Navigating Nation in Devolutionary Scottish Fiction a Thesis Submitted To
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A time of interregnum: navigating nation in devolutionary Scottish fiction A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2016 Jane E. Stedman School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Contents Abstract 3 Declaration 4 Copyright statement 5 Introduction: Scotland between referenda: a time of interregnum 6 Chapter one: ‘a mean man in a corner’: the architecture of entrapment in James Kelman’s How Late it was, How Late (1994) 42 Chapter two: ‘an annexe of nowhere’: spaces of overspill in Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) 95 Chapter three: ‘I could never leave here or I’d just burn up on re-entry’: locating and escaping origins in Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) 129 Chapter four: ‘a small black mark’: memory and mobility in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) 168 Looking forward: Two more referenda and an uncertain future 197 Bibliography 201 Word count: 78,749 2 Abstract This thesis analyses four texts produced during the so-called ‘devolutionary period’ in Scotland, between the referendum of 1979 and the opening of the Parliament at Holyrood in 1999. Due to the particular political exigencies of the time, texts from this period have often been read through the prism of cultural nationalism. One particularly influential such characterisation argues that ‘in the absence of elected political authority the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers.’1 Such a critical paradigm can impose a limiting and distorting framework on these texts, reducing the scope and complexity of their political interventions by insisting too exclusively upon reading them through the lens of nation. Therefore, in this thesis, I undertake an analysis of these novels not as documents of cultural nationalism, but through Gramsci’s description of times of interregnum. Gramsci suggested that the crisis precipitated at moments of regime change as one that ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’2 This delineation of the fraught character of interregnum seems an apt and helpful way to elucidate the tensions and fault lines within devolutionary Scottish fiction, and help to evade the pitfalls of readings that would recruit these writers into a narrative of resurgent national confidence directly connected to the political process of devolution. In order to explore the dynamics of interregnum at work in devolutionary fiction, I will analyse four key canonical texts from 1979–1999; James Kelman’s How Late it was, How Late (1994), Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998). I will be attentive to the ways that these novels literalise the figurative suggestions of Gramsci’s aphorism; probing instances of death, woundings/illnesses and interrupted reproduction. Within my discussion, I will be attentive to the fault lines within Scottishness explored by these texts, in particular paying attention to the way that the nation has been gendered in damaging or occluding ways. I will also contend that the interregnum liminality of these texts is also enacted in their spatial negotiations, as the novels repeatedly press against spatial boundaries. I hope to offer a perspective on this period in Scottish literature that complicates and refines the predominant cultural nationalism that has coloured their critical reception. 1 Christopher Whyte, ‘Masculinities in Contemporary Scottish Fiction’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 34.2 (1998), 274-85 (p. 284). 2 Antonio Gramsci, ‘State and Civil Society’, in Prison Notebooks, trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 210-70 (p. 275-6). 3 Declaration Many of the ideas in this thesis have their genesis in my work for the MA Post-1900 literatures, theories and cultures (2011). However, the only brief sections that are replicated here are the work on Althusser (two paragraphs pp. 157–158) and cross- dressing in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (four sentences on pp. 172–173, and three paragraphs on pp. 176–177). In both cases, this material has been developed substantially. Both of these instances are signalled by references in the text. Chapter two appeared in an earlier form as “An annexe of nowhere”: Overspill Identity in Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) in Boundless Scotland, ed. by Monika Szuba (Gdansk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, 2015) . 4 Copyright statement The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=24420), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/about/regulations/) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses 5 Introduction: Scotland between referenda: a time of interregnum At its origins, the word interregnum refers to the interval between sovereign rulers, a period of rupture in monarchical governance during which the throne is empty before the accession of a legitimate successor. The word denotes a period of discontinuity, certainly, but only insofar as is necessary when power must change hands. During his long incarceration at the hands of the Italian fascist regime fro 1929 to 1935, Antonio Gramsci revisited this notion and wrote evocatively of the character of periods of ‘interregnum’ in the aftermath of the First World War. Gramsci reinvigorated the concept for the twentieth century, depicting interregnum as a sort of time lag that encompasses not just a transfer of power between rulers but a fundamental shift in ideology that implicates the whole of society. In such times, he posited, there is an ideological detachment between those in power and the masses, meaning that the tenets of the old order can no longer hold, but what is to take their place has yet to be determined. He described it thus: If the ruling class has lost its consensus; i.e. is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; and in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.3 In this study, I wish to suggest that Gramsci’s description might usefully be deployed in a discussion of Scottish literature from the so-called ‘devolutionary’ period between the referenda of 1979 and 1997. Looking back on this period of extraordinary literary productivity and visibility, where Scottish writing underwent what Cairns Craig has called an ‘explosion of creativity,’4 Gramsci’s description of the fraught and contested character of times of interregnum is instructive. His articulation of the simultaneous morbidity and potentiality of such periods is productive in teasing out the ambiguities, uncertainties and contradictions that are latent in the writing of novelists such as James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Alan Warner and Jackie Kay. It is my view that Gramsci’s formulation might also prove useful in revisiting and questioning the 3 Antonio Gramsci, ‘State and Civil Society’, in Prison Notebooks, trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 210-70 (p. 275-6). 4 Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 36. 6 cultural nationalist framework and the culturalist narrative that has been so prevalent in analyses of writing from this period. Gramsci’s description of the fraught in- between character of interregnum seems an apt and helpful way to elucidate the tensions and fault lines within devolutionary Scottish fiction, and help to evade the pitfalls of readings that would recruit these writers into a narrative of resurgent national confidence directly connected to the political process of devolution. Gramsci’s notion has also proved suggestive and productive in the decades since it was published for writers working in many different contexts. In 1981 Nadine Gordimer utilises the last line of Gramsci’s proposition as the epigraph to her novel July’s People5 and even more explicitly in her essay ‘Living in the Interregnum’ two years later to evoke the atmosphere of revolutionary change in apartheid South Africa, a period in which ‘historical co-ordinates [did not] fit life any longer’.6 In 2012, Zygmunt Bauman suggested that ‘the present-day planetary condition [could be recognised] as a case of interregnum,’7 owing to the decoupling of power from the politics of the territorial nation-state, and the concomitant ambiguities and uncertainties of the future.