Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  “During my first art school summer holiday I wrote chapter 12 and the mad-vision-and-murder part of chapter 29. My first hero was based on myself. I’d have preferred someone less specialized but mine were the only entrails I could lay hands upon. I worked poor Thaw to death, quite cold-bloodedly, because though based on me he was tougher and more honest, so I hated him. Also, his death gave me a chance to shift him into a wider social context. You are Thaw with the neurotic imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world you occupy.8 This makes you much more capable of action and slightly more capable of love.

  “The time is now”—the conjuror glanced at his wristwatch, yawned and lay back on the pillows—“the time is 1970, and although the work is far from finished I see it will be disappointing in several ways. It has too many conversations and clergymen, too much asthma, frustration, shadow; not enough countryside, kind women, honest toil. Of course not many writers describe honest toil, apart from Tolstoy and Lawrence on haymaking, Tressel on house-building and Archie Hind on clerking and slaughtering. I fear that the men of a healthier age will think my story a gafuffle of grotesquely frivolous parasites, like the creatures of Mrs. Radcliffe, Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Perhaps my model world is too compressed and lacks the quiet moments of unconsidered ease which are the sustaining part of the most troubled world. Perhaps I began the work when I was too young. In those days I thought light existed to show things, that space was simply a gap between me and the bodies I feared or desired; now it seems that bodies are the stations from which we travel into space and light itself. Perhaps an illusionist’s main job is to exhaust his restless audience by a show of marvellously convincing squabbles until they see the simple things we really depend upon: the movement of shadow round a globe turning in space, the corruption of life on its way to death and the spurt of love by which it throws a new life clear. Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re trying to make the readers admire your fine way of talking.” “I’m sorry. But yes. Of course,” said the conjuror huffily. “You should know by now that I have to butter them up9 a bit. I’m like God the Father, you see, and you are my sacrificial Son, and a reader is a Holy Ghost who keeps everything joined together and moving along. It doesn’t matter how much you detest this book I am writing, you can’t escape it before I let you go. But if the readers detest it they can shut it and forget it; you’ll simply vanish and I’ll turn into an ordinary man. We mustn’t let that happen. So I’m taking this opportunity to get all of us agreeing about the end so that we stay together right up to it.”

  “You know the end I want and you’re not allowing it,” said Lanark grimly. “Since you and the readers are the absolute powers in this world you need only persuade them. My wishes don’t count.”

  “That ought to be the case,” said the conjuror, “but unluckily the readers identify with your feelings, not with mine, and if you resent my end too much I am likely to be blamed instead of revered, as I should be. Hence this interview.

  “And first I want us all to admit that a long life story cannot end happily. Yes, I know that William Blake sang on his deathbed, and that a president of the French Republic died of heart-failure while fornicating on the office sofa,10 and that in 1909 a dental patient in Wumbijee, New South Wales, was struck by lightning after receiving a dose of laughing gas.11 The God of the real world can be believed when such things happen, but no serious entertainer dare conjure them up in print. We can fool people in all kinds of elaborate ways, but our most important things must seem likely and the likeliest death is still to depart this earth in a ‘fiery-pain-chariot’ (as Carlyle put it), or to drift out in a stupefied daze if there’s a good doctor handy. But since the dismaying thing about death is loneliness, let us thrill the readers with a description of you ending in company. Let the ending be worldwide, for such a calamity is likely nowadays. Indeed, my main fear is that humanity will perish before it has a chance to enjoy my forecast of the event. It will be a metaphorical account, like Saint John’s, but nobody will doubt what’s happening. Attend!

  “When you leave this room you will utterly fail to contact any helpful officials or committees. Tomorrow, when you speak to the assembly, you will be applauded but ignored. You will learn that most other regions are as bad or even worse than your own, but that does not make the leaders want to cooperate: moreover, the council itself is maintaining its existence with great difficulty. Monboddo can offer you nothing but a personal invitation to stay in

  Provan. You refuse and return to Unthank, where the landscape is tilted at a peculiar angle, rioters are attacking the clock towers and much of the city is in flame. Members of the committee are being lynched, Sludden has fled, you stand with Rima on the height of the Necropolis watching flocks of mouths sweep the streets like the shadows of huge birds, devouring the population as they go. Suddenly there is an earthquake. Suddenly the sea floods the city, pouring down through the mouths into the corridors of council and institute and short-circuiting everything. (That sounds confusing; I haven’t worked out the details yet.) Anyway, your eyes finally close upon the sight of John Knox’s statue—symbol of the tyranny of the mind, symbol of that protracted male erection which can yield to death but not to tenderness—toppling with its column into the waves, which then roll on as they have rolled for … a very great period. How’s that for an ending?”

  “Bloody rotten,” said Lanark. “I haven’t read as much as you have, I never had the time, but when I visited public libraries in my twenties half the sciencefiction stories had scenes like that in them, 12 usually at the end. These banal world destructions prove nothing but the impoverished minds of those who can think of nothing better.”

  The conjuror’s mouth and eyes opened wide and his face grew red. He began speaking in a shrill whisper which swelled to a bellow: “I am not writing science fiction! Science-fiction stories have no real people in them, and all my characters are real, real, real people! I may astound my public by a dazzling deployment of dramatic metaphors designed to compress and accelerate the action, but that is not science, it is magic! Magic! As for my ending’s being banal, wait till you’re inside it. I warn you, my whole imagination has a carefully reined-back catastrophist tendency; you have no conception of the damage my descriptive powers will wreak when I loose them on a theme like THE END.”

  “What happens to Sandy?” said Lanark coldly.

  “Who’s Sandy?”

  “My son.”

  The conjuror stared and said, “You have no son.”

  “I have a son called Alexander who was born in the cathedral.”

  The conjuror, looking confused, grubbed among the papers on his bed and at last held one up, saying, “Impossible, look here. This is a summary of the nine or ten chapters I haven’t written yet. If you read it you’ll see there’s no time for Rima to have a baby in the cathedral. She goes away too quickly with Sludden.”

  “When you reach the cathedral,” said Lanark coldly, “you’ll describe her having a son more quickly still.”

  The conjuror looked unhappy. He said, “I’m sorry. Yes, I see the ending becomes unusually bitter for you. A child. How old is he?”

  “I don’t know. Your time goes too fast for me to estimate.”

  After a silence the conjuror said querulously, “I can’t change my overall plan now. Why should I be kinder than my century? The millions of Children who’ve been vilely murdered this Century is—don’t hit me!” Lanark had only tensed his muscles but the conjuror slid down the bed and pulled the covers over his head; they subsided until they lay perfectly flat on the mattress. Lanark sighed and dropped his race into his hand. A little voice in the air said, “Promise not to be violent.” Lanark snorted contemptuously. The bedclothes swelled up in a man-shaped lump but the conjuror did not emerge. A muffled voice under the clothes said
, “I didn’t need to play that trick. In a single sentence I could have made you my most obsequious admirer, but the reader would have turned against both of us…. I wish I could make you like death a little more. It’s a great preserver. Without it the loveliest things change slowly into farce, as you will discover if you insist on having much more life. But I refuse to discuss family matters with you. Take them to Monboddo. Please go away.”

  “Soon after I came here,” said Lanark, lifting the briefcase and standing up, “I said talking to you was a waste of time. Was I wrong?”

  He walked to the door and heard mumbling under the bedclothes. He said, “What?”

  “… know a black man called Multan …”

  “I’ve heard his name. Why?”

  “… might be useful. Sudden idea. Probably not.”

  Lanark walked round the painting of the chestnut tree, opened the door and went out.13

  INDEX OF PLAGIARISMS

  There are three kinds of literary theft in this book:

  BLOCK PLAGIARISM, where someone else’s work is printed as a distinct typographical unit, IMBEDDED PLAGIARISM, where stolen words are concealed within the body of the narrative; and DIFFUSE PLAGIARISM, where scenery, characters, actions or novel ideas have been been stolen without the original words describing them. To save space these win be referred to hereafter Block-plag, Implag, and Difplag.

  ANON.

  Chap. 29, para. 2. The couplet ends a verse on a monument now stan ding beside a pedestrian lane under a flyover of an intersection of the Monkland Motorway and Cathedral Street, Glasgow.

  ANON.

  Chap. 30, para. 12. Blockplag of inscription on cairn on moor beside the String Road near Black-waterfoot on Isle of Arran, Firth of Clyde.

  ANON.

  Chap. 43. Ozenfant’s speech. Blockplag of first stanza of Middle English epic poem Gawain and the Green Knight, omitting 3rd and 4th lines, “The tyke that the trammels of treason there wrought/Was tried for his treachery, the truest on earth” (the translation is also anonymous):

  BLACK ANGUS

  See Macneacail, Aonghas.

  BLAKE, WILLIAM

  Chap. 19, para. 1. Implag of poem “The Clod and the Pebble” from Songs of Experience.

  Chap. 35, last paragraph. Implag. Ritchie-Smollet quotes “The Little Vagabond” from Songs of Experience.

  BORGES, JORGE LUIS

  Chap. 43, Ozenfant’s speech. Blockplag from short essay “The Barbarian and the City.”

  BOYCE, CHRISTOPHER

  Chap. 38, para. 16. The encounter between the “sharp red convertible” and the motorcyclists is an Implag from the short story “Shooting Script.”

  BROWN, GEORGE DOUGLAS

  Books 1 and 2 owe much to the novel The House with the Green Shutters in which heavy paternalism forces a weak-minded youth into dread of existence, hallucination, and crime.

  BUNYAN, JOHN

  Chap. 9, para. 10. Blockplag of first paragraph of the Relation of the Holy War Made by Shaddai Upon Diabolus for the Regaining of the Metropolis of the World; or the losing and taking again of the town of Mansoul.

  BURNS, ROBERT

  Robert Burns’ humane and lyrical rationalism has had no impact upon the formation of this book, a fact more sinister than any exposed by mere attribution of sources. See also Emerson.

  CARLYLE, THOMAS

  Chap. 27, para. 5. “I can’t believe,” etc., is an Implag of the youthful sage of Ecclefechan’s query of his mother, “Did God Almighty come down and make wheelbarrows in a shop?” The device of giving a ponderous index to a work of ponderous fiction is taken from Sartor Resartus.

  CARROLL, LEWIS

  Chap. 41, para. 3. The taste of the white rainbow is a Difplag of the taste in the bottle marked “drink me” in Alice in Wonderland.

  CARY, JOYCE

  Chaps. 28 and 29. Difplags of the novel The Horse’s Mouth. Here and elsewhere Duncan Thaw is a hybrid formed by uniting Gulley Jimson (the Blake-quoting penniless painter of a mural illustrating the biblical Genesis in a derelict church) with his untalented working-class disciple, Nosey Barbon.

  CHASE, JAMES HADLEY

  Chap. 9, para. 1. Blockplag of first two paragraphs of No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

  COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR

  Chap. 41, para. 12. This reference to God, orphans and Hell is a debased Implag of “An orphan’s curse would drag to hell/A spirit from on high,” from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

  Chap. 26, para. 10. The warmth which gushes in Thaw’s chest at the kind sister’s words, freeing him from the constriction which came when he prayed God that Marjory be killed, is a difplag of that “spring of love” the Ancient Mariner felt for the watersnakes, and which freed him from the Nightmare Life-in-Death caused by killing the albatross.

  CONRAD, JOSEPH

  Chap. 41, para. 6. Kodac’s speech contains a dispersed Implag of names and nouns from the novel Nostromo.

  DISNEY, WALT

  In Book 3, the transforming of Lanark’s arm and the turning of people into dragons is a Difplag of the transformed hero’s nose and turning of bad boys into donkeys from the film Pinocchio. So is the process of purification by swallowing in the last paragraphs of Chap. 6. (See also GOD and JUNG.)

  ELIOT, T. S.

  Chap. 10, para. 4. “I’m something commonplace that keeps getting hurt” is a drab Difplag of the “notion of some infinitely gentle,/Infinitely suffering thing” in Preludes.

  EMERSON, RALPH WALDO

  Ralph Waldo Emerson has not been plagiarized.

  EVARISTI, MARCELLA

  Chap. 45, para. 3. “Dont knife the leaf” is from the song Lettuce Bleeds.

  FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT

  Epilogue, para. 1. The sentence “You don’t like me” etc. is from McKisco’s bedroom dialogue with Rosemary Hoyte in Book 1 of Tender Is the Night.

  Chap. 10, para. 6. “We think a lot of new friends” etc. echoes Dick Diver’s remark to Rosemary on the beach.

  FREUD, SIGMUND

  Difplags in every chapter. Only a writer unhealthily obsessed by all of Dr. Freud’s psycho-sexual treatises would stuff a novel with more oral, anal and respiratory symbols, more Oedipal encounters with pleasure-reality/Eros-thanatos substitutes, more recapitulations of the birth-trauma than I have space to summarize. (See also disney, god and jung.)

  GLASHAN, JOHN

  Chap. 38, para. 13. The snapping noise in Miss Maheen’s head is an Implag from the “Snapping Song” from “Earwigs Over the Mountains” sung by the Social Security choir in The Great Meths Festival.

  GOD

  Chap. 6, paras. 11, 12, 13, 14. The purification by swallowing is a Difplag from the verse drama Jonah. (See also disney and jung.)

  GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON

  Chap. 35, para. 1. “Wer immer strebend” etc. is from the verse drama Faust, angel chorus Act V, Scene VII. Bayard Taylor translates this as “Whoe’er aspires unweariedly is not beyond redeeming”; John Anster as “Him who, unwearied, still strives on/We have the power to save” and Hopton Upcraft as “It’s a great life/If you don’t weaken.”

  Epilogue, para. 1. “I am part of that part which was once the whole” is an Implag from Mephistopheles’ speech in Faust Act I, Scene III: “Ich bin ein Theu des Theus, der Angango alles war.”

  GOLDING, WILLIAM

  See footnote 6.

  GOODMAN, LORD

  Chap. 38, para. 9. “Greed isn’t a pretty thing but envy is far, far worse” is a slightly diffuse Implag from the speech in which the great company lawyer compared those who fight for dividends with those who fight for wages and declared his moral preference for the former.

  GUARDIAN

  Chap. 36, para. 8. The newspaper extract is a distorted Block-plag of the financial report from Washington, July 9, 1973.

  HEINE, HEINRICH

  Chap. 34, para. 5. “screeching, shrieking, yowling, growling, grinding, whining, yammering, skammering, trilling, chirping” etc. contains Implag from the Hellnoise
described in Chap. 1 of Reisebilder in Leland’s translation.

  HIND, ARCHIE

  Epilogue, para. 14. The disciplines of cattle slaughter and accountancy are dramatized in the novel The Dear Green Place.

  HOBBES, THOMAS

  Books 3 and 4 are Difplags of Hobbes’s daemonic metaphor Leviathan, which starts with the words “By art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State (in Latin, Civitas), which is but an artificial man.” Describing a state or tribe as a single man is as old as society—Plutarch does it in his life of Coriolanus—but Hobbes deliberately makes the metaphor a monstrous one. His state is the sort of creature Frankenstein made: mechanical yet lively; lacking ideas, yet directed by cunning brains; morally and physically clumsy, but full of strength got from people forced to supply its belly, the market. In a famous title page this state is shown threatening a whole earth with the symbols of warfare and religion. Hobbes named it from the verse drama Job, in which God describes it as a huge water beast he is specially proud to have made because it is “king of all the children of pride.” The author of The Whale thought it a relation of his hero. (See MELVILLE.)

  HOBSBAUM, DR. PHILIP

  Chap. 45, paras. 6, 7, 8. The battle between the cloth and wire monkeys is a Difplag of Monkey Puzzle:

  Wire monkeys are all

  elbows, knees and teeth.

  Cloth monkeys can be leant

  upon.

  Wire monkeys endure,

  repel invaders.

  Cloth monkeys welcome all

  comers.

  They set up wire monkeys to

  test the youngsters’ hunger,

  Cloth monkeys their loneliness.

  Wire monkeys suckle, give food.

  Cloth monkeys are barren.

  You will see the youngster