Myriad Musings on 'Beauty' in Literature - 1

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul. – Emerson

Ever since the Zadie Smith'ian ‘transatlantic comic saga,’ On Beauty, laid an impressive claim on my heart, I’ve been so wanting to put down some of the vibrant responses to beauty in literatures from across the world!

And well, these responses are pure subjective, and, as it oft is said, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder! Ain’t it?

So yup! Here we go!

Our Town, by Thornton Wilder is an unconventional play of sorts, written way back in the 1930s, that takes place in a small fictional town of Grover’s Corner. It is so unique in its descriptions of what ordinary people did in their everyday lives. Emily, especially, is of Wilder’s own heart and soul! Well, Emily so wishes to go back to the good ol’ past, and relive those nostalgic moments of yore yet again! But Mrs. Gibbs warns her not to go back to her past! She further tells her that it’s better to forget those past vignettes of life, and rather look ahead to life. But Emily sticks to her stand, and assures her that she’d choose to relive a happy day, and decides to pick her twelfth birthday.

Now, the Stage Manager promptly sets the scene back in time, down the decades, to 11 February, 1899. Emily now relives her twelfth birthday. She gazes at the town as it once used to be. She hears her mother’s voice calling her down to breakfast and is so fascinated at how young she looks, back then. Her father now walks into the house…. No spoilers again. So, life moves ahead so quickly, and people don’t even seem to realize this fact.

Emily now proceeds to ask the Stage Manager if human beings ever seem to realize the true meaning of life while they actually live it! He replies that, perhaps some saints or poets do. Mr. Stimson then observes that, she has learned that people go through life in utmost ignorance, blind to what’s really important – the little beautiful things in life!

Emily Webb’s final speech in the graveyard emphasizes the beauty of these mundane elements of life!

Well, from Emily, let’s now move on to our next fictional aristocratic Victorian character, Dorian Gray, the protagonist of Wilde’s only novel, and a Gothic-philo at that!

Dorian Gray’s beauty inspires, impresses and even infatuates the renowned painter Basil, that Dorian promptly becomes his highly intense and intoxicating muse!

On a delightful summer day, when Dorian is sitting for the painting, even as Basil Hallward is passionately painting away his ‘Dorian’ portrait in oil-on-canvas, Dorian happens to listen to the aristocratic Lord Henry explicating on his highly hedonistic world view, and soon he also begins to concur with Lord Henry, that beauty is the only aspect of life worth pursuing.

No spoilers though!

Although Dorian Gray seemed to have rubbed off on the sensibilities of the British publishers and the public at large, the wrongy way, way way back in the 1890s, still, Wilde prefaced a defence to his solo novel, as “the artist’s rights proper, and the probity of art for art’s sake.”

Wilde himself, commenting on the novel, said that, Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be!

Something akin to Dorian Gray, could be traced to Robert Browning’s own mouthpiece of a previous era, Fra Lippo Lippi. In fact, Fra Lippo Lippi was a pioneering painter of beauty, who broke away bold, from the formal, morose traditions of the religious artists, and contributed warm, vibrant, naturalistic paintings that were brimming with such expressiveness to them.

When representatives of the Religious order, dictate the terms on which he, as an artist should necessarily paint, Lippo laments the religious restrictions that constrain the artist within him!

Your business is not to catch men with show,

With homage to the perishable clay,

But life them over it, ignore it all,

Make them forget there's such a thing as flesh.

Your business is to paint the souls of men.

But these repressive strictures of the Church, are albeit, anathema to the artist Lippo, who feels that, the clichéd idealistic definition of beauty as propounded by the ‘Church dictates’ would simply end up transforming art into propaganda rather than giving vent to one’s powers of creative expression. Hence, Lippo believes that, art, in its essence, should help capture moments of artistic experience and transform them into a thing of beauty!

Therefore, like Donne and the metaphysicals, who delight in meandering their way to the soul through the flesh, Lippo justifies that, by responding to the beauty of God's creation, in the flesh, human beings are led to thank God and are spontaneously led to the awareness of the souls within themselves!

That’s one reason why, whenever he paints, he always brings to mind, the God of Genesis, creating Eve in the Garden of Eden. That flesh that was made by God cannot be evil. Realistic paintings therefore, help in drawing one’s attention to the aura and the beauty of real life, that humans may otherwise tend to slight or ignore! So akin to Emily Webb’s conception of beauty!

Hence these glorious Lippo’ish lines –

This world’s no blot or blank for us–

It means intensely, and means good.

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

To Pecola Breedlove, a black girl with the avowed dream to be beautiful, in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, ‘blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale white skin’ was the definition of beauty.

In the novel, Morrison brings out the stark and harsh reality that, all the black children literally worship ‘whiteness’, as they all have been taught right from their birth on, to believe that whiteness is the epitome of beauty. As a result, Pecola, like others of her ilk, suffers from low levels of self-esteem, since, they firmly believed in the notion that, whiteness, by default, is inherent in the definition of beauty!

The Lonely Londoners, published in 1956, by Samuel Selvon, is yet another striking study of the politics of beauty, that’s been a mentorial read for the later stalwarts like Zadie Smith and Hanif Kureishi, especially in their White Teeth and Black Album, respectively!

Pit-stopping at Zadie Smith, it should also be noted that, her gripping narrative, On Beauty, the transatlantic comic saga, with which we began this post, is in fact, an inspirational offshoot of her fascination for Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just which, again, has quite an interesting and absorbing take on beauty.

The bildungsroman novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez takes the reader into a gripping tour of the successful assimilation of the four Garcia girls into the American way of life.

To Sandra, especially, to pass off as an American, and be assimilated into the American way of life, one needs to successfully pull off a visage that sports, ‘soft blue eyes and fair skin’! And hence, in her mad, passionate craving to imitate the American paradigm of beauty, which has subsequently had adverse repercussions on her, she ends up having a nervous breakdown of sorts, believing that she will soon devolve into a monkey!

‘‘The Disciple’’ is quite an absorbing short story by Juan Jose Arreola, that exemplifies the writer’s artistic concerns, his reflections on art, and the creative process, much akin to the likes of a Robert Browning or a James Joyce! It’s again, got much in parallel to his “Cocktail Party”, a striking parallel to T. S. Eliot’s play of the same title!

In this particular story, “The Disciple”, an art teacher draws an outline on canvass for one of his students, and calls the outline ‘‘beauty.’’ The teacher then proceeds to create a wonderful picture within this outline, but soon proceeds to quickly burn the picture! He justifies his burning of the picture, saying that, in creating a wonderful picture within this outline, he has destroyed beauty! The story is in many ways, a profound take on Arreola’s views on art! As a reviewer rightly avers, to Arreola, true beauty should be highly suggestive! Hence, when a work of art tries to trespass on this lakshman rekha, it automatically, loses out on its aura and its lustre, by all means!

I quote from Arreola’s text –

The master seemed pleased with our efforts and he himself felt like drawing. And then, turning to me, “You still believe in beauty. You will pay dearly for it. Not one line is missing in your sketch, but there are too many of them. Bring me a canvas. I’ll show you how beauty is destroyed.”

With a charcoal pencil he traced the outline of a lovely figure: an angel’s face or perhaps a beautiful woman’s. He said to us, “Look, here is nascent beauty. These two hollows are her eyes; these imperceptible lines, the mouth. The whole face lacks contours. This is beauty.” And then with a wink, “Let’s finish her off.” In a short while, letting some lines fall over others, creating spaces of light and shadow, he drew from memory before my marveling eyes the portrait of Gioia. The same dark eyes, the same oval face, the same imperceptible smile.

When I was most bewitched, the master interrupted his work, and began to laugh strangely. “There is no more beauty here,” he said. All that remains is this infamous caricature.” Uncomprehending, I kept staring at that splendid, open face. Suddenly, the master ripped the drawing in two and threw the pieces into the fire on the hearth. I was stunned.

To be contd…

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