Abstract
‘The Magnetic North’ was the promotional slogan devised by the publishers Jonathan Cape and Vintage in the 1990s to advertise new Scottish writing — primarily fiction — by Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy, Duncan McLean, Tom Leonard, Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Agnes Owens. It was the title given to a small, free anthology of their writing in 1995 and I would like to look briefly at some of this work and try to relate it to matters of language, voice and social identity in this final chapter.1
Tuesday, 6th. [Samoa, June 1893, aet. 42] — I am exulting to do nothing. It pours with rain from the westward, very unusual kind of weather; I was standing out on the little verandah in front of my room this morning, and there went through me or over me a wave of extraordinary and apparently baseless emotion. I literally staggered. And then the explanation came, and I knew I had found a frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland …. Very odd these identities of sensation, and the world of connotations implied; highland huts, and peat smoke, and the brown swirling rivers, and wet clothes, and whisky, and the romance of the past, and that indescribable bite of the whole thing at a man’s heart …
— Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters
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Notes
Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy, Duncan McLean, Tom Leonard, Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Agnes Owens, The Magnetic North (Jonathan Cape/Vintage, n.d. [1990s]).
Michael Long, ‘The Politics of English Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Joyce’, in Visions and Blueprints: Avant-garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-century Europe, ed. Edward Timms and Peter Collier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 108.
John Berger, ‘That Which Is Held’, in Keeping a Rendezvous (New York: Vintage International, 1992), pp. 25–35 (p. 34).
A.L. Kennedy, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (London: Phoenix, 1993), p. 34.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 896.
Seamus Heaney, ‘A Torchlight Procession of One: On Hugh MacDiarmid’, in The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 104.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy (New York: Grove Press, 1955), p. 120.
Tom Leonard, ‘Unrelated Incidents 2’ collected in Intimate Voices: Selected Work 1965–1983 (Newcastle: Galloping Dog Press, 1984), p. 87.
Tom Leonard, Reports from the Present: Selected Work 1982–1994 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
Edwin Morgan, Demon (Glasgow: Mariscat Press, 1999), p. 5. Demon is collected in Cathures: New Poems 1997–2001 (Manchester: Carcanet Press/Mariscat Press, 2002), pp. 91–115 (p. 93).
Edwin Morgan, A.D. A Trilogy of Plays on the Life of Christ (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000), pp. 50, 163.
Edwin Morgan, A.D. A Trilogy of Plays on the Life of Christ (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000), p. 54.
Tacitus, On Britain and Germany, trans. H. Mattingly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 80.
Aneirin, The Gododdin, a version by Desmond O’Grady (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1977), p. 19.
Robert Burns, The Letters, selected and arranged by J. Logic Robertson (London: Walter Scott, The Camelot Series, 1887), p. 68.
Lady Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne. The Story of the Red Branch of Ulster Arranged and Put into English, with a preface by W.B. Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1976), p. 256.
John Barbour, The Bruce, ed. W.M. Mackenzie (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1909), p. 7. Book 1, II. 225–228.
Elspeth King, ‘Introduction’, in William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, Blind Harry’s Wallace (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2000), p. xi.
Edward McGuire, Calcagus, in Scotland’s Music (2 CD set: Linn CKD 008, 1992).
Edna Longley, ‘The Poetics of Celt and Saxon’, in Poetry & Posterity (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), pp. 52–89.
George MacDonald, The Marquis of Lossie (London: Everett & Co. [n.d.] 1877), Chapter 28, p. 110.
Malcolm MacLean and Christopher Carrell, eds, As an Fhearann/from the land: Clearances, Conflict and Crofting: A Century of Images of the Scottish Highlands (Edinburgh: Mainstream; Stornoway: an Lanntair; Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1986), p. 72.
T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 141.
Elspeth Reid and Flora Davidson, The Fortunes of Cynicus (Kirriemuir: Forest Lodge, 1995), p. 98.
Edward Dorn, ‘Proclamation/15 May 88’, in Abhorrences (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990), p. 144.
Edwin Morgan, ‘Day’s End’, in Virtual and Other Realities (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997), p. 98.
John Berger, ‘A Story for Aesop’, in Keeping a Rendezvous (New York: Vintage International, 1992), pp. 53–81 (p. 68).
Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sixth Edition. Volume 2, Gen. Ed. M.H. Abrams (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), pp. 1756–1758 (p. 1757).
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. Cedric Watts and Robert Hampson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 362.
In the Cantata Profana, the father fails to teach his sons to earn a living at home. He teaches them to hunt, not to farm. For Bartók, whose very homeland disappeared under new and different maps or masks of nationality, the necessity of separation was acute. He was ‘one of Hungary’s greatest sons’ but the knowledge that he was born in 1881 ‘in Nagyszentmiklos, Torontal county, is of limited help, since no such place is to be found on any modern map of the country’. See Hamish Milne, Bartók (London: Omnibus Press, 1982), p. 7. Later in his life, too, exile was a forced choice. Marshall Walker’s text notes: ‘There’s also the irony of accidental prophecy in the Cantata. In 1940, Bartók became a refugee from a Europe poisoned by hunting and killing. “I’d so much like to go home,” he said. But he was never to pass again through a doorway in his own country ...’ Marshall Walker, Béla Bartók (Radio New Zealand, Concert FM, 2001).
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© 2005 Alan Riach
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Riach, A. (2005). Conclusion: The Magnetic North. In: Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554962_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554962_10
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