Alasdair Gray, ‘Lanark’ (1981)

 

Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) laminates two narrative lines, disposing them into four books (though Gray, perversely, orders the books: 3, 1, 2, 4). One of these is set in ‘our’ world, mid-twentieth-century Glasgow, and follows the childhood and young adulthood of Duncan Thaw: severely asthmatic, a talented if unconventional artist—like Gray himself, though Thaw’s fate is grimmer than was Gray’s: alienated, disaffected, constantly ill, he eventually drowns himself in the sea. The other narrative is the Fantasy component of the story. After his death Thaw wakes in an underworld version of Glasgow called ‘Unthank’, a place without daylight governed by an oppressive, Orwellian logic. This takes its place in a notable tradition: as for example The City of Dreadful Night (1874) by Scottish poet James Thomson (who wrote as ‘B.V.’), or Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant, who rendered hell as an industrialised, lightless underground polis in A Beleaguered City (1880).

Posthumous Thaw falls in with a group of young people, a clique centred on a character called Sludden, who meet in the ‘Elite Café’. But as Thaw was an outsider in ‘our’ world, so he proves in Unthank; and his earthly eczema becomes hyperbolically rendered in this afterlife as ‘dragonhide’, a sickness by which his skin transforms into thick scales. Before his draconic transformation is complete Lanark itself is swallowed by a titanic mouth in the ground, and Thaw awakes in a Kafkaesque ‘Institute’, a kind of hospital that exploits its patients under the pretence of curing them, from which he resolves to escape. After these two versions of death—drowned in our world, Unthank swallowed by the earth—we learn that the next time Thaw expires he will ‘actually’ die, and the novel ends on this nihilistic, or perhaps nirvanic, note.

Gray worked for many decades on this novel, and its appearance in 1981 was in a sense untimely. It owes much to Mervyn Peake’s pseudo-Gothic fantastika, and anticipates by 20 years or more the surge of interest in ‘Weird’ fiction, but nothing else like it was being published at that time. Still, though it stood alone, it was a hit, and has remained a cult classic. Hard as it is to ‘fit’ into a narrative of genre fantasy in the 1980s, it is harder to decide whether the novel engages politically—published as it was at a politically divisive and highly agitated time—or not. For novelist Jonathan Coe, Lanark is ‘the quintessential political novel … its theme is the individual’s relationship to society, and this theme is inscribed not just in the narrative but in the formal apparatus of the novel itself, which embeds the story of the hero’s coming of age in the framework of an Orwellian dystopian fantasy.’ [Coe, ‘Nae new ideas, nae worries!’, London Review of Books, 30:22 (20 November 2008), 18]

Sara Wasson and Emily Alder see the resurgence of interest in Gothic, and the various neo-Gothic texts of the years 1980-2010, as indices of ‘late capitalism and its discontents’: ‘the 1980s saw an economic transformation in the West’ and neo-Gothic addresses the ways ‘the human subject [had] become increasingly biologized, the ideological hold of liberal humanism over the foundations of identity destabilised … with the Gothic not only unearthing the hidden, be it repressed desire or secret anxiety, but also as itself a thing of desire’ [Sara Wasson and Emily Alder (eds), Gothic Science Fiction 1980-2010 (Liverpool University Press 2011), 8, 14-15]. Gray, a socialist and Scots nationalist, devoted much of his life to political engagement, through pamphlets and articles as well as speeches; and the frontispiece for the novel riffs on that of Hobbes’s Leviathan, as if Lanark itself is a midrash upon the collectivised vision of polity of Hobbes’s vision, as standing against his fundamentally dystopian sense of life as nasty, brutish and short.

And yet—as you can see, Gray has altered Hobbes when rendering the legend of his version. The original, in the Introduction of the Leviathan is: ‘For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE which is just an artificial man—though bigger and stronger than the natural man, for whose protection and defence it was intended’ (by ‘art’ Hobbes means ‘thoughtful planning, contrivance, design’; the word was used, in the 17th-century, in contradistinction to ‘nature’, and refers to all that happens artificially rather than naturally). Gray changes this to: ‘By Arts is formed that great Mechanical Man called a State, foremost of the Beasts of the Earth for Pride’. Pride, clearly, is not the same thing as ‘protection and defence’, and arts, in the narrower 20th-century, sense of the word, were the business of Gray’s life, drawing, painting, design. Lanark includes a number of what we might call metafictional gestures, including an epilogue in which Gray introduces himself into his own story, but this frontispiece has already tipped the nod. Lanark is an intensely personal novel, looking not forward to the deracination of global capitalism and neoliberalism of the 1990s and 21st century, but back to Gray’s own childhood. The ‘fantasy’ of the book actualises and externalises the existential claustrophobia of a being-in-the-world curtailed physically by asthma and weakness and psychologically by neurodiversity, shyness and difference. It is a book of large scope, and many pages, that reverts repeatedly upon small spaces, imprisonment, being swallowed rather than swallowing. It is, I know, a precarious business bringing purely subjective responses into a work of what ought to be disinterested criticism, but I can perhaps report—as an individual who has suffered lifelong, and continues to suffer, from debilitating asthma—that when I first read Lanark as a teenager I was deeply struck by how accurately Gray represents the experiential aspect of that disease in this novel. Newer drugs make it more manageable now, but that was not Gray’s patience in the 1950s (or mine in the 1970s and early 1980s) and Lanark vividly captures how chronic, pervasive breathlessness shrinks one’s existence, seals one away in clinging cellophane. It is no coincidence that Duncan Thaw dies (the first time) by drowning. There is, believe me, nothing worse. ‘Thaw’ is a another kind of ironic reimagining, like Gray’s personalised arts-and-crafts Hobbesianism (which reverts Hobbesian collectivism upon one individual’s experience, and that individual Gray)—the Norse god Thor is the epitome of superabundant strength and outgoing-ness, where Thaw is physically weak and debilitated. But just as Thor wrestles the great ocean-dragon Jörmungandr—the ‘Midgard’ or World Serpent—that seeks to crush the breath from him and drown him, so Duncan not only wrestles asthma and an Eliotic ‘death by water’, he actually begins to transform into a dragon, and his experience renders Unthank as Midgardian, between the daylight of ‘our’ world and the final destiny of Duncan below in absolute death.

Of course, in a slogan popular in the decade when Gray completed his first draft of Lanark, the personal is political. The novel flirts with this: Sludden, expatiating on the proper role of work and love, says: ‘perhaps I've surprised you by putting work and love in the same category, but both are ways of mastering other people’ [Lanark, 6]. A grim sort of blurring of the personal and the political—though, we could say, perfectly Hobbesian. But elsewhere the ‘political’ is troped as a kind of hideous self-division. In Unthank Lanark meets a woman called Nan, who relates a strange sickness that afflicted him:

“I began to grow mouths, not just in my face but in other places, and when I was alone they argued and shouted and screamed at me. Sludden was very good with them. He could always get them singing in tune, and when we slept together he even made me glad of them. He said he'd never known a girl who could be pierced in so many places. … But they drove even Sludden away in the end (the mouths did), because as I grew worse I needed him more and he didn't like that. He was going into politics and he had a lot to do.” Lanark and Rima cried out together, “Politics?” and Rima said, “He always made fun of people who went into politics.” [Lanark, 371]

Ultimately Lanark represents a withdrawal from the social, from the intersubjective—from politics as such—into a private fantasy. It’s not a very comforting fantasy, but the retreat into the merely personal often is not comforting. Gray’s next book, 1982 Janine (1984), though a kind of masterpiece, further embeds this retreat: its narrator abandoning himself to elaborate erotic reverie and sexual fantasy even as he laments the failure of his fellow Scots to (a phrase Gray adopted from poet Dennis Lee, and made into his own slogan) ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.’ Gray published many other things, but Lanark and 1982, Janine remain his two major achievements, riffs on ‘fantasy’ in, respectively, a generic and a sexual sense. Lanark is a great novel of Glasgow, and rehearses inter alia that city’s sectarian tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism—in itself a reason for the book’s Fantasy.