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Story and Self Story and self The healing possibilities of anachrony and style in Ali Smith’s Hotel World and How to Be Both Hulda Westberg Sparbo ENG4390 – Master’s Thesis in Literature in English 60 credits A thesis presented to the department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages The Faculty of Humanities November 2019 ii Story and self The healing possibilities of anachrony and style in Ali Smith’s Hotel World and How to Be Both Hulda Westberg Sparbo University of Oslo November 2019 iii © Hulda Westberg Sparbo 2019 Story and Self: The Healing Possibilities of Anachrony and Style in Ali Smith’s Hotel World and How to Be Both Hulda Westberg Sparbo http://www.duo.uio.no/ Print: CopyCat / Reprosentralen, University of Oslo iv Abstract The story is an explicit motif in Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001) and How to Be Both (2014), two novels that experiment with the possibilities of narrative voice and explore how the act of storytelling restores the characters’ shattered selves after traumatic experiences. This thesis explores the ghost stories, the elegiac narratives, and the significance of the characters’ autobiographical memories within their present narrative. The close reading of these texts allows an analysis of how Smith’s characters use the constructive force of language to shape their identities – or selves – by the act of telling their stories. Both novels are populated with characters who are initially broken – by death, grief or illness – to the degree that they no longer recognise themselves. During the course of their narratives, some characters manage to mend the rifts that have taken place in their selves, and some do not. My hypothesis is that healing of the self, in these novels, is dependent on the telling – the act of verbalising memories and creating a new self-narrative. v vi Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Nils Axel Nissen, who made me understand that I would have to kill a whole lot of darlings in order to get anywhere at all, and who responds to e- mails with the speed of light. I am very grateful to my employers at Oslo by steinerskole for giving me a semester’s leave to write, to my colleagues, whose support have no bounds, and to my students, who make every day worthwhile. A great thanks to the members of Oslo Cathedral Choir, my home away from home, whose voices and laughter has kept me sane throughout the writing process. The pre- Christmas marathon awaits, and I am going to enjoy every second of it. Writing this thesis would have been impossible without my enthusiastic study buddies. We sure did plant a lot of trees and got stuff done. And then we sat down at the break room and discussed life and Buffy and other important matters. I would like to thank LCE at the University of Oslo for allowing me to attend a highly stimulating master class on literature and psychology with Siri Hustvedt in May 2019. Thanks to Merete Alfsen, Ali Smith’s Norwegian translator, for introducing me to my favourite author – and to Ali, who gave me carte blanche to write whatever I wanted. Thanks to Fredrik Cappelen, healer of self, and to Leif Pedersen, healer of bones. I am forever grateful to my parents, Åse Westberg and Njål Sparbo, for bringing me up in a house filled to the brink with books and music, and for your unwavering belief in my abilities and my willpower. A special thanks to my mother for the countless hours you have spent proof-reading my writing throughout the years – you have taught me what language can do if you know what to do with it. Last, but not least: My wife, Charlotte – three thousand thanks for volunteering as proof-reader, private chef, and tea-maker in the finishing stages, for pulling me away from the desk and out for a walk now and then, for being certain when I was nervous, for keeping me company through late nights, and for making up stories about Clover the rabbit in order to help me sleep when my mind was in overdrive. You make everything seem doable, my love, and that is indeed a superpower. vii viii Table of Contents Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. vii Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Theory, method, and Smith scholarship ................................................................................. 4 Self, memory, and biofiction .................................................................................................. 7 Types of story ....................................................................................................................... 10 1 Ghost stories .......................................................................................................................... 13 1.1 Sara: Remainders of self................................................................................................. 14 1.2 Francescho: “You who are more than one thing” .......................................................... 21 1.3 In transit: Consciousness and style ................................................................................. 35 2 Elegiac stories ....................................................................................................................... 45 2.1 The impact of death: Grief reactions .............................................................................. 46 2.2 Stories of the departed / stories of the future ................................................................. 52 2.2.1 The lives of the departed ......................................................................................... 53 2.2.2 Returns to the future ................................................................................................ 58 2.3 Narrating grief: Style, structure and translation ............................................................. 67 3 The other stories .................................................................................................................... 71 3.1 Else: Reunification of self .............................................................................................. 72 3.2 Lise: Lying in bed .......................................................................................................... 76 3.3 Penny: ............................................................................................................................. 81 3.4 “Present”: The choir invisible ........................................................................................ 87 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 91 Works Cited .............................................................................................................................. 93 ix x Introduction In 1966, Robert Scholes, James Phelan and Robert Kellogg – then three “brash young scholars with no academic standing to speak of” (ix) – defined narrative simply, but succinctly as “all those literary works which are distinguished by two characteristics: the presence of a story and a story-teller” (4). These two characteristics will serve as the mainspring of this thesis. Throughout her entire body of fiction, Ali Smith has concerned herself with the concept of the story and the infinite ways of telling them, not only in her short story collections,1 but also in her novels. To Smith, story is more than a literary genre, it is the cornerstone of our collective and individual identities. The story also serves as an explicit motif in Hotel World (2001) and How to Be Both (2014), two novels that experiment with the possibilities of narrative voice and explore how storytelling restores the characters’ shattered selves after traumatic experiences. The stories in these novels range from universal and autobiographical to mythical and contemporary. Smith borrows from a rich canon of mythology and literature, rewrites old stories into new, and transforms history into fiction. Memories are as prominent as the present action, as the novels are scattered with analepses, or flashbacks, allowing her characters to continually revisit and process their past, adapting their memories to adjust their present identity after losing a loved one – or themselves. The author and critic Erica Wagner asserts that Ali Smith “has always wanted to tell a good story but also to question the methodology of storytelling” (Lyall). The quote illustrates the blending of the everyday meaning of story and the specific, narratological one. Kent Puckett simply defines story as “the event or sequence of event” (4), or what is being told – as opposed to discourse, which describes the representation or transmitting of these events, “how the story is conveyed” (4). In layman’s terms, a story constitutes much more: “a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events” (Cambridge Dictionary). As such, what comprises a story may be a newspaper article, a history book, a lie, a work of fiction, or a religious myth. Humans shape our individual selves on autobiographical memories that must be narrated to be shared with others, and to be better understood by ourselves. Collective memories are essential to our understanding of historical events and the societies we are part of, as
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