Here and Now

It is an incontrovertible fact that works of art age. The distance between the time when a novel is written and the time when it is read only grows wider. The impact of this distance is acutely felt by a novel's readers, for whom the events and background that were once part of a zeitgeist become, over time, expendable footnotes—if they become footnotes at all.

This is a risk Ali Smith accepts for her own Quartet project, a series of four interrelated novels, each written in a different season and published as close to the time of their writing as possible. Together, the novels are meant to become something like a time capsule that registers—or fails to register—the blusterous world of Brexit, Trump, Covid, climate change, and global migration: "I don't know whether in 19 years' time they'll be stale and mean nothing to us," she writes, "or if there are things in them that will hold. . . . [T]he concept was always to do what the Victorian novelists did at a time when the novel was meant to be new."1 

For a project aware of its own potential for fleetingness, the seasonal framework is particularly savvy. The conceit allows Smith to divide up and isolate the moods and temperatures of a rapidly changing world. It is also a great publicity gimmick to sell more books in a shorter period. Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard was drawn to the device for similar reasons. His Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall books, which were published roughly at the same time as Smith's novels, feature short personal essays written in the Swedish countryside in the year leading up to the birth of his fourth child. Smith is not as myopically domestic, though. In her larger and heavier world, individual lives must contend with issues beyond the nexus of marriage, children, and middle age. 

To enter Smith's fictional world is to eschew the idea that life can ever be entirely domestic or fully comprehensive of a larger social world. Her novels ask if an individual can comprehend the magnitude of global events without being sidetracked by spits of teenage rebellion, menopausal memory loss, or the ruminations of middle age. They also explore how an individual might hold onto a sense of their unique being amidst the all-consuming force of political partisanship and social media dissonance. How, in other words, can Smith tell the story of a fracturing world through the lives of fractured individuals?

Each book centers on an interchange between the mostly dispirited private lives of the characters and the global events and social media that threaten to engulf them. In Summer, the final book, which Smith began writing shortly after the outbreak of Covid-19, a girl named Sacha Greenlaw receives an emoji-laden text message from a teenage school friend whose Chinese grandmother has been told not to breathe next to someone at Waitrose. In Spring, Brittany Hall, a guard at an immigration detention center, hotly rebuffs a BBC radio interviewer's question about her Brexit vote: "I'm not going to let you think you can decide something about me either way...all this. This endless. It's eating the, the, you know. Soul."2 Later in the novel, as if to negate both the individual and the social, Smith includes a short chapter made up entirely of online troll invective hurled at an unidentified character. 

Critics have reason to charge these books with political heavy-handedness. Yet what comes across as didacticism is also an honest engagement with the problem of comprehending larger political worlds as a contemporary individual. "News right now," says Elisabeth Demand in Autumn, "is like a flock of speeded-up sheep running off the side of a cliff."3 In other words, news about the atrocities of others increasingly fails to penetrate the borders of the self for long. The world that Smith reflects to her readers is one in which issues have grown substantially larger, yet individuals have smaller capacities for taking them in. "There is no more room," says Sophia Cleaves in Winter, of migrants trying to come to England, but also of the space within her mind to absorb their plight.4  

Smith perceives the disturbing and discombobulating effects of global events on individual selves—how these events alienate individuals from familial folds and personal understanding. Sacha, while walking to school to avoid using petrol, tries to imagine the "5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0" living things that have died from climate change, but "her imagination isn't big enough."5 Sophia has grown completely immune to the pain of others. "Refugees in the sea. Children in ambulances. Blood-soaked men running to hospitals or away from burning hospitals carrying blood-covered children," elicit no reaction. "Nothing."6 At the end of Spring, self-proclaimed "aging lefty" Richard Lease rekindles a passion for filmmaking after the death of his beloved friend Paddy by shooting A Thousand Thousand People, a documentary about an underground network of volunteers who help migrants escape or evade detention. "Stop making it all about you, Doubledick," Richard hears Paddy tell him.7 Get over yourself is a refrain that haunts many characters in the book. 

Get over yourself. But how? Historians of the novel suggest that it was the eighteenth-century novel that first made it possible for readers to imagine and empathize with the interior lives of singular protagonists. Smith pushes the form further, asking whether a genre historically trained on the interior lives of the individual can be a means to comprehend larger worlds. Can the novel, or a series of novels working in concert, get over the individual? At the same time, the Quartet also asks whether the life of an individual can still stand in for a larger world, as it was thought to do in so much Victorian fiction. Thus, Summer opens with Sacha's mother unable to remember the first line of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield: "Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life...."8 At the end of Spring, Brit, the detention center guard, comes to realize that she is "just an extra'' in a story that was never about her.9 While Walt Hunter might tie a moment such as this to an individual's "discovery of double meaning," I see it as more disorienting. The individual is no longer a microcosm of society just as society is no longer a web in which individuals can comprehend their true inner self. 

More than once I was reminded of Laurence Sterne's novels when reading the Quartet. Smith's jocund wordplay and sprawling subplots recalled Tristram Shandy, a novel that also tries to represent the individual in relation to wider social strands. But it was a story about Sterne's second novel, A Sentimental Journey, that most reminded me of the writing task Smith has assigned herself. 

In 1766, a freed slave named Ignatius Sancho wrote a letter to Sterne, who was at the time one of the most famous writers in Europe. Sancho asked Sterne to consider making his next novel useful for the abolitionist cause: "Give one half-hour's attention to slavery," he wrote, and "that subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many."10 In a return letter, Sterne expressed profound sympathy for the plight of Caribbean slaves. In A Sentimental Journey, however, he chose to include a vignette that focused on the representational difficulties of Sancho's request.

The moment in question concerns an Englishman named Yorick who becomes imprisoned in the Bastille for sneaking into France without a passport. As Yorick sits in his cell, he is interrupted by a voice, crying, "I can't get out." The words turn out to have come from a small, caged starling. Struck by the bird's piteous cries and desperate fluttering against the bars of its cage, Yorick's sympathetic passion uncontrollably awakens. Moments later, however, he finds he cannot summon the same passion when he tries to imagine the captivity of "millions" of slaves: "I could not bring it near me, and that the multitude of sad groups in it did but distract me—"11 

Some readers treat Yorick's spontaneous feeling for a caged starling and lack of compassion for African slaves as evidence of a heartless attitude towards real-world suffering. Sterne had a more complicated agenda. His depiction reveals sympathy to be a formal rather than moral problem. For Yorick, the "million" can only be vicariously represented through the image of the "one." The imagination cannot understand the multitude unless it is fictionalized and softened into the coherency of the individual. Sterne's novel calls attention to the very process by which the lives of others are obscured by the attention we cannot give them. 

One wonders if Smith had not come to a similar conclusion before writing her Quartet. In a welcome letter featured on the website for Refugee Tales, an organization that pairs detained migrants with authors to bring their stories to a wider audience, Smith seems to share Sancho's idealistic view of storytelling. "The telling of stories is an act of profound hospitality," she writes. "Story has always been a welcoming-in, is always one way or another a hospitable meeting of the needs of others, and a porous artform where sympathy and empathy are only the beginning of things. The individual selves we all are meet and transform in the telling into something open and communal."12

Yet in her novels, Smith reveals the difficulty of narrating the stories of others while remaining trapped in a cage. The migrants remain opaque and distant, as if to confirm Sterne's understanding of the impossibility of calibrating a relationship between individuals and large-scale suffering. For the most part, the migrants in the novel remain an abstract them to Smith's various white British characters. Even those who fancy themselves pro-immigration largely speak of migrants as causes rather than as people with distinct lives. As Matthew Hart writes, "Smith's novels are stuffed with uninvited strangers, with hospitality's radical promise and its tragic betrayal."

Until the very end, that is. The final chapter of Summer is a letter to Sacha Greenlaw from a former detained migrant who has escaped detention. "Thank you for telling me stories about your life," Anh Kiet writes. "Thank you for imagining my life."13 As if in a cryptic reference to Sterne's caged starling, Anh Kiet then speaks of a bird in the sky, a bird that had worked in an earlier novel as a Twitter joke, but now appears as a symbol of kindness, health, luck, and connection.

Smith's novel cycle thus ends its experiment with the here and now by orienting toward a possible future: two discordant characters in the contemporary world become enjoined by an epistolary correspondence, which rejects the hypermediacy and extreme individuality of social media. In letters, they write from different genders, languages, and experiences, speaking about imagination and the hope that lies ahead. The exchange between them, which has only just begun, "like something created only with ash after a fire," transcends the intemperate world Smith has spent the last four novels depicting (and begets, as Deidre Lynch and Amy E. Elkins suggest, a "new generation of correspondence").14 The final writing of Summer, where individuals meet and transform, breaks the seasonal cycle we have just read, converting what could be an endlessly circular loop into the promise—but only the promise—of a more meaningful and lasting transfiguration. 

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Stephanie DeGooyer (@S_DeGooyer) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the forthcoming book Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and a co-author of The Right to Have Rights (Verso, 2018).

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