Resumen de Escaping “Dead Time”l: The Temporal Ethics of (Un-)Grievability in Ali Smith's The Accidental
Ali Smith’s The Accidental presents characters whose existences are stuck in time, foreclosing experience and therefore the emergence of grief. However, the members of the Smart family have their lives disrupted by the arrival of a stranger in their holiday home. This chapter proposes to take up Agamben’s notion of “dead time” and to analyse how it applies to the characters’ relations to temporality, enclosing them in a state of ungrievability where they can neither acknowledge their own grief nor that of others. The figure of metalepsis materialises the particularities of the causal link between temporality and grievability in the novel, because it performs an erasure of the past that precludes grief. However, the rest of the chapter will show how the performative practice of metalepsis is reconfigured through the intrusion of Amber, who reveals the instability of the characters’ frames of intelligibility, to use Butler’s concept. Through a transformation of the contexts in which it is applied, metalepsis takes on an ethical dimension that moves away from a systematic erasure of the past. It thus implements a disruption of causal relations allowing for the acknowledgement of the figure of the other and the avowal of his or her grievability.
