Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [250]
BUNYAN, JOHN
Chap. 9, para. 10. Blockplag of first paragraph of the Relation of the Holy War Made by Shaddai Upon Diabolus for the Regaining of the Metropolis of the World; or the losing and taking again of the town of Mansoul.
BURNS, ROBERT
Robert Burns’ humane and lyrical rationalism has had no impact upon the formation of this book, a fact more sinister than any exposed by mere attribution of sources. See also Emerson.
CARLYLE, THOMAS
Chap. 27, para. 5. “I can’t believe,” etc., is an Implag of the youthful sage of Ecclefechan’s query of his mother, “Did God Almighty come down and make wheelbarrows in a shop?” The device of giving a ponderous index to a work of ponderous fiction is taken from Sartor Resartus.
CARROLL, LEWIS
Chap. 41, para. 3. The taste of the white rainbow is a Difplag of the taste in the bottle marked “drink me” in Alice in Wonderland.
CARY, JOYCE
Chaps. 28 and 29. Difplags of the novel The Horse’s Mouth. Here and elsewhere Duncan Thaw is a hybrid formed by uniting Gulley Jimson (the Blake-quoting penniless painter of a mural illustrating the biblical Genesis in a derelict church) with his untalented working-class disciple, Nosey Barbon.
CHASE, JAMES HADLEY
Chap. 9, para. 1. Blockplag of first two paragraphs of No Orchids for Miss Blandish.
COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR
Chap. 41, para. 12. This reference to God, orphans and Hell is a debased Implag of “An orphan’s curse would drag to hell/A spirit from on high,” from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Chap. 26, para. 10. The warmth which gushes in Thaw’s chest at the kind sister’s words, freeing him from the constriction which came when he prayed God that Marjory be killed, is a difplag of that “spring of love” the Ancient Mariner felt for the watersnakes, and which freed him from the Nightmare Life-in-Death caused by killing the albatross.
CONRAD, JOSEPH
Chap. 41, para. 6. Kodac’s speech contains a dispersed Implag of names and nouns from the novel Nostromo.
DISNEY, WALT
In Book 3, the transforming of Lanark’s arm and the turning of people into dragons is a Difplag of the transformed hero’s nose and turning of bad boys into donkeys from the film Pinocchio. So is the process of purification by swallowing in the last paragraphs of Chap. 6. (See also GOD and JUNG.)
ELIOT, T. S.
Chap. 10, para. 4. “I’m something commonplace that keeps getting hurt” is a drab Difplag of the “notion of some infinitely gentle,/Infinitely suffering thing” in Preludes.
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO
Ralph Waldo Emerson has not been plagiarized.
EVARISTI, MARCELLA
Chap. 45, para. 3. “Dont knife the leaf” is from the song Lettuce Bleeds.
FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT
Epilogue, para. 1. The sentence “You don’t like me” etc. is from McKisco’s bedroom dialogue with Rosemary Hoyte in Book 1 of Tender Is the Night.
Chap. 10, para. 6. “We think a lot of new friends” etc. echoes Dick Diver’s remark to Rosemary on the beach.
FREUD, SIGMUND
Difplags in every chapter. Only a writer unhealthily obsessed by all of Dr. Freud’s psycho-sexual treatises would stuff a novel with more oral, anal and respiratory symbols, more Oedipal encounters with pleasure-reality/Eros-thanatos substitutes, more recapitulations of the birth-trauma than I have space to summarize. (See also disney, god and jung.)
GLASHAN, JOHN
Chap. 38, para. 13. The snapping noise in Miss Maheen’s head is an Implag from the “Snapping Song” from “Earwigs Over the Mountains” sung by the Social Security choir in The Great Meths Festival.
GOD
Chap. 6, paras. 11, 12, 13, 14. The purification by swallowing is a Difplag from the verse drama Jonah. (See also disney and jung.)
GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON
Chap. 35, para. 1. “Wer immer strebend” etc. is from the verse drama Faust, angel chorus Act V, Scene VII. Bayard Taylor translates this as “Whoe’er aspires unweariedly is not beyond redeeming”; John Anster as “Him who, unwearied, still strives on/We have the power