The following article is a short essay and review realised as part of a take-home exam for Postromantic Materialism course held at the University of Leuven in 2014-2015. You can also read an essay about To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, NW by Zadie Smith, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach , The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen and A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh.
The novel tries out a blend of realism and fantasy. Read up on the genre of fantasy and comment on specific occurrences of the fantastic (e.g. the phenomenon of dragonhide).
In general, when we think about the genre of fantasy we imagine supernatural forces, unreal worlds, invented creatures. The notion of “fantastic” in a more realistic application to the literature was presented for the first time by the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). To summarize his idea, a novel is fantastic whenever it creates an hesitation of characters and, above all, readers when it raises questions about reality. The hesitation of the reader is the first condition of fantastic; the second is the hesitation of a character and the third condition is that the reading of the text should not be poetic or allegoric. One example of this incredulity coming from the hesitation of the reader can be found in the spanish novel El cuarto de atrás by Carmen Martín Gaite, reminding the reader The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. In Kafka’s novel, the protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes up being a monstrous creature, while in Martín Gaite’s short story is all built around the female protagonist, a man dressed in black and a beetle which appears in her apartment when the man is not there.
Lanark by Alasdair Gray seems to enter in this series of fantasy book with a realistic approach of the writer. Realism and fantasy coexist in this novel, structured in a way to confuse the reader, starting with “Book three” and followed by a “Prologue”.
“If reality is constructed verbally, through a text, Scottish texts are often seen as hybrids, a mixing and matching of different traditions and genres, fact and fiction, Gothic fantasy and social history, romance and realism. Bernstein notes how this mixing of genres is not only a characteristic of Scottish fiction but a central concern in Gray’s work: “It should thus come as no surprise to find frequent mixing of genres in Gray’s writing, and though full-blown fantasy will not always be part of the aggregate, some blending… appears inevitable”. (Kacvinsky:791)
From the first pages of the book the reader understands that the novel will not be easy to interpret. The references to an unnatural presence in the setting of the novel are inserted soon after the presentation of the protagonist and continue throughout the novel as infectious illnesses:
I asked what the hard patch was. He said, “We call it dragon-hide, a name more picturesque than scientific, perhaps, but the science of these things is in its infancy. You can dress now.” (Gray:23-24)
The fantastic element is always presented in a self-coherent setting, as in page 36: ““You’ve got dragonhide! Your shoulderblades are covered!” “Does that excite you?” “I have it too!”” (Gray:36). In this dialogue , Rima and Lanark could exchange the word “dragonhide” with “tatoo”, for instance, and everything will continue to seem natural and realistic. Another representation of the fantastic is in the “Prologue”, from page 108 to 117. The fluidity of the episode between Rima, Lanark and the Oracle is complicated by the continuous shift between the narrating person. Also the hallucinations do not help in understanding who is thinking what: “All the time they saw through the window people moving in the rooms and streets of a city, though sometimes there were glimpses of mountains and sea, and at last huge waves moving slowly at the foot of a cliff” (Gray, 1981:111).
As perfectly pointed out in Lousbergh’s work,
“As for the themes fantasy introduces, Lanark features many, such as transformations and dualism and the motifs of the ghost, the double, enclosures, cannibalism and hallucination. […] The one thing they all have in common, is obviously the fact that they enhance doubt and hesitation thematically. Many of the interpretative questions Lanark does not answer relate to exactly these themes and motifs, for instance: Is Lanark the afterlife ghost of Thaw and/or is he Thaw’s double or other self? Does Thaw kill marjory, or it is merely an hallucination? All motifs question the trueness of the truth and make both reader and character doubt reality. Even Lanark himself asks the Oracle if Thaw really killed Marjory or hallucinated it […] Fantasy than holds up the question of what is real and what not and does not answer it”. (Lousbergh, 2003:73)
It is easy to recognize the idea of fantasy in the chapters where Lanark is protagonist. At the Institute, for instance, the absurdity of some scenes -like the explosions of patients or the cure given by doctors- immediately lead the reader to an imaginary setting or even a dream. But also in Thaw sections, the more realistic ones, we can see some issues of the fantastic genre, closer to the idea of hesitation explained by Todorov. “thaw struggles with perspectives” (2003:77) and so we can say that “realism is thus overpowered by fantasy” (2003:77)
While reading Lanark we can be sure of only one thing: there is no real reality, as well as there is no fantastic fantasy. The structure of the novel, the uncertainty of time, the balance between a realistic world and an imaginary town like Unthank -though really close to the representation of Glasgow- keep the reader in a state of uncertainty which is soon reflected in the own life of the reader. Is it possible to conceive fantasy present in reality only in real life?
“Like so much modernist fiction, Lanark in this way continues to demonstrate that the temporal systems which constrain and commodify twentieth-century experience can still be escaped or reordered in art, imagination, and narrative, if hardly any longer in fact. Lanark is by no means alone among postmodernist novels in following on from modernism in this way”. (Stevenson:133)
Bibliography
Alasdar Gray, Lanark, 1981. PDF version.
Donald P. Kaczvinsky, “Making up for Lost Time”: Scotland, Stories, and the Self in Alasdair Gray’s “Poor Things” in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 775-799, University of Wisconsin Press
Randall Stevenson, “Greenwich Meanings: Clocks and Things in Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction” in The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 30, Time and Narrative (2000), pp. 124-136, Modern Humanities Research Association
Goedele Lousbergh, Who’s fooling who? Power, authority and how to undermine them in Alasdair Grays’ Lanark: a life in four books, KUL. Faculteit letteren. Departement literatuurwetenschap. Engelse literatuur, 2003