"on beauty" wrap-up & self-destruction

-more than just a novel about howard — a man who cheats on his wife w/ traditionally "beautiful" women — on beauty is a story about a man on the path to self-destruction.  by the novel's end, howard has lost the loyalty of his children, has sabotaged his marriage and is on the verge of ruining his professorial career.  zadie smith invents the character of howard's father (a racist, sexist, lower-class guy who sits around all day watching t.v. and never reads).  he also believes in the concept of genius (howard doesn't).

-part of the reason howard may have ended up essentially self-destructing is b/c of pressure felt from his father.  as a child and teen he may have felt pressure to "do better" than his father.  BUT, by ascending class lines into the upper class academic elite, howard may have felt guilt for "doing better" than his dad.  it is difficult for children to be more successful than their parents at times b/c inevitably we may feel like our success is a "condemnation" of our parents and our background and heritage.

"on beauty" (end) & the state of english lit

-the end of the novel is a contemplation of intellectual life in the western hemisphere, grabbing at the crux of the future of the study of english literature.  the discipline of english as an institution is relatively new.  for a long time, the study of literature wasn't in english.  students read latin classics and tried to apply them to their own english texts.  samuel johnson and his peers were beaten for failure to memorize texts.  it was not reading for pleasure.  it was not until 1833 that english lit became a discipline.

-on beauty asks what it means to be an intellectual.  in "the anatomy lesson" section of the book, on pgs. 225-226, claire explains her motivation behind her affair w/ howard.  claire says she instigated the affair b/t the two of them: ..."(claire) intervened in the most successful marriage she knew."  claire has read all the classics expected of her.  she is also trained in all the latest literary theory.  what is an intellectual?  who would make a better teacher, claire or zora?

-in the novel, beauty becomes de- reified (unconverted from a concrete thing).  it's about taking women as objects and how horrible that is.  zadie smith hates the objectification of women, but she also hates the fact that the left disallows talk about beauty on the other end of the spectrum.  the biggest contradiction in the book is howard, who claims to be above any kind of mystical turning art into objects or celebrating geniuses, but the minute two good-looking women come on to him who are good looking, he sleeps w/ them (claire and victoria).

-the left believes that beauty is compromised due to all these political circumstances underlying the surface.  at the end of the novel, zora gets her dad put on indefinite leave for sleeping w/ a student (she basically turns him in).

-on pg. 416, zora had been championing carl in his defense for being enrolled in the english class w/o having the money to pay for the class.  monty was trying to get all of the non-paying students kicked out of the class.  besides all his right leanings, monty was also sleeping w/ chantelle, and wants to cover his ass by kicking her out of the university.  at the same time, carl fell in love w/ victoria and not zora, to zora's dismay.  zora calls him out for not sleeping w/ someone "classier" and carl tries to tell zora that howard has slept w/ victoria as well.  victoria desperately doesn't want him to b/c jerome lost his virginity to her.  thus, both father and son have slept w/ the same woman (gross).  jerome figures this out all on his own.

-"you people don't believe like human beings man — i ain't never seen people behave like you people ... my daddy's a worthless piece of shit too, but at least i know he's a worthless piece of shit ... you got your college degrees, but you don't even live right," rants carl to jerome and zora and everyone like them.  this is a vital moment in smith's novel where she criticizes the very people she works alongside.  carl functions to point out the moral failures in the upper class intellectual elite.

"on beauty" part III

-the term "genius" alienates us from our own talents.  it prevents us from creating our own great works b/c we look to others for greatness and feel we can't achieve the same kind of greatness.  zadie smith is lionized by the left in this culture war, and is lifted up as a black woman writer, as an antidote to the right's patriarchal great male writers.  smith portrays a very dim view of "lefty" academics.  we should be able to talk about great art and great beauty hand in hand.  smith seems to be anti-left through her stories of elitist academics in on beauty.

-in the book, howard is snide and attempts to bring down great artists like rembrandt.  when asked to come give a talk about the greatness of rembrandt, smith writes of howard's speech: " 'well,' he said loudly, hoping to finish it off with a daunting display of academic pyrotechnics, 'what i meant was that rembrandt is part of the seventeenth-century european movement to ... essentially invent the idea of the human,' howard heard himself saying, all of it paraphrased from the chapter he had left upstairs, asleep on the computer screen, boring even to itself."

-the above quote is an example of smith hating on the academic left, whose goal most of the time is to shame their audience into silence either through hatred of great artists or a showoff-y display of canonical knowledge.  one of the reasons the left is able to feel this superiority complex is due to the fact that a college or university is NOT a place that protects beauty, rather, it is an accrediting institution.  "it's like sorting peas," said laura.

-in the novel, the character of carl functions to question institutional knowledge.  carl isn't paying for college but he still attends art and cultural events in the city as often as he can.  in the section, "the anatomy lesson," chapter 1, carl visits wellington and runs into zora.  they engage in a conversation about the value of college and the difference b/t english classes and his own spoken word poetry he records.  on page 140, carl says, "the future's another country, man ... and i still ain't got a passport."  his passport is another way of saying a college diploma.

-carl's argument, and his subsequent point to zora, and maybe his over role in the novel is like the lyrics to a lil' wayne rap song from tha carter III.  "talkin' about it" is a rap song where he criticizes people who don't follow through with what they say, or practice what they preach.  just like how many college kids just "talk about" books or topics vs. going out into the real world (at least during their time at school) and just doing it, 2 lines from the song seem particularly applicable to carl's view on colleges like wellington: "(man they just) talkin' bout it / and i'm on the streets with it."

-on page 155, smith critiques howard as a professor the worth of what he teaches and the mechanical way he goes through the motions at this point in his career.  "howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears.  to recast aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion.  he promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called 'art.'  'art is the western myth,' announced howard, for the SIXTH YEAR IN A ROW."

"on beauty" cont'd

-the idea of omens/objects instead of the person or thing is a problematic occurrence that happens when people fall in love with the idea of something rather than the person —> like when older rich men marry "trophy wives" or vice versa, when young women marry old me and end up w/ their own t.v. show.  while "we" scorn the idea of those kinds of relationships, many times we have similar relationships, which don't have to be limited to romantic.  for example, if a friend and fellow student fails or drops out of miami, do they remain our friend?  to what is the extent that we objectify others w/o necessarily wanting to?  how much did their status as a miami student have to do w/ our positive feelings towards that person?  how much do we consider our friends as objects vs. subjects or people?

-in on beauty, how is beauty defined?  is it blurred images w/ lines, juxtapositions and light?  or is it more conventional, in terms of thinness, starvation, etc.?  kiki, howard's wife, was conventionally beautiful at the time of their marriage.  according to their eldest daughter, zora, kiki "let herself go."  regardless, it's true that kiki has put on a lot of weight since being married.  the concept of this is rehearsed over and over in kiki's head, as her body is anatomized over and over again

-later in the novel, when jerome convinces the family to go to a mozart concert, howard is facetious and an asshole throughout the entire concert.  he makes fun of mozart, kiki, her "lower" class and jerome's passion.  jerome was so moved, he cried during the performance.  howard, an archetypal multiculturalist and leftist, parodies everything about "genius" and mocks kiki's appreciation of mozart —> later on, the part of "requiem" that kiki identified as genius, was in fact composed by sussmayr after the fact, effectively disproving her argument that this song or movement HAD to have been written by a "genius."  "great man" theory is plaguing us (arguments over who wrote what, or who composed what or who painted what).  this problem of the arts is therefore also a gendered problem.  no one is interested in whether or not virginia wolff wrote everything under her name, for example

-on pg. 116, kiki finds out that howard didn't have a one-night stand at a conference in michigan.  instead, she discovers he had a 3-week long affair w/ claire, the couple's family friend, whose now-husband warren is also friends w/ howard and kiki.  claire's body is the exact antithesis of kiki's very womanly body.  this makes howard's decision to cheat on claire slightly understandable (but not justified) in terms of satisfying his curiosity of another type of body

zadie smith's "on beauty"

-in real life, she resembles "kiki," howard's wife in her own novel, w/ her head wraps.  the youtube interview of her in stockholm, sweden, 2006 helps the reader get a better idea of what ideas smith represents (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PAmXET6hT8).  "the greatest obstacle to the good in human life is vanity and self-perception.  it's also the same case in art."  what smith means by this is that when people tell political truths in their novels they are bad.  art is a case of morals, or an analogy of morals.

-smith says it's really difficult in both life and art to be honest b/c of self-perception.  adults should be mature enough to be able to see the world in terms of other than themselves, in order to see multiple perspectives, vs. engaging in an "us vs. them" scene.  on beauty is about multiculturalism (howard's family), the bard (monty's family and culture wars.  people on the right care about standards of greatness, like shakespeare and other patriarchal authors.  liberal multiculturalists on the other hand, think that great literature has been put up on a pedestal for centuries for all the wrong reasons.  in the novel, jerome is the mediator.

-literature is about human relationships and the difficulty of knowing that, and knowing yourself.  it's interesting that zadie smith has been uplifted in the field of bardolotry by the left.

-the novel starts w/ jerome's emails to his father, which he refuses to respond to.  the family is liberal and not religious and don't understand why jerome is a moral christian.  the kips are a black family from trinidad who live in great britain.  monty is very religious, conservative, pro-business, pro-family, etc.  howard attacks monty publicly for an analysis of a rembrandt painting, saying that the painting isn't genius, and says it's a horrible painting.  monty writes back and tells him that he is talking about the wrong painting (like getting caught w/ your pants down).  this mortifies howard, who is academic rivals w/ monty.