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Alan Bissett
December 11, 2006 11:38 AM
Guardian Unlimited: Arts Blog
Is Scotland going through a golden literary age? It all depends on whom you listen to.
Far be it for me to wade into another spat, but it's stuff like this that keeps the literary world interesting. The protagonists this time are Professor Willy Maley of the University of Glasgow and Stuart Kelly, literary editor of Scotland on Sunday. Regular readers will note my suspicion for reviewers, critics and academics (so much sound and fury, as Shakespeare wrote, signifying nothing), but when they disagree as vehemently as these gents, my antennae sense real ideological difference. This is always political, thus worth noticing, whatever its guise.
The recent case of Rachel Cooke v Susan Hill over blogging was, to me, an argument about democracy, not one about "standards", and a similar divide exists in Maley and Kelly's feud. They slug it out in the new issue of Product, Scotland's finest - if most peripatetic - arts and politics magazine, over the oft-repeated claim that Scottish literature is going through a "golden age". Maley is the cheerleader; Kelly the jeerleader. For Kelly, Scottish writers "need a high bar, a rigorous scepticism that won't wallow in hype, but judiciously examine our claims to greatness". For Maley, "Scottish writing has been judged excellent at the bar of international opinion, despite wing-clipping at home by carping culture-vultures."
Maley's is a slightly different version of an appeal by the American writer and critic, Heidi Julavits, in The Believer, about the standard being set so high by critics that only carping and snarking takes place, instead of sheer delight in writers attempting serious fiction. In this context, Kelly is a Snark, Maley a Believer. Both feel they are best serving art. Maley's good cop is proud of Scottish writers' achievements; Kelly's bad cop demands ever-greater proof of the success. For those uninterested in Scottish letters (actually, aren't you what the debate's about?) this is a similar discussion to that which surrounds English writers' perceived failure to compete with the American novel.
We must be careful when examining national literatures though, especially from within that nation. All appeals to the sanctity of a nation - whether saluting the flag or cheering the football team - are preparations for the mindset of war. And art is not war. But Maley is defending the national culture against the national cringe, and Kelly seems to represent for him those Scots at pains to see only their country's shortcomings. It's a familiar exchange in Scottish life. The charge of "parochial" comes from those who declare themselves "cosmopolitan", except that one man's "parochialism" is another's cultural protectionism, and one man's "cosmopolitan" is another's hatred of the homeland. What Kelly doesn't recognise is that Scottish writers just can't exist on a level trans-national field. If Alasdair Gray's Lanark were set in New York instead of Glasgow, it would often be mentioned in the same breath as DeLillo's Underworld. The news from Scotland, a post-industrial outpost of a faded empire, simply cannot seem as important as reports from the vast, engorged heart of the new one. Yet when I go abroad people often ask, "Who are the Scottish writers to read?" ("besides Irvine Welsh," they usually add, but that's another blog. What are we supposed to say? I'm sorry, but there aren't any as good as Thomas Pynchon?
Scepticism is a healthy intellectual trait, but if Scots won't champion Scottish literature, who will? The Danes? It's one thing to claim that the final arbiter has to be international (though I personally think the opinions of school students in Dundee as valid as those of some global "council"), but if that court isn't even aware of our works - because our critics don't provide Legal Aid to our writers - then we face the death of regional literatures, and a critical establishment open to only the most glamorous clients.
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