Coalescence and the Fiction of Iain Banks

Études écossaises 12 | 2009 La Science Coalescence and the fiction of Iain Banks David Leishman Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/208 DOI: 10.4000/etudesecossaises.208 ISSN: 1969-6337 Publisher UGA Éditions/Université Grenoble Alpes Printed version Date of publication: 30 April 2009 Number of pages: 215-230 ISBN: 978-2-84310-138-0 ISSN: 1240-1439 Electronic reference David Leishman, « Coalescence and the fiction of Iain Banks », Études écossaises [Online], 12 | 2009, Online since 30 April 2010, connection on 08 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ etudesecossaises/208 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesecossaises.208 © Études écossaises David Leishman Université Stendhal – Grenoble 3 Coalescence and the fi ction of Iain Banks Iain Banks’s second novel, Walking on Glass, seems to be ideally suited for the 2007 SAES conference theme of “l’envers du décor” or “behind the scenes”, since it is preoccupied with the exploration of literature’s mechanisms and workings and with the frontiers of fi ctional worlds. All this is foregrounded in the novel’s incipit. The opening paragraphs are dominated by the colour white as if to reaffi rm the ultimate liminality of the text, the presence of the blank page that lies permanently beneath (p.11). Meanwhile, an incongruous character has opened up a service hatch in the (white) fl oor and is scrabbling about inside with a torch, the unfamiliar conduit leading to hidden levels and unimagined apparatus that defamiliarise the surface reality and challenge its seamlessness. The text precisely specifi es the time as being “3:33” and this trinity is presented by the narrator as a “good omen”, portentous of “a day events would coalesce” (p. 11), thus announcing the novel’s central concern with the inter-connection between different ontological spheres. In addition, the number three, repeated three times, necessarily evokes a theatrical universe through allusion to the unities of dramatic conven- tion, a tripartite dramatic structure or the knocks which announce the imminence of a performance. As if to confi rm this reading, on the fol- lowing page the lead character, Graham Park, steps into the brightness of day and contrasts the intensity of the moment with duller times where events were like “actors fumbling behind some thin stage curtain, strug- gling to get out” (p. 12). Later Park’s friend Slater is described as an actor playing a part (p. 191), while in a purportedly separate narrative, the narrative describes a curious castle whose attendants remain hidden by the mask of Greek tragedy (p. 42). Through these theatrical allusions Banks’s text clearly sets itself up as a spectacle, readily admitting the showman- ship and behind-the-scenes activity that this entails. What this paper aims to do is to take the novel Walking on Glass as the central example of a strong self-refl exive current in Iain Banks’s fi ction in order to question the ideological consequences of such metafi ctional, postmodernist elements in his writing. The image of an author exerting | 215 ÉTUDES ÉCOSSAISES 12 absolute, God-like power over the fi ctional worlds he creates has led him to be portrayed by critics as an inveterate player of games. 1 It is nevertheless my intention to challenge the common charge that postmodernist writing, through its constant game-playing and its eagerness to draw attention to its own artifi ce, refuses to engage with the real. Iain Banks is one of Scotland’s most prolifi c and best-selling authors of recent years, publishing a near annual stream of novels since The Wasp Factory fi rst appeared in 1984. Though the name Iain M. Banks is reserved for his science fi ction output, this division is somewhat misleading since the oeuvre of the supposedly more mainstream Iain Banks is characte- rised by its tendency to transgress traditional genre boundaries, notably interweaving science fi ction and fantasy modes with more realist fi ction. 2 This is particularly true in novels such as The Bridge (whose debt to Lanark was openly admitted by Banks, as has often been noted), and also Walking on Glass (1985). The latter, Banks’s second to appear in print, was nevertheless written prior to The Wasp Factory, and a version of it came close to being published in 1979, this anteriority reaffi rming its place as one of the founding texts of Banks’s literary oeuvre. 3 The Bridge oscillates between two fi ctional universes, one science fantasy, one realist, although the novel nevertheless contains numerous connections between the two narratives. The earlier novel, Walking on Glass, presents a similar structure, but in place of The Bridge’s bipolar ontological structure, it contains three intri- cately bound but initially separate narratives. The fi rst is focused on an amorous art student, Graham Park; the second on the deluded Stephen Grout, who believes himself to be a futuristic warrior marooned in 1980s London; the third on Quiss and Ajayi, a pair of just such futuristic warr- iors imprisoned in a castle standing on a barren planet. These charac- ters are, at a structural level, presented as inhabiting discrete universes since the novel’s architecture, in all but the fi nal section, is composed of sections where the three worlds alternate, each allocated a separate, named chapter in strict succession. 1. For an additional metafi ctional twist, Alan Riach names Banks “The Player of Games” after his 1988 novel of the same name. Alan Riach, “Nobody’s Children: Orphans and their Ancestors in Popular Scottish Fiction after 1945”, Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, Susanne Hagemann (ed.), Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 1996, p. 66-72. See also Thom Nairn, “Iain Banks and the Fiction Factory”, The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies, Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds.), Edinburgh, Edinburgh, University Press, 1993, p. 130; Alan MacGillivray, “The Worlds of Iain Banks”, Laverock, n° 2, 1996, reprinted at http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/Laverock-Iain_Banks.html [online resource], consulted March 2007. 2. Thom Nairn, “Iain Banks and the Fiction Factory”, p. 127. 3. Chris Mitchell, “Getting Used To Being God”, http://www.spikemagazine.com/0996bank. htm [on-line magazine], consulted March 2007. 216 | COALESCENCE AND THE FICTION OF IAIN BANKS On the other hand, much of the novel’s energy and interest comes from the increasing porosity between these worlds in the form of textual echoes, parallels, embeddings and inter-connections. In the fi nal section, a single chapter entitled “Truth and Consequences”, we are offered a promise of resolution which, the reader assumes, will be achieved by ensuring the separate ontologies converge into one defi nitive truth. Katherina Dodou has noted, however, that this is nothing but a quasi-conclusion, which destabilises our desire for closure by refusing to acknowledge a single dominant reality among the three separate ones offered. 4 Worse still, the novel’s internal paradoxes are said to render these separate realities – as formed by the Park, Grout and Quiss/Ajayi narratives – mutually exclu- sive, so that not only a sense of hierarchy between the different ontologies is challenged, but also their compatibility and capacity to form a coherent whole. As Dodou observes, the ending shows both the paranoid Grout chapters and the realist Park chapters to be contained within the far-fl ung science fi ction fantasy of the Quiss/Ajayi narrative while concurrently undermining this ontological dominance by proposing the Quiss/Ajayi narrative to be nothing but the deluded imaginations of a now amnesiac Stephen Grout. Thus the perfect trinity announced in the incipit has been not a “good omen” but a false portent; instead of achieving coalescence, the three narratives remain an impossible mismatch of parasitical and competing truths. The ending of the novel, according to this interpretation, is of particular importance since it is this resistance to solving the central enigma that establishes the endemic uncertainty described by David Lodge as a key feature of postmodernist writing. 5 Just as the paranoid Stephen Grout is constantly frustrated in his attempts to fi nd the hallowed “Way Out”, the “key” to escape his suffering in a universe of artifi ce, so the reader is denied a satisfying literary exit. Studies on Walking on Glass and The Bridge, such as those by Marie- Odile Pittin-Hédon or Thom Nairn have analysed with interest how the complex embedding of different diegetic levels, the use of textual and intertextual echoes, the foregrounding of typography, all contribute to forming irreducibly playful, self-referential narratives whose key charac- teristic is their pervasive ambiguity. Their resulting multiplicity corrupts and destabilises literary conventions as the texts show the breaching of perceived barriers between separate and stable ontologies, narratives, genres, identities, chronologies and so on. However, in such a view, one 4. Katherina Dodou, “Evading the dominant ‘reality’ – the case of Iain Banks’s Walking on Glass”, Studia Neophilologica, vol. 78, n° 1, June 2006, p. 28-38. 5. David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing, London, Edward Arnold, 1977, p. 226. | 217 ÉTUDES ÉCOSSAISES 12 fi nal bridgehead remains unassailable. As Lyotardian “grand narratives” such as order and truth are overthrown in favour of postmodernist doubt and subjectivity, the barrier between the text and our world, the literary and the extra-literary spheres, initially seems all the more secure. With their spiralling, narrative self-refl exivity, their looped chronologies, their endless intertextual playfulness, such novels seem to be vocally asserting a militant textuality that has two chief consequences. The fi rst is seemingly to underline their distance from the universe of the non-literary real. Speaking in particular of The Bridge, Thom Nairn describes how the effect of the palimpsests in Banks’s fi ction is one of creating “wheels within wheels, veneer beneath veneer” 6: the answer to the question of what lies behind the text, is simply that of a vertiginous series of further texts; behind the sign lie yet more signs.

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