How to be strange

In the northern and western parts of Britain, a New Year tradition persists that people call "first footing."1 Most commonly associated with Ali Smith's home nation of Scotland, the practice ritualizes the arrival of a household's first guest of the year. Shortly after midnight, the first-foot comes knocking at the door. Quite often, the first-foot stepped out barely a few minutes before twelve o'clock, leaving the party only to return, newly a stranger in the new year, carrying gifts such as food, fuel, salt, coins, and whisky. In Scotland, it's considered good luck if the first-foot is a man with dark hair; bad luck if it's a woman, a fair-haired man (Vikings!), or a doctor. In some homes, the first-foot's not far from a licensed harasser, with the right to claim a kiss from every woman; in Edinburgh, young women would arrange for their male lovers to first-foot as a step in their courtship. First footing connects the ethical imperative to be hospitable to strangers with the attempt to harness the elemental energies of the universe — luck, wealth, appetite, health, sex — to the cyclical movements of seasonal time. Welcome an uninvited stranger and a better year may lie ahead.

Ali Smith's novels are stuffed with uninvited strangers, with hospitality's radical promise and its tragic betrayal, with both sides of what Charlotte Terrell calls "the power of the chance encounter to alter a person." The first and last volumes of the Seasonal Quartet, to give just the most famous example, tell the story of Daniel Gluck and his family, including their cosmopolitan life before and between the wars: France and England and Germany; many languages, much music, a little business. They also tell of this Jewish family's desolation at the hands of the Nazis, as well as of the internment in Britain of Daniel's elderly father (and, later, Daniel) as undesirable aliens during World War I and World War II. Far from casting the past as the present's antithesis, the Quartet's twentieth-century stories suggest a moral and historical frame within which readers can understand the experience of immigration detainees in the contemporary UK. For Daniel's internment camp on the Isle of Man, circa 1940, see the Immigration Removal Centers (IRCs) that are central to Spring (2019) and scattered across the Quartet — quasi prisons, of an extraterritorial nature, in which a cosmopolitan mass of "deets" (detainees) are imprisoned without trial for the crime of expecting a welcome. Not for nothing does Autumn begin, as Amy Elkins and Deidre Lynch also notice, with Daniel's dream that he's washed up naked on a beach, like Odysseus on Phaeacia — but also like one of our century's many less-remembered sojourners across the Aegean or the English Channel. 

First-footers on every day of the year, at home in two houses and so belonging to none, Smith's uninvited guests epitomize the mixed character of her fiction, made up as it is by what James Wood calls the combination of "the realistic premises of conventional bourgeois fiction (families on holiday, unfaithful spouses, unhappy children, difficult parents)" with "surreal, experimental, or anarchic elements."2 (Weltschmerz, meet whimsy.) It's my hunch that Smith's interest in strangers-from-elsewhere represents an essential quality of her rapidly-growing and increasingly-celebrated body of work. They are, as Stephanie De Gooyer also notices, unambiguously related to her own advocacy work on behalf of immigration detainees. With Abdulrazak Gurnah, she is a patron of the charitable group Refugee Tales, which collaborates with migrants to stage annual multi-day walks of solidarity and storytelling across Britain — Chaucer's Canterbury Tales provides the model —  in order to "show the reality of indefinite detention" in the UK.3 The first volume of stories published by Refugee Tales contains her "Detainee's Tale," an uncharacteristically austere prose narrative concerned with the yawning gap between public attitudes to international migration and the experiences of the thousands of adults and children imprisoned in British IRCs.4 Asked by Gillian Beer about her repeated use of "the device of the uninvited guest," she calls it "a very good strong old story" and then asks: "How can I stop? [....] If we don't pay attention to the things that happen when something enters our world from outside, and if every dominant narrative tells us to dislike it, then I don't know how we'll manage to stay human."5

Smith's plots regularly depend on the transformative magic of extraordinary characters: young women and girls, mostly, each of them poised between goblin and girlboss, all of them able to crack the world open a little—to imagine it "differently possible," as Cara Lewis puts it, quoting from a tribute to John Berger.

In the context of first footing, the obvious example is Helena Fisker, or H, the quasi love-interest in the twenty-first-century sections of How to Be Both (2014). H is every inch the first-footer. When we first meet her, she has turned up at the front door of our protagonist, George. It's 1:30AM on New Year's Day in Cambridge (Smith's adopted hometown) and H and George barely know one another. George lets her in, H may or may not have brought a gift of food (a cabbage), and within weeks of this uninvited guest's arrival, the atmosphere in George's grief-stricken home is perceptibly changed:

And if H has the power to light up the world, what about Lux in Winter (2017), whose name derives from the Latin for light? (As Walt Hunter and Charlotte Terrell have also noticed, Smith does love to do allegory-by-naming.) Another uninvited guest — this time, at a Christmas family gathering — Lux is a gay homeless Croatian migrant who, in the aftermath of Brexit, will soon be forced to leave the UK. Lux's vulnerability in Brexit Britain is more than matched by her extraordinary power to dazzle and illuminate. "Like a figure in a Shakespearean romance," Wood avers, "she is the angelic agent who magically brings [all the other characters] together."6 Without Lux, Winter barely gets off the ground. And without Lux's charming anarchism, there's no way that, in Summer, the rambling family home to which she traveled for Christmas would have been converted, as it eventually is, into a sanctuary for migrants abruptly released from detention during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Consider, too, Amber/Alhambra in The Accidental (2005). A beautiful and mysterious young woman who enters the Smart family's life as if from nowhere, Amber's personal history is mixed up with the history of cinema, not least because she so clearly resembles the Terence Stamp character in Pasolini's Teorama (1968).7 Amber breezes into the Smarts' holiday home, upends everyone's sense of themselves, has sex with the son in the attic, empties the Smarts' London residence of all its possessions, and — at novel's end — appears to have transferred her disruptive magic to the family matriarch, who is now herself an uninvited guest in another family's home. It matters little, in the end, whether Amber's powers are rooted in the kind of glamor associated with movie stars rather than witches or fairies: she is the sort of fictional person who, as John Sutherland notes, "may or may not be supernatural" but whose effect, either way, is the same.8 Whatever its source, Amber's magic means that The Accidental could never be just another realist novel about writers and academics committing adultery. While the nature of Amber's power might matter to the Smarts, from the perspective of style and story, it makes no odds if she's an angel or a sociopath. 

It would be a stretch to suggest that every Smith novel contains a direct parallel to Amber or Lux. In There But For The (2011), the unwanted guest who makes things go topsy-turvy is Miles, a distinctly natural middle-aged man. And in Autumn (2016), the closest equivalent to Amber is Daniel, a very old man who sleeps through most of the novel. (Daniel doesn't so much direct the plot's development as, by drifting across the dream-state between life and death, refract and dilate Smith's central themes of seasonal flux and social fracture.) But if Amber's not ubiquitous, neither is she anomalous. Better than all the examples I've given so far, there's Florence in Spring (2019) — the immigrant child whose weaponized benevolence briefly melts the permanent winter of the British security state. Florence, in particular, shares Amber's faerie vibrations. This is how "Stel from Welfare" describes Florence's visit to Brit, who also works in the IRC:

In the wrong place, Florence is also the wrong age, the wrong gender, and has the wrong — which is to say, morally right — attitude towards life in an IRC. According to Sandra, a secretarial worker at the IRC, Florence's miracle consists simply of asking those in power to meet their obligations to the vulnerable people for whom they are responsible. When she addresses Sandra's boss, Oates, Florence speaks "all calm and reasonable" (140). And though what she says to him is unclear, we know that he does what she asks, just as we know that Florence has visited other IRCs and persuaded other people to do similarly "unorthodox things like cleaning toilets properly" (140). 

Florence's power isn't wholly mysterious; a little later, she explains to Brit: "Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren't here" (192-193). But that sort of invisibility can't really explain, as Brit half-suggests, how Florence also got "through the scans [ . . . ] Which is not supposed to be humanly possible" (193). Florence is magic, in the end, not because of some supernatural property or wicked bit of tech but because, unlike almost everyone else in her world, she acts from the assumption that people know the difference between virtue and the law. She is magic because of the unfathomable simplicity of her methods and intentions. When she faces a locked door, she is said to have merely "waited till it opened for some other reason and just walked through it. It was so plain and simple [ . . . ] A door opens. She goes through it" (141). 

Individually and together, characters like Florence and Lux hover somewhere between fantasy and allegory — which is to say, between the desire to escape this world and to live in it slant, to be in it but not of it. This structure of feeling may take concrete form, as when Daniel Gluck's sister Hannah leaves her infant child and sacrifices herself to the task of finding sanctuary in Switzerland for Jewish refugees. Or it may be more spectral than solid, as with the ghostly visitation named Sara Wilby in Hotel World. Most often, as with Florence and Amber, it doesn't matter. Smith's first-footers aren't disruptive because they epitomize newness in the form of unassimilable difference. They refuse such distinctions, just as her novels refuse the distinction between sentimentality and satire, or between realism and experimentalism. Smith's familiar strangers are a bit like the friend who steps outside for a moment, a bit drunk and a bit lonely, only to be transformed at the moment of midnight into a lucky wanderer from beyond the waves. 

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Matthew Hart (@thegreatkellino) is Associate Professor and DGS in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. He is the author, most recently, of Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020).

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