CONFERENCE REPORT: Scots are bigoted and self-pitying wrote Andrew O'Hagan in the 'London Review of Books'. The ensuing controversy made for a lively conference on Scottish literature at Trinity College, writes Belinda McKeon
A literary event which buzzed with an import and urgency more typical of a political summit - something out of the ordinary was taking place as poets, critics and academics gathered in Trinity College, Dublin, last Saturday. Scottish Voices, a day of Scottish literature and talk, had been planned for four months, but its fuse was lit by Andrew O'Hagan, moderator of the event, in a controversial article in last month's London Review of Books. O'Hagan, a writer and critic, launched a scathing attack on Scotland, accusing it of bigotry, crippling self-pity and a refusal to take on autonomy or responsibility for the construction of its own nationhood.
Under the auspices of reviewing Neal Ascherson's new book Stone Voices: The Search For Scotland, O'Hagan argued that Scottish people shirk from the public sphere, resisting external criticism because of the self-scrutiny it induces. They live by "the saving lie", he wrote, preserving ancient myths in a small-minded inability to move forward, in a "mean-minded carnival of easy resentments" in which intellectuals merely serve "as soft-pedalling merchants of 'national character', handmaidens to the tourist industry". The "dead rhetoric" of the new parliament encourages this childishness, as does the soft writing of Ascherson, usually "Scotland's best journalist", of whom, O'Hagan's piece makes clear, much stronger stuff is to be expected than this meditation on how Scottish identity is to be found festering within its ancient stones.
Writing in the piece about the Scottish tendency to see critics as traitors, O'Hagan must have realised the outrage with which his comments would be received in his native country. And reactions were furious. Most of them, however, were coloured with an unintended irony which endorsed rather than exploded O'Hagan's picture of a near-sighted culture, phobic about public discussion.
While the writer Ian Rankin suggested that the Scotsman's comments lacked credence because they were made from London rather than Scotland, the Scottish National Party winced to see O'Hagan, currently International Writer Fellow at TCD, "bawl" national problems "through a megaphone from London", making them "a public matter and . . . humiliating Scotland".
However, last Saturday's colloquium at Trinity, hosted by the Trinity School of English in association with the Centre for Irish-Scottish Studies and the British Council, was a success of critical and creative imagination, proving that Scots can and do publicly dissect questions of national and cultural identity, and that distance from the native soil can help.
O'Hagan's opening speech tempered frustration with hope; alongside the "horrific turn of events" of which he had written (the "almost rabid" opposition to external criticism), was the work of the participating writers: Janice Galloway, Don Paterson, Robin Robertson, Alan Spence and Ron Butlin, which set up a vital internal opposition to this stifling ideology. Language being a central zone of engagement for these cultural questions, poets and novelists find themselves, despite a lack of State support for the arts, in just as powerful a position as journalists and politicians, he argued, and they could make a difference, re-inventing, in their determination, the tired "scenic fiction" of Scotland the Brave.
And as the Scottish writers begin to read their work in rich accents at once shared and singular - complex, personal ways of speaking that suggest endless versions of a nation - this dialectic of constraint and confidence comes to life. The constricted, craven concept of Scottish identity identified by O'Hagan is voiced by the novelist Janice Galloway, who articulates the particular difficulties facing women writers in Scotland. And while Galloway insists that she does not write "Scottish books", that she does not use her fiction as a platform to express these problems, the extract she reads from her latest novel, the story of the 19th-century piano virtuoso Clara Schumann, with its vivid depiction of a talented woman defying male ideology to be herself, alerts us to how Scottish writing can address the political and cultural realities of Scotland - its poverty of the imagination, its parochialism, its bigotry, its backwardness - without becoming mere propaganda.
The artistic struggle against what O'Hagan calls the "corporate myth of struggle" in Scotland has found its way, too, into the diverse fabrics of the work of Robertson, Spence and Butlin. Each man, for example, writes about alcoholism, its destroyed communities, its tattered identities giving the lie to the great "saving lie" of Scotland as a nation of comrades, victimised from without. But each articulates this reality with a sense of black humour, of the absurd - Butlin's alcoholic hallucinates a snowman in the kitchen, Spence's locks his son in a basement of coffins and brings him lemonade from the pub, Robertson's falls asleep with his head in the fire - that ironicises and satirises that grand myth, pointing instead to the "sociopathic elements" in Scottish society. These are voices of diversity and originality, each going beyond the limiting grand narrative of Scotland with their own narratives, from Robertson's seagulls to Butlin's poem, in Scots, about a cross-dressing orgy in Edinburgh, to Spence's "wee Haiku poems" which capture fresh, unclichéd moments of authenticity.
It was the literary flowering which took place during the Thatcher era which produced these writers. Yet in their polyvocality, and in their sudden burst of activity, they had their forerunners, as the founding editor of the London Review of Books, Karl Miller, illustrates in a lecture on the 19th-century writer and publisher, James Hogg, who crafted powerful modes of utterance in the face of social discrimination. Hogg's 1824 masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Miller explains, anticipated postmodern devices with its interplay of points of view. Scottish writers of today inherit some of his concerns and his inventiveness; but so, too, do Irish writers, as evidenced by the readings of Harry Clifton and Deirdre Madden, to whose work distance from the native place has lent impartiality and perspective.
Those same concerns inform the panel discussion, chaired by Terence Brown, which follows the readings. Spence, O'Hagan and Miller are joined by Colm Tóibín; as the participants quickly get beyond initial politeness and show differing colours on fraught issues, things begin to get interesting, and, at the end of a day which has been about the importance of disagreement and debate, it's unfortunate that so little time remains for these conflicts to be elaborated.
While agreeing with Brown that the new Scotland takes post-Independence Ireland as a model for its nationhood, Tóibín and O'Hagan dispute the degree to which Scotland has a healthier relationship to the memory of Empire than Ireland. Ireland remains doggedly parochial in its infrastructure and its distrust of Dublin, says Tóibín, while Scotland, according to O'Hagan, is unable to accept the extent of its own complicity and participation in the British Empire. Miller agrees with O'Hagan, and suggests that Scotland and England are too interpenetrable for the separation of Scotland to become a reality any time soon. Something else which seems a long way off to Miller, in this preoccupation with separateness, is the achievement of a multicultural identity by the Scots, recently identified by a Scottish Executive survey as possibly the most racist group in Europe. To him, Tóibín seems surprisingly nationalistic in his argument for national identity as something at once real and fluid.
One thing the whole panel can agree upon, however, is the problem of the prejudiced, controlled Scottish press. O'Hagan condemns one newspaper in particular, the Daily Record, which recently backed the campaign to keep an arguably homophobic Clause in the Constitution, as "a despicable nest of vipers, which fires intolerance". Galloway, from the audience, calls for an investigation into the people behind the press. "Disinformation is being fed and generated through what should be our principal organs of news," she says. "Even broadsheets are no longer trustworthy. It's a very serious question about the press, and what these politics are leading towards."
And such a serious question is a fitting end to a day which has been about questioning and challenging received norms, about the voices which dissent in their search for authenticity.
Neal Ascherson's "fetid and unimaginative resignation" to a hackneyed image of a Scotland, where identity lay in ancient stones rather than within people, may have been the spark to it all, but ironically it is he who best articulates, in a LRB essay on International Space published last year, what has happened today.
In the past, he writes, people oppressed by the tyranny of the nation state, have found conceptual "breathing space" by excavating into those myths and identities which seem as solid as stone, creating "a cave", "a survival chamber hollowed out within the foundations of an oppressive system . . . spaces of authenticity'. Such spaces, Ascherson wrote in that essay, belong to the past, and there is a need today to dig again, "to fashion spaces in which we can breathe, plot and be ourselves". If he had been in the Walton Theatre last Saturday, he would have witnessed such a space, such a Scotland, come into existence for a few heartening hours.