Zadie Smith on allowing characters to exist imperfectly

"It’s something that’s important to me, in fiction: imperfect knowledge. That’s the reality of most people’s lives—mine too. It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is “faith.” I fully believe in global warming, for example—but what do I really understand of the science? Very little. If I tried to explain it to someone who had just landed from another planet I would only talk a lot of ill-informed nonsense at them—an approximation of the truth, a sliver of what I’ve gleaned from the articles I’ve read and half-comprehended. The thing that can be challenging in fiction is allowing people to exist imperfectly. There is perhaps an added pressure if the author belongs to a group that feels itself burdened by what I want to call the responsibilities of representation. But if I believed that every time I wrote a Nigerian character that he carried the heavy burden of representing “The Nigerian People” in their entirety, well, I would find it hard to write a word. I’m sure there are readers who read in that way, but I can’t—won’t—write for them. I want to write without shame or pride or over-compensation in one direction or another. To write freely."


"We’re all capable of that kind of thoughtlessness; it’s how we live. It’s what makes the life we live possible. In the end, empathy is a very limited emotion. Here in the West we romanticize its power—especially in literature!—but the truth is empathy gets turned on and off as needs be. My own feeling is you need to legislate for it, to encourage people into its practice—to enforce it, if need be. Perhaps all those Wall Street bankers were perfectly nice people, too, who didn’t mean to hurt us as they did, but we shouldn’t rely on the vagaries of human personalities. Desperation, weakness, vulnerability—these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy."


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/this-week-in-fiction-zadie-smith.html#ixzz2LG9xKXyE