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A Passage to Forster: Zadie Smith's Attempt to “Only Connect” to Howards End

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 52; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00111610903380220

1939-9138

Ann Marie Adams,

Thoreau and American Literature

ABSTRACT Critics who fault Zadie Smith for not transposing enough of Howards End into her admitted homage to Forster's novel, On Beauty, often fail to recognize that Smith is actually rewriting the Edwardian's masterpiece in light of another important intertext, Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just. Following Scarry, who is more concerned with the limitations of liberal thinking than the squabbling of campus politics, Smith shifts her focus from the opposition between conservative and liberal positions on campus (and hence from a potential confrontation between her Wilcoxes [the Kippses] and Schlegels [the Belseys]) to a thoughtful exploration of the contradictions within the liberal mind itself. Smith may offer no definitive solutions to these contradictions, but, like Forster before her, she posits hope for the future in Howard's end. Keywords: E. M. ForsterElaine Scarrybeautyliberalaesthetics Notes 1. All quotations are from the acknowledgements page in the Penguin paperback version of On Beauty, which has no page numbers for the prefatory material. 2. Michiko Kakutani's and J. A. Gray's reviews illustrate these seemingly divergent yet oddly complementary positions. Kakutani, who celebrates Smith's “original story” and “captivating authorial voice,” still argues that Smith “over-stage-manages her story” while “setting up [the] echoes of Howards End.” Gray, who criticizes Smith's “repellent industriousness” and forced prose, contends that Smith's “reworking” destroys “most of what makes Howards End a compelling, organic whole,” causing her homage to fall “somewhere between otiose and presumptuous” (52). 3. The novel, which won the Orange Prize, has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and selected as one of the “best book[s] of the year” by many prestigious periodicals. Many reviews merely mention the homage or outline a parallel or two, then focus on Smith's original storyline or style, implicitly supporting Stephanie Merritt's claim that “it would be reductive to call On Beauty an updating of Forster's novel.” Longer reviews, which discuss the function of Smith's metafictive connection, tend to be more modest in praise and/or openly critical of the project because they cannot find a coherent or realizable purpose for the homage. As Robert Alter tellingly notes, “the parallels with Howards End are more important (and perhaps more amusing) for the writer than they are likely to be for the reader. It is hard to see how they add a significant dimension of meaning. … Smith's unsubtle imitation of Forster remains puzzling, superfluous, and perhaps a little precious” (29). One of the few critics who argues that Smith's rewrite is a success from a Forsterian perspective is Colin MacCabe, who states that “the debate between London's financial and intellectual districts—the City and Bloomsbury—which animates Forster's book becomes a conflict between conservative and progressive views on race and art, articulated as fairly as the author of A Passage to India would have wished.” 4. As Adam Begley notes, the “overriding question” of postwar academic novels is the question of “tenure: Who will stay, who will go? The drama of inclusion and exclusion (or internment and escape) plays out against an absurdist comedy of eternal return” (40). Howard does, of course, want tenure, but the narrative is more concerned with his relationship to Kiki and potential to appreciate beauty than it is with his career. 5. Alter notes that the “title of On Beauty is borrowed, for reasons that are hardly compelling, from the title of Elaine Scarry's rather mechanical effort, in her book of the same name, to apply perceptual psychology to the aesthetics of fictional representation” (29), but that's all he has to say about the connection. In an extended reading of On Beauty and Ian McEwan's Saturday, Kathleen Wall does claim that Scarry is Smith's “inspiration,” but her admittedly sophisticated reading of On Beauty renders it a fictive synthesis of various postmodern aesthetic theories, not a careful re-creation of Scarry's specific arguments. Maeve Tynan's and Susan Alice Fischer's much less compelling essays also list Scarry as one intertext among many in widely divergent readings that link the novel to everything from Wide Sargasso Sea and Foe to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston. Like Ulka Anjaria, Wall, Tynan, and Fischer state that Smith has been able to successfully integrate Scarry into her tale, but they do not consider Scarry's treatise a significant subtext in and of itself, and not a one considers the ways in which Smith uses Scarry's ideas to reach back to Forster's aesthetic. 6. This is not to say that either Smith or Scarry is uninterested in the idea of the university. Smith prefaces the second part of On Beauty, “The Anatomy Lesson,” with Scarry's claim that universities are related to beauty, and hence they are one of the “beautiful” things that can be destroyed if we do not value the importance of aesthetics in education. Neither work, though, is asking whether those who embrace or scorn beauty will “inherit academe,” as Mason would have it. Rather, each work is attempting to articulate the consequences of the liberal failure to acknowledge the positive power, pleasure, and potential of beauty. 7. It is telling that the character most interested in economic exploitation in the novel is Levi, the middle class boy who tries unconvincingly to pass as “street.” A reader may well wonder if Smith's interest in these issues, particularly those of uneven globalization, is not as passing Levi's: “But Levi was also a fair-weather friend when it came to books of this kind. He need only leave the book on Haiti in a forgotten knapsack in his closet for a week, and the whole island and its history grew obscure to him once more” (Smith, On Beauty 355). 8. Although David Heim is right to note that “none of Smith's characters, including Kiki, comes close to Margaret's moral passion for healing the divisions modern society creates between the classes, and between culture and commerce,” he is not correct in stating that “On Beauty gives us no liberal hero” (39). Howard is the novel's faulty hero, and it is in his “end” that we seek hope for the future. 9. Admittedly, May argues that Margaret's thoughts are undergird by an aesthetic of the sublime, not the beautiful. There is no evidence in the text, though, that Forster makes either a Burkean or a Kantian distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. The “sublime noise” of Beethoven's sympathy, which causes Helen to experience such “panic and emptiness,” still is framed by the “beautiful” Andante and the ending “ramparts” that bring “back the gusts of splendor, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and death” (Forster, Howards End 44–46). Just as he would in his representation of Margaret's first reaction to Howards End, Forster demonstrates that beauty encompasses the sublime, which is why his central characters can experience such a profound expansion of the self in the contemplation of beauty. 10. This point could also be proven by the structural importance of Beethoven's symphony throughout Forster's “musical” narrative. For a fuller articulation of this point, see Andrea K. Weatherhead's “Howards End: Beethoven's Fifth.” 11. Forster repeatedly links the mystical power of Howards End to its beauty, and the narrator has Margaret ascribe this acknowledged loveliness to a liberal position. Walking on her way to clear up a misunderstanding with the caretaker (namely, Miss Avery's unpacking of the Schlegels belongings in order to furnish Howards End), Margaret takes the same delight in the countryside that the narrator does, and, in looking at the majesty of the surroundings, she thinks that “‘Left to itself […] this country would vote Liberal”’ (Forster, Howards End 232). Once she enters Howard End itself, she is struck by “the peculiar sadness of a rural interior” (232), as well as by the arcadian splendors the backdrop affords—a shining sun, a thrush singing “his two syllables on the budding guilder rose,” and children playing “in heaps of golden straw” (233). The somewhat saddened interior and joyous exterior “ended up by giving her a feeling of completeness. In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect” (233). 12. Normally, Kiki just lets Howard's inconsistencies pass. As she notes in a brief interior monologue, “she should probably say something when, at dinner parties, Howard claimed to despise all prose fiction. She should stop him when he argued that American cinema was just so much idealized trash. But, she should say, but! Christmas 1976 he gave me Gatsby, a first edition. We saw Taxi Driver in a filthy dive in Times Square—he loved it. She did not say those things. She let Howard reinvent, retouch” (Smith, On Beauty 174). 13. This, of course, is not the only place in which difference is registered. Very early in the novel, when Howard reacts poorly to Jerome's message about his engagement (a direct echo of Helen's short engagement to Paul Wilcox), Kiki tells Howard that it is no longer 1910, so he can quit overreacting. 14. Frederic Jameson's “third feature” of postmodernism, the waning of affect, refers to a loss of feeling and emotion within our image-saturated society: “Of course, it would be inaccurate to suggest that all affect, all feeling or emotion, all subjectivity, has vanished from the newer image. Indeed, there is a kind of return of the repressed in Diamond Dust Shoes, a strange, compensatory, decorative exhilaration. […] Think, however, of Rimbaud's magical flowers ‘that look back at you,’ or of the august premonitory eye flashes of Rilke's archaic Greek torso which warn the bourgeois subject to change his life: nothing of that sort here in the gratuitous frivolity of this final decorative overlay” (10). 15. Although Smith's novel replicates many of the Jameson's features of postmodernism, it does not represent these features as elements of a “cultural logic,” particularly because it renders some of the purported “dominant” elements as effects of academic culture alone. Quite significantly, none of the nonacademic characters suffer from the “waning of affect,” and many of the central academic characters have affective, personal experiences, even if they “know” they should not be able to have them. Additionally, Smith does her best to render the new and seemingly “low” form of rap as an art form in and of itself. While a student's description of Carl as “Keats with a knapsack” may gesture toward blank pastiche and the flattening out of cultural registers (hence fit with Jameson's argument), it is clear that the narrative is making rather exclusionary claims for rap, stating that talented practitioners are poets, and that accomplished rap songs are art (Smith, On Beauty 230). 16. Perhaps not surprisingly, Smith's fiction displays the “aspects” of characterization that Forster himself articulated in Aspects of the Novel. 17. Listening to Beethoven's powerful music, Helen sees approaching goblins and fears the onslaught of “panic and emptiness.” Just as she fears that the goblins will take over, a new movement banishes them and Beethoven restores order and meaning. Listening to Mozart, Kiki imagines walking to a great pit. Although she sees another precipice across the way, along with apes and mermaids inexplicably dancing, she experiences no final exultation in the music. Her restored sense of order and meaning comes from a contemplation of her children, not attention to the music itself. 18. In her unsuccessful attempt to keep Zora from the class, Claire tells Dean French that Zora is an ill fit because she refuses to read poetry: “My class rewards talent. … I'm trying to refine and polish a … a sensibility. I'm telling you: she doesn't have one. She has arguments. That's not the same thing” (Smith, On Beauty 158). 19. As Scarry notes, “[w]hatever merit either of these arguments has in and of itself, it is clear at the onset that they are unlikely both to be true since they fundamentally contradict one another. The first assumes that if our ‘gaze’ could just be coaxed over in one direction and made to latch onto a specific object (an injustice in need of remedy or repair), that object would benefit from our generous attention. The second assumes that generous attention is inconceivable, and that any object receiving sustained attention will somehow suffer from the act of human regard” (58–59). 20. Subtle biographical clues also reinforce the clear narrative point of this section. Not only does Smith's real-life brother, the underground rapper, Doc Brown, show up as a minor character who emcees the performance, but Carl's winning entry was written by Brown himself. Just as with Claire's poem “On Beauty” (which was written and published independently by Smith's husband, Nick Laird), a reader does not need the hidden biographical clue to pick up on the novel's implied valuation, but this clue does offer further evidence that Smith presents these textual artifacts as evidence of the “beautiful.” 21. Unlike the unfortunate Leonard Bast, Carl lives to see another day, but the narrative shows that the Belseys' “liberal” interest in him, like Helen's liberal interest in Leonard, was really an interest in the idea he represented, not the person he actually is. Howard can talk of class politics all he wants, but when Carl actually shows up at his door, he is dismayed and inadvertently turns the young man away. Zora and Levi expect Carl to live up to their idealized image of him and express frustration and disappointment when he does not. Although a repentant Zora later tries to find Carl, her tries meet with no greater successful than Helen's attempts to give the Basts money. 22. This integration, of course, does not “solve” all of the moral dilemmas within the narrative, particularly because the Schlegels' and the Wilcoxes' “symmetry” is partially constructed through Leonard Bast's demise. As Daniel Born argues in “Private Gardens, Public Swamps: Howards End and the Revaluation of Liberal Guilt,” the symbolic ending intentionally disquiets in order to retain a productive focus on liberal guilt. This point is much more subtle than Henry Wilcox's almost comical hay fever, but it too registers that the novel has not solved any liberal dilemmas. 23. Howard's “missing” lecture narratively echoes his oft-mentioned yet never completed comprehensive study of Rembrandt. Literally demonstrating Scarry's claim that full-length edicts or treatises against the beautiful are themselves impossible, Howard's work shows that arguments against beauty exist “as semiarticulate but deeply held convictions that—like snow in a winter sky that keeps materializing in the air yet never falls or accumulates on the ground—make their daily way into otherwise lively essays, articles, exams, conversations” (Scarry 63). Although capable of generating numerous “lively essays, articles, exams [and] conversations” about Rembrandt's mere competent craftsmanship, Howard is unable to formulate overarching claims against the painter's genius with “sustained arguments and examples” (63). 24. As Ulka Anjaria notes, “[b]lackness, fatness, middle age, and all sorts of non-canonical, postcolonial beauty function in the novel in relative autonomy, in an alternative world engendered by the radical decolonization of the aesthetic canon” (40).