In the Works of Irvine Welsh David Leon Higdon
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Studies in Scottish Literature Volume 33 | Issue 1 Article 32 2004 "Wild Justice" in the Works of Irvine Welsh David Leon Higdon Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Higdon, David Leon (2004) ""Wild Justice" in the Works of Irvine Welsh," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 33: Iss. 1. Available at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol33/iss1/32 This Article is brought to you by the Scottish Literature Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in Scottish Literature by an authorized editor of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. David Leon Higdon "Wild Justice" in the Works of Irvine Welsh Without question, revenge has been a constant in Western literature, and the issues involved in revenge have provided audiences with both sensationally violent and bloody scenes as well as sublimely profound encounters. In the plays of William Shakespeare alone, we see this range from the ridiculous to the sublime. On the one hand, the raped, handless, tongueless Lavinia of Titus Andronicus holds a basin in her stumps to catch the blood gushing from the throats of her two ravishers as they are slaughtered by Titus and Publicus, and in the next scene, Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, is served flesh from these dead sons' bodies at a banquet. Before slitting their throats, Titus tells the sons, "I will be revenged" (5.2.196) and then declares his intention "To make this banquet. .. More stern and bloody than the Centaurs' Feast" (5.2.203-4). On the other hand, there are the anguished existential meditations of Hamlet before he accepts the ghost's demand for revenge and sweeps into actions, which leave the stage littered with the bodies of Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and himself. Whether we are considering Aeschylus's Orestes or Seneca's Thyestes, Thomas Kyd's Hieronimo or Cyril Tourneur's Vindice, Mario Puzo's Michael Corleone or Stephen King's Andy Dufresne, revenge has re mained an ever-present concern. It is not the concern, however, that one ex- lThese are the protagonists, respectively, of The Oresteia (458 BC), Thyestes (45-55 AD), The Spanish Tragedy (1592), The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), The God/ather (1969), and The Shawshank Redemption (1982). Theodore Ziolkowski underlines the almost universal appeal of revenge stories when he comments, "Law as the foundation of civil society and as 422 David Leon Higdon peets to find explored in postmodern fiction, especially postmodern fiction saturated with the ecky, smack, shagging, acid house world of the skag boys Irvine Welsh has depicted in Trainspotting (1993), The Acid House (1994), Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), Ecstasy (1996), Filth (1998), and Glue (2001). Indeed, much of the power of Welsh's works comes not from his re alistic documentation of the contemporary "acid house," "eurotrash" milieu, or the novelty of the language, but from his corrosive exploitation of the very ancient and almost universal desire for revenge to repay perceived wrongs. In filming Trainspotting, the screenwriters reassigned episodes from one character to another rather freely and also omitted episodes which could not be worked into the general thshtening of focus on Mark Renton, Sick Boy, Tommy, Spud, and Begbie. Two scenes in particular were omitted, perhaps not by accident since these scenes make powerful statements about revenge, so powerful that they would have significantly changed the tone of the movie. The scenes show the emotional and tonal range achieved by Welsh, in that one is a comic variation on a proverb--"never offend one's waitperson"~the other is a dark, horrific revenge of absolutely Jacobean nature and very possibly in debted specifically to The Revenger's Tragedy for some of its details. Both episodes show a wronged individual whom no institution will right; therefore, the individuals move fearlessly into a lawless realm to establish their own jus tice; moreover, they suggest the need to survey and evaluate the antithetical ways in which Welsh employs revenge in his short stories and novels. "Eating Out," a chapter in Trainspotting's sixth grouping of episodes, pre sents a Scottish girl, Mark's onetime girlfriend, avenging herself on four male English tourists in a restaurant. She senses centuries of insults to her country and gender and very specific insults to herself in the boorish behavior of the four drunken men, colonials, she calls them, "white-settler types".) They order a "couple of bottles of your best piss" (p. 302), leeringly appraise the waitper son as someone they "wouldn't kick ... out of bed" (p. 302), affect accents in voices "ay arrogant, ignorant wealth unchallenged, untainted by sensitivity or intellect" (p. 303), and try to set up a date for later. The waitress's revenge is vulgar, crude, and absolutely, sickeningly thorough. She swishes her bloody tampon's "manky contents" (p. 304) through their tomato soup, pours her urine into their wine and over their fish, taking satisfaction in noting that the "pish the embodiment ofa people's ethical values resides explicitly or implicitly at the core of many of the world's greatest literary works, either as their theme or as their condition of . ., being," The Mirror C?f Justice: Literary Reflections ofLegal Crises (Princeton, 1997), p. 5. 2John Hodges adapted Trainspotting in 1995. The novel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, has now sold over half a million copies and has also been adapted as a play, which opened in March 1995 at the Citizens Theatre (Glasgow), later at the Edinburgh Festival and in London. 3Yrvine Welsh, Trainspotting (New York, 1996), p. 302. Henceforth Trainspotting. "Wild Justice" in the Works of Irvine Welsh 423 has that stagnant, cloudy look, which suggests a urinary-tract infection" (p. 304). Finally, she places "a small runny turd" (p. 304) in the chocolate sauce for the profiteroles, and, as she watches the most obnoxious of the four men eat his ice cream laced with rat poison, she "feel[sJ charged wi a great power, ac tually enjoying their insults" (p. 305). She decides that "in some circum stances, morality is relative" (p. 305), a subject to which she has been giving considerable thought lately since she must prepare a paper on this topic for her philosophy class. Just as one trusts the captain of a cruise liner, the pilot of an airplane, or the doctor in a clinic, one trusts a waitperson to place on the table well-prepared, uncontaminated food; otherwise, the guest-host relationship so valued in civilization will have been violated. The moment the men tell their joke, however-"What do you call a good-looking girl in Scotland? ... A tour ist!" (p. 302), the waitperson feels her honor and the honor of her culture at stake, and the excremental vision of the novel strikes home. (Welsh is tempted to reprise this scene in Glue, when Carl Ewart, watching Juice Terry ogle the waitress, thinks: "Ah didnae like the wey eh wis starin doon her cleavage. Ah've worked in restaurants n bars n ah hate cunts that think that yir just nowt, yir jist an object or a skivvy that's only pit oan this earth tae meet their gratifi cation.,,4 Body fluids also figure prominently in an earlier episode, but revenge here is much darker, much more sinister, and definitely much more final. In "Bad Blood," a title which economically captures the nature of the vendetta code as well as the image of contaminated blood, Dave leams that he is HIV+, a life shattering event in anyone's life, and he wants to know just how he became infected. He discovers the source is Donna, a former girlfriend, who has been raped and infected by Alan Venters-who just happens to be in Dave's AIDS self-help group. Dave's revenge is bone chilling in its destructiveness but highly imaginative in its calculations. How can he irijure Alan, he asks him self, when Alan is already dying of an opportunistic infection? He decides that "[tJhe disease could have his body; that was its victory, whatever malignant force it was. Mine would be a greater one, a more crushing one. I wanted his spirit. I planned to carve mortal wounds into his supposedly everlasting soul" (Trainspotting, pp. 242-3). When Davie discovers that Alan devotedly loves his five-year-old son, Kevin, by a woman he now rarely sees, his plot begins to take shape, with Dave imagining himself as "a semi-submerged crocodile eyeing a soft, furry animal drinking at the river's edge" (p. 243) and as an "avenging angel" (p. 248). Knowing that the boy is the only thing of value in Alan's life, Dave courts the boy's mother and, having established trust with her, begins to baby-sit the son. The climax is one a Jacobean revenge trage dian would have been proud to have written. Visiting Alan one night, Dave first makes him remember everything he did to Donna, then tells him how he 4Irvine Welsh, Glue (New York, 2001), pp. 234-5. Henceforth Glue. 424 David Leon Higdon contacted HIV through Donna. Next, he forces Alan to look at photographs of himself, Frances, and Kevin, and then one especially prepared photograph of Kevin, this after telling Alan, "Think of the worst possible thing I could do to make you pissed off.... Then multiply it by one thousand ... and you're not even fuckin close" (p. 256). The photograph shows Kevin after he has appar ently been tortured to death: "The blood was everywhere.