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The Metaphors of Identity

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The Metaphors of Identity 1 Sacred Lambencies and Thin Crusts: The Metaphors of Identity ...They went to the window. The fronting heavens were a black purple. The thunder, which had been growling in the distance, swept forward and roared above the town. The crash no longer roared afar, but cracked close to the ear, hard, crepitant. Quick lightning stabbed the world in vicious and repeated hate. A blue-black moistness lay heavy on the cowering earth. George Douglas Brown, The House with the Green Shutters, 1901¹ If a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. Alasdair Gray, Lanark, 1982² INATURAMALIGNA The Atlantic coast was appreciated for the qualities of light and landscape—the soft days of the Irish west, the clarity of Cornwall, the Welsh picturesque at Betws- y-Coed—but Victorian fictionalists encountered a Scotland which seemed irredeem- ably dour: bleakness of moorland, withered grasses, stunted trees, flailed by a merciless wind; towns and villages slattern and sullen; great cities truly hellish chasms of filthy streets and pandemonian crowds. ‘Land of the mountain and the flood’ char- acterizes some of this. The ‘Bonnie Briar Bush’ of the Kailyarder Ian MacLaren waves outside the window of a talented boy dying of tuberculosis. The same malady kills Cunninghame Graham’s returning migrant at ‘Beattock for Moffat’. George Douglas Brown in The House with the Green Shutters granted himself a couple of sentences of exhilaration, but soon let fly with natura maligna. Ibsen’sNorwayisnomorefriendly,butitwaslike that —the drenched fjord towns, the terrific mountains, the seas pounding on Rosmersholm’s beach. By con- trast, educated Scots—the bellwethers of the Atlantic intellect—made their land- scape a metaphysical horror. After the delight in their land’s beauty of such Gaelic poets as Duncan Ban MacIntyre and Alasdair MacMaisthir Alasdair (who had oth- erwise little reason for content), the likes of Alexander Smith, John Davidson, ¹ (Edinburgh: Nelson, c.1950), 129. ² (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1982), 243. 36 Places and Voices Robert Louis Stevenson, George Douglas Brown, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon wiel- ded sternness and wildness—at best, with bleak tropes of rocks, graves, and pee- wits— relentlessly. The human geography expertly displayed by Sir Walter Scott stayed quiet until its sensibilities were rediscovered by such regionalists as Neil Gunn and George Mackay Brown in and after the 1930s.³ The Scots literati were notable cosmopolitans—the inventors of English literat- ure, in Robert Crawford’s thesis, the ‘red Scots’ of my own Scotland and National- ism (1977)—whose migration contributed crucially to British, and Welsh and Irish, nationality in the Victorian epoch.⁴ But the psychological cost was high; symbol- ized by the inverted sublime of the above as well as by the ‘divided self’ from James Hogg via Stevenson to R. D. Laing. Were they also deliberately spurning a society bent on what Scott called a ‘terrifying and unnatural’ urban life, as Andrew Noble has alleged?⁵ Imaginative writers don’t just interrogate, and recoil from, reality. As the language and symbols of the Victorian Scots came from a literary tradition which was conscious of social semiotics, this equipment could be formidably directive.⁶ Two driving metaphors were the result: the psychological metaphor of dualism, and the equally powerful physical-social metaphor of ‘the thin crust of civilisation’. The German scholar Elmar Schenkel, an adept of such post-industrial Celts as the Powys brothers and David Jones, has argued that the speed of change in industrial society makes the ideal of ‘completeness’—the overcoming of alienation—affirmable or deniable only through metaphor. The actualities of childhood, the village, the small community have changed so much that invoking them makes them, as it were, meta- phors of a metaphor. Schenkel argues that, to escape intolerable reality and unstable metaphor, writers in industrial societies implicitly align themselves with ‘green’ and ‘small-is-beautiful’ projects aimed at a non-industrial, utopian logos. This provides a bearable trajectory for discourses which in turn condition the history that they sur- vey.⁷ I want to trace the linked ways in which a peculiarly influential elite interpreted, and recoiled from, an overtaxing project: the maintenance of human personality in a society in upheaval. The result was what John Buchan called the civilization– barbarism frontier: ‘a thread, a sheet of glass’, a phrase which Graham Greene in 1941 reckoned as summing up the character of the twentieth century.⁸ G. M. Young, whose subtle Portrait of an Age (1936) ‘composed’ in Lukacs’s terms the English establishment’s—‘Bladesover’s—subjugation of social change to ³ I owe the Stevenson–Grassic Gibbon comparison to Angus Calder. ⁴ Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), chap. 1; Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism, 1977 (London: Routledge, 2004), 4. ⁵ Andrew Noble, ‘Urbane Silence: Scottish Writing and the Nineteenth-Century City’, in George Gordon, ed., Perspectives of the Scottish City (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985), 70. ⁶ See, for example, Rory Watson, ‘Carlyle: The World as Text and the Text as Voice’, in Douglas Gifford, ed., The History of Scottish Literature, iii: Nineteenth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988). ⁷ Elmar Schenkel, ‘The Poet as Placemaker’, in Lothar Fietz, Paul Hoffmann, and Hans-Werner Ludwig, eds., Regionalitat,¨ Nationalitat¨ und Internationalitat¨ in der zeitgen¨ossischen Lyrik (Tubingen:¨ Attempto Verlag, 1992). ⁸ Graham Greene, ‘The Last Buchan’, in The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 119. Sacred Lambencies and Thin Crusts 37 political continuity, had told Greene’s generation to ‘Go on reading until you can hear people talking’.⁹ It was able to sort and structure this within an intellec- tual as well as temporal dimension because it was still conscious of biblical and classical exegesis. This sort of personal history seemed redundant in the collective ethos of the 1960s and 1970s, which was seen as accelerating the research/learning process.¹⁰ Since then market forces as well as the dwindling of the British state have compelled a reversal to the biographers, military historians, and heritage mer- chants, suspended between Merchant and Ivory and Sellar and Yeatman, exuding ‘the glamour of backwardness’. In Scotland, Ireland, and Wales collectivity still seems stronger: witness the three volumes of People and Society in Scotland (1988–92) and the four volumes of the History of Scottish Literature (1987–8). But interpret- ative lacunae remain, most notably concerning the economy and culture of Victorian Scotland. This is partly because historians tend to interrogate the texts of the period for fact rather than discourse. When argument and symbol are analysed, other pre- occupations emerge. In the emerging ‘world’ of the Atlantic coast—as we shall see—Thomas Carlyle was the ‘central singer’, but his texts have to be teased out. Did he read James Hutton on geology? Was he influenced, in his idea of political com- munity, by Thomas Chalmers’s ‘Godly Commonwealth’? The literary scholar is more concerned with aesthetic and emotional impact, the stylistic and ideological imprint of earlier authors. W. B. Yeats, whose ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ (1923) would become an equally emphatic summing-up, called this ‘the half-read wisdom of daemonic images’. In a present of precipitate change, with the fragmentation of the traditional Anglo-British context, such images count for so much that interdis- ciplinarity and intertextuality become unavoidable. For Ernest Renan, history was the pivot of nationality, and the dialectic between imaginative writing and social change seems crucial to the recent Scottish cultural renaissance, whether in the exploration by William Donaldson and Tom Leonard of Victorian popular literature or, conversely, the ‘conjectural history’ of Alasdair Gray’s novels.¹¹ In my study of British political fiction The Centre of Things (1991) I ana- lysed literary texts, not just to distinguish purpose and historical impact but, through examining language and allusion, to locate writers and politicians’ arguments in an evolving series of stylistic and literary ‘epiphanies’. This suggested a possible approach to the peculiarly faulted Scotland of the Victorians, analysing the success of their cul- tural incorporation into the Union State, especially in the 1840s, and its ambiguous psychological and social consequences.¹² ⁹ G. M. Young, Today and Yesterday (London: Hart-Davis, 1948) 112; and see Georg Lukacs, Essays on Thomas Mann (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), p. vi. ¹⁰ See Theodore Roszak, The Dissenting Academy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). ¹¹ Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, 1882, trans. I. H. Grant in Stuart Woolf, ed., Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1996). See also William Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland: Language, Fiction and the Press (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), and Tom Leonard, ed., Radical Renfrew (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990). ¹² Christopher Harvie, The Centre of Things: Political Fiction from Disraeli to the Present (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 38–9. 38 Places and Voices II A PATRIOT FOR WHOM? Nineteenth-century Scots identity has been called British, but it was more complex than that. ‘British’, if politically accurate, was too cumbersome a formulation for diplomats, merchants, and publicists
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