‘All that cold. All this green’. David Hockney and the intermedial expression of seasonality in Ali Smith’s post-Brexit quintet
José Igor Prieto-Arranz
University of the Balearic Islands
ABSTRACT
Drawing on Kostkowska (2013), this paper explores Ali Smith’s conception of the novel as a dialogically ‘symbiotic’ form that is characterised by its porosity to other genres and artistic forms (Masters 2021: 983; Schrag 2023). This makes Smith’s novels essentially intertextual and even intermedial. It is precisely intermediality understood as ‘media combination’ (Rajewsky 2005: 51-52) that will be studied here. More specifically, the paper will scrutinise the relationship between the narrative in Smith’s five latest novels—Autumn (2016), Winter (2017), Spring (2019), Summer (2020) and Companion Piece (2022)—and their cover artwork by David Hockney.
Thus, parallels will be drawn between Hockney’s and Smith’s pictorial and narrative techniques before attention is paid to the specific East Yorkshire landscape paintings chosen as artwork for Smith’s post-Brexit quintet. My analysis will provide textual evidence from Companion Piece which I interpret as a metafictional reflection on the nature of the relationship between text and the Hockney paratext, challenging the traditional views according to which the paratext is subordinate to the text and suggesting instead the symbiotic or dialogical nature of a relationship between two equally important elements that make up a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts—the novel as an art object in its own right that, demanding ‘slow reading’, functions as an antidote against an Internet-driven, social media-dominated ‘age of distraction’ (McNeill 2019).
The paper finishes by exploring one of the very specific themes that both Smith’s post-Brexit quintet and Hockney’s east Yorkshire paintings address, namely what Stallabrass has called ‘the eternal cycle of nature’ (2012: 93). In this analysis an account will be provided for Hockney’s apparently abrupt transition from the depiction of the human figure to landscape painting in the new millennium. This account, informed by Smith’s ecocritical engagement with Hockney’s art, will lead to the conclusion that the use of the ‘eternal cycle of nature’ theme in both Hockney and Smith blurs the boundary between, on the one hand, the human and the natural world and, on the other, life and death. This, among other findings, serves to identify an important note of metamodern hope in Smith’s oeuvre, which—like Hockney’s art—provides a glimpse of the ultimately transcendent nature of (what more often than not we insist on perceiving as transient) life (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010: 6).
References
Kostkowska, Justyna 2013: Ecocriticism and Women Writers. Environmentalist Poetics of Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Masters, Ben 2021: Adjustment-style: From H. G. Wells to Ali Smith and the metamodern novel. Textual Practice 35 (6): 967-995.
McNeill, Dougal 2019: Ali Smith and the art of the epigraph. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60 (3): 357-367.
Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005: Intermediality, intertextuality, and remediation: A literary perspective on intermediality. Intermédialités / Intermedialities 6: 43-64.
Schrag, Nicole 2023: Metamodernism and counterpublics: Politics, aesthetics, and porosity in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet. Textual Practice 37 (12): 2019-2038.
Smith, Ali 2016: Autumn. London: Penguin.
Smith, Ali 2017: Winter. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Smith, Ali 2019: Spring. London: Penguin.
Smith, Ali 2020: Summer. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Smith, Ali 2022: Companion Piece. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Stallabrass, Julian 2012: The Hockney industry. New Left Review 73: 93-94.
Vermeulen, Timotheus and Robin van den Akker 2010: Notes on metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 2 (1): 1-14.
