Shifting Sands: Re-Reading Ali Smith’s Autumn

I first read Ali Smith's Autumn in book club. Serendipity dropped me onto an Upper East Side studio couch, and for many months after, I found myself crowded in amongst a cohort of longtime friends. As the newest member, I was easily the odd person out, the person most distant from whatever synergy there was that kept the club meeting consistently for years. But enchantment, a lightly perceptible frisson akin to standing before a much-photographed painting or skyline, beat out any first blush of awkwardness. Instead, stumbling upon what I thought was only a fabled corner of New York, where the confidently successful read serious fiction over intentionally prepared food and well-selected wine, felt like a kind of arrival. It's in this context that I first grappled with Ali Smith's fiction, with her faith in chance encounters and in the shared languages facilitated by art, with her belief that sharing anything and everything but especially our deepest experiences of revelation, might provide a possible way forward in our networked and increasingly siloed world. When the book club read Autumn, they summarily dismissed it, but I experienced the novel as a rare instance of aesthetic sublimity, as the right book at the right time.

Eventually, I stopped going to book club. Eventually, I found that a common language constructed by a shared investment in literature or in serious art and ideas was not enough. Initially I retreated to the language of identity to describe the nebulous schism that existed between book club and me. Now, I tend to think that I fell prey to occupational hazard, to a kind of intellectual self-absorption that can too quickly confuse understanding with compassion, ingenuity with personal expansiveness and grace. My desire for my professional training and knowledge to have practical use forced misreadings—not generally of the fiction, but of the people who invited me to read it with them. Autumn now sits in my mind as a window onto a necessary cautionary tale, as a reminder that the possibility of human connection — the blooming heart of Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet — is not simply another aesthetic sensibility to be cultivated. How we then understand Smith's traditional and interrelated valorizations of perception, knowledge, beauty, empathy, and connection alongside her more insurgent and varied political commitments demands accounting. How we account for our own practices of reading and those practices' relation to our being in the world must follow closely in tow.

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When we meet centenarian Daniel Gluck, the first character introduced in Autumn, we are with him on a beach. We are, like him, confused and anticipatory. If we are anything like my former book club members, we might be a bit impatient, both with the shifting sands of narrative ground and with our own inability to get anywhere in such an environment. Daniel puzzles over his situation. Is he dead, has he finally made it to the afterlife? He is naked. He is out of sorts. Why is there sand everywhere? He notices his body. He notices the sharpened acuity of his perception. Daniel can see a distant wood. He can see trees. He can see leaves. He can see the stems that connect the leaves to the trees. He is at once a child, his eyes mobile and curious, and a world-worn man, wise enough to understand what he does not understand.

We readers remain in Daniel's head as he puzzles about the beach and nearby wood. His close-looking sets off his memory; his memory leads him to take stock of his place in the world, even as the mysterious place he is in is only indeterminately of the world. A song runs through his head. Puns play about his mind. There's a playfulness in his thinking, a cosmopolitanism and a living delight, which we will later learn comes from the habits of mind that make him an adroit songwriter, an excellent surrogate father. But Daniel's dream is soon corrupted by reality: he sees a dead body on the beach and then another. Just up from where people are playing, children excitedly welcoming waves and parents safely sunning themselves under well-pitched parasols, there are bodies. Daniel's eyes flit between life and death, and he recognizes with finality: "The world's sadness."1 Death confirms to Daniel that he is not dead, that the beach is no less trammeled than the life he lives, that he is in a dream, that even there, amid death, it is important to bear witness to the limitless worlds that can be cradled in just a handful of sand.

It's a challenging opening. Readers meet Daniel at his life's end, but he is still alive, in a liminal state that he only begins to recognize for its familiar barbarities. Does Daniel look away? How can we understand his wonder at the end of Autumn's first section? Children's peals of laughter rely on the practiced ignorance of their parents, on the unseen dead bodies that lie only feet away up shore. And Daniel, with all his knowledge and perception and feeling, with his decorum to run, even during a dream, into the woods to clothe himself in a leaf suit, simply wants to hold on to a token of this ephemeral world, to remember the words of a beloved song. Amy Elkins and Deidre Lynch remind us that this precarious moment is an allusion and a pun, at once a reference to Odysseus on the shores of Phaeacia and a clever rendering of Daniel's constructed leaf suit as a stand-in for the material construction of books ("folia assembled form folios"). The scene prompts questions: What does it mean to know that there are terrible things happening in the world, to know that those terrible things touch our lives whether we pay attention or not? What does it mean to pay attention? And, with what tools and what prior experiences do we organize our witnessing? How do we make space for the suffering of others in our lives without being overwhelmed, subsumed, or paralyzed? Daniel's ambiguous response, his turning toward miraculousness when confronted with the regular horror of unnecessary and unnoticed death, produces a tension that stretches across the entire novel and across the ethical project that inheres within it.

In a review published after the release of Winter, James Wood calls Ali Smith an "intensely political" writer.2 It's true that Smith writes about the contemporary moment with a historically informed scrutiny. Her engagement with history is deliberate and nuanced and surprising. She does not merely rehearse the crimes of the past nor does she argue for simple linearities into the present. Smith's historical imagination is subtle, alive to the ironies that spring up from any long-enough observed human situation. In a brief but compelling vignette, Smith juxtaposes the ethical lapses of a film production crew with a fictionalized account of abducted Jewish women in occupied France. In the autumn of 2015, a film production crew in Nice, France unfurled a Nazi banner down the front of a prominent government building with no prior announcement to the city's inhabitants. There was immediate outrage from Nice's residents, then a belated explanation from the film production crew, then a national and international frenzy. Media coverage indulged in polls meant to shame the city's inhabitants. One asked, "Were locals right to be angry about the banner: Yes or No?"3 Poll respondents overwhelmingly answered no, condemning city locals. 

Before readers can fully register the event and its implication, the temporal perspective shifts. Readers are still in Nice, France, but the year is 1943 and German occupation is afoot. Hannah Gluck, Daniel's sister, is in the back of a partially open-air truck with other abducted Jewish women. The truck stops suddenly, possibly due to a mechanical error. Hannah notices that the people in the nearby fishmarket are not yet accustomed to occupation, that they are discomfited by the appearance of the truck and its guards and its human cargo. She sees this as an opportunity. A small group of women from the fishmarket are similarly magnetized and begin to crowd around the truck and inquire after the guards' purpose. A well-dressed and well-heeled woman speaks out and steps forward. One of the guards pushes her so roughly that her head connects with a rock as she strikes the ground. Hannah is not cowed. She decides to challenge her captors. The section ends with Hannah's boldness: "Excuse me, ladies, Hannah said. This is where I get off."4 There's something glib about this moment. For all our desire to root for Hannah, to frustrate the Nazis and their death drives to labor and concentration camps, Hannah's casualness, her bon-mot courage, rings false. It's easy and understandable to dismiss this scene, as my book club did, as but one of many examples of scenes and sentiments meant to bleed the heart rather than instruct it. Their reading: A fictional girlboss is transported back to the horror of Nazi occupation to seemingly make points about the importance of historical memory and the inherent dignity of the self (best expressed through heroic resistance), two ideas so commonplace as to be platitudes. These are valid, even astute, criticisms, but as Matthew Hart suggests, "the transformative magic of extraordinary characters," often "young women and girls," regularly provides Ali Smith with the novelistic wedge needed "to "crack the world open a little."

How we contend with my book club's criticisms in relation to Ali Smith's political conscience and historical imagination challenges our methods of interpretation and perhaps reveals our own disclaimed horizons for what art, specifically literature, can and should do. Such consideration also highlights my favorite modernist preoccupation, the absolute importance and inadequacy of the emotional realm — or, as we more casually say, the limits of love. 

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In Autumn, charges of cliché or irrelevance or impotence or sentimentality or uselessness or playfulness or wistfulness or frivolity or indulgence or eccentricity are gendered and classed. We first see this when, as a young girl, Elisabeth is expressly forbidden by her mother Wendy from carrying out a school project. Elisabeth is to interview her neighbor, but Wendy refuses. As explanation, Wendy offers that Daniel is an "old queen" and disparages him for having a house full of "arty art" (43, 44). Wendy's reaction is a defense against threatening modes of attention and value, and she expresses her condemnation in the language of class and gender violation. Questions about attention, Smith reminds us, are also, unavoidably, questions about value. Later, when as a fledgling art historian, Elisabeth decides to change her dissertation topic after finding an old exhibition catalogue featuring the work of Pop Art visual artist Pauline Boty, she finds class and gender expectations of another kind. Her supervising tutor dismisses Boty's work as undeserving of critical attention and haughtily derides Elisabeth for her own lack of aesthetic and intellectual discernment. Elisabeth changes her dissertation topic and her supervising tutor anyway.

Multiplying indeterminacies foreground Smith's ideas about art, attention, and value, on one hand, and assumptions about gender and class, on the other. Both constellations intersect more uneasily still with Smith's ethical and humanistic imaginary, testing the integrity of her collagist style. The Nice incident, for example, instigates a set of questions about contemporary historical art and entertainment that have unsettling implications for Autumn: Who is the twenty-first-century audience for historical art — and specifically for the unfurling-Nazi-banner film — if numerous (fictional, but certainly not unbelievable) polls find the past so bygone as to render Nice's inhabitants not merely incorrect in their first conclusions, but ridiculous? Then, why were Nice's residents nearly uniform in their terror and outrage? Why were they so able to feel a sense of history — its weight, its violence, its tendency to cycle back — where so many others later registered only overhasty overreaction? Given the distance and difference between Nice's residents and broader consuming publics, what feelings can we expect the film production underway, once finished, to prompt in the audiences who seek it out? 

At issue is the question of Ali Smith's humanism, about what holds it together, about whether the forces and attitudes she critiques are underwritten by the same cultural logics she extols. The historical vignette brings into sharp focus not only the public degradations of the past, but also the difficulty of making sense of them in present. While the vignette ostensibly draws readers' attention to the chasm between the actual human lives lost to fascism and the ease and distance from which we consume fictions about them, it also challenges us to think about the status of history, and the ideological uses to which it is put, even in Smith's own writing. My book club zeroed in on the chutzpah of Hannah Gluck, but I'm equally fascinated by the courage of the well-heeled and well-dressed women in the fishmarket, women who in the face of Nazi occupation, manage to dress well and act righteously. I'm interested in the types of characters who emerge as saviors or redeemers or vanguardists in Smith's fiction generally, about their cultural fluencies and their class identities, about what this suggests about a writer who has been praised for her ability to engage knotty political issues, and I want to conjecture that a certain classed aesthetic sensibility sometimes disguises unsettled questions about art and attention and ethics in Smith's writing.

In Autumn, this is best glimpsed in her literary formalization of collage—an homage to Pauline Boty—and the style's proliferation of historical parallels and artistic allusions. The Nazi abductions of 1943 take shape in relation to the intensification of anti-immigrant and anti-asylum-seeker sentiment and detention in the twenty-first-century United Kingdom. Women artists' lives and biographies swirl and intersect to highlight their shared experiences and the ongoing lack of serious critical audiences for their experimental artistic production. Allusions to canonical literature, popular culture, and national trivia provide the book with a quotidian texture while preserving its cultural matrix as recognizably of a class. These dizzying and disparate elements produce a set of critical reactions that are equally divergent. Upon its release, Autumn was referred to by many critics as the first great or serious Brexit novel, but this designation sits uneasily alongside the many other words used to describe the book: breezy, silly, makeshift, moralistic, shallow, without a sense of proportion.5

For all its expansiveness, Ali Smith's humanism has a clear class character. At her best, Smith uses this positionality to register a broad skepticism toward the professional and intellectual classes; at her worst, Smith dissolves the sticky political issues she engages in a vat of the aesthetic. Does Smith escape the type of instrumentalization that besets the film production? Is she only exploiting history's usefulness? Does the text's self-conscious moralism, aided by a sometimes uncritical invocation of the aesthetic, invite readers to indulge in a kind of vanity? When a predictable subset of readers, for example, praise Ali Smith as "intensely political," are they simply recognizing and affirming their own modes of understanding and attention? Such questions are not meant to impugn, but rather to enjoin us to think seriously about how Smith's collagist literary style interrupts or facilitates her novel's espoused ethical and political projects. 

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Smith's obsession with the intellectual class, her decision to center literariness and aesthetic perspicuity as integral to the project of ethical worldmaking, has a plainly seductive appeal. What struck me so forcefully about reading Autumn for the first time with my former book club was how utterly unmoved the group was. Everything I enjoyed about the novel they found tedious, and where usually I wouldn't trouble myself over such differences of opinion, the stark nature of our divergences unnerved me. Their critiques and their disinterest — their contempt, even — continue to bang about my head. While I value Smith's willingness to sing the wonders of the aesthetic, I'm discomfited by narrative worlds that ask us to identify with those who best know their Shakespeare and their Dickens. Smith's painted road out, her resolution of the contemporary moment's most pressing issues in a celebration of aestheticized ways of knowing, troubles me. Smith's indulgence of a particular (and very recognizable) learned orientation to the world, one that has rightly been named by many critics as bordering on romanticized self-absorption, nevertheless reminds us that it's not so important what we find beautiful, but that we find beauty at all. The book's final act celebrates this seeking and finding and enshrines it as a precondition for love. Autumn begins with a political question about where to look, and that question, at book's end, is not so much answered as allegorized. Art-skeptics find love, art-lovers rediscover love, and love transmutes art into a literal weapon that can be aimed at the state's most egregious sites of abuse.

Elisabeth's mother Wendy, who earlier expressed disdain for aesthetics and "arty art", meets a former child actor, Zoe, on a reality show about antiques called The Golden Gavel. Wendy is utterly transformed, both by the experience of appreciating antiques and by sharing her sensibilities with another, Zoe. Afterwards, Wendy speaks differently of Daniel, describing him as a kind of model for the twilight years of her life, an elder who can serve as a distant guide for her newfound "fine-tuned attention." Wendy also finally, after all these years and importantly through an appreciation of art, finds love. In Smith, first comes beauty, then comes love. In Wendy's last scene in the novel, she gets arrested for throwing antiques at the fenced detention centers that have appeared slowly over the course of the novel. Smith makes her point literal. It's not only that art teaches us how to pay attention, but that it also reminds us that we, and by proxy others, can be moved.

Smith's politics and her ethics and her aesthetic sensibilities, of a class or not, tell us that this possibility, the possibility of being moved, is central to any commitment we might undertake. Elisabeth, who for much of the book had been estranged from Daniel, sits with him on the book's final pages. He wakes from one of his long slumbers, blinks as if no time has passed, and asks Elisabeth, "What are you reading?" And because we readers have been paying attention, we know that he means I love you and I want to be moved by what moves you. In a novel that seems concerned in part with the waning of a certain studied appreciation of art, Smith reminds us that attention is its own currency, even if perhaps not quite its own politics.

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Brittney Edmonds (@jussssjokes) is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work has been published in African American Review, MELUS, South, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled, Who's Laughing Now?: Black Satire and the Evolution of Form, which provides a literary historical account of the substantial outpouring of Black satire after 1968.

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