'A Terrific Waste': White Teeth from Recurrence to Accretion

Abstract

The narrator of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) insists that history obeys a logic of symmetry or repetition: that historical events recur, providing lessons applicable to the present. Other elements of Smith’s novel, however, undermine this view, presenting history instead as an accumulation of waste. Examining this bifurcation through passages in which forms of refuse are foregrounded, this essay proposes that the novel stages a dialogue between a recurrence paradigm and an accretion paradigm. It argues that White Teeth develops an account of waste which is attentive to its ecological implications and which ultimately rejects the view that waste can, in any straightforward way, be recycled or returned to use. Through attention to the category of human waste (that is, human life as waste) and the novel’s incipient critique of recycling, the essay charts the workings of Smith’s accretion paradigm and the challenge it poses to the view of history as recurrence presented by the narrator. The novel’s fixation on waste, the essay shows, calls into question arguments that its tone (by contrast to Smith’s later works) is one of unreflexive positivity, and demonstrates the necessity of a reevaluation of White Teeth’s social, political and ecological acuity