On Beauty

From Webster's Dictionary:

Beauty: the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit

So many people have tried to define beauty, what it means to be beautiful or in contrast, to be not beautiful. Zadie Smith's novel On Beauty spends the entirity of the plot contemplating that idea; what is beauty? The end, I think, is where we truly learn what beauty is: it's inexplicable.

Howard spent his entire career trying to tell the world there is no such thing as beauty, that it doesn't exist. What he realized at the end, as he stared at Rembrandt's painting, was beauty was so far beyond the realm of understanding. The painting, and beauty by extension, needed no words, no definition, no ideas thrust upon it. At the end of the day, it was just a piece of canvas with oils and dyes smeared acrossed it in the form of a woman. But Howard saw beauty for the first time, because he saw his wife in that woman. His wife, who he loved, who he cared for, who he betrayed, who he used, and who in the end left him, was there listening to his speech, subtly reminding him of all that he had lost and all that he could have again.

In order to say that something doesn't exist, it must first be defined. Howard, in his attempt to excise beauty from art, had been chasing the idea that beauty can be defined. He never stopped to really look at the art, without reservations, without ideas, without justifications, to just look at it. When he did, he saw all that is beautiful in the world, his wife. In the end, beauty is what we make it to be. It can't be defined, it can't be explained, but it can be acknowledged so long as we take the time to do so.

Notes 4/24

On Beauty continued...

Claire's view of the affair with Howard: she considers herself a masochist, trying to wreck the greatest love she's ever had, Warren. She was the one who instigated the affair. "Why should everyone be mad at me? I'm the victim." Claire is selfish and wanted to ruin one of the greatest marriage on campus - she succeeded in that Howard is now questioning what he is and his marriage.

Romantic poetry, anything about beauty or idealization, is politically suspect. Reification, to turn something back into an object; relationships are not objects and therefore not beautiful. By the end of the novel, beauty has been de-objectified and made relationships beautiful again. Zadie Smith shows her hatred in the objectification of women - Claire is thin, Kiki is fat and that's why Howard sleeps with Claire - but she's also upset that she can't write about or appreciate beauty. Beautifying landscape is wrong because there are laborers working and dying in it and beautifying it is hiding the politics of it. But sometimes it's not about that! Landscape can be beautiful and it has nothing to do with politics! Why can't people just accept that some things are as they appear, that there is no underlying idea or message, that something can be as it is and nothing else. Why do things all have to be politicized?

Carl wanted to come to the university, to get a ticket to the future but he realized that for all their intelligence, they can't see the truth about their own lives. He knows that Howard slept with a student (Victoria, who also slept with Jerome), that Monty Kipps has slept with an intern and is trying to get the non-paying students kicked out to save his career. "You got your college degrees but you don't even live right!"

Zadie Smith is trying to tell her readers that we need morality, be it Christian or otherwise, but we need some guidelines, something that keeps us on the straight and narrow, or something that defines our lives for the better. Nobody in the novel has morals or if they do, they don't have the backbone to follow their morals. Not Howard, not Monty, not Kiki, not any of them.

Notes 4/22

Literary Theory: varying ways to read and make meaning of a text

New Criticism, (1920-1950)-ish, is a way of seeking out contradictions in a text and figuring out how these contradictions unify the text and create meaning. It solely looks at the text itself, studying what the author meant.

Cultural revolution in America, England and France (1960's) brought about numerous literary theories.

Psychoanalytic Theory - psychoanalysis. The unconscious directs our thoughts and actions, such as the idea of the Oedipus complex, a son loving his mother so he kills his father to replace him. Freud came up with the idea in early 20th century. People study latent content of dreams in order to understand out lives. Psychoanalysts are studying us like one would a book, people began to apply this to actual books and began studying books with a freudian lense.

Feminism Theory - Feminism began as a movement for women's equality and rights in the 50,60,70's. People began to read texts to discover hidden or not hidden meanings about female desire, empowerment, equality, sexuality, gender politics and POWER and SUBJECTIVITY. What makes a woman a woman and a man a man?

Critical Race Theory is similar to feminism theory except instead of gender politics, it examines racial politics.

Queer Theory - gender issues, power, gender depictions, heteronormative ways of thinking. It is similar to feminism and critical race theory, but how is queer identity constructed in a text?

There are those that oppose this idea, claiming that we shouldn't be looking for political ideas in texts. It becomes less about what the author meant and more about larger social issues. Books now have larger cultural meanings. With these new movements, people begin to project their ideas onto the text, seeing only the parts that fit with their social understanding instead of reading the book as a whole entity.

Texts Now: poems, novels, plays, films, TV shows, movies, digital images, art, paintings, cd's, music, graffiti, clothes, merchandising, advertising, etc. These are all cultural artifacts. All of these theoretical movements bring politics into the classroom. It's common to read texts for these issues: power, identity, subjectivity, political significance, cultural significance, types of representation, instead of just reading the text for what the story is about. We rip apart the text and scrutinize and label and consider until everything fits into nice little compartments that have been defined. We can't enjoy the text for the beauty of the words or the rhythm; we must define it. It's not good or bad, it simply is.

Deconstructionists (1970's onward) - question meaning, question stable notions of identity, question stable notions of what a person is, etc.

- Privileged Oppositions: Logos (Speech, reason) vs Writing/text. We grant more authority to speech/reason than we do writing/non-reason because it is "closer" to ourselves. Logocentric - we the faculty of reason over all else. In the history of the West, reason has been used to judge what makes a human human.

In literature or philosophy, or in political reports, or expeditions to far away lands, non-white people are judged to be without reason and therefore not human. British imperialism, the slave trade between England and its plantations all over the word utilize this thinking to justify enslavement of a people, in order to not have to deal with the moral ramifications of their actions.

How we make meaning? Is a text a text? What is art? What is a poem? Challenging fundamental assumptions of Western culture is what deconstruction seeks to do. They challenge the use of reason as the defining meaning of being "human". What is reason though? Could it be that different people use different reason? We are all human and we all use reason but it how we use and how we define it that sets us apart. Neither definition is right or wrong, but we will privilege our meaning because its ours. If we simply disregard other definitions, that is wrong; privileging is human nature (we all do it!).

Essentialism - what is the essence of the human? Darwin and the advent of biological adaptation have affected our thinking. Different human developments in various geographic areas that accounts for difference in a non-essentialist way. This lead to the culture wars.

Notes 4/20

On Beauty continued...

Claire's Poem discusses sins, what not to do. They are the beautiful, the ideal while we are the ugly, the nonideal. We commit sins by not being beautiful.

They are the damned. This distances us from them, "not us here, them, they over there"

They are the damned. This a realization, an embodiment of what it means to be damned.

We can't draw the line between beautiful/nonbeautiful. They/we are never specified; we are all beautiful/nonbeautiful. There is no line drawn within ourselves therefore the lines can't be drawn in others.

The poem is a metacommentary, commenting on poetry and the book itself.

Carlene is living for while Kiki is living with. However, Kiki realizes she's been living for Howard after talking with Carlene.

Iam Forster - On Beauty is an homage to Iam Forster and his works - Howard's End (place, not person)

Victorian England (1890-1940?): It's all about propriety, what society thinks a person should do is what people strive to do. They live by codes and morals. For example, sexual references are repressed. Breast and thigh meat in chicken becomes white and dark meat; ankles are hidden and high-waistlines are the height of fashion. Anything different, abnormal should be avoided at all costs.

On Beauty moves the story to urban, contemporary England and adds the race factor. In the end of Howard's End, both families live "happily ever after", defying all notions of Victorian England - is it the same in On Beauty?

Voice - What kind of voice? How does one have subjectivity? Power?

I think Claire's wrong and right in a way. Carl does have a voice but he doesn't know the language; someone, Zora, should teach him the language so he can speak for himself rather than have someone speak for him. "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime."

Notes 4/15

On Beauty continued...

Does Zadie Smith disagree with the left? Howard goes to the Rembrandt Appreciation and dismantles the great artist. But as he's talking, he realizes it's boring, always telling the same stories and researching the same actions, dissecting a person's motives who has been dead for hundreds of years. Just because they've been idolized and canonized, does that mean they weren't good artists? Does that mean their works shouldn't be studied or appreciated?

Zora threatens to expose her father's affair in order to get into a creative writing course. In this instance, do universities defend beauty? No. Is Carl a pawn in the game of whether a university defends beauty? He meets the Belsey's at the Mozart concert because he's a musician and wants to better his music by studying the musicians of the past. "It might not be poetry poetry but it's what I do." Carl defines beauty as something outside university - outside grades, outside politics, outside structure. The structure of the university is what holds the students back because they force them to study for grades, not for the simple love of learning.

During Howard's class, he claims the left says beauty is a mask the power wears. I disagree. For example, when he's talking about Rembrandt painting for his patrons, that because he painted it, it's beautiful but in reality, it's just another representation of the power, the money which payed for the painting. I think he's totally wrong. I think people can love and enjoy what they do and get paid for it. I think they can create something beautiful that was bought and paid for by others, simply because he took the time to create it. I can remember writing a paper about learning to write for others and finding peace in it. Just because it's for someone else doesn't mean I can't add my own personal touches and enjoy the topic. I can write a good paper that's beautiful that was written for the "powerful" because I wrote it. "...And that has made all the difference."

Notes 4/13

On Beauty continued...

People function as an omen/object, similar to the albatross being a good-luck object in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Could you fall in love with a good-luck object? A trophy wife or power couples, are they really in love with each other or just the attention that being with that other person brings? In society, some people believe that being with a certain type of person redeems them.

Beauty is not about seeing an object but rather seeing lines and color. There is a battle between these two ideas of beauty within the novel. When Kiki's breasts are described as sisterly, motherly, etc. rather than sexually. Seeing the beauty of what breasts represent for women rather than what breasts represent for men. Also, when Jerome falls in love with the idea of the family of Kipps rather than Victoria herself. Mrs Belsey's body is anatomized; her daughter said her mother was beautiful when she married her father but let herself go. However, Mrs. Kipps says of the other woman that she carries herself well.

"Each couple is its own vaudeville act."

"What was one night in Michigan set against the idea of love?" Kiki is willing to forgive Howard because she still loves him and doesn't think one night should determine their entire relationship. She later finds out that it was not simply a one-night stand with an unknown woman but an affair with Claire that lasted three weeks.

Claire is more similar to Howard than Kiki in education but Kiki has more wisdom of the world than Claire. She is objectified, the opposite of the Kiki. But does she have any substance or are her looks all she is?

"Define genius." "How was something about that work of art that wasn't genius?" The left vs the right - the multicultural views want to stop valuing the author while the canon views don't. The couple is arguing about Mozart's Requiem. Carl wants to say that the Requiem was finished by other artists after Mozart's death but doesn't. Genius is collective, not individual.

Notes 4/8

On Beauty by Zadie Smith


During an interview, Zadie Smith talks about the greater implications of authors projecting their ideas onto their audience. Vanity and self-perception come into play when people tell political truths in their novels. If writers berate you with an idea, you can't trust them. Novels are political and moral. Iris Murdoch said that art is a case of morals, an analogy of morals. The best art is when the artist is truthful and honest to themselves and to their audience. "Good" artists are able to see the truths of both sides of the story, other perceptions and not simply their own. They are able to extend beyond the "me/us" vs "them" mentality. Similar to the culture war - Shakespeare and the canon vs multicultural works; right conservatism vs left liberalism.


Zadie Smith vs "Zadie Smith" - the quotational Zadie Smith isn't real. She's an idol, set up on a pedestal by reporters, critics, editors. The left has now done the same thing that the right has done, put someone up on a pedestal, made certain people the "good" artist, the must-reads. They've created a new canon. We attack things in people that we don't like about ourselves.


On Beauty can teach us morals and dissolve the lines between "us" vs "them". Caricatures are one-sided, flat, plain, boring. They are always right or always wrong or always something! They aren't real! Characters, on the other hand, are real; they have more emotions and sides. They aren't always right or always wrong or always anything; they simply are.


On the left, we have Howard and his family, sans Jerome; on the right, we have Monty and his family. Jerome is in the center, being pulled in both directions.


The Belsey's - An American family headed by Howard, a college professor, who are extremely free. Jerome is the only child who's Christian and they aren't quite sure how to react to him. The Kipps - A British family headed by Monty, also a college professor, who are very religious, right-wing, conservative, business oriented.


Jerome is trying to get his father's attention and rebel against the lifestyle which he grew up in, particularly now because Howard had an affair. The children may feel betrayed and Jerome could want to get back at his father. He could just be different from his family. He could just want to be religious that has nothing to do with his father or family.


Jerome falls in love with the Kipps. It could be the fact that they are so different from his own and he is so enamored with that idea. "The grass is greener on the other side." He could also enjoy as the Kipps utterly destroyed the ideals or morals of the Belsey family, the ideals that his father used to betray his mother.

Art and Lies

I think what I really like about Art and Lies is the dynamic nature of the stories. Every page is filled with something new, some new aspect of society that Jeannette Winterson is forcing us to acknowledge. For example, the three cities. Each city appears to be separate in the story, separate and gruesome in its own way. The first is, in a sense, "the forgotten city", the city that time has let go, the city that people have evolved and broken away from. It's tradition, built on and by tradition. In the modern era, tradition has been shuffled to the side and forgotten. It's monarchy, religion, the old ways. The second city is "the now", what the first city has become. Without tradition, the second city has become analytical. Not too many mansions, not too many slums, mostly apartments; the perfect bell curve. The third city is, as she says, the "invisible city", but it has ties to both. The third city is where the first and the second shuffle those who don't quite fit in their mold, the ones who the first two cities don't want to fit their mold. The thing about the cities though is that they aren't separate. They exist in each other, in our society. And while they show us everything that is not right, they don't show anything that is. So while we can see our own pettiness, our own faults, our own problems, we can't see how to change them. Perhaps, Winterson wants us to first recognize these problems before we can attempt to fix them. That's the interesting thing about her novel; she doesn't preach about what we should do, but rather what we are doing, forcing us to find the answers ourselves, in ourselves. The dynamic fluidity of her stories might be another indication of how we live now. We can't concentrate on one thing for too long; we need to be constantly engaged with something new. Just as the cities were an exaggerated representation of our society, the shortness of her stories could be a social commentary as well. Everything in the novel speaks about us, we just have to take the time to figure out what.