The Shape of Texts to Come

CORBETT, John, ‘Literary Language and Scottish Identity’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

The Shape of Texts to Come: the writing of a new Scotland, 13-14 May 2000 |

References are given at the end of the document.

Shibboleths

Our first reading for today is from the Book of Judges, Chapter 12, verses 5–6 in a recently-published version by John Manson. The Gileadites have been fighting the Ephraimites at the River Jordan. They’ve been fighting for so long that they’re muddy and dishevelled and can hardly tell one from the other.

And the men o Gilead
tuik the mountain-passes o Jordan
bifore the men o Ephraim:
and this wis the wey o’t,
that whan the men o Ephraim
wha haed wun free
frae the men o Gilead
said, Lat me gang throu;

‘Shibboleth’, which possibly meant in Hebrew ‘stream in flood’ or ‘ear of corn’,² comes down to us today as a word that signifies someone’s regional or social origins. It is a badge of identity, a badge displayed with sometimes fatal consequences. Closer to home, and much more recently, shibboleths again crop up in the title story of Walking the Dog by Bernard MacLaverty, an Irish writer living in Scotland. One night, outside Belfast, a man and his dog are abducted by two gunmen, who say they represent the IRA. A verbal sparring match ensues in which each tries to probe the other’s identity. The gunmen ask the man’s name (‘John Shields.’ ‘What sort of a name is that?’), they ask the school he went to (‘It’s none of your business.’), and they ask, directly, whether he is a Protestant or a Roman Catholic (‘I’m … I don’t believe in any of that crap. I suppose I’m nothing.’) Finally one of the gunmen says:

‘Let’s hear you saying the alphabet.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yeah – say your abc’s for us,’ said the gunman.
‘This is so fuckin ridiculous,’ said John. He steeled himself for another blow.
‘Say it – or I’ll kill you.’ The gunman’s voice was very matter-of-fact now. John knew the myth that Protestants and Roman Catholics, because of separate schooling, pronounced the eighth letter of the alphabet differently. But he couldn’t remember who said which.
‘Eh … bee … cee … dee, ee … eff.’ He said it very slowly, hoping the right pronunciation would come to him. He stopped.
‘Keep going.’
‘Gee … ’ John dropped his voice, ‘ … aitch, haitch … aye jay kay.’
‘We have a real smart Alec here,’ said the gunman.³

The episode in the Book of Judges and the MacLaverty story both show clearly some of the means by which we construct tribal identities. We can construct these identities on the basis of shared experience (we go to the same schools, do the same jobs, pray at the same church, read the same newspapers, enjoy the same leisure activities), and we can do it semiotically (we wear the same clothes, adopt the same hairstyles, and speak the same variety of language). Anyone who does not conform is banished beyond the pale, or worse. None of these identifying characteristics is (pace the Book of Judges) necessarily essential. Unlike the Ephraimites with their shibboleth, John Shields, in ‘Walking the Dog’ can make his mouth say both ‘aitch’ and ‘haitch’; he just cannot remember which version his kidnappers would prefer. Shibboleths, as John Shields recognises, are a ‘myth’ in the way that Roland Barthes uses the word ‘myth’, to mean an arbitrary sign that is invested with a social meaning beyond the literal (as a shibboleth is no longer a ‘stream in flood’ or an ‘ear of corn’ but a marker of tribal boundaries).⁴All of which is really to say that there are obvious ways in which we can draw upon language variety, as one resource amongst many, to construct a powerful sense of community. For example, we can focus on shibboleths (s/sh, aitch/haitch) as linguistic markers of community boundaries – they may seem at first glance insignificant but they act as badges of identity, excluding or including, and we have a limited degree of control over them.

Tribe and Nation

If we consider the literature and languages of Scotland at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is clear that (even if we wanted to) we would have a tremendous problem in identifying simple, workable shibboleths. This difficulty has indeed always been with us. Once you move from the particularities of tribal identity to the complexities of a multicultural nation, the range of identities and potential markers of identity becomes huge. Scotland, of course, has always been multicultural, a melange of Picts, Scots (or Gaels), Saxons (or Angles), Norse, French, Dutch, Irish, Italian, Polish, Pakistani, Chinese … to name a few. What shibboleths can we possibly all share? Particularly, what kind of literary language can we all claim ownership of? What kind of language binds us together as a single, national community?
Much of Scotland’s literary history (though by no means all of it) can be seen as a contest to establish and promote one language variety that will ‘speak for’ the nation. And much of Scotland’s literary history can equally be seen as a rebuttal of the claims of these language varieties. What I want to do for the rest of this talk is consider some of the historical debates about a distinctively Scottish literary medium, see how they inform some current writing, and speculate about future possibilities, the ‘shape of texts to come’.

Against Decorum?

As well as being multicultural, Scotland has always been multilingual. In the late mediaeval period there were Scottish texts in Latin, French and ‘Inglis’ – and the tradition of writing in Latin continued up until at least the nineteenth century. In the sixteenth century, some writers like Gavin Douglas and James VI explicitly distinguished the ‘language of the Scottish nation’ from that of English (although most of their contemporaries still referred to their language as ‘Inglis’). And there is, of course, the strong Gaelic tradition in Scottish writing, beginning in the 1300s and reaching peaks in the 18^th and 20^th Centuries.

The instinct to seek shibboleths in the face of this rich cultural and linguistic diversity has been passionately condemned by Professor Ronnie Jack.⁵ What single strand of this complex tapestry can possibly function to hold us all together as one nation, a single speech community? Certainly not Scots, says Professor Jack. The desire to equate the Scottish literary tradition with a tradition of writing in Scots (with the grudging addition of Gaelic) is distorting and reductive, and forces us to neglect in particular work in English and Latin. I yield to no-one in my admiration for Professor Jack’s erudition and I wholeheartedly acknowledge the service he continues to do in broadening the canon of Scottish literary texts. However, I worry that his beloved classicism tends to depoliticise the linguistic tradition.

In brief, Professor Jack has argued that the key to understanding linguistic diversity in Scottish literature is the classical notion of decorum. A concern for decorum lies at the heart of classical tracts such as Horace’s Ars Poetica, a verse epistle in which, for example, he commends to his readers lofty language for tragic subject matter and familiar, yet powerful language for satire:

shamefaced among the wanton satyrs. If ever I write satyric dramas, my dear fellows, I shall not be content to use merely the plain, unadorned language of everyday speech … I shall aim at a style that employs no unfamiliar diction, one that any writer might hope to achieve, but would sweat tears of blood in his efforts and still not manage it – such is the power of words that are used in the right relationships, and such is the grace that they can add to the commonplace when so used.⁶

The complex high style, drawing its coinages mainly from Latin and French, is used for the topics you hold to be the most serious and noble; the middle constitutes the normal style and draws mainly from Scots and Inglis, while the staccato, low style, supplemented mainly by Scandinavian and Germanic loanwords, is used for low subjects, vituperation and farce.⁷

From this point of view, the achievement of the 18^th Century ‘Vernacular Revival’ was to restore to Scottish writers the full range of registers previously available to the makars:

eighteenth century poets accepted the makars’ view that the two dialects had always been intertwined. What they did revive on rhetorical criteria, was the full and varied range of styles by returning Scots diction to interlace as complement and supplement to English within all registers.⁸

Now, this view can and does give powerful explanatory accounts of the use of language in many Scottish texts. True, some writers who largely play by the rules of decorum occasionally burlesque them, as in William Drummond of Hawthornden’s Polemo-Middinia inter Vitarvam et Bebernam (c.1645) which constructs a macaronic Scots-Latin to satirise the dispute between two Fife families about a right-of-way. (This poem, and a translation of it, can be found in the ASLS anthology The Christis Kirk Tradition⁹). Still, even by burlesquing the rules of decorum this poem acknowledges them: the Scots elements in the Latin provide the ‘mock’ in ‘mock heroic’. The problem I have with Professor Jack’s view is that the model of language implicit in the classical model and here applied to the literature of Scotland seems static rather than dynamic, and consensual rather than conflicting. A theory of decorum depends upon a consensus that says: this language is lofty (ie Latin and French), this language is low (ie Norse-derived Scotticisms), and this language is plain. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way it stays.

Many Scottish writers, consciously or unconsciously, refuse to accept this view of language. The whole point of a poem like Tom Leonard’s ‘Unrelated Incidents (3)’ (in which the six o’clock news is read in a Glasgow accent) is not to burlesque the rules of decorum, but, by inverting them, to challenge head-on the social structures and attitudes which maintain them. Social consent, in the view of political theorist Antonio Gramsci (and indeed linguist Noam Chomsky), is always manufactured, always subject to contention and negotiation.¹⁰ The dominant forces in society draw upon their resources to persuade the dominated that the status quo is in their interests and should be maintained. The alternative to slaughtering those who say ‘sibboleth’ or ‘haitch’ is simply to persuade them that they are uneducated and vulgar because they utter such deviant forms, and so they had better accept their lowly position in life. Or, in Leonard’s words, ‘if a toktaboot/thi trooth/lik wanna you/ scruff yi/ widny thingk/ it wuz troo.’¹¹ Even the linguistic situation that prevailed in the late middle ages can be seen in terms of domination and resistance: Latin and French became the prestige languages in Britain because of Roman imperialism, the influence of the Church, and the establishment of feudalism after the Norman Conquest in England. The ebbing of Gaelic in the lowlands of Scotland was not the result of some physical exclusion of Gaels, but rather a consequence of the rise in economic power of the burghs, where Inglis was the language of commerce and administration (to the extent where it eventually replaced Latin as the language of the law, and Gaelic as the language of everyday communication). Writers have long played a part in challenging as well as upholding the current social order, and some literature can be seen as confronting the rules of decorum that imply a certain social structure. In the fifteenth century the challenge was: why shouldn’t bourgeois Scots replace clerical Latin and become a high-style language? Nowadays one challenge is: why do we have signs in English and Gaelic in the new Scottish parliament – but not in Scots? The argument from decorum, ie that it is not appropriate to use Scots in such contexts, perhaps simply masks a more fundamental truth: certain social groups within our society (branded by their shibboleths) are still being systematically excluded from access to power and resources.

Reforging Identities

To summarise the argument so far: when you move from the relative homogeneity of a tribe to the multicultural complexities of a nation, you can no longer rely on a clear-cut set of shibboleths that everyone knows and uses as a common badge of identity. Instead you have a complex range of linguistic markers which are evaluated, and praised or stigmatised, according to rules of decorum. These rules can be presented as linguistic ‘facts’ but, of course, they are the result of social forces which themselves are subject to either acceptance and celebration, or challenge and resistance. What I want to do now is consider some writings from different linguistic traditions in Scotland and consider how the authors use language to respond (whether directly or implicitly) to the prevailing linguistic and social orders. There are so many obvious passages from the last century that spring to mind: from Chris Guthrie pondering the relative merits of Scots and English in Sunset Song, through Hugh MacDiarmid’s attempt to write a nation into existence by devising a grand linguistic fusion, to Tom Leonard’s powerful evocations of urban speech. However, in the spirit of the conference, I want to focus instead on more recent work: one extract from a forthcoming novel, and two from still-fairly-newish New Writing Scotlands, Volumes 15 and16, Some Sort of Embrace and the appropriately-titled The Glory Signs.

Consider an extract from a short story by Suhayl Saadi, ‘Bandanna’, a stream-of consciousness narrative of three teenage boys (Salman, Ali and Zafar) as they go on the randan across Glasgow:

They reached the end of the street. Ahead lay the Tramway, a theatre which none of them had ever been in, not even when the Mela had been there. The Mela wis jis fur kids and cooncilurs. Sal and his dosts preferred machines to people. They were noisy, irascible, silicon-based like Michael Jackson. They’d play the robots for hours, not bothering whether they won or lost, not caring about the game. Just moving to the beat of chip upon chip, a twitch of the film-star thigh, the hot shoulder shuffle. They were on the film set, they were living in total. There were no spaces in their existence. No gaps of silence. The Gang turned west, away fae the Mosques, towards Maxwell Park. That’s where they were heidet. To the pond, and the trees. To muck up the quiet. To fill it wi gouts ae Bhangra and Bassie. They skatit past the tenement closes, each one a blink in the Gang’s eye. The sound of generations carved into each corniced ceiling. Flip back: Sal in the gao. Or, to be more accurate, in Azaad-Kashmir, the Land of Freedom. His family’s land, earth-brown like their skins (not like Sal’s though), old blood, like the tenement stone. But Sal was another type of Azaadi. Another hybrid.¹²

mela: – festival
Azaad-Kashmir: – Free Kashmir
gao: – village

Sal, the focus of the story, explores his hybrid identity in a polyglot medium that draws on colloquial Scots, Punjabi and English (ranging from self-conscious literariness to teenage slang). The story captures the mood of someone on the cusp of various social categories, unable to fit comfortably into any one, other than (for now) the Gang whose symbol (or visual shibboleth) is the black bandanna. Sal is between Scotland and Kashmir, childhood and adulthood, family and independence, white and black. The jarring synthesis of languages in the story is decorous but only insofar as it is appropriate to the multiple identities to which Sal can potentially affiliate, to a greater or lesser degree. Like the Ephraimites in the Book of Judges who ‘could not frame to pronounce’ shibboleth, he cannot himself wholly determine his identity. Like John Shields in ‘Walking the Dog’, he can attempt to obscure the arbitrary badges of affiliation — the three boys wear black bandannas to make them look whiter — but acceptance into any community is never controlled by the relatively powerless individual. And so the slang, the swearing, and the code-switching that characterise this story cannot be seen simply as the appropriate language to use in a vigorous social satire, but as a dramatic expression of the painful process of identity-formation in a hostile society.

‘Bandannas’ is a gift to a talk like this because it is about multiple identities and it uses language to dramatise the difficulties inherent in forming an identity within a multicultural society. What about a piece of literature that has a very different topic? Let’s turn to Meg Bateman’s poem, ‘Things are not so hard’.

Chan eil rudan cho trom
air an neach a dh’fhalbhas
bidh faradh eile aig a’ghrèin,
bidh mùthadh na chomas …
Chan amhlaigh dhan neach a dh’fhanas
is gach oisean san t-sràid na chuimhneachan,
doras gach taigh-seinns’ na chlach-chinn
dhan toileachas-inntinn a chaidh seachad.

Things are not so hard
on the one who leaves –
the light will have a different slant,
change will be possible …
It’s not the same for the one who remains,
with every street corner a memorial,
every pub-door a headstone
to that excitement that has passed.¹³

Here we have an apparently simple, slightly bitter poem of lost love, presented in Gaelic and English. It is personal, low-key and not explicitly about identity. And yet, as Christopher Whyte and Iain Galbraith have argued recently,¹⁴ any poem written in Gaelic and translated into English is pregnant with unstated assumptions about identity and power within a pluralist culture. In reviews of Gaelic poems, Chris Whyte worried about what he was supposed to be reviewing: in particular what should he take to be the status of the English translations? Paraphrases or poems in their own right? The problem is compounded by the fact that most Scots only have access to the Gaelic through the translation. Iain Galbraith, faced a similar set of questions when including Gaelic poems in a bilingual anthology of translations of Scottish texts into German: should he include the English translations? Initially he was inclined not to, and simply put the Gaelic and German on facing pages. Then (perhaps influenced by Robert Crawford and Bill Herbert’s Sharawaggi ‘translations’ from English to Scots) he felt something of the polyglot character of the presentation of Scottish poetry was lost in this solution. Is Scottish Gaelic poetry now something that is not lost in translation but is rather born in the unstable interaction between the Gaelic and the English?

It is even possible to re-read Meg Bateman’s poem in the light of this debate. It is after all about a relationship that has gone wrong: for the partner who has moved on, there is novelty and hope. For the partner who has stood still, there are only memories and intimations of mortality. But it is in the relationship – the unstable interaction – that the excitement resides. Perhaps now the different linguistic strands which make up the tapestry of Scotland’s languages should only be seen in the volatile but energising context of each other: English, Scots, Gaelic, Urdu, Chinese, whatever.

When faced with complexity, the easy solution is of course to deny the complications, to idealise and simplify. People who fear diversity argue that there must be common ground, a myth, on which the nation can unite – we need a shibboleth or some other kind of marker of national identity, to brand us as a single community, a tangible commonweal. In the last century, Lallans of course, was promoted by some as a way forward, a standard written Scots that (if implemented in the school system and taught in the universities) would act as a focus for a sense of Scottish nationhood. Though it still has its supporters, Lallans failed as a general substitute for standard English, partly because of the economic and political dominance of English in the world today, and partly because of fears that Lallans would eventually signify the same social exclusion that English had come to represent. Even so, some form of Lallans (or at least, some form of non-regional, written literary Scots), I think, still has a role (and a future) as a medium that can, alongside Gaelic, in principle signify the nation, beyond the tribal specificities of urban and rural Scots dialects. Matthew Fitt’s forthcoming science fiction novel in Scots, But n Ben a Go Go, dares to imagine a future for Scots. It’s not an entirely pleasant scenario: a climatic catastrophe has meant that the world is largely drowned and the seasons have been reversed. The wife of the protagonist, Paulo Broon, has been turned into an ‘Omega’, that is, a comatose zombie after being infected with a lethal sexual disease during an adulterous affair. In the following extract, Broon visits her in the Rigo Imbeki Medical Center, ‘high up on Montrose Parish’:

Paolo’s ile-stoor resistant bitts squealed on the ceramic flair as he stepped back an glowered west alang Gallery 1083. It wis a summer Sunday forenoon the clatty end o January an the mile lang visitors’ corridor wis toom. A singil lawyer an her lycra-leggit secretary intromittit the silence, shooglin past on a courtesy electric caur. An indie-pouered germsooker jinked inconspicuously in and oot o Paolo’s personal space, dichtin up microscopic clart as it drapped aff his body.

A quarter mile doon, the wersh blinterin sun forced itsel in throu the UV filter gless at the corridor heid, illuminatin the faces an keek panels o the first fifty Omegas. An as he skellied intae the white bleeze, a troop o droid surveillance puggies advanced in heelstergowdie formation alang the corridor roof, skited by owre his heid an wi a clatter o mettalic cleuks, skittered awa eastwards doon the shadowy vennel. The toomness o the visitors’ corridor offered Paolo nae bield fae the buildin’s oorie atmosphere; Gallery 1083 wis an eerie airt wi or wioot passengers.¹⁵

Fitt’s Scots is iconoclastic, eclectic, and fun. In a way, a fantasy world is a perfect setting for this kind of Scots, a Scots which does not necessarily appeal to a strong social or regional identity, but which tries to speak for an ‘imagined national community’ of Scots.¹⁶ Though such a Scots is sometimes seen as a betrayal of social, ethnic or regional origins, there is still, I think, a home for it in the linguistic tapestry because it speaks for no individual tribe.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a talk given on language and Scottish identity could well be subtitled (like a Dulux catalogue?): ‘In Praise of Glosses’. Reading through a book like New Writing Scotland, one is struck by the number of times a text has to be glossed: whether Gaelic, Scots or Punjabi into English, which might irreverently be described as our common pidgin (or arguably, ‘King Creole’). What, then, am I trying to say about literary language and Scottish identity?

First, there is inevitably a tension between what you might call our ‘tribal’ languages (whether languages of region, class, ethnicity, religious affiliation, age or gender) and a national language that all our tribes could in principle rally around. A national language can never be stable because it will always reflect the changing status of the ‘tribes’ within our society. The imposition of, say, standard English, or Lallans, or Gaelic, or even Shetlandic Scots will be resisted by those among us who feel it does not represent them, or represents them only partially. If we are to exist as a nation, however, we must pay active attention to the variety of languages around us and to give them (as our youth tribes would say) ‘respect’. That does not just mean walking round with a permanently open mind. It means ensuring people from the rural Borders to the remoter islands have access to, say, to the urban demotic, and vice versa. It means that we must hear on television and radio and on cd’s, not just English and Gaelic and a bit of Glasgow or Edinburgh demotic, but a full range of Scottish voices from all our communities. It means we must be aware of how shibboleths are used, positively and negatively, as badges of identity for tribes within our pluralist society, and it means that we must realise that a multicultural nation is ultimately much, much more than a grab-bag of linguistic markers. What I’ve been arguing is that our ‘national language’ lies not in the shibboleths of any one linguistic variety but in the fruitful interaction between many. That does make us unique.

Publications like New Writing Scotland are invaluable because they have a history of seeking out literary language in all its variety. They embody the interactionist philosophy I’ve been proposing today. The signs elsewhere (particularly in schools) are currently looking very hopeful too, which, I dare to believe, augurs well for the shape of texts to come.

Notes

¹ Manson, John (2000) ‘Shibboleth’ in Lallans 56, p.142
² See the entry for ‘Shibboleth’ in Mcarthur, T. (1992) The Oxford Companion to the English Language Oxford: OUP, p. 932
³ MacLaverty, Bernard (1994) Walking the Dog and Other Stories London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 7-8
⁴ Barthes, Roland (1972) Mythologies trans. A. Lavers London: Jonathan Cape
⁵ See, for example, his Critical Introduction to Jack, RDS and Rozendaal, PAT, eds (1997) The Mercat Anthology of Early Scottish Literature: 1375-1707 Edinburgh: Mercat Press
⁶ Horace, Ars Poetica translated by T.S Dorsch (1965) Aristotle/Horace/Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism Harmonsworth: Penguin p. 87
⁷ Jack, RDS (1998) ‘Burns and the Makars’ in G. Ross Roy, ed Studies in Scottish Literature XXX, University of South Carolina, p. 13
⁸ Jack op. Cit. P. 17
⁹ Maclaine, A. Ed (1996) The Christis Kirk Tradition Glasgow: ASLS
¹⁰ See Gramsci, A (1971) Prison Notebooks, NY: International Publishers; Chomsky, N and Herman, ES (1988) Manufacturing Consent Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press
¹¹ Leonard, T (1984) ‘Unrelated Incidents (3)’ in Intimate Voices 1965-1983 Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press
¹² Saadi, S (1998) ‘Bandanna’ in D. O’Rourke, K. Jamie and R. Gorman, eds The Glory Signs Glasgow: ASLS
¹³ Bateman, M (1997) ‘Chan eil rudan cho trom/Things are not so hard’ in D. O’Rourke, K. Jamie and R. Gorman, eds Some Sort of Embrace Glasgow: ASLS
¹⁴ Galbraith, I (forthcoming) ‘To Hear Ourselves as Others Hear Us’ Translation and Literature, University of Glasgow; Whyte, C (1996, 1997) Reviews in Lines Review, 137 & 141.
¹⁵ From Fitt, M (1999) Sair Heid City Kingskettle: Kettilonia; extracts from a novel to be published in full as But n Ben a Go Go Edinburgh: Luath, 2000
¹⁶ Anderson, B (1983) Imagined Communities Verso

ELPHINSTONE, Margaret, ‘Fantasising Texts’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

The Shape of Texts to Come: writing a new Scotland, 13–14 May 2000
References are given at the end of the document. |

Scottish Fantasy Today

The question that arises, when one is asked to talk about Scottish fantasy today, is whether this simply means fantasy texts that come out of Scotland, or whether there is currently a genre that might be labelled ‘Scottish fantasy’ which is significantly different from fantasy that comes from anywhere else. The unique status of Scottish fantasy has been a well-established tenet of Scottish literature and criticism, but the dominant genre at the end of the twentieth century is contemporary, urban and realistic. Can we still assert that there is a distinctively Scottish fantasy genre, which is neither retrospective nor nostalgic, but which uses traditional elements to produce texts relevant to the modern world? I have a vested interest in saying ‘yes’, a claim I’ll now attempt to substantiate.

Gregory Smith suggested, back in 1919¹, that Scottish fantasy had unique features, and set up the model of the Caledonian anti-syzygy that has been extended, re-designed and deconstructed ever since. I gave a paper in 1991² in which I looked at fantasy texts by women in the light of Gregory Smith’s model, and concluded that they did indeed set up an ironic juxtaposition between the real and the fantastic. I later rejected Smith’s model for what seemed to me a more anarchic and less hierarchical pluralism. Probably the only recent critic bold enough to assert that Scottish fantasy is categorically different from, say, English fantasy is Colin Manlove, in his introduction to An Anthology of Scottish Fantasy Literature (1996)³. Interestingly, he is less definite on this point in his 1994 volume Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey⁴, which considers the ambiguity of the adjective ‘Scottish’ in relation to identifying motifs found in fantasy texts. Today I am inclined to re-visit the Caledonian anti-syzygy, very cautiously, and see if it still has anything to offer when reading contemporary texts. I also intend to test some of Manlove’s assertions against new texts coming out of Scotland.

Manlove emphasises the relationship between fantasy fiction and a living tradition of folk and fairy tale, which he asserts has survived more strongly in modern Scotland than it has done in England. Smith, in a similar argument, cited a strongly surviving ballad tradition as a major influence on Scottish fantasy writing. Both critics also consider fantasy as a method of delineating a psychological state, and the citation of Hogg and Stevenson in this context has become a critical cliché in the study of Scottish literature. In reading fantasy as an image of a psychic state, we are also indebted to a mode of thought probably first expressed by the Muirs, both Edwin and Willa, in a variety of genres, in which fantasy is understood as an image of the subconscious or dream world, a fragmented reflection of lost wholeness. A psychoanalytical model, in which fantasy becomes an image of a psychic state that cannot be apprehended through rational or conscious discourse, complements the connection between modern fantasy and the supernatural in folk tradition. Both strategies alert the reader to the use of archetypal or traditional motifs, even in the most contemporary of settings.

These strategies for reading present-day Scottish fantasy can, I suggest, be taken a step further than either the early twentieth century critics or Manlove have done. Smith and Manlove both draw attention to the way that Scottish fantasy locates the supernatural in the heart of contemporary realism. The implication is that fantasy subverts the assumptions of that world. I think it does more: in a post-structuralist world it destabilises contemporary notions of what is ‘real’, drawing upon past traditions, dreams, subconscious hopes and fears about the supernatural, and giving them a validity which is at least equal to, and often stronger than, the rational laws that supposedly govern the external world. My reading of Scottish fantasy suggests to me not so much a binary opposition: real/fantastic, as a demolishing of the boundary that divides the real from the supernatural. Therefore I still have to take issue with the notion of anti-syzygy. In this re-location the borderlands become central, the liminal place where action takes place, and, in the text, where the plot can start to happen.

Manlove rightly suggests that Scottish fantasy tends to locate the workings of the supernatural, or irrational, at the heart of the world we inhabit, rather than to construct a parallel world, which is the pre-dominant theme in most English (and I think, American) fantasy. Where there is a parallel world, Scottish texts often link it to a realistic dimension by using dual or multiple narratives (Gray’s Lanark and Banks’ The Bridge are obvious examples), but this is by no means a uniquely Scottish device. The disruptive element in much Scottish fantasy (and here Manlove aligns it with a European tradition) is that it is not a reflection of our own world, but an alarming dislocation of where we assume our world to be. The metaphor of location is very relevant here, as – and this is a fundamental aspect of Manlove’s thesis – the location of the fantastic in the real world is often tied in with a precise topography of the Scottish landscape. I think this is a peculiarly Scottish feature: nowhere else do I find, in the middle of reading fantasy, that I have to follow it, literally, on the map. The fantastic is not located in a different dimension; as readers we experience it as part of a seamless whole, which is the reality the text presents. Fantasy, as a reflection both of the individual subconscious and a collective past tradition, is central to how this world operates. That’s frightening because it cannot be consciously apprehended or controlled. Reading good Scottish fantasy is a sinister, disorientating experience because it overthrows the comfortable post-Enlightenment rationale which allows us to make a difference between the dream and the reality, and to think that we escape from the dream and become rational beings again when we wake up, or stop reading.

My remit today is to consider how Scottish fantasy is developing, in the context of this conference title ‘The Shape of Texts to Come”. Maybe I was picked for the job because I have written texts that speculate about possible futures. Outside fiction, however, I must admit to having no idea what anyone, except myself, is planning to write next, and even in my own case I can’t be categorical. This is why new fiction is exciting: writers do not and should not try to conform to academic speculation. I believe the only reliable approach to possible development is to look at what young writers are attempting in Scottish fantasy now. Instead of indulging in prediction, therefore, I shall look at an actual story from a real writer of the next generation, and use it to test the characteristics of Scottish fantasy I’ve discussed:

the use of folk tradition in a contemporary setting;
a way of exploring the psyche, using dream images or archetypes;
a means of breaking down the boundaries that apparently separate the real from the supernatural or illusory, which
destabilises what we think of as the ‘real’ external world.

This is not to say that all current Scottish fantasy necessarily fits all these criteria, but to assert that there is a continuum in the Scottish tradition that does do so. It may not be the most acclaimed form of Scottish writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it is still a vital part of the tradition.

“The Wall” is a short story by Rebecca Leach, shortly to be published as the first prizewinner in The Pushkin Prizes in Scotland⁵ the anthology of the selected entries for a literary prize for second and third year pupils in Scottish secondary schools. This is an extraordinary story from a very young writer. She takes images, which are ordinary objects in realistic terms, but which also occur as highly charged motifs in folk tale and literary tradition, and she causes them to change shape and meaning with a skill rendered unobtrusive by a deceptively simple style. This is how the story begins:

Tom held his breath and looked over the edge of the wall. He let it go and watched as it climbed the air like a Chinese dragon. Down below on the grass and rocks, a weasel was eating the remains of a fieldmouse. Tom had seen it killed by a hawk that morning when the sun rose over the grey hills. It was discarded for a larger prey soon after it was caught.
Among the trees something was moving. A shadow without anything to block the sun. A dense darkness that could be seen even though there was no sunlight to block it up … The darkness crept up to the wall but fluttered back when it got to within a few metres of it as if warded off by some invisible force.
The wall had been there forever. Since the glaciers shaped the land. Or maybe it was a glacier, caught in time and frozen in a ribbon, which gradually turned to stone and moss.

We have here some typical motifs of Scottish fantasy writing. First of all, we are in Scotland. These are Scottish hills, with grass and rocks, and the precise detail of a weasel eating a fieldmouse that had been previously killed by a hawk. Our narrator is a sharp observer, with a precise knowledge of what she describes. But even as the landscape is revealed to us, it keeps turning into something else. The inexplicable is an integral part of the world we are shown. The fieldmouse, the natural victim of a natural cycle, foreshadows the helpless victim of the plot which is still to unfold. What happens to the girl who appears later isn’t different in kind from what has already been happening, always, in the natural world.

So we’re not looking away from the real world, we’re looking very hard into it. And as we watch, every ordinary thing turns into something else, or, paradoxically, reveals more of its true nature. The simile in the second sentence sets the pattern. Tom’s breath ‘climbs the air like a Chinese dragon’. The wall, too, the central image which gives the story its title, becomes something else as soon as the narrator begins to describe it: ‘maybe it was a glacier, caught in time and frozen in a ribbon, which gradually turned to stone and moss’. The narrator here sees the wall in terms of the past history of the landscape. It represents the thing that has been here ‘forever’, which, in terms of folk memory, means back to the time of the glaciers. The glaciers are still there, their effects written on the landscape, buried in folk memory, and also a hidden part of the substance of the wall. The wall now is ‘caught in time and frozen in a ribbon’. ‘Frozen in a ribbon’ suggests a whole linear history, a narrative of the past preserved and encapsulated in the wall. But a ribbon is a also a cheerful form of adornment, more fun than a piece of string, for example. Maybe there are connotations here that the wall transforms the stuff that it is made of. But it still belongs to the land. The ribbon ‘gradually turned to stone and moss’. As with the fieldmouse, the weasel and the hawk, we are invited to see objects in terms of a natural cycle.

So what is this wall? Fantasy is not allegory. The wall changes as images in a dream change, and no fixed meaning can be assigned to it. But it is clearly a boundary: that’s what walls are for. It also has the power to transform itself into other things. Moreover, the patch of ‘dense darkness’ the ‘shadow without anything to block the sun’ can come out of the forest to within a few metres of the wall, but then it can’t pass, and it has to ‘flutter’ back. The wall, then, keeps something that comes out of the wild landscape away from what lies on the other side – presumably the human world from which Tom has come, when we first find him looking over the edge of the wall into the other landscape. At this point there seems to be a very clear boundary between nature/culture, wild/tame, supernatural/real, and perhaps subconscious/conscious. We seem to be set up for an anti-syzygy in a thoroughly Caledonian setting.

But that changes. The focus shifts so that we are no longer looking over the wall with Tom, but at the wall itself. The wall is where the action happens, on the borderline between the two worlds. The two join together seamlessly into a terrifying incident which is as much about Tom’s fear, guilt and self-justification as it is about an external supernatural force. Can Rebecca Leach have read Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner yet?

Tom was deep in his thoughts. He was looking at Katie’s Hole. He had named that particular spot Katie’s Hole after an accident some time ago. A family came – from America, Tom thought but he wasn’t sure – on holiday to the Borders. Tom hadn’t liked them much.

We have shifted to the other side of the wall, to the external social world, without any break in the narrative, and in this context we have the first reference to the central incident ‘an accident some time ago’. Only gradually do we realise the specious nature of Tom’s non-involvement. The narrator, echoing Tom’s post hoc rationale, places the incident safely in a past that is over and distances it ‘an accident’ a mistake that happened to somebody else. But the wall has already told us that time doesn’t make things go away. The past is still there, contained and transmuted within the wall. And things are not distanced: they all connect, as the hawk, the fieldmouse and the weasel are connected in the first paragraph.

As the incident is gradually revealed, the irony of Tom’s efforts to distance himself, and to be the rational observer become apparent. Like the Editor in Memoirs and Confessions, he places himself as the objective outsider, and the third person narrator makes no comment, only allows what Tom would no doubt call ‘the facts’ to speak for themselves:

Tom watched her climb up the wall … He watched her as she reached the top and hoisted her fat little body on to it. She grunted and snapped a few times as if blaming the wall for all the grazes she got on her bare legs … She was now opening the little pink bag she had brought up with her. She pulled out lots of stones from it and started chucking them off the edge. After she had disposed of thirteen – Tom had counted – she got bored and looked for other things to do with them. She found that she could stick them in the gaps of the stone of the wall. She smirked as she continued to do so.

Tom, as the hidden observer watching the stranger in his country, appears to position himself as the objective onlooker. But the narrative indicates something rather different. Tom belongs here. He is hidden further along the wall, camouflaged within the landscape. The American girl, with her fat little body and ‘little pink bag’ is the obtrusive stranger. For her, but not for Tom, the wall is inimical; it’s an effort to climb it, it grazes her bare legs. Tom, on the contrary, is at home with the wall, almost part of it. The irony is that while he positions himself as the observer from the rational world, he is actually seen to be aligned with the border country the wall represents. As far as the girl’s fate is concerned, he is the shadow without substance, the dense darkness, that we saw at the beginning. If she is the human victim, he has become diabolical.

She had taken a large stone and was cramming it into the wall when the wall started shaking. The bit Tom was on wasn’t shaking though; it was just where the girl was sitting. It was more rippling than shaking as if it were a snake waving its middle and trying to flick something off its back. Tom looked at the base of the wall where it was shaking. There was a hole there that hadn’t been there before. A black hole that looked as if it would never end. Then Tom saw Katie fall.

The wall changes its nature again: it’s been a glacier and a ribbon, now it’s a snake. One is reminded of the three transformations in Tam Lin, but the roles here are reversed. Tom is aligned with the Faerie world, where ironically we see that he belongs, but he has no love for the human girl ‘The child in the family wasn’t particularly nice’ is his opinion. He is the coldhearted observer who does nothing, and that turns out to be far more lethal than seduction and the demands that follow. It’s the wall, which contains all past tradition and separates one kind of reality from another, that shifts its shape. As a boundary it is seen to be alive, moving, dangerous and untrustworthy. But Tom has no desire to escape its spell. He’s back at the same place, a year later, still watching the dense darkness on the other side. And the girl – no one invites her into the story. She intrudes, she thrusts stones into the crevices of the wall; she appears to have no notion where she is, or what she is doing there, and as a result the wall swallows her up. Tom watches this with an indifference that belongs not to Enlightenment rationality, but to the callousness traditionally attributed to the fairy world.

But Tom is human, and suffers an aftermath of guilt and self justification, as he has to continue to exist in a world that has no knowledge of his collusion:

No one found out what happened to her. Tom never told anyone. The police and the people from the village had searched for months but they found nothing. Tom didn’t tell them because he didn’t want to. He felt as if it were none of his business. There was something stopping him but he didn’t know what.

This opens up the possible reading that Tom himself invented the story of the wall, as an absolving metaphor for a realistic and sordid crime. There are details that support this, for example when Tom looks down ‘to where a solitary bright pink bag sat discarded, the small stones lay all around it like a memorial for its owner.’ Katie has gone, and there is Tom, alone at the scene of the crime with the incriminating evidence. What did he do with the bright pink bag? Why did the police and the villagers never find it? It’s like the basket left behind by Miss Julie Logan in Barrie’s story of that name. Was there really a basket there? If so, what did the narrator do with it? Or was there no basket? So is he mad? Certainly, by the end of this story, if there is a rational explanation, it has to include the assumption that Tom has gone mad:

He sat there listening for ages, for the sound of a girl hitting the rock at the end of the hole, if there was an end.

Katie’s disappearance down an endless hole in the earth could either be attributed to an image arising from Tom’s disordered psyche, or to the magic of the wall. Either way, it’s an image with a wealth of connotation from traditional tale. Not only does it recall the many Scottish stories of abduction into the underground, fairy world, but also it goes further back, to the universal myths of descent into the underworld. But Tom is no Orpheus, any more than he is Tam Lin. He disassociates himself, and does nothing. It’s the girl, who doesn’t understand Tom’s country, who is absorbed into the landscape, and in the end it is Tom who is left outside, wondering. In terms of the descent into the underworld, however, the sacrificial aspect of Katie’s abduction is left in no doubt at the end of the story. The narrator resists any kind of reductive closure, but she brings her images full circle, indicating that Katie’s fall was part of an inevitable, timeless, cyclical process. She has become part of the blood sacrifice that makes it possible for nature to go on. Katie takes on the role of fieldmouse. Tom did not kill her, as the hawk did. It is the weasel who reaps the reward of that small sacrifice, so it seems that in some oblique and sinister fashion Tom too has had his reward:

The stones that the American girl had played with, he had built up into a cairn on the crack that remained in the rock after the hole had closed up. He watched as the weasel dragged the remains of the mouse on to the pile of stones with its teeth before running off. As the sun set on the hills making them no darker than they were before, Tom saw the blood from the mouse slowly and very slightly flow down the stones and wondered whether the snow would come again next month.

So Tom is party to the sacrifice. He erects a memorial to it in a manner used since history began in the landscape to which he belongs. The mouse’s blood is spilt on the memorial, and Tom watches. Tom is left wondering at the end about the continuance of the seasons. We can read him partly as a universal figure. His name suggests this – he is Tom, in the country which produced Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer, and where Tom is a likely candidate for the name of the Common Man. The suggestion is that he does what has always been done here, on the wall which is the frightening, shifting boundary between the daytime and nighttime worlds. On the other hand, he is a specific character who struggles with his own conscience and fears in the context of a contemporary world, where American tourists come to stay, and Tom can despise them for wearing the wrong clothes. Little girls carry bright pink bags with pebbles in them, and Tom is an ordinary boy who thinks this is pretty weak. But if we allow the realistic interpretation to predominate, Tom is an even more sinister character. In a reading which insists on excluding the supernatural, he knows what really happened to Katie, and he isn’t telling. Whether you take the fantasy as metaphor or as fact, what it says in this story is that the depth of the psyche is a fairly unsettling place.

I have taken The Wall as exemplary, but it is not an isolated example. We may or may not hear of Rebecca Leach again. But this conference invites us to come to the very edge of the time we know and look beyond it. When I was asked to write this paper I thought first of late twentieth century Scottish fantasy texts that I admire, which have been shaped by a tradition whose roots are arguably older than the idea of a Scottish nation. I considered discussing texts by Alasdair Gray, Ian Banks, Liz Lochhead, Sian Hayton, James Meek or Christopher Whyte. I hope to be around for a long time to come to read innovative new works by these established writers. However, there are others whose first books I look forward to with almost equal anticipation.: Matthew Fitt, for example, who has written “the first science fiction novel all in Scots”, But and Ben a Go Go, to be published this year by Luath Press; or Zoe Strachan, whose unnerving witch-like character Leonora exercises strange powers in contemporary Glasgow (Strachan’s first book will be published in 2001); or Anne Donavan, whose short story The Ice Horse (to be included in her first published collection next year) startlingly fulfils every one of the criteria I suggested. Watch this space …

I took Rebecca Leach’s story as one of the many coming texts which are exemplary of a strand of Scottish writing that may be muted at present, while urban realism tends to remain the dominant genre, but which is definitely alive and well. Traditional material is still being used to construct fantasies which are by no means retrospective or sentimental, but are firmly set in the contemporary world. The fantastic elements are used to explore psychic states, and reiterate, as this genre has always done, that the inexplicable and the elusive remains at the heart of human experience, and that in justice to realism it cannot be marginalised or left out. Leach’s story is ambiguous about the significance of the supernatural, and the fluidity of its images, in a manner which shows her clearly to be heir to a Scottish fantasy tradition. She is not alone. While we have writers who are producing texts like this, the Scottish fantasy tradition will continue to shape the texts that are to come.

As a fantasy writer myself, I like to imagine a person, say, a hundred years from now, reading a book, and what that experience will be like for them. I’d therefore like to conclude with a short piece of Scottish fantasy which addresses the possible nature of future texts, and what it will be like to read them. This poem arrived through my door on a postcard; I don’t know if it’s in book form yet. It’s by Tessa Ransford, and it’s about the form of future texts, whereas I have been discussing content, but it too addresses the question of inheriting a tradition. Moreover, it focusses upon the experience of the future reader, who is a mysterious figure, as yet unknown to us, who responds to the past tradition that we are making now. It also empowers us as present-day readers to make our mark on the texts that are being produced now, and to pass them on by claiming them as our own. This is a topic that seems to me to provide a sufficiently open ending for this paper:

One day in the future
a child may come across a book
and say ‘Imagine being able to hold
in your hand what you read, to carry it with you and wear it out
with your life; to pass it on
bearing your marks, your name,
written in ink, your signature:
your wave-length in letters.’

Notes

¹ G. Gregory Smith, Scottish Literature Macmillan 1919

² Margaret Elphinstone, ‘Contemporary Feminist Fantasy in the Scottish Literary Tradition’ in Caroline Gonda (ed) Tea and Leg-Irons Open Letters Press 1992 and in Robert A. Latham and Robert A. Collins (eds) Modes of the Fantastic: Selected Papers from the Twelfth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts Greenwood Press 1995

³ Colin Manlove (ed), An Anthology of Scottish Fantasy Literature Polygon 1996

⁴ Colin Manlove, Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey Canongate 1994

⁵ Rebecca Leach, ‘The Wall’ in The Pushkin Press

JAMIESON, Robert Alan, ‘Webs and Wabsters: small presses, magazines and websites’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

The Shape of Texts to Come: the writing of a new Scotland, 13-14 May 2000 |

References are given at the end of the document.

IN EVERY HOME, A BOOKBINDER?

Let me first make it clear that I am still a neophyte, a naïf in this area – a typewriter-user for whom the new technology came as a destabilizing force. I’ve had to learn, and learn quickly over the last few years, a whole new practice, knowing that if I want to be part of the literature of the future, I must get to grips with the possibilities of 2020 – and not remain stuck in the habits of 1980.

So let’s picture it: the year 2020. Amber, a student in Ohio, for whatever reason has set herself to study contemporary Scottish literature. Where else would she go but to her computer, to the ‘Online Bureau of Scottish Culture’, and its sub-site, ‘The Scottish Virtual Writers Centre’?

“Please click on the language of your choice … ”

A door springs open, the hologrammatic homoglyph of a smiling host welcomes her into the particular cyber-aspect of Scottish culture she wishes to enter …

“Here at the SVWC, where data management is undertaken regarding all aspects of literature affecting Scotland, we offer you total access to contemporary Scottish writing. From this central site, you may subscribe to all Scottish literary netzines, access archives and libraries, visit writers groups in all parts of the country, or join Gaelic and Scots language chat-rooms. You may attend virtual readings either in hologram or video mode; video-conference with those writers prepared to enter into correspondence with questioners – and of course, you can click through to our print-store, where your ‘netcreds’ can purchase any text from our files.

“You may either have the publishers’ luxury bound item sent by mail, or may choose to download the text, or any part of it, on a scale of charges. Then the choice of paper and of binding is yours. Check your printer’s binding menu for options.

“Please click here to enter our virtual foyer … ”

So much for fantasy.

But maybe it’s not so fantastically far away – all this information being available – equally easily, locally, nationally and internationally – is increasingly the case. Amber, at her station in Ohio may as well be in Oz, Oslo or Oban – access is equivalent. She is as ‘centred’ or ‘uncentred’ as she wishes to be.

All that seems rare. But it’s important to remember that the ‘new technology’ is not yet universal, though it often advertises itself as being so. It may have a full range of international links, but not every place has the same number, and not everyone in each place has equal access. Therefore, it is inevitably elitist and divisionist, even as it purports to draw the whole wide world into its web. And at this moment in time, we might say it is ‘generationalist’ too, even if it isn’t quite as recent a phenomenon as is commonly assumed, as Angus J. Kennedy suggests:

The Internet … as a concept is actually older than most of its users; it was born in the 1960s – a long time before anyone coined the buzzword ‘Information superhighway’.¹

The body that gave rise to it, indirectly, the ‘Advanced Research Projects Agency’ (ARPA), is as old as I am. That is to say it is the child of the late fifties, of the Cold War, the beginnings of the Space race; Sputnik, 1957 and all that; born out of American desire to devolve their computer resource through a network, to avoid the possibility of a solitary nuclear explosion taking out their whole system. The Internet itself is about thirty years old and the World Wide Web a mere child of ten or eleven, again the by-product of a different purpose – that of Tim Berners-Lee, the Swiss physicist who sought a single channel to unite the research in his field. Since 1991 and the commercialisation of the Web, its growth has been and is phenomenal, as is the overleaping confidence of the part of Netizens. While it still possible for a twenty two year student from the Philippines to bring the Westminster parliamentary system to a halt with a short ‘I love you’, there’s still a distance to go to cyber-nirvana. Angus J. Kennedy again:

… there’s no question that the Net … really is a quantum leap in global communications, though – right now – it’s more of a prototype than finished product. … while Bill Gates and Al Gore rhapsodise about such household services as video-on-demand, most Netizens would be happy with a system fast enough to view stills-on-demand. ²

Of course it is far from a developed technology, but with new facilities appearing faster than the consumer can keep pace with, it is a dynamically developing one.. One day our children may live in the matrix, that ultimately virtual interactive experience, but not for a while yet. And while we still have time, maybe it’s important to remind them that, symbolically:

… the spider’s web (is) a spiral net converging towards a central point. The spider sitting in its web is a symbol of the centre of the world, and is hence regarded in India as Maya, the eternal weaver of the web of illusion … ³

Yes, desirable as a broad awareness of the world and its affairs is, the immediate environment we live in, our locality, is vital. As Patrick Geddes suggests, we must each dig our own garden; or, put in terms the cyber-children may understand, we must each maintain our node of the matrix with regular defragmentation. Because:

.. the mass media clearly do not form a complete culture on their own: in other words, they do not form an entirely closed system, like a language, but simply a fraction of such a system, which is, of necessity, the culture to which they belong. ⁴

To keep a sense of balance in the cyber-age, we might well pinch a political slogan from the Green movement: think global, act local. The words of the native American Chief Seattle, in 1854, seem peculiarly topical: ‘Man does not weave the web, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.’ Macro and micro stand in a relative relationship, as do virtual and real existence, conscious and subconscious: ‘As above, so below’.
Generalities aside, what does the World Wide Web mean for the writing community in Scotland, now, at the supposed dawn of the new age? I quote a recent email from Angus Dunn, the editor of one of Scotland’s literary magazines, because I think it revealing:

I think the next step is to put some serious work into a web-site. I don’t think many people go to the web to read poetry or fiction, but there is still a lot of information about NW and writing in general that could usefully be made available. ⁵

I detect a gentle mistrust of the value of creating the website, in that phrase ‘I don’t think many people go to the web to read poetry or fiction’; but it is a mistrust of the medium as an exchange for creative work, not complete disinterest. There is a willingness to admit to it as a useful place for information about writing, but not ‘writing’ itself. But this is an average attitude – there are those in the writing community who are making full use of the facilities available, and others no doubt who will associate writing solely with paper and ink till the end of their days.
Who can say how the new technology will change print culture? What kind of writing the next generation will do? Will we use paper at all? Maybe there’s no use for the bookbinding facility in Amber’s fantasy ….

AN ELECTRONIC ANYTHING IS NOT A BOOK

One day in the future
A child may come across a book
And say: “Imagine being able to hold
In your hand what you read,
To carry it with you and wear it out
With your life; to pass it on
Bearing your marks, your name,
Written in ink, your signature:
Your wave-length in letters.” ⁶

So let’s try to think about text and what it is doing there on the screen, squirming away while your eye tries to trap it and maybe analyse its semiotic DNA. Like the book, it’s transmitting something, or trying to. Let’s think also about the book as object, and the inherent instability of electronic text, in contrast to the thick materiality of paper and ink.
For anyone who has ever lost material in a computer crash, instability is a consideration. Instability, even of the disk, which can be mysteriously wiped or simply broken. Destroying a book takes a little more determination than the tread of a size nine heel. One has first to light the fire, or put it in the black-bag. So even if most people take to reading from their palm-held, surely there will always be at least a few hard copies somewhere, of whatever text people designate as valuable enough to want to keep. And – ‘nature provideth her own cure’ – just as it threatens to take the business of text transmission away from the printed page, hasn’t the new tech made small press paper publication easier than ever? – so-called ‘Desktop Publishing’, which, according to Patricia Sullivan:

… merges writing, graphic design, art, instructional text design, and publication production in an entirely new way. … a publication can be mapped onto a single electronic file, desktop publishing creates a multi-disciplinary melting pot that encourages us to rethink the relationships of the allied publishing disciplines This new technology allows any one of the professionals involved – a writer, a designer, or a production specialist – to become the total desktop publisher. ⁷

Sullivan goes on to tell the tale of ‘My writer friend “George”’ who watched a demonstration of DTP and immediately bought the package:

He was sure that he would be turning out “publication quality” documents in hours and was disappointed at how hard it was for him to layout the simplest newsletter on his new system. I watched his frustration mount as he struggled to teach himself how to use a program he was convinced was easy-to-use, never realising that he was learning a new system at the same time as he was trying to use that system on a task he had not done before … ⁸

The problem lay in his underestimation of the expertise involved: the simpler the magic trick seems, the more slight of hand is concealed:

George assumed the desktop publishing was simple and utterly transparent; any problems he had must be due to his clumsiness with computers … had George not sought professional help he would have abandoned his machine or hired a person to be the desktop publishing specialist. Two months later the technical problems were solved but the documents were slightly comical in their excesses: George had reached the second stage and could now publish the way that anyone can play (saxophone), (John) Coltrane’s ‘badly’. While he had mastered the capabilities of the desktop publishing program, he had not become a competent desktop publisher. ⁹

DTP packages are developing all the time. Nevertheless, the point Sullivan is making, that there is expertise involved in the laying out and the design of a book which doesn’t come built into the program, is still a consideration for the creative user. The use of so-called ‘wizards’ in DTP is not conducive to the kind of creative art we associate with the best book designers. Considering only one single aspect, as Robert Bringhurst records in his Elements of Typographic Style:

… the subject is a lifelong study and for serious typographers a source of lifelong discovery and delight … consistency is one of the forms of beauty. Contrast is another. A fine page, even a fine book, can be set from beginning to end in one type in one size. It can also teem with variety, like an equatorial forest or a modern city.¹⁰

There are basic compositional skills that are readily transferable, but some feeling for the capability and plasticity of the medium must exist for the user to make the most interesting creative use of it. To borrow from Coltrane, via Sullivan, anyone can make a booklet or a website badly. But to create something that genuinely stretches the medium, we must know where the limits are. Most DTP users come nowhere near this point, and the limits are constantly changing anyway Recognition of the skills involved in DTP and the need for constant training is one by-product of this ‘new-age’ of ours.

Yes, we are learning, as the superhighway speeds beneath us and the future opens out before us. Maybe we can’t see it as easily as J.W. Dunne ¹¹ suggested:

sticking your head out of the railway carriage to glimpse the future only works if the line ahead is straight. Still we might say with some certainty that if the regular transmission of text becomes ever more an electronic event, yet the need for a few hard copies remains, then the value of the book as original artefact will increase. We might expect a correspondent rise in the aesthetic values of that artefact – work more along the lines of Iain Hamilton Finlay than Ian Rankin. The ‘book’ may, in effect, become still more an objet d’art, to be viewed, admired and possessed, rather than read, as the separation of the vehicle from its primary purpose, the transmission of text, increases. At the extreme, as it becomes redundant it may transform, metaphorically speaking, from working mill to heritage centre. There is perhaps a parallel with the fate of manuscripts after the coming of printing. Walter Ong suggests ‘that print gave us the ability to fix words on particular pages, enabling standard references and indexes’ and that although manuscripts still existed, indeed they actually increased in numbers, ‘print transformed our understanding of writing from a notetaking used to “generally” preserve speech into a way to fix meaning on a page.’ ¹²

With DTP, we are able now to fix the very page itself: to book-make. The means of production are more widely accessible. The range of facilities now available on even the most basic home PC DTP package should present enough of creative scope for the designer to make an interesting and aesthetically pleasing, if basic product. The problem is to find a way of ‘idiosyncratizing’ the technology sufficiently to make your publication expressive of your identity, either a distinct group or as an individual.

One thing about the book is that it is ‘really’ there. In fact, such a defining feature of the book’s nature is the fact of its real existence that we might argue ‘an electronic anything is NOT a book’. Books are three dimensional; visual, tactile and olfactory. They do not often sing and dance. Books are stable and durable, relatively speaking. Far from the World Wide Web swallowing up the book, it is possible to construct a converse scenario in which the book swallows at least a portion of ‘Netkultur’, preserving it. You need only look in the Computing section of a bookshop to see that the process of influence works both ways, where the pages of books are adorned by fixed screen images.

It is obvious that the screen in the first place mimics the page, but increasingly books mimic screens – and not just in ‘Word for Dummies’ variants. An interesting and creative example of this reverse case is the satire ‘Knoxland’, by Brian McCabe, in the last issue of Product magazine.¹³

It is designed as a series of screens from a fictitious website: ‘the Hottest Presbyterian Site on the Net’. McCabe cleverly reconstructs the kind of image we anticipate when we switch on a computer, not the block of type we would expect to find in a magazine. The irony is, of course, that despite the change of medium, it is the same obsessions with religion and sex that the site conjures. Reading, or maybe I should say viewing, this work I have the feeling that something about the stereotypical Scottish nature has been ‘outed’ on the Internet, while in reality I am holding a paper page.

STILLS & MOVIES, TALKIES & SILENCE

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.¹⁴

So saith John Berger in his seminal Ways of Seeing, and in the case of the Internet, sight certainly came first. It is possible to draw parallels with the motion picture industry before sound, or still photography before the movies. But this is changing fast. Integrated sound and vision is coming your way rapidly – WEBTV, a vast library of programmes, available by download. All you need is the right hardware and software.

Soon, we may all be sitting in our electric blue rooms, ‘waiting for the gift of sound and vision’,¹⁵ from elsewhere. And in ever more of those electric blue rooms, there will be performance poets ‘SLAMMING’ internationally by video-link, actors, musicians and dancers, performing for their digital cameras, live online. More than you could possibly ever watch. Putting it out there, ‘up’ on the Web. And the better your system, the better your show.

Yes, high quality, easily accessible sound is fundamental to the fulfilment of the Netdream – counter to Berger’s visual partiality, ‘nthibiginninwuzthiwurd’, as Tom Leonard phrased it,¹⁶ paraphrasing that other guy. I think we may reasonably debate whether the vibrations of a mother’s body while her child is in her womb denotes first contact with language, and if it is the same muffled music we later participate in the making of.

The point here, though, is the revolution that the coming of sound, allied to the facility of the kinetic screen, is creating. The power of movement, to morph and change each pixel – no need ever to turn the page. Words appear before you as fast as you want to read them, and disappear when you don’t; or screen images dance to the rhythm of a spoken work you never see a text of. The show is on.

These new technical facilities are even now giving to a whole new creative medium, a computer based and computer driven art, which will feed on those previously existing, am original blend of cinema, music, literature, the visual art. Computers are skilled copying and processing machines, and can be adapted to systematise and speed complex – tasks in all fields. Artists are converging on this common territory, from their different disciplines.
Computers and associated technology are being used by visual artists, by musicians, by writers … in fact, it is THE common tool.

There would seem to be, at this time, no limit to the complexity of tasks as processor speeds accelerate. The problem is, rather, that the avant-garde is advancing so quickly that the general user is ill equipped to keep pace. Our modems are too slow, we don’t have right hardware/software, our ignorance is too great.
But we are learning fast.

A MANY PORTALLED HALL

Let’s go back to Amber and speculate a moment, on how the web-ring (for such is the phrase) of Scottish writing might be accessed. Linkage and manifold access is the key to successful sites. Your own site may be very small and only one of many nodes in the matrix, but by linking with others of similar interest you increase the likelihood of someone finding their way to your door. More than just ‘someone’, ‘the right one’, the person who is genuinely interested in what it is you have to share with them – your ideal reader/audience.

But just how might Amber find her way into Scottish literature in the first place? Maybe she heard Janice Galloway reading on campus and wanted to know more about her and the city she lives in, then took a cyber walk around Glasgow on a web-tour in the company of Moira Burgess. Maybe she was searching Dracula and found herself brought to the Scottish site by means of Stoker and Cruden Bay. Maybe she was doing a project on minority languages and became intrigued by Highland mists and North Sea haars. Maybe she saw Trainspotting the movie and found herself drawn by stages to the Leith of Robert Garioch. It matters not. What matters is that there should be many portals, many ways into the web-ring that is Scottish writing, and that these doors should be open and actually lead somewhere. They must not lead visitors up a dark close.

Linkage is crucial – for the writer as much as the ‘browser’. I quote again from recent correspondence, this time with the poet and translator, John Manson:

I am interested in how I can get publicity for publication on the Internet. For a publication on paper the publisher has to advertise, seek reviews, put out catalogues. But publication on the Internet can only be made known at the moment by word of mouth – I think. ¹⁷

‘At the moment’, as he suggests, the web-ring of Scottish writing isn’t fully there. But the network of websites and email correspondence building now, and the ease of forwarding material from one computer to another, means that it’s developing all the time. By email, publicity can be spread even more quickly than terrestrial methods – at least to those who are part of the web-ring. As more individuals and organisations link, and as sites develop, so they will naturally weave together an ever-tighter mesh and the word spreads. Left to human nature, the web-ring of Scottish literature will grow in its random, haphazard, organic way. Given the right support and direction, it could be still more effective.

THE VALUE OF EXTENSION

There are those who believe television washes over viewers, doing little more than to confirm them in their existing prejudices. Others see it as a moral corruption on the one hand or of alienation on the others. Politicians and governments, however, believe it to be an important medium capable of influencing public opinion and swaying voters. Television is an industry that operates under government licence. ¹⁸

The web is the child of television in some sense, but it is an ‘unlegitimatized’ child, as far removed from state-controlled TV station as it could be: the web is the deconstruction of the structure that was ‘national’ licensed television, bursting in from the margins and out of them simultaneously. We are all now potentially multiple senders as well as receivers of international electronic sound and vision messages. Control seems alien to the nature of the enterprise. – though maybe that was how the Wild West felt at one time, and see how wild it is now.

Derrida, writing in 1977, anticipates the growth of telecommunication and indirectly raises a serious question, which we can now relate to the World Wide Web:

If one takes the notion of writing in its usually accepted sense – which above all does not mean an innocent, primitive or natural sense – one indeed must see it as a powerful means of communication which extends very far, if not infinitely, the field of oral or gestural communication. This is banally self-evident, and agreement on the matter seems easy. I will not describe all the modes of this extension … (but) … will pause over the value of extension. ¹⁹

I’m aware that I’m talking today to a shared-interest group and because of the context that governs this communicative ‘extension’, there are certain ‘givens’, certain things taken for granted, on the basis of the assumption that we share a discourse. For instance, should I question the value of all this writing, I hope that your responses would be defensive, as mine would. But sometimes it’s useful to go back to first principles, to remind ourselves of our reasons for prioritising the practice and study of writing over other fields. Has this extension, this communication, any fundamental value? Or is it, as Walter Ong suggests, that: ‘… as we live with the electronic media, we are finding and will find that we have … simply complicated everything endlessly.’ ²⁰

Derrida, talking about written communication, asks: ‘Can it still be said that upon the death of the addressee, that is, of one of the two partners, the mark left by one of them is still writing?’ ²¹ We might relate this to the Internet, and ask, ‘is the unvisited site there at all?’ If most of this information is simply being ‘posted’ but never received, is it in any sense ‘meaningful’?

It is perhaps a question of attunement, or of frequency. Human beings are sending and receiving longer messages over greater distances with ever-higher frequency. Like a hive of bees humming together, or a kirk full of psalm-singers, we create not our ‘wavelength in letters’, but a common wavelength in energy. We tune in to one another, singing sometimes antiphony, sometimes symphony – always polyphonic. Any society is only as efficient as its communication system: the higher the frequency, the clearer the transmission.

It may all sound fantastic, but I think we gave no choice but to go forward in the hope that, as the exchange of encoded ideas is simpler than ever before, a fresh literacy will develop, that something of a geo-cultural realignment may result. As access to the technology widens, that new commonalties will be discovered between shared interest groups separated by location and history. So difference is foreshortened by rapid communication, and the world appears less strange.

Sure, there are some voices among the choir so quiet they are heard only by the singer standing next to them, and some that are lost entirely in the collective sound. But their right to sing should never be questioned. The freedom to participate should be what the World Wide Web is about. There’s no shortage of ‘space’. That, I think, is the fundamental value of this ‘extension’.

NOTES

¹ Kennedy, Angus J., ‘A Short History of the Internet’, in The Rough Guide to the Internet, London 1999, pp. 442-463
² ibid.
³ Cirlot, J.E, A Dictionary of Symbols, London 1962
⁴ Burgelin, Oliver, ‘Structural Analysis and Mass Communication’ in Sociology of Mass Communications, London 1972 , p 313
⁵ Angus Dunn, editor of ‘Northwords’, in private correspondence
⁶ Ransford, Tessa, ‘The Book Rediscovered in the Future’, printed as one of series of six postcards to celebrate National Poetry Day, 1999
⁷ Sullivan, Patricia, ‘Writers as Desk-Top Publishers’ in Text, Context, and Hypertext, London 1989, pp.265-278
⁸ ibid
⁹ ibid
¹⁰ Bringhurst, Robert, Elements of Typographic Style, Vancouver 1992, p.98
¹¹ see Dunne, J.W., An Experiment with Time, 1928, in which he argues that the future and the past coexist with the present, and that with the right training, a mind might experience precognition
¹² Ong, W.J.S.J, ‘Media Transformation: The Talked Book’, in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, Cornell 1977, pp.82-91
¹³ McCabe, Brian, ‘Knoxland’, in Product magazine, issue 3, Edinburgh 2000
¹⁴ Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, London 1972: this phrase, the opening of the text, was used as the slogan for the project
¹⁵ Bowie, David: a reference to the song ‘Sound and Vision’, RCA records 1976
¹⁶ Leonard, Tom, ‘in the beginning was the word’, in Intimate Voices 1965-1983, Newcastle 1984
¹⁷ John Manson’s translations of Victor Serge’s Carnets.
¹⁸ Hood, Stuart, ‘The Politics of television’, in Sociology of Mass Communications, London 1972 , pp.406 -434
¹⁹ Derrida, Jacques, in ‘Writing and Telecommunication’, of ‘Signature-Event-Context’ (1977), published in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf, Hemel Hempstead 1991, pp.82-111
²⁰ Ong
²¹ Derrida

MACGILLIVRAY, Alan, ‘Genres in Scottish Writing: Science Fiction’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

The Shape of Texts to Come: the writing of a new Scotland, 13-14 May 2000 |

One hundred and seventy-five years ago, on the 20th December, 1825, in the hall of Anderson’s College, the principal citizens of Glasgow heard the President of the College, Doctor Ure, conclude his address with the confident prophecy that “the time is not far distant when chariots winged with fire shall be seen flying over metallic pavements through all the populous districts of the empire, transporting travellers and merchandise with amazing smoothness and velocity.” The audience responded with enthusiastic applause. The words of Doctor Ure sound like a science fiction vision, and must have struck some of his less scientifically minded hearers as having the quality of fantasy. Yet it was all sober fact dressed in the colourful rhetoric of the public speaker. What Doctor Ure was doing in that technological institution that was the precursor of the University of Strathclyde where we are now meeting was, as the Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine reported, delivering a ‘Lecture on the Steam Engine in aid of the Funds for erecting a Monument to James Watt’. Within a decade or two, Doctor Ure’s words had been proved. true and the age of the railways had begun.

Compare that prophetic vision with the inventiveness demonstrated nearly a decade earlier when in 1817 the young Scottish advocate, Thomas Erskine, in later life to become Lord Erskine and British Chancellor of the Exchequer, published a speculative utopian fiction, Armata, in which a ship sailing from New York to China is driven by storms into unknown waters and finds itself traversing a narrow and dangerous channel that connects the South Polar regions to a hitherto unsuspected satellite of Earth called Armata. This planet “had a ring like Saturn, which, by reason of our atmosphere, could not be seen at such an immense distance, and which was accessible only by a channel so narrow and so guarded by surrounding rocks and whirlpools, that even the vagrancy of modern navigators had never fallen in with it.” Erskine clearly has a problem matching the wind-powered transport and the geographical and scientific knowledge of his time to the concept of interplanetary travel. What he imagined never had a chance of standing up against current and later astronomical discoveries and technological developments.

Both Doctor Ure of Anderson’s College and Thomas Erskine of the Scottish Faculty of Advocates were clearly possessed of the speculative cast of mind, the capacity for imaginative visualisation of future and alternative possibilities that is an indispensable characteristic of the science fiction writer. Whether or not the vision of such a thinker stands up to the onward march of science and technology is basically irrelevant.

All science fiction writing is ultimately bound to look quaint and naively mistaken as its conceptual basis and material furnishings are relegated to the Museum of Outmoded Mental Artefacts in the readers’ minds. The value of the writing is not primarily to be found in the continuing predictive possibility of its content but rather in the breadth and openness and freedom of the writer’s speculative imagination in relation to the prevailing mental set of his or her time and place.

Speaking as one who has been excited and encouraged ever since childhood by science fiction and other kinds of reality-transcending writing, I have been on many occasions surprised and occasionally depressed by the resistance and hostility expressed by many people to any writing that departs from or goes beyond realism. In extreme cases, it can be a dislike of any fiction as a kind of lying, an immoral activity; more usually, it takes the form of a preference for a literature of fact, a writing that represents the reality of life within conventional narrative patterns – no fantasy, no airy-fairy unrealistic fancies, no departure from the mundane and the prosaic. As we should all know, the fallacy of this way of thinking about writing lies in the impossibility of doing any kind of straight representation of life into literature. Everything that is written creatively involves an act of the imagination, in finding the best words, the best arrangement, the best presentation. The advice to beginning writers, “Write what you know”, has always been inadequate: “Write what you can imagine” is the only possible advice to those who have aspirations beyond writing examination answers. And even there, as those of us who are teachers know, the best examination answers are those with an imaginative flair.

A more specific kind of resistance or hostility is directed against science fiction within the reading world. There is the widespread critical disdain for it as compared with the mainstream novel, whatever a ‘mainstream’ novel may be. Sometimes this disdain is justified on the grounds of quality, suggesting that science fiction is by its very nature inferior. Well, of course, there is a lot of science fiction junk around. There is also a lot of romance junk around, a lot of historical junk, a lot of crime story junk, a lot of mainstream junk. It was after all a science fiction writer who enunciated the well-known law. “90% of everything is garbage”, although he didn’t say ‘garbage’. This impression of science fiction is often created by the company it has to keep on bookshop shelves. If under the heading SCI-FI/FANTASY, you find genuine science fiction having to consort with interminable sequences of Swords and Sorcery, sub-Tolkien fantasies, the never-ending spin-offs of the overrated Star Trek phenomenon, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (although I admire his clever cultural satires) and the horrors of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you might be forgiven for thinking that science fiction is not to be taken seriously. The truth is that it is those who think in terms of “sci-fi” who are not to be taken seriously. Take it as a good rule of thumb that whenever you come across somebody who talks or writes about science fiction as “sci-fi”, you are dealing with somebody who basically has a low opinion of it and knows very little about it. The genuine science fiction aficionado will either give it its full name or abbreviate it to SF.

Let us be positive. Science fiction exists as a powerful duchy within the realm of literature. It may always have existed in some form, as the hard speculative end of imaginative narrative. If it did not exist, it would certainly have to be invented, particularly in an age that sees massive scientific and technological development. More than any other genre of fiction, it deals with systems and ideas rather than with people and emotions. It shows a major misunderstanding of science fiction to criticise it for not creating memorable characters or representing sensitive feelings. That is not its primary function. Science fiction is the only major literary genre that has as its upfront purpose the intention of speculating about where humanity is heading and how it is going to get there and what it is going to find when it arrives. The systems that operate or could operate within society, the scientific and technological ideas and devices either real or potential, these provide the mainsprings for a powerful, thoughtful and exciting fiction that is characteristic of the modern age. And if we Scots pride ourselves on being a thoughtful people, a nation with a philosophical tendency, a speculative society, guardians of the democratic intellect, then science fiction ought to come naturally to us as a readymade tool for our fictional expression. If Galt created the idea of the “theoretical history” in his social novels, other Scots writers could be creating “theoretical futures”.

However, up to quite recent years, that has not been the case. It cannot be said that there has been any discernible continuous tradition of science fiction writing in Scotland through the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Within one of the most recent reference books on the subject, the Orbit Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, there are only about sixty-five entries relating to specifically Scottish writers who have produced science fiction novels and stories. There are probably more writers who are concealed under the general description of ‘UK writer’, but even so it hardly amounts to a major contribution to the genre when the Orbit Encyclopaedia contains over 4300 entries. Countries like Albania and the Czech Republic rate special entries for their science fiction achievement, but Scotland does not, and probably would not even if it were regarded separately from the UK. There are actually some significant Scottish writers rated as producers of science fiction but it is usually only a minor element within their total output. Arthur Conan Doyle, James Leslie Mitchell, Neil Gunn, James Kennaway, Eric Linklater, George MacDonald, Compton Mackenzie, Naomi Mitchison, and Robert Louis Stevenson all rate an entry, yet we would not think of any of them as being primarily a writer of SF. We are on more certain ground when we come across entries on Paul Barnett (or John Grant), Robert Barr, Hamish Blair, Michael Elder, Sheila MacLeod, Paul McTyre, Angus MacVicar, Donald Malcolm, Graham Martin, David Masson, David Pringle, Michael Scott Rohan, Eric Temple Bell (or John Taine), and a fair number of others. These are the more dedicated or prolific writers of science fiction, but the average reader’s reaction to hearing most of these names might well be “Who?” The profile of science fiction writers within Scotland has not hitherto been high.

Yet, over the years since the Second World War, there have been a number of significant initiatives. In the 1950s, Scotland had its own dedicated science fiction magazine: from 1952 to 1959, Nebula ran for 41 issues, published by Crownpoint Publications in Glasgow until 1955, and then by Peter Hamilton. It regularly published science fiction novels and, of course, short stories. In more recent years, the efforts of Duncan Lunan here in Glasgow in the 1980s produced a number of Science Fiction Conferences sponsored by the Glasgow Herald, and accompanying short story competitions. Out of these came the anthology, Starfield: Science Fiction by Scottish Writers (1989), with all its limitations still the only specific Scottish collection of SF to be published. It has not been a rich imaginative harvest.

And yet, in spite of this, somehow, we are now in the fortunate position of having two of the foremost writers of science fiction on the contemporary scene living and writing here in Scotland. Mention the names of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod anywhere in the SF fraternity worldwide, and the recognition of the names will be instant. The two men are closely linked, indeed they may be said to have come out of the same writing stable, in this case the classrooms of Greenock High School, where they were at school together in the late 60s and early 70s. Iain Banks is the senior in terms of writing and publishing achievement and success. Ken MacLeod has been to some extent his protégé and has come more recently on to the writing scene. Yet the quality of his work so far bids fair to ultimately rival, if not surpass, that of Banks.

Banks and MacLeod between them have produced a very substantial body of work within a reasonably brief time. While tending to alternate his science fiction with his mainstream novels, Banks has published seven SF novels and a novella in the space of thirteen years, although one or two of these were written early and remained unpublished until he gained literary status with novels like The Wasp Factory. MacLeod has published a powerful sequence of four novels in the five years since 1995. Despite their closeness and apparent similarity of upbringing, their approaches to science fiction are very different, and the imaginative worlds they have created are fundamentally dissimilar.

All of Banks’ SF novels except two are concerned with his massive concept of The Culture. It would take far longer than we have here today to explore and clarify this immense imaginative construct within which the novels operate. From the earliest, Consider Phlebas, to the most recent, Inversions, the context is that of a vast group civilisation of humanoid species within a nine-thousand year old federation living in space and employing the resources of the most advanced technologies and artificial intelligences to maintain a free-living, free-thinking richly-supplied yet tolerant and benign life-style. Banks has written at length on his fictional universe in the file, “A Few Notes on The Culture”, obtainable on the Internet from various sites (see below). It is space-opera of the most expansive and encompassing kind, ranging through a galaxy of many life-supporting stars and planets with the freedom and ease to be found in the great media projects of Star Wars, Babylon 5, Space 1999, Blake’s Seven, etc., but with an even greater scope and inventiveness. The Earth hardly figures in this space-time configuration, only meriting consideration within the novella, The State of the Art.

By contrast, the fiction of Ken MacLeod is firmly Earth-centred. His four novels, The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division and The Sky Road, deal with the future of human society on the Earth from the 1970s on into the three or four centuries following, covering the success and failure of the Space movement and the breakdown of nation states and industrial capitalism. Unlike Banks, who keeps Scotland as a location and inspiration for his mainstream novels, MacLeod has used Scotland consistently within his science fiction, as the place out of which came originally the three key figures in the shaping of the new Earth and its Space Movement, and as the place fuelling the new drive to a space future after several centuries. It is specifically Glasgow, focused on Glasgow University, and the district of Lochcarron in Wester Ross that MacLeod uses, presumably for personal reasons. So on the face of it, MacLeod is more explicitly a Scottish science fiction writer than Banks in terms of the furniture of his novels.

Yet this is obviously an over-simplification. Both Banks and MacLeod write out of a clearly Scottish sensibility, in that both of them are reacting against the settled assumptions of the traditional tendencies in both English and American science fiction in ways that we have come to associate with the mainstream of Scottish realistic fiction. Of course, they have been writing during a time of general reaction within the SF genre against the increasingly tired-looking patterns of science fiction as published in the magazines and for the popular market. The 1980s saw the rise of the Cyberpunk movement associated particularly with the writers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Gibson especially created the cyberpunk world, dominated by global networks of information, the Matrix of virtual reality. In this world, visually anticipated in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, the nation states and long-established political groupings, weakened by war and economic collapse, were succumbing to commercial cartels and extremist factions and the typical human organisations were, on the one hand, the sprawling mega-city of mean streets and climatic adversity, and, on the other hand, the high-tech combines looking outward from Earth. Artificial Intelligence ultimately ruled, though mostly unseen. Those of you who have read Alasdair Gray’s Lanark will recognise the scenario as resembling Gray’s nightmare visions of the City of Unthank, the anonymous ruling Council, and the android ruling Artificial Intelligence, Lord Monboddo.

Both Banks and MacLeod inherit this world-picture. Banks is rebelling, on his own say-so, against the simplistic rightwing patriotic assumptions of Cold-War-haunted American science fiction, seen in their full horror in the sentimentalities of Star Trek and Star Wars, and has created a left-leaning socialist high-technology libertarian utopia in the Culture. MacLeod is more overtly political in the contemporary sense. In his analysis of the future three centuries, the heroes are the inheritors of twentieth-century International Socialism, and the villains are, at least initially until their overthrow, a United States attempting to police the world with nuclear power, allied to a Hanoverian Royalist reactionary Britain. In both Banks and MacLeod, Artificial Intelligence dominates, but whereas MacLeod sees it as something to be combated, Banks sees it as ultimately the great ally and partner of humanity against ignorance, prejudice and superstition. I believe there is something of a Scottish ideal in both of these stances. MacLeod seems to be articulating as a constant in human life the Burnsian theme of “A man’s a man for a’ that” within a shifting political spectrum; Banks, more philosophically, is championing the claims of the intellect, an enhanced and scientifically-aided collective intellect, against forces of irrational reaction and violence.

If Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod are the SF icons of the moment, this is a great literary coup for Scottish writing, one on which new writers ought to build for the future. With the example of their literary and critical success before their eyes, aspiring writers of science fiction in Scotland can explore a wide range of exciting possibilities. A large proportion of contemporary science fiction is aware of pressing environmental issues, a kind of eco-science fiction. Scottish writers can find a starting point for a lot of speculative writing in the landscapes and seascapes surrounding them. Hugh MacDiarmid wrote of the infinite diversity of Scotland within its apparent smallness; the richness of Scotland as a literary subject has hardly begun to be exploited. A fiction that continually is fixated on poverty is ultimately stagnant and uninspiring; the virtue of the best science fiction is that it has always seen science and technology as the keys that unlock the riches of the earth and that release humanity from an apparently limiting environment. It is for Scottish writers to apply this to their own land. The main need is for a shift in perspective, from a pessimistic inward-looking and backward-focused stance to an optimistic outward and forward prospect. The virtue of the cyberpunk fashion, which now seems to be passing in its more extreme manifestations, was that it did not adopt a moral standpoint in relation to its subject-matter. It did not look at the urban Sprawl of a declining capitalist system, the disorientating complexity of a computer-generated virtual reality and information overload, the force of a nonhuman super-intelligence, as being things to condemn out of a fear of the new and the shock of change. The protagonists of this new wave science fiction inhabit their complex new world like fish in their natural element, the great sea. So it should be for our new writers and their creations. All that is to come has to be welcomed, or at least accepted with a clear head, if we are to avoid being whingeing misfits in reality. This new fiction, and maybe I am not speaking only of science fiction, has to be more political, more analytical of society and government, in a way that Scottish writing has hardly been for several generations. For too long Scottish writing has either ignored the political reality surrounding us, or uttered an unredeemed whine about its unchangeable unfairness or inequality. That will no longer do, and if we can learn from the best science fiction that the systems that enclose us, the ideas that direct our society, are legitimate subjects for informed imaginative analysis and speculation, the healthier will our literary and social climate become.

I think there are some basic needs that we should start thinking about meeting in the near future. We need a secure and regularly-appearing magazine devoted to science fiction and to related speculative writing. This is certainly a need so long as the existing literary magazines fight shy of publishing SF. We need to have more science fiction writers’ groups as part of the network of writers’ workshops and clubs throughout Scotland. Perhaps this needs a degree of co-ordination with a national steering group overseeing the provision under the auspices of local authorities and academic institutions. In connection with such a drive to encourage writing at all levels, it ought to be unnecessary to refer specifically to choice of language. At this conference, everything we have been saying has been understood to apply to all the languages of Scotland. Gaelic, Scots and English can be the natural and acceptable choice for any writer in any kind of writing. In science fiction, we should not be limited solely to English as our possible means of expression. There has been some science fiction written in Gaelic for young readers; equally it can be the chosen language for more adult SF. Scots also, in any of its varieties, is as suitable a form as any other; some years ago, I wrote a science fiction story in Medieval Scots, but I wouldn’t hold that up as a model, only as an indication that the most unexpected things are possible in this flexible genre.

Moving on, we need more critical attention to be paid to science fiction in the columns of the quality press, regular reviewing of new science fiction and popular but informed articles instead of the occasional half-baked superficialities of ill-informed journalists. And we certainly need a more recognised place for science fiction in college and university courses in Scotland, with encouragement of research at a postgraduate level. None of these needs can be met instantly, but some planning should start as soon as possible by interested and committed parties.

J.B.S. Haldane, the elder brother of the late Naomi Mitchison, himself a writer of some science fiction like his sister, as well as being a biologist and significant thinker, propounded Haldane’s Law, which states: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” We cannot foresee the future of science fiction. Perhaps the future of the genre as we know it is in some doubt. How can we continue to try to domesticate a universe that is continually expanding, that seems more and more to be on a scale and of a nature that defeats the human capacity to encompass it. Is it only by stale fictional conventions and pseudo-science that we can fetter it to our imaginations? These doubts have been seriously expressed. I believe that there will continue to be a future for science fiction. Perhaps the contribution of Scottish writers as comparative newcomers to this field in significant numbers can be as a characteristic voice in rediscovering the realities of science and technology in the context of literature, and writing an unsentimental pragmatic fiction focused on humanity’s real needs and aspirations within a neutral yet unintimidating universe.

Presented at the ASLS Annual Conference, 14 May 2000

SAADI, Suhayl, ‘Infinite Diversity in New Scottish Writing’

10 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

The Shape of Texts to Come: the writing of a new Scotland, 13-14 May 2000.
A bibliography is given at the end of the document.

Infinite diversity in new Scottish Writing is an infinite subject, so I’m going to make some general points re. identity and writing, and then I’ll narrow it down to the subject of specifically Cultural Diversity in Scottish writing and just what ‘Scottish writing’ might be today and what it might become tomorrow. Some of what I’m going to say might seem very obvious, but I think that one of the writer’s roles in society is to point out the obvious; that the sky turns from blue to black, and back again.

Simplistically, I perceive three dynamics:

Scottish writers gazing out and drawing on so-called ‘other’ societies or literary traditions and incorporating something of these into their own writing. What I call, ‘looking out’.
Writers who hail from other cultures bringing something of their or their ancestors’ experiences with them and those experiences exerting themselves, either consciously or otherwise, in fresh contexts in their writing. I call this, ‘moving in’.
Writers who dig deep into that which they perceive as being their own, indigenous Scottish culture(s) and who, in doing so, are able to hit the bedrock, as it were. This is what I refer to as, ‘digging deep’.

By these processes – looking out, moving in, digging deep – writing becomes indigenised. It becomes perceived as mainstream. That which, in literary terms, was seen as being ‘outside’ or substratum becomes internalised, manifest.

This has been going on for centuries, from the Druids and the Celtic poets to Michael Scot, the thirteenth century Scottish scholar who lived in Toledo and at the Normano-German-Arab Sicilian court of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, where he translated Aristotle, Averroes and Avicenna from the Arabic into Latin. Margaret Anne Doody states that the internationally respected C17th. French humanist Protestant scholar, Claude de Saumaise (‘Salmasius’)

“traces a clear line of transmission for the European novel. It stemmed ultimately from the Persians, came to Asia Minor (and thence to the classical world), then traveled with the Arabs to Spain, and thence spread through the whole of Europe. It is thus a truly Eastern form of literature. To which all Europeans are to some extent latecomers”¹

According to Cerulli who, in 1949, published a study in the Vatican City, Dante was almost certainly familiar with the Islamic eschatological story, Il Libro Della Scala (The Book of the Scale). The book was translated from Arabic into Castillian by Ibrahim al-Faquim, a Jewish doctor. It was then translated into Latin as Liber Scalae Machometi. Cerulli has noted and recorded not only the general analogies in structure and narrative between this originally Islamic eschatological work and the Divine Comedy; but also analogies in points of detail. The book was known and read in Italy for several centuries, and it was available in three European languages.²Likewise, the work of Boccaccio owes much to Arab/Persian fiction; his Decameron draws upon Eastern literature, such as the Fables of Bidpai and Sindbad the Philosopher. Again, Sicily was a pivotal island for all of this to-ing-and-fro-ing between Greek, Islamic and ‘northern’ cultures. Cervantes, in Don Quijote, explicitly draws

“a line of transmission, suggesting that Western fiction has a Moorish and Arab origin, and, like sacred scripture itself, comes to us from the East. In chapter nine, the translating Moor reads, translates and sometimes indeed interprets what is supposedly the book itself, comes to us from the East. In chapter nine, the translating Moor reads, translates and sometimes indeed interprets what is supposedly the book itself, the narrative about ‘Don Quijote’, which is written in Arabic by the Moor Cide Hamete Benengeli. Literature about, or by Moors was closely related to the development of prose fiction in Spain.”³

The Sufic Illuminism of another Scottish philosopher, Duns Scotus and the Arabo-Persian-influenced writings of Dante, Boccaccio and Cervantes take us to the brink of the Eighteenth Century.

The Age of Enlightenment also marked the onset of a particular kind of blindness, referred to by Doody in her True Story of the Novel, when she attributes the rise of what she calls, ‘Prescriptive Realism’ partly to

“a general repugnance, a ‘natural’ aversion especially among the insular and provincial – if colonizing – English, to that which is ‘Oriental’. The New Novel would define itself as home-grown, Aryan. The Novel is an inheritor of the epic of Homer – that much is admissible, for ‘Homer’ is naturalized, and already stands among our cultural claims to superiority.”

But Homer is deemed ‘primitive’, ‘mere’ folk-culture, and does not meet the needs of high culture as a support to imperial greatness. Homer is replaced as an icon by Shakespeare. Doody goes on:

“Shakespeare is what the novelists must try (usually, they are told, in vain) to emulate […] the English performed a wonderful trick in persuading themselves that ‘The Rise of the Novel’ took place in England in the eighteenth century. They eliminated the predecessors once so fully acknowledged, along with transmissions outlined by Salmasius and Huet. Such historians had made the foreignness of fiction too visible. That foreignness at the root must be cut off. Only realistic novels could be viewed as literature […] The Novel becomes fully domestic, shutting out aliens […] it is almost a definition of the kind of “Novel” meant in The Rise of the Novel that we must meet no Muslim characters. If there are Muslim characters, this is not a novel. Western fiction from Boccaccio to Scudery had had Muslim characters […]”⁴

Burns, Scott and RLS were perhaps only partly aware of the elements in their work which Gibbon (the author of Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights, as well as of A Scots Quair) would have referred to as “the essential foreign-ness” which was present in much Scottish writing. According to Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott’s writing exhibits “an identity crisis engendered by the experience of empire … His Scottish identity was inextricably linked to the experience of dispossession”. In Scott’s novel, Guy Mannering, the gypsies become custodians of the Scottish folk tradition, blurring the distinction between native and settler. In this novel, Scott encapsulates the Othello complex,

“an acute sense of the ‘otherness of the Self’; the discovery of his own […] reflection in the shadow of colonised man.”⁵

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scot’s Quair deals with the furrow, the seed of north-east central Scotland, yet his lyrical style, his interweaving of romantic love with historico-political events and with deeper, mythic themes renders to his writing a profound universality. He also penned a cycle of short stories called Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights in which he explores ideas relating to the very roots of civilisation. For part of the book, Gibbon uses a polyglot narrator, Sergei Lubow, possibly in an attempt to subvert orientalist cliches in the heterogeneous city that was, and is, Cairo. In the other half, his filter is a medieval Nestorian Christian bishop. The cycle is crammed to the gunnels with local characters. Gibbon, of course, spent a decade in the armed forces in the Middle East between the world wars, a time of flux and incipient apocalypse. The irony of a crofter’s son being part of a colonialist occupying army in the cradle of western civilisation cannot have been lost on Gibbon. Some of the stories border on the magic realist, while others are plainly fantastic. Gibbon was captivated by mythology and by the diffusionist theory of civilisation and his fascination with the flow of time and with transcending reality led him also into the field of science fiction.

Thus, what we might think of as ‘Indigenous Scottish Writing’ (much like indigenous Scottish people) is actually, by its very nature, of heterogeneous origin.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Scotland – and particularly Glasgow – has been a melting-pot; of religions, ethnicities and, of course, class. All of this liminality did stimulate creativity, but it took its time in coming through and in some respects, it never came through, at all. In the 1930’s, the writer Edward Scouller observed that there were “so many Glasgows” that to get it all into one book would have been impossible.

Jonathan Raban, in ‘Soft City’, says:

“The arrival of the immigrant propels him into abstractions and the contemplation of his own internal state of mind. It is a source of transformations and distortions of scale.”⁶

Lennox Kerr, author of ‘Glenshiels’, in the 1930’s, decried the view:

“… that literature is national, and that a nation [is composed of] men and women with a common heritage, a common culture and a common ideology which comes to them all by their common nationality. Therefore, the Duke of Buccleuch and Willie Gallacher, the Communist MP, are brothers under the skin. This, of course, is nonsense.” ⁷

But Edward Scouller disagreed, saying:

“I would seriously question whether the Scoto-Irish navvy in Glasgow has more in common with the polish stockyard labourer in Chicago than with his parish priest or even with the Duke of Montrose. Perhaps he ought to have, but a realist artist is more concerned with “is” than “ought” – even if the one world-wide classless state should be achieved, those differences will be valid material for the artist.”⁸

And according to Catherine Carswell:

“One can never write till one stands outside.” ⁹

The debate as to whether or not literature is national has been a fierce one and has lasted many decades and today perhaps it is as topical as ever (though I feel in a more positive way than before), but it’s essentially a surface dialectic.

In Archie Hind’s ‘The Dear Green Place’, Mat Craig’s “feeling of self-division” and his sense that “Writers are always other people” would seem familiar today to writers from Minority Ethnic backgrounds, as would Moira Burgess’s statement that

“however well the working-class author writes about his or her own milieu, the result is going to be read mainly by middle-class people, who, by definition, won’t understand.” ¹⁰

Following Hind’s novel, there has been a river of books written from supposedly ‘working-class’ perspectives but dilemmas of identity, appropriation and exploitation refuse to go away. In 1987, Craig stated that:

“for all Scottish writers, as for few English writers until recently, the issue of language has an overwhelming significance that sets their writing quite different problems perhaps from those posed to the English writer. Few Scottish writers are not bilingual and few have not experimented in writing in two of the country’s languages. The language of literature for every Scottish writer, is a matter of choice, and those choices form an integral part of the act of writing.” ¹¹

Perhaps all creativity stems from a fundamental identity crisis, or at least, from a deep-seated sense of paradox. Economic, ethnic and class structures may affect the manifestation of this, but they are not the primary causes of it.

In digging deep and refusing to acknowledge arbitrary boundaries, writers such as Gibbon, MacDermaid, Gunn, White, Gray, Elphinstone, etc. have been able to draw out mythologies and themes which are universal in their fundamentals and yet infinitely diverse in their execution. It’s very Jungian, very Sufi – and that’s appropriate, because dreams, meditation and creative writing are closely linked to the extent that, in its initial outpouring, at least, creative writing may be said to be a kind of ‘dreaming awake’. The focus might vary, but the picture is the same. Scottish writing (and all writing) is universal, no matter from which direction one approaches it. It issues, broken and bleeding, from the same bedrock.

The interesting things about Scottish writing – and especially so, at this moment on the threshold of the Twenty-first Century – are the grey areas. If there is any salvation in politics, art and science, it’ll be through grey areas, regions of slippage. In cultural terms, this process can occur through any of the three dynamics I’ve just outlined; looking out, moving in, digging deep. The big bust-ups which have occurred in the literary world in the past, derive, in part, from a denial that the liminal in literature can be approached from any direction. That is why the diversity is potentially infinite. Boundary conditions may apply, but they are extremely malleable. When confronted by the infamous blank page, there are an infinite number of possibilities in terms of what one might attempt to write. Whenever we put pen to paper (or pixel to glass screen), we are engaging in a liminal process and no matter what our conscious aims might be, no matter how carefully-planned our literary project, the entirety of our selves must pour into the piece of writing. Writing is a jondo act. Memory is held in the nerves and muscles – maybe even ancestral memories. It’s beyond the rational, beyond even thought. The writer’s consciousness of that which they create must not exceed their ability to create it. The problems, the arguments, have arisen when an inflexible version of the scientific method has been applied to forms which by their very natures, are non-rational. This includes the concept of ‘identity’. The debate about whether or not Scottish writing is ‘exciting’ is a necessary one (and is necessarily subjective – but that’s in the nature of the beast). For every literary trend or movement in this country, there has been a counter-trend, even if the counter-trends have been less well-known, over the years. Certain themes have been dealt with more adroitly during certain periods than in others, but I would submit that elements of it have always been exciting; it’s just that the particular interface with truth which literature attempts to delineate, may alter.

The rich seam of writing by Irish and by Scots Irish writers is so important that it cannot be dealt with (and given any justice) in this talk. I believe Argyle Publishing are soon to bring out a book on the subject. There are Scottish writers of Welsh origin (like A.L Kennedy and Sian Preece, for example) and also writers from various other European countries (like Michel Faber, who is described by the Scottish Arts Council as ‘Scottish by formation’).

Among would-be (or ‘could-have-been’) writers from Minority Ethnic backgrounds, class and ethnic identities are interwoven, so that many of the attitudes adopted are actually due to economics but are perceived as being specific attributes of the ethnic group. For example, my perception is that many young men of South Asian origin in Glasgow today would not consider working in the Arts; this has nothing to do with religion or ‘culture’ but everything to do with economics and the classic ‘immigrant’ path, from inner-city to suburb, from manual worker to small business-person to pillar of the community. Most of the people came from poor villages in Pakistan or India and now their male children are still perceived as the primary breadwinners and so it’s understandable that they would seek careers in the relatively well-paid professions or in business. Art functions at the level of paradox; it implies rebellion. It tends to chomp at the bit of the status quo and is therefore perceived as dangerous by the beneficiaries of the state – which is why they try and buy it. By a strange twist, it seems more acceptable for girls from these communities to enter the Arts (or at least, the ‘para-arts’). Aside from Urdu poetry which, being deemed essentially safe, seems exempt and which (at least in Glasgow) is largely the preserve of the first generation of Asians, the Arts as a whole are viewed as largely feminine, largely ‘White’ territory and thus, as somewhat self-exposing and shameful (‘White’, that is, in its narrowest, racial sense and not in the transfiguring sense which is something quite different). Anecdotally, I think that this mixture of defensive machismo and a nouveaux riche obsession with conformity and sensate materialism is just beginning to erode, thanks to the success of ‘cross-over’ music and to the visibility (and irony) of entities like Goodness Gracious Me! and East Is East; as well as to grass-roots projects such as the Pollokshields Writers’ Group and the Soul Food Theatre Project; activity in one art-form has generally triggered activity in other art-forms and all of these phenomena are indicators of a growing self-confidence among the British South Asian communities. However, it is no accident, I believe, that much of the hitherto published fiction and poetry from Scottish writers of South Asian origin has been by women.

I think that in the next few years, we will see a steady emergence of writers from Minority Ethnic backgrounds – not because of some ‘damned cosmopolitan’ fashion nor because of a superficial fascination with that which is seen as ‘exotic’ but because of a physical indigenisation of the writers, themselves. We are dealing with people who have never known anything other than a multicultural society (and I’m talking here about Scottish writers from both Majority and Minority Ethnic groups). Scotland has actually always been a polyglot – but today perhaps it is simply that it is more visibly so. Notwithstanding the dumbing-down effect of a commercial globalisation, led and driven by aggressive capitalism, with almost instantaneous communication, everyone is impelled to examine their own identity. It ceases to seem irrelevant, and this can serve to undermine the casual assumptions of dominance which underpinned institutions such as the British Empire, etc. and which still underpin the attitudes of some in the literary world, not just in relation to an individual writer’s ethnic origin, but also in relation to the type of writing, eg. in fiction, a narrowly-defined naturalism being regarded as the paragon. In a way, it’s a kind of collective identity crisis. Scots are a minority ethnic group within Britain. The English are a Minority Ethnic group in Scotland. We are all Minority Ethnic communities in the world. However, as writers and as people, we are not defined merely by our ethnic origins. Exactly which of the three dynamics I mentioned at the start this ‘new’ writing will take, is difficult to say; perhaps it will be melange of all three. In my experience, writing from the South Asian subcontinent, for example, does not seem to have influenced the poetry or short fiction produced by ‘second’ and ‘third’ generation British Asian writers. The prevailing style seems to be naturalistic in prose and lyric in poetry. Perhaps they are currently in a phase of finding their voices, but there is no doubt that the dominance of the naturalistic style of writing in the middle English-speaking world has had its effect on the material coming from these writers. I postulate that as the writers become more confident in their work, they will exhaust (the already pretty much exhausted) reservoirs of social realism and will begin to ‘look out’ and simultaneously, to ‘dig deep’ and it will at that point that South Asian literature will become a good deal more influential on these Scottish writers than it is at present. There will be nothing to stop them drawing on other traditions/mythologies as well – indeed, they will have to do so; at some level, they will have to break apart and become conscious exiles. However, if one were able accurately to predict a particular form which writing will take, then it wouldn’t be worth the writers’ while doing the writing. It would be a wholly pointless literature.

There are a range of ‘Scottish Asian’ voices, all of which are determined by regional, gender and social class factors. To characterise it, one might say that like many Glaswegian voices, it consists of short, staccato phrases and an almost breathless cadence but with flecks of Punjabi scattered through its fabric. In fictional terms, Glasgow (and the world?) could be viewed as a city of people, either broken or else on the make. When you’re ‘on the make’, you have no time for reflection, for mirrors, and you fill your life instead with the glittering delusions of materialism. Without reflection, there can be no art. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, “the peculiar crossroads where time, place and eternity somehow meet”¹² cannot be attained. I think that the fictional exploration of the demotic of Scots Asian in all its fullness, has yet to be tackled. It carries an inherent, but still potential, poetry. Perhaps the technique of using English narrative with Scottish dialogue/interior monologue might be at least an initial way of evincing these levels of existence, of penetrating the tarmac consciousness, of entering the ‘Unthank’ of Pollokshields.

David Daiches, in the portrait of his father, the Rabbi, draws a distinction between integration and synthesis. ¹³ This book is a paean to cultural pluralism. We leap through worlds, not between them; they are not separate, but exist within one another, and one lives them all, constantly. And whether one likes it, or not, one’s writing will express this.
Alexander Trocchi, believed that all boundaries were essentially utilitarian and should be abandoned once they had ceased to be useful. Trocchi felt that he constantly “fluttered like a moth against the glass curtain of polite disbelief.” ¹⁴ Striving for metaphysical affinities, as opposed to adhering to some kind of a tribal view of literature, can help to foster a creative tension, or perhaps Daiches’s “tight-rope”.
The Dvina Remains, by Eugenie Fraser, a Russian Scottish writer, demonstrates the massive displacement of peoples and the structural changes to the land occasioned by the Russian Revolution and by WW2 – which resonates in the Partition of India and interestingly, Fraser spent the War years in British India.
John Burrowes’s novel, Incomers (Mainstream Publishing, 1987). This novel draws an interesting parallel between the Children of Israel and the Muslims of India, journeying to the ‘promised land’ of Pakistan. There are constant Biblical references in the book. Glasgow pubs are referred to as being governed by a mixture of Calvinism and the Corporation. Burrowes makes the distinction between Punjabi and Urdu, i.e. Asians are not treated as a homogenous group. He presents a fascinating picture of life in the Gorbals in the 1950’s. He draws an interesting parallel also between caste and class. Incomers is as much anthropological document as fictional narrative – indeed, I feel Burrowes is at his strongest when he’s being documentary. BUT he uses phrases like, ‘the Eastern mind’ and ‘the Western mind’ which are unhelpful, inaccurate or archaic. These are ‘said’ by the narrator and not by an character – in fact, the novel is narrator-heavy. There are also no expletives, whatsoever! He seems obsessed with arranged marriage. The voice is sometimes confusing – just whose head are we in at a certain point? I feel Incomers is a valiant, interesting attempt to delineate a changing ethnic and architectural landscape, but as whole, it fails to satisfy.
Leila (Polygon, 1995), by Robin Jenkins, on the other hand, is a good read. It deals with the role of Scots, and of Britain, in the fields of Empire/expat. culture/neo-colonialism. ‘Mixed’ relationships are explored with candour. The ‘White Man’s Burden’ is seen to be an empty receptacle. It’s set in the ‘Fifties and revolves around a Scottish man, living on the fictional island of ‘Savua’ who has an affair with a half-Scottish politician, Leila. Savua sounds suspiciously like Brunei, with its fantastically rich sultan, its oil, its Chinese/Malay/ ‘Aboriginal’ ethnic composition and its aristocratic British Resident. Jenkins expertly constructs his main character, Andrew Sandilands, from a tension between a Calvinistic upbringing and a somewhat dissolute, ‘cocktail expat.’ lifestyle. Jenkins draws on, and makes reference to a vast array of literary and philosophical forebears: Austen, Orwell, Tom Paine, Graham Greene, Conrad – (Incidentally, the word, Leila, in Arabic, means, ‘Night Dance’ and together with the zambras and other forms of ‘felagmengu’, the music of the ‘displaced peasants’, the leilas moved to Spain where eventually they transmuted into certain forms of ‘flamenco’. An appropriate name, then, for a woman of half-Scottish, half-Savuan extraction. Jenkins is careful not to fall into the trap of hip-easy stereotypes. The metaphor of golf is an interesting one: re. the Sultan, “Golfers were accustomed to accept their mistakes and try again.” (cf. Robert Bruce legend). If cricket was the sport of colonialism, then surely golf is the pastime of neo-colonialism. Savua is a strange country of pacifists and ex-head-hunters.)
Michael Mail’s story, Neighbours’ Return (from Shorts 2: The Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Collection, ed. By Candia McWilliam), which won the Macallan/Scotland-on-Sunday Competition last year is set in a Polish village at the close of WW2. With skillful restraint, Mail deals with the theme of the Holocaust. Issues of identity become issues of life and death; Mail’s family are of Jewish Russian origin, and for many centuries, Europe, of course, has been the dark continent of pogrom and internal crusade – indelible scars which demand expression.
Trumpet (Picador,1999), by Jackie Kay, a novel which won the Guardian Fiction Prize: Kay is a writer whose works crosses boundaries of gender and ethnicity in several directions at once. The use, throughout the novel, of short sentences seems to be a particularly ‘urban Scottish’ thing, perhaps reflecting speech-patterns but in the context of this novel, perhaps also reflecting the short, breathless bursts of trumpet jazz. It also heightens the sense of dislocation inherent in the theme of the book. From the vantage-point of a childhood in postwar Glasgow, Kay illustrates (among other things) a terrible, overt racism and its effects on three different people. Things are not rosy in the ‘dear green place’. But then, they never were.
Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides (Canongate, 1998), by Kevin MacNeil, who holds the first Iain Crichton Smith Fellowship: ‘Young Chinese and Scottish’ is a poem which has recently has been translated into Italian. MacNeil is a poet intensely aware of his Gaelic-ness and of his Scottish-ness and of his Zen but who is equally passionate about the ironies and inclusiveness of all of these overlapping identities. The influence of Japanese poetry on Scottish writing deserves a talk all of its own.
Ghost Dancing, by Susan Castillo (from Chapman 95, 2000): A writer who is originally from the American South and who also has links with (apart from Scotland) Portugal. The story, Ghost Dancing concerns a Ghost Shirt, a Native American woman and a Scottish woman who is a museum curator. Interesting piece about the appropriation and thence, the domination of one culture by another. The Scottish museum curator is outwitted and is shamed into wisdom. This is quite a different dynamic from Daiches’s “synthesis” and harks back to the awkward positions epitomised in Guy Mannering and Persian Dawns, Egyptian Nights but the writer has a far greater awareness of the issues than did those earlier authors. At one point, the Native American woman, who is called Lorna (and who chooses to address the Scottish museum curator as, “Mac”) comments: “So that’s why you don’t sound like you’re from Glasgow.” She looks at me pityingly. “That’s what they did to kids on my reservation – they didn’t let us talk Cherokee. They said speaking English was the way to get ahead.” When ‘Mac’ shows Lorna a stuffed Native American woman in the basement, Lorna (at the height of her shock and rage) turns to ‘Mac’ (whose real name is Crichton-Shaw) and says: “How in hell would you feel if you went to a museum and saw a stuffed Highlander?” In this story, Castillo has evinced a similar dilemma to those written about earlier by Scott and Gibbon. Dilemma leads to irony and this seems to be a particularly creative tension in Scottish writing.
Out Vile Jelly by Nasim Marie Jaffry (from Chapman 95, 2000):Set in UCLA, it seems to have nothing to do with ethnicity. But then we meet the fencing optometrist whose great-great-grandfather had been born in Aberdeen and who makes a point of saying this. We see a Chinese woman with a bandage over her left eye, a small, thin man in Bombay, sandbagged and terrified, his retinas detached. When the central character in the story has her retinas “zapped” by a clean, white laser-beam, she exclaims, “I can’t see! It’s all black! Everything’s black!” Clearly, there’s a lot more going on here than just an exposition of the claustrophobic neuroticism of modern life.
Gerrie Fellowes is a New Zealand-English-Scottish writer whose book, The Powerlines, is being published this month (May 2000) by Polygon. Her work emanates from the land and the sea, and is both prose and poetry. She’s a writer who is deeply aware of issues of cultural appropriation. Her poem, Tableau (from Chapman 95, 2000) explores the possession of a Scottish ancestry in places far-removed from the Moor-ish hills of Arrochar.
Raymond Soltysek is an award-winning writer of German-Polish/English background who was born and brought up in west central Scotland. His collection, Occasional Demons is to be published by Neil Wilson Publishing this autumn (2000). Soltysek tackles all the facets of human life; his realist prose is uncompromising and honed; some of his work deals with the position of men in a changing Scottish society. His stories hit you like bullets – but silver ones, perhaps. His writing is perceptive and sensitive and like Kelman he is adept at writing from within, as well as from outwith character.
The Translator by Leila Aboulela (Polygon, 1999): This is a novel which is set in the ‘Nineties and concerns a Sudanese woman, Sammar, who is living in Aberdeen and working as a translator and who has a relationship with Rae, an older Scottish academic who is an ‘expert’ on Islamic Studies. This book is one of the very few novels written in English and published by an author of ‘eastern’ origin in the West which deals with Islam and with Muslim characters in an adult, non-caricatured way. The language is skillful, the insights of the main character, genuinely novel. I’m not surprised it was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Aboulela was born and brought up in Sudan, and only moved to first London and then Scotland, in her mid-twenties. The juxtaposition between Aberdeen and Khartoum is highly effective, with all its resonances of General Gordon, the Mahdi, ancient Nubia and the Blue and White Niles. I wondered whether the sure-footedness of the writing and the strength of the main character perhaps might derive from a sense of strength which the author seems to have in her own identity as a Muslim, African, Arabic-speaking woman in Aberdeen.
Maya Chowdhry is an artist whose work spans several different media in an attempt to explore the interfaces between gender, ethnicity, etc. Her poem, Birth Certificate (from The Crazy Jig, Polygon, 1992), deals in an overt manner with issues of self-identity.
Kamal Sangha’s Straight to the Heart was published in New Writing Scotland 15 (1997, Association for Scottish Literary Studies) and is a totally unpretentious tale of a young boy whose brother has been murdered by racists, and it delineates the implosion of a family in which such a thing has happened.

Now I would like to mention a ‘grassroots’ project, the Pollokshields Writers’ Group, which I had the privilege to set up and run with the help of a Millennium Commission Award.

What were my reasons for setting it up? When I started writing, about ten years ago, there seemed to be no Black writers in Glasgow; actually, I there were a few, but I had no way of knowing that, nor any way of knowing how to go about knowing it. I felt that a similar writer who was beginning to try to write now, ought to be able to leap that hurdle more adroitly than I, and so I set it up, partly as a way of ‘seeding’ a network and also for a sense of solidarity. Why is that important? I grew up in Glasgow in the 1970’s, when racism in all social classes was totally naked and untrammeled. This can lead to a real sense of alienation and a fragmentation of the personality, with all the negative consequences stemming thereof. In the words of the song by The Verve: I can be a million different people from one day to the next – It’s important to combat that process, to centre oneself. There’s no doubt that for me, writing was (and is) a way of doing that. It’s a lot more than that – it has to be, to lift itself, “by the bootlaces” (to quote Hind)¹⁵, from the merely psychotherapeutic, into major art and then beyond that, into the ‘high emptiness’ to which Kenneth White refers or the naked Sufic unity of Rumi. There was a real need for a group like this, and the response has been phenomenal.

Funding was obtained from the Lottery-distributing Millennium Commission, via the Glasgow New Opportunities Millennium Fund (through Community Service Volunteers) to set up and run the group for six months.

Thirty people expressed the desire to come; I had to set a limit; a pool of sixteen come regularly (about twelve every week) and the distribution of ethnicity is as follows:

50% of South Asian origin
50% of combined African-Caribbean, Irish, Scots Gaelic, English and Ethnic Majority Scots origin.

The age distribution ranges from 17 to 70’s, but most are in their 20’s and 30’s.

85% are women.

Some didactic work and free-writing techniques were employed during the first few sessions but now the writers’ work takes up most of the time.

Guest-writers have come to the group, including Valerie Thornton (on poetry) and Chris Dolan (on film and TV writing).

The writers’ reasons for coming consisted of mostly “to improve my writing skills” and also, “to meet with other writers” and “to know whether or not I can do this”. Most said that they were interested in writing prose fiction, yet most of the material brought in has been poetry. During the sessions the issue was raised of creating a space for themes such as racism and feminism to be discussed as pertaining to the work brought in.

Most of the material has been in Standard English and only recently have there been one or two pieces which have had in some Punjabi dialogue but as yet, no interior monologue in languages other than standard English.

Future plans include:

A substantial amount of the group’s work will appear in the forthcoming issue of Nomad magazine (published by Survivors’ Poetry Scotland).
I involved a Community Artist, Jane Thakoordin, in the group’s work for three months. I wanted to allow the group to evince the links between text and visual art. Some of the people who had brought nothing in created a lot of visual art during these sessions. The group are having an exhibition, Face-to-Face: Different Visions, Common Voices, to be launched in June 2000 at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow and subsequently also at Pollokshields Library.
Arts Development Funding has been obtained from Glasgow City Council to allow the group to run on for another six months.
Possible future developments include: Joint readings; a publication; more guest writers, including Jackie Kay, Sanjeev Kohli (of Goodness Gracious Me!) and Elizabeth Reader ( a lecturer in Creative Writing and a specialist in Feminist Writing; I see this group as a mechanism for scattering seedlings into the mainstream, into the manifest future of Scottish writing.

Some examples of work from the Pollokshields Writing Group ¹⁶

The Farmer. This poem is a searing comment, well-written, concerning patriarchy in rural Punjabi communities.
Extract from Doors. This story concerns a Sikh door-to-door salesman who shaves off his hair and beard in the toilet of a railway carriage. Sheila Puri is a writer who has had work published in New Writing Scotland and broadcast on the BBC’s Storyline programme. This story dovetails with John Burrowes’s Incomersbut is told with far greater power and credibility and with absolutely no sentimentality.
Pauline Brown’s story about the arm-less policeman, The Resoluteness of Desire is almost Caribbean magic realist in the underplayed bizarrity of its narrative and in the vivid intensity of its imagery, but it turns out to be fact, not fiction. Or is this the author’s nod to Jorge Luis Borges?
Janet Cooms’s poem set in Venice, Miracles is about waking on water. Venice has always been a place of miracles, of unreality; the city itself is a monument to the impossible. It has also been the ‘Samarkand of Europe’, an epitomy of the process which has underlain the development of fiction.
Martin MacIntyre’s Faces of a Uist Girl. Written in Scots Gaelic and in English, it illustrates changing identities – Scots Gaelic/ Western Isles with the influence of a successful, dynamic Irish culture in a modern context.
Rings by Stewart Mercer is a poem which brings to the fore the Buddhist influence again – an influence which has been a powerful one in Scottish literature and art in the second half of the Twentieth Century (cf. Iain Hamilton-Finlay, Alan Spence and Kevin MacNeil).

The role of the Literature Development Officer has been and continues to be, pivotal, along with those of the Ethnic Services Librarian and the Cultural Diversity Arts Development Officer.

New Writing Scotland’s role in this whole process has been immensely positive (through its championing of Gaelic and Scots and of new writers generally, like Sheila Puri, Kamal Sangha, Leila Aboulela and others) and I would applaud New Writing Scotland’s stance of maximum inclusiveness. It has a high-profile amongst writers from Minority Ethnic communities who have been writing predominantly in English.

Kevin MacNeil and Alec Finlay (of Morning Star Publishers) are central figures in the Wish I Was Here project. This is a ground-breaking project which will be drawing on the rich heterogeneity of Scottish writing and which (in keeping with that publisher’s vision of art in its broadest interpretation) will comprise an educational pack for schools and colleges, workshops, a mobile exhibition, a book and a CD. It’s to be launched at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

As part of the Threads in the Tartan festival, there will be an exhibition, Connecting Cultures, at the Lighthouse which will have a literary input as well as a specific design theme, so that work by artists from various ‘disciplines’ who hail from ten minority ethnic groups within Scotland will be exhibited; these have been drawn from Jewish, Irish, Italian, American, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, African-Caribbean, Chinese and Polish backgrounds.

The Soul Food Theatre Project, set up by the experienced actor and movement specialist Farooq Khan and drawing on the skills of Glasgow’s Fablevision and Leeds’s Red Ladder Theatre Co., works with teenagers in Glasgow and has already produced one performance, last month, at the Ramshorn Theatre in Glasgow.

I think that in fifty years’ time, when we (or ‘people like us’) will be surveying the development of literature and the arts in Scotland over the course of the early 21^st. Century, these projects, together with the work of New Writing Scotland and of ice-breaking authors such as Jackie Kay, Leila Aboulela, Sheila Puri and others will be seen as extremely important in the development of new, old voices in Scottish writing.

One could construct almost any argument about writing, and one would probably not be wrong. The only argument which, I feel, would be inaccurate would be the one which views Scottish writing as being defined by some boundary or other, rather than by the immensity of the imagination. The more one tries to hem it in, the more one cannot fail to notice connections and micro and macro syntheses. Identity, and the ‘identity’ of writing are intimately tied up with the actual process of writing; neither will be trammeled.

The use of language in physicality which is writing offers a multiplicity of different perspectives. This dynamic is impossible to repress or suppress and this is something to be welcomed. Kennedy and Gioia state that

“for a writer, the gift of words is ‘the right inheritance’, even if those words are, for an immigrant poet, sometimes in a different language from that of one’s parents – the debate between ethnicity and universality has echoed among American writers of every racial and religious minority. There is, ultimately, no one correct answer to the questions of identity, for individual artists need the freedom to pursue their own imaginative vision. But considering the issues of ethnicity does help a poet think through the artist’s sometimes conflicting responsibilities between group and personal identity. Even in poets who have pursued their individual vision, we often see how unmistakably they write from their racial, social, cultural background. We inherit our bodies as well as our cultures. Our body represents our genetic inheritance that goes back to the beginning of time.” ¹⁷

I’d like to leave you with a thought:

We – all of us – are cosmopolitan. Whether we like it or not, whether we define ourselves as that, or not, every one of us, as writers, as people, arise from shifting, mixed contexts. Our art is both a reflection of this and an extension of it. Order is inherent everywhere, even in chaos. ‘Worlds within worlds’ mirrors the structure of our minds; the mind is thought to work like a series of overlapping fields, one part flowing through another to produce the unified and yet almost infinitely diverse phenomenon known as thought. The mind functions as an almost infinite series of mirrors; in this context, the search for self-definition, the need to read oneself, is the ultimate thought. Indeed, it is beyond thought. Writing is a crucial part of this quest. In the Beginning, there was the Word.

The dumbing-down of everything leads eventually to the death of the Word and the over-arching predominance of reactive sensation. Too often, as we wallow parasitically in our gutter, we have ceased to gaze at the stars and instead are content with a street-lamp or two.

The very act of writing is a cosmopolitan act. The moment something is written down, it has become part of an ordered universe and has the potential to go anywhere and to exist, far into the future. Its contexts will change, and the interaction between Word and context will be infinitely diverse. Scottish writing is moving towards an edge of sorts – I’m not sure whether or not it will cross that edge; if it does, then I think it will become even more diverse than it has been in the recent past; but this will only happen if it’s given the oxygen which will allow writers who wish to pursue that blade, the means to do so. I would like to give the last word to Margaret Anne Doody. She is referring specifically to the novel form, but really, her comments would apply more generally:

“What my sort of interpretation of the genre itself, of the novel as Novel, does not allow is our making narrow definitions of the genre and shutting out half of the prose fiction of the world. My reading will also not allow national and temporal boundaries to be the perdurable affairs they are often imagined to be. Like Herodotus, I wish to show that Asia and Africa were (and are) in contact with Europe, and to assure us that our literary history depends on a mixture, an interchange of all of these – with, it must now be added, the Americas, Pacific Islands, New Zealand, Australia and so forth. The history of the Novel is never pure. The stories told by the Novel are not ‘pure’. They are stories of mixture and variety, of boundary-crossing and changing. The Novel itself is not ‘pure’ and refuses ever to pretend to be so. It rejoices in a rich muddy messiness that is the ultimate despair of Fascismus. No kind of literature has ever said more fully or firmly that there is life before death.” ¹⁸

Notes

¹, ³, ⁴, ¹⁸ Doody, M.A., 1998. The True Story of the Novel. Fontana Press.
² Ahmad, A., 1975. A History of Islamic Sicily. Edinburgh University Press.
⁵ Lincoln, A., 1999. Scott’s ‘Guy Mannering’: The Limits and Limitations of Anglo-British Identity (in Scottish Literary Journal, June 1999), Association for Scottish Literary Studies.
⁶, ⁷, ⁸, ⁹, ¹⁰ Burgess, M., 1998. Imagine a City. Argyle Publishing.
¹¹ Cairns, C., (ed.), 1987. The History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 4: The Twentieth Century. Aberdeen University Press.
¹² O’Connor, F., Mystery and Manners. Faber and Faber, 1972.
¹³ Daiches, D., 1997. Two Worlds/Promised Lands, Canongate Classics.
¹⁴ Scott, A. M., 1991. Alexander Trocchi: The Making of the Monster. Polygon.
¹⁵ Hind, A., 1985. The Dear Green Place. Corgi.
¹⁶ All these pieces (with the exception of The Resoluteness of Desire, which, to date, remains unpublished) appear in Nomad 8 magazine, published by Survivors’ Poetry Scotland, June 2000.
¹⁷ Kennedy, X.J. and Gioia, D., 1995. Literature (6^th Edition). Harper Collins.

WILSON, Neil, ‘Fiction Opportunities: the 11/9 project’

9 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

The Shape of Texts to Come: the writing of a new Scotland, 13-14 May 2000 |

Neil Wilson Publishing

Why did NWP apply for Lottery funding?

NWP’s strengths have been in non-fiction, but we felt that not enough new fiction was being published in Scotland, particularly when one viewed the situation from the outside looking in. NWP also felt that in the run up to devolution, a new fiction imprint would be viewed as a positive development in the cultural spectrum as the country’s political autonomy changed course. In order to redress this situation, NWP took the decision to create a new fiction imprint. Wary of the financial pitfalls of new fiction being output from a relatively small press, NWP approached the SAC to ask about support and the company was informed that what it was proposing to undertake would probably qualify for National Lottery funding from the New Directions fund. An application to the New Directions Lottery Fund was then prepared.

ADVICE: On no account undertake this process lightly. It is time consuming and set against one of the worst years the book trade has had for a long time, the REAL cost of the application is far in excess of what is budgeted.

NWP named the imprint 11:9 which is a totally apolitical gesture towards the date of the referendum on the 11th September 1997. It’s is also VERY EASY to remember and wouldn’t cost a fortune to style up a logo for it.
In order to meet the considerable start-up costs of the imprint it was proposed that three years of funding would be required commencing in late 1999 until late 2002 after which the imprint would be commercially sustainable.
In brief the plan assumed that in late 2000, six full length novels would be published, followed by another 8 in the Spring of 2001 and a further 8 in the Autumn of the same year. In 2002 a further 16 new works would be published. In the event of titles selling out, the plan included the re-issue of that title as a ‘B’ format paperback a year after the date of first publication in order to extend the life of the work and increase access to it for the book-buying public. Between 2000 and 2003 the 11:9 imprint has a remit to source some 38 new woks of Scottish fiction. The total cost of the project exceeded £300,000 and the total lottery grant amounted to £224,500.

2. What is the 11:9 project seeking to achieve, what are its aims and objectives?

The aims and objectives of 11:9 are:

To publish new fiction work from writers based in Scotland.
To make available to the general public new works of fiction by publishing them in two paperback formats at intervals one year apart.
To achieve commercial sustainability.
To market the new work in an effective and publicly prominent manner.
To offer writers meaningful advances on commission of the new work.
To actively seek sales of foreign language rights in the new work to foreign publishers.
To actively sell other subsidiary rights to enable the new work to appear in other media such as television and film.

3. How are new writers being commissioned by the list?

NWP approached a number of people in Scotland from a variety of backgrounds in order to set up an 11:9 editorial board. Four people agreed to initiate the process of vetting submissions and commissioning new work. These are Donny O’Rourke, Marion Sinclair, Paul Pender and Douglas Gifford.
Since August 1999 the board had been actively looking at work which has come in either by word of mouth and referral or through direct approaches being made to NWP. The standard format required by the board for considering a submission prior to distributing the full work are:

A covering letter
A CV/biography
A synopsis of the work
Two sample chapters or two short stories from a collection

The board was also active in encouraging writers known to them to approach NWP with hew work. NWP contacted Writers’ Groups throughout Scotland to encourage submission of new work. NWP proposes to publish a collection of the best writing from Writers’ Groups in Scotland on an annual basis starting in the Spring of 2001. Groups will be asked to select what they consider to be the strongest pieces from the group and put these forward for consideration. There are a large number of submissions currently under consideration by the board which meets regularly. Since August 1999 the board has sifted through a large number of projects ranging from novellas, short story collections, full length novel works, collections drawn from academic creative writing groups and some fairly bizarre submissions about which I will say nothing.

In order to manage this increasing volume of traffic two new employees will be taken on in 2000 to administer and process the writing which 11:9 will be publishing. This should greatly facilitate the speed with which NWP can handle submissions and also streamline the decision-making process. Editorial board members are expected to stay on the panel until the publishing programme for the first two years is determined. After that new members will be sought.

4. What will 11:9 be publishing in the Autumn of 2000?

As I speak, 11:9 has contracted three writers, has another about to sign and has agreed to contract two others this month. The reason for the delay in the case of the last two writers is that the board is considering a novel-length submission which came in recently and which may be added to the Autumn list. In this case one of the last two writers will be mover to the Spring of 2001. The programme for October 2000 will therefore comprise of:

Two full length novels, (possibly three, if the board selects the novel currently under consideration).
Two short story collections.
And depending on the third novel scenario, one, or two part-novella/part-short story collections.

The writers who have been contracted to date are:

Martin Shannon: The Tin Man (Novel)
Tom Bryan: The Wolfclaw Chronicles (Novel)
Raymond Soltysek: Occasional Demons (Short Story Collection)

The writer we are about to contract is Linda Cracknell (Short Story Collection)
The two writers we have agreed to contract in May are:

David Cameron and Shug Hanlan (Part-Novella/part-short story collections)

Obviously I cannot name the writer whose work is currently being considered as the third novel for publication.

5. How will 11:9 market these new works?

A large amount of expenditure has been earmarked from the funding for the specific purpose of ensuring that these new works are prominently advertised and promoted.
In the run-up to publication 11:9 will promote the books in a number of ways including:

Tie-ins with all major bookshops in Scotland offering full POS material
Establishment of 11:9 website in partnership with Scotland on Line to create an innovative fiction site on the web which will include author readings, video clips, downloads of sample chapters and short stories and special offers on pre-publication offers.
Incentives to booksellers to increase subscription orders.
Distribution of postcards and samplers to the general public and literary editors throughout the UK
Full colour advertising in The Bookseller
Advertising on buses
Advertising on escalators and in SPT trains
Tie-ins with national dailies on launch
Full sponsored launch of the list in October
Targeting of all national arts programmes in the UK
Major editorial feature in The Bookseller on launch

The authors have all agreed to make themselves available to promote their work and the list at any venues which will host events at the time of publication including readings at libraries, bookstores and community centres.

6. In conclusion:

Whilst this is only the briefest of outlines I hope that it has established the fact that the 11:9 imprint offers a real opportunity for new Scottish writers of fiction over the course of the next three years and hopefully for ever after.

The Shape of Texts to Come

Presented at the ASLS Annual Conference, 14 May 2000

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