Alasdair Gray’s new book, Independence: An Argument for Home Rule, pragmatically yet problematically emphasises Scotland’s polity over Scottish identity in the bid for independence
On the night of the USA’s 2008 presidential election, I bunkered in my carrel in Bucknell University’s Bertrand Library. It was the best shelter I had from the inconclusive battle cries lobbed on the quad outside: students in support of then-Senator Barack Obama squared against students rallying for Republican Senator John McCain. Change, both sides claimed, was imminent; this election, both camps asserted, was a pivotal moment in American history. From the safety of my carrel, I followed the returns online and panicked: what if this election isn’t the dawn of change but another hour in the long day of the status quo? I opened a new tab in my web browser and booked my flight away from American uncertainty.
I resolved on Scotland, that myth-steeped and rugged land of my own ancestors, that cradle of philosophy and literature. I would fly out after the semester ended and determine my fate, then, when I set foot on Scottish soil. Scotland would be — for the duration of at least two weeks — my site of intellectual and spiritual refuge.
My return to the United States was too hopeful by half; a half decade of the Obama Administration’s drone wars and feeble domestic policy are stark indicators that the 2008 election was not the epoch-shifting moment prophesied by his campaign. Regardless of the outcome, the same cannot be said for the 18 September 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, which will affirm Scotland’s identity — as an independent nationstate or a constituent nation in the United Kingdom — for the foreseeable future.
As an avid reader of independence-minded Scots writers including Robert Burns, Catherine Carswell, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Alasdair Gray, I sympathise with the #YesScotland cause. But, as Gray is quick to remind the readers of his latest polemic Independence: An Argument for Home Rule (Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate, 2014), this isn’t my vote. “This book,” Gray pronounces, “is written for Scots, by whom I mean anyone in Scotland who will vote in the September referendum to make Scotland a more or less independent nation.” The broader discussion of global Scots culture is of no import here, nor are the millions who self-identify as Scot, despite the accidents of geography, temporality and birth that keep us from our ancestral homeland. Gray remarks that he “will not waste time by discussing Scottish identity, as vague a ghost as the identity of any other millions of people.”
This tactic is wise, yet ideologically fraught. Gray abandons the political expedient of Scottish identity so as to prioritise the question of how a hypothetical, neutral Scottish polity would operate in opposition to the Orwellian modus operandi of Barack Obama’s America and David Cameron’s Great Britain. Indeed, Gray’s disapproval of the Anglo-American military-industrial complex recurs throughout this slender volume.
In the first chapter, Gray elegantly stages this confrontation in the confined space of his doctor’s waiting room, where he and the waiting room’s magazines serve as proxies for Scotland and Britain respectively. Gray cringes at the militaristic implications of adverts and job postings in these magazines: “That is how Big Brother now tells smart youngsters: ‘WAR IS PEACE! JOIN US! THE MONEY’S GOOD!” Because we are inured to these subtexts, Gray concludes that the current generation is “a docile lot,” unaware of the human costs of the military-industrial complex. Gray concludes that an independent Scotland is “[o]n my horizon the ray of hope” against the Anglo-American war machines.
Independence progresses from this waiting-room vignette through a “a brief history in twelve brisk verses” of Britain’s military conquests, before evaluating a legion of explanations for Scotland’s difference from England: geography, intellectual history, political corruption, British bureaucracy and the rejection of prominent Scots (i.e., Sir Sean Connery and Burns expert Elspeth King) from Scottish arts advocacy. Gray’s Independence is a time capsule of Scottish grievances, a scant collection suggesting a more extensive pattern of wrongs.
However, this volume reaches its emotional apex not in Gray’s glosses of Scottish woes, but in an open letter to Paddington Station’s unknown soldier. This letter stands as a civilian counterpart to Wilfred Owen’s essential Great War poem Dulce Et Decorum Est. Bagpipe music stirs Gray to an epiphany during a remembrance service: “the men named on the monument had been fooled into thinking they were fighting for a better Britain, while those who had died in World War II had certainly fought a wicked system of government.” Such manipulation of soldiers is a manipulation of the electorate. Gray’s forlorn letter to the unknown soldier is a tacit promise that a neutral, liberated Scotland will oppose any injustice.
Gray readily avows his utopian agenda, which he packages in a wild yet elegant collision of personal essay, lyric poem, national biography, revisionist history, letters, and party platforms. These different façades represent Gray’s strategy for resolving the nascent Scottish nation’s identity crisis: “The problem of every nation,” Gray concludes, “is being governed by folk with a completely different perspective — a different view of life — from those who elect them.” The book’s 13 sections, multiple subgenres, and assimilated voices practice this sensibility. Yet, this experimentation only represents the many guises of Scotland’s electorate, not the visage of a polity.
So, what is the political face of Gray’s utopian Scotland, this creature in potentia? Gray’s vision is a rough beast left unformed as the country slouches toward the referendum. We cannot acquit Gray for this oversight: Scottish nationalist writings commonly articulate programs for expanding Scots’ influence at home and abroad, as when MacDiarmid advocated for “a rising tide of Scottish national consciousness” through “a thorough-going reconcentration, in our schools and universities and elsewhere, of Scottish literature.” The consequence is that Independence re-deploys the empty rhetoric of party banter: it is a glittering hoard of hoped-for results, without the treasure map of policy.
Gray admits that he, “a semi-alcoholic, octogenarian invalid[,] was not the kind of politican Scotland needed,” and he advocates for young politicians with “imaginative, independent minds.” Gray does not identify any of these “brave minds,” leaving Scots with First Minister Alex Salmond’s problem-riddled plans for Scotland’s financial system, its stakes in North Sea oil and national security. These gaps shift the spotlight to the polemic’s further inconsistences. Exemplifying this is Gray’s disavowal of Sir Walter Scott’s invented stereotype, “that most Scots were mountaineers who wore tartan plaids” — even as Independence proposes a rigidly masculine history of Scotland that celebrates its great men. With the notable exception of novelist Naomi Mitchison and a glancing reference to his own wife, Gray — like America’s John Adams — has forgotten the women, an unwitting reenactment of Sir Walter at his most misogynistic.
Gray’s Scotland is defined by its potential, by its difference from America and England. It’s this strange otherness that first drew me to Scotland in 2008, and that entices me still. Like Gray, I too believe in the possibilities still buried in the Scottish earth. But neither this optimism nor Gray’s utopian vision resolves the central question at stake in the referendum: what is Scotland’s identity? The referendum is the first premise in that answer.
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