Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [251]
Epilogue, para. 1. “I am part of that part which was once the whole” is an Implag from Mephistopheles’ speech in Faust Act I, Scene III: “Ich bin ein Theu des Theus, der Angango alles war.”
GOLDING, WILLIAM
See footnote 6.
GOODMAN, LORD
Chap. 38, para. 9. “Greed isn’t a pretty thing but envy is far, far worse” is a slightly diffuse Implag from the speech in which the great company lawyer compared those who fight for dividends with those who fight for wages and declared his moral preference for the former.
GUARDIAN
Chap. 36, para. 8. The newspaper extract is a distorted Block-plag of the financial report from Washington, July 9, 1973.
HEINE, HEINRICH
Chap. 34, para. 5. “screeching, shrieking, yowling, growling, grinding, whining, yammering, skammering, trilling, chirping” etc. contains Implag from the Hellnoise described in Chap. 1 of Reisebilder in Leland’s translation.
HIND, ARCHIE
Epilogue, para. 14. The disciplines of cattle slaughter and accountancy are dramatized in the novel The Dear Green Place.
HOBBES, THOMAS
Books 3 and 4 are Difplags of Hobbes’s daemonic metaphor Leviathan, which starts with the words “By art is created that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or State (in Latin, Civitas), which is but an artificial man.” Describing a state or tribe as a single man is as old as society—Plutarch does it in his life of Coriolanus—but Hobbes deliberately makes the metaphor a monstrous one. His state is the sort of creature Frankenstein made: mechanical yet lively; lacking ideas, yet directed by cunning brains; morally and physically clumsy, but full of strength got from people forced to supply its belly, the market. In a famous title page this state is shown threatening a whole earth with the symbols of warfare and religion. Hobbes named it from the verse drama Job, in which God describes it as a huge water beast he is specially proud to have made because it is “king of all the children of pride.” The author of The Whale thought it a relation of his hero. (See MELVILLE.)
HOBSBAUM, DR. PHILIP
Chap. 45, paras. 6, 7, 8. The battle between the cloth and wire monkeys is a Difplag of Monkey Puzzle:
Wire monkeys are all
elbows, knees and teeth.
Cloth monkeys can be leant
upon.
Wire monkeys endure,
repel invaders.
Cloth monkeys welcome all
comers.
They set up wire monkeys to
test the youngsters’ hunger,
Cloth monkeys their loneliness.
Wire monkeys suckle, give food.
Cloth monkeys are barren.
You will see the youngster
turn to the wire monkey
For sustenance merely
Then go back and embrace
the cloth monkey
Who affords nothing.
When frightened the youngster
will bury its head in
the soft
Warm protruding bosom of the
cloth.
The wire monkey stands
against the blast.
Everyone prefers cloth monkeys.
HUME, DAVID
Chap. 16, para. 9. Blockplag from treatise: An Enquiry Concerning Human Under standing.
IBSEN, HENRIK
Books 3 and 4. These owe much to the verse drama Peer Gynt, which presents an interplay between a petit-bourgeois universe and supernatural regions which parody and criticise it. (See also kafka.)
IMPERIAL GAZETTEER OF SCOTLAND, 1871
Chap. 25, para. 1. This is not the simple Blockplag it seems. It unites extracts from the Monkland Canal entry and the Monkland and Kirkintilloch Railway entry which preceeds that.
JOYCE, JAMES
Chap. 22, para. 5. This monologue by a would-be artist to a tolerant student friend is a crude Difplag of similar monologues in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
JUNG, CARL
Nearly every chapter of the book is a Difplag of the mythic “Night Journey of the Hero” described in that charming but practically useless treatise Psychology and Alchemy. This is most obvious in the purification by swallowing at the end of chapter 6. (See also disney, god and freud.) But the hero, Lanark, gains an unJungian political dimension by being swallowed by Hobbes’s Leviathan. (See hobbes.)
KAFKA, FRANZ
Chap. 39, last paragraph. The silhouette in the window is from the last paragraph of The