A Postsecular Reading of Nonsensical Caring in Ali Smith’s Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT Caring is the theme Ali Smith pursues consistently throughout her fiction. She seems particularly concerned with all kinds of nonstandard caring situations, care that apparently cannot make any difference included. In Like Kate offers her orange kangaroo to the dead girl living in the drain, in Hotel World Clare tries to intensely experience life for the sake of her dead sister, in How to Be Both George resolves to watch each day a porn movie for the sake of the actress presumably abused in its production. The paper suggests that such nonsensical − predictably ineffective − caring can be read as a typically metamodernist whole-hearted commitment to a cause that is doomed to failure (cf. Vermeulen and van den Akker’s “Notes on Metamodernism,” 2010). However, the caring in question also can be interpreted as a hopeful cooperation with intimated spiritual forces on the assumption of postsecularism (cf. McClure’s Partial Faiths, 2007). The paper argues that such postsecular interpretation of Smith is justifiable focusing in the analysis on How to Be Both. In all, the paper aims to contribute to research on ethical considerations in Smith’s fiction.