295 Blog Post 4-Images of Images

            I learned to draw in preschool. I remember quite clearly drawing endless dragons with magic markers, focused intently on making my pudgy four-year-old hands follow the path I wanted them to. Fine motor control is tough when you’re a kid, and so I also clearly remember the frustration I felt when my drawings just didn’t come out the way I wanted them to. Classmates were impressed with my dragons, but I was never satisfied. I would sometimes try to explain the vision in my head, struggling to find the words to capture it, and that description always seemed far better than anything I could actually produce.

            Maybe that’s why I became so fascinated with ecphrasis. It’s certainly why I never went to art school. The words used to describe an image have always had more power for me than the image itself.

            Which brings me, of course, to Autumn. Ali Smith seems obsessed with this interplay between images and the words we use to try and capture them. As with most fiction, the story is largely a series of images the reader has never seen, but the difference here is that some of them are images we have seen, or at least might have done. There is the iconography of Brexit, certainly. From the specific newspaper headlines to the spray-painted hate speech, it is a set of images that even an American audience, two years on from the pivotal referendum, can recognize, can picture in the mind’s eye with hardly any prompting. Brits reading this book in 2016 would have had an even more visceral response to the things we see described in Elizabeth’s chapters.

            And yet these images are not described in the way that we expect them. Elizabeth describes the murder of British MP Jo Cox—the first assassination of a sitting MP in over twenty five years—in almost the coldest terms: “Someone killed an MP,” she says, “A man shot her dead and came at her with a knife. Like shooting her wouldn’t be enough. But it’s old news now.” There is no affect in her words here, and yet we expect affect—how could we not, in discussing this kind of tragedy—and so it is arresting. We stop, and are perhaps more alarmed by the lack of the usual outrage than we would be empathetic to it, were it there. It forces us to reconsider.

            This seems to be one of Autumn’s major projects: defamiliarizing the audience to familiar things, forcing them to look again at what they might otherwise skim right over. (Part of me wonders if this is also why the novel’s form is somewhat experimental. Autumn is a tough read, full of free indirect discourse and empty of quotation marks, so that we are forced to sit with it longer. Forced to chew our food.) It’s not a coincidence that Smith chose an artist from the Pop Art movement to meditate on for much of the book. Pop Art too sought to force its audience to reevaluate the images of modernity. Warhol didn’t paint Campbell’s Soup cans for the hell of it. It was an attempt to confront us with something ubiquitous, something mass produced and omnipresently advertised, in a context that made it new. Advertising became art and art advertising, all of it calling attention to the so-called “norms” of mid-twentieth century consumerism. This is what Elizabeth tries to articulate in Boty’s work. As the sole female, British Pop Artist, Boty worked not only to reconfigure and defamiliarize the image lexicon of the 1960’s, but of Pop Art itself.

            “An image of an image means the image can be seen with new objectivity, with liberation from the original,” (Smith 226). This is not only Elizabeth’s thesis on Pop Art. It is also the thesis of Smith’s project within the whole of this novel. After all, what could liberate an image more from the original than changing the medium entirely, from picture to text? By reimagining the images surrounding Brexit—and indeed surrounding nationalism and refugee crises more broadly construed—we are forced to reconfront these issues with new eyes. We recontextualize the murder of Jo Cox not as a temporarily shocking but quickly forgotten headline, but as a tragedy that has been crudely swept under the rug. We recontextualize the hate speech and vandalism that surged after the referendum not as a human interest piece on the nightly news, but as a real and appalling act of violence against Elizabeth’s neighbors. We recontextualize anti-immigrant political rhetoric not as a soundbite on the radio, but as a genuine threat to the lives and livelihoods of the people caring for Daniel in the hospital. We are forced to look again. We are forced to see the world not as a simple onslaught of meaningless images, but as pieces of a larger puzzle.