Scottish Literature Since 1707

Marshall Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315505398
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Marshall Walker's lively and readable account of the highs and lows of Scottish literature from this important date to the present addresses the important themes of democracy, power and nationhood. Disposing of stereotypical ideas about Scotland and the Scots, this fresh approach to Scottish literature provides a critical interpretation of its distinctive style and presents the reader with an informative introduction to Scottish culture. Coverage includes the Scottish enlightenment and the world of Boswell and David Hulme to the 'Scottish Renaissance', associated with Hugh MacDiarmaid. Developments in the contemporary literary scene include John McGrath's theatre Company and the fiction and poetry of Alaistar Gray and Ian Crichton Smith. Particular attention is given to the work of Scottish women writers such as Lady Grizel Baillie and Liz Lochhead, who have been much neglected in previous literature.

Chapter 1
Terms of Reference: Patriotism and Change; Scottish Identity and Tradition

Patriotism and criticism

It is the scoundrel, not the critic, whom Dr Johnson's concept of patriotism affords a last refuge. The critic as scoundrel is a comparatively rare creature who, presumably, finds other bolt-holes. Exceptions might be found among Stalinist art commissars of the former Soviet Union or in the propagandists of Hitler's Kulturpolitik who traduced independent thought and free expression, brutally 'exempting' anything that was judged entartet or degenerate and therefore inimical to the Third Reich.

Ideologues, however, do not deserve to be called critics. By comparison with such cultural atrocities simple patriotism in a critic might appear merely inadequate. It might substitute Matthew Arnold's historic estimate for his real estimate or offer emotion masquerading as analysis. The patriotic critic writing a literary history of his country might attempt a geographical estimate, regressing, like a latter-day Henry Thomas Buckle, from the varieties of twentieth-century objectivism to perspectives of 'climate, food, soil, and the general aspect of nature'.¹ Yet foregrounding a national character need not be invidious unless patriotic designs were to exalt a work above its intrinsic merit simply because it was produced in a particular place or had, perhaps, made a political impact on the affairs of a country, like the effect of Uncle Tom's Cabin on public opinion before the American Civil War or Yevtushenko's poem, 'Babi Yar', on Soviet anti-semitism. A Scottish patriot might exalt Burns above Shakespeare because Burns wrote in Scots, expressed contempt for the 'birkie ca'd a lord', and was not English. He might go further and prefer Sorley MacLean to Burns because MacLean writes in Gaelic, or Liz Lochhead to MacLean and Burns because she is both Scottish and a woman. Any such judgement would make him or her a bad patriot as well as a bad critic in the sense that Shylock is a bad Jew. Even when allied to political conviction the creative urge does not simply march to a flag.

Any literary history of a country, nevertheless, must be motivated by a belief that there is value in considering the country's literature in terms of its national culture. The work of literature is a cultural fact, produced in a context which includes the life of the author and the background relations of social, historical, geographical and political factors. To undertake such a literary history — or to want to read one — is to acknowledge these factors and to admit the attraction of a specific context and the works of literature set in it. Is this interest less valid if it comes in part from patriotic feeling? Swift claimed that he had 'reconcil'd Divinity and Wit', but is it possible to reconcile love and criticism? The problem is real: can a secessionist Scot forgive James Thomson for the aureate Englishness of his diction in The Seasons (1726—30) and for providing the English composer, Thomas Arne, with the words of 'Rule Britannia' (in The Masque of Alfred, 1740), or those graduates of the Scottish academy shown by Robert Crawford to have collaborated (at least) in the invention of exclusive 'Eng. Lit.'?²

For Ben Jonson patriots were sound lovers of their country; for Samuel Johnson they were a suspect lot and in the eighteenth century the word 'patriot' was sometimes used for 'a factious disturber of the government'. A good Scottish authority, Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, defines a patriot as 'one who truly, or ostentatiously and injudiciously, loves and serves his fatherland'. The one who truly loves and serves now seems obsolete. Fashionable post-imperial cynicism sees the British patriot as a Tory jingoist with a pipe in his mouth and a book by Kipling in his pocket. The word today is inseparable from the pejoration of Dr Johnson's apothegm, or else it signifies all the love of a guided war missile. Suppose, then, we risk the charge of faux naïf, turn the semantic clock back to the possibility of love and service and consider the poem 'Scotland' by Hugh MacDiarmid:

It requires great love of it deeply to read
The configuration of a land,
Gradually grow conscious of fine shadings,
Of great meanings in slight symbols
Hear at last the great voice that speaks softly,
See the swell and fall upon the flank
Of a statue carved out in a whole country's marble,
Be like Spring, like a hand in a window
Moving New and Old things carefully to and fro,
Moving a fraction of flower here,
Placing an inch of air there,
And without breaking anything.³

This not only vindicates love but requires it. Love is needed to read 'deeply' (which, for the critic, means adequately) the configuration of a land, that is, the filigree of a culture. Love is needed if there is to be an awareness of subtleties, 'fine shadings', as well as the homogeneity of the national culture, the 'statue carved out in a whole country's marble'. Love is needed if damage is not to result from the critical rearrangement of 'New and Old things'. In other words, the monuments can only be arranged competently in a literary history if the ordering is motivated and informed by love, and without love the discriminatory act will result in breakage.

The view from Bàrr Mòr

The island of Lismore is a small piece of the whole marble of Scotland, a sliver of land in the sea of Loch Linnhe in Argyllshire. It lies off Port Appin to the north and is seven miles distant from the market town of Oban to the south. The Gaelic name means 'great garden'. It occupies the centre of a landscape created by the long-extinct volcano whose core now comprises Ben More on the island of Mull. A low-lying island, its chief marvel, ribbed by underlying folds of limestone, is its highest point, Bàrr Mòr ('Big Top'), a modest 417 feet, from which may yet be seen the whole of the Great Glen of Scotland. Today the watcher may imagine sunlight flashing on the oars of vikings when their galleys invaded Loch Linnhe twelve centuries ago, or relish the panoramic sweep from Ben Cruachan in the east to the hunched shoulder of Ben Nevis in the north and, southward, the Isles of the Sea, Scarba and the Paps of Jura. In ad 562 Moluag and Columba, natives of Ireland, arrived on the west coast of Scotland looking for a suitable place for a centre from which to disseminate Christianity. Each chose Lismore and sought to requisition it by landing there first. Tradition pictures their coracles racing towards the island, oarsmen urged on by the tonsured missionaries. As they approached the shore Moluag saw that his rival's boat would win. Picking up an axe, he placed his little finger on the gunwale, severed it from his hand, threw it on the shingle ahead and shouted, 'My flesh and blood have first possession of this island and I bless it in the name of the Lord.' Legend makes St Columba a bad loser: he cursed Moluag, saying, 'May you have the alder for your firewood.' Moluag answered with saintly equanimity, 'The Lord will make the alder burn pleasantly.' St Columba attacked again: 'May you have the jagged ridges for your pathway.' Still Moluag was beyond provocation and replied, 'The Lord will smooth them to the feet.' Columba went north to Iona. St Moluag's alleged crozier, the Bachuil Mòr ('Great Staff'), a piece of blackthorn two feet nine inches long, can be viewed on the island at the home of the Baron of Bachuil.⁴

In this piece of the configuration of Scotland a literary history might begin with a motivation born out of limestone furrows and the stones of Picts and vikings, out of the staff of a resolute saint and the copse of alder trees at the bay where he landed, out of the congregation of peaks visible from the cairn of Bàrr Mòr. History is taken back to pre-plaid blood and bone, idealism, geology and landscape. Here are the promptings of particular earth to love and enquire, to want to know how imagination has risen to the measure of the country, its people, its history, its sense of itself. As MacDiarmid says in 'On a Raised Beach': 'We must reconcile ourselves to the stones, / Not the stones to us'. Sibelius once said: 'When we see these granite rocks we know why we can treat the orchestra as we do.'⁵ George Bruce speaks more personally of the same relationship between the artist, his natural environment and his past in his poem, 'The Inheritance':

This which I write now
Was written years ago
Before my birth
In the features of my father.

It was stamped
In the rock formations
West of my home town.⁶

The connections between Ayrshire's subtle contours and the moods of Burns, or between the neo-classical terraces of Edinburgh's eighteenth-century New Town and the stylishness of Robert Louis Stevenson's prose, or between Norman MacCaig's love of the mountain called Suilven and his essential laconism may be mysteries beyond the audacity of criticism. But the view from Bàrr Mòr is a summons to try to approach the Scottish imagination by way of its own fundamentally theological habit of taking things back to first principles.

The stereotypes

Here, too, are promptings to look beyond stereotypical perceptions of Scottish culture and to be on guard against them when reading its literature. The clichés are all too familiar: the Scot is tight-fisted, brutish, maudlin, canny, repressed, volatile, alcoholic, dourly religious, a complex barbarian worth exhibitin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors' Preface
• Longman Literature in English Series
• Author's Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1 Terms of Reference: Patriotism and Change; Scottish Identity and Tradition
• 2 Union and Enlightenment
• 3 Satire, Sentiment and Scots
• 4 Robert Burns: the Myth and the Gift
• 5 Sir Walter Scott and the Supreme Fiction
• 6 Calvin's Scottish Devil, the End of Rural Sleep and Practical Christianity
• 7 Didacts and Doomsters: Nineteenth-Century Prophecy, Fantasy and Nightmare
• 8 Robert Louis Stevenson and the War in the Members
• 9 Tragedy, Epic and Entertainment: Early Twentieth-Century Fiction
• 10 'Whaur's yer Wullie Shakespeare?' The Return of Scottish Drama
• 11 Poets of the Scottish Renaissance from Hugh MacDiarmid to Edwin Morgan
• 12 Post-war Fiction: Realism, Violence and Magic
• Chronology
• General Bibliographies
• Individual Authors
• Index