Chapter 6 - Zadie Smith, E. M. Forster and the Idea of Beauty

Summary

Beauty does not rest in the forms we encounter it, or match with the idea we have of it. The young Karl Marx writes that ‘the eye’s object is different from the ear’s’, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that ‘when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it’. Beauty happens in this difficult gulf between hand and eye, between eye and ear. This essay approaches the problem of beauty through the dialogue between Zadie Smith and E. M. Forster, as conducted in Smith’s 2006 novel On Beauty. In staging her novel as a reprise of Forster’s Howards End, Smith enacts the taking place of the artwork in the duplications it urges on us, as beauty ‘brings copies of itself into being’ (Elaine Scarry). Beauty eludes expression; but in the ground that lies between On Beauty and Howards End, this essay looks for a kind of critical language and a kind of political institution in which the idea of beauty might find expression.