AESTHETIC ENCOUNTER, LITERARY POINT-SCORING, OR THEFT?

INTERTEXTUALITY AS A TOOL FOR UNDERMINING NARRATIVE AUTHORITY IN

THE FICTION OF ALASDAIR GRAY.
Camille Manfredi
Universit de Bretagne Occidentale
Let us start with a quote:
Mr Thaw said, So what are you going to do?
I dont know.
What do you want to do?
Thats irrelevant, isnt it?
Face facts, Duncan. If you cant live by doing what you want, you must take the nearest thing to it you
can get.
I want to write a modern Divine Comedy with illustrations in the style of William Blake
1
.
Here is, all in all, what Lanark was intended to be: an updated version of Dantes masterpiece,
hybridised with visual art inspired from the visionary pre-romantic English poet. Although it is
never made clear whether the novel, published in 1981, achieves this goal or is merely the nearest
thing to it Gray could get, Lanark in its design is nothing short of ambition.
One cannot but concede that the end-product isnt, either: a monstrous set of intertwined texts and a
playful mixture of old and new styles, of traditional and modernistic elements, of authentic and
apocryphal references, of truths and lies, confessions and denials. The writer or re-writer for that
matter wavers between the genuine acknowledgement of his artistic affiliations and the sheer
distortion of the latter. It soon becomes obvious that the cross-fertilisation of the textual material by
pre-existing literary or visual art gives not only food for thought, but also for suspicion. Grays use
and no less overly self-satisfying misuse of intertextuality and interpicturality, if it is in many ways
1
Lanark, 1981, p. 204.
1
almost too postmodern to be true, is at once an invitation to try and unravel the threads the novel is
woven from and a goldmine for the critic.
My point will be to suggest that the conflicting notions of devotion and disrespect, atavism and
change in Grays fiction are closely linked with his personal pledge to re-write Scotland anew,
shortly before and after devolution. This paper thus offers to examine, in Alasdair Grays first
published novel mostly, the issues of tradition and innovation, withdrawal and renewal that are at
stake in the reprising process we are interested in. I will also attempt to assess the extent to which
such texts engage with politics and lead to a new synthesis of ideas concerning Scottish identity.
Duncans somewhat childish whim may then end up on the agenda for cultural renewal of the re-
emerging Scottish nation.
The ways the texts of the past slip into Lanark (or could it be the other way round?) are many. The
most obvious one is the Epilogue inserted four chapters before the actual end of the novel. There,
Gray admits to having committed three severe literary crimes:
INDEX OF PLAGIARISMS
There are three kinds of literary theft in this book :
BLOCK PLAGIARISM, where someone elses work is printed as a distinct typographical unit, IMBEDDED
PLAGIARISM, where stolen words are concealed within the body of the narrative, and DIFFUSE PLAGIARISM,
where scenery, characters, actions of novel ideas have been stolen without the original words describing
them. To save space they will be referred to hereafter as Blockplag, Implag, and Difplag
2
.
What is likely, and of course expected, to arouse suspicion is that Gray all too readily pleads guilty
of literary theft, and while confessing to it, denies the very possibility of plagiarism. Actually,
Grays guilt far exceeds such misdeeds; to these we could easily add as we are once again
expected to two further crimes: arrogance and ironic academicism. Let us, at least for now,
forgive Grays cheeky invention of the critic fuel
3
designed to keep enlightened scholars busy
while normal readers proceed through the novel. For while he claims to be indulging in the sheer
display of his erudition, the author-conjuror as he calls himself really offers us the genealogy of the
text and the successive stages of its engendering. In what appears to spring out of a strong desire for
intellectual probity, Gray lists in his epilogue all the authors and thinkers who have helped shape
the novel both in plot and structure.
In Grays personal yet paradigmatic Pantheon, a familiar and international crowd of founding
fathers of modernism and postmodernism (James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Jorge Luis Borges) and of
classic, romantic and fantasy literature (William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Carlyle,
2
Lanark, p. 485.
3
Epilogue for the discerning critic,1982 Janine, 1984, p. 343.
2
Coleridge, Milton, Pope, Wells). As for Scottish affiliations, we find a selection of authors from
the first Scottish literary renaissance (Hugh MacDiarmid, Archie Hind, Norman McCaig), together
with Grays fellow members of the new school of Scottish writing, Tom Leonard, James Kelman
and Liz Lochhead.
Never mind what Gray says: this apparently exhaustive catalogue aims at much more than just
literary point-scoring. Grays will to associate with such a background aims at establishing a
thematic or more generally cultural community gathered round Lanark, that synthesis of a novel
and Grays first Book of Books. Here is, Gray suggests, our heritage, where we stand and who we
are. These intertexts then come to function as so many triangulation pillars in our cultural
landscape, with Gray kindly providing us with a map. At first sight, the endeavour sounds perfectly
respectable, especially when one thinks that we are Scots and particularly eager to redefine
ourselves as a politically, socially and culturally coherent nation.
Things are never so simple and through the footnotes comes an intruder who will methodically
shatter our certainties. There, Gray assumes the voice of his own editor and insists on destroying
criticism from within: one is compelled, he writes, to ask why the conjuror introduces an
apology for his work with a tedious and brief history of world literature, as though summarizing a
great tradition which culminates in himself
4
! But if the fictional editor is attempting at picking a
quarrel with the no-less fictional conjuror, it is merely in order to stage a conflict that has already
been settled or that, more likely even, never got off the ground. The far too obvious antagonism
between author and editor, as well as between personal (egotistic) and collective (national) concerns
may be beside the point. What matters is not so much the Epilogue as it is as the Epilogue as it
should be. Indeed entries appear that shouldnt while others, however conspicuous, have gone
missing.
In the first category of incongruities, an entry stands out whose sole purpose is to underline its own
irrelevance: Ralph Waldo Emerson has not been plagiarized
5
, Gray insists. Why then single out
the American transcendentalist as the one who has not inspired Gray, unless there are must have-s
in any contemporary writers portrait gallery and Emerson is among them? The entry becomes a
badge of cultural identity displayed in order to preserve the status-quo and abide by the rules of
decorum, however absurd. With this tongue-in-cheek remark, Gray plays with the cultural markers
of community boundaries while humouring an elite from which he is more than willing to become
estranged.
4
Ibid., pp. 489-490.
5
Lanark, p. 488.
3
Spotting the odd one out is an easy game, though. The actual challenge is to work out how it ended
up there, and why. In much the same way, one has to enquire into the motives that compelled Gray
to ascribe his Dragonhide (a mysterious disease that turns the inhabitants of Unthank into
dragons) to Walt Disneys Pinocchio rather than to Dantes Inferno, Ovids or Kafkas
metamorphoses. Surprisingly enough, Kafkas major influence over Lanark is written down to a
silhouette in a window, admittedly borrowed from The Trial. And what are we to say about the
ludicrous, mostly inessential cross-entries between Carl Jung, God and Disney, when the text which
has most obviously influenced Lanark, the myth of Orpheus, remains missing?
The reader is of course invited to add to the list the names and titles that were neglected, no doubt
intentionally. It is the case in particular with the disappearance from the list of the names of Neil
Gunn, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Edwin Morgan or Edwin Muir, all belonging to the Scottish
Renaissance tradition. Gray then endorses the collective amnesia, at once passive and active, that
has for many years evicted Scottish authors from university curricula; an amnesia that Gray may
well in his turn fall victim to. This is how an intertext, or rather a missing intertext, becomes a
political act: the point is to shed light on a culture that so much lacks in self-confidence that it
silences itself and had rather turn outwards to England or the US then help promote its own, or
local, creativity.
Meanwhile, the editor is sticking to his guns, apparently unaware of the polemics disclosed; he
keeps killing any form of illusion and dismissing up to his own voice, according to him no more
than a parade of irrelevant erudition through grotesquely inflated footnotes thieved from T.S. Eliot,
Nabokov and OBrien
6
, whats more without acknowledgement
What is then the Epilogue of Lanark? An assembly of competing, self-contradicting voices or a
maze of unreliable intertextual references? One thing is sure, it is anything but the all-revealing
black box the conjuror had announced it would be, nor is it the vain babble the editor claims it is.
The index of plagiarisms, when it was expected to light up the dark corners of the text, is in fact
detrimental to its legibility. It leads the reader on a series of wrong tracks, thus assigning him the
difficult task of unravelling the threads of the already written and the already read that make up the
woven fabric of the text. If Lanark is indeed a work of monumental erudition, the jigsaw puzzle
wont be completed unless the reader strives for the whole picture, helped by his own cultural and
literary background.
Could this continuous text ceaselessly being written, revised, expanded and edited eventually be but
a hoax, designed to make the reader question the operating mode of his memory? For through the
6
Lanark, p.490.
4
building up of his personal encyclopaedia and the frantic analysis of its contents, Gray explores the
compulsive habits of memory and explicit, suicidal nostalgia of both his readers and fellow citizens.
No-one would deny the extent of Grays erudition nor the impressive quality of such an arsenal of
literary allusions; yet we would be wiser to read the Epilogue and its cacophony as the symptom of
a deep intellectual crisis, the transcript of a troubled minds (failed) attempt at fighting a disease
which Gray once playfully called influenza
7
; that the plague, he continued, is endemic in the
ranks of postmodern writers should come as no surprise.
Repetition is always an experimental and critical rethinking of the tradition; Gray has his mind set
on a particular form of tradition that is, he argues, the Scottish curse, the tradition of tradition and
the orthodoxy in thoughts that according to the novelist rules over his country . But there is a
second effect: while pointing so ferociously at his own lack of innovation or even conservatism,
while insisting that all has already been written, Gray brings us dangerously close to the antithesis
of creativity and ossification of art as exposed in Jean Baudrillards work on aesthetic illusion and
the lure of postmodern recycling:
Of course, all of this remaking and recycling claim to be ironic; but this form of irony is like a threadbare
piece of cloth a by-product of disillusion a fossilized irony. () Its the irony of repentance and
resentment against our own culture. But perhaps repentance and resentment constitute the ultimate phase
of art history, just as, according to Nietzsche, they constitute the ultimate phase in the genealogy of
morals. Its a parody, and at the same time a palinody of art and art history, a self-parody of culture in the
form of revenge, characteristic of radical disillusion. Its as if art, like history, was recycling its own
garbage and looking for its redemption in its own detritus
8
.
Gray undermines the very concept of creative authority
9
, questions the notion of intellectual
property and interrogates the chronicity of literature. The memory of the past that is so ostensibly
displayed in the Epilogue is a simulacrum (that is, in Baudrillards terms, a copy without an
original) that may well serve nothing but the creation of this prodigious hypertext. Yet what Gray
seeks is neither the death of art as we know it nor its redemption. What Gray writer, painter,
7
Sean Figgis and Andrew McAllister, Alasdair Gray Interview, Bte Noire n5, 1998, p.21.
8
Jean Baudrillard, Objects, Images, and the Possibility of Aesthetic Illusion, Art and Artefact, in Nicholas Zurbrugg,
London, Sage, 1997, pp. 7-18. Peut-tre le repentir et le ressentiment constituent-ils le stade ultime de lhistoire de
lart, comme ils constituent selon Nietzsche le stade ultime de la gnalogie de la morale. Cest une parodie, en mme
temps quune palinodie de lart et de lhistoire de lart, une parodie de la culture par elle-mme en forme de vengeance,
caractristique dune dsillusion radicale ? Cest comme si lart, comme lhistoire, faisait ses propres poubelles et
cherchait sa rdemption dans ses dtritus. Jean Baudrillard, Illusion, Dsillusion Esthtiques, Paris, Sens & Tonka,
1997, pp. 8-9.
9
Lavnement de lintertextualit annoncerait la fin de lintersubjectivit o se complaisent lcrivain et ses lecteurs :
il sagit avant tout de dsacraliser lautorit de lauteur, de le destituer de son illusion doriginalit, et de rcuser par l
mme les prrogatives de luvre finie, acheve, autonome ; le dni de lindividualit, limpersonnalit de lacte
dcriture, tels sont les postulats de lintertextualit dans sa premire acception. Nathalie Limat-Letellier, Historique
du concept dintertextualit, in Nathalie Limat-Letellier et Marie Miguet-Ollagnier, LIntertextualit, Paris, Les Belles
Lettres, 1998, pp. 17-64, p. 20.
5
history maker seeks is reincarnation. This is, I will now try to show, how Gray the alchemist
transforms structural fatalism into political activism and heals the breach between two notions that
are often held to be antithetic, postmodernism and nationalism.
I have mentioned the plague that strikes Scotland according to Gray, a form of self-castrating
nostalgia; but another plague strikes, this time on an infratextual level, a surprisingly large number
of protagonists. Duncan Thaw drowns himself and is reborn as Lanark; in 1982, Janine Jock
McLeish attempts suicide and is rescued by a God-like voice urging him to come alive, a clear
reminder of Shelleys Frankenstein. The sub-text is no less conspicuous in Poor Things: there,
Bella Baxter (initials BB and Gray created woman) jumps from a bridge and is then reborn out of
the piecing together of her adult corpse and the brain of her ftus. The novel is just as protean as
Lanark: in this parody of victorianism, gothic novels and science fiction, everything seems
borrowed, as if to disclaim all independent discursive practice and meaning. Both texts comply, but
much too submissively, with the postmodern view that every artistic object is second-hand and
assembled from bits and pieces of already existent art
10
.
But there is more to it than the self-conscious endorsement of postmodern theories for Poor Things
quite literally gives birth to something which, although recycled, will eventually prove able to live a
life of its own. Five years before devolution Bella is born, the very embodiment of intertextuality
and interpicturality. As shown in her portrait
11
and visual paradigm she is the by-product of the
close encounter of Nan Shepherds A Pass in the Grampians and Lewis Grassic Gibbons A Scots
Quair with Da Vincis Mona Lisa, Grays own first novel and Hobbes Leviathan, all either listed
or intentionally unlisted in Grays early index of plagiarisms.
Bella, as a matter of fact, is the Epilogue of Lanark made flesh and at the same time, significantly
enough, a powerful allegory of Scotland. Born to Shakespeare, Shelley and Burns, Bella Caledonia
is at once a scientific and literary achievement; and although she may appear as a dangerous
erotomaniac whats more in denial of her origins, she nevertheless awakens to politics to become a
woman after Grays own heart, a socialist. Here is, no doubt, the Scotland he wishes for.
If we now get back to the Epilogue that foreshadowed the conception of Bella, it seems that our
suspicion was rightly aroused, and that what appeared at first as a perfect postmodern artefact was
already an allegorical monster: Scotland, its colonial past, present and its future, made text. The
least we can say is that the literary machinery designed by Gray is far from seamless and that the
stitches have never quite healed. The Scotland Gray describes, be it in his index of plagiarisms or in
Bellas chaotic destiny, is caught in the trap of tautology; it/she is the complacent prisoner of a
10
Allen, Graham, Intertextuality, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 5.
11
Poor Things, 1992, p. 45.
6
discursive skeleton
12
, as if the nation or rather its literature, having reached its term, refused to give
birth to itself. This feeling of imprisonment verging on claustrophobia is otherwise recurrent in
Grays treatment of both time and space, but the way out Lanark strives for is nowhere to be
found but in the book itself and its structural quest for literary reincarnation. Grays pastiche of
postmodernism (his post-postmodernism
13
), unconvincingly labelled as plagiarism or parody,
comes to spotlight the failure of the impregnation of the present by the past. It points at the
impossibility of the pre-existing form to be so simply reincarnated as the unprecedented voice the
nation so urgently needs in order to re-invent or, in Duncans own terms, to re-imagine
14
itself.
Could then Grays extravagant use of intertuality be an act of sabotage? The idea is appealing of a
writer endorsing the fictional archetype of the mad scientist blending genres and hypotexts, pouring
them into the crucible of postmodern theory, yet aware that the experiment is doomed, and willed,
to fail. Indeed, Grays conjuring tricks draw on an array of strategies of self-depreciation: a
complex hybridisation between fiction and criticism, the theorising of narrative and editorial
authorities and the playful debunking by the author of his own voice. Such outright self-denial
how typically Scottish is that? is well-spread in Grays fiction, from text and intertext to paratext,
as in his now ritual Goodbye which, once the book read, reminds the reader of its artificiality and
of the immutability of reality.
But Grays humorous awareness of limitation is again fruitful, for it tells us that the text is merely a
tool among others in the great mechanism of self-invention. Gray, who depicts himself as an
ageing pedestrian, that is, a citizen, hands over to us these crazy patchworks, the dysfunctional
machines of Bella, the Epilogue and Scotland, then tells us to make them work. And to do so, just
like Bella, Lanark and even Gray himself, we will have no other choice but to break free from the
laws of our creation. Perhaps, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, the birth of the Scottish citizen-reader
must be at the cost of the death of the Scottish author.
Grays cultural agenda for Scotland thus amounts to a paradox: one must aim toward synthesis, but
make sure to never achieve it. Grays Scotland, and this is particularly true of the Epilogue, is and
must remain a Deleuzian desiring machine. Its future as an imagined community lies not in the
successful amalgamation of parts thrown together in an allegorical body or a book, but in the very
collective will to believe them viable. This is probably how we are to read Grays incentives to his
12
The angel figure lying in a fetal position inside a skull is a recurrent motif in Grays artwork, from Lanark to The
Book of Prefaces, 2000.
13
The term, coined by Randall Stevenson, applies to Grays jocular deflection of criticism in the Epilogue ; Randall
Stevenson, Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern, in Robert Crawford and Tom Nairn, The Arts of Alasdair Gray,
Edinburgh University Press, 1991, pp. 48-63, p. 56.
14
Lanark, p. 243.
7
readers to work as if they lived in the early days of a better nation or to try again, try harder and,
as Beckett would add, to fail better.
Grays intentional dissipation of the energy released by the text through the misuse of
intertextuality clearly shows that what is to be transmitted is rather the awareness of an absence than
some ready-made cultural identity shaped by literary history. Gray is no Whitman, nor is he Hugh
MacDiarmid, who claimed in his own time to gather unto himself all the loose ends of Scotland
15
.
The Epilogue has in some way ossified into a parody of repetition, a mechanism that restricts the
readers free reading of the text when it should expand it. But such freedom is always there for the
reader to regain. What Gray has begun to do in his work, therefore, is reconstitute the meaning of
narrative authority and lay stress on the necessary co-operation with the reader in retrieving and
renewing
16
Scottish literature, perhaps even Scottish identity.
The text finally appears as a deficient structure awaiting its maker, a way out for us to find.
Intertextuality is then for Gray a means of performing his favourite and most politically charged
trick: the transfer of power from author to reader. He thus urges us to take active part in the
production or bricolage of what is by definition a myth, a super-hypertext for ever re-written. In so
doing, Gray launches quest again for the lost referential and compels devolutionary Scotland to re-
word itself along what Edgar Morin called a retrospective movement of self-production; Gray
writes Scotland into re-imagining its culture, making it emerge from multiplicity to unity and from
obsolete to functional data. Does this turn Alasdair Gray, this fat, balding, asthmatic, married
pedestrian
17
, in retreat (so he says) in The Monastery of Santa Semplicit
18
into a national hero?
Never mind Grays shouts of disagreement, the question remains, of course, open.
15
() I have gathered unto myself / all the loose ends of Scotland, / and by naming them and accepting them, / loving
them and identifying myself with them, / Attempt to express the whole. Hugh MacDiarmid, Scotland, Lucky Poet,
1943.
16
Title of a poem written by Edwin Morgan for the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, and whose first lines are:
Forget your literature? forget your soul. / If you want to see your country hale and whole / Turn back the pages of
fourteen hundred years. Glasgow, Scotlit n32, 2005.
17
Poor Things, flyleaf.
18
1982 Janine, p. 345.
8