This past summer I taught English 212: British Literature from 1800-Present for the first time. Reflecting on which of the texts was my favorite to teach, I’d have to say it’s a toss up between Mrs. Dalloway and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. While many of my students said they learned the most from the former (thanks to Woolf’s modernist style), many of them seemed to find the most pleasure in the latter. Rereading the novel for class I found myself laughing aloud and paraphrasing it in conversation. Smith, at least via her characters, mocks academics and glee clubs, fake Brooklyn accents and psychobabble. Not only are these things ripe for ridicule, but Smith’s ridicule of a world in which I participate in, admittedly, flattering.
The novel was satisfying to teach not only because my students liked it, but also because I’d never read it in a class before. This made my anticipation of their responses to it somewhat nerve wracking; would they see legitimate reasons to bring the novel into the classroom? But it also meant that when they asked and answered questions about the relationship between the politics and the personal lives, about the significance of the ending, that I was more curious to hear them. It was easier to still the sense that I needed to guide them toward particular readings.They often responded emphatically to characters, confident in their assessments of them and their assertions of what they ought to do. But they also let these readings change over the course of the novel, nor did they feel compelled to agree with one another about the extent to which Smith allows for change and growth in her characters. While I expected my students to move beyond likes and dislikes in their analysis, I was excited by the attachment to the novel that these reactions suggested.
On a more personal level, I was attached to its rich allusiveness. Not only does it encourage reading and rereading, but it also creates this network of beauty. Smith makes paintings, poetry, rap, classical music, and film, to name a few, integral parts of the novel. She gives us a litany of beautiful objects. Some are familiar, some new, which seems just right. The writing is both a reminder of the known beauty and an invitation to explore the unknown beauty. When she integrates Jeff Buckley’s song “Hallelujah” into a family story, I am reminded of its loveliness. But I don’t have the ready image of Rembrandt’s Hendrickje Bathing, and so if I explore it, can add that to my own inventory.
Further, she calls for an investigation of beauty itself. Perhaps, in part the text offers the inspiration for my own attempts here to write simply about what I like. I want to learn how to do that, so that I can integrate it into my academic writing of close reading and historicism. Without simply saying, this is good writing, that, bad writing, I want my readers (once I have them) to see both that I am writing about texts for their ability to help us understand culture and so forth, and because there is pleasure in them.
