The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution
by Scott Hames
Edinburgh University Press, £24.99

THE COMMONLY held narrative of Scottish literary studies is that after the failure of the 1979 referendum on the founding of a Scottish Parliament, writers like Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Liz Lochhead filled the political vacuum by revitalising a national culture that paved the way for Scottish devolution in 1999.

In The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution, Scott Hames calls this romantic vision of the campaign for a Scottish Parliament “the dream,” while he dubs the other more mundane story of the cut-and-thrust of machine politics “the grind.” Yet these two narratives are not in competition, each shaping the other in symbiosis.

While Hames makes it clear that this is by no means a comprehensive history of Scottish devolution, it is hard to imagine a more insightful primer in his account of the constitutional politics after Winnie Ewing’s shock win at the Hamilton by-election in 1967.

The discursive field is also expanded to include radical magazines, highlighting the more revolutionary currents coursing through the debate.

Poet and critic Christopher Whyte claimed in 1998 that “in the absence of elected political authority, the task of representing the nation has been repeatedly devolved to its writers” and it is the nature of representation that Hames deftly interrogates with theoretical rigour, mining valuable insights from the work of Nancy Fraser and Wendy Brown.

With no distinct and shared language within which it can be articulated, construction of national identity is particularly fraught in Scotland.

After 1979, it is the linguistic innovations of writers such as Irvine Welsh and James Kelman that create a new vernacular mode in which a legible version of Scottishness inheres that can be useful in a campaign for the Scottish Parliament.

In particular, the committed fictions of Kelman sought to stake out linguistic and political autonomy but, as Hames argues, the blurring of dialect and Standard English only serves the devolutionary strategy of managing national feeling to preserve the British state.

The “spectacle of voice” masks the inherent class tensions in the civic nationalist paradigm, legitimating and neutralising any of its subversive potential.

What’s often described as the “new Scottish renaissance” witnessed an efflorescence of literary experimentation. But the fetishisation of dialect is in danger of calcifying into the mere performance of voice, one that has exhausted its original impetus and been absorbed into the consumerist spectacle.

At another moment marked by the exhaustion of literary strategies, the disembodied articulating voice of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable uttered the death rattle of modernism in the declaration that: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

As Hames’s book persuasively concludes, Scottish literature finds itself at a similar crossroads.