A Socialist's Guide to Scottish Books

Burns, politics, lassies, and parodies

2011-03-15T06:27:00.004Z

It's been a while since I updated this. I've been contemplating post-structuralism and James Kelman for the first draft-chapter of my PhD thesis, but as yet have not managed to get it into form where it might make for suitable blog material. So instead I decided to post something much more light-hearted about a man who is quite possibly still Scotland's favourite poet: Robert Burns.

I'm pretty ambivalent about Robert Burns. Some of his work can be read as having quite a socialist message in its defiance of class hierarchy and high culture in poems like 'Epistle to J Lapraik' and more famously 'A Man's a Man' with it's thinly-veiled message of support for the French Revolution and it's values of liberte, egalite, and fraternite. However we should remember that this was the same man who would have gone to be bookkeeper to a slaver in Jamaica if his 'Kilmarnock Edition' of 'Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect' hadn't become the wild success that it did.

My favourite Burns poem is a little ditty called "Naething" that he wrote to patron, friend and supporter Gavin Hamilton Esq., who was also the dedicatee of the famous Kilmarnock edition and an early activist who organised some fairly decent stuff in the service of the poor, despite being a rich guy (you can find some internet stuff on this man here). I suppose I like it because it's a existentialist, even nihilistic take on the class system, and a tongue-in-cheek satire on how art and the alleged idleness and lack of practical use of artists is no more useless or insignificant than anyone else's occupation.

Stanzas On Naething

Extempore Epistle to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.
1786
Type: Poem

To you, sir, this summons I've sent,
Pray, whip till the pownie is freathing;
But if you demand what I want,
I honestly answer you-naething.

Ne'er scorn a poor Poet like me,
For idly just living and breathing,
While people of every degree
Are busy employed about-naething.

Poor Centum-per-centum may fast,
And grumble his hurdies their claithing,
He'll find, when the balance is cast,
He's gane to the devil for-naething.

The courtier cringes and bows,
Ambition has likewise its plaything;
A coronet beams on his brows;
And what is a coronet-naething.

Some quarrel the Presbyter gown,
Some quarrel Episcopal graithing;
But every good fellow will own
Their quarrel is a' about-naething.

The lover may sparkle and glow,
Approaching his bonie bit gay thing:
But marriage will soon let him know
He's gotten-a buskit up naething.

The Poet may jingle and rhyme,
In hopes of a laureate wreathing,
And when he has wasted his time,
He's kindly rewarded wi'-naething.

The thundering bully may rage,
And swagger and swear like a heathen;
But collar him fast, I'll engage,
You'll find that his courage is-naething.

Last night wi' a feminine whig-
A Poet she couldna put faith in;
But soon we grew lovingly big,
I taught her, her terrors were naething.

Her whigship was wonderful pleased,
But charmingly tickled wi' ae thing,
Her fingers I lovingly squeezed,
And kissed her, and promised her-naething.

The priest anathemas may threat-
Predicament, sir, that we're baith in;
But when honour's reveille is beat,
The holy artillery's naething.

And now I must mount on the wave-
My voyage perhaps there is death in;
But what is a watery grave?
The drowning a Poet is naething.

And now, as grim death's in my thought,
To you, sir, I make this bequeathing;
My service as long as ye've ought,
And my friendship, by God, when ye've naething.

However, even in this favourite poem do I find reasons for ambivalence - the two verses on Burns's seduction of a 'feminine Whig' who turns up her nose at his occupation are typical of Burns's attitude to women throughout his poetry. Women are either scolding wives (Tam O Shanter), silly vain airheads/ comic sterotypes (To A Louse, Naething, My Love She's But A Lassie Yet), devoted lovers (The Learig, Aye Waukin O) or passive objects of the poets affection (all the 'great love songs' - My Love is Like A Red Red Rose, Ye Banks and Braes o Bonnie Doon, etc.). 'Green Grow the Rashes' is arguably Burns's most "feminist" poem because of it's last verse:

"Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears
Her noblest work she classes, O:
Her prentice han' she try'd on man,
An' then she made the lasses, O"

But in this same poem we find the root of Burns's attitude to women as mysterious Other creatures removed from the commercial and worldly concerns of men:

"The war'ly race may riches chase,
An' riches still may fly them, O;
An' tho' at last they catch them fast,
Their hearts can ne'er enjoy them, O.

But gie me a cannie hour at e'en,
My arms about my dearie, O,
An' war'ly cares an' war'ly men
May a' gae tapsalteerie, O!"

By this assessment, women are of another 'race' which is not worldly, and they have an almost hallucinogenic effect on men that outstrips the effect of the acquiring of riches. Although the implied message 'better love than money' is probably fairly admirable for your average socialist, Burns is here romanticising women as standing outside economic concerns and inhabiting a space all of their own. Contact with this space causes giddiness and a sense of unnamable pleasure or jouissance (a psychoanalytic term for a specifically sexual type of pleasure associated with orgasm). Julia Kristeva writes about stereotyping and the perceived differences of a feminine 'time' in her seminal essay 'Women's Time':

"female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations. On the one hand, there are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extrasubjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance."

This comes close to hitting the nail on the head when it comes to Burns's attitude towards women. Women are an eternal source of pleasure, they are experienced as 'extrasubjective' - i.e. outwith the domain of his 'worldly' pursuits - and are irrevocably linked to Nature (this last point might be argued along the lines of Burns's main inspirations being women and his Romantic vision of Nature that is explored in detail in his 'Epistle to J Lapraik', where Nature too is juxtaposed with worldly concerns).

If more proof was needed, it's that when it comes to Burns's more serious, political poems, women don't get a look in. A mouse might make Burns ruminate on the hierarchy between 'man's dominion' and 'Nature's social union', but a lassie wouldn't (although I'll grant you that the mouse was female, or so Burns seems to have assumed). In 'the best laid plans o mice and men' there's no place for women, and though Burns tells us 'A Man's a Man For Aw That' women are again overlooked. Women are invariably stereotypes in Burns's verse: goddesses, witches or whores, conniving bitches or passive objects of affection and sexual desire. If Burns is our National Poet, the artistic embodiment of Scotland, we do well to question who's Scotland. Are socialist women a possibility for Burns? Or are all women too impossibly aristocratic/stupid/divine/evil to be involved with something as serious and as lowly as socialism?

So, not content with one right good go at the National Bard, I'll leave you with another, this time in a form that owes everything to his own sense of satire, playfulness and flyting. Maybe there's a legacy he's left to this socialist woman afterall (apologies to those of you who have already read this on Facebook):

Ma Luv is Like A Techno Song

eftir Burns

Ma luv is like a techno song
Thit bangs atween ma ears
Ma love is like the heid ye git
Efter too many beers

Though fair yer not, ma bonny lad
Yer bonny just the same
Alas fur me, ye live rent-free
In ma distracted brain

The things I'd do tae you, ma dear,
An whit you'd dae to me -
Ma heid's mince noo, because ay you
Leadin me astray

Away tae fuck, ma bonnie lad
Cos I've got work tae do
And better things tae think on, dear
Than gettin aff wi you.

Lassie at Work: some thoughts on Jane Duncan's My Friends the Miss Boyds

2011-01-13T23:47:00.001Z

Jane Duncan is one of many forgotten Scottish women novelists. Although a bestselling writer in her day, she seems to have fallen by the wayside as far as academics and those who determine what the 'canon' should be are concerned, for several reasons: she's a woman, she's Scottish, and she wrote popular fiction. Another reason might be that in the 1960s, when My Friends the Miss Boyds was first published, Jane Duncan was writing realist novels in a style very reminiscent of 19th century realist novels (Adam Bede and Tess of the D'Urbervilles spring to mind as similar books). Now we like to think of the 1960s as the era of postmodernism. Jane Duncan, writing this rural novel about her childhood (and later novels about the British Imperial project from the point of view of a Scottish family in the Carribean) seemed behind the times, completely out of step with the likes of Beckett and his ilk, and equally out of step with other Scottish writers who had embraced (post-)modernist aesthetics (MacDiarmid, Eddy Morgan, even Iain Crichton Smith and George MacKay Brown). Susan Ferrier, another writer of realist popular fiction, fell by the same fate, but since she does actually fit with her times (since she was writing Austenite stuff at the same time as Austen), she has been recovered from the dust of second-hand bookstores. Jane Duncan, however, has pretty much been left there, although she does appear in the History of Scottish Women's Writing (eds McMillan and Gifford), which sets as its task a desire to uncover such writers which have been so marginalised by centralised ideas of 'canon'.

My Friends the Miss Boyds is the first-published of her celebrated 'Reachfar' series. It is a Bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel or a novel about education) about a young girl, Janet Reachfar (a more-than-semi-autobiographical character) growing up on a farm in rural Scotland. Set during the first World War, it does read like a historical novel, highlighting the differences between rural Scotland and the metropolis continually - and not least because the war barely touches Reachfar, whose name suggests that it is too out-of-the-way to be affected. Feudalism is still practiced, and the Lord and Lady of the estate are included (although Janet as narrator is quick to point out that her family are treated differently since they own their land). Traditions of the local people, particularly going to meet the coal boat with the horses, and idiosyncratic rural attitudes such as referring to animals as 'people' are continually highlighted. There's a very nativist attitude prevailing in the book, which would stand up well to postcolonial analysis - often we are presented with the idea that these people are somehow Other, and no more so than when it comes to Janet's grandmother, a Gaelic-speaking Highlander with intuitive powers which the narrative strongly associates with her Highland background, and which conforms to a Kristevan sense of a particular stereotype of femininity as intuitive and eternal.

For me the treatment of femininity is the most intriguing theme here. There are many female rolemodels for Janet in this book: her grandmother, who rules the house with an iron thumb and her legendary 'intuition', the Miss Boyds, who are generally considered silly and frivilous; 'old maids' who fall into further disrepute when one is impregnated by the local tinker and has a subsequent decline into insanity (or post-natal depression), Mrs De Cambre: the fashionable, rich American friend of Lady Lydia of the estate, and her sensible, down-to-earth mother, who along with her grandmother takes care of the domestic work, which is equally important, but emphatically seperate, from the men's work at Reachfar.

Interestingly, Janet transgresses this gender divide. On the farm her companions are Tom and George, farmhands, one of whom is her uncle. She bridges the gap between domestic, women's work, and men's labour, and this is foregrounded in her travelling to the forbidden quarry early in the novel, a farm where Tom and George are secretly brewing whisky illegally. She is also complicit in their smuggling of whisky to the wounded soldiers that Lady Lydia runs a "convalescent home" for. She wears an almost genderless garment which is referred to as her 'kimono', differentiating her from both sexes. There is a memorable scene when the Reachfar troupe are off to greet the coal boat: Janet alone can handly unruly Betsy the horse, and later when the order is given that no women or children should be on the pier due to the unruliness of the horses, an exception is made for Janet because 'She's in charge of a horse'.

This ability to transgress divisions between the male and female spheres is mirrored in a class transgression which we are given to understand Janet has accomplished by the end of the book, having gone to the metropolis to work ("the south of England to earn my living"). Throughout the novel much emphasis is put on education: Janet is the smartest in her class and her ability to write and to compose rhymes is foregrounded throughout. Significantly, she is offered a doll - which she accidentally smashes, believing it to be a dead baby and dropping it in horror - but turns it down in favour of books, writing paper and a fountain pen. This symbolises a rejection of domesticity and motherhood, and a turning towards the class-transcending opportunities afforded by education. The model of old-maid afforded by the Miss Boyds is evaded by Janet, as is the model of motherhood and domesticity. Janet evades these traditional, Victorianesque stereotypes (virgin/whore, fallen woman/angel-in-the-house), transgressing set categories and all the boundaries which she would have been expected to conform to in 19th century society. Although Reachfar is barely affected by the war, Janet feels the indirect effects of the social changes it brought about, especially regarding women's emancipation.

According to older Janet, "Reachfar was the one unchanging place in a world of constant change": it is stuck in the mists of time and seperate from the modern world she now inhabits. Janet has transgressed its borders; indeed she eventually marries a Borderer, and they own a car, much to the bemusement of Tom and George. Interestingly the local pub, formerly only the haunt of men, has become the site of increased gender equality, with women and men alike patronising it: this is taken as a sign of 'the remarkable age we lived in and ended'.

“They were all Middle Class”: Women and politics in the fiction of James Kelman

2010-12-07T04:03:00.002Z

James Kelman’s new collection, If It is Your Life, first hit bookshelves in April of this year. Since I was devoting all my time to R.L. Stevenson and Iain Crichton Smith at the time, I’ve only just finished it.

The first thing you notice about it is that, since it’s published by Penguin, it comes with this godawful artsy pink and green and sepia cover that looks like it belongs on the sleeve of an indie album. Indie albums are among the good things in life, as are Kelman books, but to combine the two has a rather surreal effect:

After you’ve unceremoniously removed the offending cover (the advantage of paying extra for the hardback is that you can do this without hurting the book), the next thing you notice is gender. Kelman has been harangued by interviewers who are keen to point out that, while his narratives give us privileged and finely-tuned access to the inner workings of the minds of his male protagonists, there is never a female equivalent. To such criticisms, Kelman has tartly replied words to the effect that his subject is working-class masculinity: that’s what he writes about. To ask why he doesn’t write about something else is like asking Degas, ‘How come it’s always ballerinas?’

This would be all well and good if it weren’t for the fact that Kelman ruminates on gender in every story of his new collection. Whether he’s ironically (or is it?) outlining the sexual appeal of nurses and air hostesses, or highlighting the failure of his protagonist’s wives to understand the precise nature of the relationship between a man and his children, or of the hourly-paid job, or showing us the ways in which his protagonists are repeatedly used and abused by their girlfriends and ex-girlfriends, or sexually fantasising about female bureaucrats who have the power to turn them to ‘putty’: at every turn Kelman hangs the male-female dynamic out on a line for all to see.

In doing so he bridges a particular gap which critic Alan Freeman has perceived between Kelman’s polemics and Kelman’s art. Both Freeman and Adrian Hunter (in the new collection of Kelman essays edited by Scott Hames) perceive a subtlety particular to Kelman’s art, which Adrian attributes to his engagement with the modernist experimental form which is the short story. Adrian notes Kelman’s stated aim to avoid ‘abstractions’ and ‘value judgements’ in his work, claiming that much of the ‘power’ in Kelman’s earlier collections ‘derives from the detachment and lack of an evaluative register in the narrative voice’. But when it comes to the question of gender, this lack of evaluative register, this refusal to abstract the concrete ‘fact’ into the realm of the value-judgement, no longer holds. Note, for example, this passage in ‘talking about my wife’:

“The truth is she was an innocent. There are a lot of women like Cath. They know nothing. Cath knew nothing. She had never experienced the actuality of work. Genuine work. Jobs where things like ‘angry gaffer’ and ‘sack’ crop up regularly. In her whole life she had never worked an ordinary hourly paid job. Office work was all she did. That was a thing about women, they were all middle class. She knew nothing about real life, the kind of job where if ye told a gaffer to eff off you collect your cards at the end of the week. That was power and that was powerlessness.”

There’s some serious acrobatics going on in this passage between the concrete, the ‘real’, and the kind of abstract generalisations and judgements that Kelman elsewhere states it is his intention to avoid. From the very specific instance of Cath, the ‘wife’ of the title, whom, we are told, has never had an hourly paid job, Kelman’s narrator leaps to making abstracted judgements about ‘all women’ – Cath becomes an archetype, a symbol of what Kelman (or his narrator) perceives as that part of femininity which is inherently incompatible with the life of the working-class male. Then Kelman leaps back to the specifics of gaffers and the circumstance his protagonist has undergone, only to return to a generalisation: “that was power and that was powerlessness” . This passage implicates women, through their very lack of understanding of hierarchy, as complicit in the dynamics of ‘power and powerlessness’ which make male working lives so much more precarious than women’s (according to Kelman). Neil MacMillan’s analysis of Kelman’s representation of women, published in the Edinburgh Review 9 years before the appearance of this collection, is reinforced throughout this collection: ‘the “other” space which women occupy is also consistently defined as bourgeois” (ER 108, p.48) and ‘most of the women in the earlier Glasgow novels, are middle class, or at least upwardly mobile’.

This review is in danger of becoming too essay-like, so I will save it for the essay that I intend to write on how women are represented in this collection of stories. But it is worth pointing to the title story, ‘If it is your life’, as an example of Kelman’s engagement with the nationalistic narratives that he is usually careful to evade. In this story a Scottish philosophy student is coming home from university in England, where he is having an open relationship (or at least it’s open on her end) with a middle-class, female, drama student. In this story Scottishness is identified with familiar tropes: a working-class background and a lad-o-pairts who seizes the opportunities offered to him by the education system. Englishness is identified with middle-class, bourgeois values, especially through the character of Celia, who is the love-interest and a right bitch. There’s an interesting role-reversal going on here wherein Celia is empowered and the male protagonist becomes the sex object –she has internalised the discourse by which bodies are fetishised: a discourse usually associated with males and particularly with pornography, by which the body becomes the object of fetish. For Celia the narrator functions as a sex object: ‘she did not have to like me but she slept with me. Why? Was it because I was Scottish? Scottish working class?’ (p.150). This attempt by the narrator to make a connection between his background and Celia’s interest in him is foiled by a later scene, which reveals Celia’s bourgeois indifference to his circumstances, and her complicity and even participation in the marginalising of such as him:

“And Celia said something and it was like she excluded me too. Maybe I misheard [...] it was just a wee comment, just something whatever it was and it was to do with ‘people from the north’. Yet when she made it her hand was on my wrist and she was stroking. That was a funny thing to do. How could she do that at the same time. What did that make me to her? I was just like a body.” (p.153)

It’s fair to say, that if Kelman draws attention to a perceived schism between men and women, he is also experimenting with role-reversal whereby women are elevated into positions of power, which allow them to use the discourses of work and sex (traditionally perceived as male-dominated discourses) in order to maintain a position of power. Kelman’s women do not understand their men, divorced as they are from discourses of class and identity politics. But it is their very exclusion from these discourses which allows them to remain perpetually elevated above the working-class protagonist, powerless as he is to escape these discourses and the material circumstances which result from them.

The Dream by Iain Crichton Smith

2010-06-21T16:38:00.001+01:00

Oh no! I hear you cry. Not another Smith review!
Oh yes, I say. Another Smith review!

After the universal and surreal world of Hades, it was nice to turn in Smithland to a work as straightforward and locatable as this novel, which explores the lives of 'exiles' in Glasgow, and by exiles Smith means people who have moved from the islands to the metropolis. It is fundamentally about the struggle to keep ones culture alive in the city, and the guilt one feels when they realise it cannot be done authentically, but only through 'new ceilidhs' which do not resemble the ceilidhs of the Hebrides, and are little more than exercises in nostalgia.

Martin, the protagonist, is an academic who teaches Gaelic poetry at a Glasgow university, and has a sudden 'dream' of going back to his own culture to try and preserve the Gaelic language at its roots. He is foiled by John Morrison, an alcoholic who sees Gaelic poetry as being 'meant for the reader in his study' rather than as a living part of the community organism which is the Gaidhealtachd. Jean is Martin's wife, brought up by a cold Calvinist aunt on the same island as Martin, who will not return under any circumstance. For her Gaelic culture is austere, cruel and inhuman. Lastly there is Norman, Martin's fellow academic who sees his 'dream' for what it really is (or what it is in Smith's view) - the desire to subscribe to an ideology or a cause, to move away from the authentic, individual and human life based in human relationships towards an irrational and fierce loyalty. There are more characters, but I focus on these in particular because they are all Smith, at various stages of his life, and perhaps they are all Smith at the same stages of his life, too. He was, after all, a deeply divided man.

I am tempted to associate The Dream with Mr Trill in Hades, and not just because I read them back-to-back, but because The Dream shows the alternative story to the Greek myth. Martin does not leave his Dido to found Rome (or in his case, to participate in the revival of his culture), but finds solace in a new kind of community, one which does bear a passing resemblance to an older way of life in the islands, but a way of life that has passed. Martin commits to the women in his life - to Jean, and to one of his students whose daughter, Sheila, he views as a 'psuedo-daughter' of his own. Rather than submit to being consumed by a collective identity, Martin's individualism allows him to reconnect with other individuals in a way he realises would be impossible in the islands.

Most interesting for myself as a Smith scholar is something which Norman the novelist says, about language and literature, something which in my view is Smith as he sees himself, writing in English as a Lewisman:

"You are asking me what use my novels are. I'll tell you. I write them from within my own world, my own language, but if I had stayed in the islands I would have been writing what had been written before. Now I'm writing something new. In my own way I'm extending the frontiers."

This verifies my research on how Smith relates to Bhabha's conceptions of travelling cultures and 'how newness enters the world' through hybrid identities. Norman, and Smith, as novelists, are able to write something new because they are divided, because they're frontiers have been extended, because they can draw on two cultures and their own experiences of exile. The Dream, then, is a novel about the difficulty of being an exile, and also about the enabling of creativity and human relationships that result from being exiled. It is 168 pages long and a surprisingly easy read, considering the difficult and multifaceted identities tackled in its pages.

Mr Trill in Hades - Iain Crichton Smith (review)

2010-06-09T11:58:00.003+01:00

Well it's been a while since posted here. I blame the studies. However, today I am taking a hiatus from the hiatus to write about Iain Crichton Smith's novella, Mr Trill in Hades. Since I think I'm safe in assuming that most of you haven't read it (yet!) I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum.

First, a bit of technical stuff/housekeeping. Surprisingly little has been written about Smith. What has been written about him is usually about his poetry, and most of it is part of critical histories or anthologies of critical essays, where he tends to get lumped together with Derick Thomson and Sorley MacLean. Exceptions are Carol Gow's monograph The Leaf and the Marble, and the collection of essays edited by Colin Nicholson (published by Edinburgh University Press), of which I particularly recommend Lorn Macintyre's contribution: an essay called 'Iain Crichton Smith: a rare intelligence'. There are a few essays which touch on the prose, and Consider the Lilies in particular gets a lot of attention. For anyone generally interested in Smith I would also recommend the interviews in Scottish Writers Talking 2, edited by Isobel Murray. In these interviews Smith considers his short fiction as one of his two most 'at home' forms, along with poetry, admitting that he feels his novels to be less well-written (although here he considers Consider the Lilies to be part of the short fiction). Many of the critics who have dismissed Smith's prose on the grounds that Smith considered himself to be first and foremost a poet should pay attention to this. Douglas Gifford has stated admirably in an overview of Smith's work (Available in Wallace and Stevenson ed. The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies) that we should not take a writers word for what work is their 'best' and what isn't. In short, it is time to start investigating Smith's prose.

Most of Smith's prose is in English (although some originated in Gaelic, or has a Gaelic doppelganger, i.e. 'The Missionary'). 'Mr Trill in Hades' is no exception. It is an novella written in English and is available in The Black Halo, which is the second of the 2 volume collection of Smith's stories edited by Kevin MacNeil and published by Birlinn (for a long time Smith's short fiction was helluva difficult to find, so Kevin has certainly done me a massive favor by his Smith-related endeavors, and no doubt other readers and scholars too). I think one of the reasons it has been ignored by most critics (excepting Ann Edwards Boutelle, see Nicholson ed. collection again, and Gifford in the Wallace/Stevenson book) is that it breaks away - as much of Smith's work does - from issues of highland identity and Smith's own autobiographical concerns. Ironically, when reads it closely I think this is not really the case. On a symbolic level, at least, Mr Trill has much to do with the Highlands, even if this is never made explicit.

But on a superficial level much of Mr Trill is a rewriting of classical mythology that is not entirely unlike Joyce's Ulysses, in that it performs essentially modernist/postmodernist interrogations of national mythologies and 'grand narratives'. The first sentence of the novella has to be one of the funniest going: 'One afternoon Mr Trill, dead classics master of Eastborough Grammar School, found himself in Hades'. Cmon, tell me you're not smiling after reading that. The characters in Hades are those from Greek mythology, but transformed in such a way as to trigger a rereading of Homer, Vergil, and inevitably of all national and Imperial mythologies. The ferryman who transports Trill across the river Styx is on 'fixed rates', and his jovial expressions such as 'Cheers' place him in a recognisably realist mode. It is this sort of juxtaposition of the recognisably real and the mythological, which continues throughout the narrative and gives this story, and much of Smith's other fiction, it's surrealistic effects. Trill next meets the 'subaltern' soldiers from the seige of Troy, privates who speak in the language of private school boys (Smith's puns are many and multifarious, even in serious contexts such as in 'Poem of Lewis' he can't resist them). These soldiers reveal that the 'marvellous heroes' of the battle: Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Ajax, were in fact selfish, self-involved and vainglorious characters, who 'didn't know their arse from their elbow'.

The most poignant portrayals of this sort are of the female characters, and of the Cyclops. Dido and Andromache both lead Trill to ask the same question: is the founding of Rome worth a broken heart? This leads him to reassess the events of his own life, which he spent as 'gatekeeper' to the mythologies which he is increasingly beginning to view as false and corrupt. The characters whose perspectives are left out of the great epics each reveal to him a story which leads to a prolonged reassessment of the myths and of Trill's life. Trill re-evaluates his own classist assumptions and his ideas of authority: the teacher becomes the pupil, thus heirarchies are subverted. Existential statements abound: indeed, one of the characters Trill encounters is Sisyphus. The Cyclops is revealed to be one of the rural poor, a shepherd and island-dweller who has been cheated by Ulysses. Much of these traits have resonance with Smith's own people, but despite this and despite that the protagonist is a teacher, this work cannot be explained away by Smith's biography. It is more than an autobiographical novella, but embodies a postmodernist questioning of grand narratives, and a surrealistic dream-sequence which pushes language to its limits, again much like Joyce. The cyclops is the village idiot, one of the hermits that continually crops up in Smith's work, whose presence unsettles the island people, yet they and he have a shared future. Nativist values are called into question; the Cyclops is betrayed by the islanders who are his own people. The linguistic experimentation surrounding the word 'Noman' abounds, and the Cyclops becomes unstuck in language, which becomes a maze of expression inadequate to describe his experience. Again punning becomes serious, 'Noman' is used as a name but is also used to express that no man came to help the Cyclops or to deliver him from Ulysses's trickery; noman helped, everyman laughed. Like Smith, the Cyclops is stuck between languages and between narratives of these languages. The deterritorialization of language by Ulysses's trickery has caused a wound which cannot be apologised for: indeed the Cyclops is unable to comprehend any such apology. But again, this is not reducable to Smith's own experience. The Cyclops speaks like a child; he has lost his language, he is lost in language. He represents not only the Gaels, forced into obscurity by an unsympathetic dominant culture, but the Wretched of the Earth throughout history; those whose stories will never be told, because they have been rendered unable to tell their stories, having become disenfranchised from language by imperialist bastards such as Ulysses. By subscribing to the grand narratives that are nation-building myths, Mr Trill and society at large is complicit with, and reinforces, the economic and cultural processes which seek to eradicate the subaltern Cyclopses of the world from history.

What this recalls for me is actually that most famous of Smith's prose works, 'Consider the Lilies', in which a subaltern woman who is also linguistically disenfranchised cannot defend herself against the Ulysses-like figures of empire who seek to deterritorialise her quite literally. The theme of female suffering is also common to both texts: Mrs Scott, like Dido and Andromache, has also lost her husband, and finds herself alone. It is the local atheist, who is rejected by his society and subsequently provides another hermit figure, who leads her to re-evaluate her own beliefs, to question the authority of the church which is complicit in the grand narrative of history: a grand narrative which seeks to render her homeless in the name of economic 'progress' and the developing of the nation. It is tragic that Mr Trill does not enjoy the same critical attention as Consider the Lilies, as it explores the same themes with what I would consider a greater profundity.

I think the reason that Mr Trill has not been given due attention is that it is not a recognisably 'Scottish' book. It's preoccupations with language are not nationalist, and despite being a heavy theme throughout the narrative they cannot really be seen as making a case for Scots or for community language. This text cannot be construed as any kind of cultural nationalism; indeed the reading I have provided seems to run against the grain of such a thing. The nation is a narrative of many and multifarious voices, and Smith recognises that singular national narratives serve to advance the 'plot' at the cost of leaving out certain voices - those which do not play a major role in plot-advancing, in progress, but are left to lament having been forsaken by their husbands, by their fellow islanders, by history. Smith uses his novella as a platform for these left out voices, imagining what they would say if given such a platform. The ending has the ultimate message that one must be involved in the struggle - don't be a gatekeeper, don't preside over what matters without ever participating in it (a good message for a literary critic, I think!). Instead, join in the struggle of Sisyphus, the struggle which is without end, which can never be won. Along with Albert Camus, Smith thinks that 'the struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart', or is, at least, the best a man (or women) can do with their life.

'The Shutdown', The Moira Monologues, and Alan Bissett at Bo'ness Hippodrome

2010-02-04T23:20:00.008Z

This is Alan Bissett, whom I reckon is quite easy on the eye. He's probably about the most successful author to come from my home district of Falkirk (he's Hallglen, I'm Bo'ness, so we have Falkirk, Grangemouth and the 'Boyracer' culture in common. We also have Stirling University and Stirling Writer's Group in common, albeit at different times). He has a blog too. It's better than mine (even though it is published in the fucking Guardian, many of whose arts writers tend to write stuff aimed at justifying their own existence and perpetuating their own prejudices - perhaps Bissett's the exception that makes the rule or something) and can be found here: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/arts/author/alan_bissett/index.html.

So, the the main event. Bissett was appearing tonight (4th Feb 2010) at the Hippodrome, which is the recently refurbished cinema in Bo'ness, to read from his new play and to show a film which he had made with Adam Stafford (who is incidentally frontman in the band Y'All is Fantasy Island, for indie geeks like me who know who that is!). And I went. I expected the place to be relatively empty - people in Bo'ness don't have time for literature and artsy-fartsy short films. Right? Wrong. The place was more than half-full (and the cinema isn't particularly small - it's about five times as big as MacRobert for those of you who are Stirlingers). Ah, I thought, sitting down in the third row. This'll be the literary bourgeois coming from their middle-class suburbian bits well outside Bo'ness to get some 'culture'. Wrong again. Most of the people in the place had pretty normal local accents. They were not the kind of people you overhear at the Edinburgh book festival, going on in their middle-class accents about books being 'good' or 'bad', as if that's all that matters, and as if they 'own' literature to the extent that they have the authority to make that decision.

This got clarified for me near the end of the night at the Q&A bit, where it transpired that a lot of the people there were people who worked for the BP or had done so in the past, and were curious to see the film Bissett and Stafford had made about it. Which just goes to show. It's not that the working class aren't interested in the arts (so that's me told!), it's that their experience is rarely represented, and when it is it's suppressed (for example in the case of Tom Leonard's Intimate Voices, which was banned from libraries shortly after publication). Put on an artistic production that they relate to and like anyone else, they'll go see it. This gave me quite a lot of hope, personally. I often worry that literature in the so-called language of the working class, which is usually written by people who are no longer working class, is only ever read by the exact groups it is writing against - the 'establishment': universities, the middle classes, yada yada. Not today. So good. Fucking good.

Alan talked about that himself actually, during the Q&A. He said that ordinary people are intimidated by drama and literature because they associate it with Shakespeare and things like people in Kensington having affairs, but we all know people who are amazing dramatists and storytellers. Like during a break at work, someone will say something like 'Oh, you'll never guess whit happened tae me yesterday' and you think, here we go, and you're there for the next half an hour. But these people make you laugh, make you indigant, make you all kinds of emotions. They do voices and accents and impressions. They are storytellers. They are dramatists. The arts belong to them.

And this seems to be where his inspiration for the Moira Monologues comes from. The Moira Monologues is on at the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow next week from Tuesday to Saturday at 7.30 (I'll be going to see it on Tuesday - dunno if any of my mates reading this are interested but if so let me know and we can make it a group thing or something). It's about a Hallglen woman, Moira, and the monologues are her recounting recent events in her life to a mate called Babs. Alan performed the start of it as his first piece. At first I thought it was going to be one of these comic 'Scotch' pieces, you know, the cringeworthy kind of things that mean I have a hard time watching stand-up - it's funny because there's an accent, it's funny because the characters are ignorant, it's funny because we all know ignorant people who have that kind of accent, and it's funny at the expense of anyone who has that type of accent who is now pigeonholed as being ignorant. Except then it started being serious. And Moira became a character, not a caricature. And a good one. Issues such as domestic abuse and a strange kind of female solidarity were treated with such a fantastic subtlety and poignancy. It was a beautiful piece, it really was. I do urge you to go and see the whole thing in Glasgow.

I asked Bissett about this during the Q&A, by requesting him to comment on what I described as his use of Scots/vernacular/whatever as a 'double-edged sword', as something so funny and yet so serious within the same piece of writing, sometimes within the same phrase. Bissett did remark on how Scots has been used as the language of comedy, but says that because it's the language he grew up speaking, because his family speak it, because probably everyone in the Hippodrome at the time spoke it (and he did in fact say just that), then it was the language which came naturally to him to write in, and he felt he could access the whole range of emotions through this language because of this - because, in other words, it's the language of his culture (hopefully the days when people would deny that there is 'culture' in the demotic language of the working class are well behind us! If not they fucking should be). He then said that sometimes when he did readings in England people would ask why he didn't write it in Standard English, and when he was honest he thought the only answer he could give was 'well maybe it's not for you'. And I admired that. To write in the language of your own culture, for your own culture; to show the people you love and respect a mirror that filters them through your consciousness and reflects them back, is fantastic, for me. It takes a lot of bravery, because what if they hate it? How do you do it without patronising people? How do you do it honestly and unself-consciously and without imposing too much bullshit on the experience of the people your work is based on?

It's difficult. Pretty much everyone who writes in a vernacular form of English knows how difficult it is to do so without being patronising, without 'speaking for' the subaltern rather than speaking *from* them (even referring to working class people as 'subaltern' is pretty fucking patronising, but in fairness to me I'm not the first to do it and I wont be the last). Does Alan Bissett succeed? I think he does. But if we really want to know, then we should really ask some women from Hallglen. It's their culture Bissett is writing from. It's their art.

I will briefly say something about the film. Both the film - which is called The Shutdown and is about 10 minutes long - and the second piece Bissett read were about the hazards of working class life and based on true events. Anyone who has read the Kelman story 'Acid' will be familiar with this sort of thing, the idea that the average working-class person's life is 'horror, just horror'. The first piece was about the flood in a mine in 1923 in which 41 men were drowned, and was quite a poignant thing to read in Bo'ness especially, a mining town which pretty much got established around mining (and shipping). The film was about an explosion in the BP, in which Alan Bissett's dad was severely injured, and two men he was working with were killed. (On a sidenote, here's an odd twist on the Scottish 'I kent his faither' syndrome - my Mum apparently did know Alan Bissett's father when he worked in the BP - she grew up in Grangemouth and my grandfather/her father worked for the BP too.) It charted the horrors of working in the BP, but also the good bits - such as rattling on the scaffolding and doing the 'elephant-call' through a tube to signal the end of the shift. The accident was obviously the main source of horror, but Bissett's reading of his take on working life, the 12 hour shifts, the seven-day weeks, the de-personalisation of working people who spend 12 hours of their day doing what they are told and not using their brains, and the rest sleeping because their job is so physically exhausting - 'work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep, sleep', as he put it. What pissed me off is that someone in the audience had the audacity to ask why Alan Bissett didn't fancy going into the industry like his father. I wondered, did this guy not hear the same damn story as the rest of us? I mean, who on God's green earth would be all for working at a plant which nearly killed one of their parents? I mean, maybe the guy asking the question liked his job (he was a chemical worker for 32 years, he told us, and counting). If so, more power to him, but still, what a fucking daft insensitive question, really.

Like Kelman, Alan clearly doesn't like the way that industry treats people, how it not only tries to turn them into personalityless zombies but puts them into situations where they might be killed. In Alan's story (the story which the film was made from - 'The Shutdown') the men involved in the accident had been assured that the valve with the flammable, fatal chemicals in it was empty. If something about the BP was 'malevolent' to Bissett even before his father's injury, then something about the authority that lies to us and hurts us and oppresses us is also malevolent. Thus Bissett joins the 'alternative canon' of Scottish Socialist writers who are writing back against an indifferent or malevolent authority.

One last thing - part of this story was a line where a BP worker asked Alan what he would 'be' when he'd gotten his English degree, what it would qualify him to do, and then had a good laugh at him when he was told it wouldn't really qualify him to do anything. Looks like Bissett has more than Falkirk in common with me - I used to get asked this at the shunk on a weekly basis! It was good to hear the same experience from someone else, and maybe that's what we all look for in literature, whether we're working class, middle class, or like me - in this strange degree-ey government-funded limbo, somewhere between a job in a factory and 'being an academic'. We want to read about our own experience, to see art as mirror which reflects our experience back to us. Because along with this recognition of our own experience comes the messages, 'you are not alone', and 'your experience matters'. If someone identifies enough with and cares enough about our experience to make art out of it, then we care enough to want to go and see it, even if we are living in Bo'ness and don't generally read books or watch anything other than soaps. Surely this aesthetic kind of solidarity is one of the best things that literature - and any art - can offer us.

[Edit: When I first heard 'The Shutdown' I assumed that the injuries Alan Bissett's father received had killed him, but I have since had an email from Bissett informing me that actually his father made a full recovery and still works in the industry. Which is a much nicer ending than the far more pessimistic one I had gotten from the story. Aplologies to Alan and anyone I've misinformed in this respect.]

Headshook - New work by contemporary Scottish writers

2010-01-29T21:31:00.001Z

It's about time I got around to writing about this anthology - it's one of the reasons I started the blog! The earliest entry on this blog discusses an event with William McIlvanney at the Edinburgh Book Festival, which doubled as the launch of Headshook, which is published by Scotland on Sunday, and edited by Stuart Kelly (books editor of Scotland on Sunday). Considering that it features most of the 'major' writers working in Scotland today, I reckoned it might be a good indication of some of the directions in which Scottish literature is heading. So I bought it.

What struck me almost immediately about this book was that it included work in three languages - Gaelic, Scots, and English. Between its pages writers like Aonghas MacNeacail, Tom Leonard, A.L. Kennedy and John Burnside appear side by side. However, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to agree with the claim on the back of the book that reads 'these pieces cover the whole spectrum of possible Scotlands in Scots, English and Gaelic'. Forgetting the book for a moment, I don't think that it is even possible to cover the 'whole spectrum of possible Scotlands' in these three languages. Scotlands are infinite. I am sure that the Polish-Scottish experience - for example - could be written about in some form of English, or Scots, or possibly even Gaelic (and I'm eagerly anticipating the first published work that does so, as the Polish community in Scotland are now of quite a significant size).

This arguably outlandish claim aside, however, it must be agreed that Stuart Kelly has tried to be inclusive in representing many 'possible Scotlands', as have the writers. Apart from the Scots-speaking Scots, the English-speaking Scots, and the Gaelic-speaking Scots, we have Irish-Scots in Ali Smith's 'Foreigners', Pakistani-Scots in Jackie Kay's 'Mind Away', transvestite Scots in Liz Lochhead's 'Not Changed' - basically this book is populated by a realistic diversity of characters, with diverse and complex identities.

I'm not going to give my two pence on all the contributions in the book, but I will give it on the pieces that caught my attention most. Starting with the Gaelic poetry.

One of the things about writing in Gaelic (and the problem with translating it into English, hence why no translation will ever be truly equivalent to the original) is the sheer richness of the language. I think to an extent this is true of any translated poem - the original will have connotations and other meanings that don't translate. Two of the poets in this book - Aonghas MacNeacail and Rody Gorman, have come up with their own ways of demonstrating to non-Gaelic readers the richness and wealth that the language offers. In MacNeacail's case, he has provided not one, but two translations - each different from the other, but both in Scots. The Scots adds a further dimension, as many Scots words are very rich in meaning in comparision to their English counterparts (as MacDiarmid demonstrated a fair while ago now, see A Theory of Scots Letters).

It's high time MacDiarmid's logic regarding Scots was applied to other languages and cultures, as (for me, at least) his arguments weren't just relative to Scots, but to minority languages and cultures everywhere. For me, MacNeacail's dual translations demonstrate wonderfully how any translation can only ever approximate a poem, and can never claim the authority or preciseness of the original. To me it says, it is worth learning Gaelic in order to appreciate the centuries of this incredible poetic tradition, the richness of which we can only come close to through other languages (even if this other language also has the potential for wonderful levels of richness and/or precision). And this is a point further demonstrated by Rody Gorman's contribution, which is again translated quite uniquely. In its original Gaelic this poem is short and sweet at a mere 14 short and tidy lines long. But in English it comes to 16 considerably less tidy lines, and this is because nearly every Gaelic word of the original poem has been translated as two, three or even four English words, strung together to indicate that in Gaelic, all these meanings and connotations are bound up in the one word. Quoting the title will give you an indication of what I'm on about. Gorman's Gaelic poem is called 'Aisling' - the English equivalent he gives as 'Dreamnightmareaislingwomanvisionpoem'. I'd like to analyse the whole thing, but my Gaelic isn't really good enough to do it properly (yet - watch this space!).

I love these translations though, I think they question the very nature of the act of translating, and make us ask how close we can ever get to meaning, particularly when we have the additional barrier of a second language to contend with. Anyone who has read Kathleen Jamie's Scots translations of Holderlin might have asked some of the same questions as me about translating and reading in translation. I can almost but not quite read Holderlin in the original German, independently of the English. The English translation of my favourite Holderlin poem, 'To the Fates', is unremarkable to me (the one I refer to is Michael Hamburger's translation, although this has nothing to do with Hamburger as a translator - he is excellent, particularly in his English renderings of Paul Celan). But in Jamie's Scots, it is one of my favourite poems. Something about the Scots renders it remarkable to me, and I don't think that it's just because Scots is my native tongue and the language in which I 'feel' (as Edwin Muir might put it). But I still have to ask, if I was a native German speaker, would I get the exact same feeling from 'To the Fates' in German as I do being a native Scots speaker from the Scots version? This is further complicated by the fact that Jamie's Scots is 'synthetic' - it draws from various local and historical varieties of Scots. It is not a Scots that I speak, being a central-belter and a university student (and consequently obliged to speak something close to Standard English most of the time if I wish to be understood). Just how close is it possible to come to rendering the 'meaning' of a poem in a language other than its original one (Poets know how difficult it is to do this even in the poem's original language when writing the damn thing!).

For anyone interested, Jamie's translation of 'To the Fates' is available online here: http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=16969. The German original is also on this website.

I think that the Gaelic poets in this anthology challenge the idea that language is merely the medium by which the 'meaning' is communicated. The language creates the meaning, and no translation can have the same authority as the original (a point that I think Robert Crawford's poetry has also touched upon). What Gorman's text proves in particular is that Standard English, long credited with being the language of power, does not always have the authority that we might think. Because it needs three or four words to communicate the sense of one word of Gaelic, we as readers might have to concede that Gaelic is a more appropriate and suitable medium for this particular work of art. Which raises further questions, especially for those of us who study what still insists on calling itself 'English Literature', a subject which often incorporates literatures in forms of English which came before English as we know it, and in Scots (which may or may not be a form of English, but is certainly of the same family, having its routes in Anglo-Saxon), and in creoles and pidgins, and literary works in translation. When nearly half the world's population speak English in some shape or form, we are here being persuaded to concede that English is not enough, even in its many and pluralistic forms. Which surely scores a point against the hegemonists who are not that fussed about minority languages like Gaelic, and ask daft questions like 'why on earth are you learning Gaelic when only 80,000 people speak it and they all speak English fluently anyway?' The fact is that no language is 'universal', that is, fit for all purposes, in all cultures, at all stages of civilisation. And these translations make you realise that this is as true of English as it is of any other language.

I did also want to talk about the Kelman story in this anthology, and Alan Spence's contribution as well. But I think I'll save them for another entry - this one's long enough. But before signing off I should mention Anne Frater's Gaelic poem An Stoirm, also included in this anthology. I have not discussed it at length as it is translated in a way we're all quite used to seeing - with a Standard English translation following the Gaelic original - but it is a wonderful work of art no-less, symbolic in a style inkeeping with both the ancient Gaelic poets like Ban MacIntyre, and also with more modern ones such as MacLean and Crichton Smith.

By the way, I like the anthology, overall. It wouldn't have hurt them to put a few lesser-known writers in, I can't help thinking. But it's fine, and if its an indication of the directions in which Scottish Literature is heading, then I'm satisfied that these directions are suitably diverse and intriguing.

"What's Heidegger got to do with MacDiarmid?" - and other questions about the study of Scottish writing

2009-11-22T19:26:00.000Z

Those of you expecting an essay on Heidegger and MacDiarmid will be dissappointed - I've no written it yet and it isn't for my blog! This is just an example of the kind of question a person might legitimately ask a student of Scottish writing. Thing is though, this shouldn't be a legitimate question. A thinker like Heidegger, concerned as an ontologist with such universal concepts as 'Being', 'Dwelling' and 'Building', should not for a second be assumed to have little to do with a 'regional' writer like MacDiarmid. The reason that this question is still legitimate in this day and age is because of the way people continue to view courses and people who participate in the study of regional writing, and especially Scottish writing.

What do I mean by this? Firstly, I mean the tendency to 'ghettoise' Scottish writing. In the question 'what does Heidegger have to do with MacDiarmid', and other suchlike questions, there is an implication that the two are of no consequence to each other becuase one is Scottish and the other is German. The implication is that Scottish thinkers and writers are relevant to Scottish thinkers and writers, and those located outside Scotland are not. Obviously this is a ridiculous thing to assume in the light of the last 30 or 40 years of Scottish criticism, which have seen the application of Bakhtin and postcolonial theory to Scottish literature. Yet I still don't think this question is silly. Because we see Scottish fiction and Scottish literary traditions as having to do with Scotland, with issues of nationalism, identity and homeland. We see it as something very definitely located, with clear geographical borders. And these borders are the problem.

This does not mean that these issues are not important. We should never take a 'national' literature for granted, and therefore should continue to explore its relationship to its territory. But this does not mean that we should confine our studies to this. Scottish history, the Scottish landscape, Scottish culture, etc., all provide a useful background against which to study Scottish writing. But so does postcolonial theory, Marxism, postmodernity, international modernism, European existentialism, and so on unto infinity. When we study a literature that is 'located' in the way that Scottish literature is, it is necessary not only to question how essential or abitrary the category of 'Scottishness' is, but to expand our understanding of the texts beyond Scotland's borders. International movements like modernism and existentialism are as important to Scotland as they are to France and Germany, and an extreme localising of Scottish fiction should not be viewed as the aim of its study.

I was at a departmental lunch for the fourth years who are thinking about doing Masters courses next year on Wednesday, and people were asking me about the MLitt in Modern Scottish Writing, and what I thought about it. I replied that what was particularly good about the Stirling course was not that we never take 'Scottishness' for granted, and are taught to question the concept of a 'national' literature, parly by differentiating the contexts of cultural nationalism and political nationalism in texts. We try to determine what makes a text a 'national' text, rather than taking for granted that any text to come out of Scotland is automatically an example of 'national' literature. We also get endless opportunities to study Scottish fiction in contexts which are not necessarily 'Scottish', or are certainly not confined to Scotland. I said I had chosen to come back to Stirling to do my masters because I found that there was something particularly progressive about the department's attitude to Scottish literature, an attitude determined to place Scottish literature on an infinite literary map, by means of compariative approaches and an insistence of seeing Scottish literature as having a life outside Scotland's borders.

I hope that the outcome of all these contexts for Scottish literature is that, if I am ever a university lecturer, by the time this happens the question 'what does Heidegger have to do with Scottish literature' will be irrelevant. We will be so used to studying regional literatures (and all literatures are regional, in a way) in international contexts that this question will not occur - we will be able to take for granted that no literature is so marginal that it is exempt from analysis in an international context. And the converse will hold true - people will no longer assume that to study Scottish literature is to study questions of nation and nationalism, no more and no less. Scottish literature will cease to be seen as something to be studied by Scots and Scots alone, and there will no longer be a ridiculously small number of non-Scottish scholars in journals and monographs concerned with Scottish writing. Most great literature must start off in a specific location. But no great literature stays confined to that location. And if you don't believe me, have a go at the MLitt in Modern Scottish Writing at Stirling!

The Battle of the Scottish Artist according to Kelman

2009-08-28T00:10:00.003+01:00

A tragedy struck on Wednesday morning. I was ill. As a result of this I couldn't traipse through to Edinburgh to see James Kelman speak at the Book Festival. At the time I thought this wasn't so bad - after all, he was generous enough to spend an hour with me in Glasgow last year while I asked him daft questions - up til now, I've been lucky with Kelman-related escapades, so I didn't think I could complain. Plus, it was pouring with rain, hence traipsing through to Edinburgh didn't seem particularly attractive on that particular morning.

Having read this article, however, I'm now completely gutted. Here is one of the biggest issues facing Scottish art being openly discussed in one of the most popular (not to mention bourgeouis) forums available, and I am at home being ill!  A literary gladiator is tackling the lions on their own turf, and I'm not even spectating. Bugger.

However, let this not imply that I agreed immediately and unquestioningly with the sentiments that Kelman is reported to have expressed at this event. At first, I was completely confused as to who the 'Scottish Literary Establishment', that he refers to in the article, are.  Being of a naturally paranoid nature, it occured to me that it might well mean folk like me - critics. I thought that Kelman might think that becuase folk like me are shouting about how good Ian Rankin and J.K. Rowling are, and neglecting to shout about how good 'radical' writers like Tom Leonard (and Kelman himself) are, and sometimes even dissing said 'radical' writers, Scottish literature is being largely ignored and discredited.

But of course, this isn't the case, as anyone who has read lit crit by Cairns Craig, Roderick Watson, Robert Crawford et. al will realise. The fact is that critics, now more than ever, value the work of radical writers, and realise that theirs are voices which deserve to be heard - and which have to be heard, in my opinion.  Either Kelman doesn't realise this, or critics are not what he means when he says 'the literary establishment' (phew, I'm off the hook).

So in my quest to find out who Kelman means when he says 'the establishment', I did what any good critic would do - went to YouTube and typed in 'James Kelman'. I found this:

I conjectured that in this video Kelman says pretty much the same thing as he is reported to have said in Edinburgh, except that instead of 'the establishment', he accused 'the media' of neglect and abuse of Scottish culture. Aha, I thought.

As it turns out, Kelman is taking issue with the way that literary fiction is recieved in Scotland by the media, by the people who decide what goes on TV, and what goes in the paper, and what gets advertised in the windows of bookstores. He reckons that the Scottish media are far more interested in art which is produced in England, than art which is produced on their home turf. The exceptions are those writers who have earned millions, and those which have been recognised by the English 'establishment'. These might be deemed worthy of appearing in TV or in the window of Waterstones. But not anyone else. Kelman's own experience attests to this - before he was controversially awarded the Booker Prize in 1994, his work earned no attention whatsoever in Scotland, critical or otherwise. But once the book had earned this plaudit from outside Scotland, Kelman became a celebrated writer in Scotland.

If I am to replace Kelman's phrase 'establishment' with 'popular opinion', his claims start to make even more sense. People in Scotland generally don't read Scottish literature. Whether this is purely because the Scottish media doesn't like it is debateable, but the truth of the matter has to be admitted.  How many people working outside academia even know who Kelman is?  How many have read Tom Leonard, Alaisdair Gray, William MacIlvanney, Janice Galloway, Jackie Kay, A.L. Kennedy? Why are these writers constantly failing to achieve recognition on their own turf, until they win an award which comes from the metropolis?

Recent critics (including myself), who have used elements of postcolonial theory to analyse Scottish Literature, have discovered a vast inferiorism among Scots when it comes to their homegrown produce: namely that since the Union Scots have consistently failed to acknowledge their own culture as valid and valuable.  This applies to writers as well as the general Scottish reading public, and - of course - to the media. Kelman points out that in other countries, writers are seen as people who have something to offer society. They are on T.V., in the papers. And they don't have to be acknowledged abroad in order for this to occur. Yet no one is inviting Alasdair Gray to talk about Scottish culture on the news. No one is asking Tom Leonard for his views on the Israel/Palestine situation. In other words, no-one in Scotland is bothered about Scottish writing.

I'm bothered. And if you're reading this, you're probably bothered too. Forgetting Scotland for a minute, why is it that a book has to already be at the top of a bestseller list before you're average Joe will consider reading it? Why is it that only certain kinds of books will ever top the bestseller lists (detective stories, fantasy, romance fiction)? Why is it that these books almost never express radical or leftwing ideas? Why is it that, as a result of this, a longstanding tradition of leftwing Scottish writing has been swept under the carpet over the last thirty years, an entire oeuvre consigned to the margins of academic study?

Finally, what can we do about it? Of all the questions Kelman's output has raised, I think that this one, at least, can be answered. We must search the bookshelves (and indeed, the stores of amazon.co.uk) more thoroughly, and dig beyond the bestselling work of our day. Not that we shouldn't read Rankin and Rowling - I for one have voiced the opinion that the Harry Potter books are extremely interesting in relation to subaltern studies - but we should also read Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, and the newer, less-plaudited poets, novelists and short-story writers that Scotland is blessed with in abundance. We must not only read the Times Literary Supplement, but also magazines like Poetry Scotland, Northwords Now, and Magma - magazines which publish the writers of tomorrow as well as already-established writers. And editors and publishers must continue to publish writers that have not been 'recognised' yet, in the acknowledgement that a writer who does not earn millions of pounds from bestsellers, or win international awards and prizes, can produce work which is just as valid and important as anything which has been awarded a Nobel prize. In Hugh MacDiarmid's words, ‘Let us have an all-in view of the literary production of our country for a change’.

William McIlvanney at the Edinburgh Book Festival

2009-08-21T03:04:00.006+01:00

Yesterday William McIlvanney was at the Edinburgh Book Festival, reading from his work and discussing the future of Scotland with Stuart Kelly (editor of new Scottish anthology Headshook) and a large audience. Here is a summary of what he said:

To start off the event, MacIlvanney read from his contribution to Headshook. The piece which he contributed is 'Burdalane', a poem in Scots. Burdalane is a Scots word for the last surviving member of a family. McIlvanney uses this as an image of the Scots language - according to him, it is very much on the point of death, and he claims that 'Much of what passes for Scots today is a kind of residual demotic gruel, a poorhouse version of the language'.

A committed Socialist, McIlvanney believes that socialism has not failed, but that what has failed is merely Marxist communism, which he believes to be inhumanly totalitarian and ‘as rational as achieving immortality by committing suicide’. He sees the Scottish Parliament as a very early step towards an independent Scottish Republic, and reckons that Scotland aren’t keen on the royal family in any case.

Although resigned to the fact that Scots (as he sees it) is dying, McIlvanney hopes that something of the Scots character remains. He sees this as an essential down-to-earthness, and reckons that if a Scotsman were to be confronted with Helen of Troy, his comment would be ‘that’s no a bad lookin wumman’. Apparently, a factor in this is that a Scotsman would be aware that he might see a better-looking one in future. He read from an article on Sean Connery, claiming that ‘if you forget where you came from, you forget where you’re going’, and praising Connery’s ability to remain unmistakeably Scottish throughout his career as an international personality and actor. He also pointed out and applauded Connery’s demonstration of the alleged national characteristic, relating that when Connery was voted the sexiest man in the world, he commented that this judgement didn’t include dead ones.

In response to my question, which asked McIlvanney where he sees himself in relation to a Scottish Literary Tradition – if there is such a thing, McIlvanney replied that that was in many ways irrelevant to him, and that he could not place himself in any ‘tradition’ as his writing could easily be forgotten about in the years to come. He said he writes as honestly as he can, and although some people credit him with telling the story of their lives, this is not what he does. However, he is aware that his experience is a shared experience, and is self-consciously aware of his role as a representative of ordinary people who are not normally represented in literature: the working-class, the poor, the ‘dispossessed’ Scots that he grew up with and still considers himself to be a part of. In this way he identifies himself with writers like James Kelman.

From this event I surmise two things: Firstly, that McIlvanney’s views on Scots and the ‘Scottish character’ are somewhat MacDiarmidian in his rather essentialist claims that all Scots portray particular characteristics as a result of the language they speak. Then again, this isn’t perhaps an irrational claim – the theoretical position at the moment seems to be that the world is constructed by language and not vice-versa, so surely if a people were to all speak a particular language they would construct themselves with certain elements in common? However, despite his identification with Kelman, I am not sure that Kelman would agree with his position on Scots as deteriorating into a ‘poorhouse version of itself’, and I’m not sure that I do either. Languages have many disparate elements and all are valuable. But Scots today for McIlvanney is MacDiarmid’s ‘language but that sparely floo’ers, an maistly gangs tae weed’, and that older, ‘purer’ form of Scots is about to vanish forever. Which does seem tragic, as we will have lost an ancient element of the Scots language, and indeed an element of the Anglo-Saxon languages of which English and Scots are both branches. However, for a man who claims not to subscribe to traditional views of tradition and canonicity, it seems hypocritical to value one form of language over another merely because it is old, and to claim that the character traits which were expressed in that form of language are more valuable than these which can be expressed in another. For me, at least, there is something rather elitist about this.

I also surmise that we need to redefine our ideas of ‘tradition’. The days when a national tradition was about which books were likely to withstand the test of time, which would always be held in high esteem by people whose opinions were loud enough to matter, is over. By identifying himself with Kelman, and claiming that his aim is to write about a people that have previously been written out of literature, McIlvanney is fitting in with a wider tradition in literature, in Scotland and also beyond it, where writers have aimed to portray these lives which have hitherto been confined to the margins of literature. Scottish writers like A.L. Kennedy and Tom Leonard fit into this ‘tradition’, as do writers as diverse as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi. What these writers are doing is writing the history of the people who’s history would be lost, granted that history is usually written by the ‘winners’ – those who dominate society, economics, and the arts columns of the national newspapers. Perhaps there are several ‘traditions’, and that each tradition can span across continents and centuries, and that those writers who have been left out of the ‘tradition’ of prestige and canonicity can have their own, equally valid traditions.

After the reading I went to get my books signed, and heard a loud woman with an English accent tell a poor trapped bloke that he simply must read Docherty, that every household in Scotland should have a copy, and that she frequently sent copies to friends, irrelevant of whether they wanted them or not. This drove me nuts, as for me it implied that McIlvanney’s celebrated working-class novel is relevant to Scots, all Scots, and only Scots. Despite that this is a blog about Scottish books, for me Scottishness is a fairly arbitrary category. A sense of identity and belonging is as relevant to writers from all nations as it is to Scotland. Perhaps it is so dominant in Scotland as we are now so self-consciously aware of our status as a minority, ‘stateless’ nation that we have begun to claw back some of our autonomy, partly by establishing a new Scottish Parliament, and partly by developing such a persistent and thriving literature. This literature is relevant to Scotland in that it comes from Scotland, but a book need not address ‘Scottishness’ in any direct or indirect form to be a part of Scottish literature, and at the same time, being a part of Scottish literature need not mean that a book is not relevant outwith Scottish borders. Also, as the work of Sydney Goodsir Smith testifies, a writer need not be Scottish in order to contribute to its literature.

So what does this mean for Scottishness, and for Scottish literature? I hope it means that these things are bigger, and more diverse, than anyone might expect them to be. I hope it means that William McIlvanney is not just a Scottish writer, not just a working-class writer, not just a Socialist writer, but a writer whose work is relevant to all these categories and more, and a writer whose work anyone might be able to identify with regardless of birthplace, class, and political stance.