Irvine Welsh's Novel Subjectivities
Jeffrey Karnicky
For all the tourist industry's attempts to persuade visitors otherwise, Scotland is not welcoming.
—Simon Frith, "On Not Being Scottish"
New Scottish Writing and "the Queen's fuckin English"
In Irvine Welsh's novella The Rosewell Incident, a group of aliens intent on taking over the Earth set down in Edinburgh. In short order, the aliens adopt the language of a typical Welshian character, Mikey Devlin, who is willing to instruct them in the ways of Earth, "wanted as he was by local police on Earth for a wounding offence at Waverly Station after a full-scale pagger." 1 When the aliens address the world's leaders, translation, as in most science fiction of the "aliens taking over the Earth" variety, becomes a problem. But the problem is not that the Earthlings cannot understand an extraterrestrial language; rather, the leaders of the world cannot understand the aliens' Edinburgh-inflected speech. "We could fuckin annihilate youse in a swedge. Nae fuckin problem. We've goat the fuckin technology, eh. And the fuckin willpower. So the wey we see is, youse cunts dae as yis ur fuckin well telt and that's it. Endy fuckin story." 2This scene seems particularly relevant in general relation to recent developments in Scottish literature and politics and in specific relation to Welsh's place within this emergence. As Andrew Ross writes, because of the successful devolution vote, "Scotland is once again a blip on the radar screen of the 'international community.' Its fledgling parliament is regularly cited as a regional symptom of a new global order, good or bad, depending on the speaker's viewpoint." 3 Hand in hand with this political emergence into the "international community" comes a new Scottish writing, an "extraordinary boom now taking place in Scottish fiction," championed by such anthologies as The Vintage Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction, Children of Albion Rovers: New Scottish Writing, and Acid Plaid: New Scottish Writing, all of which include selections from Welsh. 4 The Vintage anthology, by far the most staid of these collections, draws a connection between this new writing and the sense of new political awareness in Scotland. "For the first time in centuries of insecurity and strife, Scotland [End Page 135] has begun to stop defining itself by what it is not—England—and is with good humor facing up to what it is, both bad and good. Future generations will applaud the contribution which the writers in this anthology played in the process." 5 What exactly the role of a "new" Scottish literature is in the formation of a "new" Scotland remains to be determined. The editor of Acid Plaid strikes a more skeptical note on the relation between politics and literature, as he writes that "claims that the wonderful upsurge in Scottish writing has somehow been propelled by the political Zeitgeist ... lack anything that vaguely resembles research or evidence." 6 While the relation between what literature and politics in Scotland may be or become in the future remains open to debate, one consensus can be noted: Irvine Welsh's fiction, particularly Trainspotting, has a central role—on both the literary and political stage—in the world production of Scottish identities.
The back cover copy of Acid Plaid notes Welsh's literary centrality. "Ever since the huge success of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting made Edinburgh the hottest literary scene on the map, there has been a palpable sense that the so-called Scottish Beats have something new, something young and raw and energetic and exciting, to inject into literary culture." Likewise, in his introduction to Children of Albion Rovers, Kevin Williamson compares the selection process for the anthology to "picking a [football] team." 7 Welsh becomes Williamson's goalie: "Irvine Welsh—a keeper of the faith [who has] learnt how to cope with the pressure—and the vagaries of the press—producing performances the fans just rave about." 8
The political role of Welsh's fiction, while more difficult to gauge, is also readily apparent. Chris Mitchell argues that Trainspotting, with its overt scenes of heroin use, has changed the discourse on drugs in Britain. "The phenomenal success of the film and Irvine Welsh's novel of the same name brought the realities and reasons for drug use into the mainstream for the first time." 9 More concretely, Peter Kravitz, in the introduction to the Vintage anthology, points to the "colonised by wankers" rant in Trainspotting, noting that "the Scottish National Party used this monologue by the character Mark Renton, for a recruitment form in September 1996. The commission for Racial Equality received a complaint about it from a Labour Member of Parliament and it was referred to a lawyer who said that it might be in contravention of the Malicious Publications Act." 10 In his essay on Scottish identity, Angus Calder focuses on this passage from Trainspotting:
Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It's nae good blamin it oan the English for colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. [End Page 136] We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy, culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete assholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots. 11Calder notes that in the novel, this monologue takes place as the inner thoughts of Mark Renton as he sits in an Edinburgh bar with the violent and racist Frank Begbie. In the film, however, the setting changes to the "beautiful highland scenery," where one of Renton's friends has "led a small crew of Leith druggies." 12 As the crew refuses to climb around in the countryside, Renton lets fly his rant. Calder argues that the switch of locale here politicizes what might otherwise be "a film decoded without reference to Scotland or to politics" (237). Instead, the scene challenges the tourist view of Scotland. Calder writes, "Americans and Germans will be challenged to set their romantic conceptions of Scotland against the frustrating reality of modern urban life" (219). That is, Calder argues, Trainspotting gives a "very nasty, very unheathery" picture of Scotland (238). Yet the image that Trainspotting presents to the world is not the primary political component of the novel and film.
Calder notes that Welsh is hugely popular with two particular audiences: people under thirty and residents of Edinburgh. From this, Calder argues that there will be lasting "political, social and ethical consequences" to the "phenomenon" of Welsh. Most importantly for my argument, these "consequences" are unknowable until they are produced in "an unimaginable future Scotland where Scottish identities, surviving, as I am sure they will, are constructed in ways which I cannot foresee, through language in its habitual state of flux and new songs transforming old ones" (238). Welsh's fiction is oriented toward the future, toward the creation of these new forms of identity.
Out of all this "new Scottish writing" emerges a Welshian subjectivity. That is, in Trainspotting and his other fiction, Welsh details a new configuration of literary character, a novel subjectivity emerging from the contemporary urban Scotland where most of Welsh's work takes place. These novel subjectivities negotiate class and race politics, issues of national identity, and psychological conceptions of selfhood as they struggle to invent new ways of living in the contemporary world. At the same time, it is important to note that Welsh's subjectivities are not simply a representation of what it is like to be Scottish or to live in Scotland in the twenty-first century. Susan Hageman, in her introduction to Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, writes that new Scottish fiction has little interest in defining "Scottish." Reacting as contemporary writers do against [End Page 137] "market-oriented, totalized views of Scotland," Hageman argues that "national identity is dealt with obliquely, but honestly, in their texts; and it is precisely their lack of a magisterial vision of Scotland which makes them relevant to other 'small' literatures in English." 13 I take "small" here to be akin to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call "minor literature." 14 That is, a small, or minor, literature reworks a "major" language in order to produce new enunciations, to say things that cannot be said in the major language. Deleuze and Guattari write of Kafka, a Jew in Czechoslovakia, forging a minor literature within German. Welsh's use of Scots dialect within the major language of English, while by no means exactly the same as Kafka's use of German, carves out a space of expression for a novel form of identity.
Simon Frith, an English professor living in Scotland, writes that "whenever I discuss Scottishness with Scottish students the consensus is that the only good indicator of a Scot is a Scottish accent." 15 If this is indeed the case, the aliens of The Rosewell Incident nicely illustrate the power of minor literature to create a new form of subjectivity, as they become Scottish through their ability to adopt a Scottish voice. Deleuze and Guattari call this power "the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility." 16 Welsh's use of Scottish does more than represent Scottish voices. Welsh shows readers that writing creates a novel form of subjectivity, a form of subjectivity that might bear close relation to the human but is not simply a subset of human invention. Literature does not merely reflect life; as Deleuze writes, "to write is not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience." 17 Literary characters are more than formal expressions of a writer's world. What Welsh creates in his writing is not only a reflection of the life of lower-class Scotland in the age of late capitalism. The realistic representations of Welsh's novels certainly have some political valence. Alan Freeman argues just such a point when he discusses the portrayal of "working class and underclass life" in Trainspotting. "Focusing on social margins not only affirms their inhabitants but also illuminates the center against which they are defined and, in this novel, Welsh dramatises the repressive processes of post-industrial individualism." 18 Freeman locates the political efficacy of Trainspotting in its ability to articulate the repressive relation between marginalized and normative culture. Trainspotting, in focusing on the margins, implicitly critiques the powers that have enforced this marginalization. I want to argue that the political power of Welsh's fiction lies not just in these realistic representations but also in the creative potentials that the novels engender.
That is, the expression of "another possible community" and the [End Page 138] forging of "the means for another consciousness and another sensibility" are not means to a greater understanding among various peoples; it's not as if one can read a Welsh novel and then feel that he or she now understands what it's like to be a member of a certain Scottish class. A political reading of Welsh does not find its end in a movement from an understanding of his representations to a critique of the system that produced the lives being represented. Rather, Welsh's fiction details what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call "the very unfolding of life itself." 19 In Trainspotting and his other works, Welsh creates a form of life that emerges into a "new" world of biopolitical power. Hardt and Negri write that "the great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but subjectivities. They produce agentic subjectivities within the biopolitical context: they produce needs, social relations, bodies and minds—which is to say, they produce producers" (32). These subjectivities are not merely repressed individuals; in fact, Hardt and Negri argue that there is nothing inherently positive or negative about this production of subjectivity. "The constant functioning of social machines in their various apparatuses and assemblages produces the world along with the subjects and objects that constitute it" (28). The center cannot be critiqued from the margins. Welsh's novels are not critical of the world. They create a "minor literature" that closely details ways of living that are not mere critiques of the "major," or dominant, form of life. Rather, Welsh's minor use of English highlights the transformative possibilities that exist within "standard" English.
As the aliens of The Rosewell Incident adopt what Harry Ritchie calls "the noticeably lower-class nature of some of [new Scottish fiction's] most prominent subject-matter, language and authorial CVs," 20 the world needs to enlist "some of the CCStop boys, who had the confidence of the aliens, to help with the translation." 21 In other words, to understand Welsh and his brethren, even the "English"-speaking world seems to need help. This idea that Welsh needs a translator is not a matter of concern merely within his fiction. Gerald Howard, an editor at Norton, the American publisher of Trainspotting, calls Welsh's "deployment of contemporary Scots demotic, a rich brew of industrial-strength profanity and slang." 22 Howard writes: "When we signed up Irvine Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, I joked that it was going to be Norton's first foreign language publication." But this claim that Trainspotting is written in a foreign language is more than a joke. Norton's American edition of Trainspotting comes with a glossary at the back of the book. No glossary appears in British editions of the book, and the American edition gives no attribution for the glossary. This absence of commentary serves, along with the glossary, to help render the book foreign to American audiences, with its implicit claim that [End Page 139] an American reader will need to access the glossary—presumably written by a translator fluent in Scots-American English translation—to fully understand the novel. This is not quite the case.
Before its publication in the American edition of the novel, "A Trainspotting Glossary" was published in the Paris Review, accompanied by a note by Howard, explaining that he and his assistant wrote the glossary because "American readers might feel the need for linguistic training wheels." They "doped out many of the definitions from context," and the whole glossary was finally "vetted and completed by Irvine Welsh himself." 23 Keeping up the "joke," Howard writes that readers of the glossary can now "impress your friends with your correct usage of such terms as radge, square go, biscuit-ersed, and, of course, the all purpose term of aggression and/or endearment, cunt," defined as an "all-purpose term for someone else, either friendly or unfriendly." 24
Film adaptors of Welsh's novels have also worried about the ability of American ears to understand Welsh's Scottish accents. The film of Trainspotting redubbed the voice of one character before the film's American release, and the film of The Acid House was fitted with subtitles for its American release. Frank Begbie, the character whose voice was redubbed, says of two Canadian tourists he meets on a train in Edinburgh, who have trouble understanding his question, "Whair's it yis come fae then?" "These foreign cunts've have goat trouble wi the Queen's fuckin English, ken" (114-15). To get these foreigners to understand him, Begbie says: "Ye huv tae speak louder, slower, n likesay mair posh, fir the cunts to understand ye" (115). Begbie's speaking voice, as written by Welsh, obviously marks both national and class distinctions. He defines his dialect as "the Queen's fuckin English," and he cannot understand why people from another English-speaking country might have trouble understanding him. Likewise, Begbie's need to speak with a higher-class, "posh" accent points to a wide class divide between tourists with disposable income and working-class people like himself. While a glossary might well serve to make Begbie more communicative to an American or Canadian audience, the glossary also serves to make him the "foreign cunt," the other. His language becomes nonstandard, something to translate, to understand through its relation to a normalized, standard, American or English English. Begbie's "Queen's fuckin English" becomes a subset of a broader English understandable by all English-speaking people.
Such attempts at translation ignore the inventive possibilities of minor literature. To understand Welsh's characters as simply speaking a bastardized version of a "proper" and understandable English that can be readily translated ignores the creative potential of this bastardization. That is, as Deleuze and Guattari write, "what can be said in one language cannot[End Page 140] be said in another, and the totality of what can and can't be said varies necessarily with each language and with the connections between these languages." 25 The connections between Welsh's Scots dialect and standard American and/or English English cannot be erased through glossary writing, dubbing, and subtitling, or even through speaking "louder, slower, n likesay mair posh." Welsh's characters' uses of language are vital precisely because they "bring to life new grammatical or syntactic powers." 26 That is, Welsh creates new possibilities of life within language. He articulates novel subjectivities in both senses of the word: new forms of subjectivity and forms of subjectivity that live on the pages of Welsh's fiction. These novel subjectivities resist, and even refute, traditional notions of identity formation, psychology, and characterization as they begin to imagine ways of living in an "unimaginable, future Scotland." While not literally "alien" like the novel subjectivities of The Rosewell Incident, two of Welsh's characters—Mark Renton from Trainspotting and Bruce Robertson from Filth—illustrate the widely varying forms of life that might live in this world. It is important to note that these novel subjectivities, even as they reconfigure the psychological, sociological, and political, are not necessarily critical representations. Freeman argues that "unable to become an independent I, a fully formed, stable self with the power of agency ... each of Welsh's characters suffers the stasis of existence outside of social progression." 27 It is precisely this inability to become "an independent I," to become a subject, to be translated into understanding, that allows the creation of novel subjectivities.
"A right tae dissect and analyse"
Two-thirds of the way through Trainspotting, Mark Renton, in the throes of heroin withdrawal, says, "Thir must be less tae life than this" (197), "this" being the physical pain and psychic hallucinations that accompany his withdrawal. By this point in the novel, the reader has witnessed Renton in various stages of addiction and withdrawal. The novel's sections, connected to Renton's state of addiction, are chronologically titled "Kicking," "Relapsing," "Kicking Again," and "Blowing It," the section in which the above citation appears. The novel opens with Renton and his friend Sick Boy in need of a fix and ends with Renton thinking of himself as "a junky who has just ripped off his best mates" (343). In between, Renton and his fellow junkies continually move between two worlds. The first world, the world of "normal" society, is the world of "life," as described by Renton: "Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting on a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game [End Page 141] shows, stuffing fuckin junk food intae yir mooth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fuckin embarrasment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye've produced. Choose life" (187).For Renton, heroin addiction is "choos[ing] no tae choose life" (188). Addiction sloughs off the normative narrative of consumerist life for a world that is something less than life, the world of heroin addiction and silence. "Less" should not be taken as a moral or qualitative measurement, or even as a subversive maneuver. It is, first and foremost, simply a quantitative measurement. The life of addiction is a simplified kind of life, a reduction process of the concerns of everyday life. As Renton says:
Whin yir oan junk, aw ye worry aboot is scorin. Oaf the gear, ye worry aboot loads ay things. Nae money, cannae git pished. Goat money, drinkin too much. Cannae git a burd, nae chance ay a ride. Git a burd, too much hassle, cannae breathe without her gitting oan yir case. Either that, or ye blow it, and feel aw guilty. Ye worry about bills, food, bailiffs, these Jambo Nazi scum beatin us, aw the things ye couldnae gie a fuck aboot whin yuv goat a real junk habit. Yuv just goat one thing tae worry aboot. The simplicity ay it aw. (133)Addiction is simplification. The junkie reduces his or her encounters with the world: cutting off friends, commodities, sex, family, sports, and the like in favor of a single connection with heroin and a withdrawal from other people. Early in the novel, heroin addiction is described as a withdrawal from otherness. "The real junky ... doesnae gie a fuck aboot anybody else" (7). "The fuckers dinnae exist fir us. Nae cunt does" (16). "The cunt was beginning no tae exist fir us" (6). People around the junkie become encompassed by silence. During a binge, Renton thinks of a friend sitting right next to him. "It's the first words ah kin remember hearing um say for a few days. Obviously the cunt's spoken ower this period. He must huv, surely tae fuck" (52). Through a growing silence, Welsh's junkies move toward a state where "the outside world means fuck all tae us" (87). The approach to this space is not an inward movement away from the world and toward the self. Rather, this space is approached slowly, not through movement, but through an arrest of all motion. "It's a challenge tae move: but it shouldnae be. Ah can move. It has been done before. By definition, we, humans, likes, are matter in motion" (177). Heroin brings the junkie close to a complete stop, where movement is only a memory: "It has been done before." The Trainspotting junkie falls into an inhuman slowness, a slowness that distances the junkie from both the outside world and any space of interior subjectivity.
At the same time, the desire to achieve this slowness is not a desire to [End Page 142] transcend the self or the world, but just a temporary strategy. Speaking of the cycle of addiction, Renton says, "ah jist intend tae keep right on to the end of the road" (188). The junkie in Trainspotting continually oscillates between silence and the world, between "life" and "less tae life." As Renton thinks during one movement from silence to the world: "It was amazing, he decided, how things like sex and Hibs, which were nothing to him when he was on smack, suddenly became all-important" (150). Conversely, on heroin, he thinks "at least with smack, there is no room for all the other crap" (112). As I note above, this oscillation structures the novel. Oscillation also structures the form of junkie subjectivity that continually emerges from Trainspotting.
The Trainspotting junkie is a matter of speed and slowness. Heroin addiction in Trainspotting is a slowing down of the engagement with both the self and the other, a pause, a falling into a hole. But this slowing down inevitably speeds up again and leads back to another encounter with otherness. Such oscillation becomes a way of life for Welsh's junkies. The persistence of this movement, of constantly changing speed, creates a continually emerging subject. This novel subject, the oscillating junkie, can be difficult to say anything about. Trainspotting pays little attention to character motivation; Renton's continual cycling between the silent hole of addiction and an attachment to the world is never attributed to any one specific set of problems or concerns, be they familial, social, or historical. Only a few pages are dedicated to decisions to stop or start heroin use. The movement from kicking to relapsing happens in a sentence or two. After two pages of detailed description of his "intense preparation" for getting off heroin, Renton oscillates back to it in a sentence. "Ah need the old 'slowburn,' a soft, come-down input" (16). Much later in the novel, after more oscillation, Renton decides that: "Ah'm off tae Johnny Swan's for ONE hit, just ONE FUCKIN HIT tae get us ower this long, hard, day" (177). This "ONE hit" leads to an overdose, which leads to Renton's family forcing him to kick again, setting up further oscillations. Of course, physical addiction plays a part in Renton's continual relapsing. What's more interesting, though, is how Trainspotting downplays psychic motivations and undermines attempts to understand the inner life of its characters.
In a section of Trainspotting called "Searching for the Inner Man," Renton considers normative psychological narratives that might explain his behavior. He neither refutes nor accepts these explanations. He says, "Ah've been referred tae a variety of counsellors, wi backgrounds ranging fae pure psychiatry through clinical psychology to social work" (181). Renton sums up a psychiatrist's diagnosis: [End Page 143]
Ah have an unresolved relationship wi ma deid brother, Davie, as ah huv been unable tae work oot or express ma feeling about his catatonic life and subsequent death. Ah have oedipal feelings towards ma mother and an attendant unresolved jealously towards ma faither. Ma junk behavior is anal in concept, attention-seeking, yes, but instead of withholding the faeces tae rebel against parental authority, ah'm pittin smack intae ma body tae claim power over it vis-à-vis society in general. (184-85)A drug counselor
feels that ma concept ay success and failure only operates on an individual rather than an individual and societal level. Due tae this failure tae recognise societal reward, success (and failure) can only ever be fleeting experiences for me, as that experience cannae be sustained by the socially-supported condoning of wealth, power, status, etc., nor, in the case ay failure, by stigma or reproach. (185-86)I quote these two diagnoses at length to show that Renton does indeed think about the workings of his subjectivity. He says, "ah've pondered ower a loat ay it, and ah'm willin tae explore it; ah don't feel defensive aboot any ay it" (185). At the same time, such narratives have little to nothing to do with Renton's subjectivity. While he does not reject the truth of these diagnoses, he does not connect them to his life. "Fucked if ah could see the connection between any ay that and me takin smack, but" (184). He says that "talking about it extensively has done fuck all good" (185). Considering his drug counselor's diagnosis, Renton says, "What Tom's trying tae say, ah suppose is that ah dinnae gie a fuck. Why?" (186). This question of why cannot be answered. Renton cannot explain why he does not "gie a fuck," and he cannot explain why he continually returns to heroin. Trainspotting gives no reasons for drug addiction; instead, the novel undermines this course of inquiry. Renton asks, "Why is it that because ye use hard drugs every cunt feels that they have a right tae dissect and analyse ye?" (187).
This resistance to analysis is also a primary component of Welsh's Filth, whose narrator, Bruce Robertson, is a novel subjectivity full of secrets but resistant to interpretation. Filth is a marked departure from Trainspotting and the books that followed it, as Filth is the first novel in which Welsh does not focus on the lower-class, drug-taking denizens of Edinburgh. To illustrate the distance between the subjects of Welsh's earlier work and the subject of Filth, Robertson comments on a "bohemian" poet he meets in a pub. "A jakey mumbling fuckin crap poems at people who dinnae want tae fuckin well hear them. So that's what they call art now, is it? Or some fuckin schemie writing aboot aw the fuckin drugs him [End Page 144] n his wideo mates have taken." 28 While the social milieu of Filth varies greatly from that of Trainspotting, Robertson nonetheless shares with Renton a strong resistance to analysis.
Filth is told from the perspective of a first-person narrator existing at the intersection of three voices. Filth is the first-person narration of racist, violent, misogynistic Scottish cop Bruce Robertson. Two voices, which the reader eventually learns are aspects of Robertson's unconscious, constantly interrupt Robertson's narrative. The first interruptive voice is that of "Carole," Robertson's estranged wife. This narrative appears in boldfaced chapters, with "Carole" appearing in chapter headings. Eventually, readers learn Robertson's first secret through this voice: "Carole" is Robertson's thoughts, as he prowls the town—and commits a murder—dressed in his wife's clothes. The second interruptive voice is a tapeworm living in Robertson's gut. The worm's narrative interrupts Robertson's on the page, as text framed by the shape of the worm is written over, obliterating Robertson's narrative. As the worm grows, it dubs itself "Self" and eventually becomes the voice of Robertson's unconscious, letting the reader in on Robertson's other dark secrets: that his father is a rapist, a madman locked in prison, and that his stepfather abused him as a child.
Robertson attempts to silence the voices in his head by overwhelming them with as much noise as possible. He realizes just how populated his unconscious is, so he tries to make it even more crowded, to get lost in the silence of total noise. "Get as many voices in your head as you can and hide in the crowd. We've got loads of them. Probably as many as there are worms eating away inside us" (234). Robertson tries to keep in constant motion to outrun his thoughts. "The problem with my game is that we're not great thinkers. We do. You have to keep doing, to find things to do" (73). Robertson uses work, sex, and television to keep a constant stream of voices screaming from the outside. Unable to sleep at night, Robertson works overtime. When his overtime hours are cut, he turns to sex. "These cunts are trying tae kill us with this OT cutback because they know we cannae kip during the fuckin night, never could. They know we need very little sleep and that all we do in darkness is think and think and think. In order to stop thinking we have to fuck and then you get complications; financial in the case of hoors, social in the case of slags" (254). Still, the voices persist, and Robertson grows more and more horrified of the night as the novel progresses. "No way will I sleep" (272). "Too many anxiety attacks at night. I wish it was daylight for twenty-four hours" (274). He constantly plays music loudly and always has the television on. "More television. No. The channels, the voices, always the fuckin voices" (378). "I'm hearing the voices and I'm pressing the buttons on the handset to change channels but it's the voice in my head. That same, insistent soft [End Page 145] voice, eating me up from the inside" (381). While he tries to silence this "insistent soft voice," he completely rejects the idea of examining the thoughts in his head.
Like Renton, he resists any attempts at analysis. Instead, Robertson sees his visits to prostitutes as a means of self-analysis. With a prostitute, he thinks, "this is therapy in its purest and simplest form. ... And the lesson today is: BRUCE ROBERTSON" (223). Any attempts at analysis are met with fierce resistance. A coworker attempts to discuss his psychological state, and Robertson screams in his head: "GET ON WITH YOUR FUCKIN JOB AND STOP PLAYING THE AMATEUR PSYCHOLOGIST" (340). His doctor, Rossi, asks him about what might be causing "a persistent nervous condition," and Robertson replies that there is "nothing on my mind at all" (243). While Robertson is saying this, he inwardly seethes at Rossi, a general practitioner treating Robertson for tapeworms, thinking that "Rossi evidently wants to be a psychologist" and that he should "dae yir fuckin job ya cunt" (243). As it turns out, the tapeworm, along with Carole, provides the details for a psychological diagnosis of Robertson. At the same time, the sheer overdetermined nature of this diagnostic possibility calls any analysis into question.
As the tapeworm grows and covers over more and more of Robertson's text, it gathers more information about its "Host." This gathering of information is motivated by the worm's boredom. "There is not much to do around here ... Mine Host ... you must be leading a far more interesting life than myself" (139). Out of this boredom, the worm decides: "I will sift through the food the Host ingests, prove the cells of the skin that I'm so attached to, assimilate all the bonnie data from the braw yin's consumption patterns and physical condition. To do this means I need to eat and eat and eat" (139). As the tapeworm, or "the Self," as it begins to think of itself, continues to eat, it provides insight into Robertson's character. The Self says to him, "I can feel all your ghosts. You've internalised them Bruce" (242). The tapeworm reveals Robertson's childhood and adolescent traumas: being forced to eat coal; the favoritism given to his younger brother; Robertson's accidental murder of his brother, which leads to his stepfather exclaiming: "You're no ma son! You've never been ma fuckin son! You're filth!" (354-55).
The Self reveals the secret of Robertson's father. As the Self narrates, Robertson's mother "was putting flowers on the grave of her dead brother" when she "was attacked by a man. She was beaten and raped. Molly gave a description and the man was apprehended. He was tried and convicted of a number of rapes and sexual assaults on women and men. It was revealed at his trial that this man suffered from mental problems: acute schizophrenia, depression, anxiety attacks" (381). Bruce is the child of [End Page 146] this rape. To compound this trauma, the Self also tells the story of Bruce's first girlfriend, Rhona. As the tapeworm tells it, Rhona wore a "metallic, leathery ... caliper" and the couple was referred to by other adolescents as "The Son of the Beast and The Spastic" (369, 372). To avoid such taunts, Robertson and Rhona one day take a shortcut through a golf course. A thunderstorm starts, and "then there is a rumble in the sky and the rain comes teeming down. Then you see a large flash, followed by another rumble. Then you hear Rhona let out a strange yelp ... and you turn around to see her briefly shrouded in an electrical glow as she is struck by a bolt of lightning" (373).
The tapeworm also understands how Robertson tries to "deal with" all of this trauma. "You need the job; hating, yet at the same time thriving on, its petty concerns. These concerns are enough to distract you from the Self you must only face up to at night between the extinguishing of the television set and the onset of a jittery and fitful descent into a physically bruising sleep" (260). Likewise, Carole understands that "the problem with Bruce is that he keeps it all in" (43). She also says, in an ironically reflective moment, that is, not talking about Bruce, "repressed people; you have to pity them more than anything else" (122).
Near the end Robertson reacts to the tapeworm's narrative by saying, "That is not true" (355). As the Self's voice persists, Robertson tries to distract himself with television, but that fails. Likewise, Robertson resists Carole's narrative. He acknowledges himself as Carole only because of a violent act, a kidnapping by thugs who recognize him as a cop. As they beat him up, Robertson remembers "how this all started: that when Carole first left ... we started wearing her clathes and it was like she was still with us but no really" (343). Robertson, of course, never attempts to bring all three voices together as one. He strongly resists any narrative that is centered around a human self. He belittles a coworker who is looking at him "in a deep, soulful and human way" after Robertson had tried to save a man who was dying of a heart attack (189). More strongly, Robertson continually repeats the phrase "How did it make you feel?" (141, 173, 220, 343) in an ironic manner, parodying the human caring and communication that this question can imply. Furthering his resistance to any form of analysis, Robertson says such things as "You don't fuck around with Bruce Robertson. Same rules apply" (232). These "rules" are his strong resistance to any examination of psychological state or motivation, his resistance to anything that might force him to hear the voices in his head. Robertson staunchly refuses to become a complete self.
Further, considering Robertson's three voices as part of one complete self leads to a far too obvious diagnosis. The sheer number of motivations provided for Robertson's behavior renders any analysis a parody. [End Page 147] The diagnosis of his biological father's "mental problems—acute schizophrenia, depression, anxiety attacks"—mirrors Bruce's behavior too perfectly (381). Likewise, the social traumas that Robertson suffered—abusive stepfather, girlfriend struck dead by lightning—fit together too neatly to serve as serious "explanations" for his behavior.
As I've been arguing throughout this article, Welsh creates a world that strongly resists analysis. This resistance to analysis points to a consciousness that is not centered on a fully realized, autonomous self. This is witnessed in Trainspotting as the junkie's addiction to heroin (and the nonjunkie's addiction to "life") and in Filth as the multiple voices inside the narrator's head.Trainspotting never provides glimpses into the psychic motivations, the inner lives of its characters. This is not a failing of the novel. Renton (and to a greater and lesser degree the other characters in Trainspotting) has no need for psychic motivations or inner life; such things are simply not part of his world. Filth could not be further from Trainspotting in its supply of psychic, social, and even genetic motivations for its character's behavior. At the same time, none of these motivations can be strongly attached to Robertson's self. No center exists for the voices in his head; no voice rules the others.
Robertson's doctor is speaking of worms, but he could just as easily be talking of selves in Welsh's fiction when he says: "They are harmless parasites, but they can be hard to get rid of" (131). Perhaps this is why such a strong antipsychological strain runs through Welsh's fiction, from Renton's complete indifference to all forms of psychology in the "Searching for the Inner Man" section of Trainspotting to Robertson's vehement "GET ON WITH YOUR FUCKIN JOB AND STOP PLAYING THE AMATEUR PSYCHOLOGIST" (340). In particular, Welsh's characters resist psychological narratives that are centered on the family as too simple explanations for the workings of the unconscious. Renton's response of "Radge, eh?" to his doctor's diagnosis of his "oedipal feelings towards ma mother and an attendant unresolved jealousy towards ma faither" (185) nicely typifies the novels' attitudes toward familial psychological narratives. Likewise, Robertson sarcastically says of his own violent behavior, "It was daddy. I blame him. He was a bad man" (97).
Evidence of this antipsychology also runs through Welsh's short fiction. There is the yuppie father in The Acid House, who is eager to discuss his "terrible jealousy" toward his son with his men's group, so that he can "talk it through with other men who were in touch with feelings. The thought of having a genuine hang-up to share with the rest of the group thrilled him." 29There is the ironic literalization of the Oedipus complex in "A Good Son," part of "The Sexual Disaster Quartet" in The Acid House. [End Page 148] After sleeping with his mother, as the son of the title "passed his father on his way out of the room, he heard the old man say: Aye Oedipus, yir a complex fucker right enough." 30 In short, Welsh's fictional world cannot be explained or understood through a narrative that presupposes selves or family interactions as base explanations for the functions of either conscious or unconscious minds.
"Delirium," History, and Politics
The resistance to analysis that runs through Welsh's characters is not something to be overcome by readers seeking a reflection of the world in the inner lives of Renton and Robertson. Rather, these characters provide a way of rethinking traditional notions of selfhood and its place in the world. Deleuze argues that the ability to create this kind of rethinking is one of literature's most powerful, and delirious, aspects. He writes that "literature is delirium, but delirium is not a father-mother affair: there is no delirium that does not pass through peoples, races, and tribes, and that does not haunt universal history." 31 In this formulation, literature becomes much more than a means for understanding the relation between the individual and the social. Literature leaves behind psychology as its novel subjectivities forge new connections with history and politics. Deleuze's "pass[ing] through" can be taken as a purposefully vague definition of these connections. That is, as the literary passes through the historical and the political, unforeseen configurations emerge, just as novel subjectivities emerge from heroin passing through Renton's body and from a tapeworm passing through Robertson's gut. All of these "passings through" are political in that they all configure new ways of living in the world. It is because of this creative potential, this creation of new ways of life, that Deleuze and Guattari say of minor literatures, "everything in them is political." 32 Minor literature is political precisely because of its creativity, its always reconfigured way of linking the individual and the political. That is, minor literature is more interested in producing the future than it is in critiquing the present.Deleuze and Guattari are not alone in noting that literature can have transformative political power. In Literature and Marxism, Raymond Williams argues that "creative practice" becomes political when it becomes interested in producing new ways of life. His conception of literature as a struggle resonates with Deleuze's delirium. Williams writes that when literature "becomes struggle—the active struggle for new consciousness through new relationships that is the ineradicable emphasis of the Marxist sense of self-creation—it can take many forms." 33 Williams sees new ways [End Page 149] of life emerging from the production of new connections between individuals and society. Like Deleuze, and as I am arguing, Williams notes that this production of a new consciousness is unpredictable, tenuous, and oriented toward the future. He writes that this creative practice "is always difficult and often uneven. ... For creativity and social self-creation are both known and unknown events, and it is still from grasping the known that the unknown—the next step, the next work—is conceived." 34 In other words, fiction's creative potential is also its political potential. A one-to-one relation between fiction and politics cannot be articulated, because this relation only becomes apparent in the movement from the known to the unknown, in the passing through the present to the future.
If both Scottish fiction and Scottish politics are in the process of moving from the known to the unknown, both the connections between the two and the end products of these connections remain to be determined. That there is a connection between the future of Scottish literature and politics does not seem to be in doubt. Hageman writes that "Scotland, and especially urban culture, appears to have been reinvented recently, a process which has gone hand in hand with formal innovation." 35 The formal innovation of Welsh and other "new" Scottish writers creates strategies for living in the world. Perhaps this is why Frith writes that "in wondering what it means to be Scottish, I read novels not newspapers." Novels have the power to create new linkages among individual, social, and political concerns. Frith writes that Scottish fiction reconfigures life precisely in its articulation of "a world shaped not only by English history and English culture ... but also by Hollywood films and American television, by country music, jazz and rock, by cartoons, comics and video games ... by European design and literature, by science and international academia." 36 Welsh's novel subjectivities emerge from this world at the same time as they continually produce ways of living in it. Rather than "grieve for selves that cannot be," 37 Trainspotting and Filth actively produce subjectivities that can inhabit the future.
Welsh's characters, and his novels, have tenuous and fluctuating connections to contemporary Scotland; they exist at an intersection of family, nationalism, violence, misogyny, and drugs. His fiction resists outright critique; Welsh should not be read as providing case studies that point toward what has gone wrong with the world. At the same time the opposite tack should not be taken; Welsh's fiction is by no means utopian. The point is that it is impossible to say exactly how fiction and politics pass through each other. Andrew Ross, in his consideration of Stirling's William Wallace monument, shows that this passing through always leads in multiple directions. [End Page 150]
Discussing the recent remodeling of the monument, what he calls "the makeover required of postmodern tourism,"Ross notes that a new statue of Wallace in the parking lot looks so much like Mel Gibson, the portrayer of Wallace in Braveheart, that it is often referred to as "the 'Mel Gibson statue.'" 38 In addition to this concrete effect on historical representation, Ross notes that "Braveheart has drawn many competing claims on its symbolism" (101). "Not a few of the monument's daily American visitors hail from the South, where Braveheart has been adopted by the neo-Confederate movement as a potent political token of both Scottish and Confederate secession, and where its depiction of 'angry white males' has fed into recent attempts to celebrate cracker and redneck pride" (101). In addition, Ross uses his analysis of the Wallace monument and Braveheart to point to the myriad directions Scotland's new political situation might lead to.
Scotland's way forward may yet learn how to fuse a cosmopolitan tradition ... with a tradition of popular sovereignty. ... Of course, Scottish experience also portends other, much less savory, futures; a one-way nativist path to parochial sclerosis, or the semi-periphery track of a "Celtic tiger" whose soul has been traded to the multinational leviathans of capital. Place your bets and stay tuned to Radio Caledonia! (107)In other words, the future of Scottish politics, and the role that creative practices such as the remodeled Wallace monument and Braveheart will play in this future, will only become known as they are produced. Likewise, the connection between Welsh's fiction—Ross notes that Welsh now appears in the "expanded and more politically correct" Hall of Heroes at the Wallace monument—and the future of Scotland remains to be determined (101).
Mark Renton and Bruce Robertson can be seen as two possible futures for Scotland. Of course, these novel subjectivities are certainly "less savory" than one might hope for. But with the "explosion" of "new Scottish writing" and the entry of Scotland into world politics, many more paths of moving from the known to the unknown are being produced, by Welsh and by other writers, as they create novel subjectivities. For instance, Welsh's most recent novel, Glue, maps the fate of its four central characters over the course of thirty or so years. Within the larger scope of this novel, Welsh develops his novel subjectivities differently. Glue ends on a much more optimistic note than any of Welsh's previous fiction. Whether these subjectivities seem optimistic or pessimistic about the future is, in a sense, beside the point. What seems most important is that the new literature of Scotland has a powerful, if indeterminate, connection to the[End Page 151] future of Scotland. Whatever the tenuous connections between "new Scottish writing" and Scottish politics, both are actively, even deliriously, producing the future, whatever it may come to be.
Jeffrey Karnicky is assistant professor of English at Millersville University. He is currently revising a manuscript entitled "Programs of Life: Reading Ethics and Contemporary Literature," which considers the institutional position of postmodern literary criticism and articulates an ethics of reading around writers including Susan Daitch, Irvine Welsh, David Foster Wallace, and Richard Powers.
Endnotes
I would like to thank the following colleagues for reading this manuscript and offering helpful suggestions: Richard Doyle, Jeffrey Nealon, Kathryn Hume, Marco Abel, and Megan Brown.1. Irvine Welsh, The Rosewell Incident, in Children of Albion Rovers: New Scottish Writing, ed. Kevin Williamson (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1997), 192.
2. Ibid., 216.
3. Andrew Ross, "Wallace's Monument and the Resumption of Scotland," Social Text, 18.4 (winter 2000): 83.
4. Peter Kravitz, ed., The Vintage Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction (New York: Vintage, 1999); Williamson, Children of Albion Rovers; Harry Ritchie, ed., Acid Plaid: New Scottish Writing (New York: Arcade, 1997). The quotation is from Ritchie, introduction to Acid Plaid, 3.
5. Kravitz, introduction to Contemporary Scottish Fiction, xxxvi.
6. Ritchie, introduction, 3.
7. Williamson, "Team Talk," in Children of Albion Rovers, 1.
8. Ibid., 3.
9. Chris Mitchell, "The Agony and the Ecstasy," Spike Magazine, 1997, www.spikemagazine.com/1000agonyandecstasy.html.
10. Kravitz, introduction, xxxii.
11. Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London: Minerva, 1993), 78.
12. Angus Calder, "By the Water of Leith I Sat Down and Wept: Reflections on Scottish Identity," in Ritchie, Acid Plaid, 219.
13. Susan Hageman, introduction to Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, ed. Susan Hageman (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 12-13.
14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
15. Simon Frith, "On Not Being Scottish," Critical Quarterly 42.4 (2000): 3.
16. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17.
17. Gilles Deleuze, "Literature and Life," in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1.
18. Alan Freeman, "Ghosts in Sunny Leith: Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting," in Hageman, Studies in Scottish Fiction, 251.
19. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 30.
20. Ritchie, introduction, 3.
21. Welsh, The Rosewell Incident, 215.
22. Gerald Howard, "A Trainspotting Glossary," Paris Review 38 (spring 1996): 348.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 346-48. [End Page 152]
25. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 24.
26. Gilles Deleuze, "Preface to the French Edition," in Essays Critical and Clinical, lv.
27. Freeman, "Ghosts in Sunny Leith," 256.
28. Irvine Welsh, Filth (New York: Norton, 1998), 37.
29. Irvine Welsh, The Acid House (New York: Norton, 1994), 164.
30. Ibid., 61.
31. Deleuze, "Literature and Life," 4.
32. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17.
33. Raymond Williams, Literature and Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 207.
34. Ibid., 212.
35. Hageman, introduction, 12.
36. Frith, "On Not Being Scottish," 6.
37. Freeman, "Ghosts in Sunny Leith," 260.
38. Ross, "Wallace's Monument," 100-101.
