• 2 “Scotland Reads Irvine Welsh in Psychic Defence”, Irvine Welsh inteviewed by Maria Jenskey, Septemb (...)

I particularly detest British fiction because you can never get past the idea that here is someone sitting down at a desk writing. […] I don’t use any literary references because literature just feeds off itself—it feeds off its own culture. I try to feed off contemporary culture like video/music/acid house, the whole kind of drug culture, all the kinds of experiences that are working around that so that the book is about emotions rather than intellect.2

2In spite of this highly sarcastic—psychic?—defence, Welsh does seem to derive at least the fantastic method of composition from his predecessors of the 1980s. Indeed, both his own and Gray’s story start out as typical modern Scottish fantasies, in the sense that Colin Manlove ascribes to that genre, namely that of fiction that involves the supernatural, while taking the specifically Scottish shape of a quest inward engaged in by an isolated hero who is pulled back to his roots. The critic contends that despite the diversity, even heterogeneity of Scottish fantasy literature, they all have in common their self-centredness:

• 3 Colin Manlove, Scottish Fantasy Literature: A Critical Survey, 4th ed., Edinburgh, Canongate Academ (...)

There is always the sense of a pull backwards, or even downwards, to one’s roots. From where he is, the Scots fantasist seems to journey back to his native land.3

3Added to this central feature is a sense of barrenness, even violence. Both Welsh’s and Gray’s stories seem to conform superficially but emphatically to this description of Scottish fantasy, with the definitely local, or at least restricted scope of Welsh’s title, his use of the Scottish idiom throughout the story, and with the insistence on Scottish ballads and myths in Gray’s story. The opening of “The Granton Star Cause” serves to establish a sense of the local that the story will keep up throughout:

It hit Boab Coyle hard, right in the centre of his chest. He stood at the bar, open-mouthed, as his mate Kev Hyslop explained the position to him.
Sorry, Boab, but we aw agree. We cannae guarantee ye a game. Wuv goat Tambo n wee Grant now. This team’s gaun places.
Gaun places!? Gaun Places!? Churches League Division Three!
It’s a kick aboot, ya pretentious cunt. A fucking kick aboot! (GSC, p. 120)

4Welsh reinforces this effect of banality by immersing the reader even deeper into the crude reality of his characters’ lives through his use of an in médias res incipit. In addition, in both “The Granton Star Cause” and “The Comedy of the White Dog”, the protagonist is soon isolated and starts on a quest about either the identity of the dog or the causes of his own misfortunes.

1. A zone

5The illustration that appears on the first page of “The Comedy of the White Dog” adopts and complexifies the traditional pattern: stylised thistles announce the heavy emphasis on localism, while the pet dog might provisionally be seen as an indication of homeliness, all the more so as the drawing is integrated into the part of the text that renders most systematically the routine aspect of every day life by mentioning such details as the icing of a cake, or by using first names only for the characters, as well as comforting assertions such as “It’s going to be a nice little family party” (CWD, p. 19). Yet, the dog of the illustration appears as grinning in a strange—because human—way, and with its tongue unnaturally lolling out of its mouth through clenched teeth. In addition, the dog’s head seems to have been drawn at a different angle from the body. This can be interpreted as advance notice of the fact that what governs this story is the concept of dislocation, all the more so as the metaphor is immediately taken up by the text, with a visual allusion to “bright patterns that did not harmonise” (CWD, p. 18) in the description of the house, and with the use of the musical metaphor of discord (CWD, p. 19). The result is that from the outset, the reader is transported into a space of fundamental hesitation, or, as Tzvetan Todorov puts it:

• 4 Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Paris, Seuil, 1970, p. 35.

« J’en vins presque à croire » : voilà la formule qui résume l’esprit du fantastique. La foi absolue comme l’incrédulité totale nous mèneraient hors du fantastique ; c’est l’hésitation qui lui donne vie.4

6The ambition to explore the undecided territory, the margin of a dialectics, is an element that can be detected in Welsh’s claim that he has moved to a different source of inspiration from the traditional, and in Gray’s repeated comments on his interest in the “in-betweenness” of two stages, most famously evidenced in the dual generic attribution of Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) and dwelt upon in many interviews, such as the following one:

• 5 Mark Axelrod, “An Epistolary interview, Mostly with Alasdair Gray”, The Review of Contemporary Fict (...)

I remember a children’s prose version of the Odyssey read when nine or ten. The idea of a voyage from one magic island to another gripped really hard. Of course the quest was to get home again, but the journey interested me more than the hope of arrival.5

7The result of this concentration on the transitory in the text is that Gray’s story, and Welsh’s, take on a decidedly meta-fictional aspect which, in effect, blurs the borderline between reality and fiction. However, Welsh manages to perform this rather commonplace exploration in an unusual manner, by calling into question the psychological realism of his story, thus providing a mirror image within the text of the forces working on it from the outside. The character’s elderly, respectable working-class parents are turned into “sleazy, lecherous bastards” (GSC, p. 122) who engage in sadomasochistic sexual practices, providing a jarring, distorted counterpart to the supernatural transformation of the main character into a fly: the common taste for human excrement, as well as the reversal of power which is at the core of both sadomasochistic encounters and the story, stresses the shared strangeness and therefore the link between the two realms. The assumption is that the supernatural transformation in the main protagonist appears as more rational than the supposedly realistic element of the plot. The text makes this fundamental reversal clear by juxtaposing in the figure of the mother the stereotypical reactions with the more sulphurous—stranger in the etymological sense of the term—facet of her personality:

— Ah’m gauny shite in your mooth, Boab Coyle! It’s whit wi baith want! Dinnae deny it!
— Naw! Don’t shite in ma mooth… don’t… shite in ma mooth… shite in ma mooth… shite in ma mooth… Shite in ma mooth!
[…]
— Hiya Cathy. How are you doing, love?… Good… Dad’s fine… How’s the wee felly?… Aw, the wee lamb! N Jimmy… Good.
Listen love, wir just sitting doon to oor tea. Ah’ll phone you back in aboot half an hour, n will huv a proper blether… Right love… Bye the now. (GSC, pp. 134–5)

8In “The Comedy of the White Dog”, the very first words, echoing as they do the incipit of fairy tales, also serve to heighten the sense of a world that is suspended between two possible interpretations:

One a sunny afternoon, two men went by car into the suburbs to the house of a girl called Nan. (CWD, p. 17)

9What this incipit emphasises is indeed the magic mixed with the familiar, or rather the uncanny, the borderline, the moment when the story hesitates between two possibilities, what Brian McHale rephrased after Todorov as:

• 6 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, London and New York, Routledge, 1987, p. 75.

The fantastic, in other words, involves a face-to-face confrontation between the possible (the “real”) and the impossible, the normal and the paranormal.6

10What Welsh and Gray are staging in their stories is a literalisation of that commonplace statement made about the fantastic: a confrontation in the physical sense of the word, a fight to death in both cases for the supremacy of one or the other of the two realms, which ends up in a rewriting of the fundamental question raised by the fantastic as a genre. In both stories, the vehicle for the intrusion of the supernatural is an animal which, in both cases, is violently killed. The destruction is carried out with a glee which can only be attributed to the metaphorical design behind the story: that of representing the process of staging the confrontation itself. In “The Comedy of the White Dog”, the barbarity of the annihilation of the animal emblematic of the space occupied between reality and fantasy is an indicator of the violence with which the text tackles the cliché:

With a great yell, he seized the beast’s hind leg with his free hand, sprang up and swung its whole body against the wall. […] He felt its head crush with the impact, swung and battered it twice more on the wall, leaving a jammy red stain each time. (p. 35)

11In “The Granton Star Cause”, the same semantic field presides over the destruction, which however is presented to the reader from the opposite angle, owing to the focalization of the story by the fly:

Doreen […] picked up The Evening News as she put down the phone and sprang over to the wall. Boab didn’t see the threat until the rolled paper was hurtling towards him. He took off, but the paper caught him and knocked him back against the wall at great speed. (GSC, p. 135)

2. Contrastive banality

Boab was totally deflated. There seemed to be an almost translucent aura around this man. He spoke with certainty and conviction. Boab almost believed him. He didn’t know what to believe anymore.
If you’re God, what ur ye daein wastin yir time oan me?
[…]
Boab found God’s whingeing pathetic. — You fucking toss. If ah hud your powers. (GSC, p. 129)

13The second opportunity of resistance is offered to a different character which, in strict accordance with what happens in Kafta’s Metamorphosis, remains just as soberly cool-headed as his predecessor on meeting his former friend in the shape of a large bluebottle. As Patricia Waugh pointed out, the attendant disorientation of the reader forces him to pursue a more thorough questioning of his vision of reality:

• 8 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London and New York (...)

The effect […] is close to that of a schizophrenic construction of reality […], where information is not processed, where metalingual insufficiency results in a failure to distinguish between hierarchies of messages and contexts. Here the historical world and the alternative or fantasy world merge. In metafiction they are always held in a state of tension, and the relationship between them—between “play” and “reality”—is the main focus of the text.8

14“The Comedy of the White Dog” presents a graphic re-phrasing of the same duality, which plays on the pictorial notion of plane organisation. Three of the four illustrations of the story effectively point to the overlapping of our conception of reality and the supernatural by featuring a drawing both of the title’s white dog—soon turned into the icon of supernatural transformation in this story—and of the young girl who, by her sheer humanity, conventionally stands for the world of external reality. In the three illustrations, the dog successively appears in the foreground, the background and the foreground again, thus graphically indicating the possibility for endless reversals of our conception of reality and fiction. Those strategies all foreground the exploration of what Gray calls “the journey” or, in the words of Margaret Elphinstone:

• 9 Margaret Elphinstone, “Fantasising Texts: Scottish Fantasy Today”, ASLS Conference: 14 May 2000, <w (...)

[Scottish fantasy] destabilises contemporary notions of what is “real”, drawing upon past traditions, dreams, subconscious hopes and fears about the supernatural, and giving them a validity which is at least equal to, and often stronger than, the rational laws that supposedly govern the external world. My reading of Scottish fantasy suggests to me not so much a binary opposition: real/fantastic, as a demolishing of the boundary that divides the real from supernatural. […] In this re-location the borderlands become central, the liminal place where action takes place, and, in the plot, where the plot can start to happen.9

15The assumption made by Elphinstone here is that the work of art takes place in the space left by the simultaneous creation and destruction of the limit between the real and the supernatural. In that respect, Gray’s strategy of including a scholar to rationalise the white dog out of the fantastic and simultaneously having this scholar lead the story inexorably back to its uncanny world restricts the scope of application of this story strictly within the narrow boundaries of the space in-between, while making its very delineation problematic. In a typical self-contradictory movement, the Canadian scholar is the only outsider—or non-Scot—in the story, while also being the only character who bears a Scottish surname, Mclver:

What is this white dog?
McIver answered in the tone of someone starting a lecture: Well-known references to the white dog occur in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, in Chaucer’s unfinished “Cook’s Tale”, in the picaresque novels of the Basque poet Jose Mompou, and in your Scottish Border Ballads. (CWD, p. 32)

16Here, Gray resorts to his favourite technique of proliferation of clues designed to contradict one another, such as intertextual overkill, the subtle mixture of the real with the apocryphal, with the usual result of making the boundary—whether textual or generic—an increasingly elusive one.

3. Subtextuality

17In addition to an erasure of the division between fantasy and reality, Gray and Welsh are in effect reversing Elphinstone’s statement by interchanging the status of respectively “real life” and obviously fantastic imaginings, thereby challenging not only our notions of the place occupied by fiction in postmodern fantasy, but also the reality status of our very conception of “the real”. Anne Varty, writing about Gray’s short stories, notes that:

• 10 Anne Varty, “How the Laws of Fiction Lie: A Reading of Gray’s Shorter Stories”, in Robert Crawford (...)

Gray has a fine sense of our capacity to confuse description with explanation and his imagination luxuriates in the creation of possible worlds which expose assumptions we make about our own.10

18Both Gray’s and Welsh’s stories reverse the conventional precedence of the real world over the possible world by effectively opening on to a subtext made up of widely disparate threads. Gray builds the subtext mostly on intertextuality, while Welsh achieves a similar goal by resorting mainly to heteroglossia. The result, however, goes beyond mere reciprocal challenging.

4. Absurd

19Welsh’s subtext is made primarily apparent by its heavy reliance on stereotyped languages. “The Granton Star Cause” integrates a multitude of idiolects that comment upon one another. It borrows from popular cliché—“friendship had to be put on the back burner” (p. 120), or “having one’s cake and eating it” (p. 122)—or from legal vocabulary—“mutually advantageous to both parties” (p. 122); from foreign languages—“Wir finished. Finito. Kaput” (p. 123)—and Marxist clichés—“so ah don’t want any lumpen-proletarian malcontents threatening ma investment” (p. 126). In addition, the text covers the semantic field of economics in the general sense of the term, with such occurrences as “it’s aw down to market positioning, Boab. We have to find our niche in the market” (p. 127), or the language of abuse, as in “ya fahhkin slag, cunt” (p. 124). The resulting heteroglossia, added to the deliberate phonetic transcription of the Scottish voice draws, as in Gray’s story, the reader’s attention to reality as a linguistic construct. The fantasy is put to metafictional use in the sense that, by making the confrontation between the hyperrealist world and the parallel world as jarring as possible, the text manages to induce just the possibility of a reversal of the status of fiction and magic: writing one’s own hyperrealistic fiction cannot escape the traps and boundaries of linguistic determinism. The sheer proliferation, hence artificiality of the description makes it possible for this narrative to be seen in turn as an episode in someone else’s fantasy, especially in a story that relies on metalepsis for its uncanny dislocation. This is the meaning that can be attributed to Boab’s mother’s phone conversation with her daughter. By including the emphatically realistic into her strange sex ritual, it reverses the traditional precedence of one narrated mode over the other. The same can be said of the fly’sinterior monologue, which integrates psychoanalytical clichés by literalising them into coincidence with its own parallel universe:

There was one aspect, however, where it was like father like son. He knew he could not trust himself to see his mother’s shite. It would be too arousing, that succulent, hot sour faeces, all going into his father’s mouth. Boab felt his first conscious twinges of an Oedipus complex, at twenty years old, and in a metamorphosised state. (GSG, p. 135)

• 12 Patricia Waugh, Harvest of the Sixties, op. cit., pp. 197–98.

In the eighties […], male writers too […] perceived the advantages of the fantastic for presenting dislocated worlds or politically motivated dissections of the nation. Two prominent Scottish voices, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, drew on fantastic strategies to construct a defamiliarized vision of their native Glasgow, motivated, as the title of one of their novels suggested, by A Disaffection.12

21The result of Welsh’s handling of the dislocation is a shock to the ontological structure of the realistic universe. The shockwave is destructive rather than merely unsettling; it seems to bring the parallel world, as well as the referential world that is portrayed, to a halt, in effect literalising Cairns Craig’s statement, made about Welsh’s most famous novel Trainspotting that:

• 13 Cairns Craig, The Modem Scottish Novel, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, p. 131.

The world of urban Scotland is no longer a stage of history […] it is a world where history has ceased to operate.13

Ah made yous cunts in ma ain image. Yous git oan wi it; yous fucking well sort it oot. That cunt Nietzsche wis wide ay the mark whin he sais ah wis deid. Ah’m no deid; ah jist dinnae gie a fuck. It’s no fir me tae sort every cunt’s problems oot. Nae other cunt gies a fuck so why should ah? Eh? (GSC, p. 129)

23The sense of stasis is not only enforced by the sheer nihilism of this address, but also by the circularity that governs the structure of the short story, which concludes on Boab’s friend Kev going through the very same throes as Boab does at the beginning of the story. It is also encapsulated in the name given to the central character. “Boab Coyle” is both his and his father’s name, thereby foregrounding repetition; the surname is a homophone of “coil”, which gives the repetition its spiral effect. In addition, the word “coy”, suggested in the name, with its negative connotation, echoes the annoyance in God’s address. Finally the Christian name “Bob”—preferred to “Rob” or even “Rab”—being a palindrome, it indicates the hesitancy, the reversibility of the worlds, while the added “a” stresses localism, giving a definitely Scottish background to the stagnation of both worlds.

5. Intertextuality

25This iconic repetition of the notion of dramatic presentation of events also paves the way for a thematic exploitation that rests on the sheer visuality of any illustration, with its obvious allusion to voyeurism. The historical characters brought into the story serve to heighten this connection. Of the four historical realemes, namely D. H. Lawrence, Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw, three were notorious in their time for their writing on sexuality and sexual freedom. This is another effective means of conveying to the reader a sense of a possible reversal between the (historically) real and the fictional: here, four writers, or producers of fiction in the historical world are turned into elements of fiction in the story. To make this point clear, Gray’s metalepsis introduces the four writers neither as characters nor through their books, but as framed photographs, thereby self-consciously drawing attention to the construction of his intertextual zone by referring to frame-breaking.

26The insistence of the text on the constant grinning of the dog makes for a sort of dramatic irony, in addition to intertextually introducing magic into the text—with its obvious reference to the Cheshire Cat and therefore to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. Only the dog knows more than the characters, a fact which turns him into a metaphor of the spectator of the play. One more time, in a typical Grayian interaction between the verbal and the iconic, this feature is reinforced by the central illustration. The characters in this drawing are not turned towards the scene they are witnessing as one would expect, but are facing the reader/viewer. The latter is therefore once again substituted to the character as a spectator. What the illustration achieves is an easily recognizable literalisation of the dead metaphor that identifies the reader as the spectator of the plot/play, thus questioning it in a truly economical way while making room for a subtextual, parallel world which might restore some metaphorical power to the cliché.

6. Dislocating the frames

30What the story finally achieves is a playful formal reworking on its own final sentence which claims that “He would never again be bound by dull laws” (CWD, p. 36). Gray moves so far away from the dull laws of fiction-writing as to create a sort of “ghost text” that can only be recreated imaginatively by the reader. Welsh’s story seems to abide by the same motto, even though his blasé pessimism puts the suspension inherent in the fantastic genre to literal use in order to create a picture of reality that is arrested in a non-zone. Both writers successfully re-examine our assumptions on the metafictional use of fantasy to an extent that seems to fictionalise the very sphere of the reader. Just as the white dog seemingly gets the upper hand on both the reader and the text, the un-godlike God of the not so sacred Granton Star cause might exhibit the same power. In a world that finally and meticulously spirals in on itself, who might be next on God’s list is anybody’s guess. The hypothetical, provisional or maybe simply unlikely suggestion that lurks under this circular conclusion to Welsh’s story is certain at least to broaden the white dog’s grin.