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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