Zadie Smith’s Autonomous Writing Commitments to E.M. Forster

Smith’s fiction seems to have followed some astonishing path from standard social commitment to the world to a more aesthetic and ideological commitment to Forster’s Edwardian Howards End. Does the rewriting of Forster’s novel in On Beauty stem from her initially more political writing? Beyond the structure, plot and characters revisited, the aesthetics of auto-referentiality informed by the philosophy of Zeno in White Teeth herald the autonomy of Smith’s writing in On Beauty—time and space are now interwoven in a new self-regulating frame allowing the past (and Howards End) to be actualised in the linguistic sense. And eventually, just as Forster claimed that speaking before thinking is creation’s motto, Smith’s novel disappears behind its model and the void on the page is nothing but evidence of her now purely aesthetic commitment to Forster’s own aesthetics.