Literary Criticism: Zadie Smith

Media Miscegenation and the Nature of Authenticity in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man

Abstract: This essay examines the relationship between media’s influence on Alex-Li Tandem in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man and the nature of authenticity. As a multicultural author, Zadie Smith understands the importance of authenticity when constructing a story that speaks about a cultural other than her own; however, this novel argues that authenticity is futile in a world that is truly and amalgamation of people, cultures, and experiences. No one experience can truly be purely authentic because all experience is bastardized by media influences and nearly unattainable forms of identity. Tandem, and Smith, has come to the conclusion that identity has to be formed existentially and authentic voices cannot exist in a democratic society.

In a world where ethnicities, classes, cultures, and experiences are becoming increasingly more blended, authenticity becomes increasingly harder to pin down. Not only is authenticity harder to find because of a mixing of cultural identities, but genuine experience is also becoming harder to find because of an increase in television and cinematic influences. Zadie Smith’s character Alex-Li Tandem in The Autograph Man deals with these issues surrounding authenticity. Tandem struggles to find authentic religious identity, authentic relationships, and authentic autographs for his collection. Through the perspective of the half-Jewish and half-Chinese Tandem, The Autograph Man presents two very distinct and opposing commentaries on the nature of authenticity; authenticity does not help define cultural or religious identity, and real life experience has become a blurred, unauthentic mixture of television and reality. This intersection of commentaries suggests that cultural and religious authenticities cannot be rigidly defined because even our everyday lives are already a bastardized miscegenation of blurred realities.

The first page of the novel constructs the central dilemma that Alex-Li and his generation faces. The narrator explains, “This is how things go for Alex-Li. He deals in a shorthand of experience. The TV version. He is one of this generation who watch themselves” (Smith 3). A large part of this novel is dedicated to explaining Tandem’s obsession with the world of cinema and TV, and this obsession seeps into his everyday actions. A majority of Tandem’s cultural knowledge comes from what he has learned on the screen. Even the novel’s narrator begins to adopt the blurred unauthentic language of “international gestures.” This phrase is used about 25 times in the novel to describe various actions of characters. For example when Lovelear is described, “‘Ah, this is the life,’ said Lovelear emphatically, making the awkward International Gesture of luxury (hands behind head, legs extended with feet crossed)” (Smith, 190). This gesture and the others in the novel are ubiquitous representations of certain emotions and sentiments. This gesture almost seems to be a TV cliché, and these clichés are how Tandem imagines and views the world around him. All of the occurrences in Tandem’s life are related back to something that has already been pictured on the big screen, which makes everyday life incredibly unoriginal and less interesting for Tandem. Between the thoughts of Tandem, the narrator splices in commentary on the nature of these gestures. The novel states, “It is impossible these days to follow a man or quit a job without an encyclopedia of cinematic gesture crowding you out” (Smith 225). This is the problem that Tandem begins to run into. His life had become so obsessed and dictated by what he has seen on TV that real world experiences start to lose their meaning, importance, and authenticity.

Tandem does not even dedicate time or energy into deciphering the real world from the cinematic world; this is where he begins to run into troubles. When arguing with Esther, she says to him, “Please. Please try not to say anything you’ve heard on television” (Smith 291). Even his real world relationships are affected by his blurred, hybrid, imaginative world. In portions Tandem even has to remind himself that, “YOU ARE NOT WATCHING TV” (Smith 152). Instead of living in the tactile world around him, Tandem finds it more useful to live vicariously through the lives of celebrities and movies. Tandem even celebrates this love for TV, “One of the many things TV does not show you is the potential range and horror of the human form. For this alone, thought Alex, it is rightly celebrated” (Smith 88). The real world is grotesque, and the world of cinema is nicer, cleaner, and therefore better. Tandem willingly trades the authenticity of experience for a manufactured Hollywood forgery, which is ironic because his job is to literally determine authentic autographs from forgeries.

Through this novel, it seems as if Smith disavows this idea of manufactured realities, but acknowledges that is has inevitably become a part of our culture. The narrator mentions towards the end of the novel, “You watch too many films is one of the great modern sentences. It has a hint of understanding regarding what we were before and what we have become” (324). Smith argues that we have become a culture where allusions to TV and film are common place, that it’s almost impossible to live a modern life without this non-real experiences. Since these non-real experiences are so common place and engrained into the modern culture, they have become actual realities off the screen. Therefore, the world that Tandem inhabits comments on the world that we inhabit, a world that is not void of experience, but so blurred and bastardized by media that it is not 100 percent authentic.

In The Autograph Man, Tandem does not question the authenticity of his world in relation to films; instead, he questions the authenticity of his religion and autographs. Tandem obsesses himself with demarcating the world around him into Jewishness and Goyishness. He even begins to compose a book that deciphers what makes something authentically Jewish or Goyish. It is said that if his project is brought up, he is spoken about “as if he were a character in a film” (Smith 77). The characters around Tandem criticize him in the language that they know, the clichéd language that is used in films. We then get this insight into Tandem’s thoughts, “Well, maybe Jewishness and Goyishness wasn’t for everyone. But didn’t everyone get everything?... Everyone gets all the TV programs, as near as dammit all of the cinema” (77). Tandem has a unique obsession for this demarcation while the other characters think he is crazy, but Tandem shrugs this off because he knows the topic is not as popular as cinema or TV, and he knows that not everybody is Jewish. All people have the capability to watch and understand TV, but the work that Tandem is undertaking is only for a select few, possibly only for himself. Tandem has been influenced by the neatness of the on screen world and believes that all things can fit into neat categories like Jewishness and Goyishness. This attempt to force things into rigidly defined categories is Tandem’s attempt to authentically describe the culture around him that is becoming increasingly less authentic because of media influences.

This very ironic opposition is the heart of Tandem’s meta crisis, the crisis outside of his crisis. In the novel, the narrator seems to parallel Alex’s thoughts, “It is all a sort of horrible betrayal of himself, of his whole life. Life is not just symbol, Jewish or goyish. Life is more than just a Chinese puzzle. Not everything fits. Not every road leads to epiphany. This isn’t TV, Alex, this isn’t TV” (Smith 151). Tandem comes to this sort of epiphany while high and while contemplating suicide. Here, Tandem’s cinema influenced mind becomes aware of the inability to make reality as perfect as the movies. Culture and religion do not culminate into perfectly digestible stereotypes of Jewishness and Goyishness like they do on TV. The reality has to be blurred between the two; one cannot fully embody one or the other. Tandem also comes to the realization that the only way to guard one’s authentic identity is to have a following of fans. Since Tandem has no fans, he makes it important to create his own world of authenticity and his own identity by writing his own obituary. On the next page Tandem goes into a thought bubble digression saying, “Please remember that I just walked pointlessly, that’s all I could do…please remember that you are not – that I am not” (152). At this moment Alex-Li is going through a deep existential identity crisis, he doesn’t know who he is because of his blurred reality and his inability to break his rigidly defined cultural roles. Tandem, and thus Smith, is coming to the conclusion that since nothing is truly meshing into a role of authenticity, nothing is really real, at least how we think they are.

What does this mean for Tandem and the British culture at large? Smith is arguing that the search for authenticity is futile, that nothing exists in raw authentic forms, things just are. This very stance is important for Smith to adopt because as black British writer, Smith doesn’t have the personal experience to authentically write about the experience of a Chinese Jew. This very reason is why Salman Rushdie speaks about this topic in his book Imaginary Homelands. Rushdie states, “‘Authenticity’ is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogenous and unbroken tradition. Or else… Imagine a novel being eulogized for it being ‘authentically English’, or ‘authentically German’. It would seem absurd. Yet such absurdities persist in the ghetto” (Rushdie). Rushdie argues that in a literary ghetto, where authors write only about the post-colonial experience of marginalized people, authenticity is always a question, an absurd question. Rushdie and Smith’s novels have been criticized for not being authentic enough, but why do they need to be? The Autograph Man does not attempt to present a catch all view into the world of Chinese Jews that live in the suburbs of London; instead the novel is a snapshot into one man’s life, it is imaginative not journalistic. An article by Andrew Furman states, “Cataloguing the Jewish qualities of the novel to make a case for its inclusion in the Jewish canon, however, is to descend into absurdities, absurdities that we do not impose upon works written by authors with less impeachable Jewish pedigrees” (Furman 9). Furman argues that there is no need to question the authenticity of Smith’s experience as a Jewish man because it is absurd. Just like Tandem’s attempts to pinpoint the Jewishness of celebrities, the attempt to decry Smith’s novel as unauthentic is futile. Smith already calls into question the authenticity of the entire generation she is a part of because of the media’s influence; she is not claiming to be an authentic source for this experience, she’s no more an expert than Hollywood is.

Rigid definitions of authenticity cause people, like Alex-Li Tandem, identity struggles that are very much rooted in reality and non-reality. If there was no non-reality, one could only identify with what did exist, but since imaginative works exist, authenticity will always try to bind the limits of the imagination. Furman argues that the increase in multiculturalism worldwide is one way in which identities are increasingly harder to organize. He states, “Through Tandem's travails, Smith, as I have suggested, explores the difficulty of claiming a viable identity given the increasing slipperiness of racial, ethnic, religious, and class boundaries” (Furman 8). For Tandem and Smith, it is almost impossible to fully claim an identity that exists outside of themselves, for this reason they can only determine real authenticity through existentialism. Furman argues, “We do seem to be in the midst of a paradigm shift regarding the politics of identity, one in which terms such as black, white, minority, majority, and mainstream seem increasingly obsolete, or at least problematic” (Furman 11). For Tandem these terms are Jewish and Goyish and they cause him intense identity struggles, not only for himself but for those around him too. He problematically labels everything he knows in a black and white fashion; in Tandem’s mind, things are either authentically black or authentically white, no in-between. The problem is that Tandem never allows for mixtures of identities or non-real identities; in fact, Tandem is unable to comprehend any concept as not real.

Alex-Li Tandem may try to decipher between Jewish and Goyish, but the rest of the novel he is unable to actually distinguish between forgeries and authentic moments. Most of his life is actually manufactured reality. An article by Fiona Tolan states, “Alex, however, might be better understood as suffering what Forster termed an ‘undeveloped heart’. For Smith, ‘[t]he undeveloped heart is the quality, or lack of qualities, that Forster’s novels most frequently depict’; its possessors live, ‘not by their own feelings but by the received ideas of others’” (Tolan 141). Under this explanation, Tandem is characterized by his inability to feel things for himself; a majority of his feelings are learned from what he sees on TV, which is why Esther begs Tandem to feel something for himself. Tandem does not gain that ability to feel for himself until the end of the novel after his suspicions of authenticity of Kitty’s autograph are confirmed, this is when Tandem’s face “exploded into Technicolor” (Smith 174). However, note the use of language, he is still being defined in images that are associated with non-reality. The novel does not say that Tandem came life, instead he just got more colorful, as if he flipped the channel on the TV. Even at this point, Tandem is not changed, but he his witch hunt for authenticity finally yielded him a result – arguably the only result in the whole novel because he is soon let down after he meets the real Kitty, and that she is very different than he non-real self. She, too, is unauthentically Kitty, yet she cannot be unathentically herself because she is herself, but Tandem sees her as a fake version of what he has blurrily hoped and constructed her to be.

Not only is Tandem unable to find his unrealistic expectations and fulfillments of bouts of authenticity, the type of work he partakes in comments on the nature of genuineness. A book review from the Guardian states, “Now in his 20s, he is a professional autograph man, dispassionate and prosaic, released from teenage enthusiasm into a world where the mark of identity is openly commodified, where rarity adds value and where forgery constantly threatens to collapse the market” (Hamilton, Guardian). Tandem’s profession further functions as commentary on the nature of authenticity. In the autograph market the more rare and authentic something is, the more it is valued, and the more forgeries and inauthentic copies there are, the less stable the market it. For Tandem, the need to determine between forgery and genuine autographs is crucial to his ability to perform in his career. This need to determine authenticity seeps into his religious life and causes him problems with identity. This review and Smith’s novel suggest that authenticity is rare and forgery is commonplace, much like the miscegenation of media and reality. Real genuine people, and their feelings and identities, are becoming increasingly harder to find because film and TV have influenced the masses. This influence is so strong that no one appears to be truly independent of a film cliché in The Autograph Man; no one appears original or purely authentic, this makes the characters comparable to forgeries. However, even in the world of Tandem, forgeries have real value, even though they are void of authenticity. Therefore, this novel comments that there might be no need to even strive to be authentic because real authenticity is so rare and even inauthentic qualities have value. Any time Tandem seeks out authenticity he fails, is let down, and becomes distraught with an existential identity crisis.

This novel predominantly points out the flaws in defining authenticity and seeking to find genuine qualities in everything. Throughout The Autograph Man, Smith argues that all people are mixtures of real genuine qualities and imaginative non-real qualities that are learned from the media and others. Real authenticity is so rare because it does not really exist in a post-colonial and multicultural society. People and places are not going to embody pure historical or stereotypical identities. Not only is this argument egalitarian, it also lends enormous power to artists. Even though artists do not share in the experiences that they display, they still can use imagination to create a world and environment with a message and purpose. Even though Smith is not a Chinese Jew living in London, she is just as equip to write this novel because of the argument that nothing is ever truly going to be authentic. Human beings fully rely on their ability to eclectically learn from a variety of sources around them; therefore, since humans learn eclectically and environments are increasingly influenced by media and multiculturalism, people cannot grow into authentic and pure embodiments of an idea or culture. The Autograph Man implicates the notion that all people are bastardized forgeries, which gives everyone an equal democratic voice to tell a story about the human experience rather than a pinpointed authentic message meant for a select group or culture.

Works Cited

Furman, Andrew. "The Jewishness Of The Contemporary Gentile Writer: Zadie Smith's "The

Autograph Man.." Melus 30.1 (2005): 3-17. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 May

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Hamilton, Hamish. "Signs and Wanders." The Guardian, 14 Sept. 2002. Web.

Rushdie, Salman. "Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist." Imaginary Homelands: Essays

and Criticism, 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1991. Print.

Smith, Zadie. The Autograph Man: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2002. Print.

Tolan, Fiona. "Zadie Smith's Forsterian Ethics: White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty."

Critique 54.2 (2013): 135-146. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 May 2015.