Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [255]
ZOROASTER
Chap. 50, paras 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31 are all spicy bits culled from Sybilene Greek apocrypha edited by Hermip-pus and translated by Friedrich Nietzsche, but the flowery glade of Sibma thick with vines and Eleale to the as-phaltic pool; the sun, wind and flashing foam; the triumph of Galatea and her wedding with Grant; the collapse of the Coc-qigrues; the laughing surrender of God; the bloom of the bright grey thistle; the building of Nephelococugia; the larks, lutes, cellos, violets and vials of genial wrath; the free waterbuses on the Clyde; the happiness and good work of Andrew; the return of Coulter, coming of McAlpin and resurrection of Aiken Drummond; the Apotheosis and Coronation of the Virgin AmyAnnieMoraTracy Katrina Veronica Margaret Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Inge Marian Beth Liz Betty Daniele Angel TinaJanetKate; the final descent to healthy commonplace and finding a silk smooth you inside that husk are Blockplags, Im-plags, Difplags of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell translated into dear images and sublime distances by william Blake and William Turner for the benefit of all makers of useful and lovely things.
1. To have an objection anticipated is no reason for failing to raise it.
2. Each of the four authors mentioned above began a large work in medias res, but none of them numbered their divisions out of logical sequence.
3. In 1973, as a result of sponsorship by the poet Edwin Morgan, the author received a grant of £300 from the Scottish Arts Council for the purpose of helping him write his book, but it was never assumed that he would use the money to seek out exotic local colour.
4. This is a false antithesis. Printed paper has an atomic structure like anything else. “Words” would have been a better term than “print,” being less definably concrete.
5. “Von hinten anzusehen—Die Racker sind doch gar zu appetitlich” is little more than a line. Louis MacNeice omits it from his translation as inessential because it reduces the devil’s dignity. The author’s amazing virulence against Goethe is perhaps a smokescreen to distract attention from what he owes him. See GOETHE and WELLS in the Index of Plagiarisms.
6. The index proves that Lanark is erected upon an infantile foundation of Victorian nursery tales, though the final shape derives from English language fiction printed between the 40’s and 60’s of the present century. The hero’s biography after death occurs in Wyndham-Lewis’s trilogy The Human Age, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and Golding’s Pincher Martin. Modern afterworlds are always infernos, never paradisos, presumably because the modern secular imagination is more capable of debasement than exaltation. In almost every chapter of the book there is a dialogue between the hero (Thaw or Lanark) and a social superior (parent, more experienced friend or prospective employer) about morality, society or art. This is mainly a device to let a self-educated Scot (to whom “the dominie” is the highest form of social life) tell the world what he thinks of it; but the glum flavour of these episodes recalls three books by disappointed socialists which appeared after the second world war and centred upon what I will call dialogue under threat: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, 1984 by George Orwell, and Barbary Shore by Norman Mailer. Having said this, one is compelled to ask why the “conjuror” introduces an apology for his work with a tedious and brief history of world literature, as though summarizing a great tradition which culminates in himself! Of the eleven great epics mentioned, only one has influenced Lanark. Monboddo’s speech in the last part of Lanark is a dreary parody of the Archangel Michael’s history lecture in the last book of Paradise Lost and fails for the same reason. A property is not always valuable because it is stolen from a rich man. And for this single device thieved (without acknowledgement) from Milton we find a confrontation of fictional character