Beauty, Lost/Imagined/Missed
on On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Howard Belsey has been trying to finish his book on Rembrandt for decades. He repeats argument after argument, passage after passage, but conclusion eludes him. To Howard Belsey, Rembrandt is no genius. Much of Rembrandt is a myth, Howard argues, a product of “pseudo-historical storytelling”. Talking about The Staalmeesters (also known as Syndics of the Drapers' Guild, 1662), Howard rejects the idea that this is a photograph not of six men but of a moment of cogitation; of profound judgement. To Howard, these are six men who wished to be painted as “wealthy, successful and morally sound”, and Rembrandt was merely an obliging vendor who paints luxury in gold then lauded for his depth.
Rembrandt in this way is the force that Howard—liberal, iconoclast, supporter of Affirmative Action—fervently opposes. Howard, I’m sure, considers himself welcome contrast to Rembrandt; the modern critic ordained to excoriate the conformist.
Much like Howard, Academic pieces were my first foray into art (Vermeer remains to this day a personal favourite). Rembrandt, as it happens, was my introduction to Chiaroscuro—the play of light and shadow. His etching Christ Healing the Sick (c. 1649) is one glorious example. The cave, black and chasmic, wraps around the light softly emanating from Christ’s head. This juxtaposition alone reveals his divinity: the faint streaks of illumination against the flooding darkness are not mere contrast of light and shadow—it is good and evil, the divine and the worldly, the antidote and the sickness. One underpins and solidifies the other; an inescapable cycle that both would inevitably try to best.
For Howard, the self-righteous, he is light—and Monty Kipps, Christian and opposer of Affirmative Action, is the shadow that looms over him. Kipps is as much subject to Howard as Rembrandt (one might even say his obsession of Kipps rivals his will to finish his book), but his biggest obsession, I would say, is conserving the premise that he is light; as if he understands the frailty, the misuses and untruths of this very premise. Howard longs for an evidence of his superiority over Kipps, while we the reader discovers their sins align perfectly; that in worldly desires neither can claim moral authority. This reveals what Zadie Smith herself feels about oppositions. When asked about how differences affect Howard’s marriage to Kiki (“He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political”), Smith says: “I used to think those differences made all the difference. They don’t mean anything…Many of the things I was taught to believe were important—tastes, opinions, talents—I don’t believe in their importance any more. “ On Beauty takes us through the struggle towards this realisation; this discovery of superficiality.
As her marriage to Howard disintegrates, Kiki dwells on Beauty lost. One heated argument carved itself inside my mind:
“Well, I married a slim Black woman, actually. Not that it’s relevant.” Kiki’s eyes widened, allowing what was left of the tears to film themselves over her eyeballs. “Holy shit. You want to sue me for breach-of-contract, Howard? Product expanded without warning?”
The lie Kiki tells herself—the lie all women tell themselves—is that the colour of her skin and the curves of her body could open a brand-new category of beautiful in a world that will do everything in its power to obstruct such invention. We are a deluded in that way, and an even bigger delusion still is that we possess freedom of choice; that our actions, down to their most decorative, speak only to a personal brand of empowerment and not to a system of cosmetic enslavement. Beauty—in this sense—was never ours to define nor possess. It had always been lost, and perhaps it is only through this realisation that it is found.
Smith also takes us through Beauty imagined: That idea that we allow ourselves to be infatuated with; the rose-tinted glass that we carry in our pockets out of habit.
Howard and Kiki’s fiery daughter, Zora, thinks herself matchless in her intelligence. Books are her armour; the words of famous philosophers her sword. When she meets Carl, the street-smart hip-hop wielding spoken word crusader, Zora slowly became attached to his genius—worlds away from her own. She campaigned for his admission into the poetry class at her prestigious college, follows his sentences with animated nods and gazes at him with freshly-lit passion. It is only right, Zora believes, that he recognises—no, rewards—this loyalty, this commitment she had spent on him. What Zora imagines more than Carl’s virtues is her own worth. It is arrogant to think that one deserves equal vigour in reciprocity. It is naïve to believe wit and depth can rival symmetry and the stretch of skin across toned muscles—the physical realm we are all programmed to desire. Behind her rose-tinted glass, Zora mistakes civility for devotion. She watches from the top of her pedestal as Carl falls in line with the crowd—a gross betrayal to her sensibilities.
No illusion of beauty can serve your cause.
Then Smith pans to her greatest thesis: Beauty missed. Smith, as we have established, works with contradictions. Each of her characters learns in time that one’s opposites do not elucidate and untangle one’s views or values—they complicate. Complications makes us anxious. After all, we are trained to see by discerning light and shadow: the hazy confuses us; the unpredictable worries us; the imprecise angers us. We see this through the Belsey children, who brave hell and high water trying to define themselves and stamp it final and approved. They struggle, Smith says in an interview, because “they are ‘of Modernity,’ and the product of a twentieth century that invented and patented this piece of claptrap called ‘finding an identity.’” It drives everybody nuts, Smith says, even though it is “one of the most wholesale phony ideas we’ve ever been sold”. She continues (and I will quote this in full, for I do not wish this to be another bit of Beauty missed):
"The Belsey children need to stop worrying about their identity and concern themselves with the people they care about, ideas that matter to them, beliefs they can stand by, tickets they can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful. The Belseys need to weigh situations as they appear before them, and decide what they want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out."
I imagine that Howard Belsey, a man trapped in never looking beyond the frame, is rattling his teeth at this plea for openness, for he—the liberal, the iconoclast—wants nothing more than to conform to an unchanging brand of identity. Then, in a final scene, Smith offers him a path to redemption: as Howard lectures on Hendrickje Bathing (A Woman Bathing in a Stream, 1654), he looks away from the woman in the white smock and onto Kiki—who sits in the audience:
"She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt’s love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, paint heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of the skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety – chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come."
(The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.)
