Abstract

Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is a project about the present, and about how we understand and represent events while they are unfolding. It represents Smith’s interest, as she has described it, in “returning” the novel “to the notion of the new,” telling stories about ongoing current events and emerging social forms (Armitstead 2019). It is also interested in the art of being present, and in the kinds of presence that art asks of its audience. In Artful, her work of creative criticism, Smith writes that art is “a broken thing if it’s anything, and… the art of remaking, or imagining, or imaginative involvement, is what makes the difference” (2014: 25). Smith’s citation practice plays a crucial role in her project’s attempt to understand and represent the present. Citations abound in the Seasonal Quartet: they play a central role in each individual text, connect characters across the series, and offer concrete ties to the world outside each book’s covers. Despite the important role that external pieces of art and media play in her novels, Smith’s references to them are often opaque, and identifying them relies on a combination of cultural knowledge, search engine savvy, and chance. In this essay, I argue that this opacity — especially when read alongside scenes where characters fail to recognize the art they encounter or repurpose it in creative ways — invites readers to search for the art Smith references and experience it themselves. Citation represents not only a material practice for Smith, but also, I argue, a recursive form that structures the passage of time. In attempting to narrate the present as it is happening, using an ‘old’ medium associated with temporal lag rather than immediacy, Smith’s project explores the role of the book in the present, inviting readers to consider how the book might be uniquely positioned to help us understand, represent, and navigate contemporary life.

Keywords

media aesthetics, book studies, reading, intertextuality

How to Cite