This story is a poem, a wordgame. I am not a highly literate French dwarf, my lost woman is not a revolutionary writer manque, my details are fictions, only my meaning is true and I must make that meaning clear by playing the wordgame to the bitter end.
Who is speaking? It must be the author behind Pollard. Who is that? We can’t simply say ‘Gray’ – for Lanark shows us there can be authors behind authors behind authors. Gray’s allegories express yet conceal their continual agonising over a basic human situation in which a highly talented but socially eccentric and physically unattractive protagonist has to realise that his idealistic Promethean aspiration after truth and justice and beauty may finally be seen as self-interested sexual desire dressed up to look good.
There’s even further satire on Gray’s part, in that Pollard’s great project, the completion of Aeschylus’s lost Prometheus Unbound, isn’t even original. Gray knows of Shelley’s 1820 version, of course, and how Shelley’s sentiments anticipate Pollard’s. Clearly Pollard is being shown as a derivative egotist rather than an original genius. When one places this alongside Gray’s mockery of his own literary creativity (and of course, his mockery of literary criticism) in his “Index of Plagiarisms” in Lanark, the full paradox of Gray’s literary achievement can be recognised. It is an achievement which rests on Gray’s perception of his own creativity which constantly questions the validity of that creativity, and questions the emotional and sexual motivation behind it, firstly in relation to himself, and thereafter in relation to writers and artists at large.
‘Prometheus’ is thus an important personal statement, expressing succinctly Gray’s private world of self-doubt and anxiety, and yet marvellously creating literature while anatomising what lies behind the act. The final story, ‘The End of the Axletree’, moves from personal analysis to public satire, completing Gray’s essential dualism of theme throughout the volume. Taking up where the Emperor left off, the fable tells how the great vertical city finally reached the sky, which is found to be tangible, a great canopy enclosing the world. Men, of course, can’t leave it alone, and (in a marvellous allegory for human greed and destructiveness from the beginning of property-holding to wars and space programmes and their place in political economy) they tear it open, drowning the world in a new Flood. Thus the overall story of the volume is ended; as in Lanark and Janine, “man is the pie that bakes and eats itself, and the recipe is separation”. We war with ourselves, with our society; full of sound and fury, we signify very little, as individuals, artists, societies. We are right to mock our pretensions, destroying ourselves and the earth we live on. And yet, and yet … something in the all too tragi-comic lives of Bohu, Urquhart, Pollard – and Lanark, and Kelvin Walker, and Jock McLeish – remains to suggest a glimmer of the transcendental, allowing God, just for the moment to be forgiven, as in the fleeting epiphany given to Lanark as he watches his son climb Ben Rua in sunlight. At the end of Unlikely Stories, Mostly it’s typical of Gray to leave a benign sting in the tale, lying just beyond literature. The survivor of the volume, the archetypal quixotic Scot, Sir Thomas Urquhart, sails on through time, his little boat moving out over the endpapers, a glimmer of hope in a grotesque world.
Douglas Gifford
Copyright
‘The Star’ in Collins Magazine for Boys and Girls in 1951
‘The Spread of Ian Nicols’ in Ygorra, Glasgow students’ charity magazine, 1956
‘A Unique Case’ in Cleg, a Glasgow art students’ magazine, 1956
‘The Cause of the Recent Changes’ in Ygorra, 1957
The first half of ‘The Comedy of theWhite Dog’
in Scottish International Magazine, 1969;
the whole in Glasgow University Magazine, 1970
‘The Crank that made the Revolution’ in The Scottish Field, 1971
‘Five Letters from an Eastern Empire’ in Words Magazine, 1979
Slightly amended, these and seven new tales were first published in 1983
by Canonagate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
First published as a Canongate Classic in 1997 with the addition of the recently written ‘Inches in a Column’ and the older ‘Unique Case’
This digital edition first published in 2009 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Alasdair Gray, 1951, 1997
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 502 6
www.meetatthegate.com
Unlikely Stories Mostly Page 24