A Disaffection
A Disaffection
by James Kelman
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set m the working-class neighborhoods of unemployment-torn Glasgow m the If80s; published m 1989.
SYNOPSIS
Secondary-school teacher Patrick Doyle aganizes over his social and political alienation seeking solace in drinking, constructing a musical instrument, starting an affair with a married colleague, and reaching out to hi$ laving but distant family
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
With his use of Scots vernacular and ample profanity, James Kelman has altered the landscape of the contemporary British literary scene. Kelman was born in 1946 near shipyards in the Glasgow neighborhood of Govan. At the age of eight he moved with his family to Drumchapel—an infamous housing estate on the edge of town, remote from shops and public transportation. The youngest of the five sons of struggling working-class parents, Kelman left school at age 15, dismissing its structure and lessons as irrelevant. For the next seven years, he read insatiably, educating himself while performing various menial jobs, from asbestos factory worker to bus driver before settling down to write. Convinced that working-class characters seldom occupied any role other than servant, criminal, or comic relief, he set out to express the voices of the underprivileged, making the crucial decision early in his career to use the language of those characters, in all its slang, vulgarity, and nonstandard constructions. Kelman’s first short stories conformed to this model, which was so unheard-of that the typesetter refused to finish working on them. With the help of small presses, however, Kelman’s fiction was published and did find a loyal audience. His early work in short stories, in such volumes as An Old Pub Near The Angel (1973), Not While the Giro and other stones (1983), and Greyhound for Breakfast (1985), laid the groundwork for the novels he wrote in the 1980s, including The Bus-conductor Hines (1984) and A Chancer (1985). Kelman’s A Disaffection became a finalist for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize in 1989 and his How Late it Was, How Late won this same award in 1995. Despite this public acclaim, he has continued to live in the neighborhood he writes about, agitating for other oppressed groups in Britain and criticizing both the literary and the political establishment for their elitism. His plays, essays, and fiction draw on Glasgow speech to convey the loneliness of individuals and challenges of being male in modern society, the frustration with bureaucracy, and a yearning for beauty. A Disaffection traces about a week in the life of an instructor who is highly conscious of his social distance from his less-educated parents, meanwhile raising questions about the role teachers play in maintaining or challenging the status quo and about the relationship of the personal to the political.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place
Thatcherism and economics
As a writer interested in social change, Kelman’s works deal with the present. In the 1980s, when he began to publish, the United Kingdom was experiencing a period of economic hardship rooted in the economic policies of the previous 30 years. After the shortages and hardships of World War II, the British government had nationalized such major industries as coal and the railroads and supplemented its already well-established social insurance system with socialized medical care. While prosperity marked the postwar years, the British pound was weakened by a trade imbalance, in which imports far exceeded exports. Wages were frozen and the pound was devalued in an effort to maintain good times while balancing trade, and this resulted in rapid inflation accompanied by high taxes. By the late 1970s, it became clear that Britain was in serious trouble, its former status as a world leader jeopardized. Unemployment rose ever higher as Britain’s standard of living declined in the years leading up to Margaret Thatcher’s election as prime minister in 1979. As if these economic woes were not enough, the “troubles” between Protestant Unionists and the Irish Republican Army kept erupting into violence, racial tensions continued to rise, and a Scottish Nationalist movement was in the making. Thatcher took measures to contain these problems, often making very controversial choices. Many of Thatcher’s policies, designed to restore the economy to its former strength, also reflected Thatcher’s own beliefs that such social services as medical care and housing assistance caused people to depend too much on government aid, rather than on their own hard work. In its departure from cradle-to-grave care, Thatcher’s regime diverged from the bipartisan consensus that had marked the previous 30 years. Reversing the postwar policies of nationalization, her government privatized major industries; it dismantled parts of the welfare state, faced down union leaders and labor strikes, and sought tax cuts for the wealthy. As Britain’s economy sputtered back into motion, many working-class citizens felt that their needs had been overlooked and that Thatcher’s rhetoric unfairly characterized their hardships as their own fault. In her economics and accompanying discussion, Thatcher resembled her good friend, American President Ronald Reagan, who was a proponent of trickle-down economics and welfare cutbacks at the same time. Thatcher advocated, for instance, a poll tax based on the premise that all citizens should pay equally for the social services they received. Unemployment remained high, especially in traditional industries such as mining and manufacturing, fields in which Patrick Doyle’s family works in A Disaffection. By 1987, with the third election of Thatcher and her Conservative (often called Tory) government to power, the split in Britain was clear: the Conservatives had no hold in the industrial North, including Scotland, while the progressive Labour party had little support in the economically recovering South. It is in this time of angry division that Kelman writes, as a citizen of the part of Great Britain not prospering under Thatcher’s policies.
Scottish identity in Great Britain
At the same time, and especially significant for a Scottish novel, there was a rise in Scotland of a nationalist movement. Scotland had united with England to form Great Britain in 1707, and since that time the two nations had shared political leaders and economic, religious, and legal systems. There was a feeling in mid-twentieth century Scotland that the British government did not speak to Scottish interests, and a series of candidates for office proposed a devolution of power as one of their aims. These nationalist tendencies reached an apex in the 1970s, at which time the discovery of oil in the North Sea offered the promise of Scottish prosperity. Still, despite a majority in a 1977 referendum about independence, the Scottish Nationalist Party did not manage to garner enough of a popular vote to begin the move to self-governance. Class solidarity came into conflict with national solidarity, and many of the Scottish supported Britain’s Labour party instead. The failure of the Scottish nationalists in the 1970s to capitalize on their natural allies against the Tories, the strong Labour party, revealed a movement out of touch with the very working class it claimed as its base. For Kelman and others like him, Scots nationalism would merely replace one government unreceptive to workers with another.
Yet Kelman’s novel seems to reserve special dislike for the British government, placing condemnations of its imperialist tendencies in the mouth of the character Patrick Doyle. Indeed, Kelman’s own distance from the British mainstream can be seen in his literary influences. The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the French writer Honore de Balzac, and the Russian writer Feodor Dostoyevsky all receive mention in A Disaffection, though stylistically and the-matically, Austrian-born Franz Kafka and Irish-born Samuel Beckett are the most prominent literary forefathers. Worth noticing here is the absence of British influences, which, according to Kelman, is not so much a nationalist or isolationist statement as a matter of necessity. From his readings, it seemed to Kelman that no one in British literature had ever written from anything like his own experience before. “So because of this dearth of home-grown literary models I had to look elsewhere. As I say, there was nothing at all in English literature, but in English Language literature—well, I came upon a few American writers,” as well as writers in Russian, German, and French (Kelman, Some Recent Attacks, p. 83).
Glasgow
In this rejection of a British canon, Kelman resembles other Scottish writers of his time, in particular a group called the Glasgow School. Such figures as Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, and Janice Galloway are seen as major figures in the contemporary Glasgow scene. Known for their working-class perspective, use of urban landscapes, reliance on local dialect, and resistance to a dominant British perspective, many of the writers focus on the plight of the individual isolated within society. While their formal techniques may vary, these writers share a commitment to using Scots language as the standard voice in their texts, and a tendency to focus their stories on the everyday existences of urban, working-class characters. Their storylines have led many critics, reviewers, and readers to expect gritty realist texts in coarse local dialect, in a manner much like the “kailyard” texts published
GLASGOW AND LANGUAGE
I n his essay collection Some Recent Attacks (1994), Kelman discusses how British literature’s historical depiction of class distinctions have made such differentiations seem natural, inevitable, and aesthetic. He notes that historically the working-class character, whose language is so quaintly garbled, has been equipped with an equally inaccessible inner life:
What gobbleydygook! Beautiful! Their language a cross between semaphore and Morse code; apostrophes here and apostrophes there; a strange hotchpotch of bad phonetics and horrendous spelling—unlike the nice stalwart upperclass English here (occasionally Scottish but with no linguistic variation) whose words on the page were always absolutely and splendidly proper and pure and pristinely accurate, whether in dialogue or without, and what grammar! Colons and semicolons! Straight out of their mouths! An incredible mastery of language … the narrative belonged to them and them atone They owned it The place where thought and spiritual life exists. Nobody outwith the parameters of their sociocultural setting had a spiritual life We all stumbled along in a series of behaviouristic activity, automatons, cardboard-cut-outs, folk who could be scrutinised, whose existence could be verified in a social or anthropological context In other words, in the society that is English literature, 80 to 85 percent of the population simply did not exist as human beings,
(Kelman, Some Recent Attacks, p. 82)
about village life in Scotland a century before. Drawing its name from the Scots word for “a small kitchen garden,” the kailyard movement relied on a natural-seeming, unsophisticated style to tell sentimental stories of humble folk. While Kelman and other writers in the Glasgow school similarly write about everyday events and common people, they actually write in reaction to such stereotypes as the kailyard tales created, often challenging the conventions of realism (such as linear plot and a controlling narrative perspective) that marked earlier texts, instead aiming for a nuanced reproduction of working-class voices that carry the narrative authority to tell their own stories. With an ear for the cadences
HOUSING ESTATES
At the end of the Second World War, Glasgow contained some of the most decrepit and overcrowded slums in Europe. Its inner-city neighborhoods were disease-ridden and uncomfortable. Families of five or even ten crowded into one or two rooms in tenements that had been built years before. Because the private sector was not building enough homes, the government stepped in, funding what became known as “Council Housing” or “housing estates,” At the same time, the government engaged in slum clearing, knocking down inner-city buildings. While the new housing was a significant improvement over the tenement slums, much of it was poorly designed. Moreover, rebuilding was often poorly coordinated with demolition, resulting in the devastation of local communities long before reconstruction took place, A further problem with the new estates came in their locations. While some were built in the inner city neighborhoods that had been cleared others were erected on the outskirts of Glasgow, based on the assumption that car ownership would soon become universal, A strong system of public transportation was never put into place, leaving many residents stranded in poor neighborhoods that were unable to sustain local markets and shops A cycle ensued in which estates with little public transportation and few shops were evacuated by all except the poorest tenants, which in turn led to businesses closing and further cuts fn transportation.
Leaving his brother Gavin’s house, Pat had passed a bus stop before the end of the road but no point waiting there according to Gavin. People died of exposure wafting there It was one of those bus stops you find in outer-city homing schemes all over Glasgow, only there for the benefit of the fucking canine population and n few desperate drunks because no buses ever went there.
(Kelman, A Disaffection, p. 327)
The picture Pat paints characterizes the worst problems of the postwar exurban estates, Scenes throughout A Disaffection explore the ways such remote and inaccessible housing increased both unemployment and a feeling of alienation among Glasgow’s working class.
of Glasgow speech and a vernacular at once poetic and profane, Kelman leads the drive to give equal time to voices outside conventional expectations.
Glasgow is unique in Britain and in Scotland. First recognized as a town in the twelfth century, the city came into its own in the 1800s, when it dominated in shipbuilding and other heavy manufacturing industries. Because of its community of skilled laborers, it has historically boasted a strong worker’s movement and progressive politics. Unemployment has lingered in Glasgow, especially in the poverty-stricken estates, longer than elsewhere in Scotland, in large part because of the permanent decline in shipbuilding and the gradual shift to a service and tourist economy. Moreover, it has always supported the arts, with a thriving opera and vigorous local literary scene. Industry, however, has meant pollution, and Glasgow is notorious for its slums, from the inner-city Gorbals to the more recently built estates such as Castlemilk on the outskirts of town. Kelman’s fiction, set in dingy public buildings, fetid bus shelters, and grimy pubs, portrays a city as alienated as the characters themselves.
The educational system and red-brick universities
Universal elementary education in Great Britain was made free and compulsory during the reformist Victorian era, but the goals of that education varied with the intentions the state had for various students. A university education was reserved for a tiny fraction of the very elite; most students received more vocational training. This fact hindered the population hardly at all, since the majority of jobs did not require a college degree (a concept that is itself only about 150 years old). Yet higher education in Britain has a long history; it dates to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the founding of the oldest colleges within Oxford and Cambridge universities. It was not until the nineteenth century, though, that higher education spread to the general population. Late in the century, many industrial towns built universities to serve their local inhabitants. Known as red brick universities to distinguish their buildings from the older stone colleges of “Oxbridge” (Oxford and Cambridge), these universities made education available to a wider pool of people. A further move to broaden university access came in 1963, with the release of the Robbins Report, which recommended that “courses of higher education should be available for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so” (Robbins in Bligh, p. 24). The report noted the rise in demand for education after the Second World War and the need for teachers to educate the growing populace. For the next decade, funds and access were increased; however, Margaret Thatcher’s 1972 White Paper “A Framework for Expansion” called for the reduction of the number of trainees in teacher education. Further cuts throughout the 1970s and 1980s were made in response to Britain’s continuing economic downturn.
While A Disaffection’s main character Patrick Doyle, a teacher, appears to have attended University of Glasgow, an institution with a longer history than the red bricks, his presence there stems from the inclusive admissions fostered by more open access to education through the red brick schools. The students Pat Doyle teaches are not expected to go on to college any more than he himself had been. Rather, their formal education will presumably end when they complete secondary education. For Pat, the near-inevitability of their futures outside the educational, social, and economic elite obscures the value of the material he teaches. His disenchantment with the teaching process can be attributed to the tension between economic trimming under Thatcher and an expanding student body at the secondary school level.
The Novel in Focus
Plot summary
A Disaffection opens with the information that “Patrick Doyle was a teacher. Gradually he had become sickened by it” (Kel-man, A Disaffection, p. 1). This sick feeling pervades the story, which traces about a week of Pat’s life. Curiously, there is very little plot development throughout the novel. This is not to say that things do not happen, just that the events resemble those of real life, with their randomness, occasional banality, and unresolved issues, especially at the novel’s end. Most of the narrative is in the form of third-person interior monologue; that is, we read Pat’s thoughts while they are occurring but as told to us by someone else, without use of the pronoun “1.” Reading the novel feels like reading Pat’s mind, a sense amplified both by the various formal, philosophical, slang, and vulgar linguistic registers that Pat uses, and by Kelman’s willingness to let certain thoughts trail off as unfinished sentences and others to enter and exit Pat’s mind unpredictably.
In the first scene, Pat retreats behind a building to urinate while out for drinks after work with his fellow teachers. While behind the building, he discovers a pair of cardboard pipes that he determines he can blow into like musical instruments. These pipes occupy a significant portion of Pat’s thoughts throughout the story, representing the sort of purity that he feels he has lost as a teacher. Dispirited, Pat comes to feel that he cannot change the world, that he is but a cog in a machine he wants to resist. Teaching, in Pat’s mind, influences children without actually offering them tools or hope for a better life. Instead, most teachers he knows are asked to help prepare children to accept the socioeconomic status into which they are born. In trying to combat the establishment he knows himself to be a part of, Pat encourages his students in subversive thoughts: “now then, I want you all to repeat after me: the present government in suppressing the poor, is suppressing our parents. . Our parents, who are poor, are suffering from acute poverty of the mind” (A Disaffection, p. 24). Working class Glasgow in the 1980s is about as unfortunate a lot as Pat can imagine, and he feels compromised by the institutional expectations of the school and guilty that he cannot give more to the “weans,” or children, that he teaches.
To add to Pat’s angst, he is lonely. A bachelor living on his own, he has trouble relating to other people, speaking awkwardly and often appearing to lash out at others. His experience with women is limited, and he is desperate for female companionship; mainly, he seeks the company of Alison Houston, a colleague who happens to be married, although in his typical indecisive self-dialogue, he considers bars, clubs, and prostitutes as alternatives. “What about a prostitute? A prostitute was sensible. Surely a prostitute was sensible? If it came right down to that did he really feel as low as all that and the notion that female company, that [unfinished sentence]” (A Disaffection, p. 79). Somewhat estranged from his parents and brother—his father is a machinist at a factory and his brother a chronically unemployed construction worker—Pat has no one he feels he can relate to, no one in whom he can confide. The pipes he brings home offer him a chance to take definitive action in a life that seems stagnated, so the day after he finds them, he paints them and begins to imagine the environment in which he would perform with them.
Meanwhile, the situation at Pat’s school is deteriorating. Increasingly irritated by the conversations in the staff room, Pat announces his intention to quit his job. He is jealous of the attention Alison receives from other men and fed up with his role in perpetuating the status quo. Already frustrated, Pat plans to meet Alison for a drink after work, only to feel thwarted when another teacher accompanies them. As Pat struggles with his emotions, often more inside his own head than participating in conversation, he also grapples with the question of how much to drink, especially as he is driving. Choosing to call it an early evening, he starts out for home, intending to play his pipes once his head is clear. In a moment of massive emotional need, he leaves his flat in a rush, desperate to make some human contact. Once in his car, he considers going to clubs, but recalls that his students frequent such places. He contemplates trying to contact Alison, reflects on former girlfriends, and thinks of a friend in England he hasn’t seen in a few years. As he passes a bar he used to frequent, he contemplates entering, but “he probably wont know anybody to talk to. And even if he does … he is not able to talk. If he could talk he wouldn’t be here” (A Disaffection, p. 63). As he continues to drive further and further out of Glasgow, it seems as though Pat may finally make some sort of definitive change in his life. But after a while, he turns the car around and heads home, unable or unwilling to radically change his life. The pipes offer some comfort to him, but his thoughts dart around suicide. The remainder of the weekend traces Pat’s lonely wanderings—to a football match, to his parents (where he takes a bath to avoid awkward conversation), to a strained meeting with Alison in which he cannot muster the nerve to express his feelings. The emptiness in his life is crushing, seeping into the repetitive rhythm of the narrative.
Upon his return to school Monday morning, Pat is informed by his headmaster that a transfer to another school that Pat applied for has come through. As he cannot recall putting in for such a transfer, Pat is disconcerted and reacts with suspicion. The sense of a controlling state bureaucracy looms as Pat warns his students of conspiracies around them all. He leaves campus alone at the lunch hour and gets drunk, later falling down some stairs, continuing to rant to his students, and getting sick in his classroom. Later that day, he arranges to meet with Alison that night and finally makes clear to her his interest in her. She holds his hand sympathetically but says she does not want a relationship and asks him to stop calling her at home. The next day Pat sneaks away from school early and goes to his brother’s house, where a drinking session is in progress. Gavin and his unemployed friends welcome Pat, although Gavin is wary. He feels resentful of his brother’s dissatisfaction with his job and affluent lifestyle when he himself cannot find work at all. As Pat notes, “The levels of irony were become slippery” (A Disaffection, p. 255). The brothers’ joking has an edge to it throughout the afternoon, and by the time Gavin’s wife, Nicola, returns home, there is tension in the air. Pat agrees to stay for dinner, and to pass the time, creates for his young niece and nephew a fantastic version of the story of his discovery of the pipes, one of the few moments in the text in which Pat seems to achieve warm human contact. He also finds intimacy in a conversation with his careworn sister-in-law before leaving the house on foot, unable to drive due to the alcohol he has consumed. When no buses arrive, Pat begins to walk home, eventually running through the rain into his future, a seemingly bleak one: “It was dark and it was wet but not cold; if it had not been so dark you would have seen the sky. Ah fuck off, fuck off (A Disaffection, p. 337).
Social mobility and guilt
Part of Pat’s abundant discomfort with his life comes from the guilt he feels at not being happy when he believes it is such a privilege to attend college, become a teacher, and collect such a large salary. Pat’s family, his brother Gavin included, sacrificed to make it possible for him to attend university. As he notes, he now earns twice as much as Gavin, and that is when Gavin can find the construction work that is his trade. Pat feels guilt and disconnection as a consequence of his upward mobility. While his family wanted him to have a “uni” education, they have little contact with the college-educated and don’t quite know how to communicate with Pat; his own feelings, while sometimes phrased in the language he has acquired at college, reveal a similar discomfort in his acquired milieu. Pat is acutely aware of the disjunction between the language he grew up with and the one he now speaks; his egalitarian politics are confronted by assumptions about the superiority of educated speech that seem imbedded within language itself. During the strained weekend visit to his parents, as Pat contemplates his guilt in avoiding them, the narrative moves towards their grammar: “He should have gone straight home after the match. He just shouldni have come here? How come he came? He shouldni have fucking came” (A Disaffection, p. 114). From the proscriptively proper past conditional, the language shifts to a slang, “shouldni,” before shifting into an incorrect construction, “have came,” perhaps brought on by the slang, or perhaps by sitting at the dinner table of parents who would say “have came” and whom Pat senses would feel awkward in the presence of their son’s educated speech.
This issue of speech permeates the novel. Kel-man avoids the use of quotation marks, which creates an effect of interpenetration of narrative and character voices. While many novels have a controlling narrator who translates for readers or tells them how to interpret events, Kelman offers readers of A Disaffection only a narrator who uses Pat’s phrases but does not clarify for his audience. As the quotation above has made evident, profanity is inevitable. Kelman’s own mother objects to the language he uses, but he feels that it would be a disservice to his readers and his subjects to pretend that the everyday language of Glasgow were not suffused with swearing. “In fiction whole groups in society have been suppressed by virtue of the way they speak and the language they use. If the language is taboo, the people are taboo. A culture can’t exist without the language of the culture” (Kelman in Jack, p. 26). For Kelman, then, the plot of A Disaffection may be secondary to the language used to relate it. The characters he focuses on—particularly Pat and Gavin—give voice to the “taboo” people of this world. As literary historian Cairns Craig has pointed out, “Kelman’s novels take place not in the traditional sites of the working-class struggle for power (the trades union, the educational system as liberator), nor in the traditional sites of working-class escape from work and exploitation (sport, domestic solidarity), but along the margins of that traditional working-class life … because that life has been decimated” by the destruction of traditional Glasgow industries (Craig, p. 101). Pat does not feel ennobled and set free by his advanced degrees, nor does Gavin find solidarity at work since he never does work. Moreover, home provides no safe haven. Rather it is a place of tension for Gavin and loneliness for Pat. Nor is the traditional escapism offered by sport an outlet: at the one football match that Pat attends, distracted by his woeful reflections, he misses seeing the only goal.
All the conventions of working-class fiction are resisted by A Disaffection, which then offers its readers new perspectives on characters they would perhaps never meet otherwise. Actually Pat plays in his mind with the conventions of the “poor boy makes good” novel, recalling “far-off days at the sun-drenched uni” (A Disaffection, p. 171). But now, we learn, he is “sickened” by his life. Pat’s guilt arises from his sense of having betrayed his family and his background for a set of values that offers no comfort or direction to him.
Literary context
Kelman’s distinctive writing style appeared on the British literary scene at an interesting time in history, and despite his forswearing of British influences, his work marks an important evolution in a century of powerful texts. Early twentieth-century British modernism, a diverse movement that focused on subjective experience and textual experimentation, featured writers that were by and large connected to a central, London-based literary scene or were living and writing abroad. Though Irish, James Joyce is often considered a preeminent example of British modernism (see Ulysses , also in WIAIT 4: Brítish and Irish Literature and Its Times). Kelman’s writing draws on Joyce’s in its intense interiority, its attention to the varieties of voice, and its willingness to discuss banal, everyday, and even vulgar events. His awareness of the frustrations and dehumanizations inflicted
STAYING HOME
Kelman’s commitment to his hometown of Glasgow and its residents was made evident in 198U, when A Disaffection was shortlisted for the prestigious and lucrative Booker Prize, Citing a writing course ha would not cancel, Kelman declined to attend the awards ceremony in London. His decision announced his distance from both literary and political establishments.
by bureaucracy is often compared to the work of another modernist, Franz Kafka of Prague—then part of Austria-Hungary. Literary historians frequently designate World War II as the unofficial end to modernism and the beginning of postmodernism, that is, writing that commonly takes modernist innovations to extremes while undercutting such concepts as unity of time, self, or place. Writing in self-imposed exile as Joyce did, the Irishman Samuel Beckett represents the strain of postmodernism on which Kelman seems to draw. Beckett employed a type of black comedy (see Waiting for Godot , also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Like Beckett’s characters, Pat Doyle is prone to bleak yet funny insights, alienated in the extreme, and hopeful for some undefinable relief to rescue him from the horrors of everyday existence. Unlike either of his Irish influences, however, Kelman has remained at home, writing in solidarity with the people in his neighborhood, where he has continued to live despite his financial success. Indeed, Kelman’s choice to remain in Scotland distinguished him from generations of expatriates and exiles who believed that they needed to move to metropolitan centers like Paris and London to achieve their goals. This rootedness, especially in combination with Kelman’s decision to write in local language, has had measurable effects on other Scottish writers. Describing how it felt to read Kelman’s work for the first time, author Duncan McLean claims to have been most affected by “the voice. For the first time I was reading a book about the world I lived in. I didn’t know literature could do that” (Downer, p. 44).
This is not to say that Kelman was the first working-class writer, or even the first to use local language. In the 1950s, when the literary establishment appeared to some to grow more and more disconnected from realist fiction’s depictions of daily life in recognizable settings, a group of working-class writers known as the Angry Young Men began publishing fiction, drama, and poetry about working-class people and using some working-class language. Like the “Kitchen Sink” films often based on their works, these authors focused on gritty, realistic scenes of factory life, pub life, and class tensions. While Kelman has moved away from what swiftly became the cliches of their style, his fiction recalls theirs in its attention to underrepresented characters and settings and in its vernacular vocabulary and syntax, a technique that he has innovatively extended to the narrative voice as well. John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger, with its striving working-class boy uncomfortable with his social mobility and with women, offers a good example of a Pat Doyle-like character three decades earlier. Kelman’s novel draws on the strengths of much of the fiction that preceded it but distinguishes itself in its particular willingness to portray the downside to social “advancement” and use a local vernacular suffused with both philosophy and profanity. In contrast to Look Back in Anger, whose protagonist hates the people and longs for what they have, Kelman’s protagonist is skeptical about the entire project of social mobility, given its implications of losers and winners and hierarchies of tastes and values.
Kelman’s own decision to write came upon him swiftly, during his years of menial labor. But he knew no other writers, until 1972, when he enrolled in a University of Glasgow evening class conducted by the poet Philip Hobsbaum. “Immediately Philip talked to me as a writer and a colleague in this straight Oxbridge accent of his, and that was quite powerful, to be treated like that” (Kelman in Jack, p. 26). It was through Hobsbaum that Kelman met other writers from similar backgrounds and established a social and work atmosphere that has been productive for the already mentioned Glasgow School. In turn, these authors have mentored others from backgrounds that do not traditionally foster a writer’s life. This Glasgow School has challenged the mainstream British literary culture, arguing for the inclusion of working class and Glaswegian perspectives in the canon, or for the destruction of exclusionary concepts like a canon altogether. A beneficiary himself of a supportive community of writers, Kelman has gone on to foster the careers of other writers, perhaps most notably Janice Galloway. At the same time, his tireless efforts to articulate a Glasgow voice have made it possible for such writers as Duncan McLean and Irvine Welsh to reach audiences, and he may be credited to some degree for recent interest in Scottish film, particularly such urban-based movies as Trainspotting and Small Faces.
Reviews
While most critics acknowledged Kelman’s command of his language and his deft use of literary and philosophical allusions in A Disaffection, not all appreciated the intense trip into one man’s troubled mind. Martin Kirby, writing for The New York Times, felt that there was “not very much dramatic excitement,” adding that he saw the Scottish schoolteacher as familiar, over-explored terrain and suggesting Kelman write about a Scottish criminal instead (Kirby, p. 14). (Ironically, while it is exactly this sort of pigeonholing that Kelman has sought to avoid in his varied career, his next novel, How Late it Was, How Late, did focus on an ex-convict.) There was also a tendency to overlook or underestimate the literary craftsmanship of the work, as reflected in a comment by Howard Jacobson, who on the night in 1989 that A Disaffection failed to win the Booker Prize, told his television audience that all Kelman’s work amounted to was Billy Connolly (a well-known Scottish comedian) with philosophical pretensions.
However, other reviewers found A Disaffection haunting and beautiful, acknowledging the importance of Kelman’s project, a view affirmed by critics in the decade since its publication. Writing for The Times in London, John Walsh hailed the novel’s experiments “with prose that meanders and loses its way, a technique as effective as it is daring, for it conveys the circular, circuitous ruminations of the protagonist” (Walsh, p. Fl). Jill Neville, for The Independent, cited the significance of the “combination of knowing patois and intellectual range” (Neville, p. 29). It is this unification of hauntingly complicated concepts and free-flowing vernacular that emerges as perhaps A Disaffections greatest strength.
—Mary McGlynn
For More Information
Bligh, Donald. Understanding Higher Education. Oxford: Intellect, 1999.
Craig, Cairns. “Resisting Arrest: James Kelman.” The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams. Ed. Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
Downer, Lesley. “Beats of Edinburgh.” The New York Times Magazine. 31 March, 1996, 42-45.
Jack, Ian. “Uncensored voice of a native son; James Kelman writes in the ripe vernacular rhythms of Glasgow.” The Independent (London) 28 April 1991, 26.
Kelman, James. A Disaffection. London: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1989.
____.Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political Stirling, Scotland: AK Press, 1992.
Kirby, Martin. “A Prufrock In Glasgow.” The New York Times. 18 June 1989, Late Edition—Final, sec. 7, p. 14, col. 1.
Leventhal, F. M., ed. Twentieth Century Britain: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 1995.
Neville, Jill. “O Pat. Lessons from Glasgow: ‘A Disaffection’—James Kelman.” The Independent, 18 February 1989, 29.
Walsh, John. Review of A Disaffection, by James Kelman. The Times (London), 24 September 1989, no. 8615, Features, 1.