Chapter 25 - Zadie Smith

Summary

Beauty does not rest in the forms we encounter it, or match with the idea we have of it. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes 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 asks how the novel of ideas might approach the problem of beauty, by attending to the dialogue between Zadie Smith and E. M. Forster, as it is conducted in Smith’s 2006 novel On Beauty. In staging her novel as a reprise of Forster’s Howards End, Smith suggests that the artwork is bound up with the question of duplication, as beauty, in Elaine Scarry’s terms, ‘brings copies of itself into being’ (Elaine Scarry). Beauty eludes the critical gaze; 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.