Eyes, camera. Camera, eyes.
The two sections of Ali Smith's How to be Both are each headed by a small icon. One is a boxy drawing of a surveillance camera, the other a flower with eyes for petals. The baleful camera, designed by Smith's partner Sarah Wood, faces off against Francesco del Cossa's slender stalk with eye-flowers, painted in the hand of Saint Lucy around the year 1473. Much has been made of the fact that Smith's novel comes in two editions: both of its sections are labeled "one," and, depending on the copy you pick up, either section may appear first. This setup posed a problem for the e-book, and the publishers had to include a special note.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the digital edition emphasizes the possibility of self-expression through consumer choice—Smith's title does sound like a "how to" manual. But in print, the icons loom on their respective pages, almost like frontispieces. Smith's novel is not about choice at all, but about not having to choose, about being both at exactly the same time. Smith "has it both ways" by incorporating the visual into her text—the visual as it is perceived and constructed by both eyes and cameras.
If you start with the camera section (and this is my recommendation, though I didn't have a choice), you will find yourself in the story of George, a teenage girl in present-day Cambridge, England whose mother has recently died from an allergic reaction to a common antibiotic. George's voice takes immediate control of the narrative. She is a pedant for grammar, but she also speaks like a typical teenager ("anyway," "you know," "whatever"). She imparts a potent combination of grief and angst: Smith is brilliant at how adolescent girls sound. Listen to Astrid in her 2004 novel The Accidental. George's section is full of surveillance technology: she snaps pictures with her smartphone, watches pornography on her iPad, half-believes her mother was under government surveillance for creating subversive pop-up ads, and stalks her mother's former friend and possible lover. The section begins in the present tense, but George's story simultaneously takes place during the previous summer, when her mother brought her to Italy to the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, to see the frescos of Francesco del Cossa. If you start Smith's novel with the eye-flowers, you will find yourself in the story of del Cossa's return to Cambridge to shadow George in her grief. Smith is also brilliant at ghosts—one narrates her 2001 novel Hotel World—and del Cossa delights in observing the contemporary world, observing George, and telling the story of how she came to be a painter. (The first step, it turns out, was passing for a boy in order to work alongside her father, a bricklayer.) At first, del Cossa also mistakes George for a boy. George only occasionally demands to be called by her full name, Georgia, and gender and sex are all part of her teenage tumult. How to be Both does not depict these characters making choices. In some things, of course, they have no choice: both George and del Cossa lose their mothers at an early age, and both must learn to make their way in the world. But for the space of this novel, they have the great privilege of not having to choose between male and female, past and present, eyes and cameras.
For del Cossa, "the making of pictures" has to do with the conventions of linear perspective, the mixing of colors, with feeling, pleasure, and love of life. The taking of pictures, by contrast, is at first voyeuristic, predatory, and frightening, until gradually we see that George is becoming something of an artist herself. Making and taking pictures, Renaissance craft and twenty-first-century technology, are not so very far apart in Smith's novel. Or, as George's mother remarks, "Seeing and being seen, Georgie, is very rarely simple." "Are, George says," correcting her mother's grammar but misunderstanding her point. "Seeing and being seen" is a singular phenomenon, and How to be Both takes as its subject characters negotiating that singularity. "Seeing and being seen" is also a revealing précis of the novel's form. Here, form is more than the near-gimmick of the two different editions. It is closer to the concept of form itself, which Raymond Williams describes coming into English from Latin with two often-simultaneous meanings: "a visible or outward shape" and "an inherent shaping impulse." Smith has frequently been called modernist in her attention to form, and in fact How to be Both won the Goldsmith's Prize in November 2014 for fiction that exhibits formal innovation, that "breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form." In Smith's novels, modernist exuberance in formal play routs any sense of modernist crisis (fitting, perhaps, for a writer who once embarked on a doctorate on "modernism and joy in Irish and American literature"). And yet play with form is not what sets Smith apart from other contemporary novelists—it's her attention to form as both inward and outward, both shape and shaping.
Smith does not write inward-looking auto-fiction in the mode of Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be or Ben Lerner's 10:04, though her 2013 book Artful consists of a series of lectures Ali Smith herself delivered at St Anne's College, Oxford as well as a set of visual illustrations. In Artful, the lecturer is a ghost, "leaving a trail of rubbly stuff" as she prowls her former rooms—this is nothing like the self-exposing play with memoir of Karl Ove Knausgård. Nor is Smith willfully realist—hysterical, lyrical, or otherwise. She does not write novels like bricks sunk in the detailed mire of contemporary life, titles like Freedom and Purity bobbing to the surface. Rather, form becomes the meeting point between the shape of contemporary life and the shaping force of the self. It makes sense, then, that Smith is so good at voices that well up from within, but are directed outward. And ghosts that linger on thresholds. And girls at the crossroads of adolescence: 12-year-old Astrid Smart in The Accidental remarks, "It is weird to look at someone. It is weird when they look back at you. It is really weird to be caught looking." Form is weird like that, too: interiority and exteriority, perception and creation, making and taking pictures.
To this list, let me add one more meeting point: form in How to be Both is where a solid, palpable wall becomes a work of art. Smith has admitted that she was inspired by the fresco form, in which painters paint right into the quickly-drying plaster and restorers must therefore remove a layer of the wall itself, making every restoration a partial demolition. Restoration, however, also often reveals underdrawings quite different from the finished work. This doubleness is why what would be a gimmick in another novel is forgiving and big-hearted here: the two parts of the novel start to crumble into one another a little bit. Form is not a staunch defense against life—it is susceptible to the elements.
In interviews, Smith draws a direct parallel between frescos and her novel: "I have the feeling that all stories travel with an understory," she has remarked. Neither story nor understory takes priority, and this is another point of her mother's that George fails to understand. "But which came first?" her mother asks in Ferrara, "The chicken or the egg? The picture underneath or the picture on the surface?" George insists that the picture below came first because it was done first in time. Her mother insists that the picture on the surface is what we see first: "...which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see it?" George, groaning like the teenager she is, replies, "...that was then. This is now. That's what time is." Del Cossa has a far more sophisticated theory of the fresco form. She is "good at walls" because of her apprenticeship with her father, one in a line of men who built Ferrara. By studying painting and perspective as well as her father's craft, she learns "how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it up-rising through the skin of it." The fresco, then, gives the best approximation of the relationship between the two sections of the novel. But more than that, the wall that is also a work of art quite literally reconciles the divide between eye and camera in Smith's novel.
George, like any teenage girl, has plastered the walls of her room with images. She covers one wall with snapshots of her mother at different ages, another with images her mother loved: an Antonioni poster, a photograph of Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy from the 60s. These images also cover up the fact that her room has a leak she has failed to report to her father, preferring to imagine the roof caving in and herself opened up to rain and sky. George's visual imagination also involves crumbling walls, water damage, and the ravages of time, it seems. Another wall in her bedroom is covered with iPhone photos of her mother's friend, who both George and her mother half-suspected was assigned to surveil George's mother for her political activity. Del Cossa observes George visiting this woman's house daily and snapping a picture of the façade, of the curtains twitching, of the friend objecting and covering her face. She arranges and rearranges these photos on the wall, then takes them down and stitches them together like a brick wall ("But the girl is an artist!" exclaims del Cossa). When her school friend, and also possible lover, comes over, both girls shawl themselves with the picture-wall, ripping it and laughing. "I like a good skillful friend," remarks del Cossa, "I like a good opened-up wall." But George's story does not end with this act of catharsis. She also paints a pair of eyes upon the wall opposite her mother's friend's house: "She will let whoever's watching know she's watching." In other words, George's final act—no matter which version of the novel you read—is to paint something very much like a camera eye and to turn a suburban wall into a work of art.
Is dusting off the term "ekphrasis" helpful in describing this novel's form? Ekphrasis is the verbal representation of a visual representation, in James Heffernan's pithy formulation, and both George and del Cossa deliver plenty of those here. Yet many of Smith's books incorporate actual visual representations: the appendix of illustrations in Artful, Sarah Wood's tiny images in Shire (2013), the wacky frontispiece photograph in The Accidental, and of course the icons in How to be Both. (Readers of the print version may also notice that Sarah Wood, in taking Smith's author photograph for the jacket flap, fills the frame with more wall than author, and that the wall appears along the via Francesco del Cossa in Ferrara). Too often, ekphrasis is wielded as a critical weapon, a term that describes one form of art, the written word, seeking to overcome another, the image. This reflex has a long heritage, of course, going back to the paragone of del Cossa's renaissance Italy. Yet Smith is one of a number of contemporary authors who allow images to creep into their novels and coexist there. Her icons are not publishing gimmicks, and therefore subordinate to the text. But neither are they limit cases, defying the written word.
The term ekphrasis does, however, point to a crucial element of this novel's form: time. It is commonly held, in a New Critical idiom, that an ekphrastic description stills time, freeing poetry or prose from the necessity of temporal flow. Smith, too, would like to free this novel from sequence and open up the possibility that all the parts are happening simultaneously: George in Cambridge, her summer trip to Ferrara with her mother, del Cossa in Ferrara, del Cossa shadowing George in Cambridge. That's quite a reach for a novelist, and Smith is the first to admit it. Publishing two different editions is an interesting move, but it is not a solution. It is also true that simultaneity isn't stillness, not in the mode of Keats's urn or Stevens's jar in Tennessee. It's multiplicity. But ekphrasis, freed from its trammels, can also provide a way of talking about form and multiplicity. Because what ekphrasis does do, stealthily, is to posit an embodied viewer, or it reaches out, rhetorically, to a receptive audience. Ekphrasis is where visual object and spectator encounter one another—seeing and being seen, eyes and cameras, walls and works of art. How to be Both does not deny that in a novel there is always a clock, as E.M. Forster insists. Yet George's section ends in multiple times, with her waiting, at noon, for the plot to develop, while readers hear what will happen in "roughly half an hour or so," when del Cossa rises from the dead to observe George.
If the fresco is the form of this novel, this has less to do with what we see (or what we, clicking through the e-book, choose to see) than with how we see it, to quote George's mother. The visual elements of Smith's novels—icons and illustrations as well as ekphrastic descriptions—draw careful attention to how we read a novel: we read with our eyes.
Emily Hyde is an Assistant Professor of English at Rowan University. She is completing a book manuscript, "A Way of Seeing," that examines the global forms of mid-twentieth-century modernist and postcolonial literature through the vexed status of the visual.