Wordsmith

If you have read anything by Ali Smith, you'll be familiar with the grip that all things lexical have on her authorial imagination. In the final novel of the Quartet, Summer, it only takes a few pages before we encounter this wordiness in its various forms. We see, for instance, the latest in a long line of characters' statements about how words command a special kind of attention: the teenager Sacha decides to google the definition of "antediluvian" because she "quite likes words. She doesn't really get to, though, at home, because Robert's meant to be the one who likes words."1 Sometimes the interest is expressed as a kind of soft lexical curation, the effect of which is to highlight a particular word — as when, less than ten pages into Summer, Sacha's mum peers over her shoulder as she writes an essay and asks whether "devoutly" is "the right word" for her sentence.2 At other times, the wordiness of Smith's fiction comes in the guise of punning. When Sacha's bright but troubled younger brother has superglued a glass sand timer to her hand, the malice of the action is diminished by Sacha's decision to make a joke out of it — she thanks her brother for "the exceptional bonding experience."3

These are all examples of what we might consider wordiness at the discursive level of narrative: they are part of conversations by characters, a kind of attention to the word which is acknowledged by those within the fiction. But there are also other kinds of letterplay and wordcraft that take place in Smith's fiction — often revolving around names and anagrams — that require a different scale of interpretative effort to unpick. Sticking with the Quartet, we meet characters with near-Dickensian names like Elisabeth Demand and Brit (a detention centre guard who has taken on elements of nationalist rhetoric), or names that push their owners to the point of allegory, like Art and Lux, as Walt Hunter discusses in this cluster. 

But Smith has never been too committed to using names as vehicles of plausibility. In her 2011 novel There but for the, the bourgeois dinner-party hosting couple are named Gen and Eric Lee — generically, generic characters. This sense of the formulaic is reflected in the name of the man who locks himself in Gen and Eric's spare room, Miles Garth. Garth is wilfully misnamed Milo Garth by the crowd that gathers outside the Lees' home because it makes him sound "less middle class" and therefore a more agreeable figure for media attention. 4 In so doing, Milo Garth becomes 'algorithm,' a procedural character who can be wielded as an answer to the crowd's problems. Perhaps the most audacious example of this letterplay is to be found in How to be both, a novel in which authorial anagrams (permutations of 'Ali') intrude, coalescing in the figure of the elusive bookmaker Lisa Goliard. Goliard's name can be rearranged to spell Ali S, God, Liar, three ways of accounting for the narrative authority of fiction. ⁵ Even without this rearrangement, it is clear that Lisa operates on a different narrative level because of the stage directions by which she is conveyed into the narrative: [Enter Lisa Goliard]. Tricks like these, that flag the construction and therefore artifice of Smith's fiction, can feel excitingly, embarrassingly, or even uninterestingly cheap; these characters seem "both to work too hard and work too little," to echo Sianne Ngai's line on gimmicks.6

Prior to the Quartet, Smith's work has precisely been motivated by the aesthetic affordances of this kind of blatancy or brazenness. In the short piece "Green," a character waxes over how, in a Cézanne canvas, "the artifice" of the flat paint strokes "is the thing that makes it alive." The speaker is pleased with how the painting's exposure of its own artifice means that "we know we're not being deceived," and there is "No illusion." 7 This sentiment also appears in almost identically in Artful when its protagonist remembers their late partner saying, again in relation to Cézanne, that "the artifice was what made the place in the picture — as well as the picture — truly alive. That way, we knew it was telling us no lies, it was not deluding us, it was real."8 Similarly, in How to be both, when George becomes attached to Francesco del Cossa's work it is because the del Cossa image in London's National Gallery "at least admits the whole thing's a performance."9 

Let's name this artifice Smith's index of value. The signalling of artifice as artifice in Smith's work is often framed as an equalising manoeuvre; the most enlivening kind of art object is one that permits you to see and share in the knowledge of its construction (as opposed to being overcome by the mystifying effects of its overall illusion). But this doesn't have to mean noticing the Lisa Goliards of Smith's writing. It can also mean partaking in the fictions' discursive attention to debates about politics, language, and art, as well as coming to recognize Smith's style enough to be able to notice distinctly-Smith themes and revelations — the fact, for instance, that she confidently recycles ideas and phrases like the ones above about artifice, across different works. For Smith, who otherwise expresses concern about political figures who leverage fiction for power,10 disabusing her fictions of the veneers of authority — encouraging a deployment of words which is equalising rather than hierarchising — is an important gesture. 

Smith's wordiness is a part of this loyalty to artifice. Or rather, her medium of artifice is partly comprised by the way that she uses, or smiths with letters and words (the material unit of fiction), or in Lindsay Turner's reckoning, the poetic unit of the syllable; this attention to the level of the lexical unit hones fictional worlds that sing with acts of construction and creation whether you notice the tricksiness or not. One gets the sense that Smith revels in the implications of her name as a suffix denoting craft and skill — it is no mistake that her novels frequently feature characters who are bricklayers, carpenters and construction workers. This smithing or wordplay, as the critics in this cluster have variously noted, can be an ethical and transformative act in Smith's work: it performs a kind of bridging work, connecting disparate ideas and people or connecting figurative language and ideas to the temporal nuances of embodiment. And within Smith's oeuvre, there has been an easy relation between wordiness and goodness or morality; the double or triple meanings that her keen-eyed characters find are a way that Smith toggles between the individual and the collective, gesturing to the generative acts of a broad reading public whose insights overlap and shadow one another even if they never meet.11

But in the character of Art (from Winter) whose name countenances his double-work as plausible character and device-driven quasi-allegory, being bookish or etymologically curious is no longer an indicator of inherent goodness; instead, Art represents one of few examples in Smith's work where characters' attachments to words and language obscures their understanding of the world, where word-lovers slip to the right of the political spectrum. How, then, are we to read the newly disruptive presence of Bad Art? What is the difference between his word-love and the word-loves of others?

Art is an atypical Smithian word-lover in that he is a grown man, rather than pre- or early-adolescent. He writes a blog called 'Art in Nature,' a title from which we can surmise his commitment to clever wordplay. He keeps a notebook to aid in the composition of this blog, but his notebook is populated by words, phrases, and ideas that he has copied from others — mostly the women around him, who he never credits. Not only is Art a near-fraud who copies without giving credit, he also a) lacks the kind of joyful and spontaneous curiosity that Smith's usual foils of wordiness possess, and b) is misogynistic and uncompassionate, speaking of EU citizens resident in the UK as having knowingly "ran the risk" of deportation when they decided to move.12 

For his blog, Art collects and pre-writes words and phrases in anticipation of a moment in the future at which they become usable. When his ex-girlfriend hacks his modestly followed Twitter account and starts to tweet lies about snowfall in London, Art takes it especially personally because

There's a lot going on here: the Trump-like verbiage of such good words, great words; the cheap imitation of Theory ("mark" and "track" call to mind Derrida's trace); the gesture of "conjuring" with unfamiliar words which is itself a gesture borrowed from Robert Macfarlane's nature writing (a self-described "word-collector"); and the fact that Art — who speaks of his writing as political — cares more about the thwarted opportunity to brandish his snow words than he does about the climate change which has disappeared the snow. As opposed to Sacha's lexical curiosities, which result in definitions being shared with Smith's reader, Art wants to be a conjurer who creates an illusion with his words: he wants to use words that sound impressive rather than writing in a language that can be accessed and learned. Here trail, stamp, impress, blenky, sposh and penitents do not convey their potential magic; they are merely pretentious and obscure words. Art's writing is merely Art for Art's sake.

This self-absorption is confirmed by Art's bill-paying job: he enforces media copyright, browsing online media in search of "any unlawful or uncredited quotation or usage" which he can "report back to SA4A Ents" when he finds "anything out of place or not credited so they can chase up rightful payment or issue the lawsuits."14 SA4A is the conglomerate that haunts the Quartet — detaining, border patrolling, evicting, litigating. His blog, then, emerges from hypocritical conditions in which his own sources go uncredited. On the whole, Art's is a bad faith approach to language and narrativizing which gives way to a series of potential pronouncements about the practice of the craft that he represents. Art should not be disingenuous. It should not gloat. Art should not be contrived for the purpose of leveraging a powerful illusion of exclusive knowledge.15 

But in true Ali Smith fashion, Art is not left to fester in this villainous role. By Winter's end, he has moved toward redemption with the help of the lessons learned by Lux, a young woman he meets through a chance encounter. Newly enchanted by words that Lux uses — namely the word "bounteous" (meaning full of goodness, generous) — Art hands over his blog to a "communal group of writers" and in Summer, he re-enters the Quartet (as almost all of the Quartet's characters do, as if returning for the final act) having turned the blog into a website that pays and houses its writing staff in Art's late mother's country home.16 It's an idealistic shift from individual illusion-casting to collectively wrought impact. It's a start.

Art's character arc, then, charts a move from premeditated conjuring to an experience of the unanticipated effects of words' capacity to conjure. In tandem with the illuminating input of Lux, a new appreciation for words like bounteous takes effect. Having first noticed Lux when she was at a bus stop reading a menu for the UK fast food chain Chicken Cottage, Art finds himself travelling through a city that speaks differently: narrated in the future perfect continuous, Art "will have passed repeatedly the fast food places called Chicken Cottage, seen pieces of Chicken Cottage advertising repeatedly stuck to pavements by rain and repeatedly known that mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous."17 Bounteous is another word that Art has borrowed and copied into his notebook but, in this case, the word that he has borrowed wields an enchantment of a different kind: it is not one of his inert words-in-waiting but a word that transforms its beholder.18) By the novel's end, he finds himself correcting his own misogyny, and he is newly distraught by the fate of those attempting to reach Europe by boat.

The shift in Art's lexical attitudes tells us two familiar stories of Smith's idiosyncratic aesthetic commitments, two stories that let us know we are really reading Ali Smith. First: the power of the chance encounter to alter a person — specifically, the power of what Matthew Hart calls Smith's "familiar strangers." And second: the capacity of words to, as if by magic, unlock empathy and openness, or even to unlock chronological time in order to open connections between people and readers across time and space. But who is this character lesson for? Would Art's narrative arc convince a real-life reader to take on a less border-driven and nationalist politics, or even inspire someone to become involved in leftist political or community organising? Is this call to revel in what Edmonds calls "the possibility of being moved" preaching to the choir? Herein lies the difference, I think, between Smith's wordsmithing as a novel project and as a political project. The Quartet, more than Smith's previous fiction, turns to histories of political resistance, as expressed in Iris's involvement in the protests at Greenham Common and Hannah's aid to border-crossing Jewish migrants during World War II. Smith casts these figures, too, as word-lovers who possess an insatiable curiosity about the world: when Hannah leaves her daughter with the owner of a guest house, her only request is that the woman will teach her to read so as to continue the storytelling that has been central to Hannah's style of motherhood. 

To place such faith in the transformative work of words — and to say it so transparently — lays Smith vulnerable to accusations of saccharine rather than effervescent writing. Critics have pointed their fingers at Smith's manifest contrivances, noting how the "neatness of the pun, its capacity to make things rhyme, exists at the expense, perhaps, of mess, despair, and sheer human intractability" and that sometimes Smith makes material out of words "because she can and not because she must."19 If wordiness is often called upon to do a kind of bridging work, to synthesise an otherwise extant divide, then the weight placed upon it in the political contexts of the Quartet is perhaps for some readers more weight than their levity can bear. But, of course, for Smith, contrivance is the enchanted heart of narrative, and her wordiness, her virtuous artifice, can transform individual readers — both characters and real-life readers — into an incipient collective of word-attuned thinkers.

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Charlotte Terrell (@heaven__forfend) is the Isenberg Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, University of Oxford. She is working on her first book, Critical Enchantments, a study of late C20-21 literary fiction that draws on academic and technical modes of writing as a means of addressing concerns about its readership.

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