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Article ID: CBB001320817

Science and Fiction in Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2013)

Gill, Josie (Author)

Journal of Literature and Science
Volume: 6, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 17-28
Publication date: 2013
Language: English

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Science fiction Science and society Development of science; change in science Science and literature Genetics Science and culture Family 21st century London (England)

This article argues that Smith interrogates the relationship between science and fiction in White Teeth, drawing on a Forsterian comic mode in her representation of genetics which ultimately reveals common ground between science and writing. Smith's tale of three London families, the Joneses, the Iqbals and the Chalfens, whose socially and ethnically varied backgrounds form the basis of their comic interactions, takes the new genetic science as one of its major themes: Marcus, head of the Chalfen family, is a geneticist whose experimental FutureMouse© has been designed to develop cancer and eventually die at a predetermined time - New Year's Eve 1999.2 The development of his science has been possible only through the work of his predecessor and mentor Dr Perret, who is revealed to be the Nazi racial scientist who Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal had encountered during the Second World War, as Smith uncovers the often obscured connections between genetics past and present, offering what Ashley Dawson identifies as a powerful qualification of optimistic readings of the novel forms that biopower is assuming today (151). Yet the comic form that the novel takes -- the Forsterian coincidence, irrationality, humour, melodrama and `artificiality' through which Smith portrays science and scientists -- enables Smith's engagement with science to move beyond an inquiry into the recent past of genetic engineering (McMann 619). White Teeth not only illuminates the narrative and fictional aspects of contemporary genetics, but also offers a metafictional consideration, in an extension of Trilling's analogy, of how the science it addresses might also inform the novel's construction. In so doing, Smith defends not only the novel's `artificial' plot, but the capacity of fiction to explore and to represent science in the twenty-first century.

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