Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives 9780748637751

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Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives

Edited by Michael Gardiner, Graeme Macdonald and Niall O’Gallagher

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2011 © in the individual contributions is retained by the authors Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12 Goudy Old Style by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3774 4 (hardback) The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Introduction Michael Gardiner PART I:

POSTCOLONIAL REVISIONS: COLONIALITY AND EMPIRE IN SCOTTISH WRITING 1786–1914

1 A ‘Conceptual Alliance’: ‘Interculturation’ in Robert Burns and Kamau Brathwaite Leith Davis and Kristen Mahlis 2 ‘Almost the Same as Being Innocent’: Celebrated Murderesses and National Narratives in Walter Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace Evan Gottlieb 3 Annals of Ice: Formations of Empire, Place and History in John Galt and Alice Munro Katie Trumpener 4 Alistair MacLeod and the Gaelic Poetic Tradition Douglas S. Mack 5 Captains of Industry, Lords of Misrule: Carlyle and the Second Scottish Enlightenment Christopher Harvie 6 Literary Affinities and the Postcolonial in Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad Linda Dryden 7 John Buchan and Wilson Harris: Myth and Counter-Myth, Exploration and Empire David Punter

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PART II: POSTCOLONIALISM AND MODERN SCOTTISH LITERATURE 1914–1979 8 Wole Soyinka and Hugh MacDiarmid: The Violence and Virtues of Nations Alan Riach 9 Neil M. Gunn, Chinua Achebe and the Postcolonial Debate Margery Palmer McCulloch 10 ‘East is West and West is East’: Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Quest for Ultimate Cosmopolitanism Scott Lyall 11 Unfinished Business: Muriel Spark and Hannah Arendt in Palestine Martin McQuillan 12 Rewriting and the Politics of Inheritance in Robin Jenkins and Jean Rhys Marina MacKay

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PART III: POSTCOLONIALISM AND CONTEMPORARY SCOTTISH LITERATURE 13 Race, Nation, Class and Language Use in Tom Leonard’s Intimate Voices and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Mi Revalueshanary Fren Liam Connell and Victoria Sheppard 14 Conversion and Subversion in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Leila Aboulela’s The Translator Willy Maley 15 This is not sarcasm believe me yours sincerely: James Kelman, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Amos Tutuola Iain Lambert 16 ‘Our Little Life is Rounded with a Sleep’: The Scottish Presence in Andrew Greig’s In Another Light and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Bashabi Fraser 17 ‘Dangerous Liaisons’: Gender Politics in the Contemporary Scottish and Irish ImagiNation Stefanie Lehner 18 Captain Thistlewood’s Jacobite: Reading the Caribbean in Scotland’s Historiography of Slavery Joseph Jackson Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

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Introduction Michael Gardiner, University of Warwick

This collection asks many questions, but leaves behind the wearied and misleading one of whether Scotland ‘is postcolonial’ and therefore qualifies for a critical connection. The situation is more fundamental than this. Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature are less separate trends or two sets of texts, than intricately related and often conjoined critical positionings in relation to a much longer history, which has as one of its main objects a critique of the jurisdiction of the imperial mode of British state culture. (Capital letters here reflect a disciplinary or counter-disciplinary status, rather than merely texts arising from specific nationalities.) And yet, at least in institutional terms, the statement of this realisation is still quite recent. One origin of the familiar designations of both these disciplinary or sub-disciplinary forms, Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature, was in the decline of British consensus which set in during the global postcolonial shifts from the mid-1950s, when a constitutional settlement which had been in place for around two centuries encountered social, educational and economic questions which it struggled to answer. A primary reason why these questions were difficult was that the knot of ‘British state / English culture’ could no longer be exported into empire, with ‘English’ as an ideal cultural-linguistic form. In the United Kingdom, this 1950s–1960s consensual shift combined a civic-national revival and a terminal imperial contraction and decolonisation. Not coincidentally, this was also a period when English Literature was forced to undergo huge changes as a discipline; ‘strong-canon’, heritage-based or Leavisite approaches came under serious attack, in a disciplinary-constitutional threat recalling the 1790s, the last time that British consensus was seriously and actively questioned, a time when critics of the precedence-based unwritten constitution had to flee from the London of ‘Pitt’s Terror’ to Enlightenment Edinburgh. As a field of literary theory, postcolonialism’s inception is relatively recent but, properly understood, the term, as many commentators have stressed, does not just designate a country detaching chronologically after decolonisation; it is also more fundamentally a critique working within various forms of empire, whether understood in terms of occupation, formal arrangements or epistemological dependency, and as a form of resistance the postcolonial has a history as long as

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colonisation itself (cf. McClintock 1992). Unsurprisingly, after the Indian withdrawal of 1947, the ‘after’ sense of the term was more stressed, appearing in the December 1959 Oxford English Dictionary to describe how ex-colonies remained detached from global issues – a usage which reveals an anxiety over power and critique and a need to categorise and consign to the past. This anxiety has stuck even as the term has become more nuanced (hence the question ‘is Scotland postcolonial?’). After the conflicts of global decolonisation, the term was concretised in the academy by the reception of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which used the historiography of Michel Foucault to describe how ‘the east’ had been created in terms of accumulated discourse, and so to designate an historical condition, a mode of categorisation, rather than a series of texts belonging to ‘English’, a subject area which nevertheless, then as now, has sought to recuperate the postcolonial as simply one variety of itself. The terms of both the postcolonial and of (stateless) Scottishness indicate tendencies which can be discerned by careful readings, not categories of text; notwithstanding the cultural capital of individual ‘ethnic’ authors during a period of British multiculturalism largely coinciding with the marketing of individual Scottish writers, the question of whether a text is or is not postcolonial is misguided, and the question of whether a text is or is not Scottish is not far behind. Like postcolonial criticism, the post-British moment of the mid-1950s matured with the later constitutional crisis precipitated by the rise to power of the new right at the end of the 1970s, which heralded a neo-Burkean belief in an unwritten constitution protecting the British state, placing the origin of cultural value in an ideal past based on heredity, and raising ‘heritage’ over ‘culture’ (Howkins 2001). For many (e.g. McCrone 1992), Thatcherite state nationalism moreover took England as its model – and this was indeed its outward, ‘cultural’ form, though this was really a struggle to hold on to an imperial state form which was specifically British (cf. Harvie 2004). Charges of ‘Anglocentrism’ in regard to English Literature indeed tend to be quite misleading; indeed, the power of the British nationless state suggests something more like the opposite – that there is a good case for arguing that English Literature should have been more Anglocentric. As English Literature exported a class-fixed form of ‘Englishness’ into the British empire, it turned England into what Ian Baucom (1999) has described as a set of ideal spaces or lieux de mémoire. And it was during the rise of the new right at the end of the 1970s that it became widely recognised by critics of Scottish literature that, since literary value or literary prestige always seemed to have already existed as a question of heredity and was idealistic and ultimately unreachable, value in English Literature worked in a very similar way to how political representation worked in the British state. In this sense, critique involving the nationless state was seen to be shared with postcolonial critique, opening up abundant comparative possibilities. In a still unfolding sense this was indeed a constitutional shock comparable with the latter decades of the eighteenth century, and the literature and criticism of the time show this, as in David Punter’s groundbreaking study of Gothic, The Literature of Terror (1980),

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which stressed the significance of an anti-state, ‘race’-haunted genre acting as the underside of an English Literature canon. What made Britain unusual was how, especially since the Napoleonic Wars and the firming up of the unified state, laws were held to have grown ‘organically’, embedded in a heritage-based constitution which was ‘stretchy’ in that it was able to absorb the rest of the British Isles constitutionally without rewriting itself, and thereby to absorb empire, in a double movement (cf. Kumar 2003). Values in an untouchable past could be expanded indefinitely as the canon of English Literature, a discipline which was not specific to place, but rather encouraged local franchises to invest in ideal forms. English Literature, in this sense, represents no one; it is the cultural wing of an imperial state constitutionally predicated on being unreachable. Constitutional challenges, therefore, which have tended to be especially visible in Scotland, are a key postcolonial process. The Thatcherite moment was one at which these increasingly conscious analyses came to realise that they shared a challenge to a form of a literary assumption, which could now be historicised. For two centuries before this, counter-British and counter-empire themes and forms (and, of course, British and empire themes and forms) had been connected; albeit slowly, a newer mix of the Scottish and the postcolonial began to allow these connections to be traced, and literary history to be examined through a lens less clouded by the disciplinarity of English Literature. Both Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature came to trouble the idealistic tendencies of English Literature; yet ironically, since Anglo-American postcolonial studies often mapped perfectly on to the geographical and conceptual area of English Literature, and was often made subject to its existing systems of canons, its cultural agencies and institutional prestige, in some senses it has been less able to challenge the discipline of English Literature than has the allegedly ethnic field of Scottish Literature. Thus, rather than talk of Scotland as being or not being a colony (though there are Highland and Jacobite complications, which some contributions to this book explore), this collection identifies in literary history and criticism a dual relationship of congruence and conflict centred on the form of the British empire. It is now widely accepted that the Scottish contribution to empire was often disproportionately large, from the Ulster Plantation through Hong Kong trading to the defence of the African colonies. It could be argued, indeed, that on an epistemological level, the Scottish contribution was the essence of empire: the practical and spatial attitude to the observation and organisation of the world, the ideal of franchised universalism, the culture of the work ethic, and the necessity of free markets to a nationless state (cf. Gardiner 2004a). Indeed, Lowland Scots frequently ended up policing those areas which most expressed their own cultural and linguistic anxieties of disenfranchisement (cf. Sorensen 2000: 3). The suppression of the Highlands underscores this self-immolating form of progress, as documented by Angus Calder (1981, 1994), in work which might be compared with Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993). Increasingly, during a process of devolution which has inevitably outrun state objectives,

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national Scottish constitutional critique has flowed from the bodies like the Institute of Governance, the journal Scottish Affairs and Scottish think tanks, and from a growing interest in the sociology and ethnicity of Scotland and Scottish society (c.f. Hassan and Warhurst 1999). Even so, there has always been a suspicion within postcolonial studies that the complicity of individual Scots in empire has made the connection invalid ‘at source’, an assumption made in the otherwise crucial first edition of The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 7). It has not helped that from a Scottish perspective ‘comparative literature’ has tended to connote Euro-American literature, an issue of limited ‘worldliness’ which this volume confronts. In any case, Scotland is implicated in a rethinking of our understanding of Europe as such, an uneven formulation increasingly questioned in emergent movements from post-Soviet postcolonialism to post-Balkan postcolonialism to post-imperial western Europe’s theorising of its changing demographic and cultural expressions. One of the oldest active alliances between Scottish and postcolonial cultures, yet one of its most bifurcated and confused, has of course been with Ireland, a country which has at some points seemed to be piloting postcolonial thought for the whole of the British Isles. The Scottish alliance was underscored by the shared labour movements and Home Rule movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then as empire was discredited in World War One, by eventual Irish semi-independence, and by the loss of many canonical assumptions about the power of ‘English’. Ever since its early, Saidian form, Irish postcolonialism has discussed the dual nationalist / imperialist legacy, as reflected in the Field Day projects and taking in the slight but influential Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Eagleton et al. 1990), and work by Seamus Deane (1985, 1997) and Clare Carroll and Patricia King (2003). There was also an early interest in the political conditions of Irish colonialism, Edmund Burke and the values of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy (Gibbons 1996a; Eagleton 1995; Smyth 1997; Kearney 1997; Graham and Maley 1999; Graham 2001). By the 2000s, Irish criticism was linking itself with increasing sophistication to the postcolonial (e.g. Attridge and Howes 2000; Graham and Hooper 2002; Howes 2006; Lehner 2008); yet Seamus Deane in Strange Country (1997) had stressed how ‘the Irish-English relation . . . was mediated through Scotland’ (108) – while remaining aware that, in Scottish literary history itself, postcolonial connections were still quite patchy. Nevertheless, cultural historians of Scotland, such as Murray Pittock (1997, 1999), Graeme Morton (1999), Colin Kidd (1993), and Ian Donnachie and Christopher Whatley (1992), had long been describing the tensions between British global modernity and local and national cultural formations. In literature this tension was most volubly documented, perhaps paradoxically, not in the eighteenth century described by postcolonially-aware critics like Ian Duncan and Murray Pittock, but in modernism, with the nationalist pull from ‘English’ after World War One and the (First) Scottish Literary Renaissance, as documented by Margery Palmer McCulloch (2004), as well as the many scholars of MacDiarmid, Gibbon and Gunn who drew out Scottish-Irish-socialist-international implica-

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tions. The coming moment of internationalism-in-modernism was marked by Cairns Craig’s introduction to the crucial four-volume Aberdeen University Press history of 1987, which sought to link Scottish literary development to wider global processes rather than to British English Literature (Craig 1987). This collection is in part another step in this form of internationalism, and one which moreover emphasises how ‘English’ has stepped beyond the English-speaking world. * * * In Britain’s case, then, anti-imperial critique has been tied to a redefinition of civic nationhood. The importance of national criticism of the impersonal, hereditary, untouchable, and in a sense citizenless nationless state is sometimes missed by those for whom the national is always a problem, including those embracing a certain idealistic strain of cosmopolitanism which wants the postcolonial to be automatically ‘beyond’ the national. But the raising of the national-civic over the ‘stretchy’ constitution is why Scottish Literature as a counter-discipline really matters for postcolonialism, and why it overlaps at so many points with postcolonial history. This is, in retrospect, more significant than the ‘literary globalisation’ of the 1990s, when a number of individual Scottish writers were marketed and grouped in a quasi-ethnic sense which has been described by Pascale Casanova (2005). The question is not so much the building of a canon, far less the competition to enter a pre-existing canon, as the ethical problem of canonicity itself, the historical-constitutional assumptions which underpin how literary prestige arises, along with consequent processes of centralisation and decentring in terms of national and international literary value. ‘Postcolonial’, somewhat like the term ‘Scottish’, stateless and in flux, has formal, economic and thematic connotations, but the idea that a discrete list of postcolonial texts can be constructed is a somewhat toxic one which itself belongs to a specific and biographical methodology of English Literature. Scottish Literature as a counterdiscipline, even during the 1990s fiction revival associated with the apparent global marketability of Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, has rather frequently acted as a set of political interventions against the idea that literary value arises from a single pre-given cultural source, a stance which aligns it closely with the postcolonial. Nevertheless, the relationship between Scotland and ex-colonies or neocolonies remains one of simultaneous solidarity and conflict; Scottish troops’ involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq (though often condemned by nationalists) has made absurd the idea that imperialism has been eclipsed (cf. Gopal and Lazarus 2006; Lazarus 2011; Macdonald 2010a, 2010b). Nor do Scotland’s postcolonial associations simply disappear with the assumption that devolution means that the Scottish problem has been fixed (cf. Kelly 2007). Therefore, an aim of this collection is to chart an under-represented Scottish national registration of connectedness with and complicity in colonial violence, within the search for a method of reconciling these opposite tendencies in literary history. Still, English Literature has proven extraordinarily resistant to challenges to its

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British-imperial basis of precedence, even well after decolonisation; its ‘organic’ methodology has often shown itself ready to adapt to present the incorporation of more ‘ethnic’ writers as the healthy workings of diversity from a default position of English. Indeed, the term ‘English’ has a Teflon existence within university departments, not only in the UK but around much of the world, and has often silently clung on to the ‘British state – English culture’ imperial bind. Moreover, a rearguard ‘British culture’ has struggled, against all political and economic logic, from the neo-Blitz iconography of the 1940s through to the response to the ‘Blitz spirit’ reaction to the 2008 financial crisis, to maintain the epistemology of the UK as a natural centre of a global managementocracy. As approaches, both Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature challenge the sense of unwritten precedence behind this, but doing so takes a serious effort and a sense of ex-disciplinary status. One of the great ironies of postcolonial theory has been that it usually left intact a distinct economic and political logic to English Literature despite some of the theoretical excesses of the 1990s (cf. Parry 2004a). This is an irony of which many of the writers in this collection are aware, and seek to address. A great problem has been that the devolution-era models of multiculturalism embraced by the British discipline of English Literature were really a victory for an Enoch Powellite model of ethnic grouping; they have been a way to keep using the idea of ‘race’ even after empire. British multiculturalism 2000s-style tended to raise the ius sanguinus over the ius solus (cf. Baucom 1999), working against the nation as an active, democratic, civic entity, demanding that each person have ‘a culture’ or ‘an identity’ which contained some kind of ethnic specialness yet (or therefore) remains caught within the cultural gravity of the state – in the way that ‘Celtic’ devolution was often represented in ethnic terms of ‘pride’. The Nationality Act (1980) which underscored the ‘law of blood’ was underscored again on an ‘identity’ level by New Labour, and the form of ‘Black British’ culture which it has pragmatically engineered from these Powellite roots is therefore deeply problematic; articulated as a positive identity, it is also nevertheless an abdication of collective action in favour of the very state constitution which stood behind a class-fixed culture of empire which embedded the idea of race itself. This has been a tricky problem for Scottish civic nationalists to point out, as is illustrated in the interchange between Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Tom Nairn which is appended to Nairn’s 2002 book, Pariah. Asifa Hussain’s and William Miller’s warning in Multicultural Nationalism (2006) about how easily civic nationalism can turn ethnic is well taken, but we should also note an ideological aggression behind the New Labour incarnation of the ‘Black British’ phenomenon, which reinforced an imperial unwritten constitution through an ethnicity-based inflection of state duty. Given the recent interest in the overlap between the sociology of ethnicity and the study of national literatures, the Black British debate which is currently widening in Scottish fiction shows the centrality of devolution and constitutional contest to proactive questions of ‘race’ (Macdonald 2010a). The tinge of desperation in the constant rebranding of the nationless state, though, shows the openness of the terms of the debate, in which a quite strongly

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defined civic body is struggling with one which is powerful yet unable to declare itself (e.g. Paterson et al. 2001; Keating 1996; Bond and Rosie 2006). The changed historiography of the state/nation conflict after empire was always likely to lead to a reconfiguring of those areas of Scottish literary history which had often previously been seen as a metonymic addition to another discipline – and so to a natural affinity with the postcolonial. There followed a long period of recovery for Scottish literary history, as Scottish Literature has reinvented itself. Until quite recently, many scholars of Scottish literary history used to worry that the highimperial era of the 1830s–1870s had been dropped from English Literature, but with a counter-disciplinary conception of literary criticism as critique rather than as canonical adaptation, this question becomes moot, and historical context can be worked back through. Literary-historical work aware of the terms of postcolonialism could thereafter go over what had seemed a relatively lean national canon (Davis 1999; Mack 2006; McCracken-Flesher 2007). Departments of Scottish Literature, usually conceived with one ear open to the ‘democratic intellectual’ ideals of generalism and openness of access, have been floated at all four ancient universities, as well as the long-term interest at Stirling, in part in these terms. In these ‘Scot Lit’ departments is where the question of canonicity is crucial; if these departments, schools or subject-area units merely change the writerly line-up, but continue to identify themselves in terms of English Literature method – the lives of individual authors, the ‘instinctual’ canon, and so on – then they risk being drawn right back into the methodological gravity of empire-era English Literature. There is a real danger of a kind of Celtic Leavisism. On the other hand, these departments could reflect the lessons of the postcolonial in problematising the creation of cultural value, and represent a new understanding of disciplinarity. They might enact something like the opposite process to what Robert Crawford has described as the ‘Scottish invention of English Literature’ (Crawford 1998); Scottish Literature could de-invent English Literature, where postcolonial studies has often tried but frequently found itself mired back in that discipline. In other words, on a cultural-disciplinary level, the break-up of the empire is the break-up of Britain is the break-up of English Literature – and comparative work at this point steps in to identify underlying homologies, and to try to explain to English Literature that the postcolonial will not go away as an historical problem until this has unfolded (cf. Lazarus 2011; Stevenson 2004; Gardiner 2004a). The combination of postcolonial thought and post-British civic thought requires us to rethink these problems in terms which are more material, more politically hard-edged, and more comparative. These terms also unpick ‘race’; given the UK’s status as a nationless and to a degree citizenless, classifying, managerial state, the national is less a trigger for the racial grouping than its opposite, an escape from the racial into citizenship. So the national may be just one amongst the many themes of postcolonial theory, but in context of the United Kingdom it is central, since the contestation of the national and the state is also the contestation for the end of imperial disciplinary form, and the inception of a more mature internationalism.

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How, though, could the form of the canon be fundamentally changed within the ‘absorptive’ structure of English, when it is so institutionally and constitutionally invested in the idea of precedent? This is the problem faced by both Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature (cf. Reizbaum 1992; Ngu˜gı˜ 1993). How would literary history look without the reliance on the civilised sensibilities of individual authors, or the saleability of ethnic difference as a dynamic British English Literature (or in a fashionable North American form, ‘British Studies’)? It is not that literature from Scotland has been ignored. There has never been a shortage of single studies of individual ‘classic’ Scottish authors within English Literature, such as Thomas Carlyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, and how they related to, or depicted, empire. But what if the aim was less about the sensibilities and backgrounds of authors, and more about a ‘democratic intellectual’ approach for which cross-disciplinary criticism and socio-historical context are primary? The awareness that the coalescence of these approaches is a disciplinary question helps us contextualise the impact of Robert Crawford’s Devolving English Literature (1992), a literary history which is radical almost against its own will, since it promotes writers of Scottish descent from a classically English Literature position, based on parameters of individual greatness, biography, authorial intention and received canonicity. This book has often been cited by others, notably Ania Loomba (1998: 88) and Ismail Talib (2002: 21, 46, 131), as a postcolonial-esque work with its stress on the ex-centric promotion of figures and departments. In turn, Crawford, though distancing himself from established 1990s forms of postcolonial criticism, was building on the counter-British criticism which had grown from resistance to the New Right in political-cultural-literary journals arising in the early 1980s, and whose civic nationalism became, especially in the unfolding context of the New Left which these journals rediscovered and revitalised, a radical challenge to British Marxism’s deafness to the constitutional significance of the nation. The rethinking of the nation by the New Left also helped embed those moments of international postcolonial solidarity which were quite ideologically distant, as in the work of Crawford – as well as to lead to the insight that underprivileged Scottish communities have themselves in many ways been neocolonial (cf. Welsh 1995). The New Left and its various revivals have imported AfricanCaribbean critiques like those of Frantz Fanon and Edward Kamau Brathwaite who, as Alan Riach has documented, turned to the linguistic and Africaninflected resources of the Caribbean, and flagged a long history of cultural contact between Scotland and the Caribbean (cf. Riach 1993, 2008; Riach and Murray 1995). Indeed, the New Left problematising of the national during the period of African and Caribbean decolonisation forced a partial redefinition in terms of anti-state political action, and it is in this sense that Fanon has been discussed by writers including Michael Gardiner (1996) and Roderick Watson (1998) – although Fanon had already been invoked briefly in terms of Scottish ‘inferiorism’ in 1989 by Craig Beveridge and Ronald Turnbull (Beveridge and Turnbull 1989). This collection attempts to revise the terminology of ‘Scottish

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eclipse’ further by forging new comparative links between a reconceptualised Scottish modernism and postcolonial thought. One concrete result, a ‘postcolonial’ move in some ways, was the Constitutional Assembly which reported in 1988, in its way at least as important to postcolonial questions of ‘British identity’ as the famously multiculturalist Parekh Report of 2000. Stating the constitutional problem in clear terms, the 1988 Claim of Right helped lead to the counter-disciplinary tone of the new strand of Scottish Literature. The comparativist, materialist and postcolonial mood is readable in Cairns Craig’s Out of History, eventually published in 1996 but with roots in the journals of the early 1980s. Craig’s series-edited Determinations, of which the first edition was a reprinting of the 1988 Claim of Right (Dudley Edwards 1989), aided this internationalist shift, as later did the fourth edition of Christopher Harvie’s Scotland and Nationalism (2004), as well as Neil Ascherson’s Stone Voices (2002). During the early devolutionary period, then, a fusion (whether or not de facto) of the Scottish and postcolonial emphases was increasingly discussed. Berthold Schoene’s 1995 ‘A Passage to Scotland’ had already been both aware of and sceptical towards some simplistic applications of early postcolonial theory, and was complemented and challenged from a more Fanonian angle by Michael Gardiner’s ‘Democracy and Scottish Postcoloniality’ (Schoene 1995, 1998; Gardiner 1996, 2001). Soon after, Gardiner’s The Cultural Roots of British Devolution (2004b) argued that British break-up was already a postcolonial problem, and Gavin Miller and Eleanor Bell’s Scotland in Theory (2004) offered an important range of approaches, including that of a Craig still working at defining an internationalist form of national commitment (Craig 2004). Other Scottish studies have seen postcolonial theory as applicable to a multiple or heteroglossic language situation, where literary language is mortally indexed to institutional power (sometimes linking their critique to that of Mikhail Bakhtin (e.g. Watson 1996, 2006)). In another direction, in a 2002 article in the postcolonial studies journal, Interventions, Willy Maley and Ellen-Raïssa Jackson (2002) drew out an alternative, undisciplined (or de-disciplined) Scottish–Irish modernism based on a postcolonial paradigm, drawing parallels with the Field Day project, and called for a new comparative criticism. Nevertheless, Liam Connell’s ‘Scottish Nationalism and the Colonial Vision of Scotland’, in the same journal (2004), issued warnings about what he saw as an under-examined use of the postcolonial comparison. And as a partial backlash to postcolonial readings, articulate sceptical voices have been raised by Aaron Kelly (2007), Connell elsewhere (2003), Graham Huggan (2001) and Scott Hames (2007), who stresses the ethical pitfalls of a ‘catchphrase’ terminology. Clarifying and important position papers have also been written by Stefanie Lehner (2005, 2007) and Niall O’Gallagher (2007). Lehner (2007) has engaged intelligently with the postcolonial but detected in the writing of Cairns Craig and others a form of the national which not only struggles to escape the ethnic but is also problematically gendered, an analysis she develops in a comparative context (somewhat comparable to that of Eleanor Bell in 2004). A related point is made in an important essay by Aaron

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Kelly (2007), who rightly worries over the way devolution has been used in classethnic terms to demonstrate a problem ‘solved’. Berthold Schoene (2007a, 2008) has suggested that the difficulties of a will to statehood justify an engagement with the terms of cosmopolitanism, both acknowledging and criticising some of US cosmopolitanism’s apparent jadedness with the postcolonial. And recently, from another position, Ryan Shirey (2006) and Graeme Macdonald (2010b) have taken the important step of relating Scottish Literature as national via the historical category of the postcolonial to World Literature. Macdonald’s essay in New Formations (2006) was an influential summary of the crossovers between claims for agency in devolution and those in postcolonialism, marrying the materialism of a certain school of postcolonial studies to Scottish literary history. These are important steps, and not simply because of a trend towards a ‘new comparativism’; postcolonial readings of Scotland should be related to questions of agency and empowerment ongoing in the field of World Literature, and impel new studies in this direction. * * * This collection does not insist on any one critical method. It does, though, consistently raise methodological issues which it sees as following inevitably from the historical crossovers described above. In one sense, all these essays are writing through a post-1970s lens, though some tend towards ‘recovery’ literary histories while some more explicitly deal with the question of how postcolonial comparisons speak to the flux of political commitments in the devolutionary era. Both Scotland’s complicity with empire and its long history of resistance to empire are abundantly recorded, and new ways of examining the overlap of Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature as a methodological problem are sought. The collection’s chronological split of sections corresponds roughly to the broad phases of English Literature’s disciplinarity – its boom (pre-1914), its period of guarded retraction (1914–1979), and its period of crisis and postcolonial consciousness (post-1979). As I have suggested above, the late 1970s was the point at which the intellectual overlaps became active, but also, in an era of postcolonial consciousness, there are over 200 years of literary history to work through in a revisionist mode. Leith Davis and Kristen Kahlis’s revisionist account examines the negotiation of linguistic forms and speech and music in the Robert Burns who published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786 while looking at a possible escape to Jamaica, and draws powerful lines into Caribbean linguistics, specifically those theorised by Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Evan Gottlieb describes revealing similarities between that ‘inventor of the historical novel’, Walter Scott, and the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, noting that Atwood’s understanding of national historical fiction involves an omniscient unreliable female narrator, then drawing out the postcolonial significances of this clash of historical-fictional approaches. Katie Trumpener’s is also a compelling history of Scottish–Canadian colonial – and postcolonial – literary history, in particular

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of the influence on Alice Munro of John Galt, who in turn can be traced back through a history of colonial trauma going back through Daniel Defoe and William Godwin, and forward into a Canadian colonial ambivalence and the rise of an Anglophone Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, which, Trumpener shows, has deep roots in Galt’s episodic and neo-Enlightenment understanding of history. Douglas Mack, who passed away before the publication of this book, has sketched a comparative trajectory through Epic Gaelic Poetry to Alistair MacLeod, finding narrative and thematic homologies, and complements his earlier well-known work on Scottish Literature and the British empire. Christopher Harvie, one of the most influential Scottish historians of modern times, describes a Second Scottish Enlightenment running from the early Victorian period, pointing towards modernity in telling ways, strongly colonially inflected, and centred on the complex influence of Thomas Carlyle, who, as Harvie demonstrates, was a key source for new international readings of Scottish texts of the period. Linda Dryden moves onwards with a contemporary take on the growing body of work on Robert Louis Stevenson and modernism, examining the relationship between Stevenson’s Pacific stories and the classics of the modernist ‘colonial literature’ canon, particularly Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Finally, in the pre-1914 section, David Punter contextualises John Buchan’s Prester John and Wilson Harris’s The Palace of the Peacock as parallel descriptions of empire, and goes on to suggest methodological means by which Scotland’s experience in empire can be read in terms of the work of Harris, a figure of increasing interest to Scottish critics. Dealing with the period following the trauma of the First World War, Alan Riach moves into the inter-war period to argue that both MacDiarmid and the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka have struggled similarly with mixed legacies of nineteenth-century social conservatism and progressive counter-colonial vision, contestations which unwind in definitions of social justice and political engagement arising with the possibility of a new Nigeria or a new Scotland. Margery Palmer McCulloch compares attitudes towards colony and hinterland in Neil Gunn and Chinua Achebe – a figure who, she explains, had an important but little-documented interest in Gunn – and demonstrates comparable patterns in narrative form and language use in these two writers, encouraging a revitalised rethinking of Gunn. Scott Lyall tackles another major Renaissance figure when he demonstrates that Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s idea of ‘diffusionism’, especially related to Egypt, resonates strongly with aspects of postcolonialism, and speculates on how this suggests cultural forms aimed to answer Eurocentrism in Enlightenment thought. Martin McQuillan’s contribution is an audacious reading of Muriel Spark’s most exceptional novel, The Mandelbaum Gate, which he places in a broadly deconstructive frame next to Franco-Algerian ideas of the time, questions of Jewishness, and Hannah Arendt’s account of the subject of Spark’s book, the Adolf Eichmann trial, providing a compelling ethical account of Spark in the context of the Palestinian situation. Finally, Marina MacKay ingeniously reads two classic novels which have ‘written back’ to other classic

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novels – Robin Jenkins’s Fergus Lamont (which builds on Confessions of a Justified Sinner) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (which build on Jane Eyre) – and shows how these rereadings demonstrate a tension between the liberatory impulses of postmodernism on the one hand, and on the other the perpetual reconstruction of the colonial subject. In the first essay of the post-1979 section, there is a notable shift of tone as Liam Connell and Victoria Shepard compare ethnic and national concerns in two highly polemical poets, Tom Leonard and Linton Kwesi Johnson, describing the construction of textual identities in class terms, and showing how both poets struggle to negotiate between the collective political voice and the individual poetic one. Willy Maley then compares Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, arrestingly linking Sudanese occupation history with contemporary Scottish literary history. Iain Lambert also looks at Amos Tutuola, along with fellow-Nigerian Ken Saro-Wiwa, and in a careful linguistic reading of a kind which is surprisingly rare, describes how the Nigerians’ ‘interlanguage’ feeds into James Kelman’s own work, particularly in Translated Accounts. Bashabi Fraser makes a comparative case for Amitav Ghosh and Andrew Greig to be read in terms of how they complicate the standard reading of ‘disproportionate Scots’ exploiting empire, by characterising shifting colonial alliances of Scottish colonisers and ‘travellers’ on islands domestic and ‘colonial’. Stefanie Lehner returns to the Irish analogy and suggests a gendered postcolonial reading in her study of contemporary Scottish and Irish Women’s writing and perenially problematic conventional concepts of nation. Finally, Joseph Jackson connects to contemporary and fast-moving criticism on ScottishCaribbean connections to read James Robertson’s novel, Joseph Knight, in relation to Wilson Harris, David Dabydeen and wider Scoto-British-Caribbean connections and their inflections in contemporary theory. The range, then, is both methodologically and comprehensively wide; some of the contributors have written some of the most important ‘fusion’ work thus far, and more is to be found here. The collection aims to move towards a serious and worldly field of comparison where, for a while now, Scottish Literature has at times seemed stuck in a certain kind of ‘recovery’ mode. There will be controversies surrounding critical approaches, which are welcomed as part of the process of the reinvigoration of the postcolonial, and the widening out of Scottish comparisons into a larger frame – while recognising, conversely, the importance of Scottish Literature to the disciplinary headlock in which English Literature often holds the postcolonial. The results, and the results of the results, are hoped to speak loudly to both Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature – though this states the two, as we so often seem to end up doing, as if they were separate bodies of texts when, as the book shows, they are intimately joined.

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CHAPTER 1Leith Davis and Kristen Mahlis

A ‘Conceptual Alliance’: ‘Interculturation’ in Robert Burns and Kamau Brathwaite Leith Davis, Simon Fraser University Kristen Mahlis, California State University ‘Interculturation’ in Burns and Brathwaite In June, 1786, faced with debts and bitter about the wreck of his relationship with Jean Armour, a then-unknown Robert Burns wrote to his friend, David Brice, about his imminent departure to the New World: ‘the Ship is on her way home that is to take me out to Jamaica; and then, farewel [sic] dear old Scotland, and farewel dear, ungrateful Jean, for never, never will I see you more!’ (Ferguson and Ross Roy 1985: 1:39). Having secured for himself a position as a book-keeper on the plantation of Charles Duncan near Port Antonio, Burns was due to leave Greenock harbour with his new love, Mary Campbell, in September 1786 (Hamilton 2005: 1). Strapped for the nine guineas necessary for the passage, he decided to circulate subscription bills for his poems, and, accordingly, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was printed at John Wilson’s Kilmarnock press in July 1786. Critical acclaim for the volume, the death of Mary and the birth of twins to Jean combined to persuade Burns to stay in Ayrshire, and the Nancy sailed out of Greenock without the Scottish bard among its passengers. There has been much critical discussion of Burns’s plan to become what he referred to as a ‘poor Negro-driver’ (Ferguson and Ross Roy 1985: 1:144) and to join his fellow Scots, who were, according to Hamilton, ‘disproportionately numerous’ in the Caribbean at the time (2005: 4). Instead of focusing on eighteenth-century connections between Burns and ‘the torrid zone’ (Ferguson and Ross Roy 1985: 1:145), however, this chapter adopts a rhizomatic approach derived from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as we put Burns into conversation with the contemporary Barbadian writer, Kamau Brathwaite. Brathwaite’s identification of Burns as a predecessor who was also concerned with ‘the notion of oral literature’ (1984: 14) forms a starting place for our inquiry, as we consider the commonalities between the two writers from a postcolonial perspective. But rather than a one-way model of influence, we propose a map between Burns and Brathwaite – perhaps one readable to the general relationship between Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature – that is ‘detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 13) as we explore Burns through Brathwaite’s concept of interculturation. The last decade has seen an intensification of a debate that began in the early 1990s on the applicability of postcolonial perspectives to the Scottish context

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(see Schoene (1995), Farred (2004), Gardiner (1996, 2001), Connell (2003) and Macdonald (2006) for examples). Much of the debate has centred on determining ways in which Scotland might – or might not – be considered subordinate within the United Kingdom: as a ‘semi-state’, ‘sub-nation’ or even a form of colony. Troubling this latter comparison – which has largely been discredited in the postcolonial debate – is the central fact that Scots were active in the service of promoting and administering British colonialism abroad. But to bring postcolonial theory to bear on a Scottish context is not necessarily to suggest that Scotland has been subjected to the same forces of domination as pertained in the Caribbean, India or other parts of the British empire. It is rather to participate in what Theo Goldberg and Ato Quaysan in Relocating Postcolonialism (2004: xvi) regard as a ‘conceptual alliance between postcolonialist’ and other studies ‘which draw on similar theories to address issues of representation, hegemony, and othering’. Examining Burns’s work in relation to that of Brathwaite, for example, allows us to introduce a rhizomatic perspective on the complex relationship between native orality and English literacy. Benita Parry (2004b: 71) suggests that postcolonial criticism has helped to legitimise ‘fictions written within other cultural contexts or from the margins of metropolitan centers’ that previously had been seen as poor imitations of Western forms: Such writing elaborates the broken Englishes invented by users fluent in other tongues, and disrupts / invigorates prior modes by integrating the narrative forms, such as performed storytelling and public recitation, the aesthetic languages and the perceptual resources from non-Western literary heritages and cognitive traditions. But as the case of Burns suggests, ‘complex transformations or transgressions of existing conventions’ (Parry 2004b: 71), similar to those that Parry discusses in a colonial context, had been introduced earlier by writers ‘fluent in other tongues’ from the internal margins of the metropolitan centre of Britain. Robert Burns was born into a Scotland whose active languages had once included Gaelic, Latin, Scots and English (Crawford 2009). Growing up, his creative energies were fed both by Scots oral and song culture and by formal schooling in Standard English. While his mother taught him songs and psalms in Scots, he was also deeply versed in English poetry and culture. As Murray Pittock (2008: 147) observes, ‘by early manhood he had read Akenside, Churchill, Dryden, Fielding, Goldsmith, Hutcheson, Johnson, Locke, Milton, Otway, Pope, Thomas Reid, Shenstone, Adam Smith, Thomson and Sterne, among others.’ Burns was also galvanised by his literary predecessors in Scots. According to Gerard Carruthers (2009: 4), Burns’s discovery of ‘the Scots poetry of Robert Fergusson (1750–74) in 1784 or 1785’, in particular, ‘sharply energised his own practices’. By employing the word ‘dialect’ in the title of his first book of poems, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Burns indicates his recognition of the hierarchy between Standard English and other linguistic forms that developed in the

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eighteenth century (cf. Sorensen 2000). But by including pieces in his volume that draw variously on native orality as well as both Scottish and English poetic traditions, Burns puts under question what the ‘Scottish dialect’ – as well as the standard from which it deviates – actually might be. For Kamau Brathwaite, growing up under the Union Jack on the island of Barbados also occasioned a persistent questioning of conventions that promoted the superiority of Standard English. In his Preface to Mother Poem, Brathwaite (1977) characterises Barbados as the ‘most English of West Indian islands, but at the same time nearest, as the slaves fly, to Africa’. The island, once inhabited by Amerindians, was named ‘Barbados’ by Portuguese explorers after the presence of the island’s bearded fig trees, ‘Os Barbados’. Amerindians had disappeared from the island when England began to send settlers there in the 1670s, and the system of plantation slavery gradually increased the population of African slaves and left only a small white plantocracy on the island. The island remained in English then British hands for the next two and a half centuries, unlike most of the Caribbean islands, which experienced the military, cultural and linguistic influences of various warring European powers. Barbados is thus still referred to by its Caribbean neighbours as ‘Little England’, a term derogatory in its emphasis on the island’s continuing dependence on British cultural and economic capital (cf. Cameron 1996). Christened Lawson Edward Brathwaite at the time of his birth in 1936 on the island of Barbados, Brathwaite followed a trajectory common to the young and talented in this and other British colonies: migration from homeland to England, the so-called ‘mother country’, to study in the Oxbridge system. To this ‘sound’ colonial education Brathwaite added ten years as civil servant in the Ministry of Education in Ghana, West Africa, spurring the young poet to explore the African elements that had been, through the forces of transatlantic slavery and a colonial, plantation society, suppressed and submerged in his native land of Barbados. The three volumes of Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy The Arrivants (1967–9) are written out of the literal and imaginative journey Brathwaite makes to an ancestral source. Brathwaite signalled the personal and creative transformation of this journey from Barbados to England to Ghana and then back to the Caribbean in a series of name changes; the name that Brathwaite writes under now, Kamau Brathwaite, speaks of the creolised nature of Brathwaite’s familial and cultural history.1 Brathwaite sees in Barbados a fundamentally creolised society, noting ‘the protestant Pentecostalism of its language, interleaved with Catholic bells and kumina’.2 These three strands of Barbadian culture illustrate Brathwaite’s theory of creolisation, with the imposed religion and language of Europe melding with the New World possession / dance ceremony of kumina. Brathwaite’s theory of creolisation originated in his doctoral dissertation and found subsequent expression and development in later literary and critical works. For Brathwaite, creolisation is a process that involves two modes of influence, acculturation and interculturation. Charles W. Pollard (2004: 30) characterises the differences thus:

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Leith Davis and Kristen Mahlis In Brathwaite’s model, acculturation refers to the colonial process whereby the subordinated African cultures conformed to the norms of the dominant European cultures through the power of force and the prestige of example. Interculturation is the reciprocal activity whereby the subordinated African cultures influence European cultural norms though their ‘unplanned, unstructured but osmotic relationship’.3

Pollard points out that Brathwaite’s theory of creolisation ‘recognizes both the hierarchical relationship among cultures in the Caribbean and the reciprocal undermining of those hierarchies through cultural intermixing’ (2004: 30). In its emphasis on ‘the historical inequality of cultural power’ in the Caribbean, Brathwaite’s theory thus differs fundamentally from the familiar postcolonial concepts of hybridity and métissage, which celebrate cultural intermixing but downplay historical inequalities. Such inequalities of cultural power clearly appear in both Burns’s Scotland and Brathwaite’s Barbados. Brathwaite’s two-way model of creolisation thus provides a rhizomatic ‘line of flight’ leading back to Burns. Burns also recognised an acculturative process through which Scottish citizens ‘conformed to the norms’ of the dominant language of English and the dominant metropolitan culture, and his deliberate admixture of Scottish and English elements in his poetry and song also suggests his use of a form of interculturation to combat that domination. In comparing Burns’s and Brathwaite’s ‘different histories’, however, we should emphasise that the acculturation of which Brathwaite speaks operated more profoundly in a Barbadian colonial context than in a Scottish one; in Lowland Scotland, dominance was achieved largely through ‘the prestige of example’ rather than ‘the power of force’ – though we should not downplay the exertion of the latter in certain areas of the country where political, class and ethnic hegemony operated to establish standardisation. Nevertheless, both poets recognise and express the ‘osmotic relationship’ of interculturation and use it as a strategy to resist the dominance of Standard English and a London-based print market. Both Burns and Brathwaite have sought to introduce elements of orality into their print-based poetry; to counter the centrality of Standard English poetry with forms derived from their own environments; and to stress the importance of performativity in their work. ORALITY: ‘CROONING TO A BODY’S SEL’’ In many of his critical writings, Brathwaite emphasises the ‘oral tradition’ which he claims is ‘the African aspect of our New World / Caribbean heritage’: The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song. That is to say, the noise that it makes is part of the meaning, and if you ignore the noise . . . then you lose part of the meaning. (1984: 17)

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From the submerged ‘African aspect’ arises what Brathwaite terms ‘nation language’, the vernacular from which his poetic expression emerges. Brathwaite situates his development of nation language in a historical context, seeing this language as part of a wider, transnational framework while emphasising the particularities of a Caribbean nation language. He identifies Dante Alighieri as the ‘forerunner of all this’, the poet who lobbied for ‘(his own) Tuscan vernacular as the nation language to replace Latin as the most natural, complete and accessible means of verbal expression’ (1984: 14). But the movement through Europe to establish national languages and literatures led to a hegemonic suppression of ‘European colonials such as Basque and Gaelic [peoples] . . . and suppressed overseas colonials wherever they were heard’. Brathwaite continues, And it was not until Burns in the 18th century and Rothenberg, Trask, Vansina, Tedlock, Waley, Walton, Whallon, Jahn, Jones, Whiteley, Beckwith, Herskovits, and Ruth Finnegan, among many others in this century, that we have returned, at least, to the notion of oral literature. (1984: 14) Brathwaite recognises the colonial impulse as operating equally within Europe as between Europe and its New World colonies, and, tellingly, identifies Burns as the poet who began a modern revival of the oral in written poetry. According to Brathwaite, Burns was an early example of a poet who contested the imposition of a print-based standard language by asserting ‘the tradition of the spoken word’, for Burns, like Brathwaite, recognised that ‘the noise’ a word makes ‘is part of the meaning’ (1984: 17). The reasons why Brathwaite came to identify Burns as a predecessor whose ‘nation language’ is ‘based as much on sound as it is on song’ are evident when we examine Burns’s association of Scots with orality and aural effects in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. The Preface to that volume begins with the author commenting that, because of his lack of classical education, the ‘celebrated’ works of distinction are to him as a ‘fountain shut up, and a book sealed’; he notes, however, that he ‘sings the sentiments and manners, he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him’ (1786b: iii). Classical works here are associated with print culture while the Scots that his ‘rustic compeers’ use is conveyed through the medium of the voice. Burns continues, referring to himself as an ‘obscure, nameless Bard’ (1786b: iv), a phrase that not only capitalises on the historic connection between bards and the ‘ancient, dignified vatic’ (Crawford 1992: 92) characters who had appeared in Thomas Gray’s The Bard and James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, but also suggests oral performance. Burns also capitalises on earlier associations between forms of Scots and orality, representing his Scotland as what Janet Sorensen (2007) refers to as ‘an inherently oral space’, a ‘historical remnant of embodied community’. The Scots dialect that he uses throughout the Poems inserts an embodied presence that disrupts the disembodied space of the printed text and calls attention to the question of voice. In

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addition, Burns draws attention in his poetry to the aural effects of his works. In ‘To William Simpson, Ochiltree’, for example, his description of Simpson’s and his own productions emphasises the oral qualities of the poetry that they write, poetry produced as a reflection of their particular locale. He suggests that whereas previously, ‘Yarrow an’ Tweed, to monie a tune, / Owre Scotland rings’ (ll. 47–8; our emphasis), now his own region, Coila, will be able to boast that ‘she’s gotten Bardies o’ her ain’ (l. 31). Burns and Simpson are: Chiels wha [who] their chanters winna hain [will not spare], But tune their lays, Till echoes a’ resound again Her weel-sung praise.4 Words like ‘Bardies’, ‘lays’, ‘resounds’ and ‘echoes’ call attention to the aural effects of local poetic production. By using Scots dialect to jar the reader into thinking about voice and by drawing attention to the poetry as oral performance, Burns works to denaturalise standard English and to call into question the primacy of print. While non-standard Scottish forms of English are associated with singing and the voice, in Poems Burns also links them with the more general power of ‘sound’ that Brathwaite identified as characteristic of ‘nation language’. Words emphasising the sound of Scottish speech recur throughout the Poems. In ‘Epistle to John Lapraik, An Old Scotch Bard’, for example, the narrator comments that he is ‘nae Poet, in a sense, But just a Rhymer like by chance’ who is content to ‘jingle’ at his Muse whenever she ‘does on me glance’ (ll. 49–54). Both ‘Rhymer’ and ‘jingle’ convey acoustic affect. Standard eighteenth-century accounts aligned orality with childhood and primitive society. Pedagogical works such as Rousseau’s Emile (1762) discussed how children make the transition from speech to writing, for example, while Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) used the analogy between the childhood of the individual and that of the nation to associate oral performance with the nation in historical times. In a reversal of this progression, in the ‘Epistle to Lapraik’, the narrator suggests that it was his entry into literacy – his learning to ‘spell’ – that prompted his interest in oral / aural poetry: But first an’ foremost, I should tell, Amaist as soon as I could spell, I to the crambo-jingle fell, Tho’ rude an’ rough, Yet crooning to a body’s sel’ Does weel enough. (ll. 43–8) Brathwaite, too, articulates the challenge involved in retaining the orality of nation language in the written medium of published poetry; or, as the poet says

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of his own compositions, ‘When it is written, you lose the sound or the noise, and therefore you lose part of the meaning’ (1984: 17). His work builds on associations between the oral qualities of the vernacular and the people by insisting that the spoken consists of both language and musical expression. Brathwaite published the article ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel’ in the journal Bim in 1967, which is his earliest articulation of nation language as ‘a very necessary connection . . . between native musical structures and the native language. That music is, in fact the surest threshold to the language which comes out of it’ (1984: 16). In Islands (1969), Brathwaite begins writing in the creolised tongue of nation language, integrating the oral-rhythmic qualities of native language into the inscribed English words. The poem ‘Caliban’, even when read silently, evokes the sounds of a drum and the rhythm of a dance: Ban Ban Caliban Like to play pan At the Carnival; dipping down and the black gods calling, back he falls through the water’s cries down down down where the music hides him down down down where the silence lies. (1969: ll. 72–97) The percussive ‘Ban / Ban’ establishes the centrality of the drum beat, with the dactylic meter playing in counterpoint to the drum beat. Visually, the poem descends the page with the words ‘down / down / down’, expressing both the physical contortions of the limbo, a dance of flexibility and strength thought to have arisen on the

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slave ships during the transatlantic slave trade, as well as recreating the experience of African cultures becoming submerged ‘down / down / down / where the si- / lence lies’. While Burns’s descriptions of and embodiment of the orality and ‘noise’ of Scots worked to promote a language which was seen as inferior after several centuries of English linguistic dominance, Brathwaite’s gestures toward the orality of nation language both revive the ‘submerged area of that dialect which is much more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean’ (1984: 13) and speak of the cultural deracination experienced by the African captives in that most liminal of spaces, the slave ship. While the material, cultural and linguistic deracination Brathwaite invokes is clearly more profound than what Scots speakers would have experienced in Burns’s time, both poets enlist orality to give presence to the suppressed language and, by extension, its speakers.5 POETIC FORM: RESISTING THE ‘TYRANNY OF THE PENTAMETER’ In ‘History of the Voice’, Brathwaite identifies the pentameter as the dominant mode of English poetry. Accordingly, his promotion of a ‘nation language’ that ‘in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions . . . is not English, even though the words, as you hear them, might be English to a greater or lesser degree’ involves challenging that dominant form. Positioning himself as a New World Columbus, Brathwaite adopts the collective ‘we’ to explain the subversive nature of nation language: In order to break down the pentameter, we discovered an ancient form which was always there, the calypso. This is a form that . . . employs dactyls. It therefore mandates the use of the tongue in a certain way, the use of sound in a certain way. (1984: 17) Resisting the ‘tyranny of the pentameter’ (1984: 32), Brathwaite experiments with language and sound so as to revive what had been submerged through colonial forms of acculturation and to bring into printed form the speech rhythms and sounds of the Caribbean. As Paul Naylor notes, ‘Nation language arises when the English language is infiltrated by the linguistic “noise” that signals the remnants of African cultures’ (1999: 144). The subversiveness of nation language arises therefore from both its recovery of this linguistic ‘noise’ and a rejection of a rhythmic pattern imposed by the hegemony of Standard English. This nation language functions not only to disrupt but also to provide the medium for poetic creation. The poem ‘Nametracks’ from Mother Poem exemplifies this concept of the noise of nation language: but muh muh

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mud me mudda coo like she coo like she cook and she cumya to me pun de grounn like she lik mih like she lik me wid grease like she grease mih she cum to me years like de yess off a leaf and she issper she cum to me years and she purr like a puss and she essssper she lisper to me dat me name what me name dat me name is me main an it am is me own an lion eye mane dat whinner men tek you an ame, dem is nomminit diff’rent an nan so mandingo she yesper you nam (1977: Section 7, ll. 2–17) From one word, ‘whisper’, come many sound variations – ‘issper’, ‘essssper’, ‘lisper’ and ‘yesper’ – all with slightly different connotations, each an example of the confluence of Standard English and the linguistic ‘noise’ of which Brathwaite speaks. Similarly, ‘muh’, ‘mud’ and ‘mudda’ serve as variations on – riffs on – ‘mother’, the presence who passes on that submerged connection to Africa through the words ‘mandingo’ (tribe) and ‘nam’, a transcultural word coined by Brathwaite (1982: 18) to signify ‘the indestructible and atomic core of man’s culture’. And the dactylic meter dominates, signalling a further rejection of the form which he identifies (rightly or wrongly) as the dominant poetic rhythm of Standard English: the pentameter. While Burns does not focus strictly on ‘break[ing] down the pentameter’ as does Brathwaite, he, too, seeks alternatives to the standard poetic forms of English, if not in forms which could be called ‘ancient’, then at least in forms that were uniquely connected to the Scottish poetic tradition. Standard Habbie, a verse form popularised by Gilbert Hamilton and deployed by Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, appears frequently within Burns’s Poems. ‘The Holy Fair’ employs the form used in ‘Christ’s Kirk on the Green’, a Scots poem sometimes attributed to James V that was printed variously throughout the eighteenth century and generally acknowledged to be much older. In the ‘Epistle to Davie’, Burns uses the complicated Scottish ‘Cherrie and the Slae’ stanza. He frequently emphasises the difference of the Scottish forms by using quotations from Standard English poetry as epigraphs to his poetry, juxtaposing them with the poems that follow. ‘Address to the Deil’ begins with a verse from Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘O Prince! O Chief of many throned pow’rs! / That led th’ embattled seraphim to war’. This has the effect of making the switch to Standard Habbie even more startling:

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Leith Davis and Kristen Mahlis O Thou! whatever title suit thee— Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie— Wha in yon cavern grim an’ sootie, Clos’d under hatches, Spairges about the brunstone cootie, To scaud poor wretches! (ll. 1–6)

Similarly, ‘Halloween’ juxtaposes the stately heroic couplets of the epigraph taken from Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ with the Christ’s Kirk stanza of the poem proper. Both Burns and Brathwaite, then, engage in a literary creolisation that sees no limits to the ways in which poetic forms might be juxtaposed, altered and merged. Rather than just rejecting established English poetic forms outright, both remake them in such a way as to both acknowledge and subvert their historical dominance. PERFORMATIVITY: ‘LIMBO LIKE ME’ While Brathwaite strategically emphasises the African dimensions of Caribbean experience in his descriptions of nation language, the folk culture of the Caribbean is marked by its creolisation. The European and African come in contact through the historical exigencies of a New World plantation society, and what is created from this forced marriage is a folk culture that draws on multiple sources and influences. Brathwaite identifies calypso as one of the oldest of art forms to re-emerge from this colonial New World experience – he calls calypso ‘an ancient form which was always there’ – and cites the work of Gordon Rohlehr on the relationship between kaiso (calypso) and literature. What the study of this relationship leads Brathwaite to (1984: 18–19) is the idea that nation language is part of ‘total expression’ – that is, the interaction between griot (poet) and audience: ‘the noise and sounds that the maker makes are responded to by the audience and are returned to him.’ ‘Caliban’ begins with a section of quatrains that set up the poem’s exploration of the multiple sources and influences present in the Caribbean, beginning with this peroration: Ninety-five per cent of my people poor Ninety-five per cent of my people black Ninety-five per cent of my people dead You have hear it all before O Leviticus O Jeremiah O Jean-Paul Sartre (ll. 1–4) The eighth and final quatrain of this section differs from the other seven in that it is interrupted with a blank space, indicating rupture in the cultural exertions of Europe:

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It was December second, nineteen fifty-six. It was the first of August eighteen thirty-eight. It was the twelfth October fourteen ninety-two. How many bangs how many revolutions? (ll. 29–32) Yoking the poem’s narrative present (1956) with the world historical dates of Columbus’s encounter with the New World (1492) and the official end of slavery in the British colonies (1838), the speaker then invites the reader / audience to participate in a New World experience with the repetition of the phrase ‘limbo like me’ in the second section of the poem, transforming history into ritual: And limbo stick is the silence in front of me limbo limbo limbo like me limbo limbo like me long dark night is the silence in front of me limbo limbo like me stick hit sound and the ship like it ready stick hit sound and the dark still steady limbo limbo like me (ll. 42–67) In a gloss written after the publication of the poem, Brathwaite makes the interculturation of the limbo explicit: ‘Limbo then reflects a certain kind of gateway or threshold to a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles’ (1993: 233). And in a twentieth- and twenty-first-century context, the limbo also captures the double valence of ‘performance’ that operates in the neocolonialist, tourist-based economies of most Caribbean countries, as the limbo is the dance par excellence performed by the ‘natives’ for the tourist spectator. As performance is key to the full expression of nation language, Brathwaite often plays at his own public lectures recordings of various poets performing

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their work. He repeatedly stresses the ‘riddimic aspect of Caribbean nation language’ (1984: 34) by featuring the Jamaican Reggae / dub poets Oku Onuora, Michael Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Brathwaite shows himself to be audience as much as author, borrowing and working with the popular musical traditions of the Caribbean and stressing the continuity between their performance of nation language and his, including the printed lyrics from their songs in his critical work. Indeed, Brathwaite works to break down the divide between author and audience by freely mixing the rhythms and riffs of the popular music of the Caribbean – Jamaica in particular – with his poetry, inviting his audience to sing along. Although we do not have information about Burns’s performance of his own work (apart from several contemporary biographical accounts like that of Maria Riddell that emphasise his brilliant conversation), we can see how he builds a sense of the intimate relationship between poet and audience into his work. In the subscription proposals for the Poems Burns included a quotation from Ramsay’s second ‘Epistle to William Hamilton’: Set out the brunt side o’ your shin, For pride in Poets is nae sin, Glory’s the Prize for which they rin, And Fame’s their jo; And wha blaws best the Horn shall win: And wharefare no? (Noble and Hogg 2001: 3) Not only does this suggest Burns’s confidence in entering into the realm of print, it also serves to ally him with a Scottish tradition in which poetry emerges from the social realm, rather than from the marketplace. Just as his predecessor Ramsay had engaged in a poetic dialogue with his friend and colleague, Hamilton, so Burns includes in his Poems epistles to the other poets in his local area – David Sillar, William Severn and John Lapraik, as well as to his friends – William Aiken, John Rankine and James Smith. In the first ‘Epistle to Lapraik’, especially, we see Burns’s sense of poetry arising from a community and performative context. The poem begins as a letter in which the narrator describes his recent experiences on ‘Fastneen’; the whole village is involved in a ‘rockin’ (l. 7), a party at which some people perform domestic work (mending the stockings) in the midst of an exchange of songs and stories (calling ‘the crack’ (l. 8)). He notes that he was struck by one particular song that turned out to be by ‘an odd kind chiel / About Muirkirk’ (ll. 23–4), John Lapraik. In the remainder of the poem, the narrator introduces himself to Lapraik and asks him to join him for a drink and a ‘swap o’ rhymin-ware / Wi’ ane anither’ (ll. 107–8). The enjoyment of one poetic production leads to the creation of more poetry, within the context of convivial interchange: an eighteenth-century form of mixing, slamming and jamming.

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For Burns, like Brathwaite, the production and consumption of creative works is a process shared by numerous individuals in community, often through the medium of performance. He both describes this process in his poetry and embodies it. Many of his poems, for example, are written with an explicit or implicit recipient in mind. ‘The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer’, ‘The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie’ and ‘The Auld Farmer’s New-Year-Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare’ (our italics), among others, and of course, the various addresses and epistles, are works which position the reader as an interlocutor. They are designed to elicit replies, if only imagined ones. In addition, Burns includes a number of songs in the Poems that are also intended to place demands on the reader. The ‘Song’ beginning, ‘It was upon a Lammas night’, for example, indicates that it is supposed to be sung to the ‘Tune, Corn rigs are bonie’. ‘From thee, Eliza, I must go’ includes the instruction, ‘Tune, Gilderoy’. The songs themselves provide examples of interculturation. Although ‘Corn rigs are bonie’ and ‘Gilderoy’ are Scots tunes and ‘It was upon a Lammas night’ is written with a generous sprinkling of Scots, ‘From thee, Eliza, I must go’ is in Standard English. Moreover, by providing the name of specific Scottish tunes, Burns encourages the performance of his songs, repositioning his readers not as passive consumers but as active participants in the perpetuation of Scottish culture. While Brathwaite’s readers echo the rhythm of the limbo, Burns’s readers sing ‘Scots songs’. Burns’s interest in using song as a way of breaking the division between author and reader found a new focus when he encountered the work of James Johnson after moving to Edinburgh. Johnson had published the first volume of his Scots Musical Museum in 1787. This was an affordable collection designed to encourage the sharing of Scottish national song. The Scots Musical Museum’s association with conviviality is clear from its dedication ‘to the Catch Club’, a fashionable singing club that was established in 1771 in Edinburgh in imitation of those started in London. Burns edited volumes 2 to 5. Burns’s excitement about Johnson’s project is clear from letters he wrote at the time. In February 1788, he noted to his friend James Candlish: I am engaged in assisting an honest Scots Enthusiast, a friend of mine, who is an Engraver, and has taken it into his head to publish a collection of all our songs set to music, of which the words and music are done by Scotsmen. – This, you will easily guess, is an undertaking [exactly (deleted)] to my taste. – I have collected, begg’d, borrow’d, and stolen, all the songs I could meet with. (Ferguson and Ross Roy 1985: 1:177) The terms of ‘collected, begg’d, borrow’d, and stole’ suggest that Burns himself understands folksong as a rhizomatic process of multiple possibilities rather than a process of replicating original productions. Moreover, Burns did not just write Scots words to Scots songs, but also drew on English words. ‘Scotish Song’ [sic], for example, is written primarily in Standard English:

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Leith Davis and Kristen Mahlis Behold, my Love, how green the groves, The primrose banks so fair; The balmy gales awake the flowers, And wave thy flaxen hair. (ll. 1–8)

The few Scots or Scottish English dialect expressions that appear are limited to the occasional dropped consonant and the substitution of ‘na’ for ‘no’. For Burns, it is clear that ‘Scots song’ also involved a process of interculturation. In 1792, Burns also began helping George Thomson with his Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (1793–1819). Thomson has frequently been charged with trying to anglicise the Scottish song corpus and pressuring Burns to accept more formal, standardised language. James C. Dick notes, for example, that Thomson ‘engaged Burns to destroy the vernacular’ (1962: xvii). However, such comments ignore the fact that Burns was also an enthusiastic admirer of Thomson’s project and devoted many hours to contributing to his collection, even when it took time away from his work for Johnson. For Burns, Thomson’s Collection provided yet another way to promote Scottish language and culture while mixing Scottish and English elements. Both Thomson’s and Johnson’s collections served as multi-media forms of interculturation for Burns. Carla Sassi suggests that ‘Burns inhabits and voices the space between the binary oppositions into which 18th-century culture was organising the world: “country / city, vernacular / language, Scottish / English, primitive / civilized,” ’ a process which, she suggests, ‘becomes subversive for the centre’ (2005: 52). It is important to recognise, however, that Burns is not just inhabiting the space in between the binary oppositions; his subversive quality consists in his mobility, his ability both to speak from the centre – even for the nation – and to change it through interculturation. Brathwaite continues this process of interculturation. Rejecting the notion that the Caribbean remains ‘outside history’, Brathwaite’s most recent poetic experimentations bring together ancient forms such as calypso with the electronic age and its ubiquitous tool, the computer. From this continuing creolisation emerges Brathwaite’s ‘Sycorax Video Style’, the poet’s experimentation with the video / visual aspects of printed poetry – font styles and sizes, as well as the text’s placement on the page.6 In his salient contribution to the volume Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Peter Hulme remarks ‘with respect to the current state of postcolonial studies’ that: we are still discovering, slowly, perhaps, and unmethodically, but . . . with a continuing sense of excitement, the dimensions of the field. What I mean by this is both that the field is getting bigger as the characteristic language and thematic concerns of postcolonial studies spread across many disciplines and that at the same time we are unearthing a lot of anticolonial work, often neglected at its time of writing, that is allowing

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us to piece together a fuller history of the development of post-colonial studies. (2005: 42) This chapter has suggested that one way of ‘unearthing’ neglected ‘anticolonial’ possibilities is to read not just through a ‘generative model’, looking for the roots of postcolonial thought in the work of previous colonial writers, but also to consider points of affiliation that are not necessarily generative. In this case, although it is true that Brathwaite identified Burns as an influence, it is also true that Brathwaite’s theory of interculturation can shed light on what Janet Sorensen (2000: 7) refers to as ‘the messy open-ended inventions of British identity’ and in particular the canny work that Burns performed to contest the dominance of the English language and an Anglocentric metropolitan culture. In ‘On a Scotch Bard Gone to the West Indies’ Robert Burns imagined himself fleeing from his native land to a better life in the New World: Jamaica bodies, use him weel, An’ hap him in a cozie biel: Ye’ll find him ay a dainty chiel, An’ fou o’ glee: He wad na wrang’d the vera Diel, That’s owre the Sea. (ll. 39–54) Burns’s travels did not include Jamaica after all, but by taking him critically ‘owre the Sea’ we can open up new perspectives from which to consider the intercultural aspects of his work. NOTES 1. Brathwaite differs from most of his fellow Caribbean artists in his ten years spent in Africa, followed by residences in St Lucia and Jamaica. 2. Brathwaite, ‘Preface’, Mother Poem. 3. Pollard quotes here from Brathwaite (1974). 4. ‘To William Simpson, Ochiltree’, in Burns Poems and Songs, ed. James Kinsley (1969: 72–7; ll. 33–6). Subsequent references to Burns’s poems are from this edition. 5. Connections between sound and voice and cultural imperialism exist throughout twentieth-century Scottish poetry, from Hugh MacDiarmid to Edwin Morgan to Tom Leonard to Kathleen Jamie and W. N. Herbert. 6. See Silvio Torres-Saillant (1994: 701), Elaine Savory (1994: 752) and also Pollard (2004: 121–30) for an extensive and cogent exploration of Brathwaite’s Sycorax video style.

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CHAPTER 2 Celebrated Murderesses and National Narratives in Scott and Atwood

‘Almost the Same as Being Innocent’: Celebrated Murderesses and National Narratives in Walter Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace Evan Gottlieb, Oregon State University Canada and Scotland occupy similarly ambiguous positions in the postcolonial landscape. Between the 1707 Act of Union and 1999, Scotland’s only ‘national’ political representation was within the Westminster parliament; Canada began life as a series of interlinked, North American British colonies, gaining its independence in a bloodless declaration of Confederation in 1867. Neither country is postcolonial in the manner of, for example, India or Nigeria.1 Nevertheless, considering their national literatures from a postcolonial perspective can be highly productive, particularly when the issues and tensions of national identity are borne in mind. To explore such tensions, this chapter will focus on two of the most prominent writers from each country – Walter Scott and Margaret Atwood. As a great populariser of both the historical novel and the AngloScottish Union, Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels contain many elements that have postcolonial undertones. Set in the 1730s, The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818) makes Jeanie Deans’s bid to clear her incarcerated sister of the charge of infanticide into a powerful allegory for the unity of Scotland and England after 1707. In Scott’s all-encompassing vision, women are the fundamental material of the nation, and realistic omniscient narrative is the essential vehicle for negotiating British national unity. And yet, narrative is also a problem, as length and gnarled plotting significantly complicate the novel’s nation-building designs. Such complications are thrown into greater relief when Mid-Lothian is read alongside Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), a novel generally perceived as a classic of postcolonial Canadian literature. There are immediately striking resemblances. Also historical, Atwood’s novel is set in pre-Confederation Canada, and likewise features a working-class heroine, Grace Marks, who is imprisoned on charges of murder. Unlike Scott, however, Atwood frequently supplements omniscient narration with episodes written from an unreliable perspective – in this case, Grace’s. Moreover, there is now no ‘benevolent enchanter’ (as Scott calls Jeanie’s benefactor, the Duke of Argyle) to make sure that the truth is revealed in the end; instead, when Grace says, ‘I have left no marks [my italics] . . . [which] is almost the same as being innocent’ we must register both the pun on her last name and the significant difference between being innocent (like Scott’s heroines) and

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merely seeming so (Scott 1999: 412; Atwood 1996: 342). Forsaking the appearance of harmony so precariously achieved in Scott’s novel, Alias Grace instead depicts a colonial world in which women’s bodies and minds are simultaneously vulnerable and resistant to (male) manipulation, and in which the borders of the nascent nation are as permeable as those of Grace’s capacious psyche. Yet when we return once more to Scott’s Romantic-era classic, we find that his vision of modern Britain is less stable – more postcolonial, if you will – than it initially appears. THE HEART OF MID-LOTHIAN AND THE RE-TELLING OF SCOTLAND’S NATIONAL NARRATIVE The central narrative of Scott’s fifth full-length Waverley Novel is drawn directly from historical archive; Jeanie Deans’s arduous pedestrian journey to London to plead for her sister’s life is based on the true adventures of the aptly named Helen Walker. Like her real-life counterpart, Jeanie refuses to perjure herself by testifying that her sister Effie revealed her pregnancy to her – a testimony that would have avoided a conviction of child murder. In the absence of such testimony – and in the absence of the (in actual fact, stolen) child itself – Effie is found guilty of infanticide, and Jeanie determines to travel to London to seek a royal pardon for her sister. Scott clearly recognises in Walker’s exploits the narrative potential for demonstrating how the Anglo-Scottish Union – still relatively new in 1736, when Mid-Lothian opens – had come to depend not just on the acts of men in the public, political sphere, but also on the actions of women in the private, domestic sphere. From Marx to Foucault and beyond, critical theorists have noted that as states became more tied to capitalist economic expansion, they became increasingly invested in micro-controlling their populations. This process, moreover, was taking place in Europe at the very time that The Heart of Mid-Lothian is set; accordingly, Charlotte Sussman has analysed the novel’s interest in population from the perspective of imperial utility, arguing that Scott’s novel demonstrates that ‘Scottish bodies acquire the most value in the process of imperial expansion . . . when they become portable units of labour’ (Sussman 2002: 104). By choosing to attend to the fate of women and women’s bodies, moreover, Scott clearly demonstrates his interest in women’s roles in maintaining the viability of the nation. While this did not mean granting them anything approaching full citizenship – like Edmund Burke, Scott appears to have been ‘repulsed by women’s assertions of “their” political citizenship’ (Lynch 1994: 46) – it did mean recognising the ‘scandalous’ centrality of women’s reproductive capacities to the project of British nation-building (cf. Duncan 2007: 41). Indeed, the very law of which Effie runs foul, dating from the reign of William of Orange, is explicitly presented in the book as a legitimate, if drastic, method of ‘check[ing] the alarming progress of a dreadful crime’ (Scott 1999: 234), the prosecution of which was necessary for the good of the British nation-state.

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The divergent fates of the novel’s two main female characters, moreover, testify to Scott’s understanding of the consequences of women’s bodies escaping imperial forms of regulation. As Caroline McCracken-Flesher notes, the authority to control women’s bodies in the novel is initially claimed by Jeanie and Effie’s father, Davie Deans (McCracken-Flesher 2005: 51). Belonging to a radical Scottish Presbyterian sect known as Cameronians, the widower Deans raises Jeanie to be a dutiful daughter: he ‘so schooled and trained the young minion, as he called her, that from the time she could walk, upwards, she was daily employed in some task or other suitable to her age and capacity’ (Scott 1999: 83). Jeanie is thus moulded in her father’s image, endowed with ‘fortitude, simplicity, and decision of character’. When the time comes for her to testify on her sister’s behalf, Jeanie knows it would be wrong to lie. Although even Davie Deans begins to hope that perhaps Jeanie will perjure herself to save Effie, Jeanie’s mind is already made up. Moreover, after the trial, Jeanie again knows what she must do. In spite of her father’s utter despair and the indecision of her long-time beloved, Reuben Butler, Jeanie makes her plans to travel to London and plead for her sister’s life with ‘enthusiastic firmness’: ‘I will go to London, and beg her pardon from the king and queen . . . if a sister asks a sister’s life on her bended knees, they will pardon her – they shall pardon her’ (Scott 1999: 245). Jeanie’s faith in the ultimate benevolence of the (patriarchal) system in which Effie has been snared remains unshaken despite the apparent impossibility of the situation with which she is faced. Besides being convinced that she can win her sister’s pardon on moral grounds, Jeanie is quite conscious that Effie’s case also has Anglo-Scottish significance. Taking some liberties with his original sources, Scott repositions Effie’s trial against the backdrop of the Porteous affair, in which an angry Edinburgh mob lynched the unpopular Captain of the Guard for his involvement in the execution of a much-loved local smuggler. The effect is not only to juxtapose varieties of legal transgression, but also to depict maximum Anglo-Scottish tension within the young British state. Thus, when Jeanie pleads with the Duke of Argyle to take up her cause, she cannily frames his help as a matter of British national solidarity: ‘a’ the world kens that the Duke of Argyle is his country’s friend; and that ye fight for the right . . . and if ye wunna stir to save the blood of an innocent countrywomen of your ain, what should we expect from southrons and Strangers? (Scott 1999: 349) Argyle is initially unconvinced; he is well aware that, on both the macro- and micro-political levels, this is not a good time to plead for Scottish clemency to the Queen. Nevertheless, the combination of Jeanie’s heartfelt pleading and her self-consciously patriotic dress – as she admits to Argyle, she purposefully wore her native costume because ‘I judged that being sae mony hundred miles frae hame, your Grace’s heart wad warm to the tartan’ (Scott 1999: 352) – eventually wins the Duke over, and he agrees to take up Effie’s case.

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Jeanie is no less astute in her interview with the Queen herself. Elsewhere, I have suggested that this scene is a prime depiction of the spontaneous circulation of the Anglo-Scottish sympathy that Scott felt was an integral part of the British nation-state’s coherence (Gottlieb 2007: 193–4); Jeanie speaks eloquently and pathetically, and the Queen responds in kind. Jeanie’s interview, however, is also a calculated performance designed to make maximum use of the congruities Scott has established between the moral, legal and political dimensions of ‘feeling British’. Taking her cues from Argyle, Jeanie appeals to the Queen’s conscience (‘O, madam, if ever ye kend what it was to sorry for and with a sinning and a suffering creature . . . have some compassion on our misery!’ (Scott 1999: 369)) – but also to her larger national interests. When the Queen disdainfully suggests that, even were Effie to be pardoned by King George, ‘I suppose your people of Edinburgh would hang her out of spite,’ Jeanie astutely responds that ‘baith town and country wad rejoice to see his Majesty taking compassion on a poor unfriended creature’ (Scott 1999: 368). The implications for the Union are clear: by publicly granting clemency to a poor Scotswoman who is guiltless of any actual crime, the British monarchy can with a single stroke save an innocent life and help repair its relationship with its Scottish subjects. In postcolonial terms, the sovereign legitimacy of the new British hegemony can be reaffirmed at the level of lived experience. The gambit works; Jeanie not only convinces the Queen to obtain a pardon for Effie, but also receives as a goodwill token a ‘huswife’s case’ whose contents include a fifty-pound banknote that reconfirms the British nation’s circulatory cohesiveness in economic as well as symbolic terms. Jeanie is thus confirmed as a dutiful daughter, a faithful sister, a loyal Scotswoman, and eventually – after the successful completion of her mission and a corresponding reward of land and status – a loving wife and mother to Butler and their children. Effie, by contrast, is initially presented as Jeanie’s irresponsible, irrepressible double. Beautiful where Jeanie is plain, light-hearted and carefree where Jeanie is sober and serious, Effie is the product of Deans’s second marriage and older age. Although she has ‘all the innocence and goodness of disposition’, Effie ‘possessed a little fund of self-conceit and obstinacy, and some warmth and irritability of temper’ (Scott 1999: 98). Worse, apparently due to the relaxation of Deans’s strictures, she has not taken to heart the religious principles that animate so much of Jeanie’s behaviour; as a result, Effie is far too easily seduced by the charismatic smuggler Wilson (later revealed to be an English gentleman). When she inevitably finds herself pregnant, Effie makes every effort to conceal her condition from her father and sister, somewhat improbably hiding her ‘disfigured shape’ under a ‘loose dress’ until a mere week before she secretly gives birth (Scott 1999: 104). The infant cannot be found, however, and Effie’s subsequent incarceration on suspicion of child murder in the Edinburgh jailhouse – known colloquially as ‘the Heart of Mid-Lothian’ – thus implies that the state will not tolerate her apparent deviation from the procreative norm. The particular statute under which she is convicted, moreover, is focused entirely on mothers, precisely underscoring the

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state’s desire to take control of women’s bodies in the private sphere. Having transgressed the boundaries of acceptable female sexuality by bearing a child out of wedlock, Effie is literally condemned by the state. Of course, her sentence is eventually commuted to banishment, thanks to Jeanie’s efforts, and Effie is free to return home to her family, which has settled in its new home ‘on the verge of the Highlands’ (Scott 1999: 410), courtesy of the Duke of Argyle. Instead, she chooses to elope with her lover, the dissolute English nobleman Staunton, and transform herself into a member of the British gentry. However, the reader is not to understand by this that Effie has somehow redeemed herself. Instead, Scott takes every opportunity to inform us that Effie is, if anything, more miserable after her pardon than she was before it. First and foremost, Effie and Staunton remain childless – a clear sign of narrative disapproval and a fitting punishment for earlier unauthorised fertility. Furthermore, Effie is burdened with a husband whose overwhelming guilt at having been unable to save her previously is now translated into alternating fits of rage and sullenness. Finally, Effie herself is forced to create an inauthentic life, living in fear of being discovered as something other than what she now pretends to be: ‘I drag on the life of a miserable impostor, indebted for the marks of regard I receive to a tissue of deceit and lies, which the slightest accident may unravel’ (Scott 1999: 454). To adapt Homi Bhabha’s influential terminology, the ‘colonial mimicry’ in which Effie (a Scots peasant masquerading as an English gentlewoman) engages takes a profound psychic toll. In the novel’s final pages, moreover, Effie’s punishment is made complete when her original surviving child, now part of a band of Highland banditti, commits unknowing parricide by killing Staunton during a scuffle with the local authorities. In despair and desolation, Effie retires to a European convent, and Scott concludes with a direct address in which the book’s multiple moralistic strands are drawn together and the reader is reassured above all of ‘the great truth, that guilt, though it may attain temporal splendour, can never confer real happiness’ (Scott 1999: 507). Such, at least, is the impression received by the reader on an initial reading of Scott’s great work of nation-building fiction, which appears to knit together nation and narration into a seamless fabric of shared Britishness. ALIAS GRACE AND THE RE-OPENING OF HISTORY’S GAPS Like The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Alias Grace is based on a true story. Found guilty of helping to murder her master, Thomas Kinnear (a fellow-servant named Nancy Montgomery, who was Kinnear’s mistress, was also killed), Grace Marks was imprisoned in 1843 when she was just sixteen, and not released until she was officially pardoned some thirty years later. As Atwood admits in her ‘Author’s Afterword’, she was drawn to Grace’s story, not just because it was ‘sensational’, but also because ‘The true character of the historical Grace Marks remains an enigma’ (Atwood 1996: 461, 463). Like Mid-Lothian – which began life as part of a four-volume set in which Scott also planned to recreate the story of Scotland’s

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lost-and-found royal regalia – Alias Grace can productively be read as an extended exercise in ‘filling in the gaps’ – in this case, the gaps in Grace Marks’s history, and by extension in the history of the treatment of women in nineteenth-century colonial Canada. Where Scott seems determined (although I will complicate this in my concluding section) to bring closure to both the personal and political narratives he treats, however, Atwood opens up multiple possibilities concerning the truth of Grace’s innocence or guilt. Although it chimes with Scott’s implicit admission that women’s reproductive capacities are central to any nation’s demographic well-being, Atwood’s novel differs widely in its assessment of whether and to what extent women’s lives should (or even can) be known and controlled. To this end, Alias Grace even uses multiple intertextual references to Scott’s work to make its case for a less stable, more subversive understanding of nation, narration and the relationship between them. When Alias Grace opens, Grace has already served some of her sentence, and currently divides her time between the Kingston Penitentiary, where she is incarcerated, and the Governor’s home, where she is employed as a maid. Her guilt appears to be firmly established: as she herself admits, she is a ‘celebrated murderess. Or that is what has been written down’ (Atwood 1996: 22). As this calculated qualification suggests, Atwood serves notice from the start that the reader will have to work hard to distinguish appearance from reality in Alias Grace. Indeed, from the outset, Atwood’s heroine is self-reflexive about her role as narrator; an opening dream sequence, in which Grace revisits her memories of the murder up to the point where she cannot recall what happens, ends with Grace explaining that ‘This is what I told Dr. Jordan, when we came to that part of the story’ (Atwood 1996: 6). What we have heard – or rather, overheard – and initially taken to be representative of Grace’s inner thoughts, in other words, turns out to be a self-consciously rehearsed narrative. Moreover, no one is more aware than Grace herself of the extent to which she can make use of her celebrity status to manipulate those around her. As she explains regarding her relationship with the Governor’s wife (who is obsessed with clipping newspaper articles relating to Grace’s crimes), ‘I’ve learnt how to keep my face still, I made my eyes wide and flat, like an owl’s in torchlight, and I said I had repented in bitter tears, and was a changed person’ (Atwood 1996: 26). As for the truth of Grace’s repentance, however, Atwood keeps the reader continually guessing; thus, for example, on the very next page Grace says that the pattern in the Governor’s mansion’s Turkish carpet looks to her like ‘Thick strangled tongues’ (Atwood 1996: 27) – a suggestion that she has intimate knowledge of what a murder victim looks like. Alias Grace therefore forces readers to become suspicious, not only of her guilt or innocence, but also of the ways in which guilt and innocence are themselves products of specific national cultures. As Gina Wisker notes, ‘The novel enables us to perceive how different versions of lives can be constructed and represented. It becomes a palimpsest, a layered text representing facts, historical detail, multi-layered, and imaginative versions and a variety of fictional constructions’

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(Wisker 2002: 63). Atwood’s novel, in other words, relativises and throws into doubt precisely those aspects of narrative and history that Scott’s novel – as a nation-building enterprise – seems to work so hard to stabilise. More specifically, where the great Scottish novelist had taken as his task the formulation and naturalisation of an inclusive Britishness – a national identity which the ‘colonised’ Scots and the ‘coloniser’ English could inhabit as equals – the contemporary Canadian novelist draws attention to the patriarchal oppression informing the highly circumscribed roles for women available within such nation-building scenarios. Moreover, it is precisely because Grace refuses to play by the rules of either proper feminine behaviour or proper narrative behaviour that she finds herself in the unenviable position of being simultaneously the object of pity and the subject of society’s experiments in rehabilitation. Determined to ‘beat the system’, however, Grace proves herself more than a match for it. In particular, she proves very adept at manipulating the expectations of Dr Simon Jordan, the doctor whom the Governor’s wife employs to discover the truth about Grace’s innocence or guilt. It is Jordan’s desire to uncover the truth about Grace that provides the narrative impetus for much of the rest of the novel, as he coaxes her to tell him about her past. What we learn of Grace’s background, moreover, clearly implies that ‘the system’ was against her from the start. Like Jeanie’s and Effie’s subaltern conditions as Scotswomen in the newly formed British state, Grace finds that her status as an Irish immigrant works against her from the moment of her arrival in Canada. When her mother dies on the voyage from Belfast to Toronto, Grace is left in charge of her younger siblings as well as her brutal alcoholic father. The only work Grace can find is as a maidservant at minimal wages, and even then her father makes clear that he expects her to remit as much as possible to him. How much of Grace’s story is true and how much is designed to appeal to Jordan’s (and the reader’s) ideas, however, is a question to which the narrative provides no certain answer. So whereas Scott consistently uses the moralising voice of his narratorial stand-in, Peter Pattieson, to guide his readers’ responses, Atwood leaves it up to the reader to decide on the extent to which everything Grace tells Jordan is suspect. Trained in the ‘burgeoning science’ of pre-Freudian psychology, Jordan is determined to analyse Grace thoroughly; when he tries to use free-associative techniques to draw her out, however, she proves resistant. Atwood’s Jordan attempts to function as the equivalent of Scott’s Duke of Argyle; like the latter, Jordan believes himself to be in full command of the female story with which he is entrusted, and associates his own sense of masculine prerogative with a desire to help Grace by telling her story for her. As it turns out, however, Jordan is no more able to do this than he is able to separate his feelings for Grace – with whom he becomes increasingly obsessed – from his desire to solve her case and uncover her secrets. Jordan’s ideal of masculine authority repeatedly runs up against Grace’s recalcitrant consciousness. It becomes increasingly clear that Jordan’s will to knowledge is inseparable from his will to power over Grace; as Jeanette King notes, ‘That power is . . . power to define what Grace is – mad or

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bad’ (King 2005: 74). Both alternatives are problematic, of course, and neither exonerates Grace; from Jordan’s perspective, however, it is better to know the truth of Grace’s condition. In a talk first given in 1996, Atwood observed that ‘The past is made of paper . . . What’s on the paper? The same things that are on paper now. Records, documents, newspaper stories, eyewitness accounts, gossip and rumor and opinion and contradiction’ (Atwood 1998: 1513–14). This list mirrors the various textual sources Atwood incorporates into the fabric of Alias Grace itself (see Wisker 2002: 31). She goes on to specify, however, that in many cases the paper trail does not tell the whole story: ‘If you’re after the truth, the whole and detailed truth, and nothing but the truth, you’re going to have a thin time of it if you trust to paper; but, with the past, it’s almost all you’ve got’ (Atwood 1998: 1514). The postcolonial historian, in other words, must both rely on, and find ways to move beyond, the detritus of recorded history. Similarly, to get to the bottom of Grace’s condition, Jordan must go beyond the existing written accounts of what took place on the day of the murders, and attempt to unlock ‘the truth’ that Grace cannot – or will not – recall. Hence the increasing insistence with which he pursues his single-minded goal of getting to the bottom of Grace’s mental state – a state that, like the postcolonial nation Canada would become in 1867, turns out to contain multiple identities within its borders. Simultaneously, however, the reader is privy to insights about Jordan’s own mental state which Grace, as his putative patient, is not. For instance, we are told that ‘[Jordan] has tried imagining her as a prostitute – he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters – but he can’t picture any man actually paying for her services’ (Atwood 1996: 57). Accordingly, it comes as little surprise that Jordan is later unable to resist sexually objectifying Grace as well. Under cover of scientific objectivity, he nurses a dark and forbidden passion for her. The more he tries to analyse Grace, in fact, the more Jordan is forced to wrestle with his own feelings for her. This psycho-drama plays out against a backdrop of reading – specifically, reading Scott’s Lady of the Lake, which was published in 1810, only a few decades before the main events of Atwood’s novel. Scott’s poem is first mentioned in the context of being stolen from the library of one of the homes where Grace and her friend Mary Whitney find employment as cleaning maids: Mary, Grace reports, ‘[had] taken a copy of The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott out of the library where they had five of them, and she was reading it out loud to me’ (Atwood 1996: 165). From the outset, then, Scott’s poetry is associated with implicit subversion, an act of class mimicry that is simultaneously a declaration of insubordination. It is next mentioned in the context of Jordan’s surprise at Grace’s expansive vocabulary: when he presents her with a radish to eat at the start of one of their sessions, she responds I thank you from the bottom of my heart, Sir, this radish was like the nectar of the Gods. He looks surprised to hear me use such an expression;

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Here, Scott is associated with a high-flown, hyperbolic rhetoric that Jordan does not expect to hear from Grace. Later, when Grace is coming to the crux of her retelling of the murders to Jordan, The Lady of the Lake is read aloud by Nancy Montgomery to Thomas Kinnear, who insists on mocking Scott’s romantic pretensions, as Grace recollects: The poor madwomen had just been shot by mistake, and was expiring, while speaking several lines of verse; and I thought it a very melancholy part; but Mr. Kinnear did not agree, for he said it was a wonder anyone could move an inch in romantic landscapes such as those of Scotland, without being accosted by madwomen, who were always jumping in front of arrows and bullets not intended for them, which had the virtue at least of putting an end to their caterwauling and misery; or else they were constantly throwing themselves into the ocean, at such a rate that the sea would soon be clogged with their drowned bodies, as to constitute a serious hazard to shipping. Then Nancy said he lacked a proper feeling, and Mr. Kinnear said no, he did not, but it was well known that Sir Walter Scott had put so many corpses into his books for the sake of the ladies, because the ladies must have blood, there is nothing that delights them so much as a weltering corpse. (Atwood 1996: 277) Scott’s supposed sentimentality and bowing to popular taste is implicitly juxtaposed, then, with Grace’s own reserve and unwillingness to flatter her auditors, especially Jordan himself. Furthermore, especially for the reader (who knows that Jordan and Montgomery will themselves soon be ‘weltering corpses’), the passage drips with an irony of which Grace herself seems likely to be aware. Scott’s supposed fondness for melodrama, moreover, was singled out by Atwood in a speech she gave in 1997, in which she describes how Sir Walter Scott . . . in his ultra-famous long poem The Lady of the Lake, gives us a pathetic madwoman carried off and raped on her wedding day who wanders around in the Highlands decked out with weeds and warbling soulfully. (Atwood 1997) Clearly, Atwood shares Kinnear’s suspicion regarding the alleged sentimentality of Scott’s depiction of madness – a depiction quite different from Atwood’s own representation of madness in the form of Grace’s apparent schizophrenia. References to Scott do not, however, end here. In a section of the novel entitled ‘Lady of the Lake’, in which Grace describes her post-murder attempt to flee with James McDermott to the United States, we learn not only of a famous Great Lakes steamboat called The Lady of the Lake, but also of a quilt pattern that

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bears the same name, and Grace’s comments take on a particularly dark cast. Previously, she had not understood why the pattern should be named after the poem, since I could never find any lady in the pattern, nor any lake. But now I saw that the boat was named for the poem, and the quilt was named for the boat, because it was a pinwheel design . . . And I thought that things did make sense, and have a design to them, if only you pondered them long enough. (Atwood 1996: 340) It is as if Grace is offering a challenge to the reader here to discover the hidden pattern pointing toward her guilt in the murders of Kinnear and Montgomery. The ‘patchwork’ nature of the text’s structure (Michael 2001: 438) allows Grace to exercise agency over her own narrative. Each section of the novel being named after a different quilt pattern, quilting is both the narrative’s model and its primary mode of story-telling. This is also an essentially resistant mode, since ‘Alias Grace’s patchwork form thus operates as a multipronged challenge to conventional history in its implicit rejection not only of linearity and teleology but of their connections to a patrilineal model’ (Michael 2001: 429). As Sharon R. Wilson observes, Atwood’s novel effectively ‘uses postmodern techniques such as self-reflexiveness and intertextuality to foreground issues of class, sexual politics, and other political issues, including those of the postcolonial condition’ (Wilson 2003: 122). Furthermore, by turning Jordan’s own diagnostic techniques against him, Grace both confounds his pretensions to scientific knowledge and wrests control of her life’s story from him. Only when she is hypnotised by Jerome DuPont, does ‘the truth’ emerge that Grace was possessed by the spirit of her dead friend Mary Whitney during the time of the murders. This revelation is highly suspect, however, as it is accompanied by the reader’s comprehension that there is every possibility that Grace has colluded with DuPont to produce a socially acceptable narrative excusing her participation in the murders. As Grace herself says later (albeit in a different context), ‘if I wish to commune with the dead I can do it well enough on my own; and besides, I fear there is a great deal of cheating and deception’ (Atwood 1996: 455; my italics). Such a description fits not only every act of story-telling, but also the contingent, idiosyncratic establishment of most nations’ ‘invented traditions’ – from the maple leaf (only adopted as Canada’s national symbol in 1965 after many years of experimentation) to tartan (popularised as ‘British’ rather than specifically Scottish or Highland by Scott himself for the occasion of George IV’s 1822 visit to Edinburgh). At the end of Alias Grace, Grace – who, once released from prison, abandons colonial Canada altogether – finds herself either pregnant or, in yet another of the novel’s ambiguities, beset with a tumour. The irony of this uncertainty is not lost on Grace herself, who coolly remarks that ‘It is strange to know you carry within yourself either a life or a death, but not to know which one’ (Atwood 1996: 459). If women are to be

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the reproductive basis of the nation, in other words, Atwood suggests here that their obedience to this higher cause can in no sense be counted upon; the sheer vagaries of biology make it impossible to know whether they carry life or death within themselves. THE HEART OF MID-LOTHIAN RE-VIEWED Up to this point, I have been suggesting that Scott’s and Atwood’s novels operate on notably different assumptions; where the former uses the power of narrative to create a stable, closed world of fictional certainty, the latter uses it to destabilise and re-open these very convictions. Yet this dichotomy does not tell the whole story. Instead, Scott’s novel actually prefigures many of the so-called postmodern elements of Atwood’s postcolonial fiction. Indeed, as Jerome McGann points out, Scott’s fictional corpus is postmodern avant la lettre to the extent that it ‘installs neither a truth of fact nor a truth of fiction but the truth of the game of art’ (McGann 2004: 117). Accordingly, to view The Heart of Mid-Lothian as a monological text, intent on nothing more than establishing and fixing the boundaries of proper feminine behaviour, is to miss the myriad ways in which Scott ‘is not simply a kind of fantastical historian . . . he makes a parade of his imaginary moves’ (McGann 2004: 116). The comparison with Atwood helps reveal that for all the ways that Scott is genuinely interested in creating a durable national narrative of Anglo-Scottish unity, his novel is equally invested in problematising – even subverting – that narrative. Earlier, I discussed the character of Jeanie as representative of all that is considered correct and proper by Scott in his representation of the essential feminine basis for the nation. Yet as McCrackenFlesher points out, far from being the stable centre of the narrative, Jeanie ‘comes to enact the principle of mobility that underpins the construction of Scotland as future potential’ (McCracken-Flesher 2005: 51). Such ‘mobility’ has multiple valences; although Scots of the later nineteenth century would become so closely identified with Britishness as to ‘contribut[e] disproportionately to British expansion’ by taking up leading positions through the Empire (Belich 2009: 59), by the later twentieth century they would become increasingly restless with their role as junior partners in an Anglo-dominated UK. Accordingly, beneath its apparent simplicity, Jeanie’s very speech is filled with silences and gaps that conceal, rather than reveal, the truth of her character and motivations. Instead of lying to protect her sister, for example, she remains silent; later, instead of revealing the source of her supplemental income to her husband (the money comes from the now-wealthy Effie), she says nothing; later still, when given the opportunity to explain how Staunton and Effie’s long-lost son escaped his bonds after being captured (Jeanie released him), she hides her complicity. Furthermore, David Hewitt has recently found Jeanie guilty, not just of evasions and silences, but of outright lies. Despite ‘mak[ing] truth-telling a categorical imperative’ in her refusal to lie in court, Hewitt notes that she nevertheless proceeds to lie twice in the ensuing narrative: once to the thief-turned-jailor Ratcliffe (concerning Staunton’s

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whereabouts), and again to thieves on her journey to London (when asked how much money she has on her person) (Hewitt 2009: 151). In fact, as both McCracken-Flesher and Hewitt observe, Jeanie is evasive in her interview with the Queen: when asked whether she is friends with any of the Porteous rioters, for example, Jeanie makes her response turn on a literal definition of ‘friend’, and is ‘happy that the question was so framed that she could, with a good conscience, answer it in the negative’ (Scott 1999: 369). Andrew Lincoln, moreover, takes this line of criticism a step further by arguing that Scott’s novel ‘gives Jeanie Deans’s courtroom testimony a central place . . . in order to redeem and celebrate an absolute commitment to principle which must elsewhere be treated evasively or with irony’ (Lincoln 2007: 171–2). Far from filling in the gaps in the story of women’s place in the nascent British nation-state, then, a postmodern perspective, enhanced by postcolonial concerns with the instability and unevenness of gendered visions of the nation, shows how Scott’s work actually enlarges them. Finally, as several critics have noticed, even the very title of Scott’s novel is less stable and more ambivalent than has generally been recognised. As noted above, ‘the Heart of Mid-Lothian’ refers literally to the Edinburgh prison, or Tolbooth, where both Effie and Porteous are imprisoned. But the phrase also denominates Jeanie, who is the emotional and (however problematic) ethical core of the novel. Such doubling, moreover, is multiplied in both the novel’s introductory frame narrative – in which two Edinburgh lawyers repeatedly pun on the prison’s nickname – and in its humorous afterword narrated by the pedantic Cleishbotham, the novel’s fictional amanuensis and editor. Cleishbotham explains that ‘The Heart of Mid-Lothian is now no more, or rather it is transferred to the extreme side of the city,’ a change for which he apologises with a strained allusion to a comedy by Molière, Le Médecin malgré lui (The Reluctant Doctor): where the simulated doctor wittily replieth to a charge, that he had placed the heart on the right side, instead of the left, ‘Cela étoit [sic] autrefois ainsi, mais nous avons changé tout cela.’ [‘That may be how it was in the past, but we’ve changed all that.’] (Scott 1999: 508) In other words, by the conclusion of Scott’s novel, even the seemingly most stable element, indeed the very centre, of the body – and, by extension, of the body politic of the nation as a whole – is not located where we might expect. This final twist encapsulates the destabilisation of precisely those elements of narrative, nation and history that The Heart of Mid-Lothian initially appears to work so hard to maintain – and which Alias Grace so clearly problematises. One could say, then, that Atwood’s novel looks back to its Scottish predecessor more directly than even Atwood herself might have suspected. It would be equally true, however, to say that Scott – father of the historical novel and undeniable origin of so much of the way Scotland continues to perceive itself and to be perceived by the world – looks forward to the ambiguities of both modern nationhood and

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postmodern narrative, especially as they are triangulated with the postcolonial condition of states like Scotland and Canada, much more presciently than we have previously appreciated. NOTE 1. Though see complicating work by Fielding (2008), Gottlieb (2007), Manning (2002), McNeil (2007), Trumpener (1997), Shields (2010) and Sorensen (2000); and for a helpful discussion of the ways in which ‘Canada is both a model colony and a highly unrepresentative one’, see Trumpener (1997: 246).

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CHAPTER 3

Formations of Empire, Place and History in Galt and Munro

Annals of Ice: Formations of Empire, Place and History in John Galt and Alice Munro Katie Trumpener, Yale University

Nineteenth-century Scots were disproportionately involved in the British Empire as army officers, administrators, engineers, settlers – and writers. John Galt and William ‘Tiger’ Dunlop in Upper Canada, Thomas McCulloch in Nova Scotia, Thomas Pringle in the Cape and Thomas McCombie in Australia wrote pioneering literary works in and about Britain’s new colonies, established new frameworks for colonial life and spread an empire-wide vogue for Scottish literature. From the nineteenth century onward, indeed, Canada’s English-language writers closely followed Scottish literary prototypes; Canadian literature was filled with Scottish character types (from ministers to crofters) and modelled on Scottish literary genres (from historical novel to dialect poetry) (Gittings 1995; Waterston 2003). Writers of Scottish heritage, moreover, played a preeminent role in the literary life of Anglophone Canada; as late as the 1960s and 1970s, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant and Margaret Atwood were hailed as harbingers of a new national literature. Yet while steeped in Scottish cultural and literary narratives, Munro and Laurence wrote to correct long-standing Scottish views of Canada itself. This chapter reads Scotland’s most complex nineteenth-century colonial novel, Galt’s half-forgotten 1831 Bogle Corbet, or the Emigrants, against Munro’s fiction. Galt and Munro inhabit very different temporal, political and literary moments, yet describe the same area, in present-day Ontario, while sharing an interest in the local texture of historical experience, using annalistic accretion to ground new forms of historical fiction. Galt arrived in Upper Canada in 1826 to supervise development of the Huron Tract, a million acres of largely uninhabited, previously unsurveyed land adjoining Lake Huron. He founded the towns of Guelph and Goderich – experiences he fictionalised once back in Britain. Munro claims lineal and literary descent from Scottish Romanticism. Her ancestors migrated to Upper Canada from Scotland in 1818 and, beginning in the 1840s, homesteaded on the Huron Tract. Munro grew up (and still lives) near Goderich. In describing the same region, Galt and Munro frame it very differently. Galt’s Bogle Corbet moves to Canada in a doomed attempt to escape politics and

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history: from the political unrest of the Jamaica plantations, the social transformations accompanying Scotland’s Industrial Revolution, the failure of Jacobin politics. Yet these traumas continue to haunt the new colony. Munro’s Ontario, in turn, is haunted by its own nineteenth-century settlement history, the legacy of colonists like Galt. Bogle Corbet at once allegorises Galt’s own involvement with imperial political economy, and develops a far-reaching model of imperial exchange, consciousness and guilt; it both recapitulates and complicates Galt’s earlier novelistic annals of Scottish life. Munro’s interest is less in imperial morality than in colonial self-understanding and epistemology, as they shape contemporary life and potentially complicate nationalist or postcolonial notions of cultural reclamation. Galt and Munro’s accounts are overlapping yet asymmetrical. This asymmetry is reflected in the structure of this comparative chapter, which begins by detailing Galt’s activities as a ‘coloniser’ in Upper Canada, highlighting the complexity of his historical circumstances, motivations and relationship to British and colonial authority. If Galt’s administrative work in Upper Canada might exemplify a distinctive Scottish colonial idealism, his setbacks and disappointments discernibly shaped Bogle Corbet as an anti-imperial novel. The chapter then develops a rather different framework for Munro’s fiction, and reads against the literary politics of Canadian nationalism (itself consciously reorienting a long ScottishCanadian literary tradition). Yet Munro also adapts and refashions the Galtian novel of place, implicitly rejoining Galt’s inquiry into the relationship between history and neurosis, time and place, empire and nation. Long before he became an official colonist or colonial chronicler, Galt had, as a political commentator and lobbyist, followed – and, from London, interceded in – Canadian affairs, publishing a 1807 ‘Statistical Account of Upper Canada’ and, during the 1820s, repeatedly petitioning Parliament on behalf of Upper Canada claimants loyal to the Crown throughout the colony’s 1812 American invasion and suffering damages from the invading American army. In 1825, Galt gained the lasting gratitude of Mohawk chief John Brant by securing parliamentary approval for a land claim by the Six Nations Indians, recognising their 1812 allegiance to Britain (Timothy 1977: 97). Yet other Loyalists, despite Galt’s efforts, remained unrecompensed. During the colony’s initial British settlement, two-sevenths of Upper Canada’s land became vast ‘crown and clergy reserves’, set aside for public works and Protestant church use. Galt unsuccessfully proposed that the colony compensate loyalists by selling reserve land. Later, he spearheaded a move by London investors to create the Canada Company, a joint stock company, incorporated by Parliament in 1826, to buy up Upper Canada reserve lands for development and resale to emigrants. Appointed as the Company’s first Canadian superintendent, Galt sailed for North America, inspected pre-existing settlements in upstate New York, then began developing the Huron Tract: surveying, laying connective roads, building schools, receiving settlers. On St George’s Day, 1827, Galt joined his woodsmen in the rainy bush, and with a ceremonial axe-stroke began tree-felling and bush

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clearance, founding Guelph as a new company town, sixty miles west of presentday Toronto. His report to London treats the date as happy coincidence, yet later autobiographical writings underscore his conscious choice of date – and the name Guelph, honouring Britain’s royal family – to create origin myths (Stelter 1985). Soon after, on the shore of Lake Huron, Galt established Goderich, named for Fredrick Robinson, Viscount Goderich, the Canada Company’s most influential parliamentary champion. Today Goderich is a small town of 8,000 while Guelph, currently a university town of over 100,000, retains many of its original limestone buildings, and a statue of Galt in front of City Hall. On 4 August 2008, Guelph celebrated its first annual John Galt Day. But before dawn, anarchists splashed red paint on Galt’s statue, an action memorialised on several anarchist websites. As one explains, the Canada Company settlement took place at the expense of indigenous populations. John Galt was actively engaged in that process and helped lay the foundation for genocide of unimaginable proportions. John Galt’s own words foretold the horrific consequences of the Canada Companies [sic] agenda of genocide on the day he ceremonially felled the first tree in the founding of the city of Guelph. He wrote that ‘the tree fell with a crash of accumulating thunder, as if ancient nature were alarmed at the entrance of social man into her innocent solitudes with his sorrows, his follies and his crimes’ (the Autobiography of John Galt, pp. 58–9). To celebrate John Galt is to celebrate the foundation of colonization and genocide among other follies and crimes of European men. (‘Anarchists’ 2008) Such rhetoric positions Galt as a genocidal conqueror, a Canadian Christopher Columbus. Galt indeed supported land development in Upper Canada, envisioning a colony where Scottish and British emigrants could regain self-sufficiency. Yet he was also an early champion of indigenous land claims and government transparency. As the tree-felling passage from his Autobiography suggests, Galt was no naïve memoirist, needing postcolonial reading-against-the-grain to explicate unconscious subtexts of colonial guilt. His novelistic corpus, likewise, is consistently, overtly concerned with imperialism’s historical meaning and psychic consequences. In Upper Canada, amid the practical work of planning, surveying and building, Galt informed his London publisher that he envisioned a novel or series set in Upper Canada, tentatively titled The Settlers, or Tales of Guelph (Waterston 1977a: 2). As actually written, Bogle Corbet became Galt’s most explicit, sustained meditation on the British imperial project; its final volume chronicles the founding of an ill-fated Upper Canada settlement. Galt’s own stay in Upper Canada ended abruptly and badly. From the outset, the Family Compact (the colony’s nepotistic, wealthy, reactionary oligarchy) viewed him with enmity. Determined to extirpate republican politics, the

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Compact repeatedly persecuted radicals like William Lyon Mackenzie (later to foment the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion); resolved to establish Anglican primacy in the colony, this Anglican elite not only ignored Presbyterian and Methodist claims but also falsified census data about the colonists’ religious make-up. Galt, in contrast, advocated religious tolerance and actively recruited Catholic settlers; Upper Canada’s reformers and radicals publicly (although sometimes without his approval) claimed him as an ally. In 1827, Galt faced an acute humanitarian crisis, when 135 indigent Scottish settlers, fleeing a failed colony in Caracas, unexpectedly arrived at the Huron Tract, sent on from Philadelphia by the British Consul. The Tract was always envisioned as a commercial venture, designed for emigrants with means to purchase their own land. The ‘La Guayrans’ refugees (half of them children), in contrast, arrived penniless, yet in urgent need of food, shelter and medicine, which Galt supplied using money owed to the government. Already critical of Galt’s political involvement, the Compact now charged him with usurping government functions – and denounced him to Canada Company shareholders in London. The Company, in turn, urged Galt to mollify the Compact, spend less time and money developing colonial infrastructure, eliminate charitable spending and sell more land; in their view, Galt’s ambitions, social vision and poor book-keeping threatened the Company’s viability. Galt was recalled to London in 1829, fired by the Company and landed in debtors’ prison. He never returned to North America (Timothy 1977; NashGraham 1984; Lee 2004). Yet he retained direct and indirect involvement with Canada, in 1834 co-founding the British American Land Company, and sending his three sons to settle in Canada. All three became influential figures, one as Huron County registrar, another as Ontario Chief Justice, and the youngest, Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, as secretary and commissioner of the British American Land Company, Upper Canada parliamentarian, Inspector-General of Canada and Canada’s first federal Finance Minister. He remains best remembered as a Father of Confederation, who lobbied for Canada’s 1867 constitution, then for its enshrinement of minority religious rights (Timothy 1977; Skelton 1966). John Galt, in contrast, is not usually remembered as a Father of Canadian Literature. Yet from his London debtors’ prison, he drafted two contrasting novels about Scottish emigration to North America. Both the chipper narrator of Galt’s best-selling Lawrie Todd, or The Settlers in the Wood (1830) and Bogle Corbet’s depressive narrator lead emigrant parties from the West of Scotland. Lawrie Todd founds a successful settlement in upstate New York. Once Corbet’s party arrive in Upper Canada, most reject his oligarchic leadership, while he disowns them. Together, these novels represent a paradoxical coda to Galt’s collectively titled ‘Tales of the West’. Overlapping temporally with Scott’s Waverley Novels, anticipating novel cycles by John and Michael Banim, Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, Benito Pérez Galdos and Émile Zola, Galt’s novel sequence measures the depth and breadth of regional history, describing crucial historical

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developments from various sociological, temporal and geopolitical perspectives (Trumpener 2005, 2007; Duncan 2007). Galt’s early novels repeatedly experimented with annalistic structure, as an alternative to Scott’s epic history. Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Provost (1822) describe Scotland’s economic and political modernisation from the contrasting vantage points of a sentimental small-town clergyman and a Machiavellian small-town political operator. Annals suggests the accretion of a single place over time; The Provost tracks the emptying out of place and tradition. Each of Scott’s Waverley Novels describes a crisis or turning point in Scottish history. Yet cumulatively they evoke a deep, rich, unbroken national history. ‘Tales of the West’ has the opposite effect. Its novels describe key events and developments from various interested perspectives, determined by occupation, class and political ideology. Cumulatively, the series creates a multi-faceted mosaic. A sense of sentimental recuperation permeates some novels. Yet others convey a pessimistic or depressive sense of gloom, tragedy and social dissolution. The sequence should act accretively, conveying a detailed, historically ramified sense of place. Instead, it questions Scotland’s place – and future – in the world. For the ‘Tales’ position Scotland simultaneously as an early casualty and economic node of Britain’s nascent empire. The Entail (1820) presents Scotland’s Union with Britain – and nineteenth-century Scottish fears of cultural, political and economic disenfranchisement – as consequences of Scotland’s disastrous attempt to establish its own Central American colony. Its supply lines sabotaged by the English, the Darien colony rapidly collapsed, precipitating the collapse of the Scottish economy – and, in Galt’s eyes, the Act of Union. Scotland’s bid to become an imperial power paradoxically reduced it to a de facto colony. Yet in many more indirect ways, too, Scottish cultural tradition becomes subordinated to a new imperial logic. The Provost describes Scotland’s economic and political modernisation process, and its widespread disenfranchisements, as by-products of local power-grabs by emerging mercantile oligarchs. The Last of the Lairds (1826) shows agents of empire inaugurating parallel changes; a Scottish ‘nabob’, returning from India with an ill-gotten colonial fortune, gradually displaces an enfeebled local aristocracy, awakening local nostalgia for more traditional stewardship. In Bogle Corbet, most ambitiously, Scotland appears as part of a worldwide imperial-industrial circuit. Born in Jamaica into a Scottish planter’s family and nursed there by a devoted slave, Corbet comes of age in Lowland textile mills, where Jacobin weavers inadvertently precipitate the industrial revolution yet fail to foment domestic revolution. Later, in London, Corbet observes corrupt old India hands capitalising the industrialisation process. In the novel’s final third, he accompanies to Upper Canada a settlement party of politically disillusioned Jacobin weavers, old Lowland acquaintances. As it nears the North American continent, the emigrants’ ship encounters a vast iceberg. At least at first sight, its frozen sublimity emblematises Canada’s

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chilly, unfathomable, pristine vastness. Within the imperial system Galt’s novel sketches, Canada initially represents a place of new beginnings and utopian renewal, proffering refuge for political dissidents, those sickened by the taint of mills and money. Yet only hours later, the passengers shudder as their ship passes Anticosta Island, where it almost founders, amid the ‘roaring tempest’ (Waterston 1977b: 26). In 1828, real-life mariners shipwrecked on Anticosta Island had been forced into cannibalism, as newspapers reported worldwide. Now, in a novel whose protagonist originates in Jamaica and ends in Upper Canada, the spectre of cannibalism (and the Shakespearean conjunction of ‘tempest’ / shipwreck) suggests subterranean links between present-day settlement in Britain’s latest Canadian colony and Christopher Columbus’s much earlier voyages of conquest. Columbus’s first log, describing his discovery of the Caribbean, famously emphasises its Edenic qualities. Yet logs of his subsequent voyages show cannibalism fears rapidly tainting the party’s interactions with indigenes – and precipitating pre-emptive genocide. Galt’s settlers shed no blood and only once glimpse Indians, salmon-fishers grouped in tableau. None the less, Bogle Corbet echoes the template of cultural encounter that Columbus established and Shakespeare allegorised. Veterans of empire and revolutionary upheaval come to Upper Canada to be made whole, to start again. Yet they carry with them repressed traumas, blighted dreams, deep moral exhaustion. Already at their approach, the landscape mirrors back their own suppressed violence. At first sighting, the iceberg embodies stasis. Yet it threatens to overwhelm the ship as it approaches, appearing like a ‘whole dreadful continent’ before violently sundering ‘with undescribable crashing’ (22); even in its fragments, it remains menacing, until the vessel slips into the safety of the seaway. Still shaken, Corbet finds the accompanying change in water colour ‘portentous’, probably ‘a consequence of some great internal turbulence’ (23). Corbet’s own inner turbulence, buried fears of insurrection, and insistence on re-establishing class ‘distinction’ (77) will dog Upper Canada’s newest settlement. As old acquaintances and old radicals, the settlers refuse to bend to Corbet’s will. Some, seduced by the idea of representative government, preemptively stage what Corbet terms ‘a mutiny’ (58), forsaking the British colony for the American republic. Others stay in Upper Canada, yet retain inconvenient political hopes. Before leaving Scotland, the settlers determined to build a village and live ‘in community’ (66). Now, clearing the bush, many begin to believe that their labours entitle them to their own farms. Corbet, they insist, has no moral right to dispose of communal property, for ‘this wild country was ta’en from the Indians, who have the best right to the land, if anyone has a right’ (73). From their Jacobin perspective, Corbet’s authority has little foundation; in North America, private property is built on expropriation. As a colonial administrator, Galt took responsibility for the ‘La Guayrans’, fleeing one failed settlement, continent, empire for another. In Nova Scotia, contemporary satirists Thomas McCulloch and Thomas Chandler Haliburton evoked the spectre of Scottish emigrants circulating among colonies, restless and

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increasingly rootless wanderers. Early nineteenth-century Scottish commentaries like John Leyden’s ‘Scenes of Infancy. Descriptive of Teviotdale’ (1803) and late twentieth-century Scottish-Canadian novels like Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) and Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief (1999), repeatedly linked such circulation to indigenous disenfranchisement; in an imperial domino effect, Highland disasters and clearances led directly, causally, to the displacements and genocides of Canada’s First Nations (Trumpener 1997). Bogle Corbet explores a related but finally different problem. As a colonial administrator, John Galt battled local oligarchs. None the less, Bogle Corbet persistently conflates colonial administrator with oligarch. In the bush, the settlement leader becomes the de facto government, forcing other settlers to conform or flee. Yet even as Corbet grumbles about ‘malcontents’, battles their attempts at self-sufficiency, and triumphs at their subordination, he also falls into paralysing ‘depression’ (79), having ruined not only their old dreams of sovereign equality but also his own. Like many Galt novels, Bogle Corbet turns on its narrator’s selfinterest, self-delusion, bad faith and false consciousness. In Scots, ‘bogle’ means both bogeyman and scarecrow. A child – and increasingly a tool – of empire, Bogle Corbet becomes a hollow man, malign yet haunted. Canada can bring no new beginning, only an ill-fated transposition of imperial inequity, guilt and violence into yet another place. Galt’s novelistic œuvre explores the complex geopolitical layering of colonial and historical experience. As Bogle Corbet demonstrates, the contradictions of colonial experience necessitate mechanisms for historical amnesia – and authorise a guilt-stricken, hence paranoid reading of colonial landscapes. Yet Galt is interested less in Canada’s history of indigenous dispossession – or indeed in any facet of its prior history – than its ability to serve as a staging ground and social laboratory for the moral problems generated by empire as a whole. In the 1820s and 1830s, McCulloch and Haliburton worried over Nova Scotia’s mercantile links to the Caribbean and slavery, and its proximity to American industrial capitalism (envisioned by Haliburton as a genocidal abattoir for wage-labourers and poor Irish immigrants). The first volume of Bogle Corbet makes similar links – between Jamaica and Scotland, between slavery and industrialisation. Yet Upper Canada is important to Galt not as an economic link in the imperial or capitalist economy but as a tabula rasa, an isolated, empty stage on which settlers imported from older parts of the empire can play out now-ingrained, imperially tainted social dynamics. Bogle Corbet diagrams imperial alienation in psycho-dynamic terms that anticipate Joseph Conrad, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon and George Lamming’s 1954 novel The Emigrants. What it does not and cannot provide, consequently, is a history of Canada itself. Galt’s ‘Tales of the West’ provides a cumulative, complex account of Scotland’s history in the context of empire. Bogle Corbet is a covert historical novel, yet any sense of ongoing history dissipates once protagonists (and readers) reach the St Lawrence. In Upper Canada, history only repeats itself, in symbolic re-enactment of battles fought elsewhere – in and about the

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British Empire. Overdetermined, overshadowed by this prior history, the colony cannot develop an autochthonous, let alone annalistic history. Latter-day Canadian nationalists had difficulty reconciling Galt’s vision of Canada with their own agendas. The 1960s’ and 1970s’ surge in Canadian cultural nationalism was accompanied by a literary boom characterised by a resurgence of historical fiction, using narrative templates pioneered by Scott (and popular with nineteenth-century Canadian novelists and readers), now often placed in more experimental modes. Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Hébert, Margaret Laurence, James Reaney, Marian Engel, Timothy Findley and Antonine Maillet reanimated colonial literary sources, questioning the adequacy of transmitted documents or the colonial archives to capture the full range of Canadian historical experience. Meanwhile, Canadian scholars began rediscovering colonial literary history, republishing key nineteenth-century literary works (Lecker 1992). McClelland & Stewart’s New Canadian Library virtually created a new Canadian canon and teaching canon. Yet its 1977 paperback reissue of Bogle Corbet (as Volume 135 in the New Canadian Library) involved severe abridgment. The 1831 London original had encompassed three volumes; McClelland & Stewart’s reprint consisted solely of the third volume (beginning, with little preparation, in medias res). The nationalist mandate of the New Canadian Library (as of McClelland & Stewart, ‘the Canadian publishers’) apparently made such truncation acceptable. Ignoring the original’s preoccupation with Canada’s connection to other imperial sites (Jamaica, Scotland, India), the New Canadian Library produced a Bogle Corbet concerned solely with Canadian experience, yet in the process rendered almost incomprehensible – and largely failing to find new readers (Trumpener 1997). Bogle’s latter-day ‘editor’, University of Guelph English professor Elizabeth Waterston, subsequently celebrated Galt’s Annals as formative for Canadian writing (1985b) – and discounted Bogle as a ‘sour novel’ (2003: 97). During the Romantic period, Scottish writers attempted to impart literary fullness to places, languages and cultures not fully comprehensible or comprehended in English letters’ prior history. Yet the nineteenth-century Scottish reading public thought of Canada as a place to which relatives, and sometimes whole local communities, had departed, never to return. It was hence a place of fantasy and projection, but above all loss. Like Scottish literary nationalism before it, mid-twentieth-century Canadian literary nationalism came to understand itself as counter-acting a long history of trivialising or elegiac representations. Canada was presented as neither a void nor a distant tomb but the place of real life, worthy of literary attention. Canadian literary nationalism thus unconsciously mimicked Scottish literary strategies of self-assertion even as it challenged British – and Scottish – views of Canada. Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), for instance, argued for a new Canadian social contract by evoking traumatic memories of the Highland Clearances; read postcolonially, however, Laurence’s narrative offers a utopian vision of Britain’s dispossessed Scots grasping their structural analo-

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gies to – and hence literally embracing – Canada’s dispossessed Native and Méti population. Laurence’s plot of female self-emancipation drew heavily on Munro’s 1971 breakthrough novel, Lives of Girls and Women, a subtler interrogation and integration of Scottish models. In the early nineteenth century, Munro’s family, the Laidlaws, emigrated to Upper Canada; while back in Scotland, two Laidlaw relatives assumed key roles in Romantic literary culture. Their cousin James Hogg, illiterate until the age of 40, spent his early life as a shepherd and his later life as an unconventional literary lion, championed (and patronised) by Walter Scott, publishing poetry and fascinatingly unorthodox novels, and participating in the circle around Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. In 1820, when one émigré Laidlaw sent a letter from Upper Canada, urging Scottish relatives to join them, Hogg printed it in Blackwood’s, with a letter of his own (Thacker 2005: 15). Hogg’s mother, Margaret Laidlaw, steeped in oral tradition, became a key source for Scott’s revision of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, although famously upbraiding Scott for publishing – and hence ruining – works ‘made for singin’ and no for prentin’’ (Hogg 1999b: 38). Only in middle age did Munro discover her own genealogical links to Hogg and his mother. By then, Munro and, in her wake, her father Robert Laidlaw had already published fiction based on oral family sources. Written with Munro’s encouragement and published posthumously in 1979, Laidlaw’s historical novel, The McGregors: A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer Family, drew on Laidlaw family stories of homesteading in the Huron Tract. Eight years earlier, Lives of Girls and Women had positioned itself as a historical novel of the recent past. In a series of short stories linking into a first-person Bildungsroman, Lives’ narrator, Del Jordan, describes her girlhood in the small Ontario town of Jubilee. During the 1970s and 1980s, Canadian literary historians pointed to Lives (as to short story cycles by Duncan Campbell Scott, Stephen Leacock, Mordecai Richler, Laurence and Gallant) to argue the linked short story sequence as a quintessential Canadian or indigenous postcolonial form. W. H. New (1987) offered a more complex formulation, suggesting that the modern story cycle both extended and departed from nineteenth-century colonial ‘sketches’. Yet Romantic-era Scottish experiments with narrative scale suggest alternative precedents; tale sequences, the annalistic novel and the novel sequence offer varying ways to slice and recombine time. Lives of Girls and Women not only develops a self-consciously idiosyncratic variation of the Galtian annalistic novel, but also repeatedly meditates on the historiographic problems in representing a community’s history. On one level, Munro’s novel explores ever further reaches of the Joycean concentric world Del imagines, as a girl, stretching from ‘The Flats Road, Jubilee, Wawanash County, Ontario’ to ‘The Solar System, The Universe’ (Munro 1983: 9). On another level, the novel memorialises a series of neighbours, relatives, friends and lovers whose idiosyncrasies and life philosophies consecutively, cumulatively shape Del’s consciousness, while reconstructing a sequence of discrete historical micro-periods – the Depression, World

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War II, the 1950s – experienced from the perspective of the provinces, ostensibly removed from world-historical events. In the temporal gaps between chapters, as in the new vantage point each chapter introduces, the novel underscores the limitations of its own pretensions to historical coverage. Del spends her early childhood on the Flats Road, a semi-rural no-man’s-land between the bush and Jubilee. Uncle Benny, Del’s semi-literate neighbour, embodies that liminality. His intimate, semi-intuitive relationship to the wilderness is offset by his inability to use a map, surmount his chaotic personal life or envision a larger social order. Del’s own relationship to the world veers uneasily between a pitying sympathy with Uncle Benny’s plight, anxiety about her own semi-pariah status (her critical mind trapped in an embarrassingly female body), and a precarious sense of intellectual entitlement (particularly once her autodidactic mother moves into Jubilee and sells encyclopedias). Lives’ ethical and aesthetic crux is the problem of giving literary voice to those unable to describe themselves. Munro advocates a Galtian immersion in regional history; Del remains sceptical. A key story / chapter, ‘Heirs of the Living Body’, describes the obsessive attempt of Del’s great-uncle Craig, former township clerk, to compile retrospective annals of the parish, the authoritative early history of the county. To Del’s irreverent young eyes, the project is dogged by his completism and unreflexive sense of history. I wanted to hear about how Jenkin’s Bend was named, after a young man killed by a falling tree just a little way up the road; he had been in this country less than a month. Uncle Craig’s grandfather . . . had given the young man’s name to it, for what else would such a young man, a bachelor, have to be remembered by? ‘Where was he killed?’ ‘Up the road, not a quarter of a mile.’ ‘Can I go see where?’ ‘There’s nothing marked. That’s not the sort of thing they put a marker up for.’ Uncle Craig looked at me with disapproval; he was not moved to curiosity. He often thought me flighty and stupid and I did not care much; there was something large and impersonal about his judgment that left me free. (Munro 1983: 25) Absorbed in, made impersonal by, his mandate to chronicle, Uncle Craig leaves all domestic drudgery and familial upkeep to his sisters. In his household, male and female spheres of experience rarely overlap. Men focus on a wide historical view; women, relegated to current burdens and pleasures, treat male privilege with mocking deference. Yet when her great-uncle dies, Del inherits his uncompleted magnum opus, with the expectation that she will finish it. Unwilling to subordinate her writerly energies to his vision of history, she stows it under her bed, then in the basement, where damp renders it illegible, unsalvageable.

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If this sodden manuscript fuels inchoate guilt, the novel we hold – the novel Del grows up to write for us – offers an expanded settlement history on the traces Uncle Craig laid out, foregrounding not the political and economic history made by Jubilee’s men but the private lives of women and other insignificants (Godard 1984). Uncle Craig’s grandfather named a town for a man killed by a tree; Uncle Craig finds the man, even his place of death, unworthy of a marker. In nineteenth-century Huron Township, one of Munro’s family was killed by a falling tree; Munro’s works repeatedly rework this elusive episode, paradigmatic for problems of commemoration and reconstruction (Carrington 1996; Gittings 1997). History, she insists, happens everywhere and to everyone, whether or not their lives are deemed worthy of record. Lives undertakes a compassionate, collective, compensatory chronicle, in the tradition of Thomas Gray’s 1751 ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, recording the ‘short and simple annals of the poor’, or of Galt’s Annals, working to comprehend the logic, desperation and dignity of provincial lives. As an implicit Künstlerroman, moreover, Lives explores the ways a flat, uninflected, unrecorded, apparently inconsequential place not only produces but also necessitates literature. Munro greatly admired James Agee’s 1941 Now Let Us Praise Famous Men (Sheila Munro 2001: 38), famously obsessed by the ethics of description. Lives too underscores how class, education, gender and generation implicitly divide the novelist from her subjects and the shame, self-consciousness and uncertainty this gap engenders. The act of writing, none the less, is ethically imperative. Even if its subjects do not welcome description, they have an inalienable right to be described. They may harbour a deep-rooted suspicion of map-making, even literacy itself. Yet fiction’s cosmologies counteract their sense of unmooring in the universe. Del’s early taste is Gothic – and Lives itself is conceived in terms drawn partly from Southern Gothic (William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee), as from historical novels (War and Peace, Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Gone with the Wind). Yet Munro’s sense of novelistic form and temporality is also inflected by the experimental fictional forms of Scottish Romanticism, Scottish novelists’ attempts to reanimate Scottish Enlightenment obsessions with stadialist history, to correlate geological, cultural and historical time scales. In Lives and subsequent short-story novel Who Do You Think You Are? (The Beggar Maid, 1978), Munro foregrounds the inherent novelistic tension between thick description, evoking particular moments or junctures, and the arc of narrative development. In Munro’s narratives of girlhood development, each phase is important, concrete, yet takes on final meaning in retrospect and memory, after yielding to a subsequent dispensation. Galt’s ‘Tales of the West’ return repeatedly, obsessively, to the same region of Scotland, examined from different historical and sociological vantage points – including, finally, an imperial perspective which saw it as only one of many interdependent places. Munro’s œuvre attempts a similarly comprehensive, multi-faceted survey. Like Galt, she has simultaneously immersed herself in local

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history (studying diaries, chronicles and newspapers) and tried to pull away from local perspectives, placing her locale in a much larger cosmology. Munro’s 1994 short-story collection Open Secrets involves perspectival experiments, exploring Ontario’s history in annalistic layers. A key story, ‘A Wilderness Station’, recapitulates this project by assembling the history of one locale across successive eras. Such collation involves significant overlaps of character and collective memory, but also highlights lacunae, a drift towards forgetfulness. The story’s early sections detail a widely noted tragedy, from the settlement’s first epoch: a man’s death – or murder – beneath a falling tree. Yet by the story’s epilogue, decades later, the episode is incompletely remembered, half-legendary, the initial protagonist recalled as an eccentric bit-player. With its telescoping, collapsing and overlapping temporal slices, ‘A Wilderness Station’ demonstrates the layering of the past, the triumphs and failures of historical reconstruction; a human story struggles to re-emerge from distance and document, then becomes obscure again. Other works foreground the relationship between Munro’s mode of historical fiction and early nineteenth-century Scottish experimental novels, including those of Hogg. Friend of My Youth (1990) chronicles Munro’s personal pilgrimage back to Scotland, in search of such antecedents; The View from Castle Rock, a speculative, fictionalised family memoir, episodically follows Munro’s emigrating Laidlaw ancestors in the other direction, from Scotland to Canada, pondering the accidents which established Munro’s eventual line of descent, the nature of family memory. Such meditations are deepened in View’s final story, ‘What Do You Want to Know For?’, whose narrator evokes years of drives across southern Ontario with her geologist husband. Nominally quests for geological formations, and hence navigated with special physiographic maps (showing deep formations, alongside rivers, towns and township boundaries), these repeated journeys change the travellers’ sense of their home’s location, shifting and deepening their grasp of proximate places. The story ponders the land and (as the couple search for, then investigate a country churchyard) the human record, with echoes of Gray’s ‘Churchyard’, Galt’s Annals and Scott’s 1816 Old Mortality. Romantic-era British naturalists developed a new sense of ‘locale’, a symbiotic biotope fostering specific plants and animals. By analogue, Martha Bohrer argues, British intellectuals use locale to comprehend social ecology; George Crabbe’s The Borough (1810), Mary Mitford’s Our Village (1824–32) and Galt’s Annals thus understand town, parish and village as human biotopes, microcosms (Bohrer 2003, 2007). Munro’s story reunites these senses of locale, reconciling the scales of human and geological history. The landscape here is a record of ancient events. It was formed by the advancing, stationary, and retreating ice. The ice has staged its conquests and retreats here several times, withdrawing for the last time about fifteen thousand years ago. (Munro 2006: 318)

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The process of geological formation separates adjacent pieces of landscape. Like history, geology involves uneven development, creates particular figure-ground relationships. Kame moraines show where a heap of dead ice sat, cut off from the rest of the moving glacier, earth-stuff pouring through all its holes and crevices. Or sometimes it shows where two lobes of ice pulled apart, and the crevice filled in . . . wild and bumpy, unpredictable, with a look of chance and secrets. (Munro 2006: 321) In the eighteenth century, from Europe’s distance, Voltaire dismissed New France as a few leagues of ice: ‘quelques arpents de glace en Canada’. In the late twentieth century, indigenous literati worked to effect Canada’s literary reclamation, reassembling a New Canadian Library. For many years, Munro has been one of the three-member advisory board of the New Canadian Library, functioning literally as a keeper of the Canadian canon. Lives of Girls and Women, too, participated in the project of nationalist retrieval. Yet, as this chapter’s comparative and historical character has demonstrated, Munro’s recent fiction pushes beyond a nationalist sense of Canadian terrain to think about deep formation in local and transatlantic terms. Bogle Corbet sailed for Canada searching for the end of history, an escape from historical and economic pressures, the plantation system, the industrial revolution. Yet he carries that local / world history with him, re-enacts it in the New World, and ends his story sunk into himself. At the dark heart of Joseph Conrad’s Congo is the horror of an inhuman colonial trade in commodities and lives. At the icy heart of Corbet’s Canada is a white void, reflecting back the moral hollowness of imperial, industrial Europe. The anarchists who paint-bombed Galt’s statue targeted the wrong man. Yet Bogle Corbet does encapsulate both the project of colonial literature and its necessary failure. The novel is intermittently attentive to natural landscapes, how weather, climate and countryside shape world-view. Yet where Galt’s West of Scotland is annalistically layered and socially complex, ascertainable only through a multiplicity of vantage-points and temporal scales, Galt’s Upper Canada functions primarily as an allegorical mirror, emblematising settlers’ inability to leave their pasts behind, their failure to arrive. Traversing the same geographical and literary ground, almost 200 years later, Munro finds an accreted, rich, half-buried record of human life, the annalistic micro-histories of the parish dwarfed only by the accreted, epoch-spanning natural-historical record. In their different ways, Galt and Munro each carve annals of ice. Yet their relationship remains oblique. And despite repeated calls to read them side by side (Craig 1981; Gittings 1995), so does the larger relationship between colonial and postcolonial literature. Meanwhile, the once provocative notion that postcolonial writers literally rewrite or unwrite colonial narratives has proved applicable mainly to a few famous, fiercely corrective alternative

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versions (Jean Rhys’s 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea; Margaret Atwood’s 1970 Journals of Susanna Moodie; J. M. Coetzee’s 1986 Foe) now so over-taught that they appear calculating, as if designed to secure hyper-canonical status for themselves. This chapter has modelled a different approach. Both colonial and postcolonial writing, it suggests, reach their greatest profundity not where they refunction specific metropolitan stories but when they understand their particular places as echo chambers or palimpsests, channelling a host of histories, narrative traditions and possible social forms. The relationship between metropolitan, colonial and postcolonial literature may not represent a direct line of descent or filiation – nor even rebuttal. Galt and Munro do think about place in relationship to models that earlier texts provide – but their interest is in utilising these texts’ stillunrealised formal, linguistic, political and philosophical possibilities. In Galt’s case, moreover, the ‘coloniser’ is simultaneously a withering critic of empire. Galt depicts Canada as empty. Yet this betokens not an annihilating colonial gaze so much as a symptomatic reading of imperial fatigue. Munro, in turn, grapples not with Galt’s content but with his formal innovations, not with his ignorance, pre-emptory dismissal or suppression of Canadian history, but with the myriad possibilities his novels open up – for local history, a corrective, complex historiography, new forms of fictional meditation.

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CHAPTER 4

Alistair MacLeod and the Gaelic Poetic Tradition Douglas S. Mack, University of Stirling

In August 1773, Dr Samuel Johnson left the familiar world of London, Britain’s imperial capital, and set out on a visit to that wild and remote territory, the Highlands of Scotland. Johnson recorded his experiences in A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland (1775), and in that book he writes about Gaelic, the language of the Highlands: Of the Earse [Gaelic] language, as I understood nothing, I cannot say more than I have been told. It is the rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express, and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood. After what has lately been talked of Highland Bards, and Highland genius, many will startle when they are told, that Earse was never a written language; that there is not in the world an Earse manuscript a hundred years old;1 and that the sounds of the Highlanders were never expressed by letters, till some little books of piety were translated, and a metrical version of the Psalms was made by the Synod of Argyle. (Johnson 1996: 101) Famously, in the early 1760s James Macpherson had published Fingal and Temora, which he described as his translations into English of Gaelic epic poems by a third-century warrior-bard called Ossian. Many of Macpherson’s readers responded to these ‘translations’ with great enthusiasm, and were eager to regard Ossian as Scotland’s Homer. From Dr Johnson’s perspective, however, such claims were obviously absurd; Scottish Highlanders, a people of few thoughts and gross conceptions, could not possibly have produced a bard worthy of comparison with Homer. The imperial ideology underscoring Johnson’s opinions assumed that the world’s barbarians had to be conquered, so that the benefits of civilisation and the fruits of modernity could be imposed upon them. Guided by this assumption in A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, Johnson expresses approval of Oliver Cromwell’s military conquest of Lowland Scotland, which had taken place in the 1650s:

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Douglas S. Mack What the Romans did to other nations, was in a great degree done by Cromwell to the Scots; he civilized them by conquest, and introduced by useful violence the arts of peace. I was told at Aberdeen that the people learned from Cromwell’s soldiers to make shoes and to plant kail. (1996: 22)

These comments, ostensibly espousing the ‘benefits’ of imperialism while downplaying its accompanying violence, are disturbing, in that they inevitably call to mind the traumatic events involved in Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland. As R. F. Foster puts it, ‘Cromwellian Ireland has become a subject of more balanced and analytical historical inquiry than used to be the case, but Oliver Cromwell’s record in Ireland is still inextricably identified with massacre and expropriation’ (1989: 101). Viewed from a Scottish and postcolonial perspective, Cromwell’s activities in Ireland serve as a reminder that the ‘useful violence’ of imperial conquest did not always have an obvious and evident link with the advancement of civilisation and the spreading of ‘the arts of peace’. This should be kept in mind when, in A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, it is assumed that the clans of Highland Scotland were civilised by conquest following defeat in the Jacobite rising of 1745. Dr Johnson seems to have been entirely confident in his belief that Gaelic was ‘the rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express, and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood’. Such beliefs were clearly based on narrow evidence and are challenged by the remarkable flowering of Gaelic poetry in the eighteenth century, especially evidenced in the work of Alexander MacDonald (c.1700–70) and Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724–1812). This chapter aims to show how this poetic tradition – which has, incidentally, informed some of the most significant of Scottish writers, such as James Hogg – has also registered in the work of one of the most significant of postcolonial Canadian writers, Alistair MacLeod (1936– ), whose work is vested with Scottish concerns. By reading this work comparatively the chapter will demonstrate ways in which certain texts within and influenced by the tradition of Gaelic poetry provide a cogent challenge not only to forms of cultural imperialism such as those espoused by Dr Johnson but also to material conditions of historical and contemporary imperialism. The comparison also affords opportunity to realise how a postcolonial consciousness might invite new ways to think about the writings of Gaelic and Scottish culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In turn, alertness to Gaelic writing might provide a platform from which new interpretations of MacLeod can spring. THE GAELIC BARDIC TRADITION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY In Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Katie Trumpener argues that Dr Johnson’s Journey to the Western Isles

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attempts to establish the primacy of a cosmopolitan and imperial vision of Enlightenment activity over what it sees as Scotland’s nationalist Enlightenment, of the forces of linguistic normalization over those of vernacular revival, and of a London-centered, print-based model of literary history over a bardic, nationalist model based on oral tradition. (1997: 70) These comments on Dr Johnson form part of Trumpener’s wide-ranging discussion of the vigorous eighteenth-century debates about the role of the bard in traditional oral cultures. As she explains in her Preface, her book argues that, in Scotland and in Ireland during the eighteenth century, a nationalist and traditionalist worldview takes shape from antiquarian reactions to Enlightenment programs for economic improvement, read as a form of political and cultural imperialism. The case is made in part through a detailed examination of several landmark English Enlightenment investigations of the Celtic peripheries and the critical reception of these works in Ireland and Scotland. Their famous indifference to cultural tradition catalyzes literary counterrepresentations and the articulation of an oppositional nationalist aesthetics. Responding in particular to Enlightenment dismissals of Gaelic oral traditions, Irish and Scottish antiquaries reconceive national history and literary history under the sign of the bard. According to their theories, bardic performance binds the nation together across time and across social divides; it reanimates a national landscape made desolate first by conquest and then by modernization, infusing it with historical memory. A figure both of the traditional aristocratic culture that preceded English occupation and of continued national resistance to that occupation, the bard symbolizes the central role of literature in defining national identity. (1997: xi–xii) This is the context – of modernisation, Enlightenment and imperialism – in which Dr Johnson, guided by his ‘cosmopolitan and imperial vision’, contemptuously rejected James Macpherson’s claim to have translated third-century Gaelic epics by Ossian. As Trumpener emphasises, this must be read as part of a general eighteenth-century context of social, cultural and economic upheaval in Scotland, particularly in Gaelic-speaking areas. Driven in part by the Union of England and Scotland in 1707, these upheavals accelerated in the 1740s following the final defeat at Culloden of Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s Jacobite rising of 1745–6 by a British and imperial army commanded by the Duke of Cumberland, a member of the Hanoverian royal family. The historian Michael Lynch writes: Cumberland’s savage orders to harry, burn and kill men, women and children alike in a campaign of mass-reprisal after Culloden was unusual

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Douglas S. Mack in eighteenth century warfare but it was no more than a repeat performance of the final Elizabethan conquest of Ireland after 1601, when (as here) the bloodletting came after forty years of frustration and failure in dealing with a Celtic people. It was one more act in the long drama of the consolidation of an English Empire. (1992: 338–9)

Cumberland’s ‘campaign of mass-reprisal after Culloden’ was focused on the Jacobite areas of Gaelic-speaking Highland Scotland. Members of James Macpherson’s family had been prominent in the Jacobite rising of 1745–6, and, as Fiona Stafford points out, Macpherson produced his Ossian poems after having witnessed the ‘appalling violence’ through which, in the period after Culloden, the Duke of Cumberland’s troops sought to impose ‘systematic cultural destruction’ on Highland Scotland. Stafford describes how, after the initial post-Culloden blood-letting, ‘a series of measures were implemented to crush the distinctive Highland way of life.’ These measures involved attempts to replace the use of Gaelic with English, and in addition ‘the tartan plaid was banned, and no Highlander allowed to carry arms or play the bagpipes’ (1996: ix–x). Such a curtailment of native forms of cultural transmission has been a significant issue for postcolonial criticism, as detailed below. (It should be noted in passing that whilst a postcolonial interpretation of the process of Highland Clearance has not been without controversy, it appears more readily accepted as a historically legitimate reading strategy than its application to the larger Scottish field.) After seeing the implementation of these severe post-Culloden measures at first hand, the teenage Macpherson became a student at the University of Aberdeen in 1752. At Aberdeen, he encountered the theories of the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, theories that placed great value on the epic poetry of oral cultures deemed primitive by the new British processes of cultural imperialism: cultures like the Gaelic-speaking one into which Macpherson had himself been born. For example, Thomas Blackwell of Aberdeen University had produced a pioneering Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735); and, naturally enough, ideas like Blackwell’s encouraged the young Macpherson to see potential value in the oral poetry and traditions of his own native Gaelic culture. That culture’s recent and painful experience of being on the receiving end of military conquest fired Macpherson with a desire to reassert its dignity and worth. Many poems and traditions concerning Ossian existed in traditional Gaelic oral culture, and in due course Macpherson began to recreate and embellish this traditional material in texts that he presented publicly as his own translations of third-century Gaelic epics by Ossian (cf. Thomson 1994). Fiona Stafford reminds us of the later processes of investigation into the authenticity and validity of the poems. Her assessment following the conclusions of the Highland Society of Scotland’s 1796 committee of investigation notes that: while [Macpherson] undoubtedly came across a large number of heroic ballads in the Highlands, he seems to have regarded his sources somewhat

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dismissively as the broken remains of great Celtic epics, and to have seen the task of recovery in the light of sympathetic restoration, rather than as a painstaking translation of the miscellaneous mass. (1996: xiii–xiv) How does ‘sympathetic restoration’ meet with a postcolonially inflected assessment that might see an attempt to retain pre-colonial narratives of a denigrated culture? Might there be room for seeing a wider ambit of resistance in Macpherson’s endeavour? After suffering conquest at Culloden, Gaelic-speaking Highland Scotland experienced a process of modernisation that involved the removal (sometimes by force) of much of the indigenous local population, in order to make room for the potentially highly profitable activity of sheepfarming. The long agony of the notorious ‘Highland Clearances’ had begun (cf. Prebble 1963). The cultural destruction involved in all this was resisted not only by Macpherson, but also by the nationalist Scottish antiquaries discussed by Katie Trumpener. It was also resisted through the eighteenth-century revival in Gaelic poetry – a recovery housing a form of resistance that should now be perceived as one of the earliest examples of a cultural resistance to British imperialism. Alexander MacDonald, one of the major British poets of the eighteenth century, led the revival. Alexander MacDonald’s Gaelic name was Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (‘Alexander son of the Rev. Alexander’), and he was a captain in Prince Charles’s Jacobite army during the rising of 1745–6. This son of an Episcopalian clergyman had been a student at Glasgow University – not by any stretch of the imagination a man of few thoughts and gross conceptions. He was a native speaker of Gaelic, and one of the poems through which he contributed to the eighteenth-century renewal of Gaelic poetry is ‘Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill’ (‘Clanranald’s Galley’), generally regarded as a masterpiece. In this poem MacDonald develops the Gaelic tradition of the praise-poem in various ways. ‘Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill’ was composed in the 1750s, and it describes how the galley of the MacDonalds of Clanranald survives a great storm during a voyage from South Uist in the Scottish Hebrides to Carrickfergus in Ireland. Ronald Black writes that the ‘Birlinn’ is an allegory of the Clanranald ship of state, a microcosm of the Gael and of Scotland, being navigated by its heroic crew through the dangerous waters of the ’45. [. . .] Alasdair begins to speak of Sinn dallte le cathadh fairge ‘Our being blinded by spindrift’, Peileirean beithrich ‘Bullets of fire’, Fàileadh is deathach na riofal / Gar glan thachdadh ‘The smell and smoke of the reefing sail / Completely choking us’, cogadh ‘war’, Talamh, teine, uisge ’s sian-ghaoth / Ruinn air togail ‘Earth, fire, rain and elements / Raised against us’, and finally sìth ‘peace’. This is no ship: the reef of a sail does not catch fire. It is what makes the ‘Birlinn’ epic poetry, for it concerns heroes surviving overwhelming odds to make history, and is consciously made from existing oral elements, transcended by one

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In traditional Gaelic praise-poems, the focus tends to be on the leaders of the clan. However, as Black points out, ‘Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill’ stresses ‘the primacy of the people over their leaders’ (2007: 121). In this innovative and influential praise-poem, MacDonald moves the tradition away from the aristocratic towards something more demotic. MacDonald’s developments took root within Gaelic culture, and flowered (for example) in the politically charged nineteenth-century demotic poetry of Mary Macpherson / Màiri Mhór nan Oran (‘Big Mary of the Songs’: 1821–98), and in the twentieth-century leftwing poetry of Sorley MacLean / Somhairle MacGill-Eain (1911–96).2 Yet this work travels further. It is a poetry that voyages – like its subject – across oceans. MacDonald’s development of the Gaelic tradition also helped to shape writing beyond Scotland, especially the literature and culture of diaspora. Alistair MacLeod’s Canadian novel No Great Mischief (1999) presents a notable point of comparison. ALISTAIR MACLEOD AND ALEXANDER MACDONALD In Bardic Nationalism, Trumpener notes: ‘For nationalist antiquaries, the bard is the mouthpiece for a whole society, articulating its values, chronicling its history, and mourning the inconsolable tragedy of its collapse’ (1997: 6). ‘Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill’ / ‘Clanranald’s Galley’ conforms to this description – except that here the society does not collapse; although battered and damaged in the storm, the clan’s galley does win through to Carrickfergus after its epic voyage. There is a form of defiance in this outcome, but one that cannot displace a lingering sense of anxiety at what is to come. It nevertheless seems to anticipate the future survival of Gaelic culture in some shape or form, at home and abroad. Canadian writing’s registration of the Scots diaspora, from Scott and Galt to Buchan and Kailyard to the most notable of contemporary writing – not only Alistair MacLeod but also Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro and others – has been to some extent characterised by the attempt to find ways to express anxiety about diasporic and immigrant experience. Michael Fry (2001: 466–7), for example, sees a form of literary memorialising in MacLeod’s work, giving it an ‘elegiac’ quality that rises above the more derivative qualities of popular diasporic literature. A consciousness of the deep importance of migrant roots in contemporary

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life is always accompanied by a hesitant awareness of the possible worthlessness of those roots. Fry (2001: 467) quotes a line from a MacLeod short story, ‘The Closing Down of Summer’, where Gaelic migrant miners compare an exhausted seam to ‘our Gaelic [which] seems to be of the past and largely over’. Like Alexander MacDonald’s poem, MacLeod’s No Great Mischief tells an epic story of the survival of the MacDonalds of Clanranald after Culloden; it is the central inset narrative to a contemporary Scots-Canadian family’s unclear sense of itself in the present. In MacLeod’s novel, survival involves a voyage to Canada, where a group of MacDonalds establish themselves over time as the clann Chalum Ruaidh of Cape Breton Island. It is presumably no coincidence that MacLeod’s narrator, Alexander MacDonald (himself one of the clann Chalum Ruaidh), shares the English version of the name of the author of ‘Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill’. Admittedly, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair is not mentioned explicitly in No Great Mischief. However, the novel’s awareness of the Gaelic poetic tradition does emerge explicitly through its mentions of Iain Lom,3 one of the great Gaelic bards (MacLeod 2001: 85, 89). There are two strands to the story told by the Alexander MacDonald who narrates No Great Mischief. One strand, set at the end of the twentieth century, centres around a visit by the narrator to his brother Calum in Toronto. This strand, and the novel as a whole, reaches its conclusion when Alexander MacDonald takes the dying Calum back to Cape Breton Island. The other strand of the novel focuses on the history of the clann Chalum Ruaidh since the eighteenth century. Here we learn that the brothers’ great-great-great-grandfather, Calum Ruadh (‘red-haired Calum’), joined Prince Charles’s army as a young man during the Jacobite rising of 1745–6; and we also learn that, in 1779, Calum Ruadh set sail from Moidart with his wife and children, bound for Canada: ‘Anyone who knows the history of Scotland, particularly that of the Highlands and Western Isles in the period around 1779, is not hard-pressed to understand the reasons for their leaving’ (MacLeod 2001: 17–18). Moidart is the home territory of the MacDonalds of Clanranald, which means that in 1779 Calum Ruadh was ‘another MacDonald leaving Moidart yet again – although this time not to “rise and follow Charlie”, although that image and that music may have haunted the recesses of his mind’ (MacLeod 2001: 19). This time, Calum Ruadh was leaving (in Clanranald’s galley, as it were) to establish a new life for the clan in the New World. Following Trumpener’s argument, if the bard acts as the mouthpiece for a whole society, articulating its values and chronicling its history, then it is clear that, like Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, Alistair MacLeod and his narrator Alexander MacDonald can be seen, on some level, as inheriting this bardic role. In addition, and like the traditional Gaelic bards, they are themselves part of the clan they celebrate. It should be noted, however, that the pressures of that role – formed in part by the difficult context of inheritance at different periods of crisis in the transmission of Gaelic culture – are significant to the comparison of these two writers two hundred years apart. Alistair MacLeod was born into the society

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of Cape Breton Island; and, as well as providing the subject matter of No Great Mischief, that society provides the subject matter of his short stories, as collected in Islands (2001). A traditional bard tells the stories that preserve the clan’s collective memory and maintain its sense of identity. When he begins to narrate the history of the clann Chalum Ruaidh in No Great Mischief, Alexander MacDonald begins with some comments about the clan’s founder, Calum Ruadh: Sometimes we seem to know a lot about him, and at other times very little. ‘It is all relative,’ as they say. No pun intended. There are some facts and perhaps some fantasies that change with our own perceptions and interests. These seem the facts: He was married in Moidart to Anne MacPherson, and they had six children, three boys and three girls. (2001: 17) Alexander MacDonald goes on to say that, on the voyage to Canada, Calum Ruadh’s wife died: ‘She was sewn in a canvas bag and thrown overboard, never to see the New World on which she had based such hopes.’ The story of the voyage also involves the birth of Calum Ruadh’s granddaughter. ‘The child was called Catherine and was known ever afterwards as “Catriona na mara”, “Catherine of the Sea”, because of the circumstances of her birth.’ Alexander MacDonald then continues, with comments that explain the workings of oral tradition within the clan: As I said, these seem the facts, or some of them anyway, although the fantasies are my own. And as is the case with the Gaelic songs, I do not choose nor will myself to remember them. They are just there, from what, even in my relatively short life, seems like a long time ago. I remember my grandfather telling me the story one afternoon in early spring as we were out at the woodpile making kindlings – he chopping them and I carrying them in to dry. (2001: 20–1) In ‘Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill’, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair extended the traditional bardic role by addressing not only the clan, but also a wider audience and wider concerns. As Ronald Black puts it: ‘the “Birlinn” is an allegory of the Clanranald ship of state, a microcosm of the Gael and of Scotland, being navigated by its heroic crew through the dangerous waters of the ’45’ (2007: 121). MacLeod and his narrator Alexander MacDonald follow these innovations of Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair; No Great Mischief is for and about the people of Cape Breton Island, but it is also concerned with the struggles of colonised people as they attempt to resist imperial power – and especially those who are forcibly displaced from their home territories by that power. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said points to the importance of stories for such struggles. He writes:

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A great deal of recent criticism has concentrated on narrative fiction, yet very little attention has been paid to its position in the history and world of empire. Readers of this book will quickly discover that narrative is crucial to my argument here, my basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history. (1993: xiii) No Great Mischief explores the links between the experiences of clann Chalum Ruaidh and other struggles against the power of imperialism internationally. For example, at one point in the novel the brothers Calum and Alexander MacDonald are discussing the Vietnam war. ‘From what I understand of this war,’ [Calum] continued, ‘those people are only fighting for their own country and their own way of being. It’s hard to say they should be killed for that.’ ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Wars touch all of us in different ways. I suppose we have been influenced by lots of wars ourselves. We are probably what we are because of the ’45. We are, ourselves, directly or indirectly the children of Culloden Moor, and what happened in its aftermath.’ (2001: 192) Clearly, the eighteenth-century ‘children of Culloden Moor’ were people fighting for ‘their own way of being’, and they take their place among the earliest victims of modern imperial power. However, the well-known irony is that the Highlanders who were exiled to Canada in the eighteenth century were also agents of imperialism, forming as they did, a significant part of the massive European migration that devastated the world of the Native American peoples. Furthermore, in the years after Culloden, men from the defeated Highland Jacobite clans began to be formed into regiments of the imperial British army. Indeed, Highland soldiers of this kind became noted heroes of empire in the later decades of the eighteenth century, and in the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. These complications are not ignored in No Great Mischief (and nor should they be in any consideration of the links between Scottish and postcolonial writing). We read that, when Calum Ruadh left Scotland in 1779, he was unaware that the French Revolution was coming and that a boy named Napoleon was but ten, and had not yet set out to conquer the world. Although he was not surprised, later, at the number of his own relatives who died before and during Waterloo, still shouting Gaelic war cries while fighting for the British against the resistant French. General James Wolfe, whom he perhaps did not remember from the Forty-Five, was already dead twenty years, dying with his Highlanders on the Plains of Abraham – the same Highlanders he had tried to exterminate fourteen years before. (2001: 19)

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Wolfe had fought on the victorious Hanoverian side at Culloden in 1746, and in 1759 he died in battle at the Plains of Abraham in Quebec, in the battle in which his British army secured Canada for the British empire by defeating the French. His words provide MacLeod’s novel with its title (see MacLeod 2001: 217, 219). It is known that Wolfe gave his Highlanders the most dangerous role in the battle, having earlier commented that they were ‘a secret enemy’ and that it would be ‘no great mischief if they fall’. The crucial battle on the Plains of Abraham finds another echo in the ‘present day’ strand of MacLeod’s novel, in a fight between two rival crews working for Renco Development. This powerful mining company carries on some of the traditions of empire by ruthlessly exploiting natural resources on an international scale. One of the rival crews consists of men from clann Chalum Ruaidh, and is led by Calum MacDonald (brother of the narrator). The other crew is FrenchCanadian, and their leader Fern Picard is killed by Calum in a fight, the source and outcome of which seem to suggest that the larger lessons for the warring factions of the colonial past have not been learnt. Registering these evident ironies, MacLeod’s novel none the less synthesises bardic elements with a Saidian insistence on the resistant qualities of storytelling. No Great Mischief displays MacLeod’s gifts in the genre of the short story; time and again, vividly realised incidents – often passed on orally to others – take on an unstated but richly resonant wider significance. We have seen that, when Alexander MacDonald describes the departure of Calum Ruadh and his family in 1779, he retells the story as passed on to him by his own grandfather. Memorably, part of this story is about a dog. As they waited on the shore, the dog who had worked with them for years and had been left to the care of neighbours ran about in a frenzy, sensing that something was wrong, and rolling in the sand and whining in her agitation. And when they began to wade out to the smaller boat which would take them to the waiting ship, she swam after them, her head cutting a V through the water and her anxious eyes upon the departing family she considered as her own. And as they were rowed towards the anchored ship, she continued to swim, in spite of shouted Gaelic threats and exhortations telling her to go back; swimming farther and farther from the land, until Calum Ruadh, unable to stand it any longer, changed his shouts from threats to calls of encouragement and, reaching over the side, lifted her soaked and chilled and trembling body into the boat. As she wriggled wetly against his chest and licked his face excitedly, he said to her in Gaelic, ‘Little dog, you have been with us all these years and we will not forsake you now. You will come with us.’ ‘That always got to me, somehow,’ I remember my grandfather saying, ‘that part about the dog.’ (2001: 19–20) In No Great Mischief, Clanranald’s galley sails again, this time to plant a new offshoot of the MacDonalds of Clanranald in the New World. The dog that

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refuses to be left behind embodies the qualities that will enable the family of Calum Ruadh to become established in Cape Breton Island, and to survive there over several generations. However, the kind of loyalty shown by clann Chalum Ruaidh and its dogs is not always rewarded by a happy outcome. The father of Alexander MacDonald is the keeper of a lighthouse on a small island, and Alexander MacDonald’s parents are drowned when returning to the lighthouse over the ice. Their dog survives this family disaster, only to suffer her own version of the clan’s post-Culloden traumas. Twice, before the break-up [of the ice], the dog left my grandparents’ house and crossed to the island looking for her people, and twice my uncles crossed to bring her back. The second time Grandpa tied her with a chain to the doorstep, but she whined, or ‘whinged’, as they said, so visibly and so mournfully that the next morning Grandpa let her go. ‘Because she was breaking my heart’, he said. Immediately, she raced down to the shore and started across, running low across the level ice and hurling herself without hesitation into the open water, swimming to the nearest pan and then leaping from one pan to other while Grandpa watched her progress through his binoculars. ‘She made it,’ he said, finally turning from the window. ‘Poor cú.’ She was still there, waiting for her vanished people to rise out of the sea, when the new lightkeeper, ‘a man from the way of Pictou’, nudged the prow of his boat against the wharf on the island’s rocky shore. She came scrambling down the rocks to meet him, with her hackles raised and her teeth bared, protecting what she thought was hers and snarling in her certainty. And he reached into the prow of his boat for his twenty-two rifle and pumped four bullets into her loyal waiting heart. And later he caught her by the hind legs and threw her body into the sea. ‘She was descended from the original Calum Ruaidh dog,’ said Grandpa when he heard the news, pouring himself a water glass full of whisky which he drank without a flinch. ‘The one who swam after the boat when they were leaving Scotland. It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard.’ (2001: 51–2) Pictou is the port at which clann Chalum Ruaidh had arrived in Canada in 1779; and later in the novel we learn that Calum Ruadh himself stabbed a man in Pictou. ‘His dog was heavy with pups and the man kicked her in the stomach’ (2001: 21, 153). These connected incidents, symbolising the lingering pull of ‘home’ culture and the consequences of unbending loyalty to them for future generations, suggest the novel’s concerns with legacy and unhomeliness in a postcolonial and ‘world’ context. The dog’s loyalty is as admirable as it is misguided, seeming to connote an inability to reinvent and adapt to new territorial circumstances.

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The plot of No Great Mischief posits a question as it reaches its conclusion: will the clan die with Calum, its latest leader and the successor of the original Calum Ruadh? Or will the clan yet again be able to reinvent itself? At all events Alexander MacDonald, the clan’s latest bard, survives at the end of the novel. And he has managed to tell the clan’s story, as is the duty of the clan’s bard. Perhaps, in spite of the death of Calum, there is still some remaining significance in a comment made by Alexander MacDonald’s grandmother on the occasion of an earlier death within the clan: ‘We will have to be strong. We can’t dissolve like a spoonful of sugar in a glass of water’ (2001: 111). ‘WE TOO MIGHT HAVE A STORY TO TELL’ The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has, like Said, stressed the importance of story-telling for the ‘mental revolution’ that helped the people of Africa to undermine British imperial rule. He writes: The nationalist movement in British West Africa after the Second World War brought about a mental revolution which began to reconcile us to ourselves. It suddenly seemed that we too might have a story to tell. ‘Rule Britannia!’ to which we had marched so unselfconsciously on Empire Day now stuck in our throat. (1990a: 38) Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) tells the story of imperial conquest from an African perspective. In doing so, it played its part in demolishing the imperial Grand Narrative and establishing a cultural and political climate in which British imperial rule could not survive in Africa. Likewise, a powerful alternative story to the solid benefits of empire emerges in No Great Mischief. While still a child, the narrator Alexander MacDonald learns from his grandfather that Calum Ruadh had burst into tears on landing in the New World in 1779: ‘Cried?’ I said incredulously. Because even by then I was conditioned by movies where the people all broke into applause when they saw the Statue of Liberty which their ship was approaching. Always they seemed to hug and dance and be happy at landing in the New World. And also the idea of a fifty-five-year-old man crying was a bit more than I was ready for. ‘Cried?’ I said. ‘What in the world would he cry for?’ I remember the way my grandfather drove the axe into the chopping block – with such violent force that it became so deeply embedded he had difficulty in getting it out later – and he looked at me with such temporary anger in his eyes that I thought he would snatch me by my jacket front and shake me. His eyes said that he could not believe I was so stupid, but they said so only for a moment. (2001: 21)

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After he recovers from his temporary anger, the narrator’s grandfather explains Calum Ruadh’s predicament: ‘He was,’ he said, composing himself and after a thoughtful moment, ‘crying for his history. He had left his country and lost his wife and spoke a foreign language. He had left as a husband and arrived as a widower and a grandfather, and he was responsible for all those people clustered around him. He was,’ he said, looking up to the sky, ‘like the goose who points the V, and he temporarily wavered and lost his courage.’ ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘they waited there for two weeks, trying to get a shallop to take them across the water and here to Cape Breton. And then, I guess, he got better and “set his teeth”, as they say, and resolved to carry on. It’s a good thing for us that he did.’ (2001: 22) The movies in which the people all break into applause when their ship approaches the Statue of Liberty give expression to a well-worn narrative of American dreams about the liberation offered by the New World to the Old World’s huddled masses; and that is a story that richly deserves to be told. However, as the experience of migrancy in literary history, from Gaelic Epics to the postcolonial novel, has demonstrated, it is neither the whole story nor the only story. It is, in fact, a story that has disturbing aspects that become evident when it is seen from a Gaelic or an African or a Native American or an African American perspective. Connecting and comparing this writing ensures that it is not ‘to be grossly understood’. Together and in its different ways such writing challenges a widely accepted narrative of migration by declaring that ‘we too might have a story to tell’. NOTES 1. Dr Johnson is mistaken here: Gaelic manuscripts of some antiquity (for example, The Book of the Dean of Lismore) do, in fact, exist. See Thomson’s (1994) Companion to Gaelic Scotland. 2. MacDonald is, along with Hugh MacDiarmid, one of the two dedicatees of MacLean’s long poem, ‘An Cuilithionn’ (‘The Cuillin’). 3. Iain Lom (‘Lean John’, c.1620–c.1707) was the grandson of a deposed chief of the MacDonalds of Keppoch.

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CHAPTER 5

Captains of Industry, Lords of Misrule: Carlyle and the Second Scottish Enlightenment Christopher Harvie, University of Tübingen

MASTERMAN’S ENGLAND, IRVING’S BERLIN In 1912 the Radical MP Charles Masterman published The Condition of England, an exercise in practical sociology still well worth reading, and as vivid a portrait of its age as George Dangerfield’s more famous The Strange Death of Liberal England of 1934. Masterman’s book, its title taken from Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Chartism’ essay of 1839, was written by an attractive and unorthodox intellectual who was, with his Scottish relative-by-marriage John Buchan, to direct the brilliant British propaganda coups of August–October 1914, from which Joseph Goebbels said he learned so much (the same Goebbels whom Albert Speer observed consoling Hitler in the Berlin bunker by reading him Carlyle’s Frederick the Great (Speer 1978; cf. Smith 1965; Masterman 1939). One of the lesser-known Scots influences on the Second German Empire was the Catholic Apostolic Church founded by Carlyle’s friend Edward Irving, which the novelist (and Scottophile) Theodor Fontane recorded in his last work, Der Stechlin (1899: Chapter 1) as an elite faith among Prussian administrators. It had been introduced to Berlin by one Dr Thomas Carlyle (no relation, though from Dumfriesshire) in the 1830s, and seems to have contributed to the bureaucratic overconfidence that only perished in May 1945 (Fontane 1978; Stern 1987; on Second Reich cultural pessimists not including Carlyle, see Stern 1978). Masterman’s picture was pessimistic. The English white-collar worker was populist-conservative, winnable for Tory imperialism, culturally myopic: the victim of the same sort of gullibility that the Irish socialist ‘Robert Tressell’ captured among the housepainters of Hastings in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (written 1911, published 1914). The English suburbs, briefly democratic in 1906, were again deferent. Was Masterman’s observation original, or the effect of reading Mosei Ostrogorski’s Political Parties (1901) and Graham Wallas’s Human Nature in Politics (1908) (Harvie 1976; Smith 2008; on behaviourism, see Johns 2009)? These examinations of the habitual and irrational in mass politics were later claimed as the original statements of the political behaviourism which became the ‘British homogeneity thesis’ of David Butler, Robert McKenzie,

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Donald Stokes and Jean Blondel. This centralist, elitist ideology, reinforced by Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), and heavily weighted in favour of centrists from the old universities, would dominate UK political analysis in the age of ‘Butskellism’, 1945–79. The radical Carlyle – from ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829) to Past and Present (1844) – would, however, resurface in Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and provide a countervailing element in the shape of a distinctive, cultivated, radical dialogue-with-neo-Marxism in the British nations, from the Williamses (Raymond, Gwyn Alf and Philip) in Wales to Hamish Henderson, Tom Nairn and Alasdair Gray in Scotland and an ecumenical element in Ireland extending from Field Day to John Hewitt. This was not, however, a novelty. Carlyle’s publishing history after his death in 1881 had been lively. The paradox is that decline came after 1914 (from 60 editions a decade to 18) when British government under Lloyd George, Andrew Bonar Law and Lords Weir, MacLay, Beaverbrook and Northcliffe, became strikingly Carlyleian in nature. His Captains of Industry were to defeat the German empire, whose rise he had laboriously chronicled in Frederick the Great (Harvie 2008: 219–20). ‘Condition of England’ was apt enough in 1912, because Georgian Scotland remained electorally different; still overwhelmingly Liberal, and with growing Labour and Home Rule outliers. This could also be claimed for Wales and Ireland, and to some degree the North of England – evident to, though not influential on – the Fabians and their shrewd scientistic critic H. G. Wells in his remarkable Dickensianpanoramic novels Tono-Bungay! (1910) and The New Machiavelli (1912). The relevance this has to current debates about postcolonialism in the experience of ‘peripheral Britain’ is – like the debates themselves – ambiguous, partly because politicians like myself adapt scientific formulae into the more plastic notions of ideology, serving immediate ends. Our horizon is the next election, rather than any worked-out philosophy. Suffice it to say that both terms seem at best provisional. They are means of connecting our preoccupations with the rituals and institutions of international scholarship in the era of the Research Assessment Exercise, while adding vitality to the politics of manœuvre in a collapsing post-imperial power. Such considerations underline the paradox that the Scottish radicalism of 1900 was also – for want of a better word – ‘imperial’. Characterised by a Carlyleian brusqueness with races which might have had title to invaded land – Aborigines, Inuit, Bantu, Maori – it expressed a small-town radicalism which was capable of integrating former rebels into the new democratic consensus. Politicians like Sir John A. MacDonald and Alexander Mackenzie in Canada, Alexander Paton in South Africa, Andrew Fisher in Australia and Peter Fraser in New Zealand might call themselves conservative or radical, but their common quality was a pragmatic adoption of the new structures of democratic government, of Scottishstyle higher and technical education, free churches, co-operative societies and a pervasive public culture of newspapers, societies, political parties, sports and ceremonies: Masonic, patriotic, professional, convivial (see Proceedings of ‘Burns and

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the Diaspora’, Napier University, 2009, on the spread of Burns Suppers after the centenary of the Kilmarnock Edition in 1886, boosted by the Earl of Rosebery, who inherited both some of the ‘literary-patriotic’ reputation of Carlyle, and through his patron Disraeli, some of his political ideas). I have argued in Floating Commonwealth (2008) that these ‘colonial’ regions – to be understood in J. A. Hobson’s terms of ‘settlement’ rather than ‘trusteeship’ – which looked in particular to Scotland as a mother-country, had gone through a different modernising experience from that of England. They were of, or were influenced by, the radical, pluralistic, industrialised littoral from Cornwall to the Clyde, more than by the conservative administrative and financial core, centred on monarchy, parliament, stock exchange and judiciary in London, and symbolically embodied in Walter Bagehot’s iconic institutions – and for once this overworked trope is apt – of the Cabinet’s Downing Street and the City’s Lombard Street (Harvie 2008: 6–10; the use of ‘Downing Street’ to denote the seat of political authority was itself a Carlyleian currency, as it was the title of an essay advocating ‘good government’ (particularly that of Sir Robert Peel) over ‘elected government’ in his Latter-Day Pamphlets of 1851). These institutions took their tone from the manse, the schoolhouse and the engineering shop, not from Government House, the Circuit and the Deanery. Besides heavy industry and international trade, the littoral had arguably also experienced a Second Enlightenment from the 1850s on. It had taken on board American democracy, bourgeois cosmopolitanism, political pluralism, technical education, the mass diffusion of systematised knowledge and liberal educational innovation. The Irish psychologist and educationalist Sophie Bryant (1850–1922), in her The Genius of the Gael: A Study in Celtic Psychology and its Manifestations (1913), called this governing characteristic ‘argument by extension, not by negation’ (Bryant 1913; see also Gibbons 1996b). Its cultural outcomes were a ‘West British’ equivalent to the Sezession (‘anti-Academy’) artistic and literary movement in contemporary European capitals. In this process, Carlyle (1795–1881), and a Scots-constructed memory of Carlyle, took on a central role. His reputation had initially acted as a leaven on Victorian literature, particularly the novel from the 1840s to the 1880s – from Disraeli and the Brontës via Dickens, Trollope and George Eliot to Meredith and Henry James – making it an integrating and unionising force. Posthumous ‘Carlyleianism’ mediated its concerns as the ‘condition of English’ as well as the ‘condition of England’, and redefined itself as addressing imperial and European problematics, both of which in the longer term would diminish the ‘British’ centre. TYPES OF CARLYLE Carlyle identified himself so much with ‘history as biography’ that he has been dropped from ‘scientific’ lines of enquiry. But subjectivity has a distinctive role in periods of inchoate interpretation. One has to distinguish between several Carlyles: the dramatic man and talker; the High Victorian ‘moral desperado’

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who was active though London-centred until his death in 1881 (joined within months by Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx: firstgeneration Carlyleians); and the public educator. Despite J. A. Froude’s 1895 biography – Boswell’s Johnson in reverse, though contributing to the ‘personalisation’ of the Man of Letters – enthusiasm continued at a high level up to World War I, and after a nadir in 1945 recovered through scholarly editions and the heroic enterprise of the Edinburgh–Duke Universities Carlyle Correspondence. As with his friend John Ruskin, the rekindling of a new generation took place indirectly, through writers such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Hugh MacDiarmid, who were revolutionised by him. As A. J. P. Taylor wrote, aptly enough of a film-fixated age: ‘to understand the causes of the French Revolution, you turned to J. M. Thompson; to experience it you read Carlyle.’ Henry Boothe Luce, its editor, asked by the Scotsman editor and oilman Sir Alastair Dunnett where the breathless Time style came from, answered lapidarily ‘Carlyle’ (Dunnett 1993). The individual writer fell almost silent after the completion of Frederick and the bereavement and political pessimism of 1865–7, yet the same years provided a late-flowering cultural bequest in his Edinburgh Rectorial Address and the campaign for a National Portrait Gallery in Scotland, eventually built by Robert Rowand Anderson in 1885–90 in Ruskinian Scoto-Venetian style, which had taken its cue from an 1859 essay. Hence the preservation of Carlyle’s hybrid reputation as Victorian sage – to be accessed through his influence on Ruskin, Dickens, Morris, Patrick Geddes and others, as well as through his own œuvre – and the key contributor to the ‘revolutionary into reformist’ generation born in 1840–70. In what would now be called a semiotic, culture-mediating sense, Carlyle was the ‘Society of the Book’, and in particular of the itinerant books encouraged by the transport revolution, public libraries and the AngloAmerican Copyright Treaty (1891). His apt monument was collective: the ninth to eleventh editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary and Dictionary of National Biography, and the astonishing progress made by the Dent–Dutton ‘Everyman’ reprints after 1899. All bore the stamp of the northern Dominie: Prof. Robertson Smith, Sir Leslie Stephen, Sir James Murray and Sir William Robertson Nicoll. Finally, there was a conceptual legacy which expressed itself in the cultural canon of ‘modernism’ – explicit by about 1910 – and marketed it effectively to the generation which would opt for various forms of democratic nationalism in the inter-war period and, opening out of this, varieties of intertextual and crossmedia criticism. This complexity was partly because of Carlyle’s transatlantic reputation, particularly among the transcendentalists and Whitmanites of the American East Coast and their numerous British disciples; partly by reflection on the ‘Victorian’ achievement, christened by Mountstuart Grant Duff, a reflective Scots Liberal politician, in The Victorian Anthology in 1902; and partly the recovery of Carlyle as the precursor of the post-Marxist ‘modernists’ to whom the power of society outran materialist attempts to explain it. Central to this

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inquiry is the generation attending university from the 1860s to the 1890s. They recognised the eighteenth-century Scottish achievement by christening it. The economist W. R. Scott coined the concept as ‘the Enlightenment in Scotland’ around 1896, and A. V. Dicey (Stephen’s cousin) a decade later in Law and Public Opinion (1905) periodised economic development in Adam Ferguson’s ‘stadial’ style, although they reacted against its mechanism and inegalitarianism. Carlyle belonged to Dicey’s ‘period of collectivism’, along with the ‘meliorist’ fictionwriters he motivated, but his impact owed much to the intangibles of theology and individualism (Dicey 1905; Zaiser 2005). A revisited Carlyle incorporated the impulses of the 1850s: those associated not just with the sciences but also with the cultural discoveries in the 1850s of some of Carlyle’s Chelsea entourage. Alexander (1828–61) and Anne Gilchrist (1828–85) and Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti detected in the penumbra around William Blake and Walt Whitman a field of demotic prophecy. This was an informal Anglophone and literary version of what the American intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes would call, in Consciousness and Society (1959), ‘the revolution in social thought’. Almost wholly associated in Hughes’s mind with post-Marxian European social philosophers, it was as likely to be found on the British periphery in redbrick universities, newspaper and publishing offices, engineering consultancies and architects’ practices. Noel Annan, in his essay ‘The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Social Thought’ (1959), regarded Rudyard Kipling as the closest the British got to the Durkheims and Webers, and there is a good deal of truth to this, bearing in mind Carlyleian Kipling’s remarkable career as a pre-1914 cultural export to areas such as the USA, which European sociology would only reach through the post-Nazi diaspora (Annan 1959). Post-Carlyle, the Enlightenment was incorporated into the ‘critical periods’ of Saint-Simonian to Comteian sociology. Carlyle unquestionably believed he belonged to such a neo-Enlightenment period, whose concerns he publicised in ‘Characteristics’ (1831) and Sartor Resartus (1834): two essays which, in their symbolism, represent a point at which he saw anthropology shifting to sociology – stress the signifiers that popular culture had to evolve to get itself treated seriously, and to avoid the plunge into what the later French sociologist Emile Durkheim termed ‘anomie’ (Durkheim 1897). Carlyle made a religion of transcendence – hence the appeal to post-Emerson Americans – and he introduced a random, historically specific element that accommodated, though did not ritualise, the methods of evolution. There was at the mid-century a change in symbolism in general terms, from the religious-apocalyptic to the scientific and calculable, as well as a sense of the limitations of human reason when set against the exhaustion of effort. Following the physical discoveries and law-making of the 1850s – Lord Kelvin, James Clerk Maxwell, MacQuorn Rankine, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley – there emerged a concentration on the entropy of social-cultural as well as physical ‘work’. The latter term was itself a Carlyleian moral injunction turned into a unit of power measurement

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(cf. Harvie 2008: 93–4). Applied to states and their conditions, this moral entropic element was given a vivid presence by Carlyle’s disciple John Ruskin, in the first lines of The Stones of Venice in 1851: Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruins; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction. (Ruskin 1903–12: xix, 17) This cross-cultural, physics-based emphasis was mutually recognised by religious scholarship, whether expanding from the historiography of the Bible or the comprehension of ‘mission’ within religious organisation and society in Europe: evangelicalism, Tractarianism, social Catholicism and even militant unbelief. This scientific paradigm complicated the earlier dominant schools of economics and sociology. It was not necessarily progressive and it was within this ambiguity that Carlyle found his place. In 1881 the ‘Glasgow Boys’ – the young Sezessionist artists of the ‘Second City’ – pressured the Corporation to buy James MacNeill Whistler’s 1873 ‘Study in Black and Grey: Thomas Carlyle’ as its pledge to the modern. In its restricted palette and carefully massed forms, the portrait seems a foretaste of the Jugendstil cultural movement to come. Whistler’s father George Washington Whistler, husband of the other, effectively pendant, ‘Arrangement in Black and Grey: Mary MacNeill’ – ‘Whistler’s Mother’ of 1871 – was significantly enough a railway engineer, who planned the first main line in Russia between Moscow and St Petersburg, dying of cholera shortly before its completion. It is possible to see in both paintings a deliberate homage to high Victorian sublimation and restraint, and also a forecast, in the ashen colours – contrast with the energetic floridity of Henry Raeburn or David Wilkie – of entropy itself (Macmillan 1990: 245–52). There were two cognate responses from literature: one was the openness to Nietzsche of the great syncretic venture of John Davidson in his ‘Testaments’, which invoked post-industrial disjunction and political malaise (Davidson 1901– 8). A literary example of Carlyleian historical and sociological insight is George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters (1901), whose plot – the fall of the house of John Gourlay in the small town of Barbie – was derived from classical Greek tragedy but whose mise-en-scène came from Carlyle’s ‘Hudson’s Statue’ essay of 1850 (Harvie 2008: 54–5; Craig 2009). This dramatised the impact of the Railway Mania on the traditional fora of small-town Scotland, foregrounded by Adam Smith and, following him, John Galt. Carlyle’s influence on Thomas Hardy ran in parallel in distinguishing between the natural and the fabricated. Brown’s book assaulted the sentimentality of the Kailyard, an element itself derived from the need to restate Adam Smith’s ‘sympathy’ in industrial times as an overdriven, mechanically produced emotionalism – in the work of ‘Ian

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MacLaren’ or S. R. Crockett. What distinguished Hardy and Brown was a deliberate, socially constructed rationing of the emotions, just as Darwin’s last essay ‘On the Expression of the Emotions’ emphasised the importance of sublimation to an energetic but strictly pre-Freudian generation (cf. Harvie 1982). This may indicate why, in this era and among a range of complex responses, there were repeated attempts to solve the problem of registering profound mental change during a period of intense social flux. People reacted to the latter by invoking political or religious institutions which seemed to Carlyle to be hollow shams but which provided structures for their lives: the ‘Hebrew old clothes’ of nonconformity or the ‘Grand Palaver’ of electoral politics, the bulk of which Carlyle could signify without making much progress at interpreting. Carlyle’s appreciation of the irrational in society partially explained the survival and even the revival of postTrinitarian religion. Hence a shift from the idealistic God-manufacture of the Comteian-Positivist ‘religion of humanity’ of the 1850s – pretty well dead outside upper-bourgeois London by the 1890s – to the sociology of religion and of a return to Adam Ferguson’s social categories (Wright 1986). This had been speculatively evident in Carlyle’s ‘Characteristics’ (1832) and was revived in W. Robertson Smith and The Religion of the Semites (1877). What was important about Carlyle was not just the ideas and what Philip Larkin called the ‘myth-kitty’ but the way that he accommodated himself to print, and in particular to print capitalism and the uncontrollable element of the systematised knowledge that it liberated. ‘SIGNS OF THE TIMES’ The main strand of Victorian scientism could be characterised by the phrase ‘From Bildung to Evolution’. I argued in a survey-article on Scottish culture and industrialisation in 1989 that the difficulty of making this transition, of accounting for the absence of Providence, led to the importance of autobiography in times of acute social change (Harvie 1989). The Holy Scriptures, along with their immediate familiarity and expressive language and projection in music, architecture and ritual, were reinterpreted and elaborated as mastery of the physical world, whether in the form of a Macaulay soldier or a Smilesian engineer. They were visible in the elaborate sequence of costumes on show in the architecture of high street and suburb, store, counting house, factory and railway station, where Ruskin contributed his due. The dramatic Edinburgh, Penicuik, Kelso and Irvine churches of Frederick Pilkington in the 1860s, with their theatre-like galleries and focus on the preaching-desk; William Leiper’s Venetian carpet factory for the Templetons on Glasgow Green (1885–90), and Rowand Anderson’s Mountstuart (1880) for the Marquess of Bute are the most direct tributes to him. There was also the functional but still aesthetic and elegant projection of efficiency in the shape of railway locomotives, sailing ships and steamers – themselves often the creation of similar post-Calvinist engineering – aesthete Scots sharing the convictions and even the appearance of Carlyle himself (Jessop 1997). Kipling’s Engineer McAndrew (1896) was backed by a

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history. Hence the importance of Sartor Resartus (1834) in explaining – and abetting – social survival in early industrial Britain and empire. The elaboration of Adam Smith’s ‘sympathy’ as a learned drive, and its attachment to technology, was initially opposed to Carlyle’s apparently unmaterialist line, but eventually bore it out. Smithian ‘sympathy’ depended on the excessive sensibility that had slurped around Henry Mackenzie’s near-eponymous Man of Feeling (1777); Carlyle replaced it by something far more print-based, but manly, war-forged, experimental and resilient (Evans 2004). The leitmotifs of ‘Signs of the Times’ were derived from Schiller: belief-systems as the alternative to mechanistic, fragmented unbelief (perhaps a Scottish variation on Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialism) (Harvie 2004: 94); hence the stressing of the apocalyptic alternative. Geology and the testament of the stones were presented in spectacular, aggressive ways familiar to the Calvinist groundlings. The problem, Carlyle found, was that his own gradualist advice, delivered in the far from meliorist-sounding Latter-day Pamphlets, was actually rather mild and deterrently abstract. Benthamism had already produced Edwin Chadwick: ‘the hero as civil servant’; Christian-Socialist Carlyleianism (complete with a portrait of the Sage as Sandy MacKaye) was present in Kingsley’s Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1852), in which the social crisis that F. D. Maurice hoped would be solved through the theology of the Atonement becomes a remarkable anticipation of Darwin and Freud in its evolutionary-erotic coda (Forbes 1952; Harvie 1991: 25). What came after was both more English and more subtle; indeed, the continentals would take their time to parallel the depth and comprehensiveness of its criticism – an analysis of a literary form which was also a contribution to it and the politics in which it was implicated. In the 1848–81 period, lessons were to be taught through the English novel. Extract Carlyle from English fiction from Disraeli to Meredith and its intellectual, though not its material, results would be far different and less impressive. While the Scots domesticated wild nature as never before – the theory and practice of the high-pressure steam engine, chloroform and antisepsis, the ‘muckle ferm’ with its rotations and steam-engines, wool and linen mills joining the cotton factories, emigrant Scots capturing ministries in the colonies – reflectivity was, for a couple of decades, in pretty short supply. In Scotland the mid-century ‘age of equipoise’ amounted on the surface to an English conquest, expressed in John Stuart Mill’s assault on Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, in 1864. This brings out the debt to autobiographical consciousness, as Mill’s own Bildung was more Scots than Carlyle’s, stretched between Adam Smith, as interpreted by Bentham and James Mill, and in the 1830s the romantic individualism of Carlyle, Hamilton’s disciple (Jessop 1997). Carlyle’s rapturous reception as Rector of Edinburgh University in the following year might in part be seen as a Scottish reaction to this attack. Carlyle’s tribute to the philosophy of his old teacher, another of whose disciples was the modernist theologian Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, endorsed the development of university autonomy and historical jurisprudence in the hands of Prof. James Lorimer, Erskine’s friend and

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Hamilton’s executor, whose scheme for a European Federation in his Principles of International Law (1884) would have strongly Scottish nationalist and elitist elements in it (Harvie 1999: 75–82). There was also, after the mid-1850s, a literary movement from below, which tried to fit the Free Church episode into a political framework: an initiative deftly captured by the weekly press which, as William Donaldson has shown, established a resilient and demotic literary culture (Donaldson 1986). Gladstone and his party would build on this in their party triumph in the 1868 election. But it could not yet stand on its own as a form of Scottish national-radicalism, tending to be regional and small-town in a rapidly evolving industrial society. Indeed the democratic element would be frustrated after 1874 by the well-crafted culturalnationalist interventions in Scottish life by the Earl of Rosebery. These were initially centred on the return of Gladstone to Scottish politics in the Midlothian campaign of 1879–80, then were extended into Rosebery’s own campaign for a restored Scottish Secretaryship in 1884–5. At one level this could be seen as an attempt by a neurotic but clever stylist and plutocrat – a would-be Scottish Joe Chamberlain – to ride a nationalist campaign which at any other time could have gone critical in the hands of a demotic nationalist leader (Harvie 2004: 20–1). At another level it cemented a type of government by local ‘Captains of Industry’ of which Carlyle would have thoroughly approved. What mattered were the institutions of commerce and local representation: manufacturing firms and their associations, chambers of commerce, railways and docks, churches, schools and universities, newspapers and publishers. Together, these controlled what Dicey called the ‘cross-currents and counter-currents’ that inflected the UK’s meagre stock of formal political theory. So marginalisation in UK culture of Scottish figures, from about 1832 on, intensified after the Disruption of 1843. The consequences of this seemed to show the bourgeois nation entrapped in the ‘Hebrew old clothes’ Carlyle had done his best to discard, certainly in a considerable oversupply of churches, capable in some areas of catering for 50% more than the adult population. However, this also provided a public space into which a new and predominantly secular civil society could flow, from the football teams of the Boys’ Brigade to the elaborate evening activities of Church congregations. Revival, first religious – with Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey’s crusade in 1873 – and then political in the 1880s, occurred within the perception of a two-edged development, and took in the ambiguity of emigration: the hero as missionary, explorer or settler (Harvie 2008: 151). This settler-democracy developed its new perceptions, from John Muir and the North American wilderness to Canadian or Australian reflections on frontiers. But the secular explanations of these, and the further transforming power they generated, were also evinced – for example, in the rise of the feminist movement, from women’s education in the 1860s, via Women’s Guilds in the Churches (after 1888) and women’s political, artistic and sporting organisations. (The contrast between the theological-legalist simplicities of the Free Church and the intellectual and artistic complexities that it unleashed – as in Hugh Miller’s journalism,

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Pilkington’s churches, and the contributions of its members to political theory and social anthropology – begin to make some sense when we consider that the ‘ten years’ conflict’ (1833–43) was also when Sartor established itself.) In 1848 Erskine of Linlathen (contemporary and publicist of the Tübingen theology of Strauss and Baur, friend of F. D. Maurice and other ‘Liberal Anglicans’) noted Carlyle’s shift towards ‘political science’ as a substitute for religion. Erskine may have influenced Carlyle’s attempt to create a British version of the science in Latter-Day Pamphlets with its concentration on the integrative nature of good rather than self-government, and veneration of Sir Robert Peel (who died while it was being written). In this context Frederick the Great (1857–68) could be read as an attempt to situate a model of authoritarian liberalism. Putting ‘kenning before canning’ was something that had an effect on mid-century Scottish protonationalist thinkers, such as Prof. John Stewart Blackie (an opponent of the 1867 Reform Act), as well as Lorimer, author of the pamphlet ‘Political Progress not Necessarily Democratic’ (1867) (Harvie 2008: 50–1). Carlyle’s approbation of Frederick was linked to the latter’s great lieutenant Marshal Keith: A man of Scotch type; the broad accent, with its sagacities, veracities, with its steadfastly fixed moderation, and its sly twinkles of defensive humour, is still audible to us through the foreign wrappages; not given to talk unless there is something to be said, but well capable of it then. (Carlyle 1864: 379) LAST THOUGHTS The above perspective lends meaning to Carlyle’s last works, which Frederick Engels regarded too easily as showing him to be beached by history. ‘Shooting Niagara – and After?’ was carried in Macmillan’s Magazine’s April 1867 number (Whitman 1871: 18). It came three weeks after Young Oxbridge had given voice in Essays on Reform, also a Macmillan project. It made little impact in the controversy over democracy, and was chiefly important in stimulating Walt Whitman’s considered, reverent response in Democratic Vistas four years later: ‘SHOOTING NIAGARA.’ – I was at first roused to much anger and abuse by this essay from Mr. Carlyle, so insulting to the theory of America – but happening to think afterwards how I had more than once been in the like mood, during which his essay was evidently cast, and seen persons and things in the same light, (indeed some might say there are signs of the same feeling in these Vistas) – I have since read it again, not only as a study, expressing as it does certain judgments from the highest feudal point of view, but have read it with respect as coming from an earnest soul, and as contributing certain sharp-cutting metallic grains, which, if not gold or silver, may be good hard, honest iron. (Whitman 1871; see also Whitman 1892: no 222)

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Carlyle’s essay itself elaborates little on Latter-Day Pamphlets, despite adding industrial pollution, architectural mediocrity and the neglect of ‘non-vocal’ schooling, i.e. technical education and military drill, to the bill of indictment (Carlyle 1872: 674–87, esp. 683–6). In contrast to Whitman, it seems entropic, but it was not Carlyle’s last word. In 1875 Carlyle published his last work, a review of a new edition of Snorri Storlasson’s Heimskringla Saga: ‘The Early Kings of Norway’ (Carlyle 1875), not much noticed but interesting in its epilogue. In this Carlyle’s formal political views were summed up by a long citation from Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, implying a return to the territory of ‘Chartism’: Theft and blood-guiltiness are not pleasing in their sight; yet the favouring powers of the spiritual and material world will confirm to you your stolen goods, and their noblest voices applaud the lifting of your spear, and rehearse the sculpture of your shield, if only your robbing and slaying have been in fair arbitrament of that question, ‘Who is best man?’ But if you refuse such inquiry, and maintain every man for his neighbour’s match, – if you give vote to the simple and liberty to the vile, the powers of those spiritual and material worlds in due time present you inevitably with the same problem, soluble now only wrong side upwards; and your robbing and slaying must be done then to find out, ‘Who is worst man?’ Which, in so wide an order of merit, is, indeed, not easy; but a complete Tammany Ring, and lowest circle in the Inferno of Worst, you are sure to find, and to be governed by. (Ruskin 1873: 8–10) Carlyle’s exegesis, however, followed the intellectual ferment of the time, and in particular the discovery of Icelandic literature by William Morris, Ruskin’s disciple, in his voyages to the saga-steads in 1871 and 1873: All readers will admit that there was something naturally royal in these Haarfagr Kings. A wildly great kind of kindred; counts in it two Heroes of a high, or almost highest, type: the first two Olafs, Tryggveson and the Saint. And the view of them, withal, as we chance to have it, I have often thought, how essentially Homeric it was: – indeed what is ‘Homer’ himself but the Rhapsody of five centuries of Greek Skalds and wandering Ballad-singers, done (i.e. ‘stitched together’) by somebody more musical than Snorro was? Olaf Tryggveson and Olaf Saint please me quite as well in their prosaic form; offering me the truth of them as if seen in their real lineaments by some marvellous opening (through the art of Snorro) across the black strata of the ages. Two high, almost among the highest sons of Nature, seen as they veritably were; fairly comparable or superior to god-like Achilleus, goddess-wounding Diomedes, much more to the two Atreidai, Regulators of the Peoples. I have also thought often what a Book might be made of Snorro, did

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there but arise a man furnished with due literary insight, and indefatigable diligence; who, faithfully acquainting himself with the topography, the monumental relics and illustrative actualities of Norway, carefully scanning the best testimonies as to place and time which that country can still give him, carefully the best collateral records and chronologies of other countries, and who, himself possessing the highest faculty of a Poet, could, abridging, arranging, elucidating, reduce Snorro to a polished Cosmic state, unweariedly purging away his much chaotic matter! A modern ‘highest kind of Poet’, capable of unlimited slavish labour withal – who, I fear, is not soon to be expected in this world, or likely to find his task in the Heimskringla if he did appear here. (Morris et al. 1870: 427) Carlyle was returning to the interests of his ‘radical’ period, studies in 1840 of the sagas in Samuel Laing’s translation which preceded Heroes and Hero-Worship. Now, however, he coincided with the historical-political dramas. Given this challenge, one need look no further than the early historical dramas of Henrik Ibsen, the finest of which, The Pretenders of 1864, draws on the Heimskringla, and would in turn inspire Carlyle’s compatriot William Archer, the conduit for the Ibsenism of Bernard Shaw and James Joyce, to begin his translating work in 1873. The first to be published was Pillars of Society in 1880, followed by the furore over Ghosts in 1891. This did not just raise the curtain on an Anglophone theatrical achievement unparalleled for 300 years, but contributed to a consciousness which subverted the Empire. THE POST-CARLYLEIAN BAZAAR This partially answers the question: where would the Carlyleians go after the sage’s death? Their contribution to English literature has already been signalled – with the caveat that in a metropolis the size of London individuality was always subject to specialism and its limitations. London did not produce the Goncourt brothers from among its Scots, nor a Georg Brandes. But Carlyle stimulated by example as well as by output, both there and in Scotland, a bold venture into world literature: Anne Gilchrist, biographer of Blake, who became the muse of Walt Whitman (whether he wanted one or not), E. S. Dallas in mid-century novel-criticism, and then Archer championing Ibsen, Thomas Common’s translations of Nietzsche, anticipating C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s mastering of Proust. Behind this was a conservative analysis of society, of the traditionary residues that accompanied rapid transformations and did not neatly fall into systems. This would preoccupy the first generations of Scots social anthropologists: J. F. MacLennan (1827–81) in theories of exogamy; Andrew Lang (1844–1912) and William Alexander Clouston (1843–96) in reinterpretation of custom and folk-myth. There was, accompanying this, an increasing concern about how socialisation would change with the extensions of urban life into societies whose traditional patterns ebbed with the extension of railways, the Royal Mail, public

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education through the Board Schools after 1872, and medical and social welfare services, including the fostering of children – advanced for the time – under the superintendence of local relieving officers (Harvie 2003). There was about this a proto-Heisenberg element: of the researcher being changed by his research, evidenced in the adventures of the vast and varying compendium of James George Frazer’s Golden Bough after 1888, and the orbits around it of so many of the moderns, starting with R. L. Stevenson. Influenced both by Carlyle and by the ultra-Carlyleian figure of George Meredith, he was the one Scottish fictionalist whose universalism weighed in at the level of the mid-Victorians, yet was also the analyst of the ambiguities of Carlyle’s ostensible ‘muscular realism’ and the only one of the Victorians to explore the complex rational-political-erotic world of European politics depicted by Stendhal, at the other end of the scale of bourgeois accumulation probed by Scott. One aspect of this was the seduction of philological and psychological studies in Scotland by folklore and anthropology. As early as the 1850s the strength of the historical element is demonstrable, with a series of archaeological, historical and cultural breakthroughs paralleling Darwin and greatly extending notions about Scotland’s inhabited past, backed up by the organisation, among well-doing local amateurs, of literary and historical clubs and societies (Harvie 1990). The Bostonian Francis Child’s extension of philology into folk-song – following the example of the Brothers Grimm – would in the 1860s catalogue the central elements of the ballad tradition, and Child’s efforts were paralleled by research on both the written and the oral past which established its significance in the evolution of the Scots ideas of Gemeinschaft – previously ossified as antiquarianism, ingested from the abstract pasts of Enlightenment ‘conjectural history’, or reacting to the progress of continental Marxism (Harvie 2008: 120–3). In England this movement tended to have a strong empirical neo-Darwinist thrust; in Scotland it was qualified by the impact of a revived parochial idea championed by Thomas Chalmers as the ‘Godly Commonwealth’, and backed by much of the national intelligentsia. Over-investment in churches would be compensated for by active and comprehensive parish organisation in the 1870s, supplemented by the Board Schools, local weekly papers, local publishers of fiction and history, endowed libraries, and after the 1880s the huge donations of Andrew Carnegie. In the 1890s it was further strengthened by the most energetic of Carnegie’s protégés, Patrick Geddes – notably in Palestine and India – as a social statistician, philosopher and pedagogue. His Cities in History (1913) derived its central ‘palaeotechnic’ concept from Carlyle as much as from the more obvious Darwin: the psychic power of the mechanical onslaught. During the 1890s Geddes parted from the Anglocentric bureaucracy of Frederic Harrison’s Positivists to present a regionalism which was also a learning process, and a multi-media one at that, depending on architecture and drama rather than his own clotted prose. Geddes’s ‘Masque of Civilisation’ was the logical successor to Carlyle’s massdrama, ‘carnival as eucharist’ invocations, with their Shakespearian scope. Thus Carlyle, far from being the dark philosopher of ‘the work ethic’, really anticipates

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the vitalising options of Pat Kane’s Play Ethic (2004) in our own day. What we would now call the ‘database’ for this came in first in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1888). This, under its editor William Robertson Smith, drew on the learning of the now-laicised universities, the historical clubs, and the urban autodidacts and enthusiasts. It gained another ‘literary machine’ in the publishing empire of the Rev. Sir William Robertson Nicoll (1851–1923), Sir Sandy Hammerton (1871–1949) and the cheap press: Harmsworth’s Popular Educator, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia (1903, etc.). This homogenised much of Carlyle’s personal pedagogy, aided by cheap publication of his basic texts and an ‘improving’ journalism using advertising to secure wide circulation, and consciously catering for the first generation to undergo state education after 1871–2. John Buchan christened the Nicoll-like press baron in his accomplished Peacockian comedy Castle Gay (1932) – set in the Scotland of MacDiarmid’s renaissance and in the Balkan ‘succession state’ of Evllonia – ‘Thomas Carlyle Craw’. The ‘second enlightenment’ was consciously international, but was borne as much by commercialism and civics as by aristocratic patronage. A key breakthrough – and a cause rather than simply an example – began as religious, then was transformed into something aggressively secular; in 1889 Oxford University Press’s new edition of the Bible used a very thin but robust and opaque paper which could take small but readable and well-laid out type. This rapidly migrated to commercial publication, notably by Scots entrepreneurs such as Glasgow’s Collins and Edinburgh’s Nelson’s. The eleventh edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the last to be edited from Britain, was made available to the lower middle classes, in the UK and in the Empire and the USA, via cheap lightweight A5 editions designed for despatch by post, and inclusion in the Sears Roebuck catalogue. This is one example of the way in which the Scots’ petty bourgeois energy was posited against establishment pessimism – as opposed to the racial gloom of Charles Henry Pearson’s perceptive National Life and Character (1893). Out of the divisions and rigidities of the industrial order Carlyle had, in Chartism (1839), proposed the Sanspotato liberated ‘with the immensities within him of the Autocrat of all the Russias’ (Carlyle 1840: 25). This was not lost on the first generation of socialists, tutored by equally idiosyncratic stylists such as Jim Connell, the former Fenian who wrote ‘The Red Flag’, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Edward Carpenter and James Keir Hardie, in their Clarion Clubs and Ruskin Societies, Social Democrat Federation, and Independent Labour Party branches. There is a difference in popular culture of the ‘gai savoir’ sort experienced by the young Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid from the deferential world of the metropolitan best-seller guyed by H. G. Wells in Kipps, and more savagely by Saki and Roy Horniman, Charles Garvice, William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim. John Buchan at Nelson’s, editing the Scottish Review, was conscious of it; this was something busy and exfoliating, remote from the paralysed frustrations of H. G. Wells and his southern contemporaries (Donnachie et al. 1988). This can also be traced in the reactions of Edwardian

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Scots to the metropolitan challenge, which created its own near-schizoid categories, echoing the dandy-versus-drudge confrontation of Sartor, and extended in a way unanticipated by Carlyle in its application to children’s literature in the first period that accepted them as juvenile citizens rather than ‘stepping heavenwards’. Here Francis Jeffrey’s notion of Scotland as a land of youth synchronised with the productions of Stevenson and later Kipling and Barrie, the energetic propagandism of Robertson Nicoll, the impact of the first child-centred educationalists, Simon Somerville Laurie, followed by Mary MacArthur and A. S. Neill. Play and ritual, literally Jungian, countered the sexual reductionism of Freud. The village community of the Kailyard was protective of the local Gemeinschaft: a world where children had conscious roles literally to play, as in the paintings of William MacTaggart or E. A. Hornel. Anthropomorphic animals duly appeared in J. M. Barrie and Kenneth Grahame, while in Stevenson’s most popular novels, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, the narrators were scarcely older than children (see Croall 1983). The résumé of this, reflecting and interpreting the new and unpredictable world of secular mass-culture, was itself Carlyleian, as the pathway into it was biographical. Leslie Stephen’s labours on the Dictionary of National Biography, commenced in the year of Carlyle’s death, lasted until 1891, with the first volume appearing in 1885. Research specialisations were accessed biographically: through Stephen’s English Men of Letters of the Eighteenth Century (a series written between the 1870s and the 1900s), Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers and Industrial Biography (1861), and later on – after the Dictionary of National Biography had poured out its documentation after 1881 – projects like the forty-two volumes of Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier’s Famous Scots (beginning, naturally, with Thomas Carlyle by Hector MacPherson, founder in 1900 of the Young Scots). Carlyle can also be seen as a factor in the receptivity of the UK readership both to Freud, significant after F. W. H. Myers’s first discussions of hypnosis in Freudian praxis in 1893, and to eugenics, a factor in the theory of elites after Francis Galton wrote his Hereditary Genius in 1869 and Natural Inheritance in 1889 (Myers 1893). In the time of Sartor the disturbing milieu had been that of receding religious order; now it was the sheer variety and complexity of the worlds on offer – factual, sensual, psychic. Both Herbert Spencer and George Meredith believed in an enhanced type of evolutionary intellect ‘that would sense the winds of March before they did blow’ (Milner 1928). Here Carlyle’s world, carnivalesque as well as didactic, not only retained its relevance, but also advanced it: not primarily in book form, but dictionary-wise in brief lives and sayings and apothegms. This publishing change, as influential as the reviews had been in Carlyle’s youth, was spread in Scotland by Andrew Carnegie’s library-building programme, started in 1879 in Dunfermline, which brought grand public libraries to fifty-six local authorities, and was supplemented by the thread-spinner James P. Coats’s donation of 4000 libraries of specifically non-religious works to schools in 1903–12 (see Crawford 1987; Holmes 1910; Holmes, Coats’s Library Inspector, was a former Irvingite, later a Liberal MP and the grandfather of Tony Benn).

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There was something in common with the pabulum of the popular press (Sir George Newnes’s Tit-Bits dates from the year of Carlyle’s death), the musichall comedian and, in due course, the film star. There is overt thematic/satiric continuity between Carlyle’s ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829), Dickens’s Hard Times for these Times (1854) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The miners that D. H. Lawrence imagined in 1926, feasting on the tales of such a pointilliste culture, stepping out as dancers in tight red breeches, are somewhere between Marx, Frazer and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, who took London by storm in 1911. They would have made equal sense to Carlyle and Pat Kane. In 1896 Bernard Shaw quoted Carlyle inaccurately but effectively as he challenged Ellen Terry: As Carlyle said to the emigrant ‘here and now, or nowhere and never, is thy America’; so I say to you ‘here (at Fitzroy Square) and now is thy Shakspere.’ (Shaw 1965: 642–6) (Shaw was misattributing a quote from Sartor Resartus, Ch IX.) Carlyle’s proposition would be tried out in the circumstances of 1914–21, when Frederick’s successor Wilhelm II and ‘the superfinest Lord Lieutenant’ – Sir John French in Dublin Castle (whose sister was the socialist and feminist Sinn Feiner Madame Florence Despard) – would go down, both to the Captains of Industry, and for that matter to the Sanspotatoes themselves.

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CHAPTER 6 Literary Affinities and the Postcolonial in Stevenson and Conrad

Literary Affinities and the Postcolonial in Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad Linda Dryden, Edinburgh Napier University

The foremost publisher in Britain of colonial literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and many wellknown authors, including Joseph Conrad, were pleased to be numbered among its contributors. Yet there is a notable exception to Blackwood’s lists among Scottish writers: Robert Louis Stevenson, who became famous as the author of Treasure Island (1883) and Jekyll and Hyde (1886). Despite these popular publishing successes, some of Stevenson’s most innovative and challenging literature takes place in the American colonies or in the Pacific islands, prime material for the likes of Blackwood’s. Stevenson had tried to place Weir of Hermiston (1896) with Maga in 1892 on the grounds that the ‘very Scotchness of the thing’ might appeal to Blackwood and its ‘queerness might be stomached’, but Blackwood, always wary of expensive deals, baulked at the £2,000 serial rights requested (Ferguson and Waingrove 1956: 314). In fact, Stevenson may have been better advised to have tried placing The Beach of Falesá (1892) with Maga; this story, along with The Ebb-Tide (1894), reveals Stevenson as a writer of colonial fiction, and indeed as one who preceded Conrad in authoring fictions that challenge assumptions of European superiority in the colonial encounter. In The Beach of Falesá we find what Annie Coombes has described as ‘the more ambiguous and strategic exchanges in the dialogue between colonizer and colonized’. At the end of that story Coombes’ notion of ‘the possibility of an interactive and mutually transformative relationship’ finds expression in the dilemma facing the narrator, Wiltshire, over his wife, Uma, and their children (Coombes 1994: 6). Musing on the future for himself and his family, Wiltshire decides to stay in the South Pacific for the sake of his daughters. As such, the idea that a relationship can transform both the coloniser and the colonised aptly describes the encounter between Europeans and the colonised subject because it allows for positive, negative and ambiguous outcomes in that encounter. For Wiltshire and Uma the result is a compromised, but not necessarily unhappy union; in Conrad’s tales of imperial and colonial encounters, despite their ambiguities, the transformative outcome is almost inevitably negative on both the European and the native subject, the most obvious example being the fate of Kurtz and the

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Africans he brutalises in that most disturbing of imperial tales, Heart of Darkness (1899). Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, both Stevenson and Conrad were reflecting on the imperial experience and exposing its failures. Their tales of imperial misadventures, and of dark deeds perpetrated by Europeans in the empire, often anticipate current postcolonial perspectives. Postcolonial readings in turn challenge the imperial narrative’s tendency to mythologise the imperial encounter as that between representatives of a progressive industrial society and a primitive civilisation. In this vein, both Stevenson and Conrad refused to perpetuate the imperial romance myth of the nobility and rectitude of the European imperial adventurer, opting instead to expose the profiteering and brutality that they had both witnessed in their own travels. Douglas Mack, for instance, argues that ‘Stevenson’s pro-Polynesian instincts are real and admirable.’ Indeed Mack sees Stevenson as even more radical than Conrad in his attitude towards native peoples: Arguably, Stevenson not only anticipates aspects of Conrad’s critique of imperialism in The Beach of Falesá, but he actually goes beyond Heart of Darkness in some ways, not least in his openness to the possibility that there was a real value in the pre-Imperial cultures of peoples that the European Empires tend to dismiss as ‘savages.’ (Mack 2006: 185) Mack’s comments seem to reflect what Edward Said felt about Conrad’s inability to see that the ‘non-European “darkness” was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence, and not, as Conrad reductively says, to re-establish the darkness’ (Said 1993: 33). Said argues that, as a man of his time, Conrad was ‘tragically’ limited in that he could not see beyond imperialism, despite his very critique of it (Said 1993: 34). Perhaps, but by the very fact of questioning imperialism, and its emissaries, both Stevenson and Conrad made a break with the Victorian literary tradition of imperial narratives, and thus anticipated the later postcolonial perspectives on imperial fiction. Just one year separates Stevenson’s death from the publication of Conrad’s first novel, making them near-contemporaries, or at least the inheritors of a shared literary tradition. In what follows, therefore, Stevenson and Conrad are discussed as writers whose imperial fictions voiced attitudes towards adventure and encounters that are at odds with much of the literature of empire that went before and with the romance and adventure genre of the likes of Rider Haggard. This essay will thus argue that Stevenson should be regarded as an imperial sceptic whose fictions prepared the way for the bleak vision of empire that Conrad espoused. For, as Elleke Boehmer states, although he was a contemporary of Kipling, ‘Conrad temperamentally belonged to a later historical moment – a moment in which colonial possession had become more problematic, raising spectres of

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European cultural failure’ (Boehmer 1995: 61). This, too, describes Stevenson’s perception of imperial adventure in works like The Ebb-Tide. It has increasingly become a commonplace among Conrad scholars to recognise the influence of Stevenson, and in some cases even to claim a direct line of literary descent (see Dryden et al. 2009: 2 for more discussion of the proximity of the two in terms of mutual friendships). Of course, Conrad famously disparaged Stevenson’s work and tried to distance himself from any suggestion of influence, declaring to J. B. Pinker on 8 January 1902: ‘I am no sort of airy R. L. Stevenson who considered his art a prostitute and the artist no better than one’ (Karl 1979: 462). But this attempt at distance did not prevent contemporary reviewers, like the one in the Speaker in 1903, from drawing close comparisons: ‘There are times in reading his [Conrad’s] work when we think that Stevenson with new experiences has taken up his work when it broke off in his noble fragment Weir of Hermiston’ (Karl 1979: 546). Indeed, just at the moment that Stevenson was writing this unfinished novel, Conrad was engaged with that first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895). For all his bluster about Stevenson, there can be little doubt that such tales of imperial misadventures as The Ebb-Tide and The Beach at Falesá helped to break the new ground on which the seeds of Conrad’s imperial scepticism were sown. Ultimately Conrad escaped the label of anti-imperialist that would have debarred him from the pages of Blackwood’s because his notoriously slippery narrative techniques and style did not encourage such a reading; rather, early readers assumed that what he had written in such tales as Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands (1896) were either faulty imperial romances or stories somewhat after Kipling. One reviewer in the Spectator even went so far as to compare An Outcast of the Islands unfavourably with Stevenson, suggesting that Conrad could become ‘the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago’, and then likening the novel to a Stevenson story ‘grown miraculously long and miraculously tedious’ (Sherry 1973: 61). Conrad raged against such comparisons, but a close look at their imperial narratives reveals that the two writers indeed inhabited similar literary terrain. When positioned within the parameters of a postcolonial analysis, these two authors emerge as pivotal in the historic shift from adventure and romance towards the imperial scepticism that occurred in the late nineteenth century (see White 1993 and Dryden 2000 for more discussion). While both writers were aware of the romance tradition against which their imperial tales were written, both evoked this form for their subversive projects, and both were writing from experience of the tropical lands in which their narratives take place. Unlike Rider Haggard, who wrote imperial romance that was airbrushed of all the mishandling and destruction brought about by imperial invasion, or G. A. Henty, who wrote sanitised versions of events in India, the Pacific and South America as supposedly factual, correct and instructive historical accounts laced with fictive adventure and romance narratives, Stevenson and Conrad, in varying degrees, eschewed such literary entertainment and propaganda. Instead, both attempted to show their readers the white man’s experience in the annexed lands.

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Boehmer sees a strong connection between the two authors, arguing that Conrad ‘was drawn to Stevenson’s treatment of colonial themes’: ‘In his own writing, too, Conrad would develop the subjects of colonial bad faith and fear of regression’ (Boehmer 1995: 46). Boehmer draws further comparisons by pointing out how Conrad ‘plays on the images and associations of South-East Asian idleness in Lord Jim’, and notes that in The Ebb-Tide ‘the easy life on the far colonial periphery has become the refuge of demoralised Europeans’ (Boehmer 1995: 70). The same themes are present in an earlier work of Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness, and a comparison between that work and The Ebb-Tide reveals the common imperial themes that the two authors explored. THE EBB-TIDE: IMPERIAL MISADVENTURE The Ebb-Tide is a tale of imperial misadventure in which three ne’er-do-wells stumble upon a self-aggrandising imperial despot on a remote Pacific island. It precedes, by one year, Almayer’s Folly, itself a tale of imperial dreams turned sour. The Eastern locations of these stories had been the traditional settings for tales of romance and adventure like Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857), with the empire as the playground where young British boys reach maturity through engaging in escapades that prove their worth as imperial heroes and all round ‘jolly good sorts’. Ballantyne, Henty and W. H. G. Kingston established a formula for this kind of literature that sold in its thousands. H. Rider Haggard followed suit with a more grown-up version of the imperial adventure, shifting the location to Africa and adding in a degree of macho sexuality that made his books appealing to a wider audience, but essentially the formula remained the same, only substituting men for boys. In romance and adventure the imperial landscapes are exotic, full of colourful promise and offering the chance for escapism and good clean adventure that never threatens the essential moral and racial ‘wholeness’ of the heroes. These are fantasy lands where dreams come true and British moral, political and physical superiority is proven against a seemingly primitive and morally inferior native race. It is a type of fiction that fits with Edward Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’. Said comments on how what the European said about the Orient could only reveal that he ‘was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric’ (Said 1991: 204). Thus, Ballantyne, a Scot, knew little of the Polynesia he wrote about and relied on what turned out to be misinformation from others, leading him to assume that the liquid inside a coconut tasted like lemonade (see Ballantyne 1893: 12–13). Later, in Lord of the Flies (1954), William Golding debunked Ballantyne’s vision of unalloyed adventure and unassailable moral fibre, turning his protagonists, Jack, Ralph and Piggy, into fallible alter egos of Ballantyne’s Jack, Ralph and Peterkin. In the postcolonial, post-apocalyptic atmosphere of Golding’s novel, human nature, stripped of the fetters of a society that controls and polices behaviour, is revealed as innately savage and barbarous. Golding’s vision of degenerative English children carries disturbing echoes of

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the representations of native peoples in the fiction of empire, and thus his vision embraces all of humanity. In the end, in an echo of Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, Ralph weeps for the ‘end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart’ (Golding 1959: 202). Rider Haggard’s fiction also played fast and loose with the reality of empire and its peoples, presenting his heroes Quatermain, Curtis and Good, in novels like King Solomon’s Mines (1885), as full-blooded, upright Anglo-Saxon gentlemen who could command the loyalty of ‘good natives’, but would slay thousands of insurgent Africans if they felt they had just cause. Of course, Haggard knew better, and probably had more respect for Africans and their culture than most of his generation, having spent years as a civil servant and journalist in South Africa. It is a curious irony that Haggard wrote King Solomon’s Mines in response to his brother’s challenge to ‘write anything half as good as Treasure Island’, and proceeded to outstrip the sales of Stevenson’s novel and become a best-selling author in his own right (Keating 1991: 16–18). The irony lies in the fact that Treasure Island is no gung-ho adventure story, but rather a complex narrative of loyalty and betrayal, with a charismatic villain who escapes retribution in the end. An even more curious irony is the fact that this novel propelled Haggard into a career as a popular writer of imperial romance, the very genre against which Stevenson was writing in his imperial tales. With The Ebb-Tide, as with The Beach of Falesá, Stevenson broke with the romance and adventure tradition, presenting the empire as the stage on which human vanities, self-deceptions and greed are acted out. The novel’s opening immediately signals that it will be dealing with very different material from the traditional novel of empire: Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races, and from almost every grade of society, carry activity and disseminate disease. Some prosper, some vegetate . . . and there are still others, less pliable, less capable, less fortunate, perhaps less base, who continue, even in these isles of plenty, to lack bread. At the far end of the town of Papeete, three such men were seated on the beach under a purao-tree. (Ebb-Tide 7) Herrick, Davis and Huish are the dregs of society, wasters stranded in what to them is a backwater of empire. Of the three it is Herrick who is the most likely hero, but even he is haunted by a past which is frequently alluded to, but never detailed. As a compromised hero, Herrick cannot provide the moral compass to the novel that readers of Victorian fiction expected. Anticipating the modernist tales of Conrad, in which heroes are deeply flawed, self-deceiving individuals whose betrayals and self-aggrandising tendencies alienate them from their environments, Stevenson presents his fin de siècle readership with a trio of adventurers who demonstrate the intrinsic fallibilities of the modernist protagonist. As a Scot travelling in the empire, Stevenson was alert to any parallels with

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the experiences of his compatriots back home. Writing about missionary work in Oceania, Michael Fry comments that the Scots ‘often felt aware, like Livingstone in Africa, of their own nation’s place at the edge of European civilisation where survival was a struggle’, and he notes how the ‘Highland analogy impressed [Stevenson] most’ (Fry 2002: 232). Stevenson keenly felt the history of Highland Scotland as a territory invaded and subjugated by an alien power. It is a national history he shares with Conrad, the Pole whose family were forcibly exiled from their native land by the Russian authorities. As natives of invaded territories, and later as exiles and wanderers, both Stevenson and Conrad were perhaps better placed than many writers in the late nineteenth century to sympathise with subjugated peoples, and thus to challenge the assumptions of the fiction of empire. They shared, too, a disdain for the Cockney that comes through in Stevenson’s portrayal of the dissolute Huish in The Ebb-Tide. Fry notes how, in In the South Seas, Stevenson recalls ‘how he had played on a mutual sense of kinship to get on at once with a group of tribesmen strange to him, [and had] added that “the presence of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole party to walk in clouds of darkness” ’ (Fry 2002: 232). Andrea White sees Huish as the ‘despicable cockney forerunner of Donkin’, noting that this type of unsavoury character had never before been allowed to enter into imperial narratives of upstanding European adventurers: Rather than promulgating stereotypes of the white man in the tropics, Stevenson wanted to correct them, especially since he could see for himself they no longer existed, if indeed they ever did. Another ‘romancer’ turned ‘realist,’ Stevenson meant to disabuse a misinformed home audience through his ‘grimly realistic’ ‘tough yarns’. (White 1993: 197) Toughness, grimness, reality: these are not terms we would normally associate with Stevenson. More often his tales are comic (The Dynamiter (1885)), playful (New Arabian Nights (1882)), adventurous (Treasure Island) or Gothic (Jekyll and Hyde). In Samoa, however, towards the end of the century, Stevenson, like the French realists before him and the English naturalists who were to come, saw a different reality to that offered by the traditional Victorian realist novel. He cast a cold eye over the imperial endeavour and presented his readers with a very different imperial reality than the one to which they were used. With The Ebb-Tide and The Beach at Falesá Stevenson made a new departure for the literature of empire, stripping away the propagandist whitewash to reveal some of the more unpleasant realities beneath the myth; the dregs of European society who washed up on the shores of the far-flung empire were as debauched and immoral in the East as they were in the West, perhaps even more so. Released from the constraints of a policed and regulated European civilisation, the white man in the empire finds himself reliant upon the assumed rigour of his own inner moral self, and Conrad would demonstrate all too clearly what

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that means for a character like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. But some years earlier in these stories, Stevenson had begun to expose the fundamental flaws in the perception of white superiority over the native of empire. His white adventurers manqué are as bloodthirsty and morally bereft as the fictional ‘native’ villain of imperial romance. When Davis and Huish plot to murder Attwater, they are convinced of their ability to do so because of their isolation from a retributive European society that would bring the weight of the law to bear. Even stealing the Farallone causes no pangs of conscience or great fear of discovery because they are indeed far away and far alone from the reach of justice and retribution. Attwater, like the empire in which he plies his pearl trade, is seen as fair game for Herrick, Huish and Davis; the imperial invasion set the example by pillaging the wealth of the Far East for the benefit of the West. Attwater follows this imperial example by exploiting Polynesian native pearl fishers, and the trio of desperadoes in their turn attempt to relieve him of his plunder. Huish’s murderous intent is all the more egregious when one considers that he intends to fling a highly corrosive acid into his victim’s face. That it is the murderous Huish himself who ends up as the recipient of the acid and then is summarily dispatched with a bullet is hardly poetic justice. Rather, Huish’s death at the hands of Attwater is but a dark deed by another man whose Western notion of superior morality has been badly compromised by his actions as an agent of imperialism. Attwater’s religious zeal makes him no better than the men who seek his death and in the end Davis’s decision to remain on the island as his disciple is just another example of the moral decline of the imperialist in the tropics. Lacking any moral fibre, Davis surrenders himself body and soul to the deranged zealot Attwater and renounces the family that had seemed to offer some redemption to this lost and sorry wanderer. Shocked at the retribution meted out by Attwater, Davis clutches at his ‘redeemer’s’ corrupt and merciless religion like a cripple grasps a crutch. For all his talk of being folded into the arms of the Lord, Davis is a lost and broken man, as he says himself: ‘ “I don’t seem someways rightly myself since . . .” ’ (Ebb-Tide 152) – since, of course, Attwater dispatched Huish. In the end, Stevenson implies, Davis has had a nervous breakdown. Of course, Huish is no hero and he meets the kind of death reserved for the villains of imperial romance; but then, The Ebb-Tide is no imperial romance, as Stevenson himself was only too aware. In his letters he reveals a degree of anxiety about the vileness of the tale, suggesting on Stevenson’s part either a lack of confidence in this literary terrain, or an exultation in extending his imagination so far into the territory of brutality. Writing to Sidney Colvin, on Tuesday 6 June 1893, he seems almost despairing about his latest offering: ‘There it is, and about as grim a tale as was ever written, and as grimy, and as hateful’ (Stevenson 1995: 91). To Edmund Gosse, 10 June 1893, he calls the tale ‘a dreadful, grimy business’ with ‘a vilely realistic dialogue’ that ‘has sown my head with grey hairs’ (Stevenson 1995: 103). Later, to Henry James on 17 June 1893, he laments:

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My dear man the grimness of that story is not to be depicted in words! There are only four characters to be sure, but they are such a troop of swine! And their behaviour is really so deeply beneath any possible standard, that on a retrospect I wonder I have been able to endure them myself until the yarn was finished. (Stevenson 1995: 107) Perhaps even more than Heart of Darkness, these comments remind us of those two Conradian imperial wasters, Kayerts and Carlier in ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1897). Stevenson has indeed wandered far from the territory of imperial romance, and in presenting us with a ‘troop of swine’ as imperial adventurers, he does more than anticipate Conrad’s imperial scepticism; he was in fact writing the same kind of fiction that Conrad was writing. Conrad’s first novel and Stevenson’s tale were probably written around the same time and in this respect they share a literary hinterland of romance and adventure fiction. Both authors jettison the assumptions of romance in favour of a fiction that denies possibilities for heroism in the empire. That they foreground instead the base desires and greed that often characterised imperial endeavour is evidence of the rise of critique that was beginning to shape imperial fiction. CONRAD AND THE IMPERIAL NIGHTMARE Stevenson finds his own story ‘grim’ and ‘hateful’, populated as it is with a ‘troop of swine’. Certainly his friends Charles Baxter and Sidney Colvin were despairing of the influence of the South Seas on Stevenson’s creative capacity (Colley 2004: 54). Yet for all that, The Ebb-Tide is an extraordinary tale that helped to prepare a readership for Conrad’s tales of imperial failure. Just a year after the appearance of The Ebb-Tide, Conrad appeared on the literary scene with another story that resonates with self-delusion, betrayal and intentions of murder: Almayer’s Folly is as grim and pessimistic as The Ebb-Tide, thus emphasising the fact that Conrad was, in Boehmer’s sense, developing on Stevenson’s themes of ‘imperial bad faith and fear of regression’. A year after Almayer’s Folly, and after much self-doubt, Conrad was persuaded by Edward Garnett to ‘write another’, and the result was An Outcast of the Islands (Conrad 1992: xiv). Set some years earlier than his first novel, An Outcast of the Islands features many of the same characters, but also introduces a new character, Willems, who seems to encapsulate in one persona all of the vices that Stevenson’s trio of ne’er-do-wells exhibit between them. He is variously a drunk, a gambler, a womaniser, and a man who deludes himself into believing that wealth and an easy life are there for the taking. A degenerate chancer, Willems echoes Stevenson’s visions of white men in the South Seas, proving Boehmer’s point that, like Stevenson, Conrad ‘suspected a primitive and demoralizing Other to reside within the white’ (Boehmer 1995: 61). If Willems mirrors the three desperadoes of The Ebb-Tide, Conrad’s Captain Lingard reprises aspects of Stevenson’s Attwater. Replete with self-importance

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and having created, apparently, a fortune out of his imperial ventures, Lingard, like Attwater, craves the admiration and subservience of his fellow Europeans: in this case, Willems. The novel’s atmosphere of claustrophobia in a seedy rundown imperial backwater and Willems’s yearning for escape and a return to prosperous society remind us of Stevenson’s novella, where Herrick fantasises about returning to England on a flying carpet and landing amidst ‘ “the statues in the square, and St. Martins-in-the-Fields, and the bobbies, and the sparrows, and the hacks; and I can’t tell you what I felt like” ’ (Ebb-Tide 16). Such escape, of course, is the stuff of imperial romance. Stevenson and Conrad subvert their protagonists’ daydreams of a return home, stressing instead their situation as exiles and outcasts in an empire that, unlike earlier fictionalised imperial locations, neither welcomes their presence nor provides them with the means of escape in the form of imperial treasure. Stevenson’s subversion of the good, clean fun in exotic landscapes of the imperial romance signals a new trajectory for imperial fiction that continued with Conrad’s tales of dissolute Europeans stranded in imperial outposts or brutalising native peoples under the guise of progressive paternalism. From a historical distance it is clear that the two authors were moving in the same direction: away from romance and inexorably towards modernism. The relationship between literary modernism and postcoloniality becomes clear in this coinciding of determinations to challenge what has gone before and to respond to the fluctuating conditions of a modern world. In the case of modernism, this means a rejection of the assumed ‘truths’ of the Victorian novel in favour of the muddier waters of scepticism and ruptured narrative sequence, most evident in Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), but also clearly detectable in Heart of Darkness. For postcolonialism this means revising and challenging the assumptions of previous imperial narratives and offering a reading that privileges the previously marginalised native subject. Modernism and postcolonialism meet in Stevenson and Conrad. An Outcast of the Islands and its companion novel, Almayer’s Folly, were written in a fin de siècle atmosphere of anxiety about the empire and the behaviour of those Europeans who chose to dwell there (cf. Dryden 2000: 23–32). Conrad’s break with the imperial romance tradition – indeed, his actual subversion of the genre – finds clear expression in his earliest work, but with Heart of Darkness his modernist sensibilities become devastatingly apparent as they coincide with his critique of imperialism. First published in Blackwood’s in 1899 under the title The Heart of Darkness,1 Conrad’s most famous novel turns imperial fantasy into imperial nightmare. If his first two novels echoed Stevenson’s scepticism, Heart of Darkness may even owe some debt to the earlier writer. Established as deranged despots at the heart of an imperial backwater, Attwater and Kurtz share a literary and ideological terrain. That they are both regarded with awe and terror by their subjects and by the Europeans who penetrate their ‘empires‘ further binds the two in terms of the literary imagination. What both Stevenson and Conrad expose in their novels of imperial-adventure-gone-wrong are the fatal fault-lines that undermine the imperial project. Exposing the failure of heroic adventure in the imperial lands,

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both authors reveal how the imperial project is threatened by the fallibility of its envoys. Whether it is Attwater’s religious imperative or Kurtz’s imperial zeal, the brutality of these individuals, and their failure to live up to the imperial ideal of European superiority cause the imperial project to tremble and quake, threatening ultimately to collapse in ignominious failure. Kurtz’s report for the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs outlines his intent to ‘perform a power for good practically unbounded’, and ends with the terrible exhortation to ‘exterminate all the brutes’ (Conrad 1998: 50–1). Without the restraining influence of a regulated European social order, both Attwater and Kurtz convert good intentions into tyrannical terror and imperial criminality. Furthermore, both exploit the local population in their pursuit of imperial plunder: in Attwater’s case, pearls; in Kurtz’s, ivory. The treasure that in the imperial fiction of Haggard signifies the impetus for adventure and romance within a fantastical geography becomes in the hands of Stevenson and Conrad the emblem of corruption and depravity within a very authentic imperial locality. As such, their fictions are straining towards a postcolonial viewpoint in which some of the assumptions of the imperial project are revealed as dangerously idealistic and morally indefensible. Cannibals in the imperial romance from Ballantyne through Henty to Rider Haggard had been viewed as depraved inhuman entities with no redeeming qualities. Stevenson and Conrad probe this stereotype to reveal more complex motivations at play, and an unnerving recognition that the Europeans may be as morally compromised as the cannibal. On the Farallone Herrick develops an affection for his Polynesian crewman, Sally Day, who speaks in the pidgin English of the ‘native’ stereotype – ‘ “You gootch man” ’ – and was ‘the child of cannibals, in all likelihood a cannibal himself’ (Ebb-Tide 57). Like Sally Day, the cannibal crew of Marlow’s steamer are more comic than threatening, as seen in this exchange between Marlow and a cannibal crew member: ‘Aha!’ I said, just for good fellowship’s sake. ‘Catch ’im,’ he snapped with a bloodshot widening of his eyes and a flash of sharp teeth—‘catch ’im. Give ’im to us.’ ‘To you, eh?’ I asked; ‘what would you do with them?’ ‘Eat ’im!’ he said curtly, and leaning his elbow on the rail looked out into the fog in a dignified and profoundly pensive attitude. (Conrad 1998: 42) Marlow realises that his starving cannibal crew have exercised a surprising degree of restraint in not turning on their white masters and eating them. Indeed, Marlow comes to admire them and to deplore the ‘pilgrims’ who accompany him on the upriver journey (Conrad 1998: 43). In similar vein, Herrick compares his white companions unfavourably with the ‘native’ crew: ‘It was thus a cutting reproof to compare the islanders and the whites aboard the Farallone’ (Ebb-Tide 57). In this way both writers challenge traditional perceptions of the moral superiority of Europeans in the empire by revealing them to be depraved and barbaric.

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One further example that links The Ebb-Tide and Heart of Darkness demonstrates how Conrad’s imperial imagination develops on that of Stevenson. On the pier of Attwater’s island stands a symbolic bleached figurehead. In its ‘leprous whiteness’ the figurehead foreshadows the black, shrunken heads on poles outside of Kurtz’s house, linking both men with bizarre and deathly artefacts. These uncanny, terrible symbols of corrupt power are suggestive of the deranged imaginations of the white men who erected them. In the traditional imperial imagination only the ‘natives’ of empire employ such fetishes, as symbols of power and warning to invaders. Stevenson and Conrad have reversed these tropes and reveal through their fetishes the fatal weaknesses of their imperial heroes manqués. With The Ebb-Tide Stevenson begins to dismantle some of the myths perpetrated by the imperial romance. Conrad follows the same trajectory and sends the whole process into reverse, so that in the final analysis the brutality meted out by the Europeans in the Congo reveals them to be as savage and unprincipled as they imagine the ‘natives’ to be. Under Conrad’s penetrating scrutiny the imperial project in the Congo is revealed as corrupt, depraved and doomed to failure. CONCLUSION The genre of imperial romance provided the reader at home with the ‘energising myth’ to go out and conquer the new and exotic lands of the empire (Green 1980: 3). It also offered escapism in the form of a fantasy about the possibilities for heroism and adventure, coupled with an unassailable belief in the soundness of British moral fibre and thus in the soundness of the imperial project. By the end of the century, many had come to question those certainties and, with The Ebb-Tide, Stevenson began the process of giving voice to the doubts and fears that were rising to the surface of the national consciousness. Yet he was, understandably, nervous about the reception of his tale, as he confessed to his mother in a letter of 21 May 1893: I believe you will think [The Ebb-Tide] vile; though it does end in a conversion. It is a tale that will make you be ready to throw up; horror upon horror’s head accumulated; barratry, drunkenness, vitriol, are the three golden strands that hold it together; and out of the four characters, three are mere wolves and foxes. Yet I think it has a certain merit, too; if the public will accept so gross a business, of which I am doubtful. (Stevenson 1995: 79) Anticipating Kurtz’s final words, Stevenson’s sense of his novel as piling ‘horror upon horror’s head’ seems more akin to a Gothic sensibility than that of empire, or perhaps it is an example of what Benita Parry, talking about Heart of Darkness, calls the ‘colonial Gothic’ (Parry 2004c: 138). In a new departure for imperial fiction, Stevenson begins the process of revealing the unpalatable

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truths behind the bluff façade of the imperial project, and this is a process that continued with Conrad. Stevenson and Conrad were the products of a Europe that had perpetuated these myths of empire; they shared a literary heritage and a perspective, and both chose to confront that heritage and present new perspectives on the adventure of imperialism. As Parry observes of Heart of Darkness: [B]ecause the novel inscribes and transcends the ideological determination of the milieu within which it was written; because it alienates imperialism’s conceit by reconfiguring the actuality physically and psychically in its exorbitant violence and egregious ethical violations; because it produces a negative knowledge of a real world, it seems appropriate to describe Conrad, in words borrowed from Walter Benjamin when writing about Baudelaire, as a ‘secret agent, and agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule.’ (Parry 2004c: 139) Both Stevenson and Conrad understood the need for a fresh approach to the fiction of empire, one that did not gloss over the atrocities and that did not glorify what was in fact, for the most part, an inglorious episode in European history. Stevenson had commenced the task of unravelling the misconceptions about empire while Conrad was simultaneously working on the same project. They were part of a more sceptical, and perhaps a more honest generation of writers who wanted to bring the realities of what occurred in those far-off lands vividly and realistically home to their readers. NOTE 1. A feature that earned it – not without some controversy – a prominent place in The List’s 100 Best Scottish Books (see Maley 2005; my emphasis).

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CHAPTER 7 Buchan and Harris: Myth and Counter-Myth, Exploration and Empire

John Buchan and Wilson Harris: Myth and CounterMyth, Exploration and Empire David Punter, University of Bristol

I should begin this chapter by saying what it is not. It is not an attempt at a comparison of two œuvres; both John Buchan and Wilson Harris are prolific authors, and to try to draw together all the filaments of connection between them would be a much larger task than is possible here.1 Instead, I want to say something specifically about Buchan’s Prester John (1910) and Harris’s The Palace of the Peacock (1960): two texts written fifty years apart, set in different continents and reflecting wildly different attitudes to empire and exploration. Among the themes I touch on are definitions of heroism; accounts of the journey; approaches to the exotic; the figure of the adventurer; and the locations of empire. Married to a Scot, and on record as saying that a certain Scottish morality and social vision was near the heart of the imperial enterprise, Harris may be seen as inflecting these themes with a distinctive cadence. Prester John is perhaps too well known a text to need much by way of introduction; and yet, perhaps not. It was certainly enormously popular amongst previous generations where, alongside Rider Haggard’s novels, it was regarded as the peak of a quite specific sub-genre in which, although it may look to us now like the narrative of empire, such concerns were largely hidden behind the concept of the boys’ adventure story, in which, notably, braving the dangers of wild beasts and the dangers of incomprehensible ‘natives’ were regarded as very much one and the same. Briefly, the narrator, David Crawfurd, having encountered a mysterious black minister called John Laputa while he was a boy in Scotland, discovers him again in Africa, in Zimbabwe to be precise, this time in the guise of the charismatic leader of a potential black uprising. After many adventures Crawfurd plays the leading part in thwarting the rebellion and securing the necklace of rubies which signifies Laputa’s power by placing him in the direct heritage of the semimythical figure ‘Prester John’. This establishes both Crawfurd’s status as hero and also his fortune. The ‘story’ of The Palace of the Peacock is much harder to describe, since essential elements in it shift and change, but it does concern a river journey undertaken by the leader, known only as Donne, and his crew. The members of this crew may well already be dead. Part of the object of the journey may be a search

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for Mariella; but who or what Mariella is remains an open question. She may be a woman; or she may be a figure for the land itself. On the journey many of the crew die; or it may be that, if they are already dead, it is rather their memory, or the memory of their deeds and exploits, which dies. The nature of Donne remains unclear throughout, as indeed does the nature of each member of the crew. The novel is often referred to as ‘poetic’, but this is a highly generalised and unhelpful description. We might prefer to think of it – and of the other books which go to comprise the Guyana Quartet – as surrealist, or even as ‘magic realist’; certainly it is the latter in the limited sense that natural and supernatural elements are seamlessly interwoven. Beyond the river lies a strange land, which may be a waterfall or may be a cliff face; it is with the mystical climb up this that the story ends. Buchan, of course, was a Scot; it might be going too far to claim that the Scottish element in The Palace of the Peacock is prominent, but one of the crew, Cameron, is clearly Scottish: his role may be read as evidence of Harris’s always evasive yet strangely pressing concern with a sense of Scottishness at the heart of empire. Quite what that sense is is again unclear. In Prester John, the lines of racial division are all too starkly drawn; there are notorious passages which relate to the white man’s burden and the need for clearly demarcated lines to separate him off from the blacks. In Harris’s novel, everything is mixed; all the characters apart from Donne speak a variety of pidgin English, and it is probable – although never stated – that they are all themselves racially mixed. Their identity is further confused by the familial relationships, often hinted at but rarely confirmed, among them. This, of course, has specific relevance in the context of South America, where the racial battle lines were never clearly drawn, and to the overall nature of the Spanish and Portuguese empires (although it is the British presence in what was then British Guiana which provides part of the backdrop of the text), wherein intermarriage and racial mixing have produced, as we know, a largely mestizo population, as opposed to the apparently strict taboos which theoretically governed (even while in practice they were all too frequently broken) in the British empire (cf. Young 2001: 193–203). Symbolic of this difference is the status of the only mixed-race person to appear in Prester John, the ‘Portugoose’ Henriques, who is the principal villain of the piece. Henriques, who associates with Laputa only in order to betray him for the sake of riches, is frequently portrayed as ‘yellow’; this complex signifier combines his mixed-race status, his lack of health in sharp contrast to both the physically magnificent Laputa and the extraordinarily energetic Crawfurd, and his presumed cowardice. Between black and white, we might say, all that exists is a murky territory inhabited by the venal and the corrupt; there are times when Crawfurd is lost in admiration for Laputa, a ‘worthy’ opponent, but for those like the wretched Henriques who have crossed the fatal line there is no possibility of salvation. The threat they represent, although it is partly represented as the prospect of an alternative empire to challenge the British – Portuguese Mozambique is only next door – is also of the collapse of empire itself, the erosion of its strict boundaries and a kind of leakage of the fruits of imperial domination signified

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in Henriques’s attempts to secure the ruby necklace, the talisman of power, for himself. Yet what is interesting in Prester John is that this lust for gain is by no means confined to Henriques. Crawfurd too is affected by it; indeed, there are moments when he is entirely unsure whether his ‘daylight’ motive, to thwart the uprising, is genuinely dominant or whether he is seduced by a darker desire for the necklace itself – not for any power it might bring, because that power can only be wielded by its rightful owner, but for the sheer pecuniary value of the thing, and of the gold and diamonds which make up the carefully gathered treasure hoard with which Laputa intends to finance his rebellion. Compared with these traditional imperial goals, the purposes of the journey in The Palace of the Peacock remain obscure; most probably they are to do with the reclamation of the land and with the attendant possibility of the freeing of the people whom Harris refers to throughout as ‘the folk’, although exactly who these ‘folk’ are and indeed whether they exist at all is not clear. Indeed, it may well not be for any displaced people whose own sense of origin has been occluded by centuries of appropriation of the land. One of the starting points for comparison has to be in the notion of topography, and specifically of the map (cf. Punter 2000: 29–44). Prester John is prefaced with a map, depicting the country in which the action takes place, the route which Laputa and his men follow, and the alternative route taken by Crawfurd to foil their actions. In this sense, apparent clarity and factuality underlie the journey. Of the potential for mapping in the Guyana Quartet, on the contrary, to the novel, Harris has this to say, in his Author’s Note: A great magical web born of the music of the elements is how one may respond perhaps to a detailed map of Guyana seen rotating in space with its numerous etched rivers, numerous lines and tributaries, interior rivers, coastal rivers, the arteries of God’s spider. (Harris 1988: 7) For Crawfurd, the numerous rivers are obstacles to be crossed, sites of danger from man and beast; for Donne and his men the river is a lifeline – dangerous, certainly, but a living, breathing entity which permits movement and also presents a challenge to the spirit. Both views of the map, indeed, one can see in terms of topographies of desire, and both of them involve a penetration into the previously unknown (or misremembered). One of the key elements in Prester John is the ‘discovery’ of the vast cave in the mountains where Laputa gathers his men. This is not, of course, a discovery in the strict sense of the word, since it is already well known to the ‘natives’, but none the less a discovery in the sense which has for so long been coined by the West as it penetrates heartlands of the interior and as it reforms the shapes of the land according to Western principles – ignoring, of course, much of what goes to comprise the utility of the landscape to those who inhabit it, in the name of an apparently precise geography which both renders the landscape intelligible to foreign eyes and at the same time makes that landscape over in the service of the cartographers of empire. The terrain of Prester John is therefore con-

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stantly being measured in terms of miles and hours of travelling, whereas Harris’s terrain has no such boundaries or parameters, being measured instead only by the events which occur, or which perhaps repeat themselves as the crew travel through spaces which they appear to have always, in some sense, already known, and by a count of days which increasingly bears a relation to such mystical geographies as the stations of the cross, or even of the days of biblical creation. The enigmatic name of Donne reverberates throughout The Palace of the Peacock. Why is Donne called Donne? The third ‘book’ of the novel, ‘The Second Death’, opens with an epigraph from John Donne: ‘I tune the instrument here at the door, / And what I must do then, think here before’ (Harris 1988: 59).2 Although this fits well with the constant musical imagery of the text and also with the sense of haunting and haunted repetition which lies behind it, with the notion that in some sense the landscape is constantly singing its own song for those who have ears to hear, the wider implications surely have to do more with the overall sense of exploration which was one of the conditioning features of metaphysical poetry. One thinks of Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’ (c. 1653), which is coloured by a belief that the whole vast territory of the Caribbean has been established in order to provide luxury for the foreigner – and with the exhilaration of the notion that there are yet more ‘new worlds’ waiting to be ‘discovered’ (cf. Palgrave 1991: 155–6). One thinks also, and necessarily, of the frequent ‘remakings’ of this process of exploration through which Derek Walcott offers his own view of how a landscape can be formed and re-formed, how its lineaments can be rendered in different shapes and colours, by the artist’s palette as much as by the writer’s pen (Walcott 1992: 189–221). Donne – and again I have to say ‘perhaps’ – is in part a figure for the white invader; yet at the same time it is in him that the purpose of the mission of rediscovery is embodied. This tension between figurations of an expanded life and figurations of an already apprehended, or perhaps realised, death in the service of myths of exploration and dominance works itself out into the other crew members: ferociously active yet curiously disembodied, they inhabit the land like phantoms, like the deathless who are nevertheless constantly face to face with the regime of death. Donne is ageless; Crawfurd, on the other hand, is all too precisely placed in terms of age, a ‘boy’ of nineteen, apparently flung into events with little preparation but determined to prove his manhood at precisely the moment of access to maturity. Prester John is emblematic of the imperial notion, which echoes in so many corners of nineteenth-century literature, that far-flung lands are places where a growing lad can ‘prove himself’; can, to put it in other words, gain experiences of disorientation (literally, of not being able to read the map) and isolation, experiences which will equip him for the demands of later life. The fate of such imagery in the case of ‘the boys of empire’ (Bristow 1991) is writ all too large in British cemeteries across the world: in the famous Park Street graveyard in Kolkata (Calcutta), for instance, where scores if not hundreds of young British men are buried, few of them having reached the age of twenty-five, even fewer of the military echelon having passed beyond the rank of captain.

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In trying to work out these topographical and interpretative intricacies, it is impossible not to falter before the superimposition of different maps one upon another. Both texts, for example, centre on a version of a dream. In the case of Prester John, it is a dream of a land of peace, development and tranquillity, but of course on the white man’s terms and according to an imposed notion of modernity. Writing to Crawfurd after he has returned to Scotland, the schoolmaster Wardlaw appears confident that the dream is on the brink of being realised: It would do your eyes good to see the garden we have made out of the Klein Labongo glen. The place is one big orchard with every kind of tropical fruit in it, and the irrigation dam is as full of fish as it can hold. Out at Umvelos’ there is a tobacco-factory, and all round Sikitola’s we have square miles of mealie and cotton fields. The loch on the Rooirand is stocked with Lochleven trout, and we have made a bridle-path up to it in a gully east of the one you climbed. (Buchan 1956: 203) And so Wardlaw continues, enumerating the ‘improvements’ made (and frequently describing them in distinctively Scottish terms). The ‘loch’ is particularly interesting; it occupies a prominent place on the map, yet has no obvious narrative function, presumably being identified only as the site on which a small part of Scotland can be transported to East Africa. Donne’s view of the dream is, of course, different. Speaking to the narrator, who may or may not be his brother, or his alter ego, or even himself in a different guise or at a different age, he addresses him as ‘dreamer’ and says: Life here is tough. One has to be a devil to survive. I’m the last landlord. I tell you I fight everything in nature, flood, drought, chicken hawk, rat, beast and woman. I’m everything. Midwife, yes, doctor, yes, gaoler, judge, hangman, every blasted thing to the labouring people. Look man, look outside again. Primitive. Every boundary line is a myth. No-man’s land, understand? (Harris 1988: 22) The narrator is understandably confused. When he looks around all he sees is an empty landscape, an ‘invisible population’. ‘It’s an old dream,’ he comments, but what this dream actually is and what the role of the crew can be in it remain unclear. Donne’s purpose seems to be in some sense to bring, or remember, a version of civilisation; but he is not driven by moral principle. Rather he is a kind of force of nature himself, the incarnation of the river, the eternal opposite and complement to Mariella, seeking consummation with the land yet at the same time tormenting it and – at least in his own mind – the folk, even as he claims to be liberating them. The simple, unchallenged colonial goals of Crawfurd and Wardlaw have no place here; instead, Donne seems sometimes to be the only participant in a monodrama, wherein he must somnambulistically play all available roles, encapsulating within himself the entirety of a troubled, disrupted history.

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It would be fair to see Donne commenting obliquely on Crawfurd’s rite of passage when he says, ‘Now I’m a man. I’ve learnt . . . to rule this’: This is the ultimate. This is everlasting. One doesn’t have to see deeper than that, does one? . . . Rule the land . . . while you still have a ghost of a chance. And you rule the world. Look at the sun. (Harris 1998: 23) But to look at the sun, of course, is to be blinded; blinding – or rather the halfblinding of sleep and dream – is a key to the entire narration of The Palace of the Peacock which, one might say, takes place in the blink of an eye even while it evokes the aeons of history. And Donne’s land, ‘El Doradonne’, is empty. A ghost of a chance; a chance of a ghost. What cannot be achieved by direct intervention remains an available option in the realm of the phantom, in the memory of the folk – which would be both the memory held by the folk and also the memory of a ‘folk’ long extinct, to be in some sense resurrected by this emblematic and fateful journey, which is also a journey without end and without direction, even as it seeks to establish a new map which will reconfigure the trajectories and directions, the endlessly shifting shapes of the ‘land of waters’. Another key to The Palace of the Peacock, although any resolution of the issues raised appears to be, again, deferred through a constant postponement of the reckoning which is held in abeyance between the imperial explorer and the ‘native’ guide and interpreter, can be found near the end when the narrator speculates on the possibility of providing ‘a material nexus to bind the spirit of the universe’: Indeed this was a unique frame I well knew now to construct the events of all appearance and tragedy into the vain prison they were, a child’s game of a besieged and a besieging race who felt themselves driven to seek themselves – first, outcast and miserable twins of fate – second, heroic and warlike brothers – third, conquerors and invaders of all mankind. In reality the territory they overwhelmed and abandoned had always been theirs to rule and take. (Harris 1988: 114) In the immediate context, this figures as a reflection on the possible meanings of the relation between Donne and his brother, his twin, his other self. Beyond this, one senses that it refers to the wider relation between the man of action, the hero, and the writer, and that further behind this again one can sense the endless dilemma for the postcolonial writer, which is to do with the use of the language of the imperialist to convey the sufferings of the people. ‘Divided to the vein’, as Walcott (1992: 18) has it in a different context: what can be put back together from this fractured land, how can a story be constructed that is more than, or different from, a ‘child’s game’? Crawfurd’s journeyings in Prester John are fraught with danger, certainly; but it is interesting that the map, the landscape across which he travels, although it is mainly constituted of the ‘plain’

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where the natives live and move and have their being, is nevertheless surrounded by the mountains, by the High Veld, which has already become hostage to the white man. In Prester John there is thus always a surrounding prospect of safety, if only the adventurer can be sufficiently intrepid and lucky to get to it. But it is significant too that this place of safety is figured as a high place, a place which therefore reflects authority as well as succour. Laputa has his own command of the high places, his cavern in the Rooirand, but as well as being high in the mountains this place is also underground and does not provide the possibilities of surveillance available to the whites. In The Palace of the Peacock, these are the heights that have to be scaled, the cliff that must be climbed; yet in the case of both novels, this need to reach the top, to emerge into a freer land (whether that be freer for the folk or for the white conqueror), is crossed and complicated by the waterfall. The image of the waterfall is crucial for Harris; although one might think of Guyana as the place of rivers, a different but related etymology would have it as the place of waterfalls. In Prester John, the ‘secret’ cavern which forms the beating heart of Laputa’s endlessly delayed counter-empire verges off on one side into a waterfall, which Crawfurd describes thus: the wonder was on the left side, where the floor ceased in a chasm. The left wall was one sheet of water, where the river fell from the heights into the infinite depth below. The torches and the fire made the sheer stream glow and sparkle like the battlements of the Heavenly City. I have never seen any sight so beautiful or so strange, and for a second my breath stopped in admiration. (Buchan 1956: 100) Here is, perhaps inevitably and at last, the sound of Guyana’s great and potentially endless waterfall: The noise of a thunderous waterfall began to dawn on their ear above the voice of their engine. They saw in the distance at last a thread of silver lightning that expanded and grew into a veil of smoke. They drew as near as they could and stopped under the cloud. Right and left grew the universal wall of cliff they knew, and before them the highest waterfall they had ever seen moved and still stood upon the escarpment. They were plainly astonished at the immaculate bridal veil falling motionlessly from the river’s tall brink. (Harris 1988: 100) These waterfalls cry out for interpretation; they cry out to the novels’ characters, they cry out to the readers. Yet their cry is both less and more than intelligible. The water is fraught with meaning; yet it ceaselessly carries away all prospect of meaning. For Crawfurd, the waterfall – or rather the great crack through which it flows – proves a means of escape from the cavern; for Donne and his few remaining crew it presents itself as a further stage on the journey, all

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meaning deferred until they reach the top – which, as far as the reader can tell, they never do. How to subdue the waterfall: perhaps that is one of the questions of empire – how to work with, or against, the mightiest of creation’s forces. And, of course, the answer comes all too readily to the mind – we have seen it already in the point about the ‘irrigation dam’ in Wardlaw’s letter.3 There has to be a harnessing, a subduing of this power, a conversion into the stuff of modernity and development; or, in Harris’s alternative version, a recognition that the ‘battle’ with these ‘battlements’ will be unending, that the question of ‘reaching the top’ is an illusion, and more than that, it is a confirmation of the more broadly illusory status of life, a vast reminder of insignificance – or rather, perhaps, of the limits of significance, of signification, an endlessly moving point which cannot be accounted for, or indeed recounted. ‘Upon those that step into the same river’, as Heraclitus said, ‘different and different waters flow’ (Diels and Kranz 1954: 22B 12). Through the waterfall, Donne and his crew see images, mirages: safe havens, places of light which they may never be able to reach. For Crawfurd, on the other hand, the waterfall is certainly a thing of wonder; but again, like the rivers, it represents an obstacle to be outwitted. ‘Outwitting’ is, in a sense, the whole of Crawfurd’s story: outwitting the natives by beating them at their own game, by proving that Western reasoning intelligence is superior to native field and forestcraft. Donne and his men, on the other hand, are out of their wits. Maddened by grief, despair, hope, anger, they have no sure compass by which to guide their actions, although arguably this is unnecessary; their actions are guided by the repetition, by the knowledge that wherever they go they have been here before, perhaps they are already here, perhaps we are in the company of ghosts who float through a scenario which they have themselves have created, even though they have long forgotten the circumstances or purpose of their creation. For Crawfurd it is far otherwise; his attitude to these phenomena, as we might expect, is based on the instrumental, wonder translated into function, admiration into lust for gain. If there is an object of desire in The Palace of the Peacock, it is represented by Mariella, but what Mariella is and what she stands for, whether she is a goal or has already been left behind on the lower reaches of the river, whether she is in fact the old Arawak woman who appears from time to time to travel with them, all this is unclear. Crawfurd’s desire, although it hangs heavily under the sign of disavowal, nevertheless cannot be ignored: it stands proud and straight in the figure of Laputa: As my eye fell on his splendid proportions I forgot all else in my admiration of the man. In his minister’s clothes he had looked only a heavily built native, but now in his savage dress I saw how noble a figure he made. He must have been at least six feet and a half, but his chest was so deep and his shoulders so massive that one did not remark his height. He put a hand on my saddle, and I remember noting how slim and fine it was, more like a high-bred woman’s than a man’s. (Buchan 1956: 85–6)

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Perhaps it is too obvious to dwell upon the homosocial implications here, upon the conjoining of overmastering masculinity, referred back to the condition of the ‘native’ and the ‘savage’, with the ‘high-bred’ woman, the object of desire for Crawfurd, presumably, and the hand which he will be able to win when he has wrested his fortune from its rightful owner. Crawfurd, after all, is only a ‘boy’; in the eyes of empire he must be forgiven these strange fantasies, these illusory meetings with the fragmented, objectified yet still wholly desirable figure of the native. Or so the imperial story would run; after all, Laputa is to die, there is no doubt about that, and thus a tantalising possibility of multiple miscegenation will be removed from sight. The prospect of a land populated by the likes of Donne’s half-breed crew of ghosts and demons will be forever withdrawn, and the return from imperial adventure – fraught with difficulty, neurosis and suicide though we know it to have been as a matter of historical fact – will be rendered smooth; haunting visions of statuesque black flesh, the flesh which so torments Kurtz, and Marlow, in Heart of Darkness (1902), will vanish, like the mist coiling up from the waterfall, like the efflorescence which will disappear once a new creation has been completed, to be replaced by the cool safety of loch and glen. But then, the question would run, what in fact can vanish? Certainly this is a question with which Donne’s crew, in a weird parody of metaphysical argument, continuingly engage. For example: It was all well and good they reasoned as inspired madmen would to strain themselves to gain that elastic frontier where a spirit might rise from the dead and rule the material past world. All well and good was this resurgence and reconnoitre they reasoned. But it was doomed again from the start to meet endless catastrophe: even the ghost one dreams of and restores must be embalmed and featured in the old lineaments of empty and meaningless desire. (Harris 1988: 80) It would be hard indeed not to hear echoes of Blake’s ‘lineaments of gratified desire’ beating through this, but perhaps there are even more significant phrases.4 To ‘rule the material past world’, for example: presumably this is precisely the impulse to power that drives David Crawfurd on through the violent heat, the stark terrain, the apparently impossible odds, towards his goal. Yet the phrase has further resonance, for it points up a tension within the imperial project between past and future. The dream is all towards the future, towards a new set of arrangements of subjugation; but at the same time it is, at least in the case of Prester John, past empires, imperialities of difference, which control the imagination, for one of the key features of Prester John is the absence, or perhaps it would be better to say the endless deferral of the presence, of Prester John. Just as Donne’s men are caught up in reliving a myth, so too are Crawfurd and his associates; the power here arises in an indefinable past, in lands which have moved away from modernity, at least in a secluded, perhaps ironic, parallel to it, and which thus stand to challenge the apparent normalcies of imperial (mean) time behind, as we might

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have to conclude, the waterfall. They cannot be reconstructed, but neither can they be abandoned, left in the ground; there is the continual hope or threat of resurrection, in at least the highly literal sense of an ‘uprising’, a welling up of that which has apparently been left behind in the caverns, in the dark places, but which still has the capacity to shine out, like rubies, like gold, like diamonds. For it would indeed be foolish to ignore the romance of empire. Prester John may be an unpalatable text these days; but to deny its power would be to consign yet another version of history to a premature grave. Of course it is in one sense a boys’ text; Crawfurd’s adventures are also the adventures of a child moving within a world of adults, a vindication of childhood omnipotence despite the vicissitudes of fortune. Yet even here, it is strangely bifurcated. It would appear on the surface as though the wish the text incarnates is for Crawfurd to succeed; but there are also moments – and Crawfurd shares them – when what we also want (although we clearly cannot have our cake and eat it) is for Laputa to succeed, for the meticulous planning coupled with the ancient charisma to prevail against the temporary incursions of an enfeebled invading power. Does this make Prester John less of a text of empire, more of a text of Scottish resistance? More of a book in which the question of whose side we might be on in the question of invasion and occupation is urgent? Perhaps so: these natives might be doomed, but they owe this stroke of fortune to an occluded history, a history held in orality, in the passing down of a version of the truth held in a realm before text itself originates, and above all in the sense of a primal aristocracy which cannot be wholly quelled by modernity. The power of the African chiefs is quasi-feudal; it is interesting to note that Crawfurd is often referred to in the role in which he has actually gone out to Africa, as the ‘storekeeper’, the man of accounts and balances, the bourgeois addicted to meticulous book-keeping, although from beginning to end his store, newly built, remains actually empty, devoid of all goods, useful only as a place where the plans of the natives can be heard – eavesdropped, ‘overheard’. Crawfurd might be a colonial adventurer, but he is also a potential bureaucrat. And what, finally, of Harris’s Cameron, the Scot who is not a Scot? Well, Cameron dies. He is killed, it would appear, by one of the daSilva twins (although this image too flickers and warps, in and out of sight; sometimes there are two daSilvas, sometimes only one, the occluded other made up only of old newspapers, rags and ribbons, tattered flesh). The event occurs after a singular moment when daSilva sees a parrot, or perhaps a whole flight of parrots; Cameron, however, sees only vultures, symbols attendant on death, and on the whole the text persuades us that Cameron is probably right. But this truth – the truth of death, of bitterness, of an end to all things, of picking over the bones of the corpse – is too much for daSilva to bear, too much to withstand as the possible death of the romance of empire. But Cameron, oddly, is dying long before he is killed; his tongue, we are told, has already turned black. He has tried to speak a gritty and unpalatable truth, a truth which burns and rots the tongue, but it is this that causes him to lose his footing and fall into the river, a bitter taste of reality

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which is too much for the rest of the crew to bear. Cameron – the Scot who is not a Scot – is the only character in The Palace of the Peacock who ever mentions – or remembers, or imagines he remembers – Britain, when he suggests, in a curious reversal of the free and the caged, that perhaps daSilva’s vision of parrots is actually based on a memory of London Zoo (although daSilva claims, and we believe him, that he has never been to London or in a zoo). There seems to be some sense in which Cameron’s reminder that the origin of our dreams may be not so much in a world of fantasy as in what Freud called the ‘day’s residues’ may constitute a reality too grim, too unlikely to bear.5 Cameron is a practical man, as he suggests earlier in the book: ‘I ain’t dead’, he says, ‘I can prove it any day’ (46). But of course he cannot, and the proof goes the other way, towards the void of the phantom, towards uncertainty of origin, towards obliteration. In what sense, as I have asked before, is Cameron Scottish? Well, at the very least in a name, in an act of naming; perhaps also in a deflection of subjugation, a resistance to fantasy and illusion. Crawfurd, of course, is Scottish through and through, already wedded to his home country and thereby rendered secure from the temptations and tribulations of Africa; but then, his resistance is of a different kind, and pure blood, whatever that means, runs in his veins. In the strange but compelling version of ‘real life’ that constitutes the texture of Harris’s text, nothing is so simple. We, the living, will continue strenuously to defend our own territory, or that territory which we have been taught to regard as our own: so might run the thesis of Prester John. In Harris, we hear the beat of a different drum, more echoic, less certain. The possibility that we cannot but entertain is always of what might happen when we dead awaken, and find he land of desire empty; or full, but full of whispering ghosts, with whom we cannot communicate, because we have already been complicit in the departure of their living avatars. NOTES 1. On these and similar matters see, for example, Riach (1991); Cameron McCarthy (2001). 2. The reference is to Donne, ‘Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness’ (1623), in Carey (1990), p. 332. 3. A salient contemporary example is the tension between Arundhati Roy’s writing and her commitment to preventing ecologically damaging hydroelectric schemes in India. 4. The reference is to Blake, ‘Poems from the Note-book 1793’, in Complete Writings, ed. Keynes (1966), pp. 178, 180. 5. One of the large number of references in Freud would be to ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva” ’, in the standard edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al. (1953–74), IX: 73–7.

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CHAPTER 8 Soyinka and MacDiarmid: The Violence and Virtues of Nations

Wole Soyinka and Hugh MacDiarmid: The Violence and Virtues of Nations Alan Riach, University of Glasgow

Hugh MacDiarmid and Wole Soyinka share a contradictory legacy of a conservative, nineteenth-century humanism and a progressive, modern, anti-colonial vision for an anti-imperial future. The effect has been to empower both as writers with a comprehensive, commanding and regenerative postcolonial – or anti-British-imperialist – social agenda. Few writers have engaged so comprehensively with their cultural and political contexts. Many other major writers have specialised in particular genres and forms: fiction, poetry, plays, journalism, critical essays or scholarly books. One thing that makes MacDiarmid and Soyinka comparable in the first place is the sheer magnitude of their response to the entire cultural and political contexts of their respective nations, Scotland and Nigeria. Few other writers in literary history so pre-eminently devote themselves to continuing critical dialogues with their governments, the political powers and the corrupt individuals riddling those governments, espousing the virtues that might be articulated in the varied arts of their countries, and exemplifying those virtues in literary practice and political engagement. Both writers have been criticised for endorsing the constrictions and limitations such visions imply, specifically in MacDiarmid’s case for his emphasis on national direction rather than pluralism and international cosmopolitanism, and in Soyinka’s case, for embracing European figurations of myth and identity as opposed to what some would endorse as more ‘authentic’ African models. The cultural critic offering assessment must be especially ready to historicise their work, and to see the different roles their nations have played historically, beginning from the understanding that not all nations are the same or fulfil the same function, as will be explored more fully below. One other key characteristic is that both are profoundly optimistic in their commitment to the dynamics of social change after empire. The contrasts between them – one pre-eminently a poet, moving from lyric to epic forms, the other pre-eminently a dramatist, supremely capable of rendering conflict and otherness on stage, in novels and in poems – illuminate and emphasise their shared sense of social justice and politicised engagement in the specific arenas that the nation-states Nigeria and Scotland might be.

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MacDiarmid was early to recognise what new writing might come from Nigeria and other postcolonial states. His 1955 poem, In Memoriam James Joyce, recognises: ‘Amos Tutuola, the Yoruba writer, / Who has begun the structure of new African literature’ (MacDiarmid 1994a: 793). And in 1959, in an essay for the Edinburgh University students’ magazine Jabberwock, welcoming to Scotland the American poets Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson and others, MacDiarmid notes: ‘Whether or not we consolidate the experiments of Hart Crane and e. e. cummings is largely irrelevant since while we are busy “consolidating,” a brand new “English” literature will be appearing in Johannesburg or Sydney or Vancouver or Madras’ (MacDiarmid 1997: 107). The point here is that MacDiarmid’s openness to the developments of literature in different parts of the world after empire was exemplary and early; his attitude was an extension of his self-determined identity as a Scot opposed to British imperial rule and colonial authority, and as a writer keenly interested in and eager to support new, politically engaged writing from former colonial states. Most emphatically, this characterises his introduction to Barry Feinberg’s 1974 anthology, Poets to the People: South African Freedom Poets, where he writes: Bourgeois writers and readers may decry ‘commitment’ in poetry, but . . . all over the world today millions of people, feeling they have been cut away from their real roots, are striving to re-root themselves in their native languages (even when these have been long obsolete or obsolescent, and never previously media of any written literature); and are seeking to create new indigenous literatures on the basis of their native traditions. (MacDiarmid 1974: Foreword) MacDiarmid goes on to cite his own contemporary, the Gaelic poet George Campbell Hay, as a Scottish example. As for the South African poets in the anthology: ‘I express my solidarity with, and send my fraternal greetings to, all the contributors to this volume. We shall overcome!’ (MacDiarmid 1974: 13–15). For MacDiarmid, faith in human potential, cultural adaptability and philosophical, artistic and political achievement, was essential: I never set een on a lad or a lass But I wonder gin he or she Wi’ a word or a deed ’ll suddenly dae An impossibility. (MacDiarmid 1993: 258) To develop this faith through an understanding of national history was primarily to connect the potential of one’s immediate compatriots with that of others internationally, in a comity of nations both imagined and actual. Commitment to this development meant opposition to imperial subjection. It did not signify the replication of imperialist dominance over other cultures, but rather an

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openness of mind and curiosity about the differences between cultures and the cultural constructions of nations. Such differences arise from, and are to some extent predicated by, matters of language, cultural and religious practice, social institutions, geography, terrain, climate and economy. More than any of the great modern poets, MacDiarmid based his literary effort on the validity of national identity. His conviction, far more than any comparable or contemporary figure, was that in Scotland, nationality was a vital consideration in the development of the totality of cultural production and the concurrent well-being of people generally. In his autobiography Lucky Poet, he describes the sense of destiny with which he came to believe that he was to become a major national poet. From childhood, he says, from his mother’s people, agricultural workers, and his father’s people, mill-workers in the Border burghs, and in placing his faith in the industrial workers of the cities, I drew an assurance that I felt and understood the spirit of Scotland and the Scottish country folk in no common measure, and that that made it at any rate possible that I would in due course become a great national poet of Scotland. (MacDiarmid 1994b: 3) In Scotland, the term ‘national poet’ has specific bearing on social assumptions about what the achievement of Robert Burns was, and what poetry and the arts might be according to Burns’s role in society. The popular fetishisation of Burns was anathema to MacDiarmid, who saw a much broader purpose for poetry, song and the arts in Scotland, and he abhorred the commodification of ‘The Bard’. Such commodification and fetishisation MacDiarmid saw as essentially limiting and debilitating his compatriots’ capacity for self-extension through knowledge of other great poets, writers, composers and artists in the Scottish traditions and internationally. For MacDiarmid in the 1920s, being a national poet meant understanding and endorsing the potential of the widest variety of different people throughout Scotland, as he illustrates in an anecdote in the first editorial of the magazine The Scottish Chapbook, which he produced in 1922. Here, he describes a young Edinburgh artist asking him to ‘visualise a typical Scotsman’. When MacDiarmid assures him he has done so, the artist proceeds to sketch a series of portraits of different kinds of people inhabiting contemporary Scotland: ‘a Glasgow “keelie”, a Polish pitman from Lanarkshire, a Dundee Irishman, an anarchist orator . . . a Perthshire farmer, a Hebridean islander, and a Berwickshire bondager’. The artist points out that these are ‘only a first selection’ from the varieties of people in Scotland, implying that there is no such thing as ‘a typical Scotsman’. Having established that by paying attention, as each of these descriptions does, to geographical location and economic or political identity, the diversity of characters might be illustrated, the artist then makes a series ‘of subtle strokes here and there’ to these portraits, so that ‘each of these acutely differentiated faces acquired a peculiar unplaceable resemblance – an elusive

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likeness that had in each case a faintly ennobling air’ (MacDiarmid 1992: 7–8). MacDiarmid’s comment is that a similar task to that of the artist confronts contemporary Scottish writers. The implication here is that by suggesting a coherent national purpose in their portraits, their diversity becomes strengthened into a valuable sense of political direction. They are not merely a pluralistic collection of geographical, political and economic ‘products’ but a variety of individuals who seem self-determined and with common purpose. This is a moment not only of understanding but also of shared intention and co-operation. This suggests a distinction from the traditional epiphany of perception associated with English poetic tradition at least since Wordsworth, emphasising the engagement of the individual. By contrast, this describes an epiphany of participation at the heart of MacDiarmid’s aesthetic and political purpose. It is perhaps what the West Indian novelist Wilson Harris meant when he commented, ‘You have a whole theatre in Scotland, don’t you?’ (Harris 1992: 64). MacDiarmid and Soyinka have common purpose in this – a point returned to at the end of this chapter. If endorsing human potential and investing people with dignity and selfrespect were essential components of MacDiarmid’s nationalism, its political purpose was explicitly to help bring about the destruction of the British empire: The Social revolution is possible sooner in Scotland than in England. The working-class policy ought to be to break up the Empire to avert war and enable the workers to triumph in every country and colony. Scottish separation is part of the process of England’s Imperial disintegration and is a help towards the ultimate triumph of the workers of the world. (MacDiarmid 1994b: 144) Arguably, these quotations summarise MacDiarmid’s three most essential co-ordinate points: (1) recognition of the value of the diversity of people in relation to geography, politics and economy, and as he was to elaborate the point in his later work, especially In Memoriam James Joyce, in relation to the variety of languages in the world (2) participation in the long-term common purpose of people in the effort to break up the über-nationalism of British imperialism by re-establishing Scotland as an independent state in affinity with workers’ control in ‘every country and [tellingly] colony’ (3) encouragement of the role of the arts and artists, painters, composers and poets, in that struggle. If these are indications of MacDiarmid’s main motivations, they should be contextualised by his ongoing openness to historical changes, developments in technology (his interest in radio and commitment to broadcasting and journalism),

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his sometimes wild engagements with the contradictions of the political scene, and the values to be found in ancient Celtic myth and the interconnectedness of nations. These qualities are palpable in his acknowledgement in the 1920s and 1930s of the examples of Yeats and Joyce in the Irish literary renaissance which preceded that of Scotland, his welcome to younger Scottish Gaelic poets in the 1940s and to the radical American poets in the 1950s, and his recognition of what was to come from African nations and other postcolonial locations from the 1950s to the 1970s. These qualities are equally evident in his poetic career, from the early English-language and Scots-language lyrics, through the extended lyric sequences A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) and To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930) to the lonely self-questioning of poems such as ‘On a Raised Beach’ (1935) and the social affirmation of profound national identity in ‘Lament for the Great Music’ and ‘Island Funeral’ (both 1939) to the global provenance of In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) and The Kind of Poetry I Want (1961). The latter book-length poems may be summarised as extended lists of examples and observations reflecting on a central, variable concern: the question of the relation between the almost unimaginably plural range of languages and forms of artistic self-expression to which human beings are given the world over, and the imposition upon them of forms of imperial control, whether politically or aesthetically authoritative. Any artist grappling with aesthetic value and the imperatives of social liberation in colonial, anti-imperial locations inevitably confronts this question. Few address it so comprehensively, exhilaratingly and doggedly. In contrast to MacDiarmid’s early and prophetic sense of what was coming in postcolonial writing, and specifically in work from Nigeria, and his understanding that such work would help break up the imperial authority of the British empire, Soyinka has almost nothing to say about different national identities in the archipelago currently referred to as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of Eire. The reason for this may be characteristic of a whole category of postcolonial literary study, that known as ‘Black British’ writing. Soyinka’s formative experiences as a student in England confirmed a familiar sense of Britain as England, accepting as status quo the priority of the British state. For comparison, it is worth pausing for a moment on a brief article from the October 1952 edition of the Scottish Journal (a Glasgow-based periodical issued by the major publisher of Scottish poetry in the 1940s and 1950s, William MacLellan, to which MacDiarmid himself contributed numerous essays, reviews and poems), entitled ‘A Nigerian Looks at Nationality’ by a certain L. N. Namme (about whom I have been unable to discover further information). It begins, ‘I am in sympathy with Scottish aspirations for home-rule because . . . a sense of nationality is one of the most potent sources of cultural inspiration among peoples.’ Going on to advocate ‘home-rule within the Act of Union’ the article indicates the absurdity of the situation when the Isle of Man, Ulster and the Channel Islands have domestic parliaments whereas Scotland has none and then

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compares ‘Africa from whence I come [which] is today in a state of ferment’. Scottish-born David Livingstone may have died for a noble ideal, Namme comments, but the greed and avarice of his successors have corrupted his mission. In South Africa, we are told, the British–Boer War of 1899–1902 ended by segregating the natives, exploiting their labour and ensuring a white-dominated parliament. ‘The African National Congress (ANC) led by Dr Moroka [James Sebe Moroka, 1891–1985] is resisting these racialist laws.’ Meanwhile in Central Africa, 6,000,000 Africans have turned down recent British Government proposals for the establishment of a Central African Dominion because the federal parliament-to-be is to be dominated by the representatives of 170,000 whites, particularly those of Southern Rhodesia, whose Negrophobist inclinations are already an open secret. Against ‘this sordid background of out-and-out exploitation of weaker peoples’, Namme tells us that his own country, Nigeria, ‘is not complacent. When its present electoral system is democratised, a truly Nigerian government will emerge.’ Then comes his rhetorically flourishing conclusion: From the foregoing, it is clear that Scotland is not alone in her desire for home-rule. The political ferment in Africa shows that the fundamental urge for ‘nationality’ is universal. That is why I am in sympathy with Scottish nationalism. (Namme 1952) A photograph accompanying the article shows a young, serious-looking man, presumably Nigerian, standing before Edinburgh Castle, ostensibly authenticating authorship. When this was published, Soyinka was attending University College, Ibadan, Nigeria, before enrolling as a student at the University of Leeds in 1954 and encountering the United Kingdom. At the same time, MacDiarmid was writing his lines about Amos Tutuola noted above and seeing later poetry into print. (In fact, In Memoriam James Joyce was first published by MacLellan.) However, it is worth quoting Namme’s article at length for the context it gives, both of the rising forces of the ANC (its leaders when Moroka was appointed were Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela), a general sense of African resistance to British colonial authority and the singular example of L. N. Namme relating all this to Scotland. Later examples of Nigerian writers describing their experiences of Scotland include Kole Omotoso’s novel The Edifice (1971) and Ben Okri’s ‘Diary’ entry in the New Statesman of 1986 (both discussed in Riach 2005: 154 and xiv-xv, respectively). The latter begins by simply acknowledging the fact: ‘It is another country.’ As far as I am aware, Soyinka has never written extensively of Scotland or Scottish writers. Indeed, Soyinka’s acknowledgment of the magnitude of achievement in the writings of Shakespeare, the music of Beethoven and the

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art of Picasso evidently endorses an appreciation of canonically great art in the western European tradition (Soyinka 1984: xiv). But while he is keenly conscious of the scale of this achievement, this is concurrent with his sensitivity to the identity imposed by British imperialism in the construction of the nation called Nigeria. Soyinka’s own life, his memoirs and autobiographies, speak eloquently of his adaptation, and the adaptation of the people he grew up among, of both Christian and Yoruba ways of understanding the world and the mythologies of different people. In this openness of mind and adaptability of attitude, there is a distinct affinity with the MacDiarmid of In Memoriam James Joyce, embracing the languages, cultures and arts of the world in all their real and imagined variety. Indeed, reading Soyinka’s memoirs Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), Isara: A Voyage Around Essay (1989), Ibadan: the Penkelemes Years (1994) and You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2007), his essays and cultural criticism collected in Art, Dialogue and Outrage (1988), and his seminal book Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), there are profound affinities in the world-view inherited and elaborated by both writers. It is as if, in some sense, Soyinka in the 1950s is beginning where MacDiarmid leaves off. Soyinka’s career, from his upbringing described in Aké: The Years of Childhood, through the well-known poem ‘Telephone Conversation’ about racial alienation in 1950s England, to the plays produced in London and his study with G. Wilson Knight at the University of Leeds, back to Nigeria for the country’s independence in 1960 and the production of A Dance of the Forests to celebrate and warn of the dangers of the occasion, evidently demonstrates a practical commitment to, and profound hope in, Nigeria’s national regeneration. A Dance of the Forests begins: ‘An empty clearing in the forest. Suddenly the soil appears to be breaking and the head of the Dead Woman pushes its way up. Some distance from her, another head begins to appear, that of a man’ (Soyinka 1975: 3). The ancestors return to join the living to observe but also to remind us of the momentous responsibility of the occasion, and by the end of the play, festivities are tainted by corruption and the promise held forth to the future remains to be fulfilled. Based in some respects on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this Dance holds poised and ambivalent what the moment might mean for the unborn, generations still to come. And Soyinka’s ensuing work, in fiction, plays, satires and critical writing, and his personal engagement – as an international ambassador for his country, as peacemaker and broker between hostile groups within Africa, as a political enemy at one point sentenced to death by his country’s government and in exile for his life, as militant protestor, as a criminal imprisoned for most of two years, much of that in solitary confinement – all attests to this continuing commitment and hope. When awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, he suggested that it might be seen as recognition not of his own work but of the continent of Africa. Hubristic as this might seem, it is more accurately a self-effacement in deference to the continental scale of his vision, of which that commitment and hope in Nigeria – meaning both the people of Nigeria and the nation as viable state – is a component part.

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The differences between the national identities of Nigeria and Scotland show amply how useless any single theory of nationalism is, unless it describes specific historical circumstances. This is not the place for abbreviated national histories, but it is important to remember a few facts: The country now known as Nigeria is a collection of old kingdoms, sultanates and clans. It is also an amalgamation of over 200 different ethnolinguistic groups, merged in 1914 by British colonizers. Three main groups – Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa – make up almost 60% of the population. Although over 250 languages are spoken in the country, English has been the official language since colonial rule, while many Nigerians speak and understand Pidgin, a combination of indigenous languages and English that developed through centuries of contact with British merchants and colonial authorities. (Adenekan 2009: n.p.) Scotland in the early twenty-first century has a population of around 5 million (compared to England’s of around 50 million and Nigeria’s of 148 million) but, like Nigeria and unlike England, Scotland’s people speak more than one officially recognised language, pre-eminently Gaelic, Scots and English. In Scottish literature, major works have been written in these languages, and significant works have also been written in French and Latin. The point of comparison is that while the English language and its literature have been formed in a trajectory concurrent with the expansion and ebb of empire, the indigenous languages, literatures, tribal identities and cultural formations within Scotland and Nigeria are defined by plurality. Plurality, of course, is in itself no guarantee of utopia. The violence of nations may be figured in terms of nationalism rampant to the extent of colonial subjection and imperialist domination, as in the history of the British empire, and in this context it is worth noting the prophetic observation printed in the London Mercury in 1924, that the flag has been to the British empire what the film will be to the American one (Vernon 2008: 37). But this violence can also be figured as internal division within the nation, leading to civil war and conflict between tribes or clans. The opening pages of Soyinka’s memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn are a series of maps delineating the increasing number of political units within the Nigerian state, from the Three Regions of 1955 to Thirty-six States of 1995. Such internecine warfare is also evidently a component of Scotland’s history, whether literally between the clans or more generically between the development of the kingdom of Scotland and the Lordship of the Isles. The Highland/Lowland divide is geographical, historical, linguistic and mythic, and probably the most famous. The degree of self-government desirable in the different island communities of the north and west is a matter of current concern, with specific islanders acquiring their own land rights by purchase to an extent unimaginable in previous centuries. The legacy of this is poignant and powerful in an anecdote told by James Hunter at the opening of his commanding work, Last of the Free: A History of

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the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Asked in 1979 whether he thought devolution of power from London to Edinburgh would be a good thing, a Sutherland crofter rejected the proposition. Why? ‘In London . . . they might not give a damn about folk up here. But in Edinburgh they’ve always hated us’ (Hunter 1999: 11). No Edinburgh parliament existed in 1979, but twenty years later Scots had resumed the national parliament. Nevertheless, the history of relations between Edinburgh legislation and the people of the Highlands and Islands remains a violent hinterland still being superseded by enlightened co-operation. The history of that violence and the legacy as revealed in Hunter’s anecdote should not be forgotten, of course, but it would be wrong either to stigmatise it as inconsequential or to exaggerate it as the only defining characteristic. Soyinka’s great novel Season of Anomy (1973) offers a memorable example of how a literary artist might deal with such a legacy of internecine violence. Set during the Nigerian civil war, the story is extremely graphic in its depiction of violence and possesses an astonishing immediacy, yet is securely based in the classical Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice. It thus brings together images and potencies of violence and music, a particular civil war and a universal myth of regeneration which links it to such disparate texts as the American composer Charles Ives’s orchestral ‘contemplation’ of 1906, ‘The Unanswered Question’, and the Scottish northern renaissance poet Robert Henryson’s fifteenth-century poem, ‘Orpheus and Euridice’. In Soyinka’s novel, a traditional village community is presented as a practical social organisation in contrast to the international exploitation espoused by the malevolent ‘Cartel’. Ofeyi (Orpheus), band-leader and song-writer, is employed by the Cartel until his subversive lyrics make him their target and his girlfriend Iriyise (Euridice) is abducted, prompting Ofeyi’s extended journey with his friend, the band’s drummer Zaccheus, in search of her. Their quest takes them on an ever-tightening cycle of encounters (including a meeting with a professional assassin known as the Dentist) and a fuguelike descent through cities, slaughterhouses, insane asylums, jungles, until they find and rescue Iriyise, who is injured and comatose. As the book ends, there is hope – its last words are, ‘In the forests, life began to stir’ (Soyinka 1980: 313). But there is no promise of effortless renewal. Regeneration comes at a cost. The theme is also central to Soyinka’s finest tragedy, Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). At its heart is the conflict between the justice of traditional propriety with all its radical conservatism and the violence brought about by its disruption. The ‘Market Queen’ Iyaloja’s closing words in the play are: ‘Now forget the dead, forget even the living. Turn your mind only to the unborn’ (Soyinka 1984: 219). Also crucial to the theme of regeneration and political engagement in both Soyinka and MacDiarmid has been the generic form of satire, whether in Soyinka’s plays such as Opera Wonyosi (1977) or in MacDiarmid’s scatological poems and political commentaries in essays. Examples are abundant in the collections of MacDiarmid’s journalism published in three volumes as The Raucle Tongue (1996, 1997 and 1998) and the ‘rediscovered’ poems collected in The

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Revolutionary Art of the Future (2003). Full consideration of these works could form an essay in itself. One other major way in which MacDiarmid and Soyinka addressed the multiplicity of differences within their respective nations was as anthologists, reconfiguring the poetic history of each country in The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry (1940) and Poems of Black Africa (1975). Each took a radical approach, initiating dialogue across differences of themes, languages and geographical disposition. MacDiarmid’s book for the first time included significant translations from Gaelic, Latin and French poems, alongside work in Scots and English, so that the linguistic diversity of Scottish literature could be engaged by an English-language reader. Soyinka’s included translations from Swahili, Yoruba, Portuguese and French, as well as English-language poems, drawing on poets from all across Africa and arranging material thematically, under headings such as ‘Ancestors and Gods’, ‘Cosmopolis’, ‘Exile’, ‘Land and Liberty’, ‘Praise-Singer and Critic’ and ‘Prayers, Invocations’. The essential principle of both books was that any defined geopolitical entity, whether nation or continent, was a place of many voices, and no single imperial identity could encompass them all. Being addressed to the largest constituency of readers meant making available work in the English language. However, this did not signify an intrinsic superiority of expressiveness in that language but rather a realistic recognition of a particular historical moment, a legacy of imperialism that was changing. The anthologies themselves were helping to change readers’ recognition of the virtues of sensitivity towards diversity of expression and understanding. The point is made succinctly in the Introduction to Six Plays, where Soyinka points out that the Nigerian military coup of 1983 was announced and reported exclusively in English, a language which all the coup leaders used, as did the judiciary, the legislatures, commerce, pop culture, media, bureaucracy and public services. The writer, Soyinka noted, is not ‘mystically situated outside this comprehensive communication territory’ (Soyinka 1984: xxi). Yet this does not mean an abandonment of indigenous languages, as phrases, vocabulary and allusions in Soyinka’s writing abundantly demonstrate. In any nation, the borders of languages are plural, porous but real. To quote Cairns Craig, ‘The national imagination [. . .] is a space in which a dialogue is in process [. . .] in a territory [. . .] whose borders define the limits within which certain voices [. . .] are listened for, and others resisted’ (Craig 1999: 31). This is reflected in Meic Stephens’s introduction to Poetry 1900–2000: One Hundred Poets from Wales: ‘to have a body of English verse which can properly be called Welsh there must be some reference to the land and people, to the past as well as the present’ (Stephens 2007: v–vi). This prioritisation in Craig of ‘dialogue’ in process and in Stephens of ‘reference’ to land and people, a prioritisation of engagement with the people, history and geography of their respective nations, comes through in the lives and works of MacDiarmid and Soyinka in various ways and marks a distinction from the vatic authority of the aesthete, the priorities of the singular lyric artist self-abstracted from social connection.

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The engagement both writers demonstrate with both the social pragmatics and literary aesthetics of language is conjoined with their personal, direct engagement in their political worlds, evidenced in their biographies. We have noted Soyinka’s life-threatening commitment to such engagement. Hardly so extreme, MacDiarmid’s personal commitment to political activities might be noted briefly, in the 1920s as socialist town councillor and Justice of the Peace, and in later decades as a university rectorial candidate and election candidate on a number of occasions. These ran into his role as an unofficial ambassador to numerous countries, especially East European countries in the 1960s. His affirmation of an ideal of communism, which he believed would liberate minority languages, cultures and nations from imperial subjection, even in the face of what we now recognise as the oppressions enacted by Communist regimes, remains more than wishful thinking. MacDiarmid ran the risk of endorsing absolutism and totalitarianism, entering into the most dangerous areas of modern politics, but essentially his faith was placed in the nation-state as a legislative structure where pluralism provides an inextinguishable human dynamic. It is this that Soyinka also endorses in his 2004 musings on the fate of Algeria, where in 1992 a disillusioned electorate democratically voted for a dictatorship in perpetuity. If this was to effect ‘an end of History’, Soyinka commented, ‘The perennial problem with that proposition of course is that this denies the dynamic nature of human society’ (Soyinka 2004: lecture 2). It was surely this dynamic that was enacted when the vote for the National Party of Scotland was secured in 2007 (precisely 300 years since the Treaty of Union), returning a party to government dedicated to national self-determination in opposition to British unionism. On Friday 12 June 2009, Soyinka walked into the Scottish parliament building at Holyrood in Edinburgh and commented publicly, ‘Forget about your detractors – I think it is a wonderful building!’ He was there to give a lecture entitled ‘Enlightenment and the New Enthusiasms’ to the annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes under the auspices of Edinburgh University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Essentially, his thesis was that the two children conceived in the Enlightenment who have had enormous influence subsequently were nationalism and enthusiasm, and both had grown into monstrous distortions. Enthusiasm, signifying an extreme belief in something carrying faith beyond reason, has led in religious terms to fanaticism, and the suicidal murder of innocents in the name of transcendental purpose. Nationalism, carried to levels of dominance, has propelled imperial subjugation, racism, economic exploitation and xenophobia. It would be difficult to take exception to the thesis. Soyinka delivered the lecture with characteristic eloquence and passion, and the occasion was memorable. But pressed on the question of nationalism, Soyinka seemed compelled to warn of the xenophobic evils of ‘über-nationalism’ rather than consider the virtues of ‘viable states’ – although he used that phrase in recognition of the need for political structure, and he used the phrase ‘this federation of nations’ to refer to the United Kingdom, perhaps in acknowledgment of the location of his

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lecture, perhaps with the implication that a federation of small nations might be an antidote to the monstrous development of ‘über-nations’ or imperialist power and colonial subjugation. This balance between condemnation of the monstrous authority of über-nations and affirmation of identity in terms of ‘viable states’ and national self-determination is at the heart of Soyinka’s 2007 memoir, You Must Set Forth at Dawn. Despite his clearly voiced recognition of the political motivation for the fabrication of a conservative British parliamentary system nationstate model being forced upon ‘a patchwork nation with different pre-colonial histories and systems of self-governance’ (Soyinka 2007: 63), there is undisguised national belonging in Soyinka’s memoir: ‘Instinctively, I turn towards the window when the captain announces that we have entered the Nigerian airspace’ (Soyinka 2007: 22). Soyinka’s irrepressible good humour in this sentence evokes not only the senses of warm pride and blessed self-confirmation, delicate and vulnerable as those may be. Far less is it a matter of national superiorism of the racist variety to which some people remain susceptible, in Scotland as elsewhere. It is rather a sense that whatever location we favour or are born with, there is unfinished business, matters that still need resolution, and in politics, cultural production, languages, civil society and habits of life, much remains to be fought for. Belonging requires more than sentiment. The natural concerns and responsibilities that come with place and connection are what Soyinka’s words remind us of. And they do not go away. In the introduction to Six Plays, Soyinka confirms the essential universal openness of the enquiring mind which is endorsed on every page of MacDiarmid’s later poetry and of which the inimitable careers of both men demonstrate the cost: There’s no way at all that I will ever preach the cutting off of any source of knowledge: Oriental, European, African, Polynesian, or whatever. There’s no way anyone can ever legislate that, once knowledge comes to one, that knowledge should be forever exorcised as if it never existed . . . (Soyinka 1984: xv) MacDiarmid puts it rather differently in In Memoriam James Joyce: ‘All dreams of “imperialism” must be exorcised, / Including linguistic imperialism, which sums up all the rest’ (MacDiarmid 1994a: 790). Soyinka once commented that from his earliest memory of writing, he was always writing ‘for others’. This is different from the more familiar motivation of the Romantic artist who begins writing for himself or herself and creates a literary idiolect in the Western tradition. What follows is self-revelation, what we noted before as an epiphany which is shared by readers but relates pre-eminently to individual perception. This is evident, for example, in the poetic tradition from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Eliot (pace the sacramental) and many contemporaries in the twenty-first century. There is a distinction between this and the work of writing for others. Perhaps MacDiarmid begins as self-revelatory in his early English language poems but in the Scots lyrics his poetry begins to engage

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with others in a different way. He has been accused of dictionary-dredging for obsolete words in these poems, but if their language comes from a dictionary, it got there from the speech of actual Scottish people. By regenerating that language in his poems, MacDiarmid returned it to a Scottish and international readership in a confirmation of the Scots language and the Scottish national identity of the primary users of this language. These poems enact what we might call an epiphany of participation. Their aesthetics are at the service of a profoundly politicised art. Arguably, this is the single most important aspect of the visions of national identity held forward and explored courageously, vigorously, sometimes in horrendous detail, by both MacDiarmid and Soyinka, different as Scotland and Nigeria are in so many respects. As well as the artistic epiphany of perception which is, as I remark above, a common currency in the western European tradition, their work enacts and endorses another kind of epiphany as well: the epiphany of participation. This remains their enduring challenge.

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CHAPTER 9 Gunn, Achebe and the Postcolonial Debate

Neil M. Gunn, Chinua Achebe and the Postcolonial Debate Margery Palmer McCulloch, University of Glasgow

In his exploration of the question of nationhood in his 1991 book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson quotes Hugh Seton-Watson’s attempt to define a nation and his conclusion that ‘all that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one’ (Anderson 1991: 6). This is a definition which fits well with the way the Scots have consistently perceived themselves over the centuries, before and after they lost political sovereignty in 1707 as a result of their voluntary union with England. For despite their willingness to participate as North Britons in the expansion of the British empire abroad and to act as a major centre of industrial expansion in Britain itself, the Scots have continued to cling to an image of themselves as a nation distinct from their southern neighbour and senior partner, England. This perception strengthened during the twentieth century with the progressive decline of British imperial power overseas and the industrial decline at home which deprived Glasgow of its status as ‘second city of the empire’. The failure in the early years of the century to bring a Liberal Party Home Rule Bill to fruition as a result of the outbreak of World War One, and the defection of the Scottish Labour Party in the inter-war period from support of Home Rule to a unionist position of continuing Westminster government did not drown aspirations for self-determination, although in the years immediately after the defeat of Hitler’s Germany in the Second World War nationalism inevitably became marginalised. It returned to centre-stage in Scotland in the 1970s, and after a temporary setback in the unsuccessful (and unfairly constructed) 1979 Devolution Referendum, the movement for a greater measure of national self-determination and recognition increased during the final years of the century until a Scottish parliament was once again established in Edinburgh in 1999. Although this outline account of a people seeking to reclaim responsibility for their own affairs from a dominant ‘external’ power might seem to ally Scotland with independence movements in former overseas colonies, such comparisons do not quite fit the situation of Scotland, where the Lowland Scots in particular made gains as well as losses as a result of their absorption into the British state. As

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recent historical studies such as Linda Colley’s Britons (1992) and Tom Devine’s The Scottish Nation (1999) demonstrate, the 1707 Union had, by the end of the eighteenth century, brought increased prosperity to Lowland Scotland, accompanied by opportunities to enter the administrative elite of the new Britain, to participate in its ongoing imperial expansion, and, in the literary and artistic area, to become part of a British metropolitan cultural scene. In contrast to the situation in British overseas colonies, ‘there were no barricades on all these [Scottish] pilgrims’ paths towards the centre’ (Anderson 1991: 90), and the Scot on the make in London is a stereotypical character in much post-Union fiction. The Scots also proved themselves capable colonial administrators abroad, while at home Lowland Scotland mostly took the part of the British state in the subjugation of the Highlands after the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746, and Lowland sheep farmers were all too often the beneficiaries of cleared lands during the later Highland Clearances of the nineteenth century. To complicate the matter further, military regiments including men from the subjugated Highlands played their part in the ‘pacification’ of overseas territories during the period of imperial expansion just as Scottish soldiers and settlers had for centuries played a part in the colonisation of Ireland. There is therefore no easily recognisable place to be claimed for Scotland – and Scottish Literature – generally in the postcolonial debate, unlike the situation of the Republic of Ireland, whose writers are regularly considered as European participants alongside writers from former colonies in Africa and Asia. On the other hand, Scotland did pay a price culturally and psychologically for the apparently successful forging of the new Great Britain. Cultural commentaries on the period tell of the unseemly haste with which eighteenth-century Edinburgh literati and upwardly mobile middle classes attempted to acquire the appropriate English accent so that they would not appear uncultured; of how even David Hume sent out his philosophical writings for inspection so that any Scotticisms might be expunged before publication. This Anglicisation of communication was the prelude to a more comprehensive loss of Scottish language and traditions, with Walter Scott, for example, recording in Waverley, first published in 1814, his self-imposed ‘task of tracing the evanescent manners of his own country’ (Scott 1969: 478); and Robert Louis Stevenson writing in relation to the Scots language poems in Underwoods that his wish ‘to have my hour as a native Maker, and be read by my own country-folk in our own dying language’ was ‘an ambition surely rather of the heart than of the head, so restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, so parochial in bounds of space’ (Stevenson 1887: xii). Stevenson’s fears were justified, for throughout the nineteenth century not only the English language but also the English tradition in literature became increasingly dominant in the universities and, through the 1872 Education Act, also in the schools. It is ironic that Hugh MacDiarmid, the future revolutionary, modernist, Scots language poet, was the recipient, in literary terms, of what Derek Walcott called in regard to his own Caribbean context ‘a sound colonial education’.1 MacDiarmid’s first published work, an essay in the New Age magazine of

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1911, followed his English teacher’s lead in citing as ‘cases of the highest poetic genius’ the English writers Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats (MacDiarmid 1996: 10). The Scottish Renaissance movement of the post-1918 period grew out of an increasing awareness of the kind of cultural decline described above, and its arguments for both cultural and political self-determination in many ways anticipated later colonial and postcolonial analyses about the debilitating effects of subjugation to the mores and practices of an external culture. What becomes even clearer when we consider the fiction and essay-writing of the Highland novelist Neil M. Gunn and the increasing number of studies of conditions in the Scottish Highlands which were published in books and periodical articles during the inter-war period, is that the region of northern Britain which can without equivocation be considered alongside the situation of former overseas colonies is the Highland area of Scotland: like Ireland an area with a Celtic culture and one whose history includes military subjugation by both English and Lowland Scottish forces. Gunn wrote in his essays of the effects of the loss of ‘belief in ourselves’ which had afflicted the people of the Highlands (Gunn 1987: 158). This form of loss is itself a recurring trope in postcolonial writing, where it is found that a subject people too often have internalised the coloniser’s narrative which sees their nonEuropean customs and social organisation as primitive or childish, and the people themselves as unreliable and incapable of organising their own affairs satisfactorily. From such a perspective the meaningful history of indigenous peoples begins with the arrival of the more advanced civilisation of the colonists, their own past being cast aside as of no account. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe is, like the Scottish Gunn, a writer who has seen it as his duty to his Igbo people to recover a meaningful past by investigating and writing objectively about their history, thus helping to restore a sense of belief in themselves. Achebe was appointed the Neil Gunn Fellow for 1974 when the Scottish Arts Council set up a fellowship in Gunn’s memory after his death in the previous year, and in his Preface to the 1988 Picador edition of the complete African Trilogy, Achebe mentions his indebtedness to Scotsmen such as the Heinemann reader of Things Fall Apart, the first book in the trilogy, for helping him towards publication and recognition. He writes: Perhaps the Scottish affair is a mere co-incidence. Or perhaps there may be an instinctive response there to my underdog colonial experience and all its painful aftermath [. . .] there may indeed exist between us a shared disposition [. . . so] that I felt so completely at home in the world of the peasants and fishermen of Neil Gunn’s fiction that I suspected he and I must be at heart pre-industrial men. (Achebe 1988: xii) It seems appropriate, therefore, that this chapter should explore some of the issues raised in postcolonial criticism through a comparative discussion of Gunn

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and Achebe, and through such discussion attempt to show the relevance of postcolonial discourse to the history of the Scottish Highlands. The principal fiction texts discussed will be Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), the first novel in his African Trilogy, and Gunn’s novel of the Clearances, Butcher’s Broom (1934), although comparative reference will also be made more briefly to a wider range of Gunn’s fiction. Things Fall Apart is outstanding in the way it immediately creates from the inside the life of the small fictional village of Umuofia. There is no question of the reader being treated to a display of something exotic or ‘other’ in comparison to Western civilisation; or having the unfamiliar explained by a patronising omniscient narrative voice. Instead, as Toni Morrison describes in her essay ‘The Ancestor as Foundation’, as readers we ‘feel the narrator without identifying that narrator’ so that we ‘work with the author in the construction of the book’ (Morrison 1990: 328). The implicit audience for the book, in addition to its international readership, is the author’s own people, whose history and sense of identity he aims to retrieve. In Things Fall Apart, we enter into a narrative whose pattern often approximates to the episodic form of epic poetry and oral story-telling, and where perspectives are communicated indirectly through suggestive images and metaphorical descriptions. Its principal character, the wrestler Okonkwo, is characterised like a hero in the epic stories of Homer or Scandinavian and Icelandic sagas, as well as being presented through his involvement in the everyday life of his village. He is described imagistically as being as slippery as a fish in water [. . .] He breathed heavily, and it was said that, when he slept, his wives and children in their outhouses could hear him breathe. When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on springs. (Achebe 1988: 17) And of his fighting prowess: It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights. (Achebe 1988: 17) The very rhythm of this long sentence, a sentence without punctuation or space to take breath, captures the achievement of the contemporary Okonkwo while at the same time taking the fictional watchers and their readers or listeners back in imagination to the distant heroic past of the people. We are told also that Okonkwo ‘was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond’, a description that affirms Umuofia and its neighbouring villages as the centre of the narrative, with what we usually think of as the great world of international affairs marginalised to the ‘beyond’ (Achebe 1988: 17). This description of Achebe’s methodology is similar to the way in which some of Neil Gunn’s most important Highland narratives are communicated

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to us. In the episodic The Silver Darlings, first published in 1941, the fisherman Roddie is portrayed as an epic hero as well as a local fisherman of great skill. He is described as ‘one of the old Vikings’, with an old man of his village having ‘the sort of feeling that he had come himself up out of the sea like – like one sent to deliver us’. The young Finn’s heroic sea-journeys to Stornoway and the Hebrides initiate him into the history and legends of his people as well as giving him selfknowledge; while his journeys, retold in the ceilidh house, become themselves part of this legendary history. Again it is an old man, a drover, who tells him: ‘You gave me a vision – of the youth of Finn MacCoul himself’ (Gunn 1969: 281, 449). And just as with Achebe’s depiction of Umuofia as centre, so in The Silver Darlings – as in Gunn’s first novel The Grey Coast (1926) – that grey Caithness coast itself provides the heart of the narrative from which the fishermen sail to distant places in the world beyond. Their homeland is presented as the centre, even if, as in The Grey Coast, it is a poverty-stricken centre. It is not relegated to a marginalised position as in many colonial or metropolitan narratives about remote communities. Many such meaningful comparisons can be made between Gunn’s narratives and the Nigerian’s story of his Igbo tribe. Achebe’s time-shifts take us into the past of Okonkwo’s father, a flute-player and a gregarious and gentle man who is no warrior, and in consequence is regarded as a failure by his tribe and by his son. As the episodes of the novel unfold we gradually become aware of the indigenous value systems and the social and cultural traditions of the people. Without being conscious of it we are being taught how the community functions, and above all, we recognise that this is no primitive community in need of salvation by progressive Europeans, but an autonomous distinctive culture with its own rituals and ceremonies and moral codes. We find a similar process in Gunn’s fiction of Highland experience. The Highlands for long had an image in the minds of Lowland Scots and English alike of a dangerous place not subject to the rules of civilisation, with the Highlanders themselves seen as ‘other’, primitive in their habits, untrustworthy. Although Scott’s early nineteenth-century fiction transformed the Highlands into an icon of Romanticism, and Queen Victoria’s love of Balmoral ‘civilised’ both Highlands and Highlanders in the imagination of southerners, once again there was a gap between reality and perception. By the early twentieth century, the Highlands formed a distressed area, depopulated as a result of the Clearances and economic conditions generally, the Gaelic language in severe decline, and the remaining population demoralised. Highland estates still provided a playground for rich tourists, but there was little prospect of improved living and working conditions for Highlanders themselves. This was the situation which faced Gunn when he began to publish his fiction in the early years of the Scottish inter-war literary revival, just as Achebe later in the century had to face a similarly demoralised tribal situation in Nigeria as a result of the effects of colonisation. In their novels, therefore, both writers seek to give imaginative expression to a past way of life very different from the way of life in the urbanised modern world, but a way of life whose values are shown

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to be worthy of understanding as opposed to being cast aside as primitive. For example, Gunn’s Young Art and Old Hector (1942) portrays the everyday life of a small Highland village, and the narrative gradually makes clear the social value system of the community. Its episodic scene-setting and dialogue between characters teach these characters and their readers about the negative happenings in the people’s past as well as showing the social and moral support that their co-operative living patterns could provide in difficult times. The key relationship in this novel is between the mythically named Young Art and Old Hector, a relationship in which the old man passes on to the young boy the knowledge of the traditions and history of his people, and most importantly, passes on the names of the places destroyed in the Clearances, so that they will live on in the imagination of the people, so that they will not be ‘nameless’, their history forgotten (Gunn 1976a: 251). In the sequel to the Young Art book, The Green Isle of the Great Deep, a dystopian fable about a totalitarian paradise, published in 1944 during World War Two, it is clear that what Art and Hector hold out against the conditioning of the administrators of the Green Isle and to make their stand for freedom is once again the social value system of their home village, their sense of being rooted in a way of life that involves communal responsibility and sharing as well as the freedom to develop a sense of personal identity within the community. Like Georg Lukács (who was writing during the same 1930s period as Gunn, although his seminal The Historical Novel was not available in an English translation until 1962), Gunn believed that a true historical novel was one that was historical in intention as opposed to by chance, and that in a case of historical decline, ‘the historical causes for the decline [. . .] should be explored and artistically portrayed’ (Lukács 1962: 22–3). Gunn’s modern, ideological and investigative approach in his historical fiction has too often been ignored by critics in favour of simplistic, romanticised associations with the Celtic Twilight scenarios of ‘Fiona Macleod’ or ‘Golden Age’ mythologies. Gunn himself was critical of his famous predecessor Walter Scott’s approach to the historical novel, commenting that it is not that the history was untrue or was inadequate subject matter for his genius; it was that it no longer enriched or influenced a living national tradition [. . .] it was seen backwards as in the round of some time spyglass and had interpretive bearing neither upon a present nor a future. (Gunn 1987: 123) In contrast, Gunn considered it important that the broken link between past and present should be reconnected, and the past understood and retrieved through investigation and portrayal, so that his people could move forward into a more confident future. In addition to their narrative and formal qualities, therefore, his fiction books, like his discursive essays of the 1930s, have a strong educational impulse, an objective communicated overtly in the more contemporaneous setting of Highland River (1937) where the educational system

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is shown to deculturalise its Highland pupils as opposed to drawing on the many opportunities offered by their local environment for teaching them about their own history. One of the principal issues in African postcolonial discourse in particular has been this question of how to deal with the people’s past, with approaches varying between ‘shamefaced rejection; romantic embrace; and realistic appraisal’ (Chinweizu et al. 1990: 285). The dramatist and intellectual Wole Soyinka, whose culture is that of the Yoruba-speaking peoples of Nigeria, coined the word ‘tigritude’ as a derogatory term in opposition to ‘negritude’, the term used to characterise those who in his view romanticised or uncritically ‘worshipped’ the past just because it was their own African past, free from the influence of the colonisers. ‘A tiger’, he is reputed to have said, ‘does not need to proclaim its tigritude’ (Walder 1990: 286). In contrast, Achebe, like the Scottish Gunn in relation to the Highlands, chose the route of realistic appraisal of the past, believing that ‘most African writers write out of an African experience and of commitment to an African destiny,’ and accepting for himself the role of the artist as teacher ‘because I have a deep-seated need to alter things within that situation, to find for myself a little more room than has been allowed me in the world’ (Achebe 1990b: 274, 278). In support of this approach, he quotes the Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence, who writes of the African identity dilemma in her book Long Drums and Cannons: No writer of any quality has viewed the old Africa in an idealized way, but they have tried to regain what is rightly theirs – a past composed of real and vulnerable people, their ancestors, not the figments of missionary and colonialist imaginations. (Laurence quoted in Achebe 1990b: 281) Things Fall Apart, therefore, aims to examine the past of the Igbo people in an objective way, and the narrative celebrates the strengths of the community while at the same time laying bare its weaknesses: weaknesses brought to us implicitly through varied focalisation and by the foregrounding of specific details in the narrative, as well as more explicitly and tragically through the characterisation of its flawed, ‘Shakespearean’ hero, Okonkwo himself. For this is a society which seems unable to modify traditional practices, as, for example, in its rejection of female twins by leaving them to die on ground outside the village, despite the distress this brings to the women in the community. Its refusal to accept that non-warrior men like Okonkwo’s flute-playing father and Okonkwo’s own gentle son have anything of worth to contribute to the village inhibits the evolution of existing hierarchical relationships, despite the obvious problems brought to the village by a hierarchy based on strength and capacity for violent action. Such a refusal to question or change traditional customs allows first of all the missionaries (who find a place for social misfits) and then the imperialist administrators to make entry into the community and finally take it over. Okonkwo is both a

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tragic individual in his own right, with his heroic qualities subverted by the flaws in his character, and at the same time a symbol of his community’s inability to evolve. The novel’s balanced account of the history of the fictional Umuofia and the sense of inevitability which colours the intrusion of the modern world into its life in the form of the missionaries and colonial administrators can be compared with Gunn’s approach in his 1934 novel of the Highland Clearances, Butcher’s Broom. The Clearances have become part of the mythic imagination of the Highlands, a symbol of the losses that the Gaelic-speaking population of this mountainous and economically and administratively difficult land have suffered over the centuries at the hands of outsiders as well as through the actions of their increasingly gentrified and absentee clan chieftains and factors. Like Achebe, Gunn sets out to investigate the effects of imperial modernity on a ‘peripheral’ fictional scenario, the circumstances of the Sutherland Clearances in particular, and to discover something of the way of life of the people before they were cleared from the land. By doing so, he hopes to find a narrative that will bring understanding of the present decline while restoring the lost connection between past and present, thus providing a stepping-stone to the future. The narrative initially establishes the communal identity of the village settlement in the remote glen of the Riasgan as well as the identity of the individuals in it. We see the people working and playing together: caring for their crofts and helping those who are weaker; gathering together in the ceilidh house in the evening to tell stories and sing their songs. We meet Dark Mhairi, the wise woman of the village, with her ancient knowledge of healing herbs. The people and their natural world setting are brought together in what seems to be a holistic and timeless life pattern. Yet, like Things Fall Apart, Butcher’s Broom does not romanticise this situation, but makes explicit underlying weaknesses in the way of life. The available land is not sufficient for the needs of the growing population; and the promise of land on their return is one of the encouragements given to young men to enlist to fight in the Peninsular War. There is also an uneasy relationship between the people and their Calvinistic ministers of religion, whose disapproval takes the innocent joy out of social gatherings involving music and dancing. It may be fear of their censorship that forces the young woman Elie to leave the village when she discovers herself pregnant after her lover has enlisted, unaware of her situation. And as in Fionn MacColla’s Clearances novel of 1945, And the Cock Crew, the preaching of the ministers that the Clearances are a punishment from God for the sins of their way of life inhibits the capacity of the people to cope with the disaster of the evictions when it comes upon them.2 Religion does not feature to any significant extent in Gunn’s fiction as a whole and references to the Church in Butcher’s Broom are fewer than the descriptions of Igbo religious practices in Achebe’s novel. Yet Gunn’s narrative perspective is more explicitly negative than that of Achebe, where the limitations of indigenous religious beliefs are communicated more obliquely alongside their role in the people’s lives. Butcher’s Broom also shows how the break-up of the ancient clan system

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by the Westminster government in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellions has left the people rootless. They still believe in the clan chieftain as their protector, and so are disinclined to take seriously the rumours of evictions in more southern areas brought into the glen by passing drovers. They do not believe that their chief would allow such a happening in the Riasgan and so are unable to organise themselves in the attempt to fight against possible eviction. The narrative, like Achebe’s, points to what seems the inevitable intrusion of the modern expansionist world into the more static lives of such small, traditionally organised communities, even as it points also to the weaknesses as well as the values of the way of life that will be destroyed. It also makes clear that the cruelty accompanying the intrusion, if not the intrusion itself, could have been avoided. This sense of historical inevitability is created most strongly in Gunn’s novel when he moves his setting briefly from the Highland glen to the London townhouse of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. There the image of the Duchess’s doorkeepers ‘in full Highland costume [. . .] a more uncommon possession than Nubian slaves’ (Gunn 1977: 250–1) speaks powerfully of the changed clan relationship from the chieftain’s perspective, while during the discussion between the Sutherlands and their Highland estate factor, the issue of the Sutherlands’ land and their tenant crofters is seen in the context of current capitalist economics and the drive for land improvement for food production. This is, furthermore, perceived politically, in the context of the still powerful memory of the French Revolution and the fears of the upper classes of a similar uprising of the common people in Britain. In addition to such thematic and ideological similarities, one obvious formal similarity between these two writers is that both write in English. The issue of language has posed a postcolonial dilemma for writers from former British colonies in Africa and India, in that their linguistic choice has most often been between a number of tribal languages spoken by diverse groups of local peoples or the coloniser’s legacy, English, which acts to some extent as a second and therefore unifying language. It is also a language that can carry the message about the worth of the indigenous people’s way of life to the outside world, thus subverting the colonialist narrative. Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o has argued forcibly – and in many respects convincingly – against the use of English, even using Achebe’s own words to support his case. Achebe wrote in Morning Yet on Creation Day that ‘running away from oneself seems to me a very inadequate way of dealing with an anxiety. And if writers should opt for such escapism, who is to meet the challenge?’ (Achebe 1975: 27). Ngu˜gı˜ turns this comment into support for his own belief that African writers must have the courage to use their own indigenous languages in their more ambitious work: I would like to see Kenya peoples’ mother-tongues (our national languages!) carry a literature reflecting not only the rhythms of a child’s spoken expression, but also his struggle with nature and his social nature. (Ngu˜gı˜ 1986: 29, 28)

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Nevertheless, many postcolonial writers have chosen the English route, reluctantly, yet with an awareness also of the possibility that they can remake that English to suit their own purposes. Achebe, for example, is on record as saying: ‘And let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it’ (Achebe 1990b: 274). This assertion is similar to that made by MacDiarmid in the early stages of the Scottish inter-war literary revival when he still believed that a modern Scottish literature would have to be written in English, but that it would be ‘no more English in spirit than the literature of the Irish Literary Revival, most of which was written in the English language, was English in spirit’ (MacDiarmid 2004: 23). In the article ‘Language, Orality and Literature’, Chantal Zabus explores some of the ways in which African writers in particular have done ‘unheard of things’ with English, embedding in the foreign language oral elements from their own indigenous tongues. Such a ‘foreignising’ of English includes the many Igbo proverbs found in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, proverbs which act as teaching material in the community in a way similar to Old Hector’s use of the Celtic legends of Finn MacCoul in his teaching of his young friend Art in Gunn’s fiction. Zabus also discusses devices such as ‘cushioning’ – the use of both native and English lexical terms as in ‘obi or hut’ which Achebe uses alongside his practice of using Igbo words such as ‘harmattan’, ‘dancing egwugwu’, ‘kola’, ‘ogene’ unexplained, leaving them to be clarified in the continuing development of a scene. These are practices not unfamiliar to Scottish literature, found, for example, in Walter Scott’s depiction of both Gaelic and rural Scots-speaking settings, and in the Scottish Renaissance period in Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s ‘oralising’ of English by introducing Scots-language words and idiomatic syntax and rhythmic movement from the speech of the north-east of the country. A more radical foreignising of English is ‘relexification’ where a straightforward descriptive phrase or value judgment in English is transformed into a more oblique, even ambiguous, statement through translation into the kind of imagistic language that would be used in the native tongue. Zabus points to this use in Achebe in the phrase ‘the white man’ which in the Igbo language would actually mean what English speakers would understand by the word ‘leper’. Similarly, but more amusingly, the Igbo descriptive phrase ‘a man with no toes’ is used by the villages of Umuofia to indicate ‘a man wearing shoes’ (Zabus 1996: 34–6). Although Gunn also used English for his narratives of the predominantly Gaelic-speaking Highlands, his language choices were not so varied or oppositional as those of African writers. He himself was born and brought up in coastal Caithness, which was not traditionally a Gaelic-speaking area of Scotland, although Gaelic speakers entered the county as a result of the Clearances. His father’s fishing crews came from the Western Isles and he at least was probably able to understand and speak Gaelic but the parents did not choose to have their children learn the language. As a result of school education being conducted in English, a high proportion of Highlanders were competent in the language in addition to their native Gaelic. In addition, although Gaelic literature had

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always had a strong poetry tradition, and a strong oral story-telling tradition, there were not in Gunn’s time any print-based models of a kind that could be readily developed into a modern long fiction in Gaelic. The readership for any such work would also have been minuscule, given the contemporaneous decline in the language and in the population of Gaelic-speaking areas. Even if Gunn had himself been Gaelic-speaking, it would therefore not have been surprising for him to choose to write in English, since, like Achebe in relation to his African situation, he wished to educate not only his own Highland people but also readers outwith the Highlands in an understanding of Highland history. However, as with Ngu˜gı˜ dismissal of the use of the coloniser’s language in the African context, Gunn was criticised for his use of English by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, who characterised him ironically as ‘a brilliant novelist from Scotshire’ (Gibbon and MacDiarmid 1934: 200). Yet, just as Gunn’s language dilemma was not quite the same as that of Achebe or Ngu˜gı˜, it differed also from that of Gibbon and MacDiarmid, for whom the linguistic choice was between English and Scots. Gibbon’s ‘Scotshire’ suggests that he did not appreciate, or that he chose to ignore for the sake of an ironic quip, this linguistic difference between Highlands and Lowlands. Scots was neither a relevant nor a politically appropriate narrative medium for fiction centred on a Highland and Gaelic-based way of life that had often suffered at the hands of Scots-speaking Lowlanders. In this situation, English could provide a more neutral voice. In the Preface to his own English-language novel of the Clearances, Consider the Lilies (1968), the younger Gaelic-speaking Iain Crichton Smith writes that he has deliberately chosen to use a slow pace and simple sentence structure in his English prose fiction in order to communicate the different pace and way of life of his remote Highland community. Similarly, Gunn often uses simple sentence structures, adapting pace and rhythm and at times rearranging the pattern of English syntax to connote Gaelic idiom. Such syntactical adaptation is, however, always used in dialogue as opposed to narration, and he is careful, although unobtrusive, in making clear where his settings are Gaelic-speaking (usually inland crofting areas) and where they are Scots- or Scottish/English-speaking (most often on the fishing coast). In The Silver Darlings, for example, it is clear at the outset through references to the use of Gaelic that the small community on the coast at Helmsdale are those inland Highlanders cleared from glens such as the Riasgan of Butcher’s Broom. The reader therefore understands that Catrine’s fear when she is accosted by a Scots-speaking shepherd on her journey over the Ord of Caithness to Dunster is in part caused by her inability to understand his language. Similarly when her son Finn later goes to find the cholera doctor at the coastal town of Wick during an outbreak of the disease at Dunster, he finds that his English school lessons are no help with the Scots-language speakers of Wick, and he is rescued from his inability to communicate only by a chance meeting with a Gaelic speaker. Such differential language contexts – made acute by the process and experience of Clearance and imperialism – are brought to the reader unobtrusively but effectively, while the clarity and neutrality of Gunn’s

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narrative medium generally is enriched by the vitality of imagistic description of landscape and seascape which endorses his characters’ attachment to their land, and therefore the psychological as well as physical devastation caused by their forced clearance from it. One of the aims behind this comparative discussion of Gunn and Achebe has been to point to the relevance of a postcolonial perspective in consideration of Gunn’s Highland fiction, shifting perceptions away from the Golden Age or Celtic Twilight contexts too often emphasised in readings of his work, and affirming his position as a modern writer attempting to retrieve the story of his people’s past so that it can challenge historically inept accounts and be used as a stepping stone to the future. And just as Ania Loomba has argued that early understanding of the postcolonial ‘as a linear historical development’ has moved ‘towards a much broader and more varied sense of the term as a marker of historical and cultural change’ (Loomba 1998: 3), I would suggest that such a broader view of the postcolonial should be applied where relevant to consideration of the inter-war Scottish Renaissance as a whole. This would assist in the replacing of recent inadequate criticisms of a narrow national essentialism or a belated romantic nationalism with a recognition of the movement as the expression of a desire to throw off a provincial North British identity and recover a selfdetermining cultural distinctiveness (and, in the longer term, political status) that would be more truly representative.3 It would also assist in its recognition as the outward-looking modern – and in its most adventurous literary manifestations modernist – movement its creative writings, when interrogated formally and comparatively, show it to be. NOTES 1. The phrase occurs in Walcott’s long poem ‘The Schooner Flight’. See Walcott (1992: 346). 2. John Prebble (1969: 218–25) tells of the clearance of the cottagers of Glencalvie in Ross-shire in 1845 and how they had nowhere to take refuge except in the graveyard at Croick. They apparently did not think themselves worthy to ask for refuge inside the church itself and this was not offered to them. 3. For examples of the Scottish Renaissance as a belated Romantic nationalism, see Nairn (1977). Discussion of the inter-war revival movement in terms of a narrow (and sentimental) national essentialism are to be found in Schoene (1995); Carruthers et al. (2004); and less antagonistically in Bell (2004). There is no attempt in such critiques to consider the movement in terms of literary modernism, or in the context of ideological, social and cultural change ‘beyond Scotland’. Such critiques are in themselves solipsistic.

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CHAPTER 10

‘East is West and West is East’: Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Quest for Ultimate Cosmopolitanism Scott Lyall, Edinburgh Napier University

James Leslie Mitchell, better known by his pseudonym Lewis Grassic Gibbon,1 was early on an eager literary explorer of other worlds. Douglas Young tells us that the young Leslie Mitchell’s ‘favourite authors were Jules Verne, Conan Doyle, [author of The Blue Lagoon, Henry] De Vere Stacpoole, and most of all Rider Haggard’ (Young 1973: 4). Mitchell grew up reading varieties of adventure fiction that can broadly be categorised as colonial. In each there is a quest: in science fiction, to expand earthly (i.e. Western) parameters and defeat the aliens; in detective fiction, to rescue the imperial metropolis from the foreign criminal ‘other’; or in the imperial exploits of Haggard, to discover the authentic Africa. Colonial adventure fiction forms part of the wider imperial quest. This quest is transgressive in that, as Elleke Boehmer notes, it goes ‘beyond the frontiers of civilization’ (Boehmer 2005: 2). Beginning as the quest to find and colonise new lands, initial conquest becomes the ongoing, highly populist desire to save the ‘West’ / civilisation from the ‘East’ / barbarism (see, for instance, John Buchan’s The Power-House or Ian Fleming’s Bond novels). In his own fiction, Gibbon uses the imperial quest motif in order to subvert imperialism, just as his questbook Nine Against the Unknown (1934) romanticises the beginnings of modern Western exploration, yet is critical of colonial conquest. Particularly in his Egyptbased fiction, surveyed in this chapter, Gibbon’s quest is to shatter the colonial conception of East and West and return to an age of cosmopolitanism – an idea anticipating the anti-imperial relatedness of cultures central to contemporary conceptions of postcoloniality. Egypt was important to Mitchell. He was stationed there (and in Palestine, Mesopotamia and India) during his years (1919–23) in the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC).2 Egypt is fundamental, too, to the diffusionist theory of civilisation. ‘All human civilisations originated in Ancient Egypt’ (Gibbon 2001b: 4), according to Gibbon’s ‘The Antique Scene’ (1934). The importance of diffusionism to Gibbon, both as a personal belief-system and as a theoretical scaffold for his work, is well known to critics of modern Scottish literature; it is perhaps less obvious to general readers of his work who are most likely to read, or be asked to study at a Scottish secondary school, Sunset Song (1932), voted ‘Scotland’s

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favourite book’ in 2005 (Maley 2005). However aware critics in Scotland may have been of diffusionism’s centrality to Gibbon’s work, few have examined this relationship at book length. Douglas Gifford’s Neil M. Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1983) understands the importance of the quest, but detaches this motif from diffusionism; like many critics, Gifford believes diffusionism mars Gibbon’s art. Ian Campbell considers Gibbon’s diffusionism under the chapter heading ‘Civilisation’ in his Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1985). Campbell points out with justification that ‘Gibbon was not alone, nor a far-out heretic, in his [diffusionist] view, but part of a widespread movement which shaded into others’ (Campbell 1985: 28). This is an important consideration, with theoretical ramifications for our understanding of Scottish literary history in relation to broader historical, political and theoretical movements. In rethinking Gibbon’s diffusionism we can now place his work within the scope of a postcolonial-inflected cosmopolitanism.3 It is impossible here to give an extended survey of a complex theory such as diffusionism, but of prime importance is that anthropological diffusionists such as Gibbon’s gurus, Grafton Elliot Smith and William J. Perry, believed the origins of civilisation to be in Egypt. Elliot Smith and Perry believed that originary moments in civilisation’s development, such as the invention of metallurgy or the vital innovation of irrigation, must have begun in one particular place in time (cf. Elliot Smith 1911: x). They rejected the idea that cultures had evolved independently and unbeknownst to one another and so, also, they were suspicious of humanist claims for the psychical unity or sameness of different peoples. Humans, for these diffusionists, are more imitative than inventive, and the core of the inventive cultural action at civilisation’s beginnings belonged respectively to the proto-Egyptians and ancient Babylonians, diffusing to Europe via the Mediterranean littoral. The political geographer J. M. Blaut claims that diffusionism was ‘a foundation theory in Western thought’ and that, far from being confined to a minority of academic anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the theory still ‘lies at the very root of historical and geographical scholarship’ (Blaut 1993: 17, 1). Adapting Samir Amin’s (1989: 24) phrase, Blaut’s thesis is that ‘Eurocentrism’, in particular Eurocentric pedagogy, is a species of ‘spatial elitism’ (Blaut 1993: 12) creating the idea of core / periphery, inside / outside. This model of centre and margin serves European interests by asserting that European precedence was purely internally generated, acquiring everything from the native inventiveness and superiority of Europeans alone, when in fact it owed much to the colonisation of non-European lands from 1492 onwards. Echoing Fanon’s thought that ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World’ (Fanon 1990: 81), Blaut argues that Europe was built on the back of colonisation and then covered its own tracks; Europe has denied its other to create its self. Whereas Orientalism is Edward W. Said’s term for the ideology informing Western representations of ‘the East’, Blaut is concerned with Europe as an ideological formation and how the ideology of ‘the West’ has been diffused. For

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Blaut, scholars have textually mythologised European historical identity to make an über-territory he calls ‘Greater Europe’, a powerful amalgam of the dominant world states: western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand. But Blaut argues that European historiography has further stretched the boundaries of ‘Greater Europe’ to include the ‘Bible Lands’, which reach ‘from North Africa to Mesopotamia’ (Blaut 1993: 3). Egypt, in the north, is not the ‘real’ Africa, which is black Africa; indeed, Elliot Smith claims that ‘the composition of the racial mixture in Britain and Egypt presents many analogies’ (Elliot Smith 1911: 152). If diffusionists such as Elliot Smith have claims that Egypt is the origin of civilisation, then European colonialism must subsume Egypt in ‘Greater Europe’ for European primacy to be maintained and the Hegelian hierarchy of master / slave, civilised / barbarian to remain in place. (As Robert Young reminds us, ‘it was Hegel, after all, who declared that “Africa has no history” ’ (2007: 33).) Consequently, if civilisation has its roots in Greater European culture then it is necessary for European culture to be diffused through colonialism to those less advanced places on the world atlas. Whilst Blaut argues that diffusionism is not directly responsible for the core / periphery model, he believes that Eurocentrism in large measure generates diffusionism. Given that proviso, Blaut believes diffusionism to be ‘the central intellectual doctrine that explains and rationalises the actions and interests of European colonialism and neocolonialism’ (Blaut 1993: 39). As we shall see, Gibbon’s use of diffusionism, centred as it is on the recapturing of a mythical cosmopolitan Golden Age, contradicts Blaut’s analysis. The textual battle for possession of civilisation and its origins is one that informs and is informed by colonial conquest. According to Niall Ferguson, ‘[t]he occupation of Egypt opened a new chapter in imperial history. Indeed, in many ways, it was the real trigger for the African Scramble’ (Ferguson 2004: 233). Said cites Egypt as ‘the focal point’ of Orientalism (2003: 84). Egypt was officially established as a Protectorate during the First World War, although the British had been in informal occupation from 1882. Egypt was, then, in all but name, a British colony when the diffusionist Leslie Mitchell was stationed there with the British army. But his army years also saw the political birth of modern Egypt, from the insurgency of 1919 to a compromised form of independence in 1922. Nationalist revolt in Egypt unquestionably invigorated the fiction Gibbon set in that country, although he fervently claimed to despise the ideology of nationalism: About Nationalism. About Small Nations. What a curse to the earth are small nations! Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland, San Salvador, Luxembourg, Manchukuo, the Irish Free State. There are many more: there is an appalling number of disgusting little stretches of the globe claimed, occupied and infected by groupings of babbling little morons – babbling militant on the subjects (unendingly) of their exclusive cultures, their exclusive languages, their national souls, their national genius. (Gibbon 2001b: 106)

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This outburst from ‘Glasgow’ (1934), included in Scottish Scene, a book Gibbon co-authored with Hugh MacDiarmid, sounds as if it comes from an imperialist opposed to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated nations. But Gibbon’s real gripe is with what he believed to be the reactionary, quasi-fascist basis of nationalist movements, in particular the modern Scottish Renaissance promoted by MacDiarmid. In spite of Gibbon’s scepticism, this 1920–30s cultural movement – if movement it was – can now be seen through a postcolonial lens as resistant to British political and cultural centralisation. Gibbon’s own ‘Scottish’ fiction, in particular A Scots Quair, made a key contribution to the Scottish Renaissance by employing a uniquely local vernacular voice to speak of universal concerns. Gibbon, however, resisted inclusion as ‘a member of a homogenous literary cultus’, as he jeeringly called the Scottish Renaissance (2001b: 109). And it was an internationalist political position – what we can now see as a form of radical cosmopolitanism – and the broader cultural sympathies inspired by his reading of diffusionist anthropology which ignited his suspicions of the Scottish movement. Gibbon, who as a young journalist in 1917 Aberdeen addressed Communist meetings and was a member of the Aberdeen Soviet, argues in ‘Glasgow’ that the poverty of the poorest inhabitants of Scotland’s largest city would not be alleviated by the reinvigoration of Scottish culture or even by self-government from Edinburgh. A progressive solution to the iniquities of capitalist civilisation will not be found in cultures or nations declaring their independence from each other but in the revelatory realisation of their essential oneness: ‘Glasgow’s salvation, Scotland’s salvation, the world’s salvation lies in neither nationalism nor internationalism, those twin halves of an idiot whole. It lies in ultimate cosmopolitanism, the earth the City of God’ (Gibbon 2001b: 108). Gibbon’s idealistic model of a cosmopolitan future is deeply informed by his reading of the past as adapted from diffusionism. For Gibbon, contra Blaut, diffusionism’s view of how civilisation began has what can arguably be characterised as postcolonial implications. If cultures did not evolve independently by spontaneous generation but arose fortuitously from one place, then, notwithstanding Egypt’s historical importance, in the present world order no particular culture can rightly claim cultural superiority over others, and no particular folk should imagine their nation justified in pursuing what Amin describes as a ‘global political project’ (Amin 1989: 75), or as having a chosen or ethnically determined imperial destiny. Like others on the Left in the 1930s, Gibbon was searching for an active principle in history with which to defeat Fascism’s reactionary theory of national and racial particularity. He – like other notable creative writers – found what he needed in diffusionism. W. H. Auden, for example, also saw a link between the diffusionist theory of the past and a leftist politics for the future. Auden was briefly involved in the Republican bid to defeat the Nationalist Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and his ‘Spain’ (1937) plots the history of civilisation from a diffusionist perspective and sets this against the peril to civilisation of the present Fascist threat:

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Auden had been reading W. J. Perry (cf. Fuller 2007: 284), whose The Children of the Sun (1923) is the theoretical source for many of the leitmotifs in Gibbon’s fiction. Here Perry argues that pre-civilisation food-gatherers consisted of ‘entirely peaceful’ communities practising sexual equality, and that savagery was not the evolutionary starting-point for humanity on the Great Chain of Being from primitive brute to Homo sapiens, but rather the result of ‘culture degradation’ (Perry 2004: 490, 469). This undermines the developmental timeline and imperial dualities (core / periphery, civilised / uncivilised, mature / immature) of Enlightenment, which parallels the theory of early humans as savage with racism towards existing underdeveloped nations. ‘Civilization [is] no progress from the beast, but a mind-tumour and a disease’ (Gibbon 1995: 111), realises Maudslay in Gibbon’s The Thirteenth Disciple (1931). Primitive humanity and barbarism are not comparable; and civilisation is neither inevitable nor unchangeable, but still to be won. In spite of Elliot Smith’s contention in The Diffusion of Culture (1933) that culture diffusion is not to be confused with the migration of populations but rather ideas, diffusionism is in reality a spatial theory mapping the movement and intermixture of peoples and cultures: a theory which, whilst not entirely undermining the claims of autochthony, maintains that cultures did not evolve, do not exist, and cannot be studied in isolation. In this respect it can be seen as a prototype for contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism. As Kwame Anthony Appiah says in Cosmopolitanism, ‘[c]ultural purity is an oxymoron’ (Appiah 2007: 113). Gibbon displays a proto-postcolonial understanding of the hybrid nature of culture in his Egyptian stories. Most of these centre on Cairo, his first Egyptian work being The Calends of Cairo. Collected by Jarrolds in 1931, and with a puff by H. G. Wells, many of these short stories originally appeared over 1929–30 in the Cornhill Magazine as ‘Polychromata’. ‘He Who Seeks’, the first tale in Calends, opens with the meaning (literal and metaphorical) of Polychromata: ‘Manycoloured [. . .] one of the names of our little Cairo’ (Gibbon 2001b: 224). Cairo is a great, many-coloured cosmopolitan city, and Gibbon’s stories will reflect this. The narrator of Gibbon’s Egyptian work is a White Russian in exile from the Bolshevik Revolution. In Calends and The Lost Trumpet (1932) this is Anton Saloney, ‘dragoman, guide, ex-colonel of horse in the army of Deniken, and one-time Professor of English Literature in the Gymnasium of Kazan’ (224); in the ‘Egyptian Nights’ section of Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights (1932) – and

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‘Egyptian Nights’ surely echoes Arabian Nights – the Saloney surrogate is Sergei Lubow, another White Russian. That Gibbon should choose a White Russian narrator indicates a concern with the effects of revolution and the decline and fall of civilisations. Saloney, a cultural outsider like the reader, is our guide round a once great civilisation. As the beneficiary of his homeland’s pre-revolutionary inequalities he is no ordinary dragoman but a cultivated guide who has now fallen on harder times, as both dynastic Russia and Egypt have suffered cultural decline. With bitter irony, Saloney says: ‘I have left my country for my country’s good’ (Gibbon 2001a: 184). Russia, for Saloney, is under occupation by the Bolsheviks, as Egypt’s degeneration is underlined by the British presence. Former professor of English Literature, Saloney speaks our language (although his ‘non-Standard’ English is Gibbon’s somewhat ham attempt to convey a Russian inflection) and intimately understands the literary culture of Egypt’s coloniser. In ‘The Epic’, Saloney describes English as ‘this wayward, featureless, fatherless tongue’, as if it now belongs to no one and everyone, and thinks it may even be a more subtle interpreter of ‘Cairo’s soul’ than Arabic (Gibbon 2001b: 237). ‘The Epic’ centres on John Connan, a disillusioned English – and, Saloney thinks, part-Irish – poet who is brought back to life and writing by his desire to write the epic of Cairo, ‘The Epic of Khalig’ (Cairo’s main street). Saloney describes Connan as ‘the bull-man’, and questions how someone with a despotic will-to-power resembling ‘[t]he Nietzsche, the fascist, the bolshevik’ (240) could ever write a great poem redolent of the spirit of many-coloured, cosmopolitan Cairo. Connan imagines his epic will reveal what he believes to be the essentially feminine soul of Cairo, but ‘The Spirit of the Khalig, the woman I had created!’ (248), embodied in a mute Sudanese slave, is never revealed to anyone except Saloney as Connan’s vision destroys himself and the Sudanese. Connan, a ‘sick man’ (238), is on an illusive and doomed quest to capture the essence of the East, a culturally imperial quest undermined by Gibbon throughout his Egyptian fiction. Such subversive tactics are shown to comic effect in ‘Siwa Plays the Game’ from ‘Egyptian Nights’. Another English writer, George Mentieth Elvar de Selincourt, comes to Cairo looking for the authentic East. Selincourt is author of the bestsellers Purple Sands, A Dahlia in the Desert and The Yellow Silence, Egyptian romance novels, but this is actually his first visit to Egypt. ‘I have come to Egypt’, he declares pompously to Sergei, ‘to gain a deep personal acquaintance with that mysterious East whose life I have hitherto known only intuitively’ (Gibbon 1998: 261). Imagining, indeed hoping, that the East in reality is the stereotypical metaphysical conundrum portrayed in his books, Selincourt is one of Said’s professional Orientalists, making a huge profit selling back the Western representation of the sensual, enigmatic East to Western readers jaded by instrumental reason. Selincourt does not want to stay in Cairo, which he decides is too civilised to be the real East, but instead wants Sergei to take him out to the desert lands and the Siwa Oasis: ‘I’ve heard rumours there’s a tribe of a lost white civilisation in that neighbourhood [. . .] – and there at least the True East still

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lives unchanged’ (261–2). Selincourt’s Orientalist equation runs as follows: the ‘True East’ is isolated, hence racially pure, which equals white, plus fixed in time, which equals uncontaminated by either modernity or cultural mongrelisation. Selincourt is the archetypal rich tourist in search of unspoilt difference, and he is about to be fleeced. Unfamiliar with the Siwa area, Sergei hires local guide Selim Hanna, who ‘was neither taciturn nor sinister, as were all good guides in the books of George himself’ (263). Selim has an ethos of self-help that would have made Samuel Smiles proud; aptly, his name is a comic contraction of ‘sell ’im’, while novelist George also sells, if in higher circles. If Selincourt sells the East, or the West’s representation of it, to the West, then Selim, too, sells the East to the West – at any rate, the East the West wants to buy. But Selim’s East is one that has already been contaminated by the Western popular culture of gramophone records (‘My Baby’s a Wow’) and vulgar materialism – vulgar, at any rate, to the wealthy Western visitor, but a necessity for the hard-pressed indigene. Continuing the theme of human and cultural commodification in a colonial environment, Selim’s mother, ‘a Greek woman sold from bidder to buyer’ (267), bore the beautiful Greek Zoë, Selim’s half-sister, and Zoë’s ambition is to marry a Westerner. To get George to marry her, Zoë pretends she is the daughter of a Greek professor imprisoned by Arabs and that she is to be married against her will to one of her father’s captors; George, hero of romance, must save her. Never losing his light comic touch, Gibbon is subtly playing with notions of originary myth, and mocking what Aijaz Ahmad has described as the fictitious cultural continuity of ‘this Athens-to-Albion Europe’ (Ahmad 2008: 183). To the Eurocentric George, Zoë the Hellene is of Western origin and her heritage the very origin of ‘the West’. Yet Greek origins, it has been argued, actually owe much to the Levant; indeed the Greeks liked to think they had Egyptian forebears (Bernal 1987; Amin 1989: 89–103). Zoë claims her contentious Western inheritance, while George the dupe buys the myth of Western origins and thinks he has saved ‘West’ (Greek) from ‘East’ (Arab). Like George Selincourt, Gibbon was writing for an English-speaking audience and, with at least one eye on that market himself, he is inviting Westerners to laugh at themselves as naïve yet deserving victims of the duplicitous East. As Jeremy Idle has pointed out, Gibbon’s Cairo stories contain elements of ‘complicity with Orientalist cliché’ (Idle 1994: 222). But if he trades in stereotypes for comic effect at one level, Gibbon simultaneously collapses those stereotypes from within by marrying ‘East’ and ‘West’ in a comedy of errors. ‘East is West’, from Calends, upsets the cultural apartheid signalled in Kipling’s famous line. ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’, declares Kipling’s poet in ‘The Ballad of East and West’ from Barrack-Room Ballads (1890). Kipling’s line is axiomatic of the binary opposites of colonial discourse. ‘East’ and ‘West’ exist not merely as geographical markers, points on the compass, but are capitalised as signifiers of an idea, a culture, a whole way of life. Kipling’s insistence that ‘never the twain shall meet’ isolates ‘East’ and

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‘West’ as pure, stand-alone entities, cultures that developed independently and will continue to resist any form of miscegenation. ‘East is East and West is West ’: according to Saloney, this is ‘the heresy pitiful, the concept pre-Copernican’ (Gibbon 1931: 195). Imperialists like Kipling are culturalist flat-earthers who see the globe like a map on the wall, with fixed geo-historical coordinates – an idea so reactionary as to take us back metaphorically before Copernicus (1473–1543) demonstrated that the earth circles the sun. (Copernicus’s heliocentric astronomy also hints at the diffusionist interest in sun gods and Perry’s pre-civilisation Egyptian children of the sun. Gibbon uses sun imagery a lot in his fiction, most notably Sunset Song which narrates the death of a community and its way of life, or the phrase ‘the cheated of the sunlight’ by which he means the wretched of the earth.) But Saloney knows that ‘East is West and West is East; they merge and flow and are the compass-points of a dream’ of a cosmopolitan world (Gibbon 2001b: 334). ‘East is West’ concerns Simon Mogara, French with a ‘Goanese half-caste’ (337) grandfather and Cretan grandmother. Mogara is attempting to develop an ornithopter, a helicopter-like machine that flies by flapping its wings like a bird. Researching in America he finds himself described by aeronautical colleagues as the ‘nigger birdman’ (338) and rumours he has been with a white woman see him lynched and facially scarred, so he comes to Egypt, where his colour will be less of a barrier to experimental advance. Mogara’s work attracts the interest of the blonde English aristocrat Joyce Melfort, whose ‘type’ Saloney describes as ‘[t]hese the English, the Aryans ultra-bred, dominant, blood-proud, apart. How apart from all the lesser breeds, they of the pigmentation, “without the law”!’ (340). Despite Saloney’s typecasting of Joyce, and Mogara’s initial scepticism – ‘English – and I’m a mongrel. Your people’ (349) – Melfort and Mogara marry. Their relationship is crudely, flagrantly idealistic; their children, the future generation, will be citizens of ‘the Republic in the skies’ (351), concerned only with the quest for the evolution of humanity beyond ‘tribe-taboos’ and the Kiplingesque ‘whining rhymes of cultures troglodyte!’ (334–5). Interbreeding, the merging of East and West, will bring the Republic of the skies on earth, final victory in the battle to be free of race. A proto-postcolonial idealism wins through here, at least for one couple. The story implies that scientific advance (Mogara’s ornithopter) may represent the pinnacle of our modern civilisation, but similar progress needs to be made in human relations towards the kind of cosmopolitanism science revels in. Mogara and Melfort commit to the ‘high Adventure’ of the quest for a better, non-racialised world, ethically rising, as Mogara’s ornithopter rises, ‘from the slime to the stars’ (347). Their adventure is tonally reminiscent in its childlike excitement and what-ho derring-do of colonial fiction such as Kipling’s Kim (1901) which, as Said argues, masks the violently hierarchical colonial meeting of East and West in a boy’s adventure story, the Great Game of imperialism (see Said 1994: 159–96). Yet, just as Simon and Joyce agree that Mogara’s invention

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will not be sold to the military, so Gibbon’s ‘high Adventure’ is ideologically opposed to Kipling’s Great Game. ‘Revolt’ from ‘Egyptian Nights’ was also published in the Cornhill as ‘One Man with a Dream’. Chief protagonist Thomas O’Donnell is described by the Englishman Robert Sidgwick, in conversation with Sidgwick’s brother-in-law John Caldon, as ‘a half-caste – an Irish–Sudanese, of all grotesque mixtures’ (Gibbon 1998: 185) – recalling the English–Irish Connan of ‘The Epic’ and Mogara, of French–Goanese stock; significantly, even O’Donnell’s ‘Western’ side is colonised. Accused of trying to rape Clare Caldon whilst at an English theological college, on coming to Egypt O’Donnell has renamed himself Rejeb ibn Saud and is fighting the British in the Arab revolt for ‘The Green Republic of Islam’ (188). His son, Hassan, gravely ill, ibn Saud’s revolt against the European quarter of Cairo is personalised by Gibbon as an attempt to lift all of ‘the pitiful Cohorts of the Lost, the Cheated of the Sunlight’ (182) out of the poverty and oppression of Cairo’s Black Warrens where live, in ibn Saud’s description, ‘[w]e miserable “natives” ’ (183). O’Donnell / ibn Saud intimately understands why the British, and the rest of European Cairo, contemptuously label the Arab population as ‘natives’; Sidgwick explains O’Donnell’s supposed attempted rape of Clare as his native blood inevitably getting the better of him: ‘The nigger attempted to act according to his nature’ (186). Sidgwick blames the present revolt on ‘[t] his damn self-government foolishness [. . .] Treat a native as a native’ (184), and a French couple anxiously avoid ibn Saud, the ‘crazed native’ (188). Natives are uncivilised, fanatical, aggressive; they must be controlled. In a key passage, ibn Saud enters a bookshop and opens a book at a poem that has acted as his inspiration for a decade ‘since, a homeless vagrant, he had landed at Suez to his dream of Egyptian Renaissance’: One man with a dream, at pleasure Shall go forth and conquer a crown; And three with a new song’s measure Shall trample a kingdom down. (189) Unnamed by Gibbon, the lines are from ‘Ode’ by Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy (1844–81) – significantly, born British to Irish parents. O’Shaughnessy’s poem whimsically evokes Shelley’s defence of poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators’, and correlates imagination and reality, poetry and politics, narration and nation. Gibbon slyly leaves out the revealing preceding couplet: ‘And out of a fabulous story / We fashion an empire’s glory’. Ibn Saud’s knowledge of O’Shaughnessy’s poem shows the civility of this elite-educated ‘native’, who knows both the culture of occupied and occupier. But its use here is also a postcolonial manœuvre. Ibn Saud is employing the English verse as a tool to defeat the British; he is turning their own literature, a key tool in colonial conquest, against the invader.

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‘Revolt’ concludes with ibn Saud’s refusal of the stereotype of violent native. Finding Clare Caldon’s lost and vulnerable young daughter in the bazaar, with whom he shares a feeling of instinctual affiliation, and being told of Hassan’s death, he calls off the nationalist revolt. Gibbon can certainly be criticised for extinguishing the Cairene’s legitimate insurrection against a foreign occupier, especially as this happens through the actions of a protagonist of part-Western extraction. There are no strong indigenous characters in ‘Revolt’; as the Egyptians are ruled by the imperial British, so the half-Irish, English-educated O’Donnell leads the insurrectionists. O’Donnell, his death approaching, sees – through Western eyes? – the rebels as a ‘mob’ and they misname him ‘Englishman’ (198). Nevertheless, O’Donnell does not simply suffer a fateful momentary ambivalence over the prize of independence for a people not his own; rather, he rejects the present pressing claims of nationalism in the name of a humane cosmopolitan future: Never his generation, but some time, it might be, theirs, would yet win a wide path through all the tangles of breed and creed and race, reach even to that dream that might yet be no dream – the Brotherhood of Man. (195) O’Donnell / ibn Saud, one of Gibbon’s heroic mongrels, himself composed of East and West, attempts to breach the ontological rupture between ‘East’ and ‘West’ but pays for this with his life, killed by his own faction for his betrayal. He becomes martyr to a different cause than originally intended, that of nationalist revolt, because he finally understands that nationalism offers no escape from the imprisoning dualities of colonialism, being merely the rebel flip-side to the violent currency of imperialism. In his Egyptian work Gibbon largely refuses the essentialism inhering in the concepts ‘East’ and ‘West’. Yet his cosmopolitanism, in league with his diffusionism, is a faith, an adventurer’s quest for the evolutionary beyond, a form of metaphysics – that is, a belief that the essence of things, the Real, is hidden by reality. In The Lost Trumpet (1932), his only novel set in Egypt and one that relies heavily on his diffusionist message, Gibbon brings together a disparate group of characters in search of Joshua’s lost trumpet that brought down the walls of Jericho. But their respective quest is really to raze the walls of inner repression behind which is hidden the true self, and the tool that will blast the walls away is not psychoanalysis but diffusionism. ‘The cure in Diffusionism [. . .]: Be your essential self’ (Gibbon 2001a: 139). However, as the diffusionist Dr Adrian says, ‘[o]ur trouble is this little matter of human nature’ (137). Leszek Kołakowski writes that ‘[t]he conception of human nature is at the same time a description of man’s proper calling’ (Kołakowski 2005: 179). Two contending ideas can be broadly identified. Gibbon’s diffusionists, like Rousseau, believe that human nature is originally good, but has been distorted and hampered by Western notions of civilisation. This Romantic or utopian ideal

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imagines that humanity (subject) can regain unity with nature (object). Most proponents of this philosophy are on the political Left and favour forms of communalism. The opposing tradition might be described as Hobbesian, and sees humans in a natural state as savage. This is the political basis of our individualist capitalist democracies. As Kołakowski points out, the utopians have to answer why, if people are good, we are not all freely living the good life of the Golden Age imagined by Gibbon. Yet equally, for Samir Amin, capitalist imperialism must answer the indictment of uneven development in its peripheries: The Eurocentric universalism of capitalism is not critiqued in order to allow the construction of a new universalism; all aspirations for universalism are rejected in favor of a ‘right to difference’ (in this context, differences of cultures and forms of social organization) invoked as a means of evading the real problem. This is what I call ‘provincialism’. (Amin 1989: 146) Gibbon’s cosmopolitanism, the national ‘synthesis’ (Gibbon 2001a: 268) envisioned at the end of The Lost Trumpet, is, indeed, in Kołakowski’s terms, utopian, but it is also a necessary quest to escape provincialism and imagine a new anti-imperial universalism that is ultimately postcolonial. NOTES 1. J. Leslie Mitchell wrote most of his books, the ‘English work’, under his real name. Only the ‘Scottish work was penned by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. For ease of understanding, I will throughout this chapter refer to the writer as Gibbon and the man as Mitchell. This deliberate mistake is redressed in the bibliography. 2. Mitchell’s period in the ‘Orient’ is, suitably, mysterious; his only biographer so far, Ian S. Munro (1966), takes no more than a few pages to recount Mitchell’s RASC years. 3. See Schoene (2008) on ‘Cosmopolitan Scots’.

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CHAPTER 11 Spark and Arendt in Palestine

Unfinished Business: Muriel Spark and Hannah Arendt in Palestine Martin McQuillan, Kingston University

Messianic eschatologies mobilize there all the forces of the world and the whole ‘world order’ in the ruthless war they are waging against each other, directly or indirectly; they mobilize simultaneously, in order to put them to work or to the test, the old concepts of State and nation-State of international law, of tele-techno-medio-economic and scientifico-military forces, in other words, the most archaic and the most modern spectral forces [. . .] The war for the ‘appropriation of Jerusalem’ is today the world war. It is happening everywhere, it is the world, it is today the singular figure of its being ‘out of joint’. (Derrida 1994) There are three people isolated on an island: a German citizen, a French citizen and a Jew, totally alone on this island. They don’t know when they will leave the island and it is boring. One of them says, ‘Well, we should do something. We should do something, the three of us. Why don’t we write something on the elephants?’ There were a number of elephants on the island. ‘Everyone should write something on the elephants and then we could compare the styles and the national idioms’, and so on and so forth. So the week after, the French one came, with a short, brilliant, witty essay on the sexual drive, or sexual appetite of the elephants; very short, bright and brilliant essay, very, very superficial but very brilliant. Three months, or three years after that, the German came with a heavy book on the . . . let’s say a very positive scientific book on the comparison between two kinds of species, with a very scientific title, endless title for a very positive scientific book on the elephants and the ecology of the elephants on the island. And the two of them asked the Jew, ‘Well, when will you give us your book?’ ‘Wait, it’s a very serious question. I need more time. I need more time’. And they came again every year asking him for his book. Finally, after ten years, he came back with a book called, ‘The Elephant and the Jewish Question’. (Derrida 2004)

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Martin McQuillan A crippled man arrives in Lourdes in his little wheelchair, goes to the edge of the swimming pool and, before jumping in the water, says, ‘Dear God, when I get out again, please let things be better. Dear God, when I get out again, please let things be better’. He jumps in; then he and his wheelchair are pulled out again and, lo and behold, a miracle! God has answered his prayer: there are now new tyres on his wheelchair. (Calvet 1996)

The Mandelbaum Gate is by some distance the longest novel that the famously economic Spark ever wrote, and as such is uncharacteristic in its formal design and narrative structure. As an English–Palestinian–Israeli sex-comedy set during the year of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, it also represents a departure from the works that immediately precede and succeed it in Spark’s corpus. However, while one could make a case for the repetition and iteration of certain leitmotifs scattered across the range of her fiction, what makes the novel unique for Spark is that it represents the most sustained occasion on which her fiction explores the complex nature of what she calls here and elsewhere ‘half-Jewishness’ or ‘Gentile Jewishness’ (Spark 1992). Especially magnified by the growth of postcolonialism, this has become something of a hot topic for those involved in writing on Muriel Spark. To quote the opening lines of Bryan Cheyette’s salient essay, ‘Writing against Conversion: Muriel Spark the Gentile Jewess’, ‘For much of the first half of 1988, Muriel Spark was the object of an unusual media controversy (Cheyette 2002: 95). Her son Robin claimed to have a marriage certificate which proved that his grandparents had wedded in a synagogue and that he was, therefore, ‘fully Jewish’. Spark, on the other hand, has always described herself as a ‘Gentile Jew’ or ‘half Jew’ and resented what she regarded as the rewriting of her early history (Cheyette 2002: 95). We are left with the question of how might the ‘Jewish Question’, and more widely the onto-theo-racial-national-humanism of the Israel–Palestinian situation, be inflected in this most singular work of this most celebrated Scottish writer. My epigraph jokes (one Jewish joke, told by a Jew, one a joke about Catholics told by a Protestant – but which might as well be about Jews, Catholics or Protestants) both contain a kernel of truth that illuminates the issue of Spark’s Jewishness. Derrida’s joke tells us about what Sartre calls ‘the Jewish Question’, in which the key issue for the Jewish intellectual on the island is the elephant’s relationship to his own Jewishness as the essential co-ordinate of authentic being. The self-deprecating humour here is derived not only from an excessive interest in the authentic identity of the Jew from the moment that this name has been invoked, but also from the fact that this question is taken up internally by the Jewish author as the only question worth addressing on the island. The term ‘Jew’ here precedes the author; as Sartre puts it both brilliantly and naïvely, ‘the Jew is a man whom other men consider a Jew’ (Sartre 1968; cf. Derrida 2007). A Jewish identity is conferred from the outside by the identification of the individual as Jewish, as Derrida himself discovered that he was a Jew by being told he was a

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Jew (a ‘filthy Jew’ at that) by his schoolmates in Algiers and was expelled from his lycée by the Vichy regime (cf. Derrida 2007, 1993, 1998). Hence, an absolute and originary identity is confirmed by having it retrospectively; ‘thus the Jew is in the situation of a Jew’, says Sartre, ‘because he lives in the midst of a society that takes him for a Jew’ (Sartre 1968: 72). That is to say, the identification of the Jew begins from a racist gesture that creates difference by first seeking to expel it, securing this difference as a by-product of its own attempted dismissal. This social lacuna then becomes the basis for the internalisation of an identity that is first named from outside as being different and so poses the question as the identification of difference itself. As Sartre puts it, ‘it is the anti-Semite that makes the Jew’ (Sartre 1968: 69). Equally, the anti-Semitic elephant would tell itself that there was no antiSemitism among the elephants until the Jew arrived. The French and German authors give rise to stereotypically French and German books but the identity of the authors is not saturated by their study, and they complete them in a relatively modest amount of time. But for the Jewish author the Jewish Question is the only question worth asking by him as a Jew and so all his time is consumed in the attribution of an authentic identity, which he cannot possibly avoid, so that something as open as a question becomes the fate of the individual. Sartre nevertheless goes on to make the difficult and erroneous distinction between the authentic and inauthentic Jew and so relapses into a logic of authenticity and ‘fullness’ that his argument seems to want to escape elsewhere (cf. Sartre 1958; Derrida 1982). We see a similar logic of identification at work in the discourse on Muriel Spark and Jewishness. It would seem that as soon as the term ‘Jew’ is invoked, as soon as the author has been named as a Jew, then the author finds him- or herself in precisely that ‘oriental’ situation. Having been named as such, the explication of his or her identity as a Jew begins, conferring retrospective and absolute meaning on a complex process of writing or living. If one yields to the temptation of this pathology, the only question worth asking of Muriel Spark is that of ‘Muriel Spark and the Jewish Question’. It goes without saying that Spark’s Jewishness is a vital part of understanding her writing but it is not the question, the only question (the only problem, to quote the title of one of Spark’s own novels). But while an acceptance of Spark’s fiction as in some way Jewish would be to repeat a racist logic which would also identify and so dismiss it as Jewish, it needs to be recognised that Jewishness is a question, an open question, even a rhetorical question, in Spark’s writing. In the case of the second anecdote above, reportedly Roland Barthes’s favourite joke, we encounter a similar logic of determination by the ‘other’ assigned Sparkian identity. Here the Catholic pilgrim imagines that his faith will transform everything in a positive and clearly determined way, ‘Dear God, when I get out again, please let things be better.’ However, faith results only in disappointment in this world, and the hoped-for transfiguration is never absolute; indeed, it is banally modest in scope. Faith remains structurally contingent. It is not a requirement of faith that it be fulfilled or satisfied by proof – on the

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contrary, when faith is proved to be correct it no longer remains faith. This is one of the many aporias of Catholicism whereby the omnipotent is seen to have limitations and the infinite is finite. The intervention by God, the arrival of God in the present as the result of the miracle, results in the question, what next? Things are better but they could be better still, and so faith is required to outlast the disappointment of the miracle because the needs of the future cannot be satisfied by a moment’s intervention in the present. To be sustainable as faith, faith requires that it can never be adequately answered. On the arrival of the Messiah we must ask him when he is going to get here – another of Derrida’s Jewish jokes from Specters of Marx (Derrida 1994: 59). Barthes laughs at this joke not because he thinks that Catholics and the disabled are funny but because life is disappointing and hope is the illimitable structure which immunises itself against its own closure by being in principle never satisfiable and so impossible. The point here is that Spark’s writing, as writing, cannot be saturated as either fully Catholic or fully Jewish: not fully Catholic or fully Jewish, and neither not Catholic nor not Jewish. It was precisely against such demarcations that I was working when I set out to secure ‘better’ readers for Spark through the Theorizing Muriel Spark collection (2002). These readers would move beyond the parameters and classifications of classical critical methodology which, it seemed to me at the time, was always satisfied to have identified a genus of authorial strain, as orthodox English Literature practice. Rather, this book would read with the complexity of Spark’s writing and not against it, working with her texts to open them out as an explication of and counter-signature to her own creative invention and openness to the effects of multiple and contradictory meaning. Indeed Spark’s novels are full of the insufferable suffocation of the group, the institution and the family, in which all difference is annulled in the name of the collective identity, the comme une as the French has it. Spark’s characters always refuse this pathology, preferring instead not individualism or atomism, but the articulation of creative spaces in which persons choose their own families and allegiances as alliances of solidarity and hope among those who have discovered one another as fellow travellers, rather than accepting their identity, community and place as fate. These are the ‘international messes’ that inhabit the nightclub run by Abdul in The Mandelbaum Gate: ‘lapsed Jews, lapsed Arabs, lapsed citizens, runaway Englishmen, dancing prostitutes, international messes, failed painters, intellectuals, homosexuals’ (Spark 1965: 101). In this sense, Spark’s cast of characters spanning some twenty-two novels represents a sort of cosmopolitan cavalcade resisting each and every classification directed at them, and who are prone to up sticks and leave rather than accept their pre-given designations. This includes the dogma of the Catholic Church, which Spark’s characters frequently reject or defer subservience to until their death beds, when (as Barbara Vaughn says in The Mandelbaum Gate) their ‘commitments to thinking in this life are at an end’ (Spark 1965: 22). Given the repeated rejection of the immutable in this way (Barbara Vaughn decides that she will marry Harry Clegg regardless of whether his first marriage is annulled or not), Catholicism remains for Spark’s characters

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a structuring principle through which they orientate themselves towards a future. They are faithful to the memory of an idea of Catholicism – always ending more apostate and less certain than they begin – as a structure of hope beyond satisfaction by any act in the present and thus beyond the knowable and the rational. In this sense, Spark’s Catholicism, as a fictional religion, becomes a speculation concerning the future, which has faith in the future without having any faith in the present, like Barthes’s disappointed pilgrim after he has learned his lesson. This is catholicism without Catholicism, the local system providing the condition for a universalism without prospect of closure or knowable satisfaction. In this sense, the arrival of the Messiah is immaterial for Spark. The arrival of the Messiah can no more satisfy or complete Spark’s fictional Catholicism than it can conclude the history of the Jews, who will continue to have a history as Jews even after the Messiah has arrived. This structure of hope without telos is what Derrida calls ‘Messianism without Messiah’; it is a question of the religious but it is also the structure of all politics and the very structure of the question itself. The writerly Spark’s faith is only ever in the idea of faith itself. The Mandelbaum Gate is something of a remarkable book. ‘The Book’ as such is of some significance here, for this is a book of the Book. This is a book in which all the followers of the Book congregate in accordance with what Derrida termed, in 1994, ‘the appropriation of Jerusalem’ by all the messianic eschatologies of the modern age. Here we find the three major religions of the book cheek by jowl – Islam, Judaism and Christianity – asserting their rights over the scene of the apocalypse, of the first or second coming depending on from where you start counting and whom you are expecting. Barbara Vaughn finally succumbs to the intensity of the scene at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where Russian, Greek, Armenian, Anglican and Roman Christians hold masses on parallel altars, speaking over one another and according to a strict and manic rota. There are Marxist Arab subversives and their European fifth columnists, Western imperialists and even the book of science as represented by the atheist schoolteacher Ricky, who quickly slips from one eschatology to another when she converts to Islam to become Joe Ramdez’s third wife. For the competing eschatologies, European and ‘oriental’, everything begins and ends in the place of Jerusalem, as does the novel itself, with its two-part structure (unique in Spark’s corpus), divided between the old and new testaments of the law and of love. The narrative also looks from this contested Jerusalem to two other capitals of the Abrahamic world, Rome and Athens. Rome is where Harry’s annulment is under consideration, and where he must go to conduct library research as an archeologist (an arche¯-ologist, one who works in sites of knowledge before knowledge itself). Barbara is frequently on the telephone to Rome, suggestive of all of the cultural, philosophical and historical hook-ups, exchanges, missed calls and misdials that run from Rome to Jerusalem through Athens. Athens, the Edinburgh of the South, is where Suzi Ramdez escapes at the end of the novel and where she is reunited with the newly married Harry and Barbara. Here Spark imagines an enlightened alternative to ‘the appropriation

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of Jerusalem’, and another horizon for Europe beyond the bipolarity of Rome and Athens. Her characters escape the destiny of place and blood and ‘got along fairly well together ever after’. This is a modest narrative resolution of the best that can be hoped for, like a new set of tyres on a wheelchair. In fiction Spark can imagine an alternative order of cosmopolitan affiliation beyond states, popes and patriarchs. One might decry the aestheticisation of history here, but one may as well dismiss the novel per se. This novel pre-dates 1967, when the question of Jerusalem may have seemed more of a question of inheritance than of appropriation. Now, books, papers and writing of every kind run like a red thread through this text, from the Dead Sea Scrolls which Harry excavates to the various certificates which dominate the narrative: Joe Ramdez’s insurance certificates for blackmailed European diplomats, Harry Clegg’s forged birth certificate which by peripetia enables him to marry Barbara in the Catholic Church, the forged and real baptismal certificates that allow Barbara, Suzi and Abdul to cross the border between the worlds of east and west Jerusalem, the health certificates that Suzi signs on behalf of poor Arabs in Jordan to allow them to receive aid from the United Nations as Palestinian refugees. There are the passports, genuine and stolen, the frequent letters that arrive deus ex machina, sometimes through the diplomatic bag, sometimes from Harrogate. There are the pages of poetry that Freddy composes for his hosts, the books to be found in every house, the numerous newspaper cuttings and reports to the consulate. There are the encrypted letters hidden in trees by the wife of a British consul as part of Nasser’s post office. It would seem that the whole of the Holy Land, as the land of the Book, is awash with letters. The interaction between the Abrahamic traditions and the various communities of the Book is, it seems, predicated upon the exchange of letters. Against expectation, in this novel, the spirit killeth and the letter giveth life. Freddy Hamilton writes three letters to his mother, her maid and eventual killer Benny, and their doctor in Yorkshire. These letters, had they arrived, would have prevented the only bloodshed (so frequently heralded in Spark by prolepsis) in the novel. Instead he tears them up and flushes them down the toilet in Alexandros’s shop: ‘What remained of a Rembrandt torn into small very regular squares and rammed down the shithole’, as Jean Genet, that Jewish novelist of the Palestinian cause, puts it and with which Derrida opens the left-hand column of Glas, his great critique of the onto-theology of the family (Genet 1988; Derrida 1986). Flushed away, these letters never reach Harrogate, and a murderous relationship between near neighbours with a shared history ends in death in Yorkshire not Palestine: Harrogate and not the Mandelbaum Gate. Freddy emerges from his amnesia to discover murder in a Harrogate hotel, in a typically Sparkian inflection of that novelist of murder, Agatha Christie, who emerged from amnesia to find herself in a hotel in Harrogate. So in the hands of an author more commonly associated with literary contestation in Scotland and Edinburgh, meaning, the letter, the nomadic signifier, runs around and across the borders of Israel and Palestine, circling the space in red pen

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on a map as an irreducible textual event, the result of the accretion of centuries of narrative and counter-narrative. Everywhere Barbara Vaughn goes she is confronted with the site of a story or parable. Her journey plays out a topography of the Book, with meaning inscribed on every stone: some real, some fake and the difference importantly unknowable and vertigo-inducingly incalculable. And each citation of the Bible, Torah or Koran is matched by a profane allusion to the canon of English Literature. Eventually disguised in Islamic dress she succumbs to scarlet fever, only to be nursed to health by an insufferable English Marxist and anti-Semitic spy who passes information to the Arab Nationalists. This scarlet letter/archive fever leads Barbara to turn violent assailant on her nurse (in an inversion of the Benny–Mrs Hamilton murder), attacking Ruth Gardnor with the earphones she uses for radio communication, recalling the iconic images of Adolf Eichmann listening to simultaneous translation from Hebrew, the language of the court, into German, the language that Hannah Arendt describes as ‘my only fatherland’. At this point Barbara Vaughn is led to despair of the madness of the letter of the law from Rome. She decides she will conclude her pilgrimage for sport, abandoning her roadmap for the Middle East, and marry Harry in mortal sin outside the Church, beyond the letter of the law. In a Sparkian gesture bespeaking the ‘literariness’ of Spark’s cultural politics, Barbara decides she will live with reading rather than revelation, in Athens rather than Rome, Enlightenment rather than counter-reformation, within the question rather than the inquisition. So Barbara Vaughn, as Spark’s fictional surrogate (Stannard 2009), is figuratively drowning in paper. Everywhere she goes, bureaucracy, the rule of the state and the rule of paper confront her. It is in the face of the institution and its administration that Barbara flees, often in disguise, as a nun on the run, as if she were saying ‘count me out, I am not of this pathology.’ Perhaps the most disorientating passage in the novel comes when Barbara visits the Eichmann trial as a stage on her pilgrimage because it represents an important moment in the history of the Jews. Here she is confronted with the letter that killeth, the inhuman, dehumanising bureaucracy (Bureau IV-4) that screens Eichmann’s deeds from intention, as a cog in a machine randomly producing effects without responsibility as ‘pre-written destiny’. Eichmann’s defence is that he is not responsible because as a true believer in the state system he is innocent of the ends of the machine. Eichmann claimed to have no hatred of the Jews as such – after all, he was fond of his own Jewish relatives – but was rather faithful to the bureaucratic system itself; the efficient transportation of Jews across Europe, their destination and ultimate treatment were not his responsibility. Spark only uses verbatim transcripts from the trial to represent Eichmann, as if her fiction is inadequate to an understanding of this situation. Like Barbara Vaughn, her prose is stifled in the courtroom, confused and unable to process the proceedings. Self-mythology suggests that Spark, like Hannah Arendt, had attended the trial as a journalist for the Western media (McQuillan 2002: 215). However, no journalism by Spark (or her sometime journalistic pseudonym

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Evelyn Cavallo) was ever printed by The Observer on this topic. Martin Stannard’s exhaustive biographical searches suggest that her publisher, Macmillan, arranged her visit to Israel–Palestine at this time as research on a proposed novel – one that would treat a ‘serious’ topic and secure her novelistic reputation against claims of comic slightness. This is the moment of peripetia in the novel, when Barbara begins to question faith and affirms life by deciding for the first time to marry outside the Church. Eichmann’s non-sense produces a sensation of nausea in her, like the Sartrean existentialist, when confronted with the failure of signification and that which does not refer to or confer with reality as she has experienced it. Somewhat reflecting Spark’s own early fiction, she likens this Unsinn, as the German has it (non-sense and non-sign), to the decentring of the novel by the nouveau roman (the anti-novel, as she calls it). Spark’s writerly mutability as anti-Pope and Barbara as a nouveau Roman emerge from this courtroom, like the schoolboy in Kafka that Derrida was so fond of quoting in his seminar (Peter, who believing that he has heard his name called, walks to the front of the class to receive his prize only to find that the call was addressed to another). The conclusion is less sure of Abrahamic election and more inclined to agree with that other Jewish comedian, Marx (Groucho), to count me out from all the eschatological clubs that would care to have someone like me as a member. Hannah Arendt and Muriel Spark both wrote for The New Yorker. Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, like sections of The Mandelbaum Gate, first appeared in the magazine, and they shared the same editor, William Shawn. While Spark’s novel concludes with a murder on the red riding of old Yorkshire, it is important that Arendt’s account of mass murder in old Europe is part of the new world order of New York, the work of a professor of political philosophy at the New School and by the time of the trial already the author of a substantial philosophical œuvre. If Spark’s style and structure become attenuated by the Eichmann experience, Arendt’s book is the exact opposite. Hers is a pacy and compelling text, written in English for a primarily American audience, by an émigré ex-student and lover of Martin Heidegger. For the most part it is a page-turning narrative of the work of Eichmann and his team throughout Europe, arranging first the emigration of Jews and latterly their transportation to the death camps. But this is no straightforward piece of belated holocaust commentary. Rather, as Arendt puts it, having been in Europe in the 1930s, there is nothing that Ben-Gurion’s show trial can teach her about the horrors of the Nazi terror. Instead what motivates Arendt in this book is an idea of justice – that Eichmann’s crimes be brought to justice but also that the historical reportage should do justice to Eichmann and to the events of the holocaust. The reference to the banality of the non-monstrous monster Eichmann appears only as a concluding line in Arendt’s final chapter – with the exception of a brief discussion of Eichmann’s bizarre understanding of the categorical imperative in Kant, there is very little philosophy here. In its place, as in Spark, we have a commitment by Arendt to tell the whole messy truth about the holocaust in all its ‘greyness’. She recounts all the complications, implications and

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compromises, from the Judenrat (Jewish Councils) who voluntarily assisted in the round-up of Jews across Europe, the Hungarian Jewish soldiers who fought for Germany on the Eastern front, the early Zionist collaboration with Germany against the British Mandate in Palestine, the American funders of emigration to Palestine, the bargaining of interned Jews for resources to the German army, the un-heroic conspirators against Hitler in the German High Command, the complex complicity and contest of the Vatican, the war crimes of the Allies, the considerable spectrum of differing flavours of national anti-Semitism, the Gentiles who stood up to the Nazis, the safe havens for Jews in Italy, Denmark and the escape routes through Romania, the ineffectual Jewish resistance units, the Judenkommando that operated the gas chambers for the totalitarian regime, and so on. This is a remarkable historical synthesis that demonstrates the reductiveness of much of the black and white view of the holocaust that has grown up in popular writing and culture since the Eichmann trial, and no doubt as a result of the popularisation of the prosecution case at the trial. The power of Arendt’s writing comes from her outrage at the overwhelming mismatch between the un-self-aware ‘banality’ of a ‘brainless’, semi-educated bureaucrat like Eichmann and what the prosecution case makes of Eichmann for ideological purposes. In so far as the Eichmann trial concerned in part the right of an Israeli court, as the recently formed territorial jurisdiction of the Jewish people, to try crimes against that people, it was also an important demonstration to the world of both the longevity of that ethnic nation-building project and a reminder to the Western powers that they ought to support it because of a failure previously to protect Jews in Europe (Arendt 2006: 9–10). Accordingly, the significance of the Eichmann trial for Israel was as much about what was going on outside the walls of the district courtroom as what was taking place within it. In other words, Arendt’s book, as it must be, and especially placed alongside Spark’s, is as much a book about the problematic of Palestine–Israel as it is a text concerned with the holocaust. However, it would be wrong to present Arendt as a fearsome critic of the State of Israel; she worked during the war years with refugee groups arranging the passage of European Jews to Palestine, and wholly believed in the rights of the Jewish state. But what is clear from the Eichmann book and elsewhere is that Arendt was Israel’s first exile even before the foundation of the state. She does not question Israel’s right to try Eichmann but rather demands that this trial should be fair and just in the name of what the state of Israel might be. To this end Arendt sees the predicament of Israel as the result of the complexities of contemporary history and not as a result of eternal and essential anti-Semitism. The implied criticism of the text is that the more zealous and closed the rhetoric of the prosecution (and by implication the Israeli Court of Appeal which rewrote the District Court’s more considered judgment on Eichmann in favour of the prosecution case) becomes concerning Eichmann as the origin and wellspring of the holocaust, the more it doubles the blinkered anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Nazis which allows for neither complexity nor singularity. In this sense, the more accurate Arendt’s criticism of the Israeli public sphere becomes, the less space it

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can afford a dissident voice like Arendt, who is silenced or dismissed at the point of her greatest relevance. What is most significant in relation to Spark’s novel here is the place of the public articulation of writing in relation to totalitarian or closed realities. The Eichmann book is an example of a ‘writerly’ reflection upon the actions of a man and men, not upon Man in general. Hence an individual response to a significantly Modern situation (one in which the public sphere of dialogue is worn away by a civil society based upon media exchanges and the elite domination of alienating regimes) requires precisely a singular articulation through the journalistic channels of communication provided by mass societies and a uniquely Modern state such as Israel. Correspondingly, one is left with the complexity of a text that enters the public sphere on its own unconditional terms, not demanding but simply assuming, and thereby asserting the author’s right to speak publicly on Eichmann and to publish all that needs to be said about him in the name of justice. Arendt’s book thus retains a close relation to Spark’s novel in a way that exceeds simple thematic or geographically topical significance. As Derrida proposes in his essay on ‘The Unconditional University’, it is this right to speak publicly and to publish that ties the university, and specifically the humanities, to the Modern institution of Literature (Derrida 2002). There may be a disconnect here between what Derrida means by Modernity in an epochal sense and what Arendt means by Modernity in a Heideggerian sense; however, what ties Spark the satirist of fascists of the heart (like Jean Brodie and the Abbess of Crewe) to Arendt the philosopher of totalitarianism, in a more profound way than their coterminous visits to Jerusalem and the office of The New Yorker, is their imbrication within a public sphere in which the irreducible otherness of writing speaks to a political and historical conjuncture whose media representation depends upon the repression of any such difference. It is a case of what Hélène Cixous calls the all-powerful powerlessness of writing, ‘la toute-puissance autre’ (cf. Derrida 2006). The Mandelbaum Gate is unique amongst Spark’s work because the material she has to deal with here overruns the formal exactitude by which she orders the world in her other works. She deals with evil elsewhere but never genocide; she treats her Jewishness on numerous occasions but never in such detail; she is frequently concerned with the political but never in such proximity to the material facts of history; she often eschews Catholic sexual morality but never quite in the promiscuous way she does here. In comparison to her finely pared narratives elsewhere one could say that this novel was out of control – and indeed the pace of part 2 (the new testament of the passionate pilgrims) contrasts with the languor of exposition in part 1. In one sense it is the only book worth discussing in this context in the Spark corpus, since it is the one in which all her technique and aesthetic formality escape her. It would seem that it is harder for Spark to narrativise the complexity of Gentile Jewish identity and the history of Israel–Palestine in the form of the novella than it is for the proverbial camel to pass through the Mandelbaum Gate. This is a pilgrimage that is rushed to its conclusion, abandoned faithful to the memory of the idea even when the real

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pilgrimage has failed (‘as when you visit a bereaved friend and there is nothing to say’). As a pilgrimage the trip is a failure and yet Barbara carries on regardless, in the knowledge of the failure, but at speed, as if pilgrimage were still possible. At the end of the novel, she crosses the border back into Israel, disguised as a nun with a false passport and accompanied by Abdul (a Palestinian smuggler and convert of convenience), disguised as a Franciscan friar. This carnivalesque crossing between Palestine and Israel, this site of cross-dressing and crossed meanings, is not the same crossing that exists today between the two states, the two situations, with its isometric scanning, surveillance cameras and infinite regression of gates before the law. The Mandelbaum Gate is no longer the pre-1967 border it once was. However, one phrase towards the end of the book remains disconcerting: when Abdul tells Barbara she is back in Israel she is so delighted that, as Spark puts it, ‘She wanted to run along the pavements of the sweet, rational streets’ (300). At the end of this tale, with its cast of characters, inversions, complications, contradictions, miscellany and miscegeny, are we really to be thrown back upon the Orientalist division between a rational Israel and an irrational Palestine, an Arab world of sensuality and irrationality, of carnivalesque inversions in which even lesbian schoolmistresses and homosexual filing clerks get laid by the romance of the desert storm? There is something queer about this novel, as there is about much of Spark. I think we have crossed this border, squeezed through the Mandelbaum Gate, one too many times for a definitive account of Muriel Spark in Palestine, and finally it would be an error to equate Barbara Vaughn with Spark in either her ‘full’ Gentile Jewishness or her mutable Catholicism. As with Messianism, final reading will never arrive and in the context of a fiction we are left only with the fever of signification in which the final lines of the novel name all the gates in the walls of Jerusalem, all the possible points of exit and entrance – the only significance of the Mandelbaum Gate being that it is next to a house once owned by a certain Mr Mandelbaum.

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CHAPTER 12 Rewriting and the Politics of Inheritance in Jenkins and Rhys

Rewriting and the Politics of Inheritance in Robin Jenkins and Jean Rhys Marina MacKay, Washington University in St Louis

‘Like is an ill mark,’ cautions a character in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ‘Sae ill indeed, that I wad hardly swear to ony thing’ (67). With this warning the servant Bessy Gillies refuses to identify her mistress’s stolen property, an identification on which depends the execution of the supposed thief. Bessy is surely right not to mistake likeness for identity in a novel so superlatively insistent on mismatched doubles; as if to underscore that what seems ‘like’ can prove unlike indeed, the novel’s demonic shadow, GilMartin, can copy anyone he chooses. None the less – and despite how much else in this novel remains obscure – it is never in doubt that the disputed goods belong to Bessy’s mistress, Mrs Logan, who wants the thief kept alive in the hope of punishing the murder of her stepson by his brother (or perhaps half-brother: we never find out). Which is to say that ‘likeness’ can be unreliable, undifferentiating, even thoroughly misleading, but it can also be disavowed for strategic reasons like Mrs Logan’s, or evaded, as Bessy does, simply for fear of getting things wrong. Without forgetting the risks of identifying commonalities in and among novels about the like and the unlike, this essay compares two postwar novels, Robin Jenkins’s Fergus Lamont (1979) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which look back at the canonical doublings of the early nineteenth century from the historiographically revisionist perspectives of the later twentieth. The work of a white Scot and a white Dominican writer, these novels are comparable to the extent that they are the product of, and directly responsive to, a condition of ‘betweenness’ that is both literary-historical and cultural-political: literaryhistorical in that they fall into the gap between modernism and postmodernism, and cultural-political because they are produced from and articulating perspectives that are presented as subordinated but are not in any meaningful sense subaltern. Scottish literature is manifestly not postcolonial, but in what follows I suggest that one potentially profitable way of comparing Scottish with postcolonial writing is to think about its authors alongside those postcolonial authors whose minority status is also complicated, if differently complicated, by some form of imperial privilege. In the novels discussed here, imperial privilege means white privilege, although sometimes stripped of the economic privilege historically

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attendant on it, and it means the kind of cultural privilege that makes it possible to speak back to a literary canon that can be taken for granted as shared property. Fergus Lamont and Wide Sargasso Sea are rewritings of canonical novels, and are, in their institutional contexts of Scottish and postcolonial fiction, themselves canonical. Among their shared interests are the legacies of empire, a subject both authors knew about at first hand. Rhys was born in Dominica to a Welsh father and a Creole mother of Scottish ancestry, and, as her semiautobiographical inter-war novels record, she was made powerfully conscious of her inferior, ‘colonial’ status when she emigrated to England as a teenager. Jenkins had seen from close up the aftermath of empire during his time working in the enduringly contested Afghanistan in the 1950s, and in the newly decolonised North Borneo (now the Malaysian state of Sabah) in the following decade. What their encounter with imperial contraction gave them as they returned to classic nineteenth-century novels, Hogg’s Justified Sinner and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, was an eye for the power relations embedded within them. Brontë and Hogg take as given the intersection of ethnic and class belonging, but Rhys and Jenkins see how their domestic disenfranchisements (Jane and Wringhim as ‘poor relations’) might be understood in the broader national and imperial contexts Hogg and Brontë assume rather than directly address. The ‘private memoirs and confessions’ of a Glasgow slum child turned soldier, poet and aristocrat, Fergus Lamont is among a number of Jenkins’s novels that reprise Hogg’s enduringly influential portrait of fanaticism and self-division. Here Jenkins renders the psychological condition Hogg describes as a problem of class rather than religious faith, although in other contexts he was deeply interested in the moral and religious core of Hogg’s book; Margery McCulloch (1995) has convincingly shown this in demonstrating how extensively Jenkins’s Just Duffy (1988) is indebted to Hogg, from its very title, a pun on the double meaning of ‘just’, to its overarching concern with the problem of using evil to combat evil. Fergus Lamont also recalls Hogg from the outset. ‘Fergus’ means ‘supremely choice’ (264), we are told, and ‘Lamont’ is but a letter away from ‘lament’ – the ‘lament of the supremely chosen’ being one way of paraphrasing Hogg’s title, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The echo of Hogg suggests that both novels are concerned with those who are the self-professed elite and yet also somehow dispossessed – as does Wide Sargasso Sea, another novel about fragile privilege, about those white West Indians ‘ruined’ by the abolition of slavery in Britain’s Caribbean territories. Rhys’s novel famously prequels Jane Eyre with the story of the first Mrs Rochester, Bertha Mason, the ‘madwoman in the attic’ who is conventionally read as Jane Eyre’s violent alter ego. In short, Fergus Lamont and Wide Sargasso Sea are doubles of novels about doubles, and, just as the novelistic trope of the Doppelgänger brings to light those aspects of the ‘individual’ that otherwise remain hidden or repressed, twinning these two almost contemporary novels helps to illuminate the political priorities motivating the rewriting of nineteenth-century classics by British writers (British/ Scottish, British/Dominican) who refuse to see themselves as such.

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THE RUINED ESTATE What Rhys and Jenkins take from Brontë and Hogg are, above all, narratives of inheritance. The significance of a legacy is most obvious in relation to Jane Eyre, in which the deus ex machina bequest from an uncle in colonial Madeira liberates Jane from solitude and servitude. Rhys makes inheritance a more questionable blessing by focusing on the novel’s other heiress, on Bertha/Antoinette (in Wide Sargasso Sea, only the Rochester figure, himself unnamed, addresses her by the dowdy name ‘Bertha’, trying to Anglicise a woman whose foreignness he fears), the Creole heiress whom Rochester marries for her money. The inheritance in Brontë is beneficent, whereas in Rhys the inheritance is bedevilled, but both inheritances are strictly legitimate. In contrast, the inheritances about which Hogg and Jenkins write are multiply illegitimate: legal illegitimacy, moral illegitimacy and genealogical illegitimacy become one. An estate is up for grabs in Justified Sinner, and the outcast son Robert Wringhim will inherit it after his brother’s murder, despite the fact that readers and characters alike doubt that the last laird was really his biological father – the inheritance plot offering here a secular counterpart to the novel’s uncertainty about how anyone can know himself to be among the ‘children of adoption’ (16)). Fergus Lamont proclaims himself one of the aristocratic Corses of Darndaff, but at an unlikely best only their bastard offspring; those he claims as kin will never acknowledge him. Fergus’s only tangible legacies come from his working-class mother’s side, though these are bequests that lead nowhere: an unliveable house from which Fergus’s own mother was driven to her suicide; a defunct croft on Oronsay; a second-hand kilt in, tellingly enough, someone else’s tartan – an allusion to his essential inauthenticity, certainly, but maybe an allusion, too, to the territorial ambitions and imperial conditions that imported Scottish clan names across the globe and far beyond their ‘natural’ homes. Wringhim and Fergus are the obscure, ambiguous conclusions of their respective family lines; the editor who narrates the opening of Hogg’s novel describes the Colwans as a defunct family, while Jenkins makes the same point more mordantly by assigning to those with whom Fergus aligns himself the family name of Corse – an archaic word for corpse – as if the aristocratic world Fergus is trying to enter is essentially dead already, which, in so far as the source of their wealth was imperial, it surely is. Jenkins’s macabre joke about the ‘corse’ of empire is particularly suggestive in view of his debt to Hogg’s Gothic novel. From its inception onwards, the Gothic has been intimately tied to problems of inheritance and legitimacy; in what is usually considered the earliest of English Gothic novels, Horace Walpole’s 1764 romance The Castle of Otranto, the provocation for the novel’s supernatural revenge plot is the usurping of that castle from its legitimate heirs. In one of its best-known successors, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, the evil Montoni attains his sinister, albeit inevitably temporary, power from his ill-won legacies. It is precisely this connection with illegitimate and usurped inheritances that has made the Gothic such a useful language for twentieth-century

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writers engaging transformed social relations and radical redistributions of power. This is particularly true in relation to those works that address diminished racial privilege – the white privilege that was unearned, illegitimate all along – and the end of empire. Consider, for example, the characteristically Gothic elements of novels like Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, set during the Irish Civil War, with its decayed castle (here a soon-to-be-torched ‘Big House’) and its beleaguered virgin heroine, the Anglo-Irish Lois who lives the Ascendancy way of life in its final days. That Fergus’s fake family are ‘corses’ echoes Bowen’s late-imperial replay of the long-standing connection between the Gothic as a literary mode and the story of an illegitimate line of inheritance – colonial tradition, for instance – being brought finally to an end. Importantly, the association between the Gothic and ‘racial’ inheritance is one reason why European Gothic should so readily have been indigenised and extended on American soil in the ‘southern Gothic’ produced by writers working through the legacies of the American Civil War and the abolition of African American slavery. The Gothic scenario requires ‘an oppressive ruin’, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes; and as the doomed feudal castle is to the English writer of eighteenth-century Gothic, and as the terminally endangered ‘Big House’ is to the Anglo-Irish Bowen, so are the decayed plantations of the American South to a writer like William Faulkner. ‘When the old time go, let it go,’ advises a former slave in Rhys’s novel, but the white Creoles struggle to give up their old superiorities even as their formerly slaveworked plantations run to seed, a visual reminder of how comprehensively ‘gone’ is the ‘old time’ for which they mourn (18). Their melancholy is like that of the younger Compsons in The Sound and the Fury, partly a sadness for the loss of childhood, partly an inability to renounce a way of life that gave a spurious dignity to their class. The case of Fergus Lamont is sadder and funnier, and also less Gothic, because he mourns the decline of an oppressing caste to which he could never have belonged. Wide Sargasso Sea fully exploits the symbolic connection between troubled imperial inheritances and the Gothic mode. Its creepy tenor is supplied in part by a pervasive animism: ‘I was . . . sure that everything was alive,’ Antoinette recounts, ‘chairs, looking-glasses, cups, saucers, everything’ (37), and we might consider the aliveness, the humanness of bought commodities, as a way of ironically coding the labour of slaves, themselves dehumanised and objectified, that went into their purchase. As Elaine Freedgood writes in her discussion of how histories of colonialism and slavery can be traced through the ‘things’ of Victorian novels (the mahogany furniture of Jane Eyre, for instance), ‘the knowledge that is stockpiled in . . . things bears on the grisly specifics of conflicts and conquests that a culture can neither regularly acknowledge nor permanently destroy’ (Freedgood 2006: 2). Heightening the connection between empire and the Gothic, Rhys’s plot turns on Obeah, an African diaspora form of sympathetic magic, a hybrid of African and European beliefs along the lines of Santería and Voodoo. It is never clear whether or not Rhys ascribes supernatural efficacy to Obeah, but its

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effects are real enough to the extent that Rochester is terrified by it, appalled that his wife has used it against him. In other words, it is the white Englishman who ascribes to ‘native’ magic a power that from the other characters’ point of view it may or may not have – an apt emblem for the extent to which fear and fantasy shape imperial relations, creating that sense that the other is more foreign, and so more powerful than it probably is. Of course, Rhys’s use of the Gothic is partly attributable to the source text itself, a novel that echoes well-known Gothic tropes. Famously, Jane’s first sight of Bertha Mason in Brontë’s novel will remind her of ‘the foul German spectre – the vampire’, and Rochester considers her a ‘demon’ (311, 322). But the supernatural of Wide Sargasso Sea is a specifically non-European Gothic; the Caribbean zombie to which Antoinette and her mother are likened (50) takes the place of the vampire, and when her husband is not calling Antoinette ‘Bertha’ he is calling her ‘marionette’, as if she is already the zombie or automaton into which he himself is turning her (154). Rhys certainly implies that the real ‘vampire’ in Jane Eyre is Rochester himself, the person whose sustenance, whose financial fortune is immorally made at the expense of his Creole wife, and, more savagely still, at the expense of those black West Indians whose symbolic zombification in the form of slavery created her dowry. That the locus classicus of the Gothic novel is a remote estate endangered by the ultimate exposure of its origins in a history of misappropriation and tyranny helps to explain why the country estate is also the literary site that both stands for and occludes the flow of imperial money from the British colonies to the insular centre. In his indispensable reading of Mansfield Park, Edward Said focuses on how the country estate of Jane Austen’s novel is funded by Sir Thomas Bertram’s slave-worked sugar plantations in Antigua, and thus stands ‘at the center of an arc of interests and concerns spanning the hemisphere, two major seas, and four continents’ (1993: 84). Said’s insight into the relationship between empire and the country house has been developed for the post-imperial context in Ian Baucom’s discussion of the making of Englishness from its colonial margins. The country estate has become a contemporary ‘fetish’ of English culture, Baucom argues, a symbol privileged by its association with ‘that moment in England’s cultural history it synecdochically locates’: the lost imperial moment (1999: 165). It should be noted here that Baucom is writing about Englishness, specifically; as habitually happens in readings of ‘post-imperial melancholy’, Scottish agency disappears from the story of empire, unless we are to assume that it, too, promulgated and later mourned a lost ‘English’ identity that was never in fact exclusively English. But the post-imperial familiarity of the country house as symbol or synecdoche none the less indicates why the inheritance of a country house – or its un-inheritability, as it falls into desuetude – is of such interest to Fergus Lamont and Wide Sargasso Sea. What will confirm Fergus’s success in his reconstruction of himself as an aristocrat is, he often tells us, a house befitting his new self. However, the closest he gets to the comically named Corse Castle is his purchase of an estate newly available only because of the collapse of the

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very aristocracy to which he hopes to belong. His ability to buy this house is unknowingly symptomatic of the terminal demise of the imperial class that he wants to use the house to access. And this is specifically an imperial class; Fergus’s putative father, Henry Corse, has long since been shipped off to Australia in his disgrace, while the Oronsay estate on which Fergus finds (he thinks) redemption has been paid for by ‘Malaysian tin’ (306). In Wide Sargasso Sea Coulibri, the Cosways’ Jamaican estate, is burned down, anticipating the famous incineration that destroys Rochester’s Thornfield Hall, and unambiguously identifying both doomed estates, domestic and colonial, as products and eventual casualties of the same cultural phenomena of imperial decline and the rebellion of empire’s former subjects. Rhys’s incarcerated Antoinette comes to deny the old substitutions by which the country house stands for the nation itself, and the English nation for the British empire; Rochester’s estate is ‘not England’, she concludes just before she sets fire to Thornfield, but simply a sort of theatrical front for the violence that happens out in the colonies that have both subsidised it and allowed it to naturalise its imagining of itself as the homeland, and not merely one nation in a larger British imperial project. Thornfield Hall is a ‘cardboard house’ (181). No wonder it burns so easily when the time comes. BAD BLOOD But there are other kinds and meanings of ‘inheritance’ beyond the transfer of material property from the dead to the living. It is essential to these writers’ concern with lineage that the inheritances of their source material in Jane Eyre and Justified Sinner are as much genetic as material. Named ‘Wringhim’ for his mother’s minister, ‘my pastor, and father (as I shall henceforth denominate him)’ (99), Hogg’s villainous protagonist seems a chip off the sanctimonious parental block, except that his paternity is never resolved; it is not clear if he merits the legal status of ‘the lawful son of the late laird, born in wedlock, and under his father’s roof’ (55) or is in fact ‘the crazy minister’s son from Glasgow’ (23). Robert is, according to the man who marries his mother, ‘third in a direct line who had all been children of adultery’ (46), an important point not because it explains him in the way old Colwan believes, that such children are always ‘born half deils’ (46), but because it indicates the radical indeterminacy, and thus uselessness, of thinking in terms of bloodline at all. What would a family tree look like for someone thought to be ‘third in a direct line who had all been children of adultery’? What explanatory narrative of inheritance could you ever confidently derive from this? ‘Blood’ provides the rationale for Brontë’s dispossession of her inconvenient characters. Rochester’s illegitimate daughter Adèle is a ‘French dancer’s bastard’ (Brontë 1985: 329), who has inherited her Parisian silliness from her mother, we are told, and who is shunted off stage at the end. More importantly still, it is essential to the marginalising of the first Mrs Rochester that Brontë should deploy the most ruthlessly deterministic understanding of identity as heredity. ‘Bertha

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Mason is mad,’ Brontë’s Rochester proclaims at the altar when his bigamous plan is exposed, ‘and she came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the Creole, was both a madwoman and a drunkard! . . . Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points’ (Brontë 1985: 320). The plot relies on Jane taking Rochester’s word for it, and the morally satisfactory novelistic closure on the reader agreeing to do the same. In contrast, and writing in the decade that saw ‘madness’ rethought by the Scottish anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing as well as by, in another context, Michel Foucault, Rhys offers a very different and wholly anti-essentialist story of a maternal inheritance, whereby madness works as trans-generational protest (and it is worth recalling that Fergus Lamont’s mother goes ‘insane’ and kills herself in response to the same constricted conditions that drive Fergus into his ‘delusional’ state). Mother and daughter are connected by their names – Antoinette’s mother is named Annette – but Rhys makes the grounds of the estrangement between Rochester and the first wife he both resembles and loves not a determining maternal legacy of madness, but the poisonous story of that legacy. The embittered Daniel Cosway, excluded by his mixed-race background from the privileges that the white Antoinette has enjoyed, turns against the Anglo characters those notions of ‘blood’ that have enabled his exclusion when he vengefully discloses to Rochester that his beautiful new wife has ‘bad blood . . . from both sides’: Is your wife’s mother shut away, a raging lunatic and worse besides? Dead or alive I do not know. Was your wife’s brother an idiot from birth, though God mercifully take him early on? Is your wife herself going the same way as her mother and all knowing it? (Rhys 1982: 97–8) Daniel Cosway is Antoinette’s illegitimate half-brother, the son of her white father with a black woman. Or at least we are inclined to believe he is, though the resilient ambiguity is central to Rhys’s concern with the purely social relevance of blood ties, mattering only to the extent that a culture continues to believes in them, as they (Dominica’s and Scotland’s included) continue to do. And Rochester believes unquestioningly in these blood ties, taking as truth this malicious intervention from Cosway – even though the reader knows otherwise, having already been shown that Antoinette’s mother was driven mad by grief and fear in the lead-up to the final arson attack on Coulibri; knows that Antoinette’s brother Pierre was not ‘mercifully take[n]’ but burned to death in his cot during that insurrection; and knows that Rochester’s suspicion and loathing is far more likely than innate predisposition to drive her into insanity ‘the same way as her mother’. ‘None of you understand about us,’ thinks the child-heroine, trying to explain her family circumstances to her new stepfather, Mason: ‘I wish I could tell him that out here is not at all like English people think it is’ (30, 34). The arrival of

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Mason ushers in the era of ‘beef and mutton, pies and pudding’ (35), a diet that indicates almost comically the inadequacy of the English characters to the world in which they have found themselves, even as it denounces more seriously the same cultural arrogance that will render Mason fatally oblivious to the political realities of Jamaica in the 1830s. In his political stupidity, he clearly foreshadows the other English incomer-and-husband, Rochester. Underscoring what Rhys sees as the primarily social aetiology of madness, Rhys invents this English second husband for Antoinette’s mother – in Jane Eyre, Mason is Bertha’s father – who, anticipating Rochester’s failure, will, with devastating effects, understand nothing of her feelings and fears as a white West Indian whose hitherto privileged social world is at the centre of an implosion no less personally terrifying for being historically necessary, for being even, we might say, deserved. ‘Old customs?’ asks one unnamed member of the Jamaican community in Wide Sargasso Sea. ‘Some old customs are better dead and buried’ (29). Almost inevitably, in view of their colonial concerns, concerns apparently peripheral to Jane Eyre though central to Wide Sargasso Sea, the problem of blood is racialised, connected to anxieties about miscegenation. Rhys will tackle the matter directly through the mixed-race, illegitimate Cosways: the vengeful Daniel Cosway and his putative half-brother Sandi, who becomes Antoinette’s lover by the end of the novel, even though they may be half-brother and sister. In a sense, though, Rhys is simply literalising what is already there in the crossracial symbolism of Jane Eyre. Brontë’s ironically named Blanche (‘White’), with whom Rochester will pretend to be in love, is ‘big, brown, and buxom’ (248) in the same style as the Creole Bertha Mason: white, in other words, but not nearly ‘white’ enough. In Jane’s description, Bertha is tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging down her back . . . I never saw a face like [hers]! It was a discoloured face – it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments . . . [T]he lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. (Brontë 1985: 311) And after the aborted marriage service, the wedding party troops back to Thornfield to contemplate the brutalised Bertha at greater leisure: whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours: it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face. (Brontë 1985: 321) With her dark hair, ‘savage’ and ‘discoloured’ face, and ‘blackened lineaments’, Bertha is clearly being presented as being of another race and thus of almost another species, and is denuded of her humanity accordingly, as were the slaves

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her family would until very recently have owned. Bertha’s ‘whiteness’ was an illusion, it is implied; stripped of your wealth and power, you are no longer white. This is very much to the point of Rhys’s novel, a novel in which you do not have to be black to be what the novel’s black characters call a ‘nigger’. To Rhys’s Rochester, Antoinette is irreducibly foreign, with her ‘dark alien eyes’: ‘Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either’ (Rhys 1982: 67). The caste and wealth attendant on slave-ownership have disappeared, and, her family having lost the plantation, Antoinette is no longer imaginable as genuinely white – not even to her black neighbours. ‘Plenty white people in Jamaica,’ Antoinette is told by her black alter ego Tia: ‘Real white people, they got gold money . . . Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger’ (24). There are white people, Tia knows, and then there are ‘real white people’. The colour that counts is the colour of your (gold) money. As with Rhys’s use of the old language of race to address changed class conditions, class segregation is articulated through the language of imperialist racism in Fergus Lamont. Here the Scottish rich and poor are as separate ‘as the whites in South Africa are from the blacks’ (2); the poor tenement-dwellers are ‘aborigines’ (38); and the aspiring Fergus addresses the working class in the manner of ‘Cortes to skulking Aztecs’ (105). The global and transhistorical range recalls the multiple manifestations of empire, the extent to which cultural and economic power relations at home mimic further-reaching (spatially and historically) forms of oppression. This is not to suggest that, by treating white Scots as if they were victims of empire, Jenkins is evading, or is in some sense oblivious to Scottish complicity in the racist imperialism carried out under the British flag; the Glaswegian hero of his novel Willie Hogg (1993) meets Native Americans with the traditionally Scottish names of Simpson and McKellar on a Navajo reservation in Arizona and is confronted with the fact that ‘the Scots have done their share of oppressing in the past’ – and it is hard to take seriously Willie’s glib defence that this was done only in ‘the service of their English masters’ (70). But, as in Wide Sargasso Sea, there are white people and real white people in Fergus Lamont. For example, the most progressive attitude ever attained by the novel’s bona fide aristocrat, the well-meaning but dim-witted Archie Dungavel, is to see the poor in anthropological terms, as ‘a huge alien tribe [with] weird habits, such as sharing lavatories and eating bread-and-margarine’ (101): Then he had gone to Eton, where among the subjects he had studied had certainly not been the habits of close-dwellers. It would have been fair to say of him that he knew as much about the Fiji Islanders as he did about the Scottish working-class: probably more, for in some book or other he might have come across something about the former. (Jenkins 1997: 112) Importantly, however, the language of anthropology – with its at least theoretical sense that cultures are equivalent as well as different – can be reversed,

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used against the aristocrats itself. ‘It is important that you appreciate fully what you will be up against,’ his teacher tells Fergus at the outset of his campaign. ‘It is not more difficult for an outsider to sail up the Amazon and be initiated into a cannibal tribe than it is for him to be accepted by the Scots landed gentry as one of them’ (70). The reader is expected to recognise this as a comic use of counteranthropological discourse – working-class Fergus as a civilised anthropologist attempting to access the ‘savage’ aristocrats – in support of an outlandishly and anachronistically conservative ambition. LITERARY LEGACIES In view of Jenkins’s attraction to this kind of reversibility, whereby the patronising ethnographic discourses of empire can be turned against the privileged ‘minority’ that invented them (the Scottish landed gentry as ‘cannibal tribe’), Glenda Norquay very usefully captures the unsettling, wrong-footing effects of Jenkins’s writing when she summarises his work as ‘disruptive’ rather than ‘difficult’ (1993: 11), meaning that the conventions exploded in his novels tend to be more thematic than stylistic. But even if Jenkins cannot be considered a particularly innovative writer on the formal level, this is suggestive that Fergus Lamont is one of the most metafictional novels he wrote, reflecting often on its own status as a novel. One possible conclusion to draw from this is that a concern with inheritance in the modern novel almost necessarily implies a metafictional or self-referential dimension representing modern writers’ engagements with their precursors; Fergus Lamont and Wide Sargasso Sea are novels about literal legacies, but also about the literary legacies of the minority ‘British’ writer. The Scottish literary-historical imagination is a preposterous affair in Fergus Lamont, a novel full of fraudulent producers of ‘so-called Scottish literature’ (157). There is Hamish Sievewright and his ‘two hundred and fifty page-long philosophical poem . . . a dialogue, in archaic Scots, between Mary, Queen of Scots, in her prison in England, and her husband the Earl of Bothwell, in his dungeon in Denmark’, a poem once ‘proclaimed as the profoundest exploration of the Scottish soul ever undertaken in literature’ (149). There is Alisdair Donaldson, whose first novel is ‘a gloomy tale of the killing of gannets in his native Lewis, in the eighteenth century, written in a sing-song prose supposed to represent the surge of the sea’ (150). Most important, though, among the novel’s inventory of Scot Lit kitsch, are the ersatz historical productions of the bogus Betty T. Shields, whose The Heirs of Crailzie is a family romance novel that forms the ironic double to the one we are reading; Betty’s book is surely emblematic of what the novel elsewhere characterises as the fantasy of a ‘Scotland of castles, famous families, and heroic deeds’ (59), that traditional vision of landedness as national belonging into which Fergus recklessly buys, as if his thoroughly communal upbringing in a Glasgow tenement were, perversely, a cause and marker of deracination. Fergus meets Betty during the First World War after submitting a trench poem to

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the cosy family magazine she edits, knowing that she will overwrite real historical experience by swapping ‘gay laughter for howls of protest, flowers for lumps of flesh, and nightingales for rats’ (121). Betty’s rewriting of herself – she is the illegitimate daughter of a working-class, Catholic mother – and her rewriting of the world – ‘Betty turned shit into sugar’ (131) – make her akin to Fergus himself. But while working-class Scots respond with incomprehension, anger or indifference to Fergus’s sympathetic poems about them, they readily devour the aristocratic fantasies that Betty gives them, notwithstanding that they ‘might as well have been about cannibals with bones through their noses for all the relevance they had to working-class women’ (135). Ultimately, Fergus Lamont is about the problem of how a national history can be told and passed on without the numerous forms of falsification and wishful thinking that tempt its literary hero, and, with this in mind, it is worth considering the literary legacy Jenkins and Rhys’s generation left. Allan Hepburn touches on the multiplicity of the concept of inheritance when he writes that it ‘variously signifies national belonging, literary affiliation, class identity, heredity, and kinship’ (2007: 3). Hepburn is writing in the somewhat different context of introducing a collection of essays on narrative and inheritance in Victorian and modernist fiction, but it would be difficult to overemphasise the symbolic significance of all his terms for postcolonial and post-imperial fiction specifically: the constitution of the nation, the voluntary and involuntary nature of literary tradition, problems of social stratification, birth, blood and belonging. Witness, for example, the centrality of genealogy to the major national epics of the late twentieth century, from Salman Rushdie’s landmark Midnight’s Children (1981) to Zadie Smith’s exuberant White Teeth (2000), about the unpredictable outcomes of empire. Has Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai, self-proclaimed representative of an independent India, inherited his glacially blue eyes from a Kashmiri grandfather or from the novel’s last AngloIndian, the preposterous William Methwold? The genealogical and the genetic are perhaps even more central still to Smith’s survey of the postwar period, a period bracketed by the capture at the start of the novel of a Nazi eugenicist on the run in occupied Italy in 1945 and the millennial unveiling of the genetically engineered FutureMouse©, the event that brings the novel to a close: that, and the birth of the heroine’s more optimistically futuristic child. ‘The fact is’, explains one of Smith’s characters, ‘cross-pollination produces more varied offspring, which are better able to cope with a changed environment’ (258). Exuberantly mongrelising literary ‘legacies’ of East and West – written narrative meets oral tradition and living memory, E. M. Forster meets Don Quixote and the Arabian Nights – such novels about ethnic and literary hybridisation give the lie to easy conservative and nativist understandings of national history by tracing the disavowed connections, biological and cultural, that obtain between the British and their one-time subjects in what the age of empire called the East and West Indies. This may seem strange company in which to place the morally searching but often formally sober Jenkins and the 1920s survivor, the belated

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modernist Rhys. Nevertheless, postwar writers like Robin Jenkins and Jean Rhys, and their rewritings of insular classics in order to show what they do not say, might be seen to anticipate one of the most significant aspects of Anglophone fiction from the last thirty years, the politicisation of postmodern literary sensibility by post-imperial consciousness.

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CHAPTER 13 Race, Nation, Class and Language Use in Leonard and Johnson

Race, Nation, Class and Language Use in Tom Leonard’s Intimate Voices and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Mi Revalueshanary Fren Liam Connell, University of Winchester Victoria Sheppard, University of SalfordLiam Connell and Victoria Sheppard The poetry of Tom Leonard and Linton Kwesi Johnson contains certain obvious similarities. Both poets have made use of place-specific spoken language in their poetry, which is represented in the text through experiments with orthography and phonetics. In doing so, both have endeavoured to interrogate conventional forms of English poetry and the politics of spoken language. Yet, despite these similarities, the poets are quite different sociologically and such differences, superficially at least, are evident in their engagement with poetic voices. While Leonard’s uses of ‘phonetic city dialect’ in Intimate Voices (Leonard 2003: 82; 1984) are grounded in the speech patterns of contemporary working-class Glaswegians, Johnson’s poetry, as set out in Mi Revalueshanary Fren (Johnson 2002), brings together a Jamaican-English-speaking voice with a musically rooted ‘sound’, which draws on rhythms derived from Jamaican Reggae.1 One question that this prompts is how best to explain the fact that these apparent differences in cultural location seem to have produced such similarities in poetic form. In the present context it is inviting to ask whether postcolonialism offers the best means of answering this question given that, even in its most post-structuralist modes, it is framed as a social explanation for literary form. From such founding texts as Edward Said’s Orientalism, contemporary postcolonial theory has sought to explain how cultural texts are rooted in the discursive histories of colonial and imperial power. Of course, it is important to flag the plurality of the histories that are at stake here and, as the contributions to this collection demonstrate, the methodologies which might account for their role on culture are multiple and diverse. One rationale for the present volume is to ask what benefits arise from extending postcolonial methodologies from their usual object to consider Scottish literature. In relation to this question, it is possible to note that the application of postcolonial theory to Black British authors, such as Johnson, has partly depended upon the way that migration from British colonies and former colonies has challenged exclusionary ideas of national belonging that depend upon and constitute the discourses of race. In comparison, it is certainly reasonable to claim that a Scottish national identity serves to trouble an incorporating British

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national identity by its insistence upon difference. However, the application of postcolonial methodologies that interprets this difference through the language of colonialism runs into certain difficulties. Though a junior partner in the Union, Scotland was not obviously colonised in the modern period and the role of Scots in the major political, civil and economic institutions of the British state suggest that the social divisions between Scots and English have been less salient than the divisions between social classes throughout Britain as a whole (see Connell 2003: especially 44–5). From such a perspective, it is possible to argue that the application of the language of colonialism to describe the Scottish context functions always as a metaphor which seeks to associate Scottish national antagonisms with the anti-colonial aspirations of former colonies. When addressing the figurative use of colonial domination to describe male domination in literary criticism of metropolitan fiction, Benita Parry has pointed out that this implies ‘that all oppressions are congruent, even equivalent’ (Parry 2004c: 109). As Parry acknowledges, this analogy occludes ‘the historical, ideological, experiential and discursive specificity of slavery, colonial rule and British class society’ (Parry 2004c: 110). Parry’s caution is clearly relevant to the comparison of Johnson and Leonard that we perform here, and one of our aims is to point to the dangers in hastily equating Leonard’s class-based language use with Johnson’s nation language.2 However, in thinking about these two writers in combination and in relation to postcolonial theory it may be possible to think about some correspondence between class and race while still remaining sympathetic to Parry’s more materialist methodologies. So, one of the aims of this paper is to ask how far a class analysis can be accommodated by a postcolonial analysis as a model of reading. In part this will serve to interrogate any easy assumptions about the kinds of identities that Leonard’s and Johnson’s poetry tries to articulate. The affiliations that their poetry claims are actually quite diverse; while at times these seem obviously based upon social identifications rooted in place, others are based on a shared sense of opposition to the dominant structures of power, while others still work less directly through appeals to hybrid literary identities. In attempting to separate out these different constituencies, we consider how class affiliation functions in relation to these other kinds of identity. This is not to argue that class is the determinate political category, but it is to argue that class remains an irreducible component of the identities of place these poets articulate. The relationship between postcolonial criticism and Marxist criticism has been a vexed area of debate for much of the last twenty years. Time and again, Marxist critics concerned with imperial and colonial histories have taken issue with an apparent retreat from materialism in the post-structuralist tendencies of postcolonial studies. Notable examples would include Aijaz Ahmad’s argument with Edward Said about the attitudes of Marx to British colonialism in India and about the value of Marxist methodologies for opposing imperialism (Ahmad 1992: 221–42); Ella Shohat’s complaint that the ‘dubious spatiality’ and ‘problematic temporality’ of postcolonialism leads to a failure to engage with continuing struc-

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tural conflicts between high- and low-income economies (Shohat 1992); or Arif Dirlik’s similar concern that postcolonialism is itself a ‘product’ of ‘global capitalism’ which throws ‘the cover of culture over material relationships’ in order to divert criticism of capitalism onto a criticism of Eurocentrism (Dirlik 1994: 347). If some of these arguments underestimated the concern of postcolonial theory with the material realities of ongoing imperialism, they have helped to flag up the distinction between colonisation (as an ad hoc system of settlement and economic extraction) and imperialism as a systematic internationalisation of capitalism. The influence of this kind of critique has recently seen postcolonial scholarship become increasingly interested in the material histories of imperialism alongside the linguistic focus that characterised some of the early trends in the field. An emblematic example might be Robert Young’s study, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, which sought to replace ‘postcolonialism’ with the term ‘tricontinentalism’ that could be more precisely located in the anti-imperialist struggles in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Young 2001). Such a claim seemed a major departure from Young’s earlier work that equated Marx with racist Enlightenment philosophies (Young 1995) and saw even Marxist opposition to Soviet Communism as ‘anti-Marxist’ (Young 1990: 12). Nevertheless the debate about the place of Marxism in postcolonial studies does not seem to have been silenced. In the 2004 Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, Parry reiterated her complaint about the absence of a critique of capitalism in much of postcolonial criticism and decried the ‘indifference to social explanations’ of colonialism (Parry 2004a: 70, 74). Likewise, in the 2006 collection Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Florencia E. Mallon writes of the ‘especially dense source of discontent’ found ‘in the friction between postcolonialism and Marxism that lies at the heart of many of debates within postcolonial theory’ (Mallon 2006: 273). While a number of contributors to both these collections appear to seek a compromise between Marxist and post-Marxist-postcolonial methodologies, the fact that Parry and Mallon both feel the desire to restate these familiar complaints suggests that this remains a troublesome combination. We can see something of this in another contribution to the Cambridge Companion, where Fernando Coronil claims that one characteristic of postcolonialism ‘has been the critical application of Marxism to a broad spectrum of social and cultural domination not reducible to the category of “class” ’ (Coronil 2004: 224). Though this statement seems initially sympathetic to Marxist analysis, the relegation of class remains troubling from a materialist perspective, not because all forms of domination are reducible to class, but because class remains a component of domination even where other factors are powerfully implicated. It is certainly possible to conceive of ways that a contemporary critique of capitalism may operate around a set of social categories other than class. Additionally, it is plausible that class as a system of categorisation will function differently in societies that do not completely replicate the historical structuration of a capitalist economy in Europe. The role of ad hoc colonisation as an instrument of European imperialism is undoubtedly one of the features that adapted the systems of class

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that Marx described by superimposing race as a category of discrimination on top of class differences. However, this is not to say that class disappears from such scenarios and Coronil’s judgment raises questions about the nature of class analysis within such criticism. If we are to follow Parry’s insistence that the critique of imperialism must involve a critique of capitalism, what role does class play in such an analysis? It is worth remembering, for instance, that in The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon sought to ‘stretch’ a Marxist analysis of class by arguing that ‘in the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich’ (Fanon 1967: 31). Fanon confidently interrogates the conventional Marxist vocabulary of base and superstructure by showing how race determines and is determinate of class; whiteness is both a function and a cause of wealth. If The Wretched of the Earth appears to treat race and class as inseparable, this may explain the preference for the earlier, psychoanalytical, Black Skin, White Masks by theorists such as Homi Bhabha (see Fanon 1986; Bhabha 1994: 57–93; Schwarz 1996). However, it is important to note, here, that class and race are not treated as analogous but, rather, as entwined systems of discrimination which both depend upon structures of economic power. Just as class is not some essentialist, given identity, Fanon proposes that race too is constructed economically. Clearly, this accords with contemporary theories of race, which note that racial categorisation is highly varied historically and geographically, and that it is deeply influenced by the economic and political contexts of those times and places (Niro 2003). Within postcolonial studies this thinking has found a more recent articulation in the work of Rey Chow, who has argued that postcolonial theory’s undue attention to the migratory subject has led it to ignore the extent to which otherness is a social projection grounded in the structures of capitalism. For Chow, following Immanuel Wallerstein, ethnicity is ‘produced from within privileged societies and is at once defined by and constitutive of that society’s hierarchical divisions of labour’. In her view, the ‘ethnicization of labor’ works as a mechanism for resolving contradictions of capitalism by associating those who retain the least surplus value of their labour with foreignness as a justification for their dispossession (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 83; Chow 2002: 34). It is easy to see how this view might provoke some of the usual complaints against Marxism by postcolonial critics. Chow and Wallerstein could be construed as arguing that foreignness is merely a cipher for class and that identities are all produced within the highincome economies of the former colonial empires. However, a more generous reading which is mindful of Fanon’s cognate analysis would note that Chow reads the ‘ethnicization of labor’ dialectically; she argues that ethnic differentiation is ‘produced’ by and is ‘constitutive of’ labour hierarchies. Race and class cannot be collapsed here but neither can they be disentangled. In trying to think through the value of these theoretical positions for the comparison of Johnson and Leonard we might try to keep this dialecticism to

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the fore. This would lead us to ask whether Johnson’s racially coded identity can be extended to encompass a conception of class without treating race and class as simple analogies. Additionally we might ask whether Leonard’s class-based critique of language is something that opens up a wider commentary on the nature of domination over other kinds of identity positions.3 Arguably, many of the readings of Leonard that have sought to do this have tended to pursue an analogous methodology rather than a materialist one, so we can see in the easy attempts of critics to read Leonard’s discussions of class as being about spatial identities via the metaphor of colonialism. For example, in an essay comparing Leonard with Johnson, Donald Wesling uses Bakhtinian notions of social poetics and dialogism to show how their dialect poetry articulates what he construes as different kinds of colonial culture, identifying Leonard’s writing with a Scottish border culture and Johnson with what he calls ‘diaspora culture’ (Wesling 1993: 313–15).4 Notably Wesling’s account of these different modes of colonialism lacks the historical detail that it might demand; there is no account, for instance, of how Leonard’s Irish Catholic heritage might function diasporically in relation to mainstream Scottish culture. When Wesling does talk of Scotland in relation to the history of Union, he argues that its border culture ‘is more properly precolonial than colonial’, by which he seems to mean that its incorporation into an Anglo-Scottish Union pre-dates the development of a fully colonial state. The main focus of Wesling’s reading of Leonard is the well-known poem ‘Unrelated Incidents 3’ (Leonard 1984: 88). In this poem Leonard portrays a BBC newsreader commenting upon the connection between accent and the ability of different accents to convey truthful statements. In doing so, it articulates a common theme in Leonard’s writing concerning the relationships between written and spoken language and their connections to power. The poem begins by announcing a speaker as a man reading the news on the BBC’s Six O’Clock News. It is not, however, clear whether the rest of the poem is intended to portray the newsreader himself or a Glaswegian parodist, since it goes on to justify his use of a BBC accent through an invective questioning the ability of alternate speech patterns to articulate the truth effectively. Additionally, the poem is presented in a stylised transcription of speech through which the newsreader appears to speak the very forms of language that he deprecates: yi widny wahnt me ti talk aboot thi trooth wia voice lik wanna you scruff. (Leonard 1984: 88)

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Although the poem can be read aloud as Glaswegian English, several technical elements of the poem distance the poem’s visualisation of language from its immediate spoken form. The short lines and abrupt endings, along with the absence of capitalisation, all disrupt the easy flow of the poem and the orthography prompts unfamiliarity rather than recognition, especially where it collapses distinct semic units into single words, such as in the words ‘wia’ / [with a] or ‘wanna’ / [one of]. Leonard’s concern here might be to highlight the gap between pronunciation and orthography in all English writing, something that he addresses more directly in his essays ‘The Proof of the Mince Pie’ and ‘The Locust Tree in Flower’ (Leonard 1984: 65, 95). When reading this poem, Wesling slides smoothly, and without comment, from the languages of class to the languages of colonisation. For instance, at one point he uses an explicitly colonial metaphor to argue that ‘the official voice of the BBC announcer has been colonized by the street voice of the Glasgow scruff, who makes explicit the social meanings of state and authority, including coercive meanings like the final “belt up”.’ Yet, Wesling immediately switches to talk of the poem’s portrayal of ‘a working class speaker telling himself to shut up’ (Wesling 1993: 316). This slippage between different systems of classification seems principally to depend upon the utilisation of colonialism as a metaphor for other kinds of domination. Notably, the language of Leonard’s text seems principally to justify a class reading rather than a colonial one. The repeated use of the word ‘scruff’, for example, appears to link to questions of class rather than the social identities of place. The model of inferiority at work in the poem is not explicitly linked to a spatial geography, whether national or regional. Certainly, the more general claims about language are, potentially, applicable to both working-class linguistic forms and language varieties that have grown up in former British colonies. We might note that the poem’s use of the second person plural, ‘yooz’, stands as a ‘shibboleth’ of ‘urban working-class Scots’ (Beal 1997: 344). As such it is a marker of both social class and location. Significantly, this word has spread into regions of Northern England, though it remains an urban and a working-class formation (Beal 1997: 345–6). The interconnection of place and class in some of the language forms that the poem employs might hint at a dialectical relationship between social class and spatial identity. However, this does not yet appear to justify the colonial metaphor that Wesling employs.5 The comparison with Johnson is valuable here, in so far as Johnson’s poetry reveals, in a more obvious way, a range of different identities that it negotiates through the representations of the spoken voice. While his poetry consistently focuses on questions of racial politics, this does not obscure the degree to which this politics is cut through with questions of class recalling Fanon’s and Chow’s dialectical formulations. One route into reading how this manifests itself is by trying to historicise the notion of blackness upon which his poetry depends. As Kobena Mercer sketches out in Welcome to the Jungle, the adoption of a neoPowellite rhetoric of race by the Thatcher governments of the 1980s generated black identities that were grounded in activism and a Gramscian notion of

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alliance that saw new ‘cultures of hybridity forged among the overlapping African, Asian and Caribbean diasporas’ (Mercer 1994: 3–4). As Stuart Hall has noted, the term ‘black’ became ‘a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain’, providing a ‘unifying framework based on the building up of identity across ethnic and cultural difference between the different communities’ (Hall 1988: 27). This broad category of blackness is particularly evident in those poems by Johnson which dramatise the experience of political confrontation. This is emphasised by the use of pronouns that typically employ the collective pronoun ‘wi’ in opposition to the pronouns ‘dem’ or the plural form of ‘yu’. The collective subject tends to take precedence over individualised, lyric expression, perhaps emphasising what Stuart Hall has called ‘the burden of representation’ (Hall 1988; Mercer 1994: 233–58). In line with this, critics have tended to relate Johnson’s use of realism, narrative description and sense of immediacy to the historical specificity of his work, pointing to its concern with the experiences of black urban youth in a climate of racial hostility (Dabydeen 1990; D’Aguiar 1993; Keith 1993; Walder 1998; McGuirk 1998; Procter 2002; McLeod 2004). In this context, his use of Jamaican patois should not be read only as a form of mimesis, being also an act of resistance capable of forging wider solidarities. David Dabydeen, for example, argues that the use of West Indian patois by Johnson represents ‘one of the many ways in which young British blacks have resisted white domination’, through an act of cutting up English diction so that is ‘uncomfortably raw’ (Dabydeen 1990: 3–9). Similarly, Dennis Walder argues that dub poetry was indicative of a moment in which ‘the speech of the streets’ was necessarily used ‘in solidarity against the oppressor’ (Walder 1998: 143), while Fred D’Aguiar suggests that, combined with his forceful polemic, Johnson’s language is a means of mobilising Britain’s black working class (D’Aguiar 1980). D’Aguiar’s yoking of race and social class seems particularly important in the present context but, more generally, the claims that Johnson’s language use represents identity as opposition has obvious connections with Leonard’s linguistic experiments. An example that demonstrates Johnson’s use of an oppositional address to claim and affirm a collective revolutionary identity is ‘Mekin Histri’ (Johnson 2002: 64–6). First published in 1984 as a document of a number of political protests in 1970s and 1980s Britain, it alludes directly to Southall, Bristol, Toxteth, Moss Side and Brixton. Central to the poem is a rhetorical style of confrontational address which enacts its own form of protest by recording this topical political resistance as ‘histri’. now tell mi someting mistah govahment man tell mi someting how lang yu really feel yu couda keep wi andah heel

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Liam Connell and Victoria Sheppard wen di trute done reveal bout how yu grab an steal bout how yu mek crooked deal mek yu crooked deal? well doun in Soutall Where Peach did get fall di Asians dem faam-up a human wall an dem show dat di Asians gat plenty zeal gat plenty zeal gat plenty zeal it is noh mistri wi mekin histri it is noh mistri wi winnin victri (Johnson 2002: 64)

Throughout the poem the word ‘yu’ only applies to representatives of the government, the police and the right wing. As such, it helps to distinguish the representatives of political power from black Britons and anti-racist groups who are referred to using a quite different set of pronouns. Notably, the use of the communal ‘wi’ for those who ‘mek histri’ or ‘win victri’ functions around a tension between its requirement simultaneously to represent the sound of Jamaican patois while seeking to represent, in the existential sense, a collective identity that expands beyond a Caribbean–British identity. This is evident from the fact that the poem does not solely operate around the clear-cut binary of ‘yu’ and ‘wi’. As well as this, the poem contains several references to other social groups who participated in the protests that it records. These groups are identified using the pronouns ‘dem’ / them and ‘day’ / they, which separates them from the ‘yu’ of authority but which is co-opted into the ‘wi’ of the repeated chorus. Lines such as ‘di Asians dem faam-up a human wall’, in protest against the killing of Blair Peach in 1979, shows that this co-option is not total; the third person ‘dem’ appears to signify that Johnson’s speaker stands outside of this Asian identity. However, the first occurrence of the chorus with its inclusive ‘wi’ appears immediately after this section and the poem’s structure enacts a process of coalition-forming between the speaker and the Asian community. This idea of coalition is helpful for considering how the surface identities of the poem might also be capable of articulating other positions. This can be seen to extend to class in ‘Mekin Histri’ through references to forms of domination which appear to be, at least partially, economic. Alongside references to police violence and political racism, the reference to the government man seeking to ‘keep wi andah heel’ seems to describe forms of social subordination even as it hints at physical violence and abuse. However, in Johnson’s poetry

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more generally we might recognise a concern with class which emerges from the modulations between the spoken voice and the written word, which bears comparison with Leonard’s work. Johnson’s representation of the spoken voice performs several functions in his poetry. As seen in ‘Mekin Histri’, his depiction of spoken language can be read as imitative of Caribbean English while also articulating broader forms of collective identity centred on resistance. In other poems, however, ‘voice’ is transformed into an instrument of ‘sound’ by engaging with traditions of oral performance. This is especially evident in the poems from the 1970s that were performed with the reggae band Rasta Love. In poems such as ‘Bass Culture’, Johnson affords non-semantic sound the same prominence as semic lexis, so that the political effort to capture Reggae’s ‘latent powah . . . burstin outta slave shackle’ is achieved through the enactment of the music in the ‘SCATTA-MATTA-SHATTA-SHACK’ of the beat (Johnson 2002: 15–16). In a later poem, ‘If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet’, this musical affiliation takes on a slightly different significance by considering the cultural perceptions of orality within the institutions of poetry and reaching back into the kind of language politics that Leonard addresses. Instead of the BBC news, the manifestation of cultural authority in Johnson’s poem is the literary establishment, the presence of which is introduced with a quotation from the Oxford Companion to TwentiethCentury Poetry: ‘dub poetry has been described as . . . “over-compensation for deprivation” ’ (Johnson 2002: 94–7). Through the ironic comparison of his own poetry and the conventional poetic form, Johnson takes up the oppositions between literacy and orality within literary criticism, pointing to the pervading class and racial assumptions that support this opposition. This opposition is ultimately undermined by a juxtaposition of various ‘tap-natch’ poets, through which the poem proposes an international poetic canon, bringing together African, American and Caribbean poets including Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Chris Okigbo, Nicholas Guillen, T. S. Eliot, Jayne Cortez and Amiri Baraka, a canon affording equal prominence to orality and performance traditions on one hand, and to formal experimentation with the printed word on the other. As in ‘Mekin Histri’, ‘If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet’ involves a double movement of sympathy and of distance; Johnson’s poem celebrates his canon but repeatedly defers his own inclusion with the word ‘if’. If he were like them he would be able to write poetry that is lyrical, epiphanic, ‘bittah-sweet’ or ‘rude / an rootsy / an subversive’. The distance the poem creates between Johnson’s persona of the ‘goon poet’ and his canon is partly constructed in class terms. The poet talks about his ‘ruff base line’, an allusion to the ways in which performance traditions have informed his work, and a pun which plays on perceptions of such popular forms in simplified dichotomies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. The words ‘ruff’ and ‘base’ might serve a similar function to the word ‘scruff’ in ‘Unrelated Incidents 3’, and there are further parallels between the two poems in the ambiguity over the speaker’s position. In Leonard’s poem this ambiguity inheres in the competing voices, and whether the frame narrator is seen as simply parodying the voice of authority of the newsreader, or whether the newsreader himself is understood as

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the main speaker, who, in demonstrating his linguistic dexterity by parodying an urban Glaswegian vernacular, exposes an ability to code-switch which legitimates his own cultural power and his presumed ability to determine the location of ‘thi / trooth’ (Leonard 1984: 95). Meanwhile, in Johnson’s poem, the speaker’s apparently humble position, and indeed the language used to distinguish the ‘goon poet’ from the ‘tap natch’ ones, might be better understood as a parody of critical readings of dub poetry. The Oxford Companion’s reference to the ‘demotic’ nature of dub is a prime example. Similarly, the repeated refrain of the ‘goon poet’, ‘wid mi riddim / wid mi rime / wid mi ruff base line / wid mi own sense a time’, might be seen as overstating his formal simplicity in contrast to the other poets. The ambiguity in the speaker’s position in both ‘Unrelated Incidents 3’ and ‘If I Woz’ seems to highlight and undermine the critical temptation to read spoken vernaculars in poetry as a marker of class or racial ‘authenticity’. Just as critics have described Leonard’s transcription of Scottish speech as authentic or real (Corbett 1999: 171; Strachan and Terry 2000: 159), the Oxford Companion entry on Johnson (from which the poem’s epigraph is extracted) suggests that his poems ‘display the authentic voice of young urban blacks in Britain today’ (Hamilton 1994: 247). Underlying such perceptions of authenticity is a belief that the representation of spoken voices or dialect makes for a more immediate form of poetic expression, one that is ultimately less ‘literary’ or poetic in the sense that it is less mediated or constructed, and one that is more a spontaneous articulation of a particular identity. In our readings, we have aimed to refute the notion that these poets use spoken vernaculars to articulate an authentic, singular poetic voice. This is evidenced firstly in their articulations of a complex range of identity positions and affiliations, which render problematic any simple association of spoken language with a straightforwardly collective or representational identity. Secondly, the experimentation in both poets’ work draws attention to the artifice and construction inherent in sound and speech – whether through Johnson’s formal attention to voice as sound or Leonard’s visual disruption of the link between spoken language (or ‘lang- / wij’) and its representation in writing which focuses attention away from the specifics of local speech and on to language ‘as an object in itself’ (Leonard 1984: 87, 95). In both cases, the interrogation of the relationship between orality and literacy draws on poetic influences that transcend the more narrowly place-bound identities their poetry may initially imply, demonstrated in Leonard’s debt to William Carlos Williams and Johnson’s transatlantic poetic canon. Tellingly, instead of an authenticity-of-place that is rooted in voice, the prominence of place in both poets’ work appears to derive from the immediacy of its political engagement. This engagement, while taking different forms, ultimately gestures towards materialist readings of state power. Johnson’s political engagement takes a more obviously activist form in its attempts to enact protest as poetic articulation. In Leonard, the immediacy of his politics tends to be less focused on the specific events of recent history than on the institutional structures of social stratification. His equation of material poverty with cultural subordination in

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poems such as ‘Feed Ma Lamz’ (46) and ‘The Qualification’ (50), for example, focuses on the disparagement of left or workers’ politics by cultural elites. Leonard’s political concern with the ‘ordinary wurkn / man’ (94) might easily take an international turn, seeking to find common cause with workers internationally. Certainly, as Graeme Macdonald has recently noted, Leonard’s later work takes ‘materialist directions’ which link Scottish class and national politics to the international politics of imperialist wars in the Middle East (Leonard 1993; Macdonald 2006: 130–1). While these directions are less easy to discern in the earlier poetic experiments of Intimate Voices, which tend to be framed through the politics of class rather than place, in his more polemical essays, ‘The Proof of the Mince Pie’ and ‘The Locust Tree in Flower’, Leonard does offer a framework for beginning to think about Scottish class politics in materialist postcolonial terms. A crucial element of these essays is Leonard’s attempt to identify a material basis for elite language-forms. ‘Received Pronunciation is unique’ because ‘it is not the language of a region, but on the contrary it’s been there to be bought all over Britain’ (Leonard 1984: 98). Likewise, the British University is ‘a reification of the notion that culture is synonymous with property’ (Leonard 1984: 65). This emphasis on the commoditisation of culture identifies an economic basis for the cultural subordination of working-class and regional speech patterns. As such, it seems to have more in common with the work of Chow than with the analogous readings of Leonard that we critique above. If we recall Chow’s attempt to connect unprivileged ethnic identities to the distribution of surplus value within a capitalist economy, we might be able to connect Leonard’s reading of the British cultural economy to a politics of exclusion that pertains to other kinds of identity positions. The epithet ‘scruff’ in ‘Unrelated Incidents 3’ might be read as an attempt to reify class identity as a form of the ethnic labour, structuring the hierarchical divisions of labour by denoting class as an essentialist category. Additionally, the implied violence of the concluding ‘belt up’ suggests that Leonard equates the power of British cultural institutions with force, just as Johnson links state violence to economic subordination in ‘Mekin Histri’. In both cases, the idea of power in their work is not a Foucauldian notion of power as discourse, but rather a more traditionally materialist idea of power, which represents control of the means of production and the apparatus of the state. Analysing such power does not require class and race to become analogous. Instead, what it requires is attention to the way that alternative cultural articulations are able to protest the application of this power. In this light, the comparison of Leonard and Johnson’s dialect work suggests that the effort to undermine the linguistic hierarchies that have governed poetic form can be effectively utilised to expose the political lines of privilege that such hierarchies support. NOTES 1. On Leonard’s technique see Macaulay 1991: 281; Gish 2003: 261–3; Tuma 2003: 146; on Johnson see Brathwaite 1984: 34–5; Hitchcock 1993; Marsh

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2005: 47. For analyses of Johnson’s formal imitation of Reggae sound patterns, bass lines and rhythm sections, see D’Aguiar 1993; Dawes 1996. The term ‘nation language’ was coined by Kamau Brathwaite to describe the co-mingling of English lexis with African rhythm, timbre and sounds in the Caribbean (Brathwaite 1984: 13). Given Johnson’s engagement with specific discourses of British national identity in the 1970s and 1980s, the term requires some qualification (see, for example, Hitchcock 1993). Although class is not always considered an identity in the way that race, gender and sexuality are usually talked about as ‘identity politics’, it is certainly possible to think about identification with a particular class position. Although the term ‘dialect’ has been contentious in Scottish studies because of its implication that some written poetry is in a dialect while other poetry is not, both poets use the word in connection with their own poetry. In Radical Renfrew, however, Leonard also uses the colonial metaphor to describe ‘the proletariat of the West of Scotland . . . as forming linguistically a colony within a colony’ (Leonard 1990): presumably Scotland itself being a colony of England. Yet, if colonies have linguistic implications, what is gained by interpreting class relations in colonial terms remains unclear.

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CHAPTER 14 Conversion and Subversion in Salih and Aboulela

Conversion and Subversion in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Leila Aboulela’s The Translator Willy Maley, University of Glasgow

SUDAN IMPACT: THE SCOTTISH CONTRIBUTION TO EMPIRE This chapter differs from other comparative exercises in this volume in so far as it discusses two novels by Sudanese writers detailing the colonial encounters of Sudanese students in England and Scotland, though the second work under discussion – Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999), described by its author as ‘a Muslim Jane Eyre’ (Chambers 2009) – is Scottish in terms of both setting and subject matter and by virtue of its author’s relocation to Scotland. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (first published in Arabic in 1966) is often described as the most important Arabic work of the twentieth century. Both entail homecomings, their respective protagonists returning to different Sudans, just as their sojourns in imperial Britain – London and Aberdeen – differ markedly. They also enact the classic postcolonial strategy of writing back, in Salih’s case adapting Othello and Heart of Darkness, in Aboulela’s rewriting Charlotte Brontë. Other critics have paired Salih and Aboulela, but the latter’s Scottish context remains under-examined, particularly in a comparative manner (cf. Smyth 2007). Sudan, Africa’s largest country, was effectively run as a partitioned state, divided north and south, by an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium from 1898 to 1956. Although this was a period of essentially British rule, Scotland played a disproportionate role in the governance of what was the second largest colonial administration after India, a fact noted in Aboulela’s 2001 short story ‘The Museum’, in which an exhibition in Aberdeen marks the North-East’s colonial contribution. The Scottish education system provided administrative personnel, with former pupils from schools across Scotland –chiefly fee-paying institutions – entering the Sudan Political Service. Many former pupils were also graduates of the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrew’s (cf. Kirk-Greene 1982; Mangan 1982). From the eighteenth century Scots were active in the region, including figures such as James Bruce of Kinnaird (1730–94), author of the five-volume Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790). The first Director of Education

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in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’s crucial formative period (1900–14) was Edinburghborn Sir James Currie (cf. Shepperson 1971; Sanderson 2004). Scotland’s role is evident in that country’s decisive historical events, including the death of Charles George Gordon, ‘Gordon of Khartoum’, English-born but of mixed English and Scottish parentage (cf. Allen 1941). The Translator is aware of this history, as demonstrated in this brief exchange: ‘There is a statue,’ said Rae, ‘of Gordon in Aberdeen. In Schoolhill. Have you seen it?’ ‘No.’ [Sammar] did not see much, she walked around asleep. ‘You might like to look at it sometime.’ A plaque in stone, the words died in Khartoum 1885. ‘I didn’t know he was Scottish. They didn’t teach us that at school.’ ‘It was the British . . .’ ‘The Ingeleez . . .’ They laughed and the wind rattled the front door a little and passed. (Aboulela 2001c: 52) Gordon was not the only leading Scot to die in the region. Dalkeith-born Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff, Under-Secretary of State for Scotland from 1892 to 1902, lost his only son, Colin, Deputy-Inspector of the Blue Nile Province of Sudan, in 1908.1 Colonel E. A. Stanton, reviewing England in the Sudan (1911) by Yacoub Pasha Artin, speaks of arduous journeys through scrub and forest on foot, to distant tribes that know not the white man. The Riverain tribes and population are only a very small portion of the whole . . . All these provinces have their distinctive features and tribes, as different from the Riverain, as the Highlands of Scotland and Scotch folk are from the peaceful Thames valley and its inhabitants. (Stanton 1911: 275–6) Stanton’s aside on Highlanders as a distant tribe in comparison with Londoners is ironic given the over-representation of Scots in the Sudanese colonial administration. The Aberdeen University setting of The Translator exemplifies the way in which the novel knowingly evokes this colonial connection. John Hargreaves, former professor at Aberdeen and author of Academe and Empire (1994), in an article in African Affairs in 1973 reminds readers that: In 1933 one departmental committee under Sir James Currie, a former Director of Education in the Sudan, had argued that institutions of ‘a real university standard’ (as contrasted with existing institutions geared to vocational training) could help provide ‘that reasonable degree of social and economic security, without which there can be no solid or lasting basis for any real cultural life’. (Hargreaves 1973: 28)

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Sudan not only attracted Scottish graduates but the colonial experience also fed back into the Scottish education system. This is recognised, in both the pedagogic setting of Aboulela’s transnational narrative, and in the conscious manner in which it registers Salih’s postcolonial concerns with the influences of Britain and especially of British education on returning ‘native’ subjects. (The extent to which the Scottish element is distinctive from – or analogous to – the Anglo-British is a further compelling feature here.) MIGRATION ACROSS THE GENERATIONS In Season of Migration to the North, one passage encapsulates British power in that region: ‘The English District Commissioner was a god who had a free hand over an area larger than the whole of the British Isles and lived in an enormous palace full of servants and guarded by troops’ (2003: 53). Set in post-independence Sudan, Salih’s novel charts the experiences of two men, Mustafa Sa’eed and an unnamed narrator. Mustafa, born in 1898, the year of Kitchener’s bloody campaign against the Mahdi, went to London in the 1920s after studying in Cairo, where a couple called the Robinsons – a sly allusion to Defoe – look after him. By day a lecturer at London School of Economics, by night Mustafa is a lothario who plays and preys upon the Orientalist fantasies of a series of English women. Three lovers commit suicide, while he marries and murders a fourth, Jean Morris. After serving seven years in prison, Mustafa returns to Sudan, making his new home in Wad Hamid, a small village at a bend in the Nile. He marries a local woman, Hosna Bint Mahmoud, apparently leading a settled life until the narrator, another returnee from Britain fresh from a PhD in English Poetry, makes his acquaintance. In London Mustafa turns his flat into an Orientalist boudoir. In Sudan, he keeps a secret room entirely English in style, without a single book in Arabic. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is an obvious influence on Salih’s novel (cf. Davidson 1989). The narrator is Marlowe to Mustafa’s Kurtz, but under scrutiny in the novel is not just colonialism but neocolonialism, as a retired civil servant tells the narrator: Has not the country become independent? Have we not become free men in our own country? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar. This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do. They showed favour to nonentities – and it was such people that occupied the highest positions in the days of the English. (53–4) By 1928 Mustafa is President of the Struggle for African Freedom, but his boast is: ‘I’ll liberate Africa with my penis’ (120). If, following Waïl Hassan’s (2003: 311) argument, Mustafa’s ‘sexual crusade’ is part of a perverse strategy of anti-colonial revenge, then ageing village lecher Wad Rayyes represents the other side of a misogynist coin, and ‘clearly personifies the objectifying and abuse

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of women as property that is traditional to their culture’ (Davidson 1989: 387). When Mustafa disappears, presumed to have drowned himself, Wad Rayyes insists on marrying against her will Hosna Bint Mahmoud, Mustafa’s widow (or abandoned wife, since his body is never recovered). Hosna makes her intentions known: ‘If they force me to marry, I’ll kill him and kill myself’ (96). True to her word, she murders Wad Rayyes then commits suicide, in a terrifying echo of her late / lost husband’s conduct in England. The narrator links the two when he imagines Hosna being the same woman in both instances: two white, wide-open thighs in London, and a woman groaning before dawn in an obscure village on a bend of the Nile under the weight of the aged Wad Rayyes. If that other thing was evil, this too was evil. (86–7) The narrator has a way of saving Hosna – he could marry her, as she goes so far as asking – but, impotent and tongue-tied, he does nothing till he hears of the double death after the doomed union. Not until his own failed suicide attempt does the narrator embrace something beyond himself and his double, Mustafa. Like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Season of Migration offers a hardeyed look at native culture typical of that period of self-examination that came on the cusp or in the wake of independence. A new generation of postcolonial writers are appraising afresh the legacy of imperialism, and like Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who writes back not only to empire but also to Achebe, her country’s founding figure in fiction; so Leila Aboulela rewrites the canon while paying homage, through subtle feminist critique and revision, to Salih’s pioneering work.2 BEYOND OUR KEN? ‘BARBIE IN THE MOSQUE’ Scotland, at the heart of Sudan’s colonial history, fittingly provides the context for one of its most significant contemporary literary works. The Translator belongs to Scottish as much as it does African literature. When asked in an interview about being designated a ‘Scottish Arab writer’, Aboulela expressed her satisfaction with The Translator’s designation as a Scottish novel (Chambers 2009). What this designation means in a postcolonial context is, of course, globally fashioned. The novel’s publication history and its author’s biography exemplify ways in which transnational contexts shape the parameters of Scottish Literature. Born in Cairo in 1964, to a Sudanese father and an Egyptian mother (a university lecturer who studied at the London School of Economics (LSE)), Aboulela grew up in Khartoum. She moved to London in 1987, to do postgraduate work at the LSE, following in her mother’s footsteps, then to Aberdeen in 1990, where her Anglo-Sudanese husband worked in the oil industry, then on to Abu Dhabi (again, following her husband’s work).3 Her first novel, The Translator, published by Polygon in Edinburgh in 1999, then by Heinemann in 2001 as part of the

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African Writers Series, is one of several works set in Scotland. The short story, ‘The Museum’, published by Polygon in the collection Coloured Lights in 2001 and supported by the Scottish Arts Council, first appeared in Duncan McLean’s anthology, Ahead of its Time, in 1997 and won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. The radio play, ‘The Sea Warrior’, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2001.4 Another short story in Coloured Lights, ‘The Boy from the Kebab Shop’, addresses Scottish Muslim experience. Speaking of her London move, Aboulela says: I started to wear the hijab [headscarf] when I came to Britain; I didn’t wear it in Sudan. [. . .] [I]t was only when I came to Britain that I felt free, that I wasn’t surrounded by my friends or my family, and I could do what I wanted. And ironically, when I first came, and when I started to wear the hijab in 1987, nobody even understood what it meant. I mean, in London it just had no connotations whatsoever, so it was really a very good time to begin covering my head, without it having any kind of repercussion. (Chambers 2009) That she abjured the hijab in Khartoum for fear her educated friends would ridicule her is a paradox typical of Aboulela’s writing. In a short piece entitled ‘Barbie in the Mosque’, Aboulela writes: I grew up in Khartoum, where there were no Barbie dolls. Now in my house in Aberdeen there is Action Man and Biker Mice for my sons, no doll with long hair for me to comb. So when I see Barbie in the mosque I pick her up and hold her on my lap, rest my back on the wall, and smooth her hair. (2002a: 1) Her arrival in Aberdeen coincided with the bombing of Baghdad. She feared current events might conspire against her in the most dreadful manner: At night I dreamt of my baby mangled and bloody, killed by the Americans or Saddam Hussein or the Scots who hated the Arabs because of Lockerbie. Were the streets safe to walk in? I must be wary in my new home. (Aboulela 2000a: 41) Knowing her son’s experience would differ from her own, Aboulela speaks movingly of the generational shift across borders: This grey will be my baby’s home and everywhere else he will travel to in the future he will measure against it. His place of childhood: snow instead of sun, Lochness monsters and unfamiliar songs [. . .] It was our fate to have different childhoods, different places for a homeland. The fate of all first and second-generation immigrants. I wanted him to love Scotland in

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Though Scottish weather is a constant complaint in interviews and autobiographical pieces, Aboulela acknowledges that this too is part of ‘home’, albeit a part that puts distance between generations and cultures. In The Translator, Sammar, her name like summer, reflects on Western individualism in the specific case of Scotland as being bound up with the weather: ‘Private people, she thought, made private by the cold’ (2001c: 31). ROMANCING THE SUDAN: THE TRANSLATOR AS A MUSLIM JANE EYRE Sammar, though raised in Khartoum, is a British citizen with a British passport, as is her young son, Amir, back in Khartoum with his paternal grandmother, Sammar’s husband, Tarig, having died in a car accident in Aberdeen. Sammar is Scottish-born, of Sudanese immigrant parents, who returned to Sudan when Sammar was six. Four years have passed, more than the four months and ten days required mourning time, but Sammar still grieves, even as she is falling in love with her boss, Rae Isles, a Middle East expert who lectures in Postcolonial Politics, and for whom she is translating so-called extremist literature. (There is some irony, of course, in the allegedly enlightened postcolonial professor collaborating with empire in disclosing the secrets of supposed terrorists, an irony of which both he and Sammar are aware.) Aboulela writes back not just to Western conceptions of Africa and Islam, but to her own great Sudanese predecessor, Salih. The Islamic Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation banned Salih’s groundbreaking novel in Sudan in 1989, ten years before Aboulela’s bridge-building book appeared. Although Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea are evident intertexts, The Translator has a passage from Season of Migration as the epigraph that opens part two: I looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down to the ground, at the green branches hanging down loosely over its top, and I experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like a storm-swept feather but like that palm-tree, a being with a background, with roots. (2001c: 135) Where Salih’s novel is about the vanity of sexual conquest as an expression of resistance, Aboulela’s novel’s task is to show that love, and the acceptance of another’s world such passion entails, is the true means of countering colonialism. If, for Mustafa Sa’eed, prey (as in sexual predation) is key, for Sammar prayer is the answer. Mustafa’s personal revenge on the strangling stereotypes of the colonial system is rejected in favour of a move that does not set the individual up against empire but effects union through a loving relationship (the kind of loving union denied at the close of Forster’s A Passage to India). Mustafa, engaged only in mutually exploitative encounters, sets out to liberate Africa with his penis.

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Sammar seeks to liberate the West with prayer, yet they share a common craving. Mustafa is the ‘South that yearns for the North’ (Salih 2003: 30) while Sammar is parched until Rae Isles ceases to imagine himself an island. Where Salih exposes the salacious misogyny of both colonised and coloniser, Aboulela excavates the cross-cultural potential for love, and the attendant national, intercultural and international difficulties such potential has to overcome – not only in politics and identity, but in culture and belief. In its depiction of a Muslim widow falling for her secular boss, The Translator has been praised for its quiet restraint and patient portrayal of the articulation of female desire, reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) or Janice Galloway’s The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989). Aboulela says of the novel’s genre: I saw The Translator, as being a Muslim Jane Eyre. The problem in Jane Eyre is that Mr. Rochester can’t marry both Bertha and Jane at the same time. As a Muslim I was reading it, and from an Islamic point of view there is no problem. I mean, he can be married to both women. But even though I realized that, I still got caught up in the story and I could still see things from Jane’s perspective. When I wrote The Translator, then, I presented a specifically Muslim dilemma, that she can’t marry Rae unless he converts. I was hoping that the reader, even though the reader is not a Muslim, would still get caught up in Sammar’s dilemma, just as I had been engrossed by Jane’s predicament. I see Jane Eyre as a very Christian book, a very religious book, in that the conflict is specific to Christianity: he can’t marry two women at the same time. At the end of the novel, he converts after he becomes blind, and there are pages and pages of him talking about God and faith and so on. (Chambers 2009: 97–8) Of her decision to make conversion a pre-condition of realising Rae’s relationship with Sammar, Aboulela remarks: I was often asked ‘Why should Rae convert, why should religion be an obstacle’ etc. etc? In my answer I would then fall back on Jane Eyre and say ‘From an Islamic point of view, why can’t Mr. Rochester be married to both Bertha and Jane?’ In the same way that I, as a Muslim reader, respect and empathize with Jane’s very Christian dilemma, I want Western/ Christian readers to respect and empathize with Sammar’s very Muslim dilemma. (Smyth 2007: 176) As Geoffrey Nash remarks: ‘Aboulela works through many of the usual exile’s routines, but adopting an updated Jane Eyre scenario, reverses the fatalism of the emigrant novel.’ Nash observes, Sammar’s eventual victory, like Jane’s, is on her own terms. Rae’s eventual return, his having learned to pray like herself, is a statement that

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Willy Maley he has passed across the terrains of post-colonial polemics and settled in Sammar’s own territory, where political resistance is subsumed by the deeper strength of religious assurance. (2002: 30)

SAVING PRIVATE RAE: CONVERSION AS RESCUE NARRATIVE Sammar resembles Barbara Vaughan in Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), another novel of conversion and reversion. Barbara must secure her lover, Harry Clegg, in the eyes of God. This triangulation supplements rather than supplants the basic human love the two characters feel for one another. In each case the male figure must accomplish a task before he can win the woman’s hand: for Harry the annulment of his first marriage, while Rae – also previously married – must convert to Islam. There are other parallels between The Mandelbaum Gate and The Translator, but this is not the place to develop them. Certainly Aboulela shares with Spark a conviction that faith is a serious and sustaining alternative to secularism. As Aboulela remarks: I wanted to point out that the secularism which the West championed and exported had, when it cancelled sin, cancelled with it forgiveness. And a life without forgiveness is a harsh and (paradoxically in a freedomloving society) a stunted, congealed life. (2002b: 206) Aboulela is a Muslim writer in the way Spark is a Catholic writer – faith brings a bundle of contradictions, a slow and painful working-out process, not a simple set of answers. Both writers are fascinated by differences between converts and cradle believers, reverts and secularists. As Waïl Hassan observes: As for Scottish converts, they are often better Muslims than casual or faltering born Muslims because the converts have made a conscious choice and because they have more to lose. In the opinion of one character, conversion for a Middle East historian and political commentator like Rae would be ‘professional suicide’. (2008: 312) Put like this, Rae’s is a big scalp – the conversion of such a significant Western intellectual counts for something, and Sammar is all too aware of the stakes. Islam in The Translator is a world away from Western discourse on women as its victims. For Brendan Smyth, Aboulela’s agenda challenges the colonial view that sees the West engaged in a rescue mission, preserving Muslim women from their patriarchal rulers, so that The Translator ‘reverses the conventional rescue narrative and asserts a story in which a brown woman saves a white man from white men’ (2007: 177). Soft conversions allow relationships to overcome religious obstacles. Sammar is aware some lovers use conversion in name only, with minimal observance, in order to consummate their love. Rae’s is no mere conversion of convenience, nor a sop to Sammar’s ego – though this remains a

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factor; none of Aboulela’s characters are saints, and like Spark’s their responses to faith are fraught, not dogmatic. Just as Barbara in The Mandelbaum Gate is willing to marry Harry come what may, so Sammar examines her own conscience, struggling to reconcile heart and faith. Sammar tells Rae: ‘The first believers were mostly women and slaves. I don’t know why, maybe they had softer hearts,’ to which Rae replies, ‘Maybe in changing they did not have much to lose’ (126). At this point Rae ponders what is to be lost, not gained: Sammar and spiritual fulfilment. This is neither translation of nor transition to extremism. In Aboulela’s hands Islam becomes a version of ‘liberation theology’, or as Smyth puts it: ‘Aboulela’s depiction of Islam as a foundation for social justice writes back to Western imperial discourses which depict Islam as a backward, barbaric religion of extremists and terrorists’ (2007: 180).5 Smyth sees Rae’s conversion as a subversion of ‘Orientalist Western masculinity’ (171), a balancing act between love and loyalty. But is conversion a bridge or bridgehead? Does Sammar negotiate or negate Rae’s otherness? Does she ultimately tie faith to love rather than presenting choices? Dialogues throughout the novel demonstrate determination to demystify any lingering colonialist attitudes from both sides of the colonial divide. These are meshed with an awareness of historical and present forms of neocolonial expression. Rae, for example, explains to Sammar his interest in the Middle East: I wanted to understand the Middle East. No one writing in the fifties and sixties predicted that Islam would play such a significant part in the politics of the area. Even Fanon, who I have always admired, had no insight into the religious feelings of the North Africans he wrote about. He never made the link between Islam and anti-colonialism. (109) And earlier, when her friend Yasmin brands Rae an ‘Orientalist’, Sammar resists: Sammar did not like the word orientalist. Orientalists were bad people who distorted the image of the Arabs and Islam. Something from school history or literature, she could not remember. Maybe modern orientalists were different. Her eyesight was becoming blurred. She felt tired, deflated. The headlights of the cars were too bright, round savage circles crossed by swords. (21–2) Rae subsequently tells Sammar of an impending trip to Cairo to the groups his research investigates: ‘They are protest movements [. . .] and they do have plenty to protest about. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, the mediocrity of the ruling party which has no mass support and which are in the main client states to the West. These groups appeal to people’s anger, anger against class

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Off his soapbox, but on the subject of toiletries, Rae asks Sammar: ‘Which is bluer: the Nile or Nivea tins?’ (45). Too sad to answer, Rae answers for her: the Nile. Some critics remain blind to Rae’s cultural specificity, his Scottishness, just as they are somewhat cavalier with other Scottish characters, turning ‘Scotland’ too quickly into ‘Europe’ while decrying Western simplifications of Africa. Thus Smyth informs us that: ‘Rae’s Orientalist masculinity is tied to his position of privilege and status as a white, European / Western academic, whose intellectual virility allows him to authorize, to know, to understand, and to have power over the Orient’ (2007: 173). Claire Chambers indulges in a little Orientalism of her own when she says that ‘Aboulela deftly evokes three very different locations in her prose: the snowy, remote cities of Scotland (particularly Aberdeen), the teeming multiculturalism of London, and the heat and conviviality of Khartoum’ (2009: 89). When Waïl Hassan (2003: 305–6) recognises that Aboulela subverts ‘the fixed ideas that Scots have of Muslims and that Sudanese have of Europeans’, his binary overlooks the existence of Scottish Muslims, not to mention Sudanese Europeans, including Sudanese Scots. To give a flavour of their bonding, halfway through the novel Rae and Sammar share a joke about her aunt thinking Aberdeen is in England: She took out her aunt’s letter. ‘Look what my aunt wrote as the address. “Aberdeen, England” and someone at the post office went over England in red ink.’ ‘You have just won me to your side, Sammar, in any quarrel you’ve had with your aunt. Aberdeen, England, is unforgivable.’ ‘That’s what they must have thought at the post office. It’s a good thing they delivered it.’ ‘When I was in Cairo,’ he said, ‘I was often asked, are you English, Ingelizi? and I would say, No. Amrikani? No. Then they would start getting suspicious. I’d say Scottish and they’d say, Oh, is that where the war is?’ Scotlandi,’ she said. ‘You should say, Ana Scotlandi mish Irelandi’. (85–6) Sammar and Rae see eye to eye, yet Yasmin tells her it will not work: ‘Go home and maybe you’ll meet someone normal, someone Sudanese like yourself. Mixed couples just don’t look right, they irritate everyone’ (93). Sammar is ‘home’, British passport in hand, but not ‘at home’. She sees the barrier to being with Rae: ‘Never in her life had anyone she cared about been an unbeliever’ (94). Sammar learns about her own religion through the process of translating so-called ‘fundamentalist’ literature for Rae, pointing out:

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‘One hadith that says, “The best jihad is when a person speaks the truth before a tyrant ruler.” It is not often quoted and we never did it at school. I would have remembered it.’ ‘With the kind of dictatorships with which most Muslim countries are ruled,’ he said, ‘it is unlikely that such a hadith would make its way into the school curriculum.’ ‘But we should know . . .’. (109) The knowledge Salih unearths is that oppression of women is common to colonised and colonising cultures. Aboulela uncovers another politics, refusing the paradigm of Season of Migration – as well as Shakespeare’s Othello, Forster’s Passage to India, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Mariama Ba’s Scarlet Song – that cross-cultural relationships are doomed while empire and its neocolonial legacies persist. The state of the relationship in The Translator can, in this manner, be seen as a test case of sorts for claims to Scottish postcoloniality, or, put another way, to the conditions of Scotland’s situation in respect to the postcolonial. Aboulela’s fiction feelingly represents the average, devout Muslim and the dilemmas and challenges she faces. Sammar – like Nafisa in ‘The Sea Warrior’ and Sadia in ‘The Museum’ – is flawed, fragile, removed from home, family and community. Salih’s Mustafa is a lecturer in economics at London University in the 1930s. Aboulela’s Sammar is a translator at Aberdeen University in the 1990s. Gender is key. Where Salih rewrites Othello and Heart of Darkness, Aboulela rewrites Season of Migration, turning a fatalistic tale of sexual conquest into what Susan Friedman describes as ‘a love story about migration and intercultural courtship, marriage, and conversion’ (2009: 21).6 According to Hassan: Aboulela’s fiction completes the project of Salih’s. Whereas his are narratives of failure (of the national project of the colonial bourgeoisie, of postcolonial intellectuals, of secular Arab ideologies of modernity), hers are narratives of redemption and fulfilment through Islam. While Salih’s work reflects the disappointments of the 1960s and 70s, Aboulela’s materializes the slogan of the Islamist movement that emerged in the mid-1970s: ‘Islam is the solution’. (2003: 300) This is an account of history challenged in The Translator, in keeping with a political line that sees Islam as a retreat rather than an advance. Hassan goes on to rebuke Aboulela for the fact that Sammar remains ignorant of the power / knowledge networks around her, appearing blind to Rae’s and her own complicity and collaboration with empire. For Hassan, ‘Aboulela’s version of Islam reinscribes male supremacy,’ her ‘Islamism succumbs to the fiction of authenticity’; indeed, ‘this ideology has all the elements of fundamentalism’ (314, 316–17). These are harsh words. Personally, I concur with Aboulela’s critique of individualism, a necessary critique in light of the ways in which self-fashioning in

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the West was constructed at the expense of an Other, and, contrary to Hassan’s claim that real politics and national liberation are at stake in Salih and not in Aboulela, arguably in tune with Salih’s work too. Conversion is communal, not individual. Love is conversion, a form of extremism, fundamentalism. Sammar’s story suggests that it is okay to be confused, rebellious, guilty and selfish – and to fall in love again after a grievous loss, as faith restores and forgives. Hassan points to ‘the crucial distinction in the novel between translation as a discursive strategy aimed at influencing ideological worldviews in the secular realm, and conversion as a manifestation of God’s will over and beyond human agency’ (2003: 309). Aboulela’s novel is a return to romance whereas Salih had pointed to melodrama as the proper genre of the colonial encounter. Both are novels of sexual conquest. Aboulela, while acknowledging Salih’s influence on her work, resists too close a comparison: Tayeb Salih is an important influence on my writing [. . .] But his writing wasn’t consciously in my mind when I was writing The Translator. I was surprised after it was published that people saw all these parallels between my novel and his most famous text [. . .] For me, Season of Migration is a highly masculine book, largely because of all the violence in it, and in that way, when I was writing, I just couldn’t see the connection. (Chambers 2009: 96) The Translator repeats, from a female perspective, in subtler tones, the sexual conquests of Mustafa. Salih’s Hosna is a victim; Aboulela’s Sammar is a survivorvictor. Finally, though, Salih and Aboulela share a belief in the redemptive female role. Salih famously remarked: I am deeply sympathetic toward women. Everything beautiful in life is feminine . . . Woman is the object of violence occurring in the novel Season, and she is also the one against whom violence occurs in Arab society, that is why she still struggles for liberation.7 Aboulela’s sympathy is, however, of a different order, as her women are not the victims of violence we see in Seasons of Migration to the North, but complex and conflicted figures who are agents of their own destiny. CONCLUSION: FROM DARIEN TO DARFUR One rhetorical strategy of empire is an assumed innocence amounting to denial. The dominant myth in Scottish historiography is that the failed Darien scheme in the 1690s meant Scotland had to throw in its lot with England. This conveniently ignores the Ulster Plantation of 1609, which set the tone for successful Scottish colonial exploits. It also ignores the extent of the Scottish involvement

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in empire. These two novels remind readers of an Africa beyond civil war, corrupt governments, famine and safaris. They also – in the passage to Aberdeen – remind us that colonialism is a two-way mirror. Claire Chambers writes: Recent Sudanese history has been marked by ferocious civil wars between the powerful northern Arab Muslims, the subjugated Southern African Christians, the Communists, and the sharia-endorsing religious parties . . . Now it is the genocide in the western region of Darfur, the discovery and exploitation of oil resources, and the designation of the Sudan as a state assisting international terrorists that receive the most critical attention. (2009: 87) Critical attention must focus not only on the consequences of imperialist history, but also on literary responses to that history by native writers. In Salih and Aboulela Sudan has produced two of the most distinctive writers of the modern period, and in The Translator a particularly forceful reminder of Scotland’s problematic place within the postcolonial paradigm, as both complicit cornerstone of the British imperial state and enlightened periphery with its own history of resistance and opposition. That The Translator is a bridge-building, border-crossing book is suggested by the fact that a progressive Scottish intellectual aids a young Sudanese widow’s recovery, holding out the possibility of a future marked, but not marred, by colonial history. NOTES 1. See for example, (1918) ‘The Life of Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff’, Scottish Geographical Journal, 34: 6, 235. 2. On Adichie’s relationship to Achebe, see Osinubia (2009). 3. See Fallon (2004) for more biographical details. 4. Leila Aboulela, ‘The Sea Warrior’, BBC Radio 4, 21 May 2001, African Writing online (October / November 2007), http://www.african-writing.com/ aboulela.htm, accessed 11 July 2009. 5. See also Dabashi (2008). 6. Susan Stanford Friedman (2009), ‘The “New Migration”: Clashes, Connections, and Diasporic Women’s Writing’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 3: 1, pp. 21. 7. Cited in Amyuni (1999: 214). See also Ayinde (2008).

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CHAPTER 15

Kelman, Saro-Wiwa and Tutuola

This is not sarcasm believe me yours sincerely: James Kelman, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Amos Tutuola Iain Lambert, Kyorin University

The abruptness of the departure from Glasgow as location and, superficially at least, from the modes of speech and style that had come to characterise Kelman’s writing to date has left many reviewers of Translated Accounts resorting to rather glib copy. ‘People are tortured and so is the prose,’ wrote Tim Adams in a piece in The Observer entitled ‘Kafka with Convolutions’ (2001), while James Campbell in The Guardian (2001) talked about ‘the garbled grind’ of the novel, using as his title ‘Lost in Translation’. Even some of the reactions of veterans of close reading of Kelman’s work were guarded. For Drew Milne, Translated Accounts ‘seeks to provoke political discussion rather than easy literary consumption’ (2003: 159), while Kelman’s mentor Philip Hobsbaum described the book as not what ‘you’d take on holiday to read on the beach. It’s more the sort of thing you’d write a paper about’ (quoted in Wroe 2001). This reaction uncannily calls up the reaction to two of the best-known authors from Nigeria with whom Kelman has a close aesthetic relationship – Amos Tutuola and Ken Saro-Wiwa. Whereas Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard (1953) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) caused a stir on publication but were linguistically typical of his subsequent œuvre, the language of Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985) marked it out as being an apparently complete departure from his work to that time in much the same way as with Translated Accounts. These two Nigerian authors are as much influences on Kelman, especially in the case of Translated Accounts, as are Kafka or Beckett, and here I draw parallels between Kelman’s novel and Sozaboy in particular, although any reference to Saro-Wiwa’s book will also refer to Tutuola’s groundbreaking early novels. Before any discussion of the Nigerian connection it is worth noting the connotations of the book’s title. Kelman’s work has not been translated to the same extent as other Booker Prize winners; How Late It Was, How Late, for example, is one of the few Booker-winning novels of the 1980s and 1990s never to have been translated into Japanese. Translation moreover appears as a theme in his work more generally; in ‘I Was Asking a Question Too’ from The Good Times, a character muses on the translation process when he says ‘the words themselves were a translation because his original words, the language he wrote in, was not

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my language’ (1999: 67). This question of ownership of language, or rather in Translated Accounts the means of its production, is fundamental to the novel. Perhaps the most interesting case from this point of view comes in Alan Clark’s comments in The Mail on Sunday in 1994: The Booker Committee has, after much coy and furtive debate, and leaked agonizing, chosen a ‘book’ – Compiled? Scripted? I am trying to avoid the word ‘written’ – by a Glaswegian, to receive their award of £20,000. The work consists of a series of transcripts taken from a running tape (there can be no other explanation) of a maundering old drunk who has been at the window table in the public bar since opening time. (quoted in Hames 2008) Is it possible to read Translated Accounts as a response to this? The book is presented as ‘compiled’, certainly, but how has it been scripted? Just as we read in the preface of translations having, in some cases, been ‘modified by someone of a more senior office’ (ix), all three of the authors under discussion here have had direct experience of publishers changing their manuscripts under the assumption they were ‘correcting’. Chantal Zabus (1991: 218) reproduces a page from the hand-written manuscript of Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard which was included in the original edition, and shows some of the publisher’s grammatical ‘corrections’ – although Lindfors (1975: 303) notes that Tutuola’s publishers were less intrusive with his later works. Saro-Wiwa called proofreading ‘the most interesting part of publishing for me’ after his experiences self-publishing Sozaboy (1995: 59), and Kelman of course has been engaged in a long-running struggle to have his work presented exactly as he wrote it, anticipating that a publisher would try to ‘regulate’ his language (Kövesi 2007: 25) – even returning the proofs of Translated Accounts on the strength of one misplaced comma (Wroe 2001). Translated Accounts foregrounds the question of how an author’s words are rendered, by whom and why. SCOTLAND AND NIGERIA The literary connection between Scotland and Nigeria has been the subject of discussion for a while. Alan Riach (2005; see also his chapter in this volume) has drawn links from Tutuola to Stevenson and, more indirectly, Conan Doyle (108– 9), while in Lanark Alasdair Gray includes Tutuola in his ‘Index of Plagiarisms’ – ‘Totuola [sic], Amos Books 3 and 4. These owe much to The Palm Wine Drinkard, another story whose hero’s quest brings him among dead or supernatural beings living in the same plane as the earthly’ (1981: 497). Kelman is an admirer of Tutuola, and Mia Carter (in Wroe 2001) has recalled his positive reaction to finding Tutuola’s papers on a visit to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. He echoes Tutuola in the Letter to the Editor which serves as an introduction to the 1997 collection Busted Scotch, when he talks of ‘the old guy telling

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yarns at the factory’ as a source (1998: 9), recalling Tutuola’s acknowledgment of local storytellers as a basis for his fiction (Lindfors 1975: 280). Yet perhaps the clearest link between Scotland and this land of Tutuolan ghosts appears in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet. In Kay’s description of her father’s arrival in Scotland, The air was damp and eerie on his skin and he was freezing. Ghost country. The people and the weather shrouded in uncertainty. Shadow people, he thought, insubstantial, no colour . . . This new country was a wet ghost, cold fingers searching his cheeks for warmth. (1998: 271) Kay’s telling of the father’s story continues over the next few pages with further ghostly analogies, all of which reflect Tutuola’s work: the scary, ungraspable, intangible ‘other’ of the Bush of Ghosts transposed on to a Scottish landscape – a mirror image of our own reading of not only Nigeria, but Africa as a whole, and picked up in Translated Accounts in accounts like 24 ‘most evil incidents’, with its description of a ‘security’ as ‘The light came from his skull. Skulls may give light, if the colour of this light is blue, colour from his skull’ (162). Accounts 42 ‘homecoming stories’ and 52 ‘spectral body’ have even more overt supernatural references, which suggest a country in which the living and the dead co-exist. Writing about Tutuola, Richard Priebe suggests that the fact that there are ‘no direct correspondences between that world and our physical reality necessitates the bending of our perceptions, not merely by what is said, but by the manner in which it is said’ (in Lindfors 1975). Like Mene ten years later in Sozaboy or the unnamed narrators of Translated Accounts, ‘the unimaginable horror of the inverted utopia that the Drinkard goes through is thus far better expressed by the term “Unreturnable-Heaven’s Town,” than by any conventional expression (Tutuola) might have employed’ (273). As Gareth Griffiths puts it, the language and syntax Tutuola uses constitute ‘an inter-language to record in English the complex nature of African traditional orature’ (2000: 133). This is a language that has been crafted and which can accomplish something standard varieties cannot – as is the case with Translated Accounts. Ashcroft et al. also use the term ‘interlanguage’ to describe Tutuola’s work, but in a sense closer to that of the field of Second Language Acquisition. Rather than being a halfway meeting point between two separate linguistic systems, interlanguage is defined as a stage in the language learning process that, ‘if arrested in writing at any stage . . . may become the focus of an evocative and culturally significant idiom’ (2002: 66). This can be seen in lexical items such as ‘a tight friend’ (Tutuola 1994: 56) or ‘scene-lookers’ (62), and in verbal phrases like ‘how he would barb heads for my children’ (267), and these are certainly typical of the analogous forms produced in reduced linguistic codes, be they Learner Englishes or pidgins. Correspondingly, there was both positive reaction from abroad and antipathy within Nigerian intellectual circles towards Tutuola (Griffiths 2000: 116–17; Weinstein 1998: 473ff.). Western-educated ‘been to’

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Nigerians saw the book as childish and its stories as backwards-looking when compared to the sophisticated adaptation of and reference to modern European literary forms by Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka a few years later; an attitude that would be later described by the musician Fela Kuti as ‘colo-mentality’ (Kuti 1977). KEN SARO-WIWA AND SOZABOY Sozaboy is entirely told from its narrator Mene’s perspective in what Saro-Wiwa famously sub-titles ‘Rotten English’. In his introduction to the novel SaroWiwa describes this as ‘the result of my fascination with the adaptability of the English language and of my closely observing the speech and writings of a certain segment of Nigerian society’. ‘Rotten English’ is ‘a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and occasional flashes of good, even idiomatic English’ (Saro-Wiwa 1994: author’s note), to which North (2001: 101) adds Saro-Wiwa’s own language, Khana (spelt ‘Kana’ in the novel). Saro-Wiwa’s use of a first-person narrator links the story to Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts or The Palm Wine Drinkard, and indeed with Translated Accounts. Like Translated Accounts, Sozaboy takes place in an unnamed zone, although events and descriptions make it fairly obvious that the territory is Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War – as is suggested by some of the scenes in Kelman’s novel. As with Tutuola’s books, Sozaboy was highly praised overseas ‘as an example of language experiment’ (Griffiths 2000: 238). William Boyd commented that he ‘cannot think of another example where the English language has been so engagingly and skilfully hijacked – or . . . “colonised” ’ (in Saro-Wiwa 1994), although Sozaboy was in fact a continuation of an experiment Saro-Wiwa had begun with his 1969 short story ‘High Life’, described in Adagboyin (1992: 30) as ‘an uninhibited gamble with language’ and ‘an experiment in an odd style’. However, the novel was not without criticism at home. Charles Nnolim gives examples to show that the language of Sozaboy is ‘not stylized . . . just the English of the halfliterate, poorly-educated, English-speaking Nigerian’ (1992b: 77) and quotes a negative review entitled ‘Rotten Nihilism’ (1992a: 14), while Inyama claims that Saro-Wiwa is being patronising as well as foregrounding his authorial presence by assigning limited linguistic competence to his narrator (Inyama 1992: 104). Saro-Wiwa uses the device of Mene’s education up to ‘elementary six’ (1994: 11) both to limit his linguistic ability to comprehend what is happening, as with his approximation of parade ground orders (72), and to show his naïvety in joining up in the first place. Along with the syntactic simplicity of Mene’s language and the absence of code-switching in his exchanges with his companion Bullet, Akekue (1992: 18ff.) identifies lexical and structural repetition, the ‘extreme simplicity of his lexical items – both in their syllabic and morphemic content’ and the apparently unconscious use of items from Nigerian Pidgin (NP) and Nigerian English side by side. Adagboyin (1992: 32) sees this as indicative of Mene thinking in NP as

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he attempts to simulate ‘good’ English. Likewise, features characteristic of interlanguage, such as ‘revised’ for ‘reversed’ (Saro-Wiwa 1994: 125) are common, as are formations such as ‘prouding’ (72), ‘byforce’ (6) or ‘formfool’ (7), the latter remarkably close to an example chosen by Bamiro in his survey of NP forms (1993: 51). Alongside these are orthographic features, which Akekue (1992: 23) calls ‘adulteration of words’, like ‘tory’ for ‘story’ (Saro-Wiwa 1994: 143), ‘persy’ for ‘person’ (13) and ‘gratulate’ for ‘congratulate’ (32). In contrast to Tutuola, in Sozaboy Saro-Wiwa is using what Ismail Talib calls ‘elements of imaginative recreation’, justifying this by ‘his experience as the native speaker of a language with no written literature and no public presence in Nigeria’ (2002: 119). Chantal Zabus considers Saro-Wiwa’s achievement as creating ‘a ‘post-ethnic’ interlanguage’ (1997: 466); however, her idea that Sozaboy might constitute the beginnings of a Deleuzian ‘minor literature’ for the Khanaspeaking Ogoni seems rather fanciful. North puts a stronger case when he notes that, for Saro-Wiwa, the ‘rottenness of rotten English is finally nothing more than the embedded residue of all the cultural differences that different speakers bring to it’ (2001:109). Koroye (1992: 83) notes the numerous assertions of truthfulness by Mene throughout the novel. Likewise, North posits that Mene’s use of second-person address and epithets like ‘my dear brothers and sisters’ indicate that he may be telling his story to ‘some larger version of the multiethnic population . . . in the car-parks of Port Harcourt’ (2001: 108). In Kelman’s case, the question of the intended audience of Translated Accounts is very similarly brought into focus by the repeated ‘this is not sarcasm,’ strongly recalling Mene’s ‘Believe me yours sincerely’ (Saro-Wiwa 1994: 181). KELMAN, SARO-WIWA AND POSTCOLONIALISM Kelman has made clear his sympathy for and identification with third world writers. In Some Recent Attacks he claims, ‘I could have been born anywhere in the world, I suppose’ (1992b: 78), and furthermore in an article for The Weekend Scotsman, ‘I feel I have a lot in common with black writers who have to write from the point of view of class. They can’t do otherwise’ (quoted in Macarthur 2007: 25). Macarthur also states more problematically that for Kelman ‘Scotland is a colony of England and working class Scots are a colony of the Scots middleclasses’ (18). While it is probably more correct to replace ‘England’ with ‘British state’ here, the comment is highly relevant to Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni in their relationship with the Igbo majority in what was Biafra and the Nigerian federal state. Language is seen by both writers to serve class and state interests, rather than ethnic or nationalist ones. Writing in late 1996 in a piece for the magazine Variant, subsequently published in the collection And the Judges Said . . ., Kelman says: The most contemporary example might be Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer who was murdered by the Nigerian State authorities several months

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ago. I strongly recommend his work, read his novel Soza Boy, also what he says about his use of English in the author’s note at the beginning. Part of what the authorities found so objectionable was his commitment to his own culture, that of the Ogoni people. (2003: 42) Kelman and Saro-Wiwa certainly share a history of activism on behalf of minority causes, but how does Kelman’s on behalf of Kurds in Turkey or Scottish asbestos victims sit with Saro-Wiwa’s for the Ogoni? References in Translated Accounts to ‘industrial/environmental peoples against horror diseases, horror deaths, pollutive poisonings from all such business industries, mining or energy industries, forced into our territories onto our people’ (2001: 169) chime with the idea of the following much-quoted passage referring to Ogoniland: Water and oil, these are international. Rivers may be pipes. I have heard them so called. It is not sarcastic. Rivers can be pipes. Sealed not sealed, some may be. Oil also is sealed. People do not say oil-river, rivers are of water, water gives life but of a water-river people may say of it it is a pipe. I have heard it said. If water is sealed off from people what is it, it is a pipe. The river is one issue of water, more, issuing not from the sea but from the mountains into the sea. Rivers are in the mountains but where is the water. Foreign lands have rivers, all have pipes, pipes are crossing borders, international. (Kelman 2001: 112) Pipes certainly crop up a lot in Kelman’s work, most memorably in A Disaffection (1989) where they are musical instruments rather than conduits for life-giving water or pollution that brings death or disease. According to Boyd, Saro-Wiwa ‘smoked a pipe with a curved stem’, which was ‘virtually a logo: in Nigeria people recognized him by it’, and indeed their last image of him alive would have been of him walking to the courtroom a few days before his murder with the pipe still clenched between his teeth (in Saro-Wiwa 1995: viii). In Kelman’s Account 31, ‘if I may speak’, the description of the lawyer and his situation is highly evocative of Saro-Wiwa’s self-portrait in A Month and a Day (1995). As Ashcroft says, experiences of postcolonial societies, in this case societies like Nigeria’s which have decolonised, may ‘give us insight into the operation of local engagements with global culture’ (2001: 7). The engagement of the Ogoni people with the Nigerian state and multinational oil companies certainly resonates with Kelman’s activism on behalf of people who are up against the machinations of government and industry, like the asbestos victims in And the Judges Said . . . (2003: 194–203, 204–16) or the Ravenscraig steelworkers (Lambert 2005: 112). The way that these power relationships are enacted through language becomes an explicit thematic of Kelman’s work. In a 1995 interview in The Big Issue Kelman says that

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Iain Lambert In any colonising force the greatest weapon of the imperialist culture is to wipe out the indigenous people. Take away their language. Don’t let them speak it – or else inferiorise it. Call it a dialect, patois, ‘not fit for the page’. [. . .] I’m only one of many people from all over the world writing from our own languages. Language can’t be separated from liberation and political struggles. (in Böhnke 1999: 15)

This is directly echoed in Translated Accounts, whose protagonists ‘spoke a dialect that rendered them inferior but they were not inferior’ (317). In reference to postcolonial texts and historiography, Ashcroft (2001: 85) re-contextualises the Aristotelian idea that poetry is truer than history, and so as many Nigerian writers turned to poetry to express the horror of the Biafran war and, like the testimonios of Rigoberta Menchu and others, through fiction writers approach a vital sense of the experience of what happened. Extending this reasoning, ‘a system of abnormal language can shed more light onto some obscure parts of life’ (Liyong quoted in Lindfors 1975: 121) – indicating a major area of methodological crossover between Sozaboy and Translated Accounts. Dohra Ahmad notes the tendency of works in the literary tradition to which she ascribes Sozaboy to ‘at once rely upon, mourn, and also provide redemption for the traumatic events they depict’ (2007: 29). Both Saro-Wiwa and Kelman have forged a written language with which to express the unspeakable in need of redemption, to give voice to the unheard, meaning both those people(s) who are not allowed to be heard, and their unspoken thoughts. In his prison diary A Month and a Day Saro-Wiwa describes reversing the erosion of Ogoni languages and the imposition of other Nigerian languages as one of the twenty articles of his Ogoni Bill of Rights (1995: 68) – while for Kelman ‘a culture can’t exist without the language of the culture’ (in Pitchford 2000: 702). In Translated Accounts, moreover, ‘It is confirmed that these accounts are by three, four or more anonymous individuals of a people whose identity is not available’ (2001: ix), but does this mean not available to the reader, or not available because this identity has been suppressed, or submerged as with the Ogoni? And is this the linguistic problematic which links Kelman and the Nigerian literature from which he draws? In one of the best-known theoretical descriptions of nationhood, Benedict Anderson noted that modern printing and communications technology allowed what he calls ‘imagined communities’ to be ‘represented without linguistic uniformity’, and that this often implies a non-standard or interlanguage spoken code (1991: 139). This can be seen with Nigerians abroad, who will initially address each other in NP before using English or one of the major ethnically affiliated languages like Yoruba or Hausa. When it comes to any written form, a nonspeaker of that code is implied, simply because of the nature of the code, which is primarily spoken as with NP, which has no standardised written conventions. Michael North has thus dealt with Saro-Wiwa’s mix of Khana, NP, Standard Nigerian English, Standard English and the question of the intended audience by pointing out that, had he written in Khana, the novel would have been

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unintelligible to the majority of Nigerians, while ‘to write in one of Nigeria’s major languages, would have been . . . a more grievous imposition than English’ (2001: 100). Likewise, Translated Accounts encourages the reader to think of an ‘imagined community’ of voices at the linguistic and political periphery, raising questions not only about the identity of the original speakers, but also about who will read their accounts – if anyone. TRANSLATED ACCOUNTS AND INTERLANGUAGE The preface to Translated Accounts makes it clear that, despite the cacophony, the accounts have a finite number of authors (three, four or more individuals) – although this may not be immediately apparent on first reading, and as Kövesi points out (2007: 174), the Preface itself may have been written by someone unconnected with the translation or transcription process. The effect is of a collage (Macarthur 2007: 24) rather than some kind of story cycle. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that we are not reading the words of the characters as they are spoken, but their rendering through at least two separate agencies – the person(s) who recorded the words and the ‘translators’ or transcribers. Who wrote or dictated them, who transcribed / edited / translated / input them, is then as unknown as the implied reader or audience. Indeed, as Drew Milne notes (2001: 111), it is entirely possible that the person processing the text is not proficient in the language. In addition, we do not have the utterances of the ‘interviewer’ and so have to decide whether these were expressed in the interviewee’s first language (L1), or by a foreigner in Standard English (SE) or in some kind of reduced register such as ‘foreigner talk’ (see Ellis 1994: 251) – or interlanguage. When the notion of interlanguage was originally put forward in 1972 by Larry Selinker, it was seen as a stage on the road to acquisition by a language learner of a native speaker-like Standard. Ellis usefully summarises the five processes suggested by Selinker for the creation of an interlanguage (351), noting that these can be collapsed to three: training, the learner’s approach to communication and strategies. The last of these includes transfer of rules and lexis from the L1, as well as any other second languages, regardless of the level of proficiency, and overgeneralisation of L2 rules and features. So although the interlanguage a learner creates is often considered to be a simplification, the presence of concurrent hypotheses about the target language (Corder 1981: 75) shows the reverse. These take the form of constantly developing grammars, which may overlap as the learner tests new rules or lexis and has her hypotheses confirmed or disproved. As we have already seen, a good example of the subsequent characteristic inconsistencies in grammar is Mene in Sozaboy, which is only natural as, if interlanguage is taken as a simplified code it shares almost all salient features with a pidgin (Corder 1981: 80), and NP is the only part of Mene’s ‘Rotten English’ in which he can claim fluency. In the past, areas where interlanguage became a local variety were regarded as having fossilised (Jenkins 2003: 33) – implying a failure on the part of the learner to acquire the target language, and leading to a derogatory usage of

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the term (Corder 1981: 86). Even in the 1990s this negative view persisted with concentration on the error aspect. However, with the rise in profile of World Englishes and current research into regional lingua franca varieties such as East Asian or CJK (China–Japan–Korea) English, in which speakers of English in neighbouring or closely aligned (for example, through trade) countries develop a mutually intelligible variety and so form a separate language community despite the best efforts of language instructors, the stigmatising version of interlanguage theory has lost its legitimacy to some extent (Yoneoka 2008). This implies a transfer of ownership of English and a change in its instrumental use, as well as a move away from the linguistic centre. Communication between native speakers of Standard British or US English has been overtaken by that occurring on the periphery, where interaction in English between speakers with markedly different first languages is driving linguistic innovation. To return to Translated Accounts, Corder points out that error analysis involves a translation of the utterance into the native speaker-model target language: ‘Our starting point is always pairs of utterances which are by definition synonymous in a particular context, i.e. translation equivalents’ (1981: 37). Thus when faced with something like ‘This then was the death silence’ (Kelman 2001: 66), interpretation is crucial; does this mean ‘deathly silence’ or ‘death sentence’? Since we cannot ask the speaker about what he or she meant, all we have is the immediate context, and in Translated Accounts the context has been decided by other agencies. The first of these is the interviewer or interrogator, whom we must assume is in the position to choose the language code and thus more proficient than the interviewee – the first in a series of linguistic power relationships implicit in the novel and outlined in more detail by Susanne Hagemann (2005). The language of Translated Accounts forces the reader to slow down and occupy the position of a non-native speaker functioning in a second language. As well as forcing her to supply background from her own knowledge of the world in order to make sense of the text, it puts the reader at the linguistic (and therefore political) periphery rather than the centre. This is evident from the speech of the narrators in Translated Accounts. At least one of the speakers is a non-native English speaker with a wide vocabulary, as evidenced by the use of less common lexical items such as ‘impenetrability’ (14) or ‘deprecatory’ (28). This kind of formality of language is seen as a feature of World Englishes (Jenkins 2003: 28) – which may explain why the speaker uses his linguistic resource in a generally appropriate way with occasional inappropriacies characterised by non-systematic errors in tense and a style awkward with repetition, reformulation and self-correction, though this is, of course, to a certain extent also characteristic of native speaker speech. Kelman himself mentions Translated Accounts as the first of his novels to be written in the first person (2004a, interview with Ramona Koval): a device that has continued with You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free (2004b) and Kieron Smith, Boy (2008). The constant use of ‘say’ or ‘said’ in Translated Accounts also draws attention to the original voices behind the accounts and the repeated ‘I am not sarcastic’

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(see, for example, 2001: 113–18), which recalls Mene’s ‘I mean it yours sincerely’ in Sozaboy. Of course, this could also be seen as a response to a prompt by the interrogator, but certainly it is far from uncommon for Kelman’s characters to avow truth, as with the character in Lean Tales who says, ‘it was good to be alive – really. Really and truly’ (Kelman et al. 1985: 58), and this device is picked up in Kieron Smith, Boy by ‘I was not boasting’ (2008: 339). We can also compare some of Kieron’s avowals with the language of Translated Accounts, in particular his use of ‘maybe’, as in ‘we sang hymns. If Catholics sang hymns, maybe they did’ (2008: 33), ‘if he was a Pape, maybe he was’ (57), ‘if he was RC, maybe he was’ (77), or ‘and if they got . . . Maybe they did’ (221). As a result, in the same way as Saro-Wiwa’s use of the first-person narrator clearly marks the narrative as Mene’s, Kieron’s story can clearly belong to no one else. Several other areas bear comparison with the ‘Rotten English’ of Sozaboy – in particular repetition and reformulation. Repetition occurs at word level for emphasis, such as ‘hoisting upwards quickly, quickly’ (2001: 14); ‘themselves themselves’ (16); ‘thumping on a door, quickly quickly’ (22); ‘staring, staring’ (28); ‘harder harder’, ‘banging banging’ (29), ‘crowding and crowding’ (45), ‘myself myself’ (48), ‘resting, resting’ (67), ‘up down up down along along along, along, up, down down round, round circles’ (100). Kelman has continued this kind of lexical repetition in Kieron Smith, Boy, as in ‘just kicking him thud thud’ (2008: 35). Repetition, it is important to note, is also a common feature in Sozaboy, both lexically as a feature of NP, as in ‘we don tire well well,’ ‘we ate that one quick quick’ (Saro-Wiwa 1994: 84), and in whole passages such as the following: Before before, the grammar was not plenty and everybody was happy. But now grammar begin to plenty and people were not happy. As grammar plenty, na so trouble plenty. And as trouble plenty, na so plenty people were dying. (Saro-Wiwa 1994: 3) While Okere (1992: 14) sees repetition as simply ‘a foregrounding technique’, Zabus (1991: 118–19), in her discussion of a passage from Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard in which the word release occurs six times in five lines in the fight with Death, points to this ‘oddly repetitive style’ as being characteristic of traditional Yoruba narrative. Repetition of short phrases is also common; in Sozaboy we find examples like ‘My head was beating drum, beating drum, beating drum’ (Saro-Wiwa 1991: 160), or ‘Wonders will never end. Wonders will never end’ (166). These can be compared to instances in Translated Accounts like ‘It lay in its mass, its mass’ and ‘But the mass lacked entry. It lacked entry’ (14), as well as ‘perhaps she also, she also’ (66). Repetition also occurs in slightly longer passages as with, ‘She was of an age that to die is natural but she died on the road. Natural unnatural, unnatural natural. She died, it was on the road’ (6), and this kind of paralleling, exemplified by ‘you must answer, answer you must answer’ (29); ‘how she could believe it it was falsity, falsity if she did so believe it’ (280)

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is a continuation from Kelman’s previous work. In Lean Tales, for example, ‘It was useless. I felt totally useless – I was useless, totally’ (Kelman et al. 1985: 55), or from The Burn, ‘If she wanted to wear them she would wear them, but it was only for her own pleasure, she would please herself’ (1991: 3). While the effect of lexical repetition in the shorter examples above is to emphasise action, in these longer stretches the reformulation or restatement of ideas gives the opposite effect: that of confusion or inaction. Similarly, reformulation is characteristic of both L1 and L2 users’ spoken language, and occurs in cases where the speaker seems to be looking for the right word. In Translated Accounts it is often lexical, as in ‘She had a large bundle, parcel’ (2001: 17), ‘and creams, ices, they would buy them’ (21), ‘they saw, spectated’ (21). Sometimes it is more overt, as with ‘the location, what is it, porch or entrance’ (47), or ‘looking from the window, outside this building, high building, number of floors high, numbering six, seven, something’ (65). This might be seen as self-correction. There are also cases where reformulation occurs on a grammatical level with modal verbs such as ‘I not discover it, could not’ (14), or with tenses, as in ‘had access, had had access’ (280), or ‘How could I push, it is not sensible’ (14). The cumulative effect gives extra force to instances like ‘We approve, or not, approve disprove, disapprove’ (150) or ‘he cannot hold them, onto them’ (47) where both forms carry meaning. Reformulation also occurs with collocations, as with ‘He had been on my right side and I did manoeuvre manufacture a fire.’ Instances like ‘I cannot remember for precise detailing’ (28), ‘when from the ground seeing upwards’ (15), ‘she had escaped out from them’ (47), ‘were they catching him and he put a fight to them’, ‘struck, to unconsciousness’ (42) or ‘staring also to the football match’ (57), as well as ‘all safety, safely’ (100), are highly redolent of Learner English. As with the case of ‘the death silence’ (66) noted previously, this kind of expression is indicative of Kelman’s careful crafting of language and calls to mind examples in Sozaboy like ‘simple defence’ for ‘civil defence’ (Adagboyin 1992: 36), where our knowledge of subsequent events allows us to see the black humour in the choice of words. At a word level, false cognates (words in two different languages or dialects which share a similar form but have different meanings) and possible L1 influence can be seen in items like ‘charitables’ (2001: 7) or ‘rifle weapons’ (22), and there are also neologisms like ‘heart-sorry’ (320), ‘closeby’ (45), ‘dutiful-appointed’ (75), ‘inclosing’ (133), ‘reliable as to unbias’ (81) or ‘If others were by force I do not know’ (146). This is also a feature of Sozaboy where, for example, ‘byforce’ is used as a verb. Plural endings such as ‘authoritys and securitys’ (2001: 75), ‘militarys’ (120), ‘royaltys’, ‘childs’ (42) are noticeable throughout Translated Accounts, and as with the cases of question inversion like ‘What I could give him’, or ‘What did he want from myself was not mysterious’ (97), are characteristic of interlanguage. Here the learner is applying a rule in all cases without knowledge of irregular forms. Examples such as ‘We have become fathers [mothers]’ (2001: 319) may indicate an L1 with no gender markers, and mixing of subordinate clauses such as ‘a woman who that had been close’ (242), ‘how that they accomplished

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this’ (319) or ‘knew him who he was’ (22) is common in Translated Accounts. Omission of articles is characteristic of all reduced codes including pidgins and Kelman exploits this to good effect. As well as examples of incorrect application of the definite article, such as ‘I did not pay the attention’ (2001: 21), there are many instances where the zero article is used. Examples like ‘He was older fellow’ (27) or ‘She too is human being’ (66) appear fairly straightforward, but ‘I was representative’ (1) creates a situation where the reader has to consider whether it is a case of ‘of what or whom’ or of ‘a’ representative. Once again the reader is in the place of the language learner; subordinate to another’s privileged linguistic code and forced to confront the different potential levels of meaning in the text and struggle to understand them. Thus, if we examine Translated Accounts at a stylistic level it is clear that questions of ownership of language and the ability to use words in the face of attempts to remould them by state and corporate interests are paramount. Not only does this place the novel squarely within the continuum of Kelman’s existing body of work, but it also foregrounds many of the concerns more overtly demonstrated in his non-fiction writing: specifically the unequal balance of power between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds where language is both an instrument of control and a means of establishing identity in a globalising world. So if, for Cairns Craig, part of the importance of Kelman, as with other modern Scottish writers, is how the vitality of his writing comes from ‘exploring the intersections between, and the spaces between, a multiplicity of different dialects and grammars’ (1996: 200), Translated Accounts is surely the most fully realised example of this in Kelman’s work to date. And as with the ‘Rotten English’ of Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Translated Accounts Kelman has succeeded in putting his readers in the position of someone far from the linguistic and political centre through the abrogation of a statist prestige variety of language. In the same way as Tutuola permitted Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Nigerian writers to find a voice outside of the Standard English frame it is likely that the examples of Saro-Wiwa and the other postcolonial writers Kelman admires have allowed him to make this stylistic leap in Translated Accounts, and to continue in a similar vein with the child narrator voice in Kieron Smith, Boy.

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CHAPTER 16 The Scottish Presence in Greig and Ghosh

‘Our Little Life is Rounded with a Sleep’: The Scottish Presence in Andrew Greig’s In Another Light and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide Bashabi Fraser, Edinburgh Napier University

Penang is a small island, roughly turtle-shaped and only fifteen miles by nine. A good deal smaller than, say, Orkney Mainland, with five times its population. Much of it is impenetrable jungle, the rest is densely populated. (Greig 2005: 349) Canning is the railhead for the Sunderbans . . . and Lusibari is the farthest of the inhabited islands. It’s a long way upriver – you have to go past Annpur, Jamespur and Emilybari. And there is Lusibari . . . Lusibari just means Lusi’s House. (Ghosh 2004: 13) Throughout history, islands have attracted the voyager: as tourist, settler – and coloniser. The colonial enterprise spread its tentacles over many islands across the globe, two of which, in their connections to Scotland, form the backdrop of the novels compared in this chapter. One is the fictional Lusibari in the Sunderbans, part of that mangrove belt archipelago ruled by the tide in the network of waterways of the Bay of Bengal, in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004); the other is colonial Penang, the prosperous and cosmopolitan Malayan city port represented in Andrew Greig’s In Another Light (2005). In both novels, an Eastern island is linked to another island in the West, in Scotland. In The Hungry Tide, a Scots sahib originates from the Isle of Arran. In Another Light moves between two islands removed in space and time: between present-day Orkney and the Penang of the 1930s. Like Greig’s, Ghosh’s narrative interrogates the colonial past from the vantage point of the postcolonial present. Finally, both are novels of the sea, offering, as it does, the opportunity for travel, trade and colonial opportunity, but also native sustenance and energy. The tide is literarily and figuratively harnessed; both the Bay of Bengal and Orkney are dominated by the rhythms and forces of a changing tide, churning in a foetid miasma of tropical heat or in a cold icy climate, relentless in its unpredictability, challenging to human endeavours to survive. The tide also functions in each novel as a symbol of historical investigation, of material change and the struggle against the erasure of footprints of public and private memory.

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The islands in both these novels are places ‘not for the faint hearted’ (Greig 2005: 5). Yet it was in such far-flung spaces of empire as Lusibari and Penang that Scots made careers. One question presented in their comparison concerns the extent to which these novels show how colonial Scots can be seen as distinct within the fabric of British and European imperial trade networks and administration, particularly in the way that their experiences affect them, producing a sympathetic and sometimes radical association with those natives they encounter. The now well-registered contradiction between Scot as complicit and resistant colonial agent is captured and explored in these novels, a feature of their postcoloniality. In both narratives a young generation of footloose, intelligent men and women travel, work and form relationships that ebb and flow like the tides of time and water that surround and influence their lives. Relations crisscross and meet as chance events bring to the islands an international cast of people who might not otherwise have met. So in The Hungry Tide Kanai, a smug, arrogant, middle-class Bengali with a thriving translating and interpreting business in Delhi, of which he is ‘founder and chief executive’, (20) meets Piya, an American cetologist whose parents originate from Kolkata. Kanai has been a playmate of Kusum’s, an intelligent refugee from East Bengal. Kusum has dreams of making a life in the tide country, but is defeated in the end by a government tied to international demands to save the habitat of the tiger at the cost of human lives. Kusum’s son, Fokir, is married to Moyna, a nurse who works in the hospital established by the Badabon Trust, managed by his aunt (Mashima) Nilima. As a fisherman, Fokir understands the tide country with its mazy unreliability, together with his son, Tutul, who follows his father on his dangerous adventures to eke out a living, as the two disappear for days rowing / floating in the shifting Sunderban terrain. Fokir, Piya and Kanai, from their diverse backgrounds, are drawn together in a triangle that island life facilitates – a large part of which is determined by the legacy of the plans of an ambitious Scot, as we shall see. In Another Light’s Eddie Mackay enjoys a new lease of life after a brain operation, which has left him on the verge of ‘blue shadowlands’ that never seem to leave his consciousness. His partner has left him and he has come to Orkney as an engineer working on tidal energy. Another complex triangular relationship manifests as Eddie is drawn to Mica, whose former lover Kipper attacks Eddie in a fit of anger. Behind the drama of the younger generation there is another played out through existing mother figures – Nilima Mashima in The Hungry Tide and, in In Another Light, Eddie’s mother and Mrs Cunninghame, who was a little girl in Penang when Eddie’s father was there. Such characters function as links with a past inhabited by colonial Scotsmen, pivotal presences in both novels. The central male protagonist in each story is driven by a contemporary quest to understand the lives and decisions of these Scots, decisions that reverberate in the present. These ‘colonial’ Scots, each novel reveals, challenged or reshaped elements of British colonial authority, in their egalitarian approach to the ‘natives’ and their respect for native culture. The extent to which their

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acts and beliefs were actually radical – there is a point at which ‘pity’ becomes patronising within ongoing colonialism – becomes a feature of the postcolonial revision of colonial history that each novel performs. The contemporary protagonists in each novel embark on an archival search that seeks to reveal the extent to which these Scots inhabited what Homi Bhabha (1994: 36) has called the ‘Third Space’: where colonisers encounter and accept the dignity and rights of the colonised. Dipesh Chakrabarty has adapted Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the ‘public sphere’ to show a relation to the discipline of history which ‘requires, as a condition of possibility, a process whereby documents held in private possession or available to a restricted group of people turn into public records’ (Chakrabarty 2009). Such concern for equal access to historical information preoccupies Eddie Mackay as he sifts through the archives of the Penang Gazette, trying to read between the lines to throw ‘another light’ on his father’s private life, which came under public scrutiny and made him leave his post in disgrace. Eddie seeks out Mrs Cunninghame to find information that might unwrap the discreet and ‘official’ colonial silence that shrouds the case of the reticent (and now deceased) Dr Mackay. In Another Light – like The Hungry Tide – operates a dual narrative structure. Eddie’s contemporary account is balanced by his father’s story, related in a thirdperson narrative focalised through the Scottish doctor living between the wars. In Ghosh’s novel the story of an actual historical figure, the Scots philanthropist Sir Daniel Hamilton (1860–1939) (‘S’Daniel’), is traced, and the lines between fact and fiction become blurred in the appearance of the Hamilton Trust and the Hamilton School in the narrative. Hamilton’s legendary status in British India, especially in the Gosaba region of West Bengal – where he purchased 10,000 acres of land for a rural upliftment programme – is told through the fictional rendering of Nirmal’s (Nilima’s husband, hence Kanai’s uncle) anecdotes. S’Daniel’s project involved a key proposition: if the dispossessed could leave their differences of caste, religion, class and language behind them, they could settle on land he would donate to them and cultivate it to establish their ownership over it. In Ghosh’s novel, Kusum and her fellow refugees, who have been displaced from East Bengal after the Partition of Bengal, settle on fallow land at Morichjhapi to make a new life through agricultural settlements, in the tradition initiated by S’Daniel. In his notebook, Nirmal traces the aftermath of this vision put in place by the Scots zamindar (landowner) of the Sunderbans. Decades after Hamilton’s death, these new settlers follow his egalitarian dream – which led to an actual massacre in postcolonial post-Partition reality, retold in the fictional story of Kusum and recorded by Nirmal in his notebook. It is perhaps notable that the right-wing bent of Andrew Dewar Gibbs’s Scottish Empire, published in 1937 and concerning the significant role of Scots in the empire, is marked by the absence of Sir Daniel Hamilton, who had by then promoted his ideas of micro-credit and co-operatives. Hamilton – one of the richest colonialists in India – was a public figure, in close contact and correspondence with the British Governor who granted his Sunderban zamndari

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(land holdings), and with Indian nationalist public figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. It was, perhaps, because of his progressive agenda of giving back the land to the tiller, and challenging categorisations of class, caste and religion amongst his ‘free’ tenants (who did not have to pay taxes or rent), that he has had to wait to be re-written into the colonial discourse by Amitav Ghosh. His papers have been edited and introduced by two civil servants of postcolonial India, bringing his story to the public sphere, in The Philosopher’s Stone: Speeches and Writings of Sir Daniel Hamilton (Bandyopadhyay and Matilal 2003). As this book was published in India and not sold abroad, it remains, as Sir Daniel Hamilton was, rather restricted in the larger history of British India. Not yet fully recognised in Hamilton’s native Scotland or the West in general, his story has been made retrievable through the global success of Ghosh’s fictional account in The Hungry Tide. In The Hungry Tide, Kanai is given his late uncle Nirmal’s notebook. It records the fate of a refugee squatters’ colony at Morichjhapi in 1979 and describes the last few hours before the villagers are barricaded and massacred by hired goons sent from Calcutta. This act is seen as killing the vision of S’Daniel – set up by the Hamilton Trust in Lusibari – four decades after his death. It is through Nirmal’s anguished story and through his wife Nilima’s pragmatic social work, that the life and work of S’Daniel are resurrected and recalled in the novel. Similarly, artefacts trigger a journey into the past in In Another Light, also uncovering the benevolent actions of a Scot in the colonial East. Eddie’s and Kanai’s sleuthing are attempts by a younger generation to right a wrong, quests to exonerate the misunderstood and reinstate the memory of Scotsmen who had a slightly different agenda when they found themselves as alternative players in the Great Game. Ghosh uses the ‘double-helix’ pattern as a narrative technique in The Hungry Tide, where two strands intertwine and wind like vines round an interrelated experience (cf. Mondal 2007). This description could also be applied to In Another Light. The effect of this in both novels is not only to relate past to present but also to consider the relation between private and public forms of history and memory. This connection is enhanced by the postcolonial attempt to challenge the narratives of colonial power. Additionally, folklore and myth are woven into the narrative of both novels. In The Hungry Tide, the poetic feat of the Bon Bibi (the goddess of the forest) myth is extended to the haunting, pervasive figure of S’Daniel, who embodies realisable dreams of equal opportunity, which Nirmal sees as possible for the East Bengali refugee of the Sunderbans. In Greig’s novel, Eddie is never privy to the unfolding truth about his father’s experiences – unlike the reader – and the mystery that surrounds his questions about his father’s social disgrace is echoed in the hushing up of the genocide at Morichjhapi by political powers in The Hungry Tide. This act severely compromised the legacy of Hamilton’s vision for the full-scale implementation of a rural co-operative – the impetus that led refugees to claim and develop the land in remote deltaic Bengal many years after his death.

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At the heart of both novels, therefore, there are ethical questions of propriety and exigency, contextualised by the uneasy relation between capital and ecology. The new Indian nation is keen to stand by international demands for protecting the environment. The colonial zamindar’s co-operative schemes of rural reconstruction are fragmented by ruthless force as global corporate movements grant money to save the wilderness and not its people. In The Hungry Tide, Western concern with environmental issues – notably in maintaining the habitat of the tiger – is measured against the cost of human lives as they battle with an inscrutable terrain and an unpredictable man-eater. As Kusum sits awaiting the end in a besieged Morichjhapi which the people are forbidden to leave and others to enter, she hears patrolling policemen warning villagers through microphones that this island has to be saved from humans to protect the forest and land of the tiger because Western countries have invested in their continuity, without any knowledge of the history of the people and their migration patterns. Her thoughts echo those of the dispossessed around her, as she tells Nirmal: [S]itting here, with hunger gnawing at our bellies, we would listen to these words, over and over again. Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their name? Where do they live, these people, do they have children, do they have mothers, fathers? (260–1) It dawns on her in these last few hours that their plight is no isolated act: ‘No human being could think this a crime unless they have forgotten that this is how humans have always lived – by fishing, by clearing the land and by planting the soil’ (261). In these books, early twentieth-century Scotland is depicted as bleak and without prospects. Since neither India nor Malaya was a settler colony, the Scots who served the empire travelled there with an exotic setting and a glamorous job in place – as Disraeli says in Tancred, in a sentence made famous as the epigraph to Said’s Orientalism: the east was a career. These journeys were initially considered expedient for economic reasons, for career opportunities, but not for setting down roots and for embracing that ‘somewhere’ as a permanent home, rather as a lengthy resting place in the journey which led one back ‘home’ with the means to sustain a comfortable retirement. Nevertheless, S’Daniel’s life in India, once he had amassed his fortune at Mackinnon & Mackenzie, shifted from the imperial Eastern dream to one of social service in an attempt to create a utopia of equal opportunity for those marginalised by colonial practices. In In Another Light, Alexander (Sandy) Mackay is ‘glad to be out of his shattered country, its endless dreichness of skies and mind, the patrolling ministers and the girls either prissy or downcast’ (184). For Sandy, Scotland’s a place where everyone explains what is not possible, that it’ll end in tears, we’re here to make the best of a bad job then die and

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get a good rest till we’re broken up to be informed we’re damned. Lot of bloody nonsense. These days he’d rather swear on Whitman. Something un-Scottish and bracing in these praises of life, work, leisure, the body, desire. (184) Sandy shows a nascent concern for the vulnerable that will blossom in Penang, when, en route to the East, he wins the respect of the captain and his fellow passengers by fixing the second mate’s broken bones after an accident during a storm at sea. Once in Penang, the ‘chief baby wallah’ at the Western hospital successfully operates to bring babies of influential Eastern men like Chew Yoo and Abdur Rahman into the world, and wins the coveted ticket to the Penang Club. This allows entry to ‘even (an) impoverished Scottish doctor’, as the American Marsden jokingly concedes. So he gives himself up to the attractions and privileges of colonial life; yet ethical questions about this life haunt him. Figured as a straight-playing Scot, he is drawn into a spying game managed by the charming Marsden. ‘You don’t like politics, do you?’ Marsden asks Sandy. The answer is typical of the peace-loving doctor: ‘They get a lot of people killed.’ Marsden’s rejoinder, ‘That’s why they matter,’ is disarming. Marsden’s subsequent ‘You must do what you think is right’ makes Sandy recalls his own saddler father’s words ‘do well. Do right’ (291). But what his father had actually said was in Scots, ‘dae weel, dae richt’ – a dictum that hammers through Sandy’s mind with every move he makes, and marks him out from the wider mission. It is when he lets down his ‘do well, do right’ defences that he allows himself to be drawn into a precarious net as he follows a dangerous love to the Sumatran Highlands. So, while on the world stage, ‘A tiny Indian is challenging the British Empire, and a moral atheistic Scotsman is almost ready to commit adultery, if the opportunity arises. The world is changing, no doubt about it’ (256). Sandy’s sense of measure changes as he crosses barriers of geography, class, society and propriety. Yet the ‘elsewhere’ is always there for the returning Scot to find a place, marry and remain himself (for it must be emphasised that many Scots enjoyed the inegalitarian exploits of colonial life abroad – and continued to do so at home). Sandy is a man of few words, with egalitarian principles and a distinct contempt for preachers and people with more wealth than they need. Eddie sums him up thus: ‘He had an aversion to ministers and anyone who owned more land than they could walk round in a couple of hours. He respected fishermen, joiners, electricians, men of practical skills and didn’t speak much’ (84). Such qualities, seen in another light – that of Ghosh’s novel – are Hamiltonesque. In The Hungry Tide, S’Daniel also left a dreich ‘elsewhere’; as Nirmal recounts, his ‘schooling . . . was in Scotland, which was a harsh and rocky place, cold and unforgiving’ (42). Yet it was there that he learnt the true worth of making a mark in life through work. Nirmal goes on to say that ‘In school [S’Daniel’s] teachers taught him that life’s most important lesson is “labour conquers everything”, even rocks and stones if need be – even mud,’ as in the Sunderbans, the tide country. Like Sandy, S’Daniel brings the values of the Scottish ‘elsewhere’ with him to

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start a pioneering project for the sole benefit of the natives in a land at the mercy of an unforgiving tide. Men like S’Daniel are what ‘Scotland has given India’, to quote from Gibbs. Gibbs, remember, does not refer to S’Daniel in his book, but does note (1937: 146) that ‘the pages of [India’s] later story are crowded with the names of eminent Scotsmen who, whether as statesmen, administrators, soldiers or men of affairs, have firmly guided or decisively influenced the course of British rule in India’ – and, one could add, subsequent events in postcolonial India. S’Daniel became a zamindar, via the institution of private ownership of land set up by Cornwallis with the Permanent Settlement of Bengal. Yet, the S’Daniels of the imperial world – those who give their land to communal projects – are absent in discourses of empire like Gibbs’s and later books. Such men embraced AngloIndia without compromising their principles – of doing well and doing right, in Sandy’s father’s words, working for the marginalised and dispossessed. These ‘absent’ figures in history are reinstated in novels where their legacy is recaptured in postcolonial times, as ‘Hamilton sahib’ and the Scottish ‘chief baby wallah’ are remembered by the natives with affectionate reverence. However, on the boat out to Penang, Dr Alexander Mackay is ready to drift with the uncertain tide. He arrives at Penang as the chief actor in an intense drama and meets a ‘laddie’ who, against sound advice from fellow passengers, is allowed by Sandy to carry his heavy trunk. The boy ends up under his load with a dislocated shoulder and multiple fractures which Sandy immediately attends to with his surgical skills. This boy is Li Tek, whom Sandy secretly spends money on to heal and whom he employs as his multi-tasker, as he will never be able to lift heavy loads again. As Dr Mackay leaves the imperial port, the same laddie, Li Tek, sees him off. Sandy is always conscious of his inauspicious background; when Finlayson, the Guthries’ man, ‘a Scot . . . [with] an Edinburgh private school accent’, tells Sandy ‘encouragingly that the main trading firms are “full of Scots from all different sorts of backgrounds” ’, Sandy ‘nods, knowing he’s the one with the different sort of background’ (30). Finlayson also breezily asserts that in the Straits Settlements, ‘It’s not like India – here we’re all in the same boat, eh?’, but Sandy quietly points out, ‘but some of us sleep on different decks’ (30). The class hierarchy remains in place on this ship carrying colonial personnel. However, once prow touches shore, Sandy decides he can do away with niceties and caution. The First Secretary to the Governor advises him to wear a solar topi, to which Sandy retorts, reverting to his native Scots, ‘Dinna think so . . . Looks bloody daft’ (126). And when the dignitary perseveres, ‘The Oriental sun has rays in it can turn a man’s brains,’ Sandy looks at him pointedly and says, ‘Aye, I can see that’ (126), illustrating an irreverence for colonial mores. Honest and pragmatic, he will not partner Marsden in bridge if he knows Marsden cheats and is averse to playing his spying game. However, with a fellow Scotsman, Dr Trent, his superior, he can stretch funds from rich patients to provide medical care to the poor in his hospital. In this world of inequalities, Sandy plays his own little games at setting his standards. He races up the steps of the hospital to beat the

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Sikh doorkeeper who opens the door to him, for Sandy ‘prefers to open his own doors’ (178). This boyish competition is repeated at the Penang Club and he does not quite know how to respond to the huge Sikh doorman’s salute. His initial ‘hilarious elation’ at the ‘saddler’s laddie frae Brechin’ being driven in a rickshaw turns to ‘unease as he watches the breathless struggle of the malnourished boy straggling uphill with his load’ (187). Sandy likes playing ‘square’, and it is only when he lets his defences down and takes risks that the ‘true romantic’ in him urges him to answer to his emotions rather than his reason. Finally, the administrative hands of empire sweep in and push him out of his peripheral island existence without the fanfare of farewell, following his perfunctory dismissal after the discovery of his escapade with his superior’s wife. Sandy seems to be a fictional representative of the Scot uneasy with the inequities of colonial society, albeit one who contributes and benefits from it in some way. Similarities with S’Daniel resonate. The latter is a historical figure with legendary status in Lusibari that makes him an epical hero. S’Daniel went out to head the Mackinnon & Mackenzie company and made his fortune by selling tickets for the P&O shipping line. The Hungry Tide imagines him on a boat journeying through the tide country in the Bay of Bengal. While other shahebs and mems laugh, dance, eat and drink, S’Daniel does not join in but stands aloof, on the deck, his eyes drink in these vast rivers, these mudflats, these mangrove covered islands and it occurs to him to ask, ‘Why does no one live here? Why are these islands empty of people? Why is this valuable soil allowed to lie fallow?’ (50) These questions rankle the Scot, who then dares to dream. He has plenty of money. He could have gone back ‘home’ with it, but, invoking Burns, he has the energy and vision of building an egalitarian society where all men ‘shall brothers be for a’ that’: What he wanted was to build a new kind of society, a new kind of country. It would be country run by cooperatives, he said. Here people wouldn’t exploit each other and everyone would have a share in the land. (53) The description of Hamilton’s vision, presented here in anti-colonial tones, is translated into a mission and related by the Marxist poet and dreamer, Nirmal: It was a dream . . . What he wanted was no different from what dreamers have always wanted. He wanted to build a place where no one would exploit anyone and people would live together without petty social distinctions and differences. He dreamed of a place where men and women could be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening. (53)

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The dream recalls another socialist utopian vision realised in Scotland by Robert Owen in his experiment with workers and their families in New Lanark, where the welfare of workers was a prime consideration for a better mode of production. In Lusibari, the encouraged migrants were farmers, who, like the women’s choir and schoolchildren encouraged to dance and play in New Lanark, sang their Bon Bibi songs and celebrated traditional festivals with artistic fervour. It would be wrong to see S’Daniel or Sandy as part of the Scottish diaspora, since it is associated with various degrees of forced migrancy. Theirs is a transnational temporary migrancy, which builds and maintains networks within the settler colonies of Scottish and Irish immigrants. For Angela McCarthy (2007), these community networks signify a form of transnationalism that links migrant populations to their ‘home’ country from their country of work. They also associated with fellow ‘exiles’ from the West in a cross-cultural network that was knitted together through economic, political, social and familial interests. In In Another Light, Sandy has his plans all made: ‘Save some money for a few years, go back home, buy a practice’ (188). S’Daniel, who does something altogether more radical, nevertheless gives it a Scottish impression. His forays into the Sunderbans ensure that he does not carry with him the baggage of Western networks, though he did map this country by naming islands after his relatives – Annpur, Jamespur, Emilybari and, of course, Lusibari. He even wanted to create a region called Andrewpur after Scotland’s patron saint, whose poor background was symbolic of those dispossessed he sought to reinstate with dignity in his philanthropic endeavour. In Greig’s novel, Sandy, who can often recall with humour that he is ‘wee Eck Mackay frae Brechin, the saddler’s laddie’ (110), ‘can never forget he comes from a line of domestic servants on his mother’s side and farm workers on his father’s’ (186). Yet Sandy easily gets sucked into the life of Europeans (who) are a small minority [in Penang], not much more than a thousand in all, highly visible to each other and everyone else in their white suits, buttoned up jackets and ties, their dresses, gloves and hats. Their principle occupations are work, sport and talking about each other. They have their own clubs, entertainments, recreations and places of worship. (349) In other words, both S’Daniel and Sandy play their ‘stateless national’ card when it suits. They are conscious of their Scottish identity and eager to establish their difference as individuals from British mores, even when they are key players within the business of empire of the British nation-state. Idiom is occasionally used to emphasise the distinction as people like Sandy use their wry sense of humour to share a toast while enjoying a personal joke: ‘ “Here’s tae us, wha’s like us? Gey few – and they’re aa deid!” ’ He resumes his normal voice and adds in explanation ‘Scottish toast, Alan’ (71). One of the rare facts that Eddie does discover about his father relates to his distinctive Scottish voice; as Mrs Cunninghame recalls, ‘He had a strong Scotch accent. He didn’t seem very at

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ease. Gauche, I suppose’ (146). She goes on to comment, ‘I had the impression your father was somewhat bolshie too . . . In fact . . . I’ve a notion Marsden joked that he’d persuaded your father to be put up for membership of Penang Club because they could do with a troublemaker’ (148–9). Dr Mackay’s determination to debunk the role of the colonial superior in his responses to the native population – to his discomfort saluting the Sikh doorman at the Penang Club, to Li Tek and the poorer women needing medical attention in his hospital work – exemplify his difference. The extent to which this empathy with the colonial dispossessed is an effect of his Scottish background is something never fully established in the novel. But the question is posed none the less – if only to refute it or to recognise the complexity in answering it. Perhaps S’Daniel would also fit into the description of being ‘somewhat bolshie’. Amidst the deltaic zamindari on his island, which he wanted to reclaim as a part of Scotland as Andrewpur but which the people obstinately called Hamiltonbad, he now has a status akin to Hindu gods; his birthday is marked by a public holiday, the garlanding of his statue and a ceremonial worship that resembles a puja. He remains a benevolent ghost that could not save the thousands who dared to dream his dream at Morichjhapi by trying to reclaim and cultivate fallow land, a dream considered dangerous in decolonised times by a government who organised the settlers’ decimation in 1979. It is on outlying islands, beyond the central nerve of these double-helix tales, in Sumatra and at Morichjhapi, that caution is breached in romantic challenges to the accepted colonial ‘norm’, challenges that end in disaster. They cause storms, both metaphoric and real. In In Another Light they affect individuals, while in The Hungry Tide they sweep over an entire population. Sandy’s skill as a doctor is proven as he operates on a ship in the eye of a storm. In The Hungry Tide, Fokir uses his body as a shield to protect Piya’s life as he positions himself to face the eye of the storm in the certainty that he will die. Only after Piya discovers his body does she understand his act of immense sacrifice. From Sumatra, where Sandy spends a few idyllic days with his love Mrs Trent, he writes to his parents in a postscript to a letter, ‘This is where our storms come from’ (355). Years ago, despite warnings from storm experts, the British wanted to tame the Matla river and Canning was built. The port was the gateway to the Sunderbans. But the Matla river laughed (Matla means impetuous). She rose up as she always did and washed over human endeavour. S’Daniel built his zamindari to give shelter and sustenance to people, defying the reality of an unpredictable riverine terrain. What both Greig and Ghosh have done, in weaving island tales in intertwining postcolonial narratives, is revive the distinctive presence of Scots in colonial narratives – in the centre of storms and devastating tides. With revival and reclamation comes a form of reconsideration. This is best summed up in Nirmal’s words from his notebook: I know that after the storm passes, the events that have preceded its coming will be forgotten. No one knows better than I how skilful the tide

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Bashabi Fraser country is in silting over its past. There is nothing I can do to stop what lies ahead. But . . . perhaps I can make sure at least that what has happened here leaves some trace, some hold upon the memory of the world. (69)

In The Hungry Tide, Hamilton’s legacy lives on in Nilima’s hospital for women and Nirmal’s school, which renew and restore this Scotsman’s projects in social institutions that ensure health and education for a vulnerable population in a remote area. Eddie’s choice of Orkney as his place of work in In Another Light perhaps echoes his father’s adventurous journeys, in pursuit of the renewable in a place where nature and the weather are relentless, in the face of which human endeavour proves indomitable. The novels establish that the past is never wiped away by storms or tidal waves, but lives in the haunting presence of Scottish individuals whose work and legacy, having touched several lives, are sustained in the work of contemporary characters portrayed in these postcolonial texts.

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CHAPTER 17

‘Dangerous Liaisons’: Gender Politics in the Contemporary Scottish and Irish ImagiNation Stefanie Lehner, University College Dublin

All nationalisms are gendered; all are invented; and all are dangerous – dangerous . . . in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to technologies of violence. As such, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind; as systems of cultural representation . . . they are historical practices through which social difference is both invented and performed . . . But if the invented nature of nationalism has found wide theoretical currency, explorations of the gendering of the national imaginary have been conspicuously absent. (McClintock 1993: 61) Anne McClintock’s postcolonial feminist point emphasises the intrinsically dangerous relationship between ‘gender’ and ‘nation’ in terms of constructions and practices of femininity and masculinity: a danger that has been largely overlooked in the body of work that could be identified as Scottish postcolonial criticism. This could be said to be due to the specific socio-political status of Scotland as what David McCrone (1992) famously called a ‘stateless nation’. Indeed, in Bella Caledonia, Kirsten Stirling (2008: 12, 11) points to the fact that it is precisely because of ‘Scotland’s peculiar status of a nation’ that ‘the Scottish version of the woman-as-nation figure does not really emerge until the twentieth century’, in contrast to her counterparts elsewhere, such as Britannia, Marianne (France) or Hibernia (Ireland). None the less, both the post- and pre-devolutionary Scottish cultural context seems to have inspired, rather than deterred, critics such as Berthold Schoene to endorse the ‘creative conflation of gender and nation’ (2007b: 255). This might be partly due to commentators often accrediting Scottish nationalism with being more sympathetic towards, and thus ultimately compatible with, the claims of women. Christopher Whyte, for example, suggests in his ‘Not(e) from the Margin’ – which was partly written in response to an Englishwoman’s statement that ‘nationalism is always bad news for women’ – that the Scottish version ‘could, conceivably if not actually, be more receptive and more nurturing to women, gay men and other “marginal” groups than larger, more dominant cultures’ (1995: 34). Significantly, this sentiment is echoed in Irish postcolonial studies by critics

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such as Carol Coulter (1993) and David Lloyd, who argue for what Lloyd calls ‘nationalisms against the state’ (1999: 19–36). Furthermore, postcolonial critic Laura Chrisman (2004: 191) asserts that ‘there is no necessary antagonism between gender, feminism and national culture,’ and cites the awareness of ‘the injustice that is patriarchy’ among male nationalists, such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and James Connolly, as an example. However, this chapter maintains that the notion of the purported ‘subaltern’ credentials of nationalism in its assumed compatibility with the claims of women and other marginalised identity groups is highly problematic, if not dangerous. For, in order to press and prioritise its claims, the politics of nationalism must either subsume and subordinate, or dissolve and displace, other forms of identitarian or emancipatory struggle (such as feminism). Moreover, this version of ‘nationalism as subaltern’ often relies ‘upon a de-hyphenation of the nation-state’ (Graham 2001: 108–9) – thus rendering it a more theoretical rather than practical-political endeavour intended for gaining statehood. In contrast to this, there is also a tendency in Scottish Studies to consider the relationship between gender (here notably often only in the form of ‘women’) and nation in purely constructionist terms as, for instance, apparent in Susanne Hagemann’s assertion: The only general statement that can be made about women and nation is the paradoxical one that no general statement can be made. Both women and nation are constructs, and any interpretation of the relationship between them depends to a considerable extent on the political interest which motivates it. (1997: 326) It is in face of this apparent paradox that this chapter will exemplify some of the political and material implications that the putatively ‘creative’ conflation between these two terms has for the (post)colonial construction of both femininity and masculinity in a comparative Scottish and Irish context. The Irish postcolonial context can here provide an instructive lens for Scottish studies that magnifies the dangers of a gendered imagiNation when translated from the symbolic to the political realm. The term ‘imagiNation’ draws on Benedict Anderson’s (1983) understanding of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. Hence, it suggests that the imagined nation is generated by a specific national imagination, which, in turn, motivates and substantiates the political movement of nationalism. As alluded to above, imagiNation thus needs to be understood as constitutive of a specific nationalist discourse that underpins the political institutions of the nation-state. The past decades have seen an increasing interest in the long-standing historical and cultural interrelations between Scotland and Ireland. A remarkable literary renaissance on both sides of the Irish Sea has also occurred in this time. Whilst the earliest cross-currents can be traced back to the first millennium, it is interesting to note that the field of Irish–Scottish Studies has been gaining

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prominence at roughly the same time as Postcolonial Studies, namely since the 1970s: a period marked globally by growing transnational movements of capital and labour, as well as culture. In this regard, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that Irish–Scottish comparisons often evoke a certain postcolonial model. This is, for instance, evident in the pioneering work of literary critic Marilyn Reizbaum, who begins her investigation of the work of Irish and Scottish women writers, Liz Lochhead and Eavan Boland, with the following justification: I feel I can talk about Scotland and Ireland together in this context, without homogenizing them and thereby further marginalizing them (all Celts are alike), because they have comparable ‘colonial’ histories with respect to England (unlike Wales) and because their status as minority cultures, which has more or less continued in psychic and / or political ways, has had a similar impact not only on the dissemination of their respective literatures but on the nature and means of their writing. (1992: 169) The two parts of this statement prove somewhat symptomatic of Irish–Scottish postcolonial comparisons, indicating some of the problems and pitfalls of such an approach. Firstly, as Reizbaum’s use of inverted commas indicates (and many of the chapters in this volume illustrate), it is rather controversial to designate Scotland’s historical experience as ‘colonial’ (cf. Connell 2004), while it is, however, widely accepted to do so in the Irish context – at least within literary and cultural studies. Hence, if Ireland has successfully argued its case for an acknowledged place on the postcolonial agenda, it is the uneasy fit that both countries pose when situating them as homogeneous entities into the colonial divide that has initially denied them inclusion under the postcolonial umbrella. The authors of one of the discipline’s foundational textbooks, The Empire Writes Back, assert that while it is possible to argue that [Ireland, Scotland and Wales] were the first victims of English expansion, their subsequent complicity in the British imperial enterprise makes it difficult for colonized peoples outside Britain to accept their identity as post-colonial. (Ashcroft et al. 2003: 31–2) None the less, the latest edition of that primer does make some room to incorporate Ireland into its consideration under a section entitled ‘Re-thinking the Post-colonial’. Indeed, what Ireland as well as Scotland can offer postcolonial studies is to question and rethink the unilateral power dynamics and ideological deadlocks of the colonial binary that have, since its inception with Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), problematically underpinned the discipline. It is this potential that Graham (2001: 84) makes astute usage of by exploring Ireland – and, I want to suggest, by extension Scotland – as a ‘liminal space’ of

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the colonial encounter. Graham takes the term ‘liminal’ from Said’s analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in Culture and Imperialism (1993: 159–96), wherein Kim’s ambiguous social and racial positions enable him to shift between coloniser and colonised, thus situating him on both sides of the colonial divide. Taken as a metaphor, this helps us to understand the active complicity and collaboration of the Celtic fringes in the imperial enterprise. This approach thus enables a postcolonial reading of Ireland as well as Scotland which apprehends how some sections of their respective societies profited from empire, whilst others were subjugated by it or rebelled against it (Graham 2003: 248). What makes Graham’s approach specifically important for Scottish postcolonial readings is that, while it insists on postcolonialism’s force as an ethical criticism that morally evaluates the inequalities and injustices of power relations (as between coloniser and colonised), it challenges, at the same time, the ways in which such considerations have too often allowed the national to monopolise both the Irish and Scottish postcolonial field; this, he argues, ‘is to withhold . . . a more radical interrogation by the difficult ethics of the colonial encounter’ (Graham 2001: 82). To enable such an examination, Graham proposes a subaltern approach, drawing on the work of the Subaltern Studies Group in India, which concerns itself with the histories, agency and politics of social groups that have been elided and subjugated by colonial and post-colonial state-formation, such as peasants and the lower working classes but also women and other marginalised and minority groups (Guha 1982).1 Such a method proves highly perceptive to the struggles and antagonisms not only of class but also of gender, sexuality, region, religion and so on, which question the teleological narrative of postcolonialism, in which the ‘post’ indicates the successful restoration of the independent nation-state as the ultimate goal of the process of anti-colonial liberation (Graham 2001: 82–3); for the work of Subaltern Studies makes clear that the postcolonial nation-state is often complicit in replicating and consolidating colonial forms of exclusion and subjugation that it purportedly displaced. The relevance of this critique has been widely recognised in the Irish postcolonial context, where the emancipatory thrust of nationalism transmuted specifically for female citizens into an oppressive force, concerning on the one hand the institutional enshrining of a repressive sex-gender system after independence in the Irish Republic and the strict policing of traditional gender roles in the context of political conflict in Northern Ireland on the other. By contrast, the different socio-political circumstances of the Scottish case seem to have deflected attention from such debates, as the focus here tends to be on an assumedly equally shared national condition, commonly characterised by terms such as ‘periphery’ or ‘minority culture’ (see, for instance, Craig 1996; Crawford 2000; Reizbaum 1992). Such readings, however, show the tendency to hold in place a postcolonial model that justifies the preoccupation with national paradigms and that is, moreover, problematically gendered. Here, it is again Reizbaum’s punctuation that proves suggestive; by emphasising the lasting impact that this approach has had on the literature of both entities, her phrasing

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suggests the common allegorical conflation between the psychic-personal and the political-national. One of the best-known accounts of how this gendered psycho-political model has been used to suggest Scotland’s affinity with postcolonial cultures is Tom Nairn’s (1981: 131) analysis of Scotland’s ‘pathological complex’, due to what he tellingly calls its ‘political castration’ through the Act of Union in The Break-Up of Britain. ‘The oddity of the Union’, Nairn argues, ‘has always posed grave cultural and psychological problems’ which created ‘a characteristic series of sub-national deformations or “neuroses” ’ (129). For Nairn, these come to the fore through the ‘belatedness’ of Scotland’s nationalism, which he considers as ‘the chronological companion of anti-imperialist revolt and Third World nationalism, rather than those of European movements, which it superficially resembles’ (95). If it was ironically in opposition to Nairn’s diagnosis of a ‘deformed’ national culture that postcolonial theory initially reached some prominence in the Scottish field (see Beveridge and Turnbull 1989), assessments of Scotland’s ‘democratic deficit’ and ensuing inferiority complex have continued to be expressed in explicitly gendered terms – although Aileen Christianson, somewhat surprisingly, contends that the usage of the word ‘emasculate’ is in the context of Scottish affairs neither ‘a gender specific [n]or biased word but . . . a fitting description’ (1996: 122). This motif of emasculated Scottishness as a result of English dominance is memorably expressed by Mark Renton in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting: It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We cant even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No, we’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. (Welsh 1993: 78) What Renton’s tirade underlines is the common association of a process of disempowerment and defeat with emasculation: a linkage that postcolonial critic Ashis Nandy elaborates in the Indian context in The Intimate Enemy (1983). With reference to Nandy, David Cairns and Shaun Richards investigate, in Writing Ireland (1988: 43–9), how the Celts have been historically depicted as ‘an essentially feminine race’, as described by Ernest Renan in Poésie des races celtiques in 1860. This notion of the ‘feminine’ character of the Celts (here specifically the Irish) also underpins Matthew Arnold’s arguments in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), ultimately to justify English colonial hegemony over Ireland, in particular, and thereby secure a unified British state. Tellingly, contemporary Irish critics continue – as do Scottish – to reiterate this discourse, apparent, for example, in Ann Owens Weekes’s contention that the entire population of Ireland assumes the position of women: ‘Colonisation, then, makes female both country and people’ (1990: 15). Within Nandy’s psycho-political colonial model (and as attested by the character of Frank Begbie in Welsh’s novel), this symbolic emasculation leads to the

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adoption of a compensatory ‘hyper-masculinity’ by the colonial male as an effort to offset the inferior positioning and reassert his power, ironically enacted by repeating and aping the norms that disempowered and feminised him in the first place. Nandy argues: Only the victims of a culture of hyper-masculinity, adulthood, historicism, objectivism, and hypernormality protect themselves by simultaneously conforming to the stereotype of the rulers, by over-stressing those aspects of the self which they share with the powerful, and by protecting in the corner of their heart a secret defiance which reduces to absurdity the victor’s concept of the defeated and his unspoken belief that he is morally and culturally superior to his subjects, caught on the wrong side of history. (1998: 100) Nandy’s account thus exposes a contradiction underpinning the construction of (post)colonial masculinity by colluding with the iniquitous forces of patriarchy while being, at the same time, subject to its strictures. In turn, it indicates that the gendering of colonial discourse is designed to hold in place the norms of patriarchy by outlining a system of strictly regulated and rigidly differentiated gender roles. Furthermore, given the fact that the whole notion of colonisation as emasculation posits a male viewpoint of that process, female experiences and perspectives are necessarily excluded and erased from this model. The extent to which this eclipsed space of the feminine is often replicated by anti-colonial nationalism becomes clear when considering the pervasive use of women as signs and symbols of the nation. One of the most influential examples is found in the Irish literary tradition: William Butler Yeats’s famous 1902 play Cathleen ni Houlihan, which draws on the well-established Mother Ireland trope in her various avatars (as Hibernia; Sean Bhean Bhocht or the Poor Old Woman; Róisín Dubh; or the mother goddess Cailleach Bhéarra). But despite the apparent voice and agency that Cathleen asserts in Yeats’s play, her only task is to summon her sons to fight against the imperially male invader so that, by redeeming her from colonial subjugation and violation, the purity of nation can be restored. In such a scenario, ‘woman’ comes to function as a compensatory fetish for a (post)colonial masculinity that finds itself both in construction as well as under threat: a means by which the dominant national subject not only aims to reclaim his agency and power but also can project his desire for national unity and belonging. Such a displacement of women’s actual historical experiences attests to Gayatri Spivak’s notion that ‘the discourse of man is in the metaphor of woman’ (1983: 169). Implicit to this critique is, then, that the national imagination often depends on constructions and regulations of gender that, as Margaret Ward remarks with regard to the Irish context, give rise to the ‘the assumption that nationalism is a predominantly masculine phenomenon; that the struggle for the nation-state is one defined by men, participated in entirely by men, and one in which the potential for the emancipation of women is negligible’ (1996:

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8). Feminist critic Cynthia Enloe (2000: 45) similarly contends that ‘nationalism has typically sprung from masculine memory, masculinized humiliation and masculine hope’ – and, we may add here, masculine desire. The material effects of women’s figurative role in the postcolonial Irish imagiNation are indicatively illustrated by the institutionalisation of the Mother Ireland trope in the 1937 Irish Constitution, which effectively transmutes singular ‘woman’ into plural ‘mothers’, confined to ‘their duties in the home’ (Bunreacht na hÉireann 1937: Article 41.2.2). Under such conditions, women exceed their purely symbolic definition by being interpellated into what Nira Yuval-Davis (1997: 4) describes as their supposedly ‘natural’ role as ‘biological reproducers of the nation’. The extent to which female sexuality has been used as a means to safeguard a specifically Irish imagiNation has come to the fore in the debates over women’s reproductive rights, most notably through the events surrounding the so-called ‘X case’ in 1992. This involved a state injunction over a fourteen-year-old suicidal rape victim to restrain her from travelling to England for an abortion. The X case generated a rupture in national self-definition and state legitimacy by exposing the ways in which the coercive regulation of women’s bodies has become a vehicle to maintain and perpetuate patriarchal hegemony. It is noteworthy that press coverage compared the confinement of Miss X’s pregnant body with the British policy of internment, introduced in 1971 in Northern Ireland.2 If abortion has been used in nationalist discourses to emphasise Ireland’s alterity to the British state in particular, this analogy reveals that the postcolonial state is complicit in a similar civil rights abuse that especially affects women. Evoking the Subaltern Studies critique, Irish feminist Ailbhe Smyth sardonically describes how ‘the liberation of the state implies male role-shift from that of Slave to Master, Margin to Centre, Other to Self. Women, powerless under patriarchy, are maintained as Other of the ex-Other, colonized of the post-colonized’ (1991: 11–12). This mechanistic cycle of oppression is dramatised in Edna O’Brien’s fictionalisation of the X case in Down by the River (1996). The teenage body of her protagonist, the fourteen-year-old Mary McNamara, is first sexually abused by her father and then appropriated and confined by the state, while she herself is rendered voiceless. Denied any means of self-representation, O’Brien’s protagonist appears as the ultimate embodiment of the silenced gendered subaltern that Spivak evokes in her famous 1988 essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In the novel, Mary is always spoken for: on the one hand, by the omniscient narrative voice; on the other hand, by the assemblage of male doctors, lawyers and Pro-Life activists. The extent to which these powerful others define, confine and control her is reflected in the book’s narrative structure; from the first of its seventy-four chapters, O’Brien parallels and intersects Mary’s personal herstory with the trajectory of the hypocritical ‘men of principle’, the judges who are invested with the power to decide upon her fate (O’Brien 2000: 6). Mary’s voicelessness thus comes to illustrate the silencing of women by the patriarchal state apparatus: ‘She would not speak. Nothing would drag a word out of her . . . Her tongue was gone’

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(31). Furthermore, the ways in which Mary’s pregnant body is used as a means to safeguard the purity and unity of the nation signify the extent to which woman has no place in the symbolic realm other than as the figurative trope of someone else’s imagiNation. Although evident in very different degrees, this phenomenon has been, in both the Irish and the Scottish, as well as the wider postcolonial context, recognised as a ‘double exclusion’ suffered by women in marginalised cultures where, Reizbaum (1992: 165) notes, ‘the struggle to assert a nationalist identity obscures or doubly marginalizes the assertion of gender (the women’s voice).’ Janice Galloway has addressed the ensuing difficulties for female authors in a putatively postcolonial Scottish context: Scottish women have their own particular complications with writing and definition, complications which arrive from the general problems of being a colonised nation. Then, that wee touch extra. Their sex. There is coping with that guilt of taking time off the concerns of national politics to get concerned with the sexual sort: that creeping fear it’s somehow self-indulgent to be more concerned for one’s womanness instead of one’s Scottishness . . . Guilt here comes strong from the notion that we’re not backing up our menfolk and their ‘real’ concerns. Female concerns, like meat on the mother’s plate, are extras after the man and the weans have been served. (1991: 5–6) Galloway’s notion of women’s interests as an ‘extra’ could be read as gender functioning within the postcolonial imagiNation as Derridean ‘supplement’; it works as a substitute, a representative of something other than itself (namely, ‘nation’), but, at the same time, it is an addition, an accretion and enrichment that gestures to a fundamental lack or emptiness underpinning the structure (Derrida 1976: 141–63). Galloway illustrates this supplementary space of womanhood in her novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989) in the typographical marginalisation of her protagonist’s inner thoughts and fears as well as her anorexia. Galloway’s use of food metaphors is telling here; as Anne Murcott (1983: 2–4) observes, the privileging of men and offspring in food distribution reflects the hierarchies of patriarchal social relations. The refusal and abjection of food by the main character, Joy Stone, in Galloway’s novel is marked by a similar ambiguity to the one which characterises the ‘supplement’; enacting the effacement of women in the patriarchal order, on the one hand, Joy starves herself to conform to the norms of the feminine that are promoted by the magazines she consumes which, Joy tells us, ‘are full of thin women’ (Galloway 1999: 37). On the other hand, anorexia becomes a means of resistance, defying stereotypical definitions of femininity and womanhood; while her masculine physicality challenges her allocated gender-role, her reproductive role as a mother is similarly undermined by her body’s refusal to menstruate. Assuming at first that she is pregnant, she undergoes a scan: ‘I looked. I was still there. A black hole among

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the green stars. Empty space. I had nothing inside me’ (146). It is telling that Cairns Craig attempts to appropriate this image of Joy’s body as a symbol of predevolutionary Scotland. ‘That “black hole” ’, he states, ‘is the image not only of a woman negated by a patriarchal society but of a society aware of itself only as an absence [in] its failure to be reborn’ (1999: 199). By equating the effective denial of female self-determination in patriarchy with the nationalist and inherently masculinist crisis over national self-determination following the devolution debacle of 1979, Craig’s reading not only elides the gender-specificity of Joy’s experiences but also actively contributes to the marginalisation and oppression of women’s concerns that Galloway addresses in the above quotation. His nationalist agenda thus once more repeats the dispossession and annihilation of female experiences that was addressed above. Returning to the Irish context, it is this transmutation of ‘real’ women into the ciphers of a specifically male ‘postcolonial’ imagiNation that is, for Ailbhe Smyth, reflected in the building of huge water monument of James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegans Wake (1939) in Dublin in 1987. In an important feminist intervention into Irish postcolonial studies, Smyth argues that this statue does not attest to the liberating fluidity of a ‘river’ identity often accredited to Joyce’s character but a history that is marked by the ‘pompous denial of women’s right to self-definition; [an] emphatic affirmation of the negation of women excluded from the generation of meaning’ (1991: 9–10). Smyth concludes: ‘ALP exists not in and for herself but in and for something other than herself. Essentially vacuous, receptacle without individual identity, mute spectacle, silent cipher, the symbolic female figure is incapable of conferring meaning’ (11). As with both O’Brien’s protagonist and Craig’s readings of Galloway’s, this notion of the female object as an empty cipher evokes Jacques Lacan’s notorious statement that ‘woman does not exist’: that is, following Lacan’s thesis as elaborated by Slavoj Žižek (1992: 426), under such representational conditions ‘woman does not exist in herself, as a positive entity full of ontological consistency, but only as the symptom of man’ – or, in this case, of a specifically masculine imagiNation. However, such readings show the danger of replicating the unilateral power dynamics that constitute the colonial divide, in which the female (or feminised) subaltern can nowhere effectively represent or speak for herself – indeed, can never speak back to the colonising ‘father’ – leading Spivak to her (in)famous conclusion that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’ (1994: 104). If Spivak afterwards somewhat refined her dire deduction, she has subsequently promoted the notion of subalternity as a singular state, ‘a position without identity . . . where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognisable basis of action’ (Spivak 2005: 476). However, there is, as Colin Graham observes, a danger here ‘to read into the category of the “subaltern” an ethics of oppression’, which constitutes subalternity as ‘a theoretical site of disempowered purity’ (2001: 106).3 In other words, Spivak’s notion of the subaltern remains so ‘pure’ because ‘she’ seems completely unaffected by any systems of knowledge, representation or politics, but also because she is so utterly oppressed that nothing could

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possibly transform her status. From this standpoint, subalternity becomes an end in itself, a petrified singular state that cannot be redeemed or challenged. If such an approach is hardly sustainable in the Scottish and also in the Irish context, a more helpful way to understand the representational iconography of the national imagination might be offered via the Lacanian concept of sinthome, for Lacan’s (1975: 107–8) above-mentioned thesis that ‘woman is a symptom of man’ implies that ‘woman’ functions as a signifying formation that confers ontological consistency on to the (male) subject but reveals, at the same time, his fracture and inherent instability. In a similar way, woman functions in the (post) colonial imagiNation as what I wish to call a sinathion:4 a compensatory formation penetrated by jouissance,5 by which men can secure the symbolic coherence of their desire for national independence and belonging but which, in fact, exposes the inherent inconsistency of that imagiNation. An indicative example of how this notion of the sinathion is used in the Scottish postcolonial imagiNation is provided by Alasdair Gray’s 1982 Janine; a novel which chronicles the ultimate breakdown and gradual recovery of its male protagonist, Jock McLeish. The first part of the book is taken over by Jock’s pornographic fantasies about a group of women whose foremost member is the eponymous Janine. Gray exploits the political implications of sexual metaphors by appropriating the figure of an abused woman as an allegory for Scotland, typified by Jock’s statement: But if a country is not just a tract of land but a whole people then clearly Scotland has been fucked. I mean that word in the vulgar sense of misused to give satisfaction or advantage to another. Scotland has been fucked and I am one of the fuckers who fucked her and I REFUSE TO FEEL BITTER AND GUILTY ABOUT THIS. (Gray 2003: 126) While Jock recreates here the original sexist patterns of both colonial and national iconography, he also confronts his own complicity in this mechanistic process of oppression. Working as a supervisor for security installations, Jock is the representative of a panoptical system of regulation and control, which simultaneously emasculates him; he feels ‘not [as] a man, [but as] an instrument’ (Gray 2003: 95). Just as in Nandy’s model, Jock seeks to compensate by asserting patriarchal dominance in his pornographic projections. Accordingly, Jock’s cast of female characters is subjected to the most misogynistic procedures, involving bondage and enslavement. The most dramatic staging of this erasure of female subjectivity occurs in a scene in which his ‘heroines’ are so placed that ‘each woman stands like an upside down capital Y’ (106). Their identical positioning as inverted symbols of male supremacy erases any difference between them, conflating them into a single sinathion which not only serves the empowerment of the male subject but also works as a means for securing his national jouissance. Jock explicitly defines the female body as ‘THE LANDSCAPE OF HOME’ and characterises his mother ‘not [as] a person but the climate I grew up in’ (157, 40). This enacts what Spivak describes as a double

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displacement, whereby woman’s actual body is doubly transformed: first into landscape or nature, and then into motherland as nation. Whereas female characters are subsumed symbolically, Gray’s protagonist is interpellated as a notably abject metonym for his nation, bearing, as S. J. Boyd notes (1991: 109), ‘the Scots forename’; ‘Jock’ is a distinctly pejorative English name for a Scot, often with racial connotations. This is insinuated, if not directly addressed, by Boyle’s characterisation of Jock as ‘thoroughgoing Jekyll and Hyde’. Suggesting the extent to which Gray’s character is, indeed, a fractured subject, this splitting is reflected in the structure of the text itself which, similar to Gray’s first novel Lanark (1981), is divided into a fantasy and a realist part, invoking the well known paradigm of the Scottish imagination: Gregory Smith’s ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ (1919). Similar to Arnold’s (1910: 85–6) depiction of the Celt’s ‘affinity to . . . feminine idiosyncrasy’, which he locates within their ‘reaction against the despotism of fact’, Smith’s model suggests a gender dynamic in the common association of realism / reality with the masculine and fantasy / imagination with the feminine. In his essay on ‘British Masculinities and the Post-Nation’, Berthold Schoene proposes ‘to read the doppelgänger motif as a gender-specific obsession with difference’, concerning ‘the Scottish male’s fear of his own intrinsic self-and-otherness, or “effeminacy” ’ (2002: 94). This certainly proves true for Jock, who is shown to be ultimately torn apart between his attempts to reclaim patriarchal dominance while suffering from his felt (post)colonial inferiority. Significantly, for Jock it is the identification with his feminine alterity – the embrace of his personal sinathion, Janine, not only as his other, but also as part of his self – that offers to redeem the contradictions that mark his existence. This foreshadows Schoene’s proposal of a ‘devolutionary masculinity that has embraced its feminine marginality and is saying “no” to power’:6 a condition he considers crucial for ‘the successful facilitation of a post-national state’ (2002: 95, 97). But if this seems to promise what could be tentatively called a truly post-postcolonial masculinity – in the sense of having left both the telos of the nation-state and the normative model of masculinity safely behind – the question of whether woman can actually afford to say ‘no’ to power or dissolve her identity is here not addressed. None the less, a similar embrace of the feminine has been observed in Irish men’s writing. For instance, Gerry Smyth proposes that the male protagonist of Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper (1990), Jimmy Rabbitte Sr, offers ‘the seeds of a new Irish manhood and fatherhood, one who has at least begun to acknowledge a feminine dimension to his identity’ (1997: 73). Similarly, Eve Patten discerns a shift to a ‘feminine sensibility’ in what she terms the contemporary Irish ‘postnational novel’ (2006: 262, 259). It seems that in the wake of the post-national trend previously derogatory manifestations of (post)colonial masculinity are now read as the heralds of a devolutionary, post-patriarchal sex-and-gender order. However, the context of such celebrations of putatively male transgenderings requires circumspection, for if images of the feminine have been for so long employed as a muted analogue for Scotland’s and Ireland’s (post)colonial traumas, they function nowadays to allegorise their putative post-national

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recoveries. There lurks again a danger here to overwrite and erase women’s material reality and specific bodily experiences; a danger that the Irish postcolonial context has specifically brought to the fore. Perhaps it was in order to pre-empt being, once again, reduced to such spectral females that Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy and Irish writer Anne Enright decided in their respective 1995 novels, So I Am Glad and The Wig My Father Wore, to feature spectral males instead; Kennedy resurrects the ghost of Cyrano de Bergerac while Enright revives the angel of a suicide. Their female protagonists are both caught at a personal crisis in their lives, concerning their position and construction as independent women in patriarchal society. Notably, it is in both works the (imaginary) relationship with those ghostly and thereby non-phallic representations of masculinity that enables both women to rediscover sexual intimacy and nurture, thereby allowing them to engender alternative gender roles and relations. If it has been the inclination, if not indeed the imperative, of the national to encompass and / or eclipse the female, it has proven crucial for postcolonial women writers to reclaim and resituate the concerns of gender as an affiliative and collective desire of their texts. For many female Irish and Scottish artists this has meant to ‘fly by’ the nets of nation and gender in the Joycean connotations of that phrase, as evoked by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), wherein he announces: When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it from back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. (Joyce 1977: 203) This means that, on the one hand, these writers have had ‘to fly with the means of’; namely, by encountering constructions and practices of both femininity and masculinity in nationally specific conditions, it is exactly that context that engenders their writing. On the other hand, however, their works also ‘fly by’ such restrictions, harbouring themes and addressing concerns that transgress national and gender boundaries. This has taken many different literary forms and modes of expressions – with some feminists espousing a realistic aesthetic, whilst other writers, such as the ones discussed in this chapter, emphasise the need for more dissident stylistic and formal experiments. None the less, by insisting on the existence of gender within but also outside and in opposition to the national imagination, women writers in Scotland, Ireland and other postcolonial contexts have revised its construction as a Derridean ‘supplement’ and thereby asserted what Žižek (1992: 426) would call ‘a radical ethical attitude’; for, figured as sinathion, ‘woman . . . does not exist, she insists, which is why she does not come through man [or his imagiNation] only.’ The period since the 1980s has witnessed in both Ireland and Scotland a growing insistence of female voices, addressing and exposing the silence and secrecies about issues of domestic violence, rape, incest and abuse, often committed within or condoned by patriarchal state institutions.

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Furthermore, such an aesthetic insistence also has a politically interventionist function. It offers the potential to challenge what Jacques Rancière calls ‘le partage du sensible’ (the distribution of the sensible): the system of inclusions and exclusions, divisions and boundaries that define what is visible and audible within a particular society. For Rancière, politics proper begins when those who have no voice, part or place in that order make a radical aesthetic intervention by emerging into visibility and making their voices heard. ‘Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part,’ he explains. ‘Politics exists because those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account’ (1999: 11, 27). Hence, in giving voice to what has been silenced and by bringing to light what has been erased and obscured, amongst the work of other postcolonial artists, Scottish and Irish writers have played an important role in forging a radical postcolonial aesthetic that, while specific to a national context, refuses to be limited thereto. NOTES 1. The concept of ‘subaltern’ derives from the terminology of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who developed it in his Prison Notebooks with reference to the rural Italian peasantry. While the editors of the most commonly cited translation of his work complain that Gramsci uses the term interchangeably with ‘subordinate’ or even ‘instrumental’ (Gramsci 1971: xiv), Marcus Green argues that Gramsci employs the term in a ‘figural or metaphorical sense . . . when referring to subordinate social groups or classes’ (2002: 2). 2. See cartoon by Martyn Turner, The Irish Times, 19 February 1992 (reproduced in Conrad 2004: 108). 3. Admittedly, Graham does not relate this to Spivak’s conception of the subaltern, but instead uses her own arguments to criticise this purity. For an astute critique of Spivak’s promotion of singularity in relation to postcolonial criticism, see Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial (2001). 4. The linguistic similarity to Jacques Lacan’s coinage should be obvious. If the term sination would refer to the status of ‘woman’ as symptom of the nation or imagiNation, the residual ‘h’ (for homme) is here intended to point to a specifically masculine imagiNation. 5. See Slavoj Žižek’s innovative reading of the nation as constituted by enjoyment (jouissance), notably in terms that evoke a specifically gendered dimension to that enjoyment which he, however, ignores (Žižek 1993: 202). 6. Schoene draws here on Katja Silverman’s study, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992).

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CHAPTER 18

Captain Thistlewood’s Jacobite: Reading the Caribbean in Scotland’s Historiography of Slavery Joseph Jackson, University of Warwick

A prominent area of research that has emerged from Scottish culture’s engagement with the postcolonial is the transatlantic connection between Scotland and the Caribbean, a feature of which has been the story of the Scottish plantocracy and their involvement in slavery. The function and consequences of this connection can be seen to assist in returning Scotland to the ‘causality of real history’ (Craig 1999: 118). In stark terms, slavery redefines a significant element of Scotland’s romanticised Jacobite past as excessively colonial, placing deracinated Scots firmly within the political economy of the slave trade. This is, in turn, bound up with narrative, linguistic and cultural power struggles within a triangulation of Scotland, England and the Caribbean; only through an interrogation of such history can the pre-conditions for a comparative postcolonial consciousness be fulfilled. This interrogation is not simply passive revisioning, as Graeme Macdonald summarises: ‘historicizing the contribution of Scots to empire [. . .] becomes part of a postcolonial process of resistance to the current British imperium’ (2006: 119). In the context of devolutionary Scotland, negotiating a ‘postcolonial’ identity within but also beyond the parameters of the UK, a reflexive historical form of fiction that not only acknowledges but also scrutinises the ‘contribution’ of a slave-holding past is a critical aspect of such resistance. Although considerable doubt continues to be expressed over Scotland’s credentials as a postcolonial nation in terms of a colonised history, coming to terms with a cultural construction of Scotland that denies its colonial past can be seen as recovering from a colonial legacy. Colonising Scots were, as Douglas Hamilton details, ‘disproportionately numerous in the Caribbean’, and ‘extremely successful across a range of activities including planting, trading, medicine and politics’ (2005: 4). Hamilton describes plantation-era social networks as a ‘lattice of connections that enmeshed Scotland, the Caribbean and Britain in a transatlantic complex’ (2005: 78). This ‘complex’ of Scottish colonialism is encoded in James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003), which situates Scotland in uncomfortable trade winds of slavery and plantation economics, and contributes a more rigorous and self-scrutinising national historiography. Carla Sassi describes the novel as a ‘lens through which

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national “myths of justice” are called into question and firmly challenged’ (2007: 192); Mariadele Boccardi sees it as a ‘programmatic reaction against the elegiac treatment of Scotland’s past’ (2007: 97). This chapter will expand on these notions by widening the interpretive ambit of Robertson’s novel, reading it alongside another prominent text in postcolonial ‘slave fiction’, David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress (1999). Franco Moretti’s description of the aims of comparative literature as necessarily ‘a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures’ (2000: 68) guides the alignment of texts; the chapter contends that A Harlot’s Progress provokes a more unsettling and disruptive reading of Scotland’s historiography in Joseph Knight, galvanised by distinctively Caribbean literary devices. Reading Joseph Knight ‘internationally’ provides a way to realise the productive tension between its regional-nationalinternational parameters effectively. As in Joseph Knight, recuperating untold or unremembered histories is a key aspect of Dabydeen’s novel, named after Hogarth’s popular images of Georgian dissolution and centred on Mungo, the eponymous harlot’s black pageboy. Moreover, both texts engage in a reflexive form of history-making which responds to theorists from both Caribbean and Scottish contexts. Édouard Glissant’s description of Antillean ‘nonhistory’, the ‘dislocation of the continuum’ and ‘inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it’ (1999: 62), closely resembles Cairns Craig’s Scotland in the aftermath of Scott’s romantic historical novel: ‘a place with a past but a place without a history’ (1999: 118). Each intellectual rejects the primacy of quasi-progressive colonial history as an ultimately hierarchical imposition that must be undone through creative forms of revision. Disconnection from rational, reliable history characterises A Harlot’s Progress, a metafictional pastiche of famous eighteenth-century slave narratives such as those of Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano.1 The story of Mungo takes inspiration from these autobiographies, presenting the inherent conflict that exists between representing the voiceless of slavery, espousing a political or spiritual message, and the potential for self-enrichment through marketable memoirs. The novel is framed as an autobiography, but one in which Mungo, an aged and destitute former slave recounting a chaotic and contradictory story, struggles with his abolitionist sponsor Pringle for narrative supremacy and the historical authority it confirms. These character names are not incidental. Mungo’s own name possesses rich significance in a Scottish context, not only pertaining to the founding myths of Glasgow but also to Mungo Park, a colonialera explorer of West Africa (Fry 2002: 175); Joseph Knight features a rebel slave of the same name, presumably dubbed by Scottish drivers and plantation owners. Thomas Pringle, a Scottish poet and progressive, was head of the Anti-Slavery Society until his death in 1834 (Fry 2002: 142–3); importantly, he facilitated the writing of the memoirs of a famous slave, Mary Prince. In Dabydeen’s novel Mungo’s personal expression – of secondary importance to economic considerations – echoes the lived experience of Prince; Pringle, a renowned

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figure in Scottish resistance to slavery, is renegotiated in A Harlot’s Progress as complicit in the forceful appropriation of slave-narratives for political advantage. Pringle’s list of chapter headings reflect his political objectives for Mungo’s story, scribbled even before the former slave has begun relating it; chapters such as ‘The Beloved Homeland of My Birth: Africa’, ‘The Pitiless Sun: My Plantation Travels’ and ‘Debauched by Service to Moll Hackabout, a Common Prostitute’ (Dabydeen 1999: 6–7) are an early indicator of the idealised and moralising narrative that Pringle hopes to craft. Mungo recognises that ‘Mr Pringle too will replicate Moll and me in lies, [. . .] “[a] beginning, a middle, an end,” is what he demands, promising a novel story’ (275). The ‘novel story’ relates both to novelty and novel form, with origin, progression and closure, illustrating Pringle’s prescriptive intentions. As in Joseph Knight, the act of writing history in A Harlot’s Progress is constructed as a site of postcolonial contestation, where the political and financial power of Pringle the master attempts to exert leverage over Mungo the slave, whose own narrative is his only source of personal power. Analogous with Joseph Knight’s extrapolation of ‘formal structures which deny the progressive force of history’ (Craig 1999: 166), Mungo – like Knight – rebels against the colonial imposition of both public and private versions of history. Mungo’s own narration is purposefully contradictory and overlapping. The conditions of his birth and parentage, the fate of his tribe, the reasons for his physical scarring, the actions of his owners and patrons are all mutable threads which are told and retold in a wilfully contradictory way. From this fragmentary narrative emerges a distinctively polyvalent tale, which emphasises the multiplicity of possible lives, pathways and stories that are not traversed in conventional forms of colonial historical fiction. Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace describes Mungo’s tale as: another way of understanding history, not as a rational unfolding, but as a swirling, chaotic vortex of events, in which individuals randomly clutch at bits and pieces in a vain attempt to make something of their world. (2000: 250) History as a ‘rational unfolding’ echoes the ‘progressive force’ against which Craig argues. This vortex can be read as an attempt to shatter colonial representations and expectations, and as a markedly postcolonial reaction to the standardising forms, language and ‘whitewashing’ narratives of the metropolitan centre. Like A Harlot’s Progress, Joseph Knight subverts claims to historical clarity that refuse to admit colonial responsibility; foregrounding the kinds of misinformation and romanticisation which afflict certain popular forms of Scottish historiography that remain resonant not only in Scottish popular life but also in notions of Scottish culture globally. The protagonist is a Scottish nobleman and Jacobite sympathiser, John Wedderburn, who is propelled into West Indian exile after Culloden. Wedderburn experiences the violent modernity of that defeat

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on Scottish history as a young man in attendance at the battle, as a plantation owner, and finally as an aged and wealthy gentleman returned – with his servant / ‘slave’, Joseph Knight, in tow – to Scotland. Wedderburn epitomises the manner in which colonial life renders obsolete Jacobite ideals; in this, his predicament is turned outwards into a metaphor for the modern ‘grey area’ in Scotland’s history of slavery. For Wedderburn, life was a broken expanse of land without design or cultivation, patchworked with bog and rocky outcrops. A trackless moor covered by low cloud – or by smoke. What connected one memory to another, this moment to that moment? You turned around and lost sight of someone, your bearings went astray, you could only dimly see what you had thought was a certain landmark. [. . .] There was no continuous stream, only a torn, faded, incomplete map of wilderness. (Robertson 2004: 27) Just as Mungo portrays an unreliable history of disorientation and fragmentation as a slave, the incipient colonial history of Scotland speaks through John Wedderburn’s own failing memory and disrupted sense of location, belonging and personal history, reflecting the absence of a ‘larger national trajectory of progress and constitution’ in which to participate (Boccardi 2007: 104). This trajectory deteriorates on a ‘broken expanse of land’ or ‘trackless moor’ shrouded by smoke; and the clear signification of Culloden represents the rupture that the battle and its subsequent imaginative treatment inflicted on coherent national narratives. The extended metaphor of Wedderburn’s life as ‘dream-like flight that had begun on Drummossie Moor, and from which he did not know when he would come to rest’ (50–1) represents not only his troubled coming-of-age and successive geographic and ideological dislocations, but also the public ‘dream’ of Scottish history: that disengagement from the category of the world-historical, manifested in ‘an escapism which turns the past into a romantic fiction’ (Craig 1999: 117). Joseph Knight must, in part, be read as contrapuntal: as postcolonially informed counter to the wilful amnesia of the likes of Wedderburn; an acknowledgment of Scottish colonial history, and one that does not exempt Scotland from involvement in some of the worst features of imperial history. The figurative language of dream, distortion and unreality continues throughout Joseph Knight, to emphasise the imaginative gap between Scotland and Jamaica: one of the colonial connections silenced in romanticised history. Jamaica remains a space not simply geographically separate from Scotland, but existent in an entirely different, parallel reality, where each direction of Atlantic crossing is like ‘stepping through a magical glass into an unreal world’ (Robertson 2004: 165). This ‘unreality’ of Jamaica is continually returned to in the novel: ‘the plantations became like places in a dream almost before he stepped ashore’ (164), a landscape with ‘something almost unreal about its perfection’ (67). Through this resistance to historical memory, Scotland’s part in Caribbean slavery is misappropriated, broken, rendered unreal. This in turn obscures

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histories, economies and people that connect Scotland and the Caribbean; the novel opens out a critique not only of the romantic national perspective, but also of the failure to conceptualise Scotland postcolonially as a colonial international actor. This is exemplified by the return of Wedderburn’s regimental colours; lost since Culloden, their return encourages him to envisage his Jamaican and Jacobite past as neatly sealed off from his newfound British imperial wealth. Their return ‘seemed to close a circle. [. . .] That felt like fate’ (2004: 192–3). The intervention / excuse of ‘fate’ allows a curtain to be drawn across Wedderburn’s colonial history, freeing him from the uncertainty of his Scottish Jacobite sympathies and alleviating his colonial guilt. However, the circle remains resolutely unclosed by the open rebellion of Knight. As a symbol of Wedderburn’s own rebellion and an intimate – but eventually public – link to Jamaica, Knight embodies the irreconcilable past, a living history of Scottish slavery which haunts and thwarts any attempt to cauterise a progressive Scottish historical narrative that fails to confront the truths of its Caribbean legacy in the present. A Harlot’s Progress similarly provides a challenge to the relationship between centre and periphery, slave and master, reflecting a postcolonial awareness of the subtleties of such relations beyond a ‘simplifying polarity between victimisers and victims’ (Pagnoulle 2007: 182). It seeks simultaneously to historicise and defamiliarise. Abuse at the hands of the slave-ship captain, Thomas Thistlewood, is described by Mungo – perversely – as a form of affection: ‘He pushed me to the ground in a reflex action, stamped his feet at my crotch, kicked me, and kicked me, until I fainted with the love’ (Dabydeen 1999: 57). Even the agonising, dehumanising act of branding is framed by Mungo’s ‘gratitude’: [E]ven if it is true that he stamped his foot upon my neck to stop me from wriggling so as to better brand my forehead with his initials, I felt no terror then, only gratitude for being baptized into his faith. (75) There is undoubtedly an element of wilful shock at work here: a Fanon-like gesture of defiance in the face of Pringle’s abolitionist appeal to ‘customary guilt’ (70). Mungo, resisting Pringle’s appropriation of his story, asserts control over his own narrative and powerfully (and, of course, ironically) repudiates being cast in the role of victim. Describing the redemptive influence he exerts over Thistlewood, Mungo insists that ‘[i]t is my presence which has converted him to Christian ways’ (71), adding ‘do not ask me how and why and wherefore of such cure, for love cannot disclose its alchemy’ (73). The slave appropriates the missionary rhetoric of Pringle, co-opting his righteousness and religious zeal for his own purpose. A conventional triptych of violent abuser, abused slave and liberating abolitionist is rotated; the slave adopts the role of lover / redeemer, the slaver becomes the victim, and the abolitionist the commodifier of the lives of slaves. The instability of Mungo’s story is underscored by a postcolonial desire to tell a story that breaks through routine cycles of oppression and victimhood, seizing ‘authority’ in a sense of both inventiveness and empowerment.

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Joseph Knight’s treatment of Scottish–slave connections also goes beyond what might be recognised as an orthodox recapitulation and admonition of Scotland’s role in slavery, to a nuanced depiction of Scottish–slave relations which are bound up with the insecurity of personal and national history, and the development of a postcolonial consciousness. Rigid colonial polarities of master and slave begin to disintegrate around the issue of rebellion, which is transposed from a Scottish setting at Culloden to Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica. In sparing the rebel slave Charlie, John is eager to absolve him, stating ‘I believe he went against his will’ (124). The concession of ‘will’ or self-determination undercuts the premise of slavery, where bondage is enabled by the suppression or total denial of will; thus, even considering Charlie to be capable of making a political choice can be seen as a powerful indicator of common humanity in slave-holding society. John’s internal monologue explicates this sudden humanity: ‘Charlie did not remind him only of [Wedderburn’s brother] Sandy: he reminded him of himself. A man went out for a while, and came back to find that the world had changed for ever’ (125). John sees a reflection of his own subjectivity in the slave, and imagines a common experience of anti-colonial uprising that links Charlie the slave to Charles Stuart. The slave and slaver are not reconciled, but a schism develops between Wedderburn’s membership of the plantocracy and his Jacobite sympathies; mutual rebellions draw the subjectivities of master and slave closer together. Foreshadowing the significant emotional connection between Wedderburn and Knight, the mutuality of significant strands of Scottish and Caribbean histories is suggested effectively, without relinquishing focus on the evident distinguishing factors of slavery and colonisation. Here there is room to accommodate the anti-colonial thread in Scottish history, without settling for a defensive notion of Scottish involvement in British empire as its benevolent, morally corrective wing. James Wedderburn is similarly troubled by an implied connection between slave and staunch Jacobite: the mutuality between the death of his father in Cumberland’s post-1745 reprisals and the execution of slave rebels in Savannala-Mar. As recorded in Sandy’s journal, James comments on the death of Sir John Wedderburn Sr: ‘It was life he saw that he stared at so hard. He did not wish to go even after what they had done to him. He did not wish to be taken from this world [. . .] I have seen it since’ (158–9). In conversation with John, he attempts to minimise the comparison by claiming he witnessed the death of ‘only a neger’ (123), but is betrayed by his voice, ‘suddenly weak with fatigue’ (123). The impassive dehumanisation that James practises as the most vocal proponent of slavery is confounded by the similarity in suffering between his father and the unnamed slave, which persists in his memory long after their executions. He offers a reckless allusion to his peers in recognising, and validating, the potential for revolutionary spirit amongst the slave population, noting it is ‘[s]trange that the one name you never hear is the one that might fit best. [. . .] Spartacus’ (110). John and James Wedderburn are shown to develop a nascent postcolonial consciousness, through the uncomfortable, but undeniable, shared humanity

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with slaves emergent through their interactions, and the physical violence of imperialism. As a site which unifies the distinct coastal points of the slave trade and symbolises the intense immediate and resonant trauma of the Middle Passage, the ship plays a significant role in further establishing dynamics between slave and master in both novels. In A Harlot’s Progress, Mungo’s slave-ship experiences invoke the culturally significant collective memory of the Middle Passage, but the ship is also a space where provocative symbolism and transgressive relationships contradict conventional depictions of suffering. Sexual violence committed against slaves by a sadistic crew is metaphorically depicted as a ‘banquet’, a ‘feast’ and ‘festivity’ (Dabydeen 1999: 141), alluding to the consumption of slave-narratives as simultaneously moralising tale and pornography. Thistlewood’s sexual abuse of Mungo becomes confused and inverted during the journey, as Mungo becomes dominant, Thistlewood subordinate and coquettish: ‘He twirled his forefinger in his hair in a feminine motion’; ‘His weakness emboldened me, and when he did not reply, his face flush with coyness I demanded him to tell me’ (68–9). The purposeful destabilising of power relations during the Middle Passage echoes Mungo’s earlier rejection of guilt and sympathy, seizing a right to representation that reveals the novel’s challenge to the conventional Western imagining of slave experience. Transgression against the representation of colonial / slave norms is also a key aspect of the return voyage from Jamaica to Scotland in Joseph Knight. In such a crucible, allocated roles are forgotten and new relationships are formed: ‘rules of behaviour – codes of ownership and obedience – reshaped themselves’ (Robertson 2004: 365). The Atlantic is the site of a pressing and intimate engagement in the relationship between Knight and Wedderburn: Wedderburn the master did not chastise, did not curse, did not neglect: as if he were his father, the father Joseph did not remember, he cared for him. Lying unable to speak, Joseph saw that Wedderburn was desperate to love and be loved; [. . .] [f]or a moment there on the ship, they were two sides of the same coin. (2004: 367) Initially, the conventions that govern master and slave are disrupted by Wedderburn’s adoption of guardianship, a parental role. These conventions are then stripped down to the bare minimum by his subsequent pleading and abasement: ‘Joseph, I beg you, do not die on me. This is no place for you to die.’ [. . .] He took Joseph’s left hand in his two, brought it to his mouth, kissed it. Joseph was too weak to resist. But he felt the kiss. (2004: 368–9) The rhetoric of paternalism that Wedderburn shows towards Knight throughout the novel can be read as a postcolonial critique of Scottish colonialism in the

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Caribbean (and globally), where Western-colonial ideas of ‘civilising’, through Presbyterian missionary zeal, large-scale migration and economic investment, mask exploitative realities. Although the kiss could conceivably be read as homoerotic, it is unlike the overtly sexual relationship between Thistlewood and Mungo. Wedderburn’s open expression of affection towards Knight is fleeting, and is subsumed back into the patterns of commodifying and controlling of ownership; the ‘pornographic’ element of colonial slavery vividly expressed in A Harlot’s Progress is downplayed. Instead, Knight rejects these paternal advances of Wedderburn on the basis of a claim to ownership, specifying that the kiss was ‘a mark not of kindness but of guilt’ and that ‘in claiming to own Joseph, he destroyed the possibility of goodness between them’ (Robertson 2004: 369). Wedderburn’s generosity, paternalism, prayer and affection are a specifically ‘benevolent’ colonialist counter-balance to the imposition of bondage. But his fixation on Knight as an aspect of his property is the point on which all mutuality between the two breaks down, representative of slavery as the ultimate commodifying, alienating practice and, once again, an exposure of the myth of Scottish colonial benevolence. The voyage and encounter suggest another twisting of the Middle Passage, an inversion where the ship returns from the West Indies to Britain, with the act of supplication reversed and the master deprived of power; Knight’s return is a literal, inexorable ‘coming home’ of the legacy of slavery to Scotland, a return which echoes in the novel’s contemporaneous concern with what Graeme Macdonald has delineated as the ‘accommodation [of] non- and “New” Scots’ at this juncture of Devolution (2010a: 97). The embodied ‘economic’ conflict between Mungo and Mr Pringle is also fought on cultural terrain. Language introduces a further postcolonial concern: the linguistic conflict between a regulated Standard English and ‘deviations’ such as Creole,2 or – as Robertson’s novel demonstrates – ‘Scotticisms’. Dabydeen has in fact argued that, linguistically, ‘the north / south divide [in Britain] is of course evocative of the divide between the so-called Caribbean periphery and the metropolitan centre’ (1990: 4); that, as an example, Scottish and Caribbean voices are similar, as ‘peripheral’, non-standard English forms, countering the Standard English of the colonial metropole. The relationship of English to Mungo’s Creole and a variety of Scottish voices, across the two texts, provides a valid critical basis for such a comparison. The social stigma of Mungo’s language is encapsulated by his self-consciously exaggerated pidgin: ‘nigger does munch and crunch the English, nigger does jape and jackass with the language . . . Let me talk like dis and dat till the day come that I die’ (Dabydeen 1999: 5). He instructs Pringle to ‘put this down in your book . . . properize it in your best English’ (11). It is, however, apparent that Mungo’s capability with English is far from the limited kind he seeks to show. His range of expression varies from ludic and comical to passages ‘sustained by a polished diction worthy of a European classical tragedy’ (Pagnoulle 2007: 193). One internal monologue begins with the sing-song ‘So the Lady leak and the man bring me here as cork-piece or what?’ and ends seamlessly with ‘Even the seas are in thrall of the decorum and manners that are to

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girdle me, by Lord Montague’s command’ (204–5), a sharp contrast between caricatures of Creole and an overly refined and lyrical English. Mungo draws attention to the imperial relationship between regional variants, dialects and Standard English, indicating that his mastery of the latter does not preclude his desire to express himself in the former. Echoing Mungo, the historical and contemporary tension between nonstandard Scottish forms and Standard English in Joseph Knight is encoded with issues of imperialism and slavery. The text approaches the post-Union hierarchal linguistic relationship of Scotland and England in an anti-colonial way: resisting the homogenising power of Standard English, highlighting the role of some Scots in opposing slavery and British imperial interests. Although Robertson’s novel complicates this opposition by occasionally casting Scottish vocabulary in a negative aspect (plantation owner George Kinloch and pro-slavery Lord Arniston speak Scots words strategically – seeking cultural efficacy), and conversely allows emancipation sentiments to be spoken in an eloquent English (the voice of Samuel Johnson, for example), linguistic identity substantially signifies a colonial division in Joseph Knight. In the earliest stages of the narrative, the primarily Standard English of colonial oppressor John Wedderburn grates against the Scots dialect of Archibald Jamieson. When Jamieson suggests that ‘time saftens sair herts’ and that Wedderburn seeks Knight for the payment of compensation, Wedderburn irately dismisses it as a ‘couthy proverb’ (11). Isolated in the context of Wedderburn’s English, ‘couthy’, meaning friendly with a connotation of lacking sophistication, acts as a pejorative symbol for Scots. An early opposition is presented between Scottish dialect and Standard English, one that punctuates both Wedderburn’s interpellation, from Jacobite rebel into British imperialist, and the prospective resistance Jamieson’s language offers against that imperialism. This linguistic opposition is reinforced in subsequent encounters, including two important confrontations at the courts. The civil case alternates between the ‘Scotticisms’ of John Maclaurin and the Lord Advocate Henry Dundas on the side of Knight, and the Standard English of Wedderburn’s persuasive counsel, Robert Cullen. A telling altercation occurs between James Wedderburn and Joseph Knight during the court’s adjournment. ‘[It’s] almost as hot as Jamaica at this time of year. But it’s always hot there. You’ve not forgotten that, have you?’ ‘Lea me alane.’ ‘You’re getting a right Scotch accent, Joseph. You’d almost pass for a native.’ ‘I dinna wish tae speak wi ye.’ (355) Knight’s Scottish-inflected voice is placed in stark contrast to the suppressed hostility of James Wedderburn’s Standard English, the tension between tongues representative of racial and colonial tension in the frame of history. His lan-

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guage and accent demarcate Knight as Scot; when he speaks, his voice is ‘a rich Jamaican ground, overlaid with Scotch sounds and occasional Scotch words, probably pronounced in the tones of Dundee or Perth’ (322). Knight’s acceptance / citizenship is signified by the distinct Scottish accent and words, and the sub-textual suggestion is that Knight has discovered a sense of ‘home’ in Scotland, accentuated by his Scottish wife and the solidarity offered to him by the Wemyss miners. As in A Harlot’s Progress, language in Joseph Knight is bound up with the narration, justification and abolition of slavery, and a postcolonial awareness of the struggle for linguistic legitimacy in the face of Standard English. ‘Correct’ English represents interpellation into the institutions of the British state and the master-narrative of British colonialism, the economic defence of slavery and the plantations, and, vitally, the abrogation of Scottish history manifested through Wedderburn’s personal amnesia. The use of Scots also figuratively represents the idealised unification of a black and white Atlantic working class, and links a significant Scottish national constituency to an egalitarianism diametrically opposed to an Anglocentric British colonialism.3 This equivalence is in conflict with Scotland’s less egalitarian, colonial culpability; salutary historical representations of Scottish dialects and accents risk obfuscating colonial histories, but invite closer scrutiny of the intersection between other linguistic determinants, such as class, locality and colonial practices. To approach regionalism in Britain from another angle, A Harlot’s Progress shows the instability at the heart of the Union instigated by Scotland’s eighteenth-century uprisings. Populist English nationalism is given a voice through Betty, a washerwoman and link in the commodity chain of slavery. Huguenots in London are ‘eroding the foundation of the country’ in a ‘conspiracy with Papists and Jacobites to create chaos’ (Dabydeen 1999: 143). Fearful of Mungo’s superior education, she curses him: ‘ “You are nothing but Captain Thistlewood’s – Thistlewood’s – ” she struggles to find the right word and suddenly it emerges from her mouth with appalling clarity “ – Jacobite.” She shrieks at the sound of the word’ (134). The popular associations suggested – conflating sodomites, Jacobites, slaves, Catholics, Jews and political subversives – are associations between elements that threaten hegemonic English rule from within the borders of a young Britain. The political agenda of England is further drawn into the question of slavery. Mungo recognises that in Pringle’s rhetoric, abolition is co-opted into the political aims of Protestantism and unionism: I am to become a crucial instrument in Mr Pringle’s scheme to rescue England from its enemies. Mr Pringle will demonstrate the slavery that lies at the heart of Catholic worship [. . .] and will contrast the freedoms fostered by Anglicanism. (144) Abolitionism is here revealed as serving the interests of an Anglocentric Protestantism that equates Jacobite Catholicism with the ideology of slavery;

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abolition is employed to illustrate the ideological and moral superiority of England. Like Betty, ‘Pringle sees danger to England’s Christian fabric everywhere, in the shape of Jew and Papist, Jacobite and callous merchant’ (Dabydeen 1999: 276). Thus, at a critical juncture of tension within the fledgling Union, slavery’s moral division is projected on to the imagined, popular division between Protestant and Catholic, England and Scotland. Although superficially the instigators and instability are labelled along sectarian, and by extension national, divides, Betty’s judgments go on to suggest rigid social conservatism and class-consciousness: Give them time and they’ll be arguing that men and women, noble folk and vagrants should be equal too, and they would urge people to riot and burn down all that makes this country the greatest in the world. But no Christian and true-born Englishman will heed their dangerous talk. (132) Hierarchies of race, class and gender such as those Betty describes are easily transposed to modern relevance, and it is similarly not difficult to read a contemporary encoding of a struggle for official national identity within Britain. Betty mistakenly equates England and Britain, the ‘greatest in the world’; populist xenophobia and conflict with internal and external forces is coupled with a commitment to English national character without an accurate gauge of its form. The revolutionary and socialist sentiments of England’s mortal enemies can be read as a representation of modern postcolonial attitudes to the British empire, including those from some leftist elements in Scotland. The short concluding chapter of Joseph Knight, in which Knight finally focalises, presents a contradiction to the meticulous historicising in the rest of the novel. Sassi suggests that Knight is ‘never a “real” person, but lives in the conflicting and fleeting memories and emotions of those who remember, fear, pity or distrust him’ (2007: 194); the effect of the hitherto oblique characterisation is to create a strongly symbolic figure who can be read only through reaction. At Wemyss, Knight follows the examples of Mungo and seizes the authority to speak for himself, having been conveyed previously through the voices and memories of others. However, the sudden deployment of his ‘own’ voice is a key difference from A Harlot’s Progress; Robertson’s eventual use of Knight to flesh out fully the subjectivities of a former slave actually echoes Pringle’s attempted appropriation, rather than Mungo’s resistance. Furthermore, in affirming that Wedderburn ‘needed Joseph to survive him; to survive the great wrong he had done him’ (369), the ambiguity that characterised Wedderburn’s search is curtailed. In sharp contrast to A Harlot’s Progress, Joseph Knight suggests the possibility of closure: Knight’s reward of community, ‘friendship, and trust, and once in a while a little stolen delight’ (372), and the redemption of Wedderburn’s flawed character, whose death hints at a final acceptance of and atonement for the ‘great wrong’ he perpetrated against Knight. Wedderburn’s death and Knight’s freedom might imply a progressive ‘resolution’ of the issue of how to understand Scottish slavery,

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a subject that must instead remain open and continuously engaged within a devolved Scotland. Experimental and explorative novels such as Joseph Knight and A Harlot’s Progress provide demanding, unsettling reformulations of history, initiating a precipitous departure from traditions of historical fiction, and casting doubt over the veracity and legitimacy of settled forms of history in favour of polyphonic narrative. Scotland and the Caribbean share a sense of history ‘interrupted’ by colonialism, as posited by Glissant and Craig, yet as Joseph Knight portrays, colonial relations between the two geographies are characterised by the predation of the latter by the former during the decades of slavery and plantation economics. Negotiating a postcolonial understanding of Scottish–Caribbean–British history must recognise this division, maintaining a constant critical focus on slavery as a material and economic reality, but the reward is some degree of mutuality in moulding a colonial past into usable forms, and a prospective exchange of literary strategies of resistance and re-imagining. NOTES 1. Recent editions of these texts have been published by London Penguin, edited by Vincent Carretta: Ignatius Sancho (1998) [1782], Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African; Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (1999) [1787], Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery; Olaudah Equiano (2003) [1789], The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. 2. Dabydeen’s English-based Creole is related to, but distinct from, forms in the Francophone Caribbean such as those focused on by Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant. See Dabydeen (1990). 3. Michael Morris (2008) comprehensively assesses issues of class in Joseph Knight, drawing on Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) for a theoretical framework.

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Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Liam Connell is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Winchester. He has published on Scottish literature and postcolonialism, and globalisation and contemporary literature in journals including ARIEL, CSSAAME, Interventions and Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and in the collections Globalisation and its Discontents (2006) and Global Babel (2007). He is the co-editor of Literature and Globalization: A Reader (Routledge 2010). Leith Davis is a Professor in the Department of English and the Director of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in Greater Vancouver, Canada. Her publications include Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation (1998), Music, Postcolonialism and Gender: The Construction of Irish Identity, 1724–1874 (2005) and Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (co-edited with Ian Duncan and Janet Sorensen, 2004). A co-edited collection of essays, Robert Burns in Transatlantic Culture (co-edited with Sharon Alker and Holly Nelson), is forthcoming from Ashgate Press. Linda Dryden is Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh Napier University and Director of the Centre for Literature and Writing (CLAW). She is the author of Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance and The Modern Gothic: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, both published by Palgrave. Her publications on Conrad are numerous, including ‘Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture’ and ‘Conrad and Wells: A Literary Friendship’. She is also the co-editor of the Journal of Stevenson Studies and a volume of edited essays, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad: Writers of Land and Sea. She is responsible for establishing the Stevenson website, www.robert-louis-stevenson.org. She is currently working on a research project on Conrad, Wells and Modernism. Bashabi Fraser is Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University. Her most recent creative publication is a modern epic poem, From the Ganga to the Tay (2009). She is editor of Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter (2006) and A Meeting of Two Minds: The Geddes Tagore Letters (2007). Other poetry collections include Life (1997), With Best Wishes from Edinburgh,

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An Indian Edition (2001) and Tartan and Turban (2004). She has co-edited the poetry anthologies, Edinburgh: An Intimate City, An Illustrated Anthology of Poetry on Edinburgh (2000) and Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures (2003). She is now finishing a novel, a book of life stories in verse about the experience of migrants in collaboration with the photographer, Herman Roderigues. Evan Gottlieb is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University, where he teaches courses in the literature of the long eighteenth century and critical theory. He is the author of Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (2007), and the co-editor (with Ian Duncan) of Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels (2009) and (with Juliet Shields) of Localism and Regionalism in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830 (forthcoming). He has recently completed a new manuscript, Romanticism and Globalization: British Literature and the Making of Modern World Order, 1750–1830. Christopher Harvie is Emeritus Professor of British and Irish Studies at Tuebingen, where he taught from 1980 to 2007. He has visiting Chairs at Aberystwyth and Strathclyde, and until May 2010 was Regional Member of the Scottish Parliament for Mid-Scotland and Fife in the Scottish National Party interest, and policy adviser to the First Minister, Alex Salmond. He has published or edited sixteen books on Scottish, British and European history, and his study of ‘West Britain’ in the steam age, Floating Commonwealth (2008), was widely acclaimed. Joseph Jackson is a doctoral candidate working on Scottish literature and Caribbean Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His PhD thesis examines colonial history, cosmopolitanism and race in contemporary Scottish literature. Iain Lambert is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Kyorin University, Tokyo. His primary fields of interest in terms of research are in World Englishes and postcolonial literature, in particular the use of non-standard forms and the status of Pidgins in literature. Stefanie Lehner is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies at University College Dublin. Previous publications include articles on contemporary Irish, Northern Irish and Scottish literature and postcolonialism. Her book, Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature: Tracing Counter-Histories, is to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Scott Lyall is Lecturer in Modern Literature at Edinburgh Napier University, having previously taught at Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Exeter. He is the author of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic (2006). Margery Palmer McCulloch is Senior Research Fellow in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow and co-editor of the scholarly journal, Scottish Literary

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Review. She has published widely on Scottish literature. Her books include monographs on Neil M. Gunn and Edwin Muir, an edited collection of essays on Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Modernism and Nationalism: Source Documents for the Scottish Renaissance (2004), and most recently Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959 (2010). She has recently co-edited a collection of essays on Hugh MacDiarmid for the Edinburgh Companion series. Douglas S. Mack was Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Stirling. He was founding General Editor of Edinburgh University Press’s Stirling / South Carolina Research Edition of James Hogg, a member of the Advisory Board of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, and editor of various volumes within those series. He published widely in the field of Scottish literature, including the monograph Scottish Fiction and the British Empire (2006). Kristen Mahlis is a Lecturer in the Multicultural and Gender Studies Program at California State University, Chico. She has published articles on Caribbean literature and Postcolonial Theory in Callaloo, Modern Fiction Studies, ARIEL and the Journal of West Indian Literature. She is completing a book manuscript entitled The Haitian Revolution in the Transatlantic Imagination. Willy Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Glasgow University and author of A Spenser Chronology (1994), Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997) and Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003). He is editor of Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (1993), Postcolonial Criticism (1997), A View of the Present State of Ireland (1997), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002), Shakespeare and Scotland (2004), Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas (2007), Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly (2010), This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on the Bard and Englishness (2010) and The Edinburgh Companion to Muriel Spark (2010). Marina MacKay is Associate Professor of English at Washington University in St Louis, where she teaches twentieth-century British fiction. Her publications include Modernism and World War II (2007), the Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (forthcoming 2010) and, as co-editor with Lyndsey Stonebridge, British Fiction After Modernism (2007). Martin McQuillan is Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis and co-founder of the London Graduate School. He is also Dean of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University. His latest publications include Deconstruction After 9/11 (2009) and Roland Barthes: or the Profession of Cultural Studies (2010). David Punter is currently Professor of English at the University of Bristol, having previously held Chairs at Fudan University Shanghai, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Stirling. He is the author of numerous books and articles on romantic, Gothic and contemporary literature, on literary theory,

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and on postcolonial and Scottish writing. His most relevant book to this project is Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (2000); his most recent is Rapture: Literature, Addiction, Secrecy (2009). Alan Riach is Professor of Scottish Literature in the Department of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, the General Editor of the Collected Works of Hugh MacDiarmid and the author of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Epic Poetry (1991), The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid (1999), Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography (2005) and, with Alexander Moffat, Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland (2008), as well as five books of poems: This Folding Map (1990), An Open Return (1991), First and Last Songs (1995), Clearances (2001) and Homecoming (2009). From 1986 to 2000 he worked at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, where he helped initiate courses in Scottish, Irish and Postcolonial literatures, and Creative Writing. Victoria Sheppard has a PhD in contemporary British poetry from the University of Southampton. Her research interests include experimental poetics, notions of voice, the lyric, poetic crossovers with art, and the history of poetry performance in the UK. She is a research skills coordinator at the University of Salford. Katie Trumpener is Emily Sanford Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale; the author of Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (1997) and recent articles on Austen and the colonial New Woman novel, the history of the novel and the picture book, and Central European cinema; and the editor, with the late Richard Maxwell, of The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (2008). She is currently completing a monograph about Cold War cinema culture, and working on another about the nursery memories of European modernists.

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Index

Aberdeen Soviet, 139 abolition of slavery, 159, 161, 235, 238, 243–4 Aboulela, Leila, 185–97 ‘Barbie in the Mosque’, 189 Coloured Lights, 189 ‘The Boy from the Kebab Shop’, 189 ‘The Museum’, 189, 195 ‘The Sea Warrior’, 189, 197n The Translator, 12, 185–92, 195–7 Achebe, Chinua, 11, 68, 124–35, 201 African Trilogy, 126, 127 Morning Yet on Creation Day, 132 Things Fall Apart, 68, 126, 127, 130, 131, 188 Act of Union, 30, 47, 115, 124, 125, 225; see also Anglo-Scottish Union Adagboyin, Asomwan S., 201 Adams, Tim, 198 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 188 Afghanistan, 5, 159 Africa, 3, 8, 17–18, 19, 22–4, 29, 68, 69, 89, 90, 91, 98, 107–8, 116, 117, 120, 122, 125, 130, 136, 138, 161, 175, 179, 184, 187–9, 190 African Affairs, 187 African literature, 188 African National Congress, 116 Agee, James, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, 53 Ahmad, Aijaz, 142, 174 Aiken, William, 26 Akekue, Doris, 201, 202 Alasdair, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir see MacDonald, Alexander Algeria, 121 Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin, 6 Amin, Samir, 137, 139, 146 Anderson, Benedict, 124, 204, 222

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Anderson, Robert Rowand, 73, 76 Anglicisation, 28, 125, 160 Anglo-American Copyright Treaty, 73 Anglocentrism, 2, 29, 82, 243 Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 185 Anglo-Scottish Union, 31–2, 40, 177; see also Act of Union Annan, Noel, 74 anthropology, 74, 79, 82, 139, 166 anticolonialism, 29, 111, 115, 174, 193, 224, 226, 239 anti-Semitism, 155 Anti-Slavery Society, 235 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 140 Arabian Knights, 141, 168 Archer, William, 81 Arendt, Hannah, 11, 147, 153–5, 156 Armour, Jean, 15 Arnold, Matthew, 225 Artin, Yacoub Pasha, 186 Ascherson, Neil, 9 Ashcroft, Bill, 4, 200, 203, 204, 223 Atwood, Margaret, 30–42, 43, 50, 62 Alias Grace, 10, 30 The Journals of Susanna Moodie, 56 Auden, W. H., 139 Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park, 162 Australia, 71, 138 Ba, Mariama, Scarlet Song, 195 Babylonians, 137 Bagehot, Walter, 72 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9, 177 Ballantyne, R. M., 89, 95 The Coral Island, 89 Balzac, Honoré de, 46 Bamiro, Edmund O., 202 Banim, John and Michael, 46

11/05/2011 09:04

Index Baraka, Amiri, 181 Barbados, 17 Barrie, J. M., 84 Barthes, Roland, 149, 150, 151 Baucom, Ian, 2, 162 Baxter, Charles, 93 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 116 Bell, Eleanor, 9, 135n Ben-Gurian, David, 154 Benn, Tony, 84 Beveridge, Craig, 8, 225 Bhabha, Homi, 34, 176, 212 Bible, 75, 83, 153 Black, Ronald, 61, 64 Black British writing, 6, 115, 173 Blackie, Professor John Stewart, 79 Blackwell, Thomas, 60 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 51, 86, 88, 94 Blake, William, 74, 106, 108n Blaut, J. M., 137–8, 139 Boccardi, Mariadele, 235 Boehmer, Elleke, 87, 89, 93, 136 Boer War, 116 Bohrer, Martha, 54 Boland, Eavan, 223 Booker Prize, 198, 199 Bowen, Elizabeth, The Last September, 161 Boyd, S. J., 231 Boyd, William, 201, 203 Boys’ Brigade, 78 Brandes, Georg, 81 Brant, John, 44 Brathwaite, Kamau, 8, 10, 15–29, 181 ‘Caliban’, 21, 24 ‘History of the Voice’, 22 ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel’, 21 ‘Mother Poem’, 29n ‘Nametracks’, 22 ‘Sycorax Video Style’, 28 The Arrivants, 17 Brice, David, 15 British American Land Company, 46 British Empire, 3, 11, 16, 43, 49–50, 58, 66, 99, 114, 118, 124, 163, 215, 239, 244 ‘British homogeneity thesis’, 70 British identity, 9, 29, 33, 34, 36, 40, 173–4 British Imperialism, 45, 68, 112, 114, 117, 124, 163, 223, 238, 242 British India, 212–13, 216 British multiculturalism, 2, 6 British State, 1–2, 6, 32, 36, 115, 124, 174, 225, 227, 243 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 159–66, 185, 190, 191

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 275

275

Brothers Grimm, 82 Brown, George Douglas, The House with the Green Shutters, 75–6 Bruce, James of Kinnaird, 185 Bryant, Sophie, 72 Buchan, John, 8, 11, 62, 70, 83, 98–108 Prester John, 98–108 The Power-House, 136 Burns, Robert, 10, 15–29, 113, 217 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, 15–16, 19 ‘Address to the Deil’, 23 ‘Epistle to Davie’, 23 ‘Epistle to John Lapraik’, 20, 26 ‘Halloween’, 24 ‘It was upon a Lammas Night’, 27 ‘On a Scotch Bard Gone to the West Indies’, 29 ‘The Auld Farmer’s New-Year-Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare’, 27 ‘The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer’, 27 ‘The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie’, 27 ‘The Holy Fair’, 23 ‘To William Simpson, Ochiltree’, 20 Cabral, Amilcar, 222 Cairns, David, 225 Calder, Angus, 3 Calvet, Louis-Jean, 148 calypso, 24, 28 Campbell, Ian, 137 Campbell, James, 198 Campbell, Mary, 15 Canada, 10–11, 30, 37, 71 Canada Company, 44–5 Canadian Family Compact, 45–6 Canadian literature, 44, 50 Canadian nationalism, 44, 50 cannibals, 94 canonicity, 5, 7–8 capitalism, 31, 132, 139, 146, 175, 176, 183 Caribbean, 8, 16, 101 Caribbean English, 181 Caribbean linguistics, 10 Carlyle, Thomas, 8, 11, 70–85 ‘Characteristics’, 74 ‘Chartism’, 70, 83 Frederick the Great, 70, 71, 73, 79 ‘Hudson Statue’, 75 Latter-Day Pamphlets, 77, 79, 80 Past and Present, 71 Sartor Resartus, 74, 77, 79, 84 ‘Shooting Niagara – and After?’, 79 ‘Signs of the Times’, 71, 77, 85

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276

Index

Carnegie, Andrew, 82, 84 Carpenter, Edward, 83 Carretta, Vincent, 245n Carroll, Clare, 4 Carruthers, Gerard, 16 Carter, Mia, 199 Casanova, Pascale, 5 Catholicism, 149–51, 156 Celtic Twilight, 129, 135 Central Africa, 116 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 168 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 212 Chalmers, Thomas, 82 Chambers, Claire, 194, 197 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 245n Cheyette, Bryan, 148 Child, Francis, 82 Chow, Rey, 176, 178, 183 Chrisman, Laura, 222 Christianson, Aileen, 225 Christie, Agatha, 152 citizenship, 7 Cixous, Hélène, 156 Claim of Right, 9 Clark, Alan, 199 class, 159, 174–7, 179, 180–1, 183, 184n, 224 Clouston, William Alexander, 81 Coats, J. P., 84 Coetzee, J. M., Foe, 56 Cohen, Leonard, 50 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 122 Colley, Linda, 125 colonial encounter, 86–7, 185, 196, 224 colonialism, 138, 145, 161, 174–5, 177–8, 187, 190, 197, 212, 234, 240, 243, 245 colonisation, 2, 125, 128, 137, 175, 178, 225–6, 239 Columbus, Christopher, 22, 25, 48 Colvin, Sydney, 92 Confiant, Raphael, 245n Congo, 96 Connell, Jim, 83 Connell, Liam, 9, 12 Connolly, James, 222 Conrad, Joseph, 49, 55, 86–97 Almayer’s Folly, 88–9, 93, 94 An Outcast of the Islands, 88, 93, 94 ‘An Outpost of Progress’, 93 Heart of Darkness, 11, 87, 89–90, 92–4, 96–7, 106, 185, 187, 195 Lord Jim, 89 Nostromo, 94 Constitutional Assembly (1988), 9 Coombes, Annie, 86 Copernicus, 143

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 276

Cornwallis, 216 Coronil, Fernando, 175–6 Cortez, Jane, 181 cosmopolitanism, 5, 10, 72, 111, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 145, 152 Coulter, Carol, 222 Crabbe, George, The Borough, 54 Craig, Cairns, 5, 9, 120, 209, 229, 234, 235, 236, 245 Crane, Hart, 112 Crawford, Robert, 7, 8 Creeley, Robert, 112 creole, 241–2 creolisation, 17–18, 24, 28 Crockett, S. R., 75–6 Cromwell, Oliver, 58–9 Cugoano, Ottobah, 235, 245n Culloden, 59–60, 65, 66, 125, 236–7, 239 cultural imperialism, 29n, 64 cummings, e. e., 112 Cunninghame Graham, R. B., 83 Currie, Sir James, 186 Dabydeen, David, 179, 235–45 A Harlot’s Progress, 235–45 Dallas, E. S., 81 Dangerfield, George, 70 Dante Alighieri, 19 Darfur, 197 Darien Colony, 47, 196 Darwin, Charles, 75, 77 Davidson, John, 75 Davis, Leith, 4, 10 Deane, Seamus, 4 decolonisation, 1–2, 5, 8 Defoe, Daniel, 11 Deleuze, Gilles, 15 democratic deficit, 225 Derrida, Jacques, 147–52, 156, 228 Devine, T. M., 125 devolution, 3, 5, 6, 8–10, 119, 241, 245 Devolution Referendum (1979), 124, 229 diaspora, 62, 74, 177, 179, 218; see also Scots Diaspora Dicey, A. V., 74, 78 Dick, James C., 28 Dickens, Charles, 72–3 Hard Times, 85 Dictionary of National Biography, 73, 84 diffusionism, 11, 136–40, 145 Dirlik, Arif, 175 Disraeli, Benjamin, 72–3, 77 Tancred, 214 Disruption of 1843, 78 Dominica, 159

11/05/2011 09:04

Index Donaldson, William, 78 Donnachie, Ian, 4 Donne, John, 108n Doyle, Arthur Conan, 136, 199 Doyle, Roddy, The Snapper, 231 Dryden, Linda, 11 dub poetry, 181–2 Duke of Cumberland, 59–60 Duncan, Charles, 15 Duncan, Ian, 4 Dundas, Henry, 242 Dunlop, William ‘Tiger’, 43 Dunnett, Sir Alastair, 73 Durkheim, Émile, 74 Earl of Roseberry, 72, 78 ecology, 214 Education Act of 1872, 125 Egypt, 11, 136, 138–9, 141 Eichmann, Adolf, 11, 148, 153–6 Eliot, George, 72–3 Eliot, T. S., 122, 181 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 73, 83 Engel, Marian, 50 English Literature, 1–3, 5–8, 10, 12, 81, 150, 153 Englishness, 2, 162 Enlightenment, 11, 53, 60, 59–60, 70–5, 77, 79, 81–3, 85, 121, 140, 153, 175 Enloe, Cynthia, 227 Enright, Anne, The Wig My Father Wore, 232 Equiano, Olaudah, 235, 245n Erskine, Thomas of Linlathen, 77, 79 Eurocentrism, 11, 142, 137, 175 exoticism, 89, 94, 96, 98, 127, 214 Fanon, Frantz, 8, 49, 137, 178, 193, 222, 238 Black Skin, White Masks, 176 The Wretched of the Earth, 176 fascism, 139 Faulkner, William, 53 The Sound and the Fury, 161 Feinberg, Barry, 112 feminism, 78, 188, 221–2, 229, 232 Ferguson, Adam, 74, 75 Ferguson, Niall, 138 Fergusson, Robert, 16, 23 Findley, Timothy, 50 Fleming, Ian, 136 Fontane, Theodor, 70 Forster, E. M., 168 A Passage to India, 190, 195 Foster, R. F., 58 Foucault, Michel, 2, 31, 164 Fraser, Bashabi, 12

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 277

277

Frazer, J. G., 85 The Golden Bough, 82 Free Church, 78 Freedgood, Elaine, 161 French, Sir John, 85 French Revolution, 65, 73, 132 Freud, Sigmund, 77, 84, 108, 108n Froude, J. A., 73 Fry, Michael, 62, 63, 91 Gaelic language, 16, 57–63, 118, 128, 133, 134 Gaelic literature, 11, 19, 57–69, 133–4 Galdos, Benitó Pérez, 46 Gallant, Mavis, 43, 51 Galloway, Janice, 228 The Trick is to Keep Breathing, 191, 228–9 Galt, John, 10, 43–56, 62, 75 Annals of the Parish, 47, 50, 53, 54 Autobiography, 45 Bogle Corbet, 43–5, 47, 49, 50, 55 Last of the Lairds, 47 Lawrie Todd, or The Settlers in the Wood, 46 ‘Statistical Account of Upper Canada’, 44 ‘Tales of the West’, 46, 47, 49, 53 The Entail, 47 The Provost, 47 Galt, Sir Alexander Tilloch, 46 Galton, Francis, 84 Gandhi, Mahatma, 213 Gardiner, Michael, 8, 9 Geddes, Patrick, 73, 82 gender, 9, 12, 41, 53, 184, 195, 208, 221–33, 244 Genet, Jean, 152 George, David Lloyd, 71 Ghana, 17 Ghosh, Amitav, 12, 210–20 The Hungry Tide, 210–20 Gibb, Andrew Dewar, 212, 216 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic, 4, 11, 133, 134, 136–46 ‘East is West’, 142, 143 ‘Glasgow’, 138–9 Nine Against the Unknown, 136 Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights, 140 ‘Polychromata’, 140 ‘Revolt’, 144, 145 Scottish Scene, 139 Sunset Song, 136–7, 143 ‘The Antique Scene’, 136 The Calends of Cairo, 140, 142 ‘The Epic’, 141, 144 The Lost Trumpet, 140, 145, 146 The Thirteenth Disciple, 140

11/05/2011 09:04

278

Index

Gifford, Douglas, 137 Gilchrist, Alexander, 74 Gilchrist, Anne, 74, 81 Gilroy, Paul, 245n Ginsberg, Allen, 112 Gladstone, William, 78 Glasgow Boys, 75 Glaswegian English, 178, 182 Glissant, Édouard, 235, 245, 245n Goderich (Canada), 45 Godwin, William, 11 Goebbels, Joseph, 70 Goldberg, Theo, 16 ‘Golden Age’ mythology, 129, 135, 138, 146 Golding, William, Lord of the Flies, 89 Goldsmith, Oliver, 16 ‘The Deserted Village’, 24 Gordon, Charles George, 186 Gosse, Edmund, 92 Gothic, 2, 53, 91, 96, 160–2 Gottlieb, Evan, 10 Graham, Colin, 223, 224, 229, 233n Grahame, Kenneth, 84 Gramsci, Antonio, 178–9 Prison Notebooks, 233n Gray, Alasdair, 5, 71 Lanark, 199, 231 1982 Janine, 230–1 Gray, Thomas ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, 53, 54 ‘The Bard’, 19 Green, Marcus, 233n Greig, Andrew, 12, 210–20 In Another Light, 210–20 Griffiths, Gareth, 200 Guattari, Félix, 15 Guelph (Canada), 45 Guillen, Nicholas, 181 Gulf War, 188–9 Gunn, Neil M., 4, 11, 124–35 Butcher’s Broom, 127, 131, 134 Highland River, 130 The Green Isle of the Great Deep, 129 The Grey Coast, 128 The Silver darlings, 128, 134 Young Art and Old Hector, 129 Guyana, 104 Habermas, Jürgen, 212 Hagemann, Susanne, 206, 222 Haggard, H. Rider, 87–8, 89, 94, 98, 136 King Solomon’s Mines, 90 Hall, Stuart, 179

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 278

Halliburton, Thomas Chandler, 48, 49 Hallward, Peter, 233n Hames, Scott, 9 Hamilton, Douglas, 15, 234 Hamilton, Gilbert, 23 Hamilton, Sir Donald, 212, 213, 215, 217–20 Hardy, Thomas, 75–6 Hargreaves, John, 186 Harris, Wilson, 11, 98–108, 114 Palace of the Peacock, 98–108 The Guyana Quartet, 99, 100 Harvie, Christopher, 9, 11, 72 Hassan, Waïl, 192, 194, 195, 196 Hausa, 204 Hay, George Campbell, 112 Hébert, Anne, 50 Heidegger, Martin, 154 Henderson, Hamish, 71 Henryson, Robert, 119 Henty, G. A., 88, 94 Hepburn, Allan, 168 Herbert, W. N., 29 Hewitt, David, 40–1 Hewitt, John, 71 Highland Clearances, 49, 50, 61, 125, 128, 131, 133–5 Highland/Lowland divide, 118 Highland Society of Scotland, 60 Hitler, Adolf, 124 Hobsbaum, Philip, 198 Hobson, J. A., 72 Hogarth, William, 235 Hogg, James, 51, 54, 58 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 158, 159, 160–3 Holocaust, 155 Home Rule Movement, 4, 71, 115, 124 Hornel, E. A., 84 Huggan, Graham, 9 Hughes, H. Stuart, 74 Hulme, Peter, 28 Hume, David, 125 Hunter, James, 118–19 Huron Tract, 43, 51 Hussain, Asifa, 6 Huxley, T. H., 74 hybridity, 18, 179 Ibsen, Henrik, The Pretenders, 81 Idle, Jeremy, 142 Igbo, 118, 126, 128, 130, 131, 133, 202 imperial cartography, 100 imperial privilege, 159–60 imperial romance, 87–8, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96

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Index imperialism, 5, 45, 58, 65, 70, 87, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99, 112, 115, 122, 134, 136, 143, 145, 166, 174–5, 176, 188, 240, 242 India, 16, 30, 47, 50, 88, 108n, 132, 136, 174, 185, 214, 216, 224 interculturation, 15, 18, 27, 28 interlanguage, 200, 205, 206 internationalism, 7 internment, 227 Interventions journal, 9 Inyama, N., 201 Ireland, 4, 58, 71, 125, 126, 224 Irish Civil War, 161 Irish Constitution, 227 Irish Literary Revival, 133 Irish postcolonialism, 4, 221–4, 229, 232 Irish-Scottish connections, 222–3 Ishiguro, Kazuo, The Remains of the Day, 191 Islam, 151, 190, 192–3, 195 Islamic Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation, 190 Isle of Arran, 210 Isle of Man, 115 Israel, 148, 152, 155, 156, 157, 193 Ives, Charles, 119 Jabberwock magazine, 112 Jackson, Ellen-Raïssa, 9 Jackson, Joseph, 12 Jacobite Rebellion, 58–61, 63, 65, 125, 132 Jamaica, 10, 15, 26, 44, 48, 50, 237, 238, 239 Jamaican patois, 179–80 James, Henry, 72, 92 Jamie, Kathleen, 29n Jeffrey, Francis, 84 Jenkins, Robin, 12, 158–69 Fergus Lamont, 158–69 Just Duffy, 159 Willie Hogg, 166 Jerusalem, 147, 151, 152 Jewish identity, 148–9, 156 ‘Jewish Question’, 148–9 Johnson, James, 27 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 12, 26, 173–84 ‘Bass Culture’, 181 ‘If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet’, 181 ‘Mekin Histri’, 179–80, 181, 183 Mi Revalueshanary Fren, 173 Johnson, Samuel, 69n, 59, 242 A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 57–8 Joyce, James, 73, 81, 115 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 232 Finnegans Wake, 229 Judaism, 151

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 279

279

Kafka, Franz, 154 Kahlis, Kristen, 10 Kailyard, 62, 75, 84 Kane, Pat, 83, 85 Kant, Immanuel, 154 Kay, Jackie, Trumpet, 200 Keats, John, 126 Keith, Marshal, 79 Kelly, Aaron, 9 Kelman, James, 5, 198–209 A Disaffection, 203 And the Judges Said…, 202 Busted Scotch, 199 How Late It Was, How Late, 198 ‘I Was Asking a Question Too’, 198–9 Kieron Smith, Boy, 206, 207, 209 Lean Tales, 207, 208 Some Recent Attacks, 202 The Burn, 208 The Good Times, 198 Translated Accounts, 12, 198–209 You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, 206 Kennedy, A. L., So I Am Glad, 232 Khana dialect, 204 Kidd, Colin, 4 King, Jeanette, 36 King, Patricia, 4 Kingsley, Charles, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, 77 Kingston, W. H. G., 89 Kipling, Rudyard, 74, 76, 84, 87, 88, 142, 143 Kim, 143, 144, 224 Kitchener, Lord, 187 Knight, G. Wilson, 117 Kolakowski, Leszek, 145 Kolkata, 101 Koran, 152 Koval, Ramona, 206 Kövesi, Simon, 205 kumina, 17 Kuti, Fela, 201 La Guayrans refugees, 46, 48 Lacan, Jacques, 229, 230, 233n Laidlaw, Margaret, 51 Laidlaw, Robert, The McGregors – A Novel of an Ontario Pioneer, 51 Laing, R. D., 164 Lambert, Ian, 12 Lamming, George, The Emigrants, 49 Lang, Andrew, 81 Lapraik, John, 26 Larkin, Philip, 76

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280 Laurence, Margaret, 43, 51, 62, 130 The Diviners, 49–50 Law, Andrew Bonar, 71 Lawrence, D. H., 73, 85 Leacock, Stephen, 51 Lee, Harper, 53 Lehner, Stefanie, 9, 12 Leiper, William, 76 Leonard, Tom, 12, 173–84 ‘Feed Ma Lamz’, 183 Intimate Voices, 173, 183 Radical Renfrew, 184n ‘The Locust Tree in Flower’, 178, 183 ‘The Proof of the Mince Pie’, 178, 183 ‘The Qualification’, 183 ‘Unrelated Incidents’, 17, 178, 181–3 Leyden, John, 49 Lincoln, Andrew, 41 Lindfors, B., 199 Livingstone, David, 116 Lloyd, David, 222 Lochhead, Liz, 223 Lom, Ian, 63, 69n Loomba, Ania, 8, 135 Lorimer, Professor James, 77, 79 Luce, Henry Booth, 73 Lukács, Georg, 129 Lyall, Scott, 11 Lynch, Michael, 59 Macarthur, J. D., 202 McCarthy, Angela, 218 McClintock, Anne, 221 MacColla, Fionn, And the Cock Crew, 131 McCombie, Thomas, 43 McCracken-Flesher, Caroline, 32, 40–1 McCrone, David, 221 McCullers, Carson, 53 McCulloch, Margery Palmer, 4, 11, 159 McCulloch, Thomas, 43, 48, 49 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 4, 11, 29, 69n, 73, 83, 111–23, 125, 133, 134 A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, 115 In Memoriam James Joyce, 112, 114–17, 122 ‘Island Funeral’, 115 ‘Lament for the Great Music’, 115 Lucky Poet, 113 ‘On A Raised Beach’, 115 Scottish Scene, 139 The Kind of Poetry I Want, 115 The Raucle Tongue, 119 The Revolutionary Art of the Future, 119–20 To Circumjack Cencrastus, 115

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 280

Index MacDonald, Alexander, 58, 62–6 ‘Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill’, 61–2, 63–4 Macdonald, Graeme, 10, 183, 234, 241 McGann, Jerome, 40 MacGill-Eain, Somhairle see MacLean, Sorley MacIntyre, Duncan Ban, 58 Mack, Douglas, 11, 87 MacKay, Marina, 11 Mackenzie, Henry, Man of Feeling, 77 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 46 Mackinnon and Mackenzie Co., 214, 217 MacLean, Duncan, 189 MacLean, Sorley, 62 ‘An Cuilithionn / The Cuillin’, 69n MacLennan, J. F., 81 MacLennan, William, 115 MacLeod, Alasdair, 11, 57–69 No Great Mischief, 49, 62–8 MacPherson, Hector, 84 MacPherson, James, Poems of Ossian, 19, 57, 59–61 MacPherson, Mary, 62 McQuillan, Martin, 11 MacTaggart, William, 84 Maillet, Antonine, 50 Maley, Willy, 9, 12 Mallon, Florence E., 175 Mandela, Nelson, 116 Marvell, Andrew, ‘Bermudas’, 101 Marx, Groucho, 154 Marx, Karl, 31, 73, 85, 174, 175 Marxism, 8, 71, 82, 174, 175, 176 masculinity, 36, 106, 193, 225–7, 231–2 Masterman, Charles, 70 Maurice, F. D., 77, 79 Menchu, Rigoberta, 204 Mercer, Kobena, 178 Meredith, George, 72, 77, 82, 84 Mesopotamia, 136–7 metropolitan literature, 56, 83, 125, 128, 174, 236 Mhór, Màiri see MacPherson, Mary Middle Passage, 240 Mill, John Stuart, 77 Miller, Gavin, 9 Miller, Hugh, 78 Miller, William, 6 Milne, Drew, 198, 205 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 23 miscegenation, 106, 143, 157, 165 Mitford, Mary, Our Village, 54 modernism, 4, 5, 9, 11, 73, 94, 135, 158, 168 modernity, 4, 11, 57, 105, 107, 131, 142, 156, 195, 236

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Index Moidart, 63 Molière, Le Médecin malgré lui, 41 Moretti, Franco, 235 Morgan, Edwin, 29n Morichjhapi, 212–14, 219 Morris, Michael, 245n Morris, William, 73, 80 Morrison, Toni, 127 Morton, Graeme, 4 ‘Mother Ireland’, 226–7 Muir, Edwin, 83 Muir, John, 78 Munro, Alice, 10, 43–56, 62 ‘A Wilderness Station’, 54 Lives of Girls and Women, 51–3, 55 Open Secrets, 54 The Beggar Maid, 53 The View from Castle Rock, 54 ‘What Do You Want to Know For?’, 54 ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, 53 Munro, Ian S., 146n Murcott, Anne, 228 myth, 111, 115, 117–19, 131, 138, 142, 213 Nairn, Tom, 6, 71, 225 Namme, L. N., 115–16 Nandy, Ashis, 225, 226, 230 Napoleonic Wars, 3, 65 Nash, Geoffrey, 191 nation language, 19, 20–1, 22, 25, 174, 184n national identity, 30, 36, 59, 113, 115, 174, 184n, 244 nationalism, 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 44, 50, 73, 114, 118, 121, 135, 138, 145, 221, 222, 223, 224–7, 243 Nationality Act, 6 Naylor, Paul, 22 Neil Gunn Fellowship, 126 neocolonialism, 8, 25, 138, 187, 193, 195 neo-Marxism, 71 New, W. H., 51 New Canadian Library, 50, 55 New Labour, 6 New Lanark, 218 New Left, 6 New Right, 6 New Statesman, 116 New Yorker, 154, 156 New Zealand, 71, 138 Newnes, Sir George, 85 Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o, 132, 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 75 Nigeria, 11, 30, 111–12, 115–18, 130, 203 Nigerian Civil War, 201 Nigerian English, 201, 204

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 281

281

Nnolim, Charles, 201 Nobel Prize for Literature, 117 ‘non-standard’ English, 20, 126, 141, 204, 241, 247; see also Standard English Norquay, Glenda, 167 North, Michael, 202, 204 Northern Ireland, 224, 227 nouveau roman, 154 Obeah, 161–2 O’Brien, Edna, Down by the River, 227–9 O’Connor, Flannery, 53 O’Gallagher, Niall, 9 Ogoni Tribe, 203–4 Okere, A., 207 Okigbo, Chris, 181 Okri, Ben, 116 Olson Charles, 112 Omotoso, Kole, The Edifice, 116 Ondaatje, Michael, 50 Onuora, Oku, 26 orality, 15, 16, 18–22, 51, 60–1, 64, 107, 133–4, 168, 181 O’Shaughnessy, Arthur William Edgar, 144 Osinubia, Taiwo Adetunki, 197n Ostrogorski, Mosei, 79 Owen, Robert, 218 Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, 181–2 Palestine, 11, 82, 136, 148, 152, 155, 157 Parekh Report, 9 Park, Mungo, 235 Parry, Benita, 16, 96, 97, 174–6 Patten, Eve, 231 Peach, Blair, 180 Pearson, Charles Henry, 83 Peel, Sir Robert, 72, 79 Penang, 210, 211 Percy, Thomas, 20 Permanent Settlement of Bengal, 216 Perry, William J., 137, 140 phonetic experimentation, 173 Picasso, Pablo, 117 Pilkington, Frederick, 76, 79 Pitchford, Nicola, 204 Pittock, Murray, 4, 16 Pollard, Charles W., 17, 29n Polynesia, 89 Porteous Affair, 32 Portuguese Empire, 99 postmodernism, 12, 39–41, 158, 169 post-nationalism, 231–2 Prebble, John, 135n Priebe, Richard, 200

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282 Prince, Mary, 235 Pringle, Thomas, 235, 236 Punter, David, 2 Quayson, Ato, 16 Quebec, 66 Queen Victoria, 128 race, 6–7, 99, 138–9, 143, 148, 164–6, 176–8, 179, 182, 183, 224, 242 racism, 83, 89, 99, 116, 117, 121, 139, 140, 142, 161, 165, 166, 179, 181, 231 Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 160 Raeburn, Henry, 75 Ramsay, Allan, 23 ‘Epistle to William Hamilton’, 26 Rancière, Jacques, 233 Rankin, John, 26 Reaney, James, 50 reggae, 26, 173, 181, 184n Reizbaum, Marilyn, 223, 224, 228 Renan, Ernest, 225 Riach, Alan, 8, 11, 108n, 116, 199 Richards, Shaun, 225 Richler, Mordechai, 51 Ridell, Maria, 26 Rhys, Jean, 12, 56, 158–69 Wide Sargasso Sea, 12, 158–69, 190, 195 Robertson, James, 234–45 Joseph Knight, 234–45 Robinson, Fredrick, 1st Viscount Goderich, 45 Rohlehr, Gordon, 24 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 74 Rossetti, William Michael, 74 ‘Rotten English’, 201, 205, 209 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Émile, 20 Roy, Arundhati, 108n Royal Army Service Corps, 136 Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, 168 Ruskin, John, 73 Fors Clavigera, 80 The Stones of Venice, 75 Said, Edward, 87, 89, 137, 141, 143, 162 Culture and Imperialism, 3, 64–5, 224 Orientalism, 2, 137, 138, 173, 214, 223 Saleh, Tayeb, 185–97 Season of Migration to the North, 12, 185, 187–91, 194–6 Samoa, 91 Sancho, Ignatius, 235, 245n Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 12, 198–209 A Month and a Day, 203, 204

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 282

Index ‘High Life’, 201 Sozaboy, 198–205, 207, 208 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 49, 148, 149, 154 Sassi, Carla, 28, 244 Savory, Elaine, 29n Schoene, Berthold, 9, 10, 135n, 146n, 221, 231 Schumpeter, Joseph, 71 Scots Diaspora, 62, 218 Scots language, 16, 19, 20, 22, 27, 28, 49, 115, 118, 123, 125, 134, 215, 242, 243 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 51 Scott, Walter, 10, 30–42, 82, 128, 129, 133, 235 Heart of Midlothian, 30–42 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 51 Old Mortality, 54 The Lady of the Lake, 37–8, 47, 50 Waverley, 125 Scott, W. R., 74 Scott-Moncrieff, Sir Colin, 186 Scottish Affairs, 4 Scottish Arts Council, 126, 189 Scottish-Canadian connections, 30, 62, 43–56 Scottish-Caribbean connections, 12, 44, 49, 234–45 Scottish Chapbook, 113 Scottish colonialism, 234, 240 Scottish colonials, 211–12, 215–17, 219 Scottish Highlands, 3, 34, 57, 63, 126–8, 130–1, 134, 186 Scottish identity, 2, 99, 123, 173, 194, 218 Scottish ‘inferiorism’, 8 Scottish Journal, 115 Scottish Labour Party, 124 Scottish literary nationalism, 50 Scottish Muslim experience, 189, 194 Scottish nationalism, 9, 73, 114, 116, 221, 225; see also nationalism Scottish Parliament, 119, 121, 124 Scottish Renaissance movement, 4, 11, 83, 115, 126, 133, 135, 139 Scottish Review, 83 Scottish Romanticism, 43, 53 Scottish slavery, 238 Sedgwick, Eve-Kosovsky, 161 Seton-Watson, Hugh, 124 Severn, William, 26 Shakespeare, William, 116, 126 Othello, 185, 195 Shaw, George Bernard, 81 Shawn, William, 154 Shelley, Percy Byssche, 126, 144 Shepard, Victoria, 12

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Index Shirey, Ryan, 10 Shohat, Ella, 174 Sillar, David, 26 Silverman, Katja, 233n Sisulu, Walter, 116 Six Nations Indians, 44 slavery, 17, 22, 25, 49, 138, 159, 161, 162, 166, 174, 193, 227, 230, 234–44 Smiles, Samuel, 84 Smith, Adam, 16, 75, 77 Smith, Grafton Eliot, 137, 138 Smith, Gregory, 231 Smith, Iain Crichton, Consider the Lilies, 134 Smith, James, 26 Smith, Michael, 26 Smith, W. Robertson, 76, 83 Smith, Zadie, White Teeth, 168 Smyth, Ailbhe, 227, 228 Smyth, Brendan, 192, 193 Smyth, Gerry, 231 Sorensen, Janet, 19, 29 South Africa, 71, 112, 116, 166 South America, 88, 99 South Pacific, 86 Southern Rhodesia, 116 Soyinka, Wole, 11, 111–23, 130, 201 A Dance of the Forests, 117 Aké: the Years of Childhood, 117 Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 117 Death and the King’s Horsemen, 119 Ibadan: the Penkelemes Years, 117 Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, 117 Myth, Literature and the African World, 117 Opera Wonyosi, 119 Season of Anomy, 118 Six Plays, 129, 122 ‘Telephone Conversation’, 117 You Must Set Forth at Dawn, 117, 118, 122 Spanish Civil War, 139 Spanish Empire, 99 Spark, Muriel, 147–57, 192 The Mandelbaum Gate, 11, 148, 150–7, 192 Spark, Robin, 148 Spectator, 88 Speer, Albert, 70 Spencer, Herbert, 84 Spivak, Gayatri, 226, 227, 229–31, 233n Stacpoole, Henry de Vere, 136 Stafford, Fiona, 60 Standard English, 16–18, 20, 22, 23, 27, 204, 205, 209, 241, 242; see also Glaswegian English; ‘non-standard’ English; ‘Rotten English’; Scots language; World Englishes

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 283

283

Standard Habbie, 23 Stannard, Martin, 154 Stanton, Colonel E. A., 186 Stendhal, 82 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 84 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 8, 11, 82, 84, 86–97, 125, 199 Kidnapped, 84 New Arabian Nights, 91 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 86, 91 The Beach of Falesá, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91 The Dynamiter, 91 The Ebb-Tide, 86, 88–93, 94, 96 Treasure Island, 84, 86, 90, 91 Weir of Hermiston, 86, 88 Stirling, Kristen, 221 Storlasson, Snorri, Heimskringla Saga, 80–1 Stuart, Charles Edward, 59, 61, 239 Subaltern Studies Group, 224, 227 subalternity, 222, 224, 227, 229–30 Sudan, 12, 185–90, 197 Sudan Political Service, 185 Sumatra, 219 Sunderbans, 210, 213, 218, 219 Sussman, Charlotte, 31 Tacky’s Rebellion, 239 Tagore, Rabindranath, 213 Talib, Ismail, 8, 202 Taylor, A. J. P., 73 Terry, Ellen, 85 Thatcher Government, 2–3, 178 Thomson, George, 28 Tolstoy, Leo, War and Peace, 53 Torch, 152 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 29n totalitarianism, 121 transnationalism, 19, 187, 188, 218, 223 Tressell, Robert, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 70 Trollope, Anthony, 46, 72–3 Trumpener, Katie, 10, 42n, 58–9, 61, 62, 63 Turnbull, Ronald, 8 Turner, Martin, 223n Tutuola, Amos, 12, 112, 198–209 My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 198, 201 The Palm Wine Drinkard, 198, 199, 201, 207 Ulster, 115 Ulster Plantation, 3, 196 Underwoods magazine, 125 uneven development, 55, 146 University of Aberdeen, 60, 186, 195

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284 University of Leeds, 116, 117 Unset, Sigrid, Kristin Lavrandsdatter, 53 Verne, Jules, 136 Victorian literature, 72, 73, 82, 87, 90, 91, 94, 161, 168 Victorian scientism, 76 Voltaire, 55 Walcott, Derek, 101, 103, 125, 135n, 181 Walder, Dennis, 179 Wales, 71, 223 Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski, 236 Wallas, Graham, 70 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 176 Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto, 160 Ward, Margaret, 226 Waterson, Elizabeth, 50 Watson, Roderick, 8 Weekes, Anne Owens, 225 Wells, H. G., 71, 140 Kipps, 83 The New Machiavelli, 71 Tono Bungay, 71 Welsh, Irvine, Trainspotting, 225 Welsh language, 120 Welty, Eudora, 53 Wesling, Donald, 177, 178 Whatley, Christopher, 4 Whistler, George Washington, 75

MACDONALD PRINT.indd 284

Index Whistler, James McNeill, 75 White, Andrea, 91 Whitman, Walt, 74, 79, 80, 81 Whyte, Christopher, 221 Wilkie, David, 75 William of Orange, 31 Williams, Gwyn Alf, 71 Williams, Philip, 71 Williams, Raymond, 71 Williams, William Carlos, 182 Wisker, Gina, 31 Wolfe, General James, 65–6 Wordsworth, William, 114, 122, 126 World Englishes, 16, 200, 206 World Literature, 10, 81 World War I, 4, 124 ‘writing back’, 185, 188, 190 X Case, 227 Yeats, William Butler, 115 Cathleen ní Houlihan, 226 Yoruba, 117, 204, 207 Young, Douglas, 175 Young Scots, 84 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 227 Zabus, Chantal, 133, 199, 202, 207 Zimbabwe, 98 Žižek, Slavoj, 229, 232, 233n Zola, Émile, 46

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