2 - ‘They peer at my dark land’: The Ethics of Storytelling in Twenty-First-Century Scottish Women’s Writing

Summary

In an article in The National dated 14 October 2016, Alan Riach stresses that the defining characteristic of the Scottish literary landscape is the use of the various languages of Scotland, which he links with Scotland's fundamental egalitarianism and its connection to the country's geographical diversity, as well as to freedom. One might detect the author's own leanings in his eliciting literature's ‘freedom from oppressions and freedom to do certain things otherwise than under the constraints of a political zombie uniform mentality’ (Riach 2016), but the fact remains that its versatility, diversity, its capacity to cross borders – geographic, generic, formal and political – particularly stand out in the twenty-first century. When Riach goes on to propose major themes in Scottish literature, a recurrent question appears – its participation in the ongoing debate on what constitutes national identity, what he calls ‘the matter of the nation’ (Riach 2016). This connection between national identity and Scottish literature, or more specifically the argument that literature provides a unique artistic space where the politics of national identity are played out is a long-standing idea. It has come under a certain amount of criticism for the ultimately limited scope it affords literature, which cannot be properly envisaged within such a unilateral criterion. The very influential critical works on women's literature that have been published since the mid-1990s, starting with Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan's landmark volume in 1997, followed by Carol Anderson and Aileen Christianson in 2000, Christianson and Alison Lumsden in 2000, Glenda Norquay in 2002 and Norquay again in 2012, have thoroughly analysed the implications of gender in the definition of Scottish literature, while noting, as for example Christianson and Lumsden or Eleanor Bell do, the difficulties attendant on the notion of writing as an extended meditation on the nation. For Bell:

There has been a tendency in Scottish Studies to equate history with literature, so that literature tends to be regarded as the effect of cultural processes, rather than as an intervention in those processes, or indeed as a relatively autonomous act of aesthetic, ethical or political engagement. Subsequently, there is a certain factor of reducibility at work, where texts produced by Scottish authors must in the first instance be explained in terms of their Scottishness. (Bell 2004: 2)