Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Christensen, Brianne
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Questions of hospitality––in particular, those concerning its offer at national borders and the potential outcomes of this encounter––are increasing in social and political import in the contemporary moment as global communities experience the largest forced migration of people since the Second World War. Scottish author Ali Smith recognizes and commits to narratively representing hospitality as an urgent issue, especially in the context of ongoing migration debates in post-Brexit Britain. My Master’s thesis explores, with specific consideration of post-Brexit migration discourse and national mood, how thinking about migration, hospitality, and sincerity in very concrete ways structures Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as a literary project. Across the four novels, Smith develops and demonstrates a distinct rhetoric of hospitality that connects socio-political context and literary concerns with sincerity. By theorizing this rhetoric, I show how Smith’s treatment of hospitality might engage, substantiate, challenge, and even complicate current theories of hospitality, such as those presented by Jacques Derrida, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Still. Furthermore, while Smith’s Quartet addresses the context of migration in post-Brexit Britain and the pressing need of hospitality in social life as well as in art and literature, she is also developing sincere modes of writing that are attuned to hospitality. My thesis illustrates that these modes of writing align with New Sincerity, a literary genre concerned with sincere communication through realist aesthetics. I explore how Smith’s Quartet contributes to current understandings of this genre by evaluating the correlation between the novels’ narrative voice and Smith’s authorial persona, as expressed in public paratexts like interviews and related publications. Ultimately, I argue that Smith’s distinct rhetoric of hospitality necessitates consideration of, and makes possible new outcomes from, “narrative hospitality,” the role of sincerity in politically engaged fiction, and the social responsibility of an author to be hospitable.
Hospitality in Crisis: New Sincerity and Receiving the Stranger in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet by Brianne Christensen BA (Hons) in English, University of British Columbia Okanagan, 2021 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) November 2023 © Brianne Christensen, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Hospitality in Crisis: New Sincerity and Receiving the Stranger in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet submitted by Brianne Christensen in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in English. Dr. Jennifer Gustar, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisor Dr. Margaret Reeves, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Dr. George Grinnell, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Ilya Parkins, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University Examiner Click or tap here to enter text. External Examiner iii Abstract Questions of hospitality––in particular, those concerning its offer at national borders and the potential outcomes of this encounter––are increasing in social and political import in the contemporary moment as global communities experience the largest forced migration of people since the Second World War. Scottish author Ali Smith recognizes and commits to narratively representing hospitality as an urgent issue, especially in the context of ongoing migration debates in post-Brexit Britain. My Master’s thesis explores, with specific consideration of post-Brexit migration discourse and national mood, how thinking about migration, hospitality, and sincerity in very concrete ways structures Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as a literary project. Across the four novels, Smith develops and demonstrates a distinct rhetoric of hospitality that connects socio-political context and literary concerns with sincerity. By theorizing this rhetoric, I show how Smith’s treatment of hospitality might engage, substantiate, challenge, and even complicate current theories of hospitality, such as those presented by Jacques Derrida, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Still. Furthermore, while Smith’s Quartet addresses the context of migration in post-Brexit Britain and the pressing need of hospitality in social life as well as in art and literature, she is also developing sincere modes of writing that are attuned to hospitality. My thesis illustrates that these modes of writing align with New Sincerity, a literary genre concerned with sincere communication through realist aesthetics. I explore how Smith’s Quartet contributes to current understandings of this genre by evaluating the correlation between the novels’ narrative voice and Smith’s authorial persona, as expressed in public paratexts like interviews and related publications. Ultimately, I argue that Smith’s distinct rhetoric of hospitality necessitates consideration of, and makes possible new outcomes from, “narrative hospitality,” the role of sincerity in politically engaged fiction, and the social responsibility of an author to be hospitable. iv Lay Summary My Master’s thesis explores how Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet presents hospitality and migration as urgent ethical, social, and political concerns in post-Brexit Britain and also theorizes her sincere modes of writing as developed across the four novels. My thesis contributes to scholarly reception of the Seasonal Quartet, to current understandings of literary New Sincerity, and to the application of hospitality theory to literary works. v Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................ vi Dedication .................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Locating the Subject ................................................................................................ 10 On Hospitality ....................................................................................................................... 10 Hospitality and Aesthetics..................................................................................................... 18 Ali Smith on Hospitality ........................................................................................................ 20 New Sincerity ........................................................................................................................ 26 Chapter 2: Hospitality: Connections and Critiques ................................................................ 31 Autumn .................................................................................................................................. 31 Winter .................................................................................................................................... 37 Spring .................................................................................................................................... 44 Summer ................................................................................................................................. 49 Chapter 3: New Sincerity and Narrative Hospitality: Smith’s Interventions ....................... 56 A Renewed Sincerity ............................................................................................................. 57 Smith’s Sincerity ................................................................................................................... 70 The Writer’s Responsibility................................................................................................... 77 A Welcome Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 85 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 87 vi Acknowledgments I am incredibly thankful for the generosity of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their financial support in the form of a CGS-M award as well as the Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement, which allowed me to undertake site research abroad in the UK hosted by the University of Exeter. This research opportunity enriched my work immensely and provided me with invaluable context with which to theorize Smith’s rhetoric of hospitality. Above all, I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to my supervisor and mentor, Dr. Jennifer Gustar, for her guidance, wisdom, constant encouragement, and the many hours spent reading and discussing my work. Jen, thank you for welcoming me and my ideas, and for always making me feel at home. I look forward to the many years of our continued friendship ahead. I am also incredibly grateful for the time and support of my committee members, Dr. Margaret Reeves and Dr. George Grinnell. Your advice, knowledge, and generous feedback helped shape this project into all that I hoped it might become––thank you. I am extremely fortunate to have the support of a strong network of friends, peers, and professors. I have greatly benefited from the support of Dr. Emily Murphy, whose keen editorial eye and suggestions during the early stage of this project contributed to its fruition. I am grateful to Dr. Natalie Pollard, my host supervisor at the University of Exeter, for her comments on an earlier portion of this draft and for introducing me to numerous sources that helped contextualize my work in the current UK cultural moment. Thank you to my friend Disha for her camaraderie and faith in me––I am so glad that we were brought together across such distance and a great many borders. I also want to extend my appreciation and thanks to the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, for their financial support and the many opportunities afforded to me during my time as a graduate student. My heartfelt thanks to my amazing parents, Diane and Jason, for a lifetime of support and, especially, for their trust and belief in me during the last two years. Thank you for encouraging me to read widely, to strive to know, and to love my neighbours. I also wish to acknowledge the steadfast support of my twin, sometimes-nemesis, and oldest friend, Brett. Finally, to Ryan, who motivates and uplifts me like no other: thank you for your understanding, companionship, and gentle care during the writing of this project and always. vii Dedication For Ljubica, the heart of this project and the most courageous person I’ve ever known. For Aisha, whose radical kindness and generosity help me understand what it means to be a citizen of the world. 1 Introduction We have to remember hospitality. We have to remember what it’s like to be humans, to be strangers in the world and to be welcomed in. ––Ali Smith (qtd. in Clark) Things can change over time, what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open. . . . Sometimes we’re lucky. With a bit of help and a bit of luck, we get to be more than the one thing or the nothing that history’d have us be. We’re only here by the grace and work of others. I am anyway. Here’s to those others who helped, that’s my prayer when I go to bed, and may I be such an other to a good many myself. ––Ali Smith (248-49) Hospitality suggests the process of welcoming, whether to a home, a community, or a nation. Yet the material outcomes of hospitality, what arrives when one is welcoming to the unknown and the unfamiliar, are rarely assured. In contemporary socio-political contexts, discourses related to hospitality often concern borders, whether they can be crossed, and for whom this crossing is possible. Consideration of bordered domains’ selective permeability is of urgent importance in a time witnessing heightened tensions resulting from concurrent increases in globalization, refugees seeking asylum, and hyper-nationalism. As our global community experiences the largest forced migration of people since the Second World War, questions of hospitality––in particular, those concerning both its offer at national borders and potential outcomes––are increasing in social and political import. Moreover, the assurance that climate change will expedite the migration of people over the coming decades illustrates that hospitality in our present moment is, to echo Lindsay Balfour, “both in crisis and at a crossroad” (xxi). Although one might argue that the present increase in human migration offers only one of many 2 possible indications of the necessity of hospitality, it nonetheless is a particularly rich and valuable avenue of inquiry because consideration of migration as a practice and a concept raises a number of philosophical issues––such as, among others, ethics, identity, mobility, and conceptions of the nation––and grounds these issues in specific experienced realities, thereby allowing for their examination in material and concrete ways alongside cultural, social, and political expressions of hospitality or inhospitality. As my first epigraph demonstrates, Scottish author Ali Smith recognizes and commits to narratively representing hospitality as an urgent issue, one of particular import to migration debates in the context within which she currently writes and lives: post-Brexit Britain. Numerous discourses surrounding the move to Brexit––including those concerning hyper-nationalism, Euroscepticism, and xenophobia––inherently imply questions of hospitality, particularly as related to migration and belonging. Similarly, Smith’s fiction typically engages concerns central to philosophical hospitality, such as unexpected encounters between hosts and guests across borders of difference; her oeuvre of experimental and affecting novels, for which she has received due recognition,1 often feature the figure of the “stranger” and pay attention to “the things that happen when something enters our world from outside” (Smith qtd. in Germanà and Horton 142). The stranger appears throughout her many novels as a figure that disrupts the narrative by displacing that which seems fixed. For instance, There but for the (2011) follows outcomes of a dinner party during which an unexpected and unknown guest locks himself in his host’s spare bedroom. This novel, characteristic of Smith’s work, stages acts of hospitality and 1 Her second and third novels, Hotel World (2001) and The Accidental (2005), were each shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Artful (2012) was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and How to Be Both (2014) won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Costa Novel of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize as well as the Folio Prize. Of the Seasonal Quartet, Autumn was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Summer won the Orwell Prize for Fiction. 3 its potential outcomes primarily through the trope of unexpected arrival––a key concept in philosophical writing on hospitality. In an interview with Gillian Beer, Smith responds to a question about “the device of the uninvited guest” (142): It’s just a prevalent pressure at the moment, as a narrative pressure, and it’s in the news, and we’re ignoring it. As our countries and our world becomes smaller, and yet we’re bordered, everything is about the stranger. So if we don’t pay attention to what the story of the stranger means, and if we forget the goodness of the stranger, the way in which inordinate hospitality was signalled as crucial to survival. . . . [and] 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. (qtd. in Germanà and Horton 142) A decade ago, when this interview was published in Monica Germanà and Emily Horton’s Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Smith recognized the importance of remembering the potential goodness and value of strangers and of developing modes of representation that promote connection in a world increasingly obsessed with establishing and securing borders. This pursuit finds renewed ethical and socio-political import following the 2016 Brexit Referendum and in consideration of the increasingly hostile immigration policy since Brexit. While Smith’s novels prior to Brexit indicate that, as an author, she has long been interested in representing hospitality and its outcomes, her recent Seasonal Quartet––of which the first installment, Autumn, is commonly referred to as the first Brexit novel––specifically situates her writerly commitment to remembering hospitality alongside social and political issues that demand recognition in the contemporary moment, namely post-Brexit migration debates. Published with exceptional speed and urgency over four years, the Quartet as a literary project complicates the concept of “home” and the state of belonging in post-Brexit Britain, while also raising the theme of migration and troubling the figuration of “the stranger” as one who is “out of place” at home (Ahmed 97). Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), and Summer (2020), each address isolationist, xenophobic, and hyper-nationalist rhetoric legitimized by the 4 move to Brexit and critique ways of thinking that perpetuate dominant narratives of separation. As such, the Quartet illuminates a post-Brexit mood charged by experiences of anxiety, fear, and hostility toward those seen as “other.” Yet the novels also demonstrate Smith’s writerly engagement with hope in times of crisis. In response to the Quartet’s definitive if unexpected second conclusion Companion Piece (2022), author Kamila Shamsie states, “Every time I read a book by Ali Smith I’m forced out of pessimism” (“Kamila Shamsie: Q&A” 62). Hope, though juxtaposing the novels’ dismal reminders concerning the unstable and inhospitable state of the nation, is a consistent theme across the Quartet and is defined in one instance in Autumn as a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair. (190) This definition of hope, to my mind, raises issues related to hospitality and encounters between the “self” and the “other.” The phrase “nothing human is alien to us” may beg the question as to whether the non-human world is alien, but that is not the subject of Smith’s work in the Quartet; rather, her statement appears to challenge populist rhetoric and policies that position certain humans as “illegal” or “undocumented” aliens. In addition, the definition requires that individuals who commit negative acts towards others––such as, for example, politicians who represent the nation and introduce selective, hostile immigration policies or detainee custody officers who enforce these policies with malevolent zeal––must also be remembered as human. The above definition of hope therefore raises an important question, one foundational to the Quartet’s post-Brexit narratives and which I return to in my literary analysis: how can we be hospitable to the inhospitable? Given the socio-political context in which Smith writes, this question may be narrowed further: how can we be hospitable to those who voted inhospitably? 5 To those who voted for inhospitality? These are valuable questions to think with alongside applications of philosophical hospitality as contextualized in post-Brexit immigration discourse. These questions also open avenues of analysis for literature that, like Smith’s Quartet, responds to the contemporary moment and seeks modes of representation “capable of fostering, or renewing, an ethical relationship with the truth” (Toth 29). Following the definition supplied above, one might suggest that the Quartet’s novels register as hopeful post-Brexit narratives precisely because they call to attention specific ways in which multifaceted experiences of hospitality and inhospitality structure social and political realities following the Referendum. An example I turn to later in my analysis in order to explore this attention is the struggle to understand hospitality and act hospitably experienced by the character Brit, a Detainee Custody Officer working at a UK Immigration Removal Centre in Spring. In being hospitable to both the foul and the fair within her novels, and by allowing that the two are rarely straightforward and often difficult to disentangle, Smith refuses to simplify the substantial complexities of hospitality as concept and practice within a particular cultural and historic moment. By maintaining these complexities in her fiction, and yet pursuing hope, Smith demonstrates that “there’s nothing bunny rabbit or self-indulgent or sparkly about [hope], because its obverse is despair” (qtd. in Kellaway). Smith’s hopeful narrative approach exhibits her novels’ ethical relationship to the anxieties and claims of the contemporary moment and necessitates, in literary analysis, critical attention to questions concerning the role of sincerity in aesthetic responses to crises related to experiences of hospitality and inhospitality. Smith’s fiction, because it places such an emphasis on being hospitable at a time of extensive human migration and of seismic societal and political change, can appear to restore one’s faith in art in times of crisis. In my second epigraph, the speaker Paddy offers an 6 understanding of hospitality, which, in a move characteristic of the Quartet’s narrative strategy, connects material outcomes of hospitality to engagement with stories and the production of art. The Quartet’s concurrent interest in post-Brexit immigration discourse and aesthetics calls attention to how writerly production of, and readerly engagement with, socially and politically engaged literary works might provide hopeful, hospitable alternatives during times of despair and unprecedented change. However, in the Seasonal Quartet, Smith is not only critically addressing the socio-political context of migration in post-Brexit Britain and the pressing need of hospitality in social life as well as in art and literature; she is also developing sincere modes of writing that are themselves attuned to hospitality. To explore what this might mean and how the Quartet’s relation to hospitality is unique compared to her earlier novels, it is useful to consider Smith’s contribution to and patronage of the Refugee Tales project, an aesthetic and activist movement that takes inspiration from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and demands an end to indefinite detention in the UK. The narrative dynamic of the stories in Refugee Tales are constructed through “collaboration between an established writer and the person whose tale [is] being told” (Herd 133). This methodology of collaboration offers both hospitality and anonymity to marginalized individuals whose stories have no place to tell themselves since those who have escaped the detention estate are at constant risk of reprisal. The stories themselves, as well as their construction, are thus inextricably linked to considerations of privilege and difference in encounters between “hosts” and “guests” in national and literary contexts. This mode of representation raises issues of hospitality and sincerity in thinking about what “ethical” authorship––as a kind of narrative hosting with implications beyond the narrative itself––might look like or entail for Smith. The concept of sincerity is crucial to considerations of authorship and the development of modes of writing that are attuned to hospitality because sincerity in 7 literature fosters and renews the relationship between aesthetics, social responsibility, and the author’s understanding of reality. In the Quartet, this relationship is intensified such that it necessitates a critical analytical approach which queries typical understandings of distance between fiction and reality, author and text. My thesis explores, with specific consideration of post-Brexit migration discourse and national mood, how thinking about migration, hospitality, and sincerity in very concrete ways structures Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as a literary project. I argue that, across the four novels, Smith develops and demonstrates a distinct rhetoric of hospitality that connects socio-political context and literary concerns with sincerity. The novels thereby constitute Smith’s ethical and artistic interventions into the inhospitable nature of the present moment. In Chapter 1, I situate my argument amongst extant scholarship and relevant theoretical discourses, foregrounding my location of the Quartet in the growing corpus of New Sincerity literature, which I develop alongside close readings of the novels in Chapter 3. Chapter 1 outlines how my thesis will contribute to scholarly reception of the Quartet, to current understandings of literary New Sincerity, and to the application of hospitality theory to literary works. In Chapter 2, I theorize Smith’s rhetoric of hospitality as developed in the four novels of the Quartet. To do so, I demonstrate hospitality as a connective thematic component of the literary project and explore how the novels think through philosophical questions of hospitality to address post-Brexit cultural context. Chapter 2 considers how Smith’s treatment of hospitality in the novels might engage, substantiate, challenge, and even complicate current theories of hospitality, such as those presented by Jacques Derrida, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Still. My literary analysis in this chapter consists of close readings of the Quartet’s interconnecting narratives and responds to Smith’s 8 readings of the social, cultural, and political challenges of post-Brexit Britain as she expresses these within the four novels. In Chapter 3, I contend that, while the Quartet contributes valuable insights into post-Brexit immigration debates, it also poses an extended meditation on ethical authorship and engagement with art in times of crisis. Smith’s emphasis on sincerity and hospitality in these practices necessitates critical attention to the capacity and responsibility of the author or storyteller to also be hospitable. My analysis in this chapter shifts between the novels and public paratexts to theorize Smith’s rhetoric of hospitality as expressed by her authorial persona. Examining her authorial persona as someone invested in the pursuit of hospitality in and beyond literary representation is an important critical move because it reveals how sincerity both forms and informs her narrative voice. Though authorial persona and narrative voice are distinct concepts in literary criticism, I argue that the two meet and overlap in the Quartet; as a result, the novels exhibit a kind of verisimilitude in which the relationship between fiction and reality is intensified such that borders between the two become blurred to a greater degree than is typically found in socially and politically engaged literary works. If, as Derrida suggests, what hospitality does is “blur the border” (qtd. in Still 27), then the Quartet, by troubling prior notions of separation between textual and extra-textual subjects and spaces, opens the possibility of a narrative hospitality that engages traditionally external subjects, like the author and the reader, in a close encounter. I argue in Chapter 3 that Smith’s sincere modes of writing, which are themselves attuned to hospitality, align the Quartet with literary New Sincerity, a genre concerned with “sincere communication” through “predominantly realist aesthetics” (Colton 469). New Sincerity is typically associated with contemporary American fiction that rebels against the emotional or ironic detachment that, “according to touchstones such as [David Foster 9 Wallace’s] ‘E Unibus Pluram,’ characterize[s] so much of postmodern media” under late-capitalism (Colton 469). However, I contend that Smith’s Quartet demonstrates the genre’s yet underutilized potential for exploring narrative hospitality as an ethical aesthetic response to, and critical intervention into, experiences and practices of hospitality and inhospitality in the contemporary moment. My analysis of the Quartet engages hospitality discourse in two essential ways: first, to think about migration as practice and concept in post-Brexit Britain and, second, to theorize sincere modes of aesthetic encounter. Although one might suggest that these two directions are not substantially or significantly related, each offers a unique lens for meaningful interpretation of the other and, together, they comprise Smith’s hope for and commitment to the future of hospitality. To be clear, I do not intend to conflate hospitality as a mode of national welcome with hospitality as a mode of engagement with or within literary texts. Rather, I hold these two kinds of encounter in tension, as Smith herself does, to demonstrate how they might work together to question prior notions of separation across borders––national and textual. This approach does not suggest doing away with borders of difference altogether, nor does it ignore the ways in which difference codes geopolitical, individual, and literary encounters. As Chapter 2 makes clear, Smith herself does not propose either of these options. Instead, I argue that Smith, through the Seasonal Quartet, offers new ways to conceive of borders to both theorize and enact innovative modes of engaging across them. 10 Chapter 1: Locating the Subject On Hospitality My thesis is primarily interested in how Smith’s distinctive rhetoric of hospitality––as expressed in her novels and by her authorial persona––advances current understandings of the social and political import of hospitality to address contemporary challenges in post-Brexit Britain. However, my literary analysis also explores concepts outlined by thinkers such as Derrida to theorize and contextualize acts of hospitality staged in the Quartet’s narratives within the discourse of philosophical hospitality. For many scholars, thinking about hospitality is thinking with Derrida’s philosophical insights on the concept. Engaging with this established discourse illustrates how Smith’s understanding of hospitality as concept and practice in contemporary socio-political and literary contexts shows affinities with Derrida, but also differs. For Derrida, hospitality is “not just an ethics, but ethics itself” (qtd. in Bulley 2). I read such a powerful statement as asserting that we can think about hospitality as we do ethics; like ethics, which lends itself to innumerable interpretations or applications in practice and in thought, hospitality as a concept offers an approach to existing in relation to others and to the world around us and encodes these encounters with particular sets of moral principles and obligations, which is tantamount to an ethics. According to Dan Bulley, interrogating the implications of hospitality as ethics reveals “a constitutive link between ethics, power and space within practices of hospitality” (2). To my understanding, Bulley’s reading of Derrida suggests that hospitality and ethics share a concern with and involvement in the determination and policing of thresholds or borders, as in those between “self and other, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion” (Bulley 2). These distinctions are each premised on unequal access to power and mobility and are illuminated in relation to the threshold of a given space. What is at 11 stake in the idea of hospitality as ethics, then, are questions concerning what traversing these thresholds would require and what it might mean to do so, questions which inevitably give way to questioning the nature of what, or whom, these thresholds divide. Derrida’s concept of absolute hospitality outlined in Of Hospitality further contributes to this understanding of hospitality as ethics. Derrida writes, absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner . . . but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity . . . or even their names. (25) This explanation suggests that absolute hospitality presupposes an unequal relation at the threshold. Especially important to this point is Derrida’s use of the personal pronoun “I,” which equates the self with the position of the host and, accordingly, opposes “them”––the stranger, the foreigner, the unknown and unknowable other. The self is situated as internal, recognized, always already included, whereas the stranger who arrives must do so from beyond the threshold. Derrida’s words thus appear to indicate that the host’s offer of hospitality always involves difference and conditions, whether they are sought or not––if not at the border during the act of arrival, then certainly afterwards. The other is and to an extent must remain unnamed and unknowable; it is this unknowability that forms my obligation to them in the structure of absolute hospitality. One possible reading of absolute hospitality might therefore suggest that it is a form of hospitality that, even in its unconditional openness, accepts the absolute other insofar as they remain “strange.” Indeed, if I let the stranger arrive and they take place only in the place I offer them, am I really saying “yes to who or what turns up” (Derrida 77) before any determination or anticipation? This is a valuable line of inquiry for thinking about the practice of hospitality as it relates to, for example, indefinite detention and post-Brexit UK immigration policies, such as the 12 proposed Rwanda Asylum Plan.2 While I concede that absolute hospitality, absolute openness to who or what arrives, is not possible in practice at national borders or at the border of the self––though it might, to my mind, be possible by narrative means––the ethical and hopeful pursuit of absolute hospitality must nonetheless remain an ideal. As I will show, Ali Smith’s fiction helps us see why this ideal is necessary in art and cultural texts as well as in social and political life. In the Quartet, hospitality is presented through numerous examples and with unexpected outcomes as an attempt to remain open even to the impossibility of an absolute. Absolute hospitality assumes a clear distinction between the self and the “other” that arrives; likewise, Derrida is careful not to conflate the numerous subject positions that may come to juxtapose the self. For example, the “foreigner” is rendered less threatening than the “absolute, unknown, anonymous other” (25). Yet the differences between the two are “subtle and sometimes ungraspable” (25). Accordingly, Derrida admits that, at the moment of arrival, we do not actually know how to “distinguish between a guest and a parasite,” although in principle the distinctions may appear straightforward (59). The difference between these two classifications, though attended to, does not register as a significant concern since absolute hospitality for Derrida “requires that ‘each and every one’ should be welcomed without exception” (De Ville 38). Of course, as Derrida recognizes, absolute hospitality seems dangerous, impractical, and impossible in reality. In practice, and particularly at national borders, distinctions between “desirable” guests and potentially harmful arrivals substantially condition a host’s extension of hospitality. In addition to these distinctions often being difficult to determine, the process of 2 The Rwanda Asylum Plan is a migration plan introduced in April 2022 that proposes sending people who enter the UK without permission or correct documentation to Rwanda “to have their asylum claim processed and decided there” (“What is the new Rwanda asylum plan?”). Although, the plan was reviewed as unlawful by the Court of Appeal in June 2023––which reversed the High Court’s decision in December 2022 that the plan was lawful––“it is likely that this decision will be appealed” (“What is the new Rwanda asylum plan?”). 13 making them has ethical, legal, and logistical challenges that perhaps exceed those implied in theory. Some strangers are absolutely less familiar than others, but does recognition of these distinctions make it any easier to admit or exclude them? If distinctions between “guest and parasite” are sometimes unknowable at the threshold, how might they, if at all, come into focus or be assigned after admission into the home or other bordered domain? Does hospitality end after the offer or refusal of welcome? These are important questions that, to my understanding, Derrida’s description of absolute hospitality certainly raises. For Smith, I argue, it might be that the problem resides in dominant rhetoric and practices that do not present and are not able to represent absolute hospitality but that must seek, always and nonetheless, to allow for hospitable encounter even as hospitality itself may always fall short of an absolute. Perhaps we might better conceive of how Smith understands hospitality if we look more closely at the context she presents. Let us consider the first question posed above as it regards welcome or refusal in the context of global migration. For migration, as an essential structure of human movement and a socio-political debate with ethical and economic implications, distinctions matter and undoubtably make it easier for the nation-state to admit some while refusing others. At national borders, distinctions such as those between visitors, refugees, asylum seekers,3 “illegal aliens,” and “regular” or “irregular” migrants are, in some cases, clearly discerned by documentation––such as Visas and passports––or lack thereof. However, acceptance of this documentation is not always straightforward. Furthermore, the official practice of distinguishing between the above categories often raises complex issues related to 3 According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a refugee is a person who “cannot return to their country of origin because of a well-founded fear of persecution, conflict, violence, or other circumstances that have serious disturbed public order, and who, as a result, require international protection” (“Asylum and Migration”). UNHCR defines an asylum seeker as a person “whose request for sanctuary has yet to be processed” (“Asylum-seekers”). 14 identity politics. Although, in principle, recognizing distinctions between individuals who arrive at national borders seems to be a necessary move, in practice it can exclude some individuals entirely and mark others as permanently out of place. As Smith’s Quartet illustrates, it is nevertheless worthwhile to think about how distinctions between others function within practices of hospitality, such as how they are used at national borders by immigration officers to determine entry into a country, as well as the ways in which these distinctions are policed and surveilled by authorities following an individual’s admittance across the border. Smith’s representation of immigration procedures and its problems engage in ongoing recognition of the way distinctions code and condition offers of hospitality. Her attention to the ways in which distinctions function and are reproduced acknowledges that all who arrive at the border of the nation-state come with different histories, identities, and intentions and also rejects the notion that some arrivals are inherently more deserving of hospitality than others. Such an engagement allows hospitality to be interrogated as the complex and multifaceted practice that it is and, in so doing, contributes to developing modes of response to the arrival of strangers that are necessarily complex, rather than policing these arrivals through divisive, diminishing, and discriminatory means. The second question posed above about how distinctions between individuals who arrive at borders might surface after welcome and the third question, which concerns the possible continuance of hospitality following its official offer, require further thinking about how identity politics code and condition practices of hospitality in the context of global migration. According to Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo and Jesús Benito Sanchez, expressions of identity politics ensure that “the Other is always situated in a there, as opposed to the here pertaining to the self” (8). They note that, following arrival and acceptance into the home, community, or nation, there “may be situated within here, in the hostile spaces that countries have created to both immobilize 15 and forge the newcomer as the Other” (9). Moreover, Bulley suggests that distinctions between self and other, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion continue “to be policed, managed and controlled, even after the threshold of the home is crossed” (2). Each of these claims imply that hospitality does not begin with arrival, nor does it end with crossing. Rather, hospitality is conditioned prior to arrival and is realized––or not––in the various and ongoing encounters that follow. This line of thinking necessitates reconsidering what offers of hospitality at the border of the nation-state truly entail as ongoing commitments by the host nation. In Chapter 2, I explore how Smith’s novels stage and theorize this commitment to demonstrate its complexities through national, communal, and individual encounters. To do so, I draw on Ahmed’s Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, in which she underscores the importance of critically recontextualizing hospitality in concrete and embodied ways. Ahmed addresses ways in which “strangerness” has been historically produced as a kind of hostile, perpetual state of non-belonging and also explores how it is presently reproduced and maintained through conventions, structures, and institutions that function in a given space to exclude some individuals entirely while marking others who have been allowed to cross the threshold as nonetheless permanently out of place. In so doing, Ahmed offers an understanding of hospitality that troubles its conception in the Derridean tradition. She contends that, while Derrida is providing us with a model of hospitality which is an opening to that which is yet to be assimilated (as either friend or stranger), there is still a failure to acknowledge the relationship between this opening and the forms of assimilation that already function to differentiate others. Such a hospitality is based on the forgetting of the names that are used, however inadequately, to locate subjects in a topography of time and place. (151) Ahmed interprets the concept of absolute hospitality as an erasure of differences that conceals social, political, and historic relationships. Ahmed’s interpretation is useful to my analysis of Smith’s undertaking in the Quartet because it encourages attention to the ways in which prior 16 encounters produce “the stranger” as already differentiated from the self in key ways prior to the moment of arrival and continue to condition the stranger’s state of belonging following the host’s offer of hospitality. Chapter 2 demonstrates that Smith’s rhetoric of hospitality intersects with Ahmed’s logic to make thinkable the many potential encounters of hospitality in the context of global migration and post-Brexit Britain. Ahmed’s approach to thinking about hospitality requires that, “rather than saying that History determines the relationship between this and that,” we ask “‘how is the relationship between this and that determined?’ as a historical question” (9-10). To this end, Ahmed negotiates an understanding of hospitable and inhospitable encounters that accounts for the ways in which contemporary manifestations of prior structures of oppression and differentiation––such as colonialism––might reinstate or themselves constitute selective, if not impenetrable, thresholds through which strangers are always only conditionally admitted, if indeed they are admitted at all. To be clear, Ahmed does not suggest that we engage in an ongoing struggle with identity, power, and their histories of determination simply so that we can know better how some individuals come to be marked as permanently out of place in certain spaces. Rather, through this acknowledgment and struggle, she identifies the urgent need for an understanding of hospitality that is “open to the particularity of the ‘who’ I might encounter, but in such a way that this particularity does not hold this ‘you’ in place” (152). In other words, she does not seek the impossibility of absolute hospitality, but rather proposes an embodied understanding and practice of hospitality that, on one hand, requires acknowledgement of specific lived experiences that precede, condition, and follow the act of arrival and, on the other, seeks to establish more equitable modes of encounter. This proposal constitutes an important contextualization of 17 hospitality theory that Derridean hospitality certainly provides tools for but does not itself undertake. She writes, In contrast [to Derridean hospitality], what is required is a hospitality that remembers the encounters that are already implicated in such names (including the name of ‘the stranger’), and how they affect the movement and ‘arrival’ of others, in a way which opens out the possibility of these names being moved from. This hospitality . . . would begin by admitting to how the assimilation of others, and the differentiation between others, might already affect who or what may arrive, then or now, here or there. (151) Judith Still, a notable Derrida scholar, associates Ahmed’s proposal in this passage with criticism of Derrida’s work that suggests “its inadequacy when faced with the political problems of today” (10). Although Still is not entirely convinced by Ahmed’s identification of Derridean hospitality as a “forgetting of names,” she describes Ahmed’s proposal as “excellent” and “quite valid in reference to a number of other writers on hospitality” (44). In other words, Still agrees with and sees the necessity of Ahmed’s proposed direction for thinking about hospitality in contextualized and embodied ways to address social and political issues of our time while also supporting Derrida’s understanding of hospitality as ethics. I agree with Still’s assessment because it recognizes that new understandings of hospitality can and must be developed to address specific issues in the present moment even as Derrida’s ideas on hospitality remain foundational to this ongoing discussion. However, although I recall Derrida’s thinking in my literary analysis, I primarily engage recent theories and interpretations proposed by women. As Still points out, less critical attention has been paid to women’s work in the area of theoretical writing on hospitality than to work by Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (2). Beyond rectifying this gap in the discourse, focusing on women’s work is an essential analytic approach to thinking about hospitality alongside and within Smith’s Seasonal Quartet because the novels themselves contextualize larger discourses concerning hospitality in embodied experiences related to intersections of identity and belonging, a specific 18 critical intervention that women writing on hospitality today––such as Ahmed and Still––are developing. Hospitality and Aesthetics Interest in the relation between aesthetics, culture, and hospitality has long been explored in theoretical writing. In an unpublished seminar, Derrida discusses Albert Camus’ “The Guest” as a literary text which “stages a law of hospitality [and] acts out, as its own writing what we might call ‘hospitality’” (qtd. in Still 172). I will make a similar claim regarding Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. Reading themes of philosophical hospitality staged in cultural texts is not a new practice and is likewise not exclusive to recent fiction; scholars often identify Homer’s Odyssey and episodes from the Old Testament as key intertexts for thinking about hospitality (Still 51). Literature, historically, allows us to review acts and laws of hospitality as they shape and take shape in encounters between individuals, even if only as staged or fictionalized encounters. Addressing this history of interaction between aesthetics, culture, and hospitality, Ginette Michaud suggests that “if, according to Derrida, we must turn towards literature, this is because hospitality finds resources there” and “because literature gives . . . asylum to hospitality in deploying tropes and turns which give place to hospitality in the very idiom” (qtd. in Still 172). Clearly, literature stages hospitality’s themes and tropes in ways conducive to and productive of theoretical interpretation of the laws of hospitality. In addition to this longstanding tradition of thinking about hospitality alongside and within aesthetic and cultural texts, recent scholarship suggests that aesthetic encounters might themselves facilitate, even constitute, a kind of hospitality. The capacity or potential of a text to enact hospitality to or between extra-textual subjects––such as authors, readers, viewers, or 19 audiences in general––has been explored through terms such as “textual hospitality” (Still 51), “narrative hospitality” (Shaw 209), and “literary hospitality” (Still 83; Voelz 210). These terms are used somewhat interchangeably and without distinctions. The notion that texts might potentially enact hospitality appears throughout recent scholarship on hospitality as well as literary scholarship, though the varying terminology indicates that discussions seeking to define and classify this notion remain ongoing. My analysis includes insights from scholars who employ each of the above variations of the term––as well as scholars who do not utilize any of these terms but nonetheless draw on similar understandings of the relation between texts and practices of hospitality––to contextualize my observations of how Smith’s Quartet engages and contributes to further developing this discourse. I use the term “narrative hospitality” because the term, of those supplied, best signals interrogation of dominant social and political narratives as well as literary and aesthetic narratives, and also because notable Smith scholar Kristian Shaw mentions this term in relation to the Quartet. While Still and Ahmed each contribute to literary criticism on narrative hospitality, I am particularly interested in a perspective offered by Balfour in Hospitality in a Time of Terror: Strangers at the Gate because her work theorizes “hospitality and living with others” (xiv) through critical analysis of multi-modal cultural texts. In so doing, Balfour explores whether “contemporary art and culture . . . bring us any closer to understanding what hospitality might be” and considers the extent to which art and culture might provide “an example of a purely hospitable act” (130). Her work addresses the conceptual and practical complexities of hospitality “at a time when terror and terrorism” remain “at the forefront of political and social consciousness” while, concurrently, “encounter with strangers or strangeness is at the core of cultural production and indeed culture itself in the aftermath of terrorist attack and in an era that 20 is often conceptualized as ‘after 9/11’” (xiii). Balfour’s contextualization of hospitality discourse in the 9/11 cultural archive “allows us to think about the question of hospitality again, and think of it differently when tethered to a particular cultural moment and momentum––the implications of which reach back across history and forward into an undeterminable future” (xiv). While Balfour does not explicitly employ the term narrative hospitality, her work nonetheless establishes hospitality as a social and ethical function of culturally and politically engaged art and aesthetics. Balfour’s work is vital to my literary analysis because her insistence on thinking about hospitality as tied to a particular cultural moment and momentum resonates with the Quartet’s relationship to Brexit and “post-truth tactics employed by the Leave campaign” (Shaw 167) as well as with global politics broadly. My thesis primarily engages the emergent discourse of narrative hospitality by theorizing the social and political ends to which Smith herself directs it: that is, the ways in which she puts to work discourses and practices of narrative hospitality in her novels and related authorial paratexts to offer modes of engagement across borders of difference in a cultural moment where art, hospitality, and their relation to one another, in Balfour’s words, “matter more than ever” (xxi). Ali Smith on Hospitality The novels in Smith’s oeuvre characteristically represent matters thematically associated with philosophical hospitality, such as strangers, unexpected arrivals, hosts, and acts of welcoming to or exclusion from the home, the family, or the community. Chapter 2 theorizes how the Quartet’s attention to hospitality in this thematic capacity develops a particular rhetoric of hospitality to navigate post-Brexit UK. To foreground how I advance this movement toward narrative hospitality in Chapter 3, I will first consider how Smith’s novels––in terms of plot, 21 narrative voice, and form––have hitherto been read as potentially hospitable by literary critics. Although the Quartet demonstrates a renewed and sincere focus on “welcom[ing] people into the home of [one’s] story” (Autumn 119) to address the cultural momentum of Brexit, Smith’s critical reception has associated her modes of writing with hospitality particularly since the publication of There but for the (2011). The novel’s focal point is the arrival of an unknown and unexpected guest, Miles Garth, at the Lee family’s dinner party and the subsequent locking of himself in a spare bedroom. Ben Davies suggests that the novel “sets up what could be a seen as an experiment in dwelling; the text offers sustained attention to dwelling, as well as an example of how to dwell otherwise” (509). Davies notes that this play with space, dwelling, and “artificial hospitality” (510) critically responds to the UK housing crisis and anticipates the “bedroom tax” legislation.4 In addition to critiquing contemporary socio-political crises related to inhospitality, There but for the “gives a sense of the possibilities and potentialities of textual dwelling” (Davies 518). Davies’ point is that the text’s nonlinear and disruptive narrative style––in addition to its themes of disruption––cause the reader to move “between . . . these layers, rather than simply across the text in linear fashion” and, “consequently, the reader is . . . invited to dwell on and in the very textuality” of the novel (515). This idea of textual dwelling as an “invitation” to readers resonates with the notion of narrative hospitality; both bring to the fore questions of close encounter with and within aesthetic or cultural texts and the social function of such encounters in texts that respond to inhospitable realities. Andrei Bogdan Popa offers a unique and compelling critical perspective on There but for the, drawing on Derrida and Levinas to argue that the novel 4 The piece of legislation popularly known as the “bedroom tax” came into effect in 2013 and, as a result, tenants who are of “working age” and “living in social housing who have a ‘spare’ bedroom” must either face “a reduction in their housing benefit payments or relocate” (Davies 509). Davies maintains that this piece of legislation “never considers questions of dwelling to any purposeful degree” (509). 22 constructs a temporality which simultaneously encodes the scenario of hospitality into the self’s perception of futurity, and recalibrates the present welcoming of the stranger towards the effects such a meeting will have in the future. (30) The essence of Popa’s argument is that Smith’s novel stages hospitality in destabilized and nonlinear scenarios, thereby enabling the text to think through hospitality and encounters between the self and strangers in the contemporary moment while simultaneously anticipating future encounters and potential outcomes of these encounters, which may take place in the past, present, or future. A significant aspect of his argument is the novel’s play with language, similar to what Davies describes as constituting an invitation to dwell on and in the novel’s textuality; however, Popa, unlike Davies, discusses this point specifically in relation to philosophical discourses of hospitality. He contends that “any decision to offer hospitality is contingent upon the degree to which language allows itself to be reinvented” (34), bringing to mind Derrida’s thinking regarding unequal relation to language as structuring hospitality as an encounter (Of Hospitality 15). Popa suggests that the potential reinvention of language in the novel “should be taken as referring both to hospitality as a literary dimension, and to hospitality in general” (34). In contrast to Still, who ultimately agrees with Derrida that “absolute hospitality to texts” is impossible (83), Popa appears to suggest that Smith’s writing opens possibilities for thinking about texts as potential sites of unconditional hospitality. Though my thesis does not itself undertake analysis of Smith’s earlier texts, Davies and Popa foreground the exploration of hospitality as a consistent, significant theme and narrative function across Smith’s writing. Their arguments demonstrate how her narratives’ textuality and textual construction, in addition to their content, provide resources for philosophical considerations of hospitality as well as perhaps themselves offer hospitality. 23 Existing scholarship on the Quartet focuses on the ways in which the novels represent and interrogate dominant socio-political discourses surrounding the move to Brexit and the UK’s realized exit from the EU in 2020. A number of scholars use the term “hospitality” in their analysis and several others, despite their primary critical interests laying elsewhere, discuss matters which one might describe as inherently recalling discourses of hospitality or inhospitality. In the seven years since Autumn’s publication, numerous critics have explored hospitality as a concept––in various capacities, to varying ends, and supported by different theoretical frameworks––within the novels of the Quartet to engage specific elements of post-Brexit discourse, such as populism, immigration, or ecological crisis.5 Relatively few of these works address the Quartet in its entirety. To contextualize my own analysis, I primarily draw on perspectives that engage all four novels because, to my mind, criticism that addresses one or two of the novels as individual texts without also discussing the ways in which they speak to and across one another as a literary project is unable to fully reflect Smith’s treatment of hospitality in the Quartet. Eleanor Byrne’s work is particularly valuable to my analysis; she employs Derrida’s insights on hospitality to explore how Autumn, Winter, and Spring respond to ecological crisis and the current UK political landscape. According to Byrne, the novels dramatize the “necessary ways out of seemingly irreconcilable differences through a celebration of empathy, ecological awareness and hospitality” (83). My own analysis does not discuss the Quartet’s concern with ecological crisis beyond recognizing that this crisis substantially affects experiences of human migration and will continue to do so on an exacerbated scale in the coming decades; nonetheless, 5 See, for example, Catherine Bernard, “Vibrant Allegories: Questioning Immunity with Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020);” Alice Bennett, “‘This ridiculous thing that passes for a passport’: Seeking Asylum in Ali Smith’s Fiction;” John Masterson, “‘Don’t tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way’: Imagination, Agitation, and Raging Against the Machine in Ali Smith’s Spring.” 24 Byrne’s work contributes to my understanding of how the novels stage and interact with Derridean concepts of hospitality, as well as how they move this discourse in specific and important new directions. I engage Byrne’s thinking in Chapter 2 to theorize Smith’s representation of unexpected arrivals and figures of the stranger in individual, human encounters as well as in national, geopolitical contexts. Scholarship that undertakes close readings of hospitality as staged in the Quartet’s novels is typically distinct from other forms of publication––such as interviews and book reviews––that might be said to engage Smith’s particular rhetoric of hospitality as an author. In current scholarship, less attention has been paid to Smith’s own voice in socio-political debates related to culture, aesthetics, and hospitality than it has to the expression of such debates in her novels. In my view, critical separation between the two constitutes a significant misstep because it either overlooks or too quickly passes over Smith’s overt presence in post-Brexit public discourse, or fails to theorize the ways that her particular rhetoric of hospitality might condition the novels’ responses to contemporary experiences of inhospitality. Therefore, in Chapter 3, I pursue a mode of engagement with Smith’s novels that recognizes and centers her authorial persona alongside and within the narratives themselves. By critically evaluating the correlation between Smith’s novels, her particular ethics and beliefs as an author, and her experience working with refugees and displaced individuals, I theorize how the Quartet’s distinct narrative voice embodies Smith’s authorial persona and, thereby, constitutes a sincere mode of writing that enacts narrative hospitality and aligns the Quartet with New Sincerity. Three recent publications––by Shaw, Nicole Schrag, Peter Ely and Sara Upstone––inform and foreground this move. Each publication associates Smith’s Quartet with a literary genre or movement the scholars see as post-postmodern. In Community in Contemporary British 25 Fiction: From Blair to Brexit, editors Ely and Upstone introduce Smith’s Quartet as exemplifying their interest in “complexities of the literary engagement with community” (12-13). Ely and Upstone’s emphasis on and treatment of community in and with fiction implies recognition of matters associated with hospitality––like identity, globalization, and conceptions of the nation––as crucial to socio-political discourses in contemporary Britain. They contend that “the twenty-first century has seen the return of the writer as public intellectual and social commentator and, in an era of systemic crisis, writers have been moved by global events to find a renewed public voice” (9). They associate Smith with this return, underscoring its correlation to “the current cultural moment” which has been described as “post-postmodern, metamodernist, transglossic or renewalist, among others” (9). Specifically, they argue that Smith “exemplifies a metamodern/ transglossic positioning of the author as public intellectual, and the novel as a force for social good” (13). Similarly, in BrexLit: British Literature and the European Project, Shaw considers current debates over the effectiveness of contemporary state-of-the-nation novels; he maintains that “the causal factors and motivating impulses of Brexit are best captured in the medium of the British novel” (3). He argues, “the majority of post-Brexit literary works indicate a pronounced disgust with the national turmoil continuing to embroil British politics and betray an authorial resistance to the outcome of the referendum” (169). BrexLit’s third and fifth chapters discuss Smith’s Quartet. Whereas the former explores the novels’ treatment of borders, sovereignty, and “anti-migrant policing” (124), the latter acknowledges Smith’s “authorial anger” (208) and her belief in “the writer’s responsibility to practice a form of narrative hospitality” (209). Shaw’s attention to Smith’s belief in narrative hospitality––though brief––as well as Ely and Upstone’s consideration of Smith as a “public intellectual” (13) inform my conception of Smith’s authorial persona; they each suggest that her beliefs and ethical 26 commitments as an author condition her novels’ intervention into literary and socio-political debates.6 Both BrexLit and Community in Contemporary British Fiction analyze large corpuses of contemporary British novels. While they engage Smith’s novels to illustrate and inform their arguments, the Quartet is not a primary critical focus. Conversely, in her work on metamodernism and counterpublics, Schrag focuses on Smith’s Quartet, though she does not conduct close readings of Winter. She argues that “Smith experiments with the possibilities for the twenty-first-century novel to test the relationship between art and politics in a dissident, politically engaged counterpublic sphere” (2) and that the Quartet offers “readers an intensified exploration of the metamodern artist’s relationship to a politically vital counterpublic” (3). Schrag’s work, as well as that of Ely, Upstone and Shaw, align Smith with post-postmodern literary genres or movements precisely due to the presence of her authorial voice within the Quartet’s narratives. My thesis adds to this discourse by exploring Smith’s attention to sincerity and theorizing her understanding of narrative hospitality as expressed within the novels and related authorial paratexts. I critically depart from the arguments posed by the above scholars by aligning the Quartet with the growing corpus of New Sincerity literature. New Sincerity The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “sincere” as “containing no element of dissimulation or deception; not feigned or pretended; real, true.” Based on this definition, it may seem counterintuitive, perhaps even ironic, to think about sincerity in relation to fiction, the 6 It is worth noting that scholars Shaw and Upstone are in dialogue with one another. Together, they propose the term “transglossic” to supplant other post-postmodernist neologisms and they associate Smith with several key aspects of their proposal (Shaw and Upstone 594). 27 genre conventions of which presuppose a distinction from both truth and reality. However, fiction, particularly the novel form, has always had a complex, close relation to truth in social, cultural, and political contexts. According to Smith, fiction writers “can alert us to the workings of the people who make fictions of our world and call what they’re doing truth” (“The novel” 43). This statement is drawn from her Goldsmiths Prize lecture, titled “The novel in the age of Trump” (2017), in which she defends the enduring and renewed importance of the novel form in a historical moment that has been described as “post-truth”: The novel teaches us how to read fictions, how to read structure, how to analyse the structures of the stories that we get told or we tell. Which means that the novel matters because it’s fiction, and fiction, like truth, profoundly matters to the human species. In the age of Trump, when truth is so blatantly revealed as something dismissible, somehow simply no longer relevant, the novel matters even more, because to some extent we all live by fictions, we have all along survived by using them. But in an age in which living by fiction means having powerful fictions politically, nationally, internationally foisted upon us, fiction lets us read and understand such fictions. (43) For Smith, socially and politically engaged fiction exposes and questions populist truths in the contemporary cultural moment to which it responds by teaching us how to read, how to critically encounter, fictions. Therefore, despite a perhaps inherent distinction from “truth” and “reality,” novels like those of the Quartet register as sincere, rather than ironic or distancing, by attending to, while also directing or reframing, the various and conflicting narratives of our current inhospitable, often insincere, cultural and socio-political realities. As Chapter 3 illustrates, Smith’s Quartet addresses the present moment through sincere modes of writing that request––perhaps even require––readers’ embodied and sincere encounter with the narratives such that the border between fiction and reality is blurred. Such notions of troubled distance between a text and traditionally extra-textual subjects such as authors and readers––as well as the way this concern intersects with questions of realism and irony in contemporary socially and politically engaged fiction––are of consistent critical 28 interest to scholars engaging New Sincerity literature. The term “New Sincerity” was coined by Adam Kelly in an influential treatise on David Foster Wallace, the author with whom the genre is primarily associated.7 Despite the steady increase in scholarly engagement with the term since Kelly’s introduction, a precise definition of New Sincerity has proved elusive. Most often, scholars outline a working definition through the genre’s relation to postmodernism, which New Sincerity is thought of as succeeding. Kelly suggests that being “post-postmodern”––which in this context is, according to Edward Matthews, coterminous with New Sincerity––means being uncertain about “whether you have really managed to escape narcissism, solipsism, irony and insincerity” (qtd. in Matthews 9). Although such dismissive generalizations describe postmodernism as being not merely ironic, but also narcissistic, solipsistic, and insincere, it should be emphasized that this characterization is informed by its opponents, such as Fredric Jameson and Wallace, who view the movement as an aesthetic aligned with neoliberalism and late capitalism, as outlined in Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram.” Although I move New Sincerity discourse in a different direction, considering its origins is helpful for understanding the genre’s primary goals and features. Chief amongst these features, for instance, is a reassessment of––or, according to some critics, an aversion to––irony in fiction. Aaron Colton describes irony as a “major impediment to sincere communication” and as “a detached or apolitical ethos which the fiction attributed to the New Sincerity is said to combat” (469). Yet many critics recognize that New Sincerity rethinks or redirects postmodern irony to new or renewed ends. Matthews, for instance, claims that “irony is a tool in the toolbelt [of New Sincerity,] not the toolbelt itself” (10). He further suggests that “New Sincerity authors do not abandon irony entirely but use it insofar as it allows readers to 7 Although New Sincerity is typically associated with American fiction, Johannes Voelz recently proposed an expansion of the genre’s corpus to include authors and texts from other literary geographies. 29 suspend disbelief and trust where the author is taking them” (10). This point illuminates one of the ways that current understandings of New Sincerity as a genre open compelling avenues by which to think about authors and readers in relation to a given text and moment of textual encounter. Since Roland Barthes announced the death of the author, authorial intention and motivation is typically less of a concern in literary criticism than is readerly interpretation and reception of the text itself; however, New Sincerity necessitates reconsideration of the author’s distance from readerly interpretation. As Chapter 3 will explore, the possibility of revisiting an author’s presence in readerly encounters with texts raises significant and valuable implications for theorizing narrative hospitality as a sincere response and alternative to contemporaneous experiences of inhospitality. Although this direction departs from New Sincerity’s typical association with sincere communication as an aesthetic response to postmodernism, current scholarship on New Sincerity literature nonetheless offers sufficient grounds for exploring forms of narrative hospitality by rethinking critical conventions of authorial and readerly distance––from the text and from one another. A recent article by Johannes Voelz conceptualizes “the relation between character and reader (and ultimately between author and reader) in terms of hospitality” (210) and is, to my knowledge, the first to associate New Sincerity with the discourse of literary or narrative hospitality. However, I take issue with Voelz’s suggestion that “literary hospitality” reorders and reverses “the starting point of hospitality” (210); instead, I propose that Smith is developing modes of writing that both model and facilitate close encounters between seemingly separate subjects akin to the experience of hospitality, made possible through a renewed interest in sincerity. 30 In current scholarship, if critics mention New Sincerity in their analysis of the Quartet, it is in passing and usually constitutes a detour on the way to locating the novels in a different genre or movement like metamodernism (Schrag), the transglossic (Ely and Upstone; Shaw and Upstone), or BrexLit (Shaw). Scholars of Smith are seemingly dismissive of New Sincerity as a worthwhile or serious literary movement on the grounds that, according to Alex Calder, “the terminology of ‘sincerity’ lapses into debates about veracity” and thereby “fails to account for” texts that have “open-ended metareferential forms which perform dialogue while simultaneously demonstrating the possibilities of artifice” (551). I trouble this statement in Chapter 3. Through close readings of Smith’s Quartet, I illustrate that New Sincerity offers a number of valuable avenues for, on one hand, thinking about an author’s role and their social responsibility to respond in their aesthetic practices to contemporary crises related to hospitality and, on the other, for developing modes of writing themselves attuned to hospitality. 31 Chapter 2: Hospitality: Connections and Critiques Hospitality is an organizing and predominant theme across the four novels of the Quartet and is an especially important narrative commitment given the cultural and historical context surrounding their publication. The first three novels each appear as distinct, self-contained narratives, connected primarily by consistent themes and motifs, namely as expressed through acts of hospitality or inhospitality to non-British or other marginalized and excluded individuals in the UK. These acts within the novels are accompanied by commentary on material socio-political effects following the 2016 Brexit Referendum. Each novel mediates distinct narratives of division, exclusion, and migration, bringing to the surface Brexit’s subtext of anxiety over the “foreign” stranger’s arrival at the “home” as domicile, community, or nation-state. The Quartet’s final installment, Summer, further challenges the rigidity of these structures and necessitates reconsideration of prior notions of separation between textual characters and also between the narratives themselves. This chapter illustrates that, viewed in its entirety, the Quartet radically encourages readers to remember the closeness and goodness of strangers in a time of heightened nationalism, xenophobia, and inhospitality. Ultimately, by thinking through complex acts of hospitality staged in contemporary UK spaces of dwelling, the Quartet offers and demands urgent reconsideration of the conditions attached to belonging in post-Brexit Britain and seeks to provide alternative responses to human migration and the arrival of the “foreigner” or “stranger.” Autumn The Quartet’s first installment chronicles and responds to the immediate aftermath of the 2016 Brexit Referendum. Considered the first Brexit novel (Schmitz-Justen 318), Autumn moves temporally between the weeks after the vote and Elisabeth Demand’s childhood, much of which 32 she spent in the company of a neighbour, Daniel Gluck. The novel reflects the complexities of being a neighbour in a time of increasing suspicion and hostility toward strangers. While walking through the English village where her mother lives one week after the Referendum, Elisabeth notes that “people either look down, look away, or stare her out” and they address one another “with a new kind of detachment” (53-54). Emily Hall notes that a “lack of empathy [following the Referendum] is felt by almost everyone within the village, with each pointing the finger at the other for who caused it.” The widespread disconnection and wariness between neighbours reflect the polarization of the British public following the Referendum: All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing. . . . . All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. . . . All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. (59) The poetic structure of this passage demonstrates the rife animosity and resentment “all across the country” after the Referendum by creating a list of populist affects. The passage reflects on narratives that would “sum up the country’s existential divide” in the wake of Brexit (Vincent) and explores how, in the outcome of the vote, people––regardless of what they voted––felt justified in their decision and simultaneously admonished those who voted differently. Smith represents this moment as impossibly coherent, articulated by a national fantasy of a single feeling shared by all across the country. Yet, as Smith makes clear, the vote both revealed and exacerbated the country’s existential divide; in so doing, it further estranged neighbours. Moreover, Smith illuminates the relation between division all across the country and debates concerning division in the context of national borders and “rightful” belonging within them, debates at the very core of the UK’s move to Brexit. On her walk, Elisabeth passes a cottage “whose front . . . has been painted over with black paint and the words GO and HOME” (53). 33 The phrase “go home” echoes former Prime Minister David Cameron’s goal of creating “a fair immigration system that says to people: if you’re here illegally, you should go home” (qtd. in Back and Sinha 39).8 Cameron’s assertion that such an immigration system is “fair” prioritizes a certain understanding of what it means to be British and to belong in Britain, a perspective that accordingly invites and fuels domestic anxiety over “the foreign arrival.” In Autumn, it is not clear whether the individuals living in the vandalized house are new to the UK, new to the neighbourhood, or if they have long been members of the community who, following the Referendum, are only now being targeted for some facet of their identity that positions them, according to the logic of Brexit, as “the foreign arrival.” Rather than offer a reason for the vandalism, Smith emphasizes the act’s temporal proximity to the Referendum, illustrating its xenophobic expression as symptomatic of the populist anti-migrant rhetoric that accompanied and to an extent motivated the move to Leave. By reflecting new challenges and conditions attached to being a neighbour and being welcome in the UK following the Referendum, Autumn introduces the Quartet’s preoccupation with urgent questions concerning what it means to be a stranger, or to be newly estranged, in a social and political landscape that is increasingly hostile to those rendered outside its conditional logic of belonging. For example, when a Spanish family who have “clearly just arrived” in the UK “on holiday” wait for a taxi at a transit station, people shout at them to “go home,” to “go back to Europe” (130). Elisabeth senses that what is happening in this “one passing incident [is] a fraction of something volcanic” (130). Indeed, although in 2016 the UK was four years away from realizing its exit from the EU, this incident demonstrates instantaneous materialization of 8 Cameron made this statement while standing outside a raided home with former Home Secretary Theresa May after having taken “the unprecedented step to observe an immigration raid first-hand” (Back and Sinha 39). 34 perceived separation––a new border––between Britain and mainland Europe; EU citizens are newly outside by a changing logic of who belongs where, and are treated as such. However, Autumn makes clear that these “new” detachments and divisions surfacing post-Brexit are perhaps not new at all, but rather constitute new expressions of already existing conditions of belonging that code experiences of hospitality and its refusal. Smith writes, All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. . . . All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told other people to leave. . . . All across the country, racist bile was general. All across the country, people said it wasn’t that they didn’t like immigrants. All across the country, people said it was about control. . . . All across the country, the country split in pieces. All across the country, the countries cut adrift. All across the country, the country was divided, a fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed there, . . . . a whole new line of fire, line of battle, end of the line, here/there. (60-61) This passage, marked by the repeating refrain of “all across the country” without naming the specific place, creates a sense of the mundane or ordinary at the same time as it seems to echo “the country” as a place of widespread despair. Furthermore, Smith here utilizes space on page as a poet might; the indentations between the lines drawn and crossed not only refer to “new” borders erected within the nation and individual communities but also replicate this separation on the page. Yet the final line illuminates that the border––the forward slash––between here and there collapses the distance between the two places. In this sense, the border drawn unites as much as it divides. In terms of its affective content, this associative passage is exemplative of the Quartet as a whole and historizes post-Brexit inhospitality between individuals by revealing longstanding fault lines within the British body politic related to Euroscepticism, racism, and 35 xenophobia; it also pointedly raises the issue of nostalgia for Empire. In particular, Smith’s comment on “control,” related to immigration and “racist bile,” brings to mind Ash Sarkar’s point that “the appeal of racism for some” white Britons is the fact that migrants and people of colour making lives for themselves in Britain is a “reminder of [the] loss, humiliation and degradation” associated with the diminishment of Empire (136). If, as Sarkar suggests, “migration isn’t the presence of the stranger, it’s the return” (135), then the vote to Leave registers as a––to borrow from Ahmed––a forgetting of the histories of colonial encounter that caused the need to migrate in many countries and, at the same time, demonstrates a national sensitivity and outrage over the perception that Britain has gone “straight from being the colonizer to being the colonized” (O’Toole qtd. in Dobrogoszcz 141). Rather than reconcile these prior and present histories toward a more hospitable and hopeful future of encounter at the nation’s border and within the nation-state, the decided outcome cuts the “countries adrift,” negating kinship and any social or moral responsibly to other countries and people. In raising these issues, Smith contextualizes inhospitable acts between neighbours and strangers on individual and communal scales alongside geopolitical and social concerns that already condition these acts, but which have been further aggravated and “legitimized” by the move to Brexit. Autumn thus presents the pressing need for hospitality at the level of the human while emphasizing that thinking about hospitality post-Brexit also requires consideration at national and global levels. The novel itself begins in Daniel’s dream, in which he awakes on an undistinguished beach fueled by strength he has not felt for decades; his real body is a hundred and four years old, asleep in an English care facility. He looks to the sea and notices a body washed ashore: [Daniel] goes to look. Is it his own? No. It is a dead person. 36 Just along from this dead person, there is another dead person. Beyond it, another, and another. . . . Further up the beach there are more people. These people are human, like the ones on the shore, but these are alive. They’re under parasols. They are holidaying up the shore from the dead. (12) The relationship in this passage between the indifferent vacationers and the shipwrecked dead materializes an increasing unease due to Smith’s repetition of “another” and “another,” creating a cumulative effect that emphasizes the bodies of the dead in juxtaposition to those who take no notice. This passage encompasses a key narrative strategy in the Quartet; Smith’s particular aesthetic partakes of the mundane even as the content is extraordinary in its horror. Understatement as representational mode is powerful because it parallels the “pre-planned theatre” of British politics that propels citizens “from shock to shock and chaos to chaos like it’s meant to be nourishment” (Winter 57) and that, in so doing, both produces and relies on detachment from affect and desensitization to atrocities. Daniel’s dream also raises the issue of global migration in the context of increasingly dangerous maritime crossings undertaken by asylum seekers in unseaworthy vessels. The ambiguity of the shore implies that the scene could happen anywhere; perhaps it takes place in Kent, an English county that faces the English Channel and is a main point of arrival for asylum seekers and refugees departing from Calais, France. The frequency of such crossings has increased steadily in the last decade and will continue to do so despite populist demands to “stop the boats” (Sunak qtd. in “Rishi Sunak”). By alerting readers to the precarity people face as they attempt to cross natural borders like the Channel for the chance to claim asylum at a national border, Smith invites consideration of UK immigration practices since Brexit, which have included “policies towards asylum seekers [that allow] preventable deaths” (Heidemann 684). Daniel’s dream also addresses the fact that hospitality as industry is growing at the same time as an unprecedented number of forcibly displaced people are seeking asylum. Accordingly, his 37 dream––a very real nightmare thousands of people are living through at this minute––alludes to the ways in which “the differentiation between others . . . might already affect who or what may arrive, then or now, here or there” (Ahmed 151). By introducing the contrasting mobilities of potential “guests,” Autumn points to how conditions attached to welcome in the UK––which, following Brexit, now restrict previously welcome EU citizens––maintain and strengthen a detached national mood towards those whose arrival might require something of the host nation. Smith recognizes that increasing the security and selectivity of national borders will not stop “undesirable” migrants from arriving but will, rather, ensure that their journeys are more dangerous. She therefore draws attention to the problem of hostile or uncompassionate encounters at national borders and seems to emphasize the need for developing equitable modes of encounter at these borders, modes that acknowledge and remember kinship rather than reinforce narratives of separation. Autumn represents the division between neighbours and hostility to strangers materializing domestically in the UK both as symptomatic of and as abetting hyper-nationalist and isolationist immigration policy that, since Brexit, “rhetorically and practically” encourages “the opposite of integration” (Autumn 111). In so doing, Autumn positions hospitality post-Brexit as an individual and socio-political concern while introducing key ideas and narrative strategies that the subsequent novels of the Quartet consistently engage. Winter Following Autumn’s depiction of “severe animosities . . . raised immediately after the referendum” (Dobrogoszcz 142), Winter stages acts of hospitality and inhospitality closer to home. The novel chronicles the reunion of two estranged sisters who voted differently in the Referendum. Sophia lives alone in Chei Bres, a large house on an estate which Iris––Sophia’s 38 activist sister who participated in the Greenham Common protests9––owned and used as a commune in the seventies. Fifty years later, Sophia lives there alone, haunted by her past and Dickensian ghosts––visions of a floating child’s head. Sophia considers the head “very welcome” and insists that she “couldn’t have a less intrusive guest” (13), an expression of hospitality that troubles her usual disposition: Sophia had been feeling nothing for some time now. Refugees in the sea. Children in ambulances. . . . Atrocities. People beaten up and tortured in cells. Nothing. Also, just, you know, ordinary everyday terribleness. . . . But now she sat at her table on Christmas Eve and felt pain play through her like a fine-tuned many-stringed music and her the instrument. Because how could losing so much of a self not hurt? (29-30) This passage, in keeping with Winter’s intertextual allusion to A Christmas Carol, raises the issue of hospitality alongside a kind of moral haunting corresponding to expressions of empathy. Despite Sophia feeling “nothing,” she is nonetheless aware of what she perhaps should feel in response to atrocities, which she can clearly recognize even though they seem to have become, to her, “ordinary” and “everyday.” This detachment is potentially symptomatic of the shock “served up . . . on a 24 hour newsfeed” (57)––suggested in the above passage by the short, flippant sentences that resemble headlines––and also may be correlated to a perceived distance from these atrocities, both in terms of physical and emotional proximity, whereby she is unable to truly face their horror. Perhaps due to the head’s insistent presence despite her attempts to evade it, Sophia cannot ignore its suffering in the same way that she maintains indifference to the suffering of refugees who drown in the sea; she feels responsible to the ghostly stranger in a way 9 The antinuclear, women-only protest began in 1981 as a response to NATO’s decision to host American cruise missiles at this Greenham Common, an airbase in Berkshire, England (Moore et al.). The airbase was built on common land that was “loaned to the Americans by the British Government during WWII and never returned to the people” (Stead). Hegemonic authorities did not expect the protest to make any tangible difference; yet the movement, as Smith notes, “shift[ed] political opinion about nuclear weaponry” and “culminate[d] in international policy, within a decade, altering considerably” (Winter 149). 39 she refuses to be towards embodied others to whom she may also be called to be hospitable. Though Sophia as a character might be thought of as a host who has been taken “hostage” (Derrida 55) by the haunting presence of an unknowable stranger––one whose arrival is unexpected and precedes an offer of welcome––her encounters with other strangers in Winter make thinkable anxieties related to hospitality within the home as a place of dwelling and in the home as allegorically representing the nation. The head’s disruption of Sophia’s default to inhospitality coincides with the arrival of an embodied stranger in her home––Lux. Whereas the head is described as an unobtrusive guest that requests only acknowledgment, Lux challenges Sophia’s inhospitality to strangers whose arrival at the home––or, for that matter, to the nation––may ask something of the host who is at home. Lux was born in Croatia; her family moved to Canada when she was small, but they are “war-wounded however far away [they] go” (246) following the series of ethnic conflicts and wars for independence in then-Yugoslavia during the early nineties. Lux came to England for school, but cannot afford to complete her degree. Her already precarious position living under the radar is aggravated further by Brexit; she is unable to find a job as no one knows if she will be allowed to remain in Britain (247). Lux arrives at Chei Bres in the place of Charlotte, ex-girlfriend of Sophia’s son Art. Charlotte left Art after the Referendum because of his “default to selfishness” exemplified by an indifference to the precarious position of EU citizens living in the UK who are now unsure whether they can stay (54-55). Art, embarrassed to arrive at Chei Bres alone, invites Lux––a stranger he met at a bus stop who is someone unsure if they can stay in the UK––and offers her a thousand pounds to pretend to be Charlotte (68). Lux is thus the “other Charlotte” (183), an ironic description of her position as someone “out of place” in the home, family, and nation. 40 Lux’s status as an unwelcome guest in the nation-state is reinscribed in Chei Bres when she is told by Sophia that she is unwelcome in the house (85). Lux, nevertheless, models hospitality. When Lux sees Sophia’s deteriorating state, Lux feeds her and listens to her; Sophia ultimately acknowledges that “it is sometimes easier to talk to a stranger” (253), echoing back to her repressed affect. Smith, here, offers an outcome of hospitality in which the inhospitable host is herself hosted––cared for, nourished––in her own home by the unexpected and unknown guest whose arrival she met with hostility. This outcome challenges anxieties over the “foreign arrival” as what Derrida might call a “hostile subject” (53) by reminding readers of the potential goodness of strangers. Smith further troubles understandings of matters associated with hospitality by specifically staging these encounters in Chei Bres, a place of dwelling and also an allegoric representation of the nation and of dominant logic or rhetoric; the name of the house is Cornish for “house of thought, house where gestation takes place. House of the mind and house of the uterus” (Summer 343). While there are interesting implications of the house’s association with the uterus that correlate to recent thinking regarding the question of sexual difference and hospitality––a topic beyond the scope of this thesis––it is important to read the home as a place where new thought is possible, a space that might facilitate new understanding. I return to this motif below. Iris returns to Chei Bres when Art, at Lux’s insistence, calls on her to help with Sophia even though the sisters have not spoken in decades. Iris has recently returned to England from Greece, where she aids refugees who cross the Mediterranean Sea. Sophia flippantly classifies Iris’s work as a holiday and, in response, Iris describes the “thousands of holidaymakers arriving every day” (232), recalling Daniel’s dream in Autumn. She tells Sophia to alert her “old friends” concerned with national security that “people are in a very bad way” (233): 41 Tell them about people risking their lives, about people whose lives are all they’ve got left. Tell them about what torture does to a life, what it does to a language, how it makes people unable to dare to explain to themselves, never mind to other people, what’s happened to them. Tell them what loss is. . . . And when you’ve done telling them that, she said, tell them what it’s like to come back here, when you’re a citizen of the world who’s been working with all the other citizens of the world, to be told you’re a citizen of nowhere, to hear that the world’s been equated with nowhere by a British Prime Minister. Ask them what kind of vicar, what kind of church, brings a child up to think that words like very and hostile and environment and refugees can ever go together in any response to what happens to people in the real world. (233) As with Autumn, this passage employs repetition to surface the mundanity of suffering, of exclusion and violence toward others by those in power and the willing blindness by some members of the public. The repeated demand to “tell them” accrues a sense of moral responsibility as the refrain progresses, a responsibility which recalls the memory of Sophia’s prior collaboration with hegemonic authorities concerned with security (133) and points to the material effects of contemporary iterations of national security rhetoric on individual lives. Furthermore, this passage underscores the urgent ethical imperative of hospitality in a time of multiple crises directly related to migration and also identifies how anti-migrant rhetoric and policy contributes to a dominant narrative of detachment and lack of responsibility to mainland Europe and the rest of the world, including to Britain’s former and current colonies. Iris refers to the hostile environment policy,10 exemplified by Theresa May’s infamous contention that “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere” (qtd. in Smith).11 She juxtaposes this policy and the precarity and suffering of the people she works with to emphasize the consequences of national inhospitality and detachment on individual lives. In bringing this 10 This policy was initiated by anti-migrant populist discourse prior to Brexit. On July 29th in 2014, then Prime Minister David Cameron outlined that forthcoming policy changes to the British immigration system intend to “make it harder for you to have a home, to get a car, to have a job, to get a bank account” if “you arrive in Britain illegally;” in the same speech, Cameron stressed that “when we find you, and we will find you, we’ll make sure you’re sent back to the country you came from” (Independent Television News qtd. in Back and Sinha 39). The authors of the 2016 Immigration Act legitimized these statements as policy. 11 This quotation appears as an epigraph in Winter. 42 geo-political discourse into the home––a place of dwelling and, given its name, a place of thought and gestation––Smith, through Iris, combats detachment and demands more human, more generous understandings of global migration than those offered by policy since Brexit. Smith stages similar conversations throughout Winter, bringing together opposing views on Brexit and including perspectives from individuals who are typically socially or politically excluded from the debate, such as migrants and EU citizens. Giving voice to these perspectives is significant because, as Christine Berberich points out, Brexit “has come to define” the “present and future lives” of EU citizens in the UK despite the fact that they are unable to “vote in national elections and, as such, they were also barred from voting in the Referendum” (31). For example, during Christmas dinner with Art, Iris, and Sophia, Lux remarks how strange it is “to think of anyone in this country ever talking about a room of the future” when “the only room [she is] used to hearing people talk about is the no room, the no more room” (205). Sophia says it is true, that there is no more room, and generalizes all immigrants as “economic migrants” who want better lives (205). She elaborates that “they want our lives” (206; emphasis in original). In response, Iris bets she could guess what Sophia voted in the Referendum, which Sophia then describes as a vote to “free our country from inheriting the troubles of other countries” (206). This statement ignores the UK’s legacy of colonialism that caused troubles in many other countries. Iris responds that it “depends whether you think there’s a them and an us . . . or just an us” (206). The sisters’ bickering emphasizes concern over global migration as a central divisive issue in post-Brexit socio-political discourse. Although they hesitate to listen to one another, Lux facilitates an important dialogue between the sisters. She asks, But what will the world do . . . if we can’t solve the problem of the millions and millions of people with no home to go to or whose homes aren’t good enough, except by saying 43 go away and building fences and walls? It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer. (206) Though she is an outsider in many ways, Lux generates a collective “we”––between the sisters and in the context of the nation as well as the global community––and facilitates mutual understanding in “a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it ever actually becoming dialogue” (Autumn 111). By the end of their encounter with Lux, the dynamic between the sisters, as well as between Lux and Sophia, shifts. They find common ground. However, despite facilitating tangible change in the sisters’ relationship, Lux’s words also seem to haunt the very idea of “common ground” in the post-Brexit context, suggesting that, on national scales, things are not so simple. Indeed, it is one thing to think hospitality between neighbours, strangers, or family members––relationships that are important in their own right––but it is perhaps another to think hospitality on national levels in regard to geopolitics and “millions and millions of people.” Though these two spheres of hospitality are implicitly correlated and ideologically linked, they imply very different frames of reference and authorities. Through the multifaceted allegory of Chei Bres, Winter thinks through hospitality and global migration in the context of Brexit and seeks solutions on human, individual scales as well as on a national level; Smith demonstrates how thinking about hospitality post-Brexit must not strictly engage one or the other, but bring both into conversation. Despite Lux’s significance in the narrative, the end of her story is never told. After she disappears, Art walks through “a sombre London” (312). Smith chronicles the aftermath of the Grenfell Fire and the “argument happening all across politics and the media about how many people died because nobody can say for sure how many people were in the building that night, it 44 being a place where a lot of people under the radar have been living” (313).12 Though there is no textual evidence that Lux perished in the Grenfell Fire, the narrative draws readers’ attention to the tragedy alongside her absence in order to recognize and humanize the lives lost, many of whom were undocumented migrants. Although readers encounter her only through Sophia and Art’s privileged narrational perspectives, Lux as a textual figuration stands in for the lived realities of displaced and vulnerable people, especially those who have disappeared. Winter’s neglect of Lux’s story in the end means that readers encounter her absence in a tangible way. According to Smith, when a novel leaves something unsaid or leaves readers “with a hole at the centre of their reading, then that unsaid thing that pierces the work will also pierce the reader” (“The novel” 42). Lux’s absence is therefore perhaps narratively necessary because it raises unanswerable questions that humanize and make visible the precarity of migrants and non-British individuals living in the UK post-Brexit and also emphasizes the enduring importance of centering the human in debates over immigration and national hospitality. Spring As Brexit’s various socio-political processes continue to materialize increasingly complicated national and domestic borders, the Quartet tracks how mounting hostility toward “the foreign arrival” conditions lived experiences of marginalized individuals within the nation-state, particularly within the detention estate. Brit, one of the few characters granted narrational privilege in Spring, is a Detainee Custody Officer at an Immigration Removal Center. 12 The Grenfell Tower was home to many “European migrants, black British, refugees from the developing world––some of them second generation––and asylum seekers” who shared the building with “the poor, white working class of London” (Malik). The people who lived in the building inhabited precarious positions within the UK, and many of those who survived the fire were “too frightened [to] seek medical and legal help for fear of being reported to the Home Office because of their irregular immigration status” (Gentleman). 45 Nicknamed “Britannia” by her coworkers, Brit’s own intolerances coincide with her job, a position that ensures her financial security in an increasingly unstable economy while rhetorically and practically upholding Brexit’s conditional logic of belonging. Although aware of the injustices that take place within her place of work as well as in the detention estate broadly, Brit seems incapable of recognizing and taking responsibility for either her personal actions or the inhospitality she maintains on behalf of the nation-state. For instance, upon hearing herself say “how dare you ask for a blanket” to a detainee, “she knew something terrible was happening, but by now the terrible thing . . . felt quite far away, as if not really happening to her” (166). Brit and her ex-boyfriend argue about the implications and material consequences of her position: Security, Josh said. That’s what you call it. I call it upholding the illusion. What illusion? she said. That keeping people out is what it’s all about, he said. What what’s all about? she said. Being British, he said. English. What the fuck are you on about? she said. Wall ourselves in, he said. Shoot ourselves in the foot. Great nation. Great country. (158) Josh alludes to the self-destructive consequences of post-Brexit securitization of borders. Brexit keeps out people whose arrival brings new ideas, new possibility, and also economic growth; strengthening national borders also walls in certain conditional notions of “being British.” Josh notes that Brit is “only able to see things from the point of view of” herself, to which she responds that this “just makes [her] the same as everyone else living in the whole fucking world” (157). Though there appears to be a conscience aroused by Josh’s critique, ultimately, Brit’s denial of responsibility indicates a limited perspective that includes only those like her and, thereby, illustrates the inherent defense logic and detachment to the rest of the world outlined as widespread in Iris’s rebuke, noted above, of the hostile immigration policy, which dismisses the 46 very notion that there can be “citizens of the world” (Winter 233). As such, Brit figuratively embodies––and also, given her line of work, literally maintains––Fortress Britannia. As Lux challenges Sophia’s inhospitality, so Florence challenges Brit to rethink her upholding of national borders. Florence is searching for her mother, who was detained by the Home Office because she did not have a passport though she grew up in Britain (138). Florence is introduced through a rumour circulating Brit’s workplace that a girl wearing a school uniform walked into the detention center and convinced management to clean the toilets (129). While her ability to traverse this highly secured and hostile space qualifies her, to Brit, as a mythical figure, the reason she can sometimes be “invisible” is because “certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like [they] aren’t” there (192-93). Though the outcome of her discussion with Brit’s manager, Bernard Oates, is cleaner toilets, Florence has additional questions. She asks if he knows he is breaking the law, since people can only be detained for seventy-two hours unless they are charged with a crime (204-05). Indefinitely detaining asylum seekers, in that it manifests as a penalty and as punishment, goes against the 1951 United Nations Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “the agreement on which international standards of protection for people fleeing persecution are based” (A. Hall 833). With the recent Illegal Migration Bill, the small hope of due process and protection granted by the Geneva Convention is at risk of becoming legally obsolete in the UK. Though the UK Prison and Probation department has employed private companies––represented in the Quartet by S4A4, Brit’s employer––to practice indefinite immigrant detention as a legal grey area for years, the possibility of this despicable practice being legitimized as policy is, to my mind, the single most inhospitable and inhuman outcome of Brexit to date. 47 Florence’s name alludes to the city in Italy (189), a country which has become one of several critical points of arrival in the EU for asylum seekers journeying across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya. Since Brit represents “Britannia,” her and Florence’s dynamic allegorically indicates that the UK’s exit from the EU registers as a lack of responsibility to EU member states currently experiencing an unprecedented, unmanageable influx of asylum seekers and refugees. Florence’s name also references the English indie rock band Florence and the Machine.13 When she learns Florence’s name, Brit jokingly declares that she must be her Machine (170). Of course, in the narrative, she represents the machines of Fortress Britannia and the detention estate. Florence and Brit meet by chance at a train station, and Florence enlists Brit’s help crossing the northern border of England into Scotland, specifically to Inverness––Smith’s own hometown. Throughout the journey, Florence “rail[s] against the Machine in an attempt to humanize it” (Masterson 358) by calling into question the humanity of the machine––the systems and institutions that facilitate the detention estate––as well as the humanity of the actual people, like Brit, that “let it work” (Spring 310). She suggests, What if . . . instead of saying, this border divides these places. We said, this border unites these places. This border holds together these two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible. (196) The passage asks readers, along with Brit and Britain, to listen, to imagine a world where borders do not wall out or wall in but, rather, offer a place of community, of belonging and welcome. In addition to questioning conceptions of national borders, this passage centers the marginal, mobile figures that appear at the border. Smith, through Florence––whose last name is also “Smith” (207)––proposes that when they arrive at borders, these people, rather than being a “citizen of 13 In October 2017, Florence Welch, the band’s frontperson, publicly renounced the Conservative Party’s use of the band’s song “You’ve Got the Love” at a Party conference (Kelley). In 2016, Welch encouraged her fans to vote in the Referendum, sharing the hashtag “#remain” (Kelley). 48 nowhere,” become doubly possible, become more rather than less. With this, Smith explores yet another novel way of conceiving of the border, further arming her readers with new possibilities and new ways of thinking about what a border is and could be. Florence does not suggest doing away with borders entirely. Even absolute hospitality does not suggest this; Derrida maintains that “in order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world” (61). The above passage from Spring nonetheless calls into question the idea that building a home must always be conceived of as a matter of closing the door, or of locking it outright. What Smith, through Florence, seems to seek is not absolute hospitality premised on total openness to the point of making irrelevant or invisible the very presence and conception of the border or threshold. Instead, what is at stake in Florence’s suggestion is the ethical ideal of a rhetoric and structure of hospitality that reconceives of borders, of division itself, and in so doing seeks ways of allowing for hospitable encounter even if hospitality itself must always fall short of an absolute. Brit’s encounter with Florence causes her to confront her own understanding and maintenance of the current existence and operations of the border. In so doing, Florence asks the machine “to work for [her] for a change” (310); she calls on Brit, Britannia, to be moved. As she listens to and is influenced by Florence, Brit feels that she is “on to something,” something that might “be a game changer at work” but which also may “be bigger than work . . . might be a life changer” (312). She believes that Florence “makes people behave like they should, or like they live in a different better world” (314). However, simply being offered a new perspective and a renewed chance to act hospitably does not solve the issue of inhospitality, evidenced by Brit’s failure to humanize. Once they arrive in Scotland, Florence meets Alda, a woman involved in a group that helps “people escape or outwit detention estate” in the UK (271). The two dodge Brit. 49 Embarrassed and angry that the story is “not and has never really been about [her] anyway” (315), Brit phones “the SA4A Countrywide 24-Hour Hotline number” (316). Florence is momentarily reunited with her mother before the officers responding to Brit’s call swarm them (333). The two are pried apart and placed in separate vans bound for different detention centers. Brit’s internal conflict and betrayal of Florence demonstrate the struggle to act hospitably while participating in and maintaining a system that rhetorically and practically opposes hospitality. According to Smith, the question of what Brit will do in the end is the “best question we can ask” since “what she chooses to do will make the difference between an end and a beginning” (qtd. in “Ali Smith returns”). While Brit’s choice regarding Florence and her mother is clearly made, there are choices yet unmade. After betraying Florence, Brit vomits––“sick as a dog” (321). In the following weeks, she returns to Florence’s journal, which was left behind and which Brit has kept and often reads even though “invariably she ends up feeling bad” when she looks at it (324). Florence, in this way, continues to influence her. Perhaps Brit will decide she can no longer ignore her complicity in a hostile, inhospitable system; perhaps she will quit her job. Smith does not grant readers a definitive end for Brit’s story, as is the case with Florence and Lux. Rather, she requires readers to encounter unanswered questions and imagine––hope for––hospitable endings without granting their certainty. Summer In the fourth novel of the Quartet, Sacha’s family, cleaved in half after Brexit exacerbated certain fault lines, is an apt allegoric figuration of the British public following the Referendum, decided by the thin margin of a mere two percent. Tomasz Dobrogoszcz suggests that “Smith’s novels dramatize this awkward polarization not by numbers, but in micro-scale, by means of 50 showing divided families” (143). For instance, Sacha’s father voted “remain” and her mother voted “leave;” ultimately, he moved out of the family home after the ensuing argument (80). Sacha’s troublesome younger brother Robert comments that “the people who voted leave were sort of also issuing a command” (81). Summer’s depiction of a family that has been “brex-fucked” (31) raises, to my mind, a question posed by Still: “is the nation always modelled somehow on the family?” (200). Still means that the nation tends to operate on and employ a rhetoric of conditional belonging and exclusivity based on familiarity, similar to the figure of the family. Likewise, Ahmed contends, “the techniques for differentiating between citizens and aliens, as well as between humans and aliens, allows the familiar to be established as the familial” (3). In Summer and the Quartet as a whole, Smith raises and interrogates similar understandings of the nation through the figure of the family, yet is also doing something more. Her representational mode differs from the conceptions offered by Still and Ahmed; each novel employs recognizable tropes––such as the figure of the family––that allegorically represent the nation, and which also stand on their own as representative of the embodied, lived experiences of individuals and groups within the nation following the Referendum. In other words, Smith’s narratives demonstrate global hospitality as well as hospitality on individual and human scales as distinct concepts while, simultaneously, illustrating their rhetorical and practical correlations. In addition to depicting a divided family, Summer reveals an underlying structure of hospitality within the Quartet by exposing a number of characters introduced in the previous novels as family. The textual character that facilitates familial connection is Daniel, a figure of strangeness in each narrative. Over the course of the Quartet, readers discover that he was born in Germany, raised in England, and detained on the Isle of Man during the Second World War because of his Jewish heritage and lack of correct documentation. Byrne contends that Daniel 51 “embodies a cosmopolitan identity [and] his memories point to how much of British history and culture is to be found in continental Europe” (88). In addition to representing the historic and enduring link between the UK and mainland Europe, Daniel also demonstrates, having lived through an entire century, that the current state of the nation may be read as a mere continuation of historical moments of migration, movement, and Othering that return, just like the seasons, to a different time and space. (Heidemann 685) Daniel as a character thus offers crucial reminders of forgotten or lost connections across time, space, and other borders; he historicizes the present to challenge modes of recognition that worry over present migrations while forgetting past ones. Daniel is also a narratologically important figure; his presence throughout the Quartet’s narratives link together seemingly separate characters as well as the novels themselves, revealing yet another way that Smith questions and offers new conceptions of borders of difference. Readers first encounter him in Autumn as Elisabeth’s kind, hospitable neighbour; thereafter, he appears typically in the context of a fondly remembered strange encounter. A “man for many seasons” (Summer 191), Daniel meets other characters throughout his long life and, in each relationship, inspires hospitality and hope. Paddy––a character in Spring whom I discuss further in Chapter 3––is inspired by Daniel after a brief encounter with him at a Beethoven concert and produces a film about a man who is “half German, half English” and has been “shafted by the worst of both” (Spring 59), a man to whom “nothing opens . . . though one way or another everything he touches opens” (61). The film title, Andy Hoffnung, is an embodiment of the song “An die Hoffnung”––which means “dedicated to hope”––and thus the film gives “the words a human shape” (271). Similarly, Daniel as a character in the Quartet might be thought of as personifying both hope and hospitality. 52 While his presence is a connective element across the four novels, the publication of the Quartet’s final installment further troubles the distance ascribed to the figure of the stranger by bringing to light “forms of ‘forgotten kinship’ and relationships that were hidden or unknown, lost family members, connections never understood” (Byrne 88). As a result of a chance encounter, Sacha, Robert, and their mother accompany Art and Charlotte on their journey to visit Daniel, to whom they were sent per Sophia’s will to return a stone she stole decades ago, which comprises half of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture. Summer confirms that Daniel is Art’s father, a fact alluded to in Winter. When they arrive, Daniel mistakes Robert for his sister Hannah. Delighted to be reunited with the imagined presence of his sister after over half a century apart, he remarks that he thought “time had quite undone” them (195). Robert as Hannah replies, On the contrary, time and space are what lace us all up together, Hannah says. What makes us part of the larger picture. Universally speaking. The problem is, we tend to think we’re separate. But it’s a delusion. Ah, Daniel says. Of course I’m quoting Einstein, Hannah says. Well, paraphrasing. He said the only real religion humans can have is the matter of freeing ourselves from the delusion first that we’re separate from each other and second that we’re separate from the universe, and the only peace of mind we’ll ever get, he says, is when we try and overcome this delusion. (196) Robert, paraphrasing Einstein and embodying Hannah, speaks in this passage as a figure of connection across time, space, and other borders. This sentiment is complicated by the fact that he and Sacha are the grandchildren of Hannah Gluck’s daughter, who Hannah birthed during the Second World War: We have a war story too, [Sacha] said. Our dad’s mother. I’m named after her. Her name was Sacha Albert. . . . She was French. . . . And her mother’d died in the war when she was only three, [Sacha] said. And the people who brought our grandmother up, they knew she’d died because a girl came to see them in the war and told them what had happened. She said people had seen her be shot dead after she tried to help a lady in a market square stand up after a Nazi knocked her down. (270-71) 53 Hannah Gluck, “whose real name wasn’t on her identity papers, which stated that her name was Adriene Albert,” was in France in late September 1943 (Autumn 64). Under this alias, she helps disappear refugees across the Swiss border (Summer 229) and stays with an older French couple who agree to take care of her daughter “if she should happen to be away for a length of time” (234). When Hannah’s great-grandchildren encounter Daniel, there is no way for him to know that his sister ever had a daughter or that his unknown niece lived to have her own family. Yet, inextricably, something about Robert “hit home” for Daniel (269): There is no doubt, Daniel says. You really are you. Yes, Hannah says. I really am me. And you really are you. But if we follow Einstein’s thinking and add together you plus me plus time plus space. What does that all make? Then she waits, like she always did, for Daniel finally to catch her up. What? What does it all make? Daniel says. It makes you and I more than just you or I, Hannah says. It makes us us. (197) The exchange between Robert and Daniel challenges notions of separation between subjects that posit some individuals as “us” and others as “them” to the end of reinscribing the delusion that some are inherently more deserving of hospitality than others; rather, Robert follows Einstein’s thinking to suggest that––similar to Florence in Spring––what might be perceived as divisive, impenetrable borders or thresholds can be rethought and, thereby, restructured to instead facilitate connection and community. Furthermore, Zsófia Orosz-Réti notes that “while the family union happens . . . none of the participants are aware of the fact that they are a family” (71). As such, Smith does not write a reunion but a revelation that, as Iris states, “nothing’s not connected” (Summer 338). Therefore, this moment between strangers––this strange encounter that is felt as family––illustrates the affective, hospitable essence of the Seasonal Quartet: what makes us us is the recognition of ourselves as always already connected as family despite the literal and figurative borders designed to keep us separate. 54 My assessment of this reunion differs from those who have focused on the fact that the floating child’s head which haunts Sophia in Winter is the embodied “child piece” of a Hepworth “mother and child maquette” (Summer 167). Scholars have noted that the detached but eventually reunified sculpture mirrors troubled relations between mothers and their children represented in the Quartet, such as Art and Sophia (Schmitz-Justen 331) or Florence and her mother (Orosz-Réti 66). By focusing on the familial connection involving Daniel, Hannah, and her descendants, revealed through the journey to return the stone, my reading demonstrates that the reunion offers avenues for recontextualizing and historicizing hospitality alongside conceptions of the family and the nation. Indeed, Smith reveals that family, like the nation, is always already comprised of strangers and invites the possibility that perhaps we are all family, despite our differences. In so doing, Smith troubles contemporary anxiety over securing national borders by suggesting that the figure of the family, rather than being put to work by populist rhetoric to reinscribe xenophobic conceptions of nationhood, can offer a hopeful model for how we might look after one another and respect the different desires and needs that we all have. Addressing the first three novels of the Quartet, Byrne contends that “Smith pushes at the limits of hospitality through a radical overturning of the conventionally understood guest-and-host dynamic” (88). This argument applies to characters’ encounter with Florence and Lux, who are “constructed as a guest/intruder/alien by the establishment” (Byrne 88) and nonetheless offer hospitality to and facilitate connection between other characters. On the one hand, the altruistic hospitality exhibited by strangers to the very hosts who produce or maintain conditional belonging demonstrates the goodness of strangers in a time of hostile policing of national and domestic borders and, in so doing, challenges the notion that those who arrive at the border come to do harm. The novels, and the strangers that thematically and affectively connect them, thus 55 offer unexpected and alternative forms of hospitality that allow us to reimagine dynamics between host and guest, self and other. On the other hand, this “overturning of the conventionally understood guest-and-host dynamic” as Byrne calls it (88) also implies that strangers, marginalized others, and “foreign arrivals” in post-Brexit UK are disproportionately burdened with modelling hospitality to inhospitable hosts even though, as Florence makes clear, developing new, more hospitable and more human modes of encounter also requires cooperation and collaboration on the part of those who represent and uphold the current machine. To my mind, Summer is a hopeful conclusion to the Quartet because it reveals the ways in which connections that might facilitate this cooperation and collaboration always already exist. The trouble, however, lies in the dominant logic and practices of upholding borders and thresholds that enforce and perpetuate division and conditional belonging. Smith’s novels stage numerous attempts to reconceptualize these borders as potential frontiers of hospitality and seek to make the systemic, structural implementation of this reconceptualization thinkable on human, individual scales as well as at the level of the nation. One substantial strength of Smith’s rhetoric of hospitality is that her novels, always and nevertheless, seek to illustrate the need for––and themselves model––modes of engagement across borders of difference that are structured by reciprocal generosity and affective understanding of mutual needs and humanity. 56 Chapter 3: New Sincerity and Narrative Hospitality: Smith’s Interventions The primary interest of my thesis so far has been to demonstrate Ali Smith’s sense of hospitality as she posits it in the Seasonal Quartet, especially as it regards refugees, migrants, and strangers and challenges post-Brexit logic of conditional belonging. Furthermore, I have sought to foreground her interest in welcoming readers to engage in thinking through issues that arise from immigration in the context of hospitality and its refusal. In so doing, I have argued that Smith proposes alternative, more hospitable responses to the unexpected arrival of strangers. However, can there be hospitality without sincerity? The question of sincere hospitality, while it may seem secondary to hospitality in and of itself, deserves attention in consideration of Smith’s writing and rhetoric of hospitality, and the connected but thorny problem of fiction’s relationship and responsibility to truth. I take up these themes in this chapter to argue that Smith’s approach to hospitality necessarily involves sincerity; hence I address the Quartet’s relation to literary New Sincerity. To make this connection, I explore how sincerity and hospitality are linked in the Quartet. I contend that, while the novels are about hospitality, in the sense that they present acts of hospitality and offer specific conceptions of hospitality, they also seek to enact a form of hospitality. Moreover, the novels of the Quartet both demonstrate and themselves constitute Smith’s commitment to developing modes of writing that are attuned to hospitality and which might engage in or mediate practices of hospitality beyond the narratives themselves. This kind of narrative hospitality materializes through sincerity, which, for Smith, entails developing modes of writing that trouble the border between fiction and reality in specific ways. The strong ethical dimensions of the narratives compel the reader to acknowledge Smith’s authorial persona as a distinctive presence and her extra-textual contributions as a public figure whose activities–– 57 such as interviews, related publications, and work with refugees and displaced individuals––all shape, constrain, and condition engagement with the Quartet as a literary project. A Renewed Sincerity Like all four novels of the Quartet, Winter begins with a passage spoken by an unidentified, disembodied narrative voice that locates the novel in a specific mood and context. Since the season that this novel corresponds to is a time of increasing darkness oft associated in literature with decay and despair, Winter’s opening pages are appropriately dismal in tone: God was dead: to begin with. . . . . Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. . . . The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and Marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. . . . Truth and fiction were both dead. (3) In listing the death of aesthetic forms, modes, and movements alongside the death of social, cultural, political, and economic concepts and structures, this passage emphasizes the correlation between art and life and brings to the fore the precarious position of both in the contemporary moment. We are in unprecedented times, this passage seems to suggest. However, the use of the past tense throughout creates an ambiguity as to when we locate this death in a temporal sense: yesterday or “to begin with,” or elsewhere. This uncertainty complicates the characterization of the present moment as well as efforts to move toward a seemingly indeterminate future. On one hand, while perhaps we have historically been able to turn to art to understand and survive contemporaneous realities, by counting both truth and fiction among the dead, this passage seems to grapple with the fact that when “truth” in global politics appears more unstable, subjective, and devalued than ever, then fiction seems less able to help parse the falsehoods. Yet, 58 as mentioned in my first chapter above, Smith argues in her Goldsmiths Prize lecture that reading fiction helps us now, helps us to deal with contemporary post-truth, Trumpian rhetoric. She continues, The consciousness is in the double knowledge. A lie’s not true. A fiction also knows it’s not true, but the difference between a lie and a fiction is this: a lie goes out of its way to subvert truth. That’s what a lie is for. That’s its intention. A fiction has no such intention. If it intends anything to do with truth, it’s to help us get to the truth, maybe truth that’s difficult to articulate, and for which reason has had to take another shape. (43) As Smith makes clear, fiction that employs realist aesthetics to address contemporaneous injustices or historical and political events in the “real” world does not intend to assert itself as “real” in the same way that its subject is “real,” although it certainly might represent alternatives to the real which one may hope could materialize. Rather, fiction produces “readings” of reality, in turn inviting readers to “read” the structure of reality both within the text and beyond its borders. While subjective, such readings are not necessarily deceptive, dishonest, or less true than reality, a notion that Smith’s novels themselves raise when contending that stories about the world, though “made up,” are “no less true for [it]” (Autumn 119). Fiction’s production of readings, to the end of encouraging readerly critique and reconsideration of possible alternatives within possible worlds, might therefore be thought of as a sincere undertaking or approach to the contemporary moment given that, as outlined in Chapter 1, “sincere” is defined as “containing no element of dissimulation or deception; not feigned or pretended; real, true” (OED). For Smith’s Quartet in particular, these readings offer modes of engagement with UK cultural momentum since Brexit. Her pace of writing and publication schedule––yielding an unprecedented four novels in four years––allow her to address socio-political events as they continue to unfold. Of course, the idea that “there is a one-to-one correspondence between the novel and history” is an illusion (Lee 12). Nevertheless, “historically, works of literature are credited with 59 producing change” (Culler 40), a point Smith’s novels make clear in their intertextual allusions to authors such as Charles Dickens and Katherine Mansfield,14 whose work “changes everything” by “break[ing] the mould” (Spring 42). For instance, each installment of the Quartet corresponds to a Dickens novel––A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, Hard Times, and David Copperfield, respectively.15 Spring begins with a passage that both echoes and departs from Mr. Gradgrind’s emphasis on fact as “the one thing needful” (Dickens 9): Now what we don’t want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition. What we want is people in power saying the truth is not the truth. . . . we want fury we want outrage we want words at their most emotive antisemite is good nazi is great paedo will really do it perverted foreigner illegal we want gut reaction we want Age Test for “Child Migrants” 98% Demand Ban New Migrants Gunships to Stop Migrants How Many More Can We Take Bolt Your Doors Hide Your Wives we want zero tolerance. . . . We need to suggest the enemy within. . . . we want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people we want to say loudly over and over again on as many tv and radio shows as possible how they’re silencing us. (3-5)16 Again, we encounter one of Smith’s characteristic narrative techniques: the repeated refrain. In this instance, the repetition of “we want,” while listing hostile, violent, xenophobic, and nonetheless “desired” outcomes, aligns the speaker with authoritarian and hyper-nationalist rhetoric that perpetuates fear and hatred of those marked as “the foreign other,” who may also be 14 Smith references Mansfield throughout Spring, describing her as a seminal re-maker of the literary form she was using (37). Smith also emphasizes the relations between Mansfield’s later short stories, contemporaneous socio-political contexts––such as the affects of the First World War and the state of the British Empire (41-42)––and the post-Brexit present moment in which “nostalgia for the empire’s back big-time” (43). Her work becomes a point of connection between Richard and Paddy, one enduring even in death as Richard receives a final message from Paddy written on the blank pages of a collection of Mansfield’s short stories, left to him in Paddy’s will (278). 15 Autumn’s first sentence alludes to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times” (3). The intertext is later reintroduced when Elisabeth reads the novel as Daniel sleeps in the care facility (201-2). David Copperfield is alluded to in Summer when Sacha’s mother struggles to remember where the words “heroine of my own life” and “something about a station” are from (7). She later links the full quotation to David Copperfield, recalling the summer she spent acting in a play about what happens to the women in the novel (97). The intertextual references in Autumn and Summer relate concerns central to Dickens’ novels to the contemporary moment, emphasizing that socially and politically engaged literary works can make “everything happening stand just far enough away” (Autumn 202). These references also demonstrate that engagement with aesthetics can facilitate connection between individuals and across time, space, and other borders. 16 I have enlarged the font to replicate the variation in font size in the original. 60 “the enemy within.” This passage also, in forming a wall of shocking language, imitates a thread of hateful posts or headlines as if drawn from a social media site like Twitter (now X). The juxtaposition between this passage and its intertextual allusion to Hard Times emphasizes that an appeal to “fact”––that which might be thought of as unequivocally true or real––is, in the present moment, complicated by new realities and widespread distrust of, or obstinate belief in, “fake news” (Spring 136). Thus, as Dickens’ attempt “to capture the ‘real’” (Lee 18) emphasizes the political import of literary representation as social critique, Smith attempts to capture the present moment through a narrative strategy that itself seems to acknowledge the fraught nature of “fact” that might undermine this attempt. This strategy illustrates her commitment to developing modes of writing that respond to “the post-truth era” (James). According to Shaw, “literature has always been a significant influence on the perception of Britishness (or narrower Englishness), shaping the markers of national identity in the popular cultural imagination” (3). The Quartet asserts itself within this longstanding English literary tradition at the same time as Smith’s modes of writing engage and update realist representational strategies for the present historical moment in order to address present challenges: that is, to address reality in categorically “unreal” times. Like Dickens, Smith engages realist aesthetic modes that are not themselves new, but which might be renewed to find new import given the realities of the contemporary moment, thereby reasserting the value of narrative as a mode of social critique in times of seismic societal and political change. This notion is affirmed by Paddy’s point in Spring that “there’s a difference between narrative strategy and reality but they’re symbiotic” (63). Each adapts to or alongside the other to meet mutual needs and demands. Yet urgent questions remain concerning how and to what extent this symbiosis might tangibly affect contemporary social life and politics or help dictate a more equitable and hospitable future. To this end, Shaw, in BrexLit, asks the following: 61 What is the purpose of ‘national’ literature in a divided cultural landscape? How can literature help to make sense of political and social realities? Can literature point towards new models of community and identity? What role, if any, does literary studies have to play in responding to recent cosmopolitical events? (3) Smith’s Quartet helps navigate these vital questions. In addition to taking contemporary British artists like Pauline Boty and Barbara Hepworth, modernist writers such as Mansfield, Dickens’ nineteenth century state-of-the-nation novels, and Shakespearean late romances including Cymbeline17 as points of ethical and political reference, Smith creates characters who themselves maintain that art can “rebalance and address deep-rooted problems” (Summer 263) even in the present moment in which “pre-planned theatre is replacing politics” (Winter 57). These novels also assert that we may survive these times through “the shape the telling takes” (Spring 21). This assertion recalls Smith’s statement that fiction “helps us get to” truths that are difficult to articulate and, accordingly, might necessitate a different shape (“The novel” 43). Therefore, perhaps the opening passage from Winter, in announcing a multitude of aesthetic, social, and political mortalities, rather than lamenting the death of fiction, instead identifies the need for a novel aesthetic form capable of engaging the present moment through a new or renewed shape and representational strategy. To my mind, the novels of the Quartet both contribute to and specifically position themselves as engaged in this critical effort. This pursuit aligns with what Josh Toth describes as the recent “explosion of critical works . . . marked by an effort to get over postmodernism––and, in getting over it, to name the new” (19). This effort situates the present moment as liminal: “we seem stuck between the certainty of an end and the impossibility of a future” (Toth 20). Toth describes the “explosion” of 17 In Winter, Smith describes Cymbeline as “a play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning,” a kingdom in which “everybody is pretending to be someone or something else . . . and you can’t see for the life of you how any of it will resolve in the end” (200). Cymbeline functions in the novel as a point of reference by which one may evaluate the state of UK politics and social life since Brexit. 62 this effort in literary studies since the turn of the millennium; this surge in scholarly interest to “name the new” was anticipated by Linda Hutcheon in the second edition of The Politics of Postmodernism (2002), in which she writes, “let’s just say it: it’s over” (166). She continues, The postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on––as do those of modernism––in our contemporary twenty-first-century world. Literary historical categories like modernism and postmodernism are, after all, only heuristic labels that we create in our attempts to chart cultural changes and continuities. Post-postmodernism needs a new label of its own, and I conclude, therefore, with this challenge to readers to find it––and name it for the twenty-first century. (181) That two decades have passed since Hutcheon issued this challenge, and that there has yet to be a definitive consensus among scholars on what this name ought to be, indicates not that the task is itself unmanageable, but rather that the contemporary moment is perhaps characterized by this very undecidability, this “oscillation”––as it has been referred to by scholars Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker––on an “unstable axis” between “the two opposite poles of modernism and postmodernism” (qtd. in Rudrum and Starvis 306). According to Toth, to imagine a beyond to the postmodern, we must first envision how a new (or renewed) aesthetic form might satisfactorily engage or critique whatever it is that has supplanted postmodernity––which might simply be, as many critics have already suggested, a profound intensification of what already was. (23) New Sincerity offers one such form among other suggestions such as “renewalism,” the “transglossic” or “metamodernism,” the latter of which may be read as a broader heuristic that includes New Sincerity. David Rudrum and Nicholas Starvis describe metamodernism as neither a movement nor a philosophy, but a “structure of feeling,” which, they argue, tends to “express a (often guarded) hopefulness and (at times feigned) sincerity” (310). This sense resonates with Smith’s modes of writing. Engaging works that, like Smith’s Quartet, demonstrate a nuanced approach to thinking about the future of aesthetic forms in relation to presently unfolding historic and political events, 63 is, in Toth’s words, “more interesting” than engaging fiction that is clearly and earnestly “opposed to postmodernism en masse [sic]” (10). Similarly, Schrag suggests, while “the term metamodernism can overstate the departure from postmodern aesthetics in contemporary fiction, the term is necessary in relation to an exploration of Ali Smith’s work in part because her novels directly thematize shifts in aesthetic practice” (3). She argues that Smith’s Seasonal Quartet offers readers an intensified exploration of the metamodern artist’s relationship to a politically vital counterpublic. Ali Smith, well-known for formal invention, develops an aesthetic of extreme ‘porosity’ in the Seasonal Quartet, intertwining and at times entangling the threads of the novel, the author, the reader, and social context through her repeated use of ekphrasis. (3) Schrag’s work aligns with critical responses to the Quartet by scholars Orosz-Réti and Laura Schmitz-Justen, who each explore the novels’ engagement with post-Brexit realities primarily through Smith’s use of ekphrasis––a literary device that engages extended descriptions of aesthetic works and, thus, might trouble the boundary between textual and extra-textual subjects and spaces by taking on the viewer or reader’s perspective and position. One example of Smith’s use of ekphrasis is her incorporation of Pauline Boty’s artistic productions throughout Autumn, which often materializes as dialogue between characters describing her collages to others who cannot, at the moment of description, see them, such as Daniel’s depiction to Elisabeth (73). Such instances intertwine textual and extra-textual perspectives, thereby illustrating Schrag’s above point, and also structure engagement with the text itself. Indeed, Autumn is organized as “a long and slow contemplation of an enormous collage of scenes and images about our moment” (Rau qtd. in Adam 64). As such, Smith’s use of ekphrasis in the Quartet relates to possible conceptions of narrative hospitality by welcoming readers to engage the text as a porous artform. 64 However, I suggest that, in addition to her use of ekphrasis, it is Smith’s employment of an aesthetics of sincerity which allows the novels to connect contemporary socio-political context with literary concerns and to, thereby, contribute to her overarching effort to develop and facilitate hospitable modes of encounter across borders of difference: national and textual. In other words, I argue that narrative hospitality is, for Smith, ultimately a function of renewed sincerity. For instance, the opening passage from Winter continues with an explicit address to the reader that complicates what it might mean to move beyond previously listed deaths: Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. . . . but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning . . . and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead): (4-5) Winter here draws on the intertextual memory of A Christmas Carol, recalling the British state-of-the-nation novel’s longstanding history of addressing widespread detachment from the suffering of others, while also updating this history in the wake of present challenges like climate change. This passage asks readers twice to imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. The difference between the first and the second request is that the second includes disruptive parenthesis which condition the request and invite a more sincere, embodied imagination that may require the reader to suspend their current beliefs regarding what is possible. Additionally, the above passage reflexively comments on the narrative to come, further requesting suspension of current beliefs by emphasizing that it is not a ghost story––though readers will encounter a floating child’s head and haunting memories of Christmases past. While such reflexivity is associated with postmodernist techniques, reflexivity (often referred to as self-consciousness), 65 long precedes postmodernism; witness Don Quixote or Tristram Shandy. For that matter, according to Alison Lee, Realism itself presents us with reflexive moments: a Realist text in the sense that it was, and is, defined by Realist critics, does not exist. Novelists such as Walter Scott, Thackeray, Trollope, Charlotte Brontë, to name but a few, have all been hailed as writers of Realist texts. Each of their texts, however, like Adam Bede, contains self-conscious moments which in themselves undermine Realist dictates. (Lee 8) While Smith employs realist techniques in so far as she seems to faithfully reflect “ordinary life,” the realist representations are often directed towards a focus on sincerity and sincere encounter which allows her novels to address the contemporary moment through a kind of verisimilitude—not of objective reality as much as of the reality that currently blurs the border between fiction and reality. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 2, Smith’s representation of “ordinary everyday terribleness” (Winter 30) presents ordinary life and also seeks to motivate readers to see these realities differently, to recognize the horror in their being “ordinary” and “everyday” in the first place. These realist depictions thereby demonstrate hopefulness even as they represent its adverse: despair. Given that one understanding of New Sincerity suggests that its fictions present cultural production “marked by a renewed interest in narrative efficacy and social responsibility” (Toth 22), the above passage from Winter correlates to literary New Sincerity by demonstrating Smith’s specific positioning of the Quartet’s novels to address the contemporary moment through socially and politically engaged aesthetic forms that might themselves prove capable of producing effective, hopeful responses to new challenges. Summer further advances this narrative strategy. The novel begins, Everybody said: so? As in so what? As in shoulder shrug, or what do you expect me to do about it? or I so don’t really give a fuck, or actually I approve of it, it’s fine by me. 66 Okay, not everybody said it. I’m speaking colloquially, like in that phrase everybody’s doing it. What I mean is, it was a clear marker, just then, of that particular time; a kind of litmus, this dismissive note. It got fashionable around then to act like you didn’t care. . . . It’s like a lifetime ago. But it isn’t––it’s literally only a few months since a time when people who’d lived in this country all their lives or most of their lives started to get arrested and threatened with deportation or deported: so? (3-4) This passage reflects the passing of time since the move to Brexit by dredging up disconnected domestic moods, bringing them to the surface of critique such that this detachment is held in tension with recent and ongoing experiences of inhospitality and state-sanctioned violence. The passage, in so doing, demands recognition of unjust present histories and the corresponding lack of responsibility toward, or empathy for, others by reminding readers that, to borrow Paddy’s words spoken in a similar context, “they aren’t footnotes in history. They’re history” (66). Yet the disembodied narrative voice also acknowledges that “millions of people didn’t say it” and, instead, they “saw the lying, and the mistreatment of people and the planet, and were vocal about it” (4). In response, “the people who knew the power of saying so? said, on the radio, on TV, via social media, tweet after tweet, page after page: so?” (4). Over its four-year publication schedule, the Quartet itself has documented these responses by “keeping pace with the headlines” as well as depicting characters that “ponder the news of the world” (Alam). Rather than simply acknowledging and memorializing these instances to position the Quartet as a kind of cultural litmus, the novels have sought and proposed alternative modes of encounter, such as Florence’s reframing of the border as a place of unity and double possibility, rather than of division. In Summer, the narrative voice that introduces each novel seems to propose yet another approach or, rather, intensifies the approach taken by the Quartet’s preceding three installments: I could spend my whole life listing things about, and talking about, and demonstrating with sources and graphs and examples and statistics, what history’s made . . . clear happens when we’re indifferent, and what the consequences are of the political 67 cultivation of indifference, which whoever wants to disavow will dismiss in an instant with their own punchy little so? So. Instead, here’s something I once saw. (5) This passage alludes to prior histories of social and political indifference to the suffering of others, perhaps referring to the cultivation of hateful ideology during the Second World War––a time period the novels of the Quartet consistently take as a point of reference in their representations of contemporary experiences of inhospitality, especially in the context of indefinite detention. In so doing, the above passage draws on larger cultural and political histories at the same time as it reflexively refers to recent attempts by the Quartet’s prior novels to resurface such histories in light of present issues. The passage thus demonstrates one unique strength of the Quartet: the texts themselves are not static. Rather, they expose Smith’s own understanding of, and ongoing struggle to grapple with, the present moment in real time and thus grant insight into her thinking as she seeks hopeful, hospitable perspectives and responses in her aesthetic practices. Reading the Quartet is an ongoing close encounter with, on one hand, the troubled and troubling socio-political context and cultural momentum that surrounds and informs the novels’ construction and, on the other, with Smith’s authorial persona and her constantly renewing commitment to thinking about hospitality in concrete ways. The narrative voice in the above passage continues by describing a scene from Lorenza Mazzetti’s film K (1954), which was made in London after the Second World War, a time when “London was one of the many places having to rebuild themselves . . . after the tens of millions of people of all ages all across the world had died before their time” (Summer 5). In the film, a man runs along a narrow brick ledge on the rooftop of a tall building while carrying two suitcases: 68 How can he be swinging those cases around in the air like that and still keep his balance? How can he be moving at such speed next to the sheer drop? Why is he risking everything? There’d be no point in showing you a still or a photo of this. It’s very much a moving image. For several seconds he does a crazed but merry high-wire dance above the city going far too fast along the zigzagging path of a ledge that’s the width of a single brick. So: (5-6) To my mind, the questions concerning the inherent risk taken by the man in his urgent movement along the dangerous route resonate with Iris’s description in Winter of the precarity experienced by asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants who risk their lives on journeys across hostile geography hoping for kinder, safer futures for themselves and their families, some of which are “people whose lives are all they’ve got left” (133). Like Winter’s opening pages, the above passage from Summer ends with a colon and, thereby, reflexively presents the remainder of the novel as a welcome response to the open end of the sentence. Thus, the novels assert themselves as responses to the issues and claims of the present historical moment. Moreover, Schmitz-Justen contends that Summer’s opening passage emphasizes “both the speed at which political developments and global disasters occur and are dismissed . . . and the intentionality with which the novels [of the Quartet] direct the reader’s gaze” (317-18). Whereas Schmitz-Justen’s point recognizes that the passage engages the reader in what might be described as a close encounter with both current cultural momentum and the novel’s distinct narrative voice, Schrag illustrates how Summer’s opening pages might also necessitate consideration of Smith’s authorial persona: This perspective in this section is not stable, as is so often the case with Ali Smith’s narrators. But the closeness in the opening passage between the narrative voice and authorial voice, which in turn might coincide with a character’s cultural analysis within the diegesis of the novel, highlights how porous a project the Seasonals are. Author, text, character, reader, and genres of the public sphere circulate, collide, and overlap. Such moves push the novel form to map an intimacy between fiction, other art forms, and contemporary politics, which Smith uses to affirm the role of the dissident intellectual in contributing to public understandings of the connections between art and civic life. (16) 69 Schrag directs this reading towards her argument that “the metamodernist characteristics of Smith’s work” contribute to her “reimagining of a British counterpublic sphere” in which “the everyday power of the politics of taste-making in a counterpublic of strangers” can create powerful “new spaces for living through new ways of seeing” (17). In contrast, I suggest that Smith’s authorial persona––a term I use precisely due to the difference in its corporeal implication from that of “authorial voice”––overlaps with her novels’ narrative voice. This overlap functions to animate the Quartet’s ethical commitment to developing and modelling modes of writing that are attuned to hospitality and which also emphasize the value of sincerity in aesthetics, social life, and politics. Accordingly, I propose that Smith’s narrative hospitality demands sincerity to the extent that her novels themselves evoke a more embodied authorial presence, far more embodied than an omniscient third person narrator. I align Smith with New Sincerity even as I recognize that fiction’s relationship to reality is complex, as are the related issues of realism and verisimilitude. Still, it is important to acknowledge that Smith––much like other authors whose work has been identified as, or itself identifies with, New Sincerity––has specific ethical concerns regarding the correspondence between aesthetic choices and socio-political realities. As such, like other scholars who have associated Smith with genres, movements, or structures of feeling that can be described as post-postmodern, I am interested in exploring how and to what extent Smith’s novels offer new or renewed understandings of the social responsibility of art, aesthetics, and the role of the author in the contemporary moment. I therefore do not situate Smith’s fiction among the literature dubbed New Sincerity simply to contribute to the wave of literary scholarship seeking “to get over postmodernism” or to “name the new” (Toth 19) but instead illustrate that her novels offer the means by which she is developing and facilitating modes of writing attuned to sincere hospitality 70 and, thus, attuned to New Sincerity precepts. Certainly, the topics of realism, reality, truth, and fiction and the ways in which they intersect and interact are multifaceted and heavily debated in literary scholarship. It is useful to my argument to consider understandings of these topics that help situate my interest in Smith’s narrative strategies and sincere modes of writing among larger debates in current literary criticism; however, I inevitably must limit this discussion to pursue my intended purpose of exploring the ends to which Smith herself employs them, which, I suggest, leads to thinking about narrative hospitality as a function of renewed interest in sincerity and sincere aesthetics. As such, this chapter is not about theorizing contemporary modes of realism or the renewed urgency of sincerity as a literary concept in and of itself; rather, this chapter is concerned with how Smith’s sincere modes of writing address the contemporary political and historical moment across the four novels of the Quartet while also offering understandings of the application of sincerity and hospitality to literary works. Smith’s Sincerity Balfour questions whether we have reached the limits of hospitality given that “an attentiveness to a discourse of unconditional welcome” in our present moment “is challenged and even made unbearable by the particular conditions of social and cultural life in a time of terror” (xxi-xxii). Whereas Balfour here refers to a post-9/11 cultural context, a similar limit of hospitality seems to be in place in post-Brexit UK context. Although there may be “a lot of people [who] really don’t like the way that other people are being treated” and want to help (Spring 275), the unprecedented level of human migration is met at UK national borders with increasingly hostile immigration policy. This policy is accompanied by dismissive populist rhetoric that claims, “there is no more room” (Winter 205) and legitimizes domestic fear of “the 71 foreign arrival.” I wonder if we might similarly think of ourselves as at a limit of sincerity given the understanding of our present moment as what has been called “a post-truth era” (James). Indeed, while Balfour’s contention that “both art and hospitality matter more than ever” (xxi) carries significant weight for thinking about and striving for a more equitable, hospitable future, I would add that the sincerity with which we pursue this future, and the sincerity with which we presently engage one another toward this end, also matters more than ever. A sincere hospitality, therefore, might be the key to developing modes of welcome and response to the arrival of people at national borders––as well as to unexpected arrivals and encounters with strangers in social life––that recognize the different identities, histories, and mobilities of people and remain nonetheless open to who or what arrives while also remembering that “they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair” (Autumn 190). Smith’s novels provide tools for thinking about what this sincere hospitality may look like or entail and, thus, affirm that we can still turn to aesthetic forms to bring us “closer to understanding what [this] hospitality might be” (Balfour 130). Voelz claims that “sincerity is best understood as the moral ideal of making one’s speech in public correspond to what’s felt in private” (215). According to Voelz, sincerity is not necessarily about a correspondence between reality and fictional representation; rather it is about a truth to one’s own self. In fiction, this might look like an author or narrator’s self-insertion into a text, an issue that comprises one component of Voelz’s literary analysis. While Voelz’s definition resonates to an extent with the definition in the OED discussed in Chapter 1, as both emphasize sincerity as a pursuit of truth without deception or concealment, Voelz’s thinking contrasts the OED definition by positioning sincerity as an inherently moral practice. To my mind, sincerity is not necessarily equivalent to morality or, more to my point, to hospitality as a 72 moral ideal; rather, it would seem that sincerity is not an indicator of ethics, in and of itself––a racist person can be sincere in their publicly expressed prejudice. If this is the case, why is sincerity of value? Although not all sincerity is hospitable or moral, the pursuit of hospitality as a moral ideal for Smith in her socially and politically engaged novels necessitates sincerity and sincere modes of welcome. For Smith, hospitality without sincerity is merely gestural; insincere welcome perpetuates, even itself constitutes, the very logic by which some guests are rendered stranger than others or are marked as permanently out of place. Spring offers an illustration of this point. Richard, a filmmaker, begins a project entitled A Thousand Thousand People about indefinite detention in the UK and a group of people self-identified as the Auld Alliance who help asylum seekers and detainees escape the detention estate. He conducts interviews in silhouette for anonymity, a move that recalls the collaborative representational mode of Refugee Tales. One interviewee tells him: I fought hard, to get here to your country. And the first thing you did when I arrived was hand me a letter saying, Welcome to a country in which you are not welcome. You are now a designated unwelcome person with whom we will do as we please. Never mind the hundred battles I’d fought to get here. (272) One might argue that the offer of welcome is unaffected by the sincerity with which this offer is made. Yet this passage, through an expression of lived experience, makes clear the substantial psychological and material differences between an insincere and a sincere welcome at the nation’s border. The passage raises the issue of being “welcomed” into the country, which may register as an acknowledgement of one’s physical presence within the nation-state; if insincere and conditional, this acknowledgement ironicizes and denigrates the very notion of “welcome” as a state of belonging. The passage also suggests that a sincere expression of hospitality marks individuals as distinctly welcome and desirable, a marking that, in its refusal, renders people 73 liminal, as having no place despite their physical location within the bordered space. This person’s testimony illustrates that while “hospitality is a material structure,” the practice of hospitality is “overlaid with crucial affective elements: the emotional relations associated with hospitality such as heartfelt generosity and sincere gratitude” (Still 12). Hospitality requires more than admittance across a threshold, as illustrated in Winter through Lux’s precarious position in Chei Bres and in the nation. Consideration of the affective elements of hospitality, of which sincerity for Smith is of chief import, is vital for thinking about hospitality as a matter of real people in the world. It is also crucial to Smith’s representation of hospitality as an urgent ethical matter in encounters between individuals, in social and geopolitical relations, and in aesthetic practices. The above passage illustrates that current conceptions of the national border and practices of border securitization and policing might be thought of as forms of insincere hospitality: while they may allow for a welcoming in, they ultimately exclude those “welcomed” from the very state of belonging. This insincere hospitality resonates with Byrne’s description of Derridean “hostipitaly” as “hostility at the heart of state-sanctioned forms of hospitality” where, for example, “the detainee is not afforded hospitality but is ‘detained’, not hosted but taken hostage” (87). Byrne raises this concept in reference to Spring and Smith’s contribution to Refugee Tales: “The Detainee’s Tale” (2016). Consideration of the overlap between the two literary projects––the Seasonal Quartet and Refugee Tales––is vital to theorization of Smith’s rhetoric of hospitality as it pertains to both national and narrative modes of welcome, which I discuss further below. The issue of insincere hospitality surfaces across all the four novels of the Quartet. For instance, Florence and Lux, their close encounters with other characters, and their precarious positions in the national and domestic spaces they must nonetheless navigate, as discussed in Chapter 2, 74 reveal that insincere modes of conditional belonging structure encounters at the border as well as within the nation-state, in communities, domiciles, and between strangers. Smith exposes these realities to emphasize the need for sincere practices of hospitality and to reiterate that, as Balfour reminds us, mere tolerance “is the very opposite of hospitality, even if it may sometimes be exercised in hospitality’s name” (131). Furthermore, the testimony of an individual’s personal experience of insincere hospitality in the UK––as expressed in the above passage from Spring––materializes as part of a film project that hopes to “make the act of recording lives different” (275). This is but one example of how Smith’s novels demonstrate that rethinking hospitality and sincerity in the context of migration might be usefully developed through aesthetic means. Smith, in addition to demonstrating the need for sincerity in practices of hospitality at national borders, demonstrates the role of sincerity in cultural production. For example, Winter emphasizes the social responsibility of art to be sincere. “Art” is a nature writer whose blog––Art in Nature––Charlotte describes as “irrelevant[,] reactionary [and] unpolitical” (58). To avoid the self-reflection that engaging in this conversation would require, Art tells Charlotte that he has a “solstice blog to write” (58). She replies, Solstice, she said. You said it. Darkest days ever. There’s never been a time like this. Yes there has, he said. The solstices are cyclic and they happen every year. For some reason Charlotte really erupted at this. . . . . When have you ever even mentioned the world’s threatened resources? she said. Water wars? The shelf the size of Wales that’s about to break off the side of Antarctica? The what? he said. The plastic in the sea? she said. The plastic in the seabirds? The plastic in the innards of nearly every single fish or aquatic creature? Is there even such a thing left in the world as unruined water? (58-59) Art’s misunderstanding of, or refusal to accept, Charlotte’s critique reinscribes his willing blindness to global environmental and political crises. Charlotte’s questions seek to hold him 75 accountable for his accounts: that is, for his apolitical stance as expressed by his aesthetic practices. Her questions illustrate that his work requires sincere engagement with the current cultural and political momentum that undoubtably impacts the state of the natural world. Art’s blog “miss[es] the point” and is “habitually self-satisfied and self-blinding” meant only to comfort himself about his own identity in troubling times (53). In other words, Art’s blog is insincere because it ignores, perhaps even conceals, the true state of its subject while instead focusing on fabricated and “invented shareable” memories of encounter with nature “for the people who’ll read the blog” (187). Smith’s commitment to representing the need for sincerity, in the context of migration and also in aesthetics that might respond to crises related to inhospitality, corresponds to her novels’ own relationship to the anxieties and claims of post-Brexit Britain. The novels, though subjective, are grounded in Smith’s sincere understanding of the state of the nation and the role of aesthetics. Indeed, while Smith emphasizes that nature writing as an aesthetic form has an inherent responsibility to engage its subject with sincerity, she also seems to specifically center the role of the author and their responsibility to be sincere. This notion is representative of Smith’s own understanding of authorship in times of crisis: I think all art is political, since everything is political, it just is, and that anyone not responding in their aesthetics to a time of immense political ferment and speed-of-sound change and regressing like this one we’re living through is acting every bit as politically as anyone who is. Has art anything to do with life? They’re the same thing. (qtd. in Elkins) Art––the character––seeks to avoid this responsibility too; he states that he is “just not a politico” (59). However, while readers encounter numerous passages in Winter that seem distinct from the main plot between Art, Sophia, Iris, and Lux––such as fragmented depictions of the Greenham Common protests––several of these passages correspond to Art in Nature blog posts. Over the 76 course of the narrative, the posts display a renewed investment in politics, ethics, and the state of the world, and they thereby signal a shift in Art’s recognition of authorial responsibility, perhaps as an outcome of his encounter with Lux. For instance, one such passage situates itself in April––midday, “balmy for winter, chilly for spring”––and describes the day’s news headlines (219). The headlines note that there is now “80% more plastic in the earth’s seas and on its shores than estimated,” that an attack “on MPs by MPs of the same party” who disagree with them is currently underway (219), and describe a recent poll: citizens of this country oppose a unilateral guarantee for the citizens who live here and who are originally from a lot of other countries to be able to stay here with full rights of residents after a certain date. Panic. Attack. Exclude. (220) The words “panic, attack, exclude” correspond to the list of the day’s headlines and seem to describe an overarching representational approach by media sources more generally. The blog post continues, shifting perspective to describe the speaker’s view. The speaker of the post witnesses a man on a balcony direct a hawk back and forth across a train station to “stop pigeons from thinking they can come in here for scavenging or roosting” (220), an image that clearly mirrors the hostility towards EU citizens and other migrants depicted in the above passage. The post ends, as previously, with the blog’s title: Art in Nature; yet its content illustrates a new sense of Art’s presence in, and awareness of, his subject. The irony of his name––Art capital “A”––is, for Rumaan Alam, a trite choice that “hands us meaning overtly––art matters!” This reading oversimplifies the complexities of the interpretative possibilities that emerge from Smith’s choice to embody art lower case “a” as a living person, a move that recalls Paddy’s film Andy Hoffnung, in which hope is similarly embodied. Smith’s choice is, to my mind, both valuable and necessary; she allows characters and readers to encounter Art in a time of personal struggle, fading ethos, and waning affect. In so doing, she reinscribes that, of course, art matters, 77 and she also emphasizes that “what art does is, it exists . . . and then because we encounter it, we remember we exist too” (Summer 330). Encounters with art thus remind us of what it means to be human, to be always already a part of humanity––both the foul and the fair. Most importantly, over the course of the novel and the Quartet as a whole, Art changes as his art changes, thereby reminding readers that humans can too. The Writer’s Responsibility What is an author? What does an author do? These are questions raised by a scene in Autumn in which Daniel teaches Elisabeth that “whoever makes up the story makes up the world” (119). Daniel’s use of the word “story” brings to mind the danger of populist rhetoric that excludes certain individuals from “the story of the English” (Sarkar 135) and, thereby, also excludes them from the nation. At the same time, he emphasizes the capacity of fiction to challenge these inhospitable narratives by offering alternative forms of understanding and encounter between people. To this end, Daniel centres the role of the author: So always try to welcome people into the home of your story. That’s my suggestion. How does making things up welcome people? Elisabeth said. What I’m suggesting, Daniel said, is, if you’re telling a story, always give your characters the same benefit of the doubt you’d welcome when it comes to yourself. . . . And always give them a choice––even those characters like a person with nothing but a tree costume between him or her and a man with a gun. By which I mean characters who seem to have no choice at all. Always give them a home. (119-20) The repetition of the word “welcome” resonates with hospitality as concept and as an embodied, affectively charged practice and therefore positions the story as a potential site of hospitality and place of encounter. For Daniel, the author functions to welcome people and to give them a home, however briefly, which aligns the author of the story with the position of a host: one who is already “at home” inside the threshold of a given space. This function is of particular import 78 given the current proliferation of political narratives in the UK that perpetuate anxiety or fear of the stranger as “the foreign arrival.” In this context, Daniel seems to suggest that authorship, like hospitality, is a matter of social responsibility. Ely and Upstone state that by emphasizing the “power of narrative,” Daniel speaks to “a new responsibility of the contemporary author,” while also “speaking of Derrida’s hospitality, of [Jean-Luc] Nancy’s being-in-common[, . . .] of Levinas’s encounter with the other, and of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities” (14). Ely and Upstone clearly place substantial philosophical and ethical significance on Daniel’s words to Elisabeth. In my view, Daniel’s point resonates with Smith’s own understanding of the role of the author in times of crisis and increasing hostility towards others. In her Goldsmiths Prize lecture, Smith recounts attending a talk by John Berger, during which an audience member posed a question concerning “the huge mass movement of people across the world right now” (“The novel” 45). Berger paused before replying, “I have been thinking about the storyteller’s responsibility to be hospitable” (45). Smith mentions Berger’s statement again on the Refugee Tales website in her welcome message as patron. In each paratext, Smith recognizes that “the telling of stories is an act of profound hospitality” and “an ancient form of generosity” (“A welcome”). To Smith, 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. (“A welcome”) This statement recalls Daniel’s use of the term “welcome” and emphasizes storytelling as a kind of “welcoming-in” that constitutes an ongoing yet ancient form of encounter across borders of difference. Smith’s description of story as a “porous artform”––one open to what arrives as well as to the differences and various outcomes that may arise as a result of this encounter––denotes an understanding of narrative hospitality as a concept and ongoing practice of welcome that 79 might tangibly affect how we approach “the unfamiliar” beyond the text. This porous form also invites questions about sincerity and sincere encounter. Scholarly responses to the Quartet need to grapple with this narrative strategy because sincerity in literature fosters and renews the relationship between aesthetics, social responsibility, and our social reality, and also, for Smith, contributes to the development of modes of writing that are themselves hospitable to the reader. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, Smith stages acts of hospitality and inhospitality in her literary narratives to present a challenge, and offer alternative responses, to socio-political rhetoric that produces and maintains experiences of conditional belonging in the UK. A larger argument is ultimately at stake here, one concerning whether or not an author, through narrative means and modes of writing, can make hospitality happen in a real, material sense beyond that represented in the narrative itself. Although, as Smith herself acknowledges, there is “a difference between narrative strategy and reality” (Spring 63), her contribution to and continued patronage of the Refugee Tales project suggest that she believes in that possibility. As previously noted, Refugee Tales’ collaborative mode of representation, which creates narrative space for stories with no place to tell themselves, raises issues of hospitality and sincerity in thinking about what “ethical” authorship––as a kind of narrative hosting with implications beyond the narrative itself––might entail for Smith. Exploration of the representation of migrant voices and testimony in the Quartet is important to this end, as is recognition of how Smith’s representational modes connect experiences and potential outcomes of hospitality to engagement with these stories. For example, Florence’s encounter with Richard is more explicitly hopeful than the outcomes of her encounter with Brit, discussed in Chapter 2. Mourning the loss of his long-time friend and mentor Paddy, Richard has “had it with story” (11). He joins Florence and Brit on their journey to Inverness after Florence stops him from committing suicide on the tracks of a 80 train station, stops him from “removing himself from the story” entirely (11). On this journey, he meets Alda––a founding member of the Auld Alliance––and begins working on A Thousand Thousand People. Richard, like Brit, is called on to recognize and face his privileged position in the UK, while “kids by themselves all over this country who get here by crossing the world . . . just disappear” (251). Whereas Brit reacts with hostility when she realizes that she “was never a real part of the story” (317), Richard is able to “wake [himself] up” (252) and see beyond his own story with a new, or renewed, perspective. He tells Alda, I met the girl with no idea what was happening. So preoccupied with my own drama. But that girl, carrying such a weight. The weight of her own story, and even so. Stopping like she did to help me with mine. (277) The repetition of “story” is significant as it refers to personal testimony and history as well as to aesthetic forms. While working on the film, he feels “welcome,” like he is “home” (287). This affective, though unexpected, outcome of his engagement with others’ stories invites recognition of the hospitable experience of the reader or audience, and aligns with Smith’s belief that “story” allows “the individual selves we all are [to] meet and transform in the telling into something open and communal” (“A welcome”). Furthermore, Richard’s experience recalls David Herd’s contention in Refugee Tales that the passing on of story to a wider audience means that a story that belongs to one person now belongs, also, to other people; that other people acknowledge the experience that constitutes the story, but also that in making that acknowledgement they register responsibility. (142) There are clear ethical and affective resonances between Richard’s A Thousand Thousand People, the Quartet itself––a project that also seeks to “make the act of recording lives different” (275)––and the hospitable methodology and outcomes of the Refugee Tales project. This resonance constitutes a significant overlap between the novels’ narrative voice and Smith’s extra-textual activities and ethical commitments as an author and activist who strives, through 81 her aesthetics, “to come up with a better answer,” a “more generous” answer to “the problem of the millions and millions of people with no home to go to” (Winter 206). In addition, Herd’s claim that the stories in Refugee Tales “call for and generate a collective” (142) substantiates the notion that sincere encounter with stories can move people to renewed understandings of, and inclinations toward, hospitality. This sense affects readers as well as writers who, in listening “at length and very closely” to the stories being told, find that “the experience being relayed grafts onto and alters [their] language” (141). This emphasis on the strong ethical dimensions of engagement with narratives that are both about hospitality and seek to enact hospitality is a central strategy of the Quartet, one that compels readers to acknowledge Smith’s authorial persona as a distinctive presence. According to Shaw, Smith reiterates her belief in “the writer’s responsibility to practice a form of narrative hospitality” through Daniel’s suggestion to Elisabeth that one must welcome people into the home of one’s story (209). Rather than engaging an understanding of narrative hospitality that connects textual and extra-textual subjects, Shaw seems to employ the term to demonstrate Smith’s emphasis on “the need for cosmopolitan hospitality” as “an urgent necessity in a post-Brexit world” (209). In other words, for Shaw, Smith’s “narrative hospitality” is roughly equivalent to her commitment to staging acts of hospitality and inhospitality in her novels that advance her political views, “authorial anger,” and “dreams of Remaining” (212). These issues are certainly elements of Smith’s narrative strategy in the Quartet. However, more important aspects of her writing are revealed by considering how her understanding and employment of narrative hospitality as a sincere, close encounter between seemingly separate subjects might blur the border between fiction and reality such that the novels, to borrow from Herd, “call for and generate a collective” (142). This notion is captured by Paddy’s suggestion to 82 Richard that “we’re only here by the grace and work of others” and her corresponding prayer: “here’s to those others who helped . . . and may I be such an other to a good many myself” (249). This passage reconsiders understandings of what it might mean to be an “other” in contexts and practices of hospitality, such as those understandings that seem to premise Derridean notions of absolute hospitality. Rather than locating the “other” as external, as always already outside the domain of the self who is at home, Smith invites readers to move beyond this assumption; she positions all subjects as “other,” including the self, represented in the passage by both “I” and “we.” She thus emphasizes the affective social import of cultivating and engaging in generous, reciprocal relations with and between others, relations that inherently recall prior encounters with others who have helped and, at the same time, anticipate similar encounters in the future. In so doing, perhaps Smith brings us to the other side of hospitality. She reframes a position that may typically be thought of as outside, unfamiliar, and always at risk of exclusion to one which we all might strive to inhabit in encounters with people whom we may be called on to help, to offer sincere welcome––all in the interest of a hospitable future. This moment in the text blurs the border between fiction and reality by surfacing Smith’s own practice of narrative hospitality––motivated by her engagement with the Refugee Tales project and developed in the Quartet––alongside her request for readerly reciprocation. She invites us to be present: So that’s what we can do. We can be there. It’s what the books ask, it’s what all books ask, all books ask us to be there, they ask us to be present. I love books which ask us to be present in the way that we are active in them as readers, that we find ourselves so involved with them that we make them as we read them. We can be here, rather than choose not to be. That’s what reading is. (Smith qtd. in James) Smith’s understanding of reading as a process of mutual encounter perhaps inherently necessitates consideration of matters associated with hospitality and suggests an exchangeability 83 between reader and text as guest and host. This potential exchangeability aligns to an extent with Voelz’s argument that “literary hospitality” reorders “the starting point of hospitality,” which is, for Voelz, a request for hospitality that typically precedes welcome (210). However, Chapter 2 sought to trouble the idea that there can be a definitive starting point––just as there cannot and must not be an end point––if we are to think hospitality at all, since, as Smith’s novels suggest, hospitality involves an ongoing pursuit of being in relation to one another. Furthermore, Voelz places emphasis on sincerity as the exposure of a character or author’s psychological privacy, which might materialize in fiction through authorial self-presentation, and which leads Voelz to a discussion about security and insecurity. I have, in contrast, argued that Smith’s employment of sincerity, while raising the distinct presence of her authorial persona, nevertheless does not seek to assert her narratives as “real” in a sense that might conceal their inherent construction as aesthetic forms. This notion is key for exploring how Smith’s modes of writing advance current understandings of the application of sincerity to literary works. Whereas Calder identifies New Sincerity as stuck on verity and thus incapable of accounting for texts that have “open-ended metareferential forms which perform dialogue while simultaneously demonstrating the possibilities of artifice” (551), Toth seems to have the opposite issue: Whenever I make it possible for my audience to assume that what I say, or describe, is exactly the same as what I mean, or what is represented via my description, I am offering the illusion of erasure. . . . In most cases, in fact, recent efforts to return to “sincerity” simply and problematically encourage us to acquiesce to false belief, to the necessity of “pretend.” (12) In contrast to both perspectives, Smith’s use of sincerity is neither occluded by an unattainable appeal to the exact likeness of reality––since the texts reflexively assert their own artifice––nor is it limited by the impossibility of “true” representation of authorial intention. Rather, given her authorial commitment to sincerity and hospitality as expressed through her novels as well as her 84 public activities, Smith’s aesthetics of sincerity necessitate recognition of her authorial persona alongside consideration of what the novels ask of readers: an active and sincere presence in an ongoing close encounter across textual and other borders that is profoundly hospitable. Balfour argues that cultural texts can “provide an opening and give us a language and a frame of reference in order to apprehend, question, and rethink hospitality but not to solve it” (132). While Smith’s modes of writing in the Quartet ultimately do not––indeed, cannot––solve hospitality, her commitment to developing narrative strategies toward a sincere hospitality animates her novels’ intervention into the present moment and draws on the affective power of narrative to move readers and “to welcome people into the home of [the] story” (Autumn 119). Therefore, the strength of the Quartet is not solely in its urgent representation of the need for hospitality in aesthetics as well as social life. Rather, it resides in the novels’ sincere, hopeful request for readers to willingly suspend their belief in what is or is not possible and to allow themselves to be changed, “properly changed, changed at life level” but not to have “an hour’s blurred new vision then [go] back to the usual” (Spring 313). Smith thus simultaneously requests and offers hospitality through her aesthetic practice. Accordingly, her Quartet necessitates revisiting the role of the author, not to limit the possible readings of the texts but to consider how the presence of an authorial persona potentially changes the way readers encounter the text. In the Quartet, Smith’s authorial persona function to request a reciprocal, sincere readerly presence and, therefore, enacts a form of narrative hospitality with implications beyond the text itself. 85 A Welcome Conclusion Ali Smith’s development of sincere, hospitable modes of writing as well as her commitment to positioning hospitality as the literary project’s thematic framework are both radical acts that move against the momentum of inhospitality as rhetoric and policy in post-Brexit Britain. Rather than suggesting the need for an unconditional hospitality at national borders and in social life premised on absolute openness that might ignore the potentially hostile and dangerous outcomes of such a practice or logic, Smith’s novels recognize the inherent risk that makes absolute hospitality impossible. She nonetheless emphasizes the value and necessity of pursuing such a hospitality as an ideal even if it must necessarily fall short. To do so, she alludes in her novels to the material benefits of hospitality, such as economic and cultural production, while also emphasizing its crucial affective elements: relationality on local, national, and global scales with a sincere conceptualization of ethical human relations as based on mutuality. Her realist aesthetic, which partakes of the mundane and “ordinary” to emphasize the surreality of current challenges, offers modes of close readerly encounter with embodied, lived experiences of hospitality and inhospitality, and with current public debates surrounding related socio-political discourses in post-Brexit Britain. In all this, her work may be productively identified as New Sincerity literature, but this designation matters far less than does her overt commitment to sincerity itself. The ethical dimensions of the novels, which reflexively present their own artifice and their currency in social and literary terms, invite readers to recognize Smith’s own authorial persona as a distinct presence offering welcome, and even solace. In so doing, the Quartet poses an extended meditation on––and itself models––ethical authorship and sincere engagement with art. Perhaps more importantly, it models sincere engagement with others during a time of extraordinary neglect of their needs, exemplified by a crisis of welcome 86 as it regards the thousands of refugees seeking asylum. 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Berberich, Christine. “Europe in Britain: The Marginalized Voices of EU Migrants in Contemporary British Brexlit.” Brexit and the Migrant Voice: EU Citizens in post-Brexit Literature and Culture, ed. Christine Berberich, Routledge, 2022, pp. 31-45. Bernard, Catherine. “Vibrant Allegories: Questioning Immunity with Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020).” Etudes Anglais, vol. 75, no. 1, 2022, pp. 13-29. 88 Bulley, Dan. “Ethics, Power and Space: International Hospitality Beyond Derrida.” Hospitality and Society, vol. 5, no. 2-3, 2015, pp. 185-201. Byrne, Eleanor. “Autumn, Winter, Never Spring: Brexit Season.” Open Arts Journal, no. 8, 2020, pp. 83-94. Calder, Alex J. “Artfulness: Intertextuality, Wordplay, and Precariousness in Contemporary Experimental Fiction.” Critique–Bolingbroke Society, vol. 63, no. 5, 2022, pp. 547-70. Calvo, Ana Maria Manzanas, and Jesús Benito Sanchez. Hospitality in American Literature and Culture: Spaces, Bodies, Borders. Taylor & Francis, 2016. 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Orosz-Réti, Zsófia. “Covidian Metamorphoses: Art and the Poetics of Transformation in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae. Seria Philogica, vol. 13, no, 1, 2021, pp. 60-72. Popa, Andrei Bogdan. “The Future as a Scenario of Hospitality in Ali Smith’s There but for the.” American, British, and Canadian Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2021, pp. 29-47. “Rishi Sunak is ‘throwing absolutely everything’ at stopping migrant boats but warns it won’t happen ‘overnight.’” LBC, 11 July 2023, www.lbc.co.uk/news/rishi-sunak-stop-migrant-boats-pledge/. Rudrum, David and Nicholas Starvis. “Metamodernism.” Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, pp. 305-30. Sarkar, Ash. “Conversations with Stuart Hall: What do Migrants Represent?” Soundings, vol. 71, no. 71, 2019, pp. 134-39. 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Penguin Random House, 2020. –––. “The novel in the age of Trump: When politics is built on fictions, it’s fiction that can help us get to truth: The New Statesmen Goldsmiths Prize Lecture.” The New Statesmen, vol. 146, no. 5388, 13 October 2017, pp. 40-45. –––. Winter. Penguin Random House, 2017. Stead, Jean. “The Greenham Common Peace Camp and its Legacy.” The Guardian, 5 September 2006, www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/sep/05/greenham5. Still, Judith. Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice. Edinburgh UP, 2010. Toth, Josh. Truth and Metafiction: Plasticity and Renewal in American Narrative. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Vincent, Alice. “Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: an Oral History.” Penguin, 6 August 2020, www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/08/ali-smith-autumn-winter-spring-summer-seasonal-quartet-oral-history. 93 Voelz, Johannes. “The New Sincerity as Literary Hospitality.” Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture, eds. Jeffrey Clopp and Emily Ridge, Routledge, 2015, pp. 209-26. “What is the new Rwanda asylum plan?” British Red Cross, 29 June 2023, www.redcross.org.uk/get-help/get-help-as-a-refugee/information-on-the-policy-to-send-asylum-seekers-to-rwanda#:~:text=Sending%20asylum%20seekers%20to%20Rwanda,that%20the%20plan%20is%20unlawful.
Thesis/Dissertation
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Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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Gustar, Jennifer
Hospitality in crisis : new sincerity and receiving the stranger in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet
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