Art’s distance “from the prerogatives of the powerful,” writes Zadie Smith, “is precisely where its force of resistance lives.” Smith considers the value of making art during a time of atrocities, looking to E.M. Forster, Macbeth, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World for guidance. Her essay is a searing case for the damages done to humanity when power tries to subject everything to notions of “progress” and “convenience.”
The odds of making a piece of art that truly matters never really improve. And while we can certainly interpret Jones’s portrait of black people as a progressive leap forward from Shakespeare’s portrait of Othello, the gap between Macbeth and The Known World is still quite unlike the one between washing your clothes by hand in a stream and using a washing machine. The process of reading them both will require, from you, much the same human faculties. You’ll have to imagine, think, and engage with a make-believe world, created by a stranger. An analogy for this is love. Is the love I feel for my children an advance upon or a devolution from the love a fourteenth-century woman felt for hers? Not all human experiences are subject to progress.
More picks about writing and power
The Kremlin Put Her on Trial. She Stole the Show.
“Why did the Russian state go after an experimental theatre director?”
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
“Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?”
Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group
“When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee.”
