Download Tales, Titles, Tails

Tales, Titles, Tails: Negotiations of
Genre in the Short Fiction of Alasdair
Gray
Portrait of the artist
Gray’s Mural in The Ubiquitous
Chip in Glasgow
Short story collections
• Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
• Ten Tales Tall and True: Social Realism,
Sexual Comedy, Science Fiction,
Satire (1993)
• The Ends of Our Tethers: Sorry Stories by
Alasdair Gray (2003).
Novels
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LANARK
1982 JANINE
THE FALL OF KELVIN WALKER
McGROTTY & LUDMILLA
SOMETHING LEATHER
POOR THINGS
A HISTORY MAKER
Autobiography
• Caricatures/portraits by Gray of Gray
Alasdair Gray is a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old
Glaswegian pedestrian who (despite two recent years as
Professor of Creative Writing as Glasgow University) has
mainly lived by writing and designing eighteen books, most of
them fiction.
Since 1981, when Alasdair Gray's first novel was published,
his characters have aged as fast as their author.
Literature and politics
'I believe the more people are stimulated into
thinking about their feelings, and feeling
about their thoughts, which is what a work of
art does, the less we're likely to be taken in by
the mindless power of government or
manipulated by those who regard themselves
as the bosses; and that makes political
disaster, cruelty and, in the long run,
unkindness less likely.’
Art and money
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‘Of course life would have been different if I'd had money. I now think I
would not have created more, because it seems I've had the luck to create
more than I'd ever expected to create, had the luck to survive as an artist.
Lack of money changes your plans. I was quite sure, in my early years - I'd
planned to write this great novel, Lanark, which would be my only novel.
There would then be a book of short stories, all perfect of their kind, and
then a book of poems, also perfect of their kind, then a book of essays, and
a book of plays, and then a book of my pictures. And each would be perfect
of its kind.'
'Necessity changed that. And money would have made a difference to
peace of mind, which you shouldn't underestimate. Look at many of the
world's great artists - the Impressionists, Seurat and Cézanne and Degas,
they inherited enough money not to have to depend upon selling, and that
let them concentrate. Cézanne said, in later years, "My father was the true
genius:he left me a million francs."'
Non-fiction genres in Gray
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Historiography
The essay
Journalism
Autobiography
Polemic
Fictional modes in Gray
• Fantasy
• Gothic
• Science fiction
• Pornography
Final mix:
• Neo-baroque
• Post-modern
• Cross-aesthetic fiction
Purposes
• Social commentary
• Satire
• Political critique
Transtextuality
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Intertextuality
Paratextuality
Metatextuality
Hypertextuality
Architextuality
Genette on the paratext
• A literary work consists, entirely or essentially, of a text, defined
(very minimally) as a more or less long sequence of verbal
statements that are more or less endowed with significance.
• But this text is rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced
and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other
productions, such as an author's name, a title, a preface,
illustrations.
• And although we do not always know whether these productions are
to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround it
and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of
this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure
the text's presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption in
the form (nowadays, at least) of a book.
• These accompanying productions, which vary in extent and
appearance, constitute what I have called the work's paratext. [...]
• For us, accordingly, the paratext is what enables a text to become a
book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to
the public.
More on the paratext
• Indeed, this fringe, always the conveyor of a
commentary that is authorial or more or less
legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone
between text and off-text, a zone not only of
transition but also of transaction: a privileged
place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an
influence on the public, an influence that whether well or poorly understood and achieved
- is at the service of a better reception for the
text and a more pertinent reading of it.
Unlikely Stories, Mostly
Unlikely Stories, unwrapped
Spanish version
Unlikely Stories, Mostly - Paratext
• “Scotland 1984”
• “Work as if you were
in the early days of a
better nation” (Dennis
Lee)
• Emblem: A tartaned
mermaid pointing her
finger towards the
future
Ten Tales Tall and True
Tales - Paratext
• “This book contains more tales than ten so
the title is a tall tale too. I would spoil my
book by shortening it, spoil the title if I
made it true”
“Getting Started – A Prologue”
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Poe - rejected
Melville - rejected
The Gospels - rejected
Charlotte Brontë - rejected
Ambrose Bierce finds favor with his
beginning to “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge”
Flap text: Mock reviews
• “Col. Sebastian Moran” (moronic and
inane)
• “Lady Nicola Stewart” writing in “The Celtic
Needlewoman” (simultaneously vapid and
pompous)
Poor Things
Poor Things
• It pretends to be an autobiography found in a box of legal papers
being destroyed by a Glasgow law firm. The curators of Glasgow's
People's Palace passed it to Gray, for editing and publication,
believing it to be a minor masterpiece and Gray pieced together the
life through a work of detection. Of course none of this is actually
true, but Gray's use of learned notes, illustrations, and both
introductory and secondary material is pretty convincing.
Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald
McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer, Edited by
Alasdair Gray
• “Blurb for a High-Class Hardback”: overtly
political, plays with Gray’s image as a postmodernist (claiming he has now reverted to a
Victorian style), and promises good clean love
stories with no hints of perversion…
• “Blurb for a Popular Paperback”: emphasizes
the novel’s racy depictions of sexual practices,
mysterious occurrences and villains getting their
justified come-uppance…
The Ends of Our Tethers
The Ends of Our Tethers
• “Sorry Stories”
• “Critic Fodder” or “Critic Fuel”
• “Remember everything and keep your
head! Seamus Heaney – Station Island”
The Book of Prefaces
Paratext game in Book of Prefaces
• Some copies of the 1st hardback edition included not one but two
erratum slips, both introduced in rhyme and printed in red and black
ink to match the volume itself. The first, entitled 'An Appeal to the
Reader', goes thus:
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When this book was printed and bound
Twenty-two errors were found.
The volume is therefore defective
Unless YOU supply a corrective.
Please take a pen in your fist
And mend these mistakes that we missed.
• The second, entitled 'Editor's Postscript To The First List Of Errors',
goes thus:
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I regret and deplore
that I've found fourteen more
and probably you
will find several too.
Why Scots Should Rule
Scotland, 1992 & 1997
Why Scots Should Rule Scotland
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Gray has written two books in an attempt to put his own case for self-rule for
Scotland. The first book, Independence, was written in 1992, to explain 'why so many
Scots have wanted independence; haven't got it; should get it soon; and why life in a
self-governed Scotland will be better but not easier'.
The book is not illustrated. An author's note states: 'This pamphlet omits many
important things: an independent Scottish education now almost destroyed by British
government action; Scotland's usefulness as a separate testing ground for laws
enforced in England (extra police powers, the poll tax) and much else. This cannot be
helped in a short pamphlet which I think of as a sketch for a bigger picture to be
completed before 2000 AD - if I am spared.
Which brought him to Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, published for the 1997
election. The cover of this wholly rewritten update to Independence consists of the
flags, names and populations of 20 independent nations of smaller or comparable
size to Scotland all printed in colour on a grey background. The cover text is a mix of
blue and purple on white. Throughout the text the flag motif recurs, as chapter breaks
and general decoration. Various flags make an appearance, but the Scottish lion and
cross of St Andrew predominate.
In his introduction to this volume, Gray says: 'With a view to reprinting [Why Scots
Should Rule Scotland] I read it carefully three months ago and found it a muddle of
unconnected historical details and personal anecdotes with a few lucid passages and
at least one piece of nonsense[.…] The reviewers' kindness had been the
condescension instinctively given to the art of children or halfwits.'
Author appreciations
Janet on Red Felt (1980), oil on wood, 14.75" x 47.5".
Eden and After (1966), oil on board, 24.5" x 21.5".