Context

Reading Alasdair Gray
Janice Galloway

Untitled document

Lanark

I first encountered Alasdair Gray’s work at a friend’s house. It was the middle of a not-good time for me. Suffering from a tenacious depression that made most attempts at talking, getting out of bed, everything really, seem nothing more than variations on a theme of wasting time, I nonetheless persisted with reading because (1) it reminded me there had been things I enjoyed previously and (2) I hoped reading might, sooner or later, turn up something that might help. I wasn’t sure how it was going to do this exactly but the hope lingered nonetheless. Off and on, without enthusiasm, I visited people. On one such visit, I fell over Lanark. Literally. It was on the floor where my friend had dropped it and I tripped on the open cover as I crossed to the fire. "Borrow that if you like," she said. "I’ll be interested to know what you think."

She didn’t hear for a while. I deliberately didn’t mention it again in case she asked for it back and I had fallen in love—or something—with it. The mixture of clarity, exactness, and near-childlike sincerity; its high expectations of me as a reader, that I was somehow a partner in the enterprise, capable of creative insights and interaction with an author who was prepared to share his power had a profound effect. Remember I hadn’t read prose like that before, not Machado de Assis or Marguerite Duras or Jorge Luis Borges—not yet—so this was mind-expanding stuff, all the more so for its syntax and references being close to home. I’d always assumed what my education had taught me was true: that my country was a toty wee place with no political clout, a joke heritage, dour people, and writers who were all male and all dead. Not so, the book said: on a number of levels, not so. I was so grateful I carried the thing around with me, even when I went out. I forgot meals, went by my stops on buses and had to walk, didn’t care I couldn’t sleep reading that book. It mattered more than remembering to take the Valium my doctor was so keen to have me get addicted to and certainly did me more good.

Why was a question I asked only much later.

I’m asking it again now for the purposes of this piece and find answers shift—of course they do. They redistribute their weight, sometimes change aspect altogether, and I am reluctant to pin them down as though they don’t. The important part, however, the gratitude, stays pretty much a constant. Through all the self-referential twaddle I’ve read about Alasdair’s "postmodern postmodernity," the irritable textbook analyses of his techniques and evasions (few of which ever have the grace to acknowledge the irritability of their authors is often Alasdair’s work simply doing what it’s supposed to do, i.e., confounding pigeonholing as much as possible); through all the twaddle, indeed, I’ve read about all sorts of current writers’ work, I’ve held that gratitude tight to remind me of something obvious. IT’S NOT CRITICISM THAT MATTERS, IT’S THE WORK ITSELF. IT’S NOT CRITICS THAT MATTER BUT READERS. Remembering that helps me cope with the frustrating reality that establishment analysis fails to respond intelligently to some kinds of writing as a given: politically, after all, that’s what it’s for. Work by women, for example, if it’s noticed at all, is usually noticed reductively. Sidelined or misunderstood as a rather recalcitrant part of objective (i.e., masculinist) discourse, the things in it which simply have nothing to do with established notions of "significance" or "importance" are rendered invisible. It’s only through reading feminist analysis, analysis more properly designed to read in ways more inclusive of what may well be non- or antiestablishment priorities, I’ve realized how awkward mainstream literary techniques make it to discuss the bravery, passion, or hope that exists in an author’s work—and how awkward, then, it must be for mainstream literary techniques to deal with Gray.

Even within Scotland, a country you’d think would be keen to develop more democratic analytic discourse on account of its own marginalization within the British literary establishment, this persists. Due to the extent of internalized second-class nationhood in Scotland which presupposes Scottish artistic status and priorities as naturally lesser (as opposed to different) to those of the English canon, it can actually be worse. Now I’m not saying Alasdair’s work suffers mortally or most from this kind of thing, not by a long chalk (the work of James Kelman, Tom Leonard, and of course, a whole brace of Scottish women including me raise their own "difficulties" too), but it is, in general, not well served. This then is a nonacademic piece, another writer’s piece, a personal piece. It hopes to offer something that conventional techniques can’t.

Alasdair Gray’s was a voice that offered me something freeing. It wasn’t distant or assumptive. It knew words, syntax, and places I also knew, yet used them without any tang of apology: it took its own experience and culture as valid and central, not ancient or rural, tourist-trade quaint or rude mechanical humorous. It spoke to the intellect directly and simply, didn’t proscribe what I was meant to see or think, and was not afraid of fun or admissions of emotion. It was aware too of the kinds of self-consciousness and repressions I knew, the tangle of guilts that so often inform the Scottish psyche and bedevil its written expression, yet, by using ingenious technical devices like the asides and list of plagiarisms, could contain them enough to let the story not only emerge but be even truer for their inclusion. Even more, however, it was a voice that took for granted it wasn’t the only voice. From its own experience of marginalization (and they are multiple), it knew the whole truth didn’t belong to one sex either. In short, it was a man’s voice that knew that’s all it was—a man’s.

It seem uncontentious to say that Scotland, a country still weighed down psychologically by its own political impotence and perceived secondary status, seems to consider gender and sex questions as relatively unimportant. Ironic, I know, but there it is. The bulk of our democratic writers and thinkers still, by and large, seem as secure in their ignorance of feminist issues as the Scottish press and our homegrown literary critical elite. Gray’s writing, however, is informed by a democratic urge that does not sell women short: he knows our version of the story is different, possibly even opposed, yet of equal force.

I felt this knowing before I traced it: the tracing found it on a number of levels. First, outright. Rima’s shrugged "We must have been listening to different oracles, I’m sure you imagined all that," is plain enough. But also, with Gray, there is a feeling of Woman as somehow inescapable, a sometimes paranoid, sometimes warm perception of her suffusing or permeating the narrative and its menfolk even in her absence. Kelman, for all his innovation and subversion of traditional narrative, is very much informed by what Anthony Burgess calls "male thrust": women surface in the writing as outside the main action. This is, of course, as it should be: it’s daft to expect writers to do things they don’t feel in the interests of some political notion and Kelman’s writing seems the more honest for its candid revelation of wariness, its tender suspicion of the female. Gray’s narrative, however, seems intensely aware of a kind of incompleteness. His men long for (or obsess about) women and what they offer or do not offer their lives in a way Kelman’s do not. That longing, further, is colored by a wish to be valued by women and what they know, to learn from or join with them. This is especially keen in Lanark and 1982 Janine where the sense of loss and distance from the female is something that seems to be endured only with difficulty, with an almost overpowering sadness. Gray’s writing not only knows that women experience, feel, and often think differently, it seems to be filled with a regret for that fact, and in this way, Woman—the female principal—exists in Gray’s writing the way she exists in no other current male writer’s work. Whereas Tom Leonard seems to wish women would make more of an effort to understand his dilemma and Kelman seems to perceive women as very much separate (though definitely sexual) beings, Gray yearns. This yearning, this blighted need to bond or communicate more fully with the unknowable experience of the other sex, seems to me one of the most interesting aspects of his work, an aspect I suggest powers much of his creative vision.

Simultaneously, of course, men and male roles, the anguish of sensitive men forced into the tight sausage skin of what passes for normal masculine behavior, recurs again and again and the effects of such restriction on his men’s sometimes cruel, sometimes selfish, sometimes simply bewildered attitudes to women are keenly detailed. Such generosity helps honest dialogue, yet repeatedly I’ve found criticism unable or unwilling, perhaps because of his sex (maybe they think men have more important things to do than examine gender?), to even acknowledge it. I can though. I do.

As a writer, Alasdair Gray’s writing makes me feel braver. As a woman, it makes me feel acknowledged, spoken to. Sometimes, even listened for. As a woman writer in Scotland, those gifts are still rare enough to make me very grateful indeed.


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Context Reading Alasdair Gray Janice Galloway Untitled document He said, "That was very unsatisfying. . . . Why did the oracle not make clear which of these happened?" Rima said, "What are you talking about?" "The oracle’s account of my life before Unthank. He’s just finished it." Rima said firmly, "In the first place that oracle was a woman, not a man. In the second place her story was about me. You were so bored you fell asleep and obviously dreamed something else." —Lanark I first encountered Alasdair Gray’s work at a friend’s house. It was the middle of a not-good time for me. Suffering from a tenacious depression that made most attempts at talking, getting out of bed, everything really, seem nothing more than variations on a theme of wasting time, I nonetheless persisted with reading because (1) it reminded me there had been things I enjoyed previously and (2) I hoped reading might, sooner or later, turn up something that might help. I wasn’t sure how it was going to do this exactly but the hope lingered nonetheless. Off and on, without enthusiasm, I visited people. On one such visit, I fell over Lanark. Literally. It was on the floor where my friend had dropped it and I tripped on the open cover as I crossed to the fire. "Borrow that if you like," she said. "I’ll be interested to know what you think." She didn’t hear for a while. I deliberately didn’t mention it again in case she asked for it back and I had fallen in love—or something—with it. The mixture of clarity, exactness, and near-childlike sincerity; its high expectations of me as a reader, that I was somehow a partner in the enterprise, capable of creative insights and interaction with an author who was prepared to share his power had a profound effect. Remember I hadn’t read prose like that before, not Machado de Assis or Marguerite Duras or Jorge Luis Borges—not yet—so this was mind-expanding stuff, all the more so for its syntax and references being close to home. I’d always assumed what my education had taught me was true: that my country was a toty wee place with no political clout, a joke heritage, dour people, and writers who were all male and all dead. Not so, the book said: on a number of levels, not so. I was so grateful I carried the thing around with me, even when I went out. I forgot meals, went by my stops on buses and had to walk, didn’t care I couldn’t sleep reading that book. It mattered more than remembering to take the Valium my doctor was so keen to have me get addicted to and certainly did me more good. Why was a question I asked only much later. I’m asking it again now for the purposes of this piece and find answers shift—of course they do. They redistribute their weight, sometimes change aspect altogether, and I am reluctant to pin them down as though they don’t. The important part, however, the gratitude, stays pretty much a constant. Through all the self-referential twaddle I’ve read about Alasdair’s "postmodern postmodernity," the irritable textbook analyses of his techniques and evasions (few of which ever have the grace to acknowledge the irritability of their authors is often Alasdair’s work simply doing what it’s supposed to do, i.e., confounding pigeonholing as much as possible); through all the twaddle, indeed, I’ve read about all sorts of current writers’ work, I’ve held that gratitude tight to remind me of something obvious. IT’S NOT CRITICISM THAT MATTERS, IT’S THE WORK ITSELF. IT’S NOT CRITICS THAT MATTER BUT READERS. Remembering that helps me cope with the frustrating reality that establishment analysis fails to respond intelligently to some kinds of writing as a given: politically, after all, that’s what it’s for. Work by women, for example, if it’s noticed at all, is usually noticed reductively. Sidelined or misunderstood as a rather recalcitrant part of objective (i.e., masculinist) discourse, the things in it which simply have nothing to do with established notions of "significance" or "importance" are rendered invisible. It’s only through reading feminist analysis, analysis more properly designed to read in ways more inclusive of what may well be non- or antiestablishment priorities, I’ve realized how awkward mainstream literary techniques make it to discuss the bravery, passion, or hope that exists in an author’s work—and how awkward, then, it must be for mainstream literary techniques to deal with Gray. Even within Scotland, a country you’d think would be keen to develop more democratic analytic discourse on account of its own marginalization within the British literary establishment, this persists. Due to the extent of internalized second-class nationhood in Scotland which presupposes Scottish artistic status and priorities as naturally lesser (as opposed to different) to those of the English canon, it can actually be worse. Now I’m not saying Alasdair’s work suffers mortally or most from this kind of thing, not by a long chalk (the work of James Kelman, Tom Leonard, and of course, a whole brace of Scottish women including me raise their own "difficulties" too), but it is, in general, not well served. This then is a nonacademic piece, another writer’s piece, a personal piece. It hopes to offer something that conventional techniques can’t. Alasdair Gray’s was a voice that offered me something freeing. It wasn’t distant or assumptive. It knew words, syntax, and places I also knew, yet used them without any tang of apology: it took its own experience and culture as valid and central, not ancient or rural, tourist-trade quaint or rude mechanical humorous. It spoke to the intellect directly and simply, didn’t proscribe what I was meant to see or think, and was not afraid of fun or admissions of emotion. It was aware too of the kinds of self-consciousness and repressions I knew, the tangle of guilts that so often inform the Scottish psyche and bedevil its written expression, yet, by using ingenious technical devices like the asides and list of plagiarisms, could contain them enough to let the story not only emerge but be even truer for their inclusion. Even more, however, it was a voice that took for granted it wasn’t the only voice. From its own experience of marginalization (and they are multiple), it knew the whole truth didn’t belong to one sex either. In short, it was a man’s voice that knew that’s all it was—a man’s. It seem uncontentious to say that Scotland, a country still weighed down psychologically by its own political impotence and perceived secondary status, seems to consider gender and sex questions as relatively unimportant. Ironic, I know, but there it is. The bulk of our democratic writers and thinkers still, by and large, seem as secure in their ignorance of feminist issues as the Scottish press and our homegrown literary critical elite. Gray’s writing, however, is informed by a democratic urge that does not sell women short: he knows our version of the story is different, possibly even opposed, yet of equal force. I felt this knowing before I traced it: the tracing found it on a number of levels. First, outright. Rima’s shrugged "We must have been listening to different oracles, I’m sure you imagined all that," is plain enough. But also, with Gray, there is a feeling of Woman as somehow inescapable, a sometimes paranoid, sometimes warm perception of her suffusing or permeating the narrative and its menfolk even in her absence. Kelman, for all his innovation and subversion of traditional narrative, is very much informed by what Anthony Burgess calls "male thrust": women surface in the writing as outside the main action. This is, of course, as it should be: it’s daft to expect writers to do things they don’t feel in the interests of some political notion and Kelman’s writing seems the more honest for its candid revelation of wariness, its tender suspicion of the female. Gray’s narrative, however, seems intensely aware of a kind of incompleteness. His men long for (or obsess about) women and what they offer or do not offer their lives in a way Kelman’s do not. That longing, further, is colored by a wish to be valued by women and what they know, to learn from or join with them. This is especially keen in Lanark and 1982 Janine where the sense of loss and distance from the female is something that seems to be endured only with difficulty, with an almost overpowering sadness. Gray’s writing not only knows that women experience, feel, and often think differently, it seems to be filled with a regret for that fact, and in this way, Woman—the female principal—exists in Gray’s writing the way she exists in no other current male writer’s work. Whereas Tom Leonard seems to wish women would make more of an effort to understand his dilemma and Kelman seems to perceive women as very much separate (though definitely sexual) beings, Gray yearns. This yearning, this blighted need to bond or communicate more fully with the unknowable experience of the other sex, seems to me one of the most interesting aspects of his work, an aspect I suggest powers much of his creative vision. Simultaneously, of course, men and male roles, the anguish of sensitive men forced into the tight sausage skin of what passes for normal masculine behavior, recurs again and again and the effects of such restriction on his men’s sometimes cruel, sometimes selfish, sometimes simply bewildered attitudes to women are keenly detailed. Such generosity helps honest dialogue, yet repeatedly I’ve found criticism unable or unwilling, perhaps because of his sex (maybe they think men have more important things to do than examine gender?), to even acknowledge it. I can though. I do. As a writer, Alasdair Gray’s writing makes me feel braver. As a woman, it makes me feel acknowledged, spoken to. Sometimes, even listened for. As a woman writer in Scotland, those gifts are still rare enough to make me very grateful indeed. Current issue: CONTEXT # 21 CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community. CONTEXT is available at bookstores nationwide.

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