Chair-Spotting: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

"It's very modern. It's so well designed you wouldn't want to breathe in it, no matter fart in it. There's these chairs, plastic but without legs, curved like an s; they seem to work by means of their own fold; and they fit together, about two hundred of them in ten rows; and they snake around you when you sit in them - soft yet supportive! Comfy! Modern!"

- Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Greetings, chair connoisseurs and other appreciators of well-designed sundries! Does the description of this chair sound familiar? Oh, incidentally I am Christine and Becca has generously allowed me to guestblog.

Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth is one of the bona fide critical and commercial successes published in the past decade; Smith explores several generations of families in England, many of whom are immigrants, with humour and grace. The above passage comes from the end of the novel: multiple plot threads intertwine at the much-hyped reveal of the scientific triumph known as FutureMouse. This modern chair emphasizes the modern paradigm signified by the FutureMouse, a mindset which exerts its pressures upon the different characters struggling to define their identities in the modern world. Modern modern modern. We can see the narrator slipping in snippets of humour amidst the admiration of the chair design: this modernity seems to defy human frailties – one mustn’t dare fart in its presence!

Have you figured out the name of the chair? Hint: the name of the chair is in the passage.

If you guessed Danish designer Vernor Panton’s iconic Stacking chair, otherwise known as the S chair, you would be correct!

This isn’t the S chair’s first appearance on this blog: in a previous edition of Chair-Spotting, Jody noted the ubiquity of Panton’s design at the Vancouver Olympics, and in a later post, Becca found the S chair in Design Within Reach (435 King Street).

I can’t help but wonder what other meanings Zadie Smith might be hinting at with Panton’s S chair. Are we to read the effortless autonomy of the chair’s design in contrast with the inextricably and painfully linked characters? Perhaps the mass manufacture of these chairs that are so easily stored and stacked belies the rich diversity of the characters and their complex and clashing ideologies.

On a more prosaic level, I muse over whether the S chairs at the FutureMouse reveal are the more expensive Classic S chairs with the lacquered surface, or the latest pure plastic S chair design that is cheaper and more easily produced.