Disavowal and “The Depth of a Metaphor”: Problematic Waters in Zadie Smith’s “The Lazy River”

This article analyses Zadie Smith’s short story “The Lazy River” from a blue humanities perspective, focusing on three metaphors, all of them to do with water: the agricultural greenhouses of Southern Spain, the Mediterranean, and the eponymous pool with an artificial current. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis, the article reads them as manifestations of “anthropocene water” and as “aqueous imaginaries” that offer different answers to two questions inspired by Jamie Linton, namely “what have people made of water?” and “what potential do they realise?”—meaning in what way is the significance of water “saturated with ideas, meanings, values”? All three tropes feature cyclical movements that, in one way or another, interlink the tropes: the water cycle and, connected to it, the plastic cycle; the connections between “green,” “blue” and “grey” water; the interference with the thermohaline circulation and the global ocean conveyor belt. At the same time, Smith’s narrative technique creates cycles between different parts of the story, looping forward and backward via the careful placing of anchor words. Together the metaphors and the narrative loops reveal an attitude of lethargy that results from disavowal, which psychoanalysis describes as a position of split consciousness. The narrator is especially caught between rational understanding (“I know very well…”) and contradictory irrational belief (“…but all the same”), and performs this disavowal for the story’s readers in a gesture that simultaneously invites identification and asks for action.