5
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111.09-31Smith A.
DOI: 10.4312/an.56.1-2.5-20
Art, Nature and Politics in Spring:  
Metamodern Sensibility in Ali Smith’s  
Dialogic Novel
Frederika Pekarčíková, Soňa Šnircová
Abstract
This article discusses the third instalment of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, a work whose 
complex multi-voiced narrative addresses various important issues including the role of 
art in the contemporary world. The authors of the article employ two theoretical frame-
works, Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and Vermeulen and van den Akker’s studies on 
metamodernism, to argue that Smith adopts a dialogical approach to the theme of art. 
With the help of close reading the authors map the dialogical clashes between the main 
voices and the semantic positions which are taken in order to demonstrate that the cen-
tral dialogue presented within the novel is that between postmodern and metamodern 
sensibilities. Special attention is paid to the character Richard who represents the clear 
replacement of the postmodern sensibility with a metamodern approach through his se-
mantic position, as is informed by his search for universality in art, his neo-romantic turn 
to the appreciation of the beauty of nature and his rejection of the postmodern trends that 
produce superficial and inauthentic forms of art. 
Keywords: art, nature, politics, postmodernism, metamodernism, dialogue, Ali Smith 
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6 Frederika Pekarčíková, Soňa Šnircová
Like the other three novels in her Seasonal Quartet cycle, Ali Smith’s Spring 
(2019) presents a complex, multi-voiced narrative that addresses various topical 
issues of the postmillennial world. The novel, the third in the series, touches on 
a range of issues including art, immigration, friendship, suffering, and grief, all 
of which are presented in a narrative that employs two main focalisers: Richard, 
a seventy-year-old film director who is forced to come to terms with the death 
of his long-life mentor while trying to work on a new film project, and a young 
woman Brittany (or Brit) who works at a migrant detention centre. While Britta-
ny’s story provides Smith with an opportunity to address the post-Brexit political 
situation and Britain’s “hostile environment” towards immigrants, the storyline 
that focuses on Richard allows her to intertwine the political concerns of the 
novel with its second major theme – the theme of art. Brit’s role in the novel and 
her desensitized, self-righteous and cynical approach both to immigrants and to 
life in general appear to support Dorel-Aurel Muresan’s interpretation that Brit 
is a symbolic character who “becomes the embodiment of a post-Brexit England 
that walled itself against the whole world” (134). In contrast, Richard’s engage-
ment in various discussions related to his film project and his search for his own 
artistic vision provides the basis for the argument, pursued in this article, that the 
character of Richard is intended to draw the reader’s attention to art and its role 
in contemporary society.
This article employs two theoretical frameworks, namely Bakhtin’s theory of 
dialogism and Vermeulen and van den Akker’s studies on metamodernism, to 
argue that Richard’s storyline takes a dialogical approach to the theme of art, 
providing a dialogue between two sensibilities – the postmodern line which is 
manifested, in various forms, in the opinions of Richard’s mentor Paddy and his 
new colleague Martin Terp, and the metamodern approach that can be identified, 
again in various forms, in Richard’s own perspective. It also aims to show that 
although Richard’s position is informed to a great extent by his search for univer-
sality in art, his neo-romantic turn to the appreciation of the beauty of nature (in 
both art and in reality) and his rejection of postmodern trends that result in super-
ficial and inauthentic art forms is not a radical step but one which can be seen in 
terms of the oscillation between the postmodern and the modern that Vermeulen 
and van den Akker have placed at centre of the metamodern sensibility. 
BAKHTIN’S DIALOGISM AND SMITH’S DIALOGUES ABOUT 
ART AND POLITICS 
Many critics have drawn attention to the importance that Ali Smith places on the 
representation of various voices in her work. For example, Daniel Lea notes that 
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7Art, Nature and Politics in Spring
Smith’s works “tend to be constructed as duologues or multilogues, with characters’ 
differing versions of the world built around shared events or experiences” (397). 
Monica Germanà argues that “multiple voices and points of view are distinctive 
characteristics of Smith’s narrative style, revealing her interest in the politics of 
dialogue” (454) and Ema Jelínková applies Bakhtin’s theory in her exploration 
of Smith’s approach to the use of voices: “In Bakhtinian terms, Smith rejects the 
hegemony of monoglossia and absorbs in her fictional discourse the plurality of 
polyglossia, letting the various languages and idioms interact, interanimate, and 
interilluminate one another” (11-12).
Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings on heteroglosia, polyphony and his definition of 
the dialogic novel, the prime examples of which are the works of Dostoevsky, are 
of undoubted use in shedding light on Smith’s usage of multiple voices and her 
construction of their different semantic positions. Bakhtin argues that a novel can 
only be seen as dialogic if it includes “the passing of a single theme through many 
and various voices” (265), each of them presenting a distinct semantic position. 
Caryl Emerson clarifies this concept in her introduction to her translation of 
Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984): “A voice, Bakhtin everywhere tells 
us, is not just words or ideas strung together: it is a ‘sematic position’, a point of 
view on the world, it is one personality orienting itself among other personalities 
within a limited field” (xxxvi). Bakhtin praises Dostoevsky’s dialogic approach 
that allows each character to express their individual and multifaceted ideological 
stances, and, as David Duff notes, his discussion of Dostoevsky outlines a theo-
retical perspective that is particularly useful for the examination of the coexistence 
of different ideologies within a single novel (59). In Bakhtin’s opinion, a truly 
dialogic novel values the various voices equally; a novel in which “not a single one 
of the ideas of the heroes – neither of ‘negative’ nor ‘positive’ heroes – becomes a 
principle of authorial representation” (25).
The interplay of diverse semantic positions (ideological positions) through 
plot developments and interactions produces a dialogue that contributes to the 
overall meaning of the novel, and this strategy also lies at the heart of Smith’s 
Spring. Although Spring forms its discussion of the theme of art and the dialogue 
between postmodern and metamodern sensibilities through just three main voic-
es, the novel bears clear signs of, what Bakhtin calls “a genuine polyphony of fully 
valid voices” (Bakhtin 6, original italics). These major dialogical interactions are 
developed in the passages in which Richard discusses his new film project with 
his former colleague and mentor Paddy or his new colleague Martin Terp. Pad-
dy plays the important role of mentor to Richard; over the many years of their 
collaboration, her opinions have done much to shape Richard’s perception of 
art and its role in the post-war society during many years of their collaboration, 
and therefore his semantic position is given more space in the novel than Martin 
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8 Frederika Pekarčíková, Soňa Šnircová
Terp’s. From Richard’s numerous memories and references to the films that he 
has coproduced with Paddy, the reader is left with the clear impression that these 
films represent Paddy’s artistic vision of the world, one which is marked by a 
specific postmodern sensibility. Her films explore and deconstruct dominant dis-
courses and use experimental techniques to reveal their roles in the construction 
of various socio-historical perspectives. As Richard recalls, the films were created 
at “a time when anything progressive on TV was quite often thought to be a kind 
of sin” (237), and their docudrama format was out of step with mainstream taste: 
“Sea of Troubles caught the first voicings of what would become the Northern Irish 
peace movement, and Andy Hoffnug was one of the earliest UK TV drama productions 
to take the first steps towards articulating what had happened to people three decades 
earlier in the Holocaust” (57-58, original italics). These docudramas were intended 
to cast doubt on official historical narratives and relied on typical postmodern ex-
perimentation with language, image and representation. Andy Hoffnug “told the 
story by not telling it”, revealing the tragedy of the Second World War through 
images of empty, deserted, bombed streets in London (61), while the Sea of Trou-
bles relied on postmodern fragmentation: “they’d made the camera move as the 
human eye moves among real people, via fragments of the life of the real places 
they lived” (58). 
Paddy is a well-educated woman who enjoys passionate discussions about pol-
itics, Brexit, Donald Trump’s presidency and other issues that enrage her (69); 
she is fully conscious of the close connection between what we perceive as reality 
and the narratives that we use to make sense of it: “[t]here’s a difference between 
narrative strategy and reality, but they’re symbiotic, she said to him [Richard] one 
day in the 1970s …The sentence Paddy had just uttered had something to do with 
the sentencing of the Maguires” (63). Paddy is referring to the Maguire Seven, 
the six men and one woman who were wrongly convicted of involvement in the 
Guildford pub bombings of 1974 (Ewing & McCann, 48), a key event in the 
history of the Troubles. Paddy is suggesting that the interpretation of this event 
is determined by the side of the conflict that holds control over the official nar-
rative, and opinions like these and the character of the films that she has created 
reveal that Paddy represents a semantic position related to high postmodernism 
with its focus on the political element in art, on art’s discursive and contextual 
implications and an appreciation of art that reflects an awareness of various the-
oretical discussions about discursive constructions of reality. In contrast, Martin 
Terp is depicted as holding a position more related to low postmodern trends as 
is reflected in the superficial plays with styles and images that focus solely on the 
entertaining and commercial function of art. 
These two positions are placed into a dialogical clash with Richard’s position 
when he develops his own idea of how to frame his new project, a film based on 
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9Art, Nature and Politics in Spring
“the novel about the two writers [Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke] 
who happen by coincidence both to live in and around the same small Swiss town 
in 1922 but don’t ever meet each other” (Smith 33). Promising “an escape from an 
era of Brexit” into the nostalgic “idyll of piece and quite”, the novel seems to apply 
to Richard’s desire for art which focuses on the things that Paddy’s docudramas 
clearly did not deem sufficiently important: 
I quite liked it [the original novel]. Two people live quiet writerly lives and pass 
each other sometimes in a hotel corridor. One’s finishing a life’s work, though 
she doesn’t know it. She’s ill… The other writer… Rilke… finished a life’s work 
earlier that year, Richard says, he’s exhausted… the place is empty, the hotel as 
well as the town, and sometimes the two writers end up sitting not far from 
each other in the same dining room. Sometimes they walk past each other in 
the hotel gardens, and the novel goes on at some length about the mountains 
above them and them below, etc just, you know, living their lives with all that 
grandeur of the Alps as their backdrop. And what happens? Paddy says. I just 
told you the whole plot, he says. (34)
Richard’s description indicates his focus on the novel’s universal themes – the 
figure of artist as they near the end of their (creative) life, the sublime eternal pres-
ence of nature vs. the transitoriness of human existence – and also on its aesthetic 
effects that he aims to preserve in the film adaptation. Both Paddy and Martin 
Terp criticise Richard’s vision, with Paddy accusing him of escapism and Mar-
tin pointing out its lack of appeal to mainstream audiences. Paddy is also quick 
to point out some important events that formed the wider historical and social 
contexts of the two artists’ lives, suggesting that the incorporation of these themes 
into the film would create added value and contemporary relevance: “1922, the 
killing of Michael Collins, she says…Think about it, Paddy says. Ireland in uproar. 
Brand new union. Brand new border. Brand new ancient Irish civil unrest. Don’t 
tell me this isn’t relevant all over again in its brand new same old way” (41). She 
also believes that the film would benefit from a discussion of Mussolini’s path to 
power (ibid.), the rivalry between the British and German Empires (43) or the 
rise of fascism and despotism (ibid.), drawing a connection between the ordinary 
daily lives and problems of the two writers and the political instability and turmoil 
of the interwar years in Europe while criticizing the British inability to learn from 
its past. By declaring that these issues are “relevant all over again”, Paddy shows 
that her position matches that of postmodern artists who “recognize the need for 
an ethical examination of the material condition, and social well being of a post-
modern world” (Koscianski 80).
Terp, on the other hand, recommends taking a more superficial, soap opera 
approach to the source material by incorporating a largely fabricated plot. He 
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10 Frederika Pekarčíková, Soňa Šnircová
intends to fill the film with scenes that would generate instantaneous and fleeting 
emotional responses at the expense of deeper characterisation and reflections of 
the reality which lay behind the screen. As Richard informs Paddy, “Martin Terp 
has already handed in a series of draft sex scenes” (35) that would depict fictitious 
encounters between Mansfield and Rilke with the sole purpose of attracting a 
mass audience that perceive sexual content as an essential of the entertainment 
industry. This reliance on play with attractive images that have no connection with 
the true reality of the famous authors’ lives is rejected as ridiculous by both Paddy 
and Richard: 
Sex scenes? Paddy says… In his [Rilke’s] tower, in her [Mansfield’s] hotel room, 
in various other hotel beds including her friend’s bed, there’s a bit of lesbian 
interest too, and – wait, I’m not finished – in the hotel’s gardens in a little grotto 
where a string quartet usually plays, in the hotel corridor wrapped in a curtain 
behind a pot plant, and in the hotel’s billiard room on the billiard table, the balls 
go everywhere. Comedy fuck, he says. Paddy laughs out loud. I’m not laughing 
at the comedy fuck, she says. I’m laughing because it’s not just laughable, it’s 
impossible. For one thing, Mansfield had fully-developed TB by 1922. (36)
What seems to be being addressed here critically is the “depthlessness” that 
Frederic Jameson perceives as one of the “constitutive features of the postmod-
ern” reflected in the “culture of the image or the simulacrum”, a concept which is 
associated with the “weakening of historicity” (6). As Vermeulen (“The New”) 
explains in his discussion of Jameson’s ideas, the depthlessness of the postmodern 
art can be illustrated by, for example, Warhol’s Pop Art image of Diamond Dust 
Shoes that “articulate[s] no clues about the affections, localities, or histories be-
hind it” (9). Both Jameson and Vermeulen examine the same works of visual arts 
to underline the difference between modern and postmodern approaches to the 
representation of reality. Vincent van Gogh’s modern work A Pair of Boots (1887) 
reflects depth in the sense that it “intimates a lived context outside the painting 
– the artist’s state of mind, for instance, or the ‘brutal’… reality of the farmer” 
(Vermeulen “Metamodern Depth” 147). In contrast, Andy Warhol’s postmod-
ern photo print Diamond Dust Shoes (1980) offers the viewer little opportunity 
to delve into the deeper social, cultural or psychological realities beyond its sur-
face: “Van Gogh’s painting pulls the viewer into the world it depicts, extends our 
gaze beyond the paint, behind the canvas. Warhol’s print, by contrast, pushes us 
back, cuts short the ‘hermeneutic gesture’ to suggest, as the artist would later him-
self explain, that ‘there is nothing behind it’” (Vermeulen “Metamodern Depth” 
148). Terp’s version of the film about Mansfield and Rilke can be seen as equally 
depthless since without giving relevant clues about the historical contexts of their 
lives or some deeper insights into the nature of their art, it reduces the historical 
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11Art, Nature and Politics in Spring
figures to actors in sex scenes and thus treats them as little more than conveyors 
of superficial emotions. In Terp’s artistic vision, thematic development, deeper 
characterisation and contextual depth are to be replaced with titillating images 
that will bombard audiences with fleeting stimuli and prevent them from forging 
a deeper emotional response to the film. Martin Terp’s position is also reflected 
in his earlier project, a website “where he’d created and displayed the obituaries of 
people who’d never existed” (100) and thus lied “about life, about the deaths, and 
about emotional connection” (101). The “artistic” strategies that Terp adopts in his 
projects, his focus on perfectly devised simulacra of emotions and the commodi-
fication of sex suggest that he can be seen as a personification of the postmodern 
sensibility that, as Bran Nicol claims, replaces genuine emotion with brief and 
transitory sensation (185).  
The dialogical clash between Terp and Richard can thus be conceived as a 
clash between two artistic visions and two ideological positions. In voicing his 
disagreement with Terp, Richard outlines a very different approach to the artistic 
representation of reality:
If I’m to direct this project, I want us to go about this story quite another way…I’m 
going to insist that if you want to work with me we approach this project differently 
and start over with a new script. Re this new script: I see it shaped formally as like 
a series of postcards from these writer’ lives. By which I mean depiction of very slight 
moments from their lives that will act as revelations of depth. This I think is more in 
keeping with the spirit of the book we are adapting. (96-97, original italics)
This vision comes close to Vermeleun’s concept of “new depthiness” that he dis-
cerns in metamodern art. Vermeulen (“The New”) points out the difference be-
tween modern art’s attempt to convey the sense of depth (or reality) behind the 
text and postmodern art that has been defined by its “depthlessness” and its focus 
on superficiality, in particular the postmodern tendency for wordplay and games 
with language. In order to clarify his concept of depthiness, Vermeulen devises a 
metaphor employing the figures of a snorkeler, a diver and a surfer. While “the 
diver moves towards a shipwreck or a coral reef in the depths of the ocean, and 
the surfer moves with the flow of the waves, the snorkeler swims toward a school 
of fish whilst drifting with the surface currents” (8). In other words, while modern 
art attempted to examine the depths of human experience and postmodern art 
coasted on the surface, interested only in language, the metamodern snorkeler 
struggles to reach the depths which will forever lie just beyond their grasp. The 
metaphor implies the audiences of metamodern are caught in a similar position; 
the work of art encourages them to imagine the depth beyond the textual sur-
face of the work but denies them the means of transcending this superficiality. 
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12 Frederika Pekarčíková, Soňa Šnircová
In Vermeleun’s understanding, depthiness indicates the “performative reappraisal” 
(“The New” 8) of the depth whose representation postmodernism has abandoned. 
Although Richard, shaped by Paddy’s postmodern vision of the relation between 
reality and its textual representations in multiplicity of narratives, is sceptical of 
the possibility of creating a film which would provide an objective reflection of 
Mansfield’s and Rilke’s lives, he nonetheless wants to suggest to the viewers of his 
film that there is indeed a reality that has inspired the novel and its adaptation. 
The sense of the real lives of the historical figures, the sense of historical depth 
beyond the surface of the film is to be constructed with the help of a form that still 
represents some degree of postmodern fragmentation – the film will employ post-
cards that capture isolated scenes from the writers’ lives, “slight moments” which, 
although they might seem initially insignificant, will imply the psychological, his-
torical and affective depth of their lives. Richard’s attempt to construct a sense of 
depth is also reflected in his intention to focus, with the help of the writers’ diaries, 
on actual events rather than on fictitious sexual encounters. He wants to stress the 
significance of fleeting moments and small details from their lives, like the fact 
that a postcard “pinned on the wall [by Rilke’s lover]” inspired the writing of some 
of his great poems: 
A postcard meant that all those great poems somehow got themselves written. The 
slightness of it gestures against the odds. It is like a magic spell. And this in itself is 
very like the fact of those writers just living in the same place at the same time in 
their lives, whether they met or not. This is the kind of coincidence that sends electric-
ity through the truths of our lives. Our lives which often have what we might call a 
postcard nature. (99, original italics)
Richard yearns for art that can draw our attention to the “magic moments” in 
our fragmented lives and that possesses the power to enchant us. His voice thus 
represents the semantic position that emphasizes the aesthetic and transformative 
roles of art, a fact that provides further connections between his voice and the 
metamodern sensibility that Vermeulen and van den Akker have identified in 
contemporary art. 
ART, NATURE AND TACITA DEAN – THE NEOROMANTIC 
ASPECTS OF METAMODERN SENSIBILITY 
Metamodernism has been defined by van den Akker and Vermeulen as “a struc-
ture of feeling that emerged in the 2000s” in western cultural productions (4). 
Drawing on Raymond Williams’ earlier definition of the “structure of feeling”, 
they see it as “a sensibility, a sentiment that is so pervasive as to call it structural” 
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13Art, Nature and Politics in Spring
(6); it is a sensibility that “everyone shares, that everyone is aware of, but which 
cannot easily, if at all, be pinned down. Its tenor, however, can be traced in art, 
which has the capability to express common experience of a time and place” (7). In 
their seminal article “Notes on Metamodernism” (2010), Vermeulen and van den 
Akker introduced the fundamental aspects of metamodern sensibility that they 
perceived in films and visual arts of the period. They argued that numerous con-
temporary artists had replaced postmodern scepticism and irony with a revived 
sense of optimism, utopianism and hopefulness that connects their works more 
with modern than postmodern visions of the world. 
As Vermeulen and van den Akker emphasize, “metamodernism appears to 
find its clearest expression in an emergent neoromantic sensibility” (8), a concept 
which is particularly apparent in, for example, the works of Romantic Concep-
tualists.1 “Romantic Conceptualist efforts to present the ordinary with mystery 
and the familiar with the seemliness of the unfamiliar” (7) are seen as signs of 
oscillation between opposite poles. The authors make reference to Isaiah Berlin’s 
study The Roots of Romanticism (2000) to argue that oscillation is a key element of 
the Romantic sensibility. Berlin characterises the 18th-century movement above 
all through its concern with “beauty and ugliness. It is art for art’s sake, and art as 
an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and 
collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of 
life and love of death” (18). In Spring, Richard’s search for his own artistic vision 
not only features an oscillation between the perception of art as an instrument of 
social salvation and art as a source of aesthetic experience but also incorporates 
some other important features of the neoromantic attitude. 
The neoromantic sensibility that can be found in Richard’s semantic position 
is particularly evident in his encounters with and responses to the art of Tacita 
Dean, one of the most widely exhibited and acclaimed artists of the contemporary 
era (Eakin para. 7). The curator Jörg Heiser included Tacita Dean’s artworks in 
a 2007 exhibition titled Romantic Conceptualism; his concept for the exhibition 
defined “Romantic Conceptualism” as an art movement that reveals “some in-
teresting parallels between the German Romantics of the early nineteenth cen-
tury and artists working in the realm of international conceptualism” (“Moscow, 
Romantic”, 1). He argued that some contemporary artists resolve the tension 
1 As Vermeulen and van den Akker explain, the term “Romantic Conceptualism” was coined by 
the cultural critic Jörg Heiser who “argues that that the rational, calculated conceptual art of Jeff 
Koons, Thomas Demand, and Cindy Sherman is increasingly replaced with the affective and often 
sentimental abstractions of Tacita Dean, Didier Courbot, and Mona Hatoum. Where Demand 
reproduces the most concrete simulacra, Dean creates affective illusions that can never materialize. 
Where Koons obsesses over the obscene, Courbot is concerned with the increasingly obsolete. And 
whereas Sherman criticizes subjectivity, Hatoum celebrates the felt heterogeneity of identity” (7).
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14 Frederika Pekarčíková, Soňa Šnircová
between the Romantic and the conceptual by simply combining the cerebral and 
emotional aspects and sentiments of these two disparate art movements (“Emo-
tional Rescue” para. 12). Eva Scharrer adds that certain artists can truly be said to 
breach “the ratio of the conceptual with aspects of the autobiographical, emotion-
al, irrational, poetic, and even sentimental” (para. 1, original emphasis). Vermeulen 
and van den Akker also mention Tacita Dean in their article on metamodernism, 
suggesting that her works provide an illustrative example of the metamodern os-
cillation between modern and postmodern tendencies in art. For example, her 
major work The Montafon Letter combines strong Romantic tendencies (such as 
the representation of the sublime that plays an important role in Richard’s story) 
with elements of postmodern conceptualism that draw attention to the political 
contexts of post-Brexit Britain. As Jonathan Griffin explains:
As with many of Dean’s drawings, its [The Montafon Letter’s] surface incor-
porates hand-written notes (intended to be largely indecipherable) some of 
which relate to the anecdote that inspired the title: a sequence of avalanches 
in 17th-century Austria that buried some people, then buried the priest who 
went to officiate at the site of the burial, then – finally – unburied the priest, still 
alive. Dean says in some ways it’s about Brexit, which she finds devastating, and 
about hope – “hope that the last avalanche will uncover us”. (para. 9) 
Dean’s artwork evokes the Romantic concern with nature and the sublime but 
at the same time it suggests other intertextual meanings that connect a series of 
natural disasters from the 17th century and the more recent political “avalanche” 
of Brexit. It makes allusions to the “devastating” consequences of Britain’s with-
drawal from the European Union but refuses to succumb to hopelessness. Dean’s 
drawing opens up a Romantic imaginative space that evokes strong emotional 
reactions and also encourages the viewer to contemplate contemporary socio-po-
litical issues, creating for the viewer the possibility to oscillate between the two 
positions. 
Although Richard focuses only on the Romantic aspects of Dean’s pictures 
and overlooks their connections with conceptual art, his encounters with Dean’s 
art play an important role in his oscillation between political and purely aesthetic 
perceptions of art. While his earlier involvement in the production of postmodern 
docudramas is indicative of his interest in art as an instrument of social salvation, 
his perception and reception of Dean’s visual art during a visit to a gallery reveals 
his appreciation of the aesthetic and the transcendental in art:
The gallery room he went into smelled brand new and was largely hung with 
pictures of clouds. They’d been done in white chalk on black slate. But the thing 
that stopped him in his tracks in this room was that one whole wall, also chalk 
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15Art, Nature and Politics in Spring
and slate, was a mountain picture so huge that the wall became mountain and 
the mountain became a kind of wall. There was an avalanche coming down 
the mountain picture towards anyone looking at it, an avalanche that had been 
stilled for just that moment so that whoever saw it had time to comprehend 
it. Above the mountain peaks the sky was a black so dark it was like a new 
definition of blackness. As he stood there, what he was looking at stopped be-
ing chalk on slate, stopped being a picture of mountain. It became something 
terrible, seen. (78)
The Montafon Letter that affects Richard so powerfully is clearly referencing some 
famous works of Romantic landscape painting, such as Philip James de Louther-
bourg’s An Avalanche in the Alps or Joseph Turner’s The Fall of an Avalanche, im-
ages which, like Dean’s work, evince the aesthetics of the sublime, reflected in the 
contrast between the beauty of the wild landscape and the terror induced by the 
unstoppable force of nature. However, Richard’s powerful emotional response to 
Dean’s painting is derived less from the concepts that the picture may be attempt-
ing to represent and more from his perception of the picture as an image of the 
real; in Richard’s perspective, “a picture of a mountain” stops being a picture and 
becomes “something terrible, seen.” The avalanche becomes real to him; he sees it, 
experiences it, and is affected by it, suggesting for a brief moment that the work of 
art can summon the potential to function as a window to the real and threatening 
world within the safe walls of the gallery.
While his encounter with The Montafon Letter reveals the capacity of art to 
represent the sublime aspects of nature and produce the effects that nature can 
provoke in the real world (such as the terror evoked by a real life avalanche), some 
of Dean’s other works also examine the transformative effect which art can induce 
in its recipients:
But then he’d stepped back from the mountainscape and looked round that 
room again at the other things in it, and the pictures of clouds on the walls, 
done in the same materials as the mountain, had made something else happen, 
something he didn’t realize till later, till he’d left the room, come out of the 
gallery and on to the street. They’d made space to breathe possible, up against 
something breathtaking. After them, the real clouds above London looked dif-
ferent, like they were something you could read as breathing space. This made 
something happen too to the buildings bellow them, the traffic, the ways in 
which the roads intersected, the ways in which people were passing each other 
in the street, all of it part of a structure that didn’t know it was a structure, but 
was one all the same. (78-79)
Tacita Dean’s cloud drawings that affect Richard so strongly also reveal some 
important similarities with Romantic representations of nature, most notably the 
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16 Frederika Pekarčíková, Soňa Šnircová
cloud studies of Johann Georg von Dillis or John Constable. Again, the novel 
emphasises the transformative effects which art can exert on its recipients’ percep-
tions of the world; influenced by Dean’s artistic representations of clouds, Richard 
not only sees the actual clouds in the sky in a new light, suddenly awakened to 
their unique characteristics which can serve as “a breathing space”. However, the 
transformation is even more profound; the whole world around him begins to ap-
pear in a radically different, more alive manner, with its various elements, clouds, 
buildings, traffic, the movement of people, revealed as participating in a vast and 
interconnected structure. Richard’s encounters with Dean’s art in the gallery thus 
draw attention to the importance of the aesthetic function of art, suggesting that 
Dean’s representations of nature have opened up Richard’s capacity to feel a great-
er sensitivity to the beauty of nature in the real world.  
Richard’s encounters with real nature acquire special significance during his 
trip to Scotland. His perception of the wild Scottish landscape are reminiscent 
of his response to Dean’s pictures of nature, and he instinctively searches for the 
beauty that can allow him to draw aesthetic pleasure both from art and the nat-
ural world. His tendency to aestheticize reality is reflected clearly in his reaction 
to the Scottish mountains that seem to offer him a safe haven, a possibility of 
respite from the tragic or troubling aspects of his life: “Today they look like a line 
drawn freehand by a huge hand then shaded in below, they look like something 
asleep and waiting. They look like the prehistoric backs of imagined sleeping sea-
beasts” (15). The combination of the divinely beautiful (the mountains appear as 
a picture drawn by the hand of God) and the terrifying (they resemble a sleeping 
beast) produces the effect of the sublime that inspires almost a religious devotion 
in Richard, and he feels compelled to get off the train and enjoy their magnificent 
presence:
Some of those mountains over there have what looks like raincloud over their 
tops, like their tops are veiled. The cloud the other way, direction south he’d say, 
looks like a wall, a wall lit from behind. The cloud over the mountains, north, 
northeast, is mist. It’s why he’d got off the train here: the train had pulled to-
wards this station and there’d been something clean about the mountains, clean 
like swept clean. They had something about them that accepted the fact of 
themselves, demanded nothing. They just were. Sentimentalist. (14)
The descriptions of the mountains draped in cloud, the suggestion that they can 
provide a peaceful environment in which Richard can enjoy the healing effect of 
solitude and Richard’s emotional response to the place all make him appear as 
a Romantic character. It is even possible to discern a resemblance to the central 
figure of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), a seminal 
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17Art, Nature and Politics in Spring
Romantic painting that combines the representation of the sublime power of na-
ture and the motif of personal struggle. On the whole, Richard’s reactions to the 
images of nature in Dean’s pictures and to the reality of the Scottish landscape are 
suffused with a (neo)Romantic sensibility that is “characterized by an admiration 
of the sublime as that power in nature and art which inspires awe and deep emo-
tion” (Day 49-50).
Richard’s escape into the aesthetic perceptions of art and the world that ignore 
the political aspects of both is however interrupted by the appearance of Alda Lyon, 
a local woman whose vision of the Scottish mountains clashes sharply with Rich-
ard’s more romanticizing perception. During their car ride to a nearby town, Alda 
offers a corrective to Richard’s Romanticization and idealization of the Highlands: 
Far too mountainous for people to ever live here, Richard says. But then that’s 
what’s beautiful about the Highlands. It’s so beautifully deserted everywhere. 
He watches a flush going up the neck of Alda the coffee truck woman; it 
spreads up to her ear from under the collar of her jacket. No, this was a thriving 
busy place, she says. Quite definitely populated, much busier that it is now. Not 
that the Clearances made an impact here anything like how badly they did 
elsewhere in the north. (236)
Alda draws Richard’s attention to the historical and political contexts that have 
shaped the modern face of the Scottish Highlands and the lives of the region’s peo-
ple, implying that there are conflicts and terrifying aspects of human reality from 
which the beauty of nature offers no respite. Alda’s account of the reality of the 
Highlands and the new perspective on the more recent conflicts surrounding Brexit 
and the hostile reception of immigrants which Richard gains through his friendship 
with Florence, an immigrant girl, dissuade Richard from shifting from the highly 
political style of filmmaking he produced with Paddy towards an apolitical indul-
gence in the Romantic imagination. Inspired by Tacita Dean’s representations of 
the sublimity of nature and his own experience of the terrifying beauty of Scottish 
mountains, Richard initially planned to move away from postmodern docudramas 
concerned with the politics of everyday world in favour of art that addresses instead 
the aestheticization of reality and the universal issues that take people beyond the 
limits of the political (as in his concept for the Mansfield-Rilke project); nonethe-
less, the reality of everyday political life forces him to abandon this plan, preventing 
him from ignoring the more pressing issues of the contemporary world. 
At the end of the novel, Richard is already at work on a documentary titled A 
Thousand Thousand People (269) about a “solidarity project for a refugee support 
network” (131), with Richard interviewing members of the “countrywide net-
work” (270) called the Auld Alliance that has “so far helped 235 people escape or 
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18 Frederika Pekarčíková, Soňa Šnircová
outwit detention estate” (271). The documentary is attempting to identify positive 
solutions to the refugee crisis and is constructed as a focal point for various voices 
engaged in dialogical communication about the harsh reality facing immigrants 
and their struggles in contemporary British society. Alda, a member of the net-
work, has high hopes for both the Auld Alliance project and Richard’s documen-
tary, an attitude that Richard tries to share and support in his own work despite 
his personal doubts that the Auld Alliance project will ever bring about any sig-
nificant change. While conducting the interviews, Richard constantly inserts his 
own comments and questions that reveal his doubts. He refers to their goal as “a 
vicious circle” (272), “[a] pipe dream” (276), “[a] fairy story” (ibid.) whose large-
scale success is “not feasible” (273), revealing a tension between his desire to help 
those in need, the desire for empathy and a more effective approach to the world’s 
problems, and his awareness of the possibility that the project will ultimately be 
futile. In this sense Richard’s voice reflects an oscillation between “a modern en-
thusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naiveté 
and knowingness, empathy and apathy” (5-6) that Vermeleun and van den Akker 
place at the heart of metamodern sensibility.
In conclusion, as the paper’s discussion has shown, the third instalment of 
Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, Spring meets Bakhtin’s definition of a dialogic novel 
since it passes the theme of art through various voices that take distinct semantic 
positions. Paddy’s vision of political art, Martin Terp’s depthless, commercial art, 
Richard’s idea of art as the search for the universal, the beautiful and the transcen-
dental all coexist in the novel within the overall concept of metamodern art that 
oscillates between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony, between desire for 
the beautiful (in terms of relations among people) and the realization that the ugly 
realities of the contemporary world require the presence of a political perspective. 
The crucial presence of the metamodern in Spring is also supported by Tacita 
Dean’s voice, expressed in her works that play a major role in the development of 
Smith’s main character Richard. The combination of the conceptual and the (neo)
romantic that creates the essence of Dean’s pictures offers a possibility of tran-
scending the limits of both high and low trends in postmodern art; the possibility 
whose artistic exploration lies at the heart of Smith’s inspiring novel. 
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Frederika Pekarčíková
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice
frederika.pekarcikova@student.upjs.sk
Soňa Šnircová
Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Košice
sona.snircova@upjs.sk
Umetnost, narava in politika v Pomladi: metamodernistična senzibil-
nost v dialoškem romanu Ali Smith
Članek raziskuje tretji del dela Seasonal Quartet Ali Smith, ki je kompleksna pripoved in 
se dotika različnih pomembnih vprašanj vključno z vlogo umetnosti v sodobnem svetu. 
Avtorici članka uporabita pri svoji analizi dvoje teoretskih izhodišč, Bakhtinovo teorijo 
dialoškosti in študije metamodernizma.
Ključne besede: umetnost, narava, politika, postmodernizem, metamodernizem, dialog, 
Ali Smith 
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