Unit 19: Literature – prose

Introduction

In this unit, you will learn about prose in the Scots language. There are innumerable documents in Scots dealing with matters of court, law, diplomacy and (in modern times, what we would call) cultural criticism. Since this unit deals with literary prose, you will focus on prose fiction, both short stories and novels. Prose fiction has been written in Scots for centuries but the most crucial era for this literature is in that period where oral culture, and written, print-generated culture, overlap. It is tempting to think that one superseded the other, but this is simply not true. Everyone tells stories verbally, even today.

The art of storytelling comes from ancient times and precedes writing, but when song- and story-collectors began their work seriously and transformed their collected material into written and then printed work, they co-existed with prose-fiction, continuing in the oral tradition, as you have learned in unit 13. One of the great twentieth-century collectors, Hamish Henderson, referred to this as ‘the carrying stream’ and it complements our sense of written prose in Scots. The historical significance of this period, mainly from the 18^th into the 19^th centuries and continuing, is that at its start, it coincided with the English language claiming an increasing authority in the context of the British Empire. Scots as a written and printed language was eclipsed in some crucial respects by English. It wasn’t superseded or killed off, instead Scots speech maintained a vital currency of communication even while the English language took the central position of authority in the narrative prose of most published works.

You are going to study two crucial examples that seem to run counter to this general truth: Walter Scott’s Wandering Willie’s Tale and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet. Then you are going to consider the major breakthrough made by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in the 1930s in his trilogy of novels collected as A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite. You are going to weigh the counter-arguments for writing in English and Scots proposed by Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid in their confrontation in 1936 and its consequence in 1940. Then finally, you will look at the situation as it has developed since the 1980s to the 21^st century. There are four aspects you will explore closely as listed below.

Important details to take notes on throughout this unit:

• the narrator and the narrative: who utters the words in the Scots language and what is the authority of her or his narrative
• the the relation between storytelling/the short story and the novel as forms of prose literary fiction
• the relation between English and Scots in literary prose fiction and how has it changed from the 18^th century till now
• changes in the 1930s and the lasting effect these have had on literary prose fiction since then.

19. Introductory handsel

A Scots word and example sentence to learn:

• Quair

• Definition: a set of twenty-four sheets of writing paper (Sc. 1818 Sawers). Comb. quair-book, a book consisting of a single quire of paper so folded as to make 16 pages, a kind of exercise book

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  • Example sentence: “Afore Agyness Deyn, Scotland saa Vivien Heilbon play Chris Guthrie oan the telly in aa three books o Gibbon’s A Scots Quair”

  • English translation: “Before Agyness Deyn, Scotland saw Vivien Heilbon play Chris Guthrie on the TV in all three books of Gibbon’s A Scots Quair.”

Activity 2

Click to hear the sentence above read by a Scots speaker.

You can then make your own recording and play it back to check your pronunciation.

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Transcript

Listen

Afore Agyness Deyn, Scotland saa Vivien Heilbon play Chris Guthrie oan the telly in aa three books o Gibbon’s A Scots Quair

Model

Afore Agyness Deyn, Scotland saa Vivien Heilbon play Chris Guthrie oan the telly in aa three books o Gibbon’s A Scots Quair

End transcript

 

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Go to the Dictionary of the Scots Language for a full definition of the word

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Thid is an image of a plaque commemorating Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Author of A Scots Quair.

Related word:

• Smeddum

• Definition: 3. Spirit, mettle, energy, drive, spunk, vigorous common sense and resourcefulness

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  • Example sentence: “He’s no ill aff fir smeddum…”

  • English translation: “He’s not ill off for spirit…”

Activity 3

Click to hear the sentence above read by a Scots speaker.

You can then make your own recording and play it back to check your pronunciation.

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Transcript

Listen

He’s no ill aff fir smeddum…

Model

He’s no ill aff fir smeddum…

End transcript

 

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Go to the Dictionary of the Scots Language for a full definition of the word

‘Interior of Crofter’s Cottage, Caithness’

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This is an image of a painting called ‘Interior of Crofter’s Cottage, Caithness’. It depicts an elderly woman sat inside her cottage, with a bowl of fruit on her lap.

‘Interior of Crofter’s Cottage, Caithness’

19.1 Examples of prose fiction written in Scots

This section will focus on two stories, Walter Scott’s Wandering Willie’s Tale and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet. The section will consider the ways in which Scots language is used in relation to English in the stories, how the stories themselves balance aspects of the supernatural and the material or earthly world. They will explore questions of who the narrator is and who the narrative is addressed to, and finally what legacy the stories imply for their own narrators and for subsequent readers. This last question prompts consideration of the relation between storytelling and extended prose fiction, novels.

The Scots language in these two stories is used to particular effect, not only to generate a quality of strangeness or mystery but also to give a sense of vocal immediacy or authenticity. This is a paradox: one aspect of its use as written, printed language exploits its unfamiliarity: to those accustomed to seeing the English language on the page, then Scots may seem odd or difficult; the other aspect exploits the colloquial intimacy of Scots language and implies that the speakers of these stories are talking ‘naturally’.

We know that all literature is artifice – all the arts employ design or intention, structure and method – but the relation between writing and speech is a palpable presence in these stories. How does this work? What effect does it have? You will answer these questions through exploring the two stories in some detail.

Benjamin draws our attention to a number of things, which can illuminate our reading of Scott and Stevenson and how their Scots language stories work in these examples. I’d like to draw attention to two key comparisons he makes. One is between the storyteller who stays at home and knows all about a particular locality, its inhabitants and ways of life; the other is the storyteller who travels the world and visits other places, returning with news of foreign parts and different customs. What categories do the narrators of the Scott and Stevenson stories most closely fit? The second thing is the difference between the storyteller and the novelist.

In the oral tradition, the storyteller is always present, telling the story; in the printed tradition, the novelist is almost always absent (except, these days, at book festivals and signings). You will now investigate how this observation applies to the narrators in Scott’s and Stevenson’s stories.

Portrait of Sir Walter Scott

Let’s start with the older text, Scott’s ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ from 1824, which forms chapter six of the novel Redgauntlet. It is worth thinking about the novel and the story’s place within it before looking at the story itself:

The narrator of the story is a character in the novel. The Scots of his story is embedded within the English of the narrative as a whole. Earlier chapters of the novel take the form of letters between characters, mainly in English, and the overall narrative of the book – Scott’s voice, one might argue – is given in English. So while the authority of Wandering Willie’s Scots is undisputed while the story lasts, it passes away into the larger context. But this can be regarded as something of a paradox. The story has been anthologised and read, probably, by more people over centuries, than have read the novel as a whole. That Scots voice and language has a lasting hold on the imagination of readers in a way that the novel only partly offsets. It has its own authority despite its context.

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Part 2

In the closing dialogue at the end of the story (the end of the novel’s chapter six), Willie tells his companion that “it is nae chancy thing to tak’a stranger traveller for a guide when you are in an uncouth land.” His companion, who is the main link to the novel’s main narrative, responds by saying that he should not have thought so, since the narrator’s grandfather’s adventure as recounted in the tale “was fortunate for himself, whom it saved from ruin and distress; and fortunate for his landlord.” And then Willie delivers the final revelation, the moral of the tale, which taints the ending of the story and suggests a world of unpredicted consequences. And this is the element Benjamin labelled the ‘nature of every real story […] something useful’ – a lesson to be learned.

Listen to the moral of Willie’s tale and read it out yourself. What do you think is the lesson of the tale?

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Transcript

Listen

Aye, but they had baith to sup the sauce o’ ‘t sooner or later,’ said Wandering Willie; ‘what was fristed wasna forgiven. Sir John died before he was much over threescore; and it was just like of a moment’s illness. And for my gudesire, though he departed in fullness of life, yet there was my father, a yauld man of forty-five, fell down betwixt the stilts of his plow, and rase never again, and left nae bairn but me, a puir, sightless, fatherless, motherless creature, could neither work nor want. Things gaed weel aneugh at first; for Sir Regwald Redgauntlet, the only son of Sir John and the oye of auld Sir Robert, and, wae ’s me! The last of the honorable house, took the farm aff our hands, and brought me into his household to have care of me. My head never settled since I lost him; and if I say another word about it, deil a bar will I have the heart to play the night. Look out, my gentle chap,’ he resumed, in a different tone; ‘ye should see the lights at Brokenburn Glen by this time.

Model

Aye, but they had baith to sup the sauce o’ ‘t sooner or later,’ said Wandering Willie; ‘what was fristed wasna forgiven. Sir John died before he was much over threescore; and it was just like of a moment’s illness. And for my gudesire, though he departed in fullness of life, yet there was my father, a yauld man of forty-five, fell down betwixt the stilts of his plow, and rase never again, and left nae bairn but me, a puir, sightless, fatherless, motherless creature, could neither work nor want. Things gaed weel aneugh at first; for Sir Regwald Redgauntlet, the only son of Sir John and the oye of auld Sir Robert, and, wae ’s me! The last of the honorable house, took the farm aff our hands, and brought me into his household to have care of me. My head never settled since I lost him; and if I say another word about it, deil a bar will I have the heart to play the night. Look out, my gentle chap,’ he resumed, in a different tone; ‘ye should see the lights at Brokenburn Glen by this time.

End transcript

 

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Robert Louis Stevenson by Henry Walter Barnett

Unlike Willie’s story, Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet (1881) was written as a complete work in itself, and published as soon as it was sent to the Cornhill Magazine after its completion. Stevenson begins the story in relatively straightforward English but moves into Scots very quickly and stays there. The Scots-speaking storyteller carries you through the tale and no return to an authoritative English language narrative comes at the end.

19.2 Lewis Grassic Gibbon and A Scots Quair

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

A Scots Quair is a trilogy consisting of three novels: Sunset Song (1932) – voted Scotland’s favourite novel in a Scottish Booktrust survey in 2005, Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934). The novels revolve around the life of Chris Guthrie, a woman from the north-east of Scotland, during the early 20^th century. In the opening note to A Scots Quair, Grassic Gibbon says that he has included Scots words, phrases, and idioms of speech, into the narrative, which is mainly written in English.

So the predominant language is English, but the infiltration of these words and their placement in the rhythm, texture and narrative of the novels changes their idiom entirely into Scots. The particular effect this has on the narrative is to intertwine the words of the main characters, both their speech and their internal unspoken thoughts, with that of the observing eye; it also intertwines the language of the local people, both at their most idealistic and their most spiteful and gossipy.

Close reading shows how this works, even within a single sentence. In the opening paragraph of Part Two of Sunset Song, we visualise Chris Guthrie running up the hill, lying down, and breathing deep, but the words take us into her consciousness so that we think with her as well as observe her. Note that when Gibbon says she would turn back for nothing, “not even that whistle of father’s”, he does not write, ‘of her father’s’ (which would have maintained an external account, but the leaving out of the possessive pronoun suddenly creates a shift in narrative perspective and we see things from Chris’ point of view).

Gibbon’s novels take us from farm to small town to city, and the community and the language is different in each one. The language conveys aspects of decency, civility and hope, intimacy and affection, brutality and violence, but also becomes less easeful, more stressed, as the trilogy proceeds. It can be argued that this use of Scots voices contributes to the overall narrative structure. In the passage I’ve just referred to, at the beginning of Part Two, when Chris comes to the standing stones and lies down to gather her thoughts, she remembers the last time she was there, which we’ve just read about at the end of Part One.

The second section then recounts the events that have taken her from the end of Part One to the beginning of Part Two, which we will return to at the end of the unit. The effect of this narrative approach is a sense in the reader that the narrative cannot be predicted. What happens in consequence of our actions involves a multitude of choices and possibilities. Nothing is inevitable, and therefore the struggle is worthwhile because a better outcome might be made. By embedding the idiom of different Scots voices so deeply in the narrative, it might be argued that Gibbon is showing how there is always more than one perspective, more than one way of telling, and understanding, any story. This is a key element in modernist art and Scots prose fiction is a clear demonstration of how it works.

19.3 The predicament of the Scottish writer

In the late 1930s, a series of books with the generic title The Voice of Scotland was initiated by Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid. Their intention was to invite a range of contemporary authors to write book-length essays on contentious themes and questions of the day.

Thus, Compton Mackenzie wrote Catholicism and Scotland, reminding predominantly Protestant readers that their greatest Scottish heroes, Wallace and Bruce, were pre-Reformation Catholics. Neil Gunn wrote Whisky and Scotland rehearsing all the ceremonies, rituals and traditions whisky-drinking once entailed, intrinsically celebrating sensitivity and care alongside carefully applied intoxication and language at play. Victor McClure wrote Scotland’s Inner Man about what good food and a healthy diet actually was and might again be in Scotland. Eric Linklater wrote The Lion and the Unicorn: what England has meant to Scotland and William Power wrote Literature and Oatmeal.

In the last in the series, Scott and Scotland: The Predicament of the Scottish Writer, Edwin Muir concluded that the only way to take Scottish literature forward was to write exclusively in English. Gaelic would not serve and Scots was inadequate: only English could address an international readership, as was evident in the literary triumphs of W.B. Yeats and James Joyce.

Francis George Scott

Not only MacDiarmid, whose Scots-language poetry had been so revolutionary in the 1920s, but also the composer F.G. Scott, were furious. Scott’s brilliant settings of MacDiarmid, Burns, William Soutar, George Campbell Hay and others, encapsulated a Scots musical idiom in compositions self-consciously drawing on modernist innovations from Schoenberg, Satie and Stravinsky, while keeping the traditional sense of Scots song in play. Scott met Edwin Muir and his wife Willa and wrote of their meeting, “I had a long and very exciting talk with the pair of them, told them that I disagreed with everything in the book.” He argued definitively that there were poems in Scots (not least those of Burns) that were by any standards ‘major’. Edwin, Scott reported, could not contradict him. Willa “turned extremely grave and silent”.

Gododdin

In the long run, Muir had a point: Yeats and Joyce have an international cachet still not fully extended to MacDiarmid, Soutar or Grassic Gibbon, and there are still many folk unwilling to recognise Scots as a language no less valid than English. Yet MacDiarmid and F.G. Scott won the argument. One response to this argument was MacDiarmid’s editing of an anthology entitled The Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, which for the first time emphasised Gaelic and Latin language traditions as well as those of Scots and English, in Scottish literature.

There is also important poetry in French (by Mary Queen of Scots, for example) and the first poem we might identify as Scottish, The Gododdin, was written in what we call Old Welsh or Cymric. In the 21^st century, the understanding that multilingualism, a plurality of languages, is characteristic of Scottish literature in a way that distinguishes it from the more familiar ‘one nation, one language’ imperial ideal, is generally acknowledged, and open. The linguistic diversity of contemporary Scottish writing is proof, and one might consider examples from James Kelman’s Booker-prizewinning novel How Late It was, How Late (1994) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1996).

In this context, it is beneficial to recall how inflammatory the questions raised here may be. In the New York Times (29 November 1994), Sarah Lyall reported:

This recalls Mark Twain’s ‘Explanatory’ note at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn (1884):

Twain’s ironic and bitter humour comes through especially in that last sentence. By emphasising the subtle and not-so-subtle differences in dialect and language forms and idioms, by drawing attention to their representation in his novel, Twain is also indicating a quality inherent in racist superiorism, the tendency to be disdainful of such matters from a position of power and contempt. That relationship of power, and the relationship between speech and writing, is at the heart of our enquiry into the Scots language in literary prose.

19.4 Literary prose fiction in Scots from 1900 to new millenium

In this this section, you are going to focus on the authority of the Scots language in prose fiction from the 19^th until the 20^th century. The important thing is to understand not only the arguments but to consider them in their historical context. For example: Scots was a language of formal occasion, political authority and serious social functions, yet it was always related to speech and could modulate tone, balancing irony and directness in particular ways. At different periods in history, Scots in literary prose was in contest with the authority of the English language but the contest has been resolved over the period of around 1936 to 1999 (How Late It Was).There is a distinctive tension between the use of the voice in Scots prose and its local provenance, and the use of ‘neutrality’ or ‘objectivity’, which purports to deliver an omniscient authority.

One of the most important books to present the hinterland of writing Scots prose fiction is William Donaldson’s Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland (1986). Donaldson draws attention to ‘a new professional type’ of writer such as William Alexander, who write for the popular local press, in his case in Aberdeenshire, extended prose fiction in a local dialect form of Scots.

William Alexander, who was one of the leading journalists in Victorian Scotland and

His work was published in the periodical press and collected in complete novels such as Johnny Gibb o Gushetneuk (1877).

Compare this with MacDiarmid’s revitalisation of Scots in the 1920s partly for his own individual creative priorities, partly to counter the increasingly familiar use of Scots in popular media, music hall and film, especially widespread in the establishment propaganda. MacDiarmid, in his short story or prose sketch ‘The Waterside’, uses Scots throughout and slips quickly and with great fluency between thoughtful, more meditative reflections, and representations of fast, dramatic action. These are sometimes serious – the threat to the children on the broken bridge is real – but also, at the same time, sometimes wildly comic. The moment where a mother rescues one child then finding it is not hers, throws it back into the water, is both ferociously comic and terribly chilling, partly because it seems to represent natural and understandable human behaviour, even if that behaviour is in some respects reprehensible.

The use of Scots in his prose and discussed in his essays ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’ and ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’ shows a development and resistance to what MacDiarmid calls ‘English Ascendancy’: in other words, the way in which, over time, English has come to seem the normative language in Britain, while other languages are neglected or suppressed. Seamus Heaney, when discussing MacDiarmid’s literary use of Scots, established:

And we conclude with a statement by Margery Palmer McCulloch, who verifies that Heaney’s comment, quoted above, represents “a meaningful endorsement of the way in which the inter-war Scottish Renaissance attempt to change the direction of Scottish literary (and ultimately political) culture, with its strong emphasis on national identity as well as international relationships and influences, [which] has been able to modify itself over the decades to bring about the confident, diverse yet recognisably Scottish contribution to international writing we have today” (2012, p. 73).

19.5 What I have learned

Further research

Here you can read Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair trilogy.

You can find a useful discussion and analysis of Benjamin’s essay in Angus’ blog Mostly About Stories in the entry from 4 March 2019, ‘The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin – Summary and Analysis’.

Read an article about Tessa Hadley, who found her own life story told in Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair.

To find out more about Johnny Gibb, the main character in William Alexander’s novel and the use of Doric.

Read Hugh MacDiarmid’s essays on Scots as a literary language and political tool in his essays ‘A Theory of Scots Letters’ and ‘English Ascendancy in British Literature’. These essays may be found in Hugh MacDiarmid (1992) Selected Prose, edited by Alan Riach, Michigan, Carcanet.

References

Acknowledgements

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources:

Gibbon Plaque: Bill Harrison - https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1329312 - This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Postcard: Interior of Crofter's Cottage, Caithness (1900/1902) Leonard A. Lauder collection of Raphael Tuck & Sons postcards

Portrait of Sir Walter Scott: © Hulton Archive/Stringer/Getty Images.

Extract ‘Scott's silence…’: Edinburgh University Library

Robert Louis Stevenson: State Library of New South Wales. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Photographer Unknown.

Francis George Scott: © The Estate of Lida Moser/National Galleries of Scotland

William Alexander: Frontispiece illustration for his novel 'Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk'. Artist: Sir George Reid. National Galleries of Scotland

Extract ‘politically, he was a radical…’: Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15487742.William_Alexander