‘Always try to welcome people into the home of your story’: Forms of hospitality in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet

This article analyses how hospitality emerges as a key issue in the four novels of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020), on different levels: thematically, linguistically, narratively and readerly. Firstly, hospitality is a recurring theme, as an act performed or not by institutions or individuals. Secondly, hospitality is present as a topic explicitly reflected upon as a linguistic act, an act of bridging different meanings and opening up the language. A third form in which hospitality emerges in the Seasonal Quartet is as a narrative practice, both through marked interventions of the narrator and through the open narrative structure. By constantly juxtaposing different texts and lives, Smith allows for very different voices to be heard. The reader is invited to actively make these voices resonate with one another, a process we would call training a fourth form of hospitality: readerly hospitality. Informed by notions of hospitality as theorized by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, but especially Paul Ricœur and Derek Attridge, in this article we analyse how Smith’s seasonal novels thematize, stage and perform hospitality, as well as reflect on it. We conclude that Smith endows the reader with the ethical responsibility to be hospitable: a responsibility to engage with and open up to the stories of others.