Tales, Titles, Tails: Negotiations of Genre in the Short Fiction of Alasdair

Gray

Portrait of the artist

Gray’s Mural in The Ubiquitous Chip in Glasgow

Short story collections

• Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)

• Ten Tales Tall and True: Social Realism, Sexual Comedy, Science Fiction, Satire (1993)

• The Ends of Our Tethers: Sorry Stories by Alasdair Gray (2003).

Novels

• LANARK

• 1982 JANINE

• THE FALL OF KELVIN WALKER

• McGROTTY & LUDMILLA

• SOMETHING LEATHER

• POOR THINGS

• A HISTORY MAKER

Autobiography

• Caricatures/portraits by Gray of Gray

Alasdair Gray is a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian who (despite two recent years as Professor of Creative Writing as Glasgow University) has

mainly lived by writing and designing eighteen books, most of them fiction.

Since 1981, when Alasdair Gray's first novel was published, his characters have aged as fast as their author.

Literature and politics

'I believe the more people are stimulated into thinking about their feelings, and feeling about

their thoughts, which is what a work of art does, the less we're likely to be taken in by

the mindless power of government or manipulated by those who regard themselves

as the bosses; and that makes political disaster, cruelty and, in the long run,

unkindness less likely.’

Art and money

• ‘Of course life would have been different if I'd had money. I now think I would not have created more, because it seems I've had the luck to create more than I'd ever expected to create, had the luck to survive as an artist. Lack of money changes your plans. I was quite sure, in my early years - I'd planned to write this great novel, Lanark, which would be my only novel. There would then be a book of short stories, all perfect of their kind, and then a book of poems, also perfect of their kind, then a book of essays, and a book of plays, and then a book of my pictures. And each would be perfect of its kind.'

• 'Necessity changed that. And money would have made a difference to peace of mind, which you shouldn't underestimate. Look at many of the world's great artists - the Impressionists, Seurat and Cézanne and Degas, they inherited enough money not to have to depend upon selling, and that let them concentrate. Cézanne said, in later years, "My father was the true genius:he left me a million francs."'

Non-fiction genres in Gray

• Historiography

• The essay

• Journalism

• Autobiography

• Polemic

Fictional modes in Gray

• Fantasy

• Gothic

• Science fiction

• Pornography

Final mix:

• Neo-baroque

• Post-modern

• Cross-aesthetic fiction

Purposes

• Social commentary

• Satire

• Political critique

Transtextuality

• Intertextuality • Paratextuality• Metatextuality• Hypertextuality• Archi textuality

Genette on the paratext• A literary work consists, entirely or essentially, of a text, defined

(very minimally) as a more or less long sequence of verbal statements that are more or less endowed with significance.

• But this text is rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author's name, a title, a preface, illustrations.

• And although we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround it and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text's presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book.

• These accompanying productions, which vary in extent and appearance, constitute what I have called the work's paratext. [...]

• For us, accordingly, the paratext is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public.

More on the paratext

• Indeed, this fringe, always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that - whether well or poorly understood and achieved - is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.

  Unlikely Stories, Mostly

Unlikely Stories, unwrapped

Spanish version

Unlikely Stories, Mostly - Paratext

• “Scotland 1984”• “Work as if you were

in the early days of a better nation” (Dennis Lee)

• Emblem: A tartaned mermaid pointing her finger towards the future

Ten Tales Tall and True

Tales - Paratext

• “This book contains more tales than ten so the title is a tall tale too. I would spoil my book by shortening it, spoil the title if I made it true”

“Getting Started – A Prologue”

• Poe - rejected

• Melville - rejected

• The Gospels - rejected

• Charlotte Brontë - rejected

• Ambrose Bierce finds favor with his beginning to “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

Flap text: Mock reviews

• “Col. Sebastian Moran” (moronic and inane)

• “Lady Nicola Stewart” writing in “The Celtic Needlewoman” (simultaneously vapid and pompous)

Poor Things

Poor Things

• It pretends to be an autobiography found in a box of legal papers being destroyed by a Glasgow law firm. The curators of Glasgow's People's Palace passed it to Gray, for editing and publication, believing it to be a minor masterpiece and Gray pieced together the life through a work of detection. Of course none of this is actually true, but Gray's use of learned notes, illustrations, and both introductory and secondary material is pretty convincing.

Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer, Edited by

Alasdair Gray

• “Blurb for a High-Class Hardback”: overtly political, plays with Gray’s image as a post-modernist (claiming he has now reverted to a Victorian style), and promises good clean love stories with no hints of perversion…

• “Blurb for a Popular Paperback”: emphasizes the novel’s racy depictions of sexual practices, mysterious occurrences and villains getting their justified come-uppance…

The Ends of Our Tethers

The Ends of Our Tethers

• “Sorry Stories”

• “Critic Fodder” or “Critic Fuel”

• “Remember everything and keep your head! Seamus Heaney – Station Island”

The Book of Prefaces

Paratext game in Book of Prefaces

• Some copies of the 1st hardback edition included not one but two erratum slips, both introduced in rhyme and printed in red and black ink to match the volume itself. The first, entitled 'An Appeal to the Reader', goes thus:

• When this book was printed and boundTwenty-two errors were found.The volume is therefore defectiveUnless YOU supply a corrective.Please take a pen in your fistAnd mend these mistakes that we missed.

• The second, entitled 'Editor's Postscript To The First List Of Errors', goes thus:

• I regret and deplorethat I've found fourteen moreand probably youwill find several too.

Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, 1992 & 1997

Why Scots Should Rule Scotland

• Gray has written two books in an attempt to put his own case for self-rule for Scotland. The first book, Independence, was written in 1992, to explain 'why so many Scots have wanted independence; haven't got it; should get it soon; and why life in a self-governed Scotland will be better but not easier'.

• The book is not illustrated. An author's note states: 'This pamphlet omits many important things: an independent Scottish education now almost destroyed by British government action; Scotland's usefulness as a separate testing ground for laws enforced in England (extra police powers, the poll tax) and much else. This cannot be helped in a short pamphlet which I think of as a sketch for a bigger picture to be completed before 2000 AD - if I am spared.

• Which brought him to Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, published for the 1997 election. The cover of this wholly rewritten update to Independence consists of the flags, names and populations of 20 independent nations of smaller or comparable size to Scotland all printed in colour on a grey background. The cover text is a mix of blue and purple on white. Throughout the text the flag motif recurs, as chapter breaks and general decoration. Various flags make an appearance, but the Scottish lion and cross of St Andrew predominate.

• In his introduction to this volume, Gray says: 'With a view to reprinting [Why Scots Should Rule Scotland] I read it carefully three months ago and found it a muddle of unconnected historical details and personal anecdotes with a few lucid passages and at least one piece of nonsense[.…] The reviewers' kindness had been the condescension instinctively given to the art of children or halfwits.'

Author appreciations

                                                                                

             

Janet on Red Felt (1980), oil on wood, 14.75" x 47.5".

Eden and After (1966), oil on board, 24.5" x 21.5".