Bottling the Imagination: Writing as Metamorphosis in Ali Smith'sGirl Meets Boy

Abstract

This article discusses ideas about creativity in the context of a recent work by Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy. It follows Pope in theorising a view of creativity that sees it as re-creation and demonstrates the extent to which the context in which Smith's novel is produced, as well as the acknowledged sources underlying it, helps to shape it as text. In examining the relationship between Smith's source texts and the target text she produces, it seeks to point to her creative capacity in re-imagining and re-working an ancient myth in a contemporary context. It focuses, in particular, on her embedded critique of the debasement and commercial packaging of language in marketing and advertising contexts and of a worldview that would see everything, including the imagination, as a commodity capable of being bottled and sold.

“Girl meets boy”: postcyborg ethics, individual identity and collective rights in the posthuman age

“…Ali Smith's Girl meets boy (2007) 1 is one of the contemporary rewritings of classical myths commissioned by Scottish publisher Canongate, aimed at providing old myths and legends with relevance in present day culture. As such, the novel has received critical attention as a queer retelling of Ovid's myth of Iphis and Ianthe (Ranger 2012;Mitchell 2013) and as a self-conscious reflection on the power of myths -ancient and contemporary alike -to construct reality (Doloughan 2010). Yet, this focus on the potential of myth-making and the creative reversal of Ovid's metamorphosis has led to the neglect of nearly one half of the novel, which will occupy a central place in this article.…”