“Somewhere here there was a story”: any time concept and sensitive micro-events in Hotel World, by Ali Smith

Abstract

It presents a reading of the novel Hotel World (2001), by the contemporary Scottish writer Ali Smith, in which I inquire about the articulations between aesthetics and politics based on the notions of any moment and sensitive micro-events by Jacques Rancière. The hypothesis is guided by the suspicion that Smith doesn’t exactly build a narrative, but an exercise of fabulation that links “almost-stories” that don’t follow the five main characters, flowing from their subjectivities, perception, in a progressive non-linear time guided by coexistences. I observe that, with the change in narrative focus from a chapter to another, the language also changes, following the minimal movements of these ordinary women, revealing the potencial to affront time, space and power of neoliberalism, represented by the Global Hotel.