“Notorious, a Tragedy, Not-Spoken-About”: Spatial Justice, the Buried Said, and the Fragile Circulation of Recognition in Hotel World

Abstract

Abstract

Critics of Ali Smith’s Hotel World largely approach its trauma narrative through psychoanalysis, polyphonic form, or Gothic spectrality, treating space as a passive backdrop. This article challenges this tendency, arguing that the novel reframes traumatic memory not as a private wound but as a material struggle over who may be seen, mourned, and remembered in space. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s abstract space and Axel Honneth’s ethics of recognition, it traces how the hotel, the street, and the family home collude to bury marginalized experience beneath spatial surfaces. Against this erasure, Sara’s ghost’s repeated falls, Else’s bodily occupation, and Clare’s tactile tracing are examined as embodied struggles for recognition. Yet the novel pushes further, asking whether recognition can cross class and life-death boundaries through fragile material channels. It refuses to resolve this tension, suspending the ethical demand for spatial justice in the precarious interval between a fissure’s opening and closing.