“Every Story Tells a Picture”: Suspended Time in Ali Smith’s Seasons Novels

Abstract

Through both the viewing and the reading of art, Ali Smith’s 2016–2020 tetralogy, Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, posits an ethics of meaning–making that responds to the multiplicity of time-as-it-is-lived. This article explores how Smith portrays the viewing of art as an experience of temporal disjuncture by which habitual modes of perception and cognition are renewed. Ordinarily produced through a sequential linking of cause and effect, meaning is formed instead through a postcritical engagement, which proposes an interactive mode of understanding that operates within a network of relations. Open to difference and to alteration, this mode of interpretation is, I suggest, demanded from Smith’s readers as, through ekphrasis (the verbal description of visual art), Smith suspends the temporal progression of narrative form.