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On Lecturing and Being Beautiful:Zadie Smith, Elaine Scarry, and the Liberal Aesthetic Alexander Dick (bio) and Christina Lupton (bio) At the Heart of Zadie Smith’s Prize-Winning Novel, On Beauty,is a strong sense that the humanities today are in a state of crisis: the values of equality and relativism assumed in the principles of liberal education have been outpaced, on one hand, by the competitive forces of the market and, on the other, by new forms of protest and self-knowledge, both of which lie beyond academia’s traditional paradigms. Howard Belsey, the 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 the 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 a state of skeptical despair: “‘What,’” he asks, pointing to a picture by Rembrandt, ready to undercut the feeling that any college freshman might have for great works of art and literature by suggesting the historical and cultural specificity of our [End Page 115] appreciation of beauty, “‘are we signing up to when we talk of the “beauty” of this “light”?’… ‘What are these images really concerned with?’” (252).1 The central irony of the novel is that Howard is already something of an aesthete, if not someone who can appreciate art in the classroom then certainly someone who senses it, imagines it, and confronts it everywhere else. Howard feels everything: the sadness of a funeral service, the ridiculous dancing of a glee club ruining u2’s “Pride (in the name of love),” the smell of alcohol, the touch of his children. Smith’s characterization of Howard’s fraught persona picks up on a widespread mood of concern over the perceived antipathy of academic liberals—particularly those making the cerebral, relativist arguments for which Howard sees himself a mouthpiece—to current ethical practices. Thus, Howard realizes that the responsibility and obligation that individuals should feel toward each other—the principle tenet of modern ethical liberalism—lies outside the bounds of the university as an institution, the so-called vanguard of liberal education. The affection people can and do have for each other, the novel suggests, emerges in spaces and moments of ecstatic fissure in the university’s bureaucratic edifice rather than in the institution proper. Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, from which Smith claims to have borrowed “a title, a chapter heading and a good deal of inspiration” (i), also chafes at the liberal arts’ tendency to refute the power of aesthetic experience. Disavowed by Marxist critics as a form of deflection from structural critique and by poststructuralist critics as a form of violence done to the object being viewed, the language of beauty, states Scarry, has fallen out of favour with the Howards of the world: although “the humanities are made up of beautiful poems, stories, paintings, sketches, sculpture, [End Page 116] film, essays, debates, and it is this that every day draws us to them,” she argues, “conversations about the beauty of these objects has been banished, so that we coinhabit the 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 the institutional prohibitions that deprive intellectuals of an enriching language of beauty and render works of art and literature powerless as a 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 a corrective to the rationalism of the humanities and a supplement to the discourse of postmodern liberalism. The assumption behind Scarry’s and Smith’s arguments is that beauty, and all that it implies as the focus of a moral disposition and a practical engagement with life...
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