his life. This reconstruction is the heart of the book, “what I have written that makes me most proud of my entire writing life”, in the words of Zadie Smith at the time of the book’s release in England; a hundred petrifying pages.
Widowed, Catholic, bisexual, sagacious and sarcastic, Mrs Touchet has everything to become… a writer
Based on Bogle’s extreme dignity, his modesty, his loyalty, the narration makes the gears heard. “Women, men, children, babies. Generation after generation. His father. His mother. The noble lineage of Johanna. All crushed. These plowed minds. These bodies mutilated. These souls boiled until complete evaporation. This human fuel. Turns and turns the mill. Since when ? A century ? Two ? The philosophical stable boy had mentioned three. Mow people down, plant new ones in the holes. Cut off hands, ears and breasts. A trough filled with blood. » We are almost relieved, then, to find William, his “gift for joy” combined with his lack of literary talent. The ironic flashes of Zadie Smith portraying this bad writer and his bad literature streak the text with rays of light. “How was it that everything he wrote was ridiculous, except when it came to her? » asks Eliza, who is careful not to tell her cousin.
In the end, the latter, regained by lucidity, will ring in her ears, and not just once, the crucial question: “Am I an impostor? » In any case, in this book, the writers – who see nothing of what surrounds them, who live in their heads, who are like children, and so on – take it for granted. Even the great ones, even the myths. Eliza settles her account with Dickens, who was friends with William and whom she suspects of being a “vampire”. The word comes up several times, particularly applied to her. A way of foreshadowing her metamorphosis into a writer? For this, it will take the detonator of his meeting with Bogle. In the meantime, she will be William’s Muse. A Muse who we understand knew how to handle a whip. But let’s not go too fast. The first time he pushes her against the wall to kiss her, she perceives “the strange but unmistakable submission of this man, something she could not have put into words. Spontaneously arose in his mind the vision of a ridiculous fifteen-year-old boy “running slowly” on a small stage set up in a cellar to better allow Gilbert to “cut” him with a wooden sword. He was not what he seemed. But who is? »
The Zadie Smith imposture, translated from English (UK) by Laetitia Devaux, Gallimard, 546 pages, 24.50 euros. (Credits: ©LTD / Gallimard)
From one deception to another. They are everywhere, and first of all in the stories that we tell ourselves and that the novel takes pleasure in uncovering one by one. “Sometimes, in bed, she would push the gag into his mouth, already because she felt that he liked it, but sometimes also simply to prevent him from telling the plot of his novel. » The beatings silence him “except for a murmur of pleasure.” It would only be funny – Zadie Smith’s dry and sagacious humor is a blessing if, a few pages above, the same Mrs Touchet had not become the lover of William’s first wife, Frances, therefore, the moral clarity made female, “foreign to all vanity”, “too good for this world”, gentle look charged with a “oceanic momentum towards others”, who loves her husband and who her husband doesn’t love enough, and who has no sense of humor.
We must see with what skill – sorry, I dare – Zadie Smith operates the shift towards sex between the two women: “A household of women and girls in perfect harmony. Moral progress, works of charity, silent prayer. Grace. William’s letters announced welcome delays: “I have decided to go to Switzerland.” Two months later: “I’m going back to Italy.” Grace. One thing flowed from the other, even if the logic remained obscure and too mysterious to fathom. By a finger. Or by two fingers. Two fingers penetrating a flower. In the dark, without a single lit candle. As if these fingers and this flower, which did not form two entities but one, were therefore incapable of committing a sin. The flower penetrated by these two fingers was reminiscent of wild flowers in the hedges – like them, it had petals, folds and folds – but it was also miraculously warm, moist and throbbing, because it was made of flesh. Penetrated as if by a tongue. The bud of a mouth. On another bud, apparently designed for a tongue, down there. »
Let’s come to our senses: Eliza has two Ainsworths all to herself, and she thinks she loves “her” Frances. In this fireworks novel, as in life, we deceive ourselves at least as much as we deceive others.
