A London chronotope and multiculturalism in White teeth by Zadie Smith

The problems of multiculturalism were particularly topical at the turn of the millennium: by this point, cultural and national contradictions, which had come a long way from the beginning of decolonization and decline of the British Empire, had penetrated deeply into the life of Great Britain, creating a situation described by some as a "melting pot". The history of creating such a situation is described by R. T. Ashcroft and M. I. Bevir in Multiculturalism in the British Commonwealth: Comparative Perspectives on Theory and Practice [Ashcroft, Bevir 2019]. Also, in the third issue of Footpath, the topic of multiculturalism in the novel by Zadie Smith was already discussed, in the article by Will May On the Multi-Cultural Novel, Zadie Smith, and Literary Origin [May 2010].

The term chronotope , created by M. Bakhtin, refers to an image of time and space in a work of art in their unity, interrelation and mutual influence. This term is of particular importance for my analysis, since it is the chronotope that expresses the connection between the temporal and spatial organization of the text and the artistic images of the author's idea, space or epoch described in the work. When I say "multicultural chronotope” in my further analysis, I mean a combination of the temporal and spatial features of the city and, at the same time, an expression of the general spirit, atmosphere, place and period described in the work. The topic of the chronotope of urban space was also raised in the tenth issue of Footpath [Andriushina, Bochegova 2017], where the use of this term was also necessary and dictated by the connection of space and time when including the social and human layer of reality in this relationship. White Teeth is a clear example of how London of the years 1970 -1990 is not equal to London of

the XXI century, and to understand this, it is worth referring to the system of concepts expressed by the term chronotope.

In the novel White Teeth Zadie Smith (2000) establishes complex connections between space and time, territory and events, history and prehistory with the help of a special chronotope. The modernity of the surrounding world and the historical changes in space become a kind of participant in what is happening. Instead of remaining in the background, time becomes one of the tools for transmitting ideas, multiculturalism becomes one of the main themes and is being implemented primarily through the chronotope.

The first chapter begins with the events of 1975, and as the story progresses, the text sometimes refers us even earlier – to the end of the Second World War and even to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the novel time is an instrument with which the author connects different events with each other, thereby creating both ethnocultural polyphony and chronotopic polyphony, which merge in unison at the very end of the work.

Even in the table of contents, at the same time when the multicharacter plot outline is introduced, the polyphony of time is also introduced. The novel is divided into four chapters: ARCHIE 1974, 1945, SAMAD 1984, 1857, IRIE 1990, 1907, MAGID, MILLAT and MARCUS 1992, 1999. Thus, the author makes it clear from the very beginning that the novel will combine different characters and time points. The author connects each of the designated lines in the last "act".

Despite the fact that the main events take place in London at the end of the twentieth century, many of the fragments described belong to other spaces and times. The story takes the reader from the streets of London to Eastern Europe during the Second World War, Jamaica, Bangladesh and other places. It is important that each of the described "non-London" events-responds later in London. The interweaving of time lines leads to specific points in London space through the people who found themselves there.

Samad Iqbal and Archibald Jones met long before the events of the main plot of the novel, in the last days of the war, far from England, and there they became friends, whose communication continued for life in London. The text repeatedly emphasizes the specifics of this friendship: a Bangladeshi and an Englishman who have nothing in common but a shared past. From the moment they promised each other friendship in the past they connect their lives to the present. In the future, when Samad is going through a crisis of self-identification and trying to find strength in his faith, Archibald, who is not particularly interested in spiritual life, supports him and helps him not only emotionally, but also in fact: he helps send Samad's eldest son to Bangladesh, where, according to his father, Millat should become wise and strengthen his faith.

It is worth saying more about the identity crisis experienced by Samad, since there is also a journey through the chronology of the world that ends in London as the final point at the moment. The identity crisis is associated with one of the main themes of multicultural novels: it is a crisis experienced by a migrant who is forced to leave his homeland one day, becoming a kind of “nomad” in the postcolonial world. This is something that many characters face in the novel, and not all of them are able to easily accept the need to assimilate into this new environment. Samad is not capable, he does not want to lose his cultural identity.

The novel describes more than once the feeling of being lost in a foreign environment and the fear of dissolving in it, and each of the characters who experience this copes in their own way. For Samad, the way out is to turn to the native faith and family history. While going through this crisis, Samad turns to his family history and becomes fixated on his most famous ancestor, Mangala Pandi. The events of 1857, which he knows vaguely and tries to reconstruct from historical books, become important for him here and now, become his anchor, his attempt to resolve the issue of self-identification: through the drawing of the family past into his own present, the events of the nineteenth century in the late twentieth, Samad tries to cope with his own fear of assimilation.

His sons, Millat and Magid, deal with the identity crisis in different ways. While Millat is happy to deny his own ethnic and cultural roots and strive to become a real Englishman , Magid joins a radical Islamic group, which becomes a kind of family for him.

He is not the only character in the pages of the novel who tries to understand himself through family history because of the inability to integrate into the environment. Irie, the daughter of Archibald, a native Englishman, and Clara Jones, a descendant of Jamaican migrants, is also experiencing an identity crisis. Being born in England, she is not an immigrant. She grew up in this society and on this soil, but, nevertheless, she feels like an outsider. Irie hates her appearance, realizing how much she does not fit into the ideals of the world around her:

Unwilling to accept a genetic fate; instead, it awaits its transformation from a Jamaican hourglass, weighed down by the sands that gather around the Dunn River Falls, to an English Rose [Smith 2001: 266].

So, not being an immigrant, unlike Samad, Irie is still experiencing a crisis of the inability to fit herself into the surrounding reality, the difficulties of assimilation: Here was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land [Smith 2001: 273].

After Irie meets a classmate's family, the Chalfens, she discovers that the family can track their history, know their roots. From this moment on, she especially wants to understand her roots, to have her own history. Irie has always wanted to feel involved, and the history of her family becomes such an opportunity: she goes through the memories of her great-grandmother; wanting to visit Jamaica, the homeland of her great-grandmother becomes for Irie an chance to find and define herself:

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled web-this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn, soul, and infinity that have now passed into the language [Smith 2001: 402].

The story enters the text not only through the characters, but also through the environment, through the history of places, through the general context of London.

So, the novel describes the school Glenard Oak with a long history, which was built in 1886 as a workhouse and became a school in 1963. Through the image of this school, the author tells about the colonial history as a whole, the history of this school is combined with the history of great-grandmother Irie, having some common features with her.

Thus, long stories, family and not, which did not necessarily begin in London, are poured into the context of London life through the fate of each of the characters.

London in the novel becomes more than just a city: this is a meeting place, a place of combination, a tangle of completely different social groups and cultures, which in the process of their connection give birth to something new; the capital acts as a kind of "melting pot" in a multicultural society, and the boundaries of space and time combine ethnic groups from completely different places of the world and different epochs. The multi-dimensional chronotope, which accompanies the character's multi-composition, acts here as a tool for expressing the feeling of the interweaving of different socio-cultural clusters.

Samad, trying to strengthen his own faith, Millat, who joined the radicalized group, educated Magid, who keeps aloof from tradition, Irie, who wants to fit into the ordinary English life, Archibald, who has kept a secret from a friend since the end of the Second World War, Marcus Chalfen, who devoted himself to science, his son, Joshua Chalfen, who fell into the company of animal rights activists, disgusted with his father. All these characters move separately throughout the novel, rotate in different, sometimes oppositely charged, circles, and all these circles are connected in the last act of the novel. At Markus’ presentation of his scientific achievement, "The Future Mouse", all of the characters gather, each with a different goal, and the events play out rapidly. The whole novel consists of switching between the storylines of different characters, the reader "jumps" from one character to another, their stories, although mostly connected by acquaintances, develop independently of each other, in order to finally connect into one scene, combining the stories and impulses of each of the characters.

The time chosen by the author for the description, the end of the twentieth century, plays an important role here. The author points out that it was a time of new people: black, yellow, white. A whole century of a giant migration experiment [Smith 2001: 500].

Names and surnames of children can not just be combined, but even contradict each other, bear traces of mass migration, they are confused and intertwined, the British give their children foreign names, considering them beautiful, migrants take English ones to better fit into society. And yet, the author emphasizes that despite the fact that people in the capital are mixed, it is still difficult for some to admit this, for some it is difficult to admit that the Indians are most like real Englishmen, and the English are like Indians [Smith 2001: 501].

Thus, the chronotope of the novel is intended to convey this feeling of a "melting pot". It creates an urban multicultural polyphony and a sense of multiculturalism that began before the end of the twentieth century and loomed over society at the beginning of the twenty-first.