LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 24:11 November 2024
ISSN 1930-2940

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Ali Smith’s Autumn: A Collage of Real and Unreal, Temporal and Timeless

Sifat E Rabbani, Ph.D. Student
Carleton University, Canada


Courtesy: www.amazon.com

Abstract

Ali Smith, in the first installment of her seasonal quartet Autumn, weaves together multiple themes and images to create a mélange that takes its readers into a dreamlike journey across time, space, and history. At the same time, Britain’s only female painter of the Pop Art movement in the 80’s Pauline Boty’s collages and their interpretations form a significant portion of the novel that functions as a parallel subtext in its structure. Keeping the post-Referendum divided Britain in the background, Smith in Autumn recounts an unconventional love story between Elisabeth and Daniel, that is both timeless and temporal, beyond any strict definition, and deeply rooted in the soul. Together they create a multilayered reality embedded in their imagination, which contains the meaning of life for them. Just as a collage has no apparent symmetry or order, but still manages to produce a sense of purpose and beauty, so also Smith’s novel, devoid of any chronological order or linear narrative structure, shifting back and forth in time, is able to please its reader with a sense of autumnal fulfillment and hope. Besides focusing on these thematic and structural aspects, the paper will also engage with the political undertone of the novel that has earned it the title of the first ‘Brexit novel’, which has added another layer to its complex collage-like tapestry. The neo-formalist method as employed by Caroline Levine to expand the concept of form in literary fields will be used in the latter part of this paper to analyze how the multiplicity of ideas work together. Overall, this paper will examine how in Autumn, by working with several themes and issues, Ali Smith manages at the end to combine all into a collage, which is in itself organic and whole.

Keywords: Ali Smith, Autumn, Collage, Narrative structure, Form, Neo-formalism, Erotohistoriography, Conviviality

Introduction

Ali Smith’s Autumn is crafted following a nonlinear structure that often vacillates between dream and reality, as well as from past to present. This first installment of Smith’s seasonal quartet prepares the ground for her five-year-long literary project which continues through three consecutive novels after> Autumn titled Winter, Spring, and Summer. Although there is no evident connection or continuation of a plot among these four novels, combinedly they raise a common question in their reader’s mind which is, how much of the contemporary time and events can be and should be portrayed by the artist through their artworks. Ali Smith naturally gravitates towards portraying the importance of art in making sense of the world, and her ambitious seasonal quartet is also no exception.

Autumn’s main action revolves around the lifelong friendship, which can also be interpreted as a platonic love affair between Elisabeth Demand, a single art history lecturer in her early thirties, and Daniel Gluck, a centenarian on his deathbed. Daniel has been a polite and sensitive person, who also happens to have lived quite an eventful past, which is gradually revealed to Elisabeth and the readers as the novel progresses. Through his speech, memories, dreams, and “time travels” (Smith 175), Daniel in both his conscious and subconscious states, puts together a collage that is, or might have been his life. He is seventy years older than Elisabeth, who was eight when she first met him as her neighbor.

Despite this huge age gap, they form a bond during the course of their lives and create a love that is complex, metaphysical, and beautiful. They discuss the books they have read, create pictures in their minds, and try to make sense of the world around them. Both of them have empty spaces in their lives that are filled by the other's existence.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Sifat E Rabbani
M.A. (University of Chittagong)
M.A. (McMaster University)
Assistant Professor, Department of English
University of Chittagong, Bangladesh
Second-year PhD Student at Carleton University, Canada
rabbanisifate@gmail.com
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