Ali Smith Spins Modernity Into Myth in <i>Winter</i>
Nothing is more cyclical in Ali Smith’s half-finished quartet of seasonal novels than history, condemned to repeat itself over and over. In both 2017’s Autumn and this year’s Winter, Arthurian legend foreshadows Shakespeare, which predicts the horrors of World War II, whose traumas portend the anti-immigrant sentiment that led to Brexit. Somehow, though, there’s comfort as well as despair in the patterns of humanity. Arthur, a character in Winter, at one point cites the story of Cymbeline, “the one about poison, mess, bitterness, then the balance coming back. The lies revealed. The losses compensated.” If darkness is a constant in history, so is renewal.
Smith is conducting a remarkable experiment: responding to current events in something like real time, and creating works of fiction that are also kaleidoscopic investigations of British art, the first work in the quartet, was a , set amid the turmoil in Britain following the 2016 vote to leave the European Union, but jumping back and forth in time to explore the platonic relationship between Daniel Gluck, an elderly aesthete, and Elisabeth Demand, an art-history lecturer. is set later that year, after the election of Donald Trump, in a political climate that seems even more chaotic. “God was dead: to begin with,” is how Smith begins. Romance is also apparently dead, as are chivalry, poetry, jazz, realism, history, decency, and family values. This bleak introduction is soon revealed to be one of Smith’s authorial tricks: She isn’t lamenting the state of modern civilization so much as tabulating results that come up for different search terms on Google.(Type “God is” into your browser and see what comes up.)
