Masarykova univerzita Filozofická fakulta

Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky

Magisterská diplomová práce

2020 Anna Janíková

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Anna Janíková

The Analysis of Postmodernist Features in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Novels Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.

2020

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

I would like to thank my supervisor prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for her kindness and helpful guidance. Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 6 1 Welcome to Postmodernism ...... 11 1.1 Introducing Postmodernism ...... 11

1.2 Lyotard and the Grand Narratives ...... 14

1.3 Postmodernism in Literature ...... 22

2 The Collage of The Seasons: Fragmentation and Temporality...... 27 2.1 Look Who’s Talking: The Narrative Voices in the Seasonal Quartet ... 29

2.2 There Is No Time Like the Present: The Seasonal Novels and Time .... 35

3 Intertextuality in Autumn, Winter and Spring ...... 44 3.1 Shall I Compare Thee to a Shakespeare’s Play ...... 45

3.2 Huxley, Dickens and The Little Red Cap ...... 50

3.3 Blake and Other ‘Arty-art’ ...... 56

4 The Critique of Postmodern Culture in the Seasonal Novels ...... 59 4.1 Cultural recycling and the Mass Media ...... 59

4.2 Amusing Oneself to Death ...... 62

5 Conclusion ...... 71 6 Works Cited ...... 73 7 Resumé ...... 78 8 Resume ...... 79

Introduction

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse several features of postmodern writing in three selected works by Ali Smith, namely Autumn, Winter and Spring. The novels are three out of the four-part seasonal quartet, which is currently Ali Smith’s latest project. The final and concluding part Summer is announced to be published on 2 July 2020. In the thesis, the aim is to analyse intertextuality, fragmentation and temporal distortion in the unfinished seasonal quartet. Furthermore, it seeks to examine how the novels reflect contemporary postmodern culture. Although Smith uses the stylistic features of literary postmodernism in Autumn,

Winter and Spring, she also draws attention to the negative consequences of postmodernity manifested in mindless consumerism, cultural recycling, or the dangerous manipulating power of the mass media.

Smith claims that she had the idea for the seasonal quartet long before she started writing it. In fact, in an article for the Guardian, Ali Smith confessed that the idea of writing a set of books carrying the title of each season had captivated her mind since the time she became a writer. She intended to create “four books, written close to their publication (in the old Victorian mode, published practically as soon as written) that they would be about not just their times, but the place where time and the novel meet” (Smith “‘Brexit's Divisions Are

Fracturing Our Time’: Ali Smith On Writing Autumn”). Smith claims that she conceives the books as a “sort of time-sensitive experiment”, an important criterion being that the books will be “as up-to-the-moment as possible” (Smith “Ali Smith: ‘This Young Generation Is

Showing Us That We Need To Change and We Can Change”). Rosefield neatly characterizes the three parts of the seasonal quartet when she writes that the novels “travel backwards and forwards throughout the 20th century, creating a patchwork of individual and cultural memory and forgetfulness that sets linear time against cyclical time” (43). The passage of time and its cyclicity as well as the tricks that it often plays on human memory are vital themes in all three

6 novels. Therefore, one of the chapters of the thesis, “The Collage of the Seasons:

Fragmentation and Temporality in Autumn, Winter and Spring” is devoted to their discussion.

The first of the novels, Autumn, was published in 2016 only a few months after the

United Kingdom European Union Membership Referendum, in which UK citizens voted to leave the EU. The Brexit vote and its consequences are thematized in this novel. In book reviews and newspaper articles, Autumn is often being referred to as a “Brexit novel” or even a “post-Brexit novel”1. In Autumn, however, there are other themes apart from politics which deserve the attention of the reader and the critic.

The novel presents two central characters: Elisabeth Demand and Daniel Gluck, who are bound together by a loving friendship. Elisabeth is in her thirties and lectures art history at a university. As readers later find out, Elisabeth has spent a considerable portion of her life being platonically in love with Daniel, which prevents her from having any long-term functional relationship. Daniel is 101 years old. He is slowly approaching the final phase of his life. Lying in a hospital bed, he dreams in his sleep throughout most of his last days. In other words, he is “dreaming his death” (Akins “Ali Smith Begins a New Quartet of Novels with ‘Autumn’”). The plot does not play an essential role in the book. Instead, in a series of fragments, the readers learn about the character’s lives and the nature of their relationships.

In November 2017, Winter was published. Once again, it focuses on the lives of multiple characters of different generations. The central duo are two elderly sisters with contrasting personalities. In her youth, Iris was rebellious and wild, while her sister Sophia was always the “good girl”, conservative and reserved. Although the sisters loved each other dearly when they were children, their relationship deteriorated when Iris left from home one

1 The label “post-Brexit” is noteworthy because the novel was published before Brexit happened. Thus, it can be suggested that like in the word “postmodern” the prefix post does not refer to temporality (in the meaning of “after-Brexit”) instead it follows from Brexit; it is a reaction against it, in the same way in which postmodernism is a reaction to and a consequence of modernism. Furthermore, there is also a particular resonance between the words “post-Brexit” and the word “postmodern” as will be discussed further in the chapter “Welcome to Postmodernism”. 7 day. Winter is set around Christmas in winter 2017. Iris comes on a surprise visit to Sophie’s house, and the sisters attempt once more after many years to find a way to one another. Apart from the sister’s story, the novel depicts the life struggles of Sophie’s son Arthur, who continually fails at finding his place in the contemporary society. Most of all, Arthur struggles to find his authentic self. In his search for his true self, he is unexpectedly aided by a young and free-spirited girl named Lux, whom he hires to pretend to be his ex-girlfriend Charlotte as he comes to visit his mother for Christmas. Winter is concerned with contemporary politics the same as the previous novel Autumn. Apart from politics, Winter also deals with the environment and the global refugee crisis.

Winter was followed by for now the last published novel Spring in 2019. In short, the third part of the quartet, Spring “is about truth, art and historical injustice; it is about the magic of coincidence and the urgent need to break the cycle of misinformation that has us careering towards climatic cataclysm” (Armistead “Ali Smith: ‘This Young Generation Is

Showing Us That We Need to Change and We Can Change’”). A foursome of characters play a central role in the story of Spring. An ageing film and TV director, Richard Lease, whose career peaked in 1970 and now it is on the decline. Richard is about to start filming a novel adaptation of a book about two great writers, Katharine Mansfield, and Rainer Marie, who in

1922 spent a few months in the same hotel in Switzerland but never met. Nevertheless, the film executives crave the profit, so instead of a sensitive picture, they are forcing Richard to create a shallow but popular hit which is likely to earn money. Richard, who grieves the death of his dear friend and ex-lover Paddy, falls into a mental crisis. The second part of the book reveals the story of Brittany Hall, a DCO (detention custody officer) at one of the IRCs2. She is employed by a private security company SA4A. Brittany, disillusioned by working in the

IRC, regains her spirits when she meets an exceptional 12-year-old girl Florence, who

2 The abbreviation IRC stands for International Removal Centre. 8 gradually softens her cynical heart after she cunningly convinces Brittany to accompany her on her way to Scotland. In the third part of the book, the two storylines meet as Richard joins the girls after a failed attempt to commit suicide.

Although Autumn, Winter and Spring are separate novels and star different protagonists, there is always a specific link (a travelling character, a place, or a theme) that knits them together. One of such travelling characters is Daniel Gluck. In Autumn, Daniel is a decrepit old man; however, in Winter, readers meet Daniel in his prime. In one of the flashbacks from the year 1978, young Sophie accidentally meets Daniel on Christmas Eve, and together they share a romantic and delightful night walk at the end of which they kiss

(263). After that, they lose contact, but years later, they come across each other once again and make love in Daniel’s flat (271-272). This brief affair also reveals the mystery of who is

Arthur’s biological father. Although Daniel appears in Winter only briefly, each time, he turns

Sophie’s life upside down.

In postmodern novels in general, the plots are often not primary. Lewis suggests that in postmodernist literature the plot is either “pounded into small slabs of event and circumstance, characters disintegrate into a bundle of twitching desires, settings dwindle to little more than transitory backdrops, or theme become so attenuated that it is often comically inaccurate to say that certain novels are ‘about’ such-and-such” (173). Truthfully, it would be a simplification to claim that Smith’s seasonal quartet is either about Brexit or the current migrant crisis. It can neither be said that the novels are solely about presenting the lives of the characters. Although these themes and the characters play an essential part in the novels, it is imprecise to claim that the novels are about any single one of them. Instead, the novels deal with these subjects, which are broken into a thousand pieces and then put back together into a mosaic which attempts to show the condition of the western world.

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The novels allow the readers to look through the eyes of the characters at the surrounding world. They show the reality from multiple different perspectives. Smith’s novels demonstrate that there is never a single truth or one single correct way of looking at the world.

Instead, there is a multiplicity of little truths. In this respect, Autumn, Winter and Spring can be characterised as being postmodern.

In a magazine article for the New Statesman “Why Ali Smith is the national novelist we need”, Erica Wagner ascribes to Ali Smith the title of the national writer of Scotland. She compares her to the excellent American novelist Toni Morrison, with whom she shares the great ability to understand the “sins and sufferings” of their countries and their people. One of the most considerable merits Wagner finds in Smith’s novels is the non-existence of gender and other stereotypes, since, as she writes, Smith’s novels outright “banish any thought of stereotype from the reader’s mind”. This, in combination with the mastery of crafting characters as well as the general sense of “overriding hopefulness”, qualifies Smith to be the national writer who can speak for the Scots.

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1 Welcome to Postmodernism

The purpose of this introductory chapter is to discuss some of the basic concepts concerning postmodernism and postmodernity which will serve as a necessary theoretical background for the subsequent literary analysis of Ali Smith’s seasonal novels Autumn,

Winter and Spring. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section analyses the words “postmodern” and “postmodernism”. It also introduces the postmodern movement as a rejection of the Enlightenment project. In the following section, the intention is to introduce

Jean-François Lyotard and his views concerning the grand narratives. The section discusses several other scholars who contributed significantly to the postmodernist discourse. Finally, the last section introduces several key postmodernist features in film and literature. It also provides several examples of the popular postmodernist works that enrich the contemporary cultural environment.

1.1 Introducing Postmodernism

Postmodernity is a controversial term, which has been used in different ways by numerous academics and writers. Its meaning continually changes as the literary and cultural movement of postmodernism evolves. It can be argued, however, that this feature is not necessarily negative. On the contrary, one might claim that this inconsistency in defining postmodernity is positive as well as constructive. Due to the contradictions in its meanings, postmodernity escapes a simplistic explanation. It eludes universalisation. Thus, there are various constructions of postmodernisms such as “John Barth’s postmodernism, the literature of replenishment; Charles Newman’s postmodernism, the literature of inflationary economy;

Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodernism, a general condition of knowledge in the contemporary informational regime; […], and so on” (McHale Postmodernist Fiction 4).

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Firstly, however, it might be worthwhile to examine the word “postmodern”. In

Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale argues that the prefix “post” does not mean “after”, since “modern” can be defined as “pertaining to the present” which would mean that

“postmodern” would only have to be explained as “pertaining to the future” which in its nature is a nonsensical notion, making postmodernist fiction a “fiction that has not yet been written” (4). Instead, McHale quotes John Gardner, who claims that the prefix “post” in the adjective “postmodern” functions as an intensifier in the sense of “New! Improved!” (qtd. in

McHale 4). When the suffix “-ism” is added to the word “postmodern”, the term

“postmodernism” arises, which then stands for an organised system of poetics. Some authors

(Connor; Hutcheon; Sim), however, do not use this term solely to signify the poetics’ system.

Instead, they use it in the sense of a wide-ranging cultural movement, which affects not only literature but other socio-cultural areas as well3. Nevertheless, as McHale breaks down the word “postmodernism”, he claims that the prefix “post” does not apply to the lexeme

“modern” meaning “after the present” but rather to “modernism” which implies that it is “a poetics which is the successor of, or possibly a reaction against, the poetics of early twentieth- century modernism, and not some hypothetical writing of the future” (5).

While the term “postmodernism” might refer to a system of poetics, the word

“postmodernity” designates the contemporary cultural situation, which is thoroughly studied by the humanities and social sciences. It is relevant to speak of postmodernity in a whole range of contexts. It concerns film, music, literature, theatre and other arts as well. Literary postmodernism uses the basic principles connected to postmodernity with specific characteristics connected to literary creation.

3 When the word postmodernism appears in this thesis, it is generally used in the vaguer sense of the word. It usually refers to the literary-cultural movement unless the text indicates otherwise. 12

As it was already mentioned, postmodernism resists single definition. It makes use of combinations of definitions, but a simple fixed definition does not exist. It is not possible to define postmodernism precisely because of its heterogeneous nature. It is not a single theory; it ranges to all sort of spheres. Postmodernism is hard to define as a parallel to other literary and cultural movements such as feminism, poststructuralism or postcolonialism since it seems to subsume them all. It seems that it is the present postmodern age that informs the content of postmodernity. Despite postmodernism being a much-debated term, most definitions agree on several aspects. As the word itself suggests, postmodernism originated as a break from modernism and the ideas of this movement. Several recurrent themes concerning postmodernism often appear in scholarly debates. The first theme which scholars generally agree on is “the idea that national limits for social and cultural identity have been superseded by a global environment in which multinational companies are more important than national governments in directing social and cultural tendencies” (Allen 217). This situation created by societal implications of postmodernism has negative consequences, one of them being that

“such a transitional system is characterised by ‘empty signifiers’ which have no base in a recognizable lived reality” (ibid.). These ‘signifiers’ are in effect nothing more than empty symbols which copy the copies of what once might have been the authentic reality, but during this copying process, these ‘signifiers’ lost most of their relevance. Later paragraphs of this chapter elaborate on this idea when they introduce the figure of one of the most prominent postmodern thinkers Jean Baudrillard and his concept of the simulacra.

As a philosophy, postmodernism rejects specific cultural values and cultural certainties of western society. The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism defines the philosophical movement as “a form of scepticism – scepticism about authority, received wisdom, cultural and political norms” (Sim 3). Most of all, it rejects the legacy of the

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Enlightenment4. In the 18th century, the Enlightenment changed the way people think about the world. The project of Enlightenment highlighted the importance of reason and learning.

There was a general faith that progress is always possible by education and other institutions.

In the Enlightenment, people believed that there is a higher Truth and a single reality, and that the scientific rationality will allow them to discover them. However, postmodernist thinkers are sceptical to these ideas. They believe that progress is impossible. The rejection of the

Enlightenment project goes hand in hand with the rejection of any universalising or totalising theories, since they are, in their nature, authoritarian. The theories determine what has a truth value and what does not. They dictate what is right and what is wrong. Likewise, what the people in the Enlightenment saw as the Truth, the postmodernists see as a current and temporary narrative that people have created to understand the world around them.

“Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and our ability to tolerate the incommensurable” (Lyotard xxv). Due to the dramatic events of the 20th century, society began to feel generally sceptical towards the achievability of the Enlightenment project.

1.2 Lyotard and the Grand Narratives

Among the postmodern philosophers, one name stands out from the rest; that is the name of Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard is the author of a relatively short but substantial book or as the subtitle suggests “report on knowledge” which into English commonly

4 According to the historians, the Enlightenment marks a historical period dating from the year in 1688, in which England's 'Glorious Revolution' took place, to the outbreak of French Revolution in 1798. Nevertheless, Enlightenment has one other meaning. It is also an intellectual project brought about by French philosophers and intellectuals (Spencer 251). Its aim lied in “dispelling darkness, fear and superstition; of removing all the shackles from free enquiry and debate. It opposed the traditional powers and beliefs of the church ‘branded as superstitions’ and raised questions of political legitimacy” (ibid.). 14 translates as The Postmodern Condition5. Although Lyotard did not coin the word

“postmodern”, it was he who first employed the term in other contexts than his predecessors.

Formerly, the concept belonged exclusively to the discourse of art and literature or literary criticism. However, Lyotard discusses this concept in much wider contexts, namely those of philosophy, politics and economy. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard characterises the postmodern era as a historical period which lacks the trust in the grand narratives. Grand narratives are universalising theories which give cultures their purpose and meaning. They are stories which people tell themselves to explain the world around them. Through the grand narratives, cultures legitimize their actions. They are stories, which give cultures a definite purpose. On the other hand, Lyotard sees the grand narratives as “a form of ideology which functions violently to suppress and control the individual subject by imposing a false sense of

‘totality’ and ‘universality’ on a set of disparate things, actions, and events” (Nicol 11). The wide majority of people then accept these grand narratives as being unconditionally true – like the way the world just is. One of the most prominent metanarratives of today in western society is, for instance, the project of the Enlightenment, which promotes knowledge, science and ideas such as human rights and equality.

In the 20th century, people believed that human knowledge is finally thorough enough to bring widespread prosperity and welfare based on scientific knowledge and progress.

However, the 20th century showed that these seemingly unshakeable systems of human knowledge failed and nearly caused the collapse of civilization. In the first quarter of the 20th century, the celebrated scientific progress led people right into the trenches of the First World

War; the worst war in human history so far. It was a dreadful and cruel war that should never

5 Interestingly, in Postmodernist Culture, Connor mentions that Lyotard’s reputation in the English-speaking world was established largely due to the success of the short report The Postmodern Condition, even though Lyotard's other writings concerned a broad range of topics such as linguistics, psychoanalysis and ethics. (23) However, it was The Postmodern Condition that had the most impact in its time and stayed very popular even today. Still, scholars cite Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition in their academic research and attribute great importance to the book. 15 have been repeated. Nevertheless, what followed was far worse than the greatest pessimist might have been able to imagine at that time. People had only about twenty years to recover from the horrors of World War One when the Second World War broke out. Tens of millions of people died, millions of soldiers but even more civilians. The general belief in an almighty and well-meaning Christian God shook in the foundations. The grand narratives of Fascism and Nazism proved to be very dangerous as well as deadly. Dubious advances in anthropology have in the manipulative hands of Nazi, and other vicious propaganda turned into tools for racial hatred and discrimination, which resulted in the atrocities of the

Holocaust. Thus, nationalism as a saving ideology failed. In the ‘50s, the terrible crimes of

Joseph Stalin were gradually being disclosed. The world also learned of the crimes of Mao

Zedong. It was no longer possible to full-heartedly trust the grand narratives of Marxism and

Communism into which many people have put their hopes. These grand narratives, which were supposed to bring equality and prosperity to everyone, have failed as well.

Thus, people gradually lost faith in the grand narratives, and gradually replaced them by a multiplicity of little narratives, which can be defined as “those which do not attempt to present an overarching ‘Truth’ but offer a qualified, limited ‘truth’, one relative to a particular situation” (Nicol 12). Thus, little narratives are less authoritarian and less restrictive. They do not claim to explain absolutely everything; instead, they are limited. According to Lyotard, it was this change that gave rise to the postmodern condition. “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives6” (xxiv). As one of the reasons for the distrust toward metanarratives Lyotard names the scientific progress. One of the consequences of the postmodern condition is then that “[t]he narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal” (Lyotard xxiv).

6 The expression 'metanarrative' can be used interchangeably with 'grand narrative' since they represent the same concept. 16

Some of the critics of Lyotard’s claim that discarding all grand narratives might not necessarily have positive effects on society. Until the advent of postmodernism, people throughout history have believed in some grand narratives. Now, people have suddenly gotten rid of them. Among the loud critics who explore the darker sides of the postmodernity may be named Frederic Jameson. His book, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, provides an analytic criticism of postmodernism. Jameson, for instance, argues: “If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable” (6). According to Jameson, postmodernism creates a cultural void with no certainties.

Jameson’s negative approach to postmodernity is shared by Terry Eagleton, who is yet another prominent critic of the cultural movement. In his 1996 book The Illusion of

Postmodernism, he firmly criticises its internal inconsistency, variability and multiplicity which makes it extremely difficult to define. “If postmodernism covers everything from punk rock to the death of metanarrative fanzines to Foucault, then it is difficult to see how any single explanatory scheme could do justice to such a bizarrely heterogeneous entity. And if the creature is so diverse, then it is hard to see how one could be in some simple sense either for or against it, any more than one could be for or against Peru” (21-22). He further discusses the implications that postmodernism has on the concept of truth. Furthermore, he argues that the project of postmodernism is inevitably doomed to fail because “to sacrifice the notion of truth altogether would be to disable some rather useful principles of social cohesion like religion and civic morality” (41). The rejection of the grand narratives leads to the situation in the society in which there is no longer a single truth, but instead, there are multiple truths, and every person might choose one’s favourite truth from the collection. Thus, value judgements

17 can quickly be rejected in competition with other proclaimed truths. Therefore, postmodern thinking creates boundless relativization.

Lyotard’s contemporary and a prominent French philosopher Jean Baudrillard also significantly contributed to the postmodern discourse. He elaborated on the concepts of

‘simulation’, ‘simulacra’ and ‘hyperreality’. Baudrillard borrowed the term simulacrum from the works of Plato. It stands for “a copy which does not possess an original” (Allen 182). In A

Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon summarises Baudrillard’s influential article, “The

Precession of simulacra” written in 1984, in which he describes the stages in which the mass media neutralize reality for the broad public and thus help to collapse differences and reject creative impulses within the postmodern condition. Hutcheon writes that stages in which reality was destroyed (according to Baudrillard). were the following: “first reflecting, then masking reality, and then masking the absence of reality and finally, bearing no relation to reality at all. This is the simulacrum, the final destruction of meaning” (223).

The destruction of meaning is one of the most dangerous symptoms of the postmodern condition. It is observable not only in the media and the entertainment industry but also in art, which, as Allen argues, increasingly becomes a “form of reproduction” (182).

In order to earn profit, popular film studios reproduce and recycle old films with the use of modern technology without having to create original content. Thus, Disney, for instance, may profit from making live-action remakes of classic animated fairy-tales such as

Aladdin (2019), Beauty and The Beast (2017), Cinderella (2015), or The Jungle Book (2016).

Furthermore, streaming platforms such as Netflix use artificial intelligence and data collection to guide creative choices when producing the content for their users. Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra is useful for understanding contemporary mass media through which people acquire their knowledge about the critical issues of today: “New reports of political and social events are provided by competing television channels, often with their own political and social

18 agendas. These reports employ processes of framing, editing and other reproductions of images and speed which the viewer, possessing only what is presented, cannot challenge. A constructed news report thus comes to substitute for any real experience of the event” (Allen 182-183).

In Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson also provides several insights concerning postmodern art. In the book, he analyses two famous paintings with similar themes, one of which is a modernist piece while the other is postmodern. First, he mentions Van Gogh’s famous picture of pheasant shoes. He describes it as

[…] the willed and violent transformation of a drab peasant object world into the most

glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint is to be seen as a Utopian gesture, an

act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new Utopian realm of the

senses, or at least of that supreme sense – sight, the visual, the eye – which it now

reconstitutes for us as a semiautonomous space in its own right, a part of some new

division of labor in the body of capital, some new fragmentation of the emergent

sensorium which replicates the specializations and divisions of capitalist life at the

same time that it seeks in precisely such fragmentation a desperate Utopian

compensation for them (7).

According to Jameson, Van Gogh’s picture produces strong emotions in a person. The picture is a statement. Consequently, Jameson compares this picture with Dust Diamond

Shoes by Andy Warhol. He argues that in comparison with Van Gogh’s footgear, Andy

Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes lack any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s modernist painting

(8). It does not help people to reach any better understanding of the world and people.

Warhol’s picture does not send any message; it does not express anything profound to a viewer in a gallery or a museum. Instead, it serves as a valuable commodity to be sold at an art auction. “Andy Warhol’s work, in fact, turns centrally around commodification, and the

19 great billboard images of the Coca-Cola bottle or the Campbell's soup can, which explicitly foreground the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical political statements” (9). Jameson, however, further argues that despite the picture ought to be a critical statement, Warhol’s picture seems superficial. The lack of depth,

Jameson notices, is an emerging trend in much of postmodern art. He considers depthlessness as “supreme formal feature of all the Postmodernisms” (9). He also observes what he calls

“waning of affect” in postmodern art. He suggests that feelings and emotions wane in postmodern art. “The waning of affect is, however, perhaps best initially approached by way of the human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said about the commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol’s human subjects: stars — like Marilyn Monroe — who are themselves commodified and transformed into their own images” (11).

In a chapter “Postmodernism and Lifestyles” Watson argues that one of the trends of postmodern culture is to prioritize style and appearance over the content. Watson claims that people voluntarily participate in a process in which they construe their identity by acquiring consumer goods. “The body is also a focus for identity construction in a more permanent and serious way” (65). In the postmodern society, even one’s own body is seen as a consumer commodity. Instead of being authentic, people strive to make of themselves a representation of whom they want to be. “In a competitive world, it is not enough to be ordinary, and we are all encouraged to approach more fully the ideal of bodily perfection in order to give ourselves added market value” (65). Watson suggests that consumption has become an essential experience of contemporary life. “The land which used to house factories and mines have now been developed for out-of-town shopping areas such as the Metro Centre in Gateshead or

Meadowhall in Sheffield” (64). Interestingly, this trend is observable even here in Brno, for instance, former factory Vaňkovka nicknamed for its founder Friedrich Wannieck has in the

21st century been reconstructed and reopened as a multifunctional shopping mall. Watson

20 bitterly points out: “Sunday no longer means a trip to a church or a chapel, but rather a visit to cathedrals of consumerism. Shopping malls have become major sites of leisure activity; the pilgrimage is enough even without the act of buying” (ibid.).

In the chapter, Watson claims that the advertising industry keeps creating false needs in people who are desperately trying to satisfy those needs by purchasing goods they do not really need. Yet the hunger for the goods may never be completely satisfied, since the advertising industry keeps inventing new and more acute needs in people. The victory of consumerism is complete when people base their personal identity on the brands and types of goods they buy. Watson argues that one of the strengths of consumerism is “that it is able to harness and direct our genuine needs even if the goods and services on offer more often than not leave us frustrated and unfulfilled” (66).

Baudrillard claims that “all of contemporary life has been dismantled and reproduced in scrupulous facsimile” (Connor 56). Baudrillard uses the term ‘hyperreality’ in which “the real is ceaselessly manufactured as an intensified version of itself” (Connor 174). As a typical example of ‘hyperreality’ may serve ‘reality TV’. Similarly, theme parks such as Disneyland or Santa Clause villages create hyperreality. In the Czech environment, instances of

‘hyperreal’ simulation may be found, for instance, in the popular tourist attractions for the

Czechs such as ‘western towns’, artificial sceneries attempting to recreate the atmosphere of

American Wild West. “For the epistemological nihilist that is Baudrillard, the endless network of signs endlessly referring to other signs with no referent in sight is not just a philosophical conclusion but the postmodern actuality of a media-saturated society where any resemblance of reality disappears into what he calls ‘hyperreality’” (Van Den Abbeele 21).

Thus, one of the vital traits of postmodern culture is a constant tension between simulated and authentic life.

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1.3 Postmodernism in Literature

Up to this point, this chapter mentioned several negative consequences of postmodernity. Writers such as Frederic Jameson or Terry Eagleton repeatedly stress in their publications that some of the ideas of postmodernity negatively impact contemporary society.

However, postmodernity has also positive consequences. For instance, it inspires the creation of unique literature and art including numerous noteworthy films. In the final part of the chapter, the aim is to introduce some of the critical elements of postmodernist film and literature. The closing section of this chapter introduces several remarkable works, which have been selected as illustrative examples of postmodernist film and literature. The works demonstrate the use of the postmodernist elements, such as fragmentation, multiperspectivity or parody.

Firstly, it should be mentioned that postmodernism does not distinguish between elite and popular literature. Watson mentions that “many commentators have observed that the distinction between high art and popular culture has been lost because of the uncertainty which now surrounds establishing unequivocal criteria for judging the value of the cultural form” (66). In postmodern art, there are no real boundaries between what is right and what is wrong. It becomes a playground for human creativity where everything is allowed. In a literary work, there are no objective signs of quality. It is impossible to uncritically accept some signs as inherently good while rejecting others as simply worthless. Therefore, everything becomes a subject of relativization.

Postmodern culture mixes high art with the features of popular art and kitsch, which often upsets conservative critics who refuse to accept the breakdown of traditional values in art. Such critics might feel frustrated and confused by such culture, and they might refuse it as something inappropriate or even perverted. Especially since postmodern art and culture often incorporate sex and violence. “The Postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by 22 this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so- called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply “quote”, as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance” (Jameson 2).

In the Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, McHale states that one of the typical features of postmodern writing is the rewriting or recycling of canonical texts (51).

Many postmodern authors create their works by using parody and pastiche. Despite the fact, that pastiche is a popular literary device in postmodernist literature, some critics condemn it as unoriginal style of writing. For instance, Jameson explains pastiche as “the disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style” (16).

Postmodernist creators often work with parody, which can in basic terms be defined as mocking of a dominant style. A well-known example of a postmodernist film which employs parody as one of its fundamental aspects is Monty Python and the Holy Grail from the year 1975. The film parodies the Arthurian legends. To sum up the plot, the legendary

King Arthur gathers a retinue of knights, and together they set out to fulfil a sacred quest, which has been bestowed upon them by God. They are sent to find the Holy Gail. King Arthur and the knights soon agree to split, because they want to heighten their chances of succeeding in finding the Grail. Since that point in the film, the story fragments into separate adventures the knights encountered on their quests. Furthermore, the film works with intertextuality and intermediality, which also typically appear in postmodern film and literature. Postmodernist texts often refer to other literary texts, other authors, or other works of art in general.

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According to Allen, “[intertextuality] foregrounds notions of rationality, interconnectedness and interdependence in modern cultural life” (5).

Monty Python and The Holy Grail mixes the medium of film with the medium of book. The frame of the story is created by scenes depicting “the book of the film” with and a woman’s hand turning the pages while the voice-over narrator introduces the adventures of the knights. The plot is also divided into chapters: “The Tale of Sir Robin”, then follows “The

Tale of Sir Galahad” and “Tale of Sir Lancelot”. Additionally, the film is interrupted by Terry

Gilliam’s cartoon scenes and another series of scenes in which a present-day documentary about King Arthur is being filmed. Thus, the film presents another common postmodernist element of mixing genres. These scenes seem utterly unrelated at first, but that changes when a famous historian being filmed for the documentary is suddenly murdered by one of the knights appearing unexpectedly in the shot. Another strand of the story of the film focuses on the investigation of a murder of the historian. Consequently, the police chase King Arthur and finally accuses him of the murder. In the last scene, King Arthur and Sir Lancelot are getting arrested, while the Holy Grail still has not been recovered. The last scene ends with a police officer looking into the camera and telling the cameraman to turn the camera off, which he reluctantly does. The film has an open ending. Open-endedness is also a common postmodernist feature.

Hypertextuality is yet another feature of postmodern writing. A postmodern text reminds of a palimpsest. In the past, palimpsest was a piece of parchment, from which the original text was erased. Subsequently, the parchment was reused. However, in some places on the parchment, the original text faintly shows through. Similarly, postmodern texts draw on older texts, but they often alter and reverse their original meanings. “Palimpsests suggest layers of writing and Genette’s use of the term is to indicate literature’s existence in ‘the second degree’, its non-original rewriting of what has already been written” (Allen 108). For

24 instance, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a text that is inseparably united to The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. In several places in Stoppard’s drama, Shakespeare’s original replicas from Hamlet surface in

Stoppard’s text, which intensifies the reader’s perception of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Are Dead as a palimpsest.

Multiperspectivity is yet another of the characteristics of postmodernist literature. The postmodernist works show that there is not a single universal truth. Every character has his or her story by which they can justify their behaviour. For example, multiperspectivity serves as a vital literary device in J. M. Coetzee’s semi-autobiographical novel A Diary of a Bad Year.

In a nutshell, it is a story of an elderly writer John M., who is commissioned by a German publisher to write a series of essays for a collection “Strong Opinions”. The writer has a free hand in the choice of the essays’ topics, so the range of topics is broad. He decides to write, for instance, about democracy, terrorism, animal rights and design. One day John meets a beautiful young Anya, who immediately captivates him with her sexappeal. At the time they first meet, she is in between jobs and because he fancies her looks, he offers her to become his typist, although he would manage the job himself. Over time, Anya and Señor C (as she calls the writer) develop a close friendship. Since they are from different worlds – he is a highbrow intellectual while she is a lively working woman with a sharp mind – their views often clash.

Nevertheless, they gradually begin to understand each other and learn from each other, thus grow spiritually and so may the reader. The book provides the story from several different perspectives. Furthermore, A Diary of a Bad Year has a special layout of pages. The multiperspectivity thus is supported by the visual fragmentation of the texts. Each page of the book is divided into several parts separated by space. At the top of each page, there are always parts of John’s essays for the “Strong Opinions”. Below, in the centre of the page, are John’s thoughts or accounts of situations from his point of view, as if it were his own diary. In this

25 section, the readers first read about his encounter with Anya. It provides other personal thoughts and feelings of the aged writer. The bottom part of the page is devoted to Anya’s observations, thoughts and feelings. Readers must actively participate in putting the whole story together. Just as each page is fragmented, so is the story itself. We see it from John’s as well as Anya’s perspective. What is more, the views John holds as a writer do not always match up with his personal accounts and thoughts. Multiperspectivity, fragmentation, intertextuality make this novel and other postmodernist works a noteworthy and enriching read.

The purpose of this concise chapter was to provide a concise introduction to socio-cultural movement of postmodernism, as well as to introduce several of its major figures and their insights. The text should serve as a necessary theoretical background for the subsequent analysis of Ali Smith’s seasonal novels. Therefore, the chapter discussed several formal features of postmodernism, namely parody, intertextuality, hypertextuality and multiperspectivity. The text also introduced several concrete examples of postmodernist works, in order to demonstrate, how the formal features of postmodernism may be used. In the following chapters, some of these formal features are elaborated on in the context of

Smith’s writing.

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2 The Collage of The Seasons: Fragmentation and Temporality

This chapter focuses on the postmodernist features of fragmentation and temporality as they appear in Smith’s seasonal novels Autumn, Winter and Spring. The first part of this chapter focuses mainly on fragmentation and the overall structure of the novels. The second part deals with time and its role in the novels. It also considers temporal distortion as a vital feature of postmodernist literature. Nevertheless, the intention was to discuss two postmodernist features in a single chapter since they are interrelated. In Smith’s seasonal novels, the use of both the fragmentation and the time distortion are the tools for achieving a chaotic and disarranged atmosphere, which in effect reflects the disintegration of the contemporary postmodern society. In an article for the Guardian, Smith argues that “Brexit’s particular divides aren’t just local, familial, national, international; right now they’re also a fracturing of our time, life before the vote, life after the vote” (Smith “‘Brexit’s Divisions Are

Fracturing Our Time’ – Ali Smith on Writing Autumn”). In the seasonal novels, Smith thematises the issues that divide people in contemporary society. For portraying those issues, however, she does not rely on the classical methods of structuring narrative. Instead, she works with distortion of temporality, fragmentation and creation of vicious circles, which according to The Rutledge Companion to Postmodernism “are together with looseness of association, paranoia and pastiche symptoms of the language disorders of postmodernist fiction” (Lewis 179).

Lewis also mentions that the postmodernist writers often search for new and unconventional ways in which they could structure and build their writings. Generally, postmodernist writers are sceptical of traditional narrative characterised by “wholeness and completion” (174). Instead, they prefer dissecting the text into “short fragment or sections, separated by space, titles or symbols” and thus create the space for “the open and inconclusive” in their writings (ibid.). The novels of the seasonal quartet are perfect examples

27 of such fragmented texts, shattered like a broken mirror and then put back together into a unique and meaningful collage.

Smith’s novels Autumn, Winter and Spring are not composed of a uniform body of the text. Instead, their structure looks as follows: each novel consists of several numbered segments which are separated by a blank page apart from a number in bold situated in a top- right corner of the page. These segments are then further broken up into smaller parts of the text which always begin in the centre of an odd page. One might relate these parts to chapters; however, unlike chapters, which are typically introduced by a number or a title, these parts lack such an introduction as well as they lack internal cohesion. In this thesis, however, these parts will be referred to as “chapters”, mainly for the sake of convenient simplification. The chapters are further divided into shorter bits of texts separated by a line space. These separations usually suggest a coming change in the point of view, the time or in the setting.

Regarding the fragments, the readers might observe an exciting feature throughout the series. Each of the seasonal books introduces several main characters, who are usually somehow related. They are either friends, lovers, or family, but they generally know each other. Their stories are always somehow intertwined, and they switch back and forth between each other at irregular intervals. However, all the main characters are introduced to the readers at the beginning of the novel, so that the readers have an idea, whose stories they will be following throughout the specific novel. That was at least true for Autumn and Winter.

Spring breaks this rule and presents a different structure. The first of the three parts of the book focuses mainly on the story of Richard Lease. As ever, it is interrupted by the narrator and Richard’s flashbacks, but until the end of the first part, it seems that Richard is the only protagonist of the novel. This changes in the second part. On page 129, well through into the novel, the readers meet a new protagonist DCO Brittany Hall, who comes into the centre of events at the moment she meets the mysterious girl Florence. Richard does not appear until

28 the very end of part two. In the final part of the novel, the three characters meet, and since then Richard’s, Brittany’s and Florence’s story mix into a mosaic of flashbacks and scenes from the different points of view of the characters. In the final part of the book, there is even one scene, taking place in a car, which is described several times from different points of view of the protagonists. Spring is surprising in its structure. The fact that Spring differs from the preceding novels of the series reminds the readers that they live in a swiftly changing world.

Finally, Spring having a different structure than Autumn and Winter corresponds to the fact that the seasons of the year vary from one another and each of them is unique. By changing the structure, Smith also shows that as an author, she has the unlimited power over her works and that she can change her mind about the structure of her quartet novels whenever she likes, may it be in the third book of the quartet.

2.1 Look Who’s Talking: The Narrative Voices in the Seasonal Quartet

Before the discussion of fragmentation may proceed any further, it is necessary to consider the style of writing in the novels at least briefly. Although the novels introduce multiple narrative voices, Autumn, Winter and Spring are mostly narrated by a heterodiegetic omniscient narrator, who knows not only their deepest thoughts and feelings but also has access to their memories.

It is worthwhile to mention that the narrator does not directly appear in the novels as one of the characters, but s/he often comments on what is happening. Although the narrator never reveals his or her identity, one might argue that Ali Smith is using the voice of the narrator and other characters so that she can express her own views opinions concerning current issues. In a review for The New Yorker, James Wood points out that Smith’s seasonal novels share “sense of bitter urgency” and that in the latest three novels Smith is at times

“earnestly didactic”. “[Smith] is an insistently political writer, and her most recent work can 29 be seen as an urgent, sometimes didactic intervention into post-Brexit British animosities, into a world that could be called, to borrow from one of her many punning characters, ‘nasty,

British and short’” (Wood “The Power of The Literary Pun”). Although Smith is not one of the characters, one might strongly feel her presence in the books.

Although it can rarely appear in other types of fiction as well, the notion of an author appearing in his or her work is a typical element in postmodernist fiction. Lewis states that in postmodernist fiction, the world created by the text and the real world are permeable to such an extent that it is impossible to separate one from the other (178). This concept is known as

“vicious circles”. The real world and the text might merge in several ways: either the author steps into his or her fiction (creating thus so-called “short circuits”) or real-life personas appear in the text (this concept is known as the “double bind”)(178). The seasonal novels feature several real-life historical figures, for instance, Christine Keeler and Pauline Boty in

Autumn, Barbara Hepworth in Winter and Katharine Mansfield in Spring. Although these historical women might appear only briefly in the books or they are only mentioned or discussed, they are still essential to the quartet. These “artistic spirits”7 have been conscientiously chosen by Smith for their art and literature, which allow people to “navigate through the froth of the present moment” (Jordan “Spring by Ali Smith Review – a Beautiful

Piece of Synchronicity”).

The narrator in Autumn, Winter and Spring is overt; s/he often comments on what is happening in the novels. As Makkai argues in her review of Spring for the New York Times, it is a “narrator with agency and personality, if not corporeality” (Makkai “SPRING by Ali

Smith”). Some of the narrator’s commentaries are causal, witty and provocative, often written in colloquial English, which creates a friendly and informal atmosphere. Firstly, the narrator

7 The “artistic spirit” is a fitting term for the historical artists and writers appearing in novels, whose presence as well as their art adds another layer of meaning to the text. Justine Jordan used the term in her review of Spring “Spring by Ali Smith review – a beautiful piece of synchronicity”. 30 speaks directly to the readers, encourages them to follow the story by using verbs’ imperatives such as: “imagine them arm-in-arm in the warmth” (Winter 45), “come with me now back to an early Saturday morning September 1981” (Winter 143) or “[l]et’s see another

Christmas” (Winter 174). Furthermore, s/he is using phrases such as “to cut a long story short” (Spring 207) or similar metatextualities8, which remind the readers that they are reading a story and that they are the mercy of the narrator, who has the control over what shall be said and what will remain obscure. Presumably, there is always more of the story, but the narrator decides what is essential and what can be suspended. However, there are many passages of the text where the narrator’s voice blends into the thoughts and the internal voice of the characters, and it cannot be distinguished with certainty, who is speaking. Smith uses primarily two methods to achieve this effect.

Firstly, the books are characterised by an unconventional graphic layout, which further fragments the fabric of the text. The eccentric typography of the text will be discussed separately in greater detail in the following paragraphs, yet for now, it is enough to mention that Smith ignores the conventional rules of punctuation. She does not use quotation marks or any kind of punctuation to set off direct speech. Neither does she use quotation marks or italics to indicate internal monologues in the text. For instance, in Winter, Arthur brings Lux to his mother’s house, and as they arrive, they notice a cardboard cut-out of Godfrey, an old- time celebrity, which Arthur thinks is his father (yet later it is revealed that it is not so). Lux, however, does not recognise the man on the cardboard. The passage follows in these words:

“The girl obviously does not recognise Godfrey. “Well, she wouldn’t. She’s way too young. If

Godfrey hadn’t been his father, he probably wouldn’t recognise him either” (Winter 81). The

8 According to the linguist Germaine Genette, metatextuality is a variety of transtextuality (in other words textual transcendence which “includes issues of imitation, transformation, the classification of the types of discourse, along with the thematic, modal, generic and formal and generic categorisation of formal poetics” (Allen 100)). Metatextuality then is “when a text takes up a relation of ‘commentary’ to another text” (Allen102). The metatextual commentary does not necessarily cite or even name the text it refers to, but the two texts are nevertheless united (ibid.). 31 readers are reading Art’s thoughts since it is him, who is pondering about whether he would know the celebrity if he, Godfrey, had not been his father. The text does not graphically highlight Arthur’s thoughts; instead, they just blend with the narrator’s description of the situation.

Secondly, in her novels, Smith combines passages narrated by the heterodiegetic narrator with those internally focalised9 by the novels’ characters. For instance, in the opening of a chapter from Spring, the readers follow the story through Brit’s eyes only. They see as much as she can, but they cannot access the thoughts and feelings of other characters.

Moreover, even though she does not become the chapter’s narrator, her voice or her idiolect is discernible. This sentence is taken from the opening of the chapter: “Yeah but enough about the filmmaker and what Russel would call the zzzzzzzzz of his story – back to Brit six months ago in October, in the van with Florence and two total strangers on a backroad fuck knows where going further north, at least Brit thinks it’s north” (Spring 291). Apart from internal focalisation, Smith uses other narrative techniques relevant to the perspective as well. In this example, the phrase in parentheses fulfils the function of the stage directions in a drama. It creates a dramatic effect as well as it highlights the absurdity of the situation. To Art, who is watching this scene, it seems like watching a farce on a theatre stage.

I cannot be near her fucking chaos a minute longer (His mother talking to the wall.)

Lucky I’m an optimist regardless (His aunt speaking to the ceiling.)

It is no wonder my father hated her (His mother) (213).

9 When a story is internally focalised, it means that the readers view the story through the eyes of a single character. In other words, the readers can see exclusively what the chosen character sees. Contrastingly, external focalisation means that the reader cannot access the inner thoughts and feelings of any of the characters and can only observe the story as if standing on the ‘outside’. The focalisation is another narratological concept invented by Germaine Genette mentioned above (Fludernik 36). 32

As it was already mentioned, long segments of text are devoted to the opinions, frustrations, and observations of the narrator. They provide the books with critical perspectives which reflect on the contemporary state of the world. They are concerned with politics, the environment, feminism, and a range of other topics, which need to be addressed by society. In these segments, the narrator addresses issues that need to be thought and talked about, at least that is the author’s conviction.

In the chapter “Omniscient Narrative Revisited by Ali Smith and Kate Atkinson”

Milada Franková mentions that Winter features “an unidentified narrator, possibly an authorial narrator, showing Ali Smith as very knowledgeable, passionately socially committed and fiercely critically, involved with the disturbing issues of today’s global and British cultural and political scene” (92). The same is true of the narrator in Autumn and Spring.

Nevertheless, some passages are not narrated by the narrator. Instead, they are created by more closely undetermined flows of consciousnesses. For instance, in Spring, Smith provides a passage, which is arguably narrated by a voice of the social media or of the people who profit from their users. However, it cannot be ascertained who precisely is speaking, because they hide behind the exclusive pronoun “we”. In one paragraph, Smith imagines, what the social media would say to people, if they had their own voice or perhaps what they are telling its users, without them even realising that they subject to their invisible will. What begins as a positive and friendly voice quickly turns into a voice that is blatant and obtrusive. “We want the best for you. We want to make the world more connected. We want you to feel the world is yours. We want you to see the world through us.[…] We want to know about all the places you go. We want to know where are you right now” (120). As the text progresses, other voices add to the mix, such as the voice of the internet: “We want to tailor our advertising bespoke to you. […] We want to be able to see you through that screen while you’re looking at something entirely else” (120-121). The message culminates into a final threatening

33 sentence: “We want all of you” (123). Winter, Autumn and Spring consist of fragments, and these fragments may present the plot from various perspectives while using various stylistic devices. “Style is never not content” stated Smith at a debate at the 2012 Edinburgh World

Writer’s Conference (Germanà and Horton ix). The style itself is a crucial device for expressing meaning in Smith’s novels.

Lastly, it is worthwhile to mention again that in her seasonal novels, Smith also plays with the graphic style of the text. In the novels, Smith works with multiple typefaces. Each chapter begins with a phrase in bold. Some words are written in italics to put additional stress to them: “She remembers that Daniel had given her a choice, to throw or not to throw” (Autumn 76). Italics are also used when a passage is being quoted. For example,

Smith’s quotes from an interview with Pauline Boty. The excerpt from the interview is transcribed in italics. Occasionally, upper-case letters are used to emphasise certain words or phrases within the text: “As she passes the house with GO and HOME still written across it, she sees that underneath this someone has added, in varying bright colours WE ARE

ALREADY HOME, THANK YOU, […]” (Autumn 138). Parts of text are also underlined.

“It’s that we’ve been rhetorically and practically encouraging ourselves to integrate” (Autumn 111). Additionally, in the previous quote, Smith combines text in italics with underlining, which on the one hand may seem gaudy and kitsch but on the other, it is a very confident and cheeky way of expression. Smith could not care less about conventional typographical rules, and she breaks them, whenever she fancies. Visually, the text gives a wild impression. The graphic form of Spring is the even more extravagant than Autumn and

Winter. In the novel, Smith also uses different fonts. When Richard is reading parts of the screenplay of the movie he is about to film, pieces of it appear in the book written in the

Courier font, which is the standard font for writing screenplays. Seeing the font facilitates in the readers the impression that they can look through Richard’s eyes at the actual script he

34 received, and thus, the experience becomes very authentic. Finally, Smith plays with the font sizes. Bigger sizes of the letters are used to stress some words or to suggest the loudness. The enlarged words are as if shouting from the page. “What we want is people in power saying the truth is not the truth” (3).

The use of fragmentation allows Smith to tell a story from various points of view in order to create an unbiased account of contemporary society. Each of the characters has its little narrative; a story about who they are and why they are the way they are.

2.2 There Is No Time Like the Present: The Seasonal Novels and Time

The following part of this chapter shifts focus to the theme of temporality in the seasonal novels. In an article for the Guardian, Smith claims that she intended her books to be

“time-sensitive experiment” (Smith “‘Brexit's Divisions Are Fracturing Our Time’: Ali Smith on Writing Autumn”), in which she wants to explore how the literary form of a novel relates

“both to time and its own time” (ibid.). The fact that time is central to all novels of the seasonal quartet shows in almost every chapter. A predominant number of chapters begin with some reference to time. The narrator first reveals when in time are the following described events taking place. Only later, the narrator discloses where the action is taking place and what characters are involved. “It is a Wednesday, just past midsummer” (Autumn 15). “In the middle of the night Art wakes up from a dream” (Winter 151). “It was September Brittany

Hall first heard of the girl, […]” (Spring 129). Other references to time might include opening sentences such as: “Having a bit of time out? The care assistant said” (Autumn 41). “What’s to-day?” (Winter 233). “Now for 140 seconds of cutting edge realism: […]” (Spring 223).

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, one of the typical features in postmodern fiction is the distortion of temporality. The temporality in a novel may be

35 disrupted in several ways, for instance, by creating anachronisms, which “disrupt temporal orders by flaunting glaring inconsistencies of detail or setting” (The Rutledge Guide to

Postmodernism 172).

One of the chapters begins by stating the exact time to the minute: “11.29” (27).

Waiting at a train station, Richard is talking with his imaginary daughter in his head. They have a conversation that is interrupted by a memory concerning his real daughter. Finally, he imagines talking to his real daughter. This whole thought process should presumably take a certain amount of time. Nevertheless, in one of the later chapters, it is “[s]till 11.29” (47) as the readers return to Richard, still waiting at the train station. This time, Richard is pondering about Mansfield and Rilke. After a while, as he looks at the nearby clock, he notices that it is still 11.29, which confuses him: “Is the clock broken? Is a single minute really that long? Is the clock that’s broken the one inside him?” (49). The text does not explain this time inconsistency. Richard leaves the platform for a while and returns at 11.37 (55), so the most straightforward explanation – that the clock stopped – is not possible. Thus, the scene signifies something else, for instance, the subjective perception of time – the tricky phenomenon which makes waiting for a few minutes at the dentist endless and then shortens a delightful evening with friends to a blink of an eye. Still, the scene has a destabilising effect that undermines the steadiness of time. Lastly, the scene might suggest that time in a novel is not subjected to the same rules of physics that apply to the real world but can flow according to the rules or laws that the author like a godly entity creates for it.

Similarly, in Winter, Sophia is lying in bed and hears the church bell to strike midnight. However, during the night, the bell does not strike midnight only once, but the moment repeats itself six times. The Christmas Eve is unnaturally long, at least to Sophia, who becomes trapped in a moment that does not pass; instead, it repeats itself like a looping vinyl record.

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On the other hand, Autumn provides several instances of the opposite phenomenon.

Time is depicted here as flowing unnaturally fast. It is out of control. Time does not stop for anyone, and it does not even slow down. “A minute ago it was June. Now the weather is

September. The crops are hight about to be cut, bright, golden” (85). The motive of time is connected to the motive of loss. “October’s a blink of the eye. The apples weighing down the tree a minute ago are gone, and the tree leaves are yellow and thinning” (177). This quote suggests that even the longest and sunniest summer must eventually come to an end. Later, after the trees give their sweet and ripe fruit, they shed their leaves in a beautiful rain of warm colours. Similarly, people lose hair, their faces wrinkle, old friends and young artists die, and memories of them vanish. Even 101-year-old Daniel, to whom time was generous, is slowly getting ready for his departure from this world. Still, Smith reminds us that this is only natural, and that time does not only take but also gives back. Thus, in his declining years,

Daniel meets young Elisabeth, and they instantly become “lifelong friends”, and as Daniels tells Elisabeth: “We sometimes wait a lifetime for them” (52).

Also, Smith takes inspiration from nature documentary films to manipulate time in

Autumn. The documentaries often feature so-called ‘time lapses’ which manage to capture on the camera slow processes such as flowers unfurling or other living organisms growing. These processes are not well observable by the human eye because they take a long time, but it takes only a simple film trick to speed them up. In order to create an ordinary film, the cameramen usually shoot about 24 frames per second, which are then played in the same speed (24 fps) on the screen, thus, creating the illusion of normal movement. However, to film a ‘time- lapse’, the cameramen shoot frames at much lower frequency. They shoot one photo or “one frame” per a few seconds, per several minutes or even per hours, distancing the shots further apart. On the screen, however, the film is played at the usual speed of 24 fps. Thus, birds can build their nests in less than three minutes, and people can age decades in the same length of

37 time it takes a person to clean one’s teeth. Smith creates a similar effect in her book:

“Time-lapse of a million billion flowers opening their heads, of a million billion flowers bowing, closing their heads again, of a million billion becoming leaves then leaves falling off and rotting into earth, of a million billion twigs splitting into million billion brand new buds” (Autumn 123). This almost a cinematic description shows yet another way of imagining time as a powerful physical phenomenon.

One of the elements that Autumn, Winter and Spring share is the disruption a continuous flow of the plot by jumping in time from the past to the present and vice versa.

The novels provide flashbacks into the past of the protagonists and reveal crucial memories which shaped them into the people they have become. Some of these precious memories the characters themselves have already forgotten. Still, the narrator grants the reader the privilege to return in time and see the pieces of memory which are now gone. For instance, in Autumn, the memories or flashbacks do not follow in chronological order, but they appear at random as if one impulse from the present triggered a memory buried deep in the brain to rise back to the conscious mind. For instance, Richard reads the word “cloud” in an email, which reminds him of a picture by Tacita Dean, which in mind triggers a chain of memories of his dear friend

Paddy, who died recently (Spring 76-82). Furthermore, the narrator remembers even what characters themselves had for some or other reason forgotten. Occasionally, the narrator begins to tell an episode with an introductory sentence such as in this example taken from

Autumn: “Here’s something else from another time, from when Elisabeth was thirteen that she also only remembers shreds and fragments of” (77). A similar example appears in Winter. As the bits of Art’s half-forgotten memories gradually surface, it becomes clear that when Art was a small child, he used to spend quite a lot of time with his aunt Iris, who was looking after him at the time. The jigsaw built from memories suddenly reveals Art’s and Iris’ relationship in a wholly different light. The memory begins like this: “Let’s see another

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Christmas. This one is the one that happened in 1991. Art has no memory of it” (174). The narrator also has the power to see into the future and described events that did not yet take place. In Winter, there is a scene “happening some time in the future” (223). in which Art has a conversation with his little son, who still does not exist by the time the novel ends. Thus, besides multiple flashbacks, the novel also features what might be called a flash-forward or a prolepsis.

In different cases, the narrator intentionally plays with the readers. In Autumn, for example, there is a scene in which readers first learn about Christine Keeler10. In the scene, she puts a suit of armour on her otherwise completely naked body. She carefully covers every part of her body apart from her privates, which she leaves intentionally uncovered. Dressed like this, she walks into the next room full of people, who break into wild laughter amused by

Keeler’s comical attire. However, at the end of this passage, Smith sets the story upside down when readers learn that the scene might have never had happened since Daniel only imagined it. “He dreamed it, though it’s rumoured to have happened” (93). In words of Rachael

Sumner, “Daniel dreams Keeler back into existence” (139).

Thus, the readers have been fooled. Reading the seasonal quartet, one must always pay close attention in order to be able to distinguish between what happened, what did not happen yet, what the characters thought or remembered that had happened and between what they imagined or dreamed that had happened. For instance, in Autumn, there is a scene in which Elisabeth is sitting next to Daniel, who is in a deep sleep in his care-centre bed, and she imagines the conversation they would have, if he woke up: “Oh, hello, he’d say. He’d look at the book in her hands. What are you reading? he’d say” (30).

10 Christine Keeler was a showgirl and a model, although she was often labelled as a prostitute. Keeler was engaged in the 1963 Profumo affair, the sex and political scandal, which was caused by her simultaneous sexual involvement with John Profumo, the British secretary for war and Yevgeny Ivanov who was the Soviet attaché. 39

It might be worthwhile to consider the grammatical tenses the narrator uses to convey the story. In older fiction, for example, in the writings of Charles Dickens, the narrator commonly uses the past tense to describe what is happening in the novels. The narrator using descriptions such as “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!” (Dickens

Christmas Carrol 2) alternatively, reporting clauses such as “said Carton” or “was the response of Monsieur Defarge”. In short, the narrator presents the stories as if they had already happened. Smith’s narrator, on the other hand, uses mostly the historic present tense11 as if the stories were happening right now, making the story dynamic and urgent: “On a

Saturday evening in October, a couple of days before he gets on a train north thinking naively that getting on a train to somewhere else he’ll be able to escape himself or survive himself,

Richard finally opens the latest Terp email” (Spring 83). Smith also occasionally switches to present continuous, to draw the readers right into the middle of the action: “But now, opposite her on a train speeding its way up the map of England, the girl, Florence, is talking about the invisible life she says there is in this – she is pointing at a spill of water out of one of the water bottles […]” (Spring 179). While it is true, that the past and the future tense appear in the narration as well, it can be argued, that by laying focus on the present tense, even in flashbacks, the story is in all its parts very intense.

In the novels, past and present coexist. One might even suggest that in the seasonal novels, the past is always present. Treating the past and the present is not an uncommon feature in Smith’s other writings as well. Germanà and Horton suggest that “Smith’s sense of the present as history in the making, happening now” is an essential dynamic in Smith’s fiction (ix). The relationship between past and present is vital in all three so far written parts of the seasonal quartet.

11 The online version of the Cambridge Dictionary defines historic present followingly: historic present is “the use of a verb in the present to describe past events, either informally, or to produce a special effect” (“Historic present”). 40

In Winter, there is a passage in which old Sophia is lying in her bed at Christmas Eve

2017 when the church bell strikes midnight. In the following paragraph, it is a November night in the early 1980s. A mysterious man, possibly a secret agent, pushes Sophia and she falls down the stairs in a hall in front of her flat by a while the next paragraph reveals what preceded this event, a scene from several days before, in which she was first contacted by a different strange man in a car, who wants to discuss a “pressing matter” but Sophia runs away and calls the police. The following paragraph, returns to the future moment, to the night when the man pushes Sophia down the stairs but the story reveals what happened before the incident – a man brakes in Sophia’s flat and when Sophia comes home he leads with her an unsettling conversation in which he attempts to intimidate her and convince Sophia to spy on

Iris, which she refuses, and as she is showing the man out of her building, he pushes her down the stairs and hurts her arm. Later that night, she takes a relaxing bath. Separated from this text by a line of spaces comes the following confusing passage:

Outside somewhere in the city, or town or village, wherever she was, a bell was ringing, yes

again, midnight. Where was she now? Could you stop time? Could you stop time

playing itself through you? Too late now, because here came Sophia in that bath she

ran more than thirty years ago soaping her sore arm and remembering as she does Iris

and herself in their win beds twenty years ago before that, […] (136).

Since the major part of the book is written in the present tense, including the memories, it seems as if the past was never truly gone, instead it feels as if happening right at this moment and not years and years ago. After all, travelling into one’s memories can be considered a form of time travel which is what Daniel means when he says to Elisabeth:

“Time travel is real, said Daniel. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute” (Autumn 175).

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Lastly, the novels deliberately confuse readers’ sense of time: “It was one of the days of a week in one of the seasons in one of the years, maybe 1949, maybe 1950, 1951, in any case sometime around then” (Autumn 163). Due to multiple flashbacks and changing perspectives, it might be challenging to keep a correct timeline of the events in one’s mind.

Since the novels often jump back and forward in time, the reader occasionally arrives at baffling sentences such as: “Last March. Five months before she will die” (31).

However, the readers are not asked to trace down the events as they happened in chronological order. Instead, each reader is connecting the fragments of text into a unique mosaic, which hopefully reveals a concrete image.

In Autumn, Daniel and eleven-year-old Elisabeth engage in a conversation in which

Elisabeth confines to Daniel that when she grows up she want to go to college to which

Daniel puzzlingly but cleverly replies “You want to go to collage” (71). Since Elisabeth immediately does not understand Daniel’s meaning he continues further: “Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange” (71-72). The motive of collage reappears throughout the books. Likewise, Autumn, Winter and Spring in themselves are also collages created by everchanging rules, where time and reality are shattered into bits and pieces, and each page turned reveals something new and strange. The reader must not take anything for granted. On the other hand, every piece of the text is like a jigsaw added to a puzzle which transforms the whole image. Smith wrote in an article: “The novels I like best, if we’re going to get individual, are the ones that invite, or demand, that their reader take part in their making, be present in them, be creative in response to them, and in being part, be the opposite of excluded, be active, be alive to them and them in turn alive to the reader” (Smith “Novel in the Age of Trump” 45). In the seasonal quartet, readers need to

42 actively take part in creating meanings in the novels. By using the postmodernist techniques of fragmentation and temporal distortion Smith achieves to keep the readers actively engaged with the story.

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3 Intertextuality in Autumn, Winter and Spring

The present chapter focuses on examining intertextuality in Ali Smith’s seasonal novels. Firstly, however, it is necessary to elaborate on the concept of intertextuality.

Intertextuality is hardly a new concept. Even Shakespeare refers in his plays to other works, for instance to the great ancient stories or the Bible. Afterall, his arguably best-known masterpiece Romeo and Juliet is based on an older text, The Tragicall Historye of Romeo and

Juliet written in 1562 by Arthur Brook as well as on other retellings of the tale of two star-crossed lovers. Intertextuality, in its varied forms, is a common feature of all writing.

Intertextual theory entered the field of literary study with the structuralist12 movement and continued to be a prominent subject of study for the poststructuralist theorist. According to the contemporary literary theorists, texts do not have independent meaning in themselves, rather readers arrive at the meaning by deciphering a network of intertextual relations.

“Meaning becomes something that exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out of the independent text to the network of textual relations” (Allen 1). The concept of ‘intertextuality’ was introduced into the literary discourse by Bulgarian-French philosopher, theorist and semiotician Julia Kristeva in early 1960’s. In her works, Kristeva elaborated on the semiology theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and the theoretical works of Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin. Kristeva was greatly influenced by

Saussure’s and Bakhtin’s insights. She combined their proposed linguistic models and major theories in her comprehensive studies (Allen 11-12). Yet, it is Kristeva, who first proposes that every text is composed from pieces of other texts that are woven together into a single unique patchwork. Consequently, it was proposed that “texts cannot be separated from the larger cultural or social textuality out of which they are constructed” (Allen 36). In other

12 “Structuralism, a critical, philosophical and cultural movement based on the notion of Sassurean semiology sought, from 1950’s onward to produce the revolutionary redescription of human culture in terms of sign-systems modelled on Sassure’s redefinition of sign and linguistic structure” (Allen 10) 44 words, one might read and fully understand a text only if one knows and understands the society and its culture which helped to shape and create the text in the first place. No text can occur in isolation without its author making a single reference to the socio-cultural backgrounds of the text’s origins. “Authors communicate to readers at the same moment as their words or texts communicate the existence of past texts within them” (39).

3.1 Shall I Compare Thee to a Shakespeare’s Play

Ali Smith’s seasonal novels are not texts which exist in isolation but they are created by countless intertextual relationships that connect them to numerous literary and artistic works by authors from various historical periods. The novels flourish with multiple references to the works of William Shakespeare. In Autumn, Shakespeare’s The Tempest can be considered a leitmotiv, since it is referred to repeatedly throughout the whole book. In an essay “(In-)Visibility in Ali Smith’s Autumn, Winter and Spring”, María del Pino

Montesdeoca Cubas elaborates on how The Tempest “clearly echoes the controversial climate in Britain during the novel’s genesis and publication” (73). Similarly, in her essay “The Art of

Memory in Autumn by Ali Smith”, Rachael Sumner develops the argument that in Autumn readers are “invited to draw parallels between Autumn and The Tempest, with Daniel/Prospero as guide and father figure to Elisabeth’s Miranda” (143). This parallel between the two works is not difficult to notice, since Autumn first alludes to The Tempest in the very first section or a “chapter”, which begins by a scene in which “an old old man washes up on a shore” (Autumn 3). The first time readers encounter Daniel, he is lying naked on a seashore, not unlike a castaway, washed ashore after surviving a shipwreck. This scene, however, happens only in Daniel’s head. For most of the book, Daniel is stranded in his between life and death in an increased sleep period, lying in a bed, which in a way has become his personal stranded island. 45

In a flashback from the year 1996, when Elisabeth is just eleven, Daniel takes her to see “The Tempest” in an outdoor theatre. Elisabeth enjoys the play, which according to her is mostly about “a girl whose father was sorting out her future for her” (208). It is not at all surprising that Elisabeth was most intrigued by the father-daughter relationship from the play, since she was raised only by her mother after her father abandoned the family. Young

Elisabeth misses a father figure in her life. After seeing “The Tempest”, she spends a night crying, because she cannot recall anything about her father, not even what he looks like. Over time, as their relationship evolves, it is Daniel, who stands in for Elisabeth’s absent father.

Daniel gradually becomes her Prospero as she becomes his Miranda, a beloved daughter that he never had. In one of the reviews, Daniel is aptly described as “a fatherly magician summoning the wealth of words and images that will shape [Elisabeth’s] life” (Akins, “Ali

Smith Begins a New Quartet of Novels with ‘Autumn’”).

Daniel has a magician’s flair about his personality since he can charm anyone he meets with his intelligence, spontaneity, and witty humour. It is Daniel, who awakes in

Elisabeth the love of art which leads her to study the history of art at a university. He reveals to her the beauties of Pauline Boty’s art by engagingly describing to her Boty’s pictures.

Elisabeth writes a successful dissertation “on the representation of representation in Boty’s work” which consequently allows her to become a lecturer at a university. Daniel influences also Elisabeth’s love life. She has several sexual partners, but every relationship she has is doomed to fail, since she is deeply in love with Daniel. The nature of her love is not in least physical, but merely platonic. Still, she is unable to love anyone else in that way, as she herself confesses to one of her lovers: “I’m already in love, […]. It isn’t possible to be in love with more than one person” (146). It might be interesting to point out that Daniel similarly loved only once, unfortunately for Elisabeth, his love did not belong to her. “There have been very many men and women in my life whom I hoped might, whom I wanted to love me, […]

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But I only, myself, ever, loved, in that way, just once” (159). To hear these words from Daniel hurt Elisabeth greatly, yet it is ironic that she shares his experience and his words might as easily have been hers. In many aspects, Daniel shapes the lives of Elisabeth, just like Prospero shapes the life of his daughter. The novel provides yet another link that clearly connects

Daniel with Prospero. There are several scenes in the novel, in which Daniel performs simple magic tricks. In one scene, he reminisces about his little sister who used to adore his “jokes and how he made the coins vanish”. Once, he dazzles Elisabeth with the same trick. “Then he put his hand in the pocket, took out a twenty pence piece, held it in front of Barbara the cat.

He did something with his hands and the coin disappeared! He made it disappear!” (175).

Apart from the ability to impress, Daniel shares Prospero’s greatest power – the ability to put ideas into people’s heads. In Autumn, readers of Shakespeare might certainly appreciate numerous entertaining allusions to The Tempest, some of which are more obvious than others.

Winter, on the other hand, is linked with Shakespeare’s comedy Cymbeline.

In Winter, Lux retells the plot of Cymbeline during the Christmas lunch at Sophia’s house (198-200). She expresses her opinion of the play: “I read it and I thought, if this writer from this place can make this mad and bitter mess into this graceful thing it is at the end, where the balance comes back and all the lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated, and that’s that place on earth he comes from, […] I’ll live there” (200). Lux appreciates that

Shakespeare managed to resolve such a confused and complicated plot of his play in such an elegant manner, which few of the first-time readers or the first-time viewers of The Tempest might foresee in advance. Similarly, Winter provides a plot that deals with a whole variety of complicated issues, such as family relationships, politics, refugee crisis, power of memory, but still Smith manages to masterfully hold the fragmented plot together. As Wood brightly observes, “[Winter] ends more like a Shakespearean comedy than like a political tragedy, with an air of optimistic renaissance and familial unity” (Wood “The Power of the Literary Pun”).

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Finally, in the so far last novel of the seasonal quartet Spring, one might find intertextual allusions to Pericles, Prince of Tyre, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays. Spring as a refashioning of Pericles is discussed, for instance, by Justine Jordan in her Guardian review

“Spring by Ali Smith review – a beautiful piece of synchronicity”. Similarly, John Day mentions this intertextual relationship in his review “Spring by Ali Smith — seasonal delight brings quartet towards a unified conclusion” for the Financial Times.

Another link between Shakespeare’s plays and the novels of the seasonal quartet might be seen in the way Smith and Shakespeare choose names for their characters. In her novels,

Smith pays attention to naming of the characters. In Shakespeare’s times, giving a name to a person had a special importance for people since they believed that there was a special link between one’s identity and their “labels” or names (Maguire 11). The Elizabethans considered naming as “a form of behavioural predestination” (13). It did not matter, whether people lived up to the meaning, “the destiny”, encoded in their name or whether they rebelled against that which had been assigned to them at birth. Their names still carried these meanings (Maguire

13). The common Elizabethan practice of giving predestining names is a typical feature in

Shakespeare’s plays. Just like a wise and sometimes jesting godfather13, Shakespeare chooses names for the characters of his plays. Some of these names then very often predestine the characters to their fates, while other names mock and ridicule. Always, they carry important information, a key characteristic, that the audience should not miss. Maguire mentions several examples of such ‘talking’ names, yet countless others (Malvolio, Philostrate, Bianca) could be analysed in the same fashion: “Consider the pacifist Benvolio (goodwill) in Romeo and

Juliet. The soothsayer who prophesises harmony at the end of Cymbeline is aptly named

13 In Where’s the Will, There’s a Way, Maguire writes that in Shakespeare’s times it was not the parents who had the privilege of naming their own offspring. Rather, it was customarily the children’s godparents, who chose the names for their godchildren. This practice, however, was changed in 17th century, when parents began to demand a greater control of the deciding process of naming their own children (12). 48

Philharmonius (suggesting love of harmony)” (17). Similarly, Smith chooses for the characters names that are somehow significant or determining. In Autumn, Winter and

Spring, there is always at least one scene, in which characters discus the names or labels that have been assigned to them.

In Autumn, Daniel explains to Elisabeth that her surname “Demand” does not come from English as one might instinctively think but from French expression “de monde” which he translates as “of the world” (50). In another scene at the Check & Send counter, Elisabeth discusses with a clerk the strange spelling of her name: “And there is the notion, too, in your particular take on our story so far, that I might be some kind of a weirdo because there is an s in my name instead of a z” (26). Her name predestines her to stand out. She differs; she is the

“unexpected queen of the world” as Daniel calls her (52), which is a title that suggests magnificence but also great loneliness for the one who stands above everyone else.

Similarly, Daniel explains his own name: “It means that I am lucky and happy he said.

The Gluck Part. And that if I am ever thrown into a pit that’s full of hungry lions I’ll survive” (51). Daniel alludes to the biblical figure of his namesake Daniel. In Winter, it is explained that Sophia was given a Greek name while her sister Iris was given a Roman name.

Their names were chosen to commemorate the places where their serious father fought during the Second World War (205). The nicknames characters give to one another, reveal hidden aspects of their mutual relationships. For instance, Iris calls her sister Philo, a name which shows the contempt she keeps for her younger sibling: “Philo Sophia, Iris says. And I thinks all these years she’s been imagining that what I meant was the she was like a philosopher. But

I didn’t. […] I meant the pastry kind. […] The kind you can almost see through, it’s so nearly not even there” (211). Lux, a mysterious girl with atypical name, who by her lovely presence brings exuberance, light and clarity into the lives of other protagonists of Winter, is known to them by a name which “recalls St Lucy, whose day used to coincide with the winter solstice,

49 patron saint of light in darkness” (Merrit “Winter By Ali Smith Review – Luminously

Beautiful”). Likewise, Arthur, Brittany and Florence have names that deserve to be interpreted. Arthur (shortened to Art), for instance, struggles throughout Winter to find his authenticity as one might read in Art’s thoughts: “Everybody knows the fake I am” (183). Art writes fake articles for his website about experiences he did not have (183-186) and even introduces Lux as his girlfriend Charlotte to his family (84), thus faking a relationship which he no longer has. His fake, artificial nature echoes even in his name. Lastly, Smith has explained that Florence is a character based on Marina in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of

Tyre. “Like her Shakespearean forebearer, Florence has a near-supernatural ability to persuade people to do the right thing. She is said to have walked “untouched out of a really nasty sex house in Woolwich” in a direct riff on a scene in Pericles” (Jordison “Not the

Booker: Spring by Ali Smith Review – Topical but Not Plausible”). Names in Autumn, Winter and Spring are playfully chosen by Smith to point out to the readers some important characteristic or a notable feature of the novels’ protagonists.

3.2 Huxley, Dickens and The Little Red Cap

Shakespeare, however, is far from the only writer, who appears in Smith’s seasonal quartet. In Autumn, Elizabeth randomly opens her book on a page which is quoting a short passage in The Tempest by William Shakespeare : “’O Brave new world!’ Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble” (Autumn 18). Smith is making a clever connection between

Shakespeare’s play and another acclaimed English text, which reappears throughout the pages of Autumn, that is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. These three texts (e.i. The Tempest,

Brave New World and Autumn) are at constant dialogue, which shows that old text from the past may still be relevant today. 50

In one of early chapters of Autumn, Elisabeth is waiting in a post office for her number to come up so that she can apply at the Check & Send for a new passport. To pass the time,

Elisabeth begins to read a book, since her custom is to ‘always be reading something’ as her friend Daniel often advised her. “She opens her book in her hand. It is the very first chapter of

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONAING

CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto COMMUNITY, IDENTITY,

STABILITY” (Autumn 17). The World State’s motto strongly resonates with the situation of

Britain in the time of Brexit. Seeing the capsized words “COMMUNITY, IDENTITY,

STABILITY” on the page seems in the very least ironic if not outright sardonic, since the novel portrays just how much divided and unstable the British society currently is. Other parallels between Autumn and the Brave New World might be drawn as well. For instance, In Amusing

Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman mentions Huxley as a prophesier who foresaw the possibility of our culture becoming “a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the marked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and the rationalist who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into the account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions” (viii). Smith thematizes in her seasonal novels the superficiality and triviality of the contemporary culture, which becomes apparent at the moment, Elisabeth connects at her mother’s house to the internet where the following glossy articles fight for her attention as well as her “clicks”: “Look Into My Eyes: Leave. EU campaign consulted TV Hypnotist. She scrolls and skims the screen. The Power To Influence.

I Can Make You Happy. Hypnotic Gastric Band. Helped Produce social media ads. Are you concerned? Are you worried? Isn’t it time? Being engrossed in TV broadcasts equally hypnotic. Facts don’t work. Connect with people emotionally. Trump “ (137). Other chapters of the book depict hostilities such as building of razor fences over common land (55) or

51 hateful inscriptions on walls (53) that according to Simmons can be considered “familiar tropes of a dystopian novel,[…] an impression aided by allusions to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New

World (1932) (147).

Autumn is linked with yet another text by a celebrated British classic. Charles Dickens is perhaps one of the best-known writers in the English-speaking world. Over the centuries, his books have not lost their popularity, which can be testified by the high number of film and theatre adaptations of his works. For one of the most recent films based on Dickens’ novel one might name The Personal History of David Copperfield released in 2019. In Autumn,

Elisabeth is reading Dickens’ historical novel A Tale of Two Cities. However, the first allusion to the text is made by the narrator in the very first sentence. “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times” (3). Thus, Smith changes the original quote from the beginning of the first chapter in A Tale of Two Cities, which goes as follows: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of time, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was a season of Light, it was the season of Darkness […]” (1). The novels have more in common than just a similar introductory sentence. They both thematize the motive of duality. A Tale of Two Cities juxtaposes not only the two cities, London and Paris, but also the two male protagonists,

Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. England, the country of relative peace contrasts with revolutionary and bloodthirsty France and the noble idea of human liberty is set against the brutal and ruthless killing brought about by the French revolution. But first and foremost it is a story of two worlds: the world of the wealthy aristocracy and the world of the poor and famished commoners. In Autumn, the society is also divided into two camps. This time, however, the conflict resides not between the rich and the poor, although money certainly play an important role, as ever. “All across the country, the usual the usual tiny percent of people made their money out of the usual huge percent of the people. All across the country,

52 money, money, money. All across the country, no money, no money, no money” (61). Yet, the main split is between those who voted for Brexit and those who voted against it in the

British referendum: “All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d won” (59). Autumn attempts to demonstrate that as the Brexit vote helped to reveal, the British society is divided into two implacable groups, who vigorously hate each other as well as blame each other. In her essay “The Art of Memory in Autumn by

Ali Smith”, Racheal Sumner argues that by the intertextual connection between Dicken’s text and Autumn, Smith is reminding her readers of the evil consequences brought about by societal division. In The Tale of Two Cities, Dickens depicts a society divided by the French

Revolution while in Autumn Smith depicts people separated into ideological camps over the

Brexit vote. The old times’ issues are thus contrasted with the dramatic events of the present:

“Resisting the urge to take sides, Smith instead seems to warn against a failure to engage meaningfully with the past: an almost wilful refusal to remember those crises which have resulted in the fracturing and destruction of social and national cohesion” (Sumner 134).

Yet, the societal conflict between the Brexiters and the Remainers is far from being the only duality in the novel. Like in The Tale of Cities, there are multiple dualisms that deserve to be mentioned. For instance, it might be argued that young Elisabeth and

101-year-old Daniel represent the contrast between youth and old age. Wise and experienced

Daniel often plays a role of a mentor to Elisabeth, passing down to her his knowledge and advice. On the other hand, Daniel no longer takes part in the events of the present. His time has passed and so will he in near future. It is up to Elisabeth to gather what she learned and what he taught her about the world so that she can face the challenges of today.

Countless allusions to the works of Charles Dickens may also be noticed in other parts of the seasonal quartet. In Winter, Smith alludes to Charles Dickens and the Christmas Carol.

The very first sentence of the book “God was dead: to begin with” (3) is a clear reference to

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Dickens’ beginning “Marley was dead to begin with” (1). In Charles Dickens’ Christmas

Carol, Scrooge is visited by three spirits at Christmas Eve, who eventually lead him to reconsider his life and become a better person. Several days before Christmas Sophie is seeing strange spots at the side of her vision. She is bothered by it, but when she visits her optician, the optician informs Sophie that there is nothing noticeably wrong with her sight. Yet, Sophie notices that the spots she is seeing are gradually getting bigger and finally take form of a

“disembodied head” reminding her of a “head of a child” which is following her everywhere, hovering even “floating by itself in mid air” (7). Annoyed at first, Sophie gradually notices and appreciates “the life in it, the warmth of its demeanour, and as it bobbed and nodded merrily in the air next to her like a little green buoy in untroubled water” (9). Soon, Sophia is followed around by a vision of a child’s merry head. Despite the narrator’s reassurance that

Winter is “not a ghost story,” (4) a ghostly apparition “bobbing like a helium balloon bought at a country fair” (20) is present in the story. Like Scrooge in The Christmas Carol, Sophie gets the chance to re-examine her past over Christmas and perhaps even change. However, it needs to be mentioned that in the seasonal quartet, there appear intertextual references to even older and more universal texts than Dickens’ The Christmas Carol, such as, for instance,

Little Red Riding Hood.

In a passage describing the wild and free-spirited character of Pauline Boty, the narrator describes and incident from Boty’s life which alludes to a scene from the fairy-tale.

In the climax of the original tale, the wolf dressed as the grandmother and Little Red Riding

Hood exclaim:

“Oh, but grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have!”

“The better to eat you with!”

And scarcely had the wolf said this, then with one bound he was out of bed and swallowed up Red-Cap (Grimm, and Grimm 142).

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In Autumn, the analogous exchange between Boty and a boy is described as follows:

“A boy asked her, why do you wear so much bright red lipstick, all the better to kiss you with she said and jumped out of her chair and came after him, he ran away, he was actually sort of terrified […]” (244). Yet, in this scene, Boty is the predator, the wolf who plunges after the helpless victim. Boty presents ‘the danger’, the assertive female sexuality that startles and intimidates the male counterpart. It subverts the gender dynamics of the original fairy tale.

This episode is symbolic of what was Boty achieving also in her art –in “all heart throb versus cunt throb” (244) paintings such as It’s a Man’s World. The book also provides an excerpt from an actual radio interview with Pauline Boty. “The ideal woman, a kind of faith faithful slave, who administers without a word of complaint and certainly no payment, who speaks only when spoken to and is a jolly good chap. But revolution is on a way, all over the country young girls are starting and shaking and if they terrify you, they mean to” (250). In the novel, the borders between reality and fiction are thin. Smith mixes real existing texts with fiction.

On one page, one may read a fictitious conversation between Pauline Boty and Daniel Gluck

(244), while only several pages later, there is a quote from an actual radio interview (250).

Smith obtained the information about Boty from several sources which she lists at the end of the book. Mixing fiction and reality is a technique used in all tree so-far published books of the seasonal quartet. In the first fragment of Winter, the narrator informs the readers that the story they are about to read “isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning […], and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth” (4).

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3.3 Blake and Other ‘Arty-art’

Apart from allusions to the works of famous writers such as Shakespeare and Dickens, the texts make also numerous and more subtle references whose link with some original text cannot be determined with certainty. The intertextual link between the texts is weaker, but it is still there. As for instance in the first “chapter” of Autumn, Daniel plays the following lyrics of a song in his head: “Chorus: How many worlds can you hold in a hand. In a handful of sand. (Repeat)” (6). The motive of a grain of sand in the palm of one’s hand representing an infinity of worlds is present in the well-known poem “Auguries of Innocence” written by the romantic poet William Blake. In Smith’s lyrics cited above, one might hear an echo of

Blake’s poem:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour (Blake 1-4).

There is a significant contrast between these two texts. Blake’s poem is a considered to be an example of “high” art while lyrics of a song are usually considered as popular and not of great artistic values, despite there being some exceptions (e.g. Bob Dylan’s poetic expression for which he won the Nobel prize). Questioning the border between elite forms of art and its popular forms is one of the motives in Smith’s seasonal quartet. It shows, for instance that in the eyes of a child there is considered only the beauty of the art piece. The child does not discriminate between “high” and “low” art. Eight-year-old Elisabeth is not able to distinguish between valuable art and worthless art. For a child, art is what it finds beautiful.

Only later it realizes, after it is properly educated, what has the “real” value, what the genuine art is, or as Elisabeth’s mother call it: “arty-art” (44). “We’ve got pictures, Elisabeth said. Are 56 they arty-art? She looked at the wall behind her mother, the picture of the river and the little house. The picture of a squirrels made from bits of real pinecone. The poster of the dancers by

Henri Matisse. The poster of a woman and her skirt and the Eiffel Tower. The blown-up real photographs of her grandmother and grandfather from when her mother was a baby. The ones of herself as a baby” (44).

In Winter, there is a passage, already mentioned, in which a narrative voice recounts in a stream of consciousness a list of things which are “dead”, among which stands that

“[p]oetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead Literature was dead,

[…]” (3). This quote however is in contradiction with the novel Winter as well as with other

Smith’s novels, which are overflowing with intertextual allusions to other works of art, literary and other. By referring to Huxley, Shakespeare, Dickens, Boty and other artists and their works, Smith shows that literature and art is far from dead. Instead, her novels reveal that it is firmly rooted in people’s memory as ever before who continue to seek and find valuable answers, insights, and guidance. Ali Smith herself openly admits that literature may enlighten us even on the current issues, since it has all happened in one form or another before: “It’s all there in classical myth, in Gilgamesh, in Homer; Dickens’ Hard Times, considering what happens when a country’s people become fodder to the latest industrial technology and the people who control it” (Smith “‘Brexit's Divisions Are Fracturing Our

Time’: Ali Smith on Writing Autumn”). Sumner writes that the intertextual connections made in Autumn create a complex of cultural memory, cultural heritage which establish a link to the past. She further argues that these “embedded intertextual echoes” are not only a part of an active cultural memory but may in fact hold a key to the future as well. “Literature, then is configured not as the mere passive recall of events and ideas, but of an active dialogue with the past through which the horrors of the present may be mollified or eliminated altogether” (144).

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The aim of this chapter was to discuss the use of intertextuality in Smith’s seasonal novel. In her works, Smith alludes to the works of other authors to convey to the story an additional layer of meaning. For each of her so far published seasonal novel she chooses a theme, one Shakespeare’s play and one Dickens’ novel that share some of the issues that the seasonal novels deal with. This creates an effect of cyclicity. None of the events that shape people’s lives today (and about which Smith is writing her books) are inherently original.

They have happened with different details before and were written about by other writers.

Time repeats itself as the cycle of the seasons. What one might do, however, is to listen carefully and learn from the stories of the past and thus not to repeat the mistakes people already made in course of history.

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4 The Critique of Postmodern Culture in the Seasonal Novels

This chapter deals with postmodern culture as Smith portrays it in the seasonal novels.

The chapter consists of two parts. The first section focuses primarily on the cultural exhaustion of the postmodern era, which is characterized by cultural recycling. Cultural recycling is a phenomenon which manifests itself, for instance, in the form of retro-styling and the general feeling of nostalgia. It can also be argued that cultural recycling is typical in the film industry when the same patterns and ideas are used repeatedly to maximize the chances of the success of the film, often at the expense of originality and creative choices.

Both retro-styling and the recycling of previous popular film formulas appear as motives in the seasonal novels.

The second part of this chapter introduces Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to

Death, which is an essential text in cultural and media studies. Smith seasonal novels often resonate with some of the ideas that Postman develops in his work. Both Postman and Smith examine how the mass media influence people’s perception of the reality. The season novels depict that the mass media have a massive influence on how ordinary people think, behave, and even vote their political representatives.

4.1 Cultural recycling and the Mass Media

Cultural recycling is a postmodern phenomenon that is well observable in everyday life. One of the symptoms of cultural recycling is, for instance, retro styling of fashion. “In fact, the term ‘recycling’ prompts a number of thoughts: it inevitably brings to mind the

‘cycle’ of fashion: in that field, too, everyone must be ‘with-it’ and must ‘recycle themselves’

– their clothes, their belongings, their cars – on a yearly, monthly or seasonal basis. If they do not, they are not true citizens of the consumer society” (Baudrillard 100).

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Baudrillard also argues that in a consumer society, people are exposed to various pressures that force them to buy things, for instance, clothes, furniture, or appliances that they do not inevitably need. However, the false pressures created by advertising in the mass media lead people to seek happiness via a “non-rational social process of consumption” (100).

In Autumn, Elisabeth is waiting at the post office. As she looks out through the window, she notices a magnificent old building, which served as the town post office. The postal service which connected people for generations was, however, moved to more modest premises. The seating there is broken so when Elisabeth sits down on the seating to wait

“something clanks inside its structure and the person sitting along from her is jerked an inch into the air” (16). Whereas the former post office has been turned to a row of designer chain stores selling perfume, clothes, and cosmetics.

Similarly, several chapters later, Elisabeth’s mother goes to a former local electrician’s business that used to sell the electrical appliance. However, the shop does not serve its original purpose and instead has now been transformed into “a place selling plastic starfish, pottery looking things, artisan gardening tools and canvas gardening gloves that look like they’ve been modelled on 1950’s utilitarian utopia” (54). Apart from selling mostly useless and kitsch merchandise, the shop also sells retro-stylised goods. “The kind of shop with the kinds of things that look nice, cost more than they should and persuade you that if you buy them you'll be living the right kind of life, her mother says between lips still holding two little nails” (54). Elisabeth’s mother realises that in a consumer society, people are pushed into senseless buying of material objects in a search of internal happiness. These material objects, however, often fail to provide long-term satisfaction. Under the pressure of companies’ advertising which daily convinces people that if they need to buy their products in order to be happy, pretty or respected, people continue to buy goods while being caught in the endless cycle of consumption.

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Another type of cultural recycling may also be noticed in Spring as the film director

Robert agrees to make a movie about a fictional affair between two significant literary figures – Katharine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke. The film is supposed to be an adaptation of a book which is based on a historical fact. When Paddy asks Richard what the new film’s working title is, he answers: “Same as the novel, […]. To persuade people it’s an adaptation of something a lot of people bought so it must be good” (Spring 45). Thus, a novel is recycled into a film to secure the profit instead of risking losing money by creating an original story.

In 1922, Mansfield and Rilke lived by a coincidence in the same small Swiss town.

Even though the two writers never met, Richard receives a script which depicts Rilke and

Mansfield who not only know each other but also have a wild sexual affair together. In the scene from the script excerpt that appears in the book, both writers are riding in a car pursued by Katherine’s infuriated husband who exposes their affair: “Katherine and Reiner, who has his hand inside Katherine’s dress inside her coat, surface from their kiss. Katharine notices first, then Rainer, the violently swaying cable car across from theirs with the man in it battering the glass in silence” (Spring 86). Since the producers of the film want to create a box office hit, which will earn them lots of money, the truth or authenticity have to give way to shallow erotic scenes that draw crowds of viewers into the cinema. Therefore, once again, the film recycles a popular scheme in the film industry turning the novel’s original sensitive story into a far-fetched flick about a scandalous love affair. The film is going to present its viewers with content that they already know from other films. The only difference will be that this time the lovers are going to be famous writers from the past.

The novels depict that the mass media commonly help to shape how people perceive the reality around them. Nevertheless, since the mass media such as radio and television have become so common and important in people’s lives, people might not even be conscious of

61 the massive influence they have. In Autumn, Elisabeth converses with a clerk at the post office and describes him the imagined situation of what would happen if they, Elisabeth and the post office clerk, were at the moment characters in a film: “If this were a drama on TV, Elisabeth says, you know what would happen now? […] What I’m saying is, Elisabeth says, you’d be dead of oyster poisoning and I’d be being arrested and blamed for something I didn’t do” (25-26). Films and television influence, how Elisabeth sees the world around her.

Similarly, in Winter, Sophie is driving a car while listening to the radio. As her mind wanders off, she imagines herself narrating a BBC4 Radio program. Sophie takes on the role of the broadcaster. “The thing about Christmas music that’s particularly interesting, she thought to herself in a knowledgeable but not offputting Radio 4 voice as if on a program about Christmas music, is that it is thoroughly ineffectual, it just won’t and doesn’t work at any other time of the year” (Winter 38). The scene is noteworthy since Sophie is framing her thoughts into the format of a radio broadcast.

4.2 Amusing Oneself to Death

Neil Postman is the author of an outstanding book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which concerns the cultural and societal development of contemporary society in relation to modern mass media. The book was published in 1985; however, it seems that its message is as current today as it was back then, if not more. Due to the advances in technology, many people now choose to spend a significant portion of their lives online on the internet, facing almost an endless distraction.

Postman’s book focuses on highlighting the differences between pre-television and post-television world. In contrast to the ‘80s, television now shares its supremacy in its reach and popularity as a medium with the internet. Postman’s warning message concerning the growing influence of the mass media seems even more critical today when people partially 62 migrated with their activities to the internet. McHale argues that Web culture causes the infiltration of reality by the virtual. In people’s collective imagination, the reality loses its materiality and disintegrates into streams of pixels. “It sometimes seems as though all the services and institutions on which we depend – commerce, journalism, education, health care, professional and personal communication, entertainment (it goes without saying), even sex – have migrated online, shedding their materiality for the ephemerality of electron streams and pixels” (McHale Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism 134).

The internet impacts people’s lives in many ways. However, one of the adverse effects is the overload of information that people face. It becomes hard for people to navigate through that much information effectively. One might feel paralysed by the sheer number of choices that the internet provides, and ironically, it becomes much harder to make informed decisions. The internet is flooded with fake news, hoaxes and false propaganda. Furthermore, using social media as a news source brings with itself severe threats in the form of misinformation. On the social network one might encounter hate speech, cyberbullying or become a victim of an identity theft. These and other dangers that lurk on the internet are thematised in the seasonal novels.

In Winter, Art’s ex-girlfriend Charlotte takes revenge on him after their break-up and sends fake tweets from Art’s Twitter account @rtinnatrue, which has the picture of his face on it, to mock him and humiliate him in front of his followers. She sends out lies from his account to discredit him, at least as Art is convinced. “Today’s tweets, which began half an hour ago, also under his username are telling everybody another blatant lie. Today Charlotte is tweeting pictures she’s found somewhere of Euston Road in a snowstorm” (50).

Consequently, the fake tweet triggers a storm of sarcastic and hateful responses. In one case,

Art receives on his stolen twitter account a hateful sexist reply that borders with a life threat:

“The replies are already foaming like badly poured lager. Fury and sarcasm and rancour and

63 hatred and ridicule, and one tweet which said if you were a woman I would be sending you a death threat right now” (Winter 50).

Nevertheless, Smith’s seasonal novels portray both sides of the internet. On the one hand, it serves as a platform where people can express their spite and animosity, but on the other hand, it connects people with the same interests, creates communities of friends, who can easily remain in touch, although they might live in different countries or even continents.

After many years Iris reconnects with her nephew Arthur over the internet. Thanks to the modern technologies, it was easy for Iris to find her nephew Art, although she and her sister,

Art’s mother, did not talk to each other over three decades. Art and his aunt keep in touch with each other, as he explains to Lux, since the day, Iris started following Art on Twitter and later friended him on Facebook (155). Iris gradually becomes an important person in Art’s life.

The two-faced nature of the internet is also revealed in Spring. The novel presents several passages in which an unmanned collective voice is revealing the nature of modern mass media. “Now don’t go getting us wrong. We want the best for you. We want to make the world more connected” (119). However, as the seemingly friendly and comforting voice continues its rant it gradually reveals the dangerous it presents, while masking them as innocent entertainment: “We want you to take our fun personality test to find out what kind of person you really are and who you'll vote for in the elections. We want to be able to categorise you precisely for helpful input for other people’s fun projects as well as our own”

(120). Thus, the speech continues in a crescendo of potentially threatening messages, which reveal how modern technologies can easily be abused to ordinary people’s harm.

The passages serve a critical purpose in the novel since they help to expose the treacherous nature of the mass media. Understanding the media is vitally important, as Postman argues when he writes: “Only through a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects of

64 information, through demystifying media, which combined with a deep and unfailing awareness of the structure and effects is there any hope of gaining some measure of control over television, the computer, or any other medium” (187).

In the chapter “Media as Epistemology” Postman argues, “the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense” (18). However, by the “nonsense” he does not mean junk TV. Quite surprisingly, Postman argues that junk-entertainment is the best and most useful part of the TV while it does not pose any serious threat for the public health

(185). Television is most dangerous when entertainment masquerades as essential and informative media.

Postman argues that entertainment is the supra-ideology of television. “No matter what is depicted or from what point of view, the overarching presumption is that it is there for our amusement and pleasure. That is why even on news shows which provide us daily with fragments of tragedy and barbarism, we are urged by the newscasters to ‘join them tomorrow’” (102). Postman argues that people watch the news because they see it as a form of entertainment. The stories are considered a form of amusement, including those, which should be taken seriously and not as a source of momentary entertainment. Smith also notices this trend, since the same idea of news as entertainment also resonates in Spring: “Now what we don’t want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition” (Spring 3).

“And now for something completely different” is a famous catchphrase popularised in the British sketch comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Sitting behind a news reporter’s desk, John Cleese would pronounce this sentence in a grave voice to introduce the following sketch, often totally unrelated to the other funny sketches shown in the episode of the series. In other shows, for instance, in a television news broadcast, this seemingly universal catchphrase might go unnoticed. However, it in funny in Monty Python’s Flying

Circus because in each episode the authors add an absurd element to the scene which wholly

65 undermines the seriousness and the authority of the newscaster. For instance, John Cleese would gravely say the line from behind a spacious desk with a big microphone, but instead of a television studio, he would find himself in a middle of a field or waist-deep in a sea. The short humorous scenes, however, reveal that a news broadcast is created by a vast collection of signs, such as the respectable clothes and perfect haircut that the reporters wear, the big important desk in the studio, their urgent voices with clear diction, which create the impression that they are in control. By adding an absurd feature, such as seeing the newscaster cuddle with a pig while reading the news, the viewers are thrown off balance. Postman also mentions the critical role music plays in the news. There is no logical reason for the music being a part of a news broadcast; However, it is still a crucial part of it. Furthermore, its function is the same as it has in films or theatre. The music plays to entertain and create a specific mood (Postman 119). The various beeping and energetic drums are there to create a sense of urgency. Also, the images that often accompany the news are only seemingly relevant, since they provide meaningless information, which does not add any value to the news (Postman 120). It prevents people from getting bored or uninterested for only a few second, since the moment one loses interest in the programme, s/he changes the channel.

In the chapter “The Age of Show Business”, Postman writes: “The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds so that your eye never rests and always has something new to see” (101). The narrator in Winter mentions the endless cycle of news which daily demand people’s attention. Seconds after seconds the television grinds out facts and commercials which the viewers need to make some sense of: “The first headline today in the 20 second news round-up after the 20 seconds of advertising says that there is now 80% more plastic int the earth’s seas and on its shores than estimated, and that this is three times as much plastic as was formerly thought” (219).

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In 1986, when Amusing Ourselves to Death was first published, Postman wrote that the average a news story was only about 45 seconds (Postman 119), yet today the length of a news story might be expected to be even shorter. However, it stands to reason that an important issue or an event cannot be described in depth in only several seconds. Therefore, it can be argued, as Postman does, that the purpose of the story is not as much as to inform.

Instead, its goal is to entertain. It is meant to be trivial. Providing a news story in such a short time inevitably leads to the reduction of context, which causes that the information might be misleading. There is a thin line between a piece of misleading information and disinformation.

Postman rationally argues that what most of the facts and data that are daily presented in the television in the form of context-free information, which is useless apart from giving people topics for discussion. To illustrate his point, Postman asks his readers the following rhetorical questions: “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle

East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war?” (79). After seeing the news, most people will likely go about their day as usual. The information they gain from the broadcast does not alter their plans or routine business.

Postman mentions that a load of information comes to the viewers with a pseudo- context, which he defines as “a structure invented to give fragmented, irrelevant information a seeming use. But its only value ends up being as entertainment” (88). People have no practical use for the vast amount of information they receive. Postman suggests that these incomplete facts are useful, for instance, when one is solving a crossword or entertaining guests and friends at cocktail parties. Postman claims that people need to “invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use” (88). The trivialisation of the stories that are processed by the mass media may have serious consequences.

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In Spring, Paddy opposes the trivialisation of the hardship and suffering that refugees and asylum seekers encounter on their way from war-stricken countries: “Don’t be calling it migrant crisis, Paddy said. I’ve told you a million times. It’s people. It’s an individual person crossing the world against the adds. Multiplied by 60 million, an individual people all crossing the world, against odds that worsen by the day. Migrant crisis.” (Spring 68) In the news, the viewers repeatedly hear the expression “migrant crisis” or “refugee crisis”, yet these few words may never encompass human stories and misery; instead, it only reduces a complex issue to an abstract idea.

Similar to the phrase “and now for something completely different” Postman mentions

“Now… this” as a mode of discourse that the anchors commonly use in the news to indicate that what the following news they are about to tell has no connection or relevance to the following one, they are about to tell the viewers. It acknowledges that in this speed-up electronic media world, almost everything being reported has no context and no meaning.

Furthermore, people are now accustomed to being constantly entertained. The hunger for bewilderment and sensations is also reflected in Winter. In one passage, Art is participating in a heated discussion with Charlotte, who unlike Art realises that people watch the news for the excitement. “When pre-planned theatre is replacing politics, she said, and we’re propelled into shock mode, trained to wait for whatever the next shock will be, served up shock on 24 hour newsfeed life we’re infants living from nipple to sleep to nipple to sleep

— […]— from shock to shock and chaos to chaos like its meant to be nourishment” (57).

Similarly, Postman compares television to the soma of Brave New World. Soma is a legal opiate, which causes people to feel happy and carefree. It ensures that people remain passive, thus easy to control by the totalitarian state. In the chapter aptly entitled “The Huxleyan

Warning”, Postman warns the readers that unless one carefully studies and understands the media and how they operate, one might end up in a world without coherence or sense.

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Postman asks his reader to listen to one important lesson from the Brave New World. “For in the end, [Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were all laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking” (189).

In a chapter “Reach Out and Elect Someone”, Postman argues that the television quickly became the primary way of presenting political ideas. Television became used as a useful tool in political campaigning. Even television commercials were increasingly politicised, often advertising ideological messages. These messages, however, have necessarily been shortened to the few minutes long commercial. The power of political advertising is immense since the short adverts are likely to reach a wide audience. In the

Consumer Society, Jean Baudrillard marks advertising to be “perhaps the most remarkable mass medium of our age” (Baudrillard 125).

Similarly, Smith claims that mass media, in combination with modern technologies, are powerful tools for shaping people’s socio-political views and opinions. She claims that there is nothing new about “blatant political roguery” as well as “the handshake between propagandist persuasion and whatever the latest technologies happen to be” (Smith “‘Brexit's

Divisions Are Fracturing Our Time’ – Ali Smith On Writing Autumn”). The link between propaganda and the mass media is also reflected upon in Spring, wherein a fascinating passage, the voice of the mass media is disclosing its secrets to the readers: “We want to help with government propaganda and to help people skew elections, and not to hinder people organising and promoting ethnic cleansing, as helpful by-products of being there 24/7 for you” (Spring 122).

The mass media influence whom one decides to give his or her vote in the elections.

For instance, concerning the election of a president or a governor, Postman argues that people do not longer vote for the best-qualified man or a woman, in other words, someone who

69 would be the best leader (156-157). Instead, they choose their candidate based on their image created via television. The significance of good television appearance became apparent in

1960 when J. F Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in the first televised US presidential debate.

Postman’s claims seem almost prophetic, considering the election of contemporary American president Donald Trump, who was for many years known to the broad American public as a television personality, hosting, for instance, the reality TV show The Apprentice. In Winter,

Iris mentions the absurdity of contemporary political discourse when she says: “And now for our entertainment when we want humiliation we’ve got reality TV instead, Iris said. And soon instead of reality TV, we’ll have the President of the United States” (Winter 182).

Ali Smith’s seasonal novels engage the reader in a meaningful contemplation of contemporary postmodern consumer culture as well as they help to demystify mass media, thus preventing the people from being easily manipulated and controlled by their massive influence on various aspects of people’s lives.

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5 Conclusion

The purpose of this thesis was to analyse selected postmodern features in three latest novels Autumn, Winter and Spring, written by Scottish female writer Ali Smith. Smith's work is stylistically informed by postmodernism. For the novels, she chooses an unconventional narrative structure. However, in the Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Germanà and

Horton argue that Smith’s works elude the simple designation of postmodern literature. As

Germanà and Horton mention, Smith’s work extends “beyond the dominant scepticism in the postmodern era” (6). Smith is a writer who profoundly concerns herself with morality, ethics, truth, and authenticity in her novels, and Autumn, Winter and Spring are not exceptions.

The novels do not have a single protagonist nor a single narrator. Instead, they remind a literary symphony where multiple voices harmonically intertwine and alternate. The seasonal novels are written from various points of views, including the view of the omniscient narrator. The multiple perspectives are then combined to create a vivid and vibrant portrayal of the condition of contemporary society. Every bit of the text can be viewed as a small tile placed in a beautiful but sometimes also saddening mosaic. In the seasonal quartet, Smith does not provide the readers with a straightforward plot and simple black-and-white characters. On the contrary, she forces the readers to actively take part in deciphering the meanings in the novel. Each of the characters has their little narrative, which allows the readers to see how the characters see themselves, while the use of multiperspectivity allows the readers to see how the characters see each other.

In the novels, Smith uses the postmodernist techniques of fragmentation and temporal distortion by which Smith achieves the atmosphere of chaos and disorientation. The continuous flow of time is distorted by characters’ memories and imaginations. Winter features even one scene taking place in a close future. The temporality is disrupted in several ways. The novels feature several anachronisms as well as inconsistencies in various details. 71

The temporality in the novels is disrupted anachronisms, and other inconsistencies of details and setting. Consequently, the novels’ atmosphere reflects the disintegration of the contemporary postmodern society.

Intertextuality is yet another important feature of postmodern literature which Smith relies upon in the seasonal novels. Autumn, Winter and Spring are created by a network of intertextual relations. Smith alludes to the works of other authors to enhance the stories with additional layers of meaning. For each of the so far published seasonal novel, she chooses a theme of one Shakespeare’s play (The Tempest; Cymbeline; The Pericles of Tyre) and one of

Dickens’ novels or stories (e.g. The Tale of Two Cities; The Christmas Carrol). The various intertextual links add multiple layers of meaning to the seasonal novels. Smith also alludes to

Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World. The novels demonstrate that the literary works form the past may also teach and enlighten readers about the present and maybe even suggest which way should one choose in the future. Smith reminds to the readers that what everyone might do to better understand the present is to carefully read the stories and learn from their content. The texts also serve as the cultural memory of the society. They allow the reader to reflect on the mistakes that humans have made in the intricate course of history.

Ali Smith’s seasonal novels also provide a critique of contemporary culture based on mass consumption. It is described as a largely exhausted culture that relies on cultural recycling and nostalgia. Furthermore, the novels attempt to demystify mass media, which is a vital step for remaining in control over the massive influence they have on people’s lives.

Despite being stylistically informed by postmodernism, Autumn, Winter and Spring challenge the ideas of postmodernity by strongly criticising contemporary culture.

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7 Resumé

Cílem této diplomové práce je analyzovat postmoderní prvky ve třech vybraných románech skotské spisovatelky Ali Smithové. Práce je rozdělena do šesti částí. „Úvod“ představuje magisterskou práci a poskytuje základní informace, které se týkají Ali Smithové a jejího posledního projektu, tj. sezónního kvartetu.

Kapitola „Vítejte v Postmodernismu“ poskytuje základní teoretické poznatky, potřebné k následné analýze postmoderních prvků v románech Ali Smithové. Zabývá se postmodernou ve smyslu společensko-kulturního hnutí a představuje několik významných literárních vědců, kteří výrazně přispěli k postmodernímu diskurzu. V neposlední řádě jsou pak na příkladech několika vybraných filmů a románů vykresleny prvky postmodernismu, které jsou následně detailněji rozebírány v kontextu vybraných románů Ali Smithové.

Kapitola s názvem „Intertextualita v románech Autumn, Winter a Spring“ se zaměřuje na odhalování intertextových vztahů, které se v dílech podílí na vytváření dalších vrstev významů. Romány odkazují na díla Williama Shakespeara a dalších významných autorů.

Následná část „Koláž ročních období: fragmentace a pojetí času v románech Autumn,

Winter a Spring“ se zabývá fragmentovanou stavbou analyzovaného textu. Následně rozebírá

četné narativní hlasy a střídání rozličných perspektiv v díle. Závěrem se kapitola věnuje pojetí

času a jeho zkreslování v románech Autumn, Winter a Spring. Kvůli fragmentaci, střídání perspektiv a chaotické časové linii romány působí unikátním dojmem jedinečné postmoderní koláže, která aktivně zapojuje čtenáře do procesu utváření významů.

„Kritika postmoderní kultury v sezónních románech“ zkoumá způsob, kterým

Smithová zobrazuje postmoderní kulturu a úlohu masových média v současné společnosti.

„Závěr“ shrnuje hlavní poznatky práce, načež přehodnocuje sezónní kvartet jako dílo, které ač je po stylistické stránce postmoderní, paradoxně problematizuje myšlenky postmoderny tím, že kritizuje postmoderní společnost těžce ovlivňovanou masovými médii.

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8 Resume

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse three selected novels written by Scottish writer

Ali Smith. It consists of six parts. “Introduction” introduces the thesis and presents necessary information concerning Ali Smith and her latest project – the seasonal quartet.

“Welcome to Postmodernism” provides a theoretical background to the analysis of postmodern features in Smith’s novels. It discusses the socio-cultural movement of postmodernism and introduces several prominent scholars, such as Jean-François Lyotard or

Jean Baudrillard, who significantly contributed to the postmodern discourse. Furthermore, the chapter uses a few postmodern novels and films to illustrate some of the postmodernist features, which are later thoroughly discussed in the context of Smith’s novels.

“Intertextuality in Autumn, Winter and Spring” focuses on revealing the additional layers of meaning created by the intertextual relationships which connect the seasonal novels to the works of William Shakespeare as well as other famous British writers.

“The Collage of The Seasons: Fragmentation and Temporality in Autumn, Winter and

Spring” examines the fragmented structure of the novels. Subsequently, it analyses the multiple narrative voices that create the multiperspectivity in the novels. Finally, the chapter shifts focus to time and temporal distortion in the novels. Due to the fragmentation, the multiperspectivity and the chaotic timeline of the story, the novels create an impression of a unique postmodernist collage which actively engages the reader in its interpretation.

“The Critique of Postmodern Culture in the Seasonal Novels” focuses on Smith’s depiction of the role the postmodern mass media play in the contemporary society.

The “Conclusion” summarises the main ideas discussed in the thesis as well as reconsideration the seasonal quartet as formally postmodernist work which, paradoxically, challenges the ideas of postmodernity by criticising the implications that are brought forward by the postmodernist consumer society influenced by powerful mass media.

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