CINEMATIC NARRATION AND THE MELANGE OF GENRE IN THE ACCIDENTAL BY ALI SMITH

The contemporary novel has showed unsuspected resources of adaptability and one of the secrets behind its vigorous rebirth has been the ability to renew its language through the proliferation of narrative modes. A cumulative, pliant spirit has extended the novel's boundaries, and the modes of reportage, journalism and the documentary have been subsumed. The meshing of popular sub-genres, the commingling of different narrative strategies, from memoir to diary to the epistolary, in their electronic as well as in their traditional versions, have enlarged the range of its possibilities, emphasizing at the same time its parodic strain. The novel has borrowed such a wide spread of styles, techniques and registers from other forms of art and communication that poetry, music, film, television, computer and even the cell phone may now appear all conflated in its vocabulary. Ali Smith's award-winning novel The Accidental (2005) provides a good example of this plural, flexible, heterogeneous, intertwined nature.