The short story is about all there is.
Ali Smith (“Ali Smith” 80)
1Turning to Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories in an anniversary issue of JSSE seems only too apposite. Her 2015 collection of stories, autofictional notes and testimonies from friends and fellow-writers offers itself as a celebration, a chorus of reminiscences in joyous, if elegiac, praise of public libraries, their benevolent initiatory mission and democratic vision. Exploratory and experimental, transgressive of literary boundaries and self-avowedly political, like most of Ali Smith’s writing, Public Library is a collection in more than one way—of twelve short stories and intimate childhood memories, of literary references and autobiographical vignettes—and a celebration of the experience of forms of communal reading only public libraries render possible.
2Like many of Smith’s texts, Public Library is a response, an engagement with the present: in this specific instance, a polyphonic, often intimate, reaction to the closure of public libraries in the UK, in the past decades. Invited to discuss her soon to be published How to be both, by the 2015 Edinburgh International Book Festival, she explained that Public Library was a collective reaction to the accelerating closures of libraries:
I’ve given the stories a spine, whereby, in the three or four weeks that I was putting them together and editing the book, I asked everybody I met to tell me something about their public library experiences in their lives and what they thought about the closures that have been happening in this country to public libraries.
In the space of me doing that, asking, 28 libraries closed. In the space of me writing those stories [in the book], seven years, a thousand public libraries closed. (Edinburgh International Book Festival: n.p., square brackets in the original)
- 1 In an interview with Tory Young, Smith already established the organic parallel between books and (...)
- 2 In relation to Virginia Woolf’s own passion for libraries, one may only mention her essay “Hours i (...)
3Both a work of collective reminiscing and of collective rage, Public Library weaves a communal coming of age narrative under the misleading guise of a memory puzzle, in which the library opens “a democracy of reading and a democracy of space” (Edinburgh International Book Festival: n.p.). More programmatic than any of her other works, the collection is itself structured in the form of a fragmented polylogue. As she was “editing and readying” Public Library, she was also “asking the friends and the strangers” she had “chanced to meet or spend time with what they think about public libraries” (Smith, Public Library 19). Snippets from their replies constitute the collection’s “spine”—an image we will comment on at length—, as Smith explains in her Edinburgh International Book Festival Talk, in a metaphor that weaves together books and bodies, the public library and the body politic.1 The singular “library” of the title is in itself a manifesto of sorts. The public library is both plural, specific to each reader’s accession to the joys of reading, and one, a collective institution that keeps the body politic together by defying the logic of private property and fashioning what can only be defined, in Virginia Woolf’s terms, as a “common reader.”2
- 3 See Alison Flood’s piece about the series for The Guardian (2009). Interestingly, Rowan Routh, the (...)
4Under the “spine” of a shared experience, the stories gathered in Public Library fashion “a democracy of reading,” a world of commonalities. At least three of the stories were originally written for charities or events that contribute, in their own way, to the common good. The opening story “Last” was donated to Oxfam as part of the charity’s Ox-Tales series of four collections structured around the four elements and whose selling was intended to contribute to Oxfam’s fight against global poverty; Fire, published in 2009, in which also featured stories by, among others, John Le Carré, Lionel Shriver, Vikram Seth, Jeanette Winterson, or Xiaolu Gao, was planned in reference to Oxfam’s campaign for arms control. “The Definite Article,” the ninth story in Public Library, was initially published in a series of stories commissioned by the Royal Park’s Foundation3 and “The Beholder” was commissioned by Durham Book Festival and first published in Smith’s Shire (2013). The meandering publishing history of these stories in itself speaks of shared concerns and of a culture of reading and re-editing, in which each re-publication sheds a different light on the story and inscribes it within a shifting web of affinities and contextual correlations.
5The puzzled and puzzling shape chosen for Public Library exploits the genre’s experimental potential. It asserts its potential as exploratory space, just as the public library is remembered as a space of emotional and imaginary exploration by the writers, artists, publishers, librarians, whose reminiscences are interspersed between the stories. From Kamila Shamsie, to Eve Lacey, the then Library Graduate Trainee at Newnham College Library in Cambridge, from artist Sarah Wood—Smith’s partner, to whom the collection, like all Smith’s works, is dedicated—, to publisher Anna Ridley, from Kate Atkinson, to Helen Oyeyemi, the sources delineate the contours of a community of readers, beyond space and time, who were all “made” (Edinburgh International Book Festival: n.p.) by the public library. The politics of shared reading here extolled spurns the bitterness or sentimentalism of the lament. It opts rather for the bewildering energy of experimentation via collage and generic dialogue.
6As such, Public Library seems to encapsulate most of Smith’s key formal concerns and her politics of form. One of the most articulate contemporary writers on the potential and functionings of the short story, Smith seems to have brought her ambitious poetics of the genre to bear on the proliferating structure of Public Library. Both highly speculative and poignantly embodied, both conceptual and organic, both elegiac and transcending absence, the collection tests the experimental potential of the genre in order to assert its vitality and its capacity to weave together the private and the public, the one and the many. Poised at the juncture of the testimonial and the creative, Smith’s stories stress the force of the common, and open the literary imaginary to the empathetic force of the collective.
- 4 She wrote four plays, when she was a PhD student at Newnham College, Cambridge, between 1986 and 1 (...)
7One cannot overestimate the importance of the short story genre in Ali Smith’s career. She was a short story writer, and a playwright,4 before she became a novelist. Her first short story to have been published, “Text for the Day” (1994), later republished in her first collection Free Love and Other Stories, won the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday short story prize, and Free Love was in turn crowned with the Saltire First Book of the Year Award.
8Her essay/short story “True Short Story,” originally published in 2006, in volume 10 of The European Journal of English Studies, and then reprinted two years later in The First Person and Other Stories, offers a provocative enactment of her poetics of the short story, of its hybridity and metamorphic qualities; above all, of its capacity to confront loss and death. It might be of interest to dwell on this text, as a portal onto Smith’s conception of the genre. Poised between reality, fiction, and auto-fiction, the story imagines a first-person narrator eavesdropping, in a café, on a conversation between, possibly, a father and a son who try their (not too subtle) skills at defining the novel and the short story. Whereas the novel is, according to the younger man, “a flabby old whore . . . serviceable, roomy, warm and familiar . . . but really a bit used up, really a bit too slack and loose,” the short story is “a nimble goddess, a slim nymph. Because so few people [have] mastered the short story she [is] still in very good shape” (Smith, “True Short Story” 283). As she later explained, the analogy was inspired to her by the editor of Prospect Magazine, Alexander Linklater, who described the short story as “this nubile form compared to the novel,” in a speech given at the launch of the National Short Story Award and competition (Smith, “‘Love and the Imagination’” 137). Already borrowing from life, the author figure fully opts for metaleptic slippage when she imagines herself phoning her friend Kasia, who is in hospital, undergoing chemotherapy. At this point, fiction and truth become tightly spliced, the short story/novel analogy working as a self-reflexive pre-text for a broader reflexion on the neo-liberal turn imposed on the National Health Service (NHS). As Smith later explained in a interview, Kasia is none other than her friend Kasia Boddy, renowned specialist of the short story genre and who was, at the time, fighting cancer and exerting herself to have the voice of cancer patients heard in their struggle to receive Herceptin, a new treatment considerably limiting the risks of relapse.
9Critics have already amply studied the metaleptic logic of “True Short Story,” pointing, as Michelle Ryan-Sautour does, to the way the “truth” in the story acts as “an echo chamber that reframes the non fictional utterance to reveal its inherent potential as story” (4). Just as crucial to Smith’s poetics of the short story is the gesture of defiance captured in this text. The genre answers back at death, and asserts the life-enhancing energy of fiction and story-crafting in the face of death. In an interview with the same Kasia Boddy, Smith harnesses formal considerations on the brevity of the genre with far broader life and death implications, thus revisiting the more weathered views on the genre’s temporal logic: “the story’s power is to assert back at brevity. . . . The story goes beyond itself if it’s well enough made. It’s not just that it’s an intimation or an assertion of mortality, it’s also an assertion back at mortality” (“Ali Smith” 66). In a text written for the Birdport Short Story prize report, she also defends the genre for the way its “brevity . . . challenges aliveness with the certainty of mortality, and vice versa too,” and for its dynamics as “a force and source of life” (qtd. in Horton).
10In Public Library, as elsewhere in her work—and notoriously in Artful—, the dramatic situations position the narrators in an interstitial zone between life and death, where one cohabits with ghosts and remembers the dead. The zone is, to borrow Smith’s words, a zone of “unsettling potential” (Smith, “So many afterlives from one short life”), of unravelling and transformation, between life and death, reality and fantasy. Most stories harbour an encounter with death and ponder our capacity to transcend loss and reinvest it with the intimation of a shared condition. In “The Beholder,” the narrator has recently lost her father and wavers on the brink of depression; in “Grass,” the narrator reminisces about her teenage years and her father’s faltering electrical appliance shop. “After Life” offers a humourous variation on the theme, the protagonist having been pronounced dead twice by unscrupulous papers and failing to convince them of his being alive. “The Human Claim” explores the possibility that D.H. Lawrence’s ashes may have in fact been scattered “at the harbour, into the sea” (87), in Marseilles, by Frieda’s lover, Angelo Ravagli, and replaced “with ashes of God knows what or who” (87), rather than brought back to her to be placed in a shrine in New Mexico.
- 5 One needs to mention that Shire’s first epigraph is an extract from the last lines of Woolf’s A Ro (...)
11Both “The Poet” and “The Ex-Wife” take figures of writers—poets or short story writers—as their centrepieces and as embodiments of the vital and vibrant energy of writing in the face of disaster: Olive Fraser in “The Poet” and Katherine Mansfield in “The Ex-Wife.” In “The Poet,” a text previously published in Shire, bereavement is redeemed and transmuted into a visionary experience of survival, and ultimately revival, through the transmogrification of poetry and its re-embodiment across time. Similar themes already ran through “The Commission,” one of the auto-fictional texts composing Shire, and positioned immediately after “The Poet.” In “The Commission,” Smith evokes the life and work of Cambridge Scholar Helena Shire, whose edition of Fraser’s verse inspires her in more ways than one, since she finds a postcard sent to her partner, Sarah Wood, neatly treasured in her copy of Shire’s edition; a postcard in which a PS reads: “Tell Alison to write a radioplay on Olive” (Smith, Shire 74; underscore in the original). Thus life courses from one writer to another, from one generation to another, between the leaves of books.5 And as often too, Smith’s literary musings on lack and loss dovetail as a vindication of the rights of women, the humble, those who remain voiceless and must be heard. In that evocation of Scottish poet Olive Fraser’s tragic life, an elegiac recollection of Fraser’s hindered creativity and rebellious energy is woven into a delicate poetics of writing and reading as organic experiences, embedded in an even broader ethics of life and remembrance.
- 6 The centenary collection does in fact exist. The 25 volumes were published by Adam and Black.
- 7 On the place of allegory in Smith’s writing, although specifically in relation to Smith’s seasonal (...)
12“The Poet” opens, in medias res, on the vision of the young Fraser hurling a book against a wall, out of painful frustration at the lowly status of her family and at the narrowness of her life. But the rage and pain yield an unexpected treasure: the book’s spine breaks to reveal a musical score nesting in its lining. The book is not any book, but part of the 1871 centenary edition of Walter Scott’s novels.6 As the author/narrator admits, the scene is pure invention, but the music lying within the spine of the book is not: “[T]hat 1871 edition of Scott, like many books over the centuries, bound with recycled old paper stock, really is lined and pasted with staved manuscript at the back of the pages, at least, the ones I’ve got on my desk are” (72). Between the fantasy reconstruction of Scotland’s history at the hands of Scott and Smith’s own reconstruction of the life of another, in this case overlooked, Scottish poet, runs the staves of anonymous music lining the books that link past and future. The binding, in “recycled old paper” becomes a vibrant, embodied, metaphor for the persistence of poetry, its travelling across time, its re-inventiveness, just as the discovery of the musical score captures the task of writing and reading via the disclosure of the musical spine: “Think of the Waverley collection on the shelves, the full twenty-five novels, their spines sliced back and open and the music inside them visible” (73). One might argue that, rather than being metaphorical, this concluding image is too packed, too allegorical, too close a recapitulation of the story’s programme. But one might as easily argue that Smith’s texts—her novels and her short stories alike—always hover between metaphor and allegory.7 Smith herself considers the short story form as creatively allegorical: “[S]tories are fundamentally allegorical full stop. They always have been both instructive and creative, creative with their instructiveness” (“Ali Smith” 77).
- 8 Smith does not always specify who her sources are, but one may suppose that Emma Wilson is Corpus (...)
- 9 In a piece devoted to Katherine Mansfield, to which I return later, Smith conjures a similar notat (...)
13The image of the book spine establishes a gentle connection with the testimonies interspersed with the short stories. In the fragment entitled “Put a price on that,” Emma Wilson8 remembers the local library she used as a child, and “the white and cream spines” of the books—in French—of Colette and Duras (124-25). In the second story of the collection, “Good Voice,” the narrator’s dialogue with her dead father brings her to reflect on the power of words in the face of chaos. A meandering, “war-inflected” (37), evocation of the two world conflicts—in which her grand-father and father had fought—, of vanished veterans and the silenced voices of anonymous soldiers brings her to “go to the shelf and take down [her] Penguin Book of First World War Poetry” with its “spine [that is] broken” and “pages 187-208 . . . falling out of it” (37).9 The broken spine is a paradoxical metaphor; it metaphorizes the still un-broken link to a poetic voice that has not dwindled and whose accents have been well heard and cherished. The pages falling out correspond—as my own copy of the book confirms—, to the chapter dedicated to Wilfred Owen. The poet had already appeared in the story, in order to bring the past and the future of the text to converge in the act of re-reading. The poet’s own body links the narrator’s own family story—her grand-father “was not well. His lungs were bad” (29)—with the story of England and the ironical and sad sweetness of dying for it, Owen’s emblematic “Dulce Et Decorum Est” being cryptically quoted two pages later (31). So the broken spine is also a vital link between past and present. The “man of mud and sadness” (38), that appears at the end, is both the narrator’s ancestor and Owen, everyman in fact, just as the spine is the spine of men broken and silenced by war and whose voice Owen and Siegfried Sassoon allow to resonate across time.
- 10 Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, “Ombre,” was published in 1918 in Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre (...)
- 11 The song was very popular during the Second World War.
14Eventually the task of the story’s narrator is merely to testify, in her turn, to the emotions of her younger selves as she was immersing herself in Owen’s and Sassoon’s own visions of war. She “flick[s] through the book and . . . make[s] a list of everything [she has] happened to underline in it over the years” (37). A disjointed and harrowing list follows in which brittle fragments of poems from the Penguin anthology are cobbled together, to conclude in words taken from the English translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Shadow,” that these are “memories that make only one memory” (38).10 Even more radically, the “man of mud and sadness” that “rises like a great wave” at the end of the story exists, as any reader of the War Poets will know, beyond the narrow confines of mankind, in a realm that transcends all realms: “He is made of spores, bones, stone, feet still in their boots, dead horses, steel. He speaks with all the gone voices” (38). Past and present, the ghosts and the living are at last conjoined in the dialogue that concludes the story, when the narrator’s dead father interrupts her musings with lines from Gracie Fields’ songs “Looking on the Bright Side” and “Wish Me Luck as You Wave me Goodbye,”11 and his daughter “sing[s] back” in kind with a line from the Marianne Faithfull song “Broken English” (39).
- 12 On the place of prosopopeia in contemporary British fiction and, among other texts, Ali Smith’s Ar (...)
15Smith’s technique to give her stories unbroken spines is one that relentlessly weaves together past and present and merges her voice with that of the departed. In that sense, her work of remembering reads like an extended prosopopeia12 proceeding through collages and juxtapositions, through associations, including sound associations and anagrams, as for instance in “The Poet,” when the narrator—or is it Fraser herself, one cannot be quite certain—plays with her first name: “Fraser. Olive. O LIVE. I LOVE. O VILE. EVIL O” (64). Life and evil, love and the vile coalesce in a form of endless slippage, or a kind of anagrammatic “distillation,” to resort to Smith’s own word to qualify the short story (“Ali Smith” 80). If the short story can write back at mortality, in its very brevity, and hold life and death in balance, it is also because of its power to disclose the music in the spine, the life unseen and unheard. As she insists in relation to both Katherine Mansfield and Grace Paley, this is also what the short story excels at doing:
She [Mansfield] reveals the core of the unacted. The core of life is really at the centre of form. So she’s always talking about what form is. And Paley is always talking as well about what form is. The story form, it seems to me, in the century from which we’ve inherited it, is a discussion of what form is and how we are made. . . . The dialogic element, the life of form and the form of life both become spotlit in the story form. (“Ali Smith” 81)
16For Smith, no writer encapsulates this paradoxical energy as powerfully as Katherine Mansfield does. In a piece devoted to Mansfield and published in 2007 in The Daily Telegraph, Smith concurs with Angela Carter when she identifies in Mansfield’s very life and person, the incarnation of the short story genre in its pithiness, intensity, and defiance:
Carter, like many women writers of the second half of the century, loved this too, and recognised a radical violence, something “formidable” in this slight-seeming, short-lived writer whose trademark, a form so easily dismissed, the short story, becomes in her hands something new-made, full of unsettling potential. (“So many afterlives from one short life”)
- 13 The passage is taken from Mansfield’s journal, 11 July 1921, an entry written as she was staying i (...)
Public Library, as expected, brings Mansfield back from the dead in a story that is also a tale of literary initiation and a redemption narrative. After a painful split-up with her partner—an academic who has always obsessed over Mansfield, whom the narrator nicknames “Your ex-wife”—, the narrator enters in a dialogue with Mansfield’s ghost who stalks her during her lunch breaks in what seems to be Regent’s Park, a Park that also plays a key role in the narrator’s emotional emancipation in “The Definite Article.” The dialogue is no dialogue as such, but a disorienting back and forth between the narrator, who, after the break-up, has taken to reading Mansfield’s letters and journal, and Mansfield’s ghost who interjects snippets from her correspondance and journal, disjointed, italicized shards of her own literary musings. The limping dialogue does not produce a melancholy effect, but rather one of exhilerating rejoicing in the power of form and the capacity of fiction to bring us close to truth itself: “Fiction, she said when she’d stopped laughing, is impossible but enables us to reach what is relatively truth” (108).13
17The “unsettling potential” of the short story is that of form as life and life as form. For Smith, it grants the form its capacity to enact the “unacted” and be performative in a way the novel is not. Very often using the term “story” as an overarching category, coextensive with fiction at large, Smith insists on the life-changing power of short stories. In an interview with Louise France, she insists: “Stories can change lives if we’re not careful. They will come in and take the shirts off our backs. Tell the right stories and we live better lives” (Smith, “Life Stories”). The performativity of stories inheres in their programmatic brevity and compactness, and, just as importantly, the vital organicity between the fragment and the whole, a metonymic dynamic foregrounded in Smith’s interview with Kasia Boddy, and that she sees as also productive of continuity beyond fragmentation: “If the story form is partial, then it says ‘what next?’ all the time, it asserts continuance. A broken thing asserts wholeness because you want to mend it or you look for the part that’s not there. A partial thing, a metonymy, suggests something bigger, always will” (“Ali Smith” 75-76).
18As testifies her poetics of the metonymy, and its dialectics of part and whole, Smith’s poetics of the short story is also one that engineers a sense of wholeness and collectiveness. As crucial as the texts’ capacity to write back at mortality is thus, as we will see, the politics of the common enacted by reading, a commonality that is both elegiac and the promise of a shared, emancipatory, democratic ethics.
19Critics have amply commented on Smith’s delight in breaking narratives frames and in her seemingly postmodernist metaleptic play on narrative levels. Yvonne Liebermann underlines the ontological slippages that characterize her literary imaginary:
- 14 Yvonne Liebermann is here referring to Marie-Laure Ryan’s essay, Avatars of the Story (207).
Smith’s ontological metalepsis—constantly blurring narrative levels—leads to what Marie-Laure Ryan calls “mutual contamination” and thus blurs the reader’s expectation of the “text” and the “outside of the text,” thereby staging the slippery boundary between what we expect to be “real” and what we expect to be “fiction.” (Liebermann 139)14
20Monica Germanà and Emily Horton, in the introduction to their edited volume on Ali Smith, also point to the prevalence of such postmodernist interpretations of her work: “These readings, in different ways, highlight Smith’s questioning of overarching meta-narratives, her awareness to language’s fluidity and heterogeneous meaning, and her fascination with liminal boundaries between reality and fiction, truth and lies” (“Introduction” n.p.). Michelle Ryan-Sautour reads such postmodernist sleights of hands as above all offering inventive leverage in a transgressive and fecund exploration of the mechanisms of subjectivity itself:
Smith’s stories engage with an age-old tradition of questioning fictional frames that has bloomed in the hands of postmodern writers. It is as if these authors are seeking to re-examine the experimentation with subjectivity that haunts the landscape of modernist literature by drawing new spaces for the author-subject at generic borders.
21The “trespassing” that occupies so central a place in the opening short story of Public Library is metaphorically programmatic of her relish in walking the blurred line between reality and fiction, and between planes of immanence. Flouting ontological boundaries is key, according to Brian McHale, to the postmodernist “unconstrained projection of worlds in the plural” (25), and critics have thus identified in Smith’s unlocking of imaginary pluriverses a postmodernist trait. But trespassing, as is clear in “Last”—the first story in Publich Library—, is above all emancipatory. It grants the literary imagination a licence to freely associate and to probe the semantic and implicitly ideological implications nesting in the simplest of words. The story opens on a series of phrases and expressions hovering this side of synonymy, all expressions that already insist one should be ready to be misled, and to read against the grain of narrative logic, since Public Library seems to have reached an end even before it has started:
I had come to the conclusion. I had nothing more to say. I had looked in the cupboard and found it was bare. I had known in my bones it was over. I had reached the end of my tether. I had dug until I’d hit rock bottom. I had gone past the point of no return. I had come to the end of the line. (5)
22The end of the line is an actual last stop, that on a railway line, where the narrator alights to discover a lady in a wheelchair trapped in the train that has been “shunted from the platform to wherever the empty trains go” (5-6). Intending to find a way to set her free, the narrator trespasses past a “barbed-wire fence,” ignoring the sign indicating that “trespassing was prohibited, that the only people allowed past this point were rail personnel” (7) and that “If we find you trespassing you will be fined” (7). The prohibition has the opposite effect on the narrator who not only trespasses, but also veers off into linguistic musings about the word “fine” and its paradoxical homonymies:
[W]hy anyway, did the word fine mean a payment for doing something illegal at the same time as it meant everything from okay to really grand? And was it at all connected that the word grand could also mean a thousand pounds? Did that mean that notions of fineness and grandness, in their travelling etymologies, were often tied up with notions of money? I hadn’t a clue. But I had an urge to look them up in a dictionary and see. It was the first urge to do such a thing I’d had in quite a while. (8)
- 15
Library did indeed exist. The club, on St Martin’s lane, was launched in 2014. Ironically, it had (...)
The end of the line is thus a start and the experimental trespassing a portal to an alternative train of words and thoughts kindling the long-dead desire to know more, and “see.” The first four pages of “Last” are also an immediate rejoinder to the closure the whole collection opens with, “a true story” (1) narrating how Smith and her editor at Hamish Hamilton—Simon Prosser—had been misguided by a building near Covent Garden “with the word LIBRARY above its doors” (1), only to realize that the building is in fact a private club and that the sign in fact reads Library. What Helen Clyne, Kate Atkinson’s daughter, defines as a communal space per se, in the testimony preceding the story “The Poet”—“That’s what public library means: something communal” (58)—has been privatized, and is now under erasure, denied, present as what it cannot be anymore.15
- 16 The present contribution does not allow for an in-depth analysis of the hypothesis, but, in order (...)
23Public Library might thus be considered to carry an “end of the line” flavour around it. Yet it is, as always with Smith, the opposite. A passionate eulogy of common reading, rather than an elegy, it pleads for self-invention or re-invention, the public library acting as a performative structure enabling readers and writers to beget themselves, along a chain of shared experiences. Like many of her collections and novels, Public Library imagines what Emma E. Smith has defined, in her analysis of Hotel World, as a “democracy of voice” (84). Many critics have at length commented on Smith’s “multi-perspectivalism” (Masters 989), sometimes arguing that this in part makes her narrative ethics that of a metamodern, moving beyond the playfulness of postmodernism and embracing a form of consensual capacity that accomodates contradiction.16
24The format chosen for Public Library allows Smith to trespass beyond the limits of genres, to hold the singular and the plural in tension and to experiment further with her “democracy of voice.” The fragmented structure of the collection, its diffuse sense of coherence and loose tying up of the testimonies and the stories makes for an empirical relational logic. However, relationality is rehearsed and reaffirmed with each testimony, each offering variations on the cultural sense of sharing fostered by public libraries. In Marina Warner’s own words, Smith “has her ears and her eyes wide open for the larger communal scene in which her stories are taking place,” and the reminiscences provide the contextual frame setting off the stories’ own modulations on the themes of exchange and borrowing. The “porosity between text and life” (Ryan-Sautour) that has been commented on in relation to her boundaries breaking imaginary, is here at the root of both life-writing and fiction in the endless transmutations of facts into stories and of fiction back into life-writing, “The poet” and “The Ex-wife,” being cases in point with their borrowing from Fraser’s and Mansfield’s journals and correspondances.
25In “Style vs Content?,” one of her most programmatic essays, Smith sums up what might be defined as her poetics of hospitality and poetic capaciousness: “There’s room in the world for all of us. We are large. We contain multitudes,” itself a variation on Walt Whitman’s famous “(I am large, I contain multitudes)” in section 51 of Song of Myself. And the public library is itself capacious enough to accommodate a multitude of shared experiences. In the fragment preceding “The Human Claim,” writer and activist Sophie Mayer makes a plea for the democratic utopia of public libraries, going, this time, via Michel Foucault: “The library is what Michel Foucault called a ‘heterotopia,’ an ideal yet real and historically delimited place that allows us to step into ritual time (like the cinema and the garden). It is a site of possibility and connection (and possibility in connection)” (76). The connectedness engineered by public libraries is also, for Mayer, that of “participatory democracy” (76) in their offering “individuals and communities . . . their right to . . . becoming on their own terms” (76). As critics have amply shown, hospitality is one of the central paradigms of her seasonal quartet, functioning both as a referential marker in her scathing exploration of Brexit’s jingoistic ideology and exclusionary rationale and as a metaphor for the openness of the writing imaginary and its utopian conjuring of a shared future (see Campos, Bernard, “‘It was the worst of times…’” and Bernard, “Vibrant Allegories”).
26The public library, on the contrary, embodies an economics of common affects, in which the readers’ shared emotions become allegorical of a utopian body politic that resists the privatization of experience. Public and private are here entangled and reinvented each time a book is borrowed and then returned, thus accruing layers of affects and re-enacting the promise of a being in common, of a democratic kinship. In the poem “Dear Library,” from which Smith borrows the first epigraph of the collection, Jackie Kay—one of the key literary references that course through her entire work—conjures the democratic plurality and capaciousness of the very logic of borrowing:
- 17 The poem was commissioned by Scottish Book Trust that had initiated the Artworks for Libraries Pro (...)
Your life: many characters, bleak houses, long day’s journeys. Your life of mixed fates, give and takes;
What you borrowed last month, you return today. (stanza 4)
. . .
Browse, borrow, request, renew—lovely words to me. A library card in your hand is your democracy. (stanza 5)17
27That specific quotation is itself a form of “multilogue,” Smith’s own term to describe her “democracy of voice” (qtd. in Kostkowska 147). The quotation returns in Smith’s collection, in the plural testimony that follows “The Ex-Wife” and that opens on these very lines from Kay’s poem; the words in fact were those of Kay’s father when his daughter “asked him what he thought about the library system.” The words thus circulate from mouth to book, mirroring the democracy of reading that Public Library’s “multilogue” orchestrates. From one generation to the next, the words travel and increment a body politic of readers beyond the here and now. Smith’s intensely intertextual poetics (see Liebermann) takes on a vividly political aspect as it dovetails with the collection’s paradigmatic musing on loss and the spectral presence of the past. In the double testimony (151-54) of Eve Lacey and Debbie Hodder, Newnham College Librarian, borrowing and returning become emblematic of the work of remembering and of co-memorating, thus of sharing in a common history. Taking Smith “through into the stacks of the college library,” Lacey and Hodder show her various rare books and treasures kept in the library—including “a lock of Charlotte Brontë’s hair coiled inside a ring” (153). Among these rarities lies a treatise by English mathematician Percival Frost. More than other books borrowed and returned, this copy of Frost’s treatise captures the poetics of Smith’s politics of sharing and democratic co-living. Like most old library books “the pasted-in notices” placed “inside the front cover” tell the story of the book’s circulation, of its readers; further stories nesting in these humble notices. The embedded stories loop back to the second story in the collection, “The Good Voice,” and the conversation the narrator has with her father and her reading Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon in the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. The Newnham College copy of Frost’s treatise bears a notice that is indeed metonymic of Smith’s poetics both of the short story and of the common:
1917
BRITISH PRISONERS
INTERNED ABROAD
This book is the gift of Miss M. Fletcher
Newnham College Cambridge
And is supplied through the Agency
at the Board of Education
Whitehall London S. W. (154)
28An unusual caveat accompanies the notice, that speaks, between the lines, of the context of the gift, of the circumstances in which it will be pondered over and, in its understated form, of the possible loss of the anonymous men who will be on the receiving end of the gift:
On the right-hand inside the page, the pasted-in note says in clear handwriting:
If this book is ever returned,
it will be gratefully received,
though not expected.
M. Fletcher, Librarian
Newn: Coll: Cambridge
Jan 1917 (154)
- 18 Newnham College is of course not just any college, since it is the College where Ali Smith studied (...)
29The notices speak to Smith in more than one way. The librarian’s gratefulness, if the book is returned, is anything but mundane. It is the gratefulness of one who knows that the treatise has been of use to men deprived of freedom and surviving on the brink of death; and the detail of the “clear handwriting” as such introduces a reaffected presence, beyond the more impersonal tone of institutional war parcels. The gift itself sums up the collection’s politics of reading and of sharing, in its implicit message that knowledge will engineer a form of becoming, in the darkest of times. For Smith, it also no doubt carries an indirect gendered story about the place of women in times of war, on the home front, but also of their gradual conquest of sites of knowledge, Newnham being a female college.18 Even more crucial in its understated implications is the last notice:
Underneath that, it says, in the same hand:
Returned May 13, 1919. (154)
30The spareness of the hand-written last notice speaks volumes. As such, it encapsulates Smith’s poetics of the short story and of communal reading. It might thus provide an apt conclusion to my own reading of Public Library. The notice functions metonymically. Its partial nature “suggests something bigger” (Smith, “Ali Smith” 76); in this instance, it encapsulates the emancipatory nature of the library’s politics of the common. The treatise was sent, possibly read and studied; but more importantly, it was treasured enough to be eventually returned, after the prisoners were sent back home in 1919. The chain is intact. The treatise will remain in circulation to enlighten other students. The promise of the communal has been upheld in the face of disaster and loss. The embedded stories, past and future, nesting in the notices, have acted, as all stories should, as “a site of possibility and connection (and possibility in connection)” (76), as gifts with endless returns.
