Journal Article

Aware and In Denial: Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as Climate Fiction

van Amelsvoort, Jesse

2024

Overview

With each of its four books named after a season, Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016–20) is structured according to life’s cyclical time patterns. As with all of Smith’s fiction, these novels are characterised by metamorphosis and transition. The Seasonal Quartet, however, also registers a sense of loss, as when one of the characters in Autumn laments the time “[w]hen we still had seasons, not just the monoseason we have now.” In this paper, I take up these and other references strewn through the novels and propose to read these four novels as climate fiction. Rather than representing grand-scale destruction and dislocation, however, the Seasonal Quartet registers the minute disruptions of and changes in our everyday lives due to anthropogenic climate change. The narrative form of Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer shows how the conditions of life in the present are affected and altered by climate change, whether it concerns changing weather patterns, migration patterns, and so on. The novels house both characters who are acutely aware of the current crisis, as well as those who remain in denial; as novels, however, they do make visible the effects of humanity having entered the Anthropocene. The Seasonal Quartet, therefore, shows how the radically other of our planet’s ecological and meteorological systems has entered and started to shape human lives. If these novels disclose the loss of the world as we have known it, they also find a more hospitable home in the world of art. In art, there is connection and the potentiality of a new world.

• Publisher: Open Library of Humanities
• Subject: Anthropocene / Climate change / EU membership / Fiction / Literary characters / Novels / Politics / Summer / Winter / Xenophobia