Spiraliform Narratives and the Question of Identity in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and 1982, Janine

Working Towards A Better Nation: Innovation and Entrapment in the fiction of Alasdair Gray

“…The only feature whose direct relevance to Lanark might go uncontested, in fact, is again the process of reflecting contemporary reality, to "communicate the feeling of what it was like to be alive at the time." 17 In abandoning his epic intent, Nastler explains, he must consider "the fact that my world model would be a hopeless one," 18 and in this respect it is his continued commitment to the mapping function of the epic form which leads to his otherwise deviating from its expected pattern. As Liam McIlvanney concisely expresses it, the strategy of Gray's fantastic narratives is to provide "working models of the world they seek to condemn."…”

“…19 It is in this implicit moralisation, conducted through the representation of reality rather than commentary upon it, that Gray marks his political engagement. The seeming inescapability of entrapping systems is thus in its most basic regard the effect of this condemnatory, representative thrust, which sets a pattern for Jock McLeish, dreaming his own mastery in a world realised as "a security installation powered by the sun and only crackable by death" 20 or Victoria McCandless, "taught freedom" in a world where women "are allowed to decide nothing for themselves." 21 In representing his protagonists in perpetual struggle with this reified allegory of the contemporary world-system, Gray may well leave himself open to charges of accepting systems to the extent that necessarily limited victories are represented in a positive light.…”

“…Thaw/Lanark, having escaped Glasgow for Unthank, Unthank for the institute, and the institute for Unthank again, finds his final moment of peace through escaping the darkness associated with their systems of repression, "glad to see the light in the sky." 23 Yet this light is accompanied by the announcement of Lanark's forthcoming death, an announcement whose source -a chamberlain from "the ministry of earth" 24 -and specificity -"[y]ou will die tomorrow at seven minutes after noon" 25 -both suggest that this naturally insurmountable enclosure is, if not wholly conflated with repressive political structures, at least organised with the same bureaucratic precision. Several features of these hard-won freedoms do however stand in the path of any attempt to translate them into implicit collaboration.…”

“…The creature, embodiment of the capitalist system, may be, like The Syndicate in 1982, Janine, "worldwide and irresistible," 31 but this reified vision is only partial. These and the other entities by which Gray recurrently represents capitalism, although suggestive of some inhuman agency, are, by being cast as conspiracies -in this case "[a] conspiracy which owns and manipulates everything for profit" 32 -consistently signalled as the result of collective human activity. Further, as Monboddo suggests when he explains to Lanark that "[l]eaders are the effects, not the causes of changes.…”

“…34 In the case of the creature this ignorance displayed by its constituent parts extends to the (im)moral values at their centre; as Noakes laments, much of the creature is "owned by gentle, powerless people who don't know they are cannibals and wouldn't believe if you told them." 35 The personal cannibalism which Lanark eschews and the systemic cannibalism of the creature are not only alike in kind, but are the direct, if unwitting, result of each other.…”