“Time Travel Is Real”

Navigating the Metamodernist Oscillations in Ali Smith’s "Autumn" (2016)

Abstract

Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), the first instalment of her Seasonal Quartet, has been analysed as a Brexit novel or “Brexlit” (Pittel 58), when it actually represents a much wider reality. Although some academics highlight the unclassifiable nature of the novel, I believe that, despite its undeniable political undertones and thematic concerns when depicting our transmodern society, both its form and its content are aligned with the features of metamodernism that authors like Nick Bentley and Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker define in their research (2017, 2010). While most critical studies have been concerned with the thematic aspects of the novel as the first post-Brexit novel, my aim is to offer an analysis of all the different aspects that make Autumn an accurate example of the metamodernist novel fluctuating between modern features like the use of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness and postmodern features like multiple narratives and fragmentation. In its oscillation between the modern and the postmodern, Autumn finds a balance through its main characters, Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demand, who embody these two structures of feeling. Different as they might be, the reader, alongside these two characters themselves, will find that they are more alike than they expected, and thus their shared ideas and concerns turn into the main themes of the novel: the cyclical nature of time and history, the unheimlich and the nature of art.