![]() ![]() ![]() Smith thus places before her readers an invitation for generic comparison: what is the relation between the novel’s treatment of beauty and the philosopher’s? Is Smith’s novel a novel of ideas, a fictional dramatization of Scarry’s philosophy of beauty? Or has she in a more general way been prompted by Scarry to develop her own account of beauty-moving away, perhaps, from Scarry’s emphasis on the connection between beauty and justice and emphasizing instead the connection between beauty and human fallibility (the “being wrong” chapter heading she takes from Scarry)? But importantly, in either case, Smith’s title asks us to consider as well a question that has not been asked much in the last half century: is the genre of the novel an artistic enterprise whose aim should include the achievement of aesthetic beauty? And if aesthetic beauty is a generic possibility, why have we heard so little about the beautiful as an attribute of novelistic art? ![]() Smith thanks Scarry “for her wonderful essay ‘On Beauty and Being Just,’ from which I borrowed a title, a chapter heading and a good deal of inspiration” ( On Beauty xiii). Why then choose for her third novel a title that had already been taken? As she points out in the acknowledgments to On Beauty (2005), the title is a direct reference to Elaine Scarry’s philosophical meditation On Beauty and Being Just (1999). In a 2005 interview published in The Atlantic, Zadie Smith let it be known, “I don’t fuck around with titles” (12). ![]()
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