On Lecturing and Being Beautiful: Zadie Smith, Elaine Scarry, and the Liberal Aesthetic

Abstract

AT THE HEART OF ZADIE SMITH'S PRIZE-WINNING NOVEL, On Beauty, is strong sense that humanities today are in state of crisis: values of equality and relativism assumed in principles of liberal education have been outpaced, on one hand, by competitive forces of market and, on other, by new forms of protest and self-knowledge, both of which lie beyond academia's traditional paradigms. Howard Belsey, novel's academic anti-hero, embodies this crisis. Stuck at an impasse with his anti-humanist book, Against Rembrandt, caricatured by his students as demonically opposed to any expression of enthusiasm for anything, failing to reproduce his hard-won middle-class secularism in either of his sons, opposed to Mozart, Forster, and all representational art, and suffering consequences of his committee on positive discrimination having devolved into an extramarital affair, Howard's agenda seems to lack all ethical horizons as he plummets into state of skeptical despair: 'What,' he asks, pointing to picture by Rembrandt, ready to undercut feeling that any college freshman might have for great works of art and literature by suggesting historical and cultural specificity of our appreciation of beauty, 'are we signing up to when we talk of of this light?' ... 'What are these images really concerned with?' (252). (1) The central irony of novel is that Howard is already something of an aesthete, if not someone who can appreciate art in classroom then certainly someone who senses it, imagines it, and confronts it everywhere else. Howard feels everything: sadness of funeral service, ridiculous dancing of glee club ruining U2's Pride (in name of love), smell of alcohol, touch of his children. Smith's characterization of Howard's fraught persona picks up on widespread mood of concern over perceived antipathy of academic liberals--particularly those making cerebral, relativist arguments for which Howard sees himself mouthpiece--to current ethical practices. Thus, Howard realizes that responsibility and obligation that individuals should feel toward each other--the principle tenet of modern ethical liberalism--lies outside bounds of university as an institution, so-called vanguard of liberal education. The affection people can and do have for each other, novel suggests, emerges in spaces and moments of ecstatic fissure in university's bureaucratic edifice rather than in institution proper. Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, from which Smith claims to have borrowed a title, chapter heading and good deal of inspiration (i), also chafes at liberal arts' tendency to refute power of aesthetic experience. Disavowed by Marxist critics as form of deflection from structural critique and by poststructuralist critics as form of violence done to object being viewed, language of beauty, states Scarry, has fallen out of favour with Howards of world: although the humanities are made up of beautiful poems, stories, paintings, sketches, sculpture, film, essays, debates, and it is this that every day draws us to them, she argues, conversations about beauty of these objects has been banished, so that we coinhabit space of these objects ... yet speak about their beauty only in whispers (57). The underlying aims of On Beauty and Being Just are first to unveil and then to counteract institutional prohibitions that deprive intellectuals of an enriching language of beauty and render works of art and literature powerless as moral resource in university life (58). (2) Protesting this situation, Scarry introduces beauty, which she sees as an alliance between individual responses to aesthetic objects and larger instances of truth or justice, as corrective to rationalism of humanities and supplement to discourse of postmodern liberalism. The assumption behind Scarry's and Smith's arguments is that beauty, and all that it implies as focus of moral disposition and practical engagement with life, exists somewhere outside liberal academy. …