Meeting with a cult author: Alasdair Gray and “Lanark”

24 years ago, on the occasion of the first publication of the French translation of his monumental “Lanark”, we could have thought that Alasdair Gray would become the new darling of fans of dystopian science fiction and baroque literature. The whimsical, post-modern mixture perhaps arrived a little early for the French-speaking reader. Now, the Scottish writer has inspired Yorgos Lanthimos who adapted his “Poor creatures” and new notable translations have been added to his corpus in French, such as «Janine 1982»translated by Claro last year. Today, Éditions Métailié are reissuing his famous “Lanark”, his first novel and cult work. The opportunity to unearth from our archives a meeting with this author who died five years ago.

From spicy anecdotes to shrill bursts of laughter or erudite digressions, Alasdair Gray, 66, is an author worthy of his first work, “Lanark – A Life in Four Books”, a baroque labyrinth where literary genres intertwine in limitless hybridization.

A book which, although it has just been translated into French, was published in the original language in 1981, after a very long maturation since the first drafts of what was to become a veritable literary maze were put on paper in 1954!

“At the time, I had two separate books in mind. The first was a sort of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, transposed from Ireland to Scotland and from Dublin to Glasgow: with the difference that my tragedy as an artist would not have ended with the hero leaving his country to write his masterpiece, but by his suicide. The second was to resemble Kafka’s “Castle” or “Trial”, in a city like Glasgow, with an ordinary central character with whom the reader could easily identify, a bit like Gulliver or Joseph K., having serious adventures, rather strange, but not so much from his own point of view.”

Double vision

As we may have understood, this double project by Alasdair Gray has transformed over the years into “Lanark”, a monumental book of 650 pages, commensurate with the ambitions displayed by its author. At the basis of this playful and daring montage of two destinies – one historical, the other fantastic – there is the reading of a book by EWM Tillyard on the history of the epic story which marks this young Scot determined to put his country back on the map of international literature.

Homer, Virgil, the Portuguese Camoens and his “Lusiad”, John Milton and “Paradise Lost”, or even Edward Gibbon and his “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” are all authors – and not the least! – which fascinate the young writer for their ability to offer stories with which entire nations or traditions can identify; and especially for their ability to mix literary genres.

“The “Lusiad” by Camoens, aristocrat and navigator alongside Vasco da Gama, mixes the Christian epic story, the interventions of pagan gods and is at the same time a practical navigation manual! It is a mixture of different idioms: the epic story can embrace both realistic and surreal elements. It is the fantastic exaggeration of an extended metaphor, inhabited by realistic details. I was struck by these mixtures between daily life, the ordinary schools where we are educated – often poorly – and the ordinary hospitals where we are cared for – sometimes well –, and the grotesque, colorful life that we find in the books.”

Political science fiction

Inflamed by imaginary worlds which sometimes drift to the borders of nightmare, Alasdair Gray, painter himself (the cover of his book is a detail from one of his works), still cites the fantastic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch before defending the idea of ​​this bridge thrown between distant universes. “The fantasy worlds we imagine are simply versions of the world we experience. I was enchanted by the discovery of science fiction, in particular by one of the greatest, Wells, who had such an impact on the 20th century.^e century.”

Science fiction: the word is out. And, navigating in an indefinite time and country, the fantastic journey of Lanark, one of the two characters vying for the main role in this intersecting story – the other being Duncan Thaw, a young marginal painter from Glasgow in the 1950s – , can actually be assimilated to a genre that is often criticized. In “Lanark,” doesn’t Thaw say: “I don’t like science fiction very much. Is that pessimistic?

“It’s impossible to write a book with a perfectly happy ending. Unless you believe in a paradise like Dante, who actually concludes by taking first place!” The political aims of Lanark, a sort of negative utopia, are quite clear. “I’m sorry,” retorts Gray, who readily compares the political ferocity of a realistic Chekhov and a fantastical Swift, “but I am a socialist who believes in democratic government, which requires small political units to be effective. I am a strong advocate for the collapse of Britain and the dismantling of all empires.”

The current autonomist parliament of Scotland rejoices: “It’s a start!” And added, a little later: “DH Lawrence said: “All great writing is local, all bad writing is provincial.” An elegant way of indicating that London is not his main obsession.

Caricature of himself

Among other qualities of his spiritual mess, we must not underestimate the humor of Alasdair Gray – who will delight us by playing before our eyes a hilarious dialogue between Candide and Pangloss. A sense of the comic which, for example, pushed him to feature himself in his own book, where he receives, during a mischievously anticipated epilogue, a visit from his character Lanark. Coquettish, he nevertheless specifies that “it is a caricature, and not an exact self-portrait”.

A more Machiavellian epilogue than it first appears, since it includes, in the margins, an index of all the forms of borrowing and plagiarism to which his book is responsible. Reading through it, we notice that it refers to non-existent ending chapters evoking a hypothetical and monstrously idealistic conclusion! Gray claims that it was a layout accident which forced him to fill in unforeseen blanks, and that he would have taken the opportunity to quote passages from all his writer friends… Scottish! “In any work of art you have to leave yourself with surprises, otherwise you get bored and you bore the reader.”

Crossed destinies

Critique Alasdair Gray’s highly baroque book, “Lanark – A Life in Four Books”, plays on the connection of two destinies which end up forming only one: the “historical” one (books 1 and 2), that of Scottish youth by Duncan Thaw and the other fantastic, close to science fiction (books 3 and 4), by Lanark, which serves as a distorted reflection (or continuation) of the first.

Things would be simple if the book did not open with book 3 and the spooky journey of Lanark arriving in the gloomy Unthank, a town where the sun almost never appears and where survival requires gloomy welfare offices . The opportunity to take stock of what Alasdair Gray owes – explicitly – to Kafka. We will then have to read the tormented youth of Duncan Thaw during a sort of initiation novel embedded in the work, and measure the Joycean inspiration of the Scotsman, before returning to Lanark in the fourth book.

Political tale, SF story, Freudian or autobiographical novel and Scottish evocations are present in this cult book from the supposed Glasgow school. “Lanark”, if it has just been translated, already seems to have exerted an Anglo-Saxon influence: “The Bridge” (“Entrefer”) by the Scot Ian Banks or “The Journey of Anna Blume” by Paul Auster are two of his possible illegitimate sons, but entirely recommendable. (BSE)

Did you find an error? Please report it to us.

0 comments