The Whole Story? Reading Postmodernisms in the Work of Ali Smith

Gael Harvey

The Whole Story? Reading Postmodernisms in the Work of Ali Smith

Ali Smith is a prolific contemporary writer, whose work crosses form and genre, to include short stories, novels, plays and critical works. Many labels have been attached to her fiction, amongst them ‘experimental’, ‘Scottish’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘postmodernist.’ Despite her comprehensive body of work, she is as yet academically under-researched; possibly because her work is so rich and varied, and therefore resistant to stock approaches of formulaic analysis.

Italo Calvino is one of Smith’s acknowledged literary touchstones. In The Reader (2006), an anthology of her literary influences, Smith includes an extract from his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988). Six Memos is a posthumously published series of lectures which Calvino was to have delivered at Harvard University. In it he identifies five specific qualities of literature: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity, which he situates within the perspective of the new millennium.

Appropriating Calvino’s framework, I will present five chapters, each illustrating a different trope of postmodernism, each supported with additional material from key theorists of the postmodern, including: Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Jean Francois Lyotard and Teresa de Lauretis. As postmodernism is widely regarded as a reaction to modernism; I will also draw on figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin and Henri Bergson.

I will use this taxonomy, alongside a close reading of a range of Smith’s fiction: including the novella Girl Meets Boy (2007) and selected short stories from the anthologies Free Love (1995), Other Stories and other stories (1999), The Whole Story and other stories (2004) and The First Person and other stories (2008), to identify the range of postmodernisms contained within Smith’s work. In my final chapter I will offer a detailed analysis of her latest novel, The Accidental (2005), which won the Whitbread Novel Award in 2006. My dissertation will demonstrate how Ali Smith’s fiction draws on the techniques of postmodernism, in order to critique the condition of postmodernity.

Annotated Bibliography

Calvino, Italo, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh (London:

Vintage, 1996)

My core secondary text will be this posthumous publication of Calvino’s collection of lectures, intended for delivery at Harvard, in 1985. In it Calvino describes five “values, qualities or peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart” (p.1): these being Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity. Although Calvino states that he is attempting to situate these characteristics “within the perspective of the new millennium”, his examples are, necessarily, drawn from the ‘old’ millennium. I will take these headings, and whilst trying to remain true to his definitions, will use examples largely drawn from fiction written by Ali Smith at the dawn of the ‘new’ millennium.

Calvino, Italo, The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1986)

This comprehensive collection of essays covers many topics. It includes sections on desire and eroticism which are applicable to several of my chapters, and an essay on the political uses of literature that can be used as a direct retort to Frederic Jameson’s assertions regarding the apolitical nature of postmodern fiction. There are also several references to cinema; these, together with work by Gilles Deleuze, will help to underpin the Visibility chapter. The essay on “Cybernetics and Ghosts” will also be relevant to a discussion of new communication technologies in the chapter on Quickness, and “The Pen in the First Person” will be used in a discussion of reflexivity in the Exactitude chapter.

Doan, Laura, ed., The Lesbian Postmodern (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)

In this edited volume, Doan gathers together essays by theorists including herself, Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Halberstam. In the Multiplicity chapter I will consider Linda Hutcheon’s concept of the ex centric: those on the outside, the disenfranchised. In The Uses of Literature (p.98), Calvino states: “Literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to whatever is without voice, when it gives a name to what as yet has no name.” In her short stories, Smith frequently uses the first person and non-gendered pronouns to obscure the gender of her protagonists, in other texts she is clearly writing about relationships between women; all her work is underpinned by an awareness of the position of women within patriarchal hegemony. In this chapter I specifically wish to focus on the queer and post-feminist elements of postmodern theory. I will initially explore similar themes in the Visibility chapter, using texts by Teresa de Lauretis, who asks the loaded and multi-layered question: “How do I look?”

Eshelman, Raoul, “Checking out of the Epoch: Performatism in Olga Tokarczuk’s “The Hotel Capital” vs. Late Postmodernism in Ali Smith’s Hotel World”, Anthropoetics 10, No.2, (Fall 2004/Winter 2005),

WWW documents <www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1002/transhotel.htm

(21 January 2009)

Eshelman views Smith’s Hotel World as fin-de-siècle text, and looks forward to the “post-postmodern, post-Millennium epoch.” He employs cultural theorists such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to read Smith’s text as a repressive exercise in “victimary politics.” He acknowledges Smith’s manipulation of time and space, and use of “typical, well-established procedures of postmodernism”, but concludes that foregoing epistemological critique for metaphysical ideals leads to a self-made trap. I believe Eshelman willfully misreads Smith, ignoring the inherently positive and playful nature of her fiction.

Germana, Monica,“’Une Petite Mort’: Death, Love and Liminality in the Fiction of Ali Smith”, Ecloga Online Journal, Issue 3, Autumn 2003, Dept. of English Studies, University of Strathclyde, WWW documents

www.strath.ac.uk/medie/deptments/englishstudies/ecloga/media_135640_en.doc> (07 December 2008)

With reference to the novel Hotel World, and a selection of short stories, Germana’s focus on liminality and fluidity is of particular relevance to a postmodern reading of Smith’s work. Much of her fiction is extremely self-reflexive, focusing on the processes of reading and writing and the telling of stories. Germana refers to Brian McHale’s analysis of the uncanny relation between writer, reader and character/narrator, and the division between real and imagined. Smith’s extensive use of - often unreliable - first person narrators can prove unsettling; in The Accidental, and the short story “Writ”, Smith explores multiple self identities. These issues will be explored in the chapters on Exactitude and Multiplicity. Germana also refers to an element of surrealism in Smith’s stories, which provides a link with some of Calvino’s own, magical realist work: I would highlight Smith’s “Trachtenbauer” and “The child” as being prime examples.

Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006)

Hutcheon asks the questions: What? Who? Why? How? Where? When? in order to probe the processes of postmodern adaptation. She encourages the consideration of each version of a particular narrative – be it a book, film or other form of para-text – as a work of art on its own merits. This fosters objective, rather than emotionally subjective, analysis of the processes of adaptation, viewing resulting individual texts as produced within their own unique context. My final chapter analyses Smith’s latest novel, The Accidental, which is actually an adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Neorealist film, Theorem (1968). Smith transposes the basic narrative material across time, space and media. Her Boy Meets Girl is also an adaptation; giving the tale of Ianthe and Iphis, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8AD), a new, contemporary, queer lease of life. Smith discusses the role of myth in literature in a critical context in the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour programme “Women in Myth” (see extended bibliography): Calvino’s essay “Ovid and Universal Contiguity” will also be of relevance here.

Hutcheon, Linda, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (London: Methuen, 1984)

Hutcheon’s first book focuses on the relationship between contemporary theoretical and literary texts. She examines metafictional texts, i.e. those which are self-reflexive, and which privilege language; it is not just what is said that is important but how it is said. She posits that postmodern metafiction particularly invites reader response, and foregrounds the active processes of reading and writing: “To read is to act; to act is both to interpret and to create anew – to be revolutionary, perhaps in political as well as literary terms.” (p.161) This approach has obvious parallels with Calvino’s view of the political role of literary texts, and is relevant to my chapters on both Exactitude and Multiplicity.

Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991)

Fredric Jameson is one of the most famous of the critics of postmodernism. In my chapter on Lightness I will explore the role of humour in postmodernism, focusing on irony, parody and, from Jameson’s point of view, pastiche. The other strand of his thought I wish to explore is his analysis of the role of multi national corporations in the economic era of Late Capitalism. Smith’s novella, Boy Meets Girl, has a corrupt multinational water company, Pure, at its centre, and Hotel World is based around a branch of the Global hotel chain. I will also challenge throughout my dissertation Jameson’s general assertion that postmodern texts are largely ahistorical and apolitical.

Murray, Isobel, ed., Scottish Writers Talking (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006)

This in depth interview contextualises Smith’s fiction in the light of her gender, sexuality, upbringing and education. Rather than endorsing the so called ‘Great Divide’, Smith’s responses stress the links between modernism and postmodernism. The interview stresses the intertextuality and cross-mediality of her work, which I will highlight in my Multiplicity chapter. The interview also includes detailed analysis of the rationale behind the compilation of her short story collections; this will be of use in the chapter on Exactitude.

Re, Lucia, “Calvino and the Value of Literature”, MLN, vol. 113. no.1 (1998), pp. 121-137

Though there are many books on Calvino’s fiction, there are few resources devoted to analysis of his critical work. This article gives an insightful and comprehensive survey of this material, including references to both Six Memos and the essays included within The Uses of Literature. Re gives her own summary of each of Calvino’s chosen literary qualities: Lightness “intellectual agility”, Quickness “movement of desire… without which there would be no dynamism”, Exactitude “linguistic precision”, Visibility “make the reader vividly see” and Multiplicity “a method of knowledge and a way of connecting.” She particularly foregrounds Calvino’s political angle; contextualizing his critical writings within different periods of Italian history, and also focuses on his invitation to readers to formulate their own list of personal literary ‘classics’, as posited in The Uses of Literature.

Extended Bibliography

BBC Radio 4, Bookclub, “Ali Smith’s Hotel World”, (May 2006), WWW documents

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/bookclub/> (20th May, 2009)

BBC Radio 4, Woman’s Hour, “The playful art of the short story”,

(1st October, 2008), WWW documents, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/01/2008_40_wed.shtml

(20th May, 2009)

BBC Radio 4, Woman’s Hour, “Women in myth”,

(20th November, 2007), WWW documents, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/01/2007_47_tue.shtml (20th May, 2009)

Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969)

Bataille, Georges, Eroticism, trans. M. Dalwood (London: Marion Boyars, 1987)

Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1997)

Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992)

Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayer (London: Phaidon, 1995)

Bergson, Henri, Key Writings, eds. Keith Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey (London: Continuum, 2002)

Baudrilllard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994)

Bondanella, Peter, Italian Cinema From Neorealism to the Present (London: Continuum, 1995)

Bradford, Richard, The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)

Buchanan, Ian and Claire Colebrook, eds., Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: University Press, 2000)

Chubb, Stephen, I Reader, I, Writer (Market Harborough: Troubador, 1997)

De Lauretis, Teresa, “Film and the Visible” in How Do I Look, ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991)

De Lauretis, Teresa, “Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?”, PMLA (90:3), May 1975, pp.414-425

De Lauretis, Teresa, The Practice of Love (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: The Athlone Press, 1992)

Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: The Athlone Press, 1989)

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987)

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley et al (London: The Athlone Press, 1984)

Gunnars, Kristjana, “On Writing Short Books”, World Literature Today, Vol. 78, Iss. 2, (May-Aug, 2004), pp. 21-26

Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988).

Hutcheon, Linda, The Politics of Postmodernism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005)

Hutton, Elaine, ed., Beyond Sex and Romance? The Politics of Contemporary Lesbian Fiction (London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1998)

Marcus, Millicent, Italian Film in the Light of Neo-Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)

Marks, John Giles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (London: Pluto Press, 1998)

McLaughlin, Martin, Italo Calvino (Edinburgh University Press, 1998)

Nicol, Brian, ed., Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002)

Pasolini, Pier, Paolo, Theorem (1968)

Rajchman, John, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000)

Schwarz, David, Pasolini’s Requiem (Pantheon, 1992)

Simmel, Georg, On Individuality and Social Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971)

Viano, Maurizio, A Certain Realism – Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practise (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993)

Weiss, Beno, Understanding Italo Calvino (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993)

White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 5-27

Primary Texts

(All Ali Smith unless indicated otherwise)

Ali Smith’s Supersonic 70s (London: Penguin, 2005)

Free Love (London: Virago, 1995)

Girl Meets Boy (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007)