4 - Domestic Realism: Ali Smith, The Accidental (2005)

Summary

Scottish short-story writer and novelist Ali Smith is often described as a “literary writer.” The epithet refers to, on the one hand, Smith's extraordinary sensitivity for narrative style and voice and to her self-reflective wit in foregrounding and recasting literary conventions, genres, and traditions. Her short-story collections, for instance, carry titles such as Other Stories and Other Stories(1999) and The Whole Story and Other Stories(2003), and her 2007 novel, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis, rewrites a tale from Ovid's Metamorphoses. On the other hand, Smith's work is also considered “literary” for its meticulous attention to how language is a constitutive force, rather than a transparent medium, in the building and shaping of contemporary realities and identities. In Smith's fictions, language rules—and words, to quote from The Accidental (and Shelley), are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” (72).

“Language is being,” Smith claims, “we are the words we use” (Jernigan 2002). In her five short-story collections and four novels to date, she sketches and animates characters not just through their actions, but also and particularly through the idiosyncrasies of their speech, their way of telling stories about themselves and others, their hiding beyond words or revealing their true colors in their utterances and thoughts.