ALASDAIR GRAY
Paul Haacke
reviews
Alasdair Gray's
The Book of Prefaces in
In These Times.
I was first introduced to the remarkable Mr. Gray - like so many
other relatively obscure yet talented writers - via
a lucky encounter with Anthony
Burgess's
99 Novels in the mid-1980s. That led
me to search out and read Lanark
, Gray's most famous book and one that's prompted
many to call him "the Scottish Joyce," as simultaneously
laudatory and condemnatory as that phrase may be.
I've snagged each of Gray's succeeding efforts as well.
Haacke writes of a recent Scottish literary renaissance and
Gray's place therein:
But the writer who in many ways prefigured this literary renaissance in the '70s
and '80s--Alasdair Gray--is woefully under-recognized here in the States and
only somewhat more so in England. This is a shame, not only because his
imagination has been one of the driving forces behind the growth of Scottish
literature, but because he is one of the more innovative and entertaining writers
living anywhere today.
After establishing this context we get on with the review of
Prefaces, which is ...
... literally an anthology of prefaces,
introductions, prologues and forwards to famous works of "literate thought" in
the English language, beginning in the seventh century and ending, due to
copyright costs, at the beginning of the 20th.
Colorful in style, with witty asides and broad critiques, the book is also colorful
in production: While the prefaces themselves are printed in black in the middle
of each page, they are accompanied by commentary, illustrations and titles in
bright red along the margins--a visual effect that only further highlights the
strange fact everything in the book is both introduction and body. "This book is
NOT a monster created by a literary Baron Frankenstein," Gray explains on the
inside of his characteristically witty and artful dust jacket, "but a unique history
of how literature spread and developed through three British nations and most
North American states."
The best parts of the book, as a dedicated Gray follower might
expect, are his incisive and acerbic commentary and his designing
and illustration of the volume.
On the former Haacke offers:
The commentary that runs in red throughout the book keeps all of this firmly in
place, mostly by explicating unjust social contexts, cutting the grandiose down
to size and giving the under-appreciated their rightful due (exemplified by the
opening line of the first essay "On What Led to English Literature": "Babies
embarrass masterful men who find it queer that once they too could only wail,
suck and excrete"). Gray's wonderfully sharp tongue, made even more cutting
by the relative lack of space in the margins, renders even the simplest critical
points uproarious. For instance: "Defoe: London Bachelor's son ... prints
Robinson Crusoe as a true tale warning all youths in the middle station of lifeā to
do as dad orders & never go to sea; quietly lets that moral disappear: Crusoe
ends ruling a busy island of faithful blacks."
Or, on Gerard Manley Hopkins' religiosity: "Certainly those of us who think that
Christ and the Church are very little of absolutely everything are often left
asking: What use to us is a fettered propagandist of spectacular literary skill?
However, at the very least, possibly nowhere outside of Dante has an insistent
and often aggressive credalism been so voluptuously well expressed."
As you might have guessed by this point, Gray is not lacking
in opinions. He's also more of an acquired taste than most.
Try one of his shorter productions, and if you like it then obtain
others. This one sure looks like a keeper to me.
posted by Steven Baum
3/26/2001 08:48:14 PM |
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