Figures and Grounds: Art and the Body Politic in Ali Smith's Winter

The essay reads Winter (2017), the second volume of Ali Smith's "Seasonal Quartet," as a novel that engages with Brexit by revitalizing the metaphor of the body politic. Focusing on the role of landscape, the novel's use of art objects and its intertextual conversation with Shakespeare's late romance Cymbeline (ca. 1610), the essay also addresses the ways in which the reimagining of the body politic is entangled with Smith's poetic strategies, arguing that matters of form and aesthetics are indistinguishable from the novel's ethical and political concerns. Exploring parallels with post-'45 British landscape painting and art, especially Barbara Hepworth's works, the analysis is concerned with two striking intrusions of the irrational in the novel: a hallucinated lump of landscape hovering above the characters and a child's head floating in the air; both are crucial to the revitalization of the metaphor of the body politic as well as in the conversation the novel conducts with British art and with Cymbeline, a play that is an exploration of the idea of the body politic and of sovereignty in the context of the end of Britain's relations with Europe.