‘The matter of Scotland’: Alasdair Gray and Hugh MacDiarmid

This chapter charts the influence on Alasdair Gray’s work of the poet and propogandist for Scottish Renaissance Hugh MacDiarmid’s writings and cultural politics. It analyses the ways in which the spiritual journey or odyssey undertaken by the Drunk Man of MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle informs the narrative trajectories of Jock McLeish in Gray’s 1982, Janine and, to a lesser extent, Duncan Thaw in Lanark; in these novels, and work such as The Fall of Kelvin Walker, Gray explores self-repressions he found to be characteristic of the Scottish male that MacDiarmid’s renaissance had hoped to transcend at the national level. Escape from such self-repressions is proposed in both writers’ artistic localism. MacDiarmid’s maxim from In Memoriam James Joyce that ‘The universal is the particular’ is upheld in Gray’s oeuvre and writerly practice, in which Glasgow and Scotland are central to his works’ themes and settings. The recent debate in Scottish cultural circles over the erasure of Glasgow from director Yorgos Lanthimos’s film adaptation of Gray’s Poor Things indicates the importance of Glasgow to Gray’s work; and yet, like MacDiarmid, Gray was also inspired and influenced by a global range of authors and ideas: formally, the richly intertextual nature of each writers’ work will be addressed, something directly pointed to in Gray’s ‘Index of Plagiarisms’ in Lanark where MacDiarmid’s The Kind of Poetry I Want is cited. MacDiarmid’s desire to see a Scottish literary and cultural renaissance in the post-First World War period is somewhat reflected in the ‘Glasgow renaissance’ of the post-1979 devolution referendum period, in which Gray was pivotal to a group of authors who prioritised the importance of localism whilst never losing sight of the radically internationally dimensions of their cultural politics, just as MacDiarmid’s desire for Scottish political independence was also shared by Gray. Each writers’ nationalism had a controversial side, however, and the chapter will discuss the ways in which MacDiarmid’s stated Anglophobia finds an uneasy echo in Gray’s contentious essay ‘Settlers and Colonists’.