Glasgow As Text: Mapping the Urban Space in Scottish Fiction

Glasgow as Text: Mapping the Urban Space in Scottish Fiction

Ankur Konar Department of English Sir Rashbehari Ghosh Mahavidyalaya Ukhrid, Khandaghosh, Burdwan, West Bengal - 713142 Email: [email protected]

Abstract: Through the social centrality of urban frame, Glasgow as a space and the subsequent transformation of that space into text offer more representational than referential urban dynamics in the Scottish fiction. The urban galaxy of Glasgow and the fiscal implication through the act of spatializing as reflected through the text like McArthur and Long‟s No Mean City, McNeillie‟s Glasgow Keelie, William Lobban‟s The Glasgow Curse and Archibald‟s Glasgow: The Real Mean City, will be examined to search what went into the making of novelists‟ rigid statement about the city‟s spatial coverage that Glasgow is a „real mean city‟. Through the negotiations of altered space and altered time (the contextual dynamics of urban issues through the interplay of „spatialization of time‟ and „temporalization of space‟) Glasgow has not merely been used as backdrop rather becomes a character and at certain times becomes the protagonist in these visual narratives. In the fictional representation of Glasgow that goes into the very hardcore root of the city by reconfiguring its existential route in socio-cultural ethnic elements, there is some obviousness of knowledge production triggering new paradigms through the intercultural exchange of standpoints. My article will focus on the abovementioned novelist‟s ideological response(s) to the projection of the symbolic experiences of Glasgow and its spatial ambit that has an obvious tendency of stereotyping the representation of the city.

Key Words: City, Urban Space, Glasgow, Space, Text

The best way to read a city is to read it through the proper mode of textualization. In recent times it is important to note how the sense of city‟s spatiality becomes a matter of concentration for the writers. Phil Hubbard in the critical study titled City (2006) analyses the strategies that go in unearthing the city space: In essence, the urbanity of urban life is effaced: cities are written of as spaces where innovation happens, for sure, but the city becomes backdrop rather than active participant in the making of new cultures and economics. Again, to suggest the plays an active role in innovation is not to imply it has a deterministic influence on the trajectory of economy or society, but to argue we need to take the city more seriously if we are to articulate the importance of space in social, economic and political life. (3-4) The experiences of a city‟s cultural practices are necessary for the understanding of the social balance in a particular geographical place. The literary critic Joe Moran in the book Interdisciplinarity (2007) rightly points out: Cities are clearly material entities, products of some of the traditional concerns of geography such as labour, land and capital, but they are also textualized. In a sense, the city can only ever be understood textually, because it is far too complicated and labyrinthine to be encapsulated in its material totality: we only ever have access to a selective interpretation of it. (166)

[Article History: Received on 17.05.2016, Accepted on 17.06.2016, Published on 28th June, 2016] [15]

Glasgow as Text: Mapping the Urban Space in Scottish Fiction Author: A. Konar

The concept of city as text has randomly been practiced in the literary milieu of Scottish fiction. The spatial ambit of Glasgow has recurrently been textualised in the Scottish literary space spanning from the 1935 attempt of No Mean City by Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long to the latest 2015 venture Glasgow: A History by Michael Meighan. Further examples may be cited at random - McNeillie‟s Glasgow Keelie (1940), John Burrowes‟ Glasgow: Tales of the City (2010), William Lobban‟s The Glasgow Curse (2013), Andrew Davies‟ City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of British Gangster (2014) and many more. Through the social centrality of urban frame, Glasgow, located on the banks of the River Clyde as a space and the subsequent transformation of that space into text offer more representational than referential urban dynamics in the map of Scottish fiction.1 The urban galaxy of Glasgow and the fiscal implication through the act of spatializing as reflected through the abovementioned texts will be examined to point out what went into the making of novelists‟ rigid statement about the city‟s spatial coverage that Glasgow is a „mean city‟. McArthur and Long‟s celebrated book No Mean City which described by critics as the „influential Glasgow novel of the twentieth century‟ (Bryce- Wunder 112) is a literal account of the slum dwellers of Gorbals of Glasgow in the inter-war 1920s.2 The title of the novel, according to Wikipedia, echoes a passage from the Bible, where Paul the Apostle says that he is a citizen of Tarsus, which is "no mean city", i.e. no obscure or insignificant city. Through the negotiations of altered space and altered time (the contextual dynamics of urban issues through the interplay of „spatialization of time‟ and „temporalization of space‟), Glasgow has not merely been used as backdrop rather becomes a character and at certain times becomes the protagonist in this visual narrative: Whit does it matter to the heild yins happens in Gorbals or Bridgeton or Garngad or Anderston, or in any ither bliddy slum in Glasgow for that matter, so long as we keep quiet? Do they care hoo we live or whit we dac or whit kind of derrty hoose we have? No bliddy fears! They need wakin‟ up once in a while, and it‟s fellows like Razor King that makes them remember we‟re alive. (McArthur and Long 304) This statement by a character named Lizzie indicates a gradual formation of protest against Johnnie Stark, the notorious „Razor King‟, a representative figure of exploitative nature that makes the slum dwellers terrorize and subsequently makes the urban space a „mean‟ one. The ideological standpoint of Johnnie Stark may well be summed up in the following statement: “A razor king doesny have to pay for his drinks. There‟s more ways of making money than toiling for it.” (McArthur and Long 114, original emphasis) Being a savage and raw criminal, he is trying to be above his present status. With the growth of the time this type of projected meanness of the city space is growing on and it finally culminates in Malcolm Archibald‟s direct epithetical description of the city as „a real mean‟ one in his book Glasgow: The Real Mean City (2014). Archibald‟s book is a literal account of the fact that how the urban space of Glasgow is transformed from the dynamic innovation and the technical upliftment of the industrialization of the nineteenth century to the horrific aberration of the gang culture of the twentieth century – the ongoing practice of bloodshed, violence, bigotry and hatred.3 The representation of urban space draws theoretical questions. The spatial ambit of Glasgow as represented in the abovementioned novels, by nurturing both what Henry Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1976/1991) categorizes as „representations of space‟ (33) and „representational space‟ (39), is full of encounters, attacks - a clear sense of somewhat dishevelled space. As the stable space is being traversed by the frightening reminder of physical brutality, sexual rapacity and street fighting, the city dwellers, with a note of

‘JAST’-2016, Vol.-02, Issue-01 [16]

JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-02, Issue-01 unarticulated anxiety, may sometimes attain the readers‟ sympathy. In this hybrid age of cultural vacuity, the radical transformation from humane emotion to rough and tough machine is very much overt. It would not be an overstatement to say that the literary approaches mentioned above have placed the urban space of Glasgow in the social critic Stjepan. G. Mestrovic‟s recent idea of „postemotional society‟:4 … postemotionalism is a system designed to avoid emotional disorder; to prevent loose ends in emotional exchanges; to civilize „wild‟ arenas of emotional life; and, in general, to order the emotions so that the social world hums as smoothly as a well- maintained machine. (150) In this urban space of occult instability, gun, revolver, knife become the strong characters in the texts. Andrew Davies in City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (2014) makes a similar nature of representation where the rampant use of machines has cabined, cribbed and confined the city dwellers‟ emotion in the mythology of Glasgow. To have a proper acquaintance with the city space critics have generally focused on walking rhetoric as the French critic Michel De Certeau points out: “… space is a practiced place … the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers.” (117) In addition Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) equates the street to a theatre and thereby establishes the fact that the citizens are players/actors who play their assigned role with a social mask (cited in Hubbard 18). After the emergence of the notorious identity of Glasgow as Britain's gang city in 1920s and 1930s, the gangs like the Billy Boys, the Kent Star, the Savoy Arcadians and the South Side Stickers became the owner of the streets; drunken brawls, robbery, theft and absolute disregard for the law were the essential subject of everydayness.

A quick reading in Wikipedia shows us that the gang culture of Glasgow came in prominence during 1880s and later on in 1920s and 1930s the gangs became active to the fullest. Unemployment problem may be cited as an influential force behind the formation of these groups of gangs. Many times there are wars between the police force and the groups of gangs regarding the ownership of the streets of Glasgow.5 Sometimes there were rivalries between the gangs that created a pool of bloodshed in the streets. Since a city always provides a site of conflict, urban spaces, taking cue from the urban critic Henry Lefebvre‟s oft-cited book The Production of Space (1974) one can say, are always “over-inscribed: everything therein resembles a rough draft, jumbled and self-contradictory” (142). Allied with the implication of power politics, the image of Glasgow's infamous razor gangs has been exploited in many narratives. William Lobban‟s The Glasgow Curse (2013), essentially becomes a memoir of the author‟s own engagement with the underworld culture. He begins with how his childhood days were virtually affected by drug, murder and fighting and how gradually he became part of the violent, inhuman gang of robbers. In this world of crime, punishment and surveillance, his association with the notorious gangsters like Arthur Thompson and Paul Ferris had driven his life in a blacker course of corrosive direction – false acquisition, prison riots, murder etc. The different parts of Glasgow like Exeter Prison, Perth and Full Sutton have official records of Lobban‟s criminal career from which he tried to come out of in his last part of life. Vis-à-vis the crisis through the spatial codes of the city‟s cultural matrix, it would be relevant to quote a passage from Alasdair Gray‟s Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (1981) which, according to Cairns Craig in the essay “Devolving the Scottish Novel” (2006), is “probably the most influential Scottish novel” (128). The following conversation between McAlpin and Thaw offers a decoding of the spatial coverage of Glasgow‟s urbanity: “Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, “If you want to explain that I‟ll certainly listen.” “Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger [17] Glasgow as Text: Mapping the Urban Space in Scottish Fiction Author: A. Konar

because he‟s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn‟t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That‟s all. No, I‟m wrong, there‟s also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That‟s all we‟ve given to the world outside. It‟s all we‟ve given to ourselves.” (Gray 243) Christopher Tunnard in The Modern American City (1968) maps that in postmodern time city gets its emergence as “a national rather than a sectional institution” (9) and he further adds: “The very notion of a city is eclectic; and a sociologist, a psychiatrist, an architect, and a city planner would all have their own ideas of what a city is and ought to be.” (10) It is evident from the above quoted passage that allied with the clash of tradition and trend, intimation and imitation the novelist‟s epic endeavour to textualize the shifting stance of the city offers a polysemous grip of the city - a modernized metaphysics of the city‟s place, space and landscape through the city dwellers‟ identical association with the veritable cultural centers of the city. The scant heed of social realism that has been continuously occurring in the underworld fabrication of Glasgow is being continuously reflected in the characters‟ psychology in the Scottish fictional space. John Burrowes‟ Glasgow: Tales of the City (2013) depicts the tales of the individuals like Mark McManus and Billy Connolly who represented the city in the different parts of the world. Allied with the nostalgic look at the recurring metamorphosis of the city space, John Watson in Once Upon a Time in Glasgow: The City from the Earliest Time (2003), Jack House in The Heart of Glasgow (2005), Carol Foreman in Lost Glasgow (2007), Piers Dudgeon in Our Glasgow: Memories of Life in Disappearing Britain (2010) and Michael Meighan in Glasgow: A History (2015) textualize the city‟s historical legacy through an episodic manner that went through some evolution and devolution. By projecting the existential dilemmas vis-à-vis the constant changing pattern of the city, the novels become mirrors up to the hegemonic construction of city poetics against the backdrop of power politics. In John Burrowes‟ Glasgow Characters (2010) we find the story of Johnny Ramensky, a notorious criminal of the city. Colin MacFarlane in The Real Gorbals Story: True Tales from Glasgow's Meanest Streets (2007) recreates the atmospheric zeal of No Mean City and set the novel in the same place Gorbals which is now full of hard working people. This note of positivity Colin MacFarlane further draws in No Mean Glasgow: Revelations of a Gorbals Guy (2008) and demands that life at the Gorbals have many pleasing note as well. Vis-à-vis MacFarlane‟s representation, the urban critic Sophie Watson‟s reading of city space in the book City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters (2006) may come relevant: “Moments of tranquility or harmony can easily erupt into moments of antagonism and violence. Love and hate, empathy and antipathy co-exist in ambiguous and ambivalent tension.” (2) In the present postmodern trope of cultural transmission, the epistemological decentering through the paradigm of dislocation as reflected in the abovementioned novels need the positive politics of changeability. In the fictional representation of Glasgow that goes into the very hardcore root of the city by reconfiguring its existential route in socio- cultural ethnic elements, there is some obviousness of knowledge production triggering new paradigms through the intercultural exchange of standpoints.

‘JAST’-2016, Vol.-02, Issue-01 [18]

JAST-a peer reviewed multidisciplinary research journal Vol.-02, Issue-01 Notes: 1. Francis Russell Hart‟s The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey (1978) and Cairns Craig‟s The Modern Scottish Novel (1999) are remarkable account of the development of Scottish fiction. Further Moira Burgess in the book Imagine a City: Glasgow in Fiction (1998) makes a list of the literary ventures where the urban space of Glasgow has been turned into the literary pages. 2. Bryce-Wunder‟s essay is mainly focusing on “McArthur and Long‟s treatment of class and gender ideology, and its effect on the representation of working-class masculinity and feminity in modern Scottish fiction.” (112) 3. “Cities are usually called as the cradles of civilization. However, since antiquity, the city has also been perceived as a bastion of criminality. Crime is largely the urban phenomenon.” (Venkateswarlu 273) 4. Similar to the idea of Postmodernism and Postcolonialism, the corporeal sense of emotional spillover has been replaced by Mestrovic‟s idea „postemotional society‟: “… one might interpret the „post‟ in my use of „postemotionalism‟ as „after-emotion‟. In this reading, I would be seen as agreeing that spontaneous emotion is dead, and postemotionalism is a concept that falls into a well-reorganized Western tradition emanating from Nietzsche and culminating in Marx.” (25) He further writes: “Postemotional society has McDonaldized death. Funerals are quick, efficient and rational. The contemporary disposal of the dead body has become part of machine culture as a whole.” (130) 5. As far as the historical records are concerned, Britain‟s police force was introduced in the city in 1800.

Works Cited Bryce-Wunder, Sylvia. “Of Hard Men and Hairies: No Mean City and Modern Scottish Urban Fiction.” English and Film Studies Faculty Publications. http://scholars. Wlu.ca/engl_faculty/4. Web. Accessed on 04.02.2016. Burgess, Moira. Imagine a City: Glasgow in Fiction. Argyll: Argyll Publishing, 1998. Print. Craig, Cairns. “Devolving the Scottish Novel.” A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Ed. James F. English. MA Malden: Blackwell, 121-40, 2006. Print. --- . The Modern Scottish Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Print. De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.”The De Certeau Reader. Ed. G. Ward. London: Blackwell, 2000, 100-118. Print. Gray, Alasdair. Lanark: A Life in 4 Books. Edinburgh: Canongate, 1981. Print. Hart, Francis Russell. The Scottish Novel: A Critical Survey. London: John Murray, 1978. Print. Hubbard, Phil. City. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Lefebvre, Henry. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nichilson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print. McArthur, Alexander and H. Kingsley Long. No Mean City. 1935. London: Corgi, 1998.Print. Mestrovic, Stjepan. G. Postemotional Society. London: Sage, 1997. Print. Tunnard, Christopher. The Modern American City. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1968. Print. Watson, Sophie. City Publics: The (Dis)Enchantments of Urban Encounters. London: Routledge, 2006. Print. Venkateswarlu, D., et al, eds. Facets of Urban Society in India: Processes, Problems and Development. New Delhi: Serials, 2006. Print.

[19]