Contemporary Scottish Gothic:
History, Identity, Monstrosity
MA Thesis Literature and Culture: Specialisation English
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Contemporary Scottish Gothic: History, Identity, Monstrosity
Contents
INTRODUCTION 3
CHAPTER 1 10
Self-haunting: Multiple Selves and the Ontology of the Real in Alice Thompson’s The Falconer
CHAPTER 2 20
A Textual Self-Haunting: The Legacy of Stevenson and Hogg in Irvine Welsh’s The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and Marabou Stork
Nightmares
CHAPTER 3 50
‘Gorgeous monster’: Bella Baxter and Scottish National Identity in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things
CONCLUSION 67
Contemporary Scottish Gothic: History, Identity, Monstrosity
Introduction
‘With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the
intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.’ (Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 55)
‘We are all subjected to two distinct natures in the same person. I myself have
suffered grievously in that way.’ (James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner 132)
The above quotes are taken from two canonical works in Scottish Gothic, both of which concern themselves with notions of doubling – of the ‘other’ within. This theme of self-haunting has come to be definitive of Scottish Gothic. Significantly, while these foundational texts were written in the nineteenth century, there has been a recent resurgence of the Gothic in Scotland in the last thirty-six years. Of course, at a time of such political importance in Scotland – the devolution of Parliament occurred in 1997, two referendums in 1979 and 2007 and, of course, whilst writing this thesis, the Scottish National Party was re-elected with an outstanding majority in 2015 – it is unsurprising that Scottish authors should return to a genre that has historically looked inward to anxieties about origins and identity. Monica Germanà attributes this
resurgence of Gothic literature to the breakdown between the binary opposition of Scotland/England; she argues, furthermore, that such devolution points to the ‘problematic diversity within Scottish culture’ (Women’s 2).
The self-haunting prevalent in Contemporary Scottish Gothic is not a desire to return to an idealised, unified past. Instead it utilises narratives of ‘otherness’ to subsequently both reveal and challenge national anxieties by examining the instability of origins in its own national narrative. All four novels examined in this thesis – Alice Thompson’s The Falconer (2008), Irvine Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) and The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2005), and Alasdair Gray’s Poor
Things (1992) – employ the technique of self-haunting through a variety of techniques
and with a variety of consequences. However, all of the novels discussed see an incursive, unstable past that continually interrupts and problematises the present. The task of this thesis is to trace how this is achieved – through their intertextuality and Gothic references to spectres, unreliable narrators, uncanny doubles or ‘gorgeous monsters’ (Gray 91) – and to consider the larger impact they have on notions of the self and national identity in Scotland.
Contemporary Gothic and the Search for Origins
The Gothic genre has historically always been in dialogue with uncertainties about the past. Considered as the first ever ‘Gothic’ novel, Horace Walpole’s The
Castle of Otranto (1724) deals with the issues of a sixteenth century manuscript
discovered by an ‘ancient Catholic family’ (Walpole 59) which purports to relate a story that dates from the eleventh century. Other famous Gothic novels such as Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) see the centre of the action unfold in ancient or ruined castles – a spatial and physical embodiment of the past and a place for a recursive past to unfold. Contemporary Gothic is not different in the respect that it constantly looks to the past and its influence on the present. However, Contemporary Gothic often
finds that the past it seeks to interrogate are its Gothic novel forefathers. It thus becomes self-gothicising and self-perpetuating in its intertextual references to this established tradition.
In his analysis of the Contemporary Gothic, Steven Bruhm argues, ‘to think about the contemporary Gothic is to look into a triptych of mirrors in which images of the origin continually recede in a disappearing arc. We search for a genesis but find only ghostly manifestations’ (259). I find Bruhm’s argument highly useful in considering the works explored in this thesis – all four abound with explicit or implicit references to their Gothic predecessors. This is perhaps what aligns Contemporary Gothic closely with Postmodernism: as it intertextualises earlier narratives it surmounts issues surrounding representation and subjectivity and
problematises their epistemological foundations. From a deconstructionist, Derridean perspective, one could argue that the pre-given ‘centre’ of Contemporary Gothic is already unstable and ‘de-centered’ so that it never points to anything outside of the text. As a result, the ‘real’, the ‘centre’ in Contemporary Gothic, and the Gothic more generally, is always under scrutiny. Examples of this can be seen throughout the novels discussed but perhaps are most prominent in instances where manuscripts, letters and the recounting of events purport to be the basis of some kind of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’. In The Falconer, a found letter becomes a fantastical and frightening indication of murder (Thompson 78), while ghosts and hauntings are left
unquestioned and appear somewhat banal. Welsh’s exploration of this occurs in two very distinct and complex ways. Caroline Kibby’s discovery of her father’s journal which reveals Danny Skinner to be her half-brother explicates a search for origins that is still never fully resolved by the novel’s close and in Marabou Stork Nightmares; Roy Strang is revealed to be an unreliable narrator in the final chapters, raising
questions of truth and reliability throughout the text. Through his very explicit re-writing of Hogg and Stevenson in Marabou Stork Nightmares and Bedroom Secrets of
the Master Chefs respectively, questions of Scottish national identity become
explicated and challenged in their references to an uneasy and Gothic literary tradition. Finally, Gray’s whole novel – a monstrous conglomeration of letters, manuscripts and Gray’s own ‘Notes Historical and Critical’ – reveal a tapestry of uncertainty as to where to locate the ‘real’ in the novel.
Myths and History: Contemporary Scottish Gothic
What is it about the four novels explored in this thesis that makes them
fundamentally Contemporary Scottish Gothic? Steven Bruhm’s ‘triptych of mirrors’ is again a useful analogy here, since the ‘search for origins’ and defining the locus of the ‘real’ in these novels is so heavily intertwined with the narrative of Scottish (literary) history itself. Subsumed by English literature and culture, Scotland has a history of struggling to find its literary voice. The novel, which is considered so formative in relation to nationhood, did not emerge in its ‘Scottish’ form until the works of Sir Walter Scott in the eighteenth century. As Edwin Muir has argued, Scotland grappled with the knowledge that ‘Scotsmen think in one language and feel in another’ (21). Cairns Craig argues a similar vein, conceding that the educational system forms a ‘crucial part’ of the ‘literary infrastructure’ (Scottish Literature 2), but since Scottish literature has only been taught under the guise of ‘English’ in Scottish and English universities until very recently, much of the Scottish literary canon has been subsumed into that of the English. Furthermore, ‘when the pattern of Scottish
deformed version of the true shape of literary development’ (Craig Scottish Literature 3).
In the absence of a coherent and independent literary tradition, it is
unsurprising that myths and legends have therefore had a major influence in Scottish literary history. In his seminal study on the genre, ‘Heartlands: Contemporary Scottish Gothic’, David Punter argues that Scotland’s position as a ‘stateless nation’ (101), means it is often prone to turning to these myths and legends, such as, for example, the Jacobite legacy, and in conjuring up these myths create a ‘romanticism which continues to be inseparable from Scottish views of the past’ (102). If the volatile relationship with history and origins forms the basis of Contemporary Gothic, then Contemporary Scottish Gothic goes one step further in that its very history and origins are unstable, mythical and fragmented.
The four novels discussed in this thesis therefore posit an understanding of an unstable historical origin that is necessarily Scottish – either in its use of myth and legend or recalling of Jacobite legacy in The Falconer; by explicitly re-writing Scottish Gothic canonical works as in Welsh’s works, or by a monstrous embodiment of the Scottish nation exemplified in Gray’s Bella Baxter.
A Scottish Self-Haunting
While novels such as Frankenstein and Dracula embody social anxieties that can be located in an external ‘other’, Scottish Gothic has traditionally located its anxieties inwards toward the self, as the quotes from the two canonical works by Hogg and Stevenson at the beginning of this chapter show. This can be linked to Scotland’s own uncertain historical origins and its impact on national identity. Germanà claims, ‘Scottish culture…is pervasively haunted by a sense of its own
uncanny otherness, the coexistence of the unfamiliar within the familiar’ (Sick Body 1). Forever torn between ideas of the self such as Scottish/British; pre-modern primitive self/post- Enlightenment modern self, and mythical/historical, Scottish identity straddles and permeates these often conflicting concepts. In 1919, the same year as Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny was published, G. Gregory Smith coined the term ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’, which defined Scottish culture as ‘the very
combination of opposites’ (19).
Inevitably, just as the Contemporary Scottish Gothic situates its anxieties in the self, the ‘other’ within, in the four novels discussed, concerns about the self and national identity find their locus in the body. In The Falconer, Daphne’s ghost finds her ‘skin’ blisters into ‘black weals’ that spread all over her body (Thompson 92) as the dark past of the Melfort family and Daphne’s involvement in it surfaces and manifests itself on her ghostly body. Furthermore, Iris undergoes a metamorphosis into her sister that sees the two become indistinguishable at points as their
appearances become more similar and their identities merge. Louis Melfort’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder sees him fit in terror as he recalls his time in the war to the point where he can always feel it ‘at the pit of his stomach’ (Thompson 45). In
Marabou Stork Nightmares, Roy Strang’s comatose body allows for him to escape
into a fantasy world of varying levels of consciousness that is highly reminiscent of Hogg’s Private Memoirs. Eventually, his past involvement in a brutal gang rape means he is physically castrated by his victim. Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby in
Bedroom Secrets form Jekyll and Hyde-like doubles of one another as Kibby falls
victim to Skinner’s curse and his ‘id’ like qualities infect Kibby further. Reminiscent also of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Kibby’s body bears the brunt of Skinner’s excesses, with him eventually needing a liver transplant. Finally, Gray’s novel sees
anxieties of origin, self and national identity fully embodied in the figure of his ‘gorgeous monster’ (Gray 91) Bella Baxter. A re-writing of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, Gray’s narrative traces Bella, created by Godwin Baxter from the body
of the suicide victim, Victoria Blessington, and the brain of her unborn child, as she embarks on a quest for knowledge and origin. Bella can be read as a metaphor for Scotland as she is torn between past and present – through her physical status as Victoria Blessington and her subsequent ‘recreation’ as Bella Baxter.
The four novels reveal a fragmented image of self that is reflective of the wider national identity question in Scotland (and perhaps national identity more generally). As Scotland moves away from more ‘homogenous national culture’ in the twentieth century (Bhabha 2), it once again is forced to look inward and examine its own heterogeneous nature. Contemporary Scottish Gothic seeks to address the issues inherent in such a turn – in particular, the reliance upon the past in our construction of the present. While perhaps not offering hard and fast resolutions to questions of the self and national identity, Contemporary Scottish Gothic seeks to expose such
questions, challenging and problematising them. In this thesis, I seek to examine how these four novels achieve this. Beginning with Thompson, I look at her use of
traditional Gothic concepts of ‘haunting’ and the ‘spectre’ as exemplifying this ‘other’ within and questioning notions of a whole and unfragmented self. My second chapter will look at the formal and thematic influence of Hogg and Stevenson – specifically their focus on masculinity and its impact on the creation of a fragmented or doubled sense of self – on two of Welsh’s Gothic novels. Finally, I will address Poor Things and its interrogation of the self and Scottish national identity through the figure of Bella Baxter.
Chapter 1
Self-haunting: Multiple Selves and the Ontology of the Real in Alice
Thompson’s The Falconer
In the previous two chapters, I have highlighted, to varying degrees, how intertextuality and the body become implicated in the current of self-haunting that runs through Contemporary Scottish Gothic. Predominant ways in which
self-haunting has impacted the body are through doubling – as seen in Alice Thompson’s
The Falconer with Iris and Daphne, or in Irvine Welsh’s Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs with Danny Skinner and Brian Kibby – or through illness as with Louis
Melfort’s PTSD in The Falconer or Welsh’s comatose narrator Roy Strang in
Marabou Stork Nightmares. However, what both of these effects highlight is a
permeability of the boundaries of the body, a permeability related to identity as boundaries of the body become fluid or damaged and effect characters’ subjectivity. The body furthermore relates to the intertextual elements of the novels, in that they point to previous works in the Scottish Canon and their core themes of doubles and schizoid selves. In this chapter, I argue that both intertextuality and the body become interconnected to an even greater degree and to slightly different ends in Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things (1992) through his ‘gorgeous monster’ (Gray 91) and main protagonist – Bella Baxter. The novel re-writes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as Godwin Baxter creates Bella Baxter from the suicide victim Victoria Blessington by placing Victoria’s unborn child’s brain back into her body. In this chapter, I examine Bella’s ‘monstrosity’, its relationship to the intertextuality of Gray’s novel, and the wider implications of these two, closely linked themes in relation to Scottish national identity.
Alice Thompson’s contemporary Scottish Gothic novel The Falconer (2008) predicates a form of self-haunting, that while persistent in all the novels to be
discussed in this thesis, finds its locus in what many have come to associate as ‘typically Gothic’ setting: ‘the apparent presence of a ghost, often finally explained away by non-supernatural means; the very real presence of one or more members of the aristocracy, with castles and other props to match; and a dominant love-plot…’ (Punter Literature of Terror 2). Alongside these universally acknowledged features of the Gothic, Thompson’s novel purports a conscious re-examination of the past and how it impacts notions of the present. However, what delineates Thompson’s novel as necessarily a contemporary Scottish Gothic work can be attributed to three key
elements that I wish to discuss in this chapter. Firstly, each of Thompson’s characters is haunted by their own past as it encroaches and infiltrates upon their present sense of self. Secondly, as the past returns any notion of a rational, whole self is often
constructed as mythical and unstable: moments where the past collides with the present disrupt time and space in the enclosed world of Glen Almain to a point where even knowing and understanding the ‘real’ becomes problematic. Timothy C. Baker foregrounds this as an important aspect of the Gothic. It is through this disruption of reality that:
Gothic writings never leave the ‘real’ behind, but rather posit an
originary ‘real’ that remains untraceable. On the contrary, in Gothic the ‘real’ reappears in the guise of the fantastic: rather than being directly accessible it is transmuted through ghostly or invasive means. (11) Throughout the novel, the ‘real’ is exposed through supernatural or mythical means, while that which is stated as rational or reasonable is shown to be thoroughly
Cartesian thought that presents the self as whole and cohesive becomes subsumed by irrational and fantastical forces that fragment and disrupt the self. While not
necessarily restricted to contemporary Scottish Gothic – the past in Thompson’s novel is intrinsically linked to Scottish folkloric traditions such as fairies, witchcraft and ghosts but also historical narratives of the Jacobite legacy and Scotland’s involvement the First and Second World Wars. The third key element I will explore in this chapter is that it is through this association that Thompson imbues the very landscape with a sense of agency. Subsequently, the landscape too becomes haunted by its own past. This chapter intends to examine closely how these elements are interlaced in the novel to create a necessarily contemporary Scottish Gothic novel, where anxieties about the real find their embodiment in the characters’ sense of self and in the landscape surrounding them.
Ontology of the Real: the unstable past and unstable present
Iris Tennant, the novel’s central protagonist, is perhaps most affected by this disruption of the ‘real’ upon her sense of self. She sees Glen Almain as the source, the origin, of her sister’s death and travels there in order to gain answers and
understanding. Curiously, instead of offering such hard and fast, rational answers, the novel forever foregrounds Daphne’s death as ‘more symbolic than real’ (Thompson 25) and often reveals more about Iris’ own personality. Subverting traditional Gothic tropes, it is not in the ‘huge nineteenth century castle’ with its ornate and ‘formal gardens (Thompson 4) but in the wild, remote Glen surrounding these that Iris first begins to see apparitions of her sister, Daphne. For Monica Germanà, the Glen denotes a particularly Scottish space for haunting due to its association with folklore in literature (Women’s 136), as I will discuss in more detail later, but her linking of
the ‘psychological dimension of spectrality and the revenant’s symbiotic relationship with the haunted space’ (Women’s 135) is of particular interest here. She states that:
When entering a space whose legitimacy the revenant challenges, temporal and spatial disruptions brought in by ghostly apparitions amplify the sense of unsettling indeterminacy produced by spectrality in the first place…By returning to haunt the living from the past, the revenant defies the laws of time, disrupting the chronotopic linearity of the ghost story...undermining, in turn, the ontological foundations of the real. (Women’s 138)
Glen Almain becomes a centre of temporal and spatial disruption as Iris’ ‘logical mind’ (Thompson 8) is challenged; what to consider as ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ is problematised as she steadily confronts the past and her sister’s death. Strikingly, these ghostly apparitions of her sister are never figured as frightening and nor is their ‘reality’ ever questioned by Iris. Instead, the objects, the ‘evidence’ around her sister’s death, play on Iris’ rational mind and serve to question authenticity and reality. The suicide note supposedly written by Daphne is a prominent example of this. When Iris discovers the note, she realises that it is not written in Daphne’s handwriting; she then begins a series of questioning:
Who had forged the note and why?...Iris’ mind was becoming
confused with possibilities. She was drawing up a list of names – not of the war dead, but of the men who lived in the glen. The glen was driving her mad, as it had driven her sister mad. Fantasizing about
murder. (Thompson 78, italics in original)
The note – something that has been presented as ‘real’ and tangible evidence – is what becomes fantastical and frightening as it implies to Iris her sister was murdered and
had not committed suicide. The way in which the appearance of Daphne’s ghost is not surrounded by the same fear and questioning as the note, aligns with Germanà’s assertion that the ‘ontological foundations of the real’ are undermined through the revenant (Women’s 138). While normally a characteristic of magical realism and fantasy, this technique of familiarising supernatural events and de-familiarising seemingly banal ones can also be a particularly Gothic and postmodern trope. It is precisely through the unquestioned appearance of Daphne’s ghost that we are
reminded that this is a place where temporal and spatial realms collide and the reader must therefore be wary not to take things at face value. Brian McHale suggests of fantasy that it ‘pluralizes the “real” and thus problematizes representation’ (75) and achieves this through a
confrontation between the possible (the ‘real’) and the impossible, the normal and the paranormal. Another world penetrates or encroaches upon our world … or some representative of our world penetrates an outpost of the other world. (75)
This certainly seems to be the case with the presence of Daphne’s ghost. When past and present break-down, multiple temporalities are subsequently created and thereby call into question what is being represented as ‘real’.
While Iris is haunted by the ghost of her sister, this can also be understood as a form of self-haunting through the novel’s other fundamentally Gothic element:
metamorphosis. Sarah Dunnigan and Timothy C. Baker have both identified elements of metamorphosis throughout The Falconer, typically associating it with the animal-like transformations and comparisons of the central characters1 and Louis remarks that ‘Glen Almain is a place of change, of metamorphosis’ (Thompson 71). However,
1
Iris’ metamorphosis is into that of her sister, rather than an animal form. This is signalled in the very first chapter of the novel as Iris approaches Glen Almain on the train and examines her reflection in the window:
just for a moment, the eyes became paler, more expressive, the nose narrower and shorter, the mouth more sensual; her sister’s face looked back at her, the backdrop of the reflected train carriage behind her. (Thompson 3)
The sisters could be understood as doubles of one another, Iris representing the rational mind and Daphne as the more sensual of the two: while Daphne ‘besotted men’ (Thompson 25), Iris staunchly believes at the beginning of the novel that only ‘with reason can mankind progress. As long as we have reason, we have nothing to fear. Reason will always master emotion’ (Thompson 15).
Yet, as the metamorphosis of Iris into Daphne escalates and the boundaries between these two ‘opposites’ become fluid, their lives become somewhat
interchangeable. Iris initially resists comparisons to her sister so as not to reveal her true purpose in coming to Glen Almain to the Melforts, but eventually she falls for Edward and even borrows her sister’s dress in what seems like a conscious decision to appear more like her sister and appeal to him (Thompson 100). Edward notices this and remarks ‘But Iris, you’ve come in disguise too. You’ve come dressed as your sister’ (101). Iris is also tasked with the same role as Daphne in aiding Lord Melfort in dissuading the National Socialists against war. That she eventually, like Daphne, becomes pregnant with Edward’s baby only further emphasises her metamorphosis.
Consequently, Daphne’s haunting of Iris becomes a mode of self-haunting as Daphne reveals repressed elements of Iris’ personality, such as her sensuality: as is explicit in her liaisons with Edward and the Falconer. However, the interchangeability
of the two also is suggestive of a kind of optative mode. Andrew H. Miller states of the optative mode that it presents the other ‘as an example of what I might have become and focuses on the present as it stretches back into the past’ (199). The optative’s emphasis is on alternative lives – lives one could be leading had one made different choices at different times. The temporal focus is of significance here. Daphne’s ghost, as I have discussed, disrupts chronology by appearing in the present. She therefore serves as a representative of what could happen to Iris should she remain at Glen Almain and make the decisions that she made. Iris, thankfully, when pregnant with Edward’s baby, chooses instead to leave the glen. It becomes through this metamorphosis that Iris’s journey to Glen Almain makes Daphne’s death ‘more symbolic than real’ (Thompson 25) as these decisions reflect and alter Iris’s
personality rather than uncovering the main reasons behind Daphne’s death.
Unstable Selves
Iris’ uncanny metamorphosis thus questions ideas of the ‘self’ as a stable, fixed whole. Germanà traces a pattern in Scottish modern conceptions of self that ‘emerges from the unresolved contrast between the post-Enlightenment, civilised self and its pre-modern, primitive other self, which…returns to remind the modern
counterpart of its own spectral status’ (Sick Body 4). Iris’ metamorphosis embodies this dichotomy: boundaries are blurred as the two sisters’ identities become fluid and interchangeable. Iris, while having remained staunchly aligned with notions of a ‘rational’ post-Enlightenment self, eventually embraces Daphne’s ‘magical’ hauntings that refer back to a pre-modern, folkloric sense of self. As mentioned, it is also
interesting to note that Daphne’s ghost resides not in the ‘typical’ Gothic castle but in the glen itself. References that associate Daphne with Scottish folklore abound in the
text. Hector states ‘Daphne besotted men…She cast spells on everyone she met’ (Thompson 25), suggesting associations with witchcraft. Similarly, the falconer states that Daphne’s apparitions are actually that of ‘Queen Mab of the fairies’ (Thompson 57). As Dunnigan states, ‘associations between women and witchcraft’ were
‘particularly prevalent in early modern Scotland, which associated spelling and charming with fairy communion…That the fairies may claim Iris, just as Daphne, recalls traditional narratives about fairy abduction as well as the popular belief, largely of medieval provenance but especially strong in Scottish tradition, that fairies represent the souls of the dead’ (52). Iris rebuffs such an association as ‘fanciful’ (Thompson 57), only for the fairies to speak to her moments later: ‘You, Iris, the
fairies whispered, will go through the glen, trampling over us, treading over our paths, oblivious to our presence. But we will leave traces of wetness and dark red clay, fern pollen and blue petal on your skin, as marks of our presence. As we once did on your sister’ (Thompson 57, italics in original).
Such an undermining of this post-Enlightenment, rational and whole self is fairly typical of the Gothic. Iris’ metamorphosis into that of her sister can be viewed in relation to Kelly Hurley’s theories of the ‘abhuman’. Hurley traces a movement away from this post-Enlightenment model of human identity at the fin-de-siècle toward a more fragmented sense of self that continued into the twentieth century and influenced theories such as structuralist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytical and postmodernist (Hurley 11). She sees this as being highly exemplified in turn of the century Gothic literature. Her theory therefore sees:
the ruination of traditional constructs of human identity that
accompanied the modelling of new ones at the turn of the century. In place of a human body stable and integral (at least, liable to no worse
than the ravages of time and disease), the fin-de-siècle Gothic offers the spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated; in place of the possibility of human transcendence, the prospect of an existence circumscribed within the realities of gross corporeality; in place of a
unitary and securely bounded human subjectivity, one that is both fragmented and permeable. (Hurley 3, emphasis my own)
As Iris metamorphoses into her sister, it renders the concept of a unified and whole self mythical and unstable: as Germanà argues, it reminds such a self of its ‘spectral status’ (Sick Body 4). Like the Gothic fin-de-siècle literature Hurley examines, this divided, multiple self is not unusual within the context of Scottish Gothic itself – one need only think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde as an example of this. However, Stevenson’s narrative still perpetuated the
narrative of a fixed, whole sense of self, opposite which deviant and fragmented Jekyll and Hyde could be constructed. For example, Gabriel Utterson in Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde provides a ‘total subject against whom the stereotype, the dark and evil
other, cannot prevail’ (Halberstam 81). In The Falconer, there is no such whole, fixed subject that is privileged. Indeed, by leaving pregnant with Edward’s baby, suggesting she has embraced her more ‘sensual’ and duplicitous nature, Iris leaves Glen Almain with the possibility of a more positive future.
Such a positive future is perhaps denied to Louis Melfort: the novel’s other main ‘victim’ of self-haunting. Suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after the First World War, he too experiences the past returning to impact his present sense of self. It is under this premise that Lord Melfort wishes to prevent another war and sympathises with the Nazis: ‘He would never be able to forgive himself. He had
(Thompson 121, italics in original). Louis’ PTSD is highlighted in perhaps one of the more disturbing moments of the novel when his mental illness comes to the fore and he collapses to the ground with Iris by his side:
He started to shout out what at first seemed to her to be gibberish, and then a foreign language she didn’t know. Then, slowly, she began to make out the names of men: Donaldson, Macnab, Moncrieff, Fraser – he was reciting a list of men’s names; he was naming the war dead. (Thompson 43)
The past haunts his present moment to the point where he has fits as he remembers the war dead. The war has so damaged him that he is now utterly consumed by fear; it is always ‘at the pit of his stomach’ (Thompson 45, italics in original). Like Iris’ metamorphosis, Louis’ body becomes the site of almost ‘metamorphic’ change. Without his traumatic past, Louis’ fears and traumatic past would not be influencing his present corporeal state. However, unlike Iris, his fear of such a past means Louis is forever threatening to be the monstrous presence in the text.
Presented as aggressive and unpredictable but simultaneously alluring and intriguing, he finds peace in his Cabinet of Curiosities: an oppressive place of
taxidermy, precious stones and relics. Both Baker and Dunnigan argue that when Iris first enters the Cabinet of Curiosities, she gains a sudden awareness of her own mortality2. It is a passage worthy of slightly longer quotation:
A feeling of claustrophobia was overwhelming her, surrounded as she was by these relics of nature. She felt she was becoming
petrified, like one of the objects herself, as if her life force was gradually draining out of her. However, surrounded by his wondrous
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objects, Louis was growing ever more invigorated, as if meaning was slowly being restored to him. His gestures were becoming increasingly pronounced.
It was dawning on Iris that she was simply another object of the natural world, and once dead would become another segment of hair or bone. She would belong inside the Cabinet of Curiosities, as one of the many objects Louis could add to his moonstruck, small world.
(Thompson 41)
In a profoundly parasitic, even ‘vampiric’, moment Louis gains strength and vigour from the death surrounding him and Iris feels life physically ‘draining’ from her. Confronted with these petrified objects, Iris realises her own mortality and, pre-empting the later discovery of one of her sister’s very fingers, she compares herself to just ‘another segment of hair or bone’. In this moment, as in the moment where Iris does discover her sister’s finger (Thompson 73), Iris seems to experience a sense of abjection. The sense of her own mortality at seeing hair, bone or finger – the abject – destabilises her sense of self, as Kristeva states the ‘“I” is expelled’ (4) when
confronted with the abject. Iris can no longer imagine her ‘self’ but ironically, in their well-ordered cabinets, these objects become abject as they manage to disturb
‘identity, system, order’ (Kristeva 4).
The scene is revealing not just in terms of Iris’ sudden awareness of her own mortality and this sense of abjection, but for its portrayal of Louis’s ‘insanity’ (Dunnigan 55). Like Iris, Louis is haunted by his past and by the war to the point where it infiltrates and infects his present. Fear so consumes him, he now only finds solace and strength in images of death. Displayed as a microcosm of Glen Almain, his Cabinet of Curiosities contrasts with the glen not only for lack of ‘life’ but because
that which is in it can be classified and contained. It becomes ‘a deeply irrational place, made to look rational with its particular categorization and labelling’
(Thompson 40). A place that even inspires a sense of ‘wonder’ (Thompson 39), such a place can only be a place of abjection as it ‘simultaneously beseeches and pulverises the subject’ (Kristeva 5). Just as Iris’ sense of selfhood is disrupted when confronted by the cabinet, so too is Louis’. He draws strength from the objects that signify death around him and becomes monstrous and ‘vampiric’ – terrifying and disrupting Iris’ sense of identity, he too becomes abject as a consequence. Dunnigan argues, that for Louis the Cabinet is ‘a sign of his own fragile grasp of reality’ (55). However, Louis’s irrationality battling against rationality is indicative of the wider themes of the novel as a whole, as characters attempt to understand and interpret the ‘real’ against the fantastical. As Louis struggles to make sense of the wild goings on of the glen, he creates a petrified world that only ends up being more surreal than the glen itself. As with Daphne’s suicide note, rationality once again becomes usurped by irrational forces and any ‘ontology of the real’ is undermined.
Landscape, Past and the Self
The enclosed world of Glen Almain itself as the site of this action is what allows for these concepts of the self to be challenged. As mentioned previously, glens are often presented as a location of folkloric significance (Germanà Women’s 136). Glen Almain is no exception in this regard, not only due to Daphne’s ghost but also the numerous references to fairies, Queen Mab, witchcraft and of course, the elusive Beast, all of which seem to reside in this ‘other-worldly’ space. It is precisely these folkloric influences that the ‘post-Enlightenment self’ rejects so it is in this space that
this concept of the self can be questioned. Sarah Dunnigan sees the setting of the glen and the landscape as an important tool for exploring notions of the self and identity:
Nature and landscape – the garden, the pool, the forest – constitute a ‘looking glass’ for the interiority of the novel’s protagonists. Memory, desire, and dream find visual and sensory embodiment in the text’s natural spaces; not only in the garden of statues and the woods of the legendary beast but in birds, animals and objects. (53)
This reflecting of the protagonists’ ‘interiority’ is a crucial element. It implies a self-haunting and reveals crucial, often repressed aspects of the characters personalities. Examples of this can be seen in some of the most striking moments of haunting when Daphne appears to Iris in the pool as if a reflection of her. The mystical beast that haunts the glen is also of significance in this regard. When Iris asks the falconer whether the beast is part of the glen’s ‘folklore’ he remarks: ‘Oh, no. He’s the beast in all of us. The part of nature in us we like to hide. The beast’s as real as you or I’ (Thompson 55). This remark conjures up images of Jekyll and Hyde, of repressed sexuality and the id. Indeed, Iris then dreams that she is transformed into the beast ‘running through the forest, panting, her mouth full of the taste of blood, weighed down by her new animal nature and the full moon’ (Thompson 55). These moments where some aspect of the self is reflected or revealed through the nature and
‘mysticism’ of the glen, once again problematise any concept of the ‘real’. In presenting a space where this multiplicity of the self is revealed, the glen becomes a place that ‘exists at the intersection of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a double-sided mirror that reflects in both directions’ (Faris 21). Although Faris’ claim here is in reference to magical realism, it remains a useful metaphor through which to consider the world(s) presented in Glen Almain. Elements of the self are exposed
through supernatural means that lead to the construction of a more ‘multiple’ self – particularly, if we consider the doubling of Daphne and Iris, but also the beast in relation to the ‘primitive’ ‘id’ complex and Iris as representative of the rational ‘ego’. Reality and the self consequently become destabilised in the glen.
On the other hand, to simply see the glen as that which is a backdrop or reflection to the protagonists sense of self, denies it a sense of agency: similar to that which Louis achieves in his Cabinet of Curiosity, it removes the ‘life’ from it. The glen has its own history and one that is also interpolated in the history of those who inhabit it. Considering it in this sense, the folkloric takes on a greater significance: as Germanà suggests ‘the Scottish supernatural shares a close kinship with the hardship of its land’ (Spectral Self 1). The landscape in The Falconer, and all the ‘beings’ that inhabit it, can thus be understood as:
not meant here as mere scenery, but as a balance of nature and culture stratified through centuries of mutual adaption. It is a ‘warehouse’ of common memories to humanity and nature, in which human and natural life are dialectically interlaced in the form of a co-presence. (Iovino 31)
That the glen and the history of Daphne share a ‘common memory’ is exemplified in Iris’ belief that the answer to her sister’s death is ‘somewhere in the
glen…Somewhere amongst its streams and pools and mountains’ (Thompson 56). After this moment, an apparition of her sister appears emerging from the ‘backdrop of mother-of-pearl-light’ that then ‘dissolved into mist’ (Thompson 56), further
suggesting the history of her sister and that of the landscape are connected. Iris turns to the landscape in the belief that in this sharing of memories – this co-presence – will hold the key to her sister’s death.
The ‘common memories’ of Glen Almain and its inhabitants extend further than the folkloric as Glen Almain also undergoes its own form of self-haunting. Iris notes the ruined houses of the surrounding landscape to which Lady Melfort remarks:
The estate was given to my family as a reward for fighting against the Jacobite cause. My ancestors were then responsible for clearing the glen. Hundreds used to live here. Now there are just sheep and stones and ferns. One day our family will be punished for the clearing of Glen Almain. (Thompson 15)
The dark history of the Jacobite Rebellion leaves its traces on the very landscape and the Melforts’ role in the clearances that followed ‘haunts’ Lady Melfort to the point that she is sure that they will face judgement for it. The Jacobite Rebellion is a common and important theme for Scottish Gothic and Scottish literature more
generally. Sienkiewicz-Charlish states that with the 1707 Union and the Rebellion that followed ‘the Scottish nation became divided into three different groups…
Consequently, the nation lost its coherent identity with the people split between the idea of being “Scottish” and that of being “British”’ (79). Evoking the Jacobite Rebellion in The Falconer not only places the glen as a space of violence and
bloodshed, but suggests this loss of ‘coherent identity’ implicated in the construction of Scottish identity.
It further constructs the glen as a space where identity is thrown into flux as it too is haunted by a past that seems to encroach on the present. The ruined houses are representative of a destruction that David Punter foregrounds in his discussion of monuments in ‘Scottish and Irish Gothic’. He claims such monuments:
speak of history not as a living presence nor yet as an irrecoverable absence, but as inevitably involved in specific modes of ghostly
persistence which may occur when, particularly in Scotland and Ireland, national aspirations are thwarted by conquest or by settlement, as they have been so often. (105)
The wider resonances of this reference to the Jacobite Rebellion, however, extend to the overarching theme of war and German National Socialism present in the novel. Aligning the Melforts with the unionists responsible for clearing the glen can be read as an early indication of their Nazi sympathies. Sarah Dunnigan has noted that in doing so, The Falconer displays qualities, of both ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ Gothic (49). David Punter claims that ‘we might think of the “domestic Gothic,” in which the traumas and defeats of the past are enacted on a home terrain, and the “foreign
Gothic,” in which they are displaced on to a fictionalized “third location”’(106-107). In other words, the ‘civil and religious disputes’ (Punter 107) are displaced into a fictional setting, removed from the possibility of a familiar setting – whether that is home or abroad. However, while the novel certainly deals with what could be considered a ‘foreign’ theme in its portrayal of German National Socialism, the ‘traumas and defeats’ are not displaced but remain very close to home – albeit a fictional estate. As Baker argues, the ‘world of international politics is mapped onto the Gothic, fantastic, isolated world of Glen Almain, itself a world in which nothing can be certain’ (133): indeed, both ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ Gothic manifest in the world of Glen Almain.
One such example of this is the family’s implied involvement with Gruinard Island – the small island of the coast of Ullapool that was used for testing anthrax during the Second World War(although the dates of the trials have been moved forward by around ten years in the novel). Certainly, the fears and anxieties
ghost – her skin blisters turn to ‘black weals’ that spread all over her body and she exclaims they are ‘the sickness of the glen’ (Thompson 92). The war and its
surrounding anxieties therefore do not find embodiment in a displaced ‘other’ but in the glen itself and the figure of Daphne in particular. In Judith Halberstam’s Skin
Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, she argues that as a
consequence of Nazi Germany, monstrosity stopped being specifically localised in one specific ‘body’ and instead Western society tends to view evil now as ‘banal (meaning common to all)’, working more as a ‘system’ (162). That the Melfort’s complicity and collaboration with the anthrax testing, as a deterrent to the Nazis, appear on Daphne’s skin stresses Halberstam’s assertion that we ‘wear modern
monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us’ (163). That these ‘monstrous’ occurrences took place on Gruinard Island, as actions of the allies, is suggestive again of our inability to know or align with a whole, cohesive self: as monstrosity becomes ‘banal’, to use Halberstam’s term, it can no longer be ‘safely separated from self’ (163).
This chapter has tried to trace the ways in which, through a necessarily Scottish self-haunting, Thompson’s novel constructs a self that is multiple and fragmented – just as Halberstam’s comment on the banality of monstrosity seems to suggest. Throughout the novel the monstrous ‘other’ is located in the self and revealed when the past returns to disrupt the present. It returns in ghostly spectres to assert Daphne’s ‘sensuality’ or in more sinister forms such as Louis’ PTSD, where only images of death will soothe him. Set against the backdrop of Scotland’s historical anxieties – a remote glen where the Highland Clearances and the trauma of the Jacobean legacy have left their mark on the very landscape – folklore and the
chapters will suggest, this permeates throughout contemporary Scottish Gothic. The ‘self’ and the ‘real’ become interpolated in a monstrous form that attempt to locate their authority in an unstable past. While I have been unable to cover it more broadly in this chapter, intertextuality plays a key role in how the self, reality and the past function in contemporary Scottish Gothic. Thompson’s intertextual references link back to both The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Emma Tennant’s
Two Women of London (1989) and The Bad Sister (1978) and mythical references to
Bluebeard and Ovid3. Aside from these allusions to other novels and narratives, Thompson’s work looks to these traditional Gothic tropes, as I mentioned at the beginning, but subverts them just slightly in order to create a more contemporary and Scottish form. For example, Daphne’s ghost is not explained away by
‘non-supernatural means’ (Punter Literature of Terror 2) and the indication is that such supernatural activity is somehow inherent and imbued in the Scottish landscape and psyche. The following chapters will examine how by utilising a similar concept as Thompson, questions of a cohesive, whole self are challenged in Scotland and how this is connected to broader questions of Scottish national identity.
3
Chapter 2
A Textual Self-Haunting: The Legacy of Stevenson and Hogg in
Irvine Welsh’s The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and
Marabou Stork Nightmares
In my last chapter, I focused on the idea of self-haunting in Alice Thompson’s contemporary Scottish Gothic novel The Falconer as representative of how the past interrupts and disrupts the present in the form of spectral figures or in psychological forms of trauma. This chapter will focus on another kind of self-haunting prevalent in contemporary Scottish Gothic: intertextuality. Scottish Gothic novels often find themselves referring to, and even completely re-working, two canonical Scottish novels, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)4. Indeed, even in The Falconer, Thompson gives a nod to this literary heritage when the dark, foreboding falconer claims the beast roaming the grounds of Glen Almain is ‘the beast in all of us. The part of nature in us we like to hide’ (Thompson 55), hinting at the doppelgänger legacy of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Split personalities, the fragmented self and doubling are the main focus of these two canonical works, once again highlighting the tendency of Scottish Gothic to project social anxieties and fears inwards onto the self, rather than an external ‘other’.
4
For example, Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978) and The Two Women of London: The Strange
Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde (1990) which are re-writings of Hogg and Stevenson’s works
Certainly, these themes characterise Scottish literature more generally. In 1919 – incidentally also the same year of the publication of Sigmund Freud’s ‘The
Uncanny’ – G. Gregory Smith defined the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ where he claimed Scottish literature, and more broadly the Scottish psyche, was a ‘zigzag of
contradictions’ (21). Cairns Craig in The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and
National Imagination, emphasises Smith’s point, stating, ‘the Scottish experience of
cultural dislocation finds expression in narrative terms in plots of biological
uncertainty or familial displacement. Such conditions are the breeding ground of those schizophrenics, amnesiacs, and hypocrites who have so often been taken to represent the essence of Scottish culture’ (111). Therefore, if historically Scottish identity is associated with a sense of disjunction, the uncanny turn inwards to the ‘other’ within in the genre of Scottish Gothic is reflective of anxieties about national identity and historical origins. As Monica Germanà points out, Scotland’s history is ‘traumatic’ (Sick Body 2) and the discourse that emerges around it becomes equally as disjointed and a ‘zigzag of contradictions’. She states:
Whilst supporting the rise of nationalism and national identity in Scotland, the frequently romanticised history of battles for
independence simultaneously manipulates the past and represses the nation’s darker sins. The opposition between the past and the
construction of historical narratives can be read in psychoanalytical terms as the conflict between repressed drives and traumatic memory (id) and idealised projection (superego), which informs the nation’s own dialectical unconscious. The ensuing dichotomy emerges in the suggestive disjunctions typical of the Scottish Gothic [.] (2)
Therefore, that the narratives of Stevenson and Hogg, which foreground the fractured and fragmented self, become the reference point of much contemporary Scottish Gothic implies that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century these concerns and conflicts surrounding national identity remain unresolved within the Scottish psyche. This perpetuates an intertextual self-haunting: novels in the Scottish canon that reflect this uncertainty of origin and the fragmented self, contain an uncanny, spectral presence. Irvine Welsh’s novels Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) and The
Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2005) are two such examples of this. In both
novels, the body becomes the site at which anxieties surrounding Scottish national identity are realised, more specifically the male body. Often presented as permeable, perverse, grotesque and sick, the monstrous state of bodies in Marabou Stork
Nightmares and Bedroom Secrets mirrors those in Hogg and Stevenson’s –
presenting fragmented or doubled selves that allow for an intertextual context through which we can interpret Welsh’s novels. Developing this further, this chapter will firstly consider the intertextual tropes of Welsh’s novels with a particular focus on
The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs – paying close attention to references of a
split, fragmented or doubled self. Secondly, this chapter will examine how this Gothic intertextuality impacts on the concept of national identity in Scotland: specifically, the notion of a present identity as being constructed through past historical narratives – often those which have unstable or uncertain origins. Finally, I will then attempt to unify themes of masculinity and national identity within Welsh’s novels.
Doubling and Split Selves
Just as the main protagonists of Jekyll and Hyde and Confessions of a Justified
example, the narrative of Marabou Stork Nightmares mirrors James Hogg’s
Confessions of a Justified Sinner in that we are presented with an unreliable narrator,
Roy Strang, who, like Robert Wringhim, is coming to terms with a terrible crime – his involvement in the rape of Kirsty Chalmers. We can also compare Gil-Martin’s
‘haunting’ of Roy Strang to both Roy’s fictional companion Sandy Jamieson and the Marabou Stork he attempts to hunt in his subconscious.
Similarly, doubled selves that are reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde – and the Wringhim brothers – are presented to us in The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. In a moment of sheer hatred for his co-worker Brian Kibby, inadvertently puts a mysterious hex on Brian when he wishes:
wouldn’t it be fantastic if Kibby could take his hangovers and come-downs for him! If he, Danny Skinner, indulged in the pleasures of life in the most wanton, reckless way and fresh-faced, clean-cut, mummy’s boy wanker Kibby could pay the price! ... Skinner found those idle, half-drunk ruminations evolve with an ockenblink into a violent prayer, the ferocity and intensity of which shook him to the marrow. (Bedroom
Secrets 141)
From this moment on, Brian Kibby does indeed bear the pains of Danny Skinner’s excesses. Danny becomes almost ‘Hyde’ like, often indulging in hard drugs and violence the consequences of which – in another intertextual moment reflective of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – play out on Brian’s body landing him in hospital on multiple occasions and even in dire need of a new liver. Danny gains favour at work but Brian’s ‘mysterious illness’ means he requires more and more time off and eventually is forced into early retirement. Just as Freudian readings of Jekyll
without any ethical reprimand from the superego, so too does Danny initially seem to feel no ethical responsibility in his actions toward Brian. His attitude changes, of course, when Brian’s health dramatically deteriorates and Danny realises Brian can no longer work: ‘Everything is changing. Kibby can’t do this to me! How will I be able to keep in touch, to see the effect of my powers on him? I…can’t lose him. I’ve lost everybody else, never even had my dad. For some reason I can’t lose Brian Kibby! ... He’s all I’ve got…’ (Bedroom Secrets 252). Danny’s longing for Brian to remain alive is still troubled: on the surface it appears to be derived more from a sadistic pleasure in seeing his double suffer than from a moral or ethical standpoint, but there is an underlying awareness that he is somehow dependent on him.
This dependence becomes a form of inter-dependence as the doubles begin to merge toward the end of the novel when Brian turns to drink in an attempt to deal with the debilitating effects of the ‘curse’. It emerges that the curse can work both ways, and Danny begins to feel the effects of Brian’s new found drinking habit. Simultaneously, Brian also develops more ‘id’ like qualities, mostly involving sexual fantasies towards women in his online gaming community Harvest Moon, his hill-walking companion Lucy and his co-worker Shannon. The permeability of boundaries between the two thus becomes gradually more complex as the novel progresses, aligning with David Punter’s statement that ‘Hyde is not Jekyll’s opposite, but something within him’ (Literature of Terror 242). This is particularly hinted at through Jekyll’s suggestions that he is utilising Hyde to indulge in certain illicit pleasures and become ‘in secret the slave of certain appetites’5
. The two, like Danny and Brian, are inextricably bound as one’s behaviours and desires influences and impacts upon the other.
5
This appeared in the original manuscript and early draft of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange
These desires and behaviours in Bedroom Secrets can be linked to notions of masculinity, a theme that is also prevalent in Jekyll and Hyde. I will return in more detail to these themes later in relation to Welsh but for now, the thematic similarities of the two novels is of particular interest. Jekyll creates Hyde in order to mask certain, secret desires and retain an outward appearance of a respectable Victorian gentleman. Linking this to Michel Foucault’s theories on the medicalisation of sexuality, Judith Halberstam asserts that:
If Jekyll represents power, bourgeois power, Hyde represents the pleasure denied and yet produced by the bourgeois subject. Hyde is repressed, hidden and yet he springs forth from the very body, the very desires of the respectable Jekyll. By conjuring up Hyde from the mysterious recesses of his own desires, Jekyll forges a relation to his own “perversity” – a sexuality that is onanistic, homoerotic and sadistic – that imposes a perversion upon a set of behaviours that he systematically disassociates from himself. Cursing himself for his secret desires, Jekyll turns to science to find the way to both pleasure and power, indulgence and repression. The doubled subject is split between desire and respectability identifies power as the ability to be “radically both”. (69)
Mapping this notion onto Danny and Brian, a similar pattern emerges. In particular, if we look at the passage that immediately preceding Danny cursing Brian:
No matter how many of those self-justifying twats write in their
lifestyle columns in the mags and papers that you should be this kind of man or that kind of man, that you should have responsibility to your wife, children, employer, country, government, god, delete to taste, not
one of them can convince me that Kibby is not a fucking wanker and I’m not a brilliant cunt. For however they spring-clean this
Responsible Man as a New Action Man or Renaissance Man, or a Take-No-Shit Man, in real life he is invariably a fucking insipid bore like Kibby. (Bedroom Secrets 140, italics in original)
Danny sees Brian as embodying the responsible type of masculinity perpetuated by the media. By then deciding, in a sadistic turn, that it should be Brian who takes the pains of Danny’s excesses, he, like Jekyll, expresses a desire to both indulge in his secret pleasures but also to match up to these ideologies of a ‘Responsible Man’.
This uncanny doubling and permeability of boundaries between the two is further foregrounded in the narrative structure of Bedroom Secrets. Just as the boundaries between their bodies become more permeable, so too does the narrative switch between their two voices often very seamlessly. A prominent moment where this occurs is during Brian’s liver transplant. Danny, whilst in California, slumps to the ground unable to speak just as Brian begins to undergo anaesthesia for the operation:
I slump down on to the pavement, my body heavy and head spinning. I lie groaning for a while, unable to speak, nobody stopping to help. I’m totally immobilized; all I can do is squint up at the warm California sun in my face and try to breathe slowly.
I close my eyes and seem to be falling into nothingness.
It’s so cold and I’m quivering in these robes on the gurney as they wheel me into the ante-room of the operating theatre. (Bedroom
Through focusing on the bodily experiences of each, the narrative moves from Danny’s first person narration to Brian’s with disorientating effect that takes the reader a moment to register that the voice has switched. Without the help of the missing line, it would be difficult to ascertain who is speaking.
(Un)reliable Voices: Intertextuality and National Identity Both Marabou Stork Nightmares and The Bedroom Secrets of the Master
Chefs offer a variety of voices within the narrative. The comatose narrator, Roy
Strang, of Marabou Stork Nightmares narrates us through three levels of his
(sub)conscious. These three levels consist of Roy’s fantastical journey through South Africa to hunt the Marabou Stork with his fictional companion Sandy Jamieson; the recollection of events from his childhood leading up to the brutal gang rape of Kirsty Chalmers and his subsequent attempt at suicide afterwards, and finally Roy’s
narration of the ‘present’ moment in the hospital room, as he narrates the
conversations and comments he overhears his family and the hospital staff having around his bed and to him. This fracturing of the sub(conscious) into three levels, in spite of it all occurring from ‘inside’ Roy’s head, creates a multitude of voices within the text. Furthermore, these voices are divided by the layout of the print that
‘continually mutates and merges differing typefaces and registers’ (Kelly 101) and often can have a disorientating effect on the reader.
In Bedroom Secrets, voices alternate between the first person narration of main protagonists such as Brian, Danny and, to a lesser extent, Brian’s sister Caroline, and those of minor characters such as Greg Tomlin and Raymond Boyce. Most often, the narration takes the form of a third-person omniscient narrator and all the narrative
perspectives are interspersed with moments of free indirect discourse from other characters.
The array of narrative voices in Bedroom Secrets and Marabou Stork
Nightmares, each vying to be heard, mimics the narrative structure of both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Both novels offer several
narrative perspectives, although these perspectives are typically offered in the form of letters, manuscripts and confessions (with an added opinion by either the Editor in the case of Confessions of a Justified Sinner, or by Gabriel Utterson as an investigator in
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde). This effect of the abundance of voices explicating things
through text is outlined by Timothy C. Baker in his discussion of the ‘Found Manuscript’ in Gothic literature: the narrative technique can ‘highlight the problematic relationship between text, language, and the past’ (55). That is, it
emphasises problems of authenticity and reliability as textual remnants from the past re-surface and cause the present to be interrogated. However, while in Victorian Gothic the Editorial perspectives offered purport to offer a voice of authority and stability to the narrative – for example, Gabriel Utterson is considered a fixed stable whole, a ‘total subject’ (Halberstam 81) against which Jekyll’s fragmented self is contrasted – in the postmodern, that which is considered a voice of authority in the present is also interrogated. This technique is highlighted to an even greater degree in my discussion of Poor Things but also offers some significance here in relation to present anxieties about identity and origin.
The interrogation of the past through the ‘found manuscript’ aligns with the inherent anxieties in Scottish Gothic about the past, history and origins. Bedroom
Secrets, in particular, is highly concerned with this theme as Danny Skinner searches
some part of his identity. He often compares himself to those he believes to be his father and wondering how his father would feel about his actions. For instance, Danny asks, ‘What do I really feel? Who the fuck am I? What about my old man, would he
criticise or praise my behaviour? De Fretais. He’d approve. I’m sure of that… He might not be the slim, fit suntanned old boy that I imagined, but he’s a drinker and, and he’s successful’ (Bedroom Secrets 180, italics in original). However, in a
significant moment of ‘found manuscript’ Danny’s anxieties about his father and his quest for ‘origins’ seems to be resolved within the diaries of Keith Kibby, therefore linking well with Craig’s argument that ‘cultural dislocation’ finds its manifestation in narratives of ‘biological uncertainty or familial displacement’ (111). In the diary extract Caroline reads, he confesses to disfiguring Donnie Alexander, his rival for Beverley Skinner’s affections. He also confesses to his family – Brian, Caroline and Joyce – that he believes Danny to be his son. Even though this discovery is made, there remains some uncertainty. Keith claims ‘I know that he was my son, I just do’ (Bedroom Secrets 412), suggesting there was never any biological proof to the claim. This uncertainty is further perpetuated by the fact that Beverley ‘remembered with fondness and guilt that over the course of that bizarre evening she’d taken not one, or even two, but three lovers’ (Bedroom Secrets 421). While in Stevenson, the found manuscript, Jekyll’s final confession, offers something of a resolution to the mystery for Utterson, such a resolution is denied in Welsh’s novel. We never truly know for certain if Keith Kibby is in fact Danny Skinner’s father. Thus the uncertainty of the diary’s ‘confession’ does not neatly tie up any sense of origin or identity for Danny.
In addition, the ambiguous ending of Danny’s search for his father and the subsequent ambiguous resolution that is offered, characterises Scotland’s uncertain position with regards to history and origins as suggested by Germanà’s statement that
‘Scottish gothic is the coming to terms of the fear of not knowing what one is’ (5, emphasis in original). Germanà argues that this fear means ‘a pervasive sense of alienation is generated by the gap between present identity and its bogus foundations based on forged narratives of the past’ (4). Bogus precisely because they are based on unstable or uncertain versions of history – whether that is through allusion to myth and folklore, or by romanticised versions of historical narratives such as the Jacobite legacy. Danny Skinner’s sense of alienation is created through the feeling he has something ‘missing’ from his present identity that can be found through finding his father but also an awareness that his mother has never been fully honest about her past, manipulating and withholding information so it is forever uncertain who his father could even be. The alienation even extends to Caroline Kibby when she reads the diary and discovers that her father was at one point a brutal alcoholic, capable of disfiguring Donnie Alexander. Her own sense of identity is thrown into flux as she realises what she believed about her father is based on ‘bogus foundations’.
The ‘bogus foundations based on forged narratives of the past’ come to the fore in Marabou Stork Nightmares in a different form. We learn that Roy is an unreliable narrator through Kirsty’s final visit to him in hospital. While he initially claims it was ‘LEXO, no me, LEXO’, it emerges it was actually Roy who was the main perpetrator (Marabou 259, emphasis in original). In the final, brutal scene of Roy’s castration, the ‘truth’ is apparently revealed. He states, ‘AH’M RUNNIN THIS FUCKING GIG! AH SAY WHIN THE SLAG’S HUD ENOUGH!’ (262). Indeed, his unreliable narration is hinted at earlier in the novel when Bernard visits Roy in
hospital and hints that Roy was raped by their Uncle Gordon, whereas Roy has merely suggested that they actually ‘DID NOWT…IT WIS A WANK, THAT WIS AW…’ (Marabou 127). Finally, his unreliable narration is compounded in Roy’s final
statement, ‘I have no visible ears, I never really had much in the way of ears, it was always my nose, Captain Beaky, they used to call me at the school…it wasn’t the ears, my memory hasn’t been so good, nor has my hearing but I can think more clearly now’ (Marabou 264). It emerges that Roy has even lied to the reader about being bullied at school for his large ears. As Aaron Kelly asserts:
Not only has Roy’s narrative misrepresented the rape scene but here a different self emerges – his tales of being taunted at school for having large ears (‘Dumbo Strang’) are erased as he presents us with a revised picture of himself that completely undermines not merely our sense of his physical appearance but also the suffering he endured on account of it. If such important details are revealed to be unfounded can any of the narrative be trusted? By extension, can we fully understand – rather than condemn – Roy’s life and actions if their narration is entirely fictitious? Is the narrative finally another trick from a character who in his school days and adult life evaded punishment for his violent actions by duping teachers, police officers and courts through his adoption of various personae…? (125)
Kelly’s argument can be applied, in a wider sense, to Baker’s discussion, mentioned earlier, of the found manuscript’s ability to problematise notions of the past, history and identity (55). As readers we are ‘duped’ into the notion that Roy’s narration must somehow be truthful, in spite of its movement into the fantasy hunt for the Marabou Stork. The disorientation that we are left with after the final scenes stresses
contemporary Scottish Gothic’s ability to challenge the boundaries of reality – a point I highlighted in my previous chapter.
