White Teeth

FutureMouse is the culmination of Marcus Chalfen’s work in genetic engineering: a mouse with DNA modified so it will live a specific amount of time (seven years), undergoing various illnesses at preprogrammed times. In this way, it symbolizes the Chalfenist worldview, which is itself an exaggerated form of the secularism and rationalism of the European Enlightenment: reality is orderly and knowable, and it can be made “more efficient, more logical” through human intervention (260). Ultimately, FutureMouse embodies the idea that the human experience can be perfected through science and logic, with the genetic interventions Marcus makes on the mouse paving the way for cures to cancer and other diseases.

This optimism is characteristic of Enlightenment thought, but White Teeth suggests that its basic assumptions about the world are misguided. Magid, for instance, admires FutureMouse because it aims to eliminate what Marcus calls the randomness of the world. But the novel as a whole reveals that attempts to control every aspect of life are rarely successful; Magid himself is a testament to this, having become “more English than the English” in Bangladesh (336), where his father sent him in the hopes that he would embrace his heritage. Furthermore, Smith hints that the repercussions of the FutureMouse experiment may not all be good ones. Marcus is unconcerned by questions of eugenics, but the fact that his mentor was a Nazi collaborator and that FutureMouse is programmed to “lose all its pigmentation and become albino: a white mouse” (357) suggest that the relationship between Chalfenism and multiculturalism is uneasy at best.

The fact that FutureMouse ultimately escapes is significant, marking a triumph of chance over certainty. Through an unlikely string of events, the mouse avoids certain elements of the life that had been planned for it (though not the diseases that it will develop). In other words, what begins as a symbol of determinism ends up representing the more complex lives of the novel’s characters, which are governed to some extent by historical forces but also unfold in unexpected ways.

O’Connell’s Poolroom is Samad and Archie’s favorite retreat from family life. By the time the friends first visit, it is no longer Irish nor a poolroom, having been bought a few years earlier by a family of Iraqi immigrants. The family kept the name for business reasons, and the inside is a strange mix of cultures, decorated with “an Irish flag and a map of the Arab Emirates” and serving a range of traditional English pub fare (153). The current owner has adopted an English name (Mickey), and his customers include not only Samad and Archie but also two old Jamaican men.

In one sense, O’Connell’s is a symbol of multicultural England. However, it has another distinguishing feature: timelessness. It has remained essentially unchanged since its opening, adopting new ideas (e.g., the portrait of Mangal Pande) only after years of debate. Its clientele is equally unvarying, and any potential newcomer would quickly “become aware of several pairs of eyes upon him, some condescending, some incredulous […] O’Connell’s is no place for strangers” (153).

Of course, the fact that O’Connell’s never changes is precisely why Archie and Samad like it: “It could be 1989 outside, or 1999, or 2009, and you could still be sitting at the counter in the V-neck you wore to your wedding in 1975, 1945, 1935. Nothing changes here, things are only retold, remembered” (203). In effect, O’Connell’s is Archie and Samad’s version of a fantasy shared by several characters—the “fantasy of no time” (411)—which is appealing not only because time’s passage opens up the possibility of change but also because it may reveal one’s own actions had unintended and even terrible consequences.

Throughout White Teeth, Archie uses a coin flip to make decisions both large and small. At the most basic level, the coin illustrates Archie’s indecisiveness; because he has difficulty settling on a course of action, he prefers to leave events to chance (if one assumes the outcome of the coin flip is random) or fate (if the outcome is predetermined). Archie’s reluctance to make decisions reflects the broader questions the novel raises about morality and action. As Dr. Perret notes while attempting to convince Archie not to shoot him, people must often choose between apparently equally good (or bad) options based on incomplete information, while also owning the consequences of those choices. For some people, like Archie, this is such a frightening prospect that it is tempting to cede all responsibility for one’s actions. 

What is particularly striking about Archie’s coin tosses is how often they go awry. On two separate occasions, Smith describes the coin beginning a perfect, “triumphant ascension” only for it to “go wrong,” landing far behind Archie (447). This happens when Archie is attempting to decide whether to shoot Perret, ending with Archie himself getting shot as he bends to retrieve the coin. This suggests that the complexity and interconnectivity of the world, which Archie finds so overwhelming, can be liberating; choices assumed to be binary (and therefore hugely important) can actually end in multiple different directions. 

The end of the world is a recurring motif in White Teeth. The most literal example involves the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ repeated attempts to predict when the apocalypse will occur, but the idea of apocalypse occurs in a wide variety of contexts. Smith often describes cataclysmic events (particularly natural disasters) in these terms, from the frequent flooding that plagues Bangladesh to the 1907 Jamaican earthquake: “Any other afternoon in Jamaica, the screams of Ambrosia […] would have caught somebody’s attention, brought somebody to her aid. But the world was ending that afternoon in Kingston. Everybody was screaming” (299). Perhaps more notable, Smith describes entirely personal crises as forms of apocalypse; Archie’s suicide attempt, for instance, stems from his sense that “The End was unavoidably nigh” and that “[i]t just feet like the end of the world” (9).

These references evoke the novel’s setting—specifically, its time period. Life in the second half of the 20th century felt precarious to many people, with threats ranging from nuclear war to the Y2K bug. Beyond this, the idea of apocalypse is a way for Smith to explore themes central to White Teeth. For instance, when Samad becomes infatuated with Poppy, Shiva assures him that “want[ing] somebody” is not “the end of the world,” to which Samad replies, “of, this, I wish I could be certain” (121, 122). Throughout the novel, Samad and other immigrants worry that they will disappear into their new homelands, whether through intermarriage, the adoption of Western culture, or both. Because Samad views his attraction to Poppy through this lens, it does seem like a kind of apocalypse—namely, the death of his inherited culture and religion.

Smith also uses the apocalypse motif to develop the themes of free will and personal responsibility. Faced with major decisions, characters in White Teeth often attempt to base their choices on what they would do if they knew their lives (or the world as a whole) were ending. Samad tells Archie that it is in these circumstances that a person’s choices truly reveal his character: “When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us” (87).

What is notable about White Teeth’s interest in endings, however, is that they never actually arrive. As Smith notes in the book’s final pages, everything that seems like an ending at first glance is simply the beginning of something else. Part of the problem with action, then, is that no one is ever really acting “when the chips are down” (87), as Samad says. Joshua captures this truth when he realizes that “choices need time, the fullness of time, time being the horizontal axis of morality—you make a decision and then you wait and see, wait and see” (411). Choices are meaningful partly as a result of their consequences, and fantasizing about the end of time entirely sidesteps the question of consequences. 

The epigraph to the final part of White Teeth defines both “fundamental” and “fundamentalism”—two distinct but interrelated motifs that appear throughout the novel.

KEVIN, with its rigid interpretation of Islam, is perhaps the most familiar example Smith offers of a fundamentalist group, but the label arguably applies to non-religious systems of belief, like those advanced by FATE and Chalfenism. The former takes an uncompromising and sometimes violent stance on animal rights, while the latter is so entirely devoted to rationality and progress that Joshua suspects his father would choose his FutureMouse experiment over his son’s own life.

Fundamentals, meanwhile, are the basic and essential truth of a situation. At one point, Smith describes New Year’s Eve as “[t]he night England gets down to the fundamentals,” referring to the idea that New Year’s is an “apocalypse in miniature” that reveals people’s deepest priorities (408).

In this way, fundamentals and fundamentalism fill a similar role to that of teeth in the novel; the fundamentals are people’s roots—the history, genetics, personality, etc., that shape how they act. White Teeth, however, treats the possibility of ever retrieving the pure facts about these roots with skepticism, suggesting that much of what people believe about themselves and their pasts are simply narratives they constructed.

Not surprisingly, then, the novel pokes fun at both fundamentalist groups and the broader notion of getting down to some fundamental reality at all. Here, for instance, Mickey convinces Archie that he has uncovered a deep truth about the world, when in fact all he has done is deploy a common figure of speech:

‘Some people […] will tell you not to trust people who overuse the phrase at the end of the day—football managers, estate agents, salesmen of all kinds—but Archie’s never felt that way about it. Prudent use of said phrase never failed to convince him that his interlocutor was getting to the bottom of things, the fundamentals’ (433).