“Imagine Lanark meets Something Leather, with a kind of Poor Things feel to it”: The politics of rewriting in Alasdair Gray’s Old Men in Love
In Old Men in Love (2007), a book he has himself described as his last novel (but by no means his last book) Alasdair Gray relies heavily on intertextuality and self-reference in order to create a self-pastiche that is also consistent with an update of his political project, a project which dates ba...
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| Izdano u: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises, |
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| Glavni autor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
| Izdano: |
Études écossaises
2013
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| Online pristup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sažetak: | In Old Men in Love (2007), a book he has himself described as his last novel (but by no means his last book) Alasdair Gray relies heavily on intertextuality and self-reference in order to create a self-pastiche that is also consistent with an update of his political project, a project which dates back to his earliest writings, and which is provided with a theoretical framework in Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992). The new novel manages to combine the ontological disturbances and other postmodern tricks that have made his works famous with his unchanged humanist vision and project. The numerous narratives, rewrites and hence mouthpieces it creates, as well as the novel’s pact of reading based on rewriting allow Gray to concentrate on how admittedly stable historical categories can be challenged by contemporary events and writing. In a book that insists on the organic nature of all creation with its extended metaphor of writing as landscape / as body, Gray indicates what role and what responsibility literature has in the depiction of, as well as the creation of a particular world picture, reminding the reader with the help of his protagonist John Tunnock that his “field is historical sociology”. His re-historicised world, which places literature firmly at the core of his societal and historical reflection, focuses on the cardinal issues of justice and democracy, two issues which Gray has always integrated into his artistic project. |
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