Stories That Change the World: Ali Smith’s Ecological “Realityfiction”

Abstract

In his essay “Ecocomposition and the Greening of Identity,” Christian E. Weisser observes: “Our identities are always already ecological; we are who we are as a result of people, places, things, animals, and plants that have touched our lives. It is only for us to realize these connections and incorporate them into our discourse” (2001: 93). Like Jeanette Winterson’s, Ali Smith’s writing supports Linda Hutcheon’s point about textual form existing in relationship to “real life” and readers’ identities and choices: “A study of representation becomes not a study of mimetic mirroring or subjective projecting, but an exploration of the way in which narratives and images structure how we see ourselves and how we construct our notions of self” (Hutcheon 1989: 7).¹ Smith states emphatically: “Stories can change lives if we’re not careful. They will come in and take the shirts off our backs. Tell the right stories and we live better lives” (France 2005).