Chapter 8. ‘How SCOTTISH I am’: Alasdair Gray, Race and Neo- Nationalism Len Platt ‘Modernity without illusions’ Nationalism of the kind promoted by Alasdair Gray must distinguish itself from ‘the monstrous ethnic nationalisms of early twentieth-century imperial nations’, not least because those versions of nationalism have not been confined to that historical period or to ‘imperial nations’.1 The move is rarely straightforward in execution, with all versions of cultural nationalism having to negotiate territory where ethnic and linguistic dimensions of race, however untimely, remain persistently engaged in one way or another. But for many theorists, including Tom Nairn, the early analyst of ‘the break-up of Britain’, modern Scottish nationalism is different. ‘This is overwhelmingly a politically-orientated separatism’, Nairn wrote in the 1970s, ‘rather exaggeratedly concerned with problems of state and power, and frequently indifferent to the themes of race and cultural ancestry’. 2 Alasdair Gray adopts a similar position in his public political persona where he constructs his fictional writing as operating in diversity and multiplicity. In Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992), Gray acknowledges that Readers who live in Scotland but were born elsewhere may feel threatened by the title of this pamphlet; I must therefore explain that by Scots I mean everyone in Scotland who is able to vote [… which] includes second or third generation half-breeds like me whose parents or parents’ parents were English, Chinese, Indian, Polish, Italian and Russian Jewish. 177 Gray concludes his reassurance with the disarming, but risky, explanation that his liberal take on race involves an element of professional interest: Since nobody will read a writer who seems superior to them or tries to boss them I am terrified of being thought a racist, and hope I have cleared myself of that suspicion by demonstrating that the Scots are composed of many races, not one. Moreover this pamphlet also deals at points with the English, French, Irish, Welsh, and I think does so without prejudice.3 But the matter did not end there. The issue of Gray’s anti-Englishness has re- emerged, most recently in a 2012 controversy when he raised considerable ire in some quarters by launching an attack on the appointment of English ‘colonists’ to influential positions in Scottish arts administration. ‘Immigrants into Scotland’, Gray insisted, ‘as into other lands, are settlers or colonists. English settlers are as much a part of Scotland as Asian restaurateurs and shopkeepers, or the Italians who brought us fish and chips. The colonists look forward to a future back in England through promotion or by retirement.’4 Faced again with accusations of racism, his response (or one of them), was a model of moderation and feigned innocence, ‘All I can say is that my mother’s people were English — very nice folk and many of my best friends are English’.5 For all the attempt at smoothing things over, the furore persists producing some odd results on the World Wide Web. If you now Google Gray, a picture of him looking ill-kempt and fierce in braces pops up alongside a picture of Mel Gibbs, face blued up in Braveheart mode. It should be said from the beginning that this chapter does not enter into the public slanging match over what Gray may be up to in such comments. The aim here is to contribute to a broader debate about the operation of neo-nationalism in its Scottish formation across a spectrum that has conservative national tradition going 178 back to Celticism at one end and seeks to link up with the beat generation and post- racial cosmopolitanism at the other.6 That issue could be focused on a huge range of cultural products, from the genuine iconoclasm of a figure like Frank Kuppner to the sickly sentimentality of the recent musical film scored with the songs of The Proclaimers, Sunshine on Leith (2013). In this chapter, however, the emphasis is on the most well-known works of the now institutionalised figurehead of a contemporary movement that for the last thirty years or more has been stunningly innovative in constructing ‘more authentic and representative images’ for imagining a Scotland after ‘Tartanry and the Kailyard’.7 The issue is viewed through the lens of how race and cultural nationalism are intermingled in Gray’s fictional works, both in conventional representational terms but also in relation to an idiosyncratic and highly contemporary aesthetics. The chapter argues that race remains, for all the postmodernity of Gray’s fictions, a central category in which his work operates and has been received, involving as much in the way of reconstructions of racial identity as deconstructions. Here a novel like 1982, Janine (1984), the great anti-Thatcher novel of the Thatcher decade, becomes not a withdrawal from race but a fundamental remapping of the male Scottish racial identity against what are, for Gray, the deeply flawed politics and culture of Britishness. Elsewhere, far from replacing stereotypes, Grey confirms them, in narratives where colonial power relations are traditionally re- enacted in conventional and much outmoded terms of sexual exploitation. In this respect a short story like ‘YOU’, which tells the story of an unnamed Scottish woman, an unnamed Englishman and their brief affair, shares significant cultural territory with eighteenth-century ballad traditions, except that here landlordism is brought up to date in the figure of the outsiderly Englishman — an ethnic stereotype, like other representations of English identities in Gray’s fiction, of brutality, materialism and 179 self obsession that slips into race discourse too easily.8 Poor Things (1993), on the other hand, seems almost entirely designed around the idea of a radical historiographical rewrite that reinscribes the modern world with new postracial hybridity. Here the fin de siécle loveliness, intelligence and compassion of ‘Bella Caledonia’ — part French, part Mancunian and yet somehow all Scottish — stands in for a new Scotland on the edge of a new twentieth century.9 The idea of race, in short, is fundamental to Gray’s work, to its politics and aesthetics. Both within single texts and across the whole Gray oeuvre, it figures in varied, complex and often contradictory formulations. But for all this ambiguity and nuance, there is a primary and quite singular framework in which Gray’s raciological imagination operates, a framework, this essay argues, that is informed by contemporary neo-nationalism and is in various ways consubstantial with Tom Nairn’s early and highly controversial articulation concerning ‘the break up of Britain’. Receiving Lanark— problematics of cultural nationalism and race Gray has been an outspoken Scottish nationalist since well before the publication of Why the Scots Should Rule Scotland (1997). Such positions are not easy to occupy in contemporary culture. In Scotland as elsewhere, organic historical unities of the Yeatsian or Wagnerian kind can no longer seriously underwrite appeals to nation, one reason why Lanark has to be so hybrid, but also so problematic in reception terms. This, Gray’s first novel, was widely acknowledged as a Scottish masterpiece, marking nothing less than the return of Scottish fiction to the contemporary world stage. Alan Massie, writing in The Scotsman, described the book as ‘a quite extraordinary achievement, the most remarkable thing done in Scottish fiction for a very long time.’10 A number of important literary figures, including Anthony Burgess, racialised 180 the book through comparisons with Ulysses, that other ‘Celtic’ masterpiece.11 The status of Gray’s novel was not least contingent on the self-conscious contemporaneity which seemed indicative of the cultural and political ambition of this four book gospel. Books one and two comprised a brilliant but familiar enough realistic narrative in the bildungsroman mould. Books three and four, however, were dystopian — something like science fiction, but more like fantasy — and it was with book three that Lanark, after a remarkable dedicatory illustrated page, began. Strangely, a futuristic city, Unthank, where humans feed on processed human flesh and the diseased morph into dragons, seemed conversant, if not intimate, with realist post-war Glasgow and the more or less conventional bildungsroman that told the story of an aspiring artist, Duncan Thaw. On the other hand, this double-sided novel was clearly and irreparably separate and divided. To put it starkly, if Duncan’s imagined suicide was a tragic failure of culture and post-war politics, the exuberant illustrations for Lanark, the wild typographies and the comic ‘index’ which listed examples of plagiarism in the book, dividing the theft into three kinds — ‘block’, ‘imbedded’ and ‘diffuse’ — quite simply, were not.12 How did this formal experimentation, extravagant graphics and the wicked splicing of styles, forms and tones work in terms of the ‘Scottishness’ of Lanark? If the novel’s cultural significance was underwritten precisely by the book being so much of the moment, at the same time the indulgence in contemporary aesthetics was seen by some as trivialising, a withdrawal from the realities of a distressing and immediate politics in favour of the trendy intellectualism of postmodernism. Here anarchic authors like Gray, refusing ‘to accept or to reject any of a plurality of available ontological orders’, appeared in some highly influential formulations to have no commitment to any kind of politics, or any kind of reality.13 181 Under these pressures, commentators tried to reconcile the remarkable innovation of Lanark with historical versions of cultural nationalism and racial identity. The contemporary Scottish novel was seen as taking up the Celticist charge from Ireland. Introducing The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (2001), Colm Toíbín, invited his readers to ‘compare the calmness of contemporary Irish writing with the wildness of contemporary Scottish writing’. Drawing, ironically enough, on nineteenth-century English stereotypes of the wild and magical Celt, he imagined ‘a legacy of Sterne and Swift, Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien [that] had taken the Larne-Stranraer ferry.’ In the writings of ‘James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway and Alan Warner’, Toíbín wrote, ‘there is political anger, stylistic experiment and formal trickery.’14 Writing in the Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century Scottish Literature (2009), Ian Brown and Alan Riach formulated a different but still conventionally racialised position, normalising the new Scottish novel in terms of the nation it reproduced — a ‘multi-faceted, complex identity [….] with many unfrequented areas and unexplored riches’. This was set in contrast to ‘a linear monolithic literature with imperial weight and the trajectory of a colonial empire, unified by a single language’, against which Scottish literature was apparently compelled to write.15 Others still argued that Lanark was at its best where it was most realistic, a view which Gray himself may have contributed to through a well-known disassociation from postmodern cultural theory (‘Post Modernism seems the creation of scholars acquiring a territory to lecture on. I cannae be bothered discussing post- modern critical theory’) — although at times he did sound, however unintentionally, quite postmodern.16 He asserted, for instance, that his fictions, designed as ‘propaganda for democratic welfare-state Socialism and an independent Scottish parliament’, were geared towards seducing ‘the reader by disguising themselves as 182 sensational entertainment’ — a sentiment immediately undercut by the further half- joke that his ‘jacket designs and illustrations — especially the erotic ones — […were] designed with the same high purpose.’17 Some commentators, however, insisted that Lanark was neither somehow mysteriously ‘Celtic’, merely playful, nor ruinously divided but, rather, a novel which managed to pull off the feat of making contemporary literary aesthetics viable in terms of Scotland. Randall Stevenson, for instance, argued that for all the problematics, Gray ensured postmodernism had a ‘particular potential for Scotland’, using the idea of ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’ to illustrate his point — this was the early- twentieth-century formulation that racialised Scottish identity in terms of doubleness, a propensity to alternate between dour matter-of-fact realism and wild fantasy, ‘confusion of the senses, the fun of things thrown topsy-turvy, the horns of elfland’.18 Antisyzygy and ‘the experimental tradition of postmodernism’ might be ‘different in origin’, Stevenson reminded us, but ‘they naturally, fruitfully fall into alignment with each other. The Thaw/Lanark and Glasgow/Unthank pairings, or the entanglement of erotic fantasies with miserable reality in 1982, Janine, show how suggestively the two traditions can coincide and coalesce within single works.’19 Stevenson’s role in this and other essays was to find a way of reconciling some of the genuinely radical new writing appearing in Scotland with the traditions of a literary culture which figures like Cairns Craig saw as written out of history by the authority of ‘England’. From such postcolonial perspectives the intriguing pairing of postmodernism and racialised identity became not just possible but, as Stevenson said, somehow natural. ‘Dependable tools’: Scottishness and 1982, Janine 183 Stevenson, positioning Gray in relation to divided texts central to the idea of Scottish literature and the ‘Scottish predicament’ — like James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and My Hyde (1886) — reconciles Scottish new writing with well-established tradition. Others have taken the double sidedness of Scottish culture back much further, to the Reformation and earlier still to Celticism.20 The raciology most contemporary with Gray’s writing however, and most directly influential on its redrawing of racial identity, was Tom Nairn’s treatment of the same concept of antisyzygy which appeared in The Break-Up of Britain (1977).21 Nairn’s account conducted itself in terms of neo-Marxist discourses, but its radical interference with progressivist historiographies and the Derridean deconstruction of race as otherness would have been quite impossible without the space clearing generated by the broader intellectual culture with which it was contemporary. His historical account of nationalism in ‘Scotland and Europe’ and ‘Old and New Scottish Nationalism’ drew on traditional accounts in some ways, where the Scottish Enlightenment was typically seen as aligning itself with Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial development and civilising mission. But Nairn did not see this as the conventional Lowland betrayal of an authentic Scotland. Rather, it was an inevitable product of a dynamic that under normal conditions linked nationalism to the margins, but which had a unique and in Nairn’s terms ‘schizophrenic’ configuration in Scotland. Scottish intellectuals of the modern age, Nairn emphasised, did not belong to an economically ‘backward’ culture. On the contrary, putting to one side the question of the Highlands, modern Scotland was central to the development of the ‘workshop of the world’. There had been no historical logic compelling figures like James Burnett, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith to appeal to the 184 masses on the basis of a romanticised past, no reason to formulate any version of standard nineteenth-century nationalism other than the one which aligned them to the progressivist historiography of a State formalised by the Act of the Union. ‘The new bourgeois social classes’ were unique in Scotland. They inherited a social-economic position in history vastly more favourable than that of any other fringe or backward nationality. They were neither being ground down into industrial modernity, nor excluded from it. Hence they did not perceive it as alien, as a foreign threat or a withheld promise. Consequently they were not forced to turn to nationalism, to redress the situation. (TBUB, 145) At the same time, Scotland was decisively distinct on a number of grounds. Civically, in terms of religious culture, folklore and custom, education, administration and so on, it evolved as ‘too much of a nation […] to become a mere province of the U.K.; yet it could not develop its own nation-state on this basis either, via nationalism’ (TBUB, 146). This, according to Nairn, accounted for the curious absence/presence of nationalism in Scottish culture, a particular ‘pathology’ where Scotland figured as ‘a sort of lunatic or deviant, in relation to normal development during the period in question’. Blighted by a kitsch version of nationalism that appeared infantile and stunned into a conspiracy of silence about the ‘true’ nation, Scottish culture became doubly scarred, both by the horror of its own self neglect, the original sin, and by a feigned and (until fairly recently) necessary indifference to any serious version of national destiny. This accounts for what Nairn saw as ‘the Jekyll- and- Hyde physiognomy of modern Scottishness’. He drew analogies between Scottish ‘realism’ and the acceptance of the Union (and Conservatism). Fantasy — and Scottish nationalism must turn to fantasy — had to be sublimated. ‘Is this not 185 why’, asked Nairn, ‘among the multiple caricatures haunting Scots society, we still find a peculiarly gritty and grinding middle-class “materialism” — a sort of test tube bourgeois who does, indeed, think everything but business to be nonsense?’ (TBUB, 164, 146, 170). This is the estate embedded in the doubleness of Lanark’s end-stopped imagined pasts (progressivist, humanist, individualist) and terrifying futures (militarist, consumerist, materialist) and configured over and over in Gray’s fiction generally, and in racial terms, as artistic failure, shame, disease, impotency and self abuse. The antisyzygy of 1982, Janine, Gray’s darkest and most powerful novel, turns precisely on the formulation of an identity that is in outward respects the ‘test-tube bourgeois’ of Nairn’s account, a conservative, no-nonsense, middle-class business man — ‘almost everyone of my income group is a Conservative’— who tours the country as a security advisor for ‘national installations’.22 Inwardly, however, which is the ground where almost all the novel takes place, the I-narrator lives a fantasy life constructing the tiniest details of an endless sado-masochistic fantasy constantly subject to anticipation, deferment, rehearsal and refinement. The fantasies are enacted as a kind of text in-the-making: But Janine is not (here come the clothes) happy with the white silk shirt shaped by the way it hangs from her etcetera I mean BREASTS, silk shirt not quite reaching the thick harness-leather belt which is not holding up the miniskirt but hangs in the loops round the waistband of the white suede miniskirt supported by her hips and unbuttoned as wide enough to insert three fingers. I HATED clothes when I was young. (J, 18)