10.10.1996

Human contradiction

From the debate surrounding the novels of Irvine Welsh, Phil Rudge argues that under today’s cultural conditions only artists who choose the lines of most resistance are able to even approach a committed literature

Art is a social product. The concept of artists as asocial beings, blessed with genius and divine access to inspiration allowing them to inhabit a heaven (or hell) on earth, is an ahistorical myth reaching at least as far back as the 19th century Romantics.

There is a kernel of truth here because the development of capitalism has marginalised artists. In today’s conditions of reaction and alienation, artistic subject matter is necessarily of a fragmented and inhuman society - this is true even of postmodernist patch-ups. Yet, given the degree of estrangement mentioned, pursuing a rigorous materialist analysis and criticism of art works can appear less important today than making broader polemical sweeps over terrain that seems to merely reflect and be unable to change capitalist cultural hegemony. It is precisely this kind of methodological conflict that has emerged recently around the work of the Scottish writer, Irvine Welsh.

Ecstasy (Jonathan Cape 1996, pp276), Welsh’s latest work, is a collection of three novella’s with the sub-title, Three tales of chemical romance. A quote on the fly-leaf from singer Iggy Pop goes: “They say that death kills you, but death doesn’t kill you. Boredom and indifference kill you.” The implication is clear even if the logic is not: Welsh wants the book and its readers to challenge personal and cultural feelings of apathy. Discovering whether he succeeds or even whether he should try has proven a vexed question for some parts of the left.

The June 29 edition of Socialist Worker had an article from Julie Waterson entitled, ‘Is Welsh anti-working class?’ Going in with all guns blazing, she decided within the space of a few hundred words that “At best Welsh is contradictory, at worst he is a total reactionary.” And, “His books are unpleasant because they are anti-working class.”

After several letters were published in subsequent issues, suggesting Waterson was being a little hard on Welsh, the August 3 issue included two letters effectively sealing the argument and consigning the author to a bourgeois writer’s hell. Thus,

“His much copied literary style is reactionary ... spelling out working class speech phonetically presupposes a well read, usually middle class, reader. Welsh himself speaks impeccable ‘Morningside English’ and he has not noticed that life in Edinburgh’s housing estates is characterised by boredom” (my emphasis).

The insinuation here and the overall impression from Socialist Worker is that Welsh’s books are excessive, there is too much going on and - because working class life is not full of sex, drug taking and idle fantasy - he is guilty of deceit and fostering false illusions in the working class. That must make him an enemy of the proletariat and thereby deserving of denunciation.

This rotting pile of ignorance only serves to concentrate attention on the deep mistrust and intolerance in the Socialist Workers Party towards imaginative production. Fear is the key - unless creative work has been rubber-stamped by the party leadership, then best stick to what you know (like Shelly) or something uncontroversial. After all, in today’s crazy world only the SWP see sense, only the SWP truly understands. This is socialist hyper-realism, where at the moment the party can choose to convert fictional representations into treacherous distortions of real life - whatever version of real life the SWP is promulgating at the time. We should never forget what happened to writers under Stalin who fell foul of the imaginative deficit at the heart of the Soviet bureaucracy.

To understand Irvine Welsh and his work in terms of a working class political and artistic consciousness is a much more complicated task than merely treating his books as an empirical series of fatalistic mechanical representations, where the author is morally culpable for each moment in the text or every movement of the narrative. It is essential to understand that texts do not simply reproduce the single voice of an individual (the author). This approach merely reflects the more general process of atomisation and reifies a writer as an isolated individual, disconnected from political, national and artistic influence and tradition. At its best this method can lead to existentialism; at its very worst you end up in the virtual revolutionary world of Julie Waterson and the SWP - where fact is indeed stranger than fiction.

“The various theories of creation all ignore the process of making; they omit any account of production ... All speculation over man, the creator, is intended to eliminate a real knowledge: the creative process is, precisely, not a process, a labour; it is a religious formula to be found on the funeral monument” (Pierre Macheray A theory of literary production London 1978).

Potential audiences have always produced specific types of art. The rise of the novel in the 18th century with its focus on private experience, love and individualism was closely related to the rise of the new middle class, advanced printing and distribution techniques and more leisure time. As we approach the end of the 20th century however, the novel seems increasingly in crisis, its form no longer being able to contain the contents of an increasingly globalised and fractured consciousness. There are many conflicting theories as to where the novel might go to renew its former vigour or indeed whether the novel form has stopped being a viable form of art itself. James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is often chosen as a point of closure. Its absorption of dream, reality, the vernacular and high-flown erudition into a river of words that - when it reaches its end - flows back to the beginning of the book, has been seen as unsurpassable. Almost the limit and end of an ideology that placed the well exiled genius as the guide for civilisation.

Recently, writers like Salman Rushdie, Margaret Attwood and Milan Kundera have a new spin on modernism’s tired history. Magic realism attempts a renewal of the novel’s linear form and seeks to decentre western cultural hegemony. Crucially though, none of these writers recognise class antagonism as the motor of history. Their writing reflects the contemporary divide between globalisations and nationalism. The result is too often a hyper-ventilating novel of ideas, knowledgeable about everything except the deepest contradictions (see Umberto Eco).

Postmodernism has sought to understand the death of the tragic genius and replace it with a wider, more popular ideology, where everything has been said before and nothing is new except for technological progress. As with magic realism - a literary category that comes under the umbrella of postmodernist theory - the working class is absent. Perversely, this absence provides the theory with its energy. Because of this negative dynamic the traps are set for any working class writer wishing to shift the ideological terrain, to challenge today’s period of deep reaction. Just how do you negotiate, through necessarily partial means, fundamental difference?

Irvine Welsh’s first novel, Trainspotting (1993), succeeded in creating the most vital of contemporary imaginative transgressions - an assertion of social complexity that, through its claim, manages to ossify bourgeois literary form, whilst saturating it with working class consciousness. The book had been published in parts in various underground magazines which gives it an episodic, serial form. The collision of vignettes with a linear narrative, creates a polyphonic structure, allowing different voices to wax and wane as situations unfurl.

In a partial sense, Julie Waterson is right to say that Welsh writes about an underclass and not the working class. The main characters in Trainspotting are mostly the young men of Edinburgh either bombed out by heroin or sozzled by drink. But where Waterson and too many others on the left are wrong in their belief that by portraying such characters Welsh is trying to kill off the working class. Quite the opposite: it is his decision to imagine the most disadvantaged, the most problematical areas of society, and then to mobilise their humanity and struggles, which electrifies his work. Under today’s cultural conditions only artists who choose the lines of most resistance are able to even approach an engaged, committed literature.

Irvine Welsh’s use of the vernacular in narrative and dialogue form is revolutionary. In the tradition of Burns and the communist poet, Hugh Macdairmid, he uses the Scottish idiom to breach conditioned responses to culture and class. But more than them (and James Kelman) he is able, by expropriating postmodernism’s deconstruction of the traditional mediators - author, narrator and protagonists - to inject voices not weighed down by an unbearable bourgeois lightness. Instead these voices contain the most human contradiction of oppression and hope.

Welsh’s second novel, Marabou stork nightmares (1995) takes the notion of the death of the working class a stage further. Roy Strang is lying in a coma, his consciousness shifting between a Biggles-like adventure fantasy, voices in the hospital ward trying to wake him and a deeply repressed memory of his part in gang rape. By counterbalancing these different stages of consciousness, Welsh explores in a much more experimental vein than Trainspotting the concrete and metaphorical implications of crime and punishment.

Ecstasy, Welsh’s latest book, attempts in many respects to give a more up-beat, redemptive focus to his fiction. Inevitably, creative fissures ensue. In his earlier work it was the laying out of the whole artistic process - the descent, excavation and rejuvenation that gave his work deeper meaning. Ecstasy seems too keen on providing answers rather than continuing the brave meaning. A drug and dance culture, no matter how exciting, can only ever partially answer the larger problem of capitalism. To mistake a challenge for a solution is to concentrate on survival instead of progress. It is to allow all the fetishism, all the religion, back in to square the circle. To fix rave culture as a permanent chill-out zone, a constant respite from the war on the streets, is to do capitalism’s bidding, by fixing categories and ensuring that movement becomes infected with nostalgia.

A silly man, Harry Gibson, who adapted Trainspotting for the stage, said recently in The Observer: “I don’t mind selling out at all ... We are all capitalists up to our little necks.” And: “Now and then Irvine Welsh grabs me in a headlock and shouts ‘massive respect’ in my ear.”

I think Irvine Welsh should concentrate on tightening the headlock some more and question who and what really deserves massive respect. As for the left, if we insist on posing as spectral policemen, we will only ever serve to arrest our own movement, locking ourselves permanently within a prison-house of language.