Fiction in Dark Times: the Brexit Novel and Ali Smith Harald Pittel (University of Potsdam)
he 2016 vote to leave the European Does Brexlit mean Brexlit? TUnion has incited many tormenting questions regarding the present state and o begin with, there have been future development of British society. Tboth broader and more narrow Contemporary novelists are reacting assessments of what qualifies as Brexlit in differently to this situation, giving rise the first place. Overviews include books to what some reviewers have labelled that appeared before and after the vote, “the post-referendum novel”, “Brexit and which were written in various cultural fiction” or simply “Brexlit”. It seems well and political contexts. For example, in worth investigating what constitutes his detailed account of the new literary this emergent strand of literature in landscape published in Financial Times, terms of common themes and shared Jon Day also includes Howard Jacobson’s prospects. How do authors with different anti-Trump satire Pussy (2015).1 A backgrounds approach the referendum reviewer for the Guardian, Danuta and its implications? To what extent Kean, draws attention, among others, can such fiction be understood as a new to Heinz Helle’s Eigentlich müssten wir phenomenon, or even genre in its own tanzen (2015, translated into English right? And which are the strategies chosen as Euphoria)2, an apocalyptic vision of to make literature function as political (German-yet-generalisable) consumer engagement? After a general survey of the society. However, what most approaches field, this article will have a closer look to Brexit fiction have in common is that at Ali Smith’s Autumn and Winter, often they are indeed centred on contemporary hailed as the landmarks of Brexit fiction. Britain, and while some of these books take issue with its political elites and governmental system, such as Andrew
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Marr’s farcical thriller Head of State back cover of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir (2015) and Douglas Board’s dystopian 13; see below). It should be stressed satire Time of Lies (2017), the more that in most Brexlit not only “Europe typical pre- and post-referendum novels – as a geographical reality and political
© Image by Matt Brown via Flickr (source) focus on the larger society as such. idea – is largely absent from its pages”3 t is here that a somewhat problematic (save an EU-funded flowerbed here and Itendency becomes manifest. Most there), but so are the inhabitants from Brexit novels are more specifically Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, written from an English perspective; not to speak of the larger history of they are concerned, like Paul Kingfield’s immigration entailed by Britain’s historical novel The Wake (a 2013 colonial past that would fundamentally Joyce-inspired experiment in pseudo- complicate the idea of indigenous archaic language to probe into the Englishness. In all these books, there past levels of collective consciousness), can be no doubt, this is England in with “English identity”, and their times of crisis, “England divided” (as proceedings are located geographically in Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole somewhere between London and “the (2017), which envisions the precursors heart of England” (as indicated on the of that division in history). Brexit
Page 59 Hard Times 101 (1/2018) Fiction in Dark Times: the Brexit Novel and Ali Smith fiction thus privileges England in order publisher. Advertised to offer “a fictional to expose it in fractured state, typically response to a complex issue” on the back centred around a more or less complex, cover, The Cut is centred around the and more or less fictionalized, though chasm of understanding between Grace always threateningly deep, social conflict. Trevithick, a successful London-based documentary film-maker, and Cairo n some cases, as in McGregor’s Reservoir Jukes, an ex-boxer from Dudley (at the I13 or Adam Thorpe’sMissing Fay (both centre of the formerly industrial Black 2017), Brexit fiction shows similarities Country) who is down to collecting with the crime novel. Both stories, as metal from defunct factories on zero- Jon Day adequately summarizes, revolve hours contracts. Grace meets Cairo for around a missing girl which functions an interview; their mutual attraction as “a void at the heart of a novel that leads up to an affair in which the social is really about our prejudices and how and cultural distance is for a short time we fail to communicate them to one overcome, but when Cairo is unable to another”4. However, whereas the most bear the difference, he feels driven to a recent instalment of Mark Billingham’s most melodramatic (self-)destructive successful Tom Thorne novels, Love Like response. The gendered and class-marked Blood (2017), immerses the detective in divide thus evoked brings up several key a post-referendum setting, Thorpe’s and issues in which, dramatized and distorted McGregor’s books feature yet another as they are under the fatal influence of void as they also leave empty the detective’s the populist right, one can see the extent place. Unlike the traditional trajectory of social alienation, financial hardship that is arranged around the detective and lack of solidarity that has marked as an agent restoring a certain sense of pre- as well as post-referendum England. order to a world otherwise out of joint, in But to analyse social division in this Missing Fay and Reservoir 13 it is mainly clear-cut way has arguably little to offer for the reader to bridge the clash of widely for a more profound understanding why diverging perspectives, thus encouraging so many voted for Leave, which was by the reading subject, as it were, to no means just a provincial or lower-class overcome society’s communicative gaps. phenomenon.5 While there seems to be considerable interest in holding up a his bridging approach is most mirror to contemporary society, only a Tconspicuously conducted in handful of Brexit novels make a serious Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017), effort at exploring the wider cultural the one book that was explicitly dimensions of the present crisis, and there commissioned as a “Brexit novel” by its are only few examples suggesting that a
Page 60 Hard Times 101 (1/2018) Harald Pittel more complex approach to social critique, owever, these social pathologies beyond the reduction in terms of country Hare also evident in the absurdity vs city or the like, might be in order. of rather harmless everyday situations. Thus when Elisabeth Demand, a 32 From Autumn … year-old art history lecturer, goes to the downsized post office to renew her li Smith’s Autumn (2016), highly passport using the practicable Check & Acelebrated by the press and Send service, she is told that her head is shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker the wrong size and that her eyes are too Prize, should be considered as an small (on the photograph she intends to exception in this respect, one that also submit, that is). That uneasy impression resists any facile categorization in terms about her is very much in tune with the of existing genre markers such as satire or reservations shown by her mother who dystopia. The first to appear in a planned has been thinking that something is quartet that follows the seasonal cycle, wrong with her daughter since childhood Autumn is out to exhibit a vibrant ideal, days, when Elisabeth became friends with the rich potential of love as inspirational Daniel Gluck, their aging neighbour. connectedness, provocatively pinned Elisabeth’s friendship with the thin and against the reality of present-day British cultivated man of unclear (German- society that has lost all its belief and French-English) descent intensifies over hope save narrow-minded framing, the years, much to her mother’s disdain, compartmentalization and privatization, who finds such a relationship “unnatural” in short: the drawing of lines and borders and “unhealthy”8, suspecting that Daniel for its own sake, amounting to “a new must be a pervert or gay (or both). kind of detachment”.6 While there is However, Daniel’s desire is really much little resistance against this predicament, more sublime. While it remains unclear the commodified culture of meaningless what exactly he did during his life – aside delimiting and measuring exerts a from once having written the song lyrics severely alienating effect on individuals. for a one-hit wonder – he is certainly Such ‘unculture’, the novel suggests, is an artist of sorts, highly receptive and what’s behind the aggressive mentality expressive of what art has to offer, of distrust and hostility that sometimes always intensely engaged in inspirational leads to outbursts of hatred, such as relations. It is this friendship in creative habitual racism, anti-immigration dialogue and joint story-making that campaigns or the murder of Jo Cox.7 gives Elisabeth an idea of who she actually is, as Daniel reveals to her what is really relevant about art, truth and
Page 61 Hard Times 101 (1/2018) Fiction in Dark Times: the Brexit Novel and Ali Smith life itself. Her congenial friend is always stifling traditionalism in academia. But on her mind as Elisabeth gradually unlikely as it might seem, her mother, discovers a voice, sexuality and love-life too, is eventually able to go beyond of her own, and arrives at an aesthetic the conventional frames of thinking in ideal animated by a sense of feminism which she was stuck for so many years.
© Image by Polyrus via Flickr (source)
(centred around the female 1960s She discovers a new way of loving when pop artist Pauline Boty, whose artistic she meets Zoe, a former child-star, now vision Daniel once fell in love with and a psychologist and generally an open- which he manages to communicate as minded and understanding woman (such an original experience to Elisabeth). love is “unnatural” and “unhealthy”, Elisabeth mockingly remarks)9. On top aving experienced the full of that, her mother turns into a political Hand unrestricted potential of protester of sorts as she desperately inspirational connectivity, Elisabeth is attacks an ominous electric fence that thus empowered to resist, at least partially, is installed in open nature to usurp a the overall conformism of the detached piece of common land for an unclear – unculture, reacting emotionally and yet probably detrimental – purpose, its critically to empty conventions when mere presence bringing up associations facing narrow-mindedness in outsourced with detention camps for refugees. The (formerly) public services as well as fence is heavily guarded by security
Page 62 Hard Times 101 (1/2018) Harald Pittel and Elisabeth’s mother is immediately literature is far removed from mere arrested after the attack; however, she is dystopianism, which is implied as firmly determined to extend her protest, Elisabeth, sitting at Daniel’s deathbed, planning to unrelentingly bombard the comes to swap her reading from Brave fence with a pile of desirable antiquities New World to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. that previously were on her mind before she ‘got political’. The fence, introduced hat makes Autumn more as a key symbol of the ‘new detachedness’, Wconvincing than other approaches thus transforms into a sign of hope and to Brexit fiction, then, is that it avoids resistance, and it is in this sense that being lured too much into the discursive the novel’s final lines encourage the arena of Leave and Remain camps, while reader to see the roses that still exist positioning itself nonetheless clearly on in the all-encompassing autumnal rot. the latter side by capturing the mentality, or structure of feeling, of the new he hope the novel invests in detachment and by animating the belief Tovercoming the deplorable state of in the richness and intensity of life that society is also formally enacted. Evoking comes with removing rather than erecting life in its full and shared intensity, borders. It would hence be too simple reality in Autumn principally eludes to dismiss Autumn for ‘merely’ offering any endeavour to fix it to one particular a general critique of (post-)modern point of view, as is made clear by the alienation, of too much abstracting from non-linearity and multi-perspectivity the particularity of the contemporary of Smith’s narrative, which, indebted to crisis. At the same time, the novel’s Virginia Woolf in its proclivity for free focus on England serves mainly to reveal indirect discourse and also inspired by the constructedness of English identity Shakespeare’s Tempest, takes the reader and the questionable limitations thus from dream to the everyday, a collage maintained. While the multiple French oscillating between past and present as and German connections around Daniel well as life and death, amounting to a implicitly expose the idea of separating world in which memories and empathy British from European culture as utter are as real as any other experience. In the nonsense, it is for Daniel to point out days of post-truth, Smith’s imaginative that the roots of Elisabeth’s surname, realism seems to encourage, in a way, “Demand”, are probably French, “du a return to facts – the deeper facts, that monde”. To be really demanding, then, is, reflecting an intersubjective sense is to be a citizen of the world, resisting of truth that is not simply arbitrary the facile coding of identity in terms of but authentic and solidary. Such national boundaries. Thus while Smith’s
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novel implicitly advocates a climate of a few other issues. No wonder that the openness regarding the ‘refugee crisis’, sisters have not spoken to each other for and casually registers immigration nearly three decades. But a connection from Eastern Europe (as reflected in remains, as Sophia has bought the the staff of care assistants responsible sixteen-bedroom country-house in for Daniel), it should be added that Cornwall that was previously inhabited the Scottish writer questions more by Iris and her commune of political deeply the idea of an indigenous ‘core’ friends. In this atmosphere of stifled of the British population, exposing it as nostalgia, Sophia continually drifts into always already constituted by migration. memories of her youth spent with Iris and feels haunted by a childlike ghost. … to Winter … he Cle(a)ves also get a generational inter (2017), the second Tdimension as Arthur (called Art), Winstalment in Smith’s seasonal Sophia’s son, has been left somewhat cycle, takes a more domestic approach at disorientated between his mother’s and addressing the specific mood of Britain’s aunt’s diverging outlooks. Recently divided society. Loosely connected dropped by his girl-friend, Charlotte, to its predecessor via shared themes for his indifference regarding the crises and similarities in characters, Winter of the present, Art in fact prides himself transforms Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for bringing a political dimension into a subtly crafted post-referendum into his blog on nature observation allegory. The novel is centred around (“Art in Nature”), which, however, is the Cleves family, the name evoking exactly what makes Charlotte furious, social cleavages against the backdrop of dismissing Art’s project as his “irrelevant the deeper connections of kinship. At reactionary unpolitical blog”.10 Joining first sight, the two elderly Cleves sisters, his Scrooge-like mother for Christmas, Sophia and Iris, could not be further Art visits her in her (otherwise empty) apart regarding their world-views. The house, picking up Lux on the way, a introverted Sophia is a former art student young and witty immigrant woman, and a once successful, now bankrupt and beautiful and pierced, from Croatia but socially isolated entrepreneur, having just extraordinarily fluent in English. Having lost her own chain of stores specialized just run into her at a Bus Station, Art in home decoration, whereas Iris is a gives Lux the weird sum of 1008 pounds socialite and left-wing political activist, for pretending to be Charlotte during her life-long engagement ranging from his stay with his mother. Surprisingly, anti-war to environmentalism and quite skinny and homeless Lux turns out to be
Page 64 Hard Times 101 (1/2018) Harald Pittel a catalyst par excellence. Not only does ut the novel’s meticulous allegorizing she easily connect with the otherwise Bgoes far beyond dramatizing the uncommunicative Sophia, but she also perceived and actual social divides, as encourages Art to invite her sister, Iris, it reaches out for a discussion about to come over as well. An unexpected the deep, intricate and precarious get-together unfolds between the four of relations between art and politics, or them, Sophia, Iris, Art and Lux – between individualism and solidarity. Within the
© Image by Tim Jokl via Flickr (source) people who would otherwise have been ‘logic’ of this set-up, Sophia, the ‘fallen fixated on their separate ways. Smith artist’, would embody an understanding impressively demonstrates her skills of of art as a contemplative ideal that is sketching out quirky yet to some extent removed from the everyday, amounting plausible characters, and it is only when to a detached ideal of self-cultivation a general impression has been evoked that is seemingly hinted at through Iris’ regarding these individuals’ overall long-standing habit of nicknaming her outlooks, their divergent mental worlds, “Philo”. However, Iris later undercuts how they became what they are, that the this lofty association with philosophy, contrary positions of the Brexit divide, suggesting that seeing art as a separate the Remain and Leave camps, come to be sphere has led her sister not to higher attributed to Iris and Sophia respectively. levels of insight, but towards sophistry and the market-place. Epitomizing the opposite position, Iris emphasizes that
Page 65 Hard Times 101 (1/2018) Fiction in Dark Times: the Brexit Novel and Ali Smith art and politics are in fact identical underscored as it is set – in a surprising in that they both aspire to bring out conclusive shot at Donald Trump – “THE HUMAN” [sic!].11 It seems that against the shallow praise of Christmas Iris’ incessant engagement for a variety spirit in a recent public statement of political causes and movements that once more reflects the wintry have not helped much to form an idea bleakness of the POTUS’s mind/heart. of art that goes beyond such clichés. … and beyond t is for Art now to explore new ways Iof connecting art (which is, in a li Smith has been accused of not way, himself) and politics. Inspired Aknowing where to end, meaning and animated by the light-bringer Lux that Winter is more on the lengthy who acts as a fascinating-yet-evanescent side compared with its predecessor.12 embodiment of change, Art discovers that However, to write a novel that could go his interest in nature must be thoroughly on and on is very much in the ‘nature’ transformed so as to quit regarding nature of Smith’s writing, her playful and as a place beyond politics. He relaunches pleasurable endeavour of unpacking his “Art in Nature” blog, turning it into values, beliefs and standpoints to present a collaborative project to which even his the stories, the twists and turns as well former girl-friend Charlotte contributes. as the still underexplored levels of social The family reunion on Boxing Day, interconnectedness that constitute such as made possible by Lux, also brings positions. Recently, the novel has been Sophia and Iris closer to each other, shortlisted for the Orwell prize for against all odds. The novel thus ends books, which is awarded for outstanding on a reconciliatory note, demonstrating political literature, following George that conflict between (seemingly) Orwell’s ambition to “make political incompatible outlooks, unavoidable as writing into an art”. Winter is just it is, should neither be exaggerated nor the sixth novel ever to be nominated repressed. Rather, the divergence between for the prize which is usually given standpoints and worldviews should be to non-fiction.13 The judges are quite accepted, frustrating as it might be, so right to recognize that the scope and as to condition higher levels of harmony quality of Smith’s recent writing makes in a culture that is enlightened enough it a remarkable and valuable antidote to combine empathy with arguing. It is for anyone frustrated by present-day in this way that Smith responds to the societies, disorientated and torn as present crisis by giving a new, political they are between all kinds of actual meaning to Christmas, a point that is and imagined crises and the respective
Page 66 Hard Times 101 (1/2018) Harald Pittel populist and right-wing responses. One 6 Ali Smith. Autumn. London: can hardly wait to see how Smith’s seasonal Penguin, 2017, 52 cycle will blossom in spring and summer. 7 Helen Joanne Cox was a Labour MP who was murdered on 16 June Endnotes/References 2016 by Thomas Alexander Mair, an adherent to far-right ideology. In Mair’s 1 Jon Day. “Brexlit: the new eyes, Cox was a danger to Britain and landscape of British fiction”. Financial a “traitor to white people” due to her Times, 28 July 2017, 11.
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