Zadie Smith: On [Erzulie's] Beauty

I assigned Zadie Smith's On Beauty as the culminating novel in my most recent Survey of Women's Literature class at the University of Nebraska. Although my students initially disagreed with me that Smith's novel argues for the a priori existence of beauty as an unchangeable, constant, and fixed ideal on par with truth and love and justice (a la Elaine Scarry's similarly titled work, On Beauty and Being Just), I think by discussions' end most students appreciated such a definition of beauty as an aesthetic and moral category. The incredulous students wondered how beauty could possibly be a suchness of immutability since everyone knows that beauty fades especially as one gets older. Besides this normative assumption, students also pointed to the disastrous central character of Howard Belsey (one of many signposts back to E.M. Forster's Howards End however much the 'Howard' of Howards End is a place and not a person), a character who gets beauty all wrong and fails to see the depths of beauty in the Rembrandts he studies and, more importantly, in his heroic wife Kiki. Of course, Smith's final section of her tripartite novel (her homage to the Victorian three-volume novel attempted by the likes of Dickens, Eliot, and Wilde's Miss Prism, some with better success than others, obviously) is titled "On Beauty and Being Wrong." Howard (like so many of us) erroneously defines beauty from a superficial and supercilious perspective, and yet the beauty that radiates from Kiki and Carlene Kipps and Hector Hippolyte's Maitresse Erzulie elevates the role of aesthetics to the realm of morality rather than the depravity that Howard experiences in his dalliances with Claire Malcolm and Victoria Kipps and, to a lesser extent, with his shallow assessment of Rembrandt's paintings and sketches.

On another note, the compounding allusions throughout Smith's novel provide intertextuality and cultural resonances unlike any other novel I've read before. In class, we attempted to locate the too-many-to-identify-in-one-class-setting allusions in the novel, and it was hilarious going from a reverential YouTube clip of Mozart's Requiem; to listening to hip hop excerpts from Tupac and Biggie; to visual images of Rembrandt, Hopper, Hippolyte, and everyone in between; to references to Forster, Zola, Shakespeare, Milton, Barthes, Gramsci, T. S. Eliot, and Heidegger; alongside quotes from The Sound of Music and Saturday Night Live---it's definitely a mix of high and low and an unapologetic renegotiation of the forms and contents of the past. Throughout the novel Smith playfully interrogates the question of origins, attribution, inspiration, aesthetic production, and beauty vis-a-vis morality. In all, the novel is gorgeous and ambitious and provocative and compelling and new, and it was the perfect summation to a lovely semester with some smart undergraduates in Nebraska.