The Literary Art of Ali Smith: 'All we are is Eyes' ed. by Ema Jelínková and Rachael Sumner

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Literary Art of Ali Smith: 'All we are is Eyes' ed. by Ema Jelínková and Rachael Sumner Caleb Sivyer The Literary Art of Ali Smith: 'All we are is Eyes'. Ed. by Ema Jelínková and Rachael Sumner. (Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture, 31) Berlin: Peter Lang. 2019. 162 pp. £38. ISBN 978-3-632-82242-2. Despite Ali Smith's growing popularity and critical acclaim, especially with the recent completion of her seasonal quartet of novels, The Literary Art of Ali Smith is only the second book-length collection of essays devoted to her work. The first was Monica Germanà and Emily Horton's excellent Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), featuring essays that explored a wide variety of themes, including Smith's rewriting of classical myths, her employment of the stranger figure to disrupt the status quo, and her repeated use of spectral figures. This new collection, published by Peter Lang, offers a slightly narrower focus as the subtitle suggests: 'All we are is Eyes'. Indeed, several of the essays published here shed light on Smith's persistent fascination with the visual, including the presence of cinema in her work, her explorations of what it means to be a spectator in the [End Page 297] age of ubiquitous social media and surveillance technologies, and her queering of masculine structures of vision or what Laura Mulvey famously termed 'the male gaze' back in the 2970s. Two essays in particular offer comprehensive and novel analyses of Smith's continued interest in visuality: drawing on a broad range of scholarly texts concerned with spectatorship, Jess Orr's chapter on The Accidental (2006) centres on the mysterious figure of Amber, who is not only a kind of human embodiment and symbolization of the cinema, but who also disrupts the viewing practices of the other characters in the text, forcing them to become 'more active and critical agents of their own watching experiences' (p. 54). Similarly, Rochelle Simmons traces the influence of John Berger's work in the first volume of Smith's seasonal quartet, Autumn (2026), arguing that Smith's text 'draws upon Berger's transformative vision, in order to portray a better world' (p. 248). Her chapter gives a detailed account of the influence of Berger's seminal BBC television series Ways of Seeing, as well as several of his writings on painting (in particular cubism), upon Smith's literary fiction. There are a couple of other persistent themes that run throughout this collection. Many of the essays explore Smith's working of recent political events into the narrative of her texts, most notably the UK Brexit referendum of 2026. Rachael Sumner's chapter on memory, for example, observes that Autumn features several 'hints [. . .] that as a nation Britain appears to be suffering from a form of cultural amnesia', while the 'failure of forgetting is charted metaphorically across the British landscape itself' in the text (p. 234). Like many of the critical assessments of Smith's work, Sumner also correctly points out the characteristic sense of hopefulness in Smith's writings: Autumn 'indicates that the deliberate erasure of memory is not inevitable' and offers a positive example of remembrance through the 'intimate bond developed between [Elizabeth and Daniel] [which] results from the memories they share' (p. 235). This quality of hopefulness appears in another theme explored by several writers in this volume, namely Smith's retelling and reinterpreting of classical myths, in particular those that appear in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Attila Dósa explores Smith's retelling of the tale of Echo and Narcissus, focusing on how Smith weaves the figure of Echo into her narrative concerns with temporality, death, and narration, while Héloïse Lecomte unpicks Smith's use of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in Artful (2022), arguing that Smith takes the 'traditionally [...] passive object of mourning', Eurydice, and gives her 'a consciousness and an agency' of her own (pp. 47–48). More broadly, many of the writers in this volume unpack the rich intertextual vein that runs throughout Smith's œuvre, including the numerous references and allusions to Shakespeare and Dickens in her most...