From the beauty
Von der Schönheit (English original title On Beauty ) is a society and campus novel published in 2005 by the British writer Zadie Smith . The plot is loosely based on EM Forster's novel Reunion in Howards Ends . By juxtaposing two families - the multi-ethnic, progressive Belseys and the black, conservative Kipps - Smith sheds light on the cultural differences between the United States and Great Britain, the nature of beauty, and the different values of progressive and conservative academics. The title of the novel refers to Elaine Scarry's essayOn Beauty and Being Just .
The novel was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2005 and was awarded a Somerset Maugham Award , an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2006.
In 2006 the novel was published in German by Marcus Ingendaay by Kiepenheuer & Witsch .
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Howard Belsey, a liberal British Rembrandt expert who teaches at Wellington University near Boston, is not thrilled to learn that his son Jerome is doing an internship with his professional rival, the conservative Monty Kipps, in London that summer will compete. To make matters worse, Jerome falls in love with Monty's daughter Victoria, who, to Howard's great relief, does not return his feelings. When Monty is invited to Wellington as a visiting professor, difficult times begin for him: Ideological battles with Monty cost time and energy, which Howard should invest in saving his marriage after his affair with his colleague Claire is over.
Howard's wife Kiki and their children Jerome, Zora and Levi are now pursuing their own projects: Jerome first has to overcome his unrequited love for Victoria; Model student Zora wants to pursue an academic career like her father, and the youngest son and hip-hop fan Levi tries to be friends with a group of political activists from Haiti. Meanwhile, Kiki befriends Monty's wife Carlene and is hit hard by her unexpected death from cancer.
At an open-air concert in the park, the Belsey family met the young, underprivileged rapper Carl. Zora Belsey is immediately charmed by its beauty. When she meets him again at an open mike event in a trendy bar, she introduces him to her poetry professor Claire. She is quickly convinced of Carl's talent and gives him a place in her seminar, although he is not even enrolled at the university. When Monty Kipps starts a campaign to exclude extraordinary students like Carl von Wellington's classes, Zora Carl jumps aside and advocates that he stay in her poetry class. However, their efforts remain unrewarded in a romantic way - Carl falls in love with Victoria Kipps and the two become a couple. When the disappointed Zora confronts him, he throws some uncomfortable truths on her head in order to make her feel moral superiority: Her own father Howard also had an affair with Victoria, and Monty also had an affair with a student . Zora informs her mother. Kiki cannot forgive Howard this second affair and asks for a divorce. She is now financially independent because Carlene Kipps has bequeathed a valuable painting to her.
characters
Howard Belsey : Lecturer in Art History, originally from England. He teaches at the American University of Wellington, and researches primarily on Rembrandt - work on the next planned publication, however, is progressing very slowly. Politically liberal and atheist, he occasionally flirts with his working-class background, but has largely lost touch with his roots, as can be seen in his clumsy dealings with his father.
Kiki Belsey : Howard's wife, Afro-American, originally from Florida. She has been married to Howard for 30 years and works as a nurse. Feminist and down-to-earth, she sees through the pretensions of her academic environment and does not let ideological trench warfare and academic arguments stop her from establishing a friendship with Carlene Kipps.
Jerome Belsey : eldest son of the Belseys. Despite his atheistic upbringing, the serious and idealistic young man has recently discovered the Christian religion for himself. He sets the story in motion as someone who falls in love with the Victoria Kipps during an internship in London.
Zora Belsey : daughter of the Belseys. She is studying at Wellington University. Intelligent, ambitious and opinionated, she emulates her father and would also like to gain a foothold in the academic world. Like her father, Zora also advocates progressive politics and advocates socially disadvantaged fellow students, albeit not entirely without ulterior motives. When the adored object of her efforts does not honor her in the hoped-for way, accuses her of hypocrisy and communicates sobering things about her father, Zora is shaken in her previous convictions.
Levi Belsey : youngest son of the Belseys. He keeps himself afloat with odd jobs, wants to distance himself from his middle-class origins, and therefore seeks the friendship and recognition of a group of political activists from Haiti.
Montgomery ("Monty") Kipps : Howard Belsey's professional rival, originally from Trinidad. At the beginning of the novel he lived with his family in London, but later received a position as visiting professor at the university where Howard also teaches. He has already completed his publication on Rembrandt. The antipathy between him and Howard is based partly on professional jealousy and partly on ideological differences - Monty is strictly Christian, conservative and considers any positive discrimination measures to be counterproductive.
Carlene Kipps : Monty's wife. Her shy nature gives her the aura of mystery and suggests hidden depths. At first sight she corresponds perfectly to the ideal of a Christian wife, and seems to be completely absorbed in her role as a housewife and mother.
Victoria Kipps: daughter of Kipps. It is considered an extraordinary beauty and is well aware of its merits. She always has a rich selection of admirers, whom she also likes to hear from time to time and does not allow herself to be restricted in this respect by the strict moral regulations of her pious father.
Claire Malcolm : Howard's colleague. Her now-ended affair with Howard has only just been exposed. She teaches Zora's poetry seminar and supports Zora in her work for Carl Thomas.
Carl Thomas : Rapper from Roxbury. He comes from an uneducated milieu, but his talent and beauty attract the attention of Zora Belsey, who gives him a place as an extraordinary listener in her poetry seminar. Monty Kipps takes a stand against staying at the university, but this doesn't stop Carl from falling in love with his daughter Victoria.
subjects
A central theme of the novel is the university as a scene of cultural battles. Smith chooses the fictional university town of Wellington near Boston as the setting . The prevailing atmosphere is characterized by privilege, ambition and sophistication and thus arouses associations with Harvard , where Smith took up a position as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study after the success of her novel Teeth Show .
Search for identity
Again and again, the characters in the novel are confronted with questions of identity in search of their roots, for the right point of view, for their place in the world . The Belsey children inherited their mother's black skin color, but often do not feel "black enough" because of their middle-class background. The youngest son Levi tries to compensate for this feeling of lack through his efforts to recruit a group of political activists from Haiti. Carl Thomas, the rapper from the street, also exerts a great attraction on him and his siblings, because for them he embodies a more authentic form of being black. Howard, who rose from the working class, has left his past behind as far as possible. In his political convictions he still takes this period of his life into account, but when he visits his father it becomes clear that he no longer knows what to do with the people from his background. Basically, he is no less anxious to distance himself from his roots than the now thoroughly anglicized Monty Kipps, who therefore considers his own success to be superfluous as evidence of a functioning meritocracy and measures to combat racism such as positive discrimination .
In a pluralistic society, identity is no longer necessarily determined by origin, and values are not necessarily determined by upbringing. Using the two different families of Kipps and Belsey, Smith shows the unpredictability of educational results: Jerome, the son of the atheist Howard, developed a tendency towards pietistic piety. He is looking for orientation and structure that he misses in Howard's upbringing style, which is characterized by a laissez-faire attitude. Howard exercises restraint in his father's role, but this can also be perceived as neglect. The opposite model embodies Monty Kipps, who acts as a typical patriarch and thus creates an impression of family cohesion that Jerome feels attracted to. But here, too, the result is not always the one hoped for - Monty's daughter Victoria does not adhere to the conservative values propagated by her father, such as celibacy and modesty, and the parents prefer not to look too closely.
Kulturkampf
One of the different points of contention between Howard and Monty is their different concept of art. Howard holds an annual seminar in which he argues against the redeeming power of art. He does not see Rembrandt as an innovator and genius, but merely as a competent craftsman who oriented his work solely to the demand of paying customers. In his private life, Howard prefers conceptual works of art that are too transgressive to display at home. Monty, on the other hand, would prefer to remove the "free" from "liberal arts"; his great passion is less art than the media-effective representation of scholarship. He sees art primarily as a commodity and investment and likes to show off his extensive collection of Haitian art.
Politically, too, Howard and Monty couldn't be more different. While Howard supports every motion for equality and minority rights at the university, Monty believes that positive discrimination undermines the notion of achievement. Both Howard and Monty, however, are exposed as hypocrites in the course of the plot. Howard likes to claim that he has next to no personal experience with pornography and would immediately contribute to a book by Gloria Steinem condemning pornography. The deeply Christian Monty publicly railed against homosexuality, but was privately friends with a homosexual Baptist pastor who preached when Reagan took office. In fact, both Howard and Monty took advantage of their position of power at university to start affairs with female students, which is incompatible with either feminist or Christian values.
Interpersonal relationships
What unites Monty and Howard, despite all their ideological differences, is a certain emotional instability. The immaturity and unsuitability of men stand in stark contrast to the inevitable strength of their wives, who each do the lion's share of the relationship work, and enable the men to adopt their supposedly self-chosen lifestyle and career obsession by guaranteeing the necessary domestic support.
Despite all the satire, the novel strives for a honest implementation of Forster's dictum "Only connect". The focus is on interpersonal relationships (parent-child, husband-wife-lover, employer-employee, teacher-student, colleagues, friends), their failure and the resulting alienation. Family alienation - between spouses, siblings, parents and children - is reflected on a societal level in the lack of cohesion between and within classes, races and genders. Structures that are expected to form the basis of a sense of community only add to the further alienation of individuals. Authentic relationships to one another are thwarted, among other things, because most of the characters, with the exception of the comparatively self-contained Carlene, do not even succeed in establishing an authentic relationship with themselves - the imagined self does not correspond to the actual self.
In all of the petty, domestic, and academic quarrels that drive the plot, Smith never loses sight of the pursuit of transcendence. She does not take the side of the Belseys or the Kipps, and so invites the reader to take a higher-level perspective as well. Howard and Monty are too preoccupied with Kulturkampf to properly appreciate the beauties culture can hold. But there is still hope for the younger generation. It is not for nothing that the enraptured portrayal of outstanding works of art - an open-air performance of Mozart's Requiem, a literary tour of Hampstead Heath, a Rembrand painting that is projected on the wall in the lecture hall - occupy a prominent position in the novel. The assumption is that Smith does not share Howard and Monty's purely purpose-oriented approach to art - in their novel art can touch, connect and redeem.
Embedding in the history of literature
The title of the novel refers to an essay by Harvard Professor of English, Elaine Scarry, on psychology and aesthetics. In it, Scarry emphasizes the generative, constantly self-generating aspect of art. Smith's choice of this reference is a first indication that intertextuality plays a major role in this novel.
The Beauty pays homage to EM Forster's novel Reunion in Howards End , the plot of which was moved from Edwardian England to the USA almost 100 years later before WWI. Novels deal with overcoming social barriers between people of different origins and lifestyles. At Forster, the focus is on the encounter between two different families: the Wilcox Klan, frozen in English conventions, and the half-German / half-English circle around the Schlegel sisters. The multicultural, liberal Belseys correspond to the unconventional, artistic Schlegel; Monty Kipp's old-fashioned materialism is reminiscent of Mr. Wilcox.
At Forster, the story begins when Helen, the enthusiastic, artistically interested daughter of the Schlegel family, falls in love with a son of the enterprising, down-to-earth, profit-oriented Wilcox family. At Smith's is the idealistic Jerome Belsey, who recently converted to Christianity and who raves about the fun-loving, much sought-after Victoria Kipps. Like Forster's character Helen, Smith's character Jerome, of all things, feels particularly attracted to his own family because of the ideological contrast.
Further parallels can be found in the figure of the rap prodigy Carl at Smith and Leonard Bast at Forster - both are artists from simple backgrounds whose talent is discovered by wealthy patrons and thus become toys of the higher classes - and in the friendship between the mothers of the two families, which is expressed in a precious gift in both novels. Carlene leaves a valuable painting to Kiki in her will, Ruth Wilcox leaves the Howards End estate to Margaret Schlegel.
reception
In his review of the novel in the New York Times, Frank Rich welcomed Zadie Smith as the ideal arbiter in the clash of cultures. Through her humor, her spirit, her objectivity, her empathy and her equanimity, she seems to be well equipped for this, and as a British woman sufficiently distanced from the worst battlefields in the USA, so ideally positioned to write a book that is both right and left able to make you laugh - albeit probably not in the same places. Sebastian Fasthuber rates the novel as a successful attempt to tell of modern social contrasts in an old-fashioned way. Verena Mayr sees Smith's achievement primarily in targeting academic operations without, however, reducing the characters to mere caricatures and using clichés. Tobias Heyl admires the virtuosity with which the various narrative strands are interwoven in order to present a three-dimensional image of the microcosm of a North American university town, carefully worked out down to the last detail. Andrew Hay praises the successful balance between the comic and tragic aspects of characters who only live for others, but criticizes the fact that Smith cannot bring her own unique voice to full advantage by being too faithful to Forster. Michiko Kakutani also finds the echoes of Forster a little too constructed at times, but is impressed by Smith's good ear for dialogues and different sociolects , as well as her great empathy, which enables her to take the perspective of children, adolescents and adults with the same ease and to map with great accuracy both the hardened banter of would-be rappers, the pedantic language sought after by academics and the abbreviations and private codes between married couples developed in long-term relationships. The end result is a novel that is both touching and entertaining, provocative and yet philanthropic.
A novel, the charm of which is often seen in the precise depiction of different living environments and the associated linguistic styles or ways of speaking, poses a special challenge in terms of translation - Micha Osterman therefore particularly emphasizes the work of the German translator Marcus Ingendaay , who succeeds in to preserve these linguistic subtleties and distinctions in German as well.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Andrew Hay: The Oxonian Review of Books. April 24, 2008, accessed June 10, 2019 .
- ^ The Man Booker Prize 2005 | The Booker Prizes. Retrieved June 9, 2019 .
- ↑ On Beauty. Retrieved June 9, 2019 (American English).
- ^ Zadie Smith Wins Orange Prize. November 19, 2006, accessed June 9, 2019 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Frank Rich: Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors . In: The New York Times . September 18, 2005, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed June 9, 2019]).
- ↑ a b c Verena Mayer: Smith, Zadie: From the beauty. In: Wiener Zeitung. November 17, 2006, accessed June 17, 2019 .
- ↑ a b c Tobias Heyl: The yellow of the people . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2010, ISSN 0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed June 12, 2019]).
- ↑ a b c Sebastian Fasthuber: FROM BEAUTY. Falter 40/2006, June 10, 2006, p. 21 , accessed June 11, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Michiko Kakutani: A Modern, Multicultural Makeover for Forster's Bourgeois Edwardians . In: The New York Times . September 13, 2005, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed June 11, 2019]).
- ↑ Micha Ostermann: Zadie Smith: From the beauty (Kiepenheuer & Witsch) / review. In: The Berlin literary criticism. September 6, 2006, accessed June 17, 2019 .