Questioning Scotland: literature, nationalism, postmodernism

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Questioning Scotland

10.1057/9780230508248 - Questioning Scotland, Eleanor Bell

Also by Eleanor Bell


SCOTLAND IN THEORY: Reflections on Culture and Literature (with Gavin Miller, eds)


Questioning Scotland Eleanor Bell

P3IQ? 3V6 10.1057/9780230508248 - Questioning Scotland, Eleanor Bell


Literature, Nationalism, Postmodernism

© Eleanor Bell 2004

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1-4039-1331-5 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Bell, Eleanor, 1973Questioning Scotland : literature, nationalism, postmodernism / Eleanor Bell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 1-4039-1331-5 1. Scottish literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Nationalism and literature—Scotland. 3. Postmodernism (Literature)-Scotland. 4. Literature and history—Scotland. 5. Scotland—Intellectual life. 6. Nationalism—Scotland. 7. Criticism—Scotland. I. Title. PR8518.B45 2004 820.9'9411'0904—dc22 2004053034 10 13

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


In memory of Elizabeth Stewart Bell




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Acknowledgements

ix

List of Abbreviations

x

Introduction

1

1 Tracing Predicaments: Modernism to Postmodernism From the Kailyard to the Scottish Literary Renaissance Modernist Predicaments: MacDiarmid and Muir Women, Misrepresentation and the Renaissance Period Postmodern Predicaments

7 12 15 22 28

2 (Multi)National Identity: Old and New Histories Late National Imaginings Tom Nairn: Nationalism, Neurosis and the Pathological Faces of Nationalism and Further Contradictions After Britain and the Return of Scotland Beveridge and Turnbull: Postmodernism vs. Cultural Nationalism Cairns Craig: Out of History and the Question of Tradition The Modern Scottish Novel: Reclaiming the National Imagination National Imaginations: Old and New Histories

47 52 58 62 67

86 90

3 Postmodern States: Re-thinking the Nation Apocalyptic Re-thinkings: Alasdair Gray Scotland Rematerialised: The Poetry of Edwin Morgan Postmodern States and Ethical Beyondness

95 100 111 120

4 Ethics of Deterritorialisation Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Ethics of Place Postnationalism, Ethics and Deterritorialisation

125 131 136

vn 10.1057/9780230508248 - Questioning Scotland, Eleanor Bell

70 80


Contents

viii Contents

Conclusion Scottish Postcolonialism and Cultural Difference Irish Studies: Revisionism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism

141 142

Notes

151

Bibliography

182

Index

193



145

I would like to thank Carcanet Press Limited for their permission to reprint extracts from Edwin Morgan's Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996). Special thanks to Alex Young and John Bell for their love and support throughout the preparation of this book.

IX



Acknowledgements

A AB BN EMUSC ESC FoN G GUW

HMSR IC IS ISP L NN OD OOH PE PI SAE SoC

Hugh MacDiarmid, Albyn; or, Scotland and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, 1927) Tom Nairn, After Britain (London: Granta, 2000) Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage Publications, 1995) Andrew Noble (ed.) Edwin Muir: Uncollected Scottish Criticism (London: Vision Press, 1982) Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989) Tom Nairn, Faces of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1998) Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998) Beat Witschi, Glasgow Urban Writing and Postmodernism: A Study of Alasdair Grays Fiction (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1989) Duncan Glen, Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance (London: W. & R. Chambers Ltd, 1964) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) Willa Muir, Imagined Selves (ed.) Kirsty Allen (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996) Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) Alasdair Gray, Lanark (London: Picador, 1994) Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990) Catherine Carswell, Open the Door! (London: Virago, 1986) Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996) Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997) Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull, Scotland after Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1997) Benedict Anderson, Spectres of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998) x 10.1057/9780230508248 - Questioning Scotland, Eleanor Bell


List of Abbreviations

SoE

SNSTS

SS T TBU TLS TMSN

TSN US

Geoffrey Gait Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 1999) Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds), The Scottish Novel since the Seventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993) Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd, 1936) Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives of Modern Irish Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988) Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and NeoNationalism (London: NLB, 1977) Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994) Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) Francis Russell Hart, The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey (London: John Murray, 1978) David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London: Routledge, 1992)



Abbreviations xi




Irish history emerges as the author of Irish writing, rather than vice versa, whether vice versa signifies the aesthetic or the poststructuralist. Further, history itself is constructed within a specific historical strand of Nationalist discourse - Republican as opposed to Home Rule.1

But here, precisely, we confront the fundamental question of popular sovereignty: who exactly are the people? Are they a people, the people, or peoples?2 In The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Edna Longley presents a challenge to common perceptions of Irishness, suggesting that too often national identity has been predicated on nationalist grounds, making it exclusory in certain specific ways. Irish Nationalism, she points out, has frequently been 'informed by Catholic theological habits' (TLS, 174), and this has overshadowed many other possibilities of Irish national identity, for example, those of Protestant citizens in the North. Consequently, the history of the Republic has often been unfairly judged to reflect the desirable and 'true' nature of Irishness. In her revisionist approach, Longley therefore aims to expose this overemphasis on nationalist forms of identity, exposing the ideological foundations of such constructions. It may seem peculiar that a book on Scottish studies begins by addressing issues particular to Ireland. However, increasingly, connections are now being made between the two disciplines. Yet, where there have been many recent theoretical developments in Irish studies on issues such as postcolonialism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, investigations in l



Introduction

these areas from a Scottish context have been relatively sparse, and it will be suggested that Scottish studies could therefore benefit from more reflection in these areas. While revisionism in the field of Irish studies remains highly contentious, it will nonetheless be stated that this approach of reading against the grain may, at a symbolic level, prove useful to Scottish studies in its probing and unearthing of national identity, its ability to generate critical debate. It will be proposed that such forms of critical 'revisioning' might be inherently linked to recent developments in ethical theory, where national identity must continually be interrogated in order to avoid slipping into forms of complacency. This self-conscious ethical imperative is one that has often been overlooked in Scottish studies, and it will be suggested that for too long the discipline has been posited in parochial, stereotypical, cultural nationalist terms without recourse to the possible reverberations and limitations of such constructions. Following Longley's observation above, in its dependence on cultural nationalist readings, there has been a tendency in Scottish studies to equate history with literature, so that literature tends to be regarded as the effect of cultural processes, rather than as an intervention in those processes, or indeed as a relatively autonomous act of aesthetic, ethical or political engagement. Subsequently, there is a certain factor of reducibility at work, where texts produced by Scottish authors must in the first instance be explained in terms of their Scottishness. One of the objectives of this book will therefore be to suggest that such approaches tend to perpetuate the introversion of a discipline that in actuality needs to expand its conceptual boundaries. When too much investment is placed in the role of Scottish culture in this unselfconscious way then literature is also restricted, potentially 'contained'. It will be posited that this continual need to concentrate on issues of national culture may ultimately disregard the ethical possibilities of both literature and national identity. While this book may at times appear vulnerable to falling into this same trap of reading Scottish texts in terms of their Scottishness, this, however, is carried out in order to illustrate the ways in which the texts themselves often seek to resist such forms of categorisation. Questioning Scotland will examine some of the ways in which Scottish critics have often failed to recognise the importance of what will be described as an ethical concern with difference in their determinations of Scottishness. It begins by questioning the notion of a 'predicament' facing the Scottish writer, stretching back to debates between Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid during the modernist Renaissance concerning the limitations of the English language as a means of expressing a Scottish 'sensibility'. Chapter 1 explores the way in which these essentialist preoccu-



2 Introduction

pations have been a recurrent feature within Scottish literary studies. In criticism, therefore, there has often been a tendency to resort to essentialist forms of national identity, such as the 'Caledonian Antisyzygy', as a convenient means of codifying and determining Scottishness.3 There often appears, therefore, to be a kind of persistent circularity at work, where identification with such stereotypical formulations leads inevitably to their general acceptance, generation and perpetuation within the canon. While recently many debates have emerged in Irish studies concerning postcolonialism and the need for what Spivak terms 'strategic essentialism',4 in Scottish studies this urge for essentialism has often remained largely untheorised and unchallenged. By tracing the concept of a 'Scottish Predicament' from the Modernist Renaissance to the present, Chapter 1 examines this issue of essentialism, suggesting the need for more selfconscious engagements with nationhood in order to escape the stasis generated by reductive formulations. Reflecting upon some of the characteristics of postmodern theory and recent developments in the study of nationhood, it will be suggested that Scottish studies should be encouraged to emerge from its often comfortable position of traditionalism in order to embrace, or at least become more conversant in, contemporary theoretical discourses. While some critics will be reluctant to make this move into 'postal' theory,5 into areas where the concept of the nation is 'threatened', it will be argued that such a move is nonetheless necessary in order to avoid the 'fossilisation' of national identity.6 The Irish nationalist critic Seamus Deane has suggested that to move from essentialist forms of nationalism into more postmodern spaces 'in which the postmodernist simulacrum of pluralism supplants the search for a legitimating mode of nationalism and origins, is surely to pass from one kind of colonising experience to another.'7 Throughout these chapters, however, the focus on postmodernism is not meant to encourage a form of relativism and pluralism where 'anything goes'. Rather, the objective will be to suggest some of the ways in which concerns with various recent theoretical developments might benefit Scottish studies, without wholly dismissing the need for political forms of nationalism either. It is important to stress here that the aim is not to replace forms of nationalist thinking with revisionist modes, for this would be to simply uphold forms of binary thinking which are hopefully being exposed as limiting. The objective therefore will be to encourage dialogue and points of intersection between these oppositional discourses in order to open out the accepted 'domain' of Scottish studies.8 Chapter 2 will investigate some of the possible effects of what has commonly been referred to as a general weakening of the nation-state. By



Introduction 3

looking at some of the theories of late nationalism posited by Benedict Anderson, it will consider the work of several Scottish critics, examining their hesitancy to address these changes. In The Eclipse of Scottish Culture, Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull adopt some of the theoretical ideas of Frantz Fanon in order to elucidate the means by which, they feel, Scottish culture has been 'eclipsed' and 'inferiorised' by the effects of colonialism. However, where Irish studies has been evidently engaged with theories of colonialism and postcolonialism, it will be suggested that these concerns do not easily transfer into a Scottish context. In their analyses, Beveridge and Turnbull often slip into an essentialist trap in order to justify their accounts of the Scottish cultural tradition, without critical awareness of its possible blind spots. This tendency to limit the possibilities of Scottishness in often questionable ways in order to defend the tradition can also be found in the work of Cairns Craig and Tom Nairn, and the work of each will be examined in detail. In particular, it will be suggested that if nations are now potentially subject to reconfiguration then, similarly, the notion of national traditions can no longer be uncritically assumed. In this way, the postmodern concern with provisionally and openness to alterity may prove apposite. Again, however, this is not to suggest, as hostile critics often assume, that postmodern histories simply dispense with or eradicate the past. Alternatively, such reflections may be able to critique previously exclusive historical accounts, contesting the grounds on which history is recorded. It may be that newer forms of historiography will soon supersede postmodern accounts, yet arguably it is nonetheless important to record the effects of such theoretical developments, rather than conveniently and defensively dismissing them. In this respect, a sign of growing confidence in Scottish studies is that it is able to work within these theoretical paradigms rather than shrinking from them. Challenging concepts of tradition in this way may also, it will be suggested, lead to more ethical forms of what will be described as critical traditionalism. In his book Postnationalist Ireland, the philosopher Richard Kearney is concerned with the possible future directions of nationalism when placed under pressure by forces such as globalism. In this book, and elsewhere, he is keen to point out that postnationalism does not represent the wholesale rejection or dismissal of the nationalist project. Postnationalism, he suggests, is, in this way, not a form of anft'-nationalism, but rather an acceptance and awareness of processes now taking place both within and between nations, reflecting emergent attitudes towards the changing nature of history and culture:



4 Introduction

Introduction 5

For Kearney, we are now existing in an in-between state, where new forms of citizenship may be emerging, yet where the older versions should not be underestimated or dismissed either. The task, then, is to preserve what is valuable in past models while trying to anticipate what prospective forms might involve. In this search, Kearney describes the need for a postmodern hermeneutics capable of operating and mediating between these processes of fluctuation: It has been suggested by [Agnes] Heller and others that postmodern theory can have radical implications for politics. One frequently encounters the claim, for instance, that the postmodern critiques of the centre - as logos, arche, origin, presence, identity, unity or sovereignty - challenge the categories of established power. The most often cited examples here relate to the critique of totalitarianism, colonialism and nationalism. The postmodern theory of power puts the "modern" concept of the nation-state into question. It points towards a decentralising and dissemination of sovereignty which, in the European context at least, signals the possibility of new configurations of federal-regional government. (PI, 61) In this text Kearney's notion of a postmodern hermeneutic necessitates that a sense of 'just' citizenship always remains in the nascent state, always to be further anticipated.9 It is this ability to postpone the definitive 'capturing' of the nation that is being linked here with an ethical imperative. In Chapter 3, and with reference to Julia Kristeva, it is suggested that this ethical awareness of what lies beyond conventional conceptions and boundaries of the nation can also be found in contemporary Scottish writing. In looking at some of the work of Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan, and with reference to other writers such as Kathleen Jamie, it is suggested that at a textual level there is often a desire to transgress limiting depictions of the nation. Following the debates surrounding the notion of a 'Predicament' facing the Scottish writer in Chapter 1, this chapter continues the notion that where critics have often been guilty of essentialist thinking, much Scottish writing, on the contrary, appears to challenge such forms of introversion. In this way, it looks towards what Homi



The challenge facing us is not to abrogate the desire for regionalnational identity - repeating the errors of Enlightenment rationalism or totalitarian imperialism - but to find the more appropriate forms for its expression - a regional model of cultural and political democracy within in an overall federal framework. (PI, 185)

Bhabha has described as the unhomely. Where cultural nationalist depictions have often tended to exclude marginal voices, preferring instead to create a coherent, structured, often elitist tradition, these writers alternatively tend to draw attention to estrangement and alterity, the consequent need for broader inclusion, rather than an assumption that national identity can or should be fixed. Chapter 4 begins by considering the relationship between nationalism, postmodernism and ethics, mapping some possible points of intersection. Continuing the themes discussed in earlier chapters it will be suggested that there is a need for renewed forms of ethical awareness in the consideration of national identity. This chapter will reflect generally on some of the recent concerns in nation studies in order to apply these more directly to Scottish studies. In doing so, it will consider some of Zygmunt Bauman's work on postmodernism, ethics and morality. Where postmodernism is often associated with a crisis in values, an inability to construct or establish the grounds for their discussion, Bauman, on the contrary, suggests that values, in actuality, have always been in crisis. In making this point, Bauman opens out the possibility of a postmodern ethics and its role within broader questions of community. According to Bauman, forms of belonging, such as national identity, are now becoming increasingly fragile. It is for this reason that he stresses the importance of community at smaller levels, in order to encourage a re-thinking of territory. This process, he points out, may also help to generate a more developed moral and ethical conscience It is this connection between ethics and community which has recently gained increasing prominence that will be discussed in the second section of Chapter 4. This section will aim to bring together some of the concerns which have emerged in the debates surrounding postmodernism and this renewed focus on community in order to then contextualise these from a Scottish perspective. The final section of this chapter will then reflect on issues surrounding postnationalism and possible future conceptions of community, ethical forms of inclusion and belonging, while also suggesting how these might prove beneficial to Scottish studies. Finally, the Conclusion will return to some of the contemporary, controversial debates in Irish studies concerning postmodernism, postcolonialism and revisionism in order to reflect on the significance of these from a Scottish context. It will be argued that in being open to such debates that open out the ethical possibilities of national identity Scottish studies has much to gain, that it should therefore welcome the development of such theoretical comparisons.



6 Introduction

Tracing Predicaments: Modernism to Postmodernism

I wish merely to define the position of the Scottish writer, and then to inquire by what means he can come to completeness, what help Scotland can give him in doing so, and what obstacles she puts in his way. n

The Predicament of Scotland, the State of Scotland, is a pre-occupation which is admittedly inward and introverted; some may say that it is no healthy pre-occupation. But until there is a State of Scotland, we have no choice but to be so obsessed. Would it were not so. But we can stop talking about the State of Scotland only when we are in a position to do something about it.12 In 1982, Polygon Books reprinted Edwin Muir's Scott and Scotland, which had remained unpublished since 1936. In order to publicise this event, an evening discussion was organised and a number of prominent Scottish writers invited to speak. The main theme of the evening was also one of central concern to Muir: 'The Predicament of the Scottish Writer'. Although the ensuing debates were later described by Joy Hendry, editor of Chapman, as the 'Cultural Non-event of the Year', an edition of the journal devoted to this topic nonetheless appeared. This particular edition, published in 1983, proved enormously successful in generating debate, and was itself later reprinted, testifying both to its popularity and timely importance. It is therefore this concept of a predicament facing the Scottish writer that will be examined here. Of particular concern will be the differences between what will be termed modernist and more postmodernist predicaments - that is, the ways in which these concepts may be viewed as sociological periodising terms, therefore offering insights into 7



1

the changing nature of Scottish literary studies throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. For Edwin Muir in Scott and Scotland: A Predicament for the Scottish Writer, Scottish literature had reached a crisis point, and inherent to this was an inability for culture to be expressed through a singular, autonomous language. Muir states in this text that what many people referred to as the Scottish Renaissance period of the twenties and thirties was therefore really no renaissance at all - Scottish writers, he asserts, were hindered by their history and consequently suffered from an inability to use their own 'true' language (Gaelic).13 As a result, writers were handicapped, at an unfair advantage, reduced to forming 'inferior' versions of language, such as Hugh MacDiarmid's synthetic Scots. Therefore, Muir stressed in this text, until Scotland acquired its own language it would consistently be tied to the English Tradition and faced with an insurmountable 'predicament'.14 For this reason Muir focuses on the novels of Sir Walter Scott, stating that Scott's characters lacked consistency and depth as a direct result of his acquiescent adoption of the English language. For Muir, Scott's characters were consequently superficial, being made 'of flesh and blood and pasteboard' (SS, 173). That Scott's writing could not adequately represent or map Scottish reality was problematic for Muir, as, at least in this text, he was clearly more concerned with visualising Scotland in terms of a stable, organic unity. For Muir, therefore, the 'incompleteness' of the Scottish writer was undesirable, yet nonetheless inevitable in a country that also failed to have its own autonomous identity. While Muir's desire for such an organic identity may strike the contemporary reader as unusual, such forms of essentialist rhetoric were not uncommon at this time. It is a tendency found, for example, in the essays of T.S. Eliot (also, incidentally, an admirer of Muir's work), where in 'The Function of Criticism', he writes: I thought of literature then, as I think of it now, of the literature of the world, of the literature of Europe, of the literature of a single country, not as a collection of the writings of individuals, but as 'organic wholes', as systems in relation to which, and only in relation to which, individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance.15 Throughout his career, it is clear that Edwin Muir often had a troubled relationship with Scotland and that this often contradicted the sense of holism described above. In his autobiography, for example, he describes



8 Tracing Predicaments: Modernism to Postmodernism

the degradation and sense of dejection he faced as a young Orcadian man arriving in Glasgow. Muir refers to 'the crumbling houses, the twisted faces, the obscene words casually heard in passing, the ancient, haunting stench of pollution and decay, the arrogant women, the mean men, the terrible children'.16 Another text that should not be overlooked here is Scottish Journey, published in 1935. In preparation for this book, Muir set out on a journey around Scotland, in effect searching for its national characteristics and national spirit. What Muir discovers, however, is not what he originally expected: T tried to extract a picture of Scotland as an entity, but I did not succeed'. Instead, Muir reaches the conclusion that the 'thing' he searched for was perhaps only imaginary anyway: T had to admit to myself that I had seen a great number of things, but no thing, and to fall back on the conclusion that nationality is real and yet indefinable, and that it can be grasped at most in history, which means that it cannot really be grasped at all' 17 (my italics). That Muir has such a contrary response to nationhood and national identity just one year before publishing Scott and Scotland may seem perplexing. Indeed, Muir's readings were often inconsistent in this way, and attempts to understand his work rendered more difficult as a result. While Muir's identification with the nation must always be seen as problematic due to its changeability, this chapter will concentrate mainly on Scott and Scotland, the main critical text for which he is now best remembered. Scott and Scotland remains an important text in Scottish literary studies, yet it will be argued that it remains largely unchallenged for its questionable assumptions relating to the 'essence' of nationhood. Similarly, Hugh MacDiarmid's readings of Scottish literature, culture and politics were often complicated and contradictory, and the hope is not to oversimplify his work here. Rather, some of MacDiarmid's conflicting views surrounding the 'predicament' of Scotland will be analysed. While MacDiarmid's version of the modernist predicament is also concerned with language, it will be suggested that his views differ from Muir's in many significant respects. MacDiarmid's critical position on this issue of often slippery and changeable, yet what, at least at times, unites both writers is the need for Scotland to be depicted as an organic community to escape from its political and cultural predicaments. The need for such approaches, and readings of these from a contemporary perspective, will be considered in more detail later. In the second epigraph above, from the introduction to the 1983 edition of Chapman devoted to the predicament of the Scottish writer, Joy Hendry also draws attention to this need for holistic forms of nationhood, albeit of a more directly political nature. This popular edition, published at



Tracing Predicaments: Modernism to Postmodernism 9

a time when the political situation in Scotland was generally perceived as critical, and in bringing together a series of strong voices in reaction to this crisis, will therefore be considered here as central to more recent versions of the predicament debate. In these articles, Scotland is often still defined in essentialist ways, and dubious claims frequently made about the alleged nature of nationhood in an attempt to escape from the political predicament of Scotland under Thatcherism. Yet, some of the other critics in this edition, who also share this wish to escape the political predicament, are obviously resistant to such organic models, so that an interesting tension emerges between seeing nationhood reductively and in more open-ended terms. In her editorial, Hendry briefly maps out her concerns surrounding the political status of Scotland in the 1980s, highlighting the necessity for self-conscious reflections of the general social and cultural predicament. As Hendry points out, it was often necessary for Scotland to be depicted in bleak and pessimistic terms, for this reflected the general desperate political situation of the country. Perhaps for this reason she writes that Scotland must remain introverted, at least until it becomes a more stable political entity rather than remaining a stateless nation. In another article in the same edition, Alan Bold describes the literature of the Eighties as 'an angry animal' since 'an English writer takes his or her national identity for granted, a Scottish writer has to assert it'.18 Therefore his view of the 'Scottish predicament' is similar to that of Hendry. From their perspective, Scotland, and its writers, should be obsessed by national identity; though they acknowledge, paradoxically, that this is possibly 'no healthy pre-occupation'. It is interesting to observe that in the same edition of Chapman entitled 'The State of Scotland: A Predicament for the Scottish Writer?' Alasdair Gray writes an article that undermines this urge to simplify the nation. Gray, it appears, is sympathetic to more expansive views of nationhood, and is clearly ironic in the title of his own article: 'A Modest Proposal for By-passing a Predicament'. In this article Gray denies writing for a purely Scottish audience, would indeed like to simply 'by-pass' any reductive notions of nationhood and history that are overly restrictive. He goes on to state that forms of national self-obsession are simply not healthy; that they emerge when certain countries, such as Scotland, lack the power to govern themselves and therefore resort to endless self-reflexiveness in their desperation for expression. According to Gray, Scotland has many good writers, yet they are perpetually encouraged to focus on issues of national identity, rather than on more interesting international and broader issues. Clearly Gray rejects the need for introversion proposed by Bold





Conditioned to regard himself as a loser and generally contrives to act like one. He is horribly unsure of himself, morbidly afraid of defeat. He prefers to be spectator rather than a participant unless he is drunk and daft with Scotch Courage... The typical Scot has bad teeth, a good chance of cancer, a liver under severe stress and a heart attack pending. He smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and regularly makes an exhibition of himself. He is a loser and he knows it. He is forever trying to cover up the pathological cracks in his character... Secretly the Scot longs to be impressive, is dying to be a winner. The result is almost obscene.19 Gray, on the contrary, suggests that such stereotypes only perpetuate Scotland's sense of political inferiority and cannot therefore be beneficial. He is scathing of the need for such definitive depictions: It is very queer that a small nation which has bred so many strongly local writers of worldwide scope still bickers and agonises over the phoney old local versus international doublebind. Why? The fact that Scotland is governed from outside itself, governed against the advice of the three Parliamentary Commissions and against the wishes of most Scots who voted on the matter, cannot be used to explain our lack of talent because that lack is no longer evident.20 It is therefore this often controversial concept of the 'predicament of the Scottish writer' that will be discussed in this chapter. It will focus on some of the ways in which nationhood is far from transcendent or holistic as implied in some of the prior examples discussed above. In doing so, the versions of a predicament as they emerged in literary modernism will be examined, as a means of then conceptualising their use from more contemporary sociological and cultural perspectives in a recently devolved Scotland. In doing so it will also question the extent to which in both eras there has been a strong need to define Scottish nationhood through its literature and culture, often in terms of cultural nationalism, and the chapter will therefore end with an examination of this tendency. Before going on to consider some of these various predicaments, the following sections will trace some of the background to the inter-war Scottish Renaissance, questioning in what sense it may be viewed as a



and Hendry. For Gray, this introversion tends to be narcissistic and limiting, is therefore to be avoided. Yet, for Bold, the average Scot, who is also averagely male, is described as:

coherent literary movement. While critics often tend to see this movement as purely shaped and developed by MacDiarmid, these sections will hope to open up some of the debates surrounding the Renaissance in order to widen its general scope. Beginning with an overview of the cultural context the issues leading up to the Renaissance and literary modernism, the following sections will analyse the role of central figures such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir, before going on to examine other writers who have often been omitted from discussions of the period, such as Willa Muir and Catherine Carswell, questioning some of the reasons why this has been the case. It will then suggest that perhaps our conceptions of the Renaissance now ought to be more accommodating, in order to envisage a larger cultural pattern of this time and to challenge the boundaries of what it might retrospectively represent. From the Kailyard to the Scottish Literary Renaissance At the beginning of this century there were only about half a dozen living Scots writers of any note; only three or four of them were writing on Scots themes, and only two or three were living in Scotland. Within the last few years there have been about fifty living Scots writers of some distinction; nearly all of them have been writing about Scotland, and nearly forty have been working in their own country. All of them have been more or less Scotland-conscious, many of them in a definite fashion which was quite unknown among Scots writers fifty years ago. Whether that amounts to a literary renascence cannot be known till another generation has grown up. But at least it continues a literary awakening.21 Writing in 1935, as part of the 'Voice of Scotland' series commissioned by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, William Power was concerned with 'what literature has meant to Scotland' from early Gaelic literature to his own contemporary period. Power's 'Literature and Oatmeal* emerged at a time when, to many, a Scottish Literary Renaissance had clearly been underway for some time. Writing a few years earlier, Neil Gunn commented 'Would I call it a Renaissance? Either that, or an Awakening.'22 This sense of a reawakening or Renaissance in Scotland was therefore in many respects linked with an urge to revitalise Scottish culture and politics. Critics have usually agreed that Hugh MacDiarmid was the central figure in this Literary Renaissance. Yet in order to understand the background to this perceived revitalisation of culture, it is necessary to reflect on some of the major changes taking place in nineteenth century Scotland and how these led up to the Renaissance period. During the 1800s, with




the development of industry and rising urbanisation, there was a growing fear in some quarters that with increasing modernisation was perhaps also a corresponding decline in the importance of national tradition. As Edward Cowan and Richard Finlay have pointed out, central literary figures and men of letters such as Sir Walter Scott and Henry Cockburn, then began to actively preserve forms of literary tradition before they would finally become irrecoverable. In turn, they began to collect old ballads, historical records and artefacts so that the past would be preserved rather than erased from collective memory.23 While on the one hand there was a growing fear of a loss of tradition, on the other was the development of a new form of literature towards the end of the century, what many critics have subsequently labelled as 'kailyard' (or 'cabbage patch'). Kailyard texts (usually attributed to writers such as J.M Barrie, Ian Maclaren and S.R. Crockett) have come to represent a certain tale of static Scottish rural life. These writings, often critiqued for their sentimentality and inertness, for depicting small town life from limited perspectives, have generally been viewed as presenting disingenuous forms of escapism from the realities of late nineteenth century urbanisation and industrial development. In what Ian Campbell describes as the familiar catalogue of the 'high kailyard', in 'fiction (and to a lesser extent poetry)' there was a strong concern with 'education, religion, strong social fabric and family ties, Burns worship, local boys getting on' in these texts.24 For Campbell it is also vital that the kailyard should not only be restricted to the works of Barrie, Maclaren and Crockett, and he suggests that kailyard themes can also be found earlier in, for example, the works of Henry Mackenzie, John Wilson, Elizabeth Hamilton, John Gibson Lockhart, Margaret Oliphant and George MacDonald.25 Campbell then goes on to point out that certain writers after Barrie, Maclaren and Crockett, such as George Douglas Brown (in The House with the Green Shutters) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon (in Sunset Song) also self-consciously played with kailyard stereotypes (albeit usually to undermine them). So while the kailyard may not only be contained within the late nineteenth century, it is also important to recognise that the writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance were often reacting against forms of 'high kailyard', challenging the dullness of the environment it depicted. At beginning of Sunset Song, for example, the 'bonny briar bush' of the kailyard is playfully engaged with:




So that was Kinraddie that bleak winter of nineteen eleven and the new minister, him they chose early next year, he was to say that it was Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a bonny briar bush in the lee of a house with green shutters. And what he meant by that you could guess at yourself if you'd a mind for puzzles and dirt, there wasn't a house with green shutters in the whole of Kinraddie.26 Here, in this depiction of the changing rural landscape of the North-East of Scotland after WW1, the restrictive and stagnant world of the kailyard is parodied, although arguably in order to highlight the inevitability of change. In this novel Gibbon is also concerned with a small rural community and traditional forms of farming life, precisely in order to illuminate the ways in which war and modernity will alter these irrevocably. Recognising this inevitability of change, it was also these former representations of static life that the Scottish Renaissance sought to challenge. Referring to Hugh MacDiarmid's central role in the Scottish Renaissance, William Power has suggested that one of his main aims was therefore to challenge 'bourgeois-Victorian funk-holes', such as those often ascribed to the kailyard: At times he can be clumsy, abusive, unjust, and irritatingly perverse. But he is never for one moment dull, because he is always his own amazing self. He is more thought-provoking than any of his English contemporaries. He has managed to bomb the Scots mind out of its bourgeois-Victorian funk-holes, and make it take to the open. His declared function is to enlarge human consciousness, and the brilliant intrepidity of his pioneering and exploratory spirit has made him an acknowledged leader of most of the younger writers in Scotland.27 For Power, therefore, behind MacDiarmid's work was not so much an attempt to marry literature and national identity as the impulse to 'to split the Caledonian atom, and liberate the Scot that is to be'. 28 Consequently, much of the writing of the Scottish Renaissance has also been thought of in nationalist terms, particularly in cultural nationalist terms, as a way of explicating this perceived needed liberation. For many writers and critics at this time it was imperative to reflect on the political predicament of Scotland. With the formation of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, and the success of Irish Nationalism, many commentators were encouraged to think in nationalist terms. It is therefore no coincidence that several journals and magazines began to emerge which then provided a vehicle for the expression of these thoughts.29 At the heart of this criticism





The depression from which all Europe is suffering is making the average Scot reconsider some of his major premises, and the sap of Scottish nationality, having sunk to the roots, is rising again and giving promise once more of real fruit. If you had visited us in pre-War days, you would have found the attitude so completely implied in Hume Brown everywhere triumphant - the view that Scotland, from poor beginnings, had grown up to make a successful marriage with England, and that with her children 'getting on' in the Empire overseas, the future must become ever brighter and brighter. Even before the War, this view was being slightly shaken; the War shook it violently... Then came the 'slump' from which everyone suffered and a wave of economic nationalism. The result was the conversion of a large and growing number of business men to the view expounded immediately after the War by a handful of poets, novelists and philosophers - that a country that lives on and for its export trade (of people as well as stuffs), has lost the liberty to shape its own ends and make the most of its own resources, is in a very sorry state indeed.30 Writing more recently, Richard Finlay also points out that this inter-war period was dominated by a sense of political and cultural crisis, where writers, artists and politicians were struggling against a sense of 'terminal

decline'.31 Clearly, after the Second World War this cultural nationalist drive dissipates, as does the incentive for the Renaissance itself. However, before opening out some of the wider implications of this Modernist Renaissance in Scottish literature, the following section will consider the work of Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid and their respective notions of a Scottish 'predicament' in more detail. Modernist Predicaments: MacDiarmid and Muir The very words 'a Scottish writer' have a slightly unconvincing ring to me: what they come down to (I except Grieve, who is an exception to all rules) is a writer of Scottish birth. But when we talk of an English writer we do not think of English birth: we hardly think of such things at all. A Scottish writer is in a false position, because Scotland is in a false position. Yes, that's what it comes down to; and now that I think of it, that is what fills me with such a strong desire to see Scottish literature visibly integrated in a Scottish group living in Scotland for that would make the



was a realisation that Scotland politically and culturally was in 'a very sorry state indeed':


For Edwin Muir in Scott and Scotland, the predicament of the Scottish writer lay in the hopelessness of representing a country that had no poetic means of representation.33 Muir was pessimistic about the future role of Scottish literature, sensing that it would only become further subsumed within the English Tradition.34 The predicament facing the Scottish writer, therefore, was how to exist within this ever-deepening 'false position'. In order to escape this predicament, a return to more holistic forms of nationhood was required, invoking a strengthening of national identity, therefore rescuing the national literature. Yet for Muir such a return was also problematic. Where such holistic forms may once have been possible (he asserts that this was the case prior to the sixteenth century), 'cultural decline' then led to a gradual splitting of citizens from a homogenous language. The result of this, the predicament, he concedes, is that the Scots are now tied to the English Tradition, where people may 'talk in Scots but think in English'.35 The English language cannot provide adequate means for expression for the Scot, yet nonetheless, there is now no escape from this cultural and social predicament. Muir's conceptions of Scotland and its 'predicament' have clearly perplexed many critics, and, unsurprisingly, he has been accused of 'frequent wrong-headedness'.36 The key problem is that language in Scotland has never been wholly homogenous, just as Scotland 'itself has not. Muir's concept of a predicament is therefore also one based on a 'false position'. Muir alleges that, writing in English, Sir Walter Scott could only develop Scottish characters of the most basic kind; yet, writing in English also apparently allows Muir the right to speak on behalf of the Scottish nation, expressing 'its' predicament in clear terms. Muir writes that 'Scotland's historical destiny is to eliminate itself in reality', for there is ultimately no foreseeable way that the nation can become organic and 'whole'. He claims that 'we are neither quite alive nor quite dead', and should therefore accept that becoming part of the English tradition is at least a realistic way of maintaining some form of existence (EMUSC, 37). However, Muir's ideas were often contradictory. For example, he also wrote 'All the same, at suitable opportunities, and when I feel like it, I am going to have a shot at advocating an indigenous Scottish school of literature in Scotland' (EMUSC, 37). So while Muir was concerned with depicting Scotland, and was sympathetic to MacDiarmid's views on a synthetic Scots and the need for revi-



position unequivocal, or at least would be the first step towards doing it; it would not merely be a gesture, or an expedient, but a definite act, and therefore with a symbolical value.32


I fancy that almost every other country in the world gives its writers a chance to live in it; Scotland does not. I fancy that hardly any other country in the world objects when a few of its writers chooses to live elsewhere; Scotland does. (EMUSC, 39) It is interesting to observe that in this text Muir seems to hold a personal grudge against the country, that this grudge then becomes a way of attacking the very 'nature' of Scotland. By reflecting on his own experiences of life in Scotland, Muir then is able to speak of the country as a whole in an essential way ('Scotland aims to eliminate itself) (my italics). Of course, this is also ironic, since the central point of Muir's argument was to convince others and draw attention to the fact that Scotland's problem was actually the lack of such a 'whole' or organic unity. His claim for the need for such coherence is therefore puzzling, infers the issue of whose Scotland he was aiming to depict in the first instance.37 MacDiarmid in many respects disagreed with Muir's conceptions of language. While Muir remained sceptical about the possibility of a revival of Scottish culture, MacDiarmid, writing in the twenties and thirties, strongly believed that a movement towards what he called 'synthetic Scots' was the only means of uniting a country that was eagerly awaiting fundamental political change. In his often furious and bitter attacks on what he perceived as the subjugation of Scotland, MacDiarmid called on all writers to take up his challenge to revitalise the nation. MacDiarmid therefore believed, in many respects instigated the concept of the Modernist Renaissance itself. He believed that the Scottish writer was in trouble, that she or he was placed in a 'predicament' as a direct result of their social and literary history, which remained too interested in parochial depictions of nationhood. The Scottish writer according to MacDiarmid was too implicated in tradition, too much under the influence of Burns, sentimentalised depictions of Scotland and kailyardism. MacDiarmid consequently branded the slogan 'Precedents - Not Tradition!'38 His perceptions of the need for a cultural and literary renaissance were therefore imbedded in his overall desire for a political renewal and revitalisation of Scotland.39 For MacDiarmid the adoption of synthetic Scots (Lallans) offered an opportunity and means of achieving this necessary cultural shift.40 His views were often contradictory, and as both a communist and nationalist,



talisation of the nation, he nonetheless remained pessimistic. In his own view, Scotland was beyond remedy, although he wished it could be otherwise:

he was strongly influenced by the dialectical forces through which the nation was constructed. Yet for MacDiarmid, the idea of a predicament was itself dialectical, irreducible to simple key factors such as the immersion of Scottish literature into the English Tradition. MacDiarmid's own views therefore remained more open, and he was continually seeking ways of viewing the Scottish predicament in more international terms, drawing attention, for example, to parallels between Scotland and Russia, Scotland and the rest of Europe. An encouragement of synthetic Scots was therefore only one means of securing a more positive position for Scotland in the international arena.41 Comparing the concept of a predicament as developed by both writers, Alasdair Gray comments that Edwin Muir was more interested in creating what he refers to as a constraining 'double-bind': Edwin Muir's frequently quoted formulation of the Scot's writer's predicament into a double-bind choice of, write Scottishly and you'll be sincere but neglected by the world-as-a-whole, write for the English world-as-a-whole and you must discount the source of your emotions seems to me nothing but a huge failure of nerve, a cowardice in the face of our best examples.42 In contrast, Gray argues, MacDiarmid resisted such failure of nerve: He spoke of all the things he believed, using all the language he could master: local and historical, scientific-technical, political-polemical... MacDiarmid had to make poetry from the dialectics of his selfcontradictory intelligence. But that intelligence, that poetry, is still big enough for us to have worthwhile adventures inside.43 MacDiarmid aimed to dismantle this concept of a 'double-bind', as he perceived it throughout his career. In A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle, MacDiarmid maps out the importance of artistic freedom for the Scot: I'll ha'e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken To dodge the curst conceit o' bein' richt That damns the vast majority o' men. I'll bury nae heid like an ostrich's, Nor yet believe my een and naething else. My senses may advise me, but I'll be Mysel' nae maitter what they tell's...44




Tracing Predicaments: Modernism to Postmodernism

19

He canna Scotland see wha yet Canna see the Infinite, And Scotland in true scale to it.45 Yet for many people, MacDiarmid was too interested in revitalising the Scots language, too immersed in Scottish Nationalism, to be significantly engaged with international perspectives. Some of the views he expressed in the 1920s, for example, contain violent reactions to the apparent subordination of Scotland by the English language. For in 1927 MacDiarmid stated 'English is incapable of affording means of expression for certain of the chief elements of Scottish psychology.'46 In 1959, he persisted with this idea, stating: Creative work proceeds from below the threshold of consciousness and the reason why Scots is not less important but more important to us today than ever, is that it covers, as English does not, the whole field of our subconscious. (HMSR, 27) Of course, the extent to which the English language can be blamed for Scottish cultural and political problems is deeply contestable. Also the extent to which Scots, especially the synthetic form proposed by MacDiarmid, would enable liberation through poetic expression remains equally dubious. From a more contemporary perspective, MacDiarmid is guilty of drifting into a form of national essentialism, where all experience of Scottish life and history is therefore accountable and reducible to his own theoretical position. MacDiarmid implies in such comments that Scotland could benefit from simply lifting 'itself from the trappings of English influence, in order to then 'be itself once more. However, it seems dubious that any language itself could offer such autonomy and liberation. MacDiarmid at times seems to disregard the extent to which language itself is a dialectical process, changing and diversifying over time. In this respect, Scottish national identity cannot be reduced to being an effect of either Lallans or English, for neither can provide the stability of the essential nation for which he was, at least at times, seeking. However, the use of a singular language for Scotland remained contentious even for MacDiarmid: much of his own writing was in English, and he later advocated Gaelic instead of his former wish for a synthetic Scots. Viewed from this historical perspective, observing MacDiarmid's designs



And he goes on to connect this vision of the artist with Scotland specifically:

for Scotland chronologically, it could still be argued that he did not really aim to overly restrict Scotland, despite his initial claims for an autonomous Scots language remaining questionable. MacDiarmid may have made some hasty assumptions about the function of language within Scotland, but these also seem part of his own dialectical thinking-through of the Scots predicament, from which he then later moved away. For MacDiarmid, the important issue was to represent Scotland in a new light in order to allow the nation to be represented in political terms and in the international arena. Nationalism in Scotland was therefore to provide the necessary stage for Scotland to emancipate itself from previous repression. MacDiarmid writes in Albyn: No revival of Scots can be of consequence to a literary aspirant worthy of his salt unless it is so aligned with contemporary tendencies in European thought and expression that it has with it the possibility of eventually carrying Scots work once more into the mainstream of European literature. (A, 42) The central problem was the means by which Scotland could develop a sense of national consciousness, when it had become so subsumed in the English tradition and lost its conception of identity after the Union of 1707.47 This was fundamental to the predicament of the Scottish writer. The predicament therefore was not only a question of aesthetics, but also one of economics: for, as MacDiarmid points out, because of the Union, capital and publishing houses had moved southwards, leaving few possibilities for expression and artistic cultivation in print in the North.48 For both Muir and MacDiarmid, and at least in this respect they are united, since the Union Scotland had become increasingly sentimentalised by forms of romantic nationalism, which then promoted overly fabricated conceptions of national identity. On this issue Andrew Noble writes: One of the most remarkable of Scottish phenomena is the degree to which the Scottish literati have for almost three centuries manufactured a kind of ersatz Scottish identity to make up for the national surrender of 1707. Like MacDiarmid, Muir believed that such minds found 'compensation in a "romantic nationalism" - sedulously disassociated from politics and practical realities of every kind' and that much Scottish art had been devised as escapism from the dire nature of the Scottish predicament. (EMUSC, 57)




It is vital, therefore, to see the criticisms of Scotland made by Muir and MacDiarmid within the wider historical situation of the time. For both critics, Scotland had become over-sentimentalised through movements such as the Kailyard and the effects of fantasy literature.49 The central concern raised by both critics was that such forms generated the grounds for escapism, rather than an engagement with Scottish cultural and political matters. Muir, for example, criticised the Kailyard genre as a means of depicting Scotland: 'To anyone living in Glasgow or Dundee even the kailyard must have seemed heaven' (EMUSC, 57). Literary representations of Scotland from the Union onwards therefore often manufactured and actively perpetuated nostalgic conceptions of the past. Yet for Muir and MacDiarmid this nostalgia was dangerous as it presented a conscious evasion of social and political realities. In the introduction to Edwin Muir: Uncollected Scottish Criticism, Noble reflects upon the effects of this escapism associated with Kailyard and fantasy writing: There is little doubt that the Scottish establishment, assiduously and rewardingly served by the majority of eighteenth - and nineteenthcentury Scottish writers, promulgated such a vision as a highly successful method of distracting attention from the real nature of Scottish problems and as a way of providing a series of flattering practical, militaristic and pastoral stereotypes designed to promote passivity. (EMUSC, 58) The challenge for the Scottish writer, for Muir and MacDiarmid, was then to break from these stereotypical moulds, which fostered nostalgic and erroneous versions of Scottishness. The effect played by the oppositional role of Muir and MacDiarmid in highlighting the nature of the 'predicament' should therefore not be underestimated: We will not, I think, fully understand Muir or MacDiarmid until we understand how hard they had to struggle against this kind of pervasive nonsense and how they understood it not as simply the silliness of provincial, fifth-rate minds but as a sinister form of control. (EMUSC, 60) It would seem that Muir and MacDiarmid's analysis of the 'predicament' of the Scottish writer was in many respects useful as it presented a challenge to these provincial and stereotypical visions of Scotland. MacDiarmid's slogan: 'Precedents - Not Tradition', and the movement away from sentimentalised depictions of nationhood are therefore central




to the concerns of the modernist literary revival. Muir and MacDiarmid wished for alternative possibilities for Scotland - ones that, as have been shown, were not unproblematic either. Yet, the desire to transcend the limitations facing the predicament of the Scottish writer also left each critic, especially in the case of Muir, with the tendency to formulate questionable reductions of the nation. Women, Misrepresentation and the Renaissance Period While MacDiarmid was eagerly advancing this revival of Scottish culture for aesthetic and economic reasons, in comparison, the social predicaments facing Scottish women writers have often gone unrecorded. In their Scotland since 1688: Struggle for a Nation, for example, Edward Cowan and Richard Finlay draw attention to the ways in which women, denied forms of political autonomy, have often been written out of Scottish history. Giving examples of this subjugation at the beginning of the twentieth century, they remind us that women were not allowed to attend university until 1878, 'and even then the subjects open to them were restricted. The professions feared that women who qualified as doctors or lawyers would depress earnings, as women were paid half the rates commanded by men.'50 Arguably, this bias is also detectable in the Scottish Literary Renaissance, which has often been determined in particularly male terms. While MacDiarmid noticeably promoted the work of some women writers (such as Marion Angus and Violet Jacob), he has often been criticised for his patriarchal attitude and dismissal of important texts written by women at the time (such as Catherine Carswell's Open the Door!). From a more revisionist perspective, however, Cowan and Finlay read the work of Carswell in a very different light, suggesting that perhaps the very foundations of the Renaissance might be linked to the publication of her novel in 1920: If Renaissance implies new affirmation and celebration, however, then perhaps the rebirth of Scottish literature appears with Catherine Carswell's Open the Door! of 1920, her portrayal of young Joanna Bannerman's unwillingness to accept dreich convention and sexual repression in her quest for self-realisation. Here following the carnage of the First World War, was a new fiction which put the predicament of Scottish women on the agenda.. .51 Such forms of resistance can also be found in the work of Willa Muir, Nan Shepherd and Naomi Mitchison, and it is a truism that their work has




often been under-acknowledged both at the time and subsequently in Scottish literary studies. Many of their texts therefore quite quickly went out of print, and it is only with relatively recent hindsight that critics have begun to reflect on the importance of these formerly neglected texts. The publication of The History of Scottish Women's Writing edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy MacMillan, and Scottish Women's Fiction: Journeys into Being edited by Carol Anderson and Aileen Christianson are crucial to this general reappraisal. This section will concentrate particularly on Catherine Carswell and Willa Muir, questioning the extent to which these writers contributed to the notion of a Renaissance in Scottish literature, whether consciously or unconsciously. In doing so, it will be suggested that perhaps it is now time to widen our conceptions of the Scottish Renaissance, in order to see it in broader, more critical terms, rather than as a misrepresentative historical marker. Catherine Carswell was born in Glasgow (1879-1946), and attended classes at Glasgow University, although due to the aforementioned regulations, was not officially allowed to enrol for a degree at this time. She later travelled to Italy and Germany. Carswell is known to many critics for her biography of Robert Burns (1930) and for her close friendship with D.H. Lawrence, who read early drafts of her work. It could be argued that links between Carswell and literary modernism have often been overlooked in the Scottish literary canon, where the primary attention has been, and is still today, focused on MacDiarmid. This oversight, however, has also led to gender-biased depictions of the Scottish tradition. This underestimation of many female writers has also presented a limited account of the kinds of experimentation actually taking place within Scottish literary modernism. Catherine Carswell's Open the Door! traces the development of the character Joanna Bannerman, a Bildungsroman examining her childhood in Glasgow and later journeys to continental Europe. Often the text makes a distinction between the conscious, everyday world of Joanna Bannerman and her unconscious desires and growing sense of sexuality. This concentration on the urban environment is relatively unusual in Scottish literature at the time and might therefore be significant to revisions of the literary tradition. While, for example, MacDiarmid often focused on the rural, there has arguably been an absence of reflection on the Scottish city and its modernist context, an anomaly which might seem contrary to the project of modernity itself. In this respect, a re-assessment of Carswell's work might also unveil useful connections with other modernist writers, as will be examined later with reference to Virginia Woolf.




From her early childhood Joanna Bannerman connects her urban environment with an oneiric existence: 'For in town Joanna led almost wholly a dream-life. The indoor existence, the hard streets which she hated though they made a good playground, the petty boredom of school, and the growing disharmony at home, all drove her in upon herself. In two respects only was the child's being vivid - in the activity of her body and in her dreams.'52 This focus on the power of dreams and dream-like forms of consciousness can be found throughout the novel, and we are repeatedly encouraged to engage with this character's conscious and unconscious reflections; witnessing also at times her sense of dissociation from conscious reality, and therefore from fixed notions of selfhood. The novel utilises modernist techniques in this way, allowing a sense of identity in flux. This is implicitly connected with an unravelling of the processes of desire and sexuality as they develop in the central character. In the dance scene halfway through the novel, when Joanna dances with Lawrence Urquart, apparently against her will, we are told, for example: Then as the reel progressed, she began to lose all sense of identity. Every moment-she became less herself, more a mere rhythmical expression of the soil from which they had both sprung. The memory dawned in her of some far back ancestress, of whom unheedingly she had heard her mother tell. Fresh, dim, sweet like dawn, she could see the Stirlingshire farmer's daughter carrying the milk-pails at sunrise and at sunset to the Castle on its hill... Beneath the candid darkness of Lawrence Urquart's face, she was no more than a field of barley that swings unseen in the wind before dawn. (OD, 169-70) For Joanna, this sense of exploration and opening of new doors, is obvious when, unsatisfied with her opportunities in Glasgow she agrees to marry Mario Rasponi and move to Italy. In this section of the novel, whilst out walking, Mario reveals to Joanna a small sunken door in a wall, a secret door through which, in local legend, the lady of the house could admit her lover. For Joanna, and for the novel itself, the door becomes an important symbol of her own need for escape. Working similarly throughout the text is the importance of bird imagery, the symbol of the caged bird representing Joanna's repressed desires, a search for inner freedom and fulfilment, which Carswell seemingly explores with a conscious knowledge of their possible psychoanalytic readings. Joanna states: 'Had not she too been snared? Snared indeed by her own desire; but still more, by her own desire to be set free?' (OD, 135). For Carswell, exploring such symbolism provides an important means of highlighting the gender ine-





Is a woman writer fundamentally handicapped in a whole important sphere of verbal expression? If so, why? ... The man can give himself (and others) away passionately, wittily, blatantly, imperfectly, coarsely, neurotically, without the reader feeling that his effort or his achievement was unsuitable to a man... Rousseau can say anything: so can George Moore: so can Keats in his letters, and a thousand others, English or not English, without offending any reader save on moral grounds... the woman, because she is a woman, must as an artist suppress what the man as artist or as man is entitled to reveal.53 In Imagined Corners, published in 1935, Willa Muir, like Carswell, is also concerned with gender roles and societal expectations, with characters who serve to disrupt conventional expectations of the time. Calderwick, the town we are introduced to at the start of the novel, and where the rest of the action takes place, represents a static world, an ironic parody of the conventional kailyard, against which characters such as Elizabeth Shand and Elise stand in firm contrast. In this novel there is also a strong concern with the role of dreams and consciousness, the role of the unconscious serving to disrupt any notions of autonomous selfhood. Identity, as in Open the Door! is often depicted as self-consciously fluid. A particularly obvious example of this can be found early in the novel when Elizabeth wakes from a disturbing dream: In the small hours she awoke with an anguished feeling that she was lost and no longer knew who she was. She had been dreaming that she was at home but now the window, faintly perceptible, was in the wrong place, and she knew without seeing it that she would collide with unfamiliar furniture were she to get out of bed. There was sweat on her brow and her heart was thumping; the world stretched out on all sides into dark impersonal nothingness and she herself was a terrifying anonymity. She took refuge in a device of her childhood. I'm me, she thought; me, me; here behind my eyes. Mechanically she moved her arm and crooked her little finger as she had often done before. It's me making the finger move; I am behind the eyes, but I'm in the finger



quality of her time, and we can again make a connection with Woolf's sense of injustice against women, perhaps especially for the creative artist, when Carswell writes:


Elizabeth Ramsay she was, but also Elizabeth Shand, and the more years she traversed the more unalterably would she become Elizabeth Shand. Those years of the future stretched endlessly before her; with that queer lucidity which is seldom found in daytime thinking she could see them as a perspective of fields, each one separated by a fence from its neighbour. Over you go, said a voice, and over she went, then into the next and the next. But this was no longer time or space, it was eternity; there was no end, no goal; perhaps a higher fence marked the boundary between life and death, but in the fields beyond it she was still Elizabeth Shand. She was beginning to be terrified again, and opened her eyes. Mrs Shand, she said to herself. It was appalling, and she had never realised it before. (IS, 64-5) As a young woman, Willa Muir trained as a psychologist and her awareness of psychoanalytic developments can be found throughout the text. Arguably the role of the unconscious in Scottish literary studies at this time was overshadowed by MacDiarmid's project to revive the culture in more pragmatic, objective terms. Due to their lack of direct engagement with MacDiarmid's political project, the work of Muir and Carswell has often been glossed over in assessments of the Scottish literary tradition. It is also a truism that Willa Muir's work has been neglected in favour of her husband's. After their marriage in 1919 Willa and Edwin Muir moved to London before going on to spend many years travelling in Europe, during which time they became well-known at this time for their translations of Kafka and Hermann Broch, amongst others. However, Willa's role in this work has generally been eclipsed. Noticeably critics have often referred to Edwin as the main (sometimes the only) translator of this work - this despite evidence suggesting that Willa was perhaps the main driving force behind these projects: I am a better translator than he is. The whole current of patriarchal society is set against this fact, however and sweeps it into oblivion, simply because I did not insist on shouting aloud: 'Most of this translation, especially Kafka, has been done by ME. Edwin only helped.' And every time Edwin was referred to as THE translator, I was too proud to say anything; and Edwin himself felt that it would be undignified to speak up, I suppose. (IS, xii)



Developing this notion of subjects-in-process, the novel critiques the role of marriage, highlighting the destabilisation it creates in this central character:

While Willa Muir was often content to let Edwin receive this credit for their work, preferring to let his career prosper at the expense of her own, there is an evident release of this frustration at times in her novels, critical and autobiographical writings. In Imagined Corners, for example, at several points there is an engagement with the concept of tradition, in particular a critique of its patriarchal and unjust predisposition: You know it's much more difficult for a thinking girl to swallow tradition than for a thinking boy. Tradition supports his dignity and undermines hers. I can remmember how insulted I was when I was told that woman was made from a rib of a man, and that Eve was the first sinner, and that the pains of childbirth are a punishement to women... It took me a long time to get over that... It's damnable the way a girl's self-confidence is slugged on the head from the beginning. (IS, 216-7) This sense of injustice has still to be fully addressed within the Scottish literary canon. It is only with relatively recent hindsight that writers such as Willa Muir and Catherine Carswell have come back into print, some of this material being unavailable for over fifty years. While Muir and Carswell were writing at the time of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, it is significant that their work has often not been considered an important part of this revival. While a survey of the available materials of the Scottish Literary Renaissance will reveal that Muir and Carswell were not actively engaging with MacDiarmid on this issue, perhaps their relevance to the Renaissance should not be overlooked either. Arguably Muir and Carswell's work may be more readily associated with cosmopolitan rather than cultural nationalist readings of the nation, yet both writers were clearly experimenting with modernist concerns and the boundaries of Scottish identity nevertheless. This desire to transgress limiting boundaries was also expressed by another female writer of the period, Dot Allan: I don't believe in the localisation of a writer's talent... There are no boundaries to art. That's why I am not altogether in sympathy with the Scots Renaissance movement and other allied movements, which, in my opinion, tend to cut us off from the rest of the world, instead of making us one with it. I think, in fact that a United States of Europe wouldn't be at all a bad idea, and there doesn't seem to be any reason why it wouldn't work.55




While these women writers resist any clear identification with the Renaissance movement, as Alan Riach has pointed out, MacDiarmid's own personal investment in Scotland might itself appear to be add odds with conventional views of modernism. In his introduction to MacDiarmid's Selected Poems, Riach draws attention to the modernist concern with impersonality as a drive to 'counteract the hangover of late Victorian sentimentalism.' According to Riach, MacDiarmid often resists such forms of impersonality in his work, preferring instead 'to reinstate the sense of community as value'.56 While there is a clear tension here between, on the one hand, the desire to experiment with identity in a more abstract sense in the work of Muir and Carswell, and, on the other, to assert territory, in the case of MacDiamid, perhaps both positions should be included in readings of the Modernist Renaissance in order to allow more representative forms of the tradition to emerge. In Imagined Corners there seems to be a conscious dig at MacDiarmid and his efforts to control Scottish literary studies, when Elise states: I knew - someone - who could shut himself up in a room and hunt ideas like big game. But I always suspected him of collecting only the horns and skins... I distrust any systematic interpretation of everything. (IS, 170) While MacDiarmid was busily collecting these 'horn' and 'skins', there is an indication here that potentially a lot of the meat and bones were also left behind. Postmodern Predicaments In the 1983 edition of Chapman the 'predicament' of the Scottish writer was closely linked to the political state of the nation itself, reflecting a widely-felt sense of paralysis and desperation. For many contributors, the predicament centred on how this situation might be overcome, and, as a result, many of the articles were preoccupied with themes of national and cultural introversion while exploring the need for political change. Although this volume was published relatively recently (reprinted in 1990), developments both in the study of nationhood generally and in the political structuring of Scotland in particular, now give it a very dated, historical feel. Much like the reactions of several of these critics to the predicaments described by Muir and MacDiarmid, the Chapman of 1983 might now be met with a certain amount of scepticism. Where MacDiarmid was scathing of the parochialism of the Scottish literary tradition, there is also




a renewed version of parochialism at work even in these more recent commentaries. Yet, as with the debates surrounding Muir and MacDiarmid, many of the concerns expressed in Chapman are still pertinent, even if some of its conclusions and assertions remain questionable. After a discussion of contemporary theoretical approaches to nationhood, this section will therefore turn to these individual Chapman articles, examining common themes, disagreements, and ensuing tensions, opening out the historical genealogy of the predicament in more detail. It is this anachronistic feel of the 1983 volume that is being associated with the postmodern predicament of the Scottish writer. The postmodern predicament is therefore connected to a paradoxical situation whereby, on the one hand, there is a continual need by, for example, cultural nationalists, to view cultures and nations as 'entities' in some coherent sense, yet, on the other, where belonging and organic association are now fundamentally in question. The postmodern predicament, as understood here, is therefore concerned with how to map the realities of present, and future, forms of nationhood in ways that take account of such theoretical developments without lapsing into convenient forms of national essentialism. Throughout this chapter, the postmodern predicament facing the Scottish writer will be connected to this crossover of traditional criticism (including traditional theories of nationhood, national cultures and nationalism) with the development of more theoretical approaches to identity and culture, reflecting the difficulty for the contemporary writer or critic of being implicated in-between such discourses. It is precisely in reading between these borderlines of the nation-space that we can see how the 'people' come to be constructed within a range of discourses as a double narrative movement. The people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic. They are also a complex rhetorical strategy of social reference where the claim to be representative provokes a crisis within the process of signification and discursive address. We then have a contested cultural territory where the people must be thought in a double-time; the people are the historical 'objects' of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin or event; the people are also the 'subjects' of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as that process by which the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process. The scraps, patches, and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a national culture, while the




very act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects. In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society is born. (NN, 297) The above extract is from Homi Bhabha's article 'DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation', where he aims to defamiliarise commonsensical notions of the nation. Bhabha is quoted at length here, for the ideas represented above are also central to the postmodern predicament facing the Scottish writer or cultural critic. Bhabha's approach provides a convincing interrogation of cultural essentialism, and may subsequently help to illuminate such forms of cultural and national overdetermination as they have appeared in Scottish cultural and literary criticism. Bhabha's insights will therefore be reflected upon in this section as a means of complicating some otherwise reductive assumptions. In this respect they provide an important means of disrupting convention and stereotypical notions of identity, reminding us instead that national identity is often a site a of conflict between the pedagogical and the performative, between authority and lived reality. In 'DissemiNation' Bhabha explores the concept of 'nation', pointing out that 'The title... owes something to the wit and wisdom of Jacques Derrida'. He states that the title also owes 'something more to my own experience of migration' (NN, 291). In this article, Bhabha is interested in the ways in which the concept of nation is used metaphorically and allegorically, the ways in which it subsequently becomes integrated in everyday life, in commonsensical terms and practice. He aims to disrupt any essential notions of the nation in this way, pointing out that such uses of metaphor should be subjected to further analysis and close scrutiny. As stated earlier, Bhabha instead prefers to see the nation existing in a 'double-time'; preferring not to simplify, or view history as comprehensively linear, and he questions the logical reductions that often become associated with nationhood. For Bhabha such simplifications only further restrict more complex readings of the nation, and it is with the latter that he is therefore primarily concerned. He refers to this linearity of history and culture as its 'horizontal' axis (NN, 293). For Bhabha, this axis is an insufficient means of registering the lived reality of the nation, and he writes, 'We need another time of writing that will be able to inscribe the ambivalent and chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the problematic "modern" experience of the western nation' (AW, 293). It is




this 'chiasmatic' relationship for Bhabha that is integral to any analysis of the postmodern predicament of the modern nation. In developing this notion, Bhabha suggests that we should also consequently see the nation from its 'vertical' axis; that is, in tangential ways to the commonsensical, in order to push at the limits of our understanding, allowing more fruitful, indeterminate and deconstructive possibilities to emerge. Bhabha is therefore interested in the ways in which the 'scraps, patches, and rags of daily life' are turned into manifestations of the national culture (NN, 297), and perceives that nationhood is ultimately a psychological construction, perpetuated by what he terms 'reproductive' processes (NN, 297). In this way he aligns himself with Benedict Anderson's concept of the 'imagined community', where: The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them encompassing perhaps a billion human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself as coterminous with mankind... Finally it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived in a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the last two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly die for such limited imaginings.57 Bhabha has also been influenced by Ernest Gellner's work on nations and nationalism, and in 'DissemiNation' highlights Gellner's observation that 'The historical necessity of the idea of the nation conflicts with contingent and arbitrary signs and symbols that signify the affective life of the national culture' (NN, 293). He points out that this crossover between the 'historical necessity of the idea of the nation' and its more 'arbitrary signs', is itself paradoxical. What results from it is confusion as to where to situate our conscious experience of nationhood, that is, if we are to contest its imagined borders. Yet, for Bhabha, this form of 'narrative performance' is preferable to any acquiescent or unquestioned forms of national essentialism, which are merely reductive and limiting. He then explores the ways in which subjective limitations have been imposed on concepts of the nation, going back to the eighteenth century, in order to show that any forms of national holism can ultimately only be partial. He writes that 'at the same time' as holistic versions of society are created, they are also simultaneously 'uncertain of the boundaries of society and the margins of the text' (NN, 296). The role of the postmodern, postcolonial critic advocated here is therefore to read in-between discourses, to




become actively implicated in the 'double-time' and metaphoricity of the nation-space. Once again, it is this notion of an in-betweenness that is being tied to a particularly postmodern predicament for the writer or critic, as they increasingly must be prepared to read between discourses, between horizontal and vertical axes in their readings of contemporary nationhood. Bhabha also agrees that this opening out of historical representations of the nation should be intrinsic to postmodern and postcolonial studies. Rethinking our position in the West is imperative, since we are now living in the 'horizontal, homogenous empty time of the nation's narrative' (NN, 303). In this 'homogenous empty time', we are repeatedly encouraged to adopt and perpetuate cultural stereotypes, for we rely too much on a 'horizontal' analysis of our world. Yet, according to Bhabha, we should aim to recognise that forms of 'minority discourse... speak betwixt and between times and places'.58 The contemporary critic should be aware of cultural difference, but not as 'the free play of polarities and pluralities in the homogenous empty time of the national community' (NN, 312), in a liberal spirit where 'anything goes'. Instead, to be aware of cultural difference is, for Bhabha, to be acutely aware of where cultural meaning 'jars', where it addresses intersections of meaning and values, resisting totalisation: Cultural difference, as a form of intervention, participates in a supplementary logic of secondariness similar to the strategies of minority discourse. The question of cultural difference faces us with a disposition of knowledges or a distribution of practices that exist beside each other... The aim of cultural difference is to re-articulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying singularity of the 'other' that resists totalization. (NN, 312) One of the main tasks then is to question the way in which we recognise and acknowledge the presence of the Other in Western societies. Being able to read fluidly between different discourses and temporalities allows this much needed undermining of the essential, presenting a challenge to totalisation and therefore openness to difference. Bhabha uses the idea of 'wandering peoples' as a metaphor for those 'who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture' (NN, 315) and noticeably this symbol of the postcolonial subject is used both literally and metaphorically. The nomadic subject always eludes cultural fixity, and in this way represents a fundamental threat to essential formulations and the ability to stereotype or characterise the nation. This notion




of the 'nomadic subject' has also been used in contemporary feminist theory as a means of contesting cultural assumptions, presenting a symbol of political resistance to the generally accepted, and therefore patriarchal, imagined boundaries of the nation. The term 'nomadic' has an increasing literal significance; that today many people are mobile as a result of economics, the consumer market and civil war, amongst countless other factors. Here there is perhaps a link between the writings of Rosi Braidotti and Homi Bhabha, for both aim to question the concept of origins and totalised systems in their analysis of life in Western culture. Braidotti writes: The nomadic subject is a myth, that is to say a political fiction, that allows me to think through and move across established categories and levels of experience without burning bridges. Implicit in my choice is the belief in the potency and relevance of the imagination, of mythmaking, as a way to step out of the political and intellectual stasis of these postmodern times. Political fictions may be more effective, here and now, than theoretical systems. The choice of an iconoclastic, mythic figure such as the nomadic subject is consequently a move against the settled and conventional nature of theoretical and especially philosophical thinking.59 Braidotti here maps out her own form of challenge to conventional views of nationhood by encouraging readers to see their own 'reproductive' position from a political, yet fictional, non-essentialised, standpoint. The feminist nomadic subject, she suggests, should be her or his own mythmaker and narrative organiser. As a former student of Deleuze, Braidotti has noticeably been influenced by his concept of the 'rhizome', as that which 'grows under the ground, sideways'.60 For Braidotti, the nomadic subject should also aim to deviate from what Bhabha would define as the 'horizontal' view of society, although here, in an ironic reversal, the rhizome grows horizontally as a means of escaping the domination of the vertical.61 Regardless of this technical difference, what Braidotti also proposes is a way of viewing postmodern culture in a form of double-time, where concepts such as nationhood are subject to continuous interrogation. Like Bhabha, Braidotti is also insistent that the nomadic subject is not simply a version of the free-floating signifier, a form of blind liberal pluralism. Rather her nomadic subject presents a political challenge to unquestioned forms of cultural essentialism, which, she suggests, only serve to stagnate both human potential and philosophical investigation. She states 'Nomadism, therefore, is not fluidity without borders but rather




an acute awareness of the non-fixity of boundaries. It is the intense desire to go on trespassing, transgressing.'62 It may seem a peculiar divergence to discuss Bhabha and Braidotti when the focus of this chapter is the predicament of the Scottish writer. Yet, in some ways this is why these critics have been introduced. Critics of Scottish literature and culture have often been guilty of falling into this trap of essentialism, where they have perpetuated and encouraged fixed depictions of nationhood, 'its' boundaries, in order to justify and verify their own political positions. In doing so, critics have replaced the image of the nation as an 'imagined community', as the assimilation of its arbitrary signs, with more of a closed, structured system. As will be examined, this form of national essentialism was particularly evident in the 1980s, where there was a particular need for political renewal and rejuvenation, yet where there was also a frequent dependency on stereotypical readings and cultural nationalism as a means of justifying the political. In The Divided Kingdom, John Osmond suggests that after the Referendum of 1979 there was a sense in which the distinction between culture and politics in Scotland became more pronounced: But what the referendum and the events that led up to it also demonstrated was the political potential long latent in the separate Scottish civil institutions and administration as well as in a distinct economy and culture. What the referendum provoked as well was a crisis for Scottish culture. It is one thing to recognise the regressive and deformed characteristics of Tartanry and the Kailyard; it is quite another to find more authentic and representative images.63 Addressing this tension between politics and sentimental cultural signifies is therefore also central to issues surrounding the postmodern predicament, as there is an increasing recognition, both in theory and in practice, that Scotland can no longer be limited in such convenient ways. In the 1980s, however, many of these debates between culture and politics were still at an early stage of negotiation, where there was a strong need to reclaim and reassert the political role of culture, often in order to align it directly with nationalist politics. Yet this in turn also led to a crisis, a series of debates concerning what the remit of the national culture ought to be. For some critics the political predicament could only be overcome through a more strengthened sense of national culture. Defending this approach to national culture in 1983, Cairns Craig writes:




To treat the problems of Scotland as a purely political problem, whether in terms of class analysis or in terms of nationalist aspirations, is to ignore entirely the ways in which culture operates as a powerful force for the existing state within the fabric of our total social experience. One of the reasons that it has been so difficult in Scotland to motivate resistance to what has been happening economically and politically in the country is that the people of Scotland have such a low opinion of their own culture - and, just as important, the leading elements within the Scottish political framework have an even lower opinion of their people's culture. Without a sense of the values of what they are defending there is no reason for people to suppose that there is any alternative to submissive quietism or emigration.64 Yet, at the same time as there was a growing frustration with the political situation, many sympathetic critics were also sensing an opportunity to open out the role of culture in order to make it more accommodating. Referring specifically to the 'predicament of the Scottish writer' in his article 'Out of a Predicament', Christopher Whyte, for example, commented that 'culture has to be rooted in the here and now of our predicament. It can't mean formal reference to fossilised totems that don't work for us any longer.'65 So while critics such as Cairns Craig were suggesting that 'the cultural question is crucial if the politics of nationalism is to enter properly into the contemporary dialogue in Scotland'66, there was also a growing awareness that many national stereotypes were too restrictive, unable to correspond with changes taking place. It is therefore out of such debates that the postmodern predicament emerges. In her introduction to the 1983 edition of Chapman entitled 'A Predicament for the Scottish Writer?' Joy Hendry wrote, 'The Predicament of Scotland, the State of Scotland, is a pre-occupation which is admittedly inward and introverted.' For Hendry this may be 'no healthy preoccupation', as often self-conscious and obsessive forms of national reflection are not, yet how else, she implied, will the predicament be surmounted? In this same edition, several other critics were also concerned with how this 'introverted nature' might be overcome, and in doing so, several highly questionable statements were made concerning the alleged 'nature' of Scotland. One of the most central problematic issues throughout these articles was the equation of cultural stereotypes with politics, where cultural nationalist assumptions were assumed to provide the vehicle out of political pessimism. In 'An Open Letter on the Closed Mind', in many ways an ironic title, Alan Bold presented his own views on the 'nature' of the 'average Scot'





The Scot - the typical Scot, the average Scottish writer - is marvellous at making all about him miserable. That is one of his grimmest duties, one taken very seriously indeed. He does not really believe that literature can alter the individual and yet that is the great quality of all art. Scottish writers qua typical Scots (and obviously I'm speaking for, and on behalf of, men here) are people who embody a destructive attitude to concepts like individuality and artistic integrity. Suspicious of everything they become failures but even these failures have flashes of the sensitive soul trying to get out.67 The extent to which Bold aims to speak for all Scottish men here may seem surprisingly arrogant. Nonetheless Bold is interested in depicting stereotypes of the 'average' Scot as they appeared throughout the 1980s in the often masculine depictions of urban life by writers such as James Kelman, William Mcllvanney and Jeff Torrington, amongst others. It is peculiar, however, that Bold then adopts such stereotypes as truthful, without recourse to their wider validity. The notion of the average Scot as inferior has also been a recurrent trope in Scottish cultural criticism, yet the repetition of such re-current themes does not make them unproblematic, or somehow an epitome of the Scottish psyche.68 Such stereotypes aim to reach a truth-factor through repetition and fabrication, and in this uncritical way they also encourage and perpetuate the status of Scotland as inferior, backward looking, introverted and pessimistic. That such cultural stereotypes are now often mistrusted is therefore central to the postmodern predicament. So when, for example, Bold states in his article that 'The typical Scot is marvellous at making all about him miserable',69 while the reader may sympathise with the general political situation out of which this statement emerges, such statements may also seem rather conceited in terms of their reductiveness. Also published in the same edition of Chapman is an article entitled 'The Predicament of the Scottish Writer: Some Random Reflections' by David Black. Black begins by pointing out that although he is discussing the 'nature' of the Scottish writer, this 'nature' can in no way be holistic or essential:



in the 1980s. His views here are noticeable for their need to simultaneously disable the Scottish writer, while, it seems, attempting to encourage political change. Bold's views of the Scottish writer seem especially dated now. Not only is the Scottish writer averagely male and talentless, but 'he' is also nonetheless in an impossible predicament:


After making this claim, Black nonetheless proceeds to renege on this premise by then, in a surprising turn-around, questioning why Scotland in the 1980s cannot be viewed as a coherent entity. The 'predicament of the Scottish Writer', then, according to Black, is that although writers might not 'in essence' be Scottish, nonetheless, such a thing as Scotland does exist in an essence. Black then makes the highly questionable assumption that the heart of Scotland lies fundamentally in its geology: that nationhood is somehow unquestionably 'rooted' in the soil, literally 'organic': For the paradox of Scotland is that she is a country but her people are not quite a nation. The writer who embodies the conflict of his community shares the uncertainty: he speaks for the rocks and cities of Scotland, but with whose voice does he speak and to whom? Sometimes he wonders if the 'Scotland' which obsesses him is a mere fantasy, and the reality is North Britain, only topographically distinct in the seamless garment of international Western consumerdom. Sometimes he wonders if his fantasy alone keeps Scotland in some tenuous being.71 Black, here reminiscent of Muir, aims to provoke his reader into identification with Scotland as an incomplete whole, as a means of then rallying support for the nationalist cause. For Black, although identity may not be fixed, the concept of 'Scotland' is somehow transcendent, can exist on its own terms outwith various social and historical forces, perhaps dangerously suggesting the basis of an elitist 'blood and soil' identity. 'The predicament of the Scottish Writer' in the 1980s, then, as far as its cultural critics at the time were concerned, was frequently associated with self-consciousness and introspection, which many admitted was undesirable, yet perhaps an inevitable indicator of the political mood at the time. The failed Referendum is an obvious historical marker here, with the onset of a government that the country clearly did not elect. As a result, there is often a sense of apocalypse and doom, both in the fiction and cultural criticism of the time. While this sense of stasis also helped to generate the foundations and conditions for Devolution in Scotland, and its effects should therefore not be underestimated, such forms of cultural



'The Scottish Writer' confronts a confusing scene. Jean-Paul Sartre once said: 'No man is a waiter'; by the same token nor is anyone a Scottish writer. We are all individual human beings first, and writing and Scottishness are secondary characteristics capable of wide variation.70

stasis are now an inadequate means of representing present-day forms of Scottishness and all that that might comprise. In his article 'Voices in Empty Houses: The Novel of Damaged Identity', Gavin Wallace wrote in 1989 that 'Disaffection not only keeps the Scottish novel going - it seems positively in love with it.'72 Wallace then goes on to link this concept of disaffection with the voice of the novelist: To find the cracked and strangled Scottish voice and lend it healing speech will take the Scottish novelist on a journey through a mental landscape disfigured by all the 'horrors' of self-inflicted silences. But no matter where it is finally heard, the sound of that new-found voice will always be recognised as unmistakably ours. (SNSTS, 231) What Wallace appears to do here is to transfer the result of the failed Referendum onto the psyche of Scottish people in an all-encompassing way. The extent to which the 'new-found voice' is 'unmistakably ours' is therefore not open to debate, regardless of who this 'us' is, or what 'we' might possibly represent. The predicament of the Scottish writer in the 1980s is not simply related to the issue of the Referendum and the 'self-inflicted silences' it produced as several of the critics of the 1983 edition of Chapman suggest. That such silences existed in the fictional representations of Scottish culture does indeed seem to be the case. Yet what remains contestable is the extent to which these 'silences' are 'unmistakably ours'. It is of course dubious to suggest that Scottish writers write only for and about Scotland and Scottish people, who can then be 'understood' or 'contained'. Janice Galloway has commented on this urge by critics to reduce the scope of Scottish fiction in this detrimental way: Who... lumps London writers together because they live in London? But isn't there a tendency among Scottish critics to do this with her and her West of Scotland contemporaries? Laziness. We have... a lazy critical tradition in this country. These are very limited perceptions, perceptions, which avoid having to read and critically appraise writers for what they have to say as individuals.73 When critics read fiction in direct correlation to lived cultural reality, 'lazy' strategies, and potentially unhelpful ones too, are often adopted. At times, however, the impulse may be understandable. As David Black comments, 'The true predicament is when individual freedom is blocked by a "bad" collective situation and the individual is then unable to play




the role in society to which his talents and dispositions call him.' However, as Galloway suggests, critics should also be careful not to underestimate literature as a result. It may be that, in Hendry's words, Scotland was to a large extent politically 'inward and introverted' in the 1980s and that many Scottish writers and critics then often felt the need to act in resistance to this undesirable predicament. As has been shown, some critics, however, carry this out to excessive lengths. Writers, however, have tended to be less concerned with these reductive tendencies. As mentioned earlier, the writer Alasdair Gray recognised the disadvantageous effects of such obsessional national reductions in his Chapman article 'A Modest Proposal for By-passing a Predicament'. Despite his own firmly nationalist position, evident in his political pamphlet Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992), Gray suggests that forms of national obsession and continual introversion only limit the literary potential of writers.75 This introspection, according to Gray, also limits the ability to look beyond and question the political potential of Scotland. Ironically, though, Gray's comments in this edition were overshadowed by a general urge to contain nationhood. It might not be too strong a claim to say that Scottish critics therefore became obsessed with 'finding' Scotland within literary texts, with mapping fiction onto reality for political purposes. This in itself is interesting, as it highlights the further predicament of the Scottish writer who has then had such expectations of national mapping placed upon them. It is clear that the effects of Thatcherism within Scotland led to fervent political reactions and a strengthening of Scottish cultural identity as a form of united resistance. This renewal of national and cultural identity continued into the 1990s, and led to what many would describe as a contemporary renaissance. For example, in his article 'At Last - The Real Scottish Literary Renaissance?' Douglas Gifford reveals many of the issues that have become affiliated with the concept of a modern renaissance. Yet, as soon as Gifford begins this article, it becomes apparent that the renaissance he is describing is once again centred on holistic conceptions of nationhood and identity. Gifford, whilst acknowledging new forms of literary representation in Scottish literature, simultaneously reverts to a nostalgic hope that such diversity will somehow help to assimilate Scotland, that it will help unify a collective unconscious: It has taken a decade to recover from the depression which the debacle of the referendum on Scottish devolution induced. But there's no mistaking the present revival of hopes in the political and cultural scene. There's much of the heady cultural scene of the thirties, in the years of





... Hugh MacDiarmid, when our poetry and fiction offered folk epics and Scottish mythology to remind us of our roots and ancient separate76

It is telling here that Gifford refers to 'ancient separateness'. Once again, Scotland is perceived as literally organic, tied to its soil and of unquestionable origin. This perception of the nation provides a convenient means of claiming an essential Scotland without accepting the reality of diversity. Gifford suggests that the writers of the Modernist Renaissance aimed to highlight forms of 'false Scottishness,' exposing the dangers of sentimentality in their drive for cultural renewal.77 Yet although Gifford describes the proliferation and diversity in recent literature, he nonetheless resorts to his own forms of 'false Scottishness', where such disparate elements are then somehow fundamentally interconnected; that at Scotland's geographical borders new and essentially distinct cultural identities begin.78 He then, papering over such comments, encourages the need to see forms of internationalism at work within Scotland, forms that will add to the potential of the culture. In doing so, he points to, for example, John Byrne's Americanisation of Scottish culture, and welcomes many of the factors which such cultural 'difference' can offer.79 Yet ultimately Gifford sees these factors as mere influences upon a nation with 'its own' distinct and therefore essential identity. Although he perceives that much of the literature produced in the 1990s has been from Scotland, rather than intrinsically about it, as distinct from the literature of the 1980s that tended to be more noticeably about it, he persists with the concept of Scotland as a bounded entity. Insisting that we should recognise the forces at work outside Scotland, which consequently shape 'us', we should also be aware that they are simultaneously products from 'outside'. In a peculiar and telling final statement, Gifford suggests 'we must not turn from the challenge of multi-cultural, international media-oriented experience which is the world beyond Scotland.'80 Once again it is apparent that there are homogenising forces at work in the (over)defmition of Scotland, an alignment which perhaps Bhabha would see as a narrow focus on the 'horizontal' vision of history without regard to the fluctuating impact of the 'vertical' and of issues of cultural difference. Gifford may call for new and international depictions, but it is noticeable that such visions will always be on narrow terms, for they must fit his overall depiction of the 'national picture', its collective unconscious. He writes 'How we dramatise ourselves, image ourselves forth, is crucially indicative of our total cultural and social state' (my emphasis).81



ness.

As mentioned by Gifford, Scottish literature in the 1980s was often concerned with Scotland, whereas, literature in the 1990s and afterwards seems to be more interested in writing from it. There seems to be a shift at work here, a movement away from what Hendry might label the 'introvertedness' of Scottish literature. If the predicament of the Scottish writer in the 1980s involved the need to incorporate Scotland into her or his own work, to reflect upon the political predicament, then in the 1990s and afterwards it seems the writer has been allowed some respite from this. The postmodern predicament facing the cultural critic is therefore connected to this self-conscious movement away from introversion. For many writers, however, this is no predicament at all. Rather it provides a longawaited and much-needed potential for Scottish literature to look beyond the often overly fixed boundaries of 'home'. Clearly the extent to which interest in Scottish matters have been generated outside the country also plays a significant part in the recent cultural revival. The agents and publishers of many Scottish writers are based in London, and noticeably it is there that many aspects of Scottishness are promoted as the latest cultural phenomenon. This external influence is perhaps too important to ignore in any discussion of what the 'Scottish mood' comprises, and it is clearly not as holistic and insular as many critics have hoped.82 In this respect, it is also worth reflecting on the extent to which the contemporary renaissance in Scottish literature has been actively generated to produce revenue as well as to promote political change.83 Yet to allude to such influence on Scottish matters from a London or international base is not to belittle the obvious reality of the literary revival that has taken place in recent years. Rather, such 'outside' influences have been mentioned here to show that the recent renaissance is not unproblematic or insular either. What this indicates, especially in the age of globalisation, is that parochial visions of nationhood are no longer believable, that they will only become increasingly ironic. Scotland cannot now be viewed as insular and singular, even if depicted as such, because larger systems are now re-structuring such forms of 'identitythinking'. It is now, for example, in the interest of multinational corporations and power elites to in many respects elide national boundaries rather than revere them, and this transnationality they invoke is too strong a force to be dismissed.84 Another facet of the postmodern predicament therefore refers to this position of being not only between traditional and more postmodern, deconstructive concepts of the nation, but also to the physical opening out of nations, the challenge to their borders from wider economic and social perspectives.




It is perhaps this postmodern influence, an acceptance of marginal and newer voices, that has helped challenge limiting views of nationhood, allowing more diverse and polyphonous accounts to be heard.85 In many respects the need to view Scotland as holistic is now unacceptable, yet the tendency exists nonetheless. Where writers of the Modernist Renaissance sought to replace cultural myths with more political readings in their rejection of romantic nationalism, in much the same way contemporary Scottish studies should perhaps now be more preoccupied with interrogating its own assumptions. The development of postmodern cultural paradigms has now largely placed such forms of national and cultural complacence into question. In effect, such postmodern forms have encouraged a destabilisation of the previously assured position of the critic, replacing the 'holistic' and 'organic' with difference and incommensurability. Where in the modernist period MacDiarmid wished to instil his own form of 'synthetic Scots', in the postmodern period we have become more accustomed to see Scotland as itself as synthetic, as a process shaped by endless, because continually shifting and indeterminate, cultural factors. This movement into the postmodern era has not put an end to what Bhabha earlier termed 'the archaic body of the despotic or totalitarian mass', yet, with reference to the Scottish context, it has helped interrupt the centripetal force of cultural essentialism. On the one hand the movement into postmodernity in Scotland has allowed multiple interpretations of the 'nature' of contemporary culture, and on the other it has demanded such forms of multiplicity and disparity. Where in the 1980s there was an evident cultural crisis, and general confusion as to how to 'unify' the nation, this kind of 'cultural cohesion' is no longer considered likely. Where in the 1980s there was a concern with 'our' Scotland, from a more postmodern perspective comes the question of 'whose?'. This transitional period between the Eighties and the present has in many respects challenged the previous resort to forms of fixed national identity, highlighting instead its more fluid 'nature'.86 Writing in 1978, Francis Russell Hart commented: Centuries of social observers have told us of the distinctiveness of Scottish culture by invoking a peculiar national character. Put together, this heritage of tropes and stereotypes produces a logical absurdity. That grandly anomalous person the 'typical Scot' is 'a schizophrenic creature at once realistic and recklessly sentimental, scientific and soldierly, bibulous and kilted, teetotal and trousered, diligent, religious, liberal, warm-hearted, poetry-loving, devoted to law, learning, and mercantile enterprise, friendly, unassuming, living graciously, supine,




dirty, fond of closing public houses unseasonably, violent and drunken, and addicted to casual homicide, too careful with money, generous, rash, disputatious, shy, loquacious, aggressive, refined, humane, zealous, hypocritical, adaptable, democratic, equalitarian, and peculiarly related to the Almighty.' He is also, we have been told for two centuries, disappearing, and with him a distinctive Scottish culture. But the myth survives. Its very persistence has become a notable cultural fact. Scots believe it, even as they jokingly display its anomalies; their sense of identity remains strongly typological, even as it is radically individual. Such a myth must affect the nature of the Scottish novel.87 Scottish critics, then, have often tried to capture this 'typological character'. Yet, as Hart points out, this has also generated 'logical absurdities'. There is a paradox at work here between the urge to reduce Scottishness in this way with the growing realisation that such distinctive forms of national identity are under erasure in the postmodern world, that they are no longer as viable as they once perhaps were. The urge to categorise, however, still leaves the critic with the need to mythologise, to construct national identity as though it was truthful, striving to conceal the very artificiality and paradoxical nature of his or her own creations.88 As Joyce McMillan points out in her Chapman article, the destructive urge to preserve 'Scottishness' against all odds in actuality goes 'far beyond what comes naturally and truthfully to writers'.89 The postmodern predicament facing the Scottish writer, then, is how to escape or simply avoid this apparent 'need' for obsessive depictions of Scotland and Scottishness. From a postmodern position it is no longer easy to place trust in stereotypes when concepts of the nation and Scotland itself have changed so much. Where in the past some critics have claimed, for example, that Calvinism is a dominant trait of the Scottish 'psyche', these notions of a collective 'psyche' are themselves archaic, where such overarching definitions of the nation fail to accommodate the multicultural, multireligious and also secular nature of contemporary Scotland.90 That traces of Calvinism may exist in Scottish culture, therefore, can no longer be provided as evidence that such tendencies are intrinsically linked to a codified Scottishness. In his article 'The Fratricidal Twins: Scottish Literature, Scottish History and the Construction of Scottish Culture', Cairns Craig comments on deeper implications of the predicament as mapped out by Edwin Muir:




Muir's dispirited view of Scotland was, of course, part of the 'modernist' despair over the nature of contemporary society and the perversion of values that had been brought about by industrialisation, but the underlying structure of the conception of Scottish history which Muir presents has continued to play a crucial role in constituting the narrative of the Scottish nation - not simply in the mythologies of the poets and artists, but in the work of the historians as well. The structural elements of this vision are two linked conceptions which derive from the analysis of what went wrong with Scottish culture after Scott and which are related to the mutually destructive interaction of history and literature. The first is that Scottish history is characterised by a series of disruptions that absolutely break all sense of continuity with the past and make it incapable of construction into a coherent narrative: Scots are born not out of a rich inheritance but out of a desolation in which each new era destroys the 'harvest' of the past. The second is that Scottish history - whether in terms of the actual course of events or in terms of the discipline of history as the narration of those events - is a false version of a true Scottish history which never managed to make itself manifest.91 It could however be suggested that in the transition from a modern to postmodern predicament here, a negation of Scottish history and culture does not necessarily take place. In this article and in Out of History Craig is concerned with the absences and misrepresentations of Scottish history and culture as a result of this tendency to negate the past. Yet Craig hints that critics should aim to represent Scottish history as a continuous, coherent narrative in order to prevent this fracturing he ascribes to Muir and others. From a postmodern position, of course, such continuous forms of narrative are themselves now problematic. There may not necessarily be a smooth, unilinear transition from the modernist to postmodernist period in Scottish literary history, yet this does not then negate the underlying concepts of a predicament as mapped out by Muir or MacDiarmid, or somehow undermine their contemporary relevance. Rather, this historical transition may actually help us to understand the contemporary moment, without having to essentialise its nature. In this sense, the postmodern predicament merely maps out some of the problematic issues involved in any contemporary understanding of nationhood without trying to speak for the period in holistic terms. This essentialism, in fact, would be contradictory to its own 'nature'.92 Commenting on the period of the 1980s, and what he refers to as the 'doomsday scenario' associated with it, Craig writes that 'Fear of cultural extinction is something that can be resisted.'93




It is this paradoxical need to assert culture while understanding its fabricated nature, which Scottish writers have often tended to avoid and yet which Scottish critics have often strictly held on to, that will be addressed in the following chapter. In doing so, it will then help to develop the postmodern predicament and its paradoxical position, while also examining the work of prominent Scottish critics, including Craig, in more detail.







(Multi)National Identity: Old and New Histories

There is always argument about the meaning of Scotland. Is it a nation? a sort of state? a region? or what? No one argues about the meaning of England, although exactly the same difficulties of definition occur there too. This is because Englishmen seem equally happy to use England in place of Britain or the United Kingdom when they are talking about a state, as they are to confine the term to England of the atlases when dealing with a nation. In most cases, they are unaware of any difference between these 'two Englands'.94 Arguably the position of Scotland has changed significantly since James Kellas made the above comments in 1968. In many respects, the form of autonomy which many Scottish people were fighting for during the 1980s and subsequently has arrived, is at least in its nascent stage. Yet the relationship between Scotland and England, the current state of the Union, is one that should not be overlooked in readings of contemporary Scottish literary studies. Indeed, as critics such as Robert Crawford and Cairns Craig have pointed out, it is imperative that we view Scotland comparatively, as existing between cultures rather than as an isolated unit. This is also important in readings of contemporary Englishness, as England, according to many critics, is now undergoing a re-structuring of identity in the wake of this perceived 'break-up of Britain'. Critics following this line of thought suggest that the United Kingdom may now be on its deathbed, where new forms of national and regional autonomy are waiting to take its place.95 Whilst opening out this notion of possible civic reorganisation, this chapter will question the extent to which the United Kingdom may now be at a terminal stage. In doing so, and perhaps paradoxically, it will also reflect more generally on the extent to which nationstates are still the major organising frameworks for contemporary society. 47



2

48 (Multinational Identity: Old and New Histories

The term 'nationalism' first appeared in 1774 in a text written by Herder; ever since, it has been used to describe a bewildering mix of phenomena. Commentators frequently complain that nationalism embraces so many dissimilar meanings that the concept is muddled ... If people cannot agree on a definition of nationalism, it can be no surprise that they offer quite different assessments of it - particularly what its causes are, if it is retrograde or noble, or if it is a form of politics that is here to stay.96 The notion of what Scottish nationalism might mean is further complicated, as Hechter points out, by Scotland's peripherality - that is, from what he perceives as the systematic unequal exchange between the periphery and the core (that is, between Scotland and England). For Hechter, this form of subjugation was the basis of his 1975 study Internal Colonialism, in which he sought to explore the ways in which, in particular, the Celtic fringes of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, as he terms then, were subject to repeated forms of economic disadvantagement due to hegemonic control emanating from the core. However, the extent to which this reading of core vs. periphery is still pertinent today is crucial here. If, as stated above, the project of the nation-state is today in crisis, then what are the implications of this for the status of Scotland, not only in relation to England and Britishness, but to its wider position within the European Community? While traditional readings of Scottish nationalism have focussed on this core-periphery model, part of the objective of this chapter, therefore, is to also move outside this dichotomy in order to reflect on alternative and possible future readings of Scottish identity. What I am arguing is rather that, in spite of its evident prominence, nationalism is historically less important. It is no longer, as it were, a global political programme, as it may have said to have been in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. It is at most a complicating factor, or a catalyst for other developments ... it will inevitably have to be written as the history of a world which can no longer be contained within the limits of 'nations' and 'nation-states' as these used to be defined, either politically, or economically, or culturally, or even linguistically. It will be largely supranational and infranational, but even infranationality, whether or not it dresses itself up in the costume of



To begin with it might be useful to reflect on some of the complexities of nationalism. In his most recent book, Containing Nationalism, for example, Michael Hechter states:

(Multinational Identity: Old and New Histories

49

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson points out some of the factors intrinsic to late nationalism in the contemporary world, highlighting some of its historical developments, genealogies. 'Nation, nationality, nationalism - all have proved notoriously difficult to define', he writes, though nonetheless, 'since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms'.98 For Anderson, the nation may be an imagined construct; yet, this is not to undermine its fundamental power, or the political possibilities of nationalism. Nationalism, according to Anderson, is still a powerful world force and should not be underestimated, even though the overall function of the Nationalist Project as a means of worldwide democratic liberation is now everywhere in question. It is these more recent manifestations of nationalism, referred to by Anderson as 'late' that, it will be suggested, are of particular importance to Scottish studies. Also discussed is the breakdown of the traditional nation-state mentioned above by Eric Hobsbawm. It may seem peculiar to discuss this breakdown in relation to Scotland, itself a 'stateless nation',99 yet it is important to consider its possible consequences nonetheless. As highlighted in Chapter 1, Scottish critics have often been reluctant to deconstruct the concept of Scottishness, preferring instead to rigidly construct it for various political reasons. Yet if the concept of the nation is itself now in transition, then this process should also be foregrounded in any discussion of contemporary Scottishness and what that might entail. Bearing this in mind, this chapter will also focus on the work of several Scottish critics, reflecting on their tendency to generalise about Scotland and Scottishness, often overdetermining its 'nature' as a consequence. In particular, the work of Tom Nairn, Cairns Craig, Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull will be considered. All of these critics have been active in mapping the cultural and political 'predicament' of Scotland since the 1980s and in doing so have tended to make questionable generalisations about the alleged 'character' of Scotland. It is this tendency to attribute fixed characteristics and definitive statements that is being associated with an 'overdetermination' of the nation. Such 'overdetermination' occurs when the nation is reduced in convenient, seemingly unproblematic ways, thereby assuming a level of 'national truth', when in actuality such formulations often conceal more than they explain. Overdetermination



some mini-nationalism, will reflect the decline of the old nation-state as an operational entity ... This does not mean that national history and culture will not bulk large - perhaps larger than before - in the educational systems and the cultural life of particular countries, especially the smaller ones.97

occurs, then, when the nation is perceived as being limited to such formulations, without critical awareness of their potential contradictions, their ability to mislead and obscure. Exposing such overdeterminations, highlighting the need for reflexivity, is therefore central to a critical analysis of the contemporary Scottish predicament. In The Break-up of Britain, Nairn explores the contradictory nature of nationalism in the modern world, discussing the 'neurosis' and 'possible dementia' it now faces, both 'largely incurable'100 he states, as we cannot now do without nationalism. He reflects upon a country which is 'paralysed' - 'Nowhere', he writes, 'is a distinctively Scottish place' (TBU, 185) and he stresses the desperate condition of Scottish politics. For Nairn, Scotland is suffering from 'impotence' and 'castration', and will continue to do so until independence is established. Nairn therefore advocates the Janus-faced, schizophrenic nature of nationalism as a troubling, yet necessary political portent for the future. Yet in doing so, he is also prone to establishing undesirable and questionable reductions of Scotland in order to 'verify' its paralysed 'nature', and such depictions in The Break-up of Britain, Faces of Nationalism and After Britain will therefore be discussed. In particular, it will be suggested that although these metaphors of debilitation may be apposite for describing many aspects of the political situation of Scotland both past and present, when loosely transferred onto culture as a whole, as Nairn tends to do, they become an insubstantial means of reflecting the diversity of Scottish life. In The Eclipse of Scottish Culture, Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull critique Nairn's early position on Scottish nationalism as presented in The Break-up of Britain, mapping out their own perspective on the Scottish cultural predicament. Clearly, for Beveridge and Turnbull in this text the political predicament of Scotland is always finally reducible to and inseparable from its cultural predicament. In their readings of Scotland and the Scottish tradition, they aim to revise previously negative, questionable representations of nationhood. Yet, in their defensive readings of the tradition, they are often guilty of simplifying Scottishness in order to make it suit their own agenda. It is therefore the implications of this cultural nationalist position, its relationship with the postmodern and political predicaments that will be considered. In Out of History, Cairns Craig often reads Scotland similarly to Nairn. He is scathing of parochialism, yet at the same time claims that Scots have nonetheless persistently regarded themselves as parochial. He writes 'The consequence of accepting ourselves as parochial has been a profound self-hatred' (OOH, 12). Confusingly, Craig tends to make essentialist statements, whilst simultaneously exposing such tendencies as inade-




51

quate for representing the complexity of modern Scottish life. While challenging reductive statements made by other Scottish critics, Craig often therefore tends to replace these with his own formulations that are equally questionable. He frequently comments on the typical introversion of Scots and Scottish culture, claiming for instance that 'Scottish culture has cowered in the consciousness of its own inadequacy' (OOH, 11), and his conceptions of Scottishness are often clearly based on his own particularly selective accounts of the cultural and literary tradition. For this reason, he writes that Scotland in the present moment exists 'outside history'. Yet, in writing about the Scottish literary tradition, Craig is often unselfconscious of the literary texts that he omits from the canon. If the nature of nations and nation-states is really changing as Hobsbawm suggests, then perhaps it is now also time to question the nature and purpose of tradition; time to at least be more self-conscious of its fundamental role. This is not to imply that traditions should naively be abandoned; yet neither should they be accepted unquestioningly. The section on Craig will therefore question essentialised depictions of history and tradition (which support and justify essential depictions of nationhood), as a means of then highlighting some of the problems intrinsic to such readings. In their depictions of Scottish literature and culture, therefore, many prominent critics have tended to generalise about nationhood and 'its' characteristics. Yet such notions are often limiting; they perpetuate stereotypes, odd overstatements, which have the ability to become accepted by many as national 'truths'. This chapter aims to explore some of the implications of this tendency, looking at the ways in which stereotypes are often both simultaneously inevitable yet undesirable. Fundamentally we may only be able to discuss the nation in essential terms, viewing 'it' as a coherent concept, yet this should not prohibit the uncovering and interrogation of questionable national assumptions. Forms of national essentialism in this sense remain a social construction that should not at any level be accepted as inherent or factual. A more postmodern reconfiguration of traditional national assumptions might therefore lead to more desirable, open-ended readings, where conceptions of the nation are not restricted to definitive, potentially limiting frameworks. The possibility of such postmodern approaches to the representation of history will therefore be considered in more detail at the end of this chapter.




And culturally, all Scots must get their heads round the fact that the modern Scotland is no longer the nation that lost its parliament back in 1707, a nation almost entirely defined by the trauma of Reformation and its own tough brand of Protestantism; but somewhere else entirely, a country transformed by the industrial revolution, and all the fierce cultural winds of the twentieth century, into a pluralist and highly urbanised society where faiths and ethnicities must live side by side, or perish. This is the task, and I don't doubt that today's Scotland can do k.101 For some Scottish critics (cultural nationalists in particular), Scottish identity is the product of historical linearity, where contemporary identity is largely dependent upon events of the national past, so that it is consequently possible for Scots to feel an intrinsic connection with their ancestors and historical predecessors.102 Above, Joyce McMillan parodies this exclusivity, exposing this narrow perspective of Scottishness as a kind of false nostalgia. As a result of the 'fierce cultural winds of the twentieth century', we cannot now assume homogeneity with 'our' ancestors, for Scotland has become increasingly plural and multicultural, is beyond any reductive assimilations which consequently fail to accommodate internal difference. One of the main aims of this chapter, therefore, is to question the ways in which historical representations of Scotland have changed in recent years. Beginning with a reflection on some of the consequences of late nationalism in the work of Benedict Anderson, amongst others, then looking specifically at depictions of Scotland presented by Nairn, Beveridge, Turnbull and Craig, the need for more diverse representations of Scotland and Scottishness, which take into account the shifting patterns of the global world, becomes apparent. Late National Imaginings In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson famously links the origins of the modern nation-state with the growth of print capitalism and the diversity it brings: The impact of economic change, 'discoveries' (social and scientific), and the development of increasingly rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history. No surprise then that the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together. Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search, nor made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made it




(Multinational Identity: Old and New Histories 53

As a result of print capitalism, representations of culture flourished, and hence it became possible to imagine the nation in new and more dynamic ways. The mass production and consumption of newspapers, for example, creates a 'mass ceremony'; one that is also paradoxical, for the national imagining it construes is created privately, 'in the lair of the skull', yet the newspaper reader 'is continually assured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life' (IC, 35-6): An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellow Americans. He has no idea what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity. (IC, 26) In Anderson's reading, factual accounts of the nation are exposed as actively deriving from collective imaginings, rather than existing as independent truths. As a result of print-capitalism, and in particular newspapers, Anderson points out that we are continually bombarded with news reports in an arbitrary way (IC, 33), which then force us to imagine for ourselves what the possible truth of an event might be. As a consequence of these daily fluctuating, often conflicting depictions, the reader is then left to process their own sense of nationhood. Anderson therefore stresses that the modern nation-state is constructed, for example, through the language of print-media, not through blood as some (primordialist) critics might conveniently assume (IC, 145): 'Through that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed' (IC, 154). According to Anderson, the contemporary nation-state is therefore constructed through cognitive processes, which then become assimilated into paradigms of the national character. Similarly, the history of the nation is also a product of such imaginings. It is this concept of national imagining, the processes of its construction, that will be relevant here. For if the nation exists as an imagined 'mass of data', and if this data is constructed primarily through language, then perhaps this very constructedness should be given more priority in readings of Scottishness rather than a belief in the autonomous 'nature' and linearity of the past. In Anderson's later book, The Spectre of Comparisons, he goes on to examine some of the realities of national imaginings in the late twentieth



possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways. (/C, 36)

century, exploring characteristics of this late nationalism and the role of the nation-state at our present historical moment. Anderson asks 'Is capitalism, in its eternal restlessness, producing new forms of nationalism?'103 Anderson begins the book by addressing the topic of seriality, or the processes through which citizens come to identify with their respective nations. He explains that there are two types: bound and unbound. Unbound seriality has 'its origins in the print market, especially in newspapers, and in the representations of popular performance' through which citizens are consequently encouraged to subjectively substantiate their own conceptions of national identity. Bound seriality, however, 'has its origins in governmentality, especially in such institutions as the census and elections' (SoC, 29) and is therefore connected to more objective, authoritative forms of national belonging.104 Bound seriality, then, refers to governing bodies, the more overall macrocosmic ruling frameworks of the nation, whereas unbound seriality is linked to national imaginings at smaller, more microcosmic levels. Ultimately, however, citizens become bound to the state through their unboundness - through the processes in which they creatively imagine themselves bound by it. In this respect, the performative aspect of national identity, the doubleness associated with it, assumes as much importance as that enforced by the state. Anderson engages with this performative aspect of national identity in later chapters, where he is concerned with the development and proliferation of nationalisms within late capitalism. Of particular interest here are his conceptions of 'late nationalism' and 'long-distance nationalism'. Late nationalism, as discussed in The Spectre of Comparisons, refers to the ways in which nationalism has diversified and pluralised as a result of contemporary capitalism and the commodification of national identity inevitably linked to it. Anderson suggests that our conceptions of nationhood have subsequently become increasingly fragmented and disjointed due to this commodification. In order to reinforce his main points, Anderson concentrates on national monuments, highlighting the ways in which citizens (and here he refers specifically to the United States) face a difficult task when they try to ascertain a sense of 'nationalness' from them. He uses the Lincoln Memorial as an example, pointing out that it and other statues are themselves replicas as they now cannot generate a sense of national authenticity (SoC, 48). In late nationalism, Anderson suggests, human images can never be 'singular'; by which he means that they cannot now have an aura of originality or generate a unique sense of national importance. Rather, in late nationalism commodified signifiers of the nation, such as the commercial replicas of national monuments, 'circulate extremely easily through different media - stamps, t-shirts, postcards,




wallpapers, posters, videotapes, place mats, and so on - without anyone feeling profaned' (SoC, 49). In this respect, the dissemination of national simulacra becomes as important, if not more so, than the actual monuments themselves. Anderson suggests that as national signifiers become more ephemeral and disparate through circulation, then so does our resultant sense of national identity. As will be discussed later, this postmodern fragmentation of national identity has been resisted by many Scottish cultural critics, who have been reluctant to admit the effect of globalising forces on national identity despite their increasing importance. Contrary to Anderson's position on this former national uniqueness, it might be argued that such singularity and authentic sense of national identity has never actually existed anyway. Perhaps our sense of nationalness is no longer generated by national monuments, because such types of imagining are no longer actively encouraged or viewed as necessary by dominant power bodies and the bound seriality of the State. Yet this does not imply that national identity once existed purely or unproblematically (even though it has often been depicted as such). In postmodernity, commodification of the nation, and, for example, the booming heritage industry, manipulate and re-vision the nation in spectacular ways, so that the nation itself becomes increasingly, self-consciously fictionalised within popular culture.105 Similarly, governments, with the development of globalism, often no longer need to generate such coherent, strictly controlled forms of nationalness, since at times it may be in their own interest to reorganise and undermine these forms of fixity (where, for example, capital can be generated by doing so). Anderson's comments on national monuments, then, may seem confusing. Rather, it would seem that, in general, national monuments and symbols of nationalness have always been understood through unboundness, through infinite subjective readings, which cannot then be assimilated into a singular 'aura'. Yet, Anderson's analysis is useful to discussions of contemporary Scottishness as it draws attention to the forces that now challenge the traditional concept of the nation. He may be unhappy with the globalisation taking place and the impact of transnational powers, yet nonetheless feels impelled to write about these changes. In his reading of long-distance nationalism, Anderson similarly highlights this often increasingly unstable nature of contemporary nations and our resultant changing sense of nationalness. According to Anderson, long-distance nationalism is associated with late nationalism to the extent that it is similarly generated and perpetuated through capitalism and major global changes. Empires may have disintegrated, yet:





Anderson states that we now exist in a state of nomadism - in the modern world we have the ability to exist in ways never before thought possible. He is keen to point out that this condition of the nomad is not exclusive to privileged Westerners with a desire for travel and the exotic. On the contrary, it is increasingly the reality of migrant workers amongst others. 'The communications revolution', he writes, 'has profoundly affected the subjective experience of migration': The Tamil bus-driver in Melbourne is a mere dozen sky-hours away from his land van herkomst... The Filipina maid in Hong Kong phones her sister in Manila, and sends money in the twinkling of an electronic eye to her mother in Cebu. The successful Indian student in Vancouver can keep in daily e-mail touch with her former Delhi classmates. (SoC, 68) 'Long-distance nationalism is visibly emerging', and, he continues, 'this type of politics, directed mainly towards the former Second and Third worlds, prises open the classical nation-state project from a different direction' (SoC, 73). For Anderson, capitalism is 'remorseless' and is now radically transforming all human societies (SoC, 74). Long-distance nationalism is a significant feature of late nationalism, yet for Anderson this is probably a 'menacing portent for the future', as it creates a politics which is 'radically unaccountable' (SoC, 74). This may be true, and late nationalism and long-distance nationalism may contain their own inherent dangers, threatening the power of nation-states as organising principles; yet they also self-consciously draw attention to the constructedness of nationalism rather than seeing it in terms of eternity and ancestry. This de-stabilising effect may be undesirable for Anderson, an upholder of the political possibilities of nationalism, but it must nonetheless be taken seriously in any contemporary reading of the nation. In Globalization: The Human Consequences, Zygmunt Bauman also discusses this general weakening of the nation-state. In the culture of globalisation, he writes, nation-states are now merely 'the sole frame for book-balancing',106 where increasingly the transnational now has more importance as a means of generating capital. After what he terms the



At the same time as this enormous process of disintegration, which is also a process of liberation, the world has become ever more tightly integrated into a single capitalist economy - one in which, in our epoch, billions of dollars can be sped almost instantaneously around the globe at the pressing of a computer key. (SoC, 59)


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Everything in the world had a meaning, and that meaning emanated from a split, yet single centre - from the two enormous power blocks locked up, riveted and glued to each other in an all-out combat. With the Great Schism out of the way, the world does not look like a totality anymore; it looks rather like a field of scattered and disparate forces, congealing in places difficult to predict and gathering momentum which no one really knows how to arrest. (G, 58) The expansion of global forces have therefore encouraged a growth of the importance of both what lies beyond and between nations. As a result, there are no 'natural borders' anymore, neither are there 'obvious places to occupy': Wherever we happen to be at the moment, we cannot help knowing that we could be elsewhere, so there is less and less reason to stay anywhere in particular (and thus we often feel an overwhelming urge to find - to compose - such a reason). (G, 11) Here Bauman's ideas are reminiscent of Anderson's long-distance nationalism. For Bauman, as for Anderson, it is important to point out that such deterritorialisation and nomadic ways of life are not purely the result of decadent lifestyles and consumer choice: increasingly they are the reality of oppressed groups, the 'developing world' and fundamentally interlinked with poverty. This break from traditional conceptions of belonging has also been recurrent in many postmodern and poststructural accounts of history and nationhood, which have fundamentally questioned the ways in which we can now think of both. Poststructural readings may not be intrinsically tied to forces of globalism or the development of late nationalism, working at the level of language; yet the ways in which poststructuralism has considered the representation of history, for example, might be considered useful in its questioning of stasis and fixed national assumptions. Poststructuralist readings of history in this sense are concerned with opening out the possibilities and contradictions of meaning, rather than consciously denying them. As they have emerged alongside the cultural and sociological implications of postmodernity, they may also therefore be of use in understanding the postmodern predicament in relation to Scotland. If, as Anderson points out, the modern nation is itself the product of Ian-



'Great Schism' (the era of the Cold War), we no longer have the sense of the world as an ordered totality of small units:

guage, then the move towards more poststructural readings of place and belonging from sociological and cultural perspectives is not so unexpected. This turn towards postmodern, globalising discourses, although in some senses thereby exposing nations as 'scattered', is useful in its disruption of fixity, opening up the concept and question of boundaries without negating them.107 The need for such theoretical positions as they affect Scottish literary studies will therefore be developed in more detail later, after the following sections which concentrate particularly on the work of individual Scottish critics. Tom Nairn: Nationalism, Neurosis and the Pathological Cramped, stagnant, backward-looking, parochial - all these and others are the epithets traditionally and rightly ascribed to modern Scottishness. But deformed as they are, these constitute none the less a strong, institutionally guaranteed identity. It is true that political castration was the main ingredient in this rather pathological complex (such was the point of the Union), and that intellectuals have been unable to contemplate it for a long time without inexpressible pain. Still, there it was: the one thing which the Scots can never be said to have lacked is identity. (TBU, 131) In The Break-up of Britain, Tom Nairn discusses the contemporary role of nationalism, tracing its development from the beginnings of capitalism. For Nairn, Scottish nationalism is unusual and clearly does not fit in with the overall pattern, due to what he describes as its belatedness.m Scottish nationalism, he writes, only begins in the 1920s 'and is the chronological companion of anti-imperialist revolt and Third World nationalism, rather than those of European movements, which it superficially resembles. While the latter were growing, fighting their battles and winning them (sometimes), Scottish nationalism was simply absent' (TBU, 95). However, according to Nairn, while it may have been a belated phenomenon, Scottish nationalism is now as fundamentally afflicted with neurosis and deformity as other nation-states, existing in the modern world of what he terms the Janus face. It is on this note that Nairn concludes his book, pointing out that the simultaneous growth of capitalism and nationalism has led to this condition of ambivalence. Where capitalism 'spread remorselessly over the world to unify human society into one more or less connected story for the first time', it also 'engendered a perilous and convulsive new fragmentation of that society' (TBU, 341). Subsequently, nationalism has necessarily become both 'healthy and morbid', 'both pro-




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gress and regress are inscribed in its genetic code from the start' (TBU, 347).109 In this early text, Nairn is writing from a marxist position, from which he attempts to explain the unexpected growth and persistence of nationalism in the modern world. In this book Nairn therefore attempts to attune nationalism to his own theoretical position by exposing its intrinsic deformity and pathological nature. So, even though he admits that nationalism is now 'largely incurable', he persists, 'When will socialism bring the cure?' (TBU, 359). In his examples, Nairn therefore sets out to show that Scottish nationalism has often been perpetuated through forms of romanticism. He connects this romantic nationalism with a 'search for inwardness, the trust in feeling or instinct', a concern with 'nature', which contain inherent dangers, for 'if one continues to adopt that language, then it becomes impossible to get back to the structural necessities which determined it historically' (TBU, 104). In this way, nationalism in general contains dangers, for it readily fictionalises nationhood and invents fictitious pasts, in order to justify itself to its citizens who are then susceptible to accepting such myths as truthful.110 As Benedict Anderson illustrates in Imagined Communities, nationhood is always inevitably an active construction. What Nairn implies here, in his early writing, is that one should be wary of fictions that tend to become accepted as popular reality, especially those which mythologise to the extent that they create new versions of national identity that fail to accommodate historical reality. For Nairn, in this early text, this misrepresentation of historical reality is readily found in the 'sentimental slop associated with tartan, nostalgia, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Dr Finlay, and so on' (TBU, 114). With respect to the postmodern predicament, Nairn's urge to expose forms of romanticism that often lead to cultural and national introversion might be seen as commendable. Yet, from a contemporary position where historical reality is increasingly regarded as the product of plural imaginings, Nairn's assumption of an objective historical reality existing behind, waiting to fully emerge from, the 'sentimental slop' of nationalism might now seem problematic. Nairn's position here, then, is also restrictive. While he attempts to expose the constraining elements of nationalism, he would nonetheless like to replace these with his own forms, where historical reality could be organised from his own theoretical perspective. 'Nationalism', Nairn writes 'has dominated historical development since the early 19th century', 'was in essence the forced reaction of one area after another to the spread of capitalism'. He goes on to say that 'this process has been awarded other titles too: '"westernization", "moderniza-





Neo-nationalism arises at a different, much later point in the same general process. It remains comparable to elemental nationalism in being a forced by-product of the grotesquely uneven nature of capitalist development. As the latter's blind, lurching progress impinges upon this or that region, it still poses a threat (or more exactly, a combined promise and threat) of modernization, 'imperialistic' disruption of old ways, and so on. But this now occurs at a far more advanced stage of general development... But precisely because it starts from a higher level and belongs to a more advanced stage of capitalist evolution - to the age of multinationals and the effective internationalization of capital - its real historical function will be different. (TBU, 128) Although Nairn, as will be shown in more detail later, is often dismissive of postmodern theoretical perspectives, preferring instead to work within more traditional paradigms, his description of neo-nationalism where capitalism is now re-moulding and affecting the very structures and composition of place, may connect with the Scottish postmodern predicament and challenge to national identity. Where national identity may once have been taken for granted, the development of grotesquely uneven capitalist development, in Nairn's terms, is now leading towards (multi)national identity: the awareness that the national can no longer be conceived of in singular, unproblematic terms, that any construction of national identity should also therefore leave room to accommodate the possibility of diversity, rather than closure.111 However, this is not to dismiss the importance of nations and national cultures. Rather, an awareness of the multinational may help to map contemporary nations and cultures by reflecting change more accurately. From his more traditional standpoint, Nairn writes that in fact the Union has led to 'grave cultural and psychological problems' for Scotland, has created 'a characteristic series of subnational deformations or 'neuroses' (TBU, 129). The Union also, Nairn goes on, has led to 'political castration' for Scotland. Scots have never lacked identity, he asserts, yet as a direct result of political castration and the 'neuroses' it brings, Scotland has frequently looked towards romanticism as a means of verifying its status. Nairn then cynically remarks that the assertion of the 'thistle patch' by political and cultural nationalists 'then proved very useful' (TBU, 131). This reclamation of the 'national soil' is fundamentally tied to romanticised versions of nationhood, which, according to Nairn, merely perpetu-



tion", or simply "development"' (TBU, 121). Neo-nationalism, then, has more in common with what Anderson has described as late nationalism:

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ate forms of false consciousness, of which, in this book, he is clearly scathing.112 Political castration has led to a form of 'paralysis' within Scotland. Here Nairn is explicitly referring to the early 1970s and the paralysis evident 'electorally as well as in terms of party strategies' (TBU, 129). Too often, he states, we still depend on romantic conceptions of nationhood that only perpetuate this paralysis. 'For Kailyard is popular in Scotland' and 'is recognisably intertwined with that prodigious array of Kitsch symbols, slogans, ornaments, banners, war-cries, knick-knacks, music-hall heroes, icons, conventional sayings and sentiments which have for so long resolutely defended the name of "Scotland" to the world.' (TBU, 162). Kitsch, for Nairn in The Break-up of Britain is simply 'ridiculous', and 'ridiculous or not, it is extremely strong' and 'has evolved blindly' (TBU, 162). The concept of the Caledonian Antisyzygy, Nairn states, provides another classic example of the hazards of romanticism. It 'is one of the interesting minor examples of myth made out of affliction'. Consequently, such terms are dangerous, 'even uttering them one feels a quicksand clutching at the ankles' (TBU, 150). Curiously, however, Nairn frequently defines Scotland in essentialist ways, highlighting it as deformed, suffering from castration and paralysis, although he is at times wary of the ways in which these metaphors can be misused. Yet, in stating that 'political castration' led to 'paralysis' for Scotland, it could be said that Nairn actually perpetuates notions of a romanticised nationalism. By defining Scotland through such static metaphors, limiting it to them, Nairn only further connects Scottishness with forms of introversion. It is interesting that he himself adopts metaphors of illness and the highly gendered notion of castration as a means of depicting nationhood without being self-conscious of their possible alternative readings. Scotland is often historically depicted as female, yet in The Break-up of Britain Nairn asserts that the political condition of Scotland is particularly male, and often fails to see the social implications of this. Commenting on Scottish nationalism in 1968 Nairn suggested that 'It is simply not possible for anyone born within the culture to resist at least part of its appeal'.113 Nairn, however, also insists that such nationalist affirmations are inescapably tied to 'dreams of wholeness' which can only ultimately be tied to forms of 'unreality'.114 Writing in 1977, Nairn states that it is too soon to know what the possible consequences of neonationalism will be. Yet he does suggest that it will be concerned with the move towards self-rule and democracy, with the continuation of cultural estrangement and the romanticisations inherent in nationalism.115 Nairn is keen to expose the Janus-face of neo-nationalism or late nationalism, yet




at the same time, cannot provide any realistic alternatives. '"Nationalism" is the pathology of modern developmental history' he writes, 'as inescapable as "neurosis" in the individual... a similar built-in capacity for the descent into dementia... and largely incurable.' (TBU, 359). However, while nationalism may be incurable, this does not necessarily mean that we must accept all of the distinguishing characteristics Nairn associates with it. In his later texts, where Nairn begins to advocate the positive nature of nationalism, he nonetheless curiously continues with these questionable metaphors as a means of justifying this alternative position. Faces of Nationalism and Further Contradictions In his subsequent book, Faces of Nationalism, Nairn traces the general development of nationalism in the modern world and goes on to look at specific examples of small nations, micro-states and finally the example of Scotland in particular. In the introduction he writes: The old philosophical presuppositions of modernism are losing their hold; but no one is quite sure what new ones will replace them. Events since 1989 have returned us squarely to the problem of 'blood' - the inherent and irreconcilable diversity of 'human nature'. But there is not yet a post-End-of History theory convincing or plausible enough to impose itself as a new paradigm of explanation. (FoN, 11). Since 1989 there has been a resurgence of undesirable primordialisms, linking citizens to their nation through blood relationships, which have presented fundamental challenges to defenders of the nationalist project. Due to small countries desiring independence post-1989 there has been a growing awareness that the new nation-states and nationalism itself are fundamentally different from older versions; that for this reason they cannot be anticipated or understood in the same ways. Yet for Nairn this does not imply that nationalism has become any less important to the contemporary world: on the contrary, he writes, 'The true subject of modern philosophy is nationalism' (FoN, 17). He points out that both internationalism and nationalism were generated by 'capitalist internationality' and that since the French Revolution these concepts 'have existed in permanent, uneasy tension with one another' (FoN, 28). Yet, in this later text where Nairn has now visibly changed his position, internationalism cannot now be as politically viable as nationalism: 'Internationalists show us the railway lines, the ever rising tide of Coca-Cola, corporate or state mega-structures, the "same problems" everywhere, and so on. But what




63

are they actually doing with these displays?' (FoN, 28). The internationalism which he advocated in The Break-up of Britain is now insufficient, yet nationalism is not unproblematic either, for it can 'yoke the sublime and the stupid together in one movement' (FoN, 30) and can be the breeding ground of false consciousness as much as internationalism (FoN, 31). Internationalism, however, has a tendency to promote a kind of 'all-thesameism' (FoN, 32) which Nairn clearly rejects in favour of the nationalist project and what he regards as its more democratic potential. In Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Eric Hobsbawm anticipates the end of nationalism, that we are now approaching the time of 'Minerva's Owl', and that this is to be celebrated: It would be absurd to claim that this day is already near. However, I hope it can at least be envisaged. After all, the very fact that historians are at least beginning to make some progress in the study of nations and nationalism suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak. The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism.116 Nairn, however, is highly sceptical of Hobsbawm's claims. He writes 'Although not enjoying any special relationship with Minerva, I doubt whether her pet would suggest anything of the kind' (FoN, 47). Unlike Hobsbawm, he doubts that in the future nations and nationalism will become less important. For Hobsbawm, our current fascination with nations and nationalism signifies that its liberating potential is now at an end, at least that this end is slowly manifesting. Yet, according to Nairn, 'The study of nationalism, above all, should persuade one that there is still much to be said for it' (FoN, 50) and he is dismissive of Hobsbawm on this issue.117 Throughout Faces of Nationalism Nairn highlights the contemporary importance of self-rule and towards the end of the book goes on to discuss the example of Scotland in particular. At this point, his prior optimism diminishes. In The Break-up of Britain, where Nairn draws attention to many of the undesirable features of nationalism, it is perhaps not surprising that he discusses Scotland in terms of its 'paralysis' and 'neurosis'. Yet in this later book, where Nairn has changed position and now speaks on behalf of the beneficial qualities of nationalism, it is surprising that he persists with this rhetoric of deformity, debility and disablement. Discussing his experiences at a Glasgow dinner party, Nairn describes the sense of 'strangely helpless nationalism' he found lurking amongst the




guests. For Nairn the reality was brought home that 'when Scottish politics and nationality meet, nothing can ever be taken for granted. Modern patriotism has no natural persona in Scotland. Our old clothes are romantic rags, yet - embarrassingly, inexplicably - none of the new uniforms seem to fit either' (FoN, 184). For readers of The Break-up of Britain, Nairn's admission of wearing 'romantic rags' is striking. Nairn, addressing the mood of the evening, is clearly speaking not only for himself. Intrinsic to his statement seems to be an acceptance, at least a resignation, that such romanticism is inevitable. In this respect, the tone of the narrator is clearly different from the earlier book. 'Nowhere', Nairn writes, is 'a distinctively Scottish place'. It refers to 'the reassuring void we ken, rather than unfamiliar gestures of political agreement or compromise: the limbo in which our nation happens to have settled down, as distinct from the common ground of modernity' (FoN, 184). What unites Scots, however, is the fact that we are 'united in the dread of native narrowness' (FoN, 184). There appears to be a contradictory element to Nairn's comments here: there is a dread of narrowness, yet also apparently a deeply rooted acceptance of it in the knowledge that Scotland is really politically 'nowhere'. Nairn then continues to adopt such conflicting statements throughout the remainder of his discussion of contemporary Scotland and this apparent 'nature' of Scottishness. 'From their earliest bookish encounters Scottish intellectuals imbibe a form of national nihilism', and, Nairn adds, this is what one might call 'fragmentosis Caledoniesis' (FoN, 185). This 'national nihilism' is connected to 'the sense of a Heimat loveable yet incurably divorced from the modern' (FoN, 185). It is strange that Nairn discusses such nihilism when, in his earlier chapters he articulates the need for small nations to assert themselves. When Nairn discusses the function of contemporary nationalism in general he is optimistic. However, when he addresses Scotland in particular, he then peculiarly resorts to contradictory statements that question the ability of nationalism in Scotland to have any positive effect whatsoever. Nairn appears cynical and jaded about the possibility of political change, while, paradoxically, the reader can sense his political position. Consequently, this approach often seems defeatist. The Scottish middle class, he writes, 'wants to feel paralysed in advance' (FoN, 185) by this problem of developing a progressive national politics. Perhaps it is understandable that Nairn is hesitant and anxious about the possibility of Scotland reaching self-governance, critics overcoming their cultural pessimism, yet it is odd that he also identifies with such pessimism. In part he is critiquing others' perceptions of 'fragmentosis Caledoniesis', where





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The task of resurrecting Scots identity, superhuman in any case, will before long be unthinkable amid Edinburgh's sell-outs and southeastern incomers: the 'fragmentosis' will soon be terminal, thanks to this quartier maudit devoted to the trashing of all native virtues and institutions. (FoN, 185) How should we read such statements, knowing that Nairn believes in the notion of a 'progressive' politics for Scotland? There is an acceptance here of primordialism and romanticisation, which previously he strongly attacked. The reference to 'south-eastern incomers' here seems out of place, in some respects incredulous. Where in The Break-up of Britain Nairn questions the role of civil society and its political function in the nation-state, here he seems to base his argument solely on the paranoid fear that the English will take away 'our' drive for national self-assertion. A 'black hole', we are told, now exists behind Scottishness, which we are all guilty of falling in to: Scotland, as a result, is suffering from impotence and paralysis, and he laments the fact that the ruling classes cannot yet see this (FoN, 185). Here it might be more positive to reflect on Robert Crawford's Devolving English Literature where he calls for a more 'alert and inclusive looking out' in the devolutionary era, rather than a fixation on myopic forms of 'national neurosis'.118 As in The Break-up of Britain, Scottish politics are referred to in particularly gendered terms. 'Impotence', 'coitus interruptus" and 'castration' are the central metaphors through which Nairn represents the modern Scottish condition.119 Ironically, such masculine metaphors are adopted in order to highlight the intrinsic 'identity malfunctions' of the Scottish people: Modernity summons us to show our identity passes. But all the Scots have to pull from their pocket is a set of identity malfunctions rooted in this decrepit corporate persona. Unable to escape from nationality, the latter has devoted itself to containing the beast and evading its political consequences, including democracy. (FoN, 190)



Scottish culture itself is placed into doubt or denied; yet on the other hand, Nairn seems sympathetic to the existence of such a void. In his discussion of Scotland, Nairn at times seems paranoid, doubtful that Scottish intellectuals will ever be able to assert their need for selfgovernance:

It is telling here that 'the Scots' have a collective pocket. Even if it were true that Scottish people suffered from political debilitation and paralysis, here Nairn's commentary provides no possible alternative to the problem, in fact only perpetuates and escalates the sense of crisis without giving even the hope of a cure. 'Fragmentosis', it would seem, is a permanent and essential malady of 'the Scottish people'. One of the main problems with Nairn's account of Scotland in Faces of Nationalism is that he consistently essentialises both Scotland and Scottish people in a way that then debilitates both. Nairn, peculiarly and without explanation, describes Scottishness as being caught in a structuralist maze, one which is 'exit-less' (FoN, 191). Yet it would seem that Nairn is himself guilty of upholding, if not of actively constructing this labyrinth and closed system of meaning. He discusses the 'traps' of Scottishness and Scottish culture without really discussing possible escape routes. If he perceives that the predicament of Scotland is to be lost in a structuralist maze, then perhaps he should attempt to look beyond such self-imposed boundaries. However, this may seem like a version of 'anything goes' postmodernism to Nairn, and instead he prefers to remain trapped within his own confines. Where, for example, in The Break-up of Britain Nairn bitterly attacks the concept of the Caledonian Antisyzygy, in Faces of Nationalism he has paradoxically moved more towards romanticised notions of national identity in order to justify the 'national paralysis': We are being sent down the plug-hole not by abject mediocrity but by fated contradictoriness: being forever in two minds and out of our heads, the 'tragedy' of instinct versus intellect and so on. MacDiarmid's 'Antisyzygy' symbolises the condition of being politically nobody; but also colours and disguises it, in a way palatable to the sufferers themselves. (FoN, 191) Is Nairn's resort to romanticism here his own way of making debilitation 'palatable'? Regardless, it is ironic that he mentions 'fated contradictoriness' when in actuality he is encouraging the very malady he wishes to overcome. Consequently, when he later refers to the Scotsman newspaper as 'that sounding board of the national soul' (FoN, 195), one wonders how ironic he is actually being and to what extent such generalisations should really be accepted in the first instance.





What this moment imposes is nothing less than a different sense of history. Seventy years is a long time in individual terms but a fairly short one within the three-hundred-year span which, simultaneously, cannot help coming into view here - that is, from 1707 to the present. This span of time is already beginning to look like a single episode. It is turning into the long moment during which, exceptionally, Scotland did not have its own parliament and state. (AB, 92) In his more recent book, After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, Nairn maps out the need for constitutional reform in Britain, in particular the need for constitutional reform of the Treaty of Union between Scotland and England. Throughout the book Nairn stresses the inadequacies of the Treaty, the ways in which Scotland has been continually overlooked as a result of it. Repeating the sentiments quoted earlier by Kellas, he writes 'The fact is that since the 18th century little significance has been attached to Englishness as separate from 'British' or (for about a century) British-Imperial' (AB, 40). For Nairn, Blairite politics, the move towards Social Democracy and the Third Way, provide little for the current political predicament of Scotland. The New Labour Government provides merely the illusion of radicalism, and this false impression is then allowed to spin endlessly at the hands of its doctors, rather than affecting any positive social change.120 In this way, politics continue to represent the norm, 'Englishness', and little is achieved for Scotland. Yet for Nairn, the important factor is that Britain is now fundamentally changing; the break-up of Britain is an increasing reality. Consequently, Scotland now has the chance to emerge from its state of 'limbo' which it has been in since the Union of 1707 (AB, 93). To a large extent, After Britain depends on a linear depiction of history, in which the Union of 1707 is still very much in the 'national psyche' of Scotland at the present moment.121 On the 16 January 1707 the Treaty was approved, and for Nairn this officially became Scotland's 'last day' (AB, 96). Each Scot, according to Nairn, has subsequently felt this 'river of loss' within themselves, they have felt 'the corrosive and disabling stream that has coursed through Scottish society - and in a sense through the veins of every individual - since that time'. 122 Nairn is often keen to remind his reader that his version of nationalism is not dependent on a 'blood and soil' mentality, while, at the same time, also frequently discussing nationhood in ways dependent upon notions of ancestry and genealogy and the rhetoric of organicism. 'Ethno-cultural or blood-descent



After Britain and the Return of Scotland


Few individuals spend much of their time consciously worrying over their own or their community's 'identity', while many spend none whatever. Social (including national) collective consciousness is none the less constantly transmitted onwards. In fact it may be powerfully transmitted, over surprising periods of time, and against great apparent odds - for centuries rather than just generations. 'National identity' has in this sense to be described as a non-genetic but long-range sociocultural inheritance, capable of persisting even although its salience and manifestations vary greatly from one time or situation to another. While of course it must pass through consciousness, its residence within any social fabric is largely 'unconscious' in the familiar sense of being 'taken for granted', as feeling, presupposition, reflex or fall-back mechanism. (AB, 246) For Nairn the concept of a 'national unconscious' may be problematic, yet also necessary in order to justify his version of events since the Union. This is repeatedly the case throughout After Britain. If such a 'national unconscious' does exist, then it seems peculiar that Nairn should be able to locate it, and thus describe the feelings 'running through our veins' since 1707. Nairn describes the possibility of an unconscious, yet does so in conscious terms, so that he can speak on behalf of the Scottish nation and all of its citizens. In this respect, the notion of an unconscious is desirable to Nairn as it justifies his own (nationalist) position. Clearly the ways in which we comprehend nationality are largely unconscious, the effects of unfathomable patterns and diverse historical traces. Yet here Nairn appears to simplify the complexity of national identity for his own convenience and own ends. It is such accounts of Scottish history and national generalisations that Joyce McMillan earlier attacked when she suggests that 'Scotland is no longer the nation which lost its parliament back in 1707'. The 'fierce cultural winds of the twentieth century' have created 'pluralist' and 'highly urbanised societies' that can no longer be viewed parochially as the result of the Treaty of Union. There are now too many other influences acting upon Scotland: the impact of the European Union, the forces of capitalism and technological change. By depending on a 'national unconscious', there is therefore the danger that Nairn will merely perpetuate the stereo-



nationalism is today the preserve of cranks and ideological gangsters' (AB, 244), he writes. Blood may be an unfavourable indicator of national identity, yet, the concept of a 'national unconscious', providing the bedrock of Scottishness, curiously exists:

69

types that in the end he wants to avoid. He would like radical constitutional reform and a successful, forward-looking new Parliament; yet he tends to depend on archaic, questionable depictions of Scottishness as the foundation for his account of Scottish identity. Other critics have also highlighted such archaisms in Nairn's work. In his review of After Britain in New Statesman, John Gray states that for Nairn 'the new Scottish Parliament cannot be other than a sham, if only because its creation did not include the renunciation of the Treaty of Union of 1707'. Gray goes on to state 'indeed it seems to be this legal detail, and not much else, that underpins Nairn's repeated and confident assertions that devolution in Scotland is no more than a stage on the way to the disintegration of the UK'.123 Gray points out that Nairn's account of Scottishness is 'sadly monocultural'124 and indeed this seems to be the case, as a direct result of his dependence on both historical linearity and the effects of the 'national unconscious' stemming through generations. For Nairn, the 'national self has been 'lobotomised and placed in cold storage' since 1707.125 Once again there is a suspicious reference to the Caledonian Antisyzygy when he explains that this lobotomy has created a 'split personality' in the Scottish people, that the chief effect of such a split has been to ensure a sense of shame intrinsically within each citizen.126 Scottishness, as a result, can be regarded as a form of curse: it provides an accurate reflection of the impotence and national nihilism which pervade the 'national self'.127 One of the main problems, Nairn states, is that it is the intellectuals who have for the most part succumbed to this shame, who 'have been particularly susceptible to the shameful furies, and reacted against them in various ways' (AB, 103). The most popular means of reacting was therefore to leave the country, and Nairn refers to this trend as 'departure lounge internationalism': 'an outward-bound complex of attitudes forever recoiling from the unspeakable parochialism and psychic cramps of home' (AB, 103). Where in The Break-up of Britain Nairn was a confessed 'departure lounge internationalist', famously stating in 1968 that 'Scotland will be reborn the day the last Minister is strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Posf,m in After Britain Nairn writes that he has now overcome this sense of national 'shame'.129 Curiously, in his later texts Nairn has replaced his previous 'marxist machine-gun' with a turn towards sentimentality, the urge to incorporate cultural nationalism into the political equation for Scotland. There is perhaps a resonance with Edwin Muir's reflection on the desperate predicament of Scotland mentioned in Chapter 1, where he states that 'Scotland' objects when its writers choose to live elsewhere. In Nairn's account there is a suggestion that, since 'Scots' have




'overcome their shame', there is no longer a need for departure lounge internationalism and such forms of outward bound neuroses. However, in his readings, Nairn tends to replace departure lounge internationalism with forms of inward bound neuroses, so that his nationalist rhetoric then presents a highly peculiar account of Scotland. It is perhaps unusual that Nairn would chose to perpetuate this notion of organicism, and that of a particularly modernist predicament, while in other respects he is clearly pre-occupied with the changing nature of the European Community and the development of citizenship rights. There is therefore no reflection on the possible 'lateness' of nationalism here, no self-consciousness of more postmodern positions which subject such organic forms of identity to revision. Instead, there is a growing recourse towards cultural nationalism. Where Nairn was once scathing of nationalism, and the possibility of parochialism lurking deeply within it, he now views it as beneficial: 'The alternative can now only be the rediscovery of a re-dimensioned civic nationalism on both sides of the Border. It can't remain the hopeless preservation of a Union which, in spite of the Blair rhetoric, is rapidly losing all purpose and direction' (AB, 222). On the future direction of Scotland, Nairn asserts 'Democratic citizenship must be its principal armature: but it has to be a community too, it must comprise of a "felt" association' (AB, 252). However, the question remains: whose community is being established here, in whose overall interests and at whose expense will this 'felt' association be constructed? Clearly Nairn is keen to promote the need for constitutional change by reducing Scotland to a series of negative tropes. Parochialism and undesirable forms of essentialism haunt his perspectives of the Scottish predicament, and these also therefore significantly contradict his desires for political reform. Beveridge and Turnbull: Postmodernism vs. Cultural Nationalism In The Eclipse of Scottish Culture, Beveridge and Turnbull present a challenge to Nairn's early position on Scottish nationalism. In their opinion, Nairn's position in The Break-up of Britain is problematic, as it critiques what they regard as the inherently positive nature of Scottish nationalism. They are also, therefore, wary of Nairn's urge to view nationalism as connected to forms of 'neurosis' and the pathological. According to Beveridge and Turnbull in this text, since Nairn evidently critiques cultural nationalism, writing scathingly about the parochialism of Scottish culture, his position is more correctly anti-nationalist. 13° In their opinion, Nairn's 'commitment to nationalism is pragmatic and conditional rather than principled' (ESC, 60), and they suggest that the book is more of a




call for socialists to accept the dominant reality of nationalism, as a means of then incorporating it into their own ideological and theoretical structures. 'Principled' nationalism, according to Beveridge and Turnbull, therefore refers to an unconditional commitment to Scottish culture. For them, Nairn's position therefore presents a hindrance to cultural forms of nationalism, and, they assert: 'Fighting for a culture means finding in it a valuable inheritance. Cultural nationalists can only reject Nairn's evaluation of Scottish culture': Mention of the dispersal of the Scottish intellectual inheritance and the possibility of alternative ways of seeing Scottish culture suggests, further, that cultural nationalists will have a different view of the historical development of Scottish traditions. They will emphasise the adverse effects on Scottish cultural life of the adoption by many intellectuals of English modes. One result was the displacement of the country's philosophical approach from the centre of intellectual life. Another consequence is that English ways of interpreting Scottish culture and history have become, in Scotland too, hegemonal. Nairn's work, we have been arguing, is based on such readings, and thus exemplifies the adoption by Scottish intellectuals of metropolitan perspectives... The task facing nationalists is to challenge this cultural power, to question its values and assumptions, to inquire into its operations; and, at the same time, to develop alternative codes for understanding ourselves and our past. (ESC, 61) In The Eclipse of Scottish Culture, Beveridge and Turnbull therefore attempt to map out the importance of the Scottish cultural tradition, highlighting some of its major trajectories as they perceive them. They are primarily interested in recording the ways in which Scottish culture has repeatedly been historically misrepresented, depicted as backwards and a place of darkness. In challenging such depictions, they refer to the work of Frantz Fanon, reflecting on his notion of 'inferiorism'. For Fanon, inferiorism refers to the processes through which the native comes to internalise the dominant culture of the coloniser at the expense of their own local, traditional cultures, which are undermined through the forces of oppression. Although they do not develop this analogy with nationalism in the developing world in any further detail, Beveridge and Turnbull then assume that forces of 'inferiorism' can adequately explain what they see as the Scottish cultural predicament.131 They then set out to expose some of the ways in which critics have perpetuated inferiorist notions of Scottishness, where the Scottish tradition has been subsumed within a larger Brit-




ish context, and they aim to correct this anomaly in their defence of the Scottish cultural tradition. It is largely for this work on addressing inferiorism that both critics have come to prominence in Scottish studies. It is important for Beveridge and Turnbull to defend Scottish history from its critics, who, they assert, have repeatedly threatened and undermined the tradition through their misinterpretations and historical misreadings. However, in their own attempts at correction, Beveridge and Turnbull also make questionable statements regarding the alleged 'nature' of the tradition. In doing so their interpretations and methodology are often reductive and uncritical, and it is therefore the implications of such strategies that will be examined in this section. While Beveridge and Turnbull are noticeably reluctant to question the foundations on which they construct their notion of a tradition, it is argued that such positions can no longer simply be assumed, especially when both 'nationhood' and 'tradition' have themselves become increasingly contentious. Yet, in this move towards a reflexive analysis of place, it will be suggested that the postmodern fragmentation of national identity, while challenging the rigid premises of cultural nationalism, does not abandon the notion of tradition altogether either. Rather, it may actually help interrogate forms of stasis that often lurk within uncritical notions of national identity, therefore exposing the need for more expansive accounts which will question the function of the tradition, whilst, perhaps paradoxically, helping to simultaneously generate it. In The Eclipse of Scottish Culture, Beveridge and Turnbull begin with the notion that the 'Scottish inferiority complex' has often been established and perpetuated through binary oppositions, where Scotland systematically becomes the repressed other of what England is clearly not. They map out the following system of oppositions, which, they assert, have been integral to the historical representation of Scottishness:

dark backward fanatical violent barbaric illiberal parochial uncouth intemperate savage

enlightened advanced reasonable decent civilised tolerant cosmopolitan refined moderate mild





orderly kind gentle sophisticated (ESC, 1)

Suggesting that, historically, critics have tended to depict Scotland using the kinds of debilitating terms represented in the left-hand column, Beveridge and Turnbull therefore wish to deconstruct this binary in order to introduce more historically representative forms of Scottishness. From a postmodern position, this readdressal would also be welcomed, for it challenges the restrictive nature of previous misrepresentations, seeking alternative and more accommodating accounts. Yet, while Beveridge and Turnbull rightly expose the misrepresentation of Scotland through such overly rigid formulations, they nonetheless also generate their own questionable assumptions in the process, and they clearly reject such postmodern forms of revisioning. It appears that while they may wish to deconstruct the kind of binary system represented above, they also in other respects wish to uphold a similar version of it. Beveridge and Turnbull then curiously assert that in representations of Scotland and Scottishness, critics should avoid the tendency to represent the more metropolitan perspectives designated in the right-hand column. They suggest that since 1707, critics have often negated Scottish history in order to uphold more convenient and distinctive versions of British history. This is done, they assert, at the expense of misrepresenting Scottish history before the Union, where this 'pre-modern' Scotland is then often referred to in inferiorist terms as a place of darkness and superstition. The consequence of this is that the Scottish tradition is seen as merely parochial, a smaller version of a more complete and significant tradition within 'Great' Britain. However, it seems that while they aim to dismantle this binary between the left and right-hand columns, Beveridge and Turnbull also help to sustain the notion of Scotland and Scottishness as parochial by attacking this notion of the metropolitan. In their urge to distinguish Scotland from metropolitan concerns, Beveridge and Turnbull may wish to challenge representations of the Scottish tradition based on what they see as the ideology of the coloniser, where 'metropolitan' by definition refers to the control of the 'parent state'. Yet in doing so they fail to acknowledge the often metropolitan and cosmopolitan nature of contemporary Scotland, and they therefore consistently limit Scotland by denying the reality of its present historical position. In directly opposing Scotland to the metropolitan in this way they also therefore establish their own forms of binary thinking.



unruly severe harsh primitive

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In this reading, representations of the Scottish tradition must always remain distinct from the 'dominant' culture, in order to preserve the distinctive nature of Scottish history, to protect it, ironically, from the forces of inferiorism. In their wish to rigidly hold on to notions of a Scottish tradition, they do so in ways that also simultaneously expose their own methodology as out of date, unwilling to take on board the kinds of issues now shaping Scottish life. In this sense, their own position seems itself to be suffering from parochialism. Rather than challenging binary thinking, then, they often resort to upholding versions of it in order to sustain a distinction from Englishness, which, it could be argued, is not a healthy condition on which to base the foundations of the Scottish Tradition. They present Scotland as unique, distinct from forms of 'metropolitan' England (strangely homogenised), and this really only serves to limit the potential of Scotland by restricting it to what England is not, rather than encouraging a broader reflection of what it might actually comprise. Yet, as David McCrone has recently pointed out, Scotland in actuality has many more similarities with England than differences. To establish a strict binary division between the two is therefore unhelpful and obstructive. Rather, as McCrone suggests, it is possible to map out the changing material conditions of both countries without resorting to reductive essentialist definitions. Demarcating between Scotland and England in this way then allows Beveridge and Turnbull to repeatedly sustain their own rigid notions of what Scotland is, based clearly on what England is not, and vice-versa. Beveridge and Turnbull react strongly to the views of some critics who suggest that some elements of Scottish culture (for example the legacy of John Knox and the impact of Calvinism) may be associated with backwardness. In their eyes this merely illuminates what they see as the systematic denigration of Scottish culture: It seems necessary to insist, against this mindless endorsement of metropolitan prejudice, on the strengths of the Calvinist inheritance moral seriousness, distrust of complacency, passion for theoretical argument (even if these are alien to the culture expressed by the London Sunday newspapers). (ESC, 10) Whereas Beveridge and Turnbull wish to defend Scottish matters from incorporation into an engulfing British, or even English, tradition they often do so by making spurious claims for the Scottish tradition, which in turn reflect it as inherently parochial and dependent upon various reac-




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tions to Englishness. What is 'distinctively Scottish' for them therefore must be completely distinct from what is 'distinctively English,' regardless of content or subject matter, and in this respect Scotland is often problematically essentialised. Although in their later text, Scotland after Enlightenment, Beveridge and Turnbull resist such accusations of essentialism,133 it appears that in their definitions of the national tradition, they nonetheless do establish strict borders around Scottishness, tending to treat it as a closed system of meaning defined exclusively in their own terms. In attempting to reclaim the Scottish tradition from submergence into larger frameworks, Beveridge and Turnbull then attempt to reconstruct aspects of the tradition that they view as having been forgotten or underestimated. An important way of doing this, they believe, is to reclaim the Scottish philosophical and intellectual tradition, once again seeking to define what makes Scotland distinct from other nations. The Scottish tradition, they assert, needs to pay more attention to the work of important, yet often neglected thinkers, such as George Davie, Alasdair Maclntyre, John Anderson and R.D. Laing. These figures are important, as, being Scottish, they help to fundamentally define what is Scottish, and once again there seems to be a curious circularity here, at times an obsessive need to defend Scottishness from outsiders, from other ideas which might not be 'inherently' Scottish. This kind of position, however, is generated at the expense of excluding potentially more interesting accounts of Scottishness, and clearly Scotland does not exist in isolation where ideas can be organically or particularly Scottish. For Beveridge and Turnbull, though, thinkers and philosophers who are not Scottish are therefore not of fundamental interest to the Scottish tradition, their relevance is for the most part discounted, and once again the national tradition is given a parochial and introverted turn. The relevance of, for example, marxist, feminist or psychoanalytic perspectives which have been generated outside of Scotland, yet which may have had a significant effect on theories developed inside the country, are here ignored, their influence underestimated. Beveridge and Turnbull introduce a variety of Scottish thinkers into the Scottish tradition, hold them up as ambassadors of the national culture; yet, also do so in convenient ways, so that these particular thinkers become crucial to 'Scottish thought', regardless of the diversity of their individual ideas. Tellingly, philosophical ideas and the intellectual tradition are always reduced to discussions of their Scottishness, so that even where Scotland or national identity are not addressed by an individual thinker, when brought into the tradition their ideas, regardless, become a means of framing the national 'soul'. The




underlying impulse at work here is to categorise Scottishness, regardless of whether such constructions might actually be convincing or apt. A clear example of this peculiar need to assert Scottishness can be found in Scotland after Enlightenment, where Beveridge and Turnbull suggest that as a consequence of the contemporary philosophical debates surrounding the alleged groundlessness of the modern world, Scotland could therefore benefit from an ethical grounding based upon Alasdair Maclntyre's philosophy, where he advocates a return to a preEnlightenment, pre-modern, Augustinian state in order to cure the emptiness of the modern Western world.134 Beveridge and Turnbull seem to make this, in many respects surprising and undeveloped leap here, primarily because Maclntyre is a philosopher born in Scotland, rather than for any evidence, or even any good reason, to return to such pre-modern ways of thought (as if this were somehow possible). In their need to incorporate Maclntyre's work into their own formulation of the Scottish tradition, there seems to be a desperation at work here, where important thinkers who happen to have been born in Scotland must somehow provide an explanation for the nature of lived Scottish reality and its 'psyche', must somehow be part of the inherent nature of its cultural tradition. According to Beveridge and Turnbull, Scottishness is not to be scrutinised, for in doing so this invariably induces forms of inferiorism and undesirable formulations of Scottish culture into their overall picture. An example of this is the 'Scotch Myths' exhibition of 1981, organised by Barbara and Murray Grigor, which self-consciously interrogated myths of Scottishness, such as tartanry. This exhibition, they assert, led many critics to view Scottishness in negative terms, encouraged many to sympathise with Nairn's view in The Break-up of Britain, that such 'kitsch is ridiculous'. For Beveridge and Turnbull, however, tartanry is to be defended, in order to deflect any 'damning conceptions' of national culture: The view that popular consciousness is dominated by tartanry, that the populace is sunk in ignorance and inarticulacy, accords perfectly with the governing image of Scotland as dark and backward. This reflection allows us to locate the real significance of the discussion on tartanry, namely as another instance of the Scottish intelligentsia's readiness to embrace damning conceptions of national culture - in other words as an expression of inferiorism. (ESC, 14) In order to defend the tradition from inferiorism, then, tartanry is to be uncritically embraced, just as many other conceptions of Scottishness also




are. This should be done in order to strengthen the culture; one that is unquestionably and unproblematically 'ours'. The depictions of a national tradition in The Eclipse of Scottish Culture depend upon conceptions of national belonging and historiography which therefore need to be critically examined rather than acquiescently assumed as an indicator of the Scottish cultural and historical tradition. Both in this text and in their more recent Scotland after Enlightenment, Beveridge and Turnbull repeatedly replace factors relating to the political predicament of Scotland with more convenient and more questionable cultural forms. Both critics imply that this cultural nationalist position will provide a vehicle out of political pessimism and hope that it will eventually lead to the liberation of Scotland from forms of inferiorism. Yet, the defensive cultural position they adopt often obscures more than it elucidates. It is therefore difficult to accept the kinds of rationalisations and inferences made in their approach to nationhood, where the concept of tradition is never self-consciously critiqued. Beveridge and Turnbull often substitute the cultural for the political in this way, with the result that they finally underestimate the role of both, relying on contrived formulations of the national cultural tradition as a justification for the complexity of larger political issues. In Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation, and in other publications, David McCrone takes issue with formulations of Scottishness that are based on narrow, restrictive conditions. As a sociologist, McCrone is concerned with mapping the broad changes now affecting the traditional nation-state, and in doing so wishes to reflect how these, in turn, are also having an effect on Scotland. McCrone evidently has no time for sentimental depictions of Scottishness, and instead exposes such constructions as anachronistic and unable to adequately reflect modern Scotland. In his analysis, McCrone stresses that it is vital to see that Scottish culture can no longer be viewed as unified in the ways that it once perhaps was: The relationship between culture and the nation-state has become much more complex. Multi-culturalism is embedded in virtually all states, and any claims that 'a people' have a single culture become harder to maintain. The globalization of culture and the media means that defending 'national culture' from alien influences is impossible. More importantly, it is much harder to maintain that mono-cultural societies are the norm rather than the exception. Indeed, many people, particularly the poor and disadvantaged, have lived across cultures for centuries.135




As a result of this increasing complexity between culture and the nationstate, the role of tradition is also becoming more of a problematic issue. From this more postmodern perspective, monoculturalism is no longer an acceptable foundation on which to base the frameworks of national identity, and therefore more intricate versions become necessary. It is this widespread challenge to cultural homogeneity, now becoming generally accepted, that McCrone labels postmodern. This postmodern position, he points out, refers to the increasing knowledge that 'state boundaries are becoming more malleable and changeable', that if the nation-state is generally under threat, then new forces are also at work which will replace older models.136 McCrone encourages the need to view the 'contradictory and competing identities' now on offer, in order to better acquaint ourselves with the kinds of changes now taking place that will affect all future constructions of belonging, national or otherwise.137 It is this position that Beveridge and Turnbull repeatedly fail to address. In their later text, Scotland after Enlightenment, they once again rely on limiting notions of Scottishness in order to justify their position. Once again, they critique the ways in which historians have failed to map the totality of Scottish experience,138 and they too easily critique other historians without providing a formula or theorised historiography of their own. From their cultural nationalist position, the many disparate elements of Scottish culture can then be amalgamated in order to build a convincing account of Scottishness. In their examples, they discuss many diverse aspects of Scottish culture - covering, for example, the influence of The Colourists, Glasgow tenement buildings, the reflections of the hill walker Tom Weir, and the influence of Tom Nairn. The underlying suggestion here is that if the influence of all the above (and countless other factors) could somehow be merged, providing a vitally strengthened Scottish culture, then it would no longer suffer so severely from the forces of inferiorism. Yet this suggestion that Scottishness could somehow become more stable through merging cultural elements does not in any way seem problematic for Beveridge and Turnbull. Instead, they suggest that this cultural collage would provide a means for overcoming the Scottish cultural predicament. In Scotland after Enlightenment, Beveridge and Turnbull accuse David McCrone's analysis of contemporary Scottishness of being insufficiently aligned with the cultural tradition. Once again, there is a noteworthy circularity in their argument, where, if accounts of Scottishness are not grounded in their own conceptions of tradition, then they must become so in order to be legitimate. Whereas McCrone advocates a recognition of what he terms as 'pick 'n mix' cultural identities 'in which we wear our




identities lightly, and change them according to circumstances', for Beveridge and Turnbull such notions have no legitimate place in Scottish cultural life. David McCrone's accounts have provided some of the most convincing accounts of contemporary Scottishness. In both Understanding Scotland and The Sociology of Nationalism, he sets out some of the most significant factors now at work affecting the nature of nation-states, and therefore our resultant sense of national identity. For McCrone, readings of Scotland that are dependent on cultural nationalist underpinnings repeatedly fail to accommodate the diversity and changing nature of Scottishness. He explains that in the 1960s and 1970s Scottish intellectuals resorted to forms of dependency thinking, where Scotland was viewed as a colonised nation: Such a perspective did not emerge from a careful assessment of Scotland's structural position in the world economy, but rather grew out of sense of a country which had lost control of its own economic, political, even cultural, affairs. To the question, 'What is wrong with Scotland?' came the chorus, 'Scotland is dependent'. (US, 55) Yet this 'dependency thinking' arose, according to McCrone, precisely due to the lack of political autonomy within Scotland, so that critics, in their need to then control aspects of the nation, looked towards the cultural. As discussed in Chapter 1, this equation of the cultural with the political may have subsequently helped to generate a sense of political necessity for Home Rule in Scotland. Yet when the cultural is persistently substituted for the political, then this, McCrone suggests, fails to represent the ways in which culture and politics have in many respects grown apart in recent years: It is an irony that in spite of the supposed deformation of Scottish culture, Scottish political behaviour has never in post-war politics been so divergent from its southern counterpart, a situation seemingly achieved with little help from 'Scottish national culture'. Here, it seems, is a political manifestation which is not tied to a specific cultural divergence. (US, 195) In the contemporary Western world, McCrone asserts, the search for authentic national identity is no longer convincing, especially when this split between culture and politics has become so apparent. Instead, he suggests,





Perhaps this expression of political difference - a nationalism if you want - has developed without the encumbrance of a heavy cultural baggage. It is as if, having looked to see what was on offer, the Scots have decided to travel light. No icons need be genuflected at, no correct representation needs to be observed in this journey into the future. If what we have is so thoroughly tainted and deformed, then we will leave it behind. It is almost a cultureless, post-industrial journey into the unknown. In this respect, it seems to conform to a kind of 'postmaterialist' politics... not in the sense that it is unconcerned with economic issues, but that it seems to have left behind the kind of nationalist and cultural agenda bequeathed from nineteenth and early twentieth century politics. Scotland, like other societies, may be entering a postnationalist age. The vehicle on that journey, ironically, seems to be nationalism itself. (US, 195) Who we are becoming, therefore, is intrinsically connected to the postmodern revisioning of identity, where forms of belonging are increasingly becoming more self-consciously stratified and multi-faceted, with an awareness that citizenship is also now in the process of reconfiguration. Cairns Craig: Out of History and the Question of Tradition And the consequence of accepting ourselves as parochial has been a profound self-hatred. It is not our personal self that we have hated, but that self when seen moulded to the physiognomy of the group, a group whose existence has no significance in the eyes of the world: to escape the parochial we borrow the eyes of the dominant culture and through those eyes we are allowed to see 'the world'. But we are also forced to see how close that parochial group-self stands to us - Hyde behind Jekyll - ready to claim again the self we have invented. We must distance the group-self, see it projected in the comic Scotsman of the tartan kitsch, the parodic versions of working-class Scotland, that the gap between it and us will be so wide no observer could reunite us with our cultural origin. (OOH, 12) In Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture, Cairns Craig maps out some of the ways in which Scottish literature has been underrepresented, often omitted from historical accounts since the



there is now an urge to go beyond such forms of cultural fixity in order to find adequate political expression for present cultural realities:

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nineteenth century. Craig questions the depiction of Scottish literature within the British literary tradition in order to highlight many of the ways in which Scotland has been repeatedly overshadowed by England, which has assumed the dominant position to the detriment of its peripheral neighbours. As highlighted in the above quote, Craig is often careful not to overdetermine Scottishness, and instead draws attention to its fundamental complexity. Yet in pointing out the historical void created by English dominance, Craig then justifies the need for a recaptured Scottish tradition through which the Scottish literary canon can then be justified. Subsequently, it is our historical predecessors who can provide the key for understanding the present. One of Craig's main tasks, therefore, is to reexamine the gaps and omissions of the literary tradition, established while Scotland was 'out of history', in order to benefit awareness of Scotland and Scottishness in the contemporary world. However, what Craig does not draw attention to is the way in which the construction of a coherent and linear Scottish tradition is itself paradoxical. He does not focus on the ways in which it must construct Scottishness whilst assimilating its apparent 'nature', the way in which it must exclude many other histories in the process. In his readings, therefore, Craig does not acknowledge the role of subjectivity in the establishment of a tradition, the ways in which it is potentially biased. Rather, canon formation is viewed as a necessary means of historical reclamation, of assembling histories in a selective and potentially restrictive way.140 In the prologue to Out of History entitled 'Peripheries', Craig, as quoted above, writes that as a consequence of being 'out of history' Scots have accepted themselves as parochial, and attached to this has been a loathing of the 'national self. Discussing the role of parochialism in Scottish culture, he writes, 'it damns us before we start because we must leap in desperation to join "the world"; condemns us when we finish with having been no more than ourselves' (OOH, 11). 'Politics, literature, education, art: they are all constantly threatened by the infection of the parochial' (OOH, 11) and yet he also asserts that, in part, the parochial is part of the complexity of Scottish national identity. The problem facing Scotland, according to Craig, is that Scottish culture has suffered from being historically misrepresented, and this void has been detrimentally (and presumably essentially) internalised. 'Scottish culture has cowered in the consciousness of its own inadequacy' (OOH, 11), Craig suggests, and this has led to a 'self-hatred' of the 'group-self. The threat of the parochial conceals itself in any analysis of Scottishness, 'Hyde behind Jekyll', and to escape it, we adopt the dominant perspective (i.e., the British and thus English perspective) of viewing the world, which on reflection makes





For those who live within the vowel system of the oppressed... sentimentality is the alternative face of self-hatred - what the accent speaks is not meanings, but the couthy warmness that unites people in defiance of the outside world, that makes a virtue of suffering, that glues people together in the belief that their limitations are their strengths... We are so moved by our shared commotion that we forget that it is the pressure of the outside world that holds us together. (OOH, 12) Yet for many Scots, of course, it is not only the colour of their vowels which oppress, and here Craig also appears to be guilty of monoculturalism in his assumptions of the 'national self. In this sense, it is not 'the pressure of the outside world that holds us together' but instead, as was mentioned with reference to Nairn, often the pressure of an inside world. It is perhaps this depiction of 'our shared identity' that is problematic, which needs to be more accepting if it is to be representative in any convincing way. Both Craig and Nairn are concerned with reflecting the changing nature of Scottishness, yet their accounts often fail to map issues of cultural diversity, and national identity is often perceived as primarily and inherently the product of the historical tradition. This becomes problematic, however, when such traditional formulations are accepted as representative, when in actuality they often misrepresent and simplify its complexity. In The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey, Francis Russell Hart is also concerned with this tendency to overdefine Scottishness, and draws attention to this process in the construction of tradition: In every phase of the novel's Scottish history can be seen a fidelity to local truth, to the particulars of communal place and time; at the same time an intention to represent national types and whole cultural epochs; and finally an impetus to transcendent meaning. With such scope, one sometimes finds the tendency to force implication, to make the particular mean too much on too many levels, with the co-ordinate effects of sentimentality and abstraction. (TSN, 406) Further problems arise when such depictions of identity and tradition are accepted as the primary means of explicating present cultural and po-



Scottish culture appear even more parochial, kitsch and hence undesirable. It is not by our colour that we are oppressed, Craig points out, but by 'the colour of our vowels':

litical realities. Rather it would seem that new patterns must be established which will take into account the changing nature of Scottish identity, which will acknowledge the fluidity of national identity and traditions and begin to self-consciously reflect upon their potentially unpindownable 'nature'. In this sense it is perhaps necessary to question the extent to which Craig's formulations of the literary tradition are unrepresentative, as well as the ways in which they potentially are. Scotland, in this respect, can no longer be viewed as introverted and the product of self-hatred, for such reductive notions now seem archaic and unreliable. However, for Craig, we can only really get back into history when we incorporate the influences of the parochial into the literary tradition (that is, when we accept the nature of his own account of the tradition). Questioning Nairn's representations of Scotland in The Break-up of Britain Craig writes: The argument of The Break-up of Britain still forms the essential substratum of much of the analysis of Scotland's cultural situation and the nature of its identity but it is an argument which, however correct in identifying the motors of nationalism, is deeply inhibiting and restrictive in relation to our conception of Scottish culture. (OOH, 88) Craig is interested in the ways in which Nairn adopts unhelpful metaphors in order to define the 'nature' of the country: 'Metaphor it may be', he writes 'but it is to lead a powerful life in Nairn's prose, for the language of 'neurosis' becomes the fundamental category to which is attached all the phenomena of Scottish culture.' (OOH, 93). Nairn, Craig asserts, misrepresents Scotland, adopting biased perspectives that in reality privilege Englishness and actively perpetuate the historically problematic notion of a Scottish void: Nationalism in Scotland and Wales... are relevant only in relation to the historical trajectory in England: successful historical trajectory in England would, on this basis, be much more significant than equally successful historical trajectories in Scotland and Wales because, England being the political 'centre', its transformation would include its subordinate peripheries. (OOH, 95) According to Craig, it is not that Scotland exists in a vacuum, but rather that it has been evacuated by historians writers and cultural critics.141 Craig highlights what he means by this vacuum when he gives the example of the Scotch Myths exhibition held by Barbara and Murray Grigor




in 1981. The exhibition, as mentioned earlier, famously explored many of the stereotypes and kitsch paraphernalia of Scottish culture (the tartan and shortbread, bens and glens approach to national identity), and for many represented all that was wrong with Scottish culture. Many critics were drawn to 'Scotch Myths' analyses of Scottish culture; that if only these myths could be overcome, Scotland could itself be regenerated and revitalised. For Craig, this viewpoint is problematic, for it only helps to further 'evacuate' the culture: The assumption that if we deconstruct all myths, destroy all fake versions of our culture we will liberate ourselves into a purified reality is an illusion in the minds of those who think that the world can be reinvented by simply switching discourse. (OOH, 111) The exhibition, and its later cultural resonances, according to Craig, served to insist that contemporary Scotland really had no substance: 'that it had only a mockery, a travesty of a culture, an insane sub-culture whose business was to prevent Scotland progressing towards becoming a "normal" part of the modern world' (OOH, 105), therefore evacuating its real culture. Every country, Craig points out, has its own icons and these help to make it distinctive. Rather than hindering the development of individual nations, such images actually help promote it. This is not to say that they are not historically unproblematic (such as the debates surrounding tartanry), and in this sense every national icon and stereotype is a complex cultural signifier.142 Complex signifiers are part of the construction of national identity, and, Craig asserts, therefore do not need to be abolished for the 'healthy' condition of the nation.143 Towards the end of Out of History, Craig introduces T.S. Eliot's notion of a 'dissociation of sensibility', representing a breakdown in the linearity of tradition.144 This 'dissociation of sensibility', Craig writes, has frequently been applied to Scotland precisely because Scottish culture does not have 'a continuous tradition and so cannot maintain sensibility in its full complexity' (OOH, 174). Yet, for Craig, rewriting sensibility, and mapping out the historical literary tradition, is desirable and necessary for placing Scotland 'back into history'. He quotes Edwin Muir and his wish for Scottish literature to become organic, yet also the impossibility of this due to the adoption in Scotland of the English language. Interestingly, Craig does not question Muir's presuppositions here, but rather incorporates them into his discussion as an example of the continual dissociation of Scottish sensibility. For Muir, Scots must acquiesce, accept the domi-





85

Scotland is not an organic literature and the division of the linguistic environment between Scots and English or Gaelic and English produces a divided consciousness which can never achieve a coherent sensibility: dissociation in the mind is inevitable when there is division in language, and the weakness of Burn's poetry or the weakness of Scott's writing is regularly attributed to this source. It is assumed that the coherence of the mind is a product of a coherent culture, and that without a coherent culture there must be a disabling division in the poet and his work. (OOH, 174) As a result of this rhetoric, it remains unclear the extent to which Craig identifies with Muir and his conceptions of the role of Scottish literature. Craig's position remains ambiguous, and he does not attack this division in the mind arising from division in language, so the reader is left to assume that at some level he empathises with Muir's position. The notion that division of the national language establishes a split in the 'national consciousness' now also seems outmoded. Once again, it is an example of the critic holding on to introverted conceptions of Scottishness as a convenient means of depicting the national culture, essentialising 'its' sensibility. Divisions in language may generate divisions in culture; yet to overstate the importance of this, to link these to the dissociation of 'a Scottish sensibility' only perpetuates the archaism often found in Scottish studies. It is the need to work between cultures that interests Craig, and for him it is imperative that we recognise this in-betweenness in any discussion of Scottish culture. It is important to remember that: The development of literature in Scotland has been driven not so much by the internal dynamics of a traditional cultural nationalism, but by its interaction with the stages of the revolt against the British Empire and the Imperium of the English language. (OOH, 202) The way in which we conceive Scottishness will always in this respect be determined by the ways in which we think of Englishness, the dominancy it usually assumes. Towards the end of the book, Craig goes on to highlight the multiplicity involved in any reading of Scottish identity:



nance of the English language and work within it, and Craig develops this notion:

The paradox here is that the desire to establish Scottish - or any other national identity is the desire to maintain simultaneous narratives and therefore the value of differences, but it mimics in microcosm the desire to abolish difference by linking everyone within a particular space into a single trajectory of narrative and a single totality. Neither the marxian moment of demystified oneness with real history nor the Nietzschean moment of reconstituted and singular myth is sufficient. We have to see our cultural space precisely as the intersection of many narratives: an acceptance of simultaneity. (OOH, 223) Craig may suggest the need for open-ended readings of Scottish identity here, drawing attention to simultaneity, yet for him it remains imperative, and still possible, to collate these apparently open-ended depictions into a coherent sensibility, in order to verify and organise the nature of the Scottish literary tradition 'itself. In this sense, he does not take account of the complexity of simultaneity in as suggested earlier by Anderson, and therefore also fails to refer to the 'lateness' of national imaginings. While on the one hand he discusses the discursive and constructed nature of Scottish identity, on the other, and paradoxically, Craig assumes that his own version of the literary tradition can be representative and accurate in some authoritative way. This paradoxical position is more obviously mapped out in his later book The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination. The Modern Scottish Novell Reclaiming the National Imagination There is a profound similarity between the modern nation, with its implication of all the people of a territory bound together into a single historical process, and the technique of the major nineteenth-century novels, whose emplotment enmeshes their multiplicity of characters into a single narrative trajectory. The unfolding of the complex plots of those nineteenth-century novels provided a model of how the divergent groupings that found themselves to be part of a single nation could discover in the underlying necessity that bound them together a higher purpose, turning the accidental outcomes of ancient wars and power struggles into the organic unities of a national destiny. (TMSN, 9) The above quote is from Craig's introduction to The Modern Scottish Novel, where he refers specifically to Benedict Anderson's concept of national imagining and its dissemination through the print market, leading to the evolvement and our sense of the modern nation. Craig refers to this




87

process of national construction; yet, at the same time, it is significant that this subjective, imaginative nature of Scottishness is left unconsidered in his later discussions of the Scottish literary tradition. Craig introduces Anderson's concept as a means of justifying the existence of a 'national imagination', and then goes on to discuss the historical manifestations of this 'entity', mapping out his own version of the tradition. In doing so, however, it is clear that Craig must exclude more than can possibly be included in his accounts. He goes on to consider the work of other prominent Scottish critics who have been involved in establishing the Scottish tradition; yet at the same time, once again does not question in whose interests, and by whom, traditions are actually formed. In this respect he opens up the concept of tradition, drawing attention to its subjective and imaginative constructions, but not to the extent that the concept is then critically examined. Craig is interested in the ways in which the novel can represent the nation within the modern world of the nation-state. Since the nineteenth century, he reminds us, in the novel 'the life of the individual becomes a model in miniature of the life of the society, a synecdoche of the national totality that can never be known except in its fragmentary constituents' (TMSN, 12). He is keen to highlight the complexity of tradition: the 'national totality' can never be known, and the concept of tradition can never be assumed essential: If we are to engage constructively with the traditions of the nation we need a sense of tradition which is essentialist neither in its historical mode - identifying the 'real' nation with one portion of its past - nor in its denial that the nation exists in a continual series of interchanges with other nations, and with ideas and forms of life which can be traced to an origin outside of the nation itself. The idea of the nation as a single and unified totality is itself an invention required by a specific phase of development of the system of nation-states in the global development of modernity, one which has continued to exert enormous influence in British culture precisely to the extent that England has been presented as the most effective example of such a unity. (TMSN, 30) Yet, intrinsic to Craig's view of the literary tradition is the concept of the 'national imagination', which sounds dangerously essential, but which, he claims, is not transcendental in any way:




The national imagination is not some transcendental identity which either survives or is erased: it is a space in which a dialogue is in process between the various pressures and inheritances that constitute the particularity of human experience in a territory whose boundaries might have been otherwise, but whose borders define the limits within which certain voices, both past and present, with all their centripetal and centrifugal implications, are listened for, and others resisted, no matter how loud they may be. (TMSN, 31) According to Craig, the 'national imagination' aims to incorporate many voices, to be endlessly inclusive, yet, in his own accounts, it remains questionable the extent to which this is the case. Craig may intend for the literary tradition to be an open space of dialogue and interrogation of territory, yet, in his examples throughout this book, has the tendency to discuss literature and its role in relatively unproblematic terms, also assuming knowledge of the 'nature' of this 'national imagination' and its scope. For Craig, it is important that we view Scottish literature within its historical and traditional framework in order to prevent further evacuation of the culture. However, claiming the existence of a 'national imagination', however plural and accommodating it might aim to be, will also always remain problematic, for it must repeatedly essentialise and reduce the nation, whether consciously or unconsciously, in order to verify its existence and character. Craig draws attention to the way in which traditions survive in many different forms in culture, such as those in literature, philosophy, religion and the visual arts.145 Yet in his discussion of the literary tradition, Craig at times creates the illusion of singularity, justifying the existence of a linear tradition which can be read definitively, which may satisfy his own view of the 'national imagination', yet which seems fundamentally at odds with his earlier descriptions of plurality. Craig sets out to map 'a specifically Scottish tradition of the novel', and in doing so at times includes statements which appear to act as definitive statements of Scottishness.146 In his discussion of novels that explore the relationship between the concept of fear and Scottish culture, for example, Craig is then able to say that at one level 'these novels represent the true condition of Scottish society'.147 In this way, he assumes the authority to speak on behalf of the literary tradition and has a tendency to stereotype nationhood in doing so. It remains questionable the extent to which fiction can explain or represent the nation, remaining as it does, fictional. However, in his analyses, Craig tends to view fiction as a means of unproblematically mirroring external reality, establishing a direct correlation between fiction and the





89

Dialect is like the empty shell of Leith Central Station where it is impossible now to spot trains: it gestures to the lost community which dialect had represented in the Scottish tradition and which has now been corrupted into fearful individualism. (TMSN, 97) For Craig the use of dialect in the novel therefore helps to elucidate general tendencies about the nature of dialect in the literary tradition, therefore providing a means of cultural analysis, which allows him to then 'justify' the breakdown of community in Leith. These generalisations seem unsubstantiated, yet for Craig this provides a further concrete example of the notion of 'fearful selves' in the Scottish tradition. Craig draws attention to the ways in which the growth of nationalism and the nation-state has led to the flourishing of the historical novel. Commenting on the novels of Sir Walter Scott, he observes: Insofar as the nation itself is primarily a narrative that unites the past to the present, Scott's novels provided the generic means by which the nation could be narrated as a product of history and history could be seen as the expression of a national identity. (TMSN, 117) Yet if the nature of nation-states is itself changing, as many critics, including Eric Hobsbawm, have perceived, then perhaps it is time to be more self-reflexive about the role and ambitions of a national literary tradition and the 'national imagination'. Many critics, however, are reluctant to admit such possibilities, perhaps especially cultural nationalists who have a vested interest in shaping the general direction of tradition for political ends. However, as Joyce McMillan points out, too often Scottish history is read as unproblematically linear, as if Scottish 'nature' and 'character' had been somehow intactically preserved within it. For McMillan, it is important that we now view Scotland and Scottishness as, in part, the products of globalism, multiculturalism and consumerism in order to see that we are now 'somewhere else entirely', and this opening out of Scottishness will be considered in the next section.



'nature' of Scottishness. In The Modern Scottish Novel, fiction is often read literally in this way, therefore at times limiting and undermining the role and possibilities of literature. This is evident in Craig's discussion of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. After his discussion of dialect and the ways in which it can reflect culture, Craig suggests that in Trainspotting:


Quite simply, the difference of space returns as the Sameness of time, turning Territory into Tradition, turning the People into One. The liminal point of this ideological displacement is the turning of the differentiated spatial boundary, the 'outside', into the unified temporal territory ofTradition.(AW,300) National cultures have usually emerged alongside state formation processes in which cultural specialists have reinvented traditions and reshaped and refurbished the ethnic core of the people. As nation states became increasingly drawn together in a tighter configuration of competing nations, they faced strong pressures to develop a coherent cultural identity. The homogenization of culture, the project of creating a common culture, must be understood as a process in the unification of culture of the need to ignore, or at best synthesise and blend, local differences.148 In 'DissemiNation', Homi Bhabha is concerned with opening out the ways in which we regard the temporality of the nation, suggesting that linear historicity presents an inadequate and limiting means of building the national history. Bhabha is interested in the ways in which narratives become representative of the nation, and draws attention to the need for new historical models which will be more amenable: 'we need another time of writing that will be able to inscribe the ambivalent and chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the problematic "modern" experience of the western nation' (NN, 293). In many respects Bhabha's work is clearly indebted to Anderson's, and he is preoccupied with several of the theoretical concepts mapped out in Imagined Communities. Yet, in this book, Bhabha suggests, Anderson 'fails to locate the alienating time of the arbitrary sign in his naturalised, nationalised space of the imagined community' (NN, 310). Anderson, according to Bhabha, maps out the general framework and conditions for an imagined community, yet subsequently fails to allow space in his analyses for alterity, for elements of culture that resist (or which are denied) incorporation and assimilation into the national imaginary. Anderson, although concerned with the ways in which citizens become bound to the state through their unboundness, does not address the need for non-linear, more disparate accounts of history. In Imagined Communities, therefore, the 'national imagination' leads to the construction of a national history, and any potential disputes about its 'nature' are left unregistered. In contrast, Bhabha is interested in the



National Imaginations: Old and New Histories

ways in which narratives of the nation are internally fractured, composed of disputes and dialogues, which push at the limits of its possible interpretation. For Bhabha, we should be concerned with the liminality of the 'nation-space', with interstices and the opening out of possibilities and meanings, rather than aiming to generalise about its qualities. Bhabha's rhetoric has often been accused of being deliberately difficult and obscure, yet his work has itself created a useful interstice in thinking about time and the nation. It provides a critical interjection into the 'nature' of the nation, highlighting the need for continual analysis, whilst simultaneously challenging any hasty or convenient generalisations of the nationspace. In the second quote above, Mike Featherstone comments on the construction of tradition by intellectuals, the imperative to establish a coherent and organised cultural identity which it demands. Central to this is the notion of homogeneity, the need to merge elements of culture into a recognisable 'common culture', in order to develop a shared history and collective imagining.149 Yet this development, according to Featherstone, occurs at the expense of local differences, which are then elided and incorporated into the larger framework. In this article, Featherstone is interested in the effect upon national and local cultures of globalisation, and writes 'one paradoxical consequence of the process of globalization, the awareness of the finitude and boundness of the planet and humanity, is not to produce homogeneity but to familiarise us with greater diversity, the extensive range of local cultures'. Globalisation in this respect presents a challenge to the homogenising tendencies of national traditions, as the proliferation of local cultures leads to a focus on multiplicity and individualised identities, which may resist and which are therefore more difficult to incorporate into larger imagined national communities. Featherstone suggests that global and local cultures present a challenge to the traditional conception of the nation-state and therefore to the ways in which we formulate versions of national history. In the postmodern era it becomes increasingly difficult to accept any fixed definition of a 'common culture', and the concept of tradition is often not a convincing means of understanding the 'nature' of national cultures. Rather, we have become increasingly aware of Lyotard's conception of 'local knowledge' and the importance of smaller narratives. This may sound to many like an undesirable form of chaos, a version of culture where 'anything goes', where national 'truths' are hastily abandoned. Yet rather than desperately trying to fabricate 'common cultures' in order to avoid this relativism, we should rather try to understand the processes which have now rendered them unconvincing and unstable:




Today within the humanities and social sciences the common culture issue arouses little passion. The issue which is very much alive, postmodernism, is in many ways the antithesis of the common culture question. We therefore need to regard the common culture as not somehow an eternally fixed value or statically conceived abstraction. Rather we need to inquire into the condition of its production and formation... It has recently been asserted that we are currently entering a phase of 'cultural declassification' in the Western world in which longestablished symbolic hierarchies are being deconstructed. If this is the case, we should not merely follow those who delight in the demise of the canon and welcome the possibility of disorder which signals the end of commitment to a common culture in the value-formative sense, but rather attempt to understand the social and cultural processes which bring about these swings.151 For Featherstone, as a sociologist, it is important that we consider whether common cultures exist, or whether instead it is often rather our belief and desire that they actually should. Most people are encouraged to believe in the concept of a homogenous national culture, that it is part of being bound to the nation and to the imagined community. Yet the development of local cultures, the way in which people are increasingly becoming mobile and the commodification of culture itself, means that national or common cultures are not believable in ways which they once were. Given these changes, it becomes more difficult to ascertain what might now constitute a national culture. This provides an interesting way of looking at Craig's notion of a Scottish literary tradition, the national imagination he associates with it, and Nairn's often essentialist notions of the 'national culture' and national unconscious. It would seem that their positions are incommensurable with such theoretical approaches. In the light of recent theoretical approaches to nationhood, from the work of critics such as Bhabha and Featherstone, concepts mentioned earlier such as 'Fragmentosis Caledoniesis' and the 'Caledonian Antisyzygy' are exposed as reductive and limiting ways of depicting a national culture. This movement away from cultural and national essentialism, as Robert Young points out in White Mythologies, has been an important component of contemporary philosophical developments, in a desire to question their own intrinsic forms of elitism. As Young points out, this internal searching for difference has often been associated with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and his focus on an ethics based upon the continual search for the Other. In Young's analysis, Levinas's work presents the





Because ontology involves an ethico-political violence towards the other, always to some degree seen as a threat, Levinas proposes ethics in its place, substituting a respect for the other for a grasping of it, and a theory of desire not as negation and assimilation but as an infinite separation. This challenge to traditional philosophy has been central to recent developments in ethical theory, which have often been linked to Levinas's notion of an 'ethics as first philosophy' and the continual search for alterity. It is these developments in the study of self and other that have also been crucial to rethinking the ways in which we think of 'History' as an overarching means of representing the totality of lived experience. In this respect, contemporary theory has fundamentally questioned the extent to which History can accommodate alterity and the lived reality, for example, of the oppressed and marginal.153 Following this interest in Levinas and alterity, in some respects echoing Bhabha's earlier points on the dangers of overassimilation, Young discusses the totalising nature of History, which attempts to subsume the other: History is the realm of violence and war; it constitutes another form by which the other is appropriated into the same. For the other to remain other it must not derive its meaning from History but must instead have a separate time which differs from historical time.154 Traditional History, which has served as the basis for the knowledge of the Western world, has often been accused of reducing the other to the same in order to suit its own ends. Poststructuralist and postmodern accounts of History have consequently presented a challenge to this tendency of overdetermination, attacking universalist accounts for their internal biases and contradictions. Postmodern and poststructuralist approaches to History are therefore united in many respects: Postmodernism... becomes a certain self-consciousness about a culture's own historical relativity - which begins to explain why, as its critics complain, it also involves the loss of the sense of an absoluteness of any Western account of History. Today, if we pose the difficult question of the relation of poststructuralism to postmodernism, one dis-



necessary search for a form of 'infinite separation' from homogeneity and stable, essential constructions of selfhood:

tinction between them that might be drawn would be that whereas postmodernism seems to include the problematic of the place of Western culture in relation to non-Western cultures, poststructuralism as a category seems not to imply such a perspective. This, however, is hardly the case, for it rather involves if anything a more active critique of the Eurocentric premises of Western knowledge. The difference would be that it does not offer a critique by positioning itself outside 'the West', but rather uses its own alterity and duplicity in order to effect its deconstruction.155 It is this move towards the recognition of duplicity which could benefit Scottish literary studies, a discipline that has often adopted traditional and conservative methodologies in its reductive approach to nationhood. Recent theoretical developments in postmodernism and poststructuralism have therefore encouraged depictions of Scotland and Scottishness to become more open-ended, to become more reflective of actual changes occurring within (and, vitally, outwith) its boundaries. Such critical approaches, whilst challenging the very 'nature' of culture, are therefore beneficial in the way that they present a means of revising cultural parochialism. For many critics, to challenge the concept of the nation in this way is to undermine the unity of the national historical tradition. However, opening out the possibilities of nationhood does not equal abandoning the national past or culture; rather it involves a revision of how we understand and represent these, with an emphasis on the need for recognising internal difference and alterity. This is necessary if Scotland is to be represented in non-insular ways, if it is to be regarded as part of the process of the overall shifting, global world, where boundaries are being rethought and challenged by consumerism, where the 'nature' of imagined communities are necessarily becoming more open-ended. The following chapters will therefore focus on this need to move away from introverted, essential and archaic perspectives of nationhood while also considering some of the links between literature and nationhood in more detail.




Postmodern States: Re-thinking the Nation

Foreigner: a choked up rage deep down in my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur. The image of hatred and of the other, a foreigner is neither the romantic victim of our clannish indolence nor the intruder responsible for all the ills of the polis. Neither the apocalypse on the move nor the instant adversary to be eliminated for the sake of appeasing the group. Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognising him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself. A symptom that precisely turns 'we' into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible, the foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.156

My presumption... is that ethics is not properly understood as an ultimately coherent set of concepts, rules, or principles - that it ought not even be considered a truly distinct discourse - but rather that it is best conceived as a factor of 'imperativity' immanent in, but not confined to, the practices of language, analysis, narrative, and creation. Whatever else these may or may not have in common, they share an investment in ethics. Popularly identified with exclusion, ethics can, I believe, also be construed as a principle of commonality between practices and discourses often considered to be independent both from each other and from the world of action.157 In Strangers to Ourselves, and throughout her philosophical work, Julia Kristeva repeatedly returns to the need for a recognition of alterity and estrangement within the self as a means of transcending any movement 95



3

towards 'clannish indolence'. Interested in the function, and often the necessity of borderline states, Kristeva presents a challenge to rigid formations of selfhood, which she regards as inherently dangerous. For this reason, and as stated above, for Kristeva the 'we' becomes a problem, perhaps an impossibility, precisely because too often perceptions of the 'us' are based on constructions derived at the expense of others. There is consequently a need to interrogate both the function and representation of community; to keep it in check, before it spirals narcissistically, in 'self deluded ways, out of control. Kristeva therefore posits the 'self as continually moving, the unpindownable subject-in-process, as a means of challenging any fixed forms of identity, including (and perhaps especially) national forms. For Kristeva, it is imperative that 'we' engage with the 'stranger within', with estrangement and exile at a subjective level, in order to act ethically as citizens.158 In the second quote above, Geoffrey Gait Harpham suggests that although 'ethics' may not be a coherent, organisable discourse, it is nonetheless an 'imperative' and principle of 'commonality'. This suggestion of commonality may at first seem at odds with the Kristevan questioning of community and the role of the individual within it, implying at some level a form of general agreement or consensus. However, for both critics, the ethical is posited in what lies beyond notions of a fixed, transcendental self, beyond any simplified or essentialised concepts of nationhood or community. For Harpham, ethics may be based on communality, yet such identification does not rely on fixed concepts of identity, such as national versions, nor is it tied to individualism and the 'free-play' of identity politics. Rather, the ethical is imperative as it impels us to look beyond and transgress such apparently stable, yet actually limiting frameworks. This is precisely why the ethical remains ethical: it creates the impulse to transgress issues of practical morality, concerning 'itself with forms of possibility which continually push beyond everyday, commonsensical assumptions into spaces which instead search for alternatives. In Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society, Harpham encourages the recognition of alterity within any construction or imagining of the nation, so that space is purposefully left for alternative ethical possibilities. These alternative spaces, he suggests, are part of an ethical process as they interject, disrupting continuity and the seemingly closed while denouncing forms of national holism. Nations, he points out, are the inevitable result of continual fluctuation, and in their every consideration we should acknowledge what he terms their 'moving stillness'; that is, their capacity to be explained at some level, yet to immediately transcend this very possibility of explanation. In this way, the ethical drive of na-



96 Postmodern States: Re-thinking the Nation

Postmodern States: Re-thinking the Nation 97

In the cultivation of this communal ground, this moving place, literature is a primitive tool, something like the fixed-harness, horse-drawn plough. But ploughs move, and here we come upon the other side of the paradox of literary movement. For the essential thing about a text is that it is portable. Not only can it be carried, but it seems at a deeper level to be made to carry, to bear the word out from the culture of origin into the wide world, to speak to others. Just as literature integrates and filters group identity, it also constitutes a lesion in the bounded cultural self-imagination, a principle of communication that presupposes otherness, and others. The text itself 'imagines' readers far away, who must in turn imagine the original world of the text as well as the possible community of other readers.159 Writing about identity, whether at personal or national levels, will always therefore involve 'portability'; the inevitability of otherness from inside and the recognition of alternative spaces, as 'final' meaning cannot be contained, cannot finally be realised. In this respect, fictional depictions of nationhood highlight the fundamental unpindownability of our own national identity, while also encouraging cultural identification. That literature self-consciously displays its 'lesions', is for Harpham, therefore a healthy sign of its ethical potential to create spaces of disturbance within these spaces of 'common ground'. As Cairns Craig points out in Out of History, the British literary tradition has repeatedly been equated with Englishness, and vice-versa. Hence, there has consistently been a cultural overdetermination at work, in which too much investment has been placed in the concept of Englishness at the expense of its peripheral neighbours. Stuart Hall has also commented on this tendency, suggesting that historically English identity has tended to 'place' many other cultures through the establishment of a binary logic whereby Englishness is always assured the position of dominance.160 It may therefore seem appropriate to reclaim Scottishness, its distinct place within the literary tradition. However, such reclamations should also be particularly careful of their national assumptions and declarations. As explored in the previous chapter, the concept of Scottishness, when overdefined, and invested with essentialist readings, has the potential to become sentimental and xenophobic. In such restricted readings, Scotland



tional literatures helps to map out the shared experiences of 'common ground', yet does so in a way which then encourages identifications with other cultures, a need to break from national boundaries into a sense of beyondness:

and Scottishness are often not ethically accommodating; rather, they exist as redundant assertions of the 'national psyche', which can only, in actuality, be partial, yet which nonetheless claim a more significant and teleological status. It is this partiality, and need to highlight a more ethical space, that Scottish writers have been increasingly drawn to, in a need to elide these often limiting accounts of Scottishness. Writers have often been interested in exploring the sense of 'beyondness', questioning limits and borders of Scottishness, which literary and cultural critics have often been hesitant to address. This chapter will therefore address some of the ways in which Scottish writers and artists have often sought to escape from the overly rigid definitions of Scottish identity as defined by Scottish critics, highlighting their preference instead for challenging the very foundations of such thought, whether consciously or unconsciously. In her article in the edition of Chapman devoted solely to the 'predicament' of the Scottish writer, Joyce McMillan describes the contemporary writer as an 'explorer', a creator of new spaces: Of course, writers have as much right as anyone to be feminists, socialists, Scottish Nationalists or Scots and Gaelic language activists. But the moment when they sit down to write creatively, they must turn themselves from campaigners into explorers, discarding their existing mental maps, their fixed ideologies and aspirations, accept themselves as and where they are, and work freely from there.161 The writer, it seems, is actively encouraged to divest themself of mental maps, whereas the critic has been encouraged, consciously or unconsciously, to glorify and sustain them. Perhaps then this is the 'Predicament of the Scottish Critic'. As McMillan points out, though, the Scottish writer has not been wholly excused from the 'Predicament of the Scottish Critic' either. Without specifying to which writers she is referring, McMillan suggests that 'There's no doubt that the fear of betraying either their Scottishness, or their working-class origins, or both at once, has a very limiting effect on some Scottish writers.'1 This has led, she goes on to suggest, to 'middle-class guilt', a feeling that one cannot be authentically Scottish if also middle-class (here she cites Stewart Conn as an example). McMillan seems to be referring here to the proliferation of stereotypes of the typical Scot that abounded in the 1980s, of the 'hard man' and the 'average' working-class male, such as those proposed by Bold, and she is clearly writing against the wholesale acceptance and adoption of such myths. For McMillan it is important for writers and critics to escape what she refers to as, 'the chanting of the mental supporters' club' of political




and cultural nationalism which only limits artistic expression. It is this united chant that McMillan encourages others to interrupt, and it is a disruption which has also been repeatedly found in much recent Scottish fiction, especially since the 1990s, where there has been an evident resistance to national stereotyping. The following sections will consider some recent portrayals of Scotland and Scottishness, where there is at work an intrinsic questioning of nationhood. It will be suggested that much contemporary writing has been self-conscious about nationhood in ways that constantly move away from the transcendental; de-stabilising and deferring national possibilities, by pointing to issues of the ethical and what lies beyond conventional, stereotypical notions. It is this indeterminacy of nationhood and identity that is being associated with a postmodern predicament and postmodern 'state', where borderlines are now everywhere in question. Hence it also this intermediary space of potential re-articulation of identity that is being associated here with an ethical imperative. Perhaps the most important Scottish novel to have emerged in the last few decades is Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981). Gray wrote this novel over a period of roughly twenty years, in-between working on a variety of other projects, and in this extensive period the novel clearly developed a complex series of identifications with Scotland and Scottishness. In Lanark, examined in the following section, this instability of identity mentioned above is often represented through the metaphor of apocalypse. This depiction of Scotland as futuristic wasteland creates interesting parallels with the political predicament of Scotland at the time. Clearly in this text the political state of the nation is often fundamentally associated with the 'state' of its central characters. However, in such an experimental novel these symbiotic relationships are also presented as part of the 'play' of the text itself, and such convenient modes of thinking are also therefore inherently challenged at the same time as they are posited. The second section will go on to consider the work of Edwin Morgan. While Morgan has always been undoubtedly concerned with Scottish matters, and the role of the artist working in Scotland, it will be suggested that these interests have never compromised his own writing. In this way Morgan has always been open to the possibilities of 'moving stillness', to the uncapturable 'nature' of Scottish identity and the need for alterity. With reference to the work of Kathleen Jamie, the final section is concerned with the need for an ethical opening out and questioning of community. While it is true that all of the writers discussed in this chapter have a fundamental concern with Scotland and Scottishness in their works, these texts have been chosen precisely because of the tension they





generate between the nation and its 'moving stillness', between what we commonly envisage as constituting 'Scotland' and its ultimate uncapturability.

Scotland in the past few decades has often been represented in literature as a country in crisis. Pessimism is a significant feature of literary works in the period after the 1979 Referendum, with the onset of a Conservative Government which the country clearly did not elect, and there is an obvious sense of apocalypse reflected within the culture as a result. Alasdair Gray's Lanark has played a seminal role in aesthetically mapping the social and political nature of Scotland, acting as a catalyst and inspiration for many other contemporary Scottish writers. The publication of Lanark in 1981 is therefore pivotal to the discussion of the postmodern predicament of the Scottish writer and critic and has been influential in its selfconscious experimentation with nationhood and attempts to open up fixed perceptions of Scotland. As will be examined, the text contains many postmodern literary techniques, which serve to broaden conceptions of the nation, continually puzzling the reader with new possibilities, whilst contrasting worlds of apparent realism and fantasy. The reader is therefore also positioned in-between boundaries of fantasy and reality, the recognisable and the unfamiliar, between the seemingly everyday and the apocalyptic, the local and the international, and the novel continually celebrates this notion of the nation as 'incomplete signification'.164 In Chapter 1, Benedict Anderson's idea of the 'imagined community' was introduced in order to connect with Bhabha's idea of the constricting nature of 'national culture'. For Anderson, the nation has 'finite, if elastic boundaries', and is imagined as a community in order to foster 'horizontal comradeship' at both conscious and unconscious levels. It is interesting to consider the extent to which Lanark corresponds with Anderson's ideas of comradeship and fixity, given that it simultaneously asserts and disrupts conceptions of Scottish identity and nationhood, as its postmodern devices aim to complicate any particular, stable reading. Working at many different self-reflexive, unconscious, experimental and intertextual levels, the novel cannot easily be explained in terms of its Scottishness, and rather resists such reductive tendencies by continually moving between representations and ideas. While national culture is often shown to be constricting, it is in other respects celebrated in this text. In perhaps the most often-quoted section of the novel in Book Two of Lanark, Kenneth McAlpin states: 'Glasgow is a magnificent city... Why



Apocalyptic Re-thinkings: Alasdair Gray


Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That's all. No, I'm wrong, there's also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels. That's all we've given to the world outside. It's all we've given to ourselves. (L, 243) It appears that Lanark was partly written as a means of overcoming this imaginative lack. For Duncan, Glasgow has no 'imagined community', for it has never been lived in creatively. Duncan has become so overwhelmed with this stagnant Glasgow that he sees no hope of its rejuvenation. When McAlpin states, 'So you paint to give Glasgow a more imaginative life', Duncan replies: 'No. That's my excuse. I paint because I feel cheap and purposeless when I don't.' (L, 244). Here, Duncan's speech both complicates and, paradoxically, helps to define depictions of Glasgow: it self-consciously draws attention to the void of artistic representations, while also in some ways aiming to correct this anomaly. While Duncan draws attention to this imaginative lack, in his own creative work he noticeably abstains from confronting it in any direct way. Duncan therefore feels that he lacks the agency to give impoverished Glasgow a more imaginative life. He clearly becomes increasingly estranged from his world the more he struggles to incorporate himself into it, to the extent that we are taken to the point of his apparent suicide in the novel. Yet through Duncan's estrangement and failure, we are given a powerful insight into the consequences and potential hazards of living in a city which lacks imaginative figuring. Duncan's apparent suicide later in the novel also symbolises the difficulties of living in such a static environment. Through his life, death and re-birth as the character Lanark, we are introduced, in microcosm, to some of the complexities of representing place; yet it is ironic that in this self-conscious process Glasgow is nonetheless imagined.



do we hardly ever notice that?' to which Duncan responds, 'Because nobody imagines living here'. McAlpin, lighting a cigarette, continues 'If you want to explain that I'll certainly listen', and Duncan replies:

The concept of an 'imagined community' is explored more selfconsciously in the fantastical, futuristic books of Lanark. In these sections, Glasgow is presented as the futuristic city, Unthank, providing a direct contrast with other representations of Glasgow in the novel. Yet, as the novel progresses, in its unconventional and unlinear order, we begin to sense that Unthank, an already inhospitable and de-humanising place, is becoming increasingly oppressive and alienating. The world of Unthank, it is revealed, is spiralling out of control, evolving into a hazardous and apocalyptic wasteland. This terminal world consequently becomes increasingly problematic and defamiliarising for the reader, who is then uncomfortably left to question the ways in which this imagined community might connect with the Glasgow of the Thaw narrative. In his article on 'Global and Local Cultures' Mike Featherstone is concerned with the connections between postmodernity and often-discussed 'end of history'. In his analysis, Featherstone suggests that 'modernity's account of Western history is progress', and goes on to state: In fact, it is this secularisation of Judaic-Christian notions of salvation and redemption which become transformed into the belief in progress through the development of science and technology to bring about the perfectability of man and human society.165 However, postmodernism, he suggests 'is not to be regarded as a new epoch, a new stage of development on from modernity, but as the awareness of the latter's flawed assumptions'. Where modernism is concerned with the linear displacement of history, postmodernism is often associated with 'the end of history', the 'end of our awareness of history as a unitary process'.166 If modernity does secularise Judeo-Christian notions of salvation and redemption into a belief in progress, then perhaps it is not unexpected that postmodernity is more attuned with apocalypse and the dissolution of such notions.167 In this respect, apocalypse may represent the end of progress as it was formerly known, at least an ironic awareness that progress cannot be what it once was, and this undermining is frequently found in Lanark in its pre-occupations with 'the end'. Microcosmically Lanark signifies a condition which pertains to the postmodern world, to a postmodern Scotland in particular. It is important to remember that the novel was written between the 1960s and 1980s, for it spans the period when many Scots were actively striving for independence, concluded at a time when this struggle finally proved unsuccessful and there was the onset of a new Conservative Government. Cairns Craig refers to this important moment in Scottish history, locating the culture





In the 1980s the whole infrastructure of Scottish literature - the publishing channels, the theatres, the reviews - remain fragile, and after the political collapse of the movement for devolution in the Referendum of 1979, talk of 'the end' was as potent as its expectation had been at the beginning of the century.168 As Craig points out, for many Scots feelings of 'the end' were prevalent in the 1980s, where there was a feeling of general despair and political estrangement. In his fiction, Gray therefore seems not only to have captured this particular mood, but also to have accurately mapped out many of the side effects of free-market capitalism that were to follow in the Thatcher years and subsequently. In this way, Lanark has helped to define many aspects of the postmodern condition within Scotland, whilst also challenging previous parochial depictions of nationhood. It is interesting that in the culture represented here there is both a recognisable Scotland, and yet an inherent questioning and problematising of the very idea of nationhood. We are made acutely aware that parochial depictions of the nation can no longer apply in the postmodern world, and we are also shown that what we think of as nationhood is continually shifting, moving towards a futuristic and unknowable world. Representations of apocalypse in this novel therefore provide not only a means of expressing political defeat, but also a means of complicating any reductive readings of contemporary Scotland, what 'it' represents. Writing about the state of modern nationhood, Anthony Giddens states 'The nation-state is not disappearing', yet 'boundaries are becoming fuzzier'.169 If this is true, then we can also read apocalypse symbolically here as presenting both a death and re-birth of the nation: the nation-state having reached the end of its previous existence, now being reshaped in more global and transnational ways. In his futuristic depictions of the surreal world of Unthank, Gray contrasts modern, urban Glasgow with a postmodern, apocalyptic wasteland. Lanark is faced with the space-time compression of his society, is startled by the changes taking place, which seem unstoppable with a momentum of their own. Consumerism is now concerned with the notion of buying time itself, and public advertising has developed an important function in the domination and conditioning of others. Many billboards now have similar slogans, such as 'A HOME IS MONEY, MONEY IS TIME. BUY TIME FOR YOUR FAMILY FROM THE QUANTUM CHRONOLOGI-



firmly within late capitalism, and with a sense of apocalypse, when he writes:

CAL (THEY'LL LOVE YOU FOR IT)' (L, 432). In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey points out some of the ironies of the postmodern world when he suggests that tradition in the postmodern city is often now a result of commodification and capital, rather than a direct connection with a knowable past. Harvey points out that it is often now multinationals who establish tradition, whilst also simultaneously positing this fabrication as authentic. It is in this way, he suggests, that 'histories' are now often generated and perpetuated, where the concepts of space and time have taken on new dimensions and significance in the capitalist market place.170 In Lanark, this commodification of time is now a shocking apocalyptic reality, its implications often incomprehensible. Noticeably, towards the end of the novel, some days now have twenty-five hours, and in general are no longer determined by sunlight, for natural light is slowly diminishing. When Lanark's son Alexander is born, his growth rate is also no longer dependent on conventional patterns of time. Very soon his son can speak, and in a matter of hours appears to be months old. Lanark states, on realisation of this new temporality: 'We age quickly in this world' (L, 428). As well as depicting a postmodern world in the Unthank sections of the novel, Lanark also contains many postmodern literary devices which playfully work alongside the concept of apocalypse. The novel has two central characters, one of whom is apparently the alter ego of the other, although differences between the two are never finally clarified. The implied author seems to enjoy this uncertainty he promotes, even taunting Lanark about this towards the end of the novel. At the end of chapter 40, Lanark walks into a room marked 'EPILOGUE', which we soon realise is the epilogue of the book itself, introduced self-reflexively several chapters before the end of the novel. In this room Lanark appears to have a conversation with his author, who assumes a God-like status, though admits he has now 'gone bad' and abandoned religion (L, 481). The author then reassures Lanark that he should not to be afraid at meeting his textual Creator and states: 'Please don't feel embarrassed. This isn't an unprecedented situation. Vonnegut has it in Breakfast of Champions and Jehovah in the books of Job and Jonah' (L, 481). The author figure here adopts a devious role, blurring the boundaries of fiction and reality by placing himself inbetween, yet simultaneously appears to raise deeper issues with his theological references and concerns. Though at times imitating biblical techniques, the author also now clearly distinguishes himself from God. Gray apparently implicates himself within the novel at this point in order to create an uneasy tension between Christianity and the modern secular





Not nowadays. I used to be part of him, though. Yes, I am part of a part which was once the whole. But I went bad and was excreted. If I can get well I may be allowed home before I die, so I continually plunge my beak into my rotten liver and swallow and excrete it. But it grows again. Creation festers in me. I am excreting you and your world at the present moment. (L, 489) If Lanark inhabits Hell in the underworld of Unthank, then this is also the place to which his author seems to belong. The author may be a 'creator', yet Creation also festers within him, hauntingly and redundantly. In this respect the author seems to be trapped within myths from his past, even though he might fundamentally disagree with them. He revels in his power to construct and order, yet at the same time gives the impression that he is mortal and fallible, susceptible to the limitations imposed upon him by his world. The implied author may self-consciously introduce the possibility of a Christian God, though ultimately it is to show that such a God has done very little for the modern world, is perhaps a fictional and ideological construction anyway and one difficult to remove from our thinking. In this way, the author encourages his readers to see that the apocalyptic world depicted here is both dependent upon mythical, religious references, and that in the postmodern secular world we still cannot escape such forms of ideological thinking. Gray writes, towards the end of the novel: 'Modern afterworlds are always infernos, never paradisos, presumably because the modern secular imagination is more capable of debasement than exaltation' (L, 489). It is through depictions of debasement, then, that Gray invites his reader to view contemporary Glasgow. Readers are consequently encouraged to use their secular imaginations in order to see the extremes of the afterworld in which they now live. This is largely achieved through the role of metaphor. Glasgow is consequently defamiliarised, and the concept of apocalypse, implying both a sense of 'the end' as well as a point of revelation, therefore heightens the impression of danger and doom enveloping the city, as well as, paradoxically, giving it a form of new hope. The novel therefore both is, and is not a reflection of contemporary Scotland. As Edwin Morgan points out, it is important to remember that in this novel Glasgow is in many respects more than real, that fictional depictions cannot be reducible to the city itself:



world, which, he suggests is metaphorically Hell. Lanark asks the author: 'Are you pretending to be God?' to which he answers:


On the one hand we can read apocalypse as a reflection of 'the end', as an historical moment of pessimism within Scottish political life described earlier by Craig. Yet on the other, we can read it as an escape from this pervasive mood, where the opportunity of apocalyptic revelation provides the possibility of renewal, which then offers an implicit challenge to such pessimism and political stasis. Lanark is only too aware of the contradictory nature of the apocalyptic world he finds himself in. At the beginning of Book Three, Lanark has just arrived into the futuristic Glasgow, which appears 'greyish and dead' (L, 3). He has no recollection of his previous life, yet nonetheless states 'This may be a hellish place but it's all we have' (L, A). Soon after arriving Lanark is made aware that people there are waiting for the moment of apocalypse, although noticeably this moment is also continually deferred, viewed as incomprehensible yet inevitable. When Lanark enquires about this, he is told: I can't tell you precisely, because it could take several different forms. We could be on the receiving end of any one of sixty-eight different types of attack, and I don't mind telling you that we're only capable of defending ourselves against three of them. 'Hopeless! Why bother?' you say, and miss the point entirely. The other side are as badly placed as we are. These preparations for the big show might be pretty inadequate, but if we stop them the big balloon will go up. (L, 30) When asked if he is depressed by this news, Lanark ironically states that he is not, yet that he is confused. In response to this, we are told: The tall man nodded sympathetically. T know, it's difficult. Metaphor is one of thought's most essential tools. It illuminates what would otherwise be totally obscure. But the illumination is sometimes so bright that it dazzles instead of revealing.' (L, 30) If the concept of apocalypse is viewed metaphorically by the inhabitants of Unthank and its neighbouring city, Provan, then for the reader the implications of this metaphor become even more richly coded and daz-



What Gray must have felt he had to do, and has done with so much power, was to open Glasgow up imaginatively, make it real, yes, but also more than real in terms of art, as Joyce's Dublin is and is not Dublin, as Dickens's London is and is not London, as El Greco's Toledo is and is not Toledo.171

zling. If the inhabitants of Unthank view the apocalypse ironically, then this becomes doubly ironic for the reader who must untangle its possible interpretations and significance. At a performative, sociological level the concept of apocalypse in the novel can be interpreted as symbolic of the times, representative of the political situation in Scotland. Yet it would also seem unwise to limit the possibilities of this metaphor. One of the main aspects of the novel may be to reflect modern Scotland and to point out the political stasis within Scotland after the 1979 Referendum and the rise of Thatcherism, however apocalypse also provides the possibility of rejuvenation, a means of re-presenting the city in fictional ways which then offer a vehicle out of such cultural pessimism. At a more constative, formal level, apocalypse, like the novel itself, with its many layers and possible readings can also be interpreted in multiple ways; its meaning never finally bounded. Patricia Waugh discusses the open-ended and de-stabilising nature of apocalypse in the postmodern era, when she writes: Postmodernism is nearly always parodic, acknowledging its implication in a pre-existing textuality, creating through decreation, displacing that secure perspective of a stable vantage point from outside... Indeed, even its apocalypticism is subjected to its own irony and rendered subject.172 For Waugh, 'Postmodernism is Apocalyptic', if not 'in the full Christian millenarian sense of a Last Judgement ushering in a New Jerusalem', then at least 'Apocalyptic in its sense of crisis'. 173 Waugh admits that this 'crisis thinking is as old as the Judeo-Christian tradition itself, yet at the same time is keen to point out some of the particularities of apocalypse to the postmodern condition. In postmodernity, she points out representations of apocalypse are often seen to undermine themselves, to draw attention to their own provisionality as well as inherent falsity and illusion. Yet, like Gray, Waugh seems to be of the opinion that apocalyptic metaphors provide an apposite, even if inherently unstable, means of depicting the postmodern age.174 In his article 'No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)' in the 1984 edition of Diacritics devoted to 'nuclear criticism', Derrida writes that apocalypse in the nuclear age is only something we can 'talk and write about it... It has never occurred, itself; it is a non-event'.175 It is therefore this 'non-event', the notion that apocalypse can only be understood through fable, which therefore takes on significance in Lanark. Based upon a topic which we can




only 'talk and write about', the novel exploits this notion in order to highlight the metafictionality of the text.176 Towards the end of the novel Lanark accuses his author of writing a science fiction novel with an apocalyptic ending that is merely banal. Lanark says, accusingly 'These banal world destructions prove nothing but the impoverished minds of those who can think of nothing better' (L, 497), to which the author responds: / am not writing science fiction! Science fiction stories have no real people in them, and all my characters are real, real, real people! I may astound my public by a dazzling deployment of dramatic metaphors designed to compress and accelerate the action, but that is not science fiction, it is magic! Magic! As for my endings being banal, wait till you're inside it. I warn you, my whole imagination has a carefully reined back catastrophist tendency; you have no conception of the damage my destructive powers will wreak when I have them on a theme like THE END. (L, 498) If Lanark is bored by the plot of the novel he finds himself in, then his author intends to remind him that characters like himself really have little control over their own destiny. He should now begin to accept that catastrophe will be his very real conclusion, rather than a banality. After this moment, space-time compression in the novel accelerates, and the world rapidly declines. The novel ends with Lanark waiting to die, knowing that 'knowledge and governments are dissolving', and that he will 'die tomorrow at seven minutes after noon' (L, 559). Yet for Lanark this news is not wholly pessimistic. In fact, at this moment he also seems to have more awareness and heightened perception of his surroundings than ever before. His response to his environment is one of empathy, and he appears to experience sublime sensations that transform and illuminate his previous gloomy perceptions of the city. Colours intensify, and the landscape becomes iridescent and magical: The colours of things seemed to be brightening although the fiery light over the roofs had paled to silver streaked with delicate rose... The darkness overhead shifted and broke in the wind becoming clouds with blue air between. He looked sideways and saw the sun coming up golden behind a laurel bush, light blinking, space dancing among the shifted leaves. Drunk with spaciousness he turned every way, gazing with wide-open mouth and eyes as light created colours, clouds, distances and solid, graspable things close at hand. (L, 558)




Christopher Harvie writes that this moment is one of 'rebirth' for Lanark and this seems to be the case.177 We are only given a small indication of Lanark's revelation here, for we cannot be allowed access to the real nature of his apocalyptic revelation. The novel concludes anticipating the end and in this way it remains desirably ambiguous. Just as we cannot comprehend the 'nature' of Scotland in the novel, we also cannot experience the moment of 'non-event' of apocalypse. Neither Scotland nor apocalypse can be reduced to a knowable 'event' and it is this impossibility which the text appears to celebrate. In this novel the concept of apocalypse provides a vehicle for Lanark (and hence Duncan) to leave behind cultural estrangement. Lanark may die as a result of this revelation, yet the event symbolises a form of knowledge, a recognition that will forever be concealed from the reader. If Lanark in part represents life after the 1979 referendum, the spiralling and escalation into postmodern capitalism, then once again fiction is seen to evade overdefinition, problematising the notion of an 'imagined community' whilst also paradoxically helping to ground one. The text therefore self-consciously questions how a country might be imagined as a community, and in this novel it is significant that Glasgow comes to represent a 'non-event' whilst also being simultaneously recognisable. Metaphorically, apocalypse may represent the perceived breakdown of the nation-state, yet also its re-birth into new forms, in an increasingly global world, and the novel concludes leaving us to question the ways in which nations might be conceived in the future. In her article 'Innovation and Reaction in the Fiction of Alasdair Gray'178 Alison Lumsden suggests that in his experimentalism Gray on the one hand opens up Scottishness, encouraging a questioning of boundaries, yet on the other tends to fall into a kind of parochialism, where Scottishness and Scotland become 'contained'. According to Lumsden, postmodern devices in Gray's texts often have a superficial gleam of innovation and radicalism, yet are ultimately reactionary. For Lumsden, by resorting to conventional postmodern tools Gray's metafictional and postmodern techniques provide a way of avoiding direct experimentation with nationhood. Referring to the elements of pastiche in Gray's work, such as those found in the Epilogue and the Index of Plagiarisms, Lumsden suggests that these techniques are really 'rather clumsilyhandled metafictional strategies' (SNSTS, 119) rather than serious attempts to re-vision nationhood: More significantly, if, to give Gray the benefit of the doubt, what is explored in Lanark is the more sophisticated question of how there may be no radical path available to the writer, no imaginative escape route





Where Gray's novels often seem to refuse containment, Lumsden suggests that 'Gray' often intervenes in these novels in order to limit Scottishness. In this way 'Scottish themes are no longer used as critiques of entrapment, but are, on the contrary, means of containing Gray's fiction within a particularly disenchanting sphere' (SNSTS, 121). In the end, she feels, Gray promotes 'parochial misery', that is, an inability to break from traditional Scottish themes and contexts, promoting conditions which are 'stifling' rather than radical (SNSTS, 123). Lumsden therefore accuses Gray of adopting postmodern strategies as a convenient and 'safe' means of depicting Scottish culture: Such material in Gray's work, then, initiates a safe (because invited) dialogue between critic and author, a dialogue which inevitably circumscribes the arena of critical response and, more importantly... inevitably contains the scope for real radicalism, real innovation within the work of art. (SNSTS, 124) Whereas it might be argued that standard postmodern techniques (such as pastiche, self-consciousness and metafiction) have the potential to lose their impact through continual usage, and in this respect Lanark may seem a 'dated' novel, it does seem unfair to accuse Gray of finally 'containing' Scotland in this text.179 Such a notion would be based on the principle that such containment was somehow possible in the first instance and this would seem contradictory to the postmodern literary impulse to expand textual boundaries. Many critics would also disagree with this notion that postmodern fiction is ultimately reactionary.180 As Beat Witschi points out in Glasgow Urban Writing and Postmodernism: Gray does not give any answers in Lanark, or provide recipes for a 'better world'; he only asks questions by destabilising the security of the traditional reading experience and by forcing the reader to think about what he has been reading. (GUW, 98) In this novel, the reader is therefore left to view what Harpham refers to as the 'moving stillness' of nationhood, where there is an ethical space created, an imperativity which readers must negotiate. Scottishness may be consequently explored, yet in ways which also expose its 'lesions', the indeterminacy of place whilst also paradoxically helping to situate it. 'Pa-



from inevitable entrapment, Gray's response to this position still seems to owe more to reaction that innovation. (SNSTS, 120)

Postmodern States: Re-thinking the Nation i l l

Gray's achievement in defining a Scottish identity is that he abandons any (dogmatic) traditional conceptions of Scottishness. He does mention literary models like Carlyle, MacDiarmid, or Kelman. And he does say something about how difficult it can be to produce art in Scotland with his reference to the Scottish Arts Council. However, Gray never provides clear and straightforward answers to the problem of a Scottish identity. This cultural vagueness can be alarming for some readers; but it can also be joyfully productive. What we cannot fail to admire about Gray's Lanark is his critical, but immensely entertaining, appreciation of 'culture' in Scotland - and this appreciation is presented in a radically new way for Scottish literature.181

Scotland Rematerialised: The Poetry of Edwin Morgan Writing in 1962, in an article entitled 'The Beatnik in the Kailyard', Edwin Morgan was reacting against the forms of repression he saw at work within Scottish literary studies, arguing instead for more expansive readings of what might constitute the national literature. For Morgan, a writer who has also always resisted straightforward readings of national and cultural identity, the Scottish canon remained too caught up with the literary renaissance, and, more importantly, with the legacy of Hugh MacDiarmid. While it is important to stress that Morgan has often applied criticism to MacDiarmid in a sensitive and considered manner, having a clear respect for his work, in this early article he nonetheless makes some explicit comments regarding the renaissance and its effect on the cultural climate at the time. Before challenging the movement directly, Morgan first maps out some of its main objectives: When the Scottish Renascence movement began in the 1920s, in an atmosphere pungent with ideas of Scottish nationalism, it looked back with no love at the nineteenth century, and set itself a double aim, the two parts of which have been hard to keep compatible. Hugh MacDiarmid, as its leader, wanted the movement to be modern, the sense that it would experiment with new forms, but he also wanted it to be unmistakeably Scottish, if possible by a revival and extension of the



rochial misery' may be thematically examined, yet it is also fundamentally undermined, exposed as no longer an adequate means of representing Scottishness. As Witschi also suggests:


Scots vocabulary. MacDiarmid's own poetry is a good enough guarantee that this double aim can be realised.182

But looking at the movement as a whole, I think it is clear that the language problem, the problem of Scottishness, has proved something of an incubus, and the fact that it is a real and unavoidable incubus (shake it off and you leave scars and puncture marks) makes it all the more difficult for the Scottish writer to develop integrally.183 In many respects these comments, though written more than forty years ago, retain a contemporary relevance, and it is perhaps surprising that to this day more critics have not challenged MacDiarmid's cultural hegemony. Arguably, Scottish literary studies has still to come to terms with the legacy of MacDiarmid, has still to reach the stage where negative criticism of his work might be viewed as acceptable, and that this resistance to disparagement therefore presents a hindrance to the discipline. Morgan, however, has been one of the few critics to suggest the need for new directions in Scottish literary studies. This is a point also made by Robert Crawford in his 1991 article on Morgan: Perhaps necessary in its time, MacDiarmid's view of Scottish culture and literature is now seriously out of date, an object of study and passionate stimulus, but not a credo for any but the most conservative of contemporary Scots. Part of the subtle courage of Morgan's criticism comes from an implicit realisation that this is so.184 For Morgan in 1962, Scottish literary studies was being held back by this supposed need to generate an authentic Scottish voice through the medium of Scots and all things Scottish - a dangerous impulse he remarks especially as 'too many heads are attracted by the sand'.185 Morgan was therefore reacting against an inherent parochial strain within the discipline, in effect what was referred to in the first chapter as the predicament of the Scottish writer, where Scottish writing is continually judged in terms of its Scottishness. This was all the more abhorrent to Morgan as he was increasingly being drawn to more international postwar literary developments (his interests, for example, in the Russian writer Voznesensky, in Hungarian literature and to the experimentation of the Beat writers). Throughout his career Morgan has always rejected stagnant readings of



Morgan then goes on to suggest some of the inherent problems generated by this drive:

Scottish identity. As a writer who is both strongly Scottish identified (Morgan has been the Poet Laureate of Glasgow since 1999 and nominated Poet for Scotland in 2004) and yet who has continually challenged the implications of Scottishness, he has been consistently reluctant to accept stereotypes of national identity. Instead, in both his creative and critical work Morgan has expressed his dissatisfaction with such fixed notions, preferring instead to look towards posterity and the unknown than to traditional or conventional readings. Commenting on Morgan's critical position, Crawford states: Morgan's position as a critic has been importantly instrumental in effecting within the discussion of Scottish literature a transition from the isolated polemic of MacDiarmid to the more reasonable debate carried out in a growing critical community that includes writers and academics as well as those who are neither.186 This section will therefore attempt to open out some of the often paradoxical engagements with Scottish identity in Morgan's work. As a writer, Morgan has become highly respected for his many different styles of poetry, including concrete, instamatic, emergent and science fiction, as well as for his translation and dramatic works. While only some of this material directly engages with Scotland, and without wishing to reduce his work to purely narrow Scottish concerns, this section will focus on some of Morgan's poetry that deals with national concerns in its attempt to engage with his open-ended vision of community and belonging. I am certain that Scottish literature is being held back, and young writers are slow to appear, not only because of publishing difficulties but also because of a prevailing intellectual mood of indifferentism and conservatism, a desperate unwillingness to move out into the world with which every child now at school is becoming familiar - the world of television and sputniks, automation and LPs, electronic music and multi-story flats, rebuilt city centres and new towns, coffee bars and bookable cinemas... a world that will be more clean, more 'cool' than the one it leaves behind. How ridiculous to list distinguishing features of contemporary culture - material ones at that! Yet material differences in society imply spiritual, moral, and aesthetic differences, and although writers can struggle along for a time on language, on myth, on nature, on 'eternal emotions', there comes a day of reckoning when they realise that they are not speaking the same terms as their audi-




This extract is also from Morgan's 1962 article 'The Beatnik in the Kailyard'. As a critic whose work has spanned much of the twentieth century (born in 1920), Morgan has always been open to the possibilities of new technologies and how such innovations might re-shape our present as well as future worlds. In this way Morgan has not been afraid to experiment with the possibilities of Scottish identity, and in doing so highlights the dangers of ignoring scientific advancements in favour of adhering to essentialist myths of identity, what he terms the 'eternal emotions' associated with them. For Morgan, therefore, it is vital that writers continually mirror their worlds as honestly as they can, rather than remaining the acquiescent upholders of a national tradition: The over-emphasis on Scottish tradition which is so tempting to the more beleaguered-feeling, nationalist-minded poet, is in the end stultifying when it is allowed to inhibit the naturalness of voice and heart in whose absence anyone aiming to address his contemporaries might as well stay in bed plucking the coverlet.188 Morgan has often defined himself as an anti-traditionalist in this way, instead stressing his preference for contemporaneity.189 While in many strands of his work Morgan expresses obvious interests in Scottish history, language and politics, as well as the history of Scottish literature, when incorporated into his poetry these issues are usually dealt with experimentally, therefore opening out their possibilities in myriad ways. Morgan has often stressed his preference for seeing Scottishness in transition in this way, and in his poetry has therefore encouraged a re-visioning of Scottish culture. He writes, T suppose there must be a tension in every society, in every age, between change and some kind of settled state or order, and it's just that I tend rather to like the idea of things changing than the idea of things being settled...'.190 Here we are reminded of Harpham's earlier comment on the 'moving stillness' of nations. It seems that Morgan also shares this concern with viewing the unpindownability of nationhood, that this is also part of the ethical process of his work. While Morgan has never made a secret of his strong affiliation with Scotland, in his poetry and critical writings there is a strong commitment to depicting the nation in open-ended terms. This sense of alterity is readily seen in Morgan's science fiction poetry and in the poems where there is a concern with time-travel or with re-imagining some of the earliest moments in time. The poem 'Lamps' from Hold Hands Among the Atoms (1991), for example, opens with the notion that the universe, let alone Scotland, is ulti-




mately unknowable. We are told that the universe contains 'abysses, deserts, niches' that ultimately defy explanation.191 Morgan's interest in the otherworldly often points to the possibility of other worlds within our own, the notion that alterity is integral to any reading of identity, whether individual or collective. In his play with concepts of time and space, therefore, Morgan is fond of defamiliarising the reader, upturning their familiar conceptions of place and belonging. The poem 'On Jupiter' published in Sonnets from Scotland (1984), for example, begins 'Scotland was found on Jupiter. That's true'. The poem then transports the reader to this other planet, where time and place are dizzying, where we are presented with 'A simulacrum, a dissolving view'192 The reader is therefore left to puzzle over the possible interpretations of this. Why should Scotland be connected with Jupiter in such a way? In what sense might it really be a simulacrum or a 'dissolving view'? While we might initially think that Scotland is being whimsically deconstructed here, playfully juxtaposed with another planet for no apparent reason, this is perhaps not the case. Morgan's work is often ambiguous in this way, and perhaps it is no co-incidence that this poem forms part of Sonnets from Scotland, published in 1994, a volume much engaged with a pervasive sense of crisis in Scottish politics. As the poem progresses, it then increasingly develops a political dimension, returning Scotland speedily back to earth and highlighting in many respects an unreal and desperate culture. In presenting Scotland as a possible simulacrum, this poem explores a culture that seems to have lost its sense of authenticity, that can only present imitations of itself instead. Following on from this notion, Scotland is then described as spiritless, destructive and ultimately uninhabitable: Any gods there, If they had made the thing in play, were gone, and if the land had launched its own life out among the echoes of inhuman air,193 It is easy to read many of Morgan's poems as national allegories in this way, and Morgan has often admitted his own nationalist (with a small 'n') position.194 Yet it is perhaps limiting to see such poems as purely reflective of the national condition at the time. Morgan has often commented on his interest in science fiction, and for him the construction of alternative worlds in poetry presents a liberation from the constraints of identity, national and otherwise. In this respect his interest in space travel reflects both the need to look to new worlds created by technological advancements as well as the need to challenge fixed notions of selfhood (in his





I do not share what is sometimes called the current disillusion with science and technology. I count myself lucky to have lived at a time of discoveries of such far-reaching potential as space travel must be. The poet, I think, is entitled to set up his camp on other worlds than this, and to bring back what he can in the way of human relevance.195 While in Sonnets from Scotland, and elsewhere, Morgan has been clearly working with issues pertaining to Scottish culture and politics, for him it remains vital that his work is not reduced to such themes (in much the same way as the earlier comment by Morgan where he stated that Gray's Lanark both depicted and did not depict Glasgow). At times it does seem that Morgan is particularly focussed on his native soil, indeed this is often the case, but not reductively so, not without incorporating many other elements such as humour, absurdity or the alien which then in some ways destabilise the 'Scottish scene'. Take, for example, a poem that might be viewed, given its title, as blatantly political, 'Post-Referendum'. The poem begins: No no, it will not do, it will not be. I tell you you must leave your land alone It then becomes more confusing: Who do you think is poised to ring the phone? Fish your straitjacket packet from the sea you threw it in, get your headphones mended.196 The poem begins with the theme of dispossession, a stark reminder of external control. However, this theme of powerlessness then verges on the ludicrous, 'straitjacket packet', the peculiar reference to headphones. The serious tone of the poem is then directly juxtaposed with the comic and the bizarre, which although may heighten the overall desperation of the scene, also serves to defamiliarise the reader: You don't want the world now, do you? Come on, You're pegged out on your heathery futon, take the matches from your lids, it's ended.197



eyes the former necessarily and radically reshapes the latter). Indeed Morgan has been engaged with science fiction themes and their metaphorical possibilities since the 1960s:


- That was the time Scotland began to move. - Scotland move? No, it is impossible!198 These lines are from the poem 'Outward Bound', also from 'Sonnets from Scotland', in which Scotland is literally moving into new spaces, tempting 'earnest geographers' at the same time. It may also be tempting to view this concern with other realities and unknown territories in symbolic terms, forms of dreaming for new political opportunities, yet, and similar to the 'Nastier' scenes in Lanark, there is also a blatant playfulness at work here, a celebration of linguistic conjuring tricks. Scotland is described in the following terms: Like a sea-washed log it loved to tempt earnest geographers, duck down and dub them drunk hydrographers, shake itself dry, no longer log but dog.199 In this language game Scotland is given the power to metamorphose, to transform from something inanimate into a healthy and vibrant creature. While this language game may be founded on political aspirations, ultimately the emphasis is placed on the game itself. This celebration of linguistic play and the freedom to re-explore the familiar, making it unfamiliar, has been central to Morgan's work throughout his career. Another comparison with Hugh MacDiarmid's work may help to illuminate this more clearly. Take, for instance, MacDiarmid's poem 'The Little White Rose', published in Stony Limits, where we are told that 'The rose of all the world is not for me', rather what is preferable is the 'little white rose of Scotland', despite the pain that this image apparently conjures.200 In Morgan's highly self-conscious engagement with this poem, published in 1967, the white rose has undergone linguistic transformation, becoming instead 'white rows', thus:



Often in Morgan's poetry there is a similar concern with undermining the comfortable position of the reader, presenting alternative and unexpected possibilities that serve to disorientate:

whitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitemeigel whitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitemacadamwhite whitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhiterizziowhitewhite whitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitefaslanewhitewhitewhite whitewhitewhitewhitewhitenapierwhitewhitewhitewhite whitewhitewhitewhiteduntulmwhitewhitewhitewhitewhite whitewhitewhiteyarrowwhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhite whitewhitecurlmgwhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhite whitemaxtonwhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhite allowavwhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhitewhite2( In 'The Little White Rows of Scotland' Morgan parodies the sentiment underlying MacDiarmid's poem, simultaneously also seeming to destabilise the very notion of Scotland that at the same time he is affirming. This contradictory impulse, of representing Scotland whilst resisting any coherent vision of the nation, characterises much of Morgan's experimental poetry. In this poem we are encouraged to consider a variety of seemingly unconnected concepts in relation to the surrounding 'whiteness', or the blank backdrop, on which these signifiers are posted. It seems that these words present an eclectic account of Scottishness and Scottish culture, arbitrarily representing the nation through fleeting references to Scottish heritage and history, political culture, inventors and so on, without recourse to how these might possibly interconnect. For Morgan, however, such experimental poems, by presenting themselves as curious textual constructions, encourage alternative and additional forms of decoding that is only to be encouraged: Abstract painting can often satisfy, but 'abstract poetry' can only exist in inverted commas. In poetry you get the oyster as well as the shell, and the pursuit of purity is self-defeating. The best visual or concrete poems, as it seems to me, acknowledge this fact inversely; their anatomy may be rigid and exoskeltal, but there is something living and provocative inside.202 In this poem, the romantic and nationalist vision of Scotland symbolised by the 'little white rose', is instead depicted as a textual construction, of which its constituent parts do not rest easily together. While the poem engages with the theme of Scottishness and what it may comprise, ultimately the reader can take nothing for granted and Scotland is in no way sentimentalised.




Such self-conscious engagements with Scotland and the work of Hugh MacDiarmid can be found in some of Morgan's other poems. Morgan, it seems, has always revelled in the opportunity to present the apparently zany as a means of then undermining more serious issues. A particularly obvious example of this can be seen in his treatment of the problematic 'Caledonian Antisyzygy', famously described by G. Gregory Smith as characteristic of the 'Scottish Muse'. For Smith, this Muse is torn between the commonplace and the more esoteric: Though she has loved reality, sometimes to maudlin affection for the commonplace, she has loved not less the airier pleasure to be found in the confusion of the senses, in the fun of things thrown topsy-turvy, in the horns of elfland and the voices of the mountains. It is a strange union of opposites...203 At the heart of this sentiment lies one of the most central concerns of Scottish literature since Smith published his book in 1919. For Smith, this Muse also necessarily upheld an essentialist division of heart and head, in which to be Scottish was to be somehow unique. While MacDiarmid also discussed this 'Caledonian Antisyzygy' in his poem of the same title, discussing the tensions and sense of conflict for the Scottish writer who writes in both Scots and English, thereby in many ways upholding Smith's notion, Morgan has a very different approach to this concept in his poem of the same title: Knock knock. - who's there? - Doctor. - Doctor Who? - No, just Doctor. - What's up Doc? - Stop, that's all cock. O.K. - Knock-knock. - Who's there? - Doctor Who. - Doctor Who who? - Doctor, who's a silly schmoo?204 Despite its seemingly flippant tone, this poem raises serious questions and represents a clear rejection of Smith's claims, exposing them to ridicule 'silly schmoo'. Alternatively, Morgan's poem, in its references to Jekyll ('Doctor Who?') and Hyde, perhaps invites a quite serious revisioning of this essentialist myth of Scottish identity. The poem ends with a seance: Right, join hands. Make sure the door is locked, or nothing will happen. - Dark yet? - Cover clocks. Knock. - Listen! Is there anybody there?205




We are invited to this gathering in effect to question our assumptions of the Antisyzygy, the extent to which it is believable. We also get a sense that this seance provides a means of parodying the term, highlighting the very ridiculousness of such an idea. Perhaps this is why we get a sense in the final line that listening for such ghosts (Ts there anybody there?'), or searching for such essentialist aspects of Scottish identity, is actually a redundant exercise. Postmodern States and Ethical Beyondness Recently, everyone has been harking back to his or her Origins - you have noticed it, I suppose? ...The values crisis and the fragmentation of individuals have reached the point where we no longer know what we are and take shelter, to preserve a token of personality, under the most massive, regressive common denominators: national origins and the faith of our forebears ... The cult of origins is a hate reaction. Hatred of those others who do not share my origins and who affront me personally, economically, and culturally: I then move back among my 'own,' I stick to an archaic, primitive 'common denominator,' the one of my frailest childhood, my closest relatives, hoping they will be more trustworthy than 'foreigners'. In Scottish literary studies, the question of origins has often been simplified, taken for granted by critics, leading to reductive formulations of nationhood, which then assume legitimacy. On the contrary, many Scottish writers have presented a challenge to this notion of origins, instead highlighting the need for alterity and the impossibility of assimilation, the need to recognise strangeness from within. This impulse to resist categorisation is perhaps one aspect that has characterised much of contemporary Scottish writing. In this respect writers have sought to challenge the very notion of a 'common denominator', while paradoxically also helping to ground one. This is a notion touched on by Kathleen Jamie: For some years issues round 'identity' have been ... energetic, but really, I feel it's over now, for me at any rate - I mean, those issues are resolved. There is no more poetic energy in them. Mined out. So to carry on would be ... they'd risk becoming an orthodoxy. There was a short term task to do, it had to be done, a political task, but now it's time to move on.207




For Jamie, it is important to resist the urge to continually reduce Scottish literature to questions relating to Scottishness. While Jamie admits that this may once have been a worthwhile project, it now seems both largely artistically and politically redundant. It is important to point out that while 'common denominators' are in question here, they are at no point being abandoned either. Instead, in contemporary Scottish literature there has often been an investigation of the processes of identity (particularly gendered and national forms), which, in their preoccupations with belonging have often revealed forms of political and psychological estrangement, encouraging an analysis of the 'foreigner' both inside and outside the national border. This sense of foreignness, and engagement with a changing sense of Scottishness, is perhaps dealt with most obviously in Jamie's work in her 1994 collection The Queen ofSheba. In 'Mr and Mrs Scotland are dead', for example, a now often-anthologised poem testifying to its contemporary relevance, the reader is taken to the scene of a civic amenity landfill site where paraphernalia belonging to the late 'Mr and Mrs Scotland' has been abandoned.208 A sense of lament pervades this poem, a sense that perhaps these items, although banal and quaint (Mrs Scotland's old postcards from Scottish holiday towns, her pattern for a cable-knit jumper, Mr Scotland's John Bull Puncture Repair Kit harking back to a previous time), might in fact represent something worth salvaging at a symbolic, macro level. Should Mr Scotland's joiners' tools (branded with a nowtired 'SCOTLAND SCOTLAND') be salvaged before the bulldozer eradicates the traces of these small lives? In this way the poem selfconsciously encourages the reader to engage with the production of national history and what actually gets recorded ('Should we reach and take them? And then?'). However, there is also the suggestion that this nostalgic glance may itself be fruitless, that such forms of life have now been supplanted. The poem ends by suggesting that the belongings of the reader may themselves someday also be subject to this 'sweeping up' and 'turning out', that they themselves may also appear provincial to later generations. The reader is therefore encouraged to view the construction of tradition as part of an active and uncertain process. In this concern with generational shifts, what is bulldozed and what is not is ultimately be uncertain also. In Jamie's poetry there is often this concern with belonging and the ways in which the past inhabits the present, complicating both. In this way, anachronistic references act as a means of interrogating the present, of examining the extent to which they help to shape a sense of national tradition. The poem 'Arraheids' (based on ancient arrowheads displayed




in Scottish museums) provides an apposite example. The poem begins by confronting the reader about their awareness of these artifacts 'Dae'ye near'n daur wunner at wur histrie?', incorporating a stern warning 'Weel then, Bewaur!' The arrowheads, we are encouraged to see, are not merely recordings of battles and symbols of patriarchal culture. Rather, we are told, they represent of 'a show o grannies tongues' who are 'aa deid an gaun'. These cultural signifiers, however, are not as inert as we might imagine, for these 'arraheids', or 'tongues' from the past, are still incessantly talking ('fur they cannae keep frae muttering'), and in doing so serve to unsettle ('ye arenae here tae wonder, whae dae ye think ye ur?'). When transformed in this way the arrowheads become a disruptive force, a babble that will resist easy assimilation into a conventional national paradigm. Many contemporary Scottish writers have therefore encouraged a certain permeability of borders. That recent Scottish fiction has displayed this urge to get beyond the reductive, to challenge the 'nature' of Scottishness and to expose its 'lesions', therefore signifies an optimistic, and perhaps ethical, turn. As Edwin Morgan pointed out in his Post Office Lecture at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2000: 'Scotland still has hang-ups, shoulder chips, timorousness, but it has a huge chance of doing away with these things and entering the community of nations.'210 However, for Morgan it is also vital that in an increasingly globalised world that we do not naively assume that nations are now disappearing either: We do not want a global porridge, a happy-clappy postmodern pluralism; we want writers able to be faithful to something in their country which feeds or fascinates them and at the same time to jangle the universal nerve...211 In Nations without Nationalism, Kristeva points to this need to both assert and yet transgress nationhood, in a need to continually critique expected, conventional boundaries of the nation. For Kristeva, it is politically necessary to reclaim forgotten or misrepresented histories, while also simultaneously moving this dialectical process of the nation forward, encouraging its ethical potential as an inclusive rather than elitist entity: What is involved, in short, is giving them back their own history in a shape that would be most worthy of a complex national affirmation that, as nowhere else in the world, was able to compel recognition so as better to go beyond itself; for there is no way for an identity to go beyond itself without first asserting itself in a satisfactory fashion.212




The search for an ethical beyondness is therefore desirable as it rigorously challenges concepts of 'foreignness' and inclusion, always searching for a means of further interrogating the seemingly unproblematic. In this respect, the ethical transcends what might be termed the 'moral imperative', the need to act on a practical level, working instead at more elusive levels, where it encourages a continual rethinking of the moral. Commenting on this notion, Geoffrey Gait Harpham writes 'We are commanded by ethics to act on principle, and by morality to do the right thing. Ethics leads into conflicts only morality can settle. The hands of ethics are clean, because they have touched nothing; the hands of morality are bloody, but effective' (GiR, 57). In this respect, much contemporary Scottish fiction has generated, whether intentionally or otherwise, an ethical imperative to interrogate the nature of belonging. It has generated what Harpham describes as an ethical 'shadow', and there has been a self-conscious interaction with nationhood, in a need to reformulate and reassess issues of boundaries.213 It is this ethical drive, the need to disorientate and defamiliarise from within, that will be addressed in the following chapter, where it will focus on the implications of deterritorialisation and consider some of the effects that globalisation might have on the future direction of Scottish literary studies.







4

Nationalism is part of the pathology of early modernity. This claim is not incompatible with the continued existence of singularly virulent forms of nationalism. The very historical forces which are undermining its viability also generate intense reactions, so it is not surprising that the end of nationalism is accompanied by eruptions, disruptions and conflicts. However, contemporary struggles are not harbingers of a new era of nationalism in world history, but more like, in Gramsci's phrase, 'morbid symptoms' of a historical period in which the old cannot be reinvigorated, but the new is not ready to emerge.214 Following Ross Poole's comments above, it could be suggested that the 'morbid symptoms' of the present are inherently linked to changing patterns and perceptions of territory, reflecting our inability to predict the impact of such changes on our future sense of community and belonging. As many cultural and political theorists have recently highlighted, the concept of territory is often now strongly contested, deeply associated with uncertainty. Territory, its malleability at the hands of economics and the impact of global powers, is therefore central to debates surrounding the alleged breakdown of the nation-state and death of the Nationalist Project. The purpose of this chapter will be to explore some of these emergent issues of territory, without finally conceding the end of nationalism. For, if the myth of national liberation through democratic struggle is no longer plausible, it would still be foolish to underestimate the lingering power of nations; and they are clearly still the main collective frameworks through which concepts such as democracy can be discussed. Regardless, the agenda of the nation-state is also now under general scrutiny, where we are at present existing in an in-between state, or rather in-between States, where a sense of insecurity and immanent change now pervades.215 125



Ethics of Deterritorialisation

The project of nationalism may have not reached the end of its lifespan, yet its validity is nonetheless everywhere in question. In Banal Nationalism, Michael Billig explores this moment of potential re-thinking of territory, yet is also keen to explain what he terms as the 'cultural paradoxes' with which we now live.216 Although it is commonplace to assert that that the world is now a global market place and effectively transnational, for Billig, it is vital we acknowledge the ideological powers and imperialism which some nations (namely, the United States of America) continue to exert.217 This banal, paradoxical, nationalism consequently refers to the ways in which citizens come to identify with these dominant transnational cultures (the global ' Americanisation' of everyday life) mostly at unconscious levels. According to Billig, it is such banal forms of nationalism, these supposedly 'harmless' identifications with national cultures, which should in fact be monitored with 'watchful suspicion' (BN, 176). The United States, he asserts, represents the apotheosis of this 'cultural paradox', for it repeatedly promotes its own national culture as a global ideal, whilst also making the national effectively transnational. Billig writes: 'Nationalism, or so it is said, is no longer a major force: globalization is the order of the day. But a reminder is necessary', and, he goes on, 'Nationhood is still being reproduced: it can still call for ultimate sacrifices; and, daily, its symbols and assumptions are flagged' (BN, 7). Therefore undesirable forms of nationalism associated with racism, intolerance and bigotry are often something we associate with 'others', rather than recognising our own entrenchment in, or unconscious affiliation to, national cultures. When banal nationalism is perceived as benign in this way, 'real' nationalism is then assumed to be associated with forms of extremism and totalitarianism; rather than identification with, or, for example, daily allegiance to signifiers such as the American flag (BN, 38).218 In Banal Nationalism, Billig is also concerned with the changing nature of territory and possible refigurings of the nation now at work. This gradual breakdown of nations and nation-states is leading to a new kind of sensibility; one predominantly linked with the personal, rather than conceived at a national level: It is as if the whole business of nationhood is being unravelled. At each turn, it seems that a whole group separates from a state to declare a new state in its own name and then minority groups within the new state claim national status. An infinite regress beckons, with states fragmenting into infinitely smaller units. These units, in their turn, cannot be culturally isolated entities. They are plugged into the vast networks of information, which respect no natural, political, or linguis-



126 Ethics of Deterritorialisation

tic boundaries. Thus, the thesis of postmodernism proclaims a vision of the future world. In this world, no longer is the national territory the place from which identities, attachments and patterns of life spring... In place of the bordered, national state, a multiplicity of terrae are emerging. And those, who see their identities in terms of gender or sexual orientation, are... bound by no earthly terra, restricted by no mere sense of place. Thus, a new sensibility - a new psychology emerges in global times. (BN, 134) Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman has extensively explored the implications of this 'new sensibility' throughout his work on postmodernism since the early 1990s. In particular, he has addressed the moral and ethical implications of the fracturing and re-ordering of territory, questioning this 'new sensibility' as it affects the role of the individual. Perhaps contrary to popular opinion, Bauman is keen to point out that the traditional Nationalist Project, and its concern for the careful organisation and control of territory, has often in fact led directly to disorder?19 Bauman is therefore concerned with charting the ways in which present tendencies towards the postmodern fragmentation of nationhood might be interconnected and fundamentally related to ethics and morality, and this will be developed in more detail later. In this discussion of the 'morbid symptoms' of nationalism and breakdown of the nation-state, it is again important to make a distinction between the moral and the ethical. Throughout this chapter, pragmatic issues, the everyday lived reality and experience of the nation, will be discussed in terms of morality, whereas the underlying issue of the ought, that remains at an abstract level, and which cannot ultimately be consciously realised, will be associated with the ethical. In this light, the ethical provides the fundamental drive for morality; yet cannot be reduced to it, always escaping the realm of the practical, having more work to do at unconscious, therefore unknowable levels. In this way the ethical always remains unpindownable. Where issues of morality can be endlessly and pragmatically debated, as understood here the ethical is the underlying spur which generates this apparent need for clearer insights, the impulse for morality itself. In his work on postmodern morality, Bauman points out that the postmodern turn, and its often-alleged breakdown of meaning, has repeatedly been viewed with suspicion, viewed as an attempt to evade rather than clarify. Debates surrounding the postmodern turn have therefore consistently turned towards the ethical as a means of interrogating cultural realities of postmodernity, where morality has often been declared to be in a



Ethics of Deterritorialisation 111

terminal condition. Bauman, however, is careful not to exaggerate the extent of this 'moral crisis'. On the contrary, he questions the nature of values themselves, pointing out that they are concepts which have perhaps always existed in a state of crisis; that in reality, values have never really been fully coherent or comprehensible. In the era of postmodernity, therefore, it may be that we are now more self-conscious of this instability of values, although we cannot infer from this that the 'crisis' of the present is in any clear way more extreme than at any other previous point in history. In Postmodern Ethics, Bauman suggests that whereas modernity was often concerned with imposing morality and 'a cohesive code of moral rules which people could be taught and forced to obey' (PE, 6), postmodernity, is, in effect, modernity without illusions: Postmodernism, one may say, is modernity without illusions (the obverse of which is that modernity is postmodernity refusing to accept its own truth). The illusions in question boil down to the belief that the 'messiness' of the human world is but a temporary and repairable state, sooner or later to be replaced by the orderly and systematic rule of reason. The truth in question is that the 'messiness' will stay whatever we do or know, that the little orders and 'systems' we carve out in the world are brittle, until-further-notice, and as arbitrary and in the end contingent as their alternatives. (PE, 32) Postmodern ethics, then, are not afraid to confront this 'messiness,' to deal with uncertainty and contingency as a means of exposing the illusions of modernity. Doing so, and reflecting this arbitrariness, also helps generate their ethical and moral potential. As Bauman points out: 'The kind of understanding of the moral self's condition which the postmodern vantage point allows is unlikely to make moral life easier. The most it can dream of is making it a bit more moraV (PE, 15). Another feature central to postmodernity for Bauman is the re-thinking of social space as a direct result of the diminishing power of the Nationalist Project. The emphasis away from the national is now leading to renewed interest in the community at smaller, more personal levels, akin to Billig's 'new sensibility'. Bauman, however, is highly sceptical of this urge to revitalise community to the level of multiple terrae, seeing in this an urge towards homogenisation and introversion, which he regards as ultimately unhealthy and fundamentally uncritical. He therefore encourages the view that territory should no longer be taken for granted, that in any construction of community the implicit urge to homogenise will be of detriment to the individual:




There would be a smooth way leading from many T's to the collective 'we' only if one could posit all T's as by and large identical, at least in respect of an attribute which assigns the units as members of one set and therefore, again in this respect, exchangeable; 'we' becomes a plural of T only at the cost of glossing over T's multidimensionality. (PE, 48) Central to this lack of cohesion is that of the role played by the state itself. According to Bauman, the state no longer claims spiritual and moral leadership, and this in effect perpetuates the dissolution of morality into smaller niches, leading to refigurings of morality at smaller levels. There now exists a 'divorce' between state politics and citizens, between 'statemanaged institutional socialisation and communal society,' which Bauman sees as 'irreversible' (PE, 140). The re-thinking of territory is therefore integral to Bauman's conception of a postmodern ethics. The nation-state, governed by market interests rather than the urge for the democratic liberation of its citizens, has been central to this perceived breakdown of values, and thus also needs to be addressed in new formulations of ethics and morality: The nationalist vision arose from the desperate hope that clarity and security of existence can be rebuilt at a higher, supra-local level of social organization, around the national membership and state citizenship melted into one. For reasons too vast and numerous to be listed here, that hope failed to come true. The nation-state proved to be the incubator of a modern society ruled not so much by the unity of feelings as by the diversity of unemotional market interests. Its thorough job of uprooting local loyalties looks in retrospect not so much like a production of higher-level identities, but like a site-clearing operation for the market-led confidence game of quickly assembled and even faster dismantled modes of self-description.220 This procedure of 'site-clearing' is being carried out at a level beyond the nation; where new identities are being shaped according to market demands, thus ultimately striving to dismantle previous loyalties to the national community in order to boost their own commercial, transnational formulations. Whether this is unethical or not, is left unanswered by Bauman; yet what remains certain is that such processes should certainly be carefully monitored. Similarly, in his most recent text, In Search of Politics, Bauman once again emphasises this present ethical detachment of the state, writing:




The state authorities do not even pretend that they are capable, and willing, to guarantee the safety of those in their charge; politicians of all shades make it clear that with the stark demands of competitiveness, efficiency and flexibility 'we cannot afford' collective safety nets any more. Politicians promise to modernize the worldly frames of their subjects' lives, but the promises forebode more uncertainty, deeper insecurity and less insurance against the vagaries of fate. (ISP, 40) Our present condition, therefore, is one of indecisiveness and ambiguity, perhaps necessarily so, as we are at present existing in an in-between state. In postmodern morality, Bauman points out, 'no emergent shape is likely to solidify and survive for long", where the problem is not so much 'indecision" as 'the impossibility of decision" (ISP, 144). Here Bauman refers to Anthony Giddens, and his use of the term 'manufactured uncertainty'. According to Giddens, the present moment is one of such uncertainty, and, as Bauman suggests 'Uncertainty is not something we repair, but something we create, and create it through our efforts to repair if (ISP, 145). As a result, we must now accept this 'natural' creation of our own 'value crisis': If the multiplicity of values requiring judgement and choice is a sign of 'value crisis', then we need to accept that such a crisis is a natural home of morality: only in that home are freedom, autonomy, responsibility, judgement - all of which loom large among the indispensable features of the moral self - allowed to grow and mature. The multiplicity of values does not by itself guarantee that moral selves will grow and mature. But without it, they stand little chance of doing so. What we often call the 'crisis of values' shows itself under closer scrutiny to be the 'normal state' or the human moral condition. (ISP, 149) Perhaps, then, this is not wholly dissimilar to Lyotard's concept of the 'differend', (the existence of incommensurable ideas that must necessarily exist alongside each other when no overall universal criteria exists through which to evaluate). Bauman's vision of postmodern morality involves a 'vast matrix of possibilities, in which uncountable and not at all coordinated combinations and permutations may be, and indeed are, made', and each of these permutations should also be taken seriously (ISP, 151). As a result, belonging is now fragile, especially since 'there is little in daily life to accommodate it securely or at least to display its tangible model' (ISP, 161). Territory and togetherness may be in question, yet they are also ethically questioned by Bauman, and he emphasises the pre-




liminary stage of this ethical development as a direct result of such cultural and moral uncertainty. It is this stage of in-betweenness that I would here like to provisionally link to the notion of 'deterritorialisation'.221 Deterritorialisation, and more specifically, an 'ethics of deterritorialisation', might therefore provide a purposeful means of interconnecting the breakdown of territory with new possibilities of belonging, where there is at work a break from the traditionally accepted community. Although this will be examined in more detail later, I would like to suggest that an 'ethics of deterritorialisation' might prove useful where they interrogate the possibility of difference and distinction from the accepted community, thereby challenging, at times undermining, expected conditions of place. Where morality is often conceived at the level of the 'stable' community, often directly at the expense of the 'other who is not my brother', ethics of deterritorialisation would be concerned with investigating and exposing the internal bias and selfinterest of certain groups. If the future we are moving into is becoming ever more unpredictable and unstable, with the growth of smaller communities more prevalent, then such an ethics will be concerned with mediating between these territorial discourses. Consequently, an 'ethics of deterritorialisation' strive for a condition where borders eventually become less problematic, where territory, in becoming less centred, is also less violently contested. Community, Cosmopolitanism and the Ethics of Place For those who want to turn neither to modernity nor to postmodernity, the cosmopolitan idea offers a way of linking the idea of modernity, divested of the Enlightenment, with postmodernity, divested of globalisation and relativism. For this position is reducible neither to modernity nor to postmodernity and it may be the only means of linking the idea of universalistic morality with cultural pluralism.222 Recently, many controversial debates have emerged concerning modernity, postmodernity and cosmopolitanism, complicating, whilst also attempting to address the changing nature of place.223 In particular, there has been a recurrent interest in the notion of community, concentrating on the ethical relationship between place and belonging and possible reconfigurations now taking place. The above quote by Gerard Delanty highlights this desire to move between discourses in order to search for means of opening out identity and ethical (or, as he writes, moral) frameworks. As mentioned earlier with reference to Poole, postmodern cosmopolitan




identities have often been discussed in terms of difference; yet they have also, paradoxically, been linked with the need for inclusion. This has also been the concern of theorists working in the field of radical democratic theory, who have similarly sought to anticipate reconfigurations of the political, to provide alternative frameworks for community that would accommodate alterity.224 As Delanty suggests, there is now a need to find a new 'cultural imaginary' that is capable of addressing the many forms of fluctuation affecting previously 'stable' communities. This new 'cultural imaginary' would therefore recognise the increasing reality of deterritorialisation, the awareness that both larger (e.g. the European Union) and smaller frames (e.g. the impulse towards niche marketing) of belonging are now challenging, potentially dismantling the prior 'fixity' of the nation-state. Delanty suggests that community should now therefore be viewed as 'a postmodernised discourse beyond unity', capable of extending Anderson's notion of an 'imagined community' into the global era.225 In mapping this potential restructuring of community, several critics have welcomed this concept of deterritorialisation. Delanty similarly considers it an apposite way of conceptualising emergent, globalised structures of community: The emergence of what I would prefer to call a neo-communitarian cultural imaginary must be seen in the context of the deterritorialising and globalising of community. The new discourses of community are not those of the traditional peasant communities about which the founding fathers of sociology wrote: community is decentred, contested and is thereby open to new interpretations. Nor is it a moral order based on cultural consensus, or a moral voice, as the communitarian philosophers would have it. The return of community today is a response to the failure of society to provide a basis for the three core components of community: solidarity, trust and autonomy... Community today is a product of the uncoupling of culture and society. Culture is separating from society, whose institutional complexes are unable to constrain cultural value systems.226 The move towards deterritorialisation, then, provides a means of negotiating between discourses, providing an implicit awareness and selfconsciousness of change as culture and society are increasingly growing apart; where, in Bauman's terms, a 'site-clearing' is now underway. As Delanty points out, however, in this connection between postmodernism and deterritorialisation there is also the risk that there will be an 'emptying out' of community, an inability to establish any coherent or recognis-




able structures of place. Yet, he insists, despite this potential blurring of the familiar in order to account for new forms of the global 'cultural imaginary', such forms of destabilisation must now nonetheless be recognised. If the spheres of culture and society are now growing apart and no longer necessarily fused by the nation-state then it is also important to consider the ethical implications of this divergence. Arguably, developments in niche marketing and consumer freedom, and the general encouragement of such Western forms of individualism, represent a movement away from the previously interdependent relationship between culture and the state.228 As Anthony Giddens has suggested, we are perhaps now witnessing a 'disembedding' of culture and society, where, in the movement away from tradition an increasing rift is established between the politics of the state and the moral choices of individuals.229 Theorists of community have therefore sought to address this divide, aiming to re-establish the agency of the individual at more macro levels of belonging; thereby hoping also to develop renewed ethical relationships in the process.230 In attempting to incorporate the postmodern fragmentation of identity into their theories, critics have often had to acknowledge the inherent anti-essential nature of emergent collective identities: The rise of globalism was accompanied by a turn to postmodernism. The key aspect of this was an interest in identity and cultural production as multiple and cross-cutting with respect to space. National identities are no longer the exclusive collective identities of people in an age of cultural pluralism and the anarchy of multiple identity projects. Identities are overlapping, negotiable and contested. The postmodern literature argued that collective identities are irreducible to the fixed identities of nation and class.231 While this irreducibility may seem to contradict the basis of collective identity, it has generally been suggested that, since this process of alterity cannot be simply reversed, therefore leading back into tradition and cultural homogeneity, we should consequently aim to work within and through these discourses of detraditionalisation and hybridisation in order to pre-empt posterior forms of belonging.232 In Chapter 2 it was suggested that the concept of tradition in Scottish studies ought to be opened out, that critics should be encouraged to be more critical in their determinations of the national in order to avoid forms of parochialism. This is particularly appropriate when considering the impact of postmodernism and the development of postmodern com-




munities where detraditionalisation is an increasingly reality. This may be found in a Scottish context, for example, in the postmodern refigurings of history in the heritage industry, where tradition becomes re-invented, and is therefore, at least partially, reformulated. Yet, as Ulrich Beck points out, such detraditionalisation does not invoke the wholesale abandonment of traditional forms of culture either: The other side of globalisation is detraditionalisation... This does not mean that tradition no longer plays any role - often the opposite is the case. But traditions must be chosen and often invented, and they have force only through the decisions and experience of individuals. The sources of collective and group identity and of meaning which are characteristic of industrial society (ethnic identity, class consciousness, faith in progress), whose life-styles and notions of security underpinned Western democracies and economies into the 1960s, here lose their mystique and break up, exhausted. Those who live in this postnational, global society are constantly engaged in discarding old classifications and formulating new ones. The hybrid identities and cultures that ensue are precisely the individuality which then determines social integration. In this way, identity emerges through intersection and combination, and thus through conflict with other identities.233 Beck then goes on to suggest that 'If globalisation, detraditionalisation and individualisation are analysed together, it becomes clear that your own life is an experimental one'.234 As has been suggested, it is this move towards postmodern conceptions of the self, often disregarded in Scottish studies, that have elsewhere gained increasing prominence and credibility.235 Detraditionalisation in this respect may prove inconvenient and problematic to cultural nationalist readings, yet it also seems important that such theoretical approaches should no longer be omitted from the discipline. Following Beck, if the individual life is experimental, then it also follows that this should also transfer to readings of community and nationhood. This is also the kind of community advocated by Delanty, where, with reference to Maurice Blanchot, he writes: 'The only adequate kind of community is one that can accommodate itself with reflexivity and an awareness of its own incompleteness'236 In the drive to map the changing nature of national identity there has been a clear impulse to question the significance of cosmopolitanism. For many critics, only cosmopolitan frameworks will be able to provide the means of escaping the strict confines and limitations of the nation-state




and therefore be able to provide the necessary models for ethical inclusiveness. However, the cosmopolitan critique of nationalism, as other critics have pointed out, does not provide a clear remedy either. Barbara Hernstein Smith, for example, has suggested that cosmopolitanism, far from providing a means of escaping the confines of national introversion and reductive tendencies, in actuality replaces these moulds with a similar normalising Western discourse.237 Reflecting on the United States, in At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Timothy Brennan has also been hesitant to embrace the term as a convenient means of replacing the ideology of nationalism: It is not hard to see why a concept that suggests an outward-looking, intercultural sensitivity is attractive when the United States is experiencing new racial tensions, immigrant anxieties, and declining living standards. Any reservations with the ethos of cosmopolitanism, one would think, should be a rather low priority when resurgent patriotism and new demands for conformity seem to characterise the national mood... I do not think we can afford to look at the matter this way. To understand the history of cosmopolitanism is to learn something about the elusiveness of imperial attitudes themselves, which are always painfully obvious in the historical record and always more or less invisible in the immediacy of the now. (AHW, 10) For Brennan, it is therefore important to reflect on the genealogy and historical complexity of the term. Cosmopolitanism may have advantages, for example in its attempt to build ethical macro structures, yet can also be dangerous when it attempts to evade national structures in a bid to get beyond them, thereby distancing itself from immediate political power structures at the local level. Brennan suggests that theorists who uncritically adopt such cosmopolitan ideals often 'do not want to accept the responsibility for living, actual governments, which in the nature of things throw people in jail, train armies, collect taxes, and make enemies' (AHW, 316). Arguably, what is needed here is a way of negotiating between the discourses of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, a form of ethical interrogation that will critique the seeming binary opposition between the two. In this way it may therefore be useful to reflect on such theories of cosmopolitanism, which self-consciously critique the boundaries of nationalism and which have the ability to work within larger frameworks of community, when it is clear that the forces of global capitalism will continually aim to reinvent the foundations of belonging. Yet, as stated at the




beginning of this chapter, the aim here is not to concede the redundancy of the nation-state. Therefore a move towards what Delanty has described as the 'meso' level might be desirable, where it generates the ability to mediate within discourses of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in order to encourage an ethical questioning of national and post-national identities. It is therefore this ability to work between discourses that is being advocated here as a desirable approach for contemporary Scottish studies. Many critics have recently challenged the concept of community and this debate between cosmopolitanism and nationalism will only continue as the nation-state comes increasingly under attack. In order to anticipate some of the potential reverberations and developments of this dialogue, the following section will consider the possibilities of an 'ethics of deterritorialisation.' Postnationalism, Ethics and Deterritorialisation In the most general sense, the crucial question of our time is the struggle between the forces of autonomy and fragmentation. This conflict has taken on new dimensions with the transformation of the world by globalisation, which I have argued has led to the weakening of states by an internationalised capitalism... Indeed it would appear that the condition of late modernity is one of fragmentation. The most striking dimension to this is the collapse of 'the social'. We are witnessing the end of 'the social' in the sense of the decline of society as a meaningful concept. (CGA, 99) The concept of deterritorialisation, as it is being used here, is not meant to imply that territory is disappearing, that the world has become truly cosmopolitan or that the concept of home is no longer valid. Rather, it is being introduced as a way of defamiliarising home and territory, in order to facilitate the movement between discourses of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Conflicts surrounding autonomy and fragmentation have grown alongside, and as a direct result of developments in postmodern theory which have opened out the nature of selfhood and identity, and these disputes have consequently often appeared irreconcilable. This section does not aim to provide answers to this debate. Rather, it will suggest some of the ways in which an 'ethics of deterritorialisation' might provide a provisional bridging point from which to continue the search for ethical forms of identity, community and belonging in an increasingly detraditionalised world, reflecting also on the possible benefits of this to Scottish studies.




The concept of deterritorialisation may be closely linked to postnationalism, referring to broad changes now taking place in the understanding and organisation of communities at national and transnational levels. Deterritorialisation, therefore, refers to the ways in which identity can no longer be taken for granted, taking into account the effects of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. It refers to the ways in which, as David Harvey has suggested, space and time are now also subject to renegotiation and reconfiguration.238 Gerard Delanty similarly suggests that globalisation might actually be a form of deterritorialisation: Globalisation is best seen as a field of tensions in which cultures are more exposed to each other as a result of the diminishing limits of geography. The global age is simply an era of deterritorialised forms of communication. It is a field of interacting frameworks which are as likely to enhance the particular, the 'local', rather than the universal, the 'global'.239 This threat to established forms of 'the social' may be closely linked to postmodern conceptions of identity, with its focus on multiplicity and incommensurability. Deterritorialisation, then, may work in-between conceptions of the global and the postmodern, in its concern with opening out forms of identity. This apparently infinite openness may seem incompatible with national identity and may be perceived as a negation of such well-established forms of meaning. However, the term here is being adopted as a means of trying to anticipate and partially explain the kinds of noticeable forces now affecting national identity rather than as a means of discarding the past. If there is now an increasing gulf between the role of culture and that of the state, then this also has clear implications for national identity, for it is no longer strictly defined in and through the state. Instead, national identity becomes more amenable to what John Urry has described as 'information flows', processes of technology and consumerism as well as transnationalism, regionalism and localism.240 Deterritorialisation, then, represents this ability to move between these discourses, the potential to reconfigure identity at a more individual, subjective level when faced with this weakening of cultural determination by the state. Again, however, this is not to suggest that the role of the state is no longer important, or that national, collective forms of identity can no longer exist. Instead, this focus on deterritorialisation is concerned with mapping changes and new possibilities without denying other versions. Deterritorialisation is therefore representative of and helps illuminate this self-conscious




movement between traditional and more experimental accounts of identity. As Richard Kearney has suggested, there is often now a 'prevailing sense of discontinuity', reflecting what he describes as a weakening of tradition in comparison with modernity. This has resulted, he explains, in an 'experience of living in two worlds - one dying, the other struggling to be born' and it is a tension which has created an increasing crisis of consciousness.241 This division between two worlds is now becoming an increasing reality in Scottish studies. Where in the past the discipline has been dominated by tradition-inspired approaches, it is now becoming clear that these, often cultural nationalist readings of literature and national identity are no longer the only possible readings available, and desirably so. Where, for example, Irish studies has in many respects been willing to take on board the possibilities of postmodernism and postnationalism, this is an area which in Scottish studies has been largely neglected or rejected. This move into more theoretical approaches to nationhood has proved noticeably beneficial to Irish studies, sparking many interesting debates, enriching the discipline, and this will be analysed in more detail in the Conclusion. In an overview of the role of modernism, Kearney suggests that: Modernism... affirms a radical break with tradition and endorses a practice of cultural self-reflection where inherited concepts of identity are subjected to question. Modernism is essentially a 'critical' movement in the philosophical sense of questioning the very notion of origins. And as such it challenges the ideology of identity which revivalism presupposes. The modernist mind prefers discontinuity to continuity, diversity to unity, conflict to harmony, novelty to heritage. (T, p. 12) While Kearney is concerned here with these distinctions as they have affected Irish studies, there are nonetheless important parallels to be made with Scottish literary studies. In this text Kearney is concerned with mapping this tension between traditional, cultural nationalist readings and the need to critique these from more theoretical standpoints. In doing so, he explains some of the ways in which cultural nationalist readings concerned with revivalism and myth have been subject to critique and scepticism. Joyce and Beckett, he points out, both welcomed such revisionings, and the general urge of reading against the grain has been directed by the modernist need to demythologise the 'nature' of Irish cultural and national identity.242 Irish studies, he suggests, is still working within a 'transitional paradigm', moving between tradition and innovation. He writes that this





Precisely as a collage of modern and traditional motifs, this third narrative tendency cannot strictly be confined to either modernist or revivalist categories. It may be termed postmodernism to the extent that it borrows freely from the idioms of both modernity and tradition, one moment endorsing a deconstruction of tradition, another reinventing and rewriting the stories of the past transmitted by cultural memory. (T, 14) Kearney then goes on to develop some of the implications of this transitional period, explaining the kinds of crisis it has led to, for example, in trying to explain the complexities of history, and in doing so he gives literary examples. For Irish authors, being between two worlds has often led to a sense of exile, literal and metaphorical, so that 'they often write as emigres of the imagination, conveying the feeling of both being part and not part of their culture, of being estranged from the very traditions to which they belong, of being in exile while even at home' (T, 14). While Scottish studies has noticeably been hesitant to address the implications of both modernism and 'mediational modernism' or postmodernism, recent Scottish fiction, as discussed in Chapter 3, has often been concerned with these themes of exile and estrangement. So while there has been an impulse within Scottish literature to experiment with these new possibilities of identity, in criticism there has been a repeated recourse to more traditional formulations of identity, an anxiety about potentially losing hold of the bedrock of tradition. As discussed earlier, however, it is not the aim of postnationalism and 'mediational modernism' to disregard historical conceptions and stereotypical definitions of nationhood; rather they invoke a critical interrogation and selfconsciousness of their basic tenets in order to assess their present viability. It is this approach that should be welcomed in Scottish studies, where too often national identity has been hastily assumed. It might also be suggested that Scottish studies could therefore benefit from more reflection on MacDiarmid's 'infinite', as discussed in Chapter 1, which contains an implicit awareness of the sublime and the ultimate open-endedness of national identity.



need to mediate between the two poles of the transitional paradigm can either be explained in terms of either a 'mediational modernism' or 'postmodernism'. He is keen to point out that this third, interstitial position involves a revisioning and discursive involvement with both positions, yet which cannot finally be reducible to either:


In the new European dispensation, nation-states will, arguably, become increasingly anachronistic. Power will be disseminated upwards from the state to transnational government and downwards to subnational government. In this context, future identities may, conceivably, be less nation-statist and more local and cosmopolitan. (PI, 15) It is therefore these kinds of concerns that are now affecting the future direction of national identity, and which should be given more consideration from a Scottish perspective. Where in the past it may have been necessary to shape Scottish culture in direct alignment with politics at a national level (for example, in terms of cultural nationalism), there is perhaps now the need to recognise that these models are becoming increasingly anachronistic. It could be argued that in post-Devolution Scotland such formulations are not as convincing as they perhaps once were, where renewed political confidence has weakened the previous dependency between culture and politics. The general move into postnationalism and deterritorialisation that is being advocated here is consequently one that will be able to critique previous formulations and structures of nationalism, without abandoning either the foundations of national identity or that of the nation-state.243 In Postnationalist Ireland, Kearney suggests that what is now required is a kind of postmodern hermeneutic that will be able to interrogate nationalism, whilst being able to salvage what is potentially useful within it in order to build upon postnationalism. Postmodernism, in questioning the construction of history and by rupturing fixed notions of the collective in order to illuminate alterity, therefore has strong links with postnationalism.244 For Kearney, postmodernism offers a way of representing national identity and nations without finally collapsing these into rigid, unaccommodating stereotypes: 'Thus the modern idea of a millenarian state in which cultural and political differences might be consumed into consensus is challenged by the postmodern preference for dissensus - diversity without synthesis' (PI, 65). It is this concern with a postmodern hermeneutic and notion of 'dissensus' that can be linked to deterritorialisation and a possible 'ethics of deterritorialisation'. If national identity is becoming increasingly cosmopolitan, so that an increasing tension exists between the nation and what lies beyond, then it is also apposite that this should now be more widely recognised in formulations of Scottish national identity.



Writing about this re-structuring of nation-states, Kearney has suggested that:

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha maps out the need for a developed understanding of postcolonialism as part of a necessary re-thinking of culture in the West. According to Bhabha, postcolonialism should be concerned with the drive for cultural difference rather than diversity. Whereas cultural diversity is often associated with liberal notions of multiculturalism and concepts of difference within relatively stable communities, cultural difference represents a break from this kind of 'temporality': What is required is to demonstrate another territory of translation, another testimony of analytical argument, a different engagement in the politics of and around cultural domination. What this other site for theory might be will become clearer if we see first that many poststructuralist ideas are themselves opposed to Enlightenment humanism and aesthetics. They constitute no less than a deconstruction of the moment of the modern, its legal values, its literary tastes, its philosophical and political categorical imperatives. Secondly, and more importantly, we must rehistoricize the moment of 'the emergence of the sign', of 'the question of the subject', or the 'discursive construction of social reality' to quote a few popular topics of contemporary theory. This can only happen if we relocate the referential and institutional demands of such theoretical work in the field of cultural difference - not cultural diversity.245 For Bhabha, this move towards cultural difference is necessary if concepts of culture and community are to become more inclusive, more reflective of changes now taking place within and between modern nation-states, such as the effects of migration and diaspora. In this respect there is also a link to Kearney, his call for the development of a postmodern hermeneutic based upon dissensus rather than synthesis. Cultural difference, Bhabha 141



Conclusion

points out, is therefore concerned with interrogating the authority of cultural synthesis, operating instead as a challenge to such notions.246 While some critics have been hostile to this kind of embrace of postmodern alterity, viewing it as a move towards a form of random pluralism, Bhabha insists that this is not the case. Although Bhabha's conception of postcolonial cultural difference is based upon a rejection of stable-subject communities and culture as the product of individualism, this does not imply that his more poststructural approach therefore invites a cultural void. Rather, he points out, this theoretical position should encourage an active negotiation between and through discourses, helping to re-envisage culture and communities, while at the same time pointing to their inevitable incompleteness.247 It is this need to critique the often undesirable effects of identitythinking that have been addressed throughout this book. While there has been a concern with the possible effects of postmodernism on Scottish national identity, there has also been a consequent need to 'defend' Scottishness, to show that deconstructive readings do not abandon cultural or political forms of identity either. Emerging from this, therefore, is the need for theoretical discourses that will be able to mediate through what Kearney has referred to as this 'transitional moment'. In the Introduction, it was suggested that many beneficial comparative links could now be made between Scottish and Irish studies. While there have been many intense debates in Irish studies surrounding issues of postmodern national identities, postcolonialism and the 'Tradition', from a Scottish perspective these have been relatively sparse. The aim of this conclusion, therefore, will be to address the brief emergence of these issues in Scottish studies, before going on to suggest what might be gained from more critical engagement with the Irish context.

Scottish Postcolonialism and Cultural Difference While there has been a growing tendency within Scottish studies to critique essentialist notions of Scottishness, this has often been carried out precisely in order to reinstate stable readings of nationhood. Referring to the title of the Scotlands journal, a publication that sought to selfconsciously engage with the open-endedness of nationhood, Berthold Schoene has suggested that this impulse paradoxically often serves to reinstate territory:



142 Conclusion

The seemingly ingenious critical manoeuvre of Scottish intellectuals simply to replace monolithic SCOTLAND with the more pluralistic notion of SCOTLANDS bears its own ideological quandary. While ostensibly acknowledging and even promoting cultural diversity, it is like the older label - still a territorial, historically pre-encoded and hence potentially essentialist term which serves to identify, isolate and exclude both internal and external 'aliens' by clearly distinguishing what is Scottish from what is un-Scottish... Due to its inherent culturally and historically hegemonic territorialism - undiminished by increasing Europeanisation - SCOTLANDS precludes incoming and intrinsic differences from manifesting themselves and exerting an influence, from 'taking place'. Rather, it endorses an inward process of homogenisation, subsuming emergent cultural differences and trying to collapse them under the all-overshadowing tartan umbrella of what is traditionally perceived to be truly or typically Scottish.248 So while there has been at least a partial, gestural move towards antifoundationalism, there has also been a recurring tendency to adopt the rhetoric of contemporary theory, giving Scottish national identity a 'postmodern gloss', without incurring any noticeable forms of destabilisation. It has therefore become fashionable to speak of many 'Scotlands', while, contradictively, holding on to and therefore strengthening cultural nationalist readings of the Tradition. In their Scotlands articles both Berthold Schoene and Michael Gardiner have pointed towards the importance of postcolonial readings of Scottishness. In 'A Passage to Scotland: Scottish Literature and the British Postcolonial Condition' (1995), Schoene suggests that in its historical tensions and diversity, Scottish literature can be seen as postcolonial, while at the same time pointing towards some possible pitfalls of such readings. As a Western discourse, and as many other critics have pointed out, the danger exists that theories of postcolonialism will, in the end, uphold the ideological power of the imperial centre, rather than re-prioritise power relations. Schoene points out that this move towards postcolonialism in a Scottish context might therefore ironically lead to 'further Anglicisation, relating Scotland's cultural production once again to that of an alleged English centre'.249 However, in making these comments, he also suggests that the postcolonial concern with difference will help to open out the concept of Scottishness in much needed ways.250 In particular, the postcolonial concern with cultural critique will help to provide more representative forms of Scottishness:



Conclusion 143

Contemporary Scottish literature shows as much diversity as any other national literature that has made the step from modernism to postmodernism. Racist critical concepts like that of a 'Caledonia antisyzygy', which regards the Scottish psyche as profoundly harmed by its historical experience to the extent that it has become irrevocably schizophrenic, do not any longer apply. The aim of contemporary Scottish literature is to emphasise individuality and intra-communal difference rather than to construct dubious all-in-one myths of a nationalist quality. While retaining its own characteristic timbre and twist it has become truly cosmopolitan.251 In 'Democracy and Scottish Postcoloniality' (1996), Michael Gardiner draws a helpful distinction between post-colonialism and the postcolonial: Post-colonial describes a situation where a power has retreated after a colonial period; postcolonial, in current usage, describes tendencies in cultural and institutional structures which foreground questions of race, sovereignty, and nationhood, with the colonial temporality of progress readable in terms of present identifications. So postcolonial situations are often post-colonial but enquiries which try to conflate the two, as in the historical investigation of whether Scotland has ever been treated as a colony, are often harmfully substituted for the positive move of using postcolonial qualities to develop political articulations, textual strategy.252 For Gardiner also, then, postcolonialism is connected with a necessary search for cultural difference as a means of avoiding the 'ethnicist trap'.253 In Scottish studies, Gardiner points out, there is too often a resort to ethnic nationalism, and it is in this respect that Bhabha's textual strategy of cultural resistance may prove useful in challenging such assumptions.254 Gardiner then goes on to cite Stuart Hall's notion of cultural 'positioning': The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual 'past' since our relation to it, like the child's relation to the mother, is always-already 'after the break'...Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history. Not an essence 255

but a positioning. Perhaps this move towards active cultural 'positioning' and the recognition of 'suture' may also act as a means of challenging the recurring es-



144 Conclusion

sentialism within Scottish studies. In this sense, 'positioning' might be more akin to Spivak's 'strategic essentialism'. For Spivak, 'strategic essentialism' comes into play when the post-colonial meets the postcolonial, when, for example, postcolonial theory is used to advance the position of the subaltern.256 As Gardiner points out, however, Scotland cannot be seen as strictly post-colonial. Yet it may still be useful to think of 'strategic essentialism' in the Scottish context as a way of connecting postcolonial theory with 'Scottishness'; that is, as a means of provisionally being able to 'locate' political and cultural referents of Scottishness within the realm of postcolonial cultural difference. Such a move towards 'positioning' and 'strategic essentialism' may then help to counter the notion of Scottishness as the product of cultural nationalism. In exposing the antiteleological 'nature' of Scottishness, encouraging the notion of Scotland as a non-foundational 'entity' in a theoretical sense, this positioning would also be more conducive to cultural critique. This 'strategic' approach to national identity would also therefore be more open to political forms of nationalism and to political forces now affecting the foundations of the nation-state, foregrounding the need for inclusion and the interrogation of territory, rather than an acceptance of historical and cultural ho257

mogeneity. Irish Studies: Revisionism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism While many useful connections might be established between Scottish and Irish studies, there are inevitably significant historical and political factors which keep them irrevocably distinct. This section will examine some of the recent concerns of Irish studies in order to show how Scottish studies might benefit from more broad reflection in such areas. The overall aim will therefore be to illustrate how some of these cultural complexities might be of use in the theoretical opening out of Scottish studies, while trying to consciously avoid the construction of questionable cultural and political reductions. In The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Edna Longley exposes some of the ways in which Irish literature and culture have often been accounted for in Nationalist terms, often at the expense, she suggests, of overshadowing other sections of Irish society (mainly of Protestants in the North).258 For Longley, the recent concerns with cultural difference and postcolonialism are also problematic, as they tend to generate and perpetuate these Nationalist assumptions rather than opening out identity or questioning the nature of inclusion.259 Consequently, Irish stud-



Conclusion 145

146 Conclusion

Seamus Deane and others insist that perceptions of Ireland are unduly determined by stereotypical representations, especially by the afterglow of Mathew Arnold's broodings on the Celt. But it may also be the case that perceptions of Irish literature are unduly determined by assumptions - mainly Nationalist assumptions - about Ireland. If one reading produces too many peasants in the twilight, another may produce too many colonisers in the text... since much Modernist thinking depends on literary events in Ireland at the turn of the century, to revise Irish literary history might lead to other revisions. (TLS, 10) The turn towards 'revisionism' is therefore intended to critique such Nationalist bias, attempting to break away from 'fossilised' readings of national identity.260 In her readings of Irishness, Longley is keen to explore the ways in which Nationalist critics often claim to be rejecting essentialist accounts of nationhood while simultaneously, overtly or covertly, asserting them. In this respect, there may be a connection here with Scottish studies and what was suggested in Chapter 2 as an uncritical dependency on essentialist notions in order to justify the Tradition. Chapter 2 explored some of the ways in which Scottish critics often depend on a form of circular rhetoric, where, for example, Craig asserts the need for postmodern and poststructural accounts of Scottishness, while noticeably dismissing the implications of these in justifying his own 'coherent' construction. It is therefore interesting to observe that a similar impulse exists in Irish studies. Referring to the Nationalist critic Seamus Deane, Longley writes: Deane's criticism frequently travels in a loop whereby he first seeks to disprove such a thing as an Irish national character or an Irish fate or an Irish destiny; but then reverts to Nationalist language: 'It is indeed true that we have in this island, over a very long time, produced a literature or a form of writing which is unique to us'. Deane's other loop, or contrary gyre, is to resist the 'promiscuous embrace of pluralism', even while scorning words like 'tradition', 'identity'... and their sticky swarm of relatives. (TLS, 25) It is therefore this impetus to resist closure that might be gained from Longley's approach to the revision of national identity. While Longley is critical of postcolonialism in an Irish context, Revisionism can perhaps be



ies, she feels, has often simplified the nature of Irishness in order to suit its own Nationalist agenda:

associated with forms of postcolonial cultural resistance in its unearthing of alternatives. While issues of Revisionism in Irish studies remain highly contentious, it is nonetheless being proposed that this urge to critique and expose covert Nationalist bias could only prove useful to Scottish studies, a discipline that has rarely examined the critical foundations of its 'own' construction. In her reading of Seamus Deane's Nationalist accounts, Longley suggests that 'Deane reads all Irish identity up to and back from the present moment as "a long colonial concussion'" (TLS, 28). This broad application of colonialism is problematic for Longley, and, like Schoene, she is concerned with challenging the 'one-size-fits-all zeal' of many cultural critics (TLS, 30). Although the term 'colonial' might be used to describe some aspects of Irish experience, Longley points out that it is too often applied in monolithic terms and therefore misrepresentative in this way. This is also the problem of postcolonialism for Longley. Irish Postcolonial criticism, she suggests, often depends on Nationalist conceptions, which tend to essentialise the past in order to stress the damaging effects of colonialism.261 Whereas Longley rejects the postcolonial approach on the grounds that it tends to perpetuate Nationalist constructions of identity, many Nationalist critics have similarly rejected postcolonialism for different reasons.262 In 'The Past, the Post, and the Utterly Changed: Intellectual Responsibility and Irish Cultural Criticism', Gerry Smyth suggests that postcolonial frameworks are doubtful for Ireland as they consistently fail to provide an adequate means of representing the processes of decolonisation.263 Postcolonial theory, he points out, in its concern with forms of postmodern alterity and interconnections with poststructural thought, often leads to the creation of theoretical discourses that fail to specifically address the political complexities of the nation to which it is then loosely and generally applied.264 In a later article in Irish Studies Review, Smyth continues this idea, suggesting that while postcolonialism has been useful in generating a more self-conscious Irish studies, it has simultaneously also helped to create an approach to nationhood that tends to deny the political power of the subject: At this stage, however, I believe that it is necessary to confront the impasse imported into Irish studies as part of the postcolonial package, an impasse summed up by Spivak's ambiguous response to the question she sets herself as postcolonial critic: Can the subaltern speak? For what she is forced to acknowledge in that particular essay is the inability of any of the dominant post-structuralist-inspired theories of post-



Conclusion 147

colonialism (Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida are her principle examples) to confront the historical subject (or the subject of history) in any way that does not merely reconfigure existing power relations and once again deny the Other a voice... Spivak's suspicion that the "intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self's shadow" haunts postcolonial criticism, placing a question mark over even the most radical or recuperative intervention.265 For Smyth, postcolonial criticism, and notions such as 'strategic essentialism' that it fosters, can in fact be regarded as decadent rather than a radical means of rearticulating nationhood. Consequently, it can be associated more with bad faith and arrogance, than as a helpful means of understanding contemporary Irish experience: At this stage, however, there seems something fairly decadent about the characteristically 'strategic' element of Spivak's and Bhabha's critical vision. This may just be to do with fashion and familiarity, but all that irony now appears somewhat calculated and, in the light of developments throughout the 1990s in a number of academic and political contexts, not a little precipitous. The problem is also a result, however, of postcolonial theory's infelicitous connection with the two other 'postal' discourses dominating the Western institutional-intellectual complex at the end of the century: post-structuralism and postmodernism. Postcolonial theory has been drawn, it has been claimed, towards the more politically quietistic modes of post-structuralist thought, with the result that critics and historians have become locked into a pattern of antithetical thinking characterised as 'reactive, sterile and deadlocked'.266 In his contributions to this debate over the role of postcolonialism, Willy Maley articulates similar reservations. Maley is concerned with the general turn towards 'postal' theory in Irish studies, the turn towards postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and postnationalism, and he questions their viability as a means of accurately representing the complexity of political realities. Maley is therefore troubled by the contemporary urge to get beyond the nation: Is the 'post' in post-colonialism the same as the 'post' in postnationalism? There seems to be a certain 'chronologocentrism' at work, as well as a desire, premature in my view, to be done with nationalism. Anachrony, belatedness, and untimeliness are the stuff of every



148 Conclusion

'postism'... I find myself unable either to subscribe to an uncritical nationalism or to endorse an equally essentialising revisionism. I am worried by the ease with which some critics can imagine themselves to be beyond nationalism, and troubled by the possibility that complacency and hypocrisy may allow a more insidious form of nationalist discourse to insinuate itself as an apparent alternative to nationalism.267 While many Revisionist critics accuse Nationalists of homogenising discourses of national identity in order to accommodate their own agendas, Maley stresses that Revisionists, ironically, often tend to homogenise nationalism in order to then undermine its political intentions. There have consequently been many contentious debates between Revisionists and Nationalists, and it is not the objective of this Conclusion to illustrate these in detail. Rather, by looking broadly at some of these concerns it is hoped that some parallels might be made with contemporary Scottish studies. While postcolonial theory, as defined by critics such as Bhabha, can be applied generally to any modern nation, when applied specifically it will clearly always generate another series of discourses particular to that nation. Therefore, the kinds of postcolonialism that have emerged in Scotland and Ireland must in some respects be regarded as distinct and unrelated. Yet, as with common theoretical concerns of, for example, postmodernism and postnationalism, broad comparative characteristics may prove useful. The debates that have emerged in Irish studies surrounding Revisionism and Nationalism may themselves be connected to Kearney's notion of a 'mediational modernism', or postmodernism, where the nation is clearly seen to be undergoing a period of transition. The fluctuation between these discourses, therefore, can be identified with the need to locate interstitial positions from which to renegotiate the changing structures of nationhood and community. This sense of transition is particularly acute within small nations, where its effects are often brought into focus more readily.268 In this respect, Ireland once again serves as an apposite comparative model for Scotland. Where in Irish studies there have been many rich debates surrounding the impact of 'postal' theory, Scottish studies has clearly made some tentative steps towards self-critique, though has repeatedly been unable to move beyond the framework of cultural nationalism. The aim of this book, therefore, has been to encourage this much needed critical debate and opening out of nationhood and national identity. While some critical discourses, such as postcolonialism, are often revealed to contain nationalist bias, the role of an ethical approach to national identity, as advanced here, would be to interrogate such assump-



Conclusion 149

150 Conclusion


tions in order to foster forms of critical traditionalism rather than an unquestioning acceptance of previous models.


Introduction 1

Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994), (p.27).

2

Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), (p.2). The 'Caledonian Antisyzygy' refers to the concept of a split personality, usually attributed to literary texts such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The concept originates in G. Gregory Smith's Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (1919). It has subsequently been adopted by many writers and critics, including Muir and MacDiarmid. This 'split personality' is often defended as a particularly Scottish trait, an essential characteristic of both 'the nation' and 'its people'. Although it seems peculiarly romantic and out of date, it is nonetheless still upheld by some contemporary Scottish critics.

3

4

For a discussion of 'strategic essentialism' see Spivak's The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).

5

Gerry Smyth, 'Irish Studies, Postcolonial Theory and the "New" Essentialism', Irish Studies Review, Vol. 7, No.2 (1999), pp.211-220, (p.212). In The Living Stream, Edna Longley similarly warns against the possible 'fossilisation' of Irish national identity. (TLS, 176). Quoted in John S. Rickard (ed.), Irishness and (Post)Modernism (London & Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1994), (p.15). Describing her own resistance to Nationalist narratives, Longley writes: 'My own critical approach owes something, though I hope not everything, to a particular background. Autobiographical angles on history seem as inescapable in Irish criticism as in Irish literature. So a few years ago, like the man who found out he had been speaking prose all his life, I realised that I might be a 'revisionist' literary critic. Revisionism is a shorthand and quasi-abusive term for historical studies held to be at odds with the founding ideology of the Irish Free State (Republic of Ireland since 1948). Whether malign historians have indeed caused subsidence under the Nationalist grand narrative, or whether its foundations have always quaked, I was brought up in one of the cracks that are now highly visible.' (TLS, p. 10).

6 7 8

9

Here Kearney refers specifically to Lyotard's Peregrinations and the concept of small narratives: 'To the extent that we can speak here of a political or ethical community, it

151



Notes

152 Notes

10

To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the unhomely be easily accommodated in that familiar division of the social life into private and the public spheres... In that displacement, the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting... In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible. It has less to do with forcible eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social accommodation or historical migrations and cultural relocations... The unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in-thehome, the home-in-the-world.' Homi K. Bhabha, 'The World and the Home' in McClintock, Mufti and Shohat (eds.) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp.445-455, (p.445).

Chapter 1 11 12 13

14

Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd, 1936), (p.13) Joy Hendry, 'Editorial', Chapman 35/36 (1983), (p.l). 'The pre-requisite of an autonomous literature is a homogenous language... A common language of this kind can only be conceived, it seems to me, as an achievement continuously created and preserved by the highest spiritual energy of a people: the nursing ground and guarantee of all that is best in its thought and imagination: and without it no people can have any standard of literature. For this homogenous language is the only means yet discovered for expressing the response of a whole people, emotional and intellectual, to a specific body of experience peculiar to it alone, on all the levels of thought from discursive reason to poetry. And since some time in the sixteenth century Scotland has lacked such a language.' (SS, 19-20). 'In an organic literature poetry is always influencing prose, and prose poetry; and their interaction energises them both. Scottish poetry exists in a vacuum; it neither acts on the rest of literature nor reacts to it; and consequently it has shrunk to the level of anonymous folk-song. Hugh MacDiarmid has recently tried to revive it by impregnating it all with all the contemporary influences of Europe one after another, and thus galvanise it into life by a series of violent shocks. In carrying out this experiment he has written some remarkable poetry; but he has left Scottish verse very much where it was before... Scots poetry can only be revived, that is to say, when Scotsmen begin to think naturally in Scots. The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of the whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind'. (SS, 21-22).



is one which "always remains in statu nascendi or morendi, always keeping open the issue of whether or not it actually exists".' (PI, 63).

15

T.S. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism' in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), pp.23-37, pp. 23-24.

16 17 18 19 20

Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: The Hogarth Press, 1954), pp. 91-92 Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1999), p.225. Alan Bold, 'An Open Letter on the Closed Mind', Chapman 35/36 (1983), (p.2). 'An Open Letter on the Closed Mind', (p.2). Alasdair Gray, 'A Modest Proposal for By-Passing a Predicament' Chapman 35/36 (1983), (p.9).

21

William Power, Literature and Oatmeal: What Literature has meant to Scotland (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1935), p.174.

22

In Landscape and Light: Essays by Neil M. Gunn, Alasdair MacLeery (ed.), (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), p.85.

23

See Edward J Cowan and Richard Finlay with William Paul, Scotland since 1688: Struggle for a Nation (London: Cima Books, 2000), p.74.

24

Ian Campbell, Kailyard (Edinburgh: The Ramsay Head Press, 1981), p.9.

25

Ibid, p.11.

26 27

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.30. Power, Literature and Oatmeal, p. 183.

28 29

JWtf,p.l81. See for example The Modern Scot edited by J.H. Whyte, MacDiarmid's Scottish Chapbook and William Power's Scots Observer. Anonymous, 'Post-War Scotland: A Letter to a P.E.N. Delegate', The Modern Scot, Vol. V, No. 1-2, June 1934, pp.5-19, p.6. See Richard J Finlay 'National Identity in Crisis: Politicians, Intellectuals and the "End of Scotland", 1920-1939' in Anthony Cooke (ed.) Modern Scottish History 1707 to the Present (East Iinton: Tuckwell Press, 1998), pp.13-32. Andrew Noble cites this statement by Muir in his introduction to Edwin Muir: Uncollected Scottish Criticism (London: Vision Press, 1982), (p.37). 'It is of living importance to Scotland that it should maintain and be able to assert its identity; it cannot do so unless it feels itself a unity; and it cannot feel itself a unity on a plane which has a right to human respect unless it can create an autonomous literature. Otherwise it must remain in essence a barbarous country.' (SS, 182). Muir states 'I think I am clear too on this further point; that Scottish literature as such will disappear, and that London will become quite literally the capital of the British Isles in a sense that it has never quite yet been; that, in other words, it will become our national capital in just as real a sense as it is the capital of an ordinary English man today'. Quoted in the Introduction, (EMUSC, 36).

30 31

32 33

34

35

Quoted by Noble in the Introduction. (EMUSC, 100).

36

See Alan Massie's introduction to the reprinted Scott and Scotland, (p.xxiv).



Notes 153

37

Referring to Muir in The Break-up of Britain, Tom Nairn comments 'A markedly oneiric element has crept into the argument somehow, and one wants to rub one's eyes. Can anybody really think this? Not only somebody, but most literary nationalists: it should not be imagined that this position represents a personal vagary of the author. It does have a bizarre dream-logic to it. Muir himself took his pessimism so seriously that not even nationalism seemed a solution to him. But broadly speaking the dream in question is that of romantic nationalism, and the logic is as follows: modern Scottish society does not fit it, and one has to explain why; since the idea-world (roots, organs, and all) is all right, and has unchallengeable status, it has to be Scotland which is wrong; therefore Scottish society and history are monstrously misshapen in some way, blighted by Original Sin; therefore one should look further back for whatever led to the frightful Enlightenment ("arid intellect", etc.) and the Industrial Revolution; the Reformation is the obvious candidate, so before that things were pretty sound (a safe hypothesis, given the extent of knowledge about the 15th century in modern Scotland).' (London: NLB, 1977), (p.122).

38

'On 26th August 1922 the first number of the Scottish Chapbook appeared, edited and published by CM. Grieve from 16 Links Avenue, Montrose. The Chapbook was advertised under the slogan, "Not Traditions - Precedents!"...' Duncan Glen, Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance (Edinburgh and London: W. & R. Chambers Ltd., 1964), (p.74). Commenting on the some of the underlying reasons for the emergence of the Modernist Renaissance, Duncan Glen writes: 'Many of the young Scottish writers who returned to Scotland after the 1914-1918 war filled with nationalistic feelings soon began to see their country as culturally bankrupt and in grave danger of losing its national identity in the larger political entity of Great Britain which is dominated by England. They saw Scottish education as being almost wholly anglicised - Scottish history and literature being neglected. They pointed to the lack of a Scottish national drama and of a school of native composers and dismissed what was popularly regarded as distinctively Scottish literature as being quite unworthy of the genuine Scottish literary tradition which had been weakened and corrupted by anglicisation. The remainder of Scottish writing they regarded as tributary to English literature and of little consequence to the mainstream of the English tradition. Having rejected the contemporary concept of Scottish culture, they looked for a revival of the Scottish traditions which had been submerged by anglicisation. Indeed, inspired by CM. Grieve, or "Hugh MacDiarmid", as he is perhaps better known, some of them came to believe that the only hope for a distinctively Scottish literature was through a revival of the native languages of Scotland - Scots and Gaelic; that the revival should not be built on Scotland's affinities with England but on the differences between the two countries.' Introduction, (HMSR, 1).

39



154 Notes

40

'In his attempt to create a medium "capable of addressing the full range of literary purpose" he drew on words from the various Scots dialects and further strengthened the language by reviving words which had disappeared from modern speech - words from the mediaeval poets - or as MacDiarmid said: "words and idioms from all the dialects and all the periods". In addition he was also to use words or phrases from other languages, including Gaelic... This language created by MacDiarmid became known in the 'twenties as "synthetic Scots" and its creator used the term in the sense of synthesising or "gathering together and reintegrating all the disjecta membra of the Doric".' (HMSR, 33).

41

'If there is to be a Scottish literary revival the first essential is to get rid of our provinciality of outlook and to avail ourselves of Continental experience. The prevalent indifference in Scotland to foreign literature is itself one of the causes of the continued domination and subversion of Scottish literature by English literature.' Quoted in HMSR, (p.73).

42

Gray, 'A Modest Proposal for By-passing a Predicament', (p.9).

43

Ibid, (p.8).

44

Selected Poems, (pp. 31-32).

45 46

Ibid, (p.108). Hugh MacDiarmid, Albyn: or Scotland and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, 1927), (p.36). 'At first blush there may seem little enough connection between such phenomena as the Clyde Rebels, the Scottish Home Rule Movement, the "Irish Invasion" of Scotland, and the campaign to resuscitate Braid Scots and Gaelic. But, adopting the Spenglerian philosophy, the Renaissance movement regards itself as an effort in every aspect of the national life to supplant the elements at present predominant by the other elements they have suppressed, and thus reverse the existing order. Or, in terms of psychology, the effort is to relieve the inhibitions imposed by English and Anglo-Scottish influences and to inhibit in turn those factors of Scottish psychology which have rendered it amenable to the post-Union state of affairs.' (A, 6-7). An interesting parallel could be made here between the relative 'belatedness' of Scottish nationalism, as defined by Tom Nairn, and this absence of publishing houses and capital in the North. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson attaches the defining moment of the emergence of nationalism to the growth of print capitalism. Perhaps limited forms of print capitalism in Scotland, then, could be linked to the historical absence of nationalism. In Albyn, MacDiarmid also comments on this belatedness: 'Scotland is unique among European nations in its failure to develop a nationalist sentiment strong enough to be a vital factor in its affairs... The reason probably lies in the fact that no comprehensive-enough agency has emerged; and the commonsense of our people has rejected one-sided expedients incapable of addressing the organic complexity of our national life. For it must be recognised that the absence of nationalism is,

47

48



Notes 155

paradoxically, a form of Scottish self-determination. If that self-determination, which... has reduced Scottish arts and affairs to a lamentable pass is to be induced to take different forms and to express itself in a diametrically opposite direction to that which it has taken for the past two hundred and twenty years, the persuading programme must embody considerations of superior power to those which have so long ensured the opposite process.' (A, 48). 49

In Scott and Scotland Muir writes 'Scottish writers have certainly a strong sense of the many-sided-ness of life, of the poetic side of the prosaic, and still more of the prosaic side of the poetic, as is shown so clearly by Burns and Scott in their juxtapositions of tragedy and comedy, of the lofty and the humorous. These juxtapositions are admirable, and they require a very fine balance of imagination. But Scottish fantastic poetry seems to me not to touch the second room of life at all; it is a pure escape, a pure holiday, whose ruling spirit is a Protestant Pope of Unreason...' (SS, 101). In Albyn, MacDiarmid writes 'The effect of Burns' work on Scots poetry is well-known. It has reduced it to a level beneath contempt. Little or no poetry that has been produced in Scots since Burns' day has been of a quality to support comparison for a moment with the average of contemporary poetry in any other European country. It is all of the kailyard kind; sentimental, moralising, flatfooted, and with little or no relation to reality.' (A, 37).

50

Edward J. Cowan and Richard Finlay with William Paul, Scotland since 1688: Struggle for a Nation, (London: Cima Books, 2000), p.l 15. Ibid,p.U6. Catherine Carswell, Open the Door! (London: Virago, 1986), p.38. Quoted in Alison Smith's 'And Woman Created Woman: Carswell, Shepherd and Muir, and the Self-made Woman' in Christopher Whyte (ed.) Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), pp.25-47,p.31. Willa Muir, Imagined Selves (ed.) Kirsty Allen (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1996), p.64. See Moira Burgess Imagine a City: Glasgow in Fiction (Glendaruel: Argyll Publishing, 1989), p. 133. See Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Poems, Alan Riach and Michael Grieve (eds), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p.xviii. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), (p.7).

51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

(NN, 309). As will be discussed in the next chapter, Benedict Anderson's account of the horizontal and vertical axes is slightly different. For Anderson, the horizontal represents the way in which citizens are bound to the nation through the effects of government and official national structures (he refers to the national census as an example of this). The vertical, on the other hand, refers to the ways in which citizens are



156 Notes

Notes 157

59

Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), (p.4).

60 61

Ibid,p.23 'The nomad enacts transitions without a teleological purpose; Deleuze also gives as an example of this nomadic mode thefigurationthe "rhizome". The rhizome is a root that grows underground, sideways; Deleuze plays it against the linear roots of trees. By extension, it is "as i f the rhizomatic mode expressed a nonphallogocentric way of thinking: secret, lateral, spreading, as opposed to the visible, vertical ramifications of Western ways of knowledge. By extension, the rhizome stands for a nomadic political ontology that, not unlike Donna Haraway's "cyborg"... provides movable foundations for a post-humanist view of subjectivity. Nomadic consciousness is a form of political resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity.' Ibid, p.23.

62

'Nomadic cartographies need to be redrafted constantly; as such they are structurally opposed to fixity and therefore to rapacious appropriation. The nomad has a sharpened sense of territory but no possessiveness about it.' Ibid, p. 35-6.

63

John Osmond, The Divided Kingdom (London: Constable, 1988), (p.93).

64 Cairns Craig, 'Across the Divide' Radical Scotland, April/ May (1983), pp.24-25, 65

(P-24). Christopher Whyte, 'Out of a Predicament', Radical Scotland October/ November (1983), pp.20-21, (p.20). In this article Whyte stresses the need for more expansive accounts of national culture. He writes: 'Therefore the new Scottish identity or awareness which eventually arises will bear little resemblance to what we now understand as "Scottish". Just now Scotland is a bundle of fragments, of contradictions and antagonisms which, if allowed to find expression, will add up to an identity muchricherand more tolerant than anything we could invent: Highland and Lowland, Gaelic and English-speaking, a Scots-speaking working class and a highly Anglicised middle class, Catholic and Protestant, European and Asiatic, Irish and Scottish and English, and two cities so geographically close yet different in character as Glasgow and Edinburgh... ...since over half the population are women, and there are some sensitive, feminist men around, the hard man can no longer be taken as representative of Scotland. A new Scottish identity won't exclude the experience of women, of gays, of children, or our fundamental awareness of pervasive urban misery, of what oppression and defeat are like.' (p.21).

66 67

'Across the Divide', (p.25). 'An Open Letter ', (p.4).

68

For a discussion of cultural inferiorism see The Eclipse of Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1989) by Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull. This will also be discussed in more detail in Chapter Two.



bound to the nation through, what he terms, their unboundness. This refers to the ways in which they individually imagine themselves to be bound by it.

158 Notes

71 Ibid, (p.32). 72 In Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds) The Scottish Novel since the Seventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp.217-231, (p.217). 73 Lorn Maclntyre 'Confessions of a Justified High Flyer' Glasgow Herald 5 February 1994, (p.ll). 74 'The Predicament', (p.34). 75

Alasdair Gray, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland: Independence (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1992).

76 Douglas Gifford 'At Last - The Real Scottish Literary Renaissance?' Books in Scotland no.34 (1990), pp.1-4, (p.l). 77 Ibid, (p.l). 78 Gifford writes: 'So what's new about our present revival? Is it in its turn going to be seen as energetic, interesting, but short-lived, and unrepresentative of a "whole" Scotland?' (p.l). 79 'John Byrne is the type of this new, stylish, confident Scottishness; moving through parody of American and Scottish lifestyles, his protagonists are closer to America, Hollywood and the rock and roll era than to either a Scottish traditional past or an English tradition - and his Scottishness sees no boundaries to its communication', (p.4). Throughout this article Gifford tends to ironically suggest the need for a Scotland 'without boundaries', while simultaneously hoping to reassert them. 80 Ibid, (pA). 81 Ibid, (p.4). 82 For a further discussion of how Scottishness is formed through Englishness see Cairns Craig's Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). 83 'One might say that a process of "canon-formation", guided but not dictated by consumer forces, in ways that have not been seen before, has come into being over the last fifteen years or so. I use "canon" here specifically as a piece of shorthand for what has been termed "the glacially changing core" of consensus about certain novels that is surrounded by "the rapidly changing periphery" of debate about others.' See Richard Todd Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), (p.3). 84 In Politics and Society in Scotland (London: Macmillan, 1996), Alice Brown, David McCrone and Lindsay Paterson comment on this postmodern fragmentation of national identity. They suggest: 'National identities become more problematic as conventional state identities are corroded by the forces of globalisation which shift the classical sociological focus away from the assumption that 'societies' are well-bounded social,



69 'An Open Letter', (p.4). 70 David Black, 'The Predicament of the Scottish Writer', Chapman 35/36 (1983), pp.3234, (p.32).

economic and cultural systems. What replaces conventional state identities is not "cultural homogenisation" in which everyone shares in the same global post-modern identity because they consume the same identity and cultural products; rather, in [Stuart] Hall's words, "We are confronted by a range of different identities, each appealing to us, or rather to different parts of ourselves, from which it seems possible to choose.'" (P-193). 85 Brown, McCrone and Paterson suggest that whereas in the past 'There was little need to ask who we were, because the social structures we lived in allowed us to read off our identities in an unproblematic way,' in more recent times the concept of identity has largely 'come apart' where these previous 'certainties' have now been dissolved. Politics and Society in Scotland, (p.191). This loss of certainty has therefore been central to contemporary constructions of Scottishness. 86 Brown, McCrone and Paterson also refer to this increasing fluidity and contingency of national identity with respect to growing interrelationships between Scotland, Britain and Europe. See Politics and Society in Scotland, (p.210). 87 Francis Russell Hart, The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey, (London: John Murray, 1978), (p.l). 88 For a discussion of mythology in contemporary Scottish fiction see Douglas Gifford's 'Imagining Scotlands: The Return to Mythology in Modern Scottish Fiction' in Susanne Hagemann (ed.) Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, pp.17-49. Gifford writes 'In a sense, contemporary Scottish writing is deciding that, if the ancient traditions and hidden powers of Scotland are dead, then it's necessary to reinvent them. The implications for Scottish social, cultural, and political futures are incalculable, but profound.' (p.49). 89 'The Predicament of the Scottish Writer', Chapman 35/36 (1983), pp.68-71, (p.70). 90 For a discussion of Calvinism see Cairns Craig The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 91 Cairns Craig, 'The Fratricidal Twins: Scottish Literature, Scottish History and the Construction of Scottish Culture' in Douglas Gifford and Edward J. Cowan (eds) The Polar Twins (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1999), pp.19-38, (p.22). 92 In 'A Passage to Scotland: Scottish Literature and the British Postcolonial Condition', Berthold Schoene also suggests that the movement from one literary period to another does not necessarily imply an abandonment of history: 'The writers of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, however, did not invent Scottish identity from scratch. Rather than creating new stories, they remoulded popular mythic self-images from the past with which their Scottish readership was already familiar and thus found it easy to identify. Inevitably, this went hand in hand with a resuscitation and perpetuation of national stereotypes, cliches and prejudices. Accordingly, many literary works of the Scottish Renaissance are as sentimentalising and idealistic in tone, rhetoric and atmosphere as those of the kailyard tradition.' Scotlands, 2:1 (1995), (p.l 13).



Notes 159

160 Notes 93

'The Fratricidal Twins', (p.27)

94 James G. Kellas, Modern Scotland: The Nation since 1870 (London: Pall Mall Press, 1968), p.3. 95

See, for example, Andrew Marr The Day Britain Died, (London: Profile Books, 2000).

96 Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.5. 97

E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth and Reality (Cambridge: Canto, 1997), (p. 191).

98

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), (p.3).

99

See David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London: Routledge, 1996). 'Because Scotland is a nation which is not a state, conventional sociological models - premised on the fusion of nation and state - are of limited utility. Nevertheless, as the nation-state loses its raison d'etre in a world economy, polity and culture, so Scotland seems to provide a glimpse into the future rather than the past. Given that it is locked firmly into an ever-expanding world economy, the assertion of national identity and cultural distinctiveness comes at a most interesting point in history. As such, Scotland stands at the centre of sociological concerns in this (post)modern world.' (p.33).

100 Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: NLB, 1977), (p.359). 101 Joyce McMillan, 'Scotland's Shame', Guardian, 10 August 1999, (p.15). 102 In Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), Murray Pittock adopts this approach to national identity. Commenting on the limitations of Anderson's notion of the 'imagined community', Pittock writes: 'Sociological approaches to nationalism often display severe limitations in the blithe simplicity with which they theorise the depth and variety of the history which generates and absorbs us all: many of the theorists of nationalism do not seem to care overmuch for historical detail or counterfactual evidence. For this reason... the more flexible ideas of writers such as Anthony Smith, who stress continuity and ancestry more than "invention" or "imagination", are to be preferred.' (p. 129). 103 Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), (p.59). 104 Anderson begins The Spectre of Comparisons by stating 'The purposes of this essay are essentially three. The first, and most important, is to reframe the problem of the formation of collective subjectivities in the modern world by consideration of the material, institutional, and discursive bases that necessarily generate two profoundly contrasting types of seriality, which I will call unbound and bound. Unbound seriality,



Chapter 2

Notes 161

nationalists, anarchists, bureaucrats, and workers. It is, for example, the seriality that makes the United Nations a normal, wholly unparadoxical institution. Bound seriality, which has its origins in governmentality, especially in such institutions as the census and the elections, is exemplified by finite series like Asian- Americans, beurs, and Tutsis. It is the seriality that makes a United Ethnicities or a United Identities unthinkable.'(SoC, 29). 105 See, for example, David McCrone, Angela Morris and Richard Kiely's Scotland - The Brand: The Making of Scottish Heritage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995). 106 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998), (p.56). 107 Critics such as Fredric Jameson have welcomed an interrogation of the effects of globalism. Although sceptical of broad postmodernising tendencies, Jameson has called for a need to assess the changes now taking place. See New Left Review no. 4 July/ August (2000), pp.49-69. Jameson focuses here on the need for collective resistance to globalism, examining what he regards as its central components: the technological, political, 108

cultural, economic and social. 'I am aware that this assertion of Scottish belatedness also begs many questions. There is much to say about the precursors of nationalism in the 19th century, like the romantic movement of the 1850s and the successive Home Rule movements between 1880 and 1914... But all that need be said here is that they were quite distinctly precursors, not the thing itself, remarkable in any wider perspective for their feebleness and political ambiguity rather than their prophetic power. While in the 1920s we see by contrast

the emergence of a permanent political movement with the formation of the National Party of Scotland (direct ancestor of the SNP) in 1928. And, just as important, the appearance of the epic poem of modern Scottish nationalism... MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, in 1926.' (TBU, 95). 109 'This is a structural fact about it. And it is a fact to which there are no exceptions: in this sense, it is an exact (not a rhetorical) statement about nationalism to say that it is by nature ambivalent.' (TBU, 348). 110 In his earlier article, 'The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism' Nairn writes that 'The romantic consciousness... could only be an absolute dream to the Scots. Unable to function as ideology, as a moving spirit of history, it too was bound to become a possessing demon. Elsewhere, the revelation of the romantic past and the soul of the people informed some real future - in the Scottish limbo, they were the nation's reality. Romanticism provided - as the Enlightenment could not, for all its brilliance - a surrogate identity... Perhaps this function as substitute consciousness has something to do with the peculiar intensity of Romanticism in Scotland, and with the great signifi-



which has its origins in the print market, especially in newspapers, and in the representations of popular performance, is exemplified by such open-to-the-world plurals as

162 Notes

111 Nairn continues: 'It is the devastating rapidity and scale of the impact of these new conditions that has made Scotland into the exemplar of "neo-nationalism" in this sense. One need only compare the oil industry's arrival to the previous, gradual (and more generally characteristic) infiltration of international corporations into the industrial belt during the 1950s, and 60s, to grasp this.' (TBU, 128). 112 In 'The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism', Nairn is even more cynical of the Scottish 'cultural predicament': 'Sporranry, alcoholism, and the ludicrous appropriation of the remains of Scotland's Celtic fringe as a national symbol, have been celebrated in a million emetic ballads. It is an image further blackened by a sickening militarism, the relic of Scotland's special role in the building up of British imperialism. Yet any judgement on this aspect of Scottish national consciousness ought to be softened by the recognition that these are the pathetic symbols of an inarticulate people unable to forge valid correlates of their different experience: the peculiar crudity of tartanry only corresponds to the peculiarly intense alienation of the Scots on this level.' (p.41). 113 Ibid, (p.52). 114 'Misplaced, sentimental, archaic, it is nonetheless a dream of wholeness - a wholeness which will express life instead of hiding it, which will free the national tongue and will from their secular inhibitions, a realness to startle itself and the watching world. It is a dream of release and affirmation, shared by many; and as such, more important than most of what passes for reality.' Ibid, (p.53). 115 'The contradictions and possibihties of neo-nationalism require far more study. The phenomenon is much too new to allow ready predictions as to its future course. All one can be reasonably sure of is that it will embody contradictions analogous to those of ancestral nationalism: on the one hand, the perspective of liberation to a more genuine democracy or self-rule, accompanied by emergence from debilitating provinciality and cultural estrangement; on the other hand, the tendency of the very same movement (a tendency inherent in it) towards national narrowness, subjective illusion and conceit, political and economic regression, and romantic nonsense. At different times or in different conditions, one side or the other may appear more prominent, or in control. But in reality both belong inextricably to the historical structure of nationalism as a mode of development - and presumably to that of neo-nationalism also. Given that the latter belongs to a new phase of development — to a far more advanced stage of capitalism and bourgeois society - it is still to be seen how the objective circumstances of these times will make its contradictions display themselves.' (TBU, 181).



cance of the country as a locale of the European romantic fallacy. It had the right sort of unreality. Such unreality - in effect, the substitution of nostalgia for real experience - has remained at the centre of the characteristically Scottish structure of feeling.' Reprinted in Karl Miller's Memoirs of a Modern Scotland (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp.34-54, (p.39).

Notes 163

118 See Robert Crawford Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1992 rp 2000), p.329. 119 In Out of History Caims Craig also questions Nairn's use of metaphor. For Craig, the adoption of such tropes only perpetuates the notion of a Scottish void, which has ensured that Scotland remains 'out of history'. This will be discussed in more detail later. 120 Nairn suggests that Third Way politics are like chloroform, a means of anaesthetizing (AB, 66). On Tony Blair, he writes 'If Tony Blair so much as winks at a journalist in the course of some perfectly anodyne remark about the constitution or the monarchy, it is sure to be read the next day as a sure indicator of abiding radicalism.' (AB, 173). 121 Commenting on Nairn's confusing rhetoric and this simplification of history, Francis Mulhern writes: 'His language deserves a little attention, in something of its own hightroping spirit. Imagine that a twister makes its way across Nairn's textual landscape, sucking up everything in its path. Then, quite simply, the storm abates and releases its cargo, which makes a single, very strange heap. It includes a house, a computer and a wooden spoon; the Titanic, with iceberg; a leopard (Sicilian)and an elephant; a rotting fish, a polyhedron, and assorted insects, including a butterfly that officers a ship; and on top of all this, a tub of pot-noodle. No, not Kansas: Britain. And the chief oddity in this figural jumble is that it suggests diversity in an analysis that is, in contrast, essentially simple. This archaeology-cum-zoology of Ukanian modernity somehow compensates for the fact that Nairn's literal sweep of the landscape discovers only one significant life-form and one technology: the post-1688 ruling bloc and its prosthesis, the Westminster state.' 'Britain after Nairn' New Left Review, No.5 Sep/Oct 2000, (pp.5556). 122 He continues: 'I know talk of this kind is liable to evoke Freud, or even Jung and W.B. Yeats: the mythology of a national unconscious. But actually no great excursions into that cloudy realm are required: we have all endured this familiar all our lives and know him only too well. He is none other than the Scots' most famous and unshakeable drinking companion: "lack of self-confidence".' (AB, 101). This provides another example of Nairn's urge to challenge national essentialism while simultaneously upholding it in order to 'justify' his own argument. This stereotypical formulation is perhaps not too dissimilar to that of the 'average Scot' described by Bold in Chapter 1. 123 John Gray, 'Little Scotlander', New Statesman, January 24 2000, (p.54).



116 Nations and Nationalism, (p. 192). 117 'Nationalism as a mode of political development may indeed have advanced enough for its nature to be approximately visible. It does not follow that it's on the way out. Doubt on this score must be reinforced by the fact that metropolitan pundits have been wishing it away (or imagining the worst was over) for most of the time since 1780. But the tree has grown in spite of them. Minerva's owl should be left sleeping in its branches for a while longer yet - at least until the last great empire has been Balkanized, and a new constitution for Europe been worked out.' (FoN, 48).

124 'If the idea of sovereign statehood that Nairn invokes belongs in the past, his view of society is sadly monocultural. Aside from a rather formulaic mention of the Stephen Lawrence case, there is no reference in After Britain to the UK's Asian or black communities. The England it suggests is an ironic take on that of Ealing Studios. The England that actually exists is passed over as if it does not matter. But to project the breakup of Britain without considering how it harbours Europe's most multicultural society is to blot out one of its most attractive features... It is true that many people have a waning sense of being British. Even so, there are millions of people in Britain today who are unwilling to think of themselves as being, solely or even mainly, English, Welsh, Irish or Scottish. Nairn considers the idea that states can shelter multiple identities only to reject it. Yet for many people, being British has appeal precisely because it is not a blood-and-soil identity that excludes all others. Nairn is right to remind us that Britain originated in a unitary state that has passed away, but he seems scarcely to have noticed the country that Britain has become.' 'Little Scotlander', (p.54). 125 'Absence of self-confidence is the only natural condition of a social formation whose collective or historical "self' has been partly lobotomized and partly placed in cold storage. That is, the inveterate state of a nation never destroyed but permitted half-life within relatively unalterable parameters - low-pressure or "low-political" autonomy founded on good behaviour at home, around the hearth, and then amply rewarded by the external (imperial) life-support system, the sustaining outward habitus of Britishness.' (AB, 101). 126 'Different generations have manifested this inherited dilemma and its famously "spht personality" in many different ways... I can't resist singling out one consistent and fairly central current within the stream, which has been less noticed: shame... Shame is by its nature drawn to concealment and circuitous or reluctant expression. It tends to be betrayed rather than voiced or honestly commented upon... It is part of the explanation of why the Scots have often understood themselves so badly - and at the same time made it difficult for outsiders to understand them. Some things just can't be tolerated, and so have to be pretended away, grinningly made light of or kept out of view.' (AB, 102). 127 Once again, throughout this book Nairn continues with his usage of gendered metaphors (castration and impotence) and the concepts of 'national nihilism' and paralysis as a means of defining the modem Scottish political condition. 128 'The Three Dreams of Scottish Nationalism', (p.54). 129 'In my personal case this outward-bound neurosis led to frankly nihilistic excesses about strangling Kirk Ministers and mowing down be-kilted landowners with a Marxist machine-gun. The point is that such attitudes were just part of that structural dislocation of identity I have been referring to. They were the obverse of douce conformism and being the good boys of Britishness'. (AS, 104).



164 Notes

130 'Certainly nothing in Nairn's account, in which everything has the value of a tartan knick-knack, would allow us to describe it as nationalist in any accepted sense of the word. It is sometimes closer to the ravings of a Trevor-Roper than to what might be expected in literature of a nationalist bent. Nairn is openly contemptuous of cultural nationalist claims, referring, for instance, to "nationalist paranoia about assimilation" to England... Here is a writer, one is almost tempted to say, whose profoundest reflexes are anti-nationalist rather than nationalist.' (ESC, 59). 131 'Though not always in so cmde a form, projections of this kind are to be traced in much of the scholarship associated with different aspects of Scottish history. They do not suddenly appear in a fully refined form at a particular historical juncture, expressed by a particular writer or group of thinkers. The matter is much more subtle, and much more insidious.' (ESC, 16-17). 132 'The debate over the similarities and differences between Scotland and England with regard to patterns of social change is in many ways a proxy for a deeper debate about whether or not Scotland exists; if it is similar to the rest of Britain in certain crucial respects, then it does not. The argument here, however, is that it is not necessary for Scotland to be "different" in terms of its social structures to be a proper object of sociological study. We do not negate its existence by pointing out that it has far more similarities with other advanced industrial countries (including England) than differences.' (US, 86). 133 Referring to the charge that their accounts of the Scottish tradition were based upon conflict-free notions of cultural homogeneity and essentialism, Beveridge and Turnbull write, 'Certainly they are not views we happen to hold, or have ever tried to articulate or defend.'(SAE, 166). 134 'The project involves the recovery and reconstruction of certain specific, preEnlightenment traditions of ethical enquiry which in modem liberal societies have been marginalized or lost. The argument of After Virtue was that classical, and in particular Aristotelian ethical theory displays a richness and coherence which our current views lack, while the more recent writing draws attention to the resources of Augustinian and Thomist theory... It is through a re-engagement with these and other premodern traditions of ethical, social and political thought, Maclntyre's work proposes, that we can now best confront the emptiness of liberalism and the exhaustion of modem sources of critique.' (SAE, 134). 135 David McCrone, 'Post-nationalism and the Decline of the Nation-state', Radical Scotland, No.49, Feb/Mar 1991, pp.6-8, (p.8). 136 'New state formations will emerge, some seeming to correspond to old-style nationstates, but without the doctrine of absolute sovereignty. State boundaries will become more malleable and changeable. We might ask - if the nation-state is dying, is not nationalism as an ideology dead? Not in its newer forms, because the challenges to more recent and more distant sources of power are likely to grow. Post-nationalism will seek



Notes 165

166 Notes to mobilize new sentiments of resistance and cultural development based on the challenges of the 21st century.' 'Post-nationalism and the Decline of the Nation-state', (P-8). 137 He writes: 'If the modernity thesis had stressed scientific rationaUty, post-modernity had associated itself with industrialism and organized capitalism; post-modernity focused on consumerism and "disorganized" capitalism. Modernity had aligned the national economy, polity and culture in such a way that citizenship and an allegiance to the sovereign state provided a clear and unambiguous identity. Post-modernity, on the other hand, pointed to the limited nature of state sovereignty in an interdependent world, and highlighted the often contradictory and competing identities on offer.' (US, 9). 138 Referring to the historian G.S. Pryde they write: 'Pryde's comparatively early work demonstrates an openness to the totality of modem Scottish experience which the general historians of the succeeding twenty-five years were seldom to emulate.' (SAE, 32). 139 'What is on offer in the late twentieth century is what we might call "pick 'n mix" identity, in which we wear our identities lightly, and change them according to circumstances. Those who would argue for the paramountcy or even the exclusivity of a single identity would have a hard time of it in the late twentieth century. The question to ask is no how best do cultural forms reflect an essential national identity, but how do cultural forms actually help to construct and shape identity, or rather, identities - for there is less need to reconcile and prioritize these. Hence, national identity does not take precedence over class or gender identities (or indeed, vice versa) except insofar as these are subjectively ordered. These identities themselves, in rum, cannot be defined except with reference to the cultural forms which give them shape and meaning.' (US, 195). 140 In The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey, Francis Russell Hart questions this convenience of placing literature into a 'coherent' tradition, suggesting 'There are reasonable uncertainties as to whether the novel has a distinctive Scottish tradition'. Yet Hart does not want to dismiss the importance of tradition either, merely to examine its framework. He goes on to say, 'But surely we can postulate that the novel as a form of historical and cultural representation must be significantly influenced or conditioned by the history and culture from which its practitioners come or within which they work' (TSN, viii). Hart is reluctant to generalise about an overall tradition, yet also wants to point out that 'The Scottish novel suffers from a passive conspiracy of neglect'. Consequently, it is the underlying tensions between these two positions that will be examined here. 141 'It is not that Scottish culture is a vacuum in this period: it is that Scottish culture has been retrospectively "evacuated" by its historians: first, they attach whatever it produced to a conception of English culture, ignoring the fact that their very presence un-



emphasized the erratic and unpredictable nature of much social behaviour. Modernity

Notes 167

142 For a discussion of the invention of tartanry see Hugh Trevor-Roper 'The Invention of Tradition: the Highland Tradition of Scotland', in The Invention of Tradition ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp.15-41. 143 'It is precisely the condition of modernity to inhabit a cosmopolitan city, with an international architecture, and to have a hinterland whose traditional lifestyle is artificially maintained (either by subsidy to the economic structure or by turning it into theatre) as a symbol of the difference which we know exists between our different cultures but which, in the conditions of modernity, are less and less visible... In the world of organized social symbols that is the modem condition, to articulate difference cannot be anything but a conscious construction that has to be based on something which is part of a culture's common memory. That memory can be recalled, re-awakened, reinvented even, but to do so is not simply to create new ideas out of the heads of intellectuals: those new images and symbols have to become part of the common perception of the culture. To remake existing cultural perceptions is no easy business: you may not like the existing construction; you may wish to replace it with something else; but to negate it, to deny it, to refuse to be associated with it denies the very past which represents, at least in part, the commonality of which you are an inheritor, linking you to the rest of your community, and justifying the need for a cultural identity at all.' (#, 111-112). 144 Craig quotes from 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' where Eliot discusses the importance of continuity in tradition, where the poet is able to feel 'that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order'. A 'dissociation of sensibility' occurs when this continuity is broken. (OOH, 173). 145 'The traditions of a culture survive in many ways: the centre of gravity shifts from religion to philosophy to literature to the visual arts and in each of these offer different resources through which the culture can find the means for the continued assertion of its traditions and of the values which they embody.' (TMSN, 28). 146 'This then is an attempt to define some of the key elements which constitute a specifically Scottish tradition of the novel and some of the ways in which that tradition has imagined the nation which it addresses. It is written in the context of Scotland's newly regained political status and has been shaped by the explosion of creativity that has characterized Scottish culture since the 1970s - an explosion in part stimulated by the political idealisms, both socialist and nationalist, which have resisted the incorporation of Scotland into the prevailing orthodoxies of British politics since the late 1960s. In terms of the novel, no period in Scottish culture has, perhaps, been as rich as the period



dermines the idea of an "English" culture in the period, and then they ignore what was actually happening in Scotland because it does not fit in with the model of culture which they have based on the English example.' (OOH, 98).

168 Notes

147 'The House with the Green Shutters constmcts for us the model of a society in which the creative imagination and the community which it has to express are utterly sundered from one another: this is why fear has become an immovable obstacle, locking the society into an eternal moral stasis, no matter what changes are thrust upon it from without. In one sense, one might say, these novels represent the true condition of Scottish society, since its creativity - like much of its power - was being drawn off to London and incorporated into English values; but the novels do not present that situation they present a situation in which no one within their Scottish communities has the capacity for insight which the novel itself claims, and in which, therefore, the Scottish community's ability to escape the dialectic of fearful and fearless is the inevitable outcome of its own innate characteristics. It is not, for Douglas Brown, that the imagination has been repressed or exiled from Scottish society, but that the Scottish imagination is - by virtue of Scottishness - incapable of reaching those qualities which are fulfilled in English culture. The dead-end conflict of the fearful and the fearless, tied together in communal terror and individual aggrandizement, is thus presented as the inevitable outcome of Scottish society's own innate characteristics rather than a function of the dialectic between Scottish values and English values.' (TMSN, 63-64). 148 Mike Featherstone 'Global and Local Cultures' in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change ed. by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner (London: Routledge, 1993), (p. 173). 149 See also Featherstone's Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991). 150 Mapping the Futures, (p. 169). 151 Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, (p. 129). 152 Robert Young White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990), (p. 12). 153 Here Young mentions Edward Said's Orientalism which draws attention to the elitism and underlying 'white mythologies' of universalist accounts of history, and to Hegel's The Philosophy of History where he states that 'Africa has no history' as examples of the need to revise historicism from postmodern perspectives. 154 Ibid, (p.15). 155 Ibid, (p.\9).

Chapter 3 156 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans, by Leon S. Roudiez (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), (p.l).



between the 1960s and 1990s: precisely because of its richness, and because so many of its major writers have been accepted as the voices of an "international culture" the argument of this book is designed to establish some of the underlying continuities both in terms of the issues of Scottish society and in terms of the formal development of the novel.' (TMSN, 36).

157 Geoffrey Gait Harpham, Getting it Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), (p.5). 158 Towards the end of 'Open Letter to Harlem Desir', Kristeva writes 'Finally... I should like to suggest that the following statement be engraved on the walls of all schools and political institutions; commented and elaborated upon, it could become a touchstone for anyone wishing to participate in the French nation understood as an esprit general - a set of private freedoms liable to be included in larger sets: "If I knew something useful to myself and detrimental to my family, I would reject it from my mind. If I knew something useful to my family, but not to my homeland and detrimental to Europe, or else useful to Europe and detrimental to mankind, I would consider it a crime." ... The identities and the "common denominators" are acknowledged here, but one avoids their morbid contortion by placing them, not erasing them, in a polyphonic community that is today called France. Tomorrow, perhaps, if the esprit general wins over the Volksgeist, such a polyphonic community could be named Europe.' Nations without Nationalism, 63. 159

See Geoffrey Gait Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), (p.5).

160 'Exactly when the transformation to Enghshness took place is quite a long story. But one can see a certain point at which the particular forms of English identity feel they can command, within their own discourses, the discourses of almost everybody else: not quite everybody, but almost everyone else at a certain moment in history.' Stuart Hall 'The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity' in McClintock et al. Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), (p. 174). 161 162 163 164

'The Predicament of the Scottish Writer', (p.69). Ibid, (p.70). Ibid, (p.70). In Glasgow Urban Writing and Postmodernism, Beat Witschi writes that 'Gray successfully combines the "local" with the "international"; that is the understanding of a Scottish (or Glaswegian) identity recognisable in Gray's writing is broadened - by means of various literary strategies... into a literary vision of Glasgow and beyond, a vision which can therefore be appreciated by Scots and non-Scots alike.' (p.7). 165 Mike Featherstone, 'Global and Local Cultures', in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change ed. by Jon Bird and others (London: Routledge, 1993), (p.171).

166

Ibid,(p.\l\).

167 In Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995 Richard Dellamora (ed.) writes: 'Postmodern Apocalypse. The phrase sounds apt, but do these two terms belong together? Consider, for instance, the word 'modem' within the context of aesthetic discourse. If "modem" refers to avant-garde aesthetics, which insists on "making it new," then to be post - or



Notes 169

beyond the modem is to beyond those qualitative breaks in the temporal and the spatial order that characterise apocalypse as a genre. If, in contrast, "modem" refers, as is usually the case today within anglophone literary studies, to the aesthetic closure within which the literary experimentation of James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf is judged to be contained, then to be post- means to be beyond closure in the field of newly opened textual possibilities. As a number of theorists have argued, the negative prospect of this infinite horizon is that it can imply mere repetition, a ceaseless doing again of deeds that issue in frustration and failure... This last possibility helps explain a pervasive sense of unease in contemporary existence. The attendant lack of confidence in the possibility of shaping history in accordance with human desire(s) provides the bass line of culture - political, economic, and aesthetic - in the fin de millennium.' (p.xi). This sense of the postmodern condition may also be linked to Walter Benjamin's 'Angel of History' in which the present is irredeemably separated from the notion of progress: 'His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.' Illuminations, (pp.257-258). 168 Caims Craig, The History of Scottish Literature Volume Four: The Twentieth Century, (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), (p.2). 169 Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), (p.32). 170 'The consumer turnover time of certain images can be very short indeed (close to that ideal of the "twinkling of an eye" that Marx saw as optimal from the standpoint of capital circulation). Many images can also be mass-marketed instantaneously over space. Given the pressures to accelerate turnover time (and to overcome spatial barriers), the commodification of images of the most ephemeral sort would seem to be a godsend from the standpoint of capital accumulation, particularly when other paths to relieve overaccumulation seem blocked. Ephemerality and instantaneous communicability over space then become virtues to be explored and appopriated by capitalists for their own purposes... Corporations, governments, political and intellectual leaders, all value a stable (though dynamic) image as part of their aura of authority and power. The mediatization of politics has now become all pervasive. This becomes, in effect, the fleeting, superficial, and illusory means whereby an individualistic society of transients sets forth its nostalgia for common values. The production and marketing of such images of permanence and power require considerable sophistication, because the continuity and stability of the image have to be retained while stressing the adaptabil-



170 Notes

Notes 111

ity, flexibility, and dynamism of whoever or whatever is being imaged.' The Condition of Postmodernity (p.288).

175 'For the "reality" of the nuclear age and the fable of nuclear war are perhaps distinct, but they are not two separate things. It is the war (in other words the fable) that triggers the fabulous war effort, this senseless capitalisation of sophisticated weaponry, this speed race in search of speed, this crazy precipitation which, through techno-science, through all the techno-scientific inventiveness that it motivates, structures not only the army, diplomacy, politics, but the whole of the human socius today, everything that is named by the old words culture, civilisation... "Reality", let's say the encompassing institution of the nuclear age, is constructed by the fable, on the basis of an event that has never happened (except in fantasy, and that is nothing at all), an event of which one can only speak, an event whose advent remains an invention by men (the sense of the word "invention") or which, rather, remains to be invented. An invention because it depends upon new technical mechanisms, to be sure, but an invention also because it does not exist and especially because, at whatever point it should come into existence, it would be a grand premiere appearance.' 'No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)', Diacritics, 14.2 (1984), pp.20-33, (p.24). 176 In The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), Tobin Siebers critiques Derrida's approach to 'nuclear criticism', suggesting that his approach tends to equate deconstruction with the 'reality' of the nuclear age. 'Derrida's purpose... is not to prove the competence or incompetence of the humanities to solve nuclear problems but to write a piece of nuclear criticism. In this respect, his essay is too deconstructive to succeed, if nuclear criticism designates a new approach to the problem. Derrida's description of nuclear war as fabulously textual and massively real at the same time exposes the extent to which his version of nuclear criticism relies on the same laws and ethical presuppositions as deconstruction.' (p.24). 177 'Lanark should end on a down note, with the hero's death, and yet one finishes with a feeling of only half-undertaken a process of instruction and digestion, surfeited on the



171 Edwin Morgan, 'Gray and Glasgow' in Crawford and Nairn (eds), pp.64-76, (p.71). 172 Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism, (London, Arnold, 1992), (p.l 1). 173 Ibid, (p.U). 11A 'As Kermode saw in his book The Sense of an Ending (1966), people with no clear sense of their ending will always fabricate one... Postmodernism is itself, in this respect, another Grand Narrative, but one about the End of Grand Narratives. It is impossibly tied up with performative contradictions. It may even be the case that in a world offering increasingly less space for speculative idealism, the impetus for postmodem thought comes from the diminishing speculators themselves, intellectual theorists anxious to construct a version of world history which can preserve some significant place for themselves as prophets of its doom.' Ibid, (p. 12).

172 Notes

178 Alison Lumsden, 'Innovation and Reaction in the Fiction of Alasdair Gray' in Wallace and Stevenson (eds), pp.115-127. 179 As Randall Stevenson points out in his article 'Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern', there is the danger that postmodern literary techniques have become domesticated. He writes: 'Increasingly, postmodernism may be seen not just as a symptom, but even as a contributory cause of social malaise. It may once have been a site of radical challenge to conventional forms and structures, or of subversive questioning of the means through which reality can be conveniently moulded, mediated and made consumable. What was once challenging, however, has grown increasingly familiar, even chic; institutionalised into fashions and styles which can be used to assist rather than subvert the processes of a consumer society... Postmodernism may simply have been domesticated, tamed into feeding the "creature" it once seemed equipped to threaten and condemn.' In Wallace & Stevenson (eds), pp.48-63, (p.60). 180 Despite his comments on potential 'domestication', Randall Stevenson also agrees that postmodern techniques in Lanark should not be underestimated. 'Yet if Gray's postmodernism cannot be entirely defended, nor should it be wholly condemned. Postmodernism may have lost its inherent radicalism, but there are still radical ends it can be used to achieve. Gray's insistence on his work as a constructed artefact, for example, is in certain ways as much an act of responsibility as of indulgence. Lanark, in particular, illustrates the paradox that the most transparently, ostentatiously artificial texts may be the ones most likely to redirect their readers' attention upon reality: as Berthold Brecht showed, an undermining of seductive, secure containment within illusion encourages spectators to take responsibility for reshaping the world beyond the stage. In one way, Lanark does have something to offer in terms of seductive illusion: if Glasgow is "the sort of industrial city where most people live nowadays but nobody imagines living" (L, 105), the novel helps redress this poverty of imagination through the diverse inventiveness of its means of envisaging the city. Yet neither readers nor characters can long be securely contained in worlds so clearly shown to be the results of Nastier's conjuring tricks. The real achievement of Lanark is not in seducing readers with illusion, but in allowing them to escape from it; in forcing them to consider conjuring and to examine and experience imagination as process rather than securely finished product.' 'Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern', (pp.60-61). 181 Beat Witschi, 'Defining a Scottish Identity', Books in Scotland, No.34 (1990), pp.5-6, (p.6). 182 Edwin Morgan, Essays, (Cheshire: Carcanet Press, 1974), p. 167. 183

Ibid,p.\61.



richness of the book, and ready to plunge back into it again. When Lanark, on the Necropolis, sees the floods recede and the light break over the city, there is an image of rebirth.' Christopher Harvie 'Alasdair Gray and the Condition of Scotland Question' in Crawford & Nairn (eds), pp.76-89, (p.83).

Notes 173 184 Robert Crawford, 'Morgan's Critical Position' in Chapman 64, Spring/ Summer 1991, pp.32-36, p.32.

ers. Too many heads are attracted by the sand. There is a new provincialism - in a movement which, in MacDiarmid at least, stretched out internationally and fought the Philistines. Almost no interest has been taken by established writers in Scotland to the important postwar literary developments in America and on the continent. Ignorance is not apologised for. The Beat writers are dismissed as a throwback to the 1920s.' Essays, p.MA. 186 'Morgan's Critical Position', p.36. 187 188

Essays,p.\lA Ibid,p.m

189 For various examples of this see Morgan's Nothing Not Giving Messages: Reflections on Work and Life (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990) edited by Hamish Whyte. On p.55, Morgan comments: 'I do like the idea of contemporaneity. I was never greatly attracted by the idea of tradition. I positively enjoy the contemporary world and have a sense of it, I think. I want, if possible, to reflect that in poetry, taking great risks, of course in doing this.' 190 Ibid,p36. 191 Edwin Morgan, Hold Hands Among the Atoms (Glasgow: Mariscat Press, 1991), p.81. 192 Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p.456. 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204

Ibid,p.A56 See, for example, Nothing Not Giving Messages, p.40. Ibid, p.250. Collected Poems, pMS. Ibid,p.AA9. 'Outward Bound', Ibid, p.456 Collected Poems, p.456 Published in Hugh MacDiarmid: Complete Poems Volume One ed. Michael Grieve and W.R. Aitken (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1993), p.461. Collected Poems, p.587. Nothing Not Giving Messages, p.251. G. Gregory Smith, Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (London: Macmillan, 1919), p.19. Morgan, 'Caledonian Antisyzygy' in Collected Poems, p.446.

205 Ibid,p.AA6 206 Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p.2.



185 'Despite the efforts of Hugh MacDiarmid to deal with the nameable real in contemporary experience, this aspect of his work has been least taken up and developed by oth-

174 Notes

211 Ibid, p.\5. 212 Nations without Nationalism, p.59. 213 Harpham writes, 'For its part, Uterature represents the accessible form of ethical principles, which, like atoms, are invisible in themselves but cast a kind of "shadow".' He goes on to suggest 'Making such arguments is part of the job description of criticism, which stands in an ambivalent mid-region between ethics and Uterature, with aUgiances to both.' Geoffrey Gait Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (London & Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p.ix.

Chapter 4 214 Ross Poole, Nation and Identity (London & New York: Routledge, 1997) 215 Richard Kearney, for example, refers to new relationships between politics, technology and the media: 'The nation-state is falling into crisis. ReaUsing this, and fearful that the people will also reahse it, those in power often begin to act as sovereign rulers or monarchs. They substitute communications propaganda for the assent of the people (demos). They try to fill the "credibiUty gap" no longer by poUce or military force as in former times - but by media seduction or simulation.' (PI, 65). 216 'Not only do some of the theories of postmodernity often take for granted the existence of nationhood, but some of the phenomena, which are being claimed as indicating the end of nations, themselves reveal the continuing hold of nationaUst assumptions. There is a cultural paradox: the theories of national identity and postmodernity, which assert the decline of the nation-state, are being formulated at a time when a powerful nation, the United States of America, is bidding for global hegemony. The global culture itself has a national dimension, as the symbols of the United States appear as universal symbols.' Banal Nationalism (London: Sage PubUcations, 1995), (p.ll). 217 Zygmunt Bauman, in referring to this weakening of nationaUsm, also insists that nationaUsm, as a project, has not reached its end. He writes: 'The current prohferation of units claiming a status similar to the one which has been won historicaUy by older nation-state's does not testify that smaUer and weaker entities can now reasonably claim or strive for viabiUty; it only testifies to the fact that viabihty has ceased to be a condition of nation-state formation. Most significantly, it suggests - obUquely - the loss of "viabiUty" in the old sense by such large and medium to large state organisms as could claim to enjoy the classical triad of sovereignty in the "high modernity" era. The overcrowded UN building does not augur the ultimate triumph of the nationaUst principle but the coming end of the age when the social system used to be identified territorially



207 'Kathleen Jamie interviewed by Lilias Fraser', Scottish Studies Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 15-23, p. 15. 208 Kathleen Jamie, The Queen ofSheba, (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994) 209 Ibid, p.20 210 Edwin Morgan 'Scotland and the World', Chapman 95, 2000, pp.2-15, p. 15

Notes 175

and the generation of what he describes as forms of amoral American nationaUsm: 'For better or worse, the media seem perfectly capable of popularizing a shift from cold war moraUsm to a scaled-back, amoral brand of nationaUsm. Among the media vehicles of this new nationaUsm, for example, is the popular genre of violent, neomedievaUst science fiction, such as Alien movies and Predator, where postmodern knights and cyborg creatures struggle on a darkling plain, neither exhibiting emblems of good nor expecting to encounter emblems of evil, where victory often means only self-preservation.' (p. 159). 219 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge: PoUty Press, 1997) 220 Ibid,p.\9\ 221 Where Bhabha's notion of in-betweenness in The Location of Culture, refers to a creative 'third' space between traditional readings of the nation and readings of resistance, as it is being used here, in-betweenness refers to the general instabihty of nations and the potential restructuring of national identity. The role of the ethical, as developed here, is to mediate through these positions, and is therefore perhaps not wholly dissimilar to Bhabha's urge to create new authorial positions. 222 Gerard Delanty, Modernity and Postmodernity: Knowledge, Power and the Self, (London: Sage PubUcations, 2000), (p.xii). 223 See, for example, Pheng Cheah and Bmce Robbins (ed.) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) or Timothy Brennan At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (London & Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 224 See, for example, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (ed.) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985) and Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship and Community (London: Verso, 1992). 225 'My argument so far is that recent Uterature on the idea of community points to a notion of community as a cognitive structure rooted in processes of communication, law and democracy. Postmodern conceptions emphasise community in various ways as the experience of difference, whereas legal theorists stress issues such as trust. Others, such as Habermas and Apel, speak of community in terms of the reflexivity of communication. These approaches make the traditional notion of community as a symboUc order redundant, for they aUow us to see community as a contested cultural imaginary. In order to develop further this understanding of community, I shaU extend the idea of the cognitive into a theory of the cultural imaginary and relate this to the new idea of community as a postmodemised discourse beyond unity.' Gerard Delanty, Modernity



and population-wise with the nation-state (though not necessarily, let us repeat, the end of the age of nationaUsm).' Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: BlackweU, 1993), (p.231). 218 In Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (London and New York: New York University Press, 1999), Bmce Robbins also makes a connection between the media

176 Notes and Postmodernity: Knowledge, Power and the Self (London: Sage PubUcations, 2000), p.127. 226 Ibid,p.\2%. Ibid,pA29.

228 In 'Living Your Own Life in a Runaway World: IndividuaUsation, GlobaUsation and PoUtics', Ulrich Beck writes: 'We Uve in an age in which the social order of the national state, class, ethnicity and the traditional family is in decline. The ethic of individual self-fulfilment and achievement is the most powerful current in modem society. The choosing, deciding, shaping human being who aspires to be the author of his or her own Ufe, the creator of an individual identity, is the central character of our time. It is the fundamental cause behind changes in the family and the global gender revolution in relation to work and poUtics. Any attempt to create a new sense of social cohesion has to start from the recognition that individuaUsm, diversity and scepticism are written into Western culture.' in On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism WiU Hutton and Anthony Giddens (eds), (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), pp. 164-174, p. 165. 229 'The post-traditional society is an ending; but it is also a beginning, a genuinely new social universe of action and experience. What type of social order is it, or might it become? It is, as I have said, a global society, not in the sense of a world society but as one of "indefinite space". It is one where social bonds have effectively to be made, rather than inherited from the past - on the personal and more coUective levels this is a fraught and difficult enterprise, but one also that holds out the promise of great rewards. It is decentred in terms of authorities, but recentred in terms of opportunities and dilemmas, because focussed on new forms of interdependence.' Giddens, Anthony 'Living in a Post-Traditional Society' in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash (eds) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: PoUty, 1994), pp.56-110, (p.107). 230 Giddens goes on: 'To regard narcissism, or even individualism, as at the core of the post-traditional order is a mistake - certainly in terms of the potentials for the future that it contains. In the domain of interpersonal Ufe, opening out to the other is the condition of social soUdarity; on the larger scale a proffering of the "hand of friendship" within a global cosmopoUtan order is ethicaUy impUcit in the new agenda.' 'Living in a Post-Traditional Society', (p. 107). 231 Delanty, Citizenship in a Global Age, (p. 59). 232 The foUowing Conclusion will develop these ideas in more detail. 233 Beck, (p.169). 234 Ibid, (p.169). 235 Many critics, however, have been highly critical of postmodernism. See, for example, Christopher Norris What's Wrong with Postmodernism?: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990) and Terry Eagleton The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: BlackweU, 1996). This resistance to post-



227

Notes 111

236 Delanty, Modernity and Postmodernity, p.121. In At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Timothy Brennan also highUghts the importance of self-critique beginning at home. (p. 10). 237 'Since the self, even as it is transformed by its interactions with the world, also transforms how that world seems to itself, it's system of self-securing is not thereby unhinged nor is it "corrected" by cosmopohtanism. Rather, in enlarging its view "from China to Pern", it may become all the more imperiaUstic, seeing in every horizon of difference new peripheries of its own centraUty, new pathologies through which its own normaUty may be defined and must be asserted.' Ibid, p.23. 238 In Citizenship in a Global Age: Society, Culture, Politics (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000), Delanty suggests that 'GlobaUsation, then, is primarily about the transformation of space. In this it is clearly connected with modernity, which was primarily a discourse of time. In modernity people saw in historical time visions of emancipation, which explains why all modem Utopias were located in a particular time consciousness. Today, it would appear that the focus has shifted from time to space, from Utopia to "heteropologies", as Foucault (1986) beUeved was the case. The global transformation of space is radicaUy different from the modem project, which sought to deUmit space: it concerns the deterritoriaUsation of space.' (p.83). 239 Ibid,p.%5. 240 See John Urry Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000). 241 'How is one to confront the prevailing sense of discontinuity, the absence of a coherent identity, the breakdown of inherited ideologies and beUefs, the insecurities of fragmentation? Is it possible to make the transition between past and future, between that which is famiUar to us and that which is foreign?' (T, 9). 242 'The modernist tendency in Irish culture is characterised by a determination to demythologise the orthodox heritage of tradition in so far as it lays constraints upon the openness and pluraUty of experience. Joyce's Stephen Dedalus exempUfies this impulse when he speaks of trying to awaken from the "nightmare of history". He refuses to serve that in which he no longer believes, whether it caU itself "home, fatherland or church" .... Repudiating revivaUst nationaUsm as a "pale afterthought of Europe", Joyce went into exile and chose an experimental aesthetic. Beckett too rejected the myths of the Irish Literary Revival concentrating instead on the modernist problematic of language itself - what he termed "the breakdown of the Unes of communication". The privileged province of his exploration was to be the no-man's-land of the author's own interior existence: an existence condemned to perpetual disorientation.' (T, 12). 243 In Postnationalist Ireland, Kearney writes: 'In endeavouring to go beyond negative nationaUsm one must be wary, therefore, not to succumb to the opposite extreme of



modernism, and in particular to a postmodern ethics, wiU be discussed in more detail towards the end of this chapter.

anti-nationaUsm. Those who identify aU forms of nationaUsm with irredentist fanaticism habituaUy do so in the name of some neutral standpoint that masks their own ideological bias.' He then goes on to suggest: 'Surely what is required... is a transition from traditional nationaUsm to a postnationaUsm which preserves what is valuable in the respective cultural memories of nationaUsm (Irish and British) whilst superseding them.' (PI, 58-59). 244 'To be tme to ourselves, as Joyce put it, is to be 'othered': to exist from our own time frame in order to return to it, enlarged and enriched by the detour. This signals a new attitude not only to culture but to history. The very notion of evolving historical periods (tradition, modernity, etc) foUowing each other in causal order is put into question. Rather than construing history as a continuity leading inexorably to a lost paradise or forward to a guaranteed future, postmodernism views it as coUage. It resists the beUef in history as inevitable progress or regress, recommending instead that we draw from old and new in "recreative" non-dogmatic ways. The "post" in postmodernism refers then not just to what comes after modernity. It signals rather another way of seeing things, which transmutes tinear history into a multipUcity of time-spans.' (PI, 65).

Conclusion 245 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p.32. 246 'The concept of cultural difference focuses on the problem of the ambivalence of cultural authority: the attempt to dominate in the name of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in the moment of differentiation. And it is the very authority of culture as a knowledge of referential truth which is at issue in the concept and moment of enunciation. The enunciative process introduces a spUt in the performative present of cultural identification; a spUt between the traditional culturaUst demand for a model, a tradition, a community, a stable system of reference, and the necessary negation of the certitude in the articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the poUtical present, as a practice of domination, or resistance. The struggle is often between the historicist teleological or mythical time and the narrative of traditionaUsm of the right or the left - and the shifting, strategicaUy displaced time of the articulation of a historical poUtics of negotiation.... The enunciation of cultural difference problematises the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the archaic. That iteration negated our sense of the origins of the stmggle. It undermines our sense of the homogenising effects of cultural symbols and icons, by questioning our sense of the authority of cultural synthesis in general.' Ibid, p. 34-35.



178 Notes

247 'Cultural difference must not be understood as the free play of polarities and pluraUties in the homogenous empty time of the national community. The jarring of meaning and values generated in the process of cultural interpretation is an effect of the perplexity of Uving in the timinal spaces of national society that I have tried to trace. Cultural difference, as a form of intervention, participates in a logic of supplementary subversion similar to the strategies of minority discourse. The question of cultural difference faces us with a disposition of knowledges or a distribution of practices that exist beside each other, abseits designating a form of social contradiction or antagonism that has to be negotiated rather than sublated. The difference between subjunctive sites and representations of social Ufe have to be articulated without surmounting the incommensurable meanings and judgements that are produced within the process of transcultural negotiation.' Ibid, p. 162. 248 Berthold Schoene-Harwood '"Emerging as the Other of Our Selves" - Scottish MulticulturaUsm and the ChaUenge of the Body in Postcolonial Representation', Scottish Literary Journal, May (1998), Vol. 25, No.l, pp.54-72, (p.55). 249 Berthold Schoene, 'A Passage to Scotland: Scottish Literature and the British Postcolonial Condition', Scotlands 2:1 (1995), pp.107-122, (p.120). In his later article '"Emerging as the Other of Ourselves": Scottish MulticulturaUsm and the ChaUenge of the Body in Postcolonial Representation', Schoene-Harwood refers specificaUy to Bhabha's conceptions of cultural diversity and cultural difference as a means of expUcating some of the underlying complexities of Scottish postcoloniahsm. In this article, however, while attempting to map out the need for models of cultural difference, Schoene-Harwood also at times tends to resort to forms of binary thinking. With reference to Bhabha's conceptions of cultural diversity and cultural difference, he suggests that Scottish Studies needs to become more aware of differences between Highland and Lowland Scotland, yet tends to do so to the extent of estabUshing a strict opposition between the two, therefore also coUapsing cultural difference into a form of multiculturaUsm. Bhabha's conception of cultural difference, however, is an attempt to break from this kind of identity thinking. 250 'The main issue is not any more the status of the Scottish nation as a minority within the United Kingdom but rather the status of minority communities within Scottish society; not essential Scottishness but rather the differences and similarities between different kinds and ways of Scottishness' 'A Passage to Scotland', (p.l 15). 251 Ibid, (p.l 16). 252 Michael Gardiner, 'Democracy and Scottish PostcoloniaUty', Scotlands, 3:2, (1996), pp.24-41,(p.24). 253 'But of course since Scotland is not post-colonial but nationaUy postcolonial, the nation aheady carries oppressive associations and the next rum is not to the nation as such but the nation within postcolonial theory - multiple identifications within metropoUtan terms - to articulate national needs within acting subjects.' Ibid, (p.29).



Notes 179

254 Ibid,(p.3A). 255 Ibid,(p.36). 256 'Reading the work of Subaltern Studies from within but against the grain, I would suggest that elements in their text would warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis and "situate" the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a strategic use of positive essentiaUsm in a scrupulously visible poUtical interest... This would allow them to use the critical force of anti-humanism, in other words, even as they share its constitutive paradox: that the essentiaUsing moment, the object of their criticism, is irreducible.' See 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography' in The Spivak Reader ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.203235, (p.215). 257 As Brown, McCrone and Paterson state in Politics and Society in Scotland (London: MacmiUan, 1996), 'The Scottish question should be interpreted as a manifestation of major social and poUtical changes in the late twentieth century, and specificaUy the redefinition of the state. This process can be seen clearly at the level of the British state which has undergone a major re-orientation towards its European partners, and significant chaUenges from its constituent nations. The Scottish question becomes a question of the new world order.' (p.221). 258 Longley also suggests, however, that 'Today's textual battles are more often joined between NationaUsts and 'revisionists' than between CathoUc and Protestant Ireland as such'. (TLS, 23). 259 For Longley, many feminists have also been guilty of recycUng NationaUst vocabulary 'when the canonical chips are down', and have therefore compromised their poUtical aspirations in order to accommodate the often patriarchal assumptions of NationaUsm. (TLS, 48). 260 'Culture in Ireland is a range of practices, expressions, traditions, by no means homogenously spread nor purely confined to the island. PoUtical Irishness, on the other hand, is the ideology of identity ("Irish to the core") mainly packaged by the GaeUc League, which, twined with Catholicism, served to bind the new state. In the RepubUc, the strings of this package have got looser and looser, and much of its substance has leaked out. In the North, Sinn Fein stiU tries to deliver a fossiUsed and belated version.' (TLS, 176). 261 See Longley's discussion of Terry Eagleton and his Field Day production of Saint Oscar. 'Field Day's production of Saint Oscar looked odd and out of date in Dublin because it was an instance of the reimported NationaUst propaganda... Its author... used Wilde to present a timeless thesis about imperiaUst oppression. Field Day's eagerness to coUude with the hoary stereotypes of the EngUsh hard left seems significant.' (TLS, 183).



180 Notes

Notes 181

263 Gerry Smyth, 'The Past, the Post, and the Utterly Changed: InteUectual ResponsibiUty and Irish Cultural Criticism', in Briggs, Hyland & Sammels (eds) Sarah Briggs, Paul Hyland & Neil Sammells (eds) Reviewing Ireland: Essays and Interviews from Irish Studies Review (Bath: SuUs Press), pp.240-250. 264 'Moreover, a critical ideology based on the endless revelation of an absence at the heart of modem Irish identity might be considered frustrating when it comes to the question: what is to be done? The Indian critic Gayatri Spivak has advanced the notion of a 'strategic essentiaUsm' with regard to the paradox on which modem conceptions of identity rely. This, along with Foucault's "ironic maturity" and Derrida's developing concern with "actuaUty", seems to offer some purchase in practical poUtics. Yet, as Alan Sinfield pointed out in a recent lecture, the optimism evinced by critics such as Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler with regard to the effectiveness of strategic attempts to actuaUse instabiUty and fragmentation can be seen to be misplaced when confronted with a straightgeist - racial, sexual, economic - which flourishes in conditions of change and flexibiUty.' Ibid, (p.245). 265 'Irish Studies, Postcolonial Theory and the "New" EssentiaUsm', Irish Studies Review, Vol. 7, No.2, pp.211-220, (p.211). 266 Ibid, (p.212). 267 'Varieties of NationaUsm: Post-Revisionist Irish Studies', Irish Review, No. 15, (1996), pp.34-38, (p.34). 268 As Brown, McCrone and Paterson state in Politics and Society in Scotland, 'SmaU nations are like corks in the sea. They are the first indicators of the way currents are flowing, and that the tide is turning.' (p.215).



262 These debates can be clearly traced in debates stretching over the past few years in the Irish Studies Review.

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Index

Longley, Edna, 1, 2, 145-147, 151, 180 Lumsden, Alison, 109-110 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 91, 130, 151 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 2, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15-29, 40, 42, 44, 46, 66, 111113,117-119,140,151-158,173 MacMillan, Dorothy, 23 Maley, Willy, 148, 149 McCrone, David, 74, 77-79, 158, 159, 161,181 Mcllvanney, William, 36 McMillan, Joyce, 43, 52, 68, 89, 98, 99 Mitchison, Naomi, 22 Morgan, Edwin, 5, 99, 105, 111122, 173 Muir, Edwin, 2, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15-22, 28, 29, 37, 43, 44, 69, 84, 151, 153, 154, 156 Muir, Willa, 12, 22-27 Nairn, Tom, 4, 49, 50-52, 58-70, 78, 82, 83, 92, 154, 155, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165 Nationalism, 1, 3-6, 11, 14, 15, 19, 20,29,31,34,35,42-80,83,85, 88,99, 111, 122, 125, 126, 127, 133-150 Noble, Andrew, 20, 21,153 Osmond, John, 34 Poole,Ross, 125, 132 Postcolonialism, 1, 3, 4, 6, 143-50, 179

Postmodernism, 1-6, 28-44, 51, 5560, 66, 70, 92, 94, 102, 107, 110, 127-150 Postnationalism, 4, 6, 136-40, 149, 178 Power, William, 12,14 Revisionism, 1, 2, 6,147-150, 151 Robbins, Bruce, 175 Riach, Alan, 28 Schoene, Berthold, 142, 143, 147, 159, 179 Scott, Walter, 7-9, 13, 16, 44, 85, 89,156 Scottish Literary Renaissance, 2, 3, 8, 11, 12-28, 39, 40, 42, 111, 154, 155, 159 Siebers, Tobin, 171 Smith, Barbara Hernstein, 135 Smith, G. Gregory, 119,151 Smyth, Gerry, 147,148 Spivak, Gayatri, 3, 144-148, 180, 181 Stevenson, Randall, 172 Tartanry, 36, 76, 84, 162, 167 Todd, Richard, 158 Torrington, Jeff, 36 Turnbull, Ronald, 4, 49, 50, 52, 7079,157, 165 Wallace, Gavin, 38 Waugh, Patricia, 107 Welsh, Irvine, 89 Whyte, Christopher, 35, 157 Witschi, Beat, 110,111,169 Woolf, Virginia, 23, 25,170 Young, Robert, 92-93,168



194 Index

Questioning Scotland: literature, nationalism, postmodernism

Cities, Nationalism and Democratization (Questioning Cities)

Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature

Literature nationalism and memory

Postmodernism

Questioning Technology

Postmodernism

Scotland

Introducing Children's Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism

Questioning technology

Questioning Slavery

Arab Nationalism Historical Problems in Literature

Nationalism

Questioning Geography: Fundamental Debates

Nationalism

Negotiating Postmodernism

On Historical Questioning

Introducing Postmodernism

Introducing Postmodernism

Questioning Extreme Programming

Questioning Geography: Fundamental Debates

Questioning Extreme Programming

44 Scotland Street 03 Love Over Scotland

Introducing Postmodernism

Frommer's Scotland

Frommer's Scotland

From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism (Literature, Culture, Theory)

Postmodernism and Politics (Theory and History of Literature)

Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

equality: Questioning the Information Society

Questioning Scotland: literature, nationalism, postmodernism

Cities, Nationalism and Democratization (Questioning Cities)

Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature

Literature nationalism and memory

Postmodernism

Questioning Technology

Postmodernism

Scotland

Introducing Children's Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism

Questioning technology

Questioning Slavery

Arab Nationalism Historical Problems in Literature

Nationalism

Questioning Geography: Fundamental Debates

Nationalism

Negotiating Postmodernism

On Historical Questioning

Introducing Postmodernism

Introducing Postmodernism

Questioning Extreme Programming

Questioning Geography: Fundamental Debates

Questioning Extreme Programming

44 Scotland Street 03 Love Over Scotland

Introducing Postmodernism

Frommer's Scotland

Frommer's Scotland

From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism (Literature, Culture, Theory)

Postmodernism and Politics (Theory and History of Literature)

Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization

equality: Questioning the Information Society

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