The varying degrees of interpretation in an academic setting is described in the following passage:
The tomato is just totally revealed as this phoney construction that can’t lead you to some higher truth. Or teach you how to live or ennoble you or be a great example of human spirit. They’re not fallacies. They’re just these pretty pointless tomatoes that people, for totally selfish reasons of their own, have attached cultural—nutritional—weight to. (Smith 312)
The speaker of this passage, Victoria Kipps, isolates the tomato as an entity separate and completely detached from human interpretation: simply, it is distinguished as a subject and nothing else. Through Victoria’s comment, the author points out the fallacy in human interpretations on subjects that provoke divisions among those in the academic setting. On one hand, Howard Belsey champions the task of exploring the significance of a “tomato,” critically isolating it as a subject rather than a tool to advance a social or political agenda. It is an isolationist, yet academic, standpoint that detaches the viewer (or interpreter) away from the subject as if it does not have any ideological baggage that is applicable. However, this standpoint is also tinged with idealism because it regretfully assumes that eating the tomato does not have any real consequences to the body. What if the consumer is allergic? Will that change the interpretation of the tomato that is just a fruit, and is detached from any “nutritional weight?” The opposing end of this spectrum is held by Monty Kipps, who is Howard’s rival, and whose position would be “Tomatoes Save,” (Smith 313) that attaches a tomato’s “nutritional weight” as a way to claim responsibility for the tomato. By doing so, Monty suggests that viewers of the painting should not deny their own personal biases towards the image in front of them. There is a connection between the (human) viewer and art, because the painter is also human and therefore there is already a presence of “interpretation” evident in the painting as a result. Monty’s interpretation of Rembrandt presents the danger in separating the viewer from the subject because it idealizes the status of the tomato as something more than just a tomato, even if it has physical dimensions and characteristics.
The physical dimensions of a Rembrandt painting present the area in which Howard tries to deal with his academic work and his marriage to Kiki. Even with his marriage, he tries to apply academic procedures in talking to his wife, and at times even manages to approach Kiki and their marriage the same way he would with a Rembrandt painting. This overflow of his academic work revolving Classic art is an implication of his obsession:
Howard abhorred the reference (an old war-wound in this marriage, continually reopened) to a separation between his ‘academic’ language and his wife’s so-called ‘personal language. She could always say – and often did – ‘we’re not in your class now’ and that would always be true, but he would never never concede. (Smith 205)
For Howard, there is a struggle to retain his sensibility as an academic person because Kiki’s persistence challenges his procedural tendencies of approaching problems in their marriage. His procedures also follow his academic approach where he separates himself as a viewer or a participant from the subject and rationalize different interpretations of that painting. As with a painting, Howard only takes his thirty-five year old marriage to Kiki on the surface, on face value, by refusing to delve into details of his infidelities. Kiki retorts, “I’m sorry your dick offends your intellectual sensibilities. There’s your subtle, wonderful, intricate brain and all the time it turns out your dick is a vulgar stupid little prick” (Smith 205). Kiki reduces Howard’s “sensibility” to a comparison with “Seated Nude,” in which Howard’s infidelity is portrayed in a painting that Kiki receives with disgust. While there is validity in attempting to interpret “Seated Nude” in an academic manner by separating its intellectual value from the vulgarity of its appearance, with Howard, that is not such case because his actions have physical and emotional consequences. For Kiki, it is emotionally jarring to hear Howard speak of their marriage with detachment like with a painting, because she is heavily invested in it with both body and mind. Her approach to their marriage echoes Kipps’ position on Rembrandt’s painting: marriage either “saves” or condemns.
In approaching “mixed” identities, one cannot compare it to a tomato or a Rembrandt painting because like with marriage, the “sensibilities” in conceptualizing mixed identities have physical and emotional consequences. Although these identities are often based on “face” value—on facial characteristics, bodily stature, for example—Nakashima’s “Mixed-Race Asians in the U.S. Discourse” argue that the concept of mixed race also raises intellectual, emotional, and consequential significance like Classical Art. Following Howard and Kiki’s marriage as example, Nakashima sheds light to the value and problems of “essentializing” identity as an academic or purely theoretical discourse. Mixed race identities, like in Howard’s discourse on Rembrandt’s painting, within an academic setting “reinvents the human” because it disrupts Western idealization of the “white” race as a signifier of status and power by marginalizing people of “color.” Whereas human supposedly mean “pure” shade of color, a mixed race person challenges that notion by being “impure” in having a blend of colors of black and white, white and yellow, yellow and black, etc. like a color pallet. By drawing “discussions of race and ethnicity call attention to the “totalizing” and essentializing” treatment of racial and ethnic identity, experience, and history that often characterizes multi-cultural discourse” (Nakashima 272), Nakashima’s essay tries to separate academic discourse from the actuality of mixed race people, just as Kiki would attempt to compartmentalize actions that deals with marriage and Howard’s academic career.
If taken into Howard’s academic work, the discourse on mixed race identities would coincide with his attention to the face value of images. Mixed race identities are often based on the congruence of images (phenotypes) into one singular face. Zora Belsey, a “mixed” product of Howard and Kiki, is a “sovereign face and not a blur of colour and personal thoughts” (Smith 227). Through Claire Malcolm, Smith distinguishes the uniqueness of a “mixed” face, which cannot be taken as essentially belonging to either black or white and the complications that arise within that, but as a separate entity. The focus on being a mixed race, however, is still rooted on images that evoke different interpretations that assist in formulating their value.
The value (and challenge) and the significance of images propels Howard and Monty’s obsession with Rembrandt’s paintings. Likewise, the emotional and monetary investment in the “Black Virgin” heightens its value to the Kippses and Kiki Belsey. During Carlene Kipps’ description of the painting reflects her own investment in it, Kiki becomes mesmerized by its majestic presence:
She represents love, beauty, purity, the ideal female and the moon . . . and she’s mystere of jealousy, vengeance and discord, and, on the other hand, of love, perpetual help, goodwill, health, beauty, and fortune (Smith 175).
The value that Carlene and Kiki place on this painting is based on their friendship and their understanding to each other’s situation as wives of rival intellectual men. They forge a bond based on this understanding and eventually aids Kiki in realizing her own self-worth by interpreting the “Black Virgin” as herself. She admires her vengeful parrots and desires them for herself. After Carlene’s death, the value of this painting increases because of her family’s desire for it, and their denial of Kiki as the receiver of this as a token of friendship. However, the Kippses see the painting as a token of their connection to Carlene as a mother and wife, but also as a worthwhile source of investment at three hundred thousand pounds. . After Monty’s relocation of the painting to his office at Wellington, Levi Belsey steals it for a different purpose, different interpretation of what the painting represents based on a collective struggle of Haitian people that he learns about. The presence of different interpretations based on a single portrait is an example of how images evoke different sentiments in people, and that there should be no essential definition that simplifies the value of any art piece. Meanwhile, the circulation of images denotes the various spaces where discussions of the painting are necessitated by the people within these spaces, such as the Kippses household, Wellington, then to the Belseys.
The specificity of these environments is crucial to avoid generalizing what this portrait means, because these spaces call for different situations and interpretations, as with people. However, the discourse becomes very specific, Monty would not discuss amongst visitors of his office what the painting is worth like he would with his family. Nor is the discussion of the painting similar between the Kippses and the Belseys. In either case, the portrait is still evaluated on its face value, its image and how it forces people to consider their interpretation of that image. For example, Tiger Woods’ image as “Cablinasian”—all encompassing of his multi-racial heritage—becomes a token for “multiculturalism” and is often used in as evidence for the “browning of America” that “tends to place single, unifying definitions around groups of individuals, validating ideas of essential differences” (Nakashima 272). Tiger Woods’ image becomes sensationalized as evidence of America’s fascination with multiculturalism and mixed race people. Nakashima calls this the “mainstreaming” (273) to note that Tiger’s image has become a public entity that can be interpreted in any way and every way possible as public property. She notes a number of examples with magazines such as Ebony and Asian Weekly, as well as Newsweek, that each claims its own interpretation of Tiger’s significance to their respective communities.
A student of Art History would marvel at Classical paintings as the epitome of talent, skill, and eye for beauty. Because this student is academically invested in this field, he or she will hold specific observations that contends with that specific discipline, one being, the study of various artistic styles named after artists who made that style popular. A student outside of that field would contend differently, as with the tension between Howard and Kipps, Howard and Kiki, tomatoes that save and those that are separate, even with marriage and art. In using paintings as an artifice for reflecting on mixed race identities, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty proposes the question on the validity of images, and how images are interpreted in various ways. Within this context, On Beauty suggests that it is necessary to delve into the intricate, though grotesque, realities of race, and mixed race identities. When solely based on face value, to “judge a book by its cover” becomes a farce achievement.
Works cited:
Nakashima, Cynthia, L. "Servants of Culture: The Symbolic Role of Mixed-Race Asians in American Discourse." 'Mixed Race' Studies: A Reader. Ed. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe. London: Routledge, 2004. 271-274.Smith, Zadie. On Beauty. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
