ABSTRACT
The narrative of Echo in "true short story" is followed by the narrator's first memory of Boddy, who let her inquisitive voice be heard during a lecture which they both attended as students. Ali Smith's naughty portrayal of the mythological nymph and the final statement of "true short story" are suggestive and thought-provoking, and they imply that in the short story resides a voice with subversive potential. Smith's rewriting of Ovid's metamorphosis of Echo implies a similar understanding of the constraining and liberating dimensions of language: it is an ecosystem, or rather an "echosystem" which, like the Ovidian nymph, both reproduces and resists surrounding discourses. Wordplay is an apparent feature of Smith's aesthetics, and one which seeks to undermine the stability of the relationship between word and meaning. In Smith's narratives, the instability of language is paralleled by an equally unstable conception of identity.
