How to be both is obsessed with sight – viewing and re-viewing, watching and being watched, seeing two things simultaneously, and not seeing something that claims to be there. This section will ask how Smith’s novel simulates – i.e., shares the same subprocesses – of affect theory.[2] The novel’s varying optical strategies pressurize the linearity of time and offer new ways of seeing into the present. It has two parts: one follows teenager George as she comes to terms with the recent death of her mother; the other follows Italian Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa. Smith joins George and Francesco’s narratives – which occur 400 years apart – through a portrait of ‘Saint Lucy’; Francesco’s painting asks how seeing works, who sees, what seeing something differently can mean, and how re-vision can access transcendental forms of knowledge. It paints the optical complexities of the novel.

The way that an object is perceived alters its orientation within and towards time. Split into two parts, both titled ‘One’, Smith’s novel is published in two different forms, with readers possessing an equal chance of encountering George or Francesco’s narratives first. This, as Madeleine Gray points out, ‘invites readers […] to continually consider how the meaning they intuit might have been different had they started from a different perspective’.[3] Publication thus performs what Rita Felski describes as ‘the text’s status as a coactor: as something that makes a difference, that helps make things happen’.[4] The rotatable structure of Smith’s novel brings into view literature’s ability to form and re-form a reality through differently coordinated modes of vision. Smith, like Raymond Williams in his ‘Structures’, refuses ‘the immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products’.[5] Even in the final stage of her novel’s publication, the flexibility of narrative is coded into How to be both’s textual dissemination. As Francesco puts it: ‘Nothing is finished or unchangeable except death and even death will bend a little if what you tell of it is told right’.[6]

Smith’s characters repeatedly resist the linear logic of time; George and Francesco both believe that people and events never truly finish: they can be bent, retold. The content of Smith’s novel, then, registers its broader formal aspirations to bend and retell the time, and thus uncover new ways of thinking about experience as fluid rather than fixed. New ways of telling create new ways of seeing, which in turn orient us towards the present in new ways. How to be both,therefore, becomes what Currie suggests is a space where ‘new experience[s] of time [can be] rehearsed, developed and expressed’.[7] These new experiences are negotiated within How to be both. Francesco and her mother’s discussion of a ripple in a puddle is one such rehearsal:

Smith brings Ngai’s ‘subjective-objective problematic’ (the confusion of boundaries fundamental to an affective space) into view. In the novel, the boundaries between Francesco, her mother, and the ripple are reconsidered. Three modes of vision map this space, thus engaging with the problematic. Firstly, conventional vision: Francesco cannot see the ripple (‘It’s gone’). Secondly, re-vision: her mother argues that invisibility doesn’t equate to non-existence (‘It hasn’t gone’); this, in turn, shifts feeling: Francesco’s ‘crying’ is replaced with being ‘lucky’. Thirdly, imagination: the ripple can now be felt through the observable objects – from the ‘brickpiles’ of the ‘yard’ to the ‘sea’. The mind becomes open to the possibility of a continuous ripple through new ways of seeing. The reported, completed moment of a ripple that is ‘gone’ is re-viewed as a formative, unending process; immediacy and infinity become interchangeable through Francesco’s mother’s challenge to conventional vision.

Like the ripple in Francesco’s narrative, Smith offers another educative moment between mother and daughter in George’s narrative. A scene where George and her mother both look at an Italian castle wall uses changing optical modes to challenge the linearity of time:

Like Francesco’s ripple, different forms of seeing access different temporal understandings of an occurrence. George’s mother’s challenge to distinguish between what and how something is seen provokes this visual reorientation, which in turn, reconsiders the temporality of the wall. Beyond the ‘what’ of an object, she questions the ‘how’ – the process – of that object. By pressurising the difference between a fixed form of seeing and the process underlying this seeing, George’s mother asks how the present moment can be ‘made and unmade both’ through new optical and temporal strategies.[10] She searches for ways of seeing which, through spotting infinite connections, bring the linear sequencing of history to bear on the present moment.

Multiple optical and temporal stances communicate what it is to feel present in Smith’s novel. George’s visit to the Palazzo Schifanoia is one example. Through a description of Francesco’s fresco, Smith, like affect theory, asks what structures underpin George’s experience of seeing:

Smith’s grammar, like Williams’s structures of feeling, reaches for a total view through conjunctive and disjunctive strategies. Smith’s connectives (‘and’, ‘both […] and’, ‘also’) seek to join her altered verbal phrases (‘happen’, ‘continue happening’, ‘all happening’). Grammar becomes an optical strategy. That is to say: Smith’s sentences present separate ideas beside one another. Seeing is not about sight alone but the language which informs subjectivity and objectivity. Here, the artwork lies not at the edge of semantic, but grammatical, availability. For George, the necessary words are available to describe what she sees; her difficulty lies in forming a sentence with those words – expressing how she sees. Like the fresco, Smith’s novel asks its reader to ‘look at both’.

These three moments of re-viewing in the novel – of looking at both – have traction in the everyday; such an approach can be brought to individual experience in ways that might be more explicitly political. One of the novel’s most conscious examples of a political re-vision occurs between George and the porn video of the girl in the ‘yurt-like room’ who looked ‘about twelve’. It is a video that, once watched:

Smith makes metaphysical a shift in mood. The altered structures of the body – and therefore the way George inhabits her body – redistribute the relations between George’s interior and exterior world. In this subjective-objective problematic, George undertakes a mission visually to repair the relationship between the girl and her viewer:

Reparative reading, to use Sedgwick’s phrase, becomes reparative seeing.[14] Impelled by the ‘the goal of making, which is the same as looking, which is the same as remaking’ (Gray), George insists that a shift in ‘watching’ can redistribute relationships within the subjective-objective problematic – where George, the video, and the girl can enter a shared space of acknowledgement.[15] George recontextualises the girl – not only through the temporal strategy of watching her ‘over and over again’ – but through her intervention in the collective crowd of ‘anyone’.

This act of reparative seeing does not empirically solve the exploitation that George witnesses. However, this is not to say that her visual attempt to repair the present moment is futile. Smith undertakes a similar, extended exercise of reparative seeing in her more recent novel, Spring (2019). The novel’s structuring combines right-wing headlines collected by twelve-year-old Florence (‘Now what we don’t want is Facts […] we want the people we call foreign to feel foreign’) with the narrative of migrant detention camp worker, Brittany – among other characters – thus bringing into stark view the dissonant treatment of migrants in Britain.[16] Throughout Spring, Smith asks how fractured modes of seeing might be repaired, however momentarily, by a multi-perspective text. Within the novel form, nuanced ideas about the political subject can be imagined and articulated, without necessarily being solved. Reading, then, is a covertly political exercise in its generation of multiple viewpoints and responses between character and book, book and reader. The novel’s form is its argument; Smith’s reader must negotiate multiple modes of seeing and map the links – if any – which connect them to an understanding of ‘now’. Like Spring, How to be both’s complex optics seek to restructure the present moment such that a more expansive understanding of the social and material functions of ‘now’ can be experienced.

[2] ‘Simulation’ is understood here as Susan Feagin understands it in Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 1996) pp. 84–5.

[3] Madeleine Gray, ‘Making Her Time (and Time Again): Feminist Phenomenology and Form in Recent British and Irish Fiction Written by Women’ Contemporary Women’s Writing, 14.1 (2020) pp. 66–83 (p. 70).

[4] Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) p. 12.

[5] Williams, p. 131.

[6] Ali Smith, How to be both [Both]. (London: Penguin, 2015) p. 281.

[7] Currie, p. 6.

[8] Both. pp. 204–205.

[9] Both, p. 104.

[10] Both, p. 372.

[11] Both, p. 53 [Emphasis added].

[12] Both, p. 35.

[13] Both, p. 38.

[14] Sedgwick, p. 123.

[15] Gray, p. 72.

[16] Ali Smith, Spring. (London: Penguin, 2019) p. 3.