LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/9. ALASDAIR GRAY (1934)


● Both a writer and painter, Alasdair Gray combines forceful imagery with inventivity in words, so his books are necessarily visualized. It is a Desperado feature to rummage all arts and come up with all possible devices in order to achieve uniqueness. Gray is unique in his blend of visual and verbal.

● When the reader finishes Lanark, he has already got used to terrifying imaginary ordeals, which Gray invents and makes his character go through. This reader resents the author for making him leave. He would like to linger on indefinitely in this repelling universe (at first), which has slowly grown on him. He has learnt to accept the unacceptable, to enjoy what at first depressed, even horrified him. Feeding on death, living in darkness, loneliness exacerbated, lovelessness everywhere, are only a few elements we learn to share. Apparently, Gray carries on Eliot’s aesthetics of the ugly. Actually, he just sticks to the ugly, and could not care less about its aesthetics. He does not mean to make ugliness beautiful, as Joyce and Eliot did; he wants to make fear inhabitable.

● The dystopias Gray imagines are not discouraging. He invents the hopeful dystopia, he fights old age and death with imagination as his weapon. He goes beyond what is thought to be the final human threshold, teaching his readers that nothing is final, not even the end of his book, which requires us to prolong his universe by rereading.

● The order of the plot is deliberately complicated and time dislocated. Lanark names its books ‘3, 1, 2, 4’, defying our need for a sequence, for chronological causality. The same hero dies and is reborn into another world. Imagination can move from one universe to another, which makes us incredulous of the final ‘Goodbye’; it cannot discourage us from continuing the adventures, the construction of new worlds in our minds. Gray teaches us to explore our sensibility and never desist, so reading becomes more than sharing, reading becomes experience of the unthought of.

● The moments of time are amalgamated with irony. We start with the future, then Lanark desperately clamours for his past and learns about it, and at last we get used to a present we might have rejected if it had come first. We are trained to do away with prejudice, taboo, preconceived ideas. Gray debunks the novel. We might have expected a story where the past of the character is given from at first, and where we know nothing about the future till it happens. Gray chooses to demonstrate that the past is unimportant. He describes it as a dark, depressing pit of memories, all forgotten. The future promises nothing good, either. It is a future of ‘mohomes’ (houses in cars) and deprivations of all kinds. But the present, menacing though it is, engrosses our attention. Gray makes a point here: the story is unimportant. The reader’s involvement is all that matters. And we can get involved in the most unexpected areas of imagination.

● Gray finds his heroes do not need happiness. The happy end is an obsolete tool. The end became an obsolete tool with the stream of consciousness. Now the pleasure of reading is outdated, too. The reader moves into the opposite of traditional fiction. He is displeased, repelled, humiliated, his expectations are deliberately baffled. Lanark could be an anagram of carnal, but fact is Gray’s heroes are anything but bodies. It is their minds that take over. The novel is a constant torment of understanding.

● Gray’s novels, though apprenticing us to a new way of thinking fiction, live on incidents. The recurrent incident in Lanark is death. Unthank is the beginning of forgetfulness. Gray’s beings are almost all the time ‘on the lip of a horrible pit,’ on the verge of something close to death but not quite it. The real hero’s mother dies, he himself commits suicide after possibly killing the girl he loves, Lanark (Duncan Thaw’s alter-ego in the dystopia) saves Rima from death by ‘dragonhide’ ( a strong image of the body growing old and suffocating the soul), and dies himself in the end. If real death (Duncan Thaw) is final and even comes as a liberation from asthma, imaginary death does not make sense. We have been misled so many times that we have learnt to consider nothing final, so we expect Lanark to find another life and begin another story. Gray has taught us that fiction begins with the author’s lesson and, once the reader learns that lesson, it can only end when the wizard’s apprentice realizes he can ruin it by too much interference. Gray creates this meddling reader, and then complains that his meaning was much simpler than readers claim it to be.

● Gray’s illustrations to his own works are overcrowded with faces, and his novels are overpopulated with minor characters and all sorts of incidents. Gray’s imagination never has a moment of dull rest. There is no logical order, no rule. Nothing looks familiar. Like all Desperadoes, Gray defamiliarizes, and the space he creates is alogical, makes its own rules, the same as the characters make their own soul, not obeying concrete emotions, inventing all sorts of incredible incidents, from ‘intercalendrical zones’ to ‘Ozenfant’s Institute’ and ‘dragonhide’. The text may look dry, because emotion is denied, but we soon realize that Gray’s basic mood, which we share, is despair of literature.

● In a strange way, with many Desperadoes, language is forced into four-letter words, without fear or danger or pornography. They talk about sex dispassionatley. While sex seems to be a major topic, love is not, or rather, the largest issue at stake is the absence of love. From Ishiguro, through Barnes, Lessing, Lodge, to give a few names at random, love is hidden behind the text, in the reader’s dark area of interpretation. We guess there is love in the soul of the hero, we find the signs, the pain is very intense, but love interest, as Virginia Woolf preached (though she could not do it), is dead. It does not matter whether Lanark happily joins his beloved, or Ishiguro’s butler brings Miss Kenton back into his life. What matters is that the reader should be painfully aware that the hero’s life is deprived of a happy end, for the simple reason that there is nothing that can end. Love is not there. If we choose to unearth it from the heap of broken images, we do so at our own risk, and the author will not endorse what we find.

● Gray’s text has an air of science-fiction nightmare. It happens in Lanark, Poor Things, 1982 Janine. The author’s dark inventivity arouses our curiosity in a sick way. People turn into dragons and die. Corridors open into night and time. Whatever happens is unfamiliar, never experienced before. Gray’s books are a continuous slip into the unknown.

● The torment of forgetfulness extends to language, as well. At some point, in the beginning, ‘Lanark tried to think of other words.’ Gray’s style is parsimonious. His approach is uncommitted, neutre. No sentence suggests sympathy or pity. No Desperado would commit himself in this way. They all fake indifference.

● Morbidity is the weapon to fight death in most Desperado works. Lanark chases the sun, which he can only see for two minutes a day, in a desperate attempt to restore a sense of time. The result is that he plunges into even harsher unreality, which brings about dehumanization. Everything vanishes from the hero’s life: love, happiness, order, logic, rigid rules. They learn to thrive on the hideous, which is a typically Desperado direction of sensibility. The books are traps: once we have shared them, our perception of life is changed. We may be gloomier, but definitely stronger.

● Gray’s Lanark can be associated with a number of other books, hinting at intertextuality, though Gray is far from being bookish, and even mocks at literary scholarship in the creator’s list of plagiarisms. The novel has elements in common with Brave New World, The Divine Comedy, Kafka’s Trial, Sartre, Wells, Jonathan Swift. With Desperado irony directed against the finality of a text, the last part of the book introduces an author within the author. Gray hints here at the very process of creation, coming close to Fowles’ Mantissa. Desperadoes like to talk about the way they write, even when they state in interviews they are not qualified to do it. They like to split personalities and peer at themselves in a mirror. The truth is the Desperado novel feeds on literature, the text devours other texts. Gray escapes that exacerbated awareness of past texts, though, as he combines the nightmare of his dry style with the freshness of painting.

● With Desperadoes, Gray included, the stream of consciousness has become useless, psychology is hidden behind incidents. Loving reading has to adapt to a new approach, and it probes the author’s secrecy. The chronological order of a personality is no longer needed. To prove this, Gray offers us a short chronological summary of Lanark’s evolution, right before his death. It sounds pointless, we are not interested. We are no longer the same persons who read Woolf or Joyce. We have gone farther ahead towards ‘the age of alienation and non-communication.’