The Scottish Postmodernist Never Rings Once, Let Alone Twice, and Can’t Even Be Bothered to Leave a Note

1

I first encountered Gilbert Adair’s work in the former Writers’ Room at Edinburgh Napier University, where I elected to abandon a paid career in pursuit of an MA in Unshite Writing. The Evadne Mount books, proud property of the course organiser and her Thomas Young power-reader of a husband, sat on the shelves in an enticing hardback trio. At this stage of my reading life, I went into orgasmic spasms over any book tagged postmodern—i.e. writers writing about writing in tones of narcissistic self-reference—i.e. the sort of fiction I was peddling in those days (and still struggle to avoid despite habitual dousings in Victorian opulence or the sentimental hygiene of Waterstones 2-for-1s1). I softly fingered And Then There Was No One (not then released in paperback) and set about fellating the book on a four-hour bus trip from Edinburgh to Inverness. Alongside that towering masterpiece of metafiction Mulligan Stew,2 Adair’s novel was my introduction to the kind of witty and candid authorial self-insertion and self-flagellation that enhances the reader’s interest and affection for the author’s works.3 This chimed with my fondness for attention-seeking and making a fool of myself in a comedic way to drum up readerly affection for myself through prose.4
    Adair’s final novel is a fictional literary memoir, written in the arch-affectionate style of his nonfiction, hilariously characterising a variety of literary types, from the wheedling Hugh Spaulding, author of “a cycle of thick-eared thrillers each of which was set in a different sporting milieu”, who pesters Adair for ten thousand francs after the failure of Doctor Zhivago on Ice; the outrageous egotist and star guest Slavorigin (based on . . . ?), whose collection of ill-timed 9/11 essays Out of a Clear Blue Sky launched his reputation as an outspoken anti-American terror; and Meredith van Damarest, “a hellish Hellenist from an obscure Californian college.”5 The depiction of writers as a gaggle of grotesques holds appeal. I have always viewed writers as the damaged patients in a worldwide therapy group, sharing their manias in the form of stories and novels, hoping and praying for someone to comprehend their pain in between the hourly ingestion of other nutters’ fictions. The creative process is nothing more than feverish scribbling in one’s padded cell. This notion of writers as far-gone crazies squabbling for love, understanding, and teaching posts in a stifling matrix of insane saboteurs and bile-stirrers was the truth hammered home to me by my MA tutors.6
    Adair’s blend of fiction and self-reference (several characters are named after real people, events and names from his past are scrambled as fiction), alongside his striking finale—the last gasp of a late-period postmodernist—seemed like a devilish and self-replenishing method of telling fiction. The only problem, as the resurrected cut-out Evadne flings at Adair: “Nobody gives two hoots about self-referentiality any longer, just as nobody gives two hoots, or even a single hoot, about you.” I had arrived at my literary fascination in its dying or long-dead days, twenty-one years since David Foster Wallace (also recently dead) had attempted to retire the literature of exhaustion with his rambling Barth homage ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.’7 Could a literary movement be considered passé if it never even reached the country in which I was born and raised?
    My immersion in the postmodern took me to France and the Americas, where novels are still (according to various undercover sources) being written outside the realist mode with a view to smashing the capitalist superstructure and bringing forth an era of humanist utopia with extra sprinkles and chocolate sauce. I looked in vain for the Scottish metafictionists. I was, of course, already conversant in the oeuvre of Alasdair Gray—Poor Things, a Frankenstein pastiche and beautiful marriage of art and text, was required reading at my progressive Catholic school, and the opus Lanark with its index of plagiarisms and Author-God appearance in the fourth book was an imaginative blast-off into the outer limits of what Scottish people might do with techniques already explored by Queneau, Vonnegut, O’Brien, Sorrentino (two of whom are cited by Gray as plagiarisms). These books aside, Gray’s stories and novels are in the fantastical or realist mode—he’s a postmodernist whenever it fits the form. This leaves the 1990s novels of Janice Galloway, notably The Trick is to Keep Breathing—a dark feminist novel à la A.L. Kennedy making use of typographical play à la Raymond Federman—and Ali Smith, whose novels are the least Scottish and therefore the most postmodern.
    Self-conscious fiction is inherently unScottish. I was surprised to learn Gilbert Adair was a writer comfortable with the postmodernist label8 (not a common position among the Americans, Sorrentino preferred the label “high modernist” as did others). I was not surprised to learn that Gilbert Adair was a writer uncomfortable with the Scottish label.9 The Scots are a nation of cherub-cheeked teamworkers and campfire storytellers—the solipsistic and vainglorious are not indigenous traits to this fair land. The commingling of culture, science, and philosophies from other nations is unpatriotic. We have our own thinkers here. We don’t need ideas from outside creeping in our cosy idyll when we have David Hume and the miserable internal monologues of J. Kelman for companionship.
    This, despite Scotsfolk having a foot in founding the pomo. Walter Scott was among the first to publish under comedic synonyms (Jebediah Cleisbotham, Captain Clutterbuck10) and use the found manuscript frame for his otherwise abysmal historical novels.11 James Hogg’s The Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner also makes use of a spurious editor and found manuscript—a technique later used incessantly by Gray, and in historical novels such as James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack (an homage to Hogg). These novels, however, still present provincial concerns. Scottish provincialism has been a problem for Scottish writers looking to explore new forms and challenges without having to bear the burden of Caledonia’s past. Their response is usually to scarper.
     Glaswegian novelist Alexander Trocchi, author of the outsider’s classic Cain’s Book, left for Paris in the 1950s to mingle with the French new novelists and help edit Beckett’s Watt for Olympia Press, publishing a torrent of grotty and unsexy S&M novels, all written for cash, under that imprint. He moved to Beatland in Manhattan, wrote Cain’s Book, and downed his pen for the next three decades due to heroin-inflicted impotence. The 1960s British avant-garde scene, populated by B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Christine Brooke-Rose (who fled to France in 1968) et al, never migrated north. Trocchi’s famous spat with Hugh MacDiarmid at the 1961 Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference (resuscitated in 2012), where the venerable poet dismissed Trocchi and Burroughs as drugged-up whippersnakes (not that he was wrong), highlighted the close-mindedness to new forms developed by the postmodernists (an aversion to the young?). It would take Gray’s Lanark (1981), for some of this creative energy to trickle through the Scots literary landscape (Gray was 47 upon publication).12 Even then, the multimedia one-man renaissance Gray was quick to pooh-pooh the label. Rodge Glass, Gray’s secretary, recalls in his biography asking if Lanark was “a postmodern work, or merely one that has been called postmodern by critics,”13 to which Gray replied with a temperamental glower and refusal of a free gin and tonic. Polygon, a defunct Edinburgh publisher,14 released works from poets-turned-novelists such as Frank Kuppner and Robert Alan Jamieson in the early 1990s, that while “poet’s novels”, with their focus on lyrical and opaque language, were Calvino-tinged enough for an intrepid or desperate PhD student to rush them inside the Scottish pomo camp.
    At any rate, this preamble proves the field was not crowded when I began this fruitless pursuit. I found myself pleased to be a postmodernist (if not pleased to be Scottish). While other deprived terrors from working-class backgrounds sought to become the new Irvine Welsh, clacking out rambling monologues in dialect about snorting speedballs and shagging Sharons and other unhinged yawns of passage, I was working on fictions about M. J. Nicholls persecuting his characters and characters persecuting M. J. Nicholls in a glorious masochistic loop. My characters mocked my Scottishness, teasing me for refusing to take part in the crime fiction kulturkampf (Ian Rankin’s novels litter used bookshops)15, and snubbing the Scots self-love-a-thon by failing to tip the hat to the Bard (Burns) and the Laird (Scott), and the Other One (Louis Stevenson). It seemed my acceptance as a postmodernist rested on tossing away the baggage of my Scottishness.
    And so Adair, the most prominent Scottish postmodernist whom no one identifies as Scottish, writes his European and deeply English novels, each drip-feeding moments from Adair’s past through intertextual winks and private pranks. The results being an exquisite sequence of slyly personal thrillers and pastiches, with Adair doppelgänging Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie16, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Mann, and Georges Perec, like a less cracked Peter Sellers slipping on another skin and making magic. I worked my way through the Adair oeuvre, eating up the novellas in a few days, missing the subtleties in the first-person monologues, and decided the best course of action as a postmodernist-in-waiting was to turf the hearth and proceed as an acultural nomad who can write in whatever tradition he damn well pleases (or can convincingly imitate), aware that, at some point, I would have to plunder my Scottish childhood for material. But as a postmodernist, I had no obligation to the truth.

2

Fast-forward several months and I encounter Adair himself at a conference in Edinburgh. The title? ‘The Resurrection of the Author’. Guest speakers: Gilbert Adair, Tom McCarthy, Katie McCrum, and David Polmont. I had read Tom McCarthy’s C with a degree of boredom— Ballardian “death of affect” transposed to a WWI setting was not exhilarating (no doubt I missed the point—Tom writes highbrow lit-fic in a post-Derridean mode, whatever that might mean—shall we ask the panel?), and hadn’t heard of the other two participants. Katie McCrum was a Guardian book critic who had slammed Adair’s And Then There Was No One, Tom McCarthy’s C, and David Polmont’s From Juvenal to Jonathan Franzen—A Concise History of Postmodern Satire. Polmont was the foremost writer on postmodernism in the UK, having published Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before: A Concise History of British Postmodernism (with a chapter on Trocchi), and Like Modernism, Only More So: A Blockhead’s Guide to the Postmodern World. His books had been roundly criticised for their inclusiveness—sitcoms and dense novels were on a par artistically in his universe. Soap operas and sonatas were the same. “Postmodernism freed culture from the chattering classes, creating a world where the lowliest blog could be as brilliant as a Shakespearean sonnet,” is an example of his drivel.
   Katie McCrum was on the panel as devil’s advocate. She had completed a work called Yeah But No But Yeah But Shut Up—a scathing assault on the exalting of trash that David was proposing in his books. Both of their voices were irritating. David spoke in a sort of laid-back transatlantic drawl like Peter Sellers17 on 1970s chat shows, a monied affectation that made him sound kitsch and false. Katie was a reformed ladette unable to shirk her undergraduate inflections—with each sentence, it seemed she was edging nearer an awesome or totes amazing outburst and squeeing up and down in her plastic chair. Tom and Gilbert were lacking in chemistry, made worse by them being positioned at opposite ends of the interviewer, Hugh Pegges—a smirking Irish imp with inexhaustible levels of enthusiasm for any words printed on any paper (and the only person man enough to act as arts ambassador for Clackmannashire council). The discussion began with the assumption that the author was dead in the age of mass communication etc., and how best to resurrect him [sic]?
   The question was posed to Gilbert. David made a move to speak but stopped himself when he saw Hugh looking at Gilbert. “Well . . . ” he replied, taking a moment to reflect. “If the author is really dead, we can reanimate him from the parts of other authors. A limb or two from James, Flaubert, Larkin. We can stitch them together to make a series of Frankenstein’s authors.” A slight ripple of laughter for this. Gilbert appeared content with his ripple and the buck passed to David. “If the novel is dead . . . let it die, I say. I mean, us writers, we’re like crazed doctors hunched over our manuscripts with defibrillators [defibillayters] screaming ‘Live! Liiiive!’ What we need to do is euthanise our books.” His unfunny outburst made the room uncomfortable, allowing them to forget the lapse in logic that if the author is dead there is no one around to write the dying manuscripts in the first place.
   Tom McCarthy went on to speak for a minute about something Derrida said that summed up the topic to a tee and made further discussion irrelevant, however the point sailed over everyone’s heads, so Hugh carried on. “I reckon Gilbert is right,” Katie said. “Only, writers like Gilbert have been graverobbing authors for most of their careers—pastiches of Mann and whatnot. I reckon it’s time to enter the age of the lost masterpiece. I reckon [sic] authors working as a team could recreate the prose style of a James or a Flaubert, using computer technology. We have the means to recreate at the level of syntax the style of these immortal authors—The Greats. Why not work on a sequel to Madame Bovary? Complete Bouvard et Pécuchet? Why do we need new works when we can enhance the canon?” Hugh allowed Gilbert a chance for a riposte. “In the same way we can tell a genuine Picasso from an imitation,” he said. “For one thing it would bugger the rare books market.” More laughter.
  This was an untypical remark from Adair, who seemed to be in a curmudgeonly mood. Perhaps sharing a panel with a reviewer who had shredded his latest novel, a writer who had dismissed Adair’s books as “too throwback to be pomo” (David), and another who had never read a word of his (Tom), was a tad irksome. The conversation moved to Barthes’s original posit in ‘The Death of the Author’, i.e. writer as scriptor, displaced from his text, and Tom spoke about the 1968 essay for five minutes with stops at Lyotard and Baudrillard, which went above everyone’s heads (except Adair’s). Adair politely kept silent about his 1992 novella named after Barthes’s essay, which he expected someone to namedrop, and the conversation took surreal turns with David suggesting authors should be hung up on hooks like meat in slaughterhouses and tortured to encourage them to express their fullest creative potential (no one knew if he were kidding), and Katie suggested all writers become transvestites, with both penises and vaginas, to create a sort of “gender neutral all-inclusive unisex fiction.”
   The conversation meandered until the Q&A, where things picked up. The first question: “What if I were to tell you right now, you really were all dead?” a rakish man asked, to some nervous laughs. David took a sip from his water as Kate answered. “Do I look like a zombie to you?” she asked, expecting laughs. As she said this, David slid from his chair and collapsed on the floor. We all chortled. “This is the liveliest he’s been all night,” Hugh said. The panel waited for him to end the ruse, but David was playing dead. Because he was dead. The water had been spiked. Adair crouched down to take David’s pulse and a look of horror appeared on his otherwise unflustered features. Pandemonium ensued. The man who had posed the question was seized by the audience and was heard shouting: “I only meant it as a gag! I didn’t know, I didn’t think . . . ” We were instructed to stay put while the medics carted the unfortunate critic to the morgue. The police arrived for the interrogations.

3

— What are you doing at this event?
— I came to see Gilbert Adair, mainly. And Tom McCarthy.
— Why?
— I’m a big fan of Adair’s works. I like what McCarthy has to say about fiction even if I didn’t like his latest novel.
— You came to see a novelist you don’t like?
— I disliked C, but I like McCarthy’s essays.
— What about the victim, David Polmont?
— I hate to speak ill of the deceased, but I think he’s—was—an idiot. His books are apologias for cartoons over novels, music videos over operas. He’s popular among the liberal intelligentsia because he absolves them of their guilt for slumming in front of TV sitcoms instead of reading War and Peace.
— What’s wrong with watching TV?
— Nothing. Only you can’t claim Loose Women18 has the same artistic merit as Shakespeare.
— Sounds like snobbery to me. Sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder over this David’s opinions. Do you write, Mr. Nicholls?
— Yes.
— What sort of books?
— I know what you’re angling at.
— Just answer the question, please.
— Experimental.
— So unpopular, then? The sorts of books no one reads?
— I haven’t published most of them, so clearly . . .
— Yes, and don’t you think you’d get more readers if you wrote something less snooty, less highfalutin’?
— You sound like my last girlfriend. And my mother.
— Just answer the question.
— Sorry, I don’t see what this has to do with the murder of David Polmont.
— Jealousy, Mr. Nicholls. You were so wound up that David had written a popular book promoting the popular literature that you despise, you poisoned his water to exact a public revenge.
— First off, David Polmont is, was, not popular. As I said, he’s a hero among a certain group of intellectual slobs who get their rocks off thinking Sonic the Hedgehog is the same as John Milton. Gibberish. No one in the academic world took him seriously. Even lowbrow readers took the piss. It was a pose. Secondly, I haven’t the faintest inkling how to make a colourless poison, never mind the skill to sneak it undetected in a glass when conference workers are everywhere setting up the room.
— Come off it, Nicholls. It’s simple to plot a poisoning. You’re the strongest suspect. We’ve been reading your blog. How do you think this entry, from last year, sounds to us? Tossers like David Polmont are propagating the belief that picking up the nearest available book with a pastel cover will increase one’s intellectual understanding of the world, sensitivity towards others, and ability to empathise, and that the sentimental lyricism of middlebrow drum-bangers like Jhumpa Lahiri or Khaled Hosseini constitutes High Art. Polmont is the sort of pandering populist who was the first to tout reality TV over novels. In his pseudo-scholarly ramble, he defends the copout that in a postmodern world there are no cultural barriers—novels can be about slackers in their pants or viscounts in their pools—unspellchecked drivel from a subliterate teen has as much merit as a polished masterpiece from a genius. Polmont is a first-class buffoon who should be killed with a brick.
— Clearly kidding from the tone.
— Oh? Then what about this later entry? I hate David Polmont. His stupid book is going to keep experimental writers out of publishing forever . . . I will never be published because of dickheads like him. I want to stab him in the nose with an ice-pick and hack him to bits with one of those big Japanese swords.
— I was venting. Clearly kidding again.
— You think a murderous threat is kidding? There are twelve more posts where you state your intention to murder David Polmont. We don’t consider this ‘kidding’ in light of what has happened here. Do you?
— It was unfortunate. But you’re wrong.
— Oh?
— Yes. Because it was Adair I intended to kill.
— Was it now?
— You missed the most pertinent detail. Polmont had taken Adair’s water by mistake. Adair was too polite to correct him and that’s what saved his life. I tried to kill Adair because I wanted to sever the line between fiction and reality in his works entirely. It would be the perfect postmodern murder—slain by a fan at a conference, only a year following the publication of his book where a writer is a slain at a conference. Can you think of a more perfect postmodern send-off? I wanted to make him a pomo martyr! That twerp Polmont had to ruin things with his uncoordinated lunge for the wrong water. Got what he deserved.
— Jones, better call the nut doctor.

4

I was released to private care a few months later, having successfully pleaded insanity. Now a hero in the postmodern community, I received cards of congratulations and hundreds of animated gifs on my Facebook wall. It seemed that my (accidental) murder had precipitated a “renaissance” of the postmodern novel. John Barth sent me a bouquet of hyacinths with a nice card as his backlog was now being purchased in the millions by the residents of Scotland. I published several of my novels with the emerging firm Metabooks who were receiving submissions of novels from fresh-faced writers the nation over. The Scots had “caught” postmodernism at last! Irvine Welsh wrote a novel in which he, Irvine Welsh, remixed Treasure Island, only to be haunted by the ghost of R.L. Stevenson who exacted his revenge by remixing Trainspotting. A.L. Kennedy wrote a novel about the hellishness of being A.L. Kennedy (unrecognisable from her previous novels, except the protagonist was named A.L. Kennedy). Alasdair Gray sulked, claiming he’d had these ideas first.
   Books about books were hip. Kids wore ‘I am a character in your novel’ T-shirts (with ‘And you in mine’ on the back). People protested at being considered “people”, preferring the term unreliable narrator. Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds became the ur-text of a generation. School kids took things a step further, living lives as though hopping from one “novel” to another, acknowledging no subjective reality, drifting from scenario to scenario and acting as mere vessels (scriptors) for the texts they produced. A novel comprised of the 444th word of each postmodernist novel published in America between 1960-1980 was a bestseller for two months. Mugs with the slogans ‘Eat my performative utterance’, ‘Sign my signifier’, and ‘Deconstruct my deconstructors’ were sold in the millions. My own self-published novel A Postmodern Belch became a standard on college campuses.
   I now had a clear picture of what Scottish postmodernism looked like. Ian Rankin wrote himself into his novel as a rookie detective who outsmarts the ailing Rebus, John Burnside completed an experimental novel on 4,000 beer mats in 4,000 pubs, wherein he imbibed ten pints to create a “fragmented horrologue.” James Kelman characters interrupted their usual streams of consciousness to question their purpose in his miserable novels, hopping inside cheerier works like the New Feminist satires of Louise Bagshawe. Alexander McCall Smith began writing literature. When word spread that Gilbert Adair was Scottish his sales also skyrocketed (which pleased me as in his last novel he complained about being out of sight and out of mind). I was now in a pomo-saturated Scotland. This, of course, all took place in a novel I was constructing in my head, entitled My Sad and Implausible Wet Dream, to be published in my head in a few weeks. I wasn’t allowed to leave my straight jacket, so I dribbled the novel across sheets of paper, having bitten my tongue to create red ink.

1 In Jan 2012, Waterstones dropped their apostrophe (formerly Waterstone’s), altering the name of the firm’s original owner to incorporate the spelling mistake. Fictional Adair defines the difference between bookstores in Switzerland and the UK in ATTWNO: “Your bookshops sell fifty types of books and one type of coffee, while ours sell fifty types of copy and one type of book.” My local branch of Waterstone[’]s has no titles by Adair, except the Perec translation.
2 Gilbert Sorrentino, Grove Press, 1979. That my first two postmodern crushes were named Gilbert is a happy coincidence.
3 Note from my co-editor: “This presupposes an equally self-absorbed reader.”
4 Second note from my co-editor: “Otherwise missing in all aspects of Nicholls’s life (and for good reason, which requires no adumbration here).”
5 My co-editor and I have debated (heatedly) regarding the existence or otherwise of misogynistic undertones in Adair’s writing (present book especially). This being a festschrift, all negative comments have been struck in favour of propagandist praise.
6 And, indeed, Martin Amis’ funniest novel The Information.
7 In Girl With Curious Hair, W.W. Norton, 1989.
8 See The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice, 4th Estate, 1991.
9 Adair was raised in Kilmarnock and (purportedly) studied in Edinburgh. He left for France and re-invented himself as an Englishman (with a tinge of Scots). Scots often appear in his books, such as the housekeeper in A Closed Book. It is hard not to speculate on his closed-book childhood. See also his take on Perec’s ‘I Remember’ in Myths & Memories.
10 Along with Malchi Malagrowther, Crystal Croftangry, Jonas Dryasdust, and, more boringly, Lawrence Templeton.
11 See Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation, Birlinn Ltd, 2012, for an alternative opinion.
12 By Canongate. Lanark remains the most ambitious and risky book published by this Edinburgh-based press. Their new fiction output today consists of short works written for younger readers with short attention spans, or books with film tie-in potential. Not an unshrewd business move, only disappointing for pomoheads seeking chocolate novels knitted on ox skins.
13 In fairness to Gray, Glass asked this ingratiating question when serving him in a pub.
14 Now Birlinn Ltd.
15 Crime novelists comb the Edinburgh Evening News hoping for something scandalous with sufficient plot hooks to turn into gold. Discuss the ethics of this practice.
16 A Scot, it’s true, but Peter Pan is about as Scottish as a pot of Earl Gray in a Kensington Palace hot tub.
17 At the time of writing, I am reading Roger Lewis’s 1152-page bio The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. Hence the second ref.
18 Interminable daytime gossip show presided over by four loudmouths who exchange mildly salacious banter, sweeping moral judgements on subjects about which they know nowt, and pull mock-earnest expressions whenever required.

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