Tony Hancock

            On Monday morning I finished posting my translation of “Rétro song” by Serge Gainsbourg. Next I’ll transcribe the lyrics for his “Merde à l’amour" and translate them. 

            I took a siesta at 10:45, intending on sleeping as usual for only ninety minutes but when I woke up at 12:15 I was still too tired to rise. I stayed down for another half an hour. 

            I weighed 88.4 kilos before lunch. I had the rest of my lentil chili and plantain chips for lunch. 

            I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor. 

            When I got back this week’s Brit Lit 2 lecture still hadn’t been posted. 

            I spent about an hour on one paragraph of my essay and then at about 16:45 the lecture video was up. 

            This lecture was on Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. 

            21st Century fiction. The novel brings together many key ideas, themes and questions we've been talking about through the term. It repeats and sometimes adds other things. This lecture is designed to set up arguments for after the novel is read. It points out things to think about while reading, but not clear arguments. Just building blocks for next week’s argument. And also things to talk about in tutorial. 

            On Beauty is a book that thinks about its relationship to literary history, to modernism, post modernism and after. It’s an homage to E. M. Forster's Howard's End. 

            We are almost a hundred years past Woolf’s "The Mark On The Wall" to 2005. This novel thinks about the relationship to what has come before. 

            Modernism was from the 1920s to 1950s and interested in new ways of representation, especially in fiction. Thinking about the news being important. 

            Postmodernism has different dates in different national contexts. Where modernism thought that art could, through artifice arrive at the truth of consciousness. Looking in psychology was innovative and avant garde. Poetry could give access to deep recesses of the human mind. Postmodernism empties out modernism. It emphasizes style and artifice and metafictionality with the idea that art is just art. It is only artifice that doesn’t take us into the mind or meaning or universal truth. It is about itself. This is good and bad. Art is freed from telling the truth or giving lessons. But postmodernism also becomes detached and nihilistic. All art can do is show how we think we know but don’t. It is all sarcasm and cynicism. 

            Somewhere in late 20th and early 21st we get a turn against the emptiness of post modernism. Coming back to idea that art is not a universal force but it does speak to people and does something for them. Art has a relationship to the world even though not powerful and truth telling. It is a weaker relation but still a relation.

            In On Beauty this comes up as a homage to Howard’s End. A proto modernist novel. Smith is rethinking Forster and thinking about what he’s trying to say. 

            Howard’s End (1910). Motto: "Only connect." Clash and interconnections between two families, the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels. The plot is concerned about beauty and culture in an increasingly use driven world. Forster saw profit being overvalued. He was worried about culture and art. For better or for worse the aristocracy took care of and protected art. What is the future in a world no longer ordered by the old structures of hereditary class. He was also concerned with what it meant for the aristocracy to be caretakers of art. The world is changing around class. A rising class represented by Wilcoxes who made new money not from old land like the aristocracy. Money through trade, mercantilism and exploiting empire, industry. They represent a changing world dominated by money. They have money but not generations of living money. They have no relationship with art like the Schlegels. The Schlegels don’t work and have a relation to culture. They clash around a third family. The Wilcoxes are trying to fit and don't know how to get culture so they are learning to fake it. The Wilcoxes are not hierarchical. 

            The assistant professor thinks the Wilcoxes with their money from industry and empire, their patriarchy, their utilitarianism and their trying to fit in correspond to the Kippses and that the Schlegels with their inherited money, siblings, culture focused, impracticality and out of touchness correspond to the Belseys. But that doesn't make sense. I think the old school Kippses represent the Schlegels. 

            The third family the Basts correspond to Carl and Choo. They are working class and aspirational. They are constantly working, live in a tiny basement with no bathroom. Bast wants access to culture. How to give Leonard Bast access. Leonard works seventy hours a week. Zadie Smith is taking these concerns about what happens to culture and beauty in a changing world but she is not rewriting Howard’s End. Knowledge of Howard’s End enriches our understanding of On Beauty but it's not necessary. 

            The homage is not an adaptation. The affiliation is looser. It has a similar opening but with emails rather than letters. Emails about meeting love in a rival family and losing it. What is the difference between letters and emails? Letter to sister and email to father. If written in 2020 it would be what’s app messages. There are parallel music appreciation scenes and bequeathing scenes. Beethoven vs. Mozart. There are lots of differences. On Beauty has a bigger cast. Howard’s End just has a few characters in each family. Bigger families and additional characters make On Beauty more complicated socially. It is set on campus and not just London. It’s less schematic and more hybrid. Class is no longer the ultimate cause of problems. Forster uses the families schematically as illustrations to think about relationships. In Forster a hybrid child of two classes results, representing the future of England, smearing classes. For Forster class is the ultimate cause. Not race, or gender dynamics. Smith is against any one thing being the cause of identity and subjectivity. 

            Forster ends with the image of a child that is the product of working and upper class hybridity. A compound class. Smith says yes there are hybrids but that doesn't solve our problems. On Beauty is concerned with issues of 2005. The issues are family, love, music, education, race, gender and class. These are intertwined, relative, connected and hybridized. Everyone is hybridized but that compound is more than class. There are more issues now. What defines us? 

            What does the novel show us about these families? He pauses for us to answer. 

            I say the Belseys have new ideas and they are more uncertain. They are less unified than the Kippses from a philosophical point of view. The Kippses have no danger of falling apart. They have old school conventions and religion and yet the world is changing and they are fighting it together. The Belseys are constantly in danger of breaking up and yet they have a kind of ghost unity in spirit through art and culture and radical politics. 

            The families are diverse. Composed of many different kinds. Kippses are black, Catholic, conservative; The Belseys black and white, politically liberal. Families don't fit in one category. They are not easily categorized. There are multiple affiliations. The novel is filled with cartoonish characters not deeply dense but they represent identities and class positions. They break with their stereotypes. Monty and Howard and Zoora are cartoons. Zoora is an academic. Howard is an art professor. Monty is a conservative. But they break out of those roles. No one can be pinned down. They are nonreduceable to background. But race and gender are still important but these causes are tied up with other causes.

            When Carl comes to the Belsey house. White Howard confronts black Carl. Carl is too pleased with himself and Howard turns him away. Not that Howard is not racist but race isn’t the only issue. Black is only on a list. There are a combination of issues. Carl says for "poet poets”. There needs to be a match between what he looks like and claims to be for him to be admitted. A poet is not just someone who writes poetry but must have a look. Carl represents black youth and is not supposed to be at the party. But he shows himself to be witty. He’s more than his stereotype. 

            Carlene says to Monty that life must come over the Book but Monty says life must conform to the Book. Monty is shown to have density of character and he still hangs out with a guy he likes who is gay. Monty is a jerk but makes exceptions. 

            Levi in mega store tries to raise a coup. Bailey is from the streets but Levi is middle class and wants to be street. He wants black identity that he can‘t authentically claim it. He joins the Haitians. He's distanced although of the same race as if from a different planet. Certain parts of identity can trump other parts. They are separated by class. 

            These hybrid identities create complex problems. There is a foolish idea that hybridization will act as a bridge between warring cultures. But Smith says hybridization makes life more difficult. Racism, sexism and classicism become more difficult to root out because they are entangled. If race was the only factor we could address it. But there are so many dimensions relating to gender, class, economy, geography, urban vs. rural. Hybridization makes belonging more difficult. Having things in common does not make for a connection. If we want to be antiracist we have got to see everything it relates to. 

            Ultra contemporary representations of family with old fashioned interests in beauty. Art, painting, music, combined with ultra realistic representation of family. How are the questions of aesthetics, beauty and style tied to concerns of ethics, politics and the common good? Relevance of style to ethics. Carl's style, his aesthetics that get him turned away. Howard does not listen. he reads his style. There is a relationship between aesthetics and politics and ethics on other hand. 

            The novel is very ekphrastic, with moments of ekphrasis even in the sense of it being an homage to another novel. But here Smith takes difference from Keats and against the Grecian Urn: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty and that is all ye need to know." Beauty connects us to the universal. She is against the idea that beauty connects us to a universal truth. She insists that the truths art gives access to are particular. They are subjective truths. This does not mean that Smith does not value beauty. She may value it more insofar as she recognizes its fragility and its need of support. If beauty is a not universal feature that transcends time and generations it has substance that continues. She says it's created in an interactive experience and therefore it’s fragile and needs maintenance. She moves away from masterpieces and canonical art. She says art can connect us to transcend the self but not universally. Art needs to be made public through an ekphrastic relationship. 

            When the family goes to Mozart’s Requiem it mimics scene from Howard's End and Beethoven. What kind of ekphrasis is Smith developing? How Kiki describes the music, who is “you"? Why?

            Obviously “you" is Kiki because she refers to being the only black woman at Wellington. Mozart represents a culture that she has married into even though it is not her husband’s culture. She has married white history and wants her children to appreciate art even though it also represents the death of her black culture. 

            The “you” is both plural and singular at the same time. You is simultaneously herself and the reader. The music is shared. Art speaks to us specifically but can connect us beyond ourselves. Many things get in the way of sharing. Kiki’s description is public and private. Specificity. Her personal experience but also public and shared. Asking for universal assent. Music is described as ethereal. This is a good description of the requiem. He identifies with what she is saying and walking towards a pit and judgement over the soul. 

            Kant says that judgements of beauty claim universal validity and demand agreement. When we say something is beautiful we are doing something different than saying I like something best. That's opinion. When we give a description of a work of art as beautiful we are saying you should see it as beautiful too. If you played Mozart a lot maybe you can’t see what Kiki is saying. Smith is interested in how we talk of art. Carl wants to talk about Mozart's requiem. Think about how Carl talks of Mozart. What is Zora’s problem? What is the disconnection with Zora? 

            How do we describe how he talks about Mozart? Carl is unacademic but conceals academic ideas. Carl’s “unacademic” way of talking about Mozart conceals a very Zoraesque and academic analysis of the work and its history. Zora doesn’t listen because the style or aesthetics is off. Thus Zora is the contemporary demonstration of Carl's point that fits with the idea of who can and can’t make music like this. He's using style that doesn't look academic. 

            More examples. Howard says prettiness and beauty is the mask power wears to recast aesthetics as exclusion. Clair says people think they know art is truth. Art is not truth exactly. Zora only reads footnotes. 

            What is the relationship between how people relate to art and their relation to others? Is there a connection? How does the novel think about the relation between art and ethics? What do the clash of vocabularies and styles reveal to us? What do you make of the last scene? Characters struggling with different styles of talking about the same thing? Is the last scene optimistic or negative? 

            

            I finished editing my notes just before dinner. 

            I had a potato with sautéed onion, mushrooms, broccoli and canned peas while watching an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. 

            In every episode of this show Tony Hancock has a different occupation whether professional or not. In this story he is a lawyer and he begins with a court argument against an old man who is charged with eight counts of bigamy. His attack is so powerful that the jury finds the man guilty and the judge sentences him to four years in prison. The problem however is that Hancock was supposed to be defending the accused. His boss at the law firm says he only hired him because his grandfather had been a great barrister. Hancock has never read a law book because they are written by foreigners. His knowledge of the law comes from television and Agatha Christy novels. He begs for one more chance and so his boss agrees. He is sent out to defend Sidney James who was seen robbing a jewellery store by 240 witnesses. Before he can see James in his cell Hancock is arrested for illegally parking in front of the police station, driving with an expired license and then moving the car when the police sergeant told him to. On his court date the arresting officer says he saw James commit the crime but Hancock tells him to put his helmet on and it covers his eyes. The other 240 witnesses were recently admitted to the hospital with broken noses. Hancock gives and impassioned defence and James says that he didn’t break the jewellery store window but was pushed against it by a rough man. He is asked to describe the man just before the scene changes to a few days later when Hancock is breaking rocks in prison.

            Hancock had both a radio and television version of his show at the same time and it lasted for seven years. Hancock was worried that Sidney James was stealing half his limelight and so after a few years he split from him. He then fired his scrip writers and the shows became less funny. Hancock finally got rid of himself by committing suicide. Thirty three years after his death British radio listeners voted Hancock their favourite comedian.