‘Going to Collage’: Ali Smith’s Autumn and Post-Liberal Democratic Imagination

Across her many works of fiction, Ali Smith at once laments the breakdown of civic conversation and, in what seems a paradoxical move, draws stark ethical demarcations between characters who represent different political orientations. This tension is acute in her Seasonal Quartet, and especially the first of the four novels, 'Autumn.' Hailed on publication as the first serious literary response to Brexit, 'Autumn' gives vivid account of the 'end of dialogue' at a time when 'all across the country, there was misery and rejoicing.' On one hand, in 'Autumn' and elsewhere, Smith laments the consequences of the 'end of dialogue' between citizens and populates her fiction with sympathetic characters who notice, with alarm, that 'people [are] saying stuff to each other and none of it ever actually becom[es] dialogue.' Yet on the other hand, her work is itself partisan, specifically in its tendency to draw caricatures of complacently xenophobic middle-class Britons. This article argues that this tension is in fact crucial to the political outlook suggested in Smith’s work, which hints at a positive, post- or nonliberal vision according to which neither novels, nor politics, draw democratic power from empathetic exchange or dialogue, but rather through world-affirming judgment. The specific sort of judgment Smith endorses, I argue, is rooted in 'Autumn's' 'collage' aesthetic, and its significance crystallizes when read alongside Hannah Arendt's account of political judgment. For both Smith and Arendt, the foremost threat to contemporary political life is not partisanship, but rather, the fragility of the 'common world,' and Smith proposes that the collage aesthetics of work like hers play a specific function in helping restore the 'common world.' This article thus proposes that Smith, read alongside Arendt, articulates an original, political purpose for art in the contemporary era.