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.

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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.

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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)

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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. At the end of Ash’s part (and at the end of the novel), Ash manages to secretly break into Amy’s study, finds her journals and dissapointed with their content, she burns them all. She returns to Scotland but then leaves home again, leaving the novel unconcluded.

Like, as Bailey suggests, reveals itself to be a novel concerned with the strategies behind storytelling, with the memories one might artfully preserve, discard, embellish or invent when fashioning a version of one’s history and, in turn, of oneself. This chapter elaborates on this “narrative identity“ and traces the search for identity of the two main protagonists, Amy and Ash, throughout the novel.

In Self as Narrative, Worthington argues that it is through the presence of a narrative voice that subjectivity is constituted: “In thinking myself, I remember myself: I draw together my multiple members – past and other subject positions – into a coherent narrative of selfhood which is more or less readable by myself and others” (Worthington 13). Smith herself has commented that Like is a novel “about

6 how we put history together” (qtd. in Murray 217). Smith’s remark suggests that how one perceives the reality denotes a process by which an identity is created.

Therefore, rather than being finished images of the autobiographical self, Smith’s narrators and their identity develop not only within the text, but also by its reading.

Amy, portrayed as a very secretive person, is unable to speak of her early life following an unknown incident of unspeakable trauma, because of which she even lost the ability to read. Accordingly, the third person, present tense narrative found in “Amy” reflects her inability to recall past experiences or construct a narrative identity of her own. It is only by reading Ash’s diary that the otherwise mystifying story behind Amy’s distress begins to appear.

Even her surname is described as something of a burden. „A surname like that will haunt your life. Everything becomes something you did better then, before, in the shining days. But not if you don’t let it.” Her daughter Kate, by contrast, loves her name, because “Kate Shone is like the words from a story […]. Kate

Shone. She shone for the whole night” (Smith, Like 4). On the second page of the novel we are told that Kate reads Amy’s signature as “Amy Shore“, which she finds

“very funny now that they live right next to the sea“ (4).

With her low self-esteem and depressed attitude, Amy’s daughter seems to be the only reason for her to keep going: “She mustn’t be late for Kate. This has got to stop” (4). At first, Amy is presented as a an illiterate single mom who moves from place to place, working in poorly paid positions because of unspecified occurrence. Yet, as Metz remarks, what starts as a working-class woman’s brave struggle against the inescapable, unfolds into an intellectual’s struggle against her (perhaps equally inescapable) self and past (Metz 57). For this and other reasons that remain in the dark, she even appears a stranger to her own

7 mother, when she and Kate visit her in England: “Amy, this stranger, her daughter, has appeared again out of the nowhere she has been, bringing the smell of leaves and damp into the house with her as she brushes lightly past“ (Smith, Like 63).

Because Smith’s writing does not allow Amy to live in her past (unlike Ash), the obscurity of Amy’s past permits the reader to doubt about the reliability of the information presented. Such a sense of uncertainty is felt when it comes to the parts of Amy’s narrative about Kate, and the question of who Kate is, who she is like. At first, Kate’s identity is not questioned by the reader, as it is assumed that she is Amy’s daughter, although Amy is described as being slim with dark hair while

Kate is fair-haired and although throughout the novel, Kate refers to her only as

“Amy”. However a particular remark, made by one of Kate’s classmates’ mothers raises the awarness, as she says that Kate “gets more like her mother every day“

(14) to what Amy responds: “She does, she thought. It still took her unawares, was always a surprise“ (15). Similarly, when Amy and Kate are on the train to England to visit Amy’s parents, and Kate sees a baby and asks about her own birth, Amy responds very unclearly with a set of tales about ‘a gooseberry bush‘, ‘the bottom of her bed‘, ‘a loch‘ and when Kate asks for ‘the real truth‘, Amy claims that she was delivered to her by stork (53). Amy then reveals the real truth: “I went into the big white room where you were with all the other new babies. […] I just picked you up and you came home with me“ (53). Amy then realizes that she is not sure, whether or not she has spoken these words out loud. Later, at the visit to Amy’s parents,

Kate asks Amy if Amy’s mother is her ’granny ’: “If you like“ is Amy’s response (77).

“I think you’re meant to be my grandfather,“ Kate says to Amy’s father soon afterwards (88).

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What can also be questioned is the relationship between Amy and Ash.

Except for the emotionally charged interview with a reporter, who calls Amy to find out some information about Ash, Ash appears to be very distant. Later, at the end of her part in the novel, she is burning her possessions, including some of her diaries. Although Kate discourages her from doing this, and tells her that she

“shouldn’t burn diaries in case they were important for history”, Amy responds by likening this act to “when you draw something or write it for the first time and it’s not what you wanted, so you throw it away and start again” (151). This suggest that her relationship with Amy left a deep imprint on her and by burning her diaries

(which bear the meaning of the past), Amy intends to separate from her past and find a new self. After the burning has ceased, however, Amy is left with “ash all over her” (151), a metaphorical imprint and permanent reminder of the love she is desperate to deny: “While Kate makes the shapes of birds or angels in the light of the fire, Amy waits with what is left of her burning words. The fire is collapsing in on itself now. Soon, Amy thinks, there will be nothing left of it. Ash, that’s all.

Nothing else“ (152).

Amy, therefore, emerges, in both a literal and figurative sense, from the ashes of the past to live again. Furthermore, and in terms of the novel itself, the

Amy of old emerges from “Ash”, the section of the text in which her presence is resurrected. It is the resemblance – the very likeness, as Bailey suggests - between

Amy’s present, ongoing recovery of body and mind, and the gradual construction of her narrative identity in the latter half of the novel, that points to Like’s status as a work of metafiction.

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It is in the second half of the novel, where the difference between the real and unreal plays an important part in establishing the narrative identity. As an actor, Ash herself is aware of the fact that diaries in general are full of “lies“, when it comes to their presentation of reality (Smith, Like 157). Any form of narrative act is guilty of moulding, discovering or even inventing a shape for an event “like it’s just a story, like it didn’t even have to have happened“ (169). Characterised by its conflicting voices (and thus suggesting narrative unreliability), Ash’s section resembles an unachievable goal of her unified identity.

Amy questions Ash about whether “our thoughts are the only things that are truly real“, whether or not the only way to “make things real, make them happen, is by thinking about them“ (266). Who is making things up is apparent in the narrative that describes Ash’s final encounter with Amy, something that (according to Ash) ought to be a loving and passionate moment between them. First there is a dream version of the event, as Ash goes round to see Amy and they fall upon each other for the inevitable “sex scene”, “the moment we have been waiting for”, as Ash calls it (298). However, concluding the description of that event, Ash states “didn’t we“,

„wasn’t it“ (300). “No,“ she admits then at the start of the next chapter, “not how it happened, not what it was like“ (301).

As Bailey insinuates, Ash’s excessive narrative performance also serves as an attempt to compensate for the self-negation she experienced during her relationship with Amy, who insisted that their love remain hidden at all costs. For Ash, the most devastating moment in their relationship, and the incident that prompted her act of destruction of Amy’s possessions, occured when she found herself absent from all seven of Amy’s diaries:

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“Not a word, not a thought, not a syllable. Not once did I get a mention. I wasn’t there, anywhere. She’d left me out. Now I turned and saw the sky was lit up behind me. The sight of it. The smell on the wind. The charred pages. The historic place of burning, I’d done that, me.That’d get into her diary, then, if nothing else did“ (305).

Bailey further claims that what emerges from this revelatory moment is that, long before Ash came to write the story of her life, Amy did the same. In a process of “fiction-making” (thus finding her identity), Amy has constructed a version of the past that omits all trace of her homosexuality and, as a result, of Ash. Proceeding,

Ash makes an extraordinary attempt to influence Amy’s future “fiction-making” by engaging in an act so destructive that her former lover will never be able to recall the past without thinking of it. “That’d get into her diary”, foreshadows the unshakeable trauma that continues to haunt Amy and provides link between both parts of the novel.

Ash’s account of various events, memories and feelings is therefore very rich and the novel’s title word, “like“, is abundantly used in Ash’s depictions. “I had always known that I liked girls,“ Ash reports early on in her diary. “I liked boys too, but I certainly liked girls more“ (Smith, Like 160). The problem, of course, is that this was not the sort of thing that one could be open about in Inverness, “the decent, upright capital of the Highlands“ (158). “Imagine the scandal,“ she writes, the stories which would have spread about her being “you know, a bit funny, like that“ (159). One day at school, Ash’s fellow prefect Shone sees a “disgusting“ story in a newspaper – concerning two female tennis players at Wimbledon: “they’re poofs, well, you know, queer“, she explains (215-216). Ash stares at her book when a voice come out of her throat saying, “well, maybe they like each other… It’s perfectly okay for people to like whoever they want to like“ (217). As more and

11 more of these comparisons are piled up upon on one and other, the less they come to mean. “Like the time when. Like the time. Like. There was no stopping it“, Ash complains, “You say something’s like something else, and all you have really said is that actually, because it’s only like it, it’s different“ (335).

The meaning of the word “like“ invokes the need to underline her love for

Amy in Ash’s narrative. The title Like emphasizes the process of trying to get closer to what we mean: “It’s like, like…“ (342). As Kostkowska suggests, Ash, Amy, and the readers discover that we can only attempt to come close to describing a thing, and only do so by relating it to another (Kostkowska 126). She further states, Like foreground the process of trying to become intimate with what we know we cannot reach. The novel highlights connection, proximity, and the need to get as close as possible (Kostkowska 141).

Apart from making comparisons, the split structure of the novel invites us to consider questions of similarity and difference, preference and affection, fiction and reality, truth and lies. We see Amy gradually recovering her memories, her ability to read, her sense of self; we know that Ash is trying to forget, or to remember differently. Amy and Ash appear to be close – as if they are lovers (another detail on which the novel is pointedly ambiguous), but at other times they could not be more distant, could not be more unlike each other. As Justine Jordan has noted,

“the two women’s narratives mirror each other in language and style: Ash’s sensuality exists only in relation to Amy’s asceticism, Amy’s coolness is defined through Ash’s ardour“ (Jordan 33).

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Ash gets home to find a note from her father with a recipe and a prayer, she receives several phone calls from America concerning a part in a film, she thinks of her brothers, she thinks of Amy. As the novel closes, Ash is ready to put aside speculation and story-telling, her diary, and the territory of things that are like

(Blyth 33). By burning Amy’s diaries and books, she is able to get back to her real identity.

Because of its dual narrative structure, muddled chronology and conflicting

accounts of past events, Ali Smith described her debut novel Like as “a nasty warring book, a book of two sides” (qtd. in Murray 222). These two narratives of the novel, appearing at first highly distinctive and separated, are on the contrary closely connected. Although Amy’s section starts the novel, it is the one that generates most unanswered questions. To make things more difficult, Amy’s section is set forward in time, and chronologically follows Ash’s, although at the time of the reading this reference point is not given. Therefore, moving from one section to the other and back in the hope of finding more answers, these two parts, so apparently separate, become dependent on each other and mutually fill in the blanks to the story, but at the same time leave the reader uncertain about the reality of the events.

In Artful Smith says, “we do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it just once“ (31). The text of Like forces us to reread it, to approach it again, to try to fill in the missing gaps.

Eventually, we come face to face with the fact that no matter how many times we comb through the novel for details and hints, we will never know “the whole story”.

We realize that it has been left up to us to imagine what might have happened.

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Just like when Amy tells Kate a bedtime story and Kate is rewarded with a beguiling yet inconclusive tale about a fish that transforms into a girl. Bemused and dissatisfied, she complains, “It wasn’t the story I was wanting”, to which Amy replies, “Well it’s the only story you’re going to get” (Smith, Like 83).

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3 Girl Meets Boy

“It’s easy to think it’s a mistake, or you’re a mistake. It’s easy, when everything and everyone you know tells you you’re the wrong shape, to believe you’re the wrong shape.“

(Smith, Girl Meets Boy 97)

Girl Meets Boy tells a story about two sisters, Imogen (called also Midge) and

Anthea, who live together in the city of Inverness in Scotland. Anthea and Midge both work in the marketing department of Pure, a large company that produces bottled water and whose aim is to expand into every conceivable market and sell water as commodity. Anthea is, unlike Midge, uninterested in her job as she despises Pure’s marketing strategy and also her boss, Keith. The third protagonist of the novel is Robin, a boyish looking girl, a graffiti activist fighting against the Pure unscrupulous marketing. Anthea falls is love with Robin and the lovestory about a girl, who meets “boy“, begins.

The important fact that ought to be noted is that Ali Smith based Girl Meets

Boy on re-writing of the tale of Iphis and Ianthe, a tale originally written by Ovid in

Book 9 of his Metamorphoses. In this original tale, the pregnant Telethusa and her husband Lycurgus are about to welcome their first child into the world. Lycurgus is a good man, but poor, and he is aware of the fact that they can only raise a son, not a daughter; and if a girl is born, she will have to be killed. Telethusa appeals to the goddess Isis for help, Isis tells her that she should raise the child regardless of its sex, and leave the rest to her. A girl is soon born, and so Telethusa disguises her daughter as a son, and gives her the unisex name Iphis. However, problem arises

15 when Iphis falls in love with the girl next door, Ianthe, who falls in love as well, but of course takes Iphis for a boy. Their families bless the union and the young couple are betrothed to be married. Day before the wedding, Iphis realizes that as a girl she would not be able to make Ianthe happy and despair overcomes her. Therefore, her mother returns to the temple of Isis and once more asks for the goddess’ help.

The goddess grants her wish and Iphis is magically transformed into a ‘real’ boy.

They marry and everyone lives happily ever after.

In the previous chapter about the novel Like, I focused on the unfulfilled lesbian love of the two main protagonists and how their identity evolves by the means of narrative. Smith, in general, uses her writing to change public perceptions of gender and sexuality. In Girl Meets Boy, she creates a fictional space which allows to reanimate the original Ovidian theme of metamorphosis in a contemporary context. This way, she explores various types of transformation, including the transformative power of love. The intertextual dependence of Girl Meets Boy is stated in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of the book, where Book 9 of Ovid’s

Metamorphoses as a source is cited with Smith commenting: “It is one of the cheeriest metamorphoses in the whole work, one of the most happily resolved of its stories about the desire for and ramifications of change“ (Smith, Girl Meets Boy

163).

The term ‘intertextuality’ was coined in Julia Kristeva’s Le mot, le dialogue et le roman to describe the way in which texts interact with each other. Meaning more than simple influences or allusions within one text to another, intertextuality is suggestive of the ways that texts relate to one another, both forwards and backwards in time. A text can therefore no longer have a static, monolithic meaning

16 or reading passed down through time in a linear fashion, but its readings change over time as new texts are written and added to its meaning.

This chapter elaborates on metamorphosis of the characters, their desire and their identity and suggests that identity can be fluid, according to one’s sexuality and the society pressure.

The novel consists of five parts. First part, titled “I“ is a first-person narrative told by Anthea. At the beginning, Anthea seems to be nonplussed by her own existence. Skipping work and going for a walk instead, she is aware of her emptiness: “I wished I was old. I was tired of being so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like think white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I’d try to click on me, try to go any deeper when it came to the meaning of ’I’, I mean deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I’d wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of ’I’ existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that’s how rootless. And that’s how fragile. And what would poor Anthea do then, poor thing?“ (Smith, Girl Meets Boy 23-24). At the end of her narrative she sees Robin for the first time, and it is this point of the novel, where the theme of Ovid’s metamorphosis begins: “My head, something happened to its insides. It was as if a storm at sea happened, but only for a moment, and only on the inside of my head.

My ribcage, something definitely happened there. It was as if it unknotted itself from itself, like the hull of a ship hitting rock, giving way, and the ship that I was opened wide inside me and in came the ocean. He was the most beautiful boy I had

17 ever seen in my life. But he looked really like a girl. She was the most beautiful boy

I had ever seen in my life“ (44-45). The moment when Anthea and Robin meet for the first time partly reminds similar special connection between Ash and Amy in Like on their first encounter. Anthea, considered by her sister to be straight until now, falls in love.

The second part, “you“, deals with the topic of same-sex relations told from the perspective of Anthea’s sister Midge, who finds it difficult to begin to accept that her sister is ‘One of Them’ (55). Dominic and Norman, her co-workers at Pure, also indicate their distaste of homosexuality at the pub and discuss lesbianism in terms of ‘marked underdevelopment’ (69).

Imogen represents a gender stereotype of female submissiveness and subjugation, along with boss Keith, who is portrayed as a caricature of misogyny. As

Imogen contends with her sister’s transformation from ‘straight’ to ‘lesbian’, she is struggling to ‘name’ her sister, to find a category into which she can be definitively placed.

This issue of naming connects to both identity and (im)possibility – language identifies, categorizes, makes possible – yet when Imogen demands of Robin,

“what’s the correct word for it, I mean, for you?“, Robin replies simply, “The proper word for me … is me” (76-7). Smith here, through Imogen, explores the desire to classify; Imogen is looking for a definition, and in doing so exposes to the reader the inadequacies of language to do this (Ranger 28). By depicting everything around here as being “normal“, her narrative creates a contrast between the categories “straight“ and “gay“, “normal“ and “abnormal“:

“ (Oh my God my sister is A GAY.)

(I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset.)

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I am putting on my Stella McCartney Adidas tracksuit bottoms. I am lacing up my Nike runners. I am zipping up my Stella McCartney Adidas tracksuit top. I am going out the front door like I am a (normal) person just going out of a (normal) from door on a (normal) early summer day in the month of May and I am going for a run which is the kind of (normal) thing (normal) people do all the time“. (Smith,

Girl Meet Boy 49).

The idea of the fluidity of the identity based on sexuality is at most

explored in the third section of the novel, named “us“, which is in clear contrast

with the previous section. In the first-person narrative, Anthea describes her

connection with Robin, both mental and physical. In Anthea’s description of

Robin, Smith emphasizes that attributes, which are normally labelled ‘male’ or

‘female’ according to the current binary gender model, are not really gendered at

all, thus challenging the existing gender model. Anthea depicts Robin: “It had

been exciting, first the not knowing what Robin was, then finding out. The grey

area, I’d discovered, had been misnamed: really the grey area was a whole other

spectrum of colours new to the eye. She had the swagger of a girl. She blushed

like a boy. She had a girl’s toughness. She had a boy’s gentleness. She was as

meaty as a girl. She was as graceful as a boy. She was as brave and handsome

and rough as a girl. She was as pretty and delicate and dainty as a boy“ (83-4).

In Gender Trouble Judith Butler suggests that we should discard gender categories altogether and on the contrary asserts such fluidity and instability of gender categories. Butler argues against the binary division of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ supposedly based on essential qualities and concentrates on the theories of Michel

Foucault, arguing that humans are simply social products organised by societal discourses and power relations. Ranger says that Girl meets boy, as well as being a

19 lesbian retelling of a classical myth, can be read as a fictional account of Butler’s

Gender Trouble as key points of her gender theory are acted out for us by the characters.

Metamorphosis emphasizes transformation, fluidity, flexibility and the permeability of the boundaries between subjects, genders – while still expressing sameness and belonging that we might call “identity“ (Mitchel 62). This is indeed visible in Girl Meets Boy, where this transformation, flexibility and fluidity is also demonstrated in relation to the power that love has to transform people’s lives. The passage depicting the act of love between Robin and Anthea indicates the various transformations through which they go and emphasizes the fluidity of sexuality and of identity:

I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy, we were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician, were arrows fired by a god, we hit heart, we hit home, we were the tail of a fish were the reek of a cat were the beak of a bird were the feather that mastered gravity were high above every landscape then down deep in the purple haze of the heather were roamin in the gloaming in a brash unending Scottish piece of perfect jigging reeling reel. (Smith, Girl Meets Boy 103)

Smith presents gender as much more radically indeterminate: Robin and Anthea are

“both genders, a whole new gender, no gender at all” (104). Anthea’s metamorphosis is accomplished.

The following section, named “them“ brings us back to the first-person narrative of Imogen, who is taken to base camp of Pure in Milton Keynes and is offered a promotion and better salary by Keith. Here, Smith’s writing gives space to topics such as the politics of water and the excesses of consumer culture.

Doloughan points out that what is played out in this section of Smith’s work is the

20 manner in which logic can be inverted and language debased in advertising in particular and the commercial world in general (Doloughan 248). Keith is trying to inveigle Imogen into accepting the fraudulent tactics of Pure by claiming that “water is not a human right. Water is a human need. And that means we can market it. We can sell a need. It’s our human right to“ (Smith, Girls Meet Boy 124). Water, no longer seen as a natural resource necessary for the sustenance of life, becomes ‘the perfect commodity’ because it ‘is running out’ (37) and can therefore be marketed as a scarce resource and sold at a premium.

It is actually the novel’s central motif of water that signals the notion of metamorphosis. As Robin tells the Iphis and Ianthe story to Anthea, she says that

“It will be like standing right in the middle of a stream, dying of thirst, with my hand full of water, but I won’t be able to drink it!“ (96). At the meeting about Pure’s marketing strategy, it is suggested that “water IS us” and that “water can define us, no matter what our political or national differences” (38-39). Water, then, offers a model of identity – “water IS us“, we are water.

In this concept there is both change and continuity here, a new identity and the persistence of the old one: the transformation allows Anthea to take “the shape

I was always supposed to“. She says: “I was like a species that hadn’t even realised it lived in a near-desert till one day its taproot hit water“ (81). Similarly, Robin herself says that her life only began, when she fell in love with Anthea (85). Water can take any shape, yet it can also actively shape things and in Girl Meets Boy it is considered as a methaphor for shaping identity, who we are.

Water then, in the metaphorical sense created by Pure’s dishonest advertising to sell water as a commodity and Keith’s manipulative language, allows

Imogen to take the shape she was always supposed to, just like Anthea did.

21

Imogen, repelled by Keith’s behaviour, suddendly finds herself protesting, something, which she was never able to do before: “Keith, that’s ridiculous, I say.

Those words you just used are all in the wrong places,” (124) and further reinforces her disapproval: “Then the law should be changed, I hear myself say. It’s a wrong law. And there’s a lot I can do about it. What I can do is, I can, uh, I can say as loudly as I possibly can, everywhere that I can, that it shouldn’t be happening like this, until as many people hear as it takes to make it not happen“ (125). On her way back, Imogen calls her colleague Paul and expresses her feelings for him, once again something she was not able to do before: “…I am tired of feeling things I never get to express, things that I always have to hold inside, I’m fed up not knowing whether I’m saying the right thing when I do speak…“ (131). Imogen, previously unasserted, narrow-minded, prejudiced and limited by what is “normal“, suceeds in transforming her identity.

The last section of the novel, “all together now“, represents Anthea’s narrative about her and Robin’s marriage in the form of “happy ending“ (149). At the end of the novel, it is revealed that this public celebration of the relationship between Robin and Anthea is merely fantasized, althought played out in detail, with grandparents returned from the dead on a fibreglass boat, and magical music that makes the cathedral “leap and caper“ (158) – before Anthea confesses: „Uh-huh.

Okay. I know. In my dreams. What I mean is, we stood on the bank of the river under the trees, the pair of us, and we promised the nothing that was there, the nothing that made us, the nothing that was listening, that we truly desired to go beyond ourselves. And that’s the message. That’s it. That’s all“ (159).

What seems to be a plain conclusion of the novel carries in fact deeper meaning with regard to current social-historical context. In Artful Smith says: “Old

22 stories repeat themselves, but always to new ends and always to this end: a renewal of vision“ (38). Indeed, what appears to be a rewriting of an old story in fact elaborates on the current climate, social and political context, where the ‘value’ of same-sex love cannot be taken for granted. According to Mitchel, this is the happy ending that acknowledges the transience, the provisionality of all such

“endings“, and that refuses public recognition or endorsement in favour of private, intimate avowal (71).

Smith’s rewriting of the tale, taking place in a contemporary setting, forces the reader to take a different point of view on the story. As Kristeva suggests, social context and contemporary dominant social narratives influence the readings or rewritings we make of texts, and a new text is not so much created as deciphered

(125). Smith’s updating of this story of metamorphosis therefore transposes it to the 21st century and points out that in this supposedly enlightened era same-sex relations can be conducted without the transformation of one of the couple into a member of the opposite sex.

In contrast with the current socio-historical context, in Ovid’s tale, two thousand years ago, there was no term to define what we now call lesbianism.

When Robin tells Anthea the tale of Iphis and Ianthe, she notes that she is imposing far too modern reading on it and that a lesbian sub-text is “debatable“ (Smith, Girl

Meets Boy 95). Robin says of Ovid’s tale that his version was simply ‘the way of the world’ two thousand years ago, and that ‘he can’t help being the Roman he is, he can’t help fixating on what it is that girls don’t have under their togas, and it’s him who can’t imagine what girls would ever do without one’ (97).

23

By using Ovid’s theme of metamorphosis, Smith introduces a conception of sexuality as an identity and emphasizes the naturalness of female same-sex desire.

Cox connects this theme of metamorphosis with the third-wave feminism, which is defined by following characteristic: “Girls who want to be boys, boys who want to be girls, boys and girls who insist they are both, whites who want to be black, blacks who want or refuse to be white, people who are white and black, gay and straight, masculine and feminine, or who are finding ways to be and name none of the above“ (165). Ovidian conception of metamorphosis, according to Warner, “runs counter to notions of unique, individual integrity of identity in the Judaeo-Christian tradition” and this might provide another reason for the popularity of Ovid in the contemporary period – a period in which the very concept of identity has become both a preoccupation and a problem (2).

Smith claims that “books [are understood] always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than by writers; they’re a result of all the books that went before them. Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives. You can’t step into the same story twice“ (Artul 31). In Girl Meets Boy, Smith’s rewriting of the tale placed in a contemporary setting with the modern-day issues, its intertextuality and storytelling function as a process metamorphic and redemptive. As it is said in the novel’s conclusion, “it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse.

They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to“ (Smith, Girl Meets Boy 160).

24

4 The Accidental

“Couldn’t it sometimes take an outsider to reveal to a family that it was a family?”

(Smith, The Accidental 97)

In Ali Smith's 2005 novel The Accidental, the story recounts a modern middle-class family, the Smarts, who have rented a holiday house in Norfork over the summer. Eve Smart, previously married to Adam Berenski, is a popular writer, who is hoping to overcome her writer’s block by temporary changing the environment, her partner Michael is an academic literature teacher, who blatantly cheats on Eve with his students. Eve’s children Magnus and Astrid live in their own world and inwardly suffer from diverse psychical problems. One day, a woman named Amber pays a visit to their summer residence and ends up staying there for a longer time. The novel consists of three main parts with headings “The beginning”, “The middle” and “The end”, whose titles also act as the first words of each of the respective sections. Each of these is further subdivided into four separate chapters in which the family members take turns to tell a part of the story from their respective points of view.

Astrid’s account opens the main part of the novel. While contemplating about the sound of her name, “Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski. Astrid Smart. Astrid

Berenski” (Smith, The Accidental 7), it is soon revealed that she suffers from a strong sense of deviancy, which stems from her family situation. Since her mother divorced Astrid’s real father, Adam Berenski, and married Michael, Astrid has obviously not come to terms with having a stepfather, describing that Michael’s

25

“second name is stuck on the end of her first name and she has no say about it at all“ (20). Her deep anxiety about “true“ personal origins is underlined by her waking obsession with rereading her father’s old love letters to her mother, as a means of supporting her desire to an alternate familial identity. Astrid therefore suffers from an identity crisis that is both connected to her altered last name and she also does not seem to cope well with her mother’s popularity as a writer, which also draws attention to Astrid. She is further tormented by an experience of school bullying, in which three classmates have branded her a lesbian and a weirdo. Due to her uncertainity and lack of confidence, she becomes fixated on video documenting as response mechanisms, believing that by documenting every occurrence that happens to her through the lens of a digital camera, she is able to make her life more real.

Every day, Astrid goes off with her camera, observing, documenting. She wakes early to shoot dawns. She aims to record a burned-down local restaurant owned by East Indians. Until Amber’s arrival, she constantly tries to stitch a pattern from everything she reads, notices, overhears. According to Eder, her behaviour is a barrier to involvement – Amber’s confusion by her identity causes her alienation from the outside world, from her family, even from her mother. When Astrid goes to the garden summerhouse to tell Eve that Amber (whom she considered to be her mother’s guest) has come, she remains standing outside the summerhouse, unable to go in, feeling that “compared to those trees round the summerhouse she is the kind of meaningless tree that gets planted in the grassy areas of the car parks of supermarkets“ (Smith, The Accidental 22).

Magnus, Eve’s oldest child from her marriage to Adam Berenski, is a guilt- ridden teenager who has been involved in a schoolroom pranks that leads to a

26 suicide of his classmate, Catherine Masson. He is temporarily suspended from school because of investigation and feeling all alone in their secluded holiday cottage, he is unable to cope with his feelings of guilt. After Catherine’s death, he feels lost and unable to identify himself: “He changed himself when he changed her.

He snapped his own head off without even knowing. It transplanted itself on to a body he doesn‘t know. If he looks in the mirror he looks the same as before. But he isn’t the same. It is a shock to see how like himself it looks“ (40). He replaced his identity, the “real Magnus” with the idea of “hologram boy”. The self-image as

“hologram boy“ is a reassuring fantasy, whereas his real, embodied equivalent is inescapably implied in the girl’s death.

The emptiness of this “hologram boy“ is obvious when he comes down to the hall for dinner and sees his family: “That’s his mother. She doesn’t know anything.

She is saying something. Magnus nods. He picks up the plate from a place at the table with no one sitting at it. His sister takes the plate from him. She doesn’t know either. She is putting something on the plate out of a dish on the table. It smells of fish in the room. Michael is saying something. He doesn’t know anything. He is pointing at something. Magnus nods. He hopes that this nodding is what they need.

He nods several times, as if he is very sure of what he is nodding about. Yes. Yes, definitely. No worries” (47). His guilt and remorse haunt him to such an extent that he is unable to confide to anybody, not even his own family.

Michael, Eve’s second husband and a literature lecturer at university, Dr.

Michael Smart, as he likes to refer to himself, is a embodiment of a boastful, pretentious and calculating character, who builds his ego on continual affairs with his students. Cheating on Eve and despising his stepchildren, Astrid and Magnus,

Michael’s behaviour is a definition of two-facedness and arrogance: “He held his

27 wine glass out in front of him, swirled the end of the wine in it, watched it settle. It was good. It was Gavi, from Waitrose. If he were this wine glass there would be hairline cracks holding him together, running their live little electrical connections all over him. Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness. Michael smiled. Eve thought he was smiling at her. She smiled back. He smiled at Astrid too. She gave him a murderous look and scraped a plate. Good for her! Obnoxious little creep. He laughed out loud“ (58). By his fake, arrogant and superior behaviour, Michael strives to avoid realizing his real identity.

Lastly, Eve, the mother, a bestselling author, who writes books about various people who died in World War II, but who has based her career on inventing stories about their ordinary lives as if the dead people had lived on. However, Eve seems lost in her professional identity as a writer. Although giving voices to dead people, ironically, her own voice has been stilled by the writer’s block. Her life and identity, like her writing, is not her own. It is actually psychological and social inauthenticity that defines her. Identifying herself in commoditized terms as "a house and a garden and a four-square family and a fascinating writer in her own right" (96), she consoles herself with her unappreciated importace - "it asks a lot, to be able to do all the things we're supposed to do the way we're expected to do them" (85).

One of the most striking references to the “fragmentation“ of the Smarts family is told by Magnus in the middle of the novel, already some time after

Amber’s arrival: “Everybody at this table is in broken pieces which won’t go together, pieces which are nothing to do with each other…“ (138). Smart family is already on the road to ruin before Amber appers at the front door of Smart’s summer house: “Sorry I’m late. I’m Amber. Car broke down” (64).

28

Since Eve thinks Amber is one of her philandering husband's former students, whereas Michael thinks Amber is one of the people Eve is interviewing for a series of books, Amber’s identity is uncertain. She is introduced as a dangerous element, allegedly, from her mother she inherits “grace under pressure,“ “the uses of mystery“ and the ability “to get what I want“, from her father, “how to disappear, how to not exist“ (3).

Gradually, Amber develops intimate relationships between each member of the family during her short stay, each leading to multivalent changes. She becomes a life-mentor and friend to Astrid and quickly gains her trust, making Astrid confide in her about being bullied at school and about her desire to reconnect with her biological father. Astrid’s connection to Amber is so strong that she even fantasizes about Amber taking revenge on her behalf. Semi-conscious just before going to sleep, Astrid imagens Amber attacking the girls who bully her. This insinuates

Amber’s later utterance: “Careful, I am everything you ever dreamed“ (305). The fact that this is all happening in Astrid’s unconscious suggests that Amber functions here as an externalization of the former’s unacknowledged impulses and desires

(Tancke 83). Going for a walk one day, Amber takes Astrid’s precious camera and throws it over a bridge, urging Astrid to free herself from a mechanical device for self-expression. With success, Astrid becomes determined to stop approaching her surroundings through the lens of her digital camera.

When Amber arrives, Magnus is on the verge of suicide, because of the guilt and horror he feels at his involvement in the suicide of a classmate. Amber’s aim

(and cure at the same time) is to seduce him. By establishing an intimate relationship with Magnus, Amber succeeds in bringing out his personal strenght, confidence and sexuality. Urging Magnus to have sex with her in the attic of the

29 vacation cottage, and flirting with him playfully in public and familial scenarios,

Amber embodies the hidden fantasies behind Magnus's all-conforming familial persona: his repressed dreams of sexual confidence and seductive attraction

(Horton 642). His affair with Amber leads to evolving his maturity and willingness to take responsibility for his role in the suicide of a young girl, thus to getting rid of the empty “hologram boy“ identity and gaining the ability to feel emotions and to overcome what he did. Magnus, who previously attempts to understand the world in terms of its mathematical simplicity, stops with his online activities and changes into repeating the melancholic mantra that everyone around him is “broken“.

In a similar way, Amber, aware of Michael’s confidence and ego, seduces him at first, but later appears extremely underwhelmed by him, ignoring him at best.

With her demonstrative disinterest and her immunity against Michael’s charming routine, Amber works her very own charm on him, though in an entirely different way than he desires, making his narcissistic self-image become deeply disturbed by her refusal. Her presence marks a turning point for his personality. Disruption of

Michael’s idealized self is figured literally in a sonnet sequence. At the end of this process, he reflects on Amber’s transformative impact on him: “The pretty young woman has broken him open while he slept, put her hand in and thieved the heart out of him“ (Smith, The Accidental 270). Falling in love with Amber produces an important lesson in Michael’s emotional literacy. As Head suggests, emotional literacy indeed is what Amber teaches (108). Michael is eventually dismissed from his position because of a complaint from a student with who he has had relations, but owing to Amber, Michael in the end experiences sense of release as well: he has been saved from the parody of bourgeois existence that he has embodied up to

30 this point in time (O’Donnel 97). In this sense, Amber encourages psychological growth in the characters.

The same process applies to Eve. Head suggests that the fact that she is suffering from writer’s block implies a subconscious guilt that parallels that of her son and her husband (107). For Eve, Amber acts as a constant reminder that her real identity is blocked by her inauthenticity. The mounting tension, and eventual confrontation between Eve and Amber is portrayed after Amber tells Eve that she is

“an excellent fake“. Eve examines a photograph that shows “the idyllic summerhouse of the holiday home of Eve and her husband“ (Smith, The Accidental

183). The photograph both creates an idealized image – of Eve’s domestic happiness and her success as a writer and artist. But instead of representing the real Smart family, the photograph seems to confirm Amber’s assessment: “A family, all of them, smiling. Who were they smiling for? Was it for themselves, somewhere in the future? Was it for the photographer? Who took the photograph? What did it show? Did it show that Michael had come home smelling, yet again, of someone else? Did it show that Magnus was a boy so like his father that Eve almost couldn’t bear to sit in the same room with him? Did it show that Astrid was infuriating to

Eve, that she deserved to have no father, just as Eve had done most of her life, and was lucky still to have a mother at all? “ (183-4). Due to Amber’s constant influence,

Eve realizes that she “could be something other than what she seemed“ (184).

When Amber kisses Eve, Amber becomes a catalyst for Eve’s suppressed desires for non-conformity and escape, undermining her average existence as a middle-class, working mother. It is this moment that becomes a turning point not only in Eve’s identity, but also in the whole novel. Eve is “moved beyond belief by the kiss“ and finds that she is “gifted with a new kind of vision“ (202). However, immediately

31 after the kiss, in what can also be read as a homophobic or self-deceptive reaction

(Metz 54), Eve asks Amber to go for good:

“Goodbye, she said. Eh? Amber said. It’s time, Eve said. Goodbye. Where are you going? Amber said. I’m not going anywhere, Eve said. […] That’s true, at last. You’re going nowhere, Amber said. Meaning? Eve said. You’re a dead person, Amber said. Get out of my house, Eve said. It’s not your house, Amber said. You’re only the tenant. Get out of the house I’m renting, Eve said.“

(Smith, The Accidental 203)

After Amber leaves, the Smarts return from holiday to find their home completely emptied (presumably burgled by Amber), leaving nothing but the answering machine, which contains messages forcing Magnus, Michael and Eve to face up to their past. However, getting rid of all of their possessions provides a relief for Michael, Magnus and Astrid. Although Astrid initially finds it difficult to cope with the loss of the letters from her father to her mother, which she had hidden under her bed, she later finds she is relieved to be without them, and free of the anxiety of trying to interpret her parents’ backstory through them, because "she doesn't need her father's letters any more. They weren't proof of anything really. It doesn't matter that they're gone" (232).

With Amber gone, Smarts back at home with a literally clean slate and the title of the last novel’s section “The End“, the plot of the novel suggests itself to be over. Nevertheless, as Astrid observes, “it’s not Amber that’ over, […] looking at the photograph of Michael with his hand on Magnus’s shoulder and both of them laughing, her mother smiling like that with her arm round Astrid, Astrid with her

32 arm around her mother” (232). Astrid, noticing the end of her family life as she has known it, reflects on the demise of a planet “actually getting darker“ (233) and contemplates at the same time that nothing is actually the end, but “the beginning of everything, the beginning of the century“ (234). What Astrid notices is followed by Eve’s breaking decision. Eve, constantly encouraged by Amber before, decides for a radical break from family and profession, runs away and leaves her family behind. The narrative concludes with Eve becoming “another Amber“ by intruding as a stranger into a house of another family, a move which reflects and repeats

Amber’s equally sudden presence in the Smarts’ holiday home. Resembling the similarity between her and Amber, Eve asks a rethorical question “What if I told you my car broke down?“ (297).

The connection between Amber and Eve is reinforced by their past relationship. Throughout the novel, Amber’s relationship with Eve appears to be special in a particular way, resembling daughter and mother. For the first time ever,

Amber confides to Eve about her past, telling her that “when she was in her twenties“, driving a Porsche “one sleeting winter night, the week before Christmas“, she has accidentally run over and killed a girl (100). Amber implies that she has been escaping this event and the “self“ associated with it ever since, as she roams without direction from place to place. It is at this point we realize that Amber herself strives to find her identity as well, since she feels estranged from the society.

Before Amber’s arrival, the Smarts are locked in a world largely shaped by their careers. Yet we find that the imaginary domain of self-hood, the formation of their identities, is quite fragile and vulnerable to the intrusion of the real (Levin 38).

By forging specific relationships with each member of the family, Amber enables the

33 entire family to see, or rather to recognise themselves and to find their real identity.

As the story unravels, the lives of its characters are smashed and put together again in new, bewildering patterns. So is it all a chance accident? Not according to Ali

Smith: 'I think I believe that every random chance has a purpose. Life seems random while we're in the middle of it but, even so, we long to see shape in it, and give it shape' (qtd. In Jones).

The Accidental initially appears to chart a conventional developmental trajectory, in which Amber figures as a catalyst for change, however, since the novel takes place over the summer of 2003, Horton points out that it is also a text whose central interest is not only in personal issues, but also in public catastrophic experience, in relation to an Iraq War background (Horton 639). Even Smith herself alludes that the text should be read as a war novel (qtd. in France).

Indeed, there are occasional hints at current political and cultural affairs, most notably the Iraq war in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the war crimes committed by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison, which came to media attention in 2004. These contextual reference points neatly appear to situate The

Accidental in the category of “post-9/11 fiction” (Tancke 78).

Allusions to war are made throughout the whole novel, particularly Amber draws a special connection between fantasy, sexuality, and war. She speaks of how

"The bombs curve at their heavy ens like the naked breasts of women" (Smith, The

Accidental 210), and of how "The dead on all the battlefields get up and walk… they stare in through the windows" (211).

On a U.S. book tou rafter leasing family, Eve takes a trip to locate her father's home and while idly glancing at her newspaper, she reads in an article:

"There was a picture on the front of it in a bodybag. The man was clearly dead. He

34 had the empty clayey look of the not-longgone. […] There was a report about a woman in her seventies. One day they took her out of her cell. They snarled a dog at her and they made her go down on all fours like a dog. A soldier sat on her back and rode her round the prison courtyard like a horse. There were pictures of a lot of prisoners-of-war who were made, by dog and at gunpoint, to strip. Then the soldiers put bags over their heads. Then they were piled up, naked, one on top of the other into a hive of live bodies and the soldiers had had their photographs taken smiling as if at a family party over the top of the pile of people" (285).

One possibility to make sense of characterizing The Accidental as a war novel is to read the plot device of Amber’s intrusion and its cataclysmic nature as a natural parallel to the events of 9/11, demonstrating, in Tew’s words, “a traumatological emphasis…foregrounding conflict and intimacy in the apparently narrow bounds of domesticity“ (211).

According to Williams, Smarts, coddled by middle-class complacency and mired in creative and sexual dysfunction, are the model for today's bourgeoisie.

They have the luxury of not fully apprehending their lives, since they are too bent on avoiding one another and falling under the devil-may-care spell of Amber. Thus, how can they take meaningful notice of the war? And for that matter, how, as readers, could we?

Amber’s name and its meaning as a color suggest clearly a warning signal.

Her description of her birth insinuates a war cloud: “I was formed and made in the

Saigon days, the Rhodesian days, the days of the rivers of blood“ (Smith, The

Accidental 103-4). As “the accidental“, she is the embodiment of contingency – the untimely and unforeseen, the small event that has fatal consequences, the sudden arrival of the catastrophic (O’Donnel 98). McGillis similarly claims that it's hard not

35 to read some heavy symbolism into Amber's name since it is, after all, the colour between red and green, between restriction and liberty.

Amber brings the family to the real world by freeing each member of their personal burden and enabling them to discover their real identity. She is at the same time physical and mysterious, present and not real; by accidentally happening to the Smart family, she manages to bring up the best and the worst in all of them.

As Tolstoy noted, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. However, the particular unhappiness of Smart in The Accidental is not the only concern of the novel. Tancke proposes that “what the novel suggests is that individuals’ implication in violence and cruelty starts much closer at home and that professed moral outrage at things far beyond our personal sphere of influence may all too easily make us overlook our own capacity for inflicting violence and suffering“ (Tancke

80). It is this uncomfortable recognition that is triggered by Amber’s appearance.

The narrative thus exposes a disturbing set of human universals – the capacity for violence, the ruthless pursuit of self-interest and the propensity to inflict hurt on others. By intruding into a dysfunctional family, Amber acts as a catalyst forcing the characters to acknowledge those aspects of their personalities that point not only to individual flaws, but to disturbing constants of the human condition: our inclination to self-delusion and our innate capacity for violence.

Just like Smarts are alienated from the outside world, from themselves and even from their real identity, the novel draws attention to our own alienation from the real events happening around us. For Smith, the arrival of the “other“ produces a breakdown of the referential narrative that compels one not simply to “know“ the real that structures the domestic fantasy, but to “experience“ it. With the war in

Iraq shadowing the narrative, Smith suggests that such fantasies of omnipotence in

36 fact perpetuate, in a particular moment of globalization, a condition of „not knowing“ (Levin 39).

37

5 Hotel World

“I had been missing the having a heart.“

(Smith, Hotel World 7)

The plot of Hotel World revolves around an accidental death of a girl named

Sara, who worked there as a chambermaid. The event of Sara’s unfortunate death catalyses the remaining four narratives told from the perspective of different women, who are interconnected despite the fact that they do not know each other.

Sara, who has just taken on a job as chambermaid in Global Hotel, bets that she can stuff herself into the hotel’s dumbwaiter. However, the elevator cable tears and Sara crashes down to the bottom of the shaft. Sara’s death reverberates in six sections of the novel, which are named after grammatical tenses and narrated by five different characters: Sara’s ghost (‘Past’); Else, a homeless lady staying outside the Global Hotel (‘Future Conditional’); Lise, the hotel’s receptionist who notices Else and gives her a shelter for the night in one of the hotel’s unoccupied rooms

(‘Present historic’); Penny, a journalist staying in Hotel World to review its services

(‘Perfect’); Clare Wilby, Sara’s sister, who is struggling to come to terms with her sister’s death (‘Future in the past’), and the narration in the last section is presumably concluded by Sara’s ghost (‘Present’). Together, the narrators of Hotel

World form a community of strangers, brought together by chance.

The writing of Hotel World, Smith has commented, has its origins in “the notion of transience that hotels are all about, and at the same time the notion of tiered social hierarchies” (“Ali Smith’s Split World”). I suggest that Smith’s portrayal of the characters in the novel and their identity is closely connected to the notion of

38 language. This chapter therefore discusses the novel's thematic concerns – the relation between the nature of time and alienation and the relation between language and existence.

The narrative opens with a section entitled ‘past’ and immediatelly at the beginning it is revealed that the major event of the novel (Sara’s death) has already taken place. Sara’s ghost remains lost in a purgatorial space between worlds and clarifies the cause of her demise and the events that lead up to it: ‘Here’s the story; it starts at the end’ (Smith, Hotel World 3) While alive, Sara has silently fallen in love with a girl from the watch shop who repairs her watch, but Sara’s death prevented her from revealing her true feelings.

Even before her death, Sara feels alienation due to her sexual orientation.

She feels lost and stuck, just like hands of her broken watch are “stuck at ten to two” (17). After falling in love with the girl at the watch shop, Sara admits that

“falling for her had made me invisible” (23). Sara is already trapped in a liminal dimension before she falls down the lift. It is also a notion of time that connect

Sara and the girl in a watch shop, who is “surrounded by watches in cabinets, watches in case, watches all up and down the walls… all of them stopped, with their hands pointing to different, possible, times of day” (18).

After Sara dies, her ghostly existence is literally fading in and out of language: “I am hanging falling breaking between this word and the next“ (31).

And yet, as Levin notices, this breakdown of the rules of grammar and fading offers the possibility for new significations and the potential for new modes of individual and cultural expressivity (Levin 43):

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Remember you must live. Remember You most love. Remember you mist leaf. (I will mist mist. I will mist leaf. I will miss the, the. What’s the word? Lost, I’ve, the word. The word for. You know. I don’t mean a house. I don’t mean a room. I mean the way of the . Dead to the . Out of this . Word.

(Smith, Hotel World 30-31)

The two signifiers – “word“ and “world“ – although very similar, are in fact separated by an irreducible gap. Levin further specifies that as language disintegrates and the gap in the narration becomes dominant, the “world“ loses its ontological clarity and the subject takes on a ghostly relationship to the social structure (Levin 44). The connection between language, existence and identity is manifested as Sara’s ghost is moving away from the real world and simultaneously loses her ability to speak fluently - she describes her own mortality as a falling out of language: “I climbed inside the, the… I forget the word, it has its own name”

(Smith, Hotel World 6).

The focus of the next chapter, “Present Historic“, is Else, a homeless woman, who lives in the margins of the urban streetscape. Else, possibly suffering from tuberculosis, observes the street scene as she begs outside the Global Hotel. In contrast with the previous chapter’s first-person narrative, Else’s consciousness is presented in the third person. With the use of third-person narrative, Smith comments on the way in which social prejudice sees the homeless people stereotyped, or not seen at all: “People go past. They don’t see Else, or decide not to“ (39).

In such a global setting, where the novel takes place, the city has become an object of tourist fantasy, just a place for “tourists to bring their traveller’s cheques to in the summer“ (45). To this dreamworld, Else is an anomaly due to her

40 homelessness and inferior status.Her suffering is, similarly to Sara, marked by defective language: when begging, her speech is reduced to almost incomprehensible fragments like "Spr sm chn" (63), meaning in fact "spare some change". Else’s rejection of the vowels calls our attention on their absence, a similar effect to that of the passers-by’s rejection of Else’s presence.

Being observed, compounded by an awareness of being observed, is an element of Else’s identity, closely connected to her language. The relation between

Else’s identity and language is apparent in her description of her surroundings, where she “imagines the pavement littered with the letters that fall out of the half- words she uses (she doesn’t need the whole words)“ (47). The fact that language partly represents a burden for her is pointed out when she reflects on the novel form. She states that she likes reading poetry in the local town library, but not novels: “She can’t be bothered with novels any more. She has read enough novels to last a lifetime. They take too long. They say too much. Not that much needs to be said. They trail stories after them, like if you tied old tin cans to your ankles and then tried to walk about“ (51).

The heading of the section “Present Historic” reveals the manner Else deals with the dimension of time in placing herself in the world. Else’s point of view is mainly directed to the past, with narratives offering glances on her life leading to the present situation. She also describes her previous experiences in order to give reasons for her present actions. This way, her identity is formed by bringing the past into connection with the present.

The section “Future conditional“ is situated some time in the future and is told from the perspective of Lise, who is no longer working as a receptionist in the

Global Hotel. Several months after Sara’s death, Lise is at home suffering from an

41 indiagnosed sickness affecting her mind. Trapped in her apartment, barely able to cross the room without getting exhausted and distressed, she is looked after by her mother. Similarly to Else, whose language was affected by her alienation to society,

Lise has become separated from the surrounding society not only by the walls of her apartment, but by language as well.

Just like Sara before her death, Lise feels alienated from the outside world even before her illness. Lying in her bed, she reminisces about her days behind the receptionist desk, “her subtly made-up face above her Name Badge, sleek and smiling, emptied of self, very good at what she does“ (112) Noticing Else in front of the hotel and inviting her to make use of an unoccupied room for free, Lise attempts to distance herself from the symbolic order of the hotel.

Like Else, Lise has no use for words and this lack of her language ability signifies her identity confusion. When filling a form about her condition, she finds it unable to describe herself:

About you –continued. If you need help filling in this form, or any part of it, phone 0800 88 22 00. Tell us about yourself. Well. I am a nice person. … After this she would cross out the word nice, and write above it the word sick. I am a sick person. … I am a ( ) person. (81, 85) Ironically, by writing first nice, then sick, and finally allowing the abject to come to the surface by leaving the space blank, the reader is allowed to see the obvious:

Lise is a person (Sánchez 51).

The heading of the section “Future Conditional” has a a similar meaning as it was in the case of the previous section of the novel. Because of her illness, Lise finds herself in a situation where she cannot be sure of her future. The narrative in

42 fact moves along a contradictory trajectory from the past tense into the present:

“That is then, this was now” (Smith, Hotel World 119), expressing Lise’s confusion and difficulties attaching herself to the reality.

The section entitled “Perfect“ deals with Penny, a reporter who has been accommodated in Hotel World to write a review about it. Unlike the rest of the novel’s characters, Penny is not bounded by language, but on the contrary, which is underscored by her profession as a reporter and journalist, for whom everything is a potential story. As a result of this, she translates everything that takes place, and even things that might occur, into something that has already happened: “And if I help that girl, Penny thought as she skipped from stair to stair, that girl will always remember me as the nice person who helped her the night she was, was, doing whatever it is she’s doing. And I will always remember it too, and look back on it many years from now as that night I helped the remarkable teenage chambermaid take the screws out of the wall in that hotel” (138-9).

Penny, a priviliged guest, is put in contrast with Else, who is a representative of a fringe of society. Penny’s thinking is presented as sharp, humorous, but in fact she misreads the world around her. When she sees Else emptying handfuls of money out of her coat, Penny finds it astounding “to see so much loose change in the one place at the same time“ (141) as she completely misapprenends Else’s situation. For Penny, Else’s homelessness does not make sense within the context of the hotel; as she speculates that her presence can only be translated as that of

“some kind of druggy eccentric guest or maybe even a minor ex-rock star” (139).

The section’s title “perfect” in relation to Penny seem to have a special relevance, since Penny seemingly alludes to the idea of perfection:

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“Fawless, Penny typed. She deleted the F and replaced it with an l. Then she put the F back on the front again. … FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFlawless, the computer screen said.“

(125-26)

It is her encounter with Else, who is confusedly departing from the hotel in the middle of the night, that leads to a clarification of Penny’s character. After a meandering walk with Else, Penny decides to give Else a cheque, but after they say goodbye, Penny changes her mind: “By the time she was back at the hotel Penny had become anxious about having written a cheque for so much. By the time the lift had reached her floor she had decided what to do about it“ (174).

Penny, perceiving the world around her by a distorted idealistic view, in fact unknowingly represents the opposite of perfection. As apparently “the only figure in the novel who is able to write, speak, and act in a conventional way” (Eshelman), she is eventually exposed as a fraud. Her lack of connection with the world around her arises through a lack of understanding: her reality fails to correspond to the idealized expectation (Pready 115).

With the novel’s penultimate section, “Future in the past,” we return to the first-person narrative, told by Clare Wilby, Sara’s sister. Following the title of the section, Clare’s narration recalls her sister’s past and its imagined relation to a future she is never to have, but at the same time without any actual occurrence of the future perfect as a tense form. As Currie notes, this is important for the way that it transforms the grammatical into something more metaphorical and leads us away from its dready analytical project into something more poetic (57). The ’future

44 in the past’ can be also viewed as a comparison to death, and it is this sense of

Sara’s future as a thing of the past that drives Clare’s grief.

Clare’s grief and her effort to come to terms with her sister’s death is reflected in her narrative form, where the punctiation is completely ommited. Her narrative, appearing as a flow of words methaphorically resembles Clare’s flow of tears. As she makes lists of all the things her sister could have been and no longer will be, Clare decides “the list of things it would have been possible for you to do is never fucking ending it goes on forever” (Smith, Hotel World 208), because it is the openness of the future in general that is in the past.

The final part of the novel finally moves out of narrative time marked by the shadow of Sara’s death into the next morning. The title, “present,” denotes the narrative tense, but it also echoes the message of this closing narrative: that people are “present” as long as they are remembered, or imagined (E. Smith 96). The narrator roams among the citizens near the Global Hotel and focuses for a moment on the young woman in the watch repair shop, where a final act of reparation and mourning takes place. This methaphorically points to the allusions to time in the opening section of the novel: Sara’s watch, now keeping time, ends upon the wrist of the young woman, who knows nothing of Sara’s death and imagines Sara’s visit that allows her to return the repaired watch at no charge. As Eshelman states:

„Love, then, is possible after all: you love without knowing the other, without wanting to do so, and without having to invest your desire in a bothersome interpersonal projection.“ On the novel’s last two pages, Sara’s words fade out, but in the imagination of this girl waiting, with love, for her return, Sara is still present in the world. The novel thus closes with a repetition of an earlier semantic

45 transmutation: “remember you must live, remember you must love. remember you mist leaf” (Smith, Hotel World 237).

Smith’s novel works to examine the relations of social privilege dividing the rich guest from the receptionist or the chambermaid, and from the homeless woman outside. But as well as focusing on social boundaries, the novel depicts moments of love, of death, of generosity and understanding. The environment of the Global Hotel, a culturally homogenized space full of luxury, participates in the production of anonymous, unengaged, displaced experiences of other places: “You could be, literally, anywhere,” says Penny’s hotel review (180).

Similar to The Accidental, Hotel World depicts the “arrival“ of the other – in this case, it is Sara and her death. What occurs within the confined spaces of a hotel or a vacation home in the novels extends outwards to a cosmopolitan world inhabited by strangers, contextualized by a history in which the past is always present (O’Donnel 89).

The disruption of characters‘ identities manifests in the dissolution of language itself, leaving word gaps in their narration. Sánchez explains: “The horror of what cannot be said – the absence – leaves a (blank) palimpsest on Smith’s text, a physical gap which should have been filled – as the dumbwaiter is successfully filled with Sara’s body – by the expected word“ (47). In each of the narratives, attention is always directed to what is not on the page: punctuation marks, words or Sara’s body. For all the characters, the notion of language represents their estrangement from the world. Sara’s fading words resemble her body fading out of this world, Clare’s heartbreaking monologue demonstrates her effort to cope with her sister’s death. Both Else, the homeless woman and Lise, the receptionist, experience their separation from other people very strongly, but with differing

46 effects on the development of their identities. By limiting her means of expression,

Else has made marginality a defining aspect of her personality, while Lise, separated from the outside world due to her illness, is striving to reach out toward the conventional society. Penny’s flawless utilization of the language in fact alienates her more perilously, since she is completely unaware of this estrangement.

According to Caldwell, the novel implores one to breathe in the sweet elixirs of a necessarily transient life. The coexistence of love and death in Hotel World questions at the same time the boundaries between life and death, overcomes the threshold of the physical world to reach beyond this limit, and explores all the possibilities in between. As Germana in her essay Une Petite Mort: Death, Love and

Liminality in the Fiction of Ali Smith points out, death often seems to be a paradoxical vehicle through which life and love are manifested and asserted.

Apparently unimportant things represent an essential role when it comes remembering: ‘Beautiful dirt, grey and vintage, the grime left by life, sticking to the bony roof of a mouth and tasting of next to nothing, which is always better than nothing’ (Smith, Hotel World 5).

Anything is better than not being and people should appreciate life and live it to the fullest, because it will end one day. Contrasting Muriel Spark’s quotation at the beginning of the novel “remember you must die”, Smith successfully retorts with more striking “remember you must live” (30).

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6 There But For The

“It is strange having a stranger in the house with you all the time. It makes you strangely self-aware, strange to yourself. It is literally like living with a mystery.“

(Smith, There But For The 106)

The novel’s opening sentence of the first chapter in fact summarizes what to expect in the novel’s plot. The chapter, titled “There“, begins with continuation “was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party“ (Smith, There But For The 3).

When a well-off middle-class English couple, Gen and Eric Lee, decide to give a dinner party one night for special guests they see only once a year, little do they know what is in store for them. One of the dinner guests, a gay man Mark, brings with him a man named Miles Garth, whom he met by chance a few days before the dinner party. At one point, between the main course and dessert, Miles leaves the table and heads upstairs. Everyone assumes that he is going to the washroom, but afer some time, he still fails to come back. Gen, the hostess, goes upstairs to make sure he is alright and discovers that Miles has locked himself in the spare room and refuses to come out. The door dates to the 18th century and the hosts are hesitant to break it. Nothing prevents therefore Miles from staying in the Lees’ house for another couple of months, before he leaves in silence, making the novel unconcluded.

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But, There But For The is not just Miles's story. In fact, although being the book’s true centre, Miles doesn’t get a voice of his own. However, Smith manages to tie the individual narratives together so beautifully that we learn a lot about Miles from the viewpoints of her four central characters.

Each section of the novel is headed with a single word from the book's title.

The "There" section involves Anna, whom Miles met twenty years ago at university and on whom the dinner party hosts call to see if she can talk him out of the bedroom. The second part, "But," belongs to the man who brought Miles to the dinner, Mark Palmer, haunted in his mind by his dead mother, a famous painter, who committed suicide when he was at school. Mark is an artfully created

“damaged“ character, whose homosexuality has marginalized him as much as has his hypersensitivity. "For" is the story of May Young, the aged, now bedridden mother of Jennifer, one of Miles's long-dead schoolmates. The final part, "The," belongs to a nine-year-old girl, Brooke Bayoude, whose parents are neighbours of the dinner-party couple and who throughout the novel revels in jokes, puns, word games and various observations.

When Anna Hardie is contacted by Gen Lee with a request to help, she vaguely remembers Miles from a European writing competition where they both were finalists. Anna is aware of the fact that her life stagnates. She is unemployed, broke and “feeling nothing“ (7). Although she has no interest in Miles’s case, she eventually decides to visit him. As Anna knocks on the door to Miles's room, she contemplates his silence: "What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself?

Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and

49 assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? ...Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you'd ever forgotten, all layered there inside of you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?" (66). Since Miles does not anwer, Anna fails, but at the same time stresses one of the novel's themes, which is, as

Brownrigg suggests, the difference between presence and absence, given that those who are apparently absent (like the dead) can feel more present than the people right in front of you.

Anna, before giving up her job, used to work for immigration authorities recording asylum seekers‘ claims and their justifications. While focusing on Anna’s work at a refugee agency (that Anna jokingly calls the "Center for Temporary

Permanence"), Smith touches once again on the political topics and the notion of interconnection between language and identity. Recalling memories of people who she met at the immigration office, she remembers: “There was person after person, sitting in front of Anna, still in Anna’s head. They were from all over the world. They arrived by air, by sea, by lorry, in car boots, on foot. If they tried to enter the country invisibly their heartbeats could be detected (like the thirteen Afganis and the two Iranians hidden in the lorryload of lightbulbs had been) by the special new detector sheds of which the Agency was very proud, and the brand new probes that could detect whether someone was breathing where he or she shouldn’t be. A lot of people Anna had seen had trouble speaking, either because of translation problems, or because a rain of blows had made them distrust words. […] How could what had happened to them be possible in one language, never mind be able to be retold in another? In any language, it was almost always about what home was“ (59).

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The refugee topic is further taken up in the part of the novel, which recounts the events preceding Miles’s disappearance, largely from Mark’s point of view.

During shallow conversation revolving about the benefits of a globalized world, one of the guests states that the world is “a more or less borderless world. And that is as it should be“ (146), with the other chiming in: “Oh, I’m really proud of being

British, me, Hugo says. I’m very big on the choice of toothpaste we have these days. That’s what I call global choice. It’s great, living in such a multivalent universe and having so much choice. I am what I listen to on my iPod“ (147).

The superficiality of guests is manifested afterwards, when they at the same time express the need for borders and divisions asserting that “everywhere needs some defence against people just coming in and overrunning the place with their terrorisms or their deficiencies…“ (146).

When it comes to edges, borders and divisions in connection with There But

For The, it is appropriate to quote Smith herself: “Edges involve extremes. Edges are borders. Edges are very much about identity, about who you are. Crossing a border is not a simple thing. Geopolitically, getting anywhere round the world in which we live now requires a constant producing of proof of identity (Artful 125).

She further carries on, claiming that “edge is the difference between one thing and another. It is the brink. It suggests keenness and it suggests sharpness. It can wound. It can cut. It is the blade – but it is the blunt part of the knife too (Artful

126).

There But For The is a novel preoccupied with edges and boundaries, some of which are those that bound the story itself, such as the line between a section’s title and what follows from it; others are concerned with various kinds of

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(metaphoric) thresholds, such as the contrast between globalization and the need for borders suggested at the dinner party.

Currie suggests that the plot also epitomizes the boundary between what is real and what is imagined. The threshold of the room in which Miles encloses himself acts as a reproduction of the boundaries that create the space of fiction more generally, or as the threshold that we cross when we begin to read (54).

Abstract borderlines are given physical existence within the novel, like the descriptions of Brooke’s blank sheets of paper, on which stories are yet to be written, or the Meridian line that she jumps over in Greenwich.

It is through Anna that we first encounter Brooke, the "preternaturally articulate" girl who becomes the center of the novel's final section. Brooke also bears some resemblance to Astrid in The Accidental. Brooke is a character that provides a link through all of the narratives and she is in fact the only person who is let in by Miles into the spare room and who strikes up a convesation with him before he leaves Lees’ house for good.

“The future is a foreign country.“ This statement, which is Anna’s modification of the first line of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between in the novel’s opening section, is, as Currie suggests, also an announcement of one central themes in There But For The – the strangeness of the future (Currie 48). In

Brooke’s section of the novel, titled “The“, Brooke makes a list of notes that she is trying to incorporate into her History Moleskin notebook, which she calls the “The fact is“ notes. “The The fact is notes will all go here“ she says, counting the blank pages in the notebook. “The fact is“ notes are, like the novel’s title, incomplete forms that leave their future blank. They begin from “the“ and point to a blank, as yet unwritten future.

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The notion of “unwritten future“ is depicted in the novel’s conclusion: Gen

Lee, realizing that she could turn her unwanted guest to her advantage, publishes an article about Miles in a newspaper, calling him “Milo“ and consequently making him a celebrity afterwards. However, after a few months, Miles finally leaves, leaving the novel’s plot incomplete.

Incompleteness is also apparent in the novel’s title. "There," "But," "For" and

"The," though the title phrase is nowhere spoken, leaves us wondering what Smith is referring to. Tancke suggests that since the scenario remains largely unresolved, the novel’s title underlines this ambiguity, suggesting ostensive presence (“there”) but at the same time undermining it with its incomplete concession (“but for the”)

(Tancke 77). The novel’s title evokes blanks, or silences, through incompletion, but by the time we reach its end, we do not seem much closer to a complete grammatical sentence. In the closing pages, the figure of incompletion, and of beginnings of untold stories, remains prominent. In Brooke’s encounter with Miles, in particular, the blank pages that are left in the Moleskin notebook become an issue about just how much of the story remains to be told: “And then that will be the end of this history, at least the bit that actually has Mr Garth in it. Though it might be a good idea to leave some pages blank at the end in case there is anything else that happens, in case the history isn’t over” (Smith, There But For The

335).

Just like The Accidental, There But For The misleads the reader as to its narrative set-up. With its four sections revolving around the incident at the Lees’ dinner party and its aftermath, it is expected that Miles’s unlikely behaviour will be eventually explained and resolved. Both novels centre on the intrusion of a stranger into a middle-class family’s home. The only exception in There But For The is that

53 there is no interaction between Miles and the other characters after he has locked himself away in the Lees‘ spare room. He does not function as a catalyst figure like

Amber does, however, while physically present and variously connected to each of the characters, Miles manages to shed light on them. It is revealed that each character’s identity is damaged, flawed or lost. Anne is mentally tired from her previous work experiences, Mark feels alienated from society because of his homosexuality, May Young is traumatized by her daughter’s untimely death. The

Lees’ are represented as ridiculous bourgeois stereotypes, shallow, obsessed with the fabric of their home, insensitive to difference with their stultifying prejudice and snobbery. Smith frequently notes the misapprehensions any group may have about another - whites about blacks, straight people about gay people, citizens about refugees, interrogatating this way society and its value system.

By leaving the table in the middle of a shallow conversation and locking himself in a room, separated from the outside world by a threshold, Miles, invisible, silent and not missed by anyone, represents the emptiness within us and the indifference to the world around us. The novel, according to Tancke, pinpoints the dark sides of the human psyche and human desires and the figure of Miles (just like

Amber) invites us to become “strangely self-aware“ and to honestly acknowledge the destructive impulses inherent in human nature (Tancke 88).

Kristeva states: “Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, a time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, amenable to bonds and communities“ (Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves

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1). Miles, the guest who doesn’t leave becomes the means through which the broader social anomie is revealed: “Perhaps in some way metaphorically we are all like this man ‘Milo‘ – all of us locked in a room in a house belonging to strangers…

We do not know when our home will feel like home again“ (Smith, There But For

The 107).

Going back to the novel’s title, „there but for the“ might be a possible reference to John Bradford’s quote "There but for the grace of God go I."

Brownrigg suggests that we perceive Miles, perhaps, a little like the way we perceive God - which may explain why Miles's self-imprisonment eventually inspires

TV news coverage and a reverent cult following whose members gather behind the house, cheering on this stranger they call "Milo." But as Virag points out, it's difficult to imagine that the iconoclastic and irreverent Ali Smith intended this phrase to refer to God.

What the various narrative strands of the novel expose, is a set of uncomfortable observations on our contemporary reality and on the human condition. In her review of There But For The, Churchwell ephasizes the ways in which the novel’s punning, philosophical commentary and contemporary allusions make it a literary reflection on “the way we are now”.

While going for a walk in the Greenwich Park, Mark contemplates: “How adaptable human beings were without even realizing it, slipping blindly from state to state. One morning is was summer, the next you woke up and the whole year was over; one minute you were thirty, the next sixty, sixty next year quick as a wink, how fast it all was“ (Smith, There But For The 91).

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A metaphor, as Brooke tells us, is just a way of saying something that is difficult to say. Perhaps by There But For The, Smith just simply explores the seemingly innocent questions: Why are we here? What use are we? What is the point of us?

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7 Conclusion

Smith clarifies the ambiguity of her novels by giving an example of Hitchcock:

“Hitchcock, a brilliant early interpreter of film form, knew that to hook a film audience with real suspense you have to let them in on parts of the plot or understandings of narrative atmosphere that the people in the story can’t have or understand. ‘The whodunnit contains no emotion. The audience are wondering, they’re not emoting, they’re not apprehensive for anyone… When the film is finished and the revelation comes, well, you get two or three minutes of saying, ‘ah, I told you so‘, or ‘I thought so‘, or ‘fancy that‘“ (Artful 118-199).

Indeed, Smith’s novels are not to be read in an easy manner, but she manages to hook the reader and leave a lasting impression. With the use of fragmentation, temporal distortion, punning, blank pages, internal texts and the tension between complete and incomplete sequences, Smith creates unexceptional narratives that focus not only on the characters, but enable the reader to experience attachment, estrangement, the fleetingness of life and the decline of social values. It is this particular impact of Ali Smith’s prose that Winterson touches on, where we confront “real feeling” and “tough emotion” as opposed to the easy sentimentality so prevalent in popular media. Smith’s often formally difficult prose challenges us to adapt to uncomfortable reading “conditions“. Generically, as

Monica Germana notes, Smith's novels manipulate a Gothic motif of the female witch-demon as a symbol of the psychic "contingency and absurdity" in the context of postmodern consumer life (Germana, Scottish Women's Gothic and Fantasy

Writing 87).

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Each of Smith’s novels is unique in its own way, however they all possess

similar connections at the same time. In each case, the reader is implicitly asked

to look elsewhere for the novels‘ genuine concerns. Like represents a story where

a lesbian love could not be fulfilled due to the constraints of society, in Girl Meets

boy, Smith highlights the cultural, social and physical markers that ‘construct’ sex

and gender, and explore the consequences for those who do not fit into such

rigid culturally determined categories. In The Accidental, by juxtaposing such

topics as birth and destruction, sex and war, love and violence, Smith invokes the

extremes of post-9/11 experience. The focus of Hotel World centres more on

subjects marginalized within the field of global culture and in There But For The,

Smith deploys the conceit to satirise contemporary culture.

John Bergerwrote notes: "Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous" (qtd. in Goring). That gap shrinks with every story Ali Smith writes.

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Works Cited

Primary Sources Smith, Ali. Girl Meets Boy. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Print. ---. Hotel World. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001. Print. ---. Like. London: Virago, 1997. Print. ---. The Accidental. London: Penguin, 2006. Print. ---. There but for the. London: Penguin, 2011. Print.

Secondary Sources Akbar, Arifa. "Conversations with the Undead: Ali Smith Gives the Lecture a Haunting Twist."The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, 27 Oct. 2012. Web. 12 Nov. 2013.

“Ali Smith’s Split World.” BBC Arts. 18 Sept. 2001. Web. 20 Mar. 2007. .

Bailey, James. ""What a Story It Could Be": Identity and Narrative Strategy in Ali Smith's Like | FORUM Postgraduate Journal." Forum Journal. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Aug. 2013.

Blyth, Ian. "Simile and Similarity in Ali Smith's Like." Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 23-34. Print.

Brownrigg, Sylvia. "Open House." New York Times Book Review 18 Sept. 2011: 12.ProQuest. Web. 12 July 2013.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

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Caldwell, Gail. "Ghost World A Voice From Beyond The Grave Animates Ali Smith's Tale of Transcient Intimacies." Boston Globe 20 Jan. 2002, Books sec.: 3. Print.

Cox, Fiona M. "Metamorphosis, Mutability and the Third Wave." Classical Receptions Journal 4.2 (2012): 163-75. Print.

Churchwell, Sarah. "There but for The, by Ali Smith: Review." The Guardian. N.p., 5 June 2011. Web. 01 Oct. 2013.

Currie, Mark. "Ali Smith and the Philosophy of Grammar." Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 48-60. Print.

Doloughan, Fiona. "Bottling the Imagination: Writing as Metamorphosis in Ali Smith's Girl Meets Boy." New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 7.3 (2010): 241-51. Web.

Eder, Richard. "Nanny Dearest; The Accidental A Novel." Los Angeles Times 29 Jan. 2006: 4. Print.

Eshelman, Raoul. Anthropoetics - The Journal of Generative Anthropology 10.2 (2004): n. pag. Anthropoetics. Web. 2 Sept. 2013.

France, Louise. "Life Stories - Interview: Ali Smith." The Guardian. N.p., 22 May 2005. Web. 18 Sept. 2013. .

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---. "Une Petite Mort: Death, Love and Liminality in the Fiction of Ali Smith." The University of Strathclyde. Proc. of The Scottish Graduate Research

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Conference. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Sept. 2013. .

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Head, Dominic. "Idiosyncrasy and Currency: Ali Smith and the Contemporary Canon." Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 101-14. Print.

Horton, Emily. " ‘Everything You Ever Dreamed‘:Post-9/11 Trauma and Fantasy in Ali Smith's The Accidental." Modern Fiction Studies 58.3 (2012): 637-55. Print.

Jordan, Justine. London Review of Books 21.13 (1999): 33. Print.

Jones, Nigel. "Fateful Attraction ; Fate Changed the Lives of the Family at the Heart of ALI SMITH's Novel, The Accidental and That of Its Shy Author." Daily Mail [London] 1 Apr. 2006: 18. Print.

Kostkowska, Justyna. Ecocriticism and Women Writers: Environmentalist Poetics of Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith. Basingstoke [u.a.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print.

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---. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Print.

Levin, Stephen M. "Narrating Remainders: Spectral Presences in Ali Smith’s Fictions’." Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 35-47. Print.

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McGillis, Ian. "Secrets and Symbols: The Accidental." The Gazette [Montreal, Que] 20 Aug. 2005: 4. Print.

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Czech Resume

Tato práce analyzuje pět románů skotské spisovatelky Ali Smith. Její romány jsou poměrně komplikované na čtení a ne vždy je jednoduché je interpretovat. To je zčásti způsobeno využitím různých postmoderních prvků, a zčásti je to také dáno jejich obsahem, který sahá od společenských problémů až po abstraktní pojmy, jako např. pomíjitelnost života.

Tato práce zkoumá témata, která jsou společná všem jejím pěti románům, a zabývá se konkrétně náměty lásky, odcizení, křehkosti lidských vztahů a prchavosti

života. V románech je příběh, který končí otevřeně, vypravován z pohledu jednotlivých protagonistů, což umožňuje čtenáři vlastní interpretaci. Využití konceptu času představuje v románech způsob vyjádření pocitu odcizenosti a odloučení hlavních protagonistů. Slovní hříčky, intertextualita a sociální kontext jsou známkou toho, že romány oplývají postmoderními prvky.

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English Resume

This thesis analyzes the work of a Scottish writer Ali Smith, in particular all of her five novels that were published so far. Smith’s novels are not always easy to read and their meaning are 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, 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. 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 that creates the concept of alienation from the outside world.

With their recurrent use of wordplay, numerous intertextual references and broad range of cultural allusions, Smith’s novels seem to exemplify postmodern playfulness.

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