I Confess

 Let me confess to being a fan of Alasdair Gray's Lanark. I do not know if I would have found a way to write what I wanted to write without finding this novel (and a couple of others, but Gray started it....)

I did a search for another reason, and found Thinking about Alasdair Gray and Lanark, forty years since on The British Museum's English and Drama Blog. And it has much of interest about the writer, but then I read this and had to say, Yes, it is an epic. A story far from the center of the literary world, a story about life in a grimy factory town, of succeeding where success was not a foregone conclusion.

The word ‘epic’ is one of the woolliest of literary terms. It usually just means a long poem with some fighting in it. It’s often also used to describe a foundational narrative which depicts events leading to the creation of something new, a city, a society, a confirmation of belief and development, a rising from ruins. And it also suggests scale: something big.

Well, Lanark is an epic novel.

Read it in its era, in the aftermath of 1979, when a referendum on Scottish devolution was confirmed by a majority in favour but the result was torpedoed by the Westminster government, and when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was elected by a majority of voters in England, not Scotland. In the 1980s, Lanark (1981) in prose fiction, alongside Edwin Morgan’s collection of poems Sonnets from Scotland (1984), and Liz Lochhead’s play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987) might be taken as one of three literary paradigms of self-determination, each enacting the same principle that reality cannot do without imagination and imagination helps transform reality.

So, for those of you who think you are from places that do not matter, that literature has nothing to draw upon, I recommend reading Lanark. 

Twenty-one years ago, Glasgow University Library Special Collections Department published Drafts and papers of Lanark: A life in four books by Alasdair Gray which includes Gray's illustrations and drafts. Those may interest those aspiring writers, or fans of Gray. For those of you wondering why I find this novel so inspiring, this might help:

Lanark is an unusual book, employing techniques seldom used by other authors, although parallels have been drawn with literary greats such as Dante and Blake. There  are four books in this volume which are sequenced book three, one, two and four, and they must be read in this order. The volume contains two interwoven narratives with books one and four dealing with the life of Lanark and his time in Unthank and Provan. These books are written in a fantastical manner in a Kafkaesque style, introducing nightmarish notions such as characters growing mouths on their bodies and a disease called "dragonhide". 

In  contrast to this, books two and four are written in a much more realistic and down to earth style. These two books follow the life and troubles of Duncan Thaw, who lives in Glasgow. This section of Lanark is very much autobiographical, mirroring numerous events in Gray's life such as his evacuation during the war to Perthshire, the occasion of a dance at the Glasgow School of Art, and Gray's continuing health problems with asthma and eczema. 

In book three, Lanark cannot remember his past, and so in the prologue (at the end of book three) Lanark asks an oracle to tell him who he is, with the oracle stating he will tell him about Duncan Thaw. This ends book one and takes the reader to Thaw's story, thereby suggesting that Thaw and Lanark are perhaps the same person. There are also marked similarities between Unthank and Glasgow, again suggesting that both places are the same. Both localities are dystopian and both are ultimately apocalyptic for the characters - ending in destruction and death. However, numerous interpretations of this book and its characters have been suggested.

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This collection provides a valuable insight into the methods and techniques used by Gray when writing this epic novel, from the original ideas through to the publication of this important Scottish literary work.

I think Gray's novel can inspire anyone, anywhere, just as it was for Scotland. This comes from Martyn mcLaughlin's alasdair gray and lanark:

“Lanark came out two years after the failure of the devolution bill, and in certain ways Scotland was in the process of creating a cultural autonomy which it hadn’t achieved politically,” recalls Randall Stevenson, professor of 20th century literature at Edinburgh University. “Having a major novel which greatly expanded the range of perspectives through which the country, particularly Glasgow, could be seen was very convenient for that project. Gray answered a cultural need.”

Dr Matthew Wickman, senior lecturer in Scottish literature at Aberdeen University, said: “The memory is that of a very important book in Scottish literary history. It was such an enigmatic work, part science-fiction, part ‘artist novel’, with a multitude of different genres within one wider tome.”

So too, young writers starting their own engagement with the creative process found themselves enamoured by the book’s vista, and its treatment of Scotland. Andrew O’Hagan, who first read it at the age of 14, said: “Lanark was a rallying call for my generation of Scottish novelists. It introduced a great new expansiveness, a sense that nothing was too big or too small for the modern Scottish novel. I was thrilled by its international character, the way it was a product of Scotland that clearly could speak to the world, and speak of the world. I still believe it’s the most compendious piece of literary art out of Scotland since The Heart of Midlothian.”

I could say - might say if I were not feeling very sober this morning -  Indiana has Raintree Country as an example of a great novel out of Indiana, that might even be about Indiana, but it was not written of a contemporary Indiana. Lanark was a contemporary novel about what was considered a backwater of Great Britain. Hoosiers might see what I saw - a guide to what Indiana writers might rise to.

More recently, there is Alasdair Gray Reading Between the Lines: on Lust, Lanark and a Life in Letters by Natasha Hoare, another who has fallen under Gray's spell. She wrote:

...It is in this Epilogue, an extraordinary moment in which the protagonist speaks to the writer himself, that Gray lays out his art:

‘Your survival as a character and mine as an author depend on us seducing a living soul into our printed world and trapping it here long enough to steal the imaginative energy that gives us life. To cast a spell over this stranger I am doing the most abominable things. I am prostituting my most sacred memories into the commonest possible words and sentences. When I need more sentences or ideas I steal them from other writers, usually twisting them to blend with my own.’

This deft self-reflexivity, shift in tone, encyclopedic knowledge of literary history, and above all sense of humor, is what endears Gray’s fiction to me again and again. In the case of Lanark it was well ahead of its time. Gray was repeatedly advised by his publisher that the form was problematic and that the book was best cut in two, realist novel and sci-fi trash sensibly divided. Gray thankfully prevailed.

She follows with her email exchange with  Gray. Annotations are provided. This I found fascinating; hopefully so will you. I have not done the reading and the studying and the apprentice work to do anything comparable, maybe someone else can do so. I can only do what I can do.

Scholars have written on Lanark, Scottish Fiction 1980-81: The Importance of Alasdair Gray's Lanark.

What I really think you should do is get the novel. 

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