Alan Warner: Art-Speech and the Morvern Paradox

Abstract

If even the profound ideological momentum of How Late It Was, How Late has proven insufficiently powerful to prevent entirely strains of an explicitly authorial (and hieratic) discourse from leaching into the demotic-oriented voice of the character-narrator, then the challenge to an instinctive (and lyrically gifted) poet-cum-novelist such as Alan Warner to exorcise himself from the narrative discourse becomes all the more daunting. However, Warner’s is a very different case to that of Kelman, and it is arguable in the extreme whether a free indirect discourse (FID) methodology could ever fulfil Warner’s ambition. In the first place, he seemingly ignores the ‘responsibility’ (identified by Bell in the previous chapter) to Scotland and its language which Kelman so avidly takes on, and thus, as far as can be ascertained, does not view narrative technique within an ideological context; his writing stems from no obvious nationalist impetus, as he has made clear in interviews with various journalists.¹