'Out of the quarrel with ourselves...'

The Literature of Scotland: Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century

'Out of the quarrel with others, we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves poetry', says Yeats, and there's rhetoric and poetry and quarrels enough in the long tale of Scotland's literature for the phrase to have a special resonance for anyone brave enough to try to chart this particular story. Nor should we look for a single narrative, for there have been many different and at times competing voices to be heard, and the history of Scottish literature is a history of revivals, rediscoveries and re-interpretations as successive generations of writers and critics have sought to identify, or to make and remake the tradition in keeping with the times and their own insights and experience. One of the ways in which this debate —creative and damaging by turns— has manifested itself in Scottish culture can be seen in how Gaelic culture has been received, or not received, outwith the so-called Highland line. From the start of this project, more than 20 years ago, I was determined that the Gaelic contribution should be seen alongside, if not always in step with, the more familiar Lowland stories —something that no other Scottish literary history has attempted to tackle on such a scale.

The Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century

Consider the fact, for example, that Duncan Bàn Macintyre's poems were published in Edinburgh when the city was alive with enthusiasm for Macpherson's Ossian, and yet those self-same Lowland literary circles seem to have been all but ignorant of the great vernacular flowering of Gaelic poetry at the time, whether it was Duncan Bàn's celebration of the natural world in all the crystalline detail of happy days spent shooting deer on Ben Dorain, or the apocalyptic religious terrors of Dugul Buchanan's 'Day of Judgment'. Two more different poets from the same tradition could not be found, but Edinburgh (and most of Europe) wanted the 'ancient' twilight of Macpherson's Celtic Ossian, 'translated' into English, hailed by Madame de Staël as 'l'Homère du Nord', and recruited to the task of establishing that European and indeed British culture (for this was after 1707) could claim antique roots to equal those of classical Greece. When Burns' Kilmarnock edition was printed to sensational acclaim in 1786, Donnchadh Bàn was touring the Highlands and Islands, dressed in plaid and a fox-skin cap, making a bare living as a travelling bard –a walking (and entirely unlettered) anthology of his own and Gaelic poetry's living oral tradition. The ironies, paradoxes and anguishes of how 'Scotland' has come to know itself –or not know itself— could not be more clearly illustrated.

The Literature Of Scotland: Two Volume Set

Actually the Gàidhealtachd has often shown itself to be more in touch with southern production than vice versa. Thus William Ross's Gaelic poems show familiarity with Burns and the Augustan neoclassical tradition, while Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair and Eoghan MacLachlan (the headmaster of Aberdeen Grammar, my old school), both wrote poems inspired by the English of James Thomson's 'Four Seasons'. MacLachlan translated most of the Iliad into Gaelic, and Rob Donn, an unlettered man, shows echoes of Alexander Pope in his poems. The same degree of awareness could not be claimed for their cousins to the south.

Of course books and writers cannot help but be grounded in their own times, which is why The Literature of Scotland offers historical contextualisation and biographical sketches of so many individual authors. Analytical insights are also offered on key texts —in the light of how they were seen in their day, and also from a more contemporary perspective. Of course I cannot deny that the decision to class some books as 'key' and not others is itself a critical judgment. Nevertheless, to lay 'the literature of Scotland' out in readable form, and to allow the reader a chance to make their own connections, I have tried to allow the books and poems to speak for themselves, both within their own time and in the light of subsequent revaluations. This has meant a broadly descriptive approach to the work in hand, in the hope that such a grounding will lead readers to seek out the books to read for themselves, and then, if they so wish, to develop their critical analysis by way of further and more detailed studies.

The last twenty years (since this book was first published) have seen an absolutely remarkable increase in critical publication and serious academic output in the field of Scottish literary studies, and the contribution of critics and scholars should not be underestimated. (Gregory Smith's Scottish Literature: Character and Influence hugely influenced Hugh MacDiarmid in 1919, for example, and became a significant plank in his hopes for a renaissance of Scottish writing in the twentieth century.) Even so, the teaching and general dissemination of Scottish literature in our schools and universities is still less than it should be and there is still a need, I believe, for an authoritative introductory survey of the field at large, with an eye on the wider historical and cultural landscape.

In the twentieth, as indeed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perennial, and now global questions of culture, identity, language, class and representation have all been fascinatingly worked out on our own small stage. (Immediately I hear the ghostly poetic voice of MacDiarmid: 'Scotland Small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?') What this particular stage came to offer in the twentieth century —in my opinion the greatest of the three great periods of creative achievement in Scotland's story— has led this second edition to take in many more authors from our own time than the first edition could countenance. This expansion has led to the book being republished in two volumes (for there were additions to the earlier periods as well) taking the story into the start of the twenty-first century.

Critical distance is more difficult to maintain at closer range, but the longer overview across the modern period has shown a remarkable explosion of creative confidence, particularly among women writers, in the course of and also the aftermath of the devolution debates and the referenda of 1979 and 1997. The 'miserableism' in the prose fiction of the damaged male psyche in the writing of the 1970s, and the revival of confidence and agency in the 1990s, are among the more striking features of our time—once again revealed, if you like, by letting the books speak for themselves in their broadly chronological sequences. This is not to deny or avoid critical insight, for to recognise or to propose even such broad patterns is to conduct an analytical act. Nor can one ever stand outside one's own point of view. Nevertheless, I hope that this study manages to give a narrative drive to what I have called 'the matter of Scotland' as it has been imagined and described, invented, re-invented and disputed in three —or if we count Latin— four languages from the times of Barbour's Bruce to the present day, when indeed other languages and other cultural histories from Scotland's new citizens are also beginning to contribute to the tale.

Roderick Watson