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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral 1 Forster, Smith and Moore 2 The Principia Ethica in On Beauty 3 An Ethical Relationship to the Other Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature

    Ce livre est recensé par

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    On ‘Personal Affection and the Appreciation of what is Beautiful’: Rewriting and Rethinking Ethics in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

    Elsa Cavalié

    p. 193-203

    Résumé

    Like E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty discusses the Moorian postulate stating ‘the importance of Art and human affections in life’ and offers a pessimistic take on the possibility of a connection between human beings while emphasising the need to pursue such a connection. On Beauty also interrogates Smith’s relationship to the past and tradition while propounding a Levinasian approach to ethics that relies on a pre-modernist, Forsterian simplicity of style.

    Texte intégral 1 Forster, Smith and Moore 2 The Principia Ethica in On Beauty 3 An Ethical Relationship to the Other Notes de bas de page Auteur

    Texte intégral

    1In her fascinating article about Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, critic Kathleen Wall asks the following question: ‘How does a man who believes the human isn’t central conduct himself in the most intimate relationships?’ Her answer is blunt: ‘selfishly and cynically.’1 Smith’s novel tells the story of Howard Belsey, a fifty-something British academic living and working in a Harvard-like university near Boston, whose mid-life crisis and subsequent short-lived extra-marital affairs wreak havoc in his family. The novel is a rewriting of E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), from which it borrows the main lines of its plot, but also some crucial ethical questions. On Beauty, like Howards End, discusses the importance of Art and human affections in life and, not unlike its Edwardian counterpart, offers a pessimistic take on the possibility of a connection between human beings while emphasising the need to pursue such a connection.

    2 The novel’s ethical bearings have often being discussed2 : Smith herself openly acknowledges Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty (whose title she borrowed) as a crucial influence which shaped her vision of ethics and of one individual’s relationship to beauty and also refers to Martha Nussbaum’s theories,3 and her famous defence of the ethical turn in fiction.4 In addition to the acknowledged influence of contemporary philosophers and thinkers, I will argue that the main work of Cantabrigian philosopher G.E. Moore—The Principa Ethica—has filtered through Forster’s novel, and sheds new light on Smith ethical thought. I will focus on two aspects of Moore’s work: his methodical critique of Spencerian ethics, and his definition of what is good as ‘personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature.’Moreover, the novel offers a fascinating insight into the ethics of alterity, especially as Howard Belsey’s relationship to the feminine Other is concerned. Confronted to an indecipherable Other, the main protagonist discovers, as Levinas has it, that ‘the other is in no way another myself, participating with me in a common existence.’5 Finally, through its style and narratorial choices, On Beauty interrogates Smith’s relationship to the past and tradition: is Forster’s text nothing but a pretext, a classic to borrow the plot from, or is the return to Forster a defence of pre-modernist humanism that simultaneously signals a departure from postmodernist style and ethics?

    1 Forster, Smith and Moore

    3When they were published in 1903, the Principia Ethica,6 met an enthusiastic reception with the members of the Bloomsbury circle. According to Wilfred Stone, ‘the whole chapter on “The Ideal”—moved Keynes to see “a new heaven on a new earth” and Strachey to exclaim “The age of reason has come”.’7 Moore’s essay was published when Forster was still at Cambridge and was based on two separate works: first Moore’s 1898 dissertation called ‘The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics’ in which he started working on an idealist ethics, then a series of conferences on ethics called ‘Elements of Ethics’—given in London in 1889—that Moore had written down in order to publish them later.

    4In the Principia Ethica, Moore purposes to denounce what he considers to be a major flaw of philosophy, the ‘naturalistic fallacy,’ described thus by critic Arthur Prior:

    The assumption that because some quality or combination of qualities invariably and necessarily accompanies the quality of goodness, or is invariably and necessarily accompanied by it, or both, this quality or combination of qualities is identical with goodness. If, for example, it is believed that whatever is pleasant is and must be good, or that whatever is good is and must be pleasant, or both, it is committing the naturalistic fallacy to infer from this that goodness and pleasantness are one and the same quality.8

    5In his essay, Moore innovatively criticizes the Hedonist conception of ethics defended by Sidgwick and Spencer and their assumption that evolution would necessarily lead to more refined ethical judgements.9 Nevertheless, it is for its last chapter, the one where Moore, after having evoked previous definitions of ‘good,’ gives his own, that the Principia Ethica are mostly remembered. Among three possible kinds of ideals—‘the best state of things conceivable’ (Moore 183), ‘the best possible state of things’ (Moore 183) and something ‘good in itself in a high degree’ (Moore 183)—Moore chooses the third definition (‘something being good in itself in a high degree’) and thus abandons the concept of ‘good’ as an ideal, abstract notion in order to situate it in the everyday world:

    By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may roughly be described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves. (Moore 188)

    6When reading this definition, one cannot but be struck with the fact that Moore’s ethics must have filtered through Forster’s novels and therefore are very much relevant to On Beauty: the emphasis on the superiority of the ‘human’ strongly echoes Smith’s views, as one may find them in ‘Love actually’ for instance, where she quotes Forster commenting on Keats as the poet who had ‘seized upon the supreme fact of human nature, the very small amount of good in it, and the supreme importance of that little’ (Smith 2003). Indeed, Smith readily acknowledges Forster’s, and therefore Moore’s (indirect) influence in her preface: ‘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 another. This time I wanted to repay the debt with homage.’10

    7Yet, there is evidence that Smith learned about G.E. Moore first-hand at Cambridge. In a 2006 tribute to her recently deceased father called ‘Dead Man laughing’ she notes that: ‘When I returned home from my first term at Cambridge, we couldn’t discuss the things I’d learnt, about Anna Karenina, or GE Moore.’11 Although the essay does not expand further on what she learnt, we know that Smith went to King’s, like Forster and Moore before her, and that Moorian ethics were part of the general philosophy of the place where she lived.

    8To go back to Howards End as a basis for On Beauty, the 1910 novel has often been described as the ‘scaffolding’ on which its 2005 counterpart was built. Catherine Lanone considers that Howards End was used as a ‘scaffolding’ which she might well have taken out in the end’12 while Gemma Lopez explains that ‘the tribute to the Edwardian novelist is... used by the younger writer as a scaffolding, at least in the early stage of plot development.’13 Both Lanone and Lopez refer to an interview Smith published on a website, where she explains that: ‘It was a kind of scaffolding for me, but in the end the books only meet properly at two or three points.’14

    9And while that may be true for the plot, in a novel which memorably starts with an imitation of Howards End’s arch-famous ‘One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister,’15 transforming it into ‘One may as well begin with Jerome’s e-mails to his father’ Smith 2005, 3, I will argue that, although Smith somewhat abandons the search for an identity that was the core of Howards End, she does concern herself with Moore’s two pillars: ‘personal affection and the appreciation of what is good in Art or nature’ (Moore 183).

    2 The Principia Ethica in On Beauty

    10In her interview to Bookbrowse.com Smith herself underlines the shift from identity to personal ethics:

    The Belsey children need to stop worrying about their identity and concern themselves with the people they care about, ideas that matter to them, beliefs they can stand by, tickets they can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brains and hearts and they make them alone.
    (Smith 2006)

    11Among the three children, Levi—the younger son—seems to be the one most deeply engrossed in the search for an identity. Although he is the son of an Englishman from London and of an African-American woman from Florida and has been raised in a wealthy middle-class suburban setting, he seems to have adopted the persona of an uneducated young man from the Bronx, complete with the clothes, accent and idioms. His older brother Jerome is the ghost of a character, a deeply religious young man, at odds with his family, whose life seems to be side-tracked by his affair with Victoria Kipps. The daughter—Zora—although outwardly passionate about her beliefs, is in fact naively fascinated by intellectuals, and often thinks that she could argue two opposite views of an issue: ‘She didn’t feel that she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and successfully the other way round’ (Smith 2005, 209). At different degrees, and in different ways, the children fail to appreciate the affection of people (the three of them are relatively friendless) and to recognise beauty, because they are too deeply engrossed in who they want to be, therefore offering discordant echoes of their father’s personality to the reader. What they do not do, unlike their father, is commit the naturalistic fallacy, and become egoists in the Moorian sense, for Moore defines ‘Egoism’ as what ‘more properly applies to the theory that ‘my own good’ is the sole good, than that my own pleasure is so’ (Moore 97).

    12Moore’s powerful critique of Spencer’s hedonist Utilitarianism may indeed be detected in Smith’s indictment of Howard’s behaviour: in Howard, one may recognise the embodiment of Spencerian ethics, equating ‘the most evolved,’ here the most intellectually evolved, with the ‘superior,’ at least in his own conception of himself. His pathetic attempt at trying to explain his unfaithfulness is thus defended from an aesthetic point of view: because men are more evolved than women, they are more susceptible to beauty insofar as it might provide sexual gratification: ‘It’s true that men—they respond to beauty... it doesn’t end from them, this... this concern with beauty as a physical actuality in the world—and it’s clearly imprisoning and it infantilises... but it’s true’ (Smith 2005, 207). Here, Howard commits the cardinal sin, in Moorian ethics, of mistaking the nature of man with what a ‘good’ man should be. One must nevertheless note that his ethical failure is not presented as a by-product of his Liberal views, for his Conservative nemesis and alter-ego—Monty Kipps—behaves more or less in the same way. Both fail, insofar as they believe that their own masculine nature is inescapable, and thus avoid responsibility towards the Other, here the feminine Other. As Kathleen Wall has it:

    Neither acknowledges the intersubjectivity of the aesthetic experience, the sense of a presence beyond themselves. The result, Smith’s plot implies, is a concomitant ethical blindness to the particularities of the individuals in their world: they violate their intersubjective relations with others, treating wives, students, and children as adjuncts to their reputations and desires. (Wall 760–761)

    13When committing what Moore called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ of trusting one’s nature, or at least abandoning the will to control it, both men avoid responsibility towards an often feminine Other whose alterity is, in Howard’s case,16 both fascinating and essentially strange, in both its senses: unfamiliar and odd.

    3 An Ethical Relationship to the Other

    14The plot of the novel revolves around Howard’s two affairs: the one with Claire Malcolm, his colleague, and the one with Victoria Kipps— Monty Kipps’s daughter. Both are accidentally discovered by his wife, and result in Howard’s pathetic attempts to ingratiate himself to her again. It is striking how, time and again, Kiki’s face remains a closed book to Howard. The irony lies, of course, in the fact that his primary occupation consists in deciphering and explaining works of art and that only the human resists him: ‘In response Kiki’s face resolved itself into impassive blackness. It was this sphinx-like expression that sometimes induced their American friends to imagine a more exotic provenance for her than she actually possessed’ (Smith 2006, 8).

    15A few moments later, when Howard insists on broaching the subject of Jerome’s recent affair with Victoria Kipps, his wife’s indecipherability is asserted again: ‘A few minutes later, ... Kiki turned to her husband with a thesis for a face, of which only Howard could know every line and reference’ (Smith 2006, 14). What is peculiar here is that although Howard knows the details of his wife’s face, he is incapable of displaying any sort of empathy. At the beginning of the novel, the emphasis on Kiki’s face quite expectedly underlines the marital strife and Howard’s painful attempts at being forgiven.

    16Yet, it is soon obvious that Howard cannot read any face, or feel empathy at the sight of one: when he meets Carl—the young rapper from Boston—he finds himself incapable of explaining his feeling of dejà-vu: ‘Are you at Wellington? Familiar face’ (Smith 2005, 76), only to realise a few minutes later that he knew (so to speak) Carl from a painting: ‘“Rubens,” said Howard suddenly. “Your face. From the four African heads”’ (Smith 2005, 77). However, Smith quite unexpectedly chooses to contradict her own character in the postface to the novel where she playfully notes that she disagrees with Howard’s opinion17 and thus reinforces the ‘muddled’ (to use a Forsterian word) quality of Howard’s judgement. For there’s the rub: Howard systematically resorts to aesthetic theory in order to avoid the burden (or so he feels) of human intersubjectivity. When he meets Victoria Kipps for the first time, his experience is entirely aesthetic, while it should be intersubjective and ethical:

    The first thing to note were two spots of radiant highlights on her face ... A pool of moonlight on her smooth forehead, and another on the tip of her nose; the kind of highlights, it occurred to Howard, that would be impossible to paint without distorting, without misrepresenting, the solid darkness of her true complexion. (Smith 2005, 156)

    17The girl’s face radiates light, a word which is rhythmically repeated in this passage. Still, the ternary highlight/moonlight/highlight repetition is followed by a reference to the ‘solid darkness of her complexion’ as if her luminous face did not provide Howard with an insight into the girl’s mind, opening the way for an empathetic response but rather presented him with an intersubjective dead-end. Faced with the impossibility of truly connecting with the girl, Howard retreats into aesthetic theory, and notes that painting her would be impossible, while her face called for an immediate sense of the presence of the Other. To quote Levinas:

    Since the Other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken responsibilities in his regard; his responsibility is incumbent on me. It is a responsibility that goes beyond what I do. Usually, one is responsible for what one does oneself.... This means that I am responsible for his very responsibility.18

    18It is peculiar that Kiki and Victoria are the two people whose radical, and desirable alterities are enhanced by the beauty of their faces, for they are precisely the two people that Howard ethically betrays. Because he mistakes pleasure for beauty, desire for love, Howard has sex with Victoria and breaks a triple moral boundary: the one that should separate a teacher from a student, an adult from a child and a father from a daughter, for it is quite obvious that Victoria’s attempt to seduce Howard has oedipal overtones. Simultaneously, he betrays his wife, sleeping with a younger woman, the daughter of her deceased friend, their son’s first love. Therefore, Howard might feel the ‘call’ that a face can provoke but changes the Levinasian ethical response into an aesthetic one, for the latter can be intellectually dissected and does not involve any responsibility towards the Other.

    19For Levinas the Other is essentially ‘widow, orphan, or stranger’19 that is to say someone who lacks something in its existence whether it be spouse, parents, or home. It is then particularly striking that Howard has sex with Victoria just after she has buried her mother, for it emphasises the fact that he has shut himself from the acknowledgment of the lacking Other, who should ethically come first. As Kiki, and then Victoria, have it: ‘You know Theresa, Howard—she’s one of the people who exist on this planet who isn’t you’Smith 2005, 339 or ‘You are so bloody self-obsessed’ (Smith 2005, 337). In Howard’s world, the Other is nothing but a sometimes aesthetically-pleasing adjunct to his own life.

    20Similarly to Forster’s novel, the right intuition, the ethical responsibility, is to be found in women. Kiki intuitively feels responsible for Carlene Kipps, the older woman, when she sees her asleep on her front porch: ‘Kiki understood she would never wish to be seen like this, with her thinning hair fanned out across her cheek, her mouth wide open and half of one fluttering, unseeing eyeball revealed to the world’ (Smith 2005, 89). Indeed, in that first, decisive, empathetic meeting, Kiki experiences what Levinas describes as the essential poverty of a face:

    The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity. It is the most destitute also: there is an essential poverty in the face; the proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance. The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill. (Levinas 1985, 85)

    21Levinas’s evocation of the vulnerability of a face (that he links with the topic of death in Time and Infinity) is particularly relevant here because Carlene’s face betrays the illness that will soon take her away. Yet, contrary to Howard when he is faced with Vee’s emotional vulnerability, Kiki does not shun her responsibility, and acknowledges her ethical duty towards the woman, an acceptance which will result in their subsequent, intense albeit short-lived friendship. Indeed, the sense of responsibility one feels towards the Other even if it’s not reciprocated, and that Levinas would call the precedence of alterity over ontology, is simply put by Levi, as he attempts to help the Haitian immigrants:

    ... sometimes it’s like you just meet someone and you just know that you’re totally connected, and this person is, like, your brother—or your sister. Even if they don’t, like, recognize it, you feel it. And in a lot of ways it don’t matter if they do or they don’t see that for what it is—all you can do is put the feeling out there. That’s your duty. Then you just wait and see what comes back to you. That’s the deal. (Smith 2005, 221)

    22According to Levi, and to Smith, one has the duty to ‘put the feeling out there,’ and to acknowledge the responsibility one has towards the Other even if it’s not reciprocated. Yet, that profound truth, as far as Smith’s fiction is concerned, is not uttered by one of the theoreticians in the novel, Howard or Monty, or by the down-to-earth Kiki, but by Howard’s younger son Levi, the simple-minded, gangsta wannabe. Moreover, the informality of the language might surprise the reader. Why should such an important ethical stance be put in such plain words?

    23In fact, it seems that ethical responsibility in On Beauty goes hand in hand with simplicity of style and an overt ‘plaisir du texte’ that Barthes might not disown. However, that deliberately simple, one might say pre-modernist, or even Forsterian20 style, very much contradicts Howard Belsey’s beliefs, for whom, ‘aesthetics’ is to be considered as a rarefied language of exclusion’ (Smith 2005, 155).21 When she uses post-modern, Marxist Howard Belsey as a counterpoint to her own ethical stance, Smith seems to sketch an ethics of writing that partakes of the Forsterian staple elements: ‘plot patterning and characterisation,’ which Forster himself felt uncomfortable with, but which Smith tries to redeem: ‘The ease of the read, the vivid characterisation, the satisfactory patterning of the plot—in short, all the things that lend the novel its pleasurable aspect— felt like failures to him’ (Smith 2003).

    24Rather than the language of exclusion that Belsey propounds, Smith presents literature as a language of inclusion, whose simplicity of style is based on Forster’s and whose end is felt as deeply ethical:

    It seems that if you put people on paper and move them through time, you cannot help but talk about ethics, because the ethical realm exists nowhere if not here: in the consequences of human actions as they unfold in time, and the multiple interpretive possibility of those actions.
    (Smith 2003)

    25For Smith, the novel itself presents the reader with the face of an Other, or rather Others, and therefore calls for ethical responsibility as the very act of reading triggers an empathetic response. By going back to a pre-modernist simplicity of style borrowed from Forster, she endeavours to establish an immediate intersubjective relationship with the reader, an instinctive empathy that will lead him into ethical responsibility: ‘When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us’ (Smith 2003).

    26In On Beauty Zadie Smith seems to offer an ethics of writing that favours simplicity in style and a strong emphasis on characterisation in order to provoke empathy in the reader and awake responsibility towards the Other.

    27Following in the footsteps of G.E. Moore and E.M. Forster, her conception of goodness does not partakes of the ideal, but rather of the Levinasian idea that alterity comes before ontology. Replacing the human at the core of her fiction, she offers a seductive yet profound insight into the ethics of alterity, as an author who trusts her reader with the empathy leading towards ethical responsibility.

    Notes de bas de page

    1 Kathleen Wall, ‘Ethics, Knowledge, and the Need for Beauty: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Ian McEwan’s Saturday,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 77.2 (2008): 769.

    2 See Wall, or Gen’ichiro Itakura, ‘On Beauty and Doing Justice to Art: Aesthetics and Ethics in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty,’ Ariel 41.1 (Jan. 2011): 27–44.

    3 Zadie Smith, ‘Love Actually,’ The Guardian 1 Nov. 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/nov/01/classics.zadiesmith, last accessed on 1 July 2011.

    4 See Martha Nussbaum, ‘Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,’ Mapping the Ethical Turn, eds. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack (Charlottesville: U.P. of Virginia, 2001): 59–79, in which she responds to Richard Posner’s attack on ‘Ethical Criticism.’

    5 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Dusquene UP, 1987) 75.

    6 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903; Mineola N.Y.: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003).

    7 Wilfred Stone, ‘Some Bloomsbury Interviews and Memories,’ Twentieth Century Literature 43.2 (Summer 1997): 177.

    8 Arthur Prior, Logic And The Basis Of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1949) 6.

    9 He also draws an important distinction between an error of judgement and en error of taste. The error of judgement is ‘the attribution to an object of really beautiful qualities which it does not possess’ (Moore 192) while the error of taste is ‘the feeling towards qualities which are not beautiful’ (Moore 192).

    10 Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005; London: Penguin, 2006) preface.

    11 Zadie Smith, ‘Dead man Laughing,’ Changing My Mind (London: Penguin, 2009) 239.

    12 Catherine Lanone, ‘Mediating Multi-Cultural Muddle: E.M. Forster meets Zadie Smith,’ Études anglaises 60.2 (2007) 194.

    13 Gemma Lopez, ‘After Theory: Academia and the Death of Aesthetic Relish in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty,’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51.4 (Aug 2010): 352.

    14 Zadie Smith, ‘A Conversation with Zadie Smith about On Beauty,’ Bookbrowse, Web, 2006, www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/344/zadie-smith, last accessed on 1 Jul 2011.

    15 E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989) 19.

    16 The reader does not know much of the inner workings of Monty Kipps’s mind.

    17 Interestingly enough, those are the last words of the novel, maybe adding a postmodernist touch of instability to a novel that seems to drift from postmodenist aesthetics.

    18 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R.A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985) 96.

    19 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1978) 98.

    20 I am referring to the early novels such as A Room with a View (1905). One could effectively argue that A Passage to India (1924) is indeed modernist.

    21 Indeed, his conception of teaching ethics stems from a sense of rejection. While the young lecturer he was encouraged questions and exchange, the more seasoned one positively relishes the silence that follows his first intervention: ‘We he first began teaching he had tried, stupidly, to coax them out of this fear—–now he positively relished it’ (Smith 2005, 155).

    Auteur

    • Elsa Cavalié

      University of Toulouse, C.A.S.

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    Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature

    Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature

    Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier (dir.)

    2013

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    1 Kathleen Wall, ‘Ethics, Knowledge, and the Need for Beauty: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Ian McEwan’s Saturday,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 77.2 (2008): 769.

    2 See Wall, or Gen’ichiro Itakura, ‘On Beauty and Doing Justice to Art: Aesthetics and Ethics in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty,’ Ariel 41.1 (Jan. 2011): 27–44.

    3 Zadie Smith, ‘Love Actually,’ The Guardian 1 Nov. 2003, www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/nov/01/classics.zadiesmith, last accessed on 1 July 2011.

    4 See Martha Nussbaum, ‘Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,’ Mapping the Ethical Turn, eds. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack (Charlottesville: U.P. of Virginia, 2001): 59–79, in which she responds to Richard Posner’s attack on ‘Ethical Criticism.’

    5 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other (Pittsburgh: Dusquene UP, 1987) 75.

    6 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903; Mineola N.Y.: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003).

    7 Wilfred Stone, ‘Some Bloomsbury Interviews and Memories,’ Twentieth Century Literature 43.2 (Summer 1997): 177.

    8 Arthur Prior, Logic And The Basis Of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1949) 6.

    9 He also draws an important distinction between an error of judgement and en error of taste. The error of judgement is ‘the attribution to an object of really beautiful qualities which it does not possess’ (Moore 192) while the error of taste is ‘the feeling towards qualities which are not beautiful’ (Moore 192).

    10 Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005; London: Penguin, 2006) preface.

    11 Zadie Smith, ‘Dead man Laughing,’ Changing My Mind (London: Penguin, 2009) 239.

    12 Catherine Lanone, ‘Mediating Multi-Cultural Muddle: E.M. Forster meets Zadie Smith,’ Études anglaises 60.2 (2007) 194.

    13 Gemma Lopez, ‘After Theory: Academia and the Death of Aesthetic Relish in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty,’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 51.4 (Aug 2010): 352.

    14 Zadie Smith, ‘A Conversation with Zadie Smith about On Beauty,’ Bookbrowse, Web, 2006, www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/344/zadie-smith, last accessed on 1 Jul 2011.

    15 E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989) 19.

    16 The reader does not know much of the inner workings of Monty Kipps’s mind.

    17 Interestingly enough, those are the last words of the novel, maybe adding a postmodernist touch of instability to a novel that seems to drift from postmodenist aesthetics.

    18 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R.A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985) 96.

    19 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1978) 98.

    20 I am referring to the early novels such as A Room with a View (1905). One could effectively argue that A Passage to India (1924) is indeed modernist.

    21 Indeed, his conception of teaching ethics stems from a sense of rejection. While the young lecturer he was encouraged questions and exchange, the more seasoned one positively relishes the silence that follows his first intervention: ‘We he first began teaching he had tried, stupidly, to coax them out of this fear—–now he positively relished it’ (Smith 2005, 155).

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    Cavalié, E. (2013). On ‘Personal Affection and the Appreciation of what is Beautiful’: Rewriting and Rethinking Ethics in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. In J.-M. Ganteau & C. Reynier (éds.), Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature (1‑). Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9845
    Cavalié, Elsa. « On ‘Personal Affection and the Appreciation of What Is Beautiful’: Rewriting and Rethinking Ethics in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty ». In Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature, édité par Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9845.
    Cavalié, Elsa. « On ‘Personal Affection and the Appreciation of What Is Beautiful’: Rewriting and Rethinking Ethics in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty ». Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature, édité par Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9845.

    Référence numérique du livre

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    Ganteau, J.-M., & Reynier, C. (éds.). (2013). Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature (1‑). Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9645
    Ganteau, Jean-Michel, et Christine Reynier, éd. Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9645.
    Ganteau, Jean-Michel, et Christine Reynier, éditeurs. Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature. Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pulm.9645.
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