Not Dead Yet: Rescuing the Silent Voice of May Young in Ali Smith’s There but for the

Abstract

In line with the rest of Ali Smith’s fiction, There but for the intimately binds the aesthetic and the political, as shown in particular by its imaginative articulation of what gets to be spoken or written and what does not. Silence and invisibility form the core of the novel, as its main event consists in the puzzling behaviour of a man who disappears during a dinner party and locks himself up for months inside the guestroom of his hosts. His silence is matched by that of May Young, an old lady who lives between the four walls of a hospital and only speaks ‘within the confines of her head’. The question of why May Young’s voice matters and how it matters in the general economy of the novel is one way of approaching the central riddle of the book. May’s story seems to result from one main imperative: to rescue from silence a life made invisible. While the old lady may be considered by some as good as dead, her lively monologue proves rather the opposite. But while it rescues a voice from silence, the novel also rescues its silence—a silence which stands in sharp contrast with the loud vacuous dinner conversation during which Miles, the mystery man, absconds. May’s mute resistance, like Miles’s disappearance, bores a hole into the fabric of social so-called exchange, small talk riddled with deadly clichés. Silence becomes a productive force that compels us to listen rather than talk. Challenging the received notion of a ‘second childhood’, May’s monologue invites us to reflect instead on the value of ‘in-fancy’ and what Jean-François Lyotard calls our ‘debt to infancy’. May’s silent voice can be the name for an idiom that manages to weave together the spoken and the unspoken and to resist both the threat (or temptation) of absolute silence and the deafness of self-sufficient discourse.

Keywords

• Ali Smith
• There but for the
• silence
• voice
• infancy