Never Being Boring: Ali Smith’s Amends

In How to be Both, one of Ali Smith's signature smart and snarky teenage girls, George, and her mother, an online activist-artist, have an argument about the lyrics to the Pet Shop Boys' hauntingly beautiful AIDS elegy, "Being Boring" from their 1990 album Behaviour.   

Although the internet indicates that George's less inspiring version of the lyrics is the correct one, I, like George's mother, only ever hear the line as "we dressed up in thoughts, and thoughts make amends."2 Whatever the Pet Shop Boys originally sang, Smith's use of the misheard lyrics in How to Be Both introduces a question that is central to Western debates around what art is or should do. Can thoughts, or art, ever make amends in the way George's mother seems to hope? The relationship between art as just "dressing up," and art as "thoughts making amends" is a complicated and historically fraught one. On the one hand, if we understand art as "dressing up" and never being boring, then art should be enthralling or shocking or beautiful (à la Kant's purposive purposelessness), but also self-contained. In line with the tradition inaugurated by Decadence and l'art pour l'art that continues into the version of modernism that emphasizes the autonomy of the aesthetic object, this argument insists that art does not need to goad its audience into deeds or political action in order to be successful. Rather, the aesthetic experience is better understood as complete in itself.3 If, on the other hand, we believe that thoughts should make amends, then the purpose of art is to intervene in, and help repair, the world by inspiring subjects to act. As the world has become more chaotic in the wake of Brexit, Trump, Covid, and more, Smith's works have come down more strongly on the side of amends, for art as intervention and action. But at the same time Smith's writing is never boring. At the level of the sentence, the word, the letter, she is committed to a combination of exuberant formal experimentation and the easy joke. As Charlotte Terrell and Lindsay Turner show, her characters and narrators revel in wordplay. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Smith's work shows that art can be both: a space apart from, and an intervention into, the frightening present. 

Cara Lewis explores the Seasonal Quartet's rampant ecstatic ekphrasis: the novels are chock-full of scenes in which characters are moved, charmed, disarmed, overpowered, fully sublimed, by an artwork (frequently, although not always, one that exists in the real world and that Smith describes in some detail). The shared experience of a work of art at different times is portrayed as an aspect of a strong emotional bond between Smith's characters (see for instance, George's revisiting a Francesco del Cossa beloved by her dead mother). While attending a Tacita Dean exhibition one character in Spring imagines that another character, who they loved, might love it too.4 But art can also imply an ethical imperative in Smith's novels, echoing Rilke's "you must change your life."5 Her characters sometimes do try and change the world or themselves after an experience with art. George's mother's "subverts," for instance, are designed to jolt people into seeing the world differently.6 When George half-kiddingly whines "What's the point of art?" as they visit yet another art gallery, George already knows what her mother's response will be: "Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen. (That's the wording of one of her mother's most re-tweeted Subverts.)"7  

Most of us, I suspect, are pro-art and pro-action, but if you are like me, you might also be uncertain about whether the two positions bear any relation to each other.8 Part of Smith's enterprise is, I think, to model powerful connections between the two realms. In an earlier formulation about the power of art, Don DeLillo's reclusive novelist figure, Bill Gray, mourns the ways that terrorism has usurped the novelist's ability to "make raids on human consciousness."9 Smith, too, subscribes to the idea that art should be a raid on human consciousness. The Seasonal Quartet grapples with what interventions the novel as a form can make in the face of contemporary political crises including ubiquitous media disinformation, climate change, and the rise in hate crimes and violent nationalism associated with the anti-Immigration policies of Brexit Britain. To return to the Pet Shop Boys' (almost) language, what does Smith's use of form offer in the way of "thoughts making amends"?10 Could amends be built into the very structure of a seasonal quartet? Slow repair and rejuvenation seem hewn into the seasonal cycle. Beginning with Autumn and ending in Summer, while using Shakespeare's romances as touchpoints, the scaffolding of the Seasonal Quartet makes it almost inevitable that someone will heal and someone or something will come back to life; that is part of the pleasure of reading Smith. However, the overarching optimism of Smith's political and aesthetic vision, a belief in the possibilities of art to prompt aesthetic and political rebirth, is never a straightforward insistence on politicized art's efficacy in the world. Rather, Smith's belief in aesthetics attempts to bridge the gap between art's performances — dressing up and never being boring — and the possibility of repair, of making (political and individual) amends. 

A scene near the end of Spring inserts a significant aestheticized tableau into the tragic unfolding present. This scene centres around a brief embrace between a separated immigrant mother and daughter, who are almost immediately wrenched apart by the State. In the run-up to the scene, with the help of several characters in the novel and an underground network called the Auld Alliance that helps refugees escape from detention centres, the uncannily powerful child Florence has come to the battlefield of Culloden in Scotland.11 As we reach the end of the novel we understand that the reunion between Florence and her mother was the prompt for her train journey with the immigration guard Brit, who betrays her at the end. The scene of Florence's reunion with her mother is approached several times over through the perspective of several different characters, but is only actually represented four pages from the end.    

This reunion is short-lived. Florence and her mother are immediately separated, the mother handcuffed and presumably returned to detention. However, the two are also filmed by tourists who are visiting the battlefield and watched by actors dressed up for the historical re-enactment of the Battle of Culloden.13 Although the statelessness of refugees allows the British carceral state to de-humanise, anonymise, and disappear them throughout the novel, here they are witnessed by (people dressed up as) history in a strangely literalized way. The hug between Florence and her mother and its aftermath also becomes a turning point in re-awakening the desire to make politically relevant art for the filmmaker, Richard Lease, who returns later (although earlier in the novel) to interview members of the Auld Alliance about the work of their underground network; those rescued in turn frequently become the rescuers of others, and presumably those who see Richard's film might do the same. Florence and her mother set off a chain reaction of art making things happen. The key to this scene — "They stand there like that and it's like the world can't not coalesce round it" — turns on the pronoun it, not them. This mediated embrace is a tableau vivant, a scene removed from time: it is art, as well as a love relation.14 It's a spectacle for the book to move toward, around which the novel seems to coalesce.

This scene of the world coalescing resembles the arresting ending of another novel from two years earlier, Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017). As Spring does with Shakespeare's Pericles, Home Fire takes part of its inspiration from a much older story, Antigone. Like Spring, Home Fire is immersed in the question of borders, nation states, and statelessness. Also like Spring, Shamsie's novel ends on an embrace between two people in a catastrophic situation that seems to put them both inside and outside history. 

Home Fire tells the story of a British Muslim family living in post 9/11 London. The family consists of three orphaned siblings, the twins Aneeka and Parvaiz, and their older sister Isma. Their father, a suspected terrorist, died on the way to Guantanamo. Living constantly in the shadow of state surveillance and suspicion, Parvaiz becomes radicalized, travelling to Pakistan to join ISIS.  When he is killed when trying to escape back to England, Aneeka travels to Pakistan to attempt to bring his body home. Prevented from repatriating his body by the policies of the English-Pakistani Conservative home secretary, Karamat Lone, who is also the father of her lover, Eamonn, Aneeka sets up a scene of public mourning in a park, insisting that she be allowed to take her brother's body to England where he was born. In the dramatic final scene, Eamonn comes to Pakistan to stand with Aneeka in the park, but is waylaid by men, who, knowing he is the son of the English Home Secretary, lock a bomb to him set to detonate moments later. The final words of Home Fire are:

Smith's representation of the embrace between Florence and her mother seems to be in dialogue with Shamsie's ending.16 Both novelists create an intervention into history in the form of a representation of love. Neither tableau of intense love can redeem the political catastrophe that will tear apart the couple's world, and yet both these moments make something happen. Shamsie ends the novel while the blast is still just expected, with that silent image in the midst of panic, two lovers in a park, entwined with only each other.17 The novelist/ artist here shows their power, arresting time so that a tragic ending never arrives (in Shamsie's case) or highlighting that vivid joyful moment of connection, before the pair are separated again (in Smith's case). Both endings. I think, imagine the embrace as a political intervention, suggesting that love and its witnessing matters. In both Home Fire and Spring, the mediation of the scene (over social media, by people filming it on their phones, in Home Fire by a news cameraman) are crucial to the scenes' framing, and to how the ripple effects of those scenes of arrested time play out.18 In these scenes, the world of the novel, and the world of the reader, coalesce around the image (or vision) of an embrace, inviting us to imagine a different world than the one that is about to crash through its stillness. 

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Pamela Thurschwell (@pamthur) is a Reader in English at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and the Routledge Critical Thinkers book Sigmund Freud (2009). In 2020 she co-edited a Post45: Contemporaries cluster on the TV show Bojack Horseman.

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