ZAA 57.

4 (2009): 389-402 ©

SANDRA HEINEN

“I Get My Culture Where I Can:”

Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s
On Beauty

Abstract: Although references to various literary, pictorial and musical works of art are
central to the meaning and aesthetics of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, the critical discussion
has so far mainly focussed on its relationship to Forster’s Howards End and widely re-
frained from a functional interpretation of On Beauty’s intertextuality. While Howards
End is an important reference point, the full functional potential of the novel’s inter-
textuality can only be described in a wider and more differentiated analysis. As a con-
tribution to such an analysis, this paper distinguishes between three functions of On
Beauty’s intertextuality: it is argued that in Smith’s novel intertextuality is (a) a means
of constituting the storyworld, (b) a means of staging the novel’s central themes and
(c) a means of poetological self-positioning.

1. Reading Intertextuality in On Beauty: Introduction

Even a cursory reading of Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, On Beauty, reveals its
surplus of intertextuality: the book abounds with quotations of and allusions to not
only literary texts but also academic writing, pieces of music, and paintings. These
references occur on all diegetic levels, as part of the storyworld and as part of the
authorial narrator’s discourse, as well as in the paratext (in the form of epigraphs
or explicitly acknowledged influences). The novel as a whole is a rewriting of E.M.
Forster’s Howards End, published in 1910. It comes therefore as no surprise that
On Beauty’s intertextuality has been one of the focal points of the novel’s critical
reception.1
This course was already set by numerous reviews accompanying the novel’s
publication in September 2005, highlighting in particular On Beauty’s relationship
to Howards End. From this hypotext Smith not only takes the first sentence, the
protagonist’s name, the basic character constellation, several elements of the plot-
line, many central scenes and some dialogue, but also the narrative strategy of inter-
textuality itself. Nothing, of course, is quite the same in On Beauty as it was in
Howards End. As the Condition of England novel becomes an intercultural trans-
atlantic campus novel, letters become e-mails, a momentous kiss under a wych-elm
becomes full sexual intercourse – albeit under a similar tree – and the insurmountable
—————
1
A second theme dominating On Beauty’s reception is the novel’s discourse on aesthetics, with
particular attention being paid to the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Cf. Tolan
(2006), Sommer (2007), Pino Montesdeocra Cubas (2007) and Wall (2008).

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390 Sandra Heinen

class barriers separating Leonard Bast and the Schlegels become interrelated with
racial discrimination.
Nearly all critics take On Beauty’s opening line – a blatant modulation of the
famous first line of Forster’s Edwardian novel – as the starting point of their review
in order to characterise Smith’s novel as a “modern, multicultural makeover for
Forster’s bourgeois Edwardians,” as does, for example, Michiko Kakutani in The
New York Times (Kakutani 2005, n.p.). Along the same lines, James Lasdun com-
ments in The Observer that “the plot of Forster’s Howards End, ingeniously re-
engineered, underpins much of the storyline of On Beauty,” while “Forster’s style
[...] resonates strongly in the leisured cadences and playful figuration of the many
beautiful descriptions and gently ironic authorial interjections that frame and
connect the bright pieces of Smith’s mosaic” (Lasdun 2005, 9). In The Times,
Helen Dunmore similarly employs metaphoric imagery to describe the relation-
ship between the two novels: “On Beauty plays with Howards End like a child
with a beloved grandfather” (Dunmore 2005, n.p.). Yet although most reviews
praise the novel’s intertextual dimension and provide a rather detailed enumera-
tion of the similarities and differences between Howards End and On Beauty,
they curiously avoid discussing the function of this intertextuality.2
Academic writing about On Beauty’s intertextuality follows suit both by ne-
glecting the many references to texts other than Howards End and dispensing
with a discussion of the potential functions of the observed intertextuality. Stephan
Karschay’s comparison of the two novels merely results in a declaration of essential
alikeness:
On Beauty and Howards End [...] are no strangers to each other. Both show the many
difficulties individuals and collectives have to overcome in their quest for identity.
Both novels show the same solution: a heightened attention to sameness without
eliminating difference. Both novels gently urge their readers: ‘Only Connect’! (Kar-
schay 2007, 212)
Similarly, Maeve Tynan stresses that Smith’s On Beauty “veers from the typical path
of adversarial ‘writing back,’ seeking instead the more diffident aim of establishing
links” (Tynan 2008, 73). Yet, Tynan takes a step further than Karschay when she
detects a parallel between On Beauty’s intertextuality and the novel’s conceptuali-
sation of identity as “a matter of identification with reference points in the outside
world” (ibid., 74). While both Karschay and Tynan are mainly interested in On
Beauty’s relationship to Howards End, Catherine Lanone extends this somewhat
restricted perspective on the novel’s intertextuality by also looking at On Beauty’s
musical and pictorial intertextuality. However, the latter two kinds of intertextuality
are implicitly regarded as subordinate to the general attempt of updating Howards

—————
2
Dunmore (2005), however, asks: “[...] why do it? Howards End has been written once, and
perfectly. What does Zadie Smith achieve, or intend to achieve, by following its pattern so
closely, and by recalling to the reader a novel which inevitably surpasses her own?” Yet she
remains conspicuously vague in her attempt to come up with an answer. Peter Kemp, who has
written the most scathing review of On Beauty, also addresses the issue of purpose but finds
no merit at all in Smith’s “cannibalising” of Howards End (Kemp 2005, n.p.).

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 Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty 391

End, as becomes apparent when Lanone comments that “Smith bows to Forster’s
use of musical intertextuality” (Lanone 2007, 188), or that “pictorial intertextuality
becomes Smith’s way of reviving Forster’s Edwardian meditation on connection
and identity” (Lanone 2007, 194). As the quotes from the analyses by Karschay,
Tynan and Lanone show, all three critics regard On Beauty’s intertextuality as first
and foremost a literary device employed to parallel in formal terms the novels’
theme of interconnectedness, which is famously summed up in Howards End by
Margaret Schlegel’s wish to “Only connect!” (Forster 1992, 188).3
In the following I will suggest a reading of On Beauty’s intertextuality which
differs in two ways from existing readings: On the one hand, I will consider the
wide range of intertextual connections made throughout the novel. Obviously, such
a study cannot neglect On Beauty’s intertextual relationship to Howards End, but
it will be treated merely as one intertextual reference point among many others.4
On the other hand, I will pay particular attention to the potential functions the
intertextual references might have beyond simply underlining the theme of inter-
connectedness. Before turning to On Beauty I will briefly outline relevant aspects
of the theoretical discussion of intertextuality, with a particular focus on the
question of functionality.

2. Classic and Postcolonial Perspectives on Intertextuality

The theory of intertextuality is concerned with the relationships between different

texts and thus pays particular attention to the recognition that “the creation of
literary texts depends in significant part on the alignment of texts to prior texts”
(Bauman 2004, 1). Yet intertextuality is anything but a clearly defined concept,
since opinions about what qualifies as an intertextual relationship differ widely. It
is by now common practice to distinguish two main camps, as does Hans-Peter Mai,
who summarises the argument thusly: “[t]he basic disagreement about intertex-
tuality is whether it is to be regarded as a general state of textual affairs or as an
inherent quality of specific texts” (Mai 1991, 31).5
As is generally known, the term ‘intertextuality’ was coined by Julia Kristeva,
one of the leading representatives of the first position, in response to Bakhtin’s
concept of dialogism. Her theory of intertextuality is part of the late 1960s post-
structuralist endeavour to undermine all sorts of conceptions of coherent, enclosed
—————
3
The formulation, which also functions as an epigraph to Howards End, is in On Beauty replaced
by a quotation from Smith’s husband Nick Laird: “There is such a shelter in each other” (Smith
2006, 93, 94 and 431).
4
For readers who are not familiar with Forster’s novel (and probably, therefore, for most people
who have not gone through the British education system), the references to Howards End are in
fact much less obvious and therefore much less important than most other intertextual refer-
ences. I read the novel in an advanced English literature seminar at a German university and,
significantly, none of the students noticed the references to Howards End, even when specifi-
cally asked to identify intertextual references.
5
An arrangement of the field of intertextual theory into two contrasting camps can also be
found in Pfister (1985) or, in somewhat disguised form, in Allen (2000).

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392 Sandra Heinen

and original entities which stabilise existing structures of meaning. With regard to
texts, Kristeva argues that there is no such thing as an original or self-contained text,
but that any text is “constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorp-
tion and transformation of another” (Kristeva 1986, 37). Texts have, therefore, not
one stable meaning, which can be traced back to the author, but are heterogeneous
entities resonating with multiple meanings which can contrast or even contradict
one another. Or, as Roland Barthes, another proponent of this ontological con-
ception of intertextuality, formulates in his much quoted essay on “The Death of
the Author:”
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning
(the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations
drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. (Barthes 1977, 146)
Precisely because the poststructuralist framework forbids discussion of authorial
intention, this conception of intertextuality is ultimately theoretically incompatible
with the second, alternative approach to intertextuality. In this second, much older
conception, which is under various guises often traced back to Plato and Aristotle,
intertextuality is seen as the result of an intentional strategy employed by a text’s
author. In this sense, an intertextual text refers back in a self-conscious gesture to
an earlier text or a group of texts through such features as quotation or allusion.
The relationship between the two texts in question is therefore temporally and
causally clearly defined: while the earlier text – in Genette’s terminology, the
‘hypotext’ – might be seen as motivating the later text’s references, it is clearly the
later text – the ‘hypertext’ – which constitutes the intertextual relationship between
the two texts in question. To speak of the functions of intertextuality only
makes sense within the framework of this narrower definition of intertextuality and
in relation to specific texts: only when references to a hypotext are recognized
by the reader and read as literary devices used intentionally, does the intertextuality
become operative as a means of meaning constitution.6 Thus, I will for the time
being consider the function of intertextuality to be this construction of a layer of
meaning which would not exist were it not for the intertextual reference. Since
such constitution of meaning is dependent on the reader’s knowledge and inter-
pretation, ‘function’ in this context can only mean ‘potential function,’ and the
identification of the functions of intertextuality are themselves always acts of inter-
pretation and therefore culturally and historically determined as well as open to
debate.
With regard to postcolonial and intercultural fiction, intertextuality is currently
most often discussed in connection with rewritings of literary texts from the
Western canon. The label of ‘writing back,’ which has been applied to many such
rewritings since its introduction by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen
Tiffin in 1989, already indicates the way intertextuality is functionalised within

—————
6
In contrast, in the broader sense, intertextuality has no function, serving neither a purpose
nor providing additional meaning, since it is a characteristic of every existing text.

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 Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty 393

this theoretical framework: in the context of postcolonial theory, ‘writing back’ is

defined as a reworking and revision of colonial writing from a postcolonial per-
spective, as a subversive activity undermining Western representational domination.
The link between ‘writing back’ and a critical attitude to the Western canon has
become so solid that it has turned – as Frank Schulze-Engler polemically states –
“the ‘writing back’ paradigm [...] into an epistemological gristmill: all texts that
pass through it end up as counter-discoursive, subversive, oppositional” (Schulze-
Engler 1998, 216). In such critical rewritings the main function of intertextuality
is to create an awareness of the ideological implications of the canonical hypotexts
and to question their cultural centrality. Within this theoretical framework any
rewriting is therefore mainly an intertextual rereading of the hypotext, and the
additional meaning provided by the rewriting is above all a critical re-interpretation
of the earlier text.7
The pervasiveness of the ‘writing back’ paradigm in contemporary literary theory
and criticism might underlie reviewers’ and scholars’ particular interest in On
Beauty’s relationship to Howards End, yet – as most critics remark – the concept’s
application to On Beauty would certainly be misguided. On Beauty may question
Western or white representations of ethnicity, but it is clearly not a critique of
Howards End. On the contrary, it is rather an appraisal – as Zadie Smith herself
makes explicit in her acknowledgements to the novel: “It should be obvious from
the first line that this is a novel inspired by a love of E. M. Forster, to whom all
my fiction is indebted, one way or the other. This time I want to repay my debt
with hommage” (Smith 2006, n. p.).
Furthermore, On Beauty’s intertextuality appears to have more bearing on
Smith’s novel than on Forster’s.8 Instead of regarding On Beauty’s intertextuality
within the framework of postcolonial theory or considering its effects on the
quoted texts, it is more promising to focus on the way intertextuality participates in
the constitution of On Beauty’s meaning. Most obviously, intertextuality is used
in Smith’s novel as a means by which the story-world is constituted (part 3) and
by which the novel’s main themes are staged (part 4). In addition to these textual
functions one can also ascribe a contextual function to On Beauty’s intertextuality
in so far as it becomes a means of literary self-positioning (part 5).

3. Intertextuality as a Means of Constituting the Storyworld

The novel’s richness in intertextual references can in part be accounted for by its
setting: On Beauty is a campus novel which takes place in the fictitious American
East Coast university of Wellington (which displays striking similarities to Harvard).
Among the novel’s main characters are Howard Belsey, an art historian at Welling-
—————
7
This ambiguity inherent in postcolonial rewritings, which on the one hand attack the hegemony
of colonial discourses while on the other hand affirming the pretexts’ canonicity by referring to
them, has been pointed out frequently (cf. e.g. Stein 2004, 163-4; Thieme 2001; Griem 2007, 93).
8
For a systematic discussion of the potential multi-directionality of intertextuality, see Schulte-
Middelich (1985).

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394 Sandra Heinen

ton, and his family; other characters include not only colleagues from the art history
department, but also other members of the university, such as Erskine Jegede, a
professor of African literature, Claire Malcolm, a poet and creative writing teacher,
and her husband, molecular scientist Warren Crane, the only representative of the
natural sciences. Because Wellington provides its inhabitants with easy access to
music, paintings, literature and the various modes of their academic recycling, it
comes as no surprise that in addition to Rembrandt and his paintings – Howard’s
field of research – numerous writers and thinkers such as Maya Angelou (Smith
2006, 94), Harold Bloom (ibid., 182), Noam Chomsky (ibid., 200), Emily Dickinson
(ibid., 19), F. Scott Fitzgerald (ibid., 174), Michel Foucault (ibid., 219), Victor
Hugo (ibid., 152), Machiavelli (ibid., 180), Sylvia Plath (ibid., 200), Jean-Paul
Sartre (ibid., 94), Jules Verne (ibid., 25), and Oscar Wilde (ibid., 179), among many
others, are referred to by the characters. Thus, a first function of the many
quotes and allusions is to establish the intellectual atmosphere of the setting. To
do this, the exact nature of the references – who exactly is quoted or whether (s)he
is mentioned favourably – is of minor importance: they function primarily as
metasigns or markers of an academic group identity.9 Yet the fact that the refer-
ences to works of art or academic discourses occur mostly in the form of name-
dropping or platitudes rather than detailed critical discussions further specifies
the scholarly atmosphere of the story-world, since it doesn’t take long before the
characters’ erudition is – in the tradition of the comic British variant of the campus
novel – revealed to be primarily academic pretension.
In addition to this atmospheric function, intertextual references in On Beauty
are a central means of characterisation: the kinds of literature, music or art a
character likes and thus refers to in his utterances appear to be strongly linked to his
personality and identity. To begin with, the characters differ with regard to their
degree of education, since they range from high school drop-outs to university
professors. The varying degrees of knowledge are, thus, reflected by the variable
amount of individual characters’ references to cultural artefacts as well as by the
different kinds of sources referred to. In addition, the characters’ attitude towards
their own education repeatedly becomes a means of implicit characterisation, as
when Kiki, who has no academic background, is unable to identify the source of
a quotation. She is “aware that she should know” (ibid., 101) but doesn’t try to
hide her insecurity: “‘Is it Plath? That’s wrong, isn’t it?’” (ibid., 102). The admission
of a gap of knowledge makes Kiki likeable for the reader but only earns her mild
condescension from Howard’s colleagues: “‘It’s Shakespeare,’ said Christian,
wincing slightly,” before further parading his knowledge by quoting by heart a
few more lines from Shakespeare’s text. Christian’s haughtiness becomes even more
pronounced when he adds that “‘Plath stripped it for parts’” (ibid., 102), because
it is made clear that Kiki’s guess wasn’t that far off after all.

—————
9
On the use of metasigns in contemporary Black British fiction, see in particular Reichl’s semiotic
approach (2002).

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 Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty 395

Yet even more than the characters’ knowledge, it is the way they respond to works
of art which characterises them: Howard, for example, has a purely theoretical
approach to art, and thus stands in contrast to his wife Kiki, whose response is
mainly emotional and imaginative. A key episode showing this range of sensibilities
is a Belsey family outing to a performance of Mozart’s Requiem: Howard denies
reception of the music, which he considers populist, by sleeping through the
concert. Howard’s and Kiki’s daughter Zora, incapable of an independent response,
“concentrate[s] on her Discman, through which a recording of the voice of Pro-
fessor N.R.A. Gould carefully guide[s] her through each movement” (ibid., 70).
Zora’s rational approach is contrasted with the emotional responses of her mother
Kiki and her brother Jerome: Kiki makes sense of the music by translating it into
symbolic imagery and relating it to her real life experiences, such as the recent
problems in her marriage with Howard:
Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other
side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. [...] In
the pit is a great choir, like the one you joined for two months in Wellington in which
you were the only black woman. This choir is [...] every person who has changed you
during your time on this earth: your many lovers; your family; your enemies, the
nameless, faceless woman who slept with your husband [...]. (ibid., 69)
Though Kiki can relate to Mozart’s music, it is only her son Jerome who in her
opinion does justice to the Requiem: “Jerome [...], Kiki now noticed, was crying. [...]
I don’t understand, she thought, but he does” (ibid., 70). By elaborating the char-
acters’ responses to Mozart’s music, the narrow-mindedness of Howard’s and Zora’s
rationality is contrasted with Kiki’s and Jerome’s natural sensibility.
Both the characters’ references to culture as well as their responses to art are not
only indicators of who they are but also of who they would like to be. Zora’s lecture-
guided perception of the Requiem is a clear case in point: she is an ambitious
second-year student, intrigued by the persuasiveness of scholarly argumentation,
which she tries to adopt in order to pursue her own university career. In contrast,
the Belsey’s third child Levi, who has adopted a “faux Brooklyn accent” (ibid., 11),
tries to get away from Wellington’s high culture and intellectualism. He turns to
the urban hip-hop scene in Boston and frequently incorporates lines from songs of
American rappers like Tupac or Big Pun into his speech. By quoting rap music and
what he assumes to be black street culture, Levi positions himself in a cultural
context which he feels he can relate to, though it is worlds apart from his actual
middle class background. The tie Levi perceives with hip-hop culture is constituted
mainly by his ethnicity, him being the son of a white father and a black mother.
Unlike his siblings, Levi emphasises the black half of his ethnic heritage, from which
he feels estranged in Wellington. In order to stay, as he says, “half normal, half sane,
half black” (ibid., 193), he travels every Saturday into Boston to work in the hip-hop
department of a large music store.

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396 Sandra Heinen

4. Intertextuality as a Means of Staging the Novel’s Central Themes

The particular cases of Zora and Levi, as well as the novel’s dominant means of
characterisation in relation to cultural artefacts, show that intertextuality is, more
generally speaking, also used in On Beauty to make the relationship between culture
and identity, one of the novel’s main themes, a subject of discussion. The many
quotes and allusions to cultural artefacts are employed to characterise the protago-
nists exactly because their identity is conceived of as being dependent on those
cultural intertexts. Since intertextuality “foregrounds notions of relationality, inter-
connectedness and interdependence in modern cultural life” (Allen 2000, 5), it is
a fitting literary device to stage the idea that culture is crucial to an individual’s
identity.
In On Beauty, the cultural context a subject draws on is repeatedly described
as a matter of choice. This occurs most markedly in the case of Levi and Zora, but
also in the case of Carl, an uneducated black street poet who aspires to become a
member of Wellington’s academic community. As he explains to Levi at the Mozart
concert, Carl tries to make up for a lack of formal education by showing an
openness towards all kinds of culture: “I get my culture where I can, you know –
going to free shit like tonight, for example. Anything happening that’s free in
this city and might teach me something, I’m there” (Smith 2006, 76).
With their choices, both Carl and Levi try to transcend what they perceive as
the confinements of their social background. As a result, their choices bear the risk
of appearing arbitrary to others, as Kiki remarks when she talks with Jerome
about Levi’s recent interest in Haitian culture: “Don’t you find it a little strange
that he’s so interested in Haitian things? I mean, we’re not Haitian, he’s never been
to Haiti – six months ago he couldn’t have pointed to Haiti on a map. I just think
it seems a little ... random” (ibid., 400). Here, the limits of the idea that a person’s
cultural identity can be wholly determined by conscious choices, are foregrounded:
it might be possible for Howard to give people an “edited version of the past” (174),
in which he never loved the representational art he now despises, but Levi’s im-
personation of a streetwise gangsta is never actually convincing for anyone, especially
not those people who have the background Levi only pretends to have and to which
Levi imagines he belongs: the street-hawkers he associates with in Boston “always
smiled and played along, and they had learned a few of the artificial words that
Levi liked to apply to their real-life situation. Hustler, Playa, Gangsta, Pimp” (ibid.,
245). Whereas Levi’s impersonations of street culture are merely lightly ridiculed,
there is more at stake for Carl when he crosses the cultural divide between his
low social background and the middle class world of Wellington: as a “kid from the
streets” (ibid., 422), Carl – like his counterpart Leonard Bast in Howards End – is
never truly treated as an equal in the intellectual middle class world he longs to
be a part of. And the fact that Carl works at the university “without references,
without qualifications, without anybody knowing anything whatsoever about him”
(ibid., 421) makes him an obvious suspect as soon as a crime is committed; although

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 Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty 397

innocent, he “disappear[s] from Wellington altogether” (ibid., 439) towards the end
of the novel.
A second central theme of On Beauty, which is not least of all mounted through
the novel’s intertextuality, is already hinted at in the novel’s title: its discourse on
aesthetics.10 One aspect of this discourse which I have already mentioned is aesthetic
experience. As can be seen in the concert scene, different forms of aesthetic ex-
perience are contrasted with each other in the novel. An opposition between a
rational, theoretical, academic form of response and an emotional, imaginative,
spontaneous form is established. The rational academic discourse is shown to be
victorious in most direct confrontations, but the victory is revealed to be an act of
suppression, as when Katie, one of Howard’s students, is unable to even voice her
subjective emotional reading of Rembrandt’s paintings. Though Katie is silenced
by the theoretical discourse in class, she is not similarly silenced by the novel’s
authorial narrator who describes her reaction to the paintings in detail and with
much sympathy. Thus, the narrator clearly privileges Katie’s somewhat naïve and
partially biographical response to the paintings over Howard’s deconstructive
approach, which is revealed to be ultimately destructive. Tellingly, the book he is
trying to write bears the title “Against Rembrandt” (ibid., 332), and, even more
tellingly, he has been working on it for years but is unlikely to ever finish it. His
academic approach ultimately fails to make art meaningful, even to himself.
In contrast to the rationalisation of art, spontaneous occurrences of aesthetic
experience are repeatedly described as intense and highly meaningful events.
Throughout the novel various characters unexpectedly undergo epiphanies when
confronted with works of art. Even Howard is not immune to art’s potential
emotional impact when caught off guard, as at the funeral of his rival’s wife. Since he
never did particularly care about the deceased woman, the occasion can not account
for his response, when a
wash of music [...] poured down on his head from above, from a balcony. [...] Howard
[...] found himself – in a manner both sudden and horrible – mortally affected by it.
He did not even get the opportunity to check the booklet in his hand; never discovered
that this was Mozart’s Ave Verum, and this choir, Cambridge singers; no time to remind
himself that he hated Mozart, nor to laugh at the expensive pretension of bussing
down Kingsmen to sing at a Willesden funeral. It was too late for all that. The song
had him. [... H]e was tasting salt, watery salt, a lot of it [...]. It was coming from his
eyes. He had the feeling that there was a second, gaping mouth in the centre of his
stomach and that this was screaming. (ibid., 286-7)
Howard’s reception of the music remains – in stark contrast to his customary
approach – pre-rational. This appears to occasion the force of the aesthetic ex-
perience, which can only be grasped by Howard indirectly through its physical
effects (tears) and the use of less-than-sophisticated imagery (screaming mouth).
—————
10
The ideological underpinnings of On Beauty’s discourse on aesthetics are to a great extent in-
spired by Elaine Scarry’s essay “On Beauty and Being Just,” which Smith refers to in her ac-
knowledgements and borrows the novel’s title from. For a more detailed exploration of On
Beauty’s relationship to Scarry’s essay cf. Tolan (2006) and del Pino Montesdeocra Cubas
(2007).

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398 Sandra Heinen

Although Howard is quite uncomfortable with the loss of control in this situation,
the episode can be understood as a step forward in the development of his character.
Being capable of intense feelings is no weakness in Smith’s novel, but rather a
sign of a character’s depth and humanity, brought to the fore in the process of
aesthetic experience.
Since the main value of art, according to On Beauty, lies in its ability to move
its recipients, it follows logically that the novel defines good art mainly by the
effect it has on people. Although both the characters and the narrator imply that
good and bad art can and should be distinguished, and that beauty is not entirely
in the eye of the beholder, normative definitions are clearly avoided. In analogy
to the precedence given to the spontaneous reception of poetry, the two poets in
the novel, the value of whose work is never questioned, whether by other characters
or by the narrator, are unencumbered by theoretical concepts. Carl, the gifted
street poet, is surprised to be told that his rap consists of classic metrical feet and
“denie[s] any knowledge of these arcane arts” (ibid., 259). Claire, an established
poet who teaches creative writing at Wellington, is not guided by theory, either
in her poetry writing or her lessons, but by examples provided by literary texts.
When asked about “the precise nature of a pantoum” Claire soon interrupts her
abstract description: “‘It’s kind of hard to explain ... it’s better just to look at
one,’ she said and opened the book to the relevant page [...]” (ibid., 152). Claire’s
empirical approach might disqualify her in Zora’s eyes – “Sometimes Zora suspected
[Claire] of being barely intellectual. With her, it was always ‘in Plato’ or ‘in
Baudelaire’ or ‘in Rimbaud’, as if we all had time to sit around reading whatever
we fancied” (ibid., 219) – yet this approach is clearly portrayed more favourably
than Zora’s by the novel’s narrator.

5. Intertextuality as a Means of Poetological Self-Positioning

Such meta-poetical passages contribute not only to the fleshing-out of the story-
world and the novel’s main themes, but can also be understood as a means of
poetological self-reflection. On Beauty’s discourse on aesthetics thus becomes an
implicitly unfurled poetic programme, with the novel’s intertextuality as one of its
sustaining pillars: if intertextuality ‘foregrounds notions of relationality, inter-
connectedness and interdependence,’ this applies to concepts of art at least as much
as to those of identity. Both Claire and Carl do not work in cultural isolation,
but consider themselves to be continuing a tradition and display in their poetic
practice a deep consideration of other works of art. As Carl puts it, “you can’t do
what I do without knowing about other shit outside of your direct, like, your in-
fluences and shit” (ibid., 136). In analogy, On Beauty’s intertextuality is a literary
device which on the one hand places a special emphasis on the connectedness of
texts in general, and on the other hand acknowledges particular influences on
Smith’s writing.

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 Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty 399

As pointed out in the reviews, the most prominent of these influences is E.M.
Forster.11 In an essay published in The Guardian in 2003 – and therefore probably
written while working on On Beauty – Zadie Smith explained what it is about
Forster’s writing she relates to. The two aspects of Forster’s novels Smith seems to
appreciate most are the fact that his characters “are always in a muddle: [that]
they don’t know what they want or how to get it” and “that his narrative structure
is muddled also; impulsive, meandering, irrational” (Smith 2003, n.p.). What most
people would describe as formal shortcomings are regarded by Zadie Smith as
adequate means to represent the “messy complexities of the human heart” (ibid.).
According to Smith, Forster’s style allows an aesthetic experience which – more
than any more regulated form of writing – ethically educates the reader through
emotional engagement: “What Forster’s muddled style has to tell us is that there
are some goods in the world that cannot be purely pursued rationally, we must also
feel our way through them” (ibid.). This interpretation of Forster clearly anticipates
the literary representation of the same idea in On Beauty, thus constituting yet
another link between Smith and Forster, which is extended by Smith even further
back into English literary history: through her affirmative rewriting of Howards
End Smith implicitly aligns herself with “a long tradition of English literary
thought” (ibid.), which – as she outlines it in her essay – reaches back far beyond
Forster to Jane Austen, John Keats and William Shakespeare.12
Yet this long tradition of established English writers is clearly not the only
influence Smith acknowledges through her intertextual references. As has been
pointed out, Smith positions herself in relation to a wide variety of cultural
products – of theory and artistic practice, of high and popular culture, of white and
ethnic culture.13 Carl’s programmatic maxim, ‘I get my culture where I can,’ there-
fore seems to sum up Smith’s own approach of synthesising influences from ex-
tremely heterogeneous cultural sources. According to Susanne Reichl this form
of ‘transcultural intertextuality’ is not uncommon in recent black British writing:14
What most of these writers engage in [...] can be called, tentatively ‘transcultural inter-
textuality’, drawing from a pool of [...] signs they have at their disposal which does not
merely derive from the dominant or the minority culture but originates in a potential

—————
11
Smith’s statement in the acknowledgements, placed directly before the novel’s main text, draws
special attention to Howards End. The acknowledgements are thus an instrument in guiding
the readers’ reception process by generating expectations. The expectations concerning Forster’s
influence are then immediately answered by the obvious references to Howards End at the
beginning of Smith’s novel. This whole process can account for the critical focus on On
Beauty’s relationship to Forster’s novel.
12
Smith’s rewriting of Howards End is of course not the only aspect of her continuation of the
English literary tradition but can, for example, be seen as complementing her choice to write a
campus novel, which constitutes an instance of generic intertextuality.
13
For an investigation of the influences of African American women writers in general and Zora
Neale Hurston in particular on Smith’s On Beauty, cf. Fischer (2007).
14
Although Reichl’s understanding of intertextuality is much broader than mine – in so far as
she opens it up to encompass the quotation of any form of semiological system – her definition
can also be applied to the phenomenon of intertextuality in the narrower sense.

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400 Sandra Heinen

resource of all the cultures involved, as well as the syncretised Black British and globalised
cultures. (Reichl 2002, 44-5)
From a poetological perspective, transcultural intertextuality can be regarded as a
means of re-negotiating the relationship between different areas of cultural pro-
duction. In the case of On Beauty this most obviously concerns the relationship
between high culture and popular culture, the relationship between different art
forms and the relationship between different ‘ethnic cultures.’
Yet, the novel’s transcultural intertextuality can more broadly be considered as
an attempt to re-situate black British writing in relation to other cultural traditions.
It has been argued that despite many claims to the contrary, black British fiction
still occupies a place at the margins of British literature, with “publishers, book
reviewers, and literary critics, still explicitly or implicitly uphold[ing] the distinction
between ‘black’ and Asian writing and ‘general’ fiction” (Sommer 2007, 181), but
that black British novels can, by means of intertextual references to the mainstream
canon, “metafictionally demand their position in the revered canon of ‘Eng lit’”
(Reichl 2002, 213). The fact that On Beauty draws on both intercultural fiction
and mainstream fiction promotes an altered conceptualisation of intercultural
fiction, according to which black British fiction is no longer a specific kind of
writing in Britain, existing alongside English fiction, but is instead part and parcel
of the British tradition. Hence Zadie Smith’s intertextual references move (her)
intercultural fiction from the margin to the centre of English literature.
As Roy Sommer has pointed out, what is at stake is not only the position of
black British writing in relation to the literary centre, but also the far-reaching
question of finding an adequate critical approach to these novels, since pigeon-
holed intercultural fiction is usually discussed “mainly in terms of identity politics”
(Sommer 2007, 181), while aesthetics and formal analysis are reserved for the
‘central’ texts considered more literary and, by implication, more valuable. Inter-
textuality is a particularly suitable stylistic device by which texts can claim cultural
value, since its mere occurrence already signals – independently of the actual inter-
textual reference points – erudition and literariness. Yet it is the specific way in
which Smith employs intertextuality, its variety and sophistication, and its functional
complexity in particular, which makes On Beauty – as I hope to have shown – a
worthy object of a formal analysis of its aesthetics.

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