Contemporary Scottish Short Stories

25/05/2024

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Knowing One's Own Mind

Scottish literature may appear minor next to English, French, Russian or Italian fiction. However, it still happens to be vast enough for any attempt at a summary in essay form to be foolish without winnowing the work down to a narrow corpus, a chiefly contemporary concern and a handful of stories. Many have surveyed a broader terrain — but even Alan Bold looked at only Modern Sottish Literature in a book under that title, while Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson took as their project The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. As a collection of short stories, the most ambitious must surely be The Devil and The Giro, with the very title proposing two concerns that preoccupy Scottish fiction: the more traditional interest in the supernatural, and the more contemporary concern with the destitute. It covers hundreds of years in Scottish short fiction. What joins the two major themes together, Carl MacDougall notes in his introduction, is the importance of “the spoken voice and the power of first person narration.” Here the oral tradition in older work that suggests community meets the alienation of the voice in the industrial wilderness of the modern story.  

      Perhaps one of the advantages of being a small country is that preoccupations are easier to find than in vaster literature. Who could say what the vital themes of English or French fiction happen to be, while in Scottish narrative much has been made of the ongoing interests in Tartanry, Kailyard and Clydesideism, and the Caledonian Antisiyzygy. The latter looks at the split-consciousness in the Scottish psyche and can be found most explicitly in James Hog’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Tartanry describes the fixation of the Highlands on the Scottish imaginary and will be noticed at any airport duty-free selling whisky, tartan items and shortbread. Its image may have been created in 1822 by George IV’s visit to Scotland and the ‘plaid pageantry’ that accompanied it, but the film Brigadoon helped it along internationally. (Walter Scott was the orchestrator of that pageant but a short story like The Two Drovers is a complex account of the Highland mind as it became part of the Union). 

     Kailyard has similarities with Tartanry but while the latter often suggests clans and kilts, the former shows small communities working together in likeable harmony. J. M. Barrie was seen as its most significant exponent, “and here was clearly a market for this type of Scottish fiction, yet there were many who resented its romantic portrayal of an idealistic past at a time when the country was living through turbulent industrial change.” (The Bottle Imp) Clydesidism attended to that industrialisation, and its post-industrial consequences, and has found various manifestations in James Kelman, William McIlvaney and Irvine Welsh, a manifestation that can be traced back at least as far as No Mean City, published in 1935. The term Clydesideism of course invokes Glasgow and its famous river, but it can be extended to urban life more generally, as its interest often lies, as John Marmysz notes,  in “emphasising the urban, often violent, face of Scotland.” (‘The Myth of Scotland as Nowhere in Particular’)

         Finally, to help us comprehend an aspect of Scottish fiction, we can think too of Nietzsche’s analysis as he proposed different approaches to history: the critical, the antiquated and monumental. Here Nietzsche sees the critical as looking queryingly and often sceptically at a nation’s past, while the antiquated can appear to fetishise it, seeing in the details of history a perspective that is too narrow. In monumental history the past is usually glorified and magnified, made large and looming. Nietzsche believed that history in its various forms can generate lethargy and lassitude and draws comparisons with humans and other animals. “…We have observed the animal, which is quite unhistorical, and dwells within a horizon reduced almost to a point, and yet lives in a certain degree of happiness, or at least without boredom and dissimulation.” (‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’) 

     To understand an element of Scottish literature is to comprehend the potential ways in which history and cultural expectations shape and limit the Scottish consciousness, one where the burden of history and the weight of cultural influence can leave the Scots without the wherewithal to act. It isn’t the writer’s purpose to generate that action but it might be vital to their creativity to look at how they can propose a consciousness that is free, or freer. If so many writers in the Scottish Renaissance turned against Scott, it rested perhaps more on this writer’s presence in Scottish culture than on the writer’s literary works. As Margery Palmer McCulloch says, “…one notices that Scott is still being judged not by literary criteria but by factors external to his work. (Hugh) MacDiarmid’s animus against Scott also seems based on his appropriation by English culture and by Anglo-Scots, with, perhaps, as with Burns, his Scots-speaking characters providing material for music-hall Scotsmen. In addition, Scott's high Toryism, his enjoyment of his position as Laird of Abbotsford and his intercourse with southern nobility were all antipathetic to the views of these predominantly socialist — in some cases Marxist-interwar writers.” (‘Studies in Scottish Literature’) 

     Scott helped create a Scottish history that was both monumental and antiquated, one that can be seen both in his central role in creating Scottish cliches, and in one of the largest and surely the grandest monuments to a writer in the world, one that can be found on Princes Street in Edinburgh. The Scott Monument is a Neo-Gothic hymn to Union aggrandisement, commissioned shortly after Scott’s death in 1832. This was only a decade after Scott’s role in George IV’s visit; a visit that was, as Tom Devine says, a “‘plaided panorama’ based on fake Highland regalia and the mythical costume and traditions of the clans. Scott had determined that Highlanders were what George would most like to see…” (The Scottish Nation) As Devine says, “Scott had wished the royal visit to be a ‘gathering of the Gael’ but what his Celtic fantasy had in fact produced was a distortion of the Highland past and present and the projection of a national image in which the Lowlands had no part.” (The Scottish Nation)  

      A question for many Scottish writers is how to attend to the various aspects of history without arriving at the sort of monumentalism and antiquated notions of Scott, while going beyond a self-criticism well encapsulated in the famous passage in Trainspotting: “Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us?” A critical approach to one’s history so harsh can lead to a self-deprecation that is less than useful. We should remember that, as the characters in Trainspotting hit the countryside and rail against Scotland, they are skag-addled lost causes looking for a reason to hate something even more than themselves. Welsh understands that history isn’t this objective thing that has names and dates; it is also an opportunity to widen one’s horizons of self-hatred, to turn individual despair into national failure. Some might see in the rejection of Scott and monumental and antiquated history that contemporary writers have been too keen to reverse the process, arriving at a nippy Clydesidism without warmth or humour.  “…In his Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories, [Douglas] Dunn, Peter Kravitz noted, talks of the ‘bruising candour’ of Kelman and McLean. His argument is that just as in the nineteenth century many Scottish writers escaped into writing kailyard (cabbage patch) stories of rural idylls, so now unfortunately, the emphasis on urban working-class stories can appear to be as exaggerated as the agrarian stresses of the past.” (Variant)

        We might not agree with Dunn but let us start with him, with his excellent short story ‘The Canoes’, one that announces history in its opening paragraph and plays with it ironically. Here the narrator offers his voice in the plural as he discusses a couple visiting the village while he and others stand by the Promenade. The old duke paid for its construction as a way of employing the lads’ fathers and, after it became viewed by the duke as a symbol of their fathers’ idleness, the sons are now knocking it down for good wages all over again. These are canny folk who know how to work the system, whether it is taking advantage of the Duke or gormless tourists who seek the authentic rural, Scottish experience. The locals have to play a role but if that is what authenticity demands then so be it. “…We all nodded a polite and silent good evening to them, which we believe is necessary for they have heard of our courtesy, our soft-spoken and excellent good manners and clear speech.” Everyone in the village gives the impression of having no interest in time but the narrator tells us that “…if [the boatman] Magee is late for his dinner by so much as half a minute, his wife will scatter it…social security keeps him and the rest of us alive, and I have yet to see a man late for his money.” 

      While the visitors see relaxed folk and an idyll getaway, the locals are parsimonious with the truth and reliant on the taxes paid on money made elsewhere. If Clydesdism would be the natural home of the Giro (the unemployment cheque), then Dunn proposes its permeating presence even in the most rural of environments and the most sly of political stories. When the English tourist steps into Magee’s boat, he might wonder how much is a fair price for the journey. But Magee will charge based on more than how much the trip is worth; he will base it on what he thinks the Englishman Barker is worth. “The Englishman had a look of prosperity about him.” When Barker says “how much do I owe you?”, the narrator sees a political answer in the question. “Now, there can be a long and historical answer to that one…” as if a little bit of exploitation here is nothing against the broader unfairness Scots have suffered under the English. Is this the truth or a convenient way of ridding one’s conscience of guilty feelings after screwing someone over? 

     Dunn’s story is a constantly shifting work of culpability and responsibility, of locals taking advantage where they can — but potentially hapless more broadly. Perhaps a definition of the canny is close to dire resourcefulness: that those with limited means can look much more shrewd than those with money and opportunities at their disposal. When Magee notes that Mrs Barker “…was a touch on the overpaying side of humanity”, is this partly because she is also on the side that has relatively large amounts of cash in the first place? This isn’t to say the wealthy can’t be mean, nor that the poor can’t be improvident, but it might seem unfair to blame the poor for taking small advantages while they are victims of bigger injustices. When the narrator proposes he is lazy he adds that “part of my trouble is that I have become content enough on plain victuals in modest quantities and two packs of Players a week.” But he also says, “what jobs I’ve done in other parts than this one did not contribute much to my happiness.” These are unlikely to have been jobs that paid well or offered many opportunities, so why not settle for the basics in a place he knows well?

   It wouldn’t be true to say that Dunn doesn’t judge but he offers a sense of perspective that proposes the narrator might be a harder worker with a different set of incentives; maybe not. What we do know is that there will continue to be a duke lording it over the locals and a government paying modest remuneration in return for the folk knowing their place. But they will also knowingly know it and much of the story’s irony comes out of this acknowledgement. 

      In ‘The Canoes’, much of the quality of the writing rests in the awareness the narrator has of his world and those around him. In Bernard MacLaverty’s ‘A Time to Dance’ it is more the opposite, with MacLaverty using his central character’s youthful obliviousness to point up the gap between the world he sees and the world we can comprehend. Here is a boy with a squint and a single mum, who avoids school because of the former and whose mother is forced to drag him to work before taking him back to school when she finds Nelson wandering the streets. She works as a stripper in a bar during the day and insists that Nelson put a patch over his other eye as well while she leaves him in a small, locked room and goes out to perform. Here are two people trying to hide things from each other, but while his mother is fully aware of what Nelson is hiding as she discovers him skiving from school, Nelson seems at least half unaware of his mother’s profession. MacLaverty insists on this lack of recognition throughout the story just as he also shows Nelson’s idiosyncratic awareness of the world through defamiliarising aspects of it. Nelson avoids “distant uniforms” and when he wears both eye patches through choice to see what it would be like to be blind, he notes that “one of the footsteps even laughed”. When the mother calls her tranquillisers ‘tantalisers’, Nelson isn’t likely to muse over what they contain and the impact they will be having on her. Those distant uniforms are just school kids he needs to avoid who might recognise his truancy, and footsteps will be all you might hear when blind unless someone lets out a noise. Those tantalisers will be keeping his mother calm when she has plenty to worry about - including Nelson’s frequent truancy. “Look Nelson, love. If you’re skiving school, do you realise what’ll happen to me? In Primary the Children’s Panel threatened to send me to court.” 

      The narrator in ‘Canoes’ is wise to the world; Nelson is mainly oblivious to it, but neither are in control of their lives. The history that we find in ‘The Canoes’ is replaced, or augmented, by religion in ‘A Time to Dance’. It isn’t just that the Boy attends St John the Baptist’s school and that, before the end of the story, he ends up in a religious education class where the teacher reads out a passage from Ecclesiastes, one that gives the story its title. It is also there in Nelson’s presence in Edinburgh. His mother is from Ireland and we might wonder if she has escaped to Scotland to bring up a child in a slightly less religiously judgemental environment. She may say that one day they will be going back, once she has enough money, but we might not be convinced that she is in Scotland chiefly to save up cash. Religion is also in the background as a question of the Troubles. MacLaverty’s best-known book is probably Cal, about a young Irish Catholic involved in the IRA and, though the writer has lived for many years in Scotland, his work has more often than not been drawn to Irish questions. Near the end of ‘A Time to Dance’, Nelson and his mother are in the housemaster’s office and the master asks about her accent. She says she is from Derry; he says he is from across the border in Donegal. Little is made of this politically and the reader might be more inclined to concentrate on sex over politics as the housemaster is young and so is the mother. We have been made well aware of her desirous qualities with the wolf-whistling of the sixth formers when she arrives with Nelson at the school. Yet politics is there nevertheless, a political divide and a town, Derry, that is hardly neutral. It is where many believe the Troubles started with a three-day riot known as The Battle of the Bogside in 1969 and where, in 1972, in what became known as Bloody Sunday, fourteen people lost their lives after British troops started shooting at unarmed civilians. ‘A Time to Dance’ was first published in 1982, not long after Bobby Sands and other IRA figures had died during a hunger strike. Its lines from Ecclesiastes — a time to kill and time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh — would have had a particular resonance. As MacLaverty noted: “You write about what is happening around you. You write about what is making people weep.” (The Common Breath)

     MacLaverty was an Irish writer living in Scotland during a period (especially the 1980s) when Scotland’s relationship with the United Kingdom wasn’t as fractious as Irish Catholics’ with Britain, but was full of (often productive) tension. The question of critical history became pronounced, with many writers, as well as musicians, and painters seeing the presence of Thatcherism as antithetical to the sort of Scotland they wanted to live in. When Thatcher talked of the enemy within, she might have been discussing the miners, but it was as though her deregulating, neoliberal and punishing policies were creating enemies elsewhere also. She drew parallels with the Falklands War, saying “…at the time of the conflict they had had to fight the enemy without; but the enemy within, much more difficult to fight, was just as dangerous to liberty.” (Margaret Thatcher Foundation) It was as though the war she fought in the South Atlantic, in working wonders for her popularity with a conservative base, could then be a war on parts of the British population as well. Both James Kelman and Alasdair Gray spoke about this in an interview they did together, with Gray saying that they were both products of a post-war “state that Thatcher started dismantling, In short, Britain after the war was a socialist democracy…It wasn't going for mere competitive profiteering out of things like the sale of water and the sale of education like the United States.” (Contemporary Literature) 

        Both Kelman and Gray might be seen as political writers but that isn’t how they view themselves. For Gray, “what is sometimes defined as "political writing" has to do with a sense of justice, while Kelman says “politics is really irrelevant to my work; There’s no place for it.” (Contemporary Literature) The point is to be alive to the injustices and perplexities of the contemporary moment, while finding within it underlying principles that propose a purpose greater than the symptomatic. Even Scott for all his high Toryism wouldn’t have been an important novelist if he were contained by such a view. As Gray says, Marx believed Scott was a great novelist “because in his presentation of the peasantry, lawyers, schoolteachers, and aristocrats, he showed how the class war operated.” (Contemporary Literature) It is partly why the image and actions of Scott as an individual are more the problem than Scott the novelist. Scott fell into antiquarian and monumental notions of history that his work often escaped, without perhaps quite consisting of the critical as Nietzsche would couch it and Kelman and Gray would address it. 

        However, while Kelman drew on the absurdity of existentialism and thus was chiefly interested in realism; Gray was drawn to the absurdity of the fantastic and the allegorical — using realism as no more than a base to escape into flights of fancy or the humorous. Kelman’s work had plenty of humour too, but it was grimly present rather than exuberantly exaggerated. We can see the difference in Gray’s ‘Five Letters from an Eastern Empire’ and Kelman’s ‘Not Not While the Giro’ — both anthologised in The Devil and The Giro. In Gray’s story, a young poet is sent to an elaborate palace where the emperor lives, a place where it seems that several cities have been laid bare so that rice fields can feed those inside the palace walls. The word often used is etiquette to describe expected behavioural codes that might in other circumstances be called diktats and none more so than the demands placed upon the central character as a state poet. As the narrator Bohu notes: “The air was still warm. A gardener spread cushions on the platform edge and I lay and thought about the poem I would be ordered to write.” Later, the emperor insists “I order you to write a poem celebrating my irrevocable justice.” The emperor has had the old capital burned down and everyone killed but that is a small issue next to the peace it has brought to the empire — no matter if now our poet is without parents. A headmaster of literature says to Bohu “the building of the new palace and the destruction of the old capital are the same thing, All big new things must begin by destroying the old. Otherwise they are a mere continuation.” The rebellion the emperor claimed needed to be quelled seems to have been an elaborate lie, and our narrator says that he cannot write a poem based on this fabrication, especially as it led also to his parents’ death. Maybe if they were still alive he might have managed. The headmaster is in some ways right to point out that this would have been a greater falsification. If the emperor had saved his parents, Bohu’s poem would be an “ordinary piece of political excuse-making, Anyone can see the good in disasters which leave their family and property intact. But a poet must feel the cracks in the nation splitting his individual heart.” 

        Gray’s story is politically slippery as readers could see it as an attack on free-market individualism or as an account of state control. It of course incorporates aspects of both even if politically they would usually be antithetical. Though Joanna Kerr sees the story chiefly through The Republic and Plato’s rejection of the poet, which in Gray’s story becomes acceptable only if the poet is a servant of the state, and why there are only two, it is no less useful to read it through the Hegelian against the Hayekian. That will take a moment to unpack, but when Plato says that “if you admit the entertaining Muse of lyric and epic poetry, then instead of law and the shared acceptance of reason as the best guide, the kings of your community will be pleasure and pain”, Kerr sees that these “are the enemies of reason, inciting subversive elements and exciting baser instincts. This is because they appeal to the irrational part of our natures and encourage emotional reactions to events.” (Literature and Aesthetics) When Bohu asks the headmaster of literature why there are so many headmasters and so few poets, the headmaster replies: "The emperor needs all the headmasters he can get. If a quarter of his people were headmasters he would be perfectly happy. But more than two poets would tear his kingdom apart.” Poets must be kept to the minimum or serve the purposes of a higher spirit than individual expression. They must in Gray’s dystopian story serve the state. 

    This might not seem too far removed from Hegel’s claim that “the German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realisation of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom —that freedom which has its own absolute form itself as its purport.” (The History of Western Philosophy) Bertrand Russell quotes the passage and sees in it the glorification of the state, a claim that became weakened by the middle of the 20th-century after Naziism, the terrors of Stalinism and the horror of Mussolini. The state was potentially a problem rather than a solution, and for nobody more so than Friedrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom would be of immense importance to the shift towards neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan. Hayek’s claimed it was impossible to predict the actions of numerous individuals and the market was better than the state at generating a healthy economy and society. “Hayek’s epistemology thus leads to a defence of moral and institutional conservatism as against rationalistic reformers, and of the free market, as against the command economy.” (The Oxford Companion to Philosophy) 

  Gray supported an independent Scotland but he was hardly going to allow his work to be coopted by State ideology. Equally the notion of the "Aryan race" or the "German race”, Gray says, “ — it was only possible to make such a thing believable by deciding to exterminate Jews and eliminate them. I wrote this pamphlet called Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland, and I begin by defining a Scot as anyone who happens to live in Scotland and is able to vote.” (Contemporary Literature) Gray is far removed from Hegel’s notion of national spirit. But if Hayek’s reaction to the Hegelian Geist and the planned economy was a market-driven individualism, Gray wasn’t much for that either, and like many a Scottish writer of the eighties happy to castigate Thatcherite self-advancement. Speaking of Poor Things, Calum Barnes and Ewan Gibbs insists: “Gray makes clear in his characteristic deadpan that buried within the novel is an oblique commentary on the depredations of Thatcherism, its unabashed veneration of individualism and imperialist chauvinism.” (Tribune)  

    The story can thus be read as an allegorical account of the poet’s role within society, which shouldn’t be seen as a societal obligation but neither as one of full autonomy. It is partly why we can say the headmaster is right from one perspective no matter how horrendously wrong he happens to be from another. He wants Bohu to write for the State to the detriment of personal feeling. His creativity will be completely subordinate to the ideological. But Bohu saying he would maybe have written the poem glorifying the emperor’s destruction of the old capital if his parents had been saved would have been an example of no more than self-interest. Gray wonders what is this place between the self-interested (Hayek) and the potentially self-abnegatory (Hegel) — writing without any obligation to others and writing that doesn’t entertain the self at all. This is a complicated question theoretically. Gray’s purpose isn’t so much to resolve it but to allegorise it into comprehension. Bohu must write a poem that contains an inherent contradiction and resolve it. The poem must reveal why the emperor was right to destroy the old capital. But as the headmaster says in the last letter, “if we describe the people we kill as dangerous rebels that looks glamorous; if we describe them as weak and silly we seem unjust.” It is a problem many a journalist propping up power will have to face as well and, in most instances, the columnists don’t resolve the contradictions but hope they will pass the inflammatory reader by. The readers are so worked up by a sense of indignation the news story creates that the underlying potential heroism of the activists or their weakness becomes secondary. Gray’s story is an inversion of such journalism not only in its retreat from immediate political realities into abstract, fantastic narrative, but also in teasing out the contradictions of power. It returns us to Nietzsche’s historical taxonomy, and the story ends on monumental history while the tale has been an examination of it in critical form. The poem will serve as a grounding myth in the birth of a new nation. “I advise that the poem be sent to every village, town and city in the land.” 

         When it comes to the Nietzschean, Kelman is nothing if not critical, an example of Clydesidism at its most complex. Dunn may have reservations about how many writers are offering prose in the vernacular and focusing on the central belt. But this is partly a necessary corrective to the Scottish Highlands’ centrality prevalent in 19th-century prose —and still evident in novels like The Outlander series — and the kailyard tradition of the late 19th and early 20th century. It was as if Scott’s plaid pageant needed virulent contradiction by serious writers in the modern era. Yet if Kelman were merely countering assumption that would be all very well but wouldn’t be enough. He also more than most updates and complicates that Caledonian Antisyzygy, a term G. Gregory Smith offered to explain the split personality often evident in Scottish literature, and as we have seen, vital to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of Justified Sinner and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both gothic accounts of the split. Kelman’s Not Not While the Giro is a post-industrial take on it, with the narrator of a self-perceived slacker who won’t take such a slur lying down, even if he isn’t much inclined to get up either. Kelman’s work passes through Dostoevsky, Beckett and Kafka — and is as clearly located in place as Dostoevsky’s was in St Petersburg. Kelman is a Glasgow writer and perhaps even more so than Gray because his work rarely adopts the fantastic that is so important a dimension of Gray’s imaginings. 

     However, we could say that Kelman’s work is internally hypothetical as Gray’s is often externally so: Kelman offers up figures who are frequently in at least two minds as they muse over various scenarios of action, while Gray extends his characters into imagined worlds that exist for us on the page. In ‘Not Not While the Giro’, the narrator says “But there should be direction at 30 years of age. A knowing where I am going. Alright Sr Hamish we can’t all be Charles Clore and Florence Nightingale.” Our narrator thinks to himself and imagines scenarios with others, all the while trying to stave off self-criticism while also musing over its justification. “I am wasting time…my production rate is less than atrocious.” Nevertheless he does a bit of work sometimes: “I mend fuses for people, odd jobs, and that kind of blah for associates of the naff, tenants in other words.” But this is because “I am expected to do it. I fall behind with the fucking rent. Terrible situation. I have to keep on his right side.” Though he doesn’t mind so much. “It gets you out and about.” 

           If the narrator doesn’t know his own mind it isn’t for want of reflection. He has plenty of time for that. It is more that he isn’t so sure how much of his unemployment status is down to bone idleness or the direst of circumstances, how much of his laziness comes from the situation he is in and perhaps many like him. He is hopelessly ill-connected and wouldn’t be looking for a job from those he knew anyway.  “Tramping around pubs in the offchance of bumping into wealthy acquaintances is a depressing affair. And as far as I remember none of mine are wealthy and even then it is never a doddle to beg from acquaintances — hard enough with friends. Of which I no longer have.” In ‘Canoes', we also have characters on the dole but resourceful and convivial, capable of keeping friends in their community and making new ones when it looks like being nice can make them a few pounds. Dunn accesses aspects of Kailyard in village life while Kelman of course explores Clydesidism in an urban environment. It might partly be why the tones are so different even if the unemployed status is the same. Both may be examples of contemporary Scotland on the dole but Kelman’s story is despairing in its irony while Dunn’s is gentle in its paradoxes. It would be a useless exaggeration to say that the narrator in ‘The Canoes’ is split in his personality — he is aware of the face he puts on for tourists isn’t quite the one he will show to his mates; and both are public manifestations. In ‘Not Not While the Giro’, the narrator is as indecisive as a Beckett figure, as paranoiac as a Kafka character and as potentially destructive as a Dostoevsky anti-hero. When the narrator wonders if he could be more economically active he creates in his mind a figure he will bow to and who will judge him. “Where is that godforsaken factory. Let me at it. A Trier. I would say so Your Magnateship. And was Never Say Die the type of adage one could apply to the wretch, I believe so Your Industrialiness.” The paragraph ends and the next once begins and concludes with “Fuck off.” To be in two minds indicates a minor moment of indecision; to be in multiple minds might make you wonder where your head is most of the time. It may not help that the narrator wonders “why am I against action”, as Kelman forgoes the question mark. Action would at least propel him into a deed, and the deed in turn would eradicate the possibility in action by becoming an act in reality. It is as if the less the narrator acts the more proliferations he generates in his head, and the more ways he could act (but doesn’t), the more minds he is in while stuck in his own. 

    If in Stevenson’s novel the purposes rests in perverse actualisation, with Dr Jekyll producing a potion that gives birth to an alter-ego of untrammelled self-interest, Kelman’s relationship with the Caledonian Antisyzygy is to push it to the further limits of non-actualisation, to see how many voices can be generated in a story that only has one. There is no external dialogue in ‘Not Not While the Giro’, nothing to take us out of the suffocating self-absorption, and nor would Kelman wish to do so. Kelman shows us someone who is not fit for purpose, and leaves the viewer to decide if this is a personal fault or a societal catastrophe. Does the narrator need to get off his backside or does society need to function in a way that doesn’t leave millions unemployed? ‘Not Not While the Giro’ was published in 1983, at the end of Thatcher’s first term in government, and during a period that prioritised cutting jobs in industries she regarded as lacking competitiveness. “The deep recession of the early 1980s and the job losses that followed the miners' strike of 1984 pushed unemployment up from the 1 million Margaret Thatcher had inherited as prime minister in 1979 to more than 3 million in seven years.” (Guardian) Kelman would be more inclined to blame the state than the individual but that doesn’t mean that the narrator is a blameless product of economic injustice. The story is too focused on his interiority for such a claim to be valid, and it would rob Kelman of his desire to create a character of immense complexity that resembles existential figures of the literary past. A Thatcherite government wouldn’t have created such a narrator, even if her policies weren’t likely to do him any favours. 

                Both Iain Crichton Smith and George Mackay Brown would appear closer to Kailyard than to Clydesidism or even Tartanry, but perhaps that these three terms could be seen to exclude the Islands, or to incorporate them into the mainland, might be reflective of a bias even within so small a nation as Scotland. In Smith’s case, it was complicated still further by having Gaelic as his first language. (He wrote in both Gaelic and English)  While Kelman uses aspect of Clydesidism to suggest alienation, Smith uses Kailyard to convey an element of madness, or at least eccentricity. If the narrator in ‘Not Not While the Giro’ usually allows thoughts to rattle around in his head, in Smith’s ‘Murdo’ he expresses them aloud. When a local tries to cadge some money off him, Murdo replies, “No understand, Me German. Tourist.” You can get away with this in a city of strangers but not when you’re on first name terms with the cadger. It doesn’t help perceptions of your sanity when you add: “Me without pity. Have done enough for shrinking pound already. What fought war for, what sent Panzer divisions into civilised treasuries of the West for, if required to prop up currency now.” If in ‘Not Not While the Giro’ the narrator’s position might soon become intolerable, Murdo’s is tolerated. His wife Janet “sometimes…thought that Murdo was out of his mind”, but she also “felt fear and happiness together.” When they visit Glasgow it is a bit like an away day from a mental asylum, reminiscent of the fishing trip in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but with far fewer signs of competence than the institutionalised in the novel, who at least prove capable of a decent catch. After replaying 'Bridge over Troubled Waters’ on the jukebox, Murdo sits there moving his head to the music while “a number of girls gazed at him with astonishment.” 

     But mostly he is in the village, making a fool of others while making a fool of himself. When he meets someone he used to work with at the bank, the man asks what he is doing now, and Murdo says he is looking after his grandfather and his dog. “An old dog. He’s very fond of my grandfather. He saved his life at Paschendale. He picked him up between his teeth and took him back to the British lines after he had been very badly nay almost fatally wounded.” It is as if village life is so predicated on the commonplace that Murdo offers instead the bizarre in an attempt to offer expression that happens to be his own. A common theme in Smith’s work is the problem of conformism, well explored in his lovely short novel On the Island, looking at Lewis and more specifically the village of Point, and how difficult it is to escape expectations of family and community in a small place. 

       This is evident too in George Mackay Brown’s story ‘Celia’, which makes Kailyard dark and dank, with the sort of drinking to be found in Whisky Galore not a source of communal pleasure but solitary despair. The title character is an alcoholic who services her clients in return for the booze she needs, a woman who hopes that alcohol will assuage the fears it no doubt helps to create. She sees nothing but cruelty in the world and describes it with such vivid precision that it is hard not to disagree with her perspective. “The gull came down on the rat and swallowed it whole…I could see the shape of the rain the blackjack’s throat, a kind of fierce twist and thrust.”  Brown’s story like much of his work is hard to locate socio-historically even if Celia talks of Vietnam and the Warsaw Ghetto, Cape Town and Chicago. These are events dropped in to reflect Celia’s despair rather than to locate the story in time and place. More than most modern Scottish writers, Brown’s work possesses an engagement with legend and myth, even if it is one found in other 20th-century Scottish writers, as John Burns notes when writing on Brown and others in an essay ‘Myth and Marvels’, found in The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. It is a tradition Dennis Gifford, for example, sees in Renaissance writers like Gunn, Linklater and Aitchison and that Burns reckons continues in Sian Hayton and Harry Tait’s work as well as Brown’s. But Brown turned a living place (Orkney) into a mythic world without producing historical fiction or giving us an environment more vividly imagined than elaborately realised. Orkney is central to Brown’s work as a peripheral locale that absorbs far more of the primitive than a contemporary urban setting, with Celia managing to turn the historical into the emotionally incidental. Its titular character’s despair is her own, and yet the story shows that it is manifest in the fears of a central character whose father died when she was twelve and whose mother followed him three years later. There is also the gossip, lust and aggression of the townsfolk and, too, the incoming sailors from further afield. Brown doesn’t show the island as an escape from the brutality of the world but as a microcosm of it. This is Kailyard turned inside out. 

             There is much more to modern Scottish literature than this: female writers like Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, for example, and, in Muriel Spark, a novelist whose Scottishness will probably always be associated with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - whose success turned her into an international writer with only passing references to Scotland. But our purpose has been to remain narrowly focused and attend to a few stories  — ones that allow us to understand the preoccupations of the Scottish consciousness in contained and brilliantly delineated form. 

           

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin Tony McKibbin

Contemporary Scottish Short Stories

Knowing One's Own Mind

Scottish literature may appear minor next to English, French, Russian or Italian fiction. However, it still happens to be vast enough for any attempt at a summary in essay form to be foolish without winnowing the work down to a narrow corpus, a chiefly contemporary concern and a handful of stories. Many have surveyed a broader terrain but even Alan Bold looked at only Modern Sottish Literature in a book under that title, while Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson took as their project The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. As a collection of short stories, the most ambitious must surely be The Devil and The Giro, with the very title proposing two concerns that preoccupy Scottish fiction: the more traditional interest in the supernatural, and the more contemporary concern with the destitute. It covers hundreds of years in Scottish short fiction. What joins the two major themes together, Carl MacDougall notes in his introduction, is the importance of "the spoken voice and the power of first person narration." Here the oral tradition in older work that suggests community meets the alienation of the voice in the industrial wilderness of the modern story.

Perhaps one of the advantages of being a small country is that preoccupations are easier to find than in vaster literature. Who could say what the vital themes of English or French fiction happen to be, while in Scottish narrative much has been made of the ongoing interests in Tartanry, Kailyard and Clydesideism, and the Caledonian Antisiyzygy. The latter looks at the split-consciousness in the Scottish psyche and can be found most explicitly in James Hog's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Tartanry describes the fixation of the Highlands on the Scottish imaginary and will be noticed at any airport duty-free selling whisky, tartan items and shortbread. Its image may have been created in 1822 by George IV's visit to Scotland and the 'plaid pageantry' that accompanied it, but the film Brigadoon helped it along internationally. (Walter Scott was the orchestrator of that pageant but a short story like The Two Drovers is a complex account of the Highland mind as it became part of the Union).

Kailyard has similarities with Tartanry but while the latter often suggests clans and kilts, the former shows small communities working together in likeable harmony. J. M. Barrie was seen as its most significant exponent, "and here was clearly a market for this type of Scottish fiction, yet there were many who resented its romantic portrayal of an idealistic past at a time when the country was living through turbulent industrial change." (The Bottle Imp) Clydesidism attended to that industrialisation, and its post-industrial consequences, and has found various manifestations in James Kelman, William McIlvaney and Irvine Welsh, a manifestation that can be traced back at least as far as No Mean City, published in 1935. The term Clydesideism of course invokes Glasgow and its famous river, but it can be extended to urban life more generally, as its interest often lies, as John Marmysz notes, in "emphasising the urban, often violent, face of Scotland." ('The Myth of Scotland as Nowhere in Particular')

Finally, to help us comprehend an aspect of Scottish fiction, we can think too of Nietzsche's analysis as he proposed different approaches to history: the critical, the antiquated and monumental. Here Nietzsche sees the critical as looking queryingly and often sceptically at a nation's past, while the antiquated can appear to fetishise it, seeing in the details of history a perspective that is too narrow. In monumental history the past is usually glorified and magnified, made large and looming. Nietzsche believed that history in its various forms can generate lethargy and lassitude and draws comparisons with humans and other animals. "...We have observed the animal, which is quite unhistorical, and dwells within a horizon reduced almost to a point, and yet lives in a certain degree of happiness, or at least without boredom and dissimulation." ('On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life')

To understand an element of Scottish literature is to comprehend the potential ways in which history and cultural expectations shape and limit the Scottish consciousness, one where the burden of history and the weight of cultural influence can leave the Scots without the wherewithal to act. It isn't the writer's purpose to generate that action but it might be vital to their creativity to look at how they can propose a consciousness that is free, or freer. If so many writers in the Scottish Renaissance turned against Scott, it rested perhaps more on this writer's presence in Scottish culture than on the writer's literary works. As Margery Palmer McCulloch says, "...one notices that Scott is still being judged not by literary criteria but by factors external to his work. (Hugh) MacDiarmid's animus against Scott also seems based on his appropriation by English culture and by Anglo-Scots, with, perhaps, as with Burns, his Scots-speaking characters providing material for music-hall Scotsmen. In addition, Scott's high Toryism, his enjoyment of his position as Laird of Abbotsford and his intercourse with southern nobility were all antipathetic to the views of these predominantly socialist in some cases Marxist-interwar writers." ('Studies in Scottish Literature')

Scott helped create a Scottish history that was both monumental and antiquated, one that can be seen both in his central role in creating Scottish cliches, and in one of the largest and surely the grandest monuments to a writer in the world, one that can be found on Princes Street in Edinburgh. The Scott Monument is a Neo-Gothic hymn to Union aggrandisement, commissioned shortly after Scott's death in 1832. This was only a decade after Scott's role in George IV's visit; a visit that was, as Tom Devine says, a "'plaided panorama' based on fake Highland regalia and the mythical costume and traditions of the clans. Scott had determined that Highlanders were what George would most like to see..." (The Scottish Nation) As Devine says, "Scott had wished the royal visit to be a 'gathering of the Gael' but what his Celtic fantasy had in fact produced was a distortion of the Highland past and present and the projection of a national image in which the Lowlands had no part." (The Scottish Nation)

A question for many Scottish writers is how to attend to the various aspects of history without arriving at the sort of monumentalism and antiquated notions of Scott, while going beyond a self-criticism well encapsulated in the famous passage in Trainspotting: "Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us?" A critical approach to one's history so harsh can lead to a self-deprecation that is less than useful. We should remember that, as the characters in Trainspotting hit the countryside and rail against Scotland, they are skag-addled lost causes looking for a reason to hate something even more than themselves. Welsh understands that history isn't this objective thing that has names and dates; it is also an opportunity to widen one's horizons of self-hatred, to turn individual despair into national failure. Some might see in the rejection of Scott and monumental and antiquated history that contemporary writers have been too keen to reverse the process, arriving at a nippy Clydesidism without warmth or humour. "...In his Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories, [Douglas] Dunn, Peter Kravitz noted, talks of the 'bruising candour' of Kelman and McLean. His argument is that just as in the nineteenth century many Scottish writers escaped into writing kailyard (cabbage patch) stories of rural idylls, so now unfortunately, the emphasis on urban working-class stories can appear to be as exaggerated as the agrarian stresses of the past." (Variant)

We might not agree with Dunn but let us start with him, with his excellent short story 'The Canoes', one that announces history in its opening paragraph and plays with it ironically. Here the narrator offers his voice in the plural as he discusses a couple visiting the village while he and others stand by the Promenade. The old duke paid for its construction as a way of employing the lads' fathers and, after it became viewed by the duke as a symbol of their fathers' idleness, the sons are now knocking it down for good wages all over again. These are canny folk who know how to work the system, whether it is taking advantage of the Duke or gormless tourists who seek the authentic rural, Scottish experience. The locals have to play a role but if that is what authenticity demands then so be it. "...We all nodded a polite and silent good evening to them, which we believe is necessary for they have heard of our courtesy, our soft-spoken and excellent good manners and clear speech." Everyone in the village gives the impression of having no interest in time but the narrator tells us that "...if [the boatman] Magee is late for his dinner by so much as half a minute, his wife will scatter it...social security keeps him and the rest of us alive, and I have yet to see a man late for his money."

While the visitors see relaxed folk and an idyll getaway, the locals are parsimonious with the truth and reliant on the taxes paid on money made elsewhere. If Clydesdism would be the natural home of the Giro (the unemployment cheque), then Dunn proposes its permeating presence even in the most rural of environments and the most sly of political stories. When the English tourist steps into Magee's boat, he might wonder how much is a fair price for the journey. But Magee will charge based on more than how much the trip is worth; he will base it on what he thinks the Englishman Barker is worth. "The Englishman had a look of prosperity about him." When Barker says "how much do I owe you?", the narrator sees a political answer in the question. "Now, there can be a long and historical answer to that one..." as if a little bit of exploitation here is nothing against the broader unfairness Scots have suffered under the English. Is this the truth or a convenient way of ridding one's conscience of guilty feelings after screwing someone over?

Dunn's story is a constantly shifting work of culpability and responsibility, of locals taking advantage where they can but potentially hapless more broadly. Perhaps a definition of the canny is close to dire resourcefulness: that those with limited means can look much more shrewd than those with money and opportunities at their disposal. When Magee notes that Mrs Barker "...was a touch on the overpaying side of humanity", is this partly because she is also on the side that has relatively large amounts of cash in the first place? This isn't to say the wealthy can't be mean, nor that the poor can't be improvident, but it might seem unfair to blame the poor for taking small advantages while they are victims of bigger injustices. When the narrator proposes he is lazy he adds that "part of my trouble is that I have become content enough on plain victuals in modest quantities and two packs of Players a week." But he also says, "what jobs I've done in other parts than this one did not contribute much to my happiness." These are unlikely to have been jobs that paid well or offered many opportunities, so why not settle for the basics in a place he knows well?

It wouldn't be true to say that Dunn doesn't judge but he offers a sense of perspective that proposes the narrator might be a harder worker with a different set of incentives; maybe not. What we do know is that there will continue to be a duke lording it over the locals and a government paying modest remuneration in return for the folk knowing their place. But they will also knowingly know it and much of the story's irony comes out of this acknowledgement.

In 'The Canoes', much of the quality of the writing rests in the awareness the narrator has of his world and those around him. In Bernard MacLaverty's 'A Time to Dance' it is more the opposite, with MacLaverty using his central character's youthful obliviousness to point up the gap between the world he sees and the world we can comprehend. Here is a boy with a squint and a single mum, who avoids school because of the former and whose mother is forced to drag him to work before taking him back to school when she finds Nelson wandering the streets. She works as a stripper in a bar during the day and insists that Nelson put a patch over his other eye as well while she leaves him in a small, locked room and goes out to perform. Here are two people trying to hide things from each other, but while his mother is fully aware of what Nelson is hiding as she discovers him skiving from school, Nelson seems at least half unaware of his mother's profession. MacLaverty insists on this lack of recognition throughout the story just as he also shows Nelson's idiosyncratic awareness of the world through defamiliarising aspects of it. Nelson avoids "distant uniforms" and when he wears both eye patches through choice to see what it would be like to be blind, he notes that "one of the footsteps even laughed". When the mother calls her tranquillisers 'tantalisers', Nelson isn't likely to muse over what they contain and the impact they will be having on her. Those distant uniforms are just school kids he needs to avoid who might recognise his truancy, and footsteps will be all you might hear when blind unless someone lets out a noise. Those tantalisers will be keeping his mother calm when she has plenty to worry about - including Nelson's frequent truancy. "Look Nelson, love. If you're skiving school, do you realise what'll happen to me? In Primary the Children's Panel threatened to send me to court."

The narrator in 'Canoes' is wise to the world; Nelson is mainly oblivious to it, but neither are in control of their lives. The history that we find in 'The Canoes' is replaced, or augmented, by religion in 'A Time to Dance'. It isn't just that the Boy attends St John the Baptist's school and that, before the end of the story, he ends up in a religious education class where the teacher reads out a passage from Ecclesiastes, one that gives the story its title. It is also there in Nelson's presence in Edinburgh. His mother is from Ireland and we might wonder if she has escaped to Scotland to bring up a child in a slightly less religiously judgemental environment. She may say that one day they will be going back, once she has enough money, but we might not be convinced that she is in Scotland chiefly to save up cash. Religion is also in the background as a question of the Troubles. MacLaverty's best-known book is probably Cal, about a young Irish Catholic involved in the IRA and, though the writer has lived for many years in Scotland, his work has more often than not been drawn to Irish questions. Near the end of 'A Time to Dance', Nelson and his mother are in the housemaster's office and the master asks about her accent. She says she is from Derry; he says he is from across the border in Donegal. Little is made of this politically and the reader might be more inclined to concentrate on sex over politics as the housemaster is young and so is the mother. We have been made well aware of her desirous qualities with the wolf-whistling of the sixth formers when she arrives with Nelson at the school. Yet politics is there nevertheless, a political divide and a town, Derry, that is hardly neutral. It is where many believe the Troubles started with a three-day riot known as The Battle of the Bogside in 1969 and where, in 1972, in what became known as Bloody Sunday, fourteen people lost their lives after British troops started shooting at unarmed civilians. 'A Time to Dance' was first published in 1982, not long after Bobby Sands and other IRA figures had died during a hunger strike. Its lines from Ecclesiastes a time to kill and time to heal; a time to weep and a time to laugh would have had a particular resonance. As MacLaverty noted: "You write about what is happening around you. You write about what is making people weep." (The Common Breath)

MacLaverty was an Irish writer living in Scotland during a period (especially the 1980s) when Scotland's relationship with the United Kingdom wasn't as fractious as Irish Catholics' with Britain, but was full of (often productive) tension. The question of critical history became pronounced, with many writers, as well as musicians, and painters seeing the presence of Thatcherism as antithetical to the sort of Scotland they wanted to live in. When Thatcher talked of the enemy within, she might have been discussing the miners, but it was as though her deregulating, neoliberal and punishing policies were creating enemies elsewhere also. She drew parallels with the Falklands War, saying "...at the time of the conflict they had had to fight the enemy without; but the enemy within, much more difficult to fight, was just as dangerous to liberty." (Margaret Thatcher Foundation) It was as though the war she fought in the South Atlantic, in working wonders for her popularity with a conservative base, could then be a war on parts of the British population as well. Both James Kelman and Alasdair Gray spoke about this in an interview they did together, with Gray saying that they were both products of a post-war "state that Thatcher started dismantling, In short, Britain after the war was a socialist democracy...It wasn't going for mere competitive profiteering out of things like the sale of water and the sale of education like the United States." (Contemporary Literature)

Both Kelman and Gray might be seen as political writers but that isn't how they view themselves. For Gray, "what is sometimes defined as political writing has to do with a sense of justice, while Kelman says "politics is really irrelevant to my work; There's no place for it." (Contemporary Literature) The point is to be alive to the injustices and perplexities of the contemporary moment, while finding within it underlying principles that propose a purpose greater than the symptomatic. Even Scott for all his high Toryism wouldn't have been an important novelist if he were contained by such a view. As Gray says, Marx believed Scott was a great novelist "because in his presentation of the peasantry, lawyers, schoolteachers, and aristocrats, he showed how the class war operated." (Contemporary Literature) It is partly why the image and actions of Scott as an individual are more the problem than Scott the novelist. Scott fell into antiquarian and monumental notions of history that his work often escaped, without perhaps quite consisting of the critical as Nietzsche would couch it and Kelman and Gray would address it.

However, while Kelman drew on the absurdity of existentialism and thus was chiefly interested in realism; Gray was drawn to the absurdity of the fantastic and the allegorical using realism as no more than a base to escape into flights of fancy or the humorous. Kelman's work had plenty of humour too, but it was grimly present rather than exuberantly exaggerated. We can see the difference in Gray's 'Five Letters from an Eastern Empire' and Kelman's 'Not Not While the Giro' both anthologised in The Devil and The Giro. In Gray's story, a young poet is sent to an elaborate palace where the emperor lives, a place where it seems that several cities have been laid bare so that rice fields can feed those inside the palace walls. The word often used is etiquette to describe expected behavioural codes that might in other circumstances be called diktats and none more so than the demands placed upon the central character as a state poet. As the narrator Bohu notes: "The air was still warm. A gardener spread cushions on the platform edge and I lay and thought about the poem I would be ordered to write." Later, the emperor insists "I order you to write a poem celebrating my irrevocable justice." The emperor has had the old capital burned down and everyone killed but that is a small issue next to the peace it has brought to the empire no matter if now our poet is without parents. A headmaster of literature says to Bohu "the building of the new palace and the destruction of the old capital are the same thing, All big new things must begin by destroying the old. Otherwise they are a mere continuation." The rebellion the emperor claimed needed to be quelled seems to have been an elaborate lie, and our narrator says that he cannot write a poem based on this fabrication, especially as it led also to his parents' death. Maybe if they were still alive he might have managed. The headmaster is in some ways right to point out that this would have been a greater falsification. If the emperor had saved his parents, Bohu's poem would be an "ordinary piece of political excuse-making, Anyone can see the good in disasters which leave their family and property intact. But a poet must feel the cracks in the nation splitting his individual heart."

Gray's story is politically slippery as readers could see it as an attack on free-market individualism or as an account of state control. It of course incorporates aspects of both even if politically they would usually be antithetical. Though Joanna Kerr sees the story chiefly through The Republic and Plato's rejection of the poet, which in Gray's story becomes acceptable only if the poet is a servant of the state, and why there are only two, it is no less useful to read it through the Hegelian against the Hayekian. That will take a moment to unpack, but when Plato says that "if you admit the entertaining Muse of lyric and epic poetry, then instead of law and the shared acceptance of reason as the best guide, the kings of your community will be pleasure and pain", Kerr sees that these "are the enemies of reason, inciting subversive elements and exciting baser instincts. This is because they appeal to the irrational part of our natures and encourage emotional reactions to events." (Literature and Aesthetics) When Bohu asks the headmaster of literature why there are so many headmasters and so few poets, the headmaster replies: The emperor needs all the headmasters he can get. If a quarter of his people were headmasters he would be perfectly happy. But more than two poets would tear his kingdom apart." Poets must be kept to the minimum or serve the purposes of a higher spirit than individual expression. They must in Gray's dystopian story serve the state.

This might not seem too far removed from Hegel's claim that "the German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realisation of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom that freedom which has its own absolute form itself as its purport." (The History of Western Philosophy) Bertrand Russell quotes the passage and sees in it the glorification of the state, a claim that became weakened by the middle of the 20th-century after Naziism, the terrors of Stalinism and the horror of Mussolini. The state was potentially a problem rather than a solution, and for nobody more so than Friedrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom would be of immense importance to the shift towards neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan. Hayek's claimed it was impossible to predict the actions of numerous individuals and the market was better than the state at generating a healthy economy and society. "Hayek's epistemology thus leads to a defence of moral and institutional conservatism as against rationalistic reformers, and of the free market, as against the command economy." (The Oxford Companion to Philosophy)

Gray supported an independent Scotland but he was hardly going to allow his work to be coopted by State ideology. Equally the notion of the Aryan race or the German race", Gray says, " it was only possible to make such a thing believable by deciding to exterminate Jews and eliminate them. I wrote this pamphlet called Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland, and I begin by defining a Scot as anyone who happens to live in Scotland and is able to vote." (Contemporary Literature) Gray is far removed from Hegel's notion of national spirit. But if Hayek's reaction to the Hegelian Geist and the planned economy was a market-driven individualism, Gray wasn't much for that either, and like many a Scottish writer of the eighties happy to castigate Thatcherite self-advancement. Speaking of Poor Things, Calum Barnes and Ewan Gibbs insists: "Gray makes clear in his characteristic deadpan that buried within the novel is an oblique commentary on the depredations of Thatcherism, its unabashed veneration of individualism and imperialist chauvinism." (Tribune)

The story can thus be read as an allegorical account of the poet's role within society, which shouldn't be seen as a societal obligation but neither as one of full autonomy. It is partly why we can say the headmaster is right from one perspective no matter how horrendously wrong he happens to be from another. He wants Bohu to write for the State to the detriment of personal feeling. His creativity will be completely subordinate to the ideological. But Bohu saying he would maybe have written the poem glorifying the emperor's destruction of the old capital if his parents had been saved would have been an example of no more than self-interest. Gray wonders what is this place between the self-interested (Hayek) and the potentially self-abnegatory (Hegel) writing without any obligation to others and writing that doesn't entertain the self at all. This is a complicated question theoretically. Gray's purpose isn't so much to resolve it but to allegorise it into comprehension. Bohu must write a poem that contains an inherent contradiction and resolve it. The poem must reveal why the emperor was right to destroy the old capital. But as the headmaster says in the last letter, "if we describe the people we kill as dangerous rebels that looks glamorous; if we describe them as weak and silly we seem unjust." It is a problem many a journalist propping up power will have to face as well and, in most instances, the columnists don't resolve the contradictions but hope they will pass the inflammatory reader by. The readers are so worked up by a sense of indignation the news story creates that the underlying potential heroism of the activists or their weakness becomes secondary. Gray's story is an inversion of such journalism not only in its retreat from immediate political realities into abstract, fantastic narrative, but also in teasing out the contradictions of power. It returns us to Nietzsche's historical taxonomy, and the story ends on monumental history while the tale has been an examination of it in critical form. The poem will serve as a grounding myth in the birth of a new nation. "I advise that the poem be sent to every village, town and city in the land."

When it comes to the Nietzschean, Kelman is nothing if not critical, an example of Clydesidism at its most complex. Dunn may have reservations about how many writers are offering prose in the vernacular and focusing on the central belt. But this is partly a necessary corrective to the Scottish Highlands' centrality prevalent in 19th-century prose and still evident in novels like The Outlander series and the kailyard tradition of the late 19th and early 20th century. It was as if Scott's plaid pageant needed virulent contradiction by serious writers in the modern era. Yet if Kelman were merely countering assumption that would be all very well but wouldn't be enough. He also more than most updates and complicates that Caledonian Antisyzygy, a term G. Gregory Smith offered to explain the split personality often evident in Scottish literature, and as we have seen, vital to James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of Justified Sinner and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both gothic accounts of the split. Kelman's Not Not While the Giro is a post-industrial take on it, with the narrator of a self-perceived slacker who won't take such a slur lying down, even if he isn't much inclined to get up either. Kelman's work passes through Dostoevsky, Beckett and Kafka and is as clearly located in place as Dostoevsky's was in St Petersburg. Kelman is a Glasgow writer and perhaps even more so than Gray because his work rarely adopts the fantastic that is so important a dimension of Gray's imaginings.

However, we could say that Kelman's work is internally hypothetical as Gray's is often externally so: Kelman offers up figures who are frequently in at least two minds as they muse over various scenarios of action, while Gray extends his characters into imagined worlds that exist for us on the page. In 'Not Not While the Giro', the narrator says "But there should be direction at 30 years of age. A knowing where I am going. Alright Sr Hamish we can't all be Charles Clore and Florence Nightingale." Our narrator thinks to himself and imagines scenarios with others, all the while trying to stave off self-criticism while also musing over its justification. "I am wasting time...my production rate is less than atrocious." Nevertheless he does a bit of work sometimes: "I mend fuses for people, odd jobs, and that kind of blah for associates of the naff, tenants in other words." But this is because "I am expected to do it. I fall behind with the fucking rent. Terrible situation. I have to keep on his right side." Though he doesn't mind so much. "It gets you out and about."

If the narrator doesn't know his own mind it isn't for want of reflection. He has plenty of time for that. It is more that he isn't so sure how much of his unemployment status is down to bone idleness or the direst of circumstances, how much of his laziness comes from the situation he is in and perhaps many like him. He is hopelessly ill-connected and wouldn't be looking for a job from those he knew anyway. "Tramping around pubs in the offchance of bumping into wealthy acquaintances is a depressing affair. And as far as I remember none of mine are wealthy and even then it is never a doddle to beg from acquaintances hard enough with friends. Of which I no longer have." In 'Canoes', we also have characters on the dole but resourceful and convivial, capable of keeping friends in their community and making new ones when it looks like being nice can make them a few pounds. Dunn accesses aspects of Kailyard in village life while Kelman of course explores Clydesidism in an urban environment. It might partly be why the tones are so different even if the unemployed status is the same. Both may be examples of contemporary Scotland on the dole but Kelman's story is despairing in its irony while Dunn's is gentle in its paradoxes. It would be a useless exaggeration to say that the narrator in 'The Canoes' is split in his personality he is aware of the face he puts on for tourists isn't quite the one he will show to his mates; and both are public manifestations. In 'Not Not While the Giro', the narrator is as indecisive as a Beckett figure, as paranoiac as a Kafka character and as potentially destructive as a Dostoevsky anti-hero. When the narrator wonders if he could be more economically active he creates in his mind a figure he will bow to and who will judge him. "Where is that godforsaken factory. Let me at it. A Trier. I would say so Your Magnateship. And was Never Say Die the type of adage one could apply to the wretch, I believe so Your Industrialiness." The paragraph ends and the next once begins and concludes with "Fuck off." To be in two minds indicates a minor moment of indecision; to be in multiple minds might make you wonder where your head is most of the time. It may not help that the narrator wonders "why am I against action", as Kelman forgoes the question mark. Action would at least propel him into a deed, and the deed in turn would eradicate the possibility in action by becoming an act in reality. It is as if the less the narrator acts the more proliferations he generates in his head, and the more ways he could act (but doesn't), the more minds he is in while stuck in his own.

If in Stevenson's novel the purposes rests in perverse actualisation, with Dr Jekyll producing a potion that gives birth to an alter-ego of untrammelled self-interest, Kelman's relationship with the Caledonian Antisyzygy is to push it to the further limits of non-actualisation, to see how many voices can be generated in a story that only has one. There is no external dialogue in 'Not Not While the Giro', nothing to take us out of the suffocating self-absorption, and nor would Kelman wish to do so. Kelman shows us someone who is not fit for purpose, and leaves the viewer to decide if this is a personal fault or a societal catastrophe. Does the narrator need to get off his backside or does society need to function in a way that doesn't leave millions unemployed? 'Not Not While the Giro' was published in 1983, at the end of Thatcher's first term in government, and during a period that prioritised cutting jobs in industries she regarded as lacking competitiveness. "The deep recession of the early 1980s and the job losses that followed the miners' strike of 1984 pushed unemployment up from the 1 million Margaret Thatcher had inherited as prime minister in 1979 to more than 3 million in seven years." (Guardian) Kelman would be more inclined to blame the state than the individual but that doesn't mean that the narrator is a blameless product of economic injustice. The story is too focused on his interiority for such a claim to be valid, and it would rob Kelman of his desire to create a character of immense complexity that resembles existential figures of the literary past. A Thatcherite government wouldn't have created such a narrator, even if her policies weren't likely to do him any favours.

Both Iain Crichton Smith and George Mackay Brown would appear closer to Kailyard than to Clydesidism or even Tartanry, but perhaps that these three terms could be seen to exclude the Islands, or to incorporate them into the mainland, might be reflective of a bias even within so small a nation as Scotland. In Smith's case, it was complicated still further by having Gaelic as his first language. (He wrote in both Gaelic and English) While Kelman uses aspect of Clydesidism to suggest alienation, Smith uses Kailyard to convey an element of madness, or at least eccentricity. If the narrator in 'Not Not While the Giro' usually allows thoughts to rattle around in his head, in Smith's 'Murdo' he expresses them aloud. When a local tries to cadge some money off him, Murdo replies, "No understand, Me German. Tourist." You can get away with this in a city of strangers but not when you're on first name terms with the cadger. It doesn't help perceptions of your sanity when you add: "Me without pity. Have done enough for shrinking pound already. What fought war for, what sent Panzer divisions into civilised treasuries of the West for, if required to prop up currency now." If in 'Not Not While the Giro' the narrator's position might soon become intolerable, Murdo's is tolerated. His wife Janet "sometimes...thought that Murdo was out of his mind", but she also "felt fear and happiness together." When they visit Glasgow it is a bit like an away day from a mental asylum, reminiscent of the fishing trip in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest but with far fewer signs of competence than the institutionalised in the novel, who at least prove capable of a decent catch. After replaying 'Bridge over Troubled Waters' on the jukebox, Murdo sits there moving his head to the music while "a number of girls gazed at him with astonishment."

But mostly he is in the village, making a fool of others while making a fool of himself. When he meets someone he used to work with at the bank, the man asks what he is doing now, and Murdo says he is looking after his grandfather and his dog. "An old dog. He's very fond of my grandfather. He saved his life at Paschendale. He picked him up between his teeth and took him back to the British lines after he had been very badly nay almost fatally wounded." It is as if village life is so predicated on the commonplace that Murdo offers instead the bizarre in an attempt to offer expression that happens to be his own. A common theme in Smith's work is the problem of conformism, well explored in his lovely short novel On the Island, looking at Lewis and more specifically the village of Point, and how difficult it is to escape expectations of family and community in a small place.

This is evident too in George Mackay Brown's story 'Celia', which makes Kailyard dark and dank, with the sort of drinking to be found in Whisky Galore not a source of communal pleasure but solitary despair. The title character is an alcoholic who services her clients in return for the booze she needs, a woman who hopes that alcohol will assuage the fears it no doubt helps to create. She sees nothing but cruelty in the world and describes it with such vivid precision that it is hard not to disagree with her perspective. "The gull came down on the rat and swallowed it whole...I could see the shape of the rain the blackjack's throat, a kind of fierce twist and thrust." Brown's story like much of his work is hard to locate socio-historically even if Celia talks of Vietnam and the Warsaw Ghetto, Cape Town and Chicago. These are events dropped in to reflect Celia's despair rather than to locate the story in time and place. More than most modern Scottish writers, Brown's work possesses an engagement with legend and myth, even if it is one found in other 20th-century Scottish writers, as John Burns notes when writing on Brown and others in an essay 'Myth and Marvels', found in The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies. It is a tradition Dennis Gifford, for example, sees in Renaissance writers like Gunn, Linklater and Aitchison and that Burns reckons continues in Sian Hayton and Harry Tait's work as well as Brown's. But Brown turned a living place (Orkney) into a mythic world without producing historical fiction or giving us an environment more vividly imagined than elaborately realised. Orkney is central to Brown's work as a peripheral locale that absorbs far more of the primitive than a contemporary urban setting, with Celia managing to turn the historical into the emotionally incidental. Its titular character's despair is her own, and yet the story shows that it is manifest in the fears of a central character whose father died when she was twelve and whose mother followed him three years later. There is also the gossip, lust and aggression of the townsfolk and, too, the incoming sailors from further afield. Brown doesn't show the island as an escape from the brutality of the world but as a microcosm of it. This is Kailyard turned inside out.

There is much more to modern Scottish literature than this: female writers like Janice Galloway, Agnes Owens, for example, and, in Muriel Spark, a novelist whose Scottishness will probably always be associated with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - whose success turned her into an international writer with only passing references to Scotland. But our purpose has been to remain narrowly focused and attend to a few stories ones that allow us to understand the preoccupations of the Scottish consciousness in contained and brilliantly delineated form.


© Tony McKibbin