These days, we seem to be witnessing a subtle shift in conceptions of art and literature’s political significance. Abandoning straightforward instrumentalism, more and more artists and writers are instead insisting that any political interventions their works make must be subtle, indirect, and adjacent, and that this actually strengthens the works’ political power. Here is Scottish novelist and activist Ali Smith making one such claim. ‘[Y]ou can’t sit down with a mind to writing something with a political agenda. It never works’, she tells her interviewer, before asserting that narrative allows us to understand and change the stories, the harmful stereotypes and political lies, which ‘are being visited on us.’
As attentive to the unique powers of aesthetics as Smith’s theory may be, it seems to have a potential problem: its vision of impact is far too abstract. It is premised on the notion that each reader enthusiastically absorbs and acts on the effects of narrative art in the same way, yet individuals’ reading experiences differ significantly. Each reader comes to and is influenced by art in unique, singular ways. Indeed, this is imaginatively traced in Smith’s own work, where fictional encounters with art bring about varied political impacts. Her most recent Seasonal Quartet is full of characters invested in literature and visual art; their aesthetic engagements inform their responses to (among other things) Brexit, gender inequality, and the climate and refugee crises. And portrayals of the concrete political ramifications of aesthetic encounters are not limited to Smith. Twenty-first-century works of art grappling with border politics frequently allude to and adapt Ancient Greek tragedies, as both John Kerrigan and Jennifer Wallace have shown.
To come to a better understanding of how literature and art might come to bear on political situations and events, then, we can look at how writers themselves imagine the politics of allusion and aesthetic engagement. I would like to pursue this meta-aesthetic line of enquiry via the first novel of Smith’s Quartet: Autumn (2016). Published only months after the Brexit referendum, Autumn charts the intertwining stories of two unexpected friends, the precarious art history lecturer Elisabeth Demand and 101-year-old cosmopolitan Daniel Gluck. We witness Elisabeth navigating misogynist academic circles in xenophobic post-Brexit Britain and learn about Daniel’s experiences in Nazi-occupied Europe. Throughout, the narrative voice and the characters themselves grapple with works of art and literature, ranging from William Shakespeare’s Tempest and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to the pop collages of Pauline Boty. Using Autumn’s own thinking on aesthetic engagement, I intend to ask two questions: do artworks merely instil sympathy and understanding in us (rather pointless cognitions, as Lyndsey Stonebridge has pointed out)? And how, to quote from Stonebridge again, can literature and art ‘help us to think and judge in creative and unusual ways?’
Autumn begins with the highly allusive narrative voice proclaiming ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That’s the thing about things. They fall apart.’ The first sentence plays with the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’), except here the referent becomes Brexit Britain instead of revolutionary France. This is combined with a quotation from W. B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’, a bleak poetic vision of post-WW1 Europe and Ireland embroiled in the War of Independence.
The purpose of the allusions seems clear. As Smith likes saying in interviews, one theme she wants to highlight in the Quartet is that ‘nothing is really new in what’s happening to us now.’ The allusions, in Smith critic Alex Calder’s analysis, ‘recontextualise’ political developments by providing historical weight and dimension. Yet is it not banal to compare Brexit and its limited regional reverberations to world-changing events such as the French Revolution or the First World War? And even if not, does a historical recontextualisation via art achieve anything?
These are not questions I extraneously force upon the novel; rather, they erupt from within. Soon, we learn that the narrative voice is an inflection of Daniel’s, who in a dream is washed up an unknown shore. As he gathers his bearings, we hear him riffing on poems by William Blake and John Keats, while his circumstances recall those of characters created by Shakespeare and Ovid. We have here an echo chamber of literature, culture, and memory. But towards the end of the dream, Daniel suddenly spots ‘a dark line of the tide-dumped dead. Some of the bodies are of very small children’: a reference to the harrowing reality of drowned refugee children being washed up European shores. The bodies are ignored by people ‘holidaying up the shore from the dead.’
This could be read as an interrogation of the political role of art: is the playfulness and performativity of art merely a distraction from, and does it pale in the face of, the horrors of socio-political reality? Is a humanistic consciousness whose first recourse is always to art any different from the ignorant tourists in Daniel’s dream? Perhaps not.
The narrative situation Smith sets up is certainly sobering. But Smith’s artful allusiveness may well remind us of similar practices in early twentieth-century modernist writing. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Edward Said distinguishes between filiation and affiliation. Filiation refers to those biological, cultural, and national allegiances pre-determined by facts of birth, affiliation to the imaginative and recombinant identifications an individual makes themselves. The privileging of affiliation over filiation in modern culture is associated with modernism, and is manifested in the many allusions and adaptations that modernist authors make.
An allusive mind, in other words, is crucially affiliative. It imaginatively aligns itself with writers across time and space and draws them together; it is able to transcend national and cultural boundaries. Meanwhile, the fate of the refugee children is emphatically the result of a complete lack of affiliative empathy; their statelessness is brought about by politicians and border control guards who cannot look beyond arbitrary borders. Smith is not saying that thinking about art will somehow directly help the children; no, the allusions and the socio-political reality remain narratively adjacent to each other. But she does seem to suggest that an allusive, artful consciousness, trained in affiliation through frequent aesthetic encounters, is more capable of caring and bearing witness. The aesthetically engaged Daniel Gluck thus ‘looks from the death to the life, then back to the death again.’ Now the question we are left with, and that the novel will set out to answer, is this: what sort of looking does art and literature foster?
If aesthetic engagement (or what she terms ‘literary humanism’) merely results in looking with compassion at refugees and the dispossessed peoples of the world, Lyndsey Stonebridge thunders in Placeless People, then such engagement is worthless. To ‘humanize the inhuman is to lend dignity to a condition that by robbing people of citizenship—of the right to exist in a community—has deliberately denied them dignity.’ For Stonebridge, the power of art lies in its ability to drive the reader towards active reflection and intervention. Through allusion, Smith similarly reflects on the way aesthetic engagement can lead not to compassion or pity, but to connection, identification, affiliation; these cognitions are adjacent to politics, but are political by being the basis of political judgement and action.
Later in Autumn, Elisabeth comes across what is presumably the house of a migrant family. On its walls is painted a xenophobic message ‘GO HOME’, which is then countered by some graffiti of a tree and a ‘row of bright red flowers’ surrounding the words ‘WE ARE ALREADY HOME THANK YOU’. Seeing this, Elisabeth turns to allusion: ‘The painting by Pauline Boty comes into her head, the one called With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo.’ Inflecting her interior thoughts, the narration muses that maybe there is ‘something about the use of colour as language, the natural use of colour alongside the aesthetic use, the wild, joyful brightness painted on the front of that house in a dire time, alongside the action of a painting like that one by Boty.’
Elisabeth’s allusive, aesthetic consciousness does not prompt her to try to understand the migrants or wallow in pity for them. Instead, it prompts her to aesthetically and imaginatively identify with the creative potential and resistance they demonstrate. Aesthetics, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant contended, is concerned with the act of judgement. Aesthetics is not just about us exercising the freedom to choose what we like or do not like; it is a powerful, worldly act of identification and affiliation. Aesthetic engagement, as an inherent act of evaluative connection-making, allows Elisabeth to affiliate herself with the dispossessed and the powerless, to participate in an imaginative solidarity that is every bit as affirming as the wild, joyful colours she sees.
Evaluation or judgement, Stonebridge argues in Writing and Righting, never occurs in a vacuum; to judge is to distribute values, and thus judgement ‘is the middle term between theory and practice, between thought and action, between passivity and active change’. And the politics of evaluation and affiliation driven by aesthetic engagement ultimately leads to action by the end of Autumn. Elisabeth’s mother participates in a daytime TV show, The Golden Gavel, where participants visit antique shops and determine the worth of artefacts. This is an act of aesthetic judgement par excellence, and throughout the process Elisabeth’s mother finds both romantic love as well as a ‘fine-tuned attention’, a political and ethical sensibility that allows her to care deeply again. In a highly symbolic scene, Elisabeth’s mother, after returning from an antiques shop visit, throws the barometer she buys at the fence of a newly built detention centre for migrants and refugees. This is not just, in the words of one of the characters, ‘bombarding that fence with people’s histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times.’ It is a dramatisation of the way the redistribution of value in the aesthetic sphere can motivate changing configurations of value in political reality.
Finally, does Smith’s meta-aesthetic line of thinking illuminate anything about the political saliences of her chosen form—literature and the novel? We are used to hearing about how novels use story to redress harmful narratives and discourses, to expand notions of community by bringing together radically different characters, or to bring the reader out of their own self and into the life of others. Less is said about the more hermetic and autonomous aspects of literature, such as its inherent intertextuality. If literature, as Ankhi Mukherjee summarises, is a ‘linguistic act whose nature is to repeat’ former traditions and classics, does it intrinsically have any political and ethical import? We learn from Autumn that the answer (as with all answers regarding aesthetics) is: not directly. Literary play with citations and allusions, no matter within a text or the consciousness of a humanist reader, makes nothing happen, to adapt W. H. Auden’s famous phrase. But it does model and cultivate a process of affiliation and aesthetic judgement, which can be the basis for political action.
Autumn ends with a portrait of a garden in November, a time ‘more winter than autumn.’ Though the trees are getting increasingly barren, ‘In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there’s a wide-open rose, still.’ The last sentence of the novel is: ‘Look at the colour of it.’ Why does a novel so self-consciously worldly and political end with a homely, even slightly over-sentimental, picture of natural beauty and resilience? Perhaps because it is conscious of itself as a work of art that wants to maintain a certain autonomy from the heteronomy of politics. But as Autumn’s very last sentence reminds us, to engage with art is inherently to act, to look. To look at the image of hope and resistance, to reflect on what that means for us as worldly beings, to take action: the possibilities the novel leaves for us, as with the rose described, are ‘wide-open’. Now, what will we do?
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 14: Fictions and Narratives.