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Literature As Intervention

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Literature As Intervention WISSENSCHAFTLICHE BEITRÄGE AUS DEM TECTUM VERLAG Reihe Literaturwissenschaft Band 3 Literature as Intervention Struggles over Cultural Identity in Contemporary Scottish Fiction von Jürgen Neubauer Tectum Verlag Marburg 1999 Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Neubauer, Jürgen: Literature as Intervention. Struggles over Cultural Identity in Contemporary Scottish Fiction. / von Jürgen Neubauer - Marburg : Tectum Verlag, 1999 Zugl: Trier, Univ. Diss. 1999 ISBN 3-8288-8054-1 Tectum Verlag Tectum Verlag Marburg 1999 Acknowledgements Conceived in Scotland in 1996, this book took shape during my two-year assistantship at Pennsylvania State University, was finished in Bad Brückenau between August and December 1998 and accepted by Trier University as doctoral thesis. Many people have contributed to this dissertation and I am glad I have this opportunity to finally thank at least a few of them. I would like to thank my adviser Prof. Dr. Horst Breuer for supporting me across the Atlantic and after my return to Germany. Thanks also to Dr. Frank Gentry and Dr. Gerhardt Strasser at Penn State for granting and renewing the teaching assistantship in the German Department. I am particularly grateful for the friendship of Prof. Dr. Henry Giroux, whose passionate pedagogy is a continuing source of inspiration. Thanks to all my friends in State College, Marburg, Trier and Bad Brückenau, especially Silke, Beverly, Heather, Anna, Anke and Patrizia, for debate, for proof reading, or simply for sharing good times. My special thanks and all my love to Emily Sheesley. Mein ganz besonderer Dank gilt meinen Eltern Hermann und Barbara Neubauer, deren unbedingte Unterstützung diese Arbeit überhaupt erst ermöglicht hat. Marburg, July 1999 Literature as Intervention Das Leben aller Menschen ist von Tagträumen durchzogen, darin ist ein Teil lediglich schale, auch entnervende Flucht, auch Beute für Betrüger, aber ein anderer Teil reizt auf, läßt mit dem schlecht Vorhandenen sich nicht abfinden, läßt eben nicht entsagen. Dieser andere Teil hat das Hoffen im Kern, und er ist lehrbar. E. BLOCH, DAS PRINZIP HOFFNUNG. Ten pounds for a piece of cheese that has travelled the world by three different forms of transport, signed all the relevant forms, hung about in at least two warehouses and remains absolutely unchanged by its experiences. It is a narrow-minded cheese. C. MCWILLIAM, DEBATABLE LAND. The fact that this book has, in a sense, crossed the Atlantic twice, to arrive back almost in the same spot that it started out from, greatly appeals to me. F. KUPPNER, A VERY QUIET STREET. 6 Contents Introduction 9 1. Literature and the Struggle for Cultural Identity 21 1.1 Imagine Living There 21 1.2 Culture, Nation, Identity: The Scottish Debate 28 1.3 Novel Identities 42 1.3.1 Imagining the Nation 43 1.3.2 Imagining Communities of Difference 49 1.4 Summary 62 2. ‘Putting a Brick Through Somebody’s Window’: Writing as Intervention 65 2.1 Commitment in Times of Difference 65 2.2 The Politics of Scottish Landscapes 73 2.3 Territoriality and Deterritorialisation 84 2.4 Remembering and Forgetting 100 2.4.1 Alternative Histories 101 2.4.2 Histories of Difference 108 2.5 People Like That 119 2.5.1 Postcolonial Hybridity 122 2.5.2 Re-Constructing Gender 126 2.5.3 Working-Class Struggles 134 2.6 Representations of the Mother Tongue 143 2.6.1 Language and Class 148 2.6.2 Language and Realism 151 2.7 Summary 158 3. (Not) Educating a Nation: Reading as Intervention 161 3.1 Education and Meaning 161 3.2 Representations of Pedagogy: Democratic Intellectualism 163 3.2.1 Egalitarianism and Difference 166 3.2.2 Curriculum and Intellectualism: Power and Knowledge 176 3.3 Pedagogies of Representation 190 3.3.1 Canonisation and Meaning 192 3.3.2 Imagining Communities of Difference 197 3.4 Pedagogical Interventions in Scottish Fiction 203 Conclusion: Over the Border and into the Open 219 Bibliography 223 8 Introduction During the last two decades, Scottish authors may have produced more fiction of note than in the previous two centuries, and they may have produced some of the most important fiction in the United Kingdom. In 1981, Anthony Burgess greeted Alasdair Gray’s Lanark as the greatest Scottish novel since Sir Walter Scott. Since then, a veritable avalanche of writers has poured over the Hadrian’s Wall into the British and international markets. Over the last three years, Edinburgh writer Irvine Welsh may have become the most renowned British writer inter- nationally: after the surprise success of the movie version of his novel Trainspotting (1993), he has won a huge cult following from the UK to the US and Australia. Sponsored by his American publisher Norton and accompanied by James Kelman and Duncan McLean, he toured the US in 1997 to give readings from his most recent novels and stories. Kelman himself, who started writing in the early 1980s, gained notoriety in Britain when his novel A Disaffection (1989) was nominated for the Booker Prize, and even more so when he won the Booker in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late. Duncan McLean won a national award for his short story collection Bucket of Tongues (1992), and so did Candia McWilliam’s Debatable Land (1994). A.L. Kennedy’s Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990) and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts (1994) also won national and international awards. Though he does not win prizes, Iain Banks writes popular ‘postmodern’ fiction and is – as Iain M. Banks – one of the best known British Science Fiction writers both at home and abroad. These ‘hot items’ are joined by a number of authors who are less widely read outside Scotland, among them writers as different as Agnes Owens, Jeff Torrington or the poet-novelists Frank Kuppner and William McIlvanney. Scottish fiction has become a popular event within the British literary scene and seems to address readers far beyond Scotland with a directness rarely achieved by other British authors of the last two decades. In Scotland, many critics link this success story with the Scottish struggle for national independence. The beginnings of this literary phenomenon coincide roughly with the defeat of the Devolution Bill in 1979, which was supposed to give Scotland its own parliament and a more independent role within the United Kingdom. While the decade after this historic failure was marked by political apathy, fiction began to flourish, ‘as though,’ Cairns Craig writes, ‘the energy that had failed to be harnessed by the politicians flowed into other channels’ (Donnachie et al., Forward!, v). During the highly unpopular government of Margaret Thatcher, when less than a quarter of the Scottish electorate 10 Introduction was actually represented in Westminster,1 so the argument goes, politics became cultural: writers were the avant-garde for the shift from Unionism towards an independent Scotland, which culminated in the success of the new referendum after the election of Tony Blair in 1997. For other critics, the 1980s and 90s merely illustrate the predicament of Scottish politics in general: in his introduction to The Poetry of Scotland, Roderick Watson writes that ‘the main state left to a stateless nation may well be its state of mind, and in that territory it is literature which maps the land’ (Watson, ‘Maps of Desire’ 285). Like Watson, many critics have argued that when the Scots gave up their political sovereignty with the Union between Scotland and England in 1707, literary texts pre- served national identity. On the surface, there seems to be a much greater concern with things Scottish now than at any other time since the Scottish Renaissance during the second quarter of this century. Unlike many of the prominent Scottish writers of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, who, like Muriel Spark, tended to make little of their Scottish background, most of the ‘new’ authors explore life in contemporary Scotland. Scottish themes and language forms predominate, which may raise the question whether these authors attempt to ‘map’ a state of mind, and to come to terms with what it means to be Scottish. The largely realist texts of Kelman, Welsh and McLean are set in Glasgow, Edinburgh, or rural Aberdeenshire, and they examine these cityscapes and countrysides with unprecedented frankness. Yet, even some of the more surreal or fantastic novels by Banks, Gray and Kennedy have recognisably Scottish backdrops: Gray’s Lanark and Banks’s The Bridge (1986), for instance, alternate between ‘realist’ narratives of adolescence in Scottish settings (or, especially in The Bridge, a Scottish refraction of international popular culture) on the one hand and fantastic dystopian nightmares on the other. The use of Scots demotic, especially in realist fiction, has also become far more widespread than it has ever been. There is of course precedent for this, for instance in McDiarmid’s development of Lallans as a literary form of Scots. In earlier decades the use of Scots and Scottish subjects was often regarded as a sign of parochialism. In the current cultural climate, however, this no longer seems to deter larger audiences and in some cases even seems to be regarded as an asset by publishers and readers alike. However, in spite of the new visibility of Scottish themes and language forms, I question whether authors like Galloway, Kelman, Welsh, or any of the other writers really ‘map’ a new national community. Above and beyond the realist representation of life in 1For Scottish election results from 1945 to 1992 see David McCrone, Understanding Scotland 148-9, and Andrew Marr, The Battle for Scotland 175. Introduction 11 Scotland, these texts address a number of themes that are relevant far beyond the issues of national independence. Besides using a Scottish backdrop for their novels, they also explore questions that are of particular pertinence in a postmodern culture.
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