Contemporary Scottish Gothic: History, Identity, Monstrosity

1 Contemporary Scottish Gothic: History, Identity, Monstrosity MA Thesis Literature and Culture: Specialisation English Universiteit van Amsterdam 2 Contemporary Scottish Gothic: History, Identity, Monstrosity Contents INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER 1 10 Self-haunting: Multiple Selves and the Ontology of the Real in Alice Thompson’s The Falconer CHAPTER 2 20 A Textual Self-Haunting: The Legacy of Stevenson and Hogg in Irvine Welsh’s The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and Marabou Stork Nightmares CHAPTER 3 50 ‘Gorgeous monster’: Bella Baxter and Scottish National Identity in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things CONCLUSION 67 WORKS CITED 71 3 Contemporary Scottish Gothic: History, Identity, Monstrosity Introduction ‘With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.’ (Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 55) ‘We are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person. I myself have suffered grievously in that way.’ (James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 132) The above quotes are taken from two canonical works in Scottish Gothic, both of which concern themselves with notions of doubling – of the ‘other’ within. This theme of self-haunting has come to be definitive of Scottish Gothic. Significantly, while these foundational texts were written in the nineteenth century, there has been a recent resurgence of the Gothic in Scotland in the last thirty-six years. Of course, at a time of such political importance in Scotland – the devolution of Parliament occurred in 1997, two referendums in 1979 and 2007 and, of course, whilst writing this thesis, the Scottish National Party was re-elected with an outstanding majority in 2015 – it is unsurprising that Scottish authors should return to a genre that has historically looked inward to anxieties about origins and identity. Monica Germanà attributes this resurgence of Gothic literature to the breakdown between the binary opposition of Scotland/England; she argues, furthermore, that such devolution points to the ‘problematic diversity within Scottish culture’ (Women’s 2). 4 The self-haunting prevalent in Contemporary Scottish Gothic is not a desire to return to an idealised, unified past. Instead it utilises narratives of ‘otherness’ to subsequently both reveal and challenge national anxieties by examining the instability of origins in its own national narrative. All four novels examined in this thesis – Alice Thompson’s The Falconer (2008), Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) and The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2005), and Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) – employ the technique of self-haunting through a variety of techniques and with a variety of consequences. However, all of the novels discussed see an incursive, unstable past that continually interrupts and problematises the present. The task of this thesis is to trace how this is achieved – through their intertextuality and Gothic references to spectres, unreliable narrators, uncanny doubles or ‘gorgeous monsters’ (Gray 91) – and to consider the larger impact they have on notions of the self and national identity in Scotland. Contemporary Gothic and the Search for Origins The Gothic genre has historically always been in dialogue with uncertainties about the past. Considered as the first ever ‘Gothic’ novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1724) deals with the issues of a sixteenth century manuscript discovered by an ‘ancient Catholic family’ (Walpole 59) which purports to relate a story that dates from the eleventh century. Other famous Gothic novels such as Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) see the centre of the action unfold in ancient or ruined castles – a spatial and physical embodiment of the past and a place for a recursive past to unfold. Contemporary Gothic is not different in the respect that it constantly looks to the past and its influence on the present. However, Contemporary Gothic often 5 finds that the past it seeks to interrogate are its Gothic novel forefathers. It thus becomes self-gothicising and self-perpetuating in its intertextual references to this established tradition. In his analysis of the Contemporary Gothic, Steven Bruhm argues, ‘to think about the contemporary Gothic is to look into a triptych of mirrors in which images of the origin continually recede in a disappearing arc. We search for a genesis but find only ghostly manifestations’ (259). I find Bruhm’s argument highly useful in considering the works explored in this thesis – all four abound with explicit or implicit references to their Gothic predecessors. This is perhaps what aligns Contemporary Gothic closely with Postmodernism: as it intertextualises earlier narratives it surmounts issues surrounding representation and subjectivity and problematises their epistemological foundations. From a deconstructionist, Derridean perspective, one could argue that the pre-given ‘centre’ of Contemporary Gothic is already unstable and ‘de-centered’ so that it never points to anything outside of the text. As a result, the ‘real’, the ‘centre’ in Contemporary Gothic, and the Gothic more generally, is always under scrutiny. Examples of this can be seen throughout the novels discussed but perhaps are most prominent in instances where manuscripts, letters and the recounting of events purport to be the basis of some kind of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’. In The Falconer, a found letter becomes a fantastical and frightening indication of murder (Thompson 78), while ghosts and hauntings are left unquestioned and appear somewhat banal. Welsh’s exploration of this occurs in two very distinct and complex ways. Caroline Kibby’s discovery of her father’s journal which reveals Danny Skinner to be her half-brother explicates a search for origins that is still never fully resolved by the novel’s close and in Marabou Stork Nightmares; Roy Strang is revealed to be an unreliable narrator in the final chapters, raising 6 questions of truth and reliability throughout the text. Through his very explicit re- writing of Hogg and Stevenson in Marabou Stork Nightmares and Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs respectively, questions of Scottish national identity become explicated and challenged in their references to an uneasy and Gothic literary tradition. Finally, Gray’s whole novel – a monstrous conglomeration of letters, manuscripts and Gray’s own ‘Notes Historical and Critical’ – reveal a tapestry of uncertainty as to where to locate the ‘real’ in the novel. Myths and History: Contemporary Scottish Gothic What is it about the four novels explored in this thesis that makes them fundamentally Contemporary Scottish Gothic? Steven Bruhm’s ‘triptych of mirrors’ is again a useful analogy here, since the ‘search for origins’ and defining the locus of the ‘real’ in these novels is so heavily intertwined with the narrative of Scottish (literary) history itself. Subsumed by English literature and culture, Scotland has a history of struggling to find its literary voice. The novel, which is considered so formative in relation to nationhood, did not emerge in its ‘Scottish’ form until the works of Sir Walter Scott in the eighteenth century. As Edwin Muir has argued, Scotland grappled with the knowledge that ‘Scotsmen think in one language and feel in another’ (21). Cairns Craig argues a similar vein, conceding that the educational system forms a ‘crucial part’ of the ‘literary infrastructure’ (Scottish Literature 2), but since Scottish literature has only been taught under the guise of ‘English’ in Scottish and English universities until very recently, much of the Scottish literary canon has been subsumed into that of the English. Furthermore, ‘when the pattern of Scottish literature failed to conform to that of English literature it was regarded as a deviant or 7 deformed version of the true shape of literary development’ (Craig Scottish Literature 3). In the absence of a coherent and independent literary tradition, it is unsurprising that myths and legends have therefore had a major influence in Scottish literary history. In his seminal study on the genre, ‘Heartlands: Contemporary Scottish Gothic’, David Punter argues that Scotland’s position as a ‘stateless nation’ (101), means it is often prone to turning to these myths and legends, such as, for example, the Jacobite legacy, and in conjuring up these myths create a ‘romanticism which continues to be inseparable from Scottish views of the past’ (102). If the volatile relationship with history and origins forms the basis of Contemporary Gothic, then Contemporary Scottish Gothic goes one step further in that its very history and origins are unstable, mythical and fragmented. The four novels discussed in this thesis therefore posit an understanding of an unstable historical origin that is necessarily Scottish – either in its use of myth and legend or recalling of Jacobite legacy in The Falconer; by explicitly re-writing Scottish Gothic canonical works as in Welsh’s works, or by a monstrous embodiment of the Scottish nation exemplified in Gray’s Bella Baxter. A Scottish Self-Haunting While novels such as Frankenstein and Dracula embody social anxieties that can be located in an external ‘other’, Scottish Gothic has traditionally located its anxieties inwards toward the self, as the quotes from the two canonical works by Hogg and Stevenson at the beginning of this chapter show. This can be linked to Scotland’s own uncertain historical origins and its impact on national identity. Germanà claims, ‘Scottish culture…is pervasively haunted by a sense of its own 8 uncanny otherness, the coexistence of the unfamiliar within the familiar’ (Sick Body 1). Forever torn between ideas of the self such as Scottish/British; pre-modern primitive self/post- Enlightenment modern self, and mythical/historical, Scottish identity straddles and permeates these often conflicting concepts.

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