“Probably Filmic” - Ali Smith’s There but for the

Posting more “reading notes” on here, as I search for a more hospitable social media space than twitter is now. As folks who follow me on twitter will know, I’m a big fan of Scottish queer writer Ali Smith. Last year, I re-read her seasonal quartet, and now I’m going back to re-read her earlier work. Here are a few re-reading notes (not comprehensive!) on Smith’s 2011 novel There but for the.

Posting more “reading notes” on here, as I search for a more hospitable social media space than twitter is now. As folks who follow me on twitter will know, I’m a big fan of Scottish queer writer Ali Smith. Last year, I re-read her seasonal quartet, and now I’m going back to re-read her earlier work. Here are a few re-reading notes (not comprehensive!) on Smith’s 2011 novel There but for the.

In an interview in The Paris Review in 2017, Adam Begley asks Ali Smith about how a number of her novels “seem to germinate from a shocking or troubling incident,” which operates as a kind of catalyst for the story. Smith responds with this somewhat impressionistic comment on form: “Probably filmic—a visual device which allows you to build a spatial happening around it, which becomes the novel.” I’m struck by Smith’s use of the phrase “probably filmic”—that is, not definitively but most likely filmic, as if the word filmic can only imprecisely capture what this device is doing in Smith’s work. Smith leaves open the terminology for the device but acknowledges its visual and spatial qualities. Begley responds, “And is that how composition works? You imagine consequences?” Smith then uses the example of the dumbwaiter incident from her novel Hotel World (2001), and says she was “immensely grateful that the incident just appeared.” What this exchange captures, for me, is that Smith’s formal play operates both verbally and visually across her oeuvre. We can see this both/and verbal/visual formal play at work in There but for the, beginning with the title whose four words are used as a 4-part syntactical structure for the book—each word is the title of a section of the book, but the words (separately and together) also create an opening for imagining ourselves in other circumstances—as is suggested by the saying that the title directs us towards but doesn’t finish—“there but for the…grace of god, go I.” Our capacity (or not) for empathy is central to all of Smith’s work.

In There but for the, the ”shocking or troubling incident” that Smith builds a spatial happening around is the story of a man, Miles Garth, who goes to a dinner party with another man he barely knows and ends up quietly locking himself in the hosts’ spare bedroom, where he will stay for several months, attracting attention from the media and a growing group of followers who camp outside the house hoping for a glimpse of Milo, as they insist on calling him. Miles’s followers ascribe spiritual meaning to his actions, even as he is hidden from view and his reasons for shutting himself in a stranger’s home remain opaque and are never fully explained. The stranger/house guest makes frequent appearances in Smith’s novels, but until I read the interview with Smith, I hadn’t thought of the visual and spatial effects that such encounters and intrusions produce. The filmic element is that we get to see domestic scenes—and the idea of home itself—through the eyes of a stranger. In this case, however, the visitor becomes the absent presence behind a closed door for other encounters in and beyond the house. We might say, with reference to the first two words in the title, his thereness in the guest room takes the story and the reader off to the side (as Miles says the word “but” does, grammatically-speaking), forcing us to wonder how things are connected. Our capacity (or not) to see and feel connection is another way of describing empathy.

Smith’s novels also almost always include a precocious young person—in this case, 9 (soon to be 10)-year-old Brooke, who is the clever and sensitive child of two professors. Brooke loves wordplay—knock knock jokes feature prominently, and of course knock knock jokes are verbal and visual devices made possible by an imagined or actual closed door. As Smith professes and performs in her novels, “Language is endless currency.” We learn Brooke is Black by the not-at-all-subtle racism and microaggressions that her parents endure at the excruciating dinner party scene at the center of the book that Miles disengages himself from by, paradoxically, refusing to leave the house. Smith is especially good at creating intergenerational encounters and friendships, and it is Brooke who will form a connection with Miles by slipping notes under the door of his room. The notes begin with the phrase “The fact is” and the repetition of the phrase in the last section of the book suggests the ongoingness of gathering “the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know.” It is Brooke who eventually knocks on the closed, but, as it turns out, not locked, door and Miles invites her in. The book ends with a door opening and Miles and Brooke exchanging with each other the first line of a story that the other will then write to “see what happens in the process.” Words as opening to a story still to be written. Probably filmic. A spatial happening. Knock knock. Who’s there?

Photo of a page from my notebook with a drawing of Ali Smith and some notes on There but for the, including “thereness: the condition of being there in position: presence in a place distinguishably there not here” and “Brooke 9 years old” “Obviously not ours.” (13)