1In 1964, the Lacanian ethnologist Gustave Mannoni wrote an article on fetishism and its connection to belief titled “Je sais bien, mais quand même…,” discussing the Freudian concept of disavowal, a split state of mind in which a belief in something irrational is coupled with a simultaneous sense of knowing better. Sigmund Freud refers to disavowal, as a form of defence: if acknowledging a traumatising piece of reality risks destroying the subject, disavowal, as a mechanism, protects the psyche from having to deal with this reality and its destructive potential (Laplanche and Pontalis 595). Freud links disavowal to fetishism early on, since fetishism permits the subject to juxtapose two contradictory positions: the simultaneous denial and acknowledgment of something. Originally, for Freud, this “something” is what he calls “female castration” (Laplanche and Pontalis 596). In general, someone who disavows something has “retained” a belief but at the same time “also given it up” (Freud 154). In the case of Zadie Smith’s short story “The Lazy River,” the “something” that is retained/acknowledged but at the same time given up/denied, is the awareness that we are destroying our planet. A few years after Freud, G.M. Goshgarian translated Mannoni’s article into English and re-published it as “I know very well, but all the same…” (68). In the following article, I contend that Mannoni’s catchphrase puts into a nutshell what Smith’s narrator manages to perform with regard to the short story’s “acqueous imaginaries” (Neimanis 156). Its narrator carefully refrains from preaching or passing judgment and operates instead in the mode of quietly amused and alarmed confession, thus allowing readers to witness an only seemingly harmless state of lethargy.
- 1 All quotations preceded by “TLR” refer to the version published in Grand Union.
2Smith published “The Lazy River,” a text at the intersection of Brexlit and cli-fi, in The New Yorker in 2017 and subsequently included it into her collection of short fiction Grand Union, which came out two years later.1 Barbara Korte, in an edited volume that highlights the short story as “a genre with special aptness to engage with bordering(s) and limitations of all kinds,” juxtaposes Smith’s “Meet The President” and “The Embassy of Cambodia” with “The Lazy River,” identifying the latter as “an expression of post-Brexit despair” (22) and “post-Brexit resignation” (32). Mary Eagleton reads “The Lazy River” as a companion piece to Smith’s non-fictional “Fences: A Brexit Diary,” an essay that focuses on divisions that built up in British society over the thirty years leading up to the referendum, stressing the cultural labour which pronouns and metaphors perform to highlight these tensions, both in Smith’s fictional and non-fictional short forms. Like Korte, Marc Farrant categorises “The Lazy River,” with reference to Kristian Shaw, as “Brexlit.” Also, like Korte, he juxtaposes it with “The Embassy of Cambodia,” but adds a comparison with David Szalay’s novel All that Man Is. Farrant argues that the three texts he investigates exemplify a “mode of agonistic or illiberal imagining,” suggesting that this mode might be “what contemporary writers can offer to the wider and ongoing debate about populism in the public sphere” (490). Antonio Acosta Sánchez discusses “The Lazy River” in the context of human mobility, contrasting tourism and migration as forms of displacement that entail different conceptions of space, which have consequences for the construction of the cultural other. Barbara Barrow approaches “The Lazy River” from an environmental humanities angle, presenting it as a prime example for contemporary fiction that stages “ecological epiphanies” (123).
3In the following, I offer a reading of “The Lazy River” that draws on ecocriticism focused on water, including “critical ocean studies” (de Loughrey 242), while using the psychoanalytic concept of “disavowal,” as a critical lens. After introducing my object of analysis, I will unfold my argument by analysing three watery metaphors used in Smith’s story: the polytunnels, the sea, and the eponymous circular hotel pool, which sports an artificial current. My interpretation aims to substantiate this article’s central claim that the “The Lazy River” demonstrates some of the obstacles that lethargy produced by neoliberal commodification poses to our absorbing vital lessons of the “oceanic turn” (de Loughrey 242) and presents disavowal as a light, mildly ironic, and only seemingly harmless attitude.
4“The Lazy River” is set in an Andalusian resort that is heavily frequented by British tourists. On the level of plot, it describes the holidaymaker’s activities and delivers the personal reflections of the narrator, who is part of and identifies with this group. On the level of narration, two devices are prominent: an unusual narrator (who is, however, not unique in the context of Smith’s work), and the narrator’s attention to the use of metaphor. Although a homodiegetic, nameless, and non-gendered narrator, who largely uses the first-person plural and acts as a focaliser is relatively rare in literature, Smith has employed it before. That “The Embassy of Cambodia” (2014) shares this narrator-type with “The Lazy River” partly explains why several scholars juxtapose these two texts in their articles. In both stories, these “we”-narrators are unreliable, and in both stories their authority—as voices that legitimately speak “for” or “in the name of” one collective or another—is subverted. “The Embassy of Cambodia” undermines their legitimacy to represent others by having the narrator focalise events, even feelings, they cannot possibly witness or know about (Mieszkowski 119) and by having the narrator switch, at times, from first-person plural to first-person singular. The latter not only hints at possible fissures between the opinions of the individual and those shared by the collective but reveals that the “I” is only a self-appointed spokesperson for the “we” (Mieszkowski 118). Although Smith uses the latter narrative technique in “The Lazy River” as well, the undermining of authority works slightly differently here, namely as a signifier of disavowal.
5Unlike in “The Embassy of Cambodia,” not every use of the first-person plural in “The Lazy River” refers to the same collective: sometimes, it encompasses all British tourists in that specific hotel in Almería—“We’re submerged, all of us” (“TLR” 31)—, but at other times, it only denotes the majority of these tourists: “True, too, that most of us voted for Brexit” (35). And in a few cases, the “we” only encompasses the narrator and their sexual partner, possibly including their friends: “And now we strap our children into harnesses and watch them bounce up and down” (39). These discrete sets at least imply that differences of opinion between different collectives, in all of which the narrator participates, are possible, even when they are not explicitly voiced. Additionally, the narrator’s switching between the first-person plural and the first-person singular, leaves open the possibility that they might—on occasion—be holding two differing opinions (one individual, one as a member of a collective) simultaneously, while being fully aware of the contradiction. A sentence like “Not a soul among us has read the recent novel, set right here in Almería, nor do we have any intention of doing so” (34) simultaneously signals rejection of literature shared by the collective “we” and an awareness of it by the individual narrator (in this case, the recent novel is most likely Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk from 2016). Counter-intuitively, the smaller the “we” becomes the more effective it is as an invitation to readers with tourism-experience to identify with the narrator. Smith cleverly starts with the largest “we” (all British at the hotel) and excludes all other nationalities, but also all tourists who travel differently, who like to read rather than do sudokus, who like to eat locally, or who take in the cultural sites. The slightly smaller “we” (all the Brexit voters) “only” excludes all Brits who voted to “remain,” whereas the narrator and their circle of family/friends, an ever smaller “we,” are relatively easy to identify with, regardless of nationality or political position, at least for people who worry about the planet’s future.
6Yet, this last “we” never translates into a global one that could refer to all humans (as well as most animals) for whom, due to the environmental damage already done, in “2050 or so, according to the prophets— . . . time will run out” (“TLR” 40). Such an all-inclusive collective of “life forms that share a planet” is never evoked as an “imagined community” (Anderson). Instead, the story, which refrains from mentioning animals almost completely, stresses the differences between groups of humans, due to their privileges, rather than foregrounding any common fate they will share when “time runs out.” This emphasises that current social divisions—due to poverty, unequal distribution of resources, political conflict—outweigh potential future ones, even if the latter do turn out to be all-encompassing. Leaving the local Spanish population aside completely, “The Lazy River” contrasts the tourists with others who have come from elsewhere: the workers who have migrated across the Mediterranean to earn a living in agriculture (“the Africans who work here, alone or in pairs, riding their bicycles in the merciless sun, moving between the polytunnels” [34]); the hotel’s animators, who have migrated from Tunisia to work at the resort (“Rico and Rocco . . . have just finished their act and are packing up their boom box” [41]); Mariatou and Cynthia, who offer their hair plaiting services on the boardwalk; and with the two unnamed male labourers who clean the hotel pool after hours. There is no attempt to imagine any form of general human collective—not within the immediate vicinity of the hotel, never mind on a larger scale, as if people could leave the planet, once it is used up, just as tourists leave the hotel at the end of their holiday. A global “we” that might be needed to take action about climate change is, thus, so far beyond the horizon of the possible as to remain utopian. Yet the dominant water-related metaphors of “The Lazy River” point towards connection through evoking different kinds of cyclicality.
7Metaphors play a prominent role in “The Lazy River.” Not only does Smith’s short story contain a fair number of them, but its narrator keeps commenting on their presence (in life and literature), in a metafictional manner. In an interview with The New Yorker, Smith makes it clear that neither use of metaphor is coincidental. Discussing the genesis of “The Lazy River,” she comments: “Anyway, when I picked it up again, it had become this strange sort of fable and I found I didn’t want the metaphor on the inside. I wanted it on the outside—explicit. That’s been my experience of lazy rivers: they’re none too subtle” (“Tourists and Metaphors”). Leaving author-to-reader communication aside, even within the “The Lazy River” this lack of subtlety—obvious from the start—sets the tone:
We’re submerged, all of us. You, me, the children, our friends, their children, everybody else. Sometimes we get out: for lunch, to read or to tan, never for long. Then we all climb back into the metaphor. The Lazy River is a circle, it is wet, it has an artificial current. Even if you don’t move you will get somewhere and then return to wherever you started, and if we may speak of the depth of a metaphor, well, then it’s about three feet deep excepting a brief stretch at which point it rises to six feet four. Round and round we go. All life is in here, flowing. Flowing!” (“TLR” 31)
While in the twenty-first century “all life” apparently is no longer a river but (at least for the privileged) a ring-shaped pool the waters of which are moved “round and round” at controlled speed by a pump, it is still conceived as “flowing. Flowing!” For readers who make it through the story’s opening paragraph without having a “panta rhei”-association, the narrator drops Heraclitus’s name a few pages later (35). By literalising “the depth of a metaphor” to “about three feet,” the narrator also takes a so-called “dead” metaphor—one of these “conventional metaphoric expressions” (Müller 1) that have become all but imperceptible as metaphor—and revitalise it, to comic effect. At the same time, these metaphors alert readers to the fact that “The Lazy River,” as a text, is extremely conscious of its own literariness. This is confirmed as the story progresses to the bouncing-scene, where the narrator’s kids are strapped into trampoline-harnesses:
Life’s certainly an up-and-down, up-and-down sort of affair, although, for the children, the downs seem to come as a surprise—almost as a delight, being so outrageous, so difficult to believe—whereas for us . . . it’s the ups that have come to appear a little preposterous, hard to credit; they strike us as a cunning bit of misdirection, rarer than a blood-red moon. Speaking of which, that night there was a blood-red moon. Don’t look at me: southern Spain has the highest ratio of metaphor to reality of any place I’ve ever known. (“TLR” 39-40)
Any text that flaunts its metafictionality like this invites a close look at its dominant tropes. In the following, I will adopt a perspective inspired by the blue humanities to demonstrate that the three key metaphors of “Anthropocene water” (Neimanis 156) in “The Lazy River” are Smith’s tool of choice to expose disavowal as the dominant attitude that underpins the “slow violence” (Nixon) with which “we” keep destroying our habitats.
8While the eponymous Lazy River is the first metaphor that links circularity and water in Smith’s short story, it is not the only one. The greenhouses in the province of Almería that are colloquially dubbed the “sea of plastic,” or the “Costa del Polythene” that Smith’s narrator calls “polytunnels” (“TLR” 34), make this connection as well, albeit by linking different kinds of water to a different kind of circularity. In Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis argues that water, in general, “corresponds to our values, behaviours, and orientations in regard to this wet substance that saturates our lifeworld” (157), and it is my claim that the polytunnels in “The Lazy River” offer a perfect example of this.
9Europe’s largest greenhouse producing area is in Spain. A sizeable portion of it—about 40.000 hectares—is located roughly thirty kilometres southwest of Almería, on a plain called Campo de Dalías, where “The roofs of tens of thousands of closely packed plastic greenhouses form a blanket of mirrored light beaming into space” (Tremlett). Geographically speaking, the coastal plain that forms this region is “a semi-arid desert and the driest region in continental Europe” (Haddaway), and greenhouses use considerable amounts of water. How much exactly depends on the season and on whether produce is grown in soil or in substrate. It also varies, of course, according to what is grown. Cultivating tomatoes in Southern Spain, where they have a crop water requirement between 177 mm/day from September to March, and 276 mm/day from March to July (Gallardo et al. 111), is only possible thanks to desalinating sea water and combining drip irrigation with using artificial soil. This lucrative agricultural endeavour creates a considerable “water footprint,” a quantity that is made up of several components: the “blue WF,” the “green WF” and the “grey WF” (Egea et al. 2). The “blue water footprint” refers to surface water (i.e. the little rain that falls) and groundwater. The “green water footprint” is defined as “the amount of rainwater stored in the soil that is used in the evapotranspiration process” (2). By contrast to “blue” and “green” water, which are both produced by nature, “grey water” is “wastewater,” i.e. the result of human use of blue or green water. Since “grey water . . . may contain some impurities” and is “usually treated and discharged” (ASA/CSSA/SSSA), the “grey water footprint” designates the “volume of freshwater needed to dilute pollutants discharged into water bodies because of irrigation” (Egea et al. 2). Whereas groundwater used to supply most of what was needed for growing produce around Almería, massive expansion of the greenhouses in the last decade has led to deteriorating water quality and sinking groundwater levels: “The aquifers used to be important sources of drinking water, but now even wells dug 1 km deep bring back corrupted water” (Haddaway). Twenty years ago, Giles Tremlett—in a piece for The Guardian—already commented on the involvement of British supermarkets who, at the time, tended to keep quiet about how much of their fruit and vegetables were produced in Almería: “Tesco calls this ‘commercially sensitive information.’ But Rafael Losilla, editor of a local farming magazine, names Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s as valued customers. ‘Britain is the third-biggest export market after France and Germany,’ he says.” Neal Haddaway confirms that, two decades later, still “much of the produce in British supermarkets comes from a single Spanish region”—meaning Almería—, and stresses that “intensive agriculture” comes at a “heavy human and environmental cost,” which he details as follows: “Overexploitation of water resources, plastic and agrochemical pollution, the loss of native habitat, and modern slavery and inhumane working and living conditions of undocumented migrants are some of the key issues.” All of this information is hovering persistently in the background of “The Lazy River.”
10Based on the fact that France, Germany, and Britain are the three countries that import most from the Almería region, Smith could have opted for assigning responsibility everywhere it belongs. Instead, “The Lazy River” takes France and Germany out of the equation. It does so subtly, in a passage that, though still connected to food consumption, is not about polytunnel-products but describes the hotel clientele’s eating habits: “There is nobody French or German here to see us at the buffet, rejecting paella and swordfish in favour of sausages and chips” (“TLR” 33). It seems unlikely that mentioning the top two importer nations of Almería’s produce should be a complete coincidence. But even if that were the case, what remains is the zoom-in from European tourists in Southern Spain to British tourists in one specific hotel, which suggests that—in the historical moment between the Brexit vote and its implementation—Smith is most interested in the UK’s commercial connections (touristic and agricultural) to Andalusia. It does not seem random either, that the Brits at the buffet in “The Lazy River” eat “sausages and chips,” meaning that they precisely do not eat any fruit or vegetables, grown in the greenhouses around the corner, never mind any local dishes like “paella and swordfish.” In fact, the buffet sentence, apart from factoring out French and German involvement in Andalusia’s industries, not only foregrounds eating habits but ironically suggests that the Brits only eat Almería’s fruit and veg—of which they are the third-largest consumers—after these have been imported to UK supermarkets.
11Although Smith’s narrator suggests early on that the very condition of “being on holiday” frees tourists from any obligation to think critically about their responsibilities—environmental or otherwise—the plastic greenhouses cannot be ignored: “We will not be judged. The Lazy River is a nonjudgment zone. This does not mean, however, that we are blind. For we, too, saw the polytunnels—from the coach, on the way from the airport” (“TLR” 34). Following upon this observation, the zoom-in that had started with narrowing the perspective from “problematic European” to “problematic British consumption of Alméria-products” continues. Thus, further honing in on the narrator’s personal shopping habits occurs in a scene Barrow discusses as one of the “ecological epiphanies” (128) staged in Smith’s texts:
I leaned my head against the shuddering glass as in the fable of the burning bush, saw instead of the Africans a mirage. It was a vision of a little punnet of baby tomatoes, wrapped in plastic. Floating just outside my window, in the almost-desert, among the Moorish ruins. . . . And upon that punnet I saw a barcode, and just above that barcode was written PRODUCT OF SPAIN—ALMERÍA. The vision passed. (“TLR” 34, emphasis mine)
Thanks to the reference to the “burning bush” (Exodus 3.2), because of the “vision” that happens “in the almost-desert,” and due to the paratactical style (“And upon that punnet I saw a barcode, and just above that barcode was written…”), this passage reads like a Bible-pastiche. Barrow correctly points out that it “links human consumption to broader networks of exploitation,” although she reduces these to “exploited labor” (128). Barrow also draws attention to the fact that the barcode scene is one of the few moments in “The Lazy River” in which its narrator switches from first-person plural-narration into the first-person singular, which she reads as “suggesting that a momentary splitting-off from the collective ‘we’-mentality of the other hotel guests, is necessary in order to acknowledge this exploitation fully” (128). What becomes more visible through a blue humanities-approach is a type of exploitation that the barcode scene quoted above only implies, through the choice of “baby tomatoes,” namely that of unsustainable “aqua extractio” (de Loughrey 243, emphasis in original).
- 2 Technically, tomatoes—although eaten as vegetables—are berries, all of which have a very high blue (...)
- 3 Inés Oort Alonso mentions two problems: “Unmanaged agri-plastics have been found blocking riverbeds (...)
12Tomatoes are the vegetable2 that produces the largest blue WF by far (Sequeira). In other words, what appears to the narrator as a vision is the one product of Almería’s greenhouses that, due to its popularity, is most iconic for its problematically high consumption of ground water. Moreover, the barcode marks it primarily not as an edible plant but as a commodity: shipped, packaged, and ready for sale in a supermarket. The “little punnet of baby tomatoes, wrapped in plastic” additionally connects Almería’s real-life “shimmering sea of polythene” (Tremlett) to “The Lazy River” description of the Mediterranean and its “little islands of twisted plastic” (“TLR” 39). At the same time, the formulation at the end of the barcode scene—“The vision passed” (emphasis mine)—, foreshadows the later boardwalk scene, where the narrator’s family react to the polluted sea by ignoring it: “We pass it by” (“TLR” 39, emphasis mine). However, the barcode scene not only loops forward, but also back, this time using “vision” as an anchor word. Whereas the narrator first seems to favour “vision” in the positive sense (i.e. a revelation of profound truth through a single image), they come round to a more negative understanding of “vision” (i.e. a hallucination produced by an unhealthy or dehydrated mind, which will hopefully “pass”), by its end. What is lost to the narrator by ignoring their vision’s potential as an “ecological epiphany” (Barrow 128) is the insight that there is a direct and causal connection between high-impact agriculture and unsustainable consumer habits. Because the WF produced by cropping tomatoes in Almería “continuously from October to July” (Tremlett) by far exceeds what the cyclical “evapotranspiration process” (Egea et al. 2) can provide, consumers become complicit in this exploitative practice. Equally available through the “vision” could be an insight about pollution by agri-plastics that are washed into the sea (Alonso).3 While the image hovers, the “vision” represents the first part of the narrator’s disavowal, i.e. their “I know very well…,” although they never put this insight into words. When the images dissolves, its “passing” from the narrator’s vision represents the second part of the narrator’s disavowal’s, the “but all the same.” This, however, does not mean that insights are lost to the story’s readers as well. This is ensured by another narrative loop, since the baby-tomatoes are not only linked forward but also backwards: from “the vision passed” to “we passed it by” and from “the vision passed” to “vision” (“TLR” 34 and 39, emphases mine). As a result, Smith’s narrative loops not only actively draw readers’ attention to how the baby-tomatoes are problematically linked both to the water-cycle and the plastic-cycle, they also mark that these connections are disavowed by the narrator rather than completely unknown to them.
13Of all the watery metaphors in “The Lazy River,” the sea is the vehicle that carries the most depressing tenor. Additionally—and inversely proportional to its size—it is also the body of water least discussed in Smith’s short story. Whereas the hotel pool crops up all the time and occupies the most prominent positions (opening and ending), the Mediterranean is mentioned only twice and given just a few, if powerful, lines each time. The narrator’s first mention of the sea occurs when they and their family (possibly accompanied by their friends) leave the pool in the evening, to seek other amusements:
One of these entertainments is . . . the sea. But once you have entered the Lazy River . . . it is very hard to accept the sea: its abundant salt, its marine life, those little islands of twisted plastic. Not to mention its overfished depths, ever-warming temperature, and infinite horizons, reminders of death. We pass it by. (“TLR” 39)
To Smith’s tourists, the sea is uninteresting because it is neither entertaining nor attractive. In fact, most of its features, which the narrator finds “hard to accept,” signal danger and are potential dangers or causes of death: by high saline content (i.e. by swallowing sea water), by being stung, bitten, eaten (i.e. by dangerous sea creatures) or through loss of orientation and exposure (“infinite horizons”). The remaining features refer to ways in which the sea itself is being killed: through pollution, overfishing and using drag-nets (“depths”), and rising temperatures. This overdetermination of the sea as a space full of “reminders of death” in “The Lazy River” overwrites any positive association it might also have. Instead of registering as the origin of the first chemical building blocks from which life developed, the sea is full of pollutants. Instead of marine life being a source of wonder, delight, awe, or making connections between species, the short story’s only mention of animals depicts them as a threat.
14In the previous section, I already touched upon Smith’s narrative looping to the boardwalk scene: “the vision passed”; “We pass it by” (“TLR” 34; 39, emphases mine). It happens again, when the phrase “those little islands of twisted plastic” (“TLR” 39, emphasis mine) loops back to the plastic cycle first evoked by the “punnet of baby-tomatoes wrapped in plastic” (“TLR” 34), strengthening the signifier of complicity between consumer practices and the interference in the water/plastic cycle. Moreover, the closing words of the boardwalk scene carry yet another of the narrator’s (and their partner’s and possibly their friends’) disavowals; one that regards the state of the sea. On the one hand, “We pass it by” denotes their writing off the sea as ignorable and therefore irrelevant. It also signals a complete failure to achieve even a little bit of what Karin Amimoto Ingersoll calls “oceanic literacy” (79). Clearly, the Mediterranean neither forms part of the tourists’ “aqueous imaginaries” (Neimanis 155), which are completely dominated by the Lazy River, nor is it related, for them, to the wider network that connects seas and oceans. Furthermore, since none of Smith’s characters engages with the “seascape” as a space of potential immersion, none ever even comes close to forming an “ocean-body assemblage” (109). On the other hand, it is also clear to the narrator that none of the problems they list in describing the sea are going to go away, simply because they are ignored. “We pass it by,” therefore, is more than simple dismissal; it is the equivalent of “but all the same…,” which complements the “I know very well” that materialises in the many associations of the Mediterranean with death. Together, they form a signifier of disavowal that keeps haunting the narrator.
15This haunting is manifest in the fact that the tourists’ non-engagement with the sea forms the backdrop of the “entertainment” offered by the trampolines on which the children happily bounce “up and down on the metaphor, up and down, up and down” (“TLR” 39) for a while, and that their movement is connected back, by yet another narrative loop, to death. This time, Smith’s anchor for the loop is the notion of “time running out.” The first time the narrator uses the phrase it is in a literal sense, when the trampoline operators stop the kids’ bouncing, once the period for which the parents had paid has elapsed; the second time, the phrase is used figuratively:
Then the time ran out. The children were enraged, not understanding yet about time running out, kicking and scratching us as we unstrapped them from their harnesses. But we . . . accepted their rage, took it into our bodies . . . as a substitute for the true outrage, which of course they do not yet know, because we have not yet told them . . . . In truth there is never a good moment. One day they will open a paper or a web page and read for themselves about the year—2050 or so, according to the prophets—when the time will run out. A year when they will be no older than we are now. Not everything goes round and round. Some things go up and— (“TLR” 40)
Time running out—for all humanity, possibly for all life on the planet, because we will have used up all available resources—links back to the sea as yet another body of “anthropocene water” (Neimanis 156), because its “death” foreshadows what is to come for all.
- 4 Thermohaline circulation moves warmer/less salty water from the surface and colder/more salty and n (...)
- 5 Wind-driven surface currents move warmer/less salty water from around the equator to the poles and (...)
16Metaphorically speaking, the sea as dead evokes the idea of a life-giving cycle that is breaking down, or rather that is being broken, as the sea’s “ever-warming temperature” (Smith, “TLR” 39) threatens the global ocean conveyor belt (Rahmstorf 699; NOAA), which combines thermohaline circulation4 with wind-driven surface currents.5 This idea of a broken cycle that cannot supply marine life with nutrients anymore and will affect temperatures on land, loops forward again, to the trampoline scene, as the narrator imagines the sequence of generations—a form of cyclicality on the level of a species—as simply breaking off: “when the time will run out. A year when they will be no older than we are now. Not everything goes round and round. Some things go up and—” (“TLR” 40). Because the phrase “up and down” occurs four times in the trampoline scene, leaving its last iteration incomplete is extremely effective. In combination with the dash at and as the end of the sentence, it performs rather than announces things coming to an abrupt end and ‘time running out’ within the next generation’s lifespan.
17Despite the many ways in which the sea stands for “death” in the boardwalk scene, one of the currently most notorious ones—migrants drowning while trying to cross from North Africa to Andalusia on the Western Mediterranean Route—is not mentioned in the passage. Typically for “The Lazy River,” however, the potentially lethal route into the south of Spain is not not mentioned either. Instead (not unlike German and French involvement in problematic consumption of Almería produce), it is displaced onto another passage. The Mediterranean is mentioned for the second and last time when the narrator reports Mariatou and Cynthia, the two ladies who braid tourists’ hair for a living, came to Andalusia from Africa: “one from Senegal and the other from the Gambia” (“TLR” 40-41): “we can glimpse the coast of their continent across the water from our own, but they did not cross this particular stretch of ocean, because it is even more treacherous than the one between Libya and Lampedusa, by which route they came” (“TLR” 41). Especially against the political backdrop of the Brexit-campaign and the issues that drove it—among them immigration into Europe—another form of disavowal emerges here. The narrator “knows very well” that the very policies which support the idea of “Fortress Europe” (and of “Fortress Britain”) are part of the reason why crossing the Mediterranean between the coast of North Africa and the South of Europe is so dangerous, “but all the same,” as they admit, “most of us voted for Brexit.” The sea, however, is not the only dangerous body of water in “The Lazy River,” although the peril it embodies as a metaphor lies less immediately in a threat to life than in a threat to the ability to muster energy and act.
18Long before the narrator contrasts the sea unfavourably with the Lazy River, due to the latter’s “pliability and ease, its sterilizing chlorine and swift yet manageable currents” (“TLR” 39), they highlight the hotel pool’s double identity as “a metaphor and at the same time a real body of artificial water” (“TLR” 33). In Bodies of Water, Astreida Neimanis quotes the geographer Jamie Linton’s dictum that “water is what we make it” (155). Linton also makes a second claim, namely that “[w]e give to water that which enables it to realize its potential” (3), by which he draws attention to what he calls “the water process” (4). Linton thinks of water “primarily as a process rather than a thing,” defining the water process as “that out of which every specific instance of water gets abstracted” (4). In the light of this, it is worth asking about Smith’s short story: “what have people made of water?” by building the Lazy River, and “what potential does the pool realise?” (both emphases mine). One possible set of answers, and a very literal one at that, is: as temperatures habitually reach 40°C in the Andalusian summer, people have arrested the potentiality of water and made a harmless form of amusement—it realises its potential by cooling overheating bodies off.
19A second, more figurative set of answers suggests itself if one focuses on the Lazy River’s cyclicality. What people have made, with this pool, is a pathetic parody of the sea. While the Lazy River is a classic manifestation of “modern water” (Neimanis 157), the artificial current’s “principle of universal flow” (“TLR” 32) also turns it into a tiny, simplified and rather sad spoof of the global ocean conveyor belt. Driven by an electric pump, the Lazy River does not need differences in water temperature or saline content, and it certainly does not nourish anything, as chlorine is meant to kill off microbes. Its sole purpose, and thus the only potential it will presumably ever realise, is to move people in endless circles, in an effortless, but also pointless way: “Even if you don’t move you will get somewhere and then return to wherever you started” (31). The artificial current is thus a domesticated travesty that takes over, once the sea is associated with death on multiple levels, ensuring that everything keeps “flowing. Flowing!” (31). Yet, the movement that the pool produces is as much a sign of life as that created by an Artificial Blood Circulation System next to a hospital bed.
20Circular movement is not the only maritime feature which the hotel pool parodies, however. Focusing on Smith’s use of colour inspires a third set of answers to Linton’s questions, as her short story offers a comic take on “green,” “blue” and “grey” water. I discussed this distinction, which agricultural engineers have introduced, in the polytunnel-section and will now argue that the Lazy River combines all three types. What people have made, is something that mimics “green” and “blue”—and again, it does so in parodic form; this time through literalisation—while actually being “grey water.” Two of the story’s longer descriptions of the pool focus on its colour: first, the water unexpectedly turns green; then, in a scene set at night, the illumination makes it look electric blue. The green scene highlights how the tourists completely misread their favoured body of water:
Yesterday, the Lazy River was green. Nobody knows why. Theories abound. They all involve urine. Either the colour is the consequence of urine or it is the colour of the chemical put in to disguise the urine or it is the reaction of urine to chlorine or some other unknown chemical agent. I don’t doubt urine is involved. I have peed in there myself. But it is not the urine I find so disturbing. No, the sad consequence of the green is that it concentrates the mind in a very unpleasant way upon the fundamental artificiality of the Lazy River. Suddenly, what had seemed quite natural—floating slowing in an unending circle . . . seems not only unnatural but surprisingly odd. Less like a holiday from life than like some kind of terrible metaphor for it. (“TLR” 36)
In fact, there is a number of reasons why a pool can suddenly turn green: it could be a lack of chlorine that allows algae growth (especially in hot weather and with high bathing loads); it could be due to chlorine-resistant algae; filters could be defective; pH-levels could be out of balance or the content of cyanuric acid could be too high, both of which would stop chlorine from killing off the algae properly. Professional pool-maintenance companies describe any urine-based explanation as myth, and since this information is easy to research, it actually matters that the narrator, having reported all the different urine-based theories, does not offer any counter-narrative.
21I can think of four ways to read the green scene, the first of which points to puerile toilet humour. Although some tourists might have urinated in the pool—as the narrator admits to having done—perhaps none of them actually believe that this is what turned the water green. They just might think it amusing that they—collectively—could be able to change the colour of the pool. Given that people are on holiday, in a festive mood and that considerable amounts of alcohol are being consumed—“What you do is this: you drink so much alcohol that your accommodation is effectively free. (Only the most vulgar among us speak this plan aloud, but we are all on board)” (“TLR” 33)—, this does not strike me as unrealistic. The second interpretation is more sarcastic: while the doubly-deluded tourists in “The Lazy River” dangerously underestimate what their water-related consumer behaviour does to groundwater levels in Andalusia (as discussed in the section on polytunnels) and what pollution does to the sea (as discussed in the section on the sea) they ridiculously overestimate what their pee can do to the colour of their pool. The third reading draws on Roland Barthes’s definition of “myth” as a “metalanguage” (114) that “transforms history into nature” (128). A Barthes-inspired reading would suggest that Smith’s tourists prefer urine-myths to science because it transforms a history of a steps not taken (not enough chlorine has been added; filters or pH levels of cyanuric acid contents have not been checked) that have nothing to do with the bathers into a simple causality in which the humans in the pool are actual agents of nature (urine causes green colour). The narrator’s reflection on the green scene offers a clue that seems to point to this, given that what they find “so disturbing,” namely “the sad consequence of the green is that it concentrates the mind in a very unpleasant way upon the fundamental artificiality of the Lazy River” (emphasis mine). According to Barthes “naturalization” is “the essential function of myth” (130). With regard to Smith’s short story, this means that as long as the pool colour is “normal,” the Lazy River’s “fundamental artificiality” can be successfully denied, and the tourists can tell themselves that their “floating slowly in an unending circle” is “quite natural” (emphasis mine). Only when the colour changes to green, does it “seem . . . not only unnatural but surprisingly odd” (emphasis mine), which ignores that the pool is “a real body of artificial water” (“TLR” 33), a part of the tourists’ well-deserved break from “life” and foregrounds it instead as “some kind of terrible metaphor for it” (“TLR” 36). My final suggestion for an interpretation of the green scene would be to read the colour as a literalisation. The Lazy River’s water needs to turn green in order to bring it to the narrator’s attention that what the pool contains is precisely not “green” water—it has nothing to do with “water absorbed by roots, used by plants, and released back to the atmosphere through the process of transpiration” (ASA/CSSA/SSSA). The irony of this becomes fully apparent, when considering that algae—actual plant life—might very well be the real reason for the pool turning green. A parallel point, about colour drawing attention to the pool’s artificiality, could be made in the context of the blue scene, which occurs towards the story’s end. Since the water contained in the Lazy River is decidedly not “found in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs” or “seen in wetlands” or “pumped from below surface aquifers” (ASA/CSSA/SSSA), the pool contains just as little “blue water,” in the agricultural engineering sense of the word, as it does “green water.” The narrator, however, uses the blue scene to make a couple of different points. After these have been considered, the potential of the green and blue colours of the pool will become clearer.
22The blue scene occurs at night, as the sleepy tourists check their devices on their balconies, before going to bed, and the blue light off their phone or tablet screens finds its parallel in the nocturnal pool illumination, that is switched on “in the few darkling hours in which the Lazy river is serviced, cleaned and sterilized” (“TLR” 38-39):
Down below, the Lazy River runs, a neon blue, a crazy blue, a Facebook blue. In it stands a fully clothed man armed with a long mop—he is being held in place by another man who grips him by the waist, so that the first man may angle his mop and position himself against the strong yet somniferous current and clean whatever scum we have left of ourselves off the sides. (“TLR” 42)
- 6 Not to put too fine a point on this, but since “The Lazy River” was published in 2017, the precise (...)
Of the three qualifiers that give information about the type of blue—“neon,” “crazy” and “Facebook”—the first two confirm the point about the pool’s artificiality made above, since the very names of these shades suggest that their luminance and colour saturation is more likely human-made, possibly with the aid of optical brighteners in the paint covering the walls and floor of the pool, rather than natural. The third qualifier adds a dimension, since it evokes a specific brand name and logo the shade of which many people—at any given time since the company’s breakthrough in 2003—would be able to identify or associate with a particular shade of blue.6 The Facebook-blue pool adds another twist, though: instead of describing cultural phenomena by reference to colours of natural water (like Caribbean, Aegean, ocean or iceberg blue), people now portray the colour of water by referring to cultural icons like Facebook. In the blue scene, the pool thus realises Linton’s potential of the water process by being abstracted into the simulacrum of an icon of digital culture.
23The second point the blue scene makes refers to the actions that take place only when the pool is lit—after it has been closed for bathers and before the lights are switched off for the night—when the workers mop to prepare it for the next day. As one man holds his colleague in position, so he may clean effectively, the narrator reflects that what is being cleaned off the floor and walls of the pool is “whatever scum we have left of ourselves.” Once the human debris most likely mixed with sweat and suntan lotion, has been removed, fresh water has to be added to make sure the pool meets hygienic standards. Keeping in mind that “Nature makes blue and green water. Humans make—and have learned to reuse—grey water” (ASA/CSSA/SSSA), what the blue scene in “The Lazy River” reveals through the practice of cleaning, is that the pool can only ever realise its potential, in Linton’s sense of the abstraction of the “water process,” as a classical example of “grey water.”
24Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Smith’s “The Lazy River” is that, while dropping readers in at the deep end, it refrains from condemning its characters, who prefer to call what they do on vacation, “going with the flow” (“TRL” 32). This non-accusatory attitude makes particular sense against the backdrop of the social atmosphere of division and mutual browbeating from which Brexit arose and which it enhanced. It would be so easy for the narrator to roll their eyes at British tourists, who have exactly zero interest in Andalusia’s cuisine (“paella and swordfish” [33]), its rich multi-religious history (“No, we have not seen the Moorish ruins”), its landscape (“Nor will we be traveling into those bare, arid mountains”) or its ability to inspire contemporary literature (“Not a soul among us has read the recent novel set right here, in Almería” [34]). But Smith works hard to make sure her focaliser-narrator ensures that the story—much like the Lazy River itself—remains a “nonjudgement zone” (34). All the time, though, these negations point at knowledge about what would be on offer, or possibly at questions—“did you try paella?”; “did you visit the medieval Arab bathhouses?”; “did you go walking in the Sierra Nevada?”—that express expectations or hopes, which hover perpetually in the background without ever being voiced. This carefully maintained equilibrium, which keeps the “I know very well…” implied, while delivering the “but all the same” explicitly, is my final example for Smith’s narrator’s split logic of disavowal. I hope to have shown that this contradictory attitude is also the source of the lethargy that characterises how the tourists relate (or refuse to relate) to the polytunnels, the sea, and the circular pool. I offer a reading that focuses both on how—as real bodies of water—they evoke the problematic disruption of water cycles (evapotranspiration, the thermohaline cycle, and global ocean conveyor belt), while also unfolding their epistemological potential as the story’s three “deepest” tropes. Additionally, I argue that Smith’s narrative technique—by looping from the polytunnels to the sea, from the sea to the pool, and from the pool back to the polytunnels—performs the cyclicality to which the metaphors already draw attention, thereby enhancing their effectiveness.