Alone in the library one evening, early winter, I chance to stumble upon a curious title: History and Derivation of Edinburgh Streetnames, published by The Edinburgh Corporation, City Engineers Department, May 1975. I dust down the cover and settle down at a reading table to flick through a few of the pages.
I’m surprised, first of all, to discover that the city once had its own engineer; a certain A.S. Crockett, whose various designatory letters are listed after his name. I wonder whether this is still the case; I wonder too, what Mr Crockett and his predecessors would make of the current state of affairs.
Turning the pages, it fascinates me to learn of the histories which accompany the street names: Morrison Street, so called because it occupied part of Mr Morrison’s land; Elm Row, which took its name from the line of Elm trees running parallel to Baxter place, marking the boundary of the land of a certain Mr Allan; or Fountainbridge, which I am informed takes its name from an old bridge over the Dalry Burn, flowing from the Borough Loch and passing by Lochirn to Coltbridge. It intrigues me to learn of the long-lost hydrology of a sector of the city which is now fully developed, without a burn or a loch in site; it’s no surprise, I reflect, that the area was once so popular with the city’s brewing trade.
I close the book and rest my eyes. Looking out of the window, gazing across the meadows, I see the moon hanging high in the night sky, a thin yellow crescent. I’m struck by the sheer volume of history that lies before me, the hidden past of artefacts which I, and no doubt many others too, take for granted. I try in vain to conjure up an image of Mr Morrison and his land, or Mr Allan and his, perhaps out hunting one frosty winter morn, the trusty hounds trotting by their sides, their paws making a gentle crushing sound as they pad over the grass. But the city stops me: its stone and concrete stands firmly in the way of this bucolic scene. For their part, Borough Loch and Coltbridge are but names to me, and the Dalry Burn a feature of the city that has long since gone.
It disturbs me to discover the transience of objects which, for all intents and purposes, appear to us as permanent, unchanging. Returning the volume to its position on the shelf, I pay silent tribute to Mr Crockett, whose labours have succeeded in preventing, at least for the time being, these historical fascicles from becoming forever lost to the sands of time.
Stepping out into the night, I am at once met by the crisp winter air; the stars shine brightly in the sky above. The city bristles around me, in all its occult past; the street signs wink at me, hinting at their histories from all around.
With a title that is perhaps a tongue in cheek nod to Oliver Chesler’s One night in New York City, Araya’s novella marks a brave departure from the short stories penned as part of his Tales from the Chilean Andes series (2008–2009). Turning his back on the mountains with which he appeared to have developed a spiritual bond, One night in Buenos Aires sees him cross the cordillera and the Argentinean pampa to plunge headfirst into a reluctant embrace of the urban environment in a tale which follows the trajectory of a young expat as he passes through various factions of the Argentinean capital’s nightlife. Marked by an at times caustic humour and a cynicism worthy of Holden Caulfield himself, the novella seeks to challenge notions of identity and above all to deconstruct the mythologies which surround the traveller, the bohemian, and ultimately the much eulogised capital itself.
The novel opens in a bar, a tourist trap in the city’s San Telmo district, on a roof terrace where the protagonist is watching the sun setting over the city and meditating on the growing sense of disillusionment he feels towards the crowd of backpackers by which he is surrounded. The boastful undertone which forms the basis of many of the conversations within earshot is, he observes, based on the one-upmanship of what he curtly describes as “travellers’ trumps”. Yet while the setting of this first episode of the novella may be limited, the protagonist’s ruminations allow us to perceive how the phenomenon of travel, in its most recent guise, has allowed Western cultures to extend the consumerism which powered twentieth century capitalism to encompass entire nations and their peoples, turning their cultures and geographical landscapes into commodities to be bought and sold on a whim:
it occurred to me, sat there with a glass of cheap wine in one hand and a wizened roll-up cigarette in the other, that for many of them, this was just a game, one in which the components of identikit identities based on seemingly unique experiences were snapped up by the privileged bourgeoisie of a new global elite. The end result was less an egalitarian form of promoting cultural understanding and more a sort of neoliberal imperialism which fostered shallow visions of cultures characterised by a distinct lack of integrity and respect.
Moving on, the second part of the novella sees Araya’s protagonist travel across the city to meet a group of friends for an electronic music concert whose headline act will see a pair of Brazilian laptop musicians satirise the sound of reggaeton, in an unlikely mongrel of Latino cumbia, misogynistic US gangster rap and UK acid techno. The group smoke, drink and make conversation with some of the locals; a cut-price, bohemian crowd, which in turn serves as the object of a second meditation, this time on the subcultures which sustain their lifestyle. There is, the protagonist notes, a significant proportion of “hangers-on” present, people whom he characterises as having no genuine interest in the scene itself but who associate themselves with it nonetheless, perhaps for the kudos of being down with those in the know, or perhaps as part of a misguided attempted to shore up a fragile sense identity”. Araya shows us how these fragile subcultures, “for all intents and purposes, lack a clear and strongly grounded sense of social consciousness and for the larger part remain oblivious to the wider context of which they form a part”. He even goes as far as to suggest that the inability of many such subcultures to mature has its roots in this defect, and there is something quite poignant about his evocation of the dancefloors of yesteryear, capturing the intensity of the clubbing experience with fond nostalgia and memories of concerts characterised by “percussion bursting like thunder from black speaker towers on either side of the stage” and people “brought together by the creative energy of the performer”.
Araya’s prose is poised and poetic, such as when the concert comes to an end and the group are hustled outside by the somewhat over-zealous security staff:
for a while, they had hung about outside the club chatting, cadging roll-ups and trying desperately to find an afterparty where they could go to finish the night. But slowly the crowd, that evanescent cohesion of souls, began to disperse, scattering its hundreds of composite pieces out across the darkness of the city.
Then, following a narrow escape with a gang of youths lurking in a backstreet round the corner, and a hair-raising high-speed taxi journey through the heart of the city, the group end up in El cacho, an afterhours café bar downtown and the favoured late night meeting place of prostitutes and their clients who are mostly a mix of corrupt politicians and business men, what Araya calls “the people who wield power, who run the city, giving it direction and making it what it is”. It is this less than salubrious establishment which forms the setting for the third and final part of the novella.
Worse for wear after what has clearly been a long night on the town, here the protagonist’s critique turns particularly acerbic, rounding on the seedy underside of “a mythology which is enthusiastically and unashamedly promoted by the Porteños”. In a moment of despair at the scenes around him, he asks himself: “What is this city? What is the substance which lies behind the romanticised façade of tango? How much of its identity is no more than a nebulous shroud of myth?” As the protagonist observes the ladies of the night in their cheap red lipstick and low-cut dresses, writhing around politicians and business men who are intoxicated by their mastery of the fairer sex, and the desolate eyes of the tramps who from time to time pass by the window, their faces grubby, their clothes tattered, the reader is left with a strong sense of a place pretending to be something it is not.
The reality of what is sometimes referred to as the Paris of South America, Araya seems to suggest, fails to live up to its hype: in spite of its pretentions to the contrary, the protagonist reminds us that Argentina continues to be a developing country in which basic problems such as poor infrastructure and even shortages of coins remain to be solved. In spite of its glossy European façade, there are always hints of another city, one of grimy backstreets and shabby barrios which are carefully concealed from the public eye. He asks:
Where are these poorer barrios? Where are those who are denied the right to participate in this pretence of Europeanness, those consigned to the reality of crushing inequality, a brutal poverty which from time to time reveals itself unannounced, like a rat scuttling across an alleyway? Where are these people while those with the power to change their destiny are out screwing around in late night bars, drinking Scotch, smoking plump Cuban cigars and flirting with cheap whores?
This strength of this book is not its plot, rather its reflections around the theme of identities and how they are constructed, be they of individual travellers, subcultures or even cities themselves. At times the novella seems saturated with the sense of disillusionment felt by Araya towards how we live in this day and age, however, any overindulgences are largely redeemed by his carefully crafted prose, a laconic sense of humour, and a gift for reflective monologues which challenge the doxa of our time. This is a novella which will perhaps appeal more to a younger demographic, to a readership sceptical of the twentieth century gap-year generation and nostalgic for the passing of an era of smoky nightclubs and vibrant subcultures, and finally one which is critical of the acceptability of mild-corruption amongst the political classes. It is only unfortunate that the limitations imposed by the author’s decision to publish this book privately mean that in all likelihood, a large proportion of Araya’s potential audience will remain deprived of his wit, wisdom and prose.
Araya, K. (2010). One night in Buenos Aires. Santiago de Chile: Pelacable Ediciones.
There are better ways of living than being happy but they require strength and sanity.
Revisiting Gray’s avocation of home rule almost twenty years after this pamphlet was first published for the 1992 general election, and almost fifteen years since its subsequent revision, the political landscape it describes is much changed, or at least superficially. The Scottish nation once more has its own parliament, albeit one from which many of its heavyweight politicians remain notably absent, and the relative successes of the Scottish National Party have resulted in a first minister who shares the sense of purpose that is adumbrated in Gray’s work. More so than anything else, however, this pamphlet is essentially a history, albeit a potted, highly partisan and idiosyncratic one, of the United Kingdom and the triumph of a conservative English ruling class. Its premise is a highly inclusive one: the book is addressed to “everyone in Scotland who is able to vote” and is based on the geographical features which distinguish the nation from the rest of the British Isles.
It is in this context that Gray evokes a geography in which “firths, sea lochs, chains of high moorlands and mountains make north Britain like a cluster of big islands jammed together in the east and coming apart in the west,” and in which the geological processes which formed the land meant that the “soil which could be cultivated lay in districts cut off from each other”. Whence, perhaps, the distinction between the hierarchy of privilege which characterises the English feudal system of counties, awarded to barons in return for their allegiance to the king and in turn subdivided into estates which were entrusted to knights on similar terms, and the kith and kin nature of the Scottish clan system whereby what Gray refers to as “a cluster of small nations” was unified by a King of Scots who was crucially, and here he is keen to stress the point, not the king of Scotland. It is this difference which made the Scotland of the time a new, and in a certain sense democratically advanced, sort of European nation in an era in which the modern-day concept of democracy was still many centuries from inception.
The introduction to this pamphlet contains a quote from a short story by the Edinburgh writer Irvine Welsh, where it is asserted that “Scots oppress themselves by their obsession with the English which breeds the negatives of hatred, fear, servility, contempt and dependency”. Gray maintains that such an “unhealthy state of mind will always occur while most Scottish opinion has no influence on how Scots are ruled,” although this is not, he adds, his state of mind. Yet in spite of this claim, his argument is largely grounded in a history of the emergence of the English state and its grip on Scotland, and as such, it must be asked to what extent Gray himself falls victim to perpetrating this phenomenon. Many a chapter is devoted to covering the historical iniquities of the relationship between the two nations, as exemplified by his comments on trade relations around the time of the union:
English coal could enter Ireland duty free, Scottish coal could not. England’s main industry was wool so the government put a light export duty on it. Scotland’s was linen so the government put a heavy duty on it. English brokers took shares in the Irish linen trade, got a government subsidy to expand it, and began buying Scottish flax for it.
Perhaps then, Gray’s concern with the past is in part understandable since it is only recently, with the establishment of a new parliament, that Scottish opinion has begun to have more direct influence on how its people are ruled; a process which has run in parallel to the prospect of new generations who are beginning to see beyond longstanding historical grudges.
It is also interesting to consider Gray’s take on more recent events from living memory. His contempt for Margaret Thatcher is, as it is elsewhere in his work, undisguised, although it is interesting to note that in some senses he foresees New Labour’s adherence to her corrosive neoliberal ideals. Perhaps however, as a whole, the tone of the book is too inward looking, for the reality is that Gray has little to say about modern Scotland’s place in the world and, save for references to certain countries, some of which, such as Iceland and Ireland, now seem rather unfortunate, has even less to say about what could be in the future. Yet comparisons with strong, progressive Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Norway continue to provide a source of inspiration, not least with Scotland’s involvement in emerging technologies, such as renewable energies, in which, given sufficient enterprise and vision, the county could conceivably once again become a major player on the world stage.
The pamphlet is let down by a lack of references which would allow the curious reader to further pursue some of the points Gray makes and at times, most notably in the final chapter, it does fall victim to its own eccentricity. Yet not withstanding these minor quibbles, in the run up to the fourth Scottish general election, this is a piece of writing which still has ample capacity to, as Gray puts it with characteristic modesty, “provoke intelligent thought”. The creation of a coherent and powerful vision for Scotland’s future in the twenty-first century however, remains very much an open task.
Gray, A. (1997). Why Scots should rule Scotland. Edinburgh: Canongate.
That the post colonial enterprise would one day turn back on itself to reconsider its largely unashamed championing of the so-called “third space”, a space where peoples and cultures collide, now seems inevitable. Moslund’s study provides a refreshing critique of this phenomenon, connecting with broader undercurrents of disaffection with the fetishism of difference and the Other which has constituted one of the driving forces of the postmodern project. His sober scepticism cuts through the mythology which has sprouted at times unchecked around the ideas of certain fashionable figures of late twentieth century philosophy, ideas which have been adopted and developed perhaps without due diligence on the part of those who should perhaps know better. Moreover, as Moslund observes, the rise of this mythology has been accompanied by its own poetics of flux, difference, movement, hybridity and nomadicity, with such buzzwords becoming glamorous, sexy even, pursued with an at times ideological zeal. However, swept along in a current of ceaseless “becoming”, seldom do we pause to reflect on the question: becoming what?
Moslund’s critique largely focuses on the ideas of Deleuze and Bakhtin and represents a carefully considered and meticulous attempt to show how concepts from these writers, such as the Deleuzean dichotomy of difference and identity and Bakhtinian notions of centrifugality and centripetality, can be applied to so-called hybrid literature. Yet his approach is thoroughly constructive, using ideas from these thinkers to construct a robust theoretical framework which in turn lays the foundations for an insightful and perspicacious work of literary criticism. He reveals cultural change to be a much more dynamic and complex beast than the celebrationists of hybridity would have us believe, exposing how the various centripetal and centrifugal forces at play within a given space and time—the former exerting a force towards sameness and the latter towards difference—interact to create not a sheer contrast between the sedentary and the nomadic (something for which he is quick to rebuke Deleuze), but instead a rich spectrum in which it is possible to identify multiple speeds of change.
Moslund’s work represents an example of inspired and first rate literary criticism, and the elegance of the arguments he constructs in his case studies is at times comparable to that of a mathematical proof. He has a gift for leading us to rethink conventional wisdom, something exemplified by his exposition of a strongly centripetal force in what at first seems to be a resolutely centrifugal novel (Mukherjee’s Jasmine), and the detection of a strong presence of change and difference in what at first appears to be a novel grounded thoroughly in the Same (Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival). Central to his approach, and both these discoveries, is an ability to conceive of change in two dimensions: the transgressive, where difference is effected on the spatiality of the here and now, and the ingressive, where difference is effected over the continuum of a given time frame. Thus while a novel such as Jasmine may be avowedly centrifugal, when viewed in terms of transgression, in terms of ingression, Moslund shows its potential for change to be rather underwhelming. Moreover, the concomitant observation that celebrationist readings of cultural hybridity are largely concerned with the present, with the here and now of cultural change and migration, and the implication that they lack ingressive, temporal depth, perhaps hints at a more general and dangerous complacency which currently afflicts the postmodern West, constituting just one of the many insights provided to the reader throughout the course of the book.
From his carefully considered theoretical analysis to the case studies which accompany it, Moslund succeeds in making a valuable contribution to the realm of literary theory and perhaps also to his own ambition of developing Deleuze’s idea of a “science of holey space”. This is a challenging book which will be of considerable value to those with an interest in literature, migration and transcultural politics, as well as the more general ideas of the postmodern episteme; it is unfortunate that at the time of writing, a more economical paperback version of the book is not available.
Moslund, S. P. (2010). Migration Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
1. Disclaimer. Before beginning, it should be noted that whilst the title of this short collection of notes might at first sight seem an exercise in bigotry and generalisation, it should become clear to the reader that this is not the case. This is not a polemic against England or its people but an attempt to distil an essence which has prevailed among us for much too long; one which continues to exert a lamentable hegemony whose effects extend disproportionally throughout the British Isles and the world beyond. For the purposes of this discussion then, our Englishman is not a solid, concrete entity, but an abstract figure, an archetype, the embodiment of an outdated mode of thinking which is of increasingly dubious relevance to the world in which we live and upon which the forces of change are perhaps now threatening to call time.
2. The Major. To be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is: the words are those of the American poet Ogden Nash. Being an Englishman, it would seem, is quite a unique predicament, and one that is markedly different to being from one of the other three nations which comprise the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. To be an Englishman is to be not the minor but the major, to exist not on the periphery but at the centre; it is to be at the heart of a once mighty and now decaying empire whose sphere of influence, at the height of its dominance, extended throughout the world.
3. Sovereign. Let us also observe that his relationship with his kingdom is also unique: while the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh all had to be subjugated by means of an instrument of union, this is in no way true of the English, for it is their nationality alone which may indisputably claim the kingdom as their own. It is a natural relationship: for the Englishman, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II belongs to a long and prestigious lineage, which—and here let us leave pontifications regarding the House of Hanover aside—has historically always been that of his own nation. She is his indisputable sovereign, and he is bound by history to willingly acknowledge her as such.
4. Power. For the Englishman, there need be no awkward embrace of the oppressive power structures and institutions through which the sovereign exercises its power, for these too are unquestionably his own. To behold the splendour of the Houses of Parliament is for him to behold the warmth and security of a family home. To behold the privileges of wealth and influence in the realm of foreign affairs, a direct product of iniquitous dealings from centuries gone by, is to behold a proud tradition to be upheld, a realm whose greatness must be defended at all costs.
5. Privilege. Whilst others may struggle to brandish the authority and privilege inherent in such institutions, showing themselves up as mere amateurs through a grasping and overly rigid assertion of power—although is this not precisely because they are always fighting against the machinery of the Englishman?— from the academic sovereignty of Eton and Oxbridge to the positions of high office that are both his right and destiny, the Englishman is bred into such authority, and wears it like a well-worn gown, a family heirloom handed down through the generations. Returning to Ogden Nash, one’s membership of this most exclusive of clubs, is reinforced, somewhat paradoxically, by the very nonchalance and self-assurance with which the gown is worn.
6. Patriarch. It must be curious too, for him to visit the other nations of his kingdom. Perhaps it is like a big brother visiting his younger siblings, confident that none can ever match the achievements of his own—for has he not contrived to rig the game against them, stacked up the odds in his favour? Scottish and Northern Irish banknotes are to him play money, devoid of the primacy of his own. Moreover, their languages are no more than mere dialects, derivatives of standard English, quaint and heathen; their legal and educational systems anachronistic aberrations, perhaps somewhat lacking the inbred privilege inherent to his own.
7. Empire. Beyond the British Isles, does not the world owe him a living? Too often he is blind to the historical fortune which grants him privileged access to countries and their cultures, and equally so to the notion that there is anything untoward in looking down at others. This is, of course, their fault for failing to assert themselves in a game which they could never dream of being winners. Similarly, it is no cause for embarrassment that he cannot speak the native tongues of the lands he visits; he need make no effort to do so, since surely it is up to them to accede to the greatness of his own. Finally, how he must take delight in the foreigner’s tendency to conflate the United Kingdom and England, although surely it must vex him somewhat when residents of the other nations are welcomed more warmly than those of his own.
8. Satellites. Yet perhaps there is also a brutal honesty behind such pronunciations. Perhaps they tell a truth about the other partners which make up the kingdom: they are satellite nations, orbiting the magnetic gravity of Westminster, whose lure has corrupted many an honest, or at least well-intentioned, man. The individual achievements of these nations will always be pray to assimilation, or at least obscuration, by his own. Think of a recent remark by a well-known Scottish sports personality when asked whether he was Scottish or British: it depended, he quipped in good humour, on the result. For all the progress of recent initiatives, the United Kingdom remains a monokingdom, in which its minor elements remain grossly overshadowed by the dominant one.
9. Plurality. Socrates once remarked that Athens was not the only polis in the world and that there existed others equally as honourable. Yet, a descendent of the tradition of imperialist Rome, it is hard to imagine the Englishman admitting that there are poleis equally as honourable as his own, less still that these may be those of his neighbours. However, for as long as this situation prevails, it will do so to the detriment of the cultural and intellectual capital of these other nations. While it is most certainly naïve to think that, united by a historic relationship which spans many centuries, two or more neighbours could part and completely go their own separate ways, perhaps the time has come to find new forms of releasing the plurality and undisputable right to autonomy of three quite individual nations. However, is this not the antithesis of all that the Englishman stands for? Would this not be to acknowledge the rights and virtues of his subjects? It is clear that for as long as he and his like prevail, the very idea remains quite unthinkable.
