And the Land Lay Still

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Pat: This is a powerful story of Scotland and of the growth of Scottish Nationalism from the 1950s to the present day, evoking strong nostalgic memories of life during these times. We begin at a Christmas market in Edinburgh, where protagonist Eric is suddenly and inexplicably drawn away from his fiancee by the allure of a woman named Delia. Showing no regret for his actions, however uncharacteristic, Eric is taken in a taxi to a remote hotel in the Scottish highlands; a place that never sees any guests and the snow never stops falling. Whether circular or not, we should notice that the culturalist narrative includes ample room for historical contingency and the unexpected twist. In a 2014 essay Craig observes that ‘in 1990 no political party in Scotland was in favour of the Parliament that actually came into existence in 1999’ ( Craig 2014, 1). 3 In Scotland, as much as in England – I don’t see much difference here – literature has played a very central role in the construction of national identity, and literary texts and writers have here a nationally iconic status that does not necessarily characterise other European contexts. You can have a literature, but in other countries, you’re not necessarily entitled to independence for that, or perhaps you’re not even interested in independence. ( Recording, Workshop 2)

Other voices rather welcomed the bracing effect of the call-up papers, or devolution’s nearest equivalent. Writing in the wake of the failed 1979 referendum on a Scottish Assembly, Tom Nairn took heart from the harsh division exposed between the ‘windy, sleekit, after-dinner “Patriotism”’ of middle-class Scotland and the hard political choice imposed by the Scotland Act. Despite the general malaise which followed, wrote Nairn, ‘a great deal of spineless self-affirmation was blown away in the result’. Craig’s foreword to the Determinations series he edited for Polygon: ‘the 1980s proved to be one of the most productive and creative decades in Scotland this century — as though the energy that had failed to be harnessed by the politicians flowed into other channels’. The first three books of the Determinations series were published in 1989, making the foreword evidence of the cultural phenomenon on which it claims to reflect. ( Thomson 2007) The full rigours of a politicized assertion of Scottishness would have to wait for the debates of 2012–14, however. In 1983, Joyce McMillan felt that the ‘Predicament of the Scottish Writer’ – updated from Edwin Muir’s 1936 diagnosis in Scott and Scotland – was marked by an over-developed reflex of self-assertion, noting that the Scottish cultural establishment ‘cherishes its hard-won consciousness of the ways in which Scottish culture has been discriminated against, and tends to demand that that consciousness never be let slip; and it is at this point that the artistic rot set in’ ( McMillan 1983, 69). Its ill-effects may be literary and aesthetic, but the remedy is clearly political: The winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award 2010, And the Land Lay Still is a masterful insight into Scotland's history in the twentieth century and a moving, beautifully written novel of intertwined stories.The destructive obsession with the need to emphasise and preserve the ‘Scottishness’ of our writing far beyond what comes naturally and truthfully to writers will persist for as long as Scotland remains in a political limbo; in other words, it will last until Scotland either becomes a full nation-state, or loses its sense of nationhood altogether. ( McMillan 1983, 70) This part of the project draws on archival research into the Royal Commission and the ‘cultural’ dimension of devolution policy from 1967–1979. Competing narratives and histories – both of Britishness and Scottishness – are richly evident in unpublished drafts and discussions of the Royal Commission, as is a striking preoccupation with national feeling and sentiment. From an early stage of its deliberations the Royal Commission comes to understand its primary purpose as that of remedying the threat posed by sub-British nationalism, and theorises the problem as one of affect and attachment: ‘the question for us is whether in [Scotland and Wales] the existence of national feeling gives rise to a need for change in political institutions’ ( Royal Commission 1973, I, 102). Indeed, an entire chapter of the final Report is devoted to the nature, strength and implications of ‘National Feeling’. The Commission is continually exercised by whether votes for the SNP reflect a desire for constitutional change, or mere recognition of distinct national identity. Devolution is thus conceived as the management of ‘national feeling’ and its channelling into new institutional loyalties which will corral its destabilising potential. One of Robertson’s fictional spymasters also conceives the threat of nationalism in emotional terms when justifying the intelligence services’ heightened interest in the SNP after 1967: ‘people should be aware of the dangers, the unintended consequences, of indulging their emotions. They need to be made aware of them’ ( Robertson 2010, 290). For all that, ‘the government’s policy is to contain Nationalism, not to persecute it’ (299), and the receptacle for this containment is ‘identity’ itself. The Kilbrandon Report recommends devolution as ‘an appropriate means of recognizing Scotland’s national identity and of giving expression to its national consciousness’ ( Royal Commission 1973, I, 335) but takes great pains to emphasise its larger purpose of strengthening and preserving Britishness. Notably, the discourse around ‘identity’ shifts into a more romantic idiom of national community when placing the essential unity of the United Kingdom beyond question. A section on ‘history and tradition’ declares: In contrast, Alex Thomson offered a sceptical view of national literary history and its critical methods, so often employed to justify the canon (and discipline) in ways which tend to inhibit critical enquiry: JAMES Robertson's fascinating and multi stranded novel is proving a huge hit with Scottish book groups - and Strathblane is no exception. Leading sociologist David McCrone notes ‘an influential strain of writing about the relationship between culture and politics’ in modern Scotland.

Robertson lives in the village of Newtyle, 10 miles north of Dundee. Sometimes called Scotland's forgotten corner, it glories in verdant countryside, standing stones and legend. Issuing directions, he cautions against the cannibal who used to waylay travellers on the road ("but don't worry, he was dealt with"). With his wife Marianne, Robertson lives in a handsome villa that was once a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. He is a keen, busy man in his early 50s. Answering the door with telephone in hand, he gives the friendly impression that if he were not at the centre of a one-man literary industry, he might make a decent job of running the bank. The germ of And the Land Lay Still settled in Robertson's imagination in the 1990s, when the Tories governed Great Britain without a single Scottish MP. "It was a time when we were on the receiving end of a lot of politics we didn't like, and it caused many people in Scotland to ask who they were and what they wanted to be." He has spent four years toiling on his answer to those questions. The novel was enjoyed by everyone in the group - which is no mean feat as there are usually lots of different opinions around the room and few books gain a unanimous accolade!The majority report, we believe, has the effect of magnifying the extent of the social and cultural differences between Scotland, Wales and England. This is partly because of the way it handles in the historical section the concept of ‘nationhood’ – with Scotland and Wales thus appearing as separate nations with distinctive values and ways of life ‘struggling to be free’. In contrast there is no matching study of the more homogenous contemporary pattern of social and cultural values and behaviour which characterise all the different parts of the United Kingdom. ( Royal Commission 1973, II, vii) If contesting an integrated British historical narrative was key to these Whitehall debates of the 1970s, the question of Scotland’s ‘distinct values and way of life’ were being explored with great energy by writers and scholars. Here the problem was blank space, rather than competing stories. During our first workshop, Cairns Craig argued that the explosion of Scottish historical writing over the past few decades represents the ‘filling-in of what was a kind of emptiness in the Scottish past’. For Craig the energies which led to Holyrood originate in the recovery of national historical memory, with magazines such as Radical Scotland and Cencrastus playing a key role: There is no strong ideological pulse beating through devolution, no political theology hovering above the pragmatic fudging of institutional reform. This makes the meaning of devolution both conveniently flexible and somewhat unstable, both as a policy and as an object of knowledge. Perhaps appropriately for an enterprise involving the deliberate erosion of central authority, devolution is always susceptible to being commandeered and re-defined, bent to stronger narrative impulses than those of its tinkering architects. Published by the fine folks at Scotland-based indie publishing house Haunt, Joanna Corrance’s novel The Gingerbread Men is a fantastically gothic fairy tale for adults.

it had much earlier declared cultural devolution, both in the radical voices of new Scottish writing – from James Kelman to Matthew Fitt, from Janice Galloway to Ali Smith – and in the rewriting of Scottish cultural history that produced, in the 1980s and 1990s, a new sense of the richness and the autonomy of Scotland’s past cultural achievements. ( Craig 2003, 39) The novel first introduces us to the thoughtful Michael, a photographer of leftish nationalist sympathies, who's been as slow in coming out as Scottish law was to sanction the idea of gay sex. Michael is ambivalent about being entrusted with the task of curating an exhibition of work by his late father, Angus, a more successful and celebrated photographer. Michael's largely been in his paternal shadow, not just professionally but sexually and socially, the whole of his life. Basically, he's a nicer guy than his womanising old man, without the ruthlessness that often distinguishes artist from artisan, and thus perennially destined to come second.

Abstract

Alongside the recovery and ‘filling-in’ of Scottish cultural identity were several literary interventions which urged caution about national tradition and pre-given modes of belonging. At the 2014 workshop, critic Eleanor Bell surveyed small experimental magazines of the 1960s including New Saltire and Scottish International. These magazines contain a range of cultural explorations which clearly anticipate the debates of the following decades, without being yoked to, or delimited by, the national question as a salient political issue (which was yet to fully emerge). Scottish International magazine (1968–74), for example, set its store on newness and exploration, not recovery of the past. In Bell’s words,