Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Kateřina Štruncová Love, Alienation and Identity in Ali Smith’s Novels Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2013 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor prof. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for introducing me to the breathtaking world of Ali Smith’s novels and for her kindness and helpful guidance. Table of Contents 1 Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 2 Like …………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4 3 Girl Meets Boy …………………………………………………………………………………………… 15 4 The Accidental …………………………………………………………………………………………… 25 5 Hotel World ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 38 6 There But For The ……………………………………………………………………………………… 48 7 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 57 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 59 Czech Resume ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 64 English Resume ………………………………………………………………………………………………65 1 Introduction This thesis analyzes the work of a Scottish writer Ali Smith, in particular all of her five novels that were published so far. Smith was born in Inverness in 1962, the fifth of five children. After school, Smith went to university at Aberdeen, then to Cambridge to study for a PhD, which she has never finished. After she gave up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde, she began writing short stories and novels. Smith, openly gay, currently lives in Cambridge and avoids publicity. She says that she has always believed that an author must remain as anonymous as possible or risk impeding the fiction for her readers. Too much biographical information “diminishes the thing that you do” she says. “You have to remain invisible” (qtd. in Akbar). Describing the work of Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson states: “Her particular beginning again is, of course, the voice, authentically hers, and a refusal of sentimentality at a time when we are drowning in the stuff. From adverts to happy endings, we risk losing tough emotion - call it real feeling. Soap operas and reality TV, popular novels and trendy politics depend on the sentimental gene. Smith's genius is an antidote to this. She pushes us into a situation and gives us no way out. Her work is cathartic because it is painful in the proper sense. Our feelings are engaged, measured, challenged, and released. This is what art is supposed to do, and still does, far away from phoney violence or bathos.“ Therefore, Smith’s novels are not always easy to read and their meaning is hard to grasp. It is partly because of the way they are written, with various postmodern features used, and partly because of what they are about – the flaws of the modern world and the fleetingness of life. The intention of this thesis is to explore themes, 1 which are common in all of her five novels – love, alienation and search for identity, including topics such as consumerism, fragile human relationships and the transience of life. In her writing, Smith uses multi-leveled narrative which allows each character to tell a story from their point of view. Ali Smith does not write “concluded“ novels, but she gives the reader enough room to interpret them in his own way. She explains herself: “The more we know, the more it gets in the way of the book.“ This fragmentation has become the most obvious featuresof her texts and exploring this aspect of her novels plays an important role in this thesis. Another concept that is featured in Smith’s novels is the temporal distortion. The structure of chapters in not trasparent and comprehensive from the beginning and creates another way, how to influence the reader’s grasp of story and his final impression. This temporal distortion also creates the concept of alienation from the outside world. The creative potential of word play, form, syntax and so on is a thread that runs throughout all Smith’s fiction. This thesis focuses on Smith’s following novels: Like (1997), Girl Meets Boy (2007), The Accidental (2005), Hotel World (2001) and There But For The (2011). Each novel represents a unique story, but all of them also feature similar elements. Like describes love that could not be fulfilled, dealing with the concept of narrative identity. Girl Meets Boy depicts on the contrary the transformative power of love in relation to the social acceptance of homosexuality with the concept of intertextuality. The Accidental and Hotel World are equally concerned with the spatial economies of estrangement in two realms that share the status of being temporary housing – that of a holiday cottage in Norfolk inhabited by the Smart family, and a hotel in an unnamed city where the accidental death of a young 2 chambermaid has occurred. Amber’s presence in The Accidental, like Sara’s accident in Hotel World, leads to the spontaneous creation of a community of strangers both gathered around the person or event that has happened. There But For The has a similar scenario as The Accidental as it centres on the intrusion of a stranger into a home. All Smith’s novels, with their recurrent use of wordplay, numerous intertextual references and broad range of cultural allusions, seem to exemplify postmodern playfulness. 3 2 Like “We’re always hanging on to what we know, what we remember, like it’s got the power to make us who we are.“ (Smith, Like 321) The novel consists of two main parts, each bearing the name of one of the two female protagonists, Amy and Ash. The first half of the novel, titled “Amy“ is set in ‘the present’ and introduces us to Amy Shone and her seven-year-old daugther Kate. Amy and Kate live a hand-to-mouth existence and have just moved with their caravan to a camp in the north of Scotland, where Amy gets a job and earns a living as an auxiliary for the camp owner, Angus. Amy, who was born in England, as it is later revealed in the novel, stands out among the local society because of her distinct English accent. From the beginning of the novel, Amy’s identity is a mystery to local people, to the reader and even to Amy herself, as the novel develops. Amy does not talk about herself, no one knows where she is from or why she came to Scotland, but it appears that she is haunted by some kind of traumatic experience. In the first chapter, an old song is stuck in her head: Always something there to remind me always something there to remind me I was born to love you and I will ne ver be free you’ll always be apart of me (Smith, Like 7) 4 For the most part, Amy’s section describes relationship with her daughter Kate and their experiences together. They go to England to visit Amy’s parents, later they make a trip to Vesuvius and Pompeii. Amy’s emotions or thoughts rarely surface through the third-person narrative for most of her section, the only exception is her conversation with a newspaper reporter who calls her in the hope of finding information about a long-missing actress, Aisling McCarthy, with whom Amy had, as it is later revealed, a very personal relationship. Amy’s intense reactions to the reporter’s questions about their relationship provide some hints about its importance in Amy’s life. Amy’s part of the novel ends with the burning of her diary volumes and an open ending. The second half of the novel, titled “Ash“ is in a form of a first-person narrative and acts as a diary of Aisling McCarthy, known as Ash. Ash is now a successful actress, who has gone to visit her father in Scotland, and her writing bounces back and forth between her memories of Amy and her present. Unlike the preceding half, Ash’s section is filled with considerable emotional honesty. Since her diary is dated April 1987, we realize that Ash is writing over ten month before Kate’s birth, which makes it nine years before Amy’s part of the novel starts. Ash’s diary is an intimate depiction of her childhood in a small Scottish town, including her first lesbian experiences and feelings about her complicated sexuality. She further describes her meeting with Amy and their later friendship. Amy and her parents, on holiday in Scotland, have acommodated themselves in a hotel next to Ash’s house. Her first encounter with Amy takes places at Ash’s backyard, where she wakes us from a nap and her eyes rest on Amy, who has been lying in a tree, watching Ash for some time and who, without a single word of introduction, tells her: “You’ll never guess. I just saw the most beautiful thing. Therewas a butterfly 5 drinking from the corner of your eye just a moment ago. Nymphalis io. They’re quite rare this far north“ (Smith, Like 168). Ash falls in love with Amy, however, Amy’s feelings for Ash are unuttered throughout the novel, although the above mentioned quote already suggests that Amy’s feeling for Ash were probably the same. After a couple of years, Ash receives a letter from Amy, who is now a scholar at Cambridge. Ash, still infatuated by Amy, immediately leaves home and follows Amy, without letting her know that she would come. Finding herself suddenly at Amy’s university, without money or a plan of action, Ash finds her way to Amy by chance. However, Amy acts aloof and responds to seeing Ash without surprise. Ash finds a job at university library and tries to make Amy reciprocate her feelings, but without any success.