ORAGONX: THE NEW BIKOL REPUBLIK

In saying that his culture and language have the right to exist and that no one has the

right to take them away, James Kelman was not only declaring the Scottish peoples’

human right to exist in this planet, but he was also asserting the place for his own

kind of writing. The kind of resistance to his writing, described as a “disgrace” by one

of the juries in the Booker Prize which he won in 1994; shows the snobbery and

disdain towards Scottish culture in England, where, as Kelman himself said in an

interview, they had existed as some kind of a colony for hundreds of years. It bares

cracks and props the existence of several Englishes in the (otherwise) hegemonic

empire called English literature. It also establishes Kelman’s unique and

unmistakable voice and style of writing.

I will not discuss here the marginalization of the Scottish people in England, nor of the

debate on the empire writing back; but on the distinctive marks of Kelman’s writing and

his place in the larger literary realm. A common complaint, echoed by one of the

participants in the recent reading Kelman did at the Martin Luther King Library,

concerns his language, particularly, his generous use of the “fuck” word. In the same

reading, Kelman explained that his use of the word doesn’t have the “sexual”

connotation most readers think of. He uses it for emphasis, he stressed. In this

incident, we can see an underlying and unexpressed expectation among readers, of

what or in what kind of language literature should be written. They expect that it should

be in the “polite English accent” of one of his inveterate gambling characters in his

short story collection, Busted Scotch, who goes by the non-de-plume Cute Chick!

Kelman subverts this, as in this self-same terse story where the exclamation mark

appended in the Cute Chick’s name perhaps graphically summarizes his mockery and

satire of the English woman gambler. In most of his works, though, Kelman’s

subversion of the prevailing linguistic preference is through his use of the Scottish

language, an inferior, if measured in the snobbish English literati. No wonder, the

same Booker judge dismissed How Late It Was, How Late, as the work of a drunkard.

Nevertheless, it is precisely through his use of his native Glaswegian tongue that gives

Kelman’s ouvres their identity. In a BBC interview, Kelman, aside from his own

personal politics, hinted the reason for this choice. He sees the kind of English

literature being taught in the academe as a continuing imperialism and control of

England and the upper class, a view he shares with critic Terry Eagleton who studied

the employment of literature in England’s colonial project. Kelman also rejects the

idea of a Great Literary Tradition and said that writers should be concerned with

immediate issues like everyday speech and politics.

Reading How Late It Was, How Late and Busted Scotch, I saw the logic of this choice.

The dialect gives Kelman that affinity and familiarity with his characters and their

stories; and in the process, give them authenticity and sincerity. I saw this in Kelman’s

reading where I heard his quaint diction and suspected the underlying oral tradition in

his writing. Kelman’s language also give him the facility to write about his own kind of

politics, that of the lives of the lower class, the wretched of the earth, so to speak. I am

not sure what gives rise to what, that is, whether it is his language or his politics and

vice versa; but what is important is that he is effective in both. I can say they become

complimentary, each one strengthening the other. Because of his working class

background (Kelman worked once as a bus driver), he can powerfully write about a

father ducking his son in a vat of acid, in some sort of euthanasia; in “Acid”, which is

perhaps a condemnation of the working conditions in industrializing England. In “Not

not while the giro”, he talks about a Walter Mitty kind of character who is in the

government’s welfare. In “How Late it was, How late”, he writes about Sammy, whose

name is an obvious cut-out from Kafka’s George Samsa, whose transformation into an

insect is echoed in Sammy’s waking up blind one day. His liminal stories and

characters, and their language, give Kelman’s writing its distinctive identity.

Another mark of Kelman’s writing is his narrative technique. It flows from his language

and his existential view of life. Under this view, what matters is the present; devoid or

divorced from rational explanation. It is because of this thinking that Kelman’s

characters are thrown in so real and present quandary, where they struggle much like

George Samsa when he woke up one day an insect. The struggle takes the form of

introspection and self-interrogation and thus, their thoughts vacillate from firmness and

indecision, from certainty to doubt. The narrative also becomes so focused on that

present struggle. In “How Late it was, How late”, for instance, much of the earlier part

of the story is focused on Sammy’s walking out of the police station and his effort to find

his way back home. A reader gets in much of Sammy’s difficulty as he literally gropes

his way, inch by inch, block by block in the street, holding on to walls, lampposts or

people’s bodies he occasionally bump into. The secret is in the narrative technique,

which perhaps is much like a frame-by-frame shot of a character. Kelman explained

that by shifting the narrative point of view and the tense of the action, the reader gets to

have multiple views of the character, including his internal ruminations.

An effect of this technique is on the sense of time. Readers who had been used to the

fast-paced narrative of film will perhaps find Kelman’s writing dragging. Yet, precisely,

it is the existentialist technique for the reader to be riveted on the drama-of-the-

moment as it is enacted by a character. In Kelman’s case, the existentialism of his

characters do not have the pessimism of Camus’ characters. Instead, like Sammy,

they are hopeful, struggling and exercising their human capacity of choice. It is no

surprise that while Sammy is blinded at the start of the story, he vanished at the end of

the story, metaphorically to quote the novel, out of sight. It is an end absurd and ironic,

but triumphant. This, along Kelman’s distinctive language and politics, give his work

its sense of triumph even amidst the metaphorical blindness to them.