On Beauty as Beautiful?: The Problem of Novelistic Aesthetics by Way of Zadie Smith

In a 2005 interview published in The Atlantic, Zadie Smith let it be known, “I don’t fuck around with titles” (12). Why then choose for her third novel a title that had already been taken? As she points out in the acknowledgments to On Beauty (2005), the title is a direct reference to Elaine Scarry’s philosophical meditation On Beauty and Being Just (1999). Smith thanks Scarry “for her wonderful essay ‘On Beauty and Being Just,’ from which I borrowed a title, a chapter heading and a good deal of inspiration” (On Beauty xiii). Smith thus places before her readers an invitation for generic comparison: what is the relation between the novel’s treatment of beauty and the philosopher’s? Is Smith’s novel a novel of ideas, a fictional dramatization of Scarry’s philosophy of beauty? Or has she in a more general way been prompted by Scarry to develop her own account of beauty—moving away, perhaps, from Scarry’s emphasis on the connection between beauty and justice and emphasizing instead the connection between beauty and human fallibility (the “being wrong” chapter heading she takes from Scarry)? But importantly, in either case, Smith’s title asks us to consider as well a question that has not been asked much in the last half century: is the genre of the novel an artistic enterprise whose aim should include the achievement of aesthetic beauty? And if aesthetic beauty is a generic possibility, why have we heard so little about the beautiful as an attribute of novelistic art?

When asked by the Atlantic interviewer to summarize what position her novel takes in regard to beauty, Smith is deliberately vague: “it is a book about beauty, but in a very loose sense, and it’s about all these other things, as well” (12). Smith does not enumerate what “all these other things” might be, and it seems she uses the phrase deliberately to indicate that there are so many other things the novel is about that one cannot begin to name them all. Yet if Smith’s novel is engaged with beauty only “in a very loose sense,” then why insist so much on the rightness of its allusive title?

I want to suggest that Smith as a novelist values her title for the difference it seeks to draw between the philosopher’s treatment of beauty and the novelist’s, between Scarry’s phenomenological project and the novelistic aesthetics of alterity that Smith pursues.¹ Whereas Scarry seeks primarily to describe the “felt experience of cognition” (3) that unites all human beings of every culture in their experience of beauty, Smith portrays the particularity and contingency of each individual’s apprehension of beauty. And while Scarry aims to enumerate the fundamental qualities of beauty, Smith stresses its relativity and social constructedness. If Smith’s repetition of Scarry’s title prepares us for a novel of ideas, the novel quickly teaches us that the novel’s idea of an idea is different from the philosopher’s. In On Beauty the lives of Smith’s socially diverse characters are filled with aesthetic experience, and their individual attempts to understand that experience—through private contemplation as well as through acts of social exchange—highlight the power relations and social alliances that give meaning to even the most embodied sensory perceptions. In Smith’s novel, not only is the “felt experience of cognition” shown to be contingent upon social life, but any abstract idea a character might hold about the operation or value of cognition is shown to be inseparable from an individual’s social position within a particular cultural formation.

The citationality of Smith’s title thus signals the difference between the philosopher’s notion of beauty and the novelist’s by calling attention to the social discursivity through which the meaning of beauty is produced. In this way Smith’s novelistic aesthetics of alterity is in keeping with Virginia Woolf’s description of the novel as the “cannibal” art (“Narrow Bridge” 18) and with Mikhail Bakhtin’s celebratory theorization...