Writing Scotland : contemporary Scottish literature and the “representation” of the nation.

Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon

In the absence of elected political authority, the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers.

Christopher Whyte

“a general tendency to locate (and often confine) the politics of contemporary Scottish writers within the relatively narrow horizons of the constitutional debate they are credited with re-energising.”

Scott Hames

“The trope of ‘representation’ is central to what is misleading and even mystificatory in this pattern.”

Scott Hames

“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin, “why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living there, “ said Thaw. [...]

“Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in books, 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. [...] And when our imagination needs exercise we use it 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.

Alasdair Gray, Lanark, A Life in Four Books

“just follow someone around for 24 hours and it will be horror”

James Kelman

The establishment demands art from its own perspective but these forms of committed art have always been as suffocating to me as the impositions laid down by the British State […] In prose fiction I saw the distinction between dialogue and narrative as a summation of the political system; it was simply another method exclusion, or marginalizing and disenfranchising different peoples, cultures and communities. I was uncomfortable with ‘working-class’ authors who allowed ‘the voice’ of higher authority to control narrative, the place where the psychological drama occurred. How could I write from within my own place and time if I was forced to adopt the ‘received’ language of the ruling class? Not to challenge the rules of narrative was to be coerced into assimilation, I would be forced to write in the voice of an imagined member of the ruling class. I saw the struggle as towards a self-contained world. This meant I had to work my way through language, find a way of making it my own.

James Kelman, And the Judges Said

I’d always assumed what my education had taught me was true: that my country was a toty wee place with no political clout, a joke heritage, dour people, and writers who were all male and all dead. Not so, the book said? [...]

Alasdair Gray’s was a voice that offered me something freeing. It wasn’t distant or assumptive. It knew words, syntax, and places I also knew yet used them without any tang of apology: it took its own experience and culture as valid and central, not ancient or rural, tourist trade quaint or rude-mechanical humorous. […] Even more, however, it was a voice that took for granted it wasn’t the only voice.

Janice Galloway, “Different Oracles: Me and Alasdair Gray

[C]ertainly there’s less pessimism in Scotland nowadays, about the prospect of being an artist there, partly because undoubtedly things have improved. There are art dealers working in Glasgow now with international connections, and in the 1950s and 1960s there weren’t any at all. And from the point of view of individual writings, one of the things I find quite cheery about the Scottish situation nowadays is that it would once have been unthinkable to have a private eye crime fiction with a Scottish setting and a Scottish detective and Ian Rankin has shown that possible. People have accepted that Scotland is as possible a place to have what is called genre fiction as anywhere else in Britain.

Alasdair Gray, Literature Against Amnesia

Ewan Morrison

2007

2008

2009

2012

Suhayl Saadi

2004

2009

Cross-fertilized soil is always richer, and it might help get us off some of the rather tedious single-track roads this country’s writers are often expected to go down. Who wants to write about nation all the bloody time? To write through it, take it for granted – dear me yes.

Janice Galloway, The Edinburgh Review, 1999

Is there such a thing as English literature or Irish literature or American literature? You don’t want to claim any literature for a country because it’s international and has to do with the commonality of human experience, but Scotland exists, as a cultural entity, as an historical entity. I want somebody to be able to sit in a Scottish school and think, I can succeed, being myself for my country, using the language that I use, being the person that I am.

A.L. Kennedy, BBC Newsnight, 2011

The key Scottish novels of the past few decades largely reject the politics of ‘representation’ enshrined in parliamentary democracy, yet they are continually presented as the models and cultural guarantors of Scottish devolution understood as the (incomplete) recovery of national agency and identity via representation. But it is equally possible to understand devolution as a highly conservative state process, one that openly figures ‘cultural representation’ as the containment and deferral of democratic empowermentScott Hames, Scottish Literature, Devolution, and the Fetish of

Representation”, The Bottle Imp, March 2014

Scotland is an attitude of the mind

Maurice Lindsay, « Speaking of Scotland » from Collected poems 1940-1990

“an inclusive tradition has asserted itself by being relaxed about, and open to diverse voices”

James Robertson, 2014, The Scotsman

Scotland’s a sense of change, an endlessbecoming for which there never was a kindof wholeness or ultimate category