Alasdair Gray: Unlikely Stories Mostly

Who is speaking? It must be the author behind Pollard. Who is that? We can’t simply say ‘Gray’ — for Lanark shows us there can be authors behind authors behind authors. Gray’s allegories express yet conceal their continual agonising over a basic human situation in which a highly talented but socially eccentric and physically unattractive protagonist has to realise that his idealistic Promethean aspiration after truth and justice and beauty may finally be seen as self-interested sexual desire dressed up to look good.

There’s even further satire on Gray’s part, in that Pollard’s great project, the completion of Aeschylus’s lost Prometheus Unbound , isn’t even original. Gray knows of Shelley’s 1820 version, of course, and how Shelley’s sentiments anticipate Pollard’s. Clearly Pollard is being shown as a derivative egotist rather than an original genius. When one places this alongside Gray’s mockery of his own literary creativity (and of course, his mockery of literary criticism) in his “Index of Plagiarisms” in Lanark , the full paradox of Gray’s literary achievement can be recognised. It is an achievement which rests on Gray’s perception of his own creativity which constantly questions the validity of that creativity, and questions the emotional and sexual motivation behind it, firstly in relation to himself, and thereafter in relation to writers and artists at large.

‘Prometheus’ is thus an important personal statement, expressing succinctly Gray’s private world of self-doubt and anxiety, and yet marvellously creating literature while anatomising what lies behind the act. The final story, ‘The End of the Axletree’, moves from personal analysis to public satire, completing Gray’s essential dualism of theme throughout the volume. Taking up where the Emperor left off, the fable tells how the great vertical city finally reached the sky, which is found to be tangible, a great canopy enclosing the world. Men, of course, can’t leave it alone, and (in a marvellous allegory for human greed and destructiveness from the beginning of property-holding to wars and space programmes and their place in political economy) they tear it open, drowning the world in a new Flood. Thus the overall story of the volume is ended; as in Lanark and Janine , “man is the pie that bakes and eats itself, and the recipe is separation”. We war with ourselves, with our society; full of sound and fury, we signify very little, as individuals, artists, societies. We are right to mock our pretensions, destroying ourselves and the earth we live on. And yet, and yet … something in the all too tragi-comic lives of Bohu, Urquhart, Pollard — and Lanark, and Kelvin Walker, and Jock McLeish — remains to suggest a glimmer of the transcendental, allowing God, just for the moment to be forgiven, as in the fleeting epiphany given to Lanark as he watches his son climb Ben Rua in sunlight. At the end of Unlikely Stories, Mostly it’s typical of Gray to leave a benign sting in the tale, lying just beyond literature. The survivor of the volume, the archetypal quixotic Scot, Sir Thomas Urquhart, sails on through time, his little boat moving out over the endpapers, a glimmer of hope in a grotesque world.

Douglas Gifford