Why Scottish Literature Matters

Why Scottish Literature Matters provides an attempt to reply to these questions by using Scotland’s literature as a paradigmatic case, thus addressing both a Scottish and a non-Scottish readership.

The study, focused mainly on the period between 1707 (the Union of Parliaments) and the present day (the fourth in a series devoted to Scottish culture and history published by the Saltire Society) goes beyond what we can all reasonably give for granted today: that Scottish literature matters. It represents a well-established tradition and includes some of the most widely read classics of all times, from Ossian to R.L. Stevenson, from Sir Walter Scott to Conan Doyle, not to mention internationally acclaimed contemporary writers such as Muriel Spark, Irvine Welsh or Alexander McCall Smith.

The study also tries to go beyond a series of commonplace definitions, such as ‘eccentric’ or ‘anomalous’, that in the past have been used both by English (or ‘British’) and Scottish critics to describe Scottish authors and their work. In fact, by describing something or someone as an ‘eccentric’, no matter how sympathetic we are, we implicitly subscribe to a norm, and thus accept the idea that ‘difference’ necessarily implies a hegemonic relation. In Why Scottish Literature Matters I contend that many Scottish writers, consciously or unwittingly, challenged the very model centre/periphery which marginalised their native culture and language(s) within Great Britain, by promoting a ‘dialogic’ approach to the representation of difference. To say that Scotland’s modern history is simply and only a history of marginalisation, however, would be reductive and inaccurate. The study attempts to address the complexity and the problematic constructions of Scottishness through three centuries of cultural history, including the myth of ‘Scotland’s Empire’ and the modern paradox of the double status of Scotland (coloniser/colonised) which, in many ways, is still a source of unease for many Scottish intellectuals.

What can the study of Scottish literary texts specifically teach us? The first and perhaps the most valuable suggestion is an idea of identity (‘national’ as well as ‘individual’) which is not fixed and monolithic, but fluid and multi-layered – an idea which can accommodate both diversity and change. The work by the Scottish artist Michael Visocchi, which I have chosen for the cover of the book, illustrates with admirable synthesis this idea. The photograph portrays a man walking across a field, carrying with him what seems the silhouette of a bell tower. This is a powerful symbol throughout Europe, of one’s native village and by extension, of one’s roots. Visocchi’s image seems indeed to suggest an interesting compromise between the polarised notions of a stable, fixed identity and of cosmopolitan uprootedness. "It's great to have roots, as long as you can take them with you", as Gertrude Stein replied to someone who asked her if, after 40 years residing in France, she was worried about losing her American roots.

As I try to demonstrate in my book, many Scottish authors, from Sir Walter Scott to Lewis Grassic Gibbon, from John Galt to Hugh MacDiarmid make the idea of (national) identity problematic rather than offering us a single definition, thus shaping what seems indeed a modern idea of nationalism. There are many ways to explain this. One is that after the Union of Parliaments, Scotland experienced a process of cultural dislocation. As Salman Rushdie has pointed out, from a dislocated subject’s perspective reality is never “what it is”, rather it is perceived as a transient, artificial construction. The dislocated subject knows very well, “that reality is an artefact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artefact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of course, be unmade.” Rushdie refers to migrants in particular, but the experience of dislocation can be cultural as well as physical/geographical, and Scots, as I explain in my study, at different times and in different ways, underwent both processes, encouraging a ‘postmodern’ relativisation of absolute concepts as early as the 19th century.

Finally, Scottish literature, for the above mentioned reasons, can inspire a fruitful meditation upon the relevance and topicality of ‘national identity’ as a category of identification – a category which we may like or disapprove of, but against which we still have to measure ourselves. Scholars today claim with good right that the nation has become an entirely superseded organisational model and is bound to decline or even disappear in the 21st century. Academic discourse, in a similar way, has neglected the ‘local’ for a long time in favour of wider and more comprehensive (or ‘universal’) critical and theoretical approaches. Yet the nation – as an ‘imagined community’ – is still a powerful form of identity group for many people in Europe and in the world. Many scholars are now realising that between extreme localism and sheer globalism there must be some ‘safer’, in between option, or a way of ‘reading the global in the local’ – of striving for glocality.

There is no doubt that these are exciting times for Scottish literary studies. I am not referring to the subject itself, quite obviously, which is as exciting today as it was twenty or two hundred years ago, but to the fact that it is at last establishing itself as an international field of studies. This is bound to yield interesting fruits in the near future. Scottish literature has gradually emerged as a distinct tradition, and as a separate field of studies. It is now time to reveal and explore the networks of reciprocal making that connect it to England, to other European countries and, via the British Empire, to the rest of the world. We all need to reconcile the local and global through an informed awareness of the balance between global coherences and local differences and of the changes wrought in their relation in the course of time. Scotland’s cultural and literary history is but one tessera of a larger mosaic. Its specificity, however, is as essential to the whole as any other of its parts.

Carla Sassi, Edinburgh Saltire Society, 2005.

Carla Sassi is Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Verona. She specialises in Scottish literature and has published and lectured widely on this subject; both in Italy and in other countries. Her most recent book, Imagined Scotlands (2002), is a study on post-Union Scottish literature. She has a special interest in women's writing and in the literature of post-colonial societies. She is Honorary Patron of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.