Binaries and Beauty

Amidst romantic entanglements, heartbreaking infidelity, and family struggles, On Beauty offers an insightful look at the complicated construction and deconstruction of familiar binaries. Beautiful and ugly. Intelligent and stupid. Right and Left. Big and small. White and black. Building them up and breaking them down, Zadie Smith offers a pardoxical perspective on seeing through a dichotomous lens.

Perhaps one of the most noticebale ways in which Smith complicates notions binarical structures is in her depiction of the Left. Howard is an intellgient, talented, Leftist. He works hard to convince his young students that there is beauty in the world, beauty that can be found in secret places. He urges his students to look beyond stereotypical constructions of art and beauty and, rather, embrace the individual beauty of the avant-garde. At first, the reader might cling to the quixotic sentiments of Howard, applauding his comfortability with interracial desire and advocacy for free-thinking. However, it is his affair with Claire that begins to shake the reader's faith in the old professor. Of course, the infidelity in and of itself is (at best) disconcerting, but it is the image of Claire that is most troubling. Small and white, she is the literal physical opposite of Howard's wife Kiki. Moreover, she is the standard of beauty. She is not large, she is not dark. She fulfills the most standard, stereotypical image of feminine beauty. What's this all about, Howard? Here, the reader can start to see the separation of practice and theory. Howard, righteous in his academic convictions, seemingly transgresses his own obscure conception of beauty.

Another binary addressed by Smith is the one containing Self and Other. This is made apparent in a conversation between Kiki and Carlene in which the latter insists that a wife must live for her lover and the former confesses that she has, in fact, not done that at all. Confused by what she should be living for, Kiki questions Carlene for her opinion. Carlene's answer sets up another complex binary. To Carlene, one must live his/her lover, for the Other. But what does this say about Self? Does the relationship become a complimentary one or a devouring one? Does Carlene lose herself in her husband? If she lives for her husband, and thus defines herself in relation to him, does she then have any real, independent definition? Later, after Kiki discovers the truth about Howard's affair, yells at her husband, "I staked my life on you!" Does this contradict what she had said to Carlene? Perhaps Kiki simply could not accept that she had depended so heavily on a man, a white man, a person whom was everything she was not. By allowing herself to be defined by him, she simultaneously sacrificed significant aspects of her Self.

The complication of binaries and trespassing of personal ideologies are at once troubling and comforting. It is troubling to think that, despite our most earnest efforts to become a person of whom we can be very proud, we are still inevitably and eternally susceptible to fallibility. Our righteous and admirable theories can, at any moment, be shaken by our own umanity.