David Harvie
Now that the farce of the Westminster vote on whether or not to permit a referendum on the UK’s relationship with the EU has passed, it is time to expose the shallowness of the procedure that led to this nonsense.
There is still some way to go to perfect the public petitions system of the Scottish Parliament, but it is entire street-maps ahead of the appalling Westminster e-petitions farrago. Here, once any petition has garnered 100,000 on-line signatures, it is automatically allotted a debate in the parliamentary chamber. No commitment required, no engagement by ‘signatories’ with any part of the process whatsoever. Click-n-move on.
The Holyrood system expects and requires that petitioners and their witnesses engage with the petitions committee and, if the petition passes initial muster, with the further evidence sessions held by specialist subject committees. The fact that the current Westminster pantomime ‘guaranteed’ a debate which was then three-line whipped by the government to ensure that the duck was well and truly dead should surely see the end of such an inconsequential and shallow attempt to woo the electorate.
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What does it
mean to be a
‘Scottish’ writer?
Sophie Cooke
Scottish nationalism has never been stronger. So why do so many Scottish writers and critics want to distance themselves from the notion of being Scottish? Contemporary literary critics like Stuart Kelly of the Scotland on Sunday newspaper are keen to de-nationalise Scottish writing and to present it as being ‘writing’, not ‘Scottish writing’.
There seems to be a belief that the national identity of Scottish writers is not a simple description but a confining limitation. ‘Scottish writing’ finds itself in a peculiar limbo, as the political map changes. Writing the great American novel may be a worthy pursuit on the other side of the Atlantic, but on these shores some cringe at the notion of a Scottish novel, Great or otherwise.
We have to ask what these people are talking about when they talk about ‘Scottish writing’. There’s no easy answer: after all, Scottish writing largely came into being after the union with England, and has largely been written in English rather than Scots or Gaelic. I suspect that, because of this problem, they view ‘Scottish writing’ as a sort of flag-waving cultural activity that plays to outsiders’ existing views of Scotland’s literature: the Walter Scott legacy, or the ‘Trainspotting’ legacy. Another tartan export. Perhaps they are also nervous about the links between pure art and a very politically active nationalism.
This nervousness would be understandable if we lived in a country where nationalism dictates the artistic agenda, accepting nothing but a flattering portrait of the nation. But we don’t. Like any other writers living in free countries, we are unlikely to use our work for tub-thumping eulogies: it’s far more in our spirit to question and criticise our country than to wholeheartedly sing its praises. Writers have often been cast as the conscience of a country, and there is much truth in that. Nationalism – the love of your nation – does not have to mean being blind to its failings.
I wonder if the issue here isn’t the way that nationalism and intellectualism have always sat so uncomfortably together. Nationalism, after all, often plays on emotion as much as reason. But this is precisely why national identity has always had such an interesting effect on art: because art, too, inhabits our hearts as much as our heads. In its building of an imagined community, nationalism, like writing, is an active cultural project that mixes fact and feeling. Its emotional appeal should not make us want to flush our national identity from our books. After all, I can’t imagine any novelist wanting to write a book that leaves their readers emotionally cold.
In countries whose nationality is politically more assured than Scotland’s, writers frequently draw on aspects of the national myth or address issues of national identity, without being seen as intellectually lacking. In the USA, trying to write the Great American Novel has long been seen as the most intellectually worthy cultural endeavour of all. Borges, meanwhile, could have been nothing other than Argentinian – fusing national traditions with his own unique intellect. In Spain, the Generations of 1898, 1914 and 1927 formed a strikingly brilliant period in Spanish literature: is it a coincidence that these writers intentionally turned away from broadly Western bourgeois motifs and focused instead on issues relating to Spain’s national identity? Certainly they have never been critically castigated for it. Garcia Lorca is still, rightly, revered as one of the world’s greatest poets.
I have called myself a ‘Scottish writer’ ever since I started my career over 10 years ago. I wasn’t making a political statement. It was simply a description of my national identity and of my work.
I have looked very hard, but can find no contemporary Scottish novelists ‘reinterpreting’ the work of, say, Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson. Nor do we have a generation of Irvine Welsh / James Kelman imitators.
Sophie Cooke is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet. She is the author of the novels ‘The Glass House’ and ‘Under The Mountain’, and was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year Award
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