Notes Introduction 1 Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994), (p.27). 2 Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), (p.2). 3 The 'Caledonian Antisyzygy' refers to the concept of a split personality, usually at­ tributed to literary texts such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Confessions of a Justi­ fied Sinner. The concept originates in G. Gregory Smith's Scottish Literature: Charac­ ter and Influence (1919). It has subsequently been adopted by many writers and critics, including Muir and MacDiarmid. This 'split personality' is often defended as a par­ ticularly Scottish trait, an essential characteristic of both 'the nation' and 'its people'. Although it seems peculiarly romantic and out of date, it is nonetheless still upheld by some contemporary Scottish critics. 4 For a discussion of 'strategic essentialism' see Spivak's The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). 5 Gerry Smyth, 'Irish Studies, Postcolonial Theory and the "New" Essentialism', Irish Studies Review, Vol. 7, No.2 (1999), pp.211-220, (p.212). 6 In The Living Stream, Edna Longley similarly warns against the possible 'fossilisation' of Irish national identity. (TLS, 176). 7 Quoted in John S. Rickard (ed.), Irishness and (Post)Modernism (London & Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1994), (p.15). 8 Describing her own resistance to Nationalist narratives, Longley writes: 'My own critical approach owes something, though I hope not everything, to a particular back­ ground. Autobiographical angles on history seem as inescapable in Irish criticism as in Irish literature. So a few years ago, like the man who found out he had been speaking prose all his life, I realised that I might be a 'revisionist' literary critic. Revisionism is a shorthand and quasi-abusive term for historical studies held to be at odds with the founding ideology of the Irish Free State (Republic of Ireland since 1948). Whether malign historians have indeed caused subsidence under the Nationalist grand narrative, or whether its foundations have always quaked, I was brought up in one of the cracks that are now highly visible.' (TLS, p. 10). 9 Here Kearney refers specifically to Lyotard's Peregrinations and the concept of small narratives: 'To the extent that we can speak here of a political or ethical community, it 151 152 Notes is one which "always remains in statu nascendi or morendi, always keeping open the issue of whether or not it actually exists".' (PI, 63). 10 To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the unhomely be easily accommodated in that familiar division of the social life into private and the public spheres... In that displacement, the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting... In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible. It has less to do with forcible eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social accommodation or historical migrations and cul­ tural relocations... The unhomely is the shock of recognition of the world-in-the- home, the home-in-the-world.' Homi K. Bhabha, 'The World and the Home' in McClintock, Mufti and Shohat (eds.) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Post- colonial Perspectives (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp.445-455, (p.445). Chapter 1 11 Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer (London: George Routledge and Sons Ltd, 1936), (p.13) 12 Joy Hendry, 'Editorial', Chapman 35/36 (1983), (p.l). 13 'The pre-requisite of an autonomous literature is a homogenous language... A com­ mon language of this kind can only be conceived, it seems to me, as an achievement continuously created and preserved by the highest spiritual energy of a people: the nursing ground and guarantee of all that is best in its thought and imagination: and without it no people can have any standard of literature. For this homogenous language is the only means yet discovered for expressing the response of a whole people, emo­ tional and intellectual, to a specific body of experience peculiar to it alone, on all the levels of thought from discursive reason to poetry. And since some time in the six­ teenth century Scotland has lacked such a language.' (SS, 19-20). 14 'In an organic literature poetry is always influencing prose, and prose poetry; and their interaction energises them both. Scottish poetry exists in a vacuum; it neither acts on the rest of literature nor reacts to it; and consequently it has shrunk to the level of anonymous folk-song. Hugh MacDiarmid has recently tried to revive it by impregnat­ ing it all with all the contemporary influences of Europe one after another, and thus galvanise it into life by a series of violent shocks. In carrying out this experiment he has written some remarkable poetry; but he has left Scottish verse very much where it was before... Scots poetry can only be revived, that is to say, when Scotsmen begin to think naturally in Scots. The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of the whole lan­ guage, which finally means the lack of a whole mind'. (SS, 21-22). Notes 153 15 T.S. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism' in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), pp.23-37, pp. 23-24. 16 Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: The Hogarth Press, 1954), pp. 91-92 17 Edwin Muir, Scottish Journey (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1999), p.225. 18 Alan Bold, 'An Open Letter on the Closed Mind', Chapman 35/36 (1983), (p.2). 19 'An Open Letter on the Closed Mind', (p.2). 20 Alasdair Gray, 'A Modest Proposal for By-Passing a Predicament' Chapman 35/36 (1983), (p.9). 21 William Power, Literature and Oatmeal: What Literature has meant to Scotland (Lon­ don: George Routledge and Sons, 1935), p.174. 22 In Landscape and Light: Essays by Neil M. Gunn, Alasdair MacLeery (ed.), (Aber­ deen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987), p.85. 23 See Edward J Cowan and Richard Finlay with William Paul, Scotland since 1688: Struggle for a Nation (London: Cima Books, 2000), p.74. 24 Ian Campbell, Kailyard (Edinburgh: The Ramsay Head Press, 1981), p.9. 25 Ibid, p.11. 26 Lewis Grassic Gibbon, A Scots Quair (London: Penguin Books, 1998), p.30. 27 Power, Literature and Oatmeal, p. 183. 28 JWtf,p.l81. 29 See for example The Modern Scot edited by J.H. Whyte, MacDiarmid's Scottish Chapbook and William Power's Scots Observer. 30 Anonymous, 'Post-War Scotland: A Letter to a P.E.N. Delegate', The Modern Scot, Vol. V, No. 1-2, June 1934, pp.5-19, p.6. 31 See Richard J Finlay 'National Identity in Crisis: Politicians, Intellectuals and the "End of Scotland", 1920-1939' in Anthony Cooke (ed.) Modern Scottish History 1707 to the Present (East Iinton: Tuckwell Press, 1998), pp.13-32. 32 Andrew Noble cites this statement by Muir in his introduction to Edwin Muir: Uncol­ lected Scottish Criticism (London: Vision Press, 1982), (p.37). 33 'It is of living importance to Scotland that it should maintain and be able to assert its identity; it cannot do so unless it feels itself a unity; and it cannot feel itself a unity on a plane which has a right to human respect unless it can create an autonomous litera­ ture. Otherwise it must remain in essence a barbarous country.' (SS, 182). 34 Muir states 'I think I am clear too on this further point; that Scottish literature as such will disappear, and that London will become quite literally the capital of the British Isles in a sense that it has never quite yet been; that, in other words, it will become our national capital in just as real a sense as it is the capital of an ordinary English man to­ day'. Quoted in the Introduction, (EMUSC, 36). 35 Quoted by Noble in the Introduction. (EMUSC, 100). 36 See Alan Massie's introduction to the reprinted Scott and Scotland, (p.xxiv). 154 Notes 37 Referring to Muir in The Break-up of Britain, Tom Nairn comments 'A markedly oneiric element has crept into the argument somehow, and one wants to rub one's eyes. Can anybody really think this? Not only somebody, but most literary nationalists: it should not be imagined that this position represents a personal vagary of the author. It does have a bizarre dream-logic to it. Muir himself took his pessimism so seriously that not even nationalism seemed a solution to him. But broadly speaking the dream in question is that of romantic nationalism, and the logic is as follows: modern Scottish society does not fit it, and one has to explain why; since the idea-world (roots, organs, and all) is all right, and has unchallengeable status, it has to be Scotland which is wrong; therefore Scottish society and history are monstrously misshapen in some way, blighted by Original Sin; therefore one should look further back for whatever led to the frightful Enlightenment ("arid intellect", etc.) and the Industrial Revolution; the Ref­ ormation is the obvious candidate, so before that things were pretty sound (a safe hy­ pothesis, given the extent of knowledge about the 15th century in modern Scotland).' (London: NLB, 1977), (p.122). 38 'On 26th August 1922 the first number of the Scottish Chapbook appeared, edited and published by CM. Grieve from 16 Links Avenue, Montrose. The Chapbook was ad­ vertised under the slogan, "Not Traditions - Precedents!"...' Duncan Glen, Hugh MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance (Edinburgh and London: W.