Laura O’Connor

Department of English
University of California, Irvine
loconnor@uci.edu

 

This article explores the influence of linguicism–discrimination against others on the basis of language and speaking style–on the poetics and politics of literary Creoles by examining the “Synthetic Scots” of modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. When languages that have previously been separate are brought into contact as a result of colonization, migration, and globalization, both the languages themselves and popular perceptions of them alter significantly. The proliferation of hybrid Englishes that has accompanied the monocultural thrust of “global” English has affected literary production in English significantly. Hybrid Englishes are formed in what Mary Louise Pratt describes as “contact zone[s] . . . where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (4). The close proximity of English to Scots, Gaelic, and Welsh, and the documented history of their long interaction, make the internal context of the British Isles a fertile site for analyzing colonial contact-zones, places where English coexists with other vernaculars that have been marginalized or almost supplanted by it. As I will suggest, the literary Creoles that develop under conditions of linguicism illuminate the dynamics of intimate and hostile relations across a contested border. MacDiarmid’s poetics reveals, for example, that forms such as blazon and caricature reflect and attempt to reintegrate on a linguistic level one’s neighbor’s ambivalence toward oneself.

 

Even as it expresses the ambivalences of linguistic proximity, the convergence of diverse languages and dialects is in many ways a boon for literary creativity. Behind the apparent cohesion of a literary language lies “an intense struggle that goes on between languages and within languages,” Mikhail Bakhtin observes, and a multilingual or multidialectal environment enables writers “to look at language from the outside, with another’s eyes, from the point-of-view of a potentially different language and style” (Dialogic 66, 60). When writers combine two or more linguistic systems that relate to one another in a single literary utterance as do rejoinders in a dialogue, they objectify the worldviews of the juxtaposed idioms to form what Bakhtin characterizes as the “intentional hybridization” of “dialogical” discourse.

 

The ability to see one’s own linguistic habitus in the light of another’s owes something to linguicism, according to Bakhtin. He locates its prehistory in parodic-travestying expressions of neighborly hostility, the “ridiculing [of] dialectological peculiarities, and making fun of the linguistic and speech manners of [other] groups . . . that belongs to every people’s most ancient store of language images” (82). The habit of disparaging the speaking styles of neighboring speech communities and social inferiors is as old as ethnocentrism (the Greek barbaros is supposed to be an onomatapoeic imitation of incomprehensible speech) and the competitive pursuit of social prestige: “The rich man speaks and everyone stops talking; and then they praise his discourse to the skies. The poor man speaks and people say, ‘who is this,’ and if he stumbles, they trip him up yet more” (Ecclus. 13.28-29). In this essay I use the metaphor of the “Pale/Fringe” contact-zone to track how the linguicism of English-only Anglicization (figured as “the English Pale”) and the concomitant translation of the receding Gaelic and Scots culture into a romanticized “Celtic Fringe” made linguicism a pervasive and constitutive feature of British cultural life. English-only linguicism encompasses the destruction or near-supplantation of indigenous languages; the ostracism of competing vernaculars from the center of power; and the stigmatization of speakers of other languages or vernacular Englishes as “beyond the Pale.” The literary Scots of MacDiarmid exploits the discrepant registers of his hybrid linguistic heritage in order to dramatize, interrogate, and reconfigure the high/low hierarchy established between the encroaching English and marginalized Scots vernaculars.

 

In 1977, a BBC interviewer asked Hugh MacDiarmid, then the grand old man of Scottish letters, what difference it would have made had he been born ten miles further south and hence an Englishman. Growing up in Langholm had imbued him with “a border spirit where differences are accentuated by proximity,” MacDiarmid replied, “the frontier feeling” that made him a fervent Scottish nationalist and an unremitting vanguardist (Thistle 287). The “frontier feeling” is evident in MacDiarmid’s nationalism, which is defiantly bellicose toward the powerful English neighbor, and in his eagerness to experiment, to push the boundaries of consciousness, and to restlessly, ceaselessly innovate. He is intimately familiar with the bordering English culture, yet his “border spirit” intensifies his antipathy and estrangement from it. Neighborly hostility became the creative agon and the raison d’être of his lifelong campaign for Scotland’s cultural secession from England.

 

The genesis of “Hugh MacDiarmid” out of an encounter between Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978), a minor Scottish poet in English, and a Scottish etymological dictionary is one of the marvels of literary modernism’s annus mirabilis, 1922. Grieve had turned to the dictionary in order to lampoon what he then saw as the mindless sentimentality of the Scots verse found in the “poetry corner” of provincial newspapers. In the course of caricaturing a poetic practice he despised, however, Grieve discovered a nascent literary vernacular in the play of “differences accentuated by proximity” between the Scots headwords and their English glosses that persuaded him that the vernacular could be renovated into an international literary language. He patented his new voice with an ultra-Scottish authorial signature: “an immediate realization of . . . [the] ultimate reach of the implications of my experiment made me adopt, when I began writing Scots poetry, the Gaelic pseudonym of Hugh MacDiarmid” (Lucky Poet 6). “Synthetic Scots,” the stuff out of which “MacDiarmid” is forged, is composed in an ambiguous zone of inter- and intralingual translation between Scots and English, under the remote influence of Scotland’s third language, Gaelic.

 

In order to appreciate the complexities of Grieve/MacDiarmid’s “religious conversion” and the commonalties and differences between his predicament and those of Anglophone writers elsewhere, it is necessary to know something of the conflictual multilingual history of the British Isles (Buthlay 149). Scottish developed out of a Northumbrian dialect into a literary vernacular in the fourteenth century and served as the official language of the kingdom of Scotland for two centuries.¹ By the late-eighteenth century, the Scottish-Southron bidialectalism of the fifteenth century had polarized into diglossia, the coexistence of a “High” (English) vernacular with a wide range of functions and a “Low” (Scots) vernacular with restricted usage.² English/Scots diglossia is part of a larger pattern of Pale/Fringe linguicism that boosts the superiority of English and belittles Gaelic, Welsh, and other varieties of English as “beyond the Pale.”

 

The changing metaphorical status of “the Pale” illustrates the role of linguicism in securing the hegemony of English. “The Pale” originally referred to the double ramparts built to keep native Gaels out of confiscated Irish lands and the inner sanctum of the settler-colony and to prevent English settlers from assimilating native mores. In Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, the segregating Pale comes to represent the frontline of a perilous linguistic struggle to Anglicize the natives before they could Gaelicize the settlers. The Pale’s dual function of exclusion and restraint in the war between colonial and native speech-communities survives in the idiomatic phrase “beyond the Pale,” which later came to delimit the boundaries of verbal propriety for the modern bourgeois British subject. The phrase “beyond the Pale” calls attention to the intimate reciprocity between the dispositions that are ingrained into our bodily demeanors and the circulation of social prestige “out there” in the public sphere, a symbiosis between the formation of bourgeois subjectivity and the flow of cultural capital that Pierre Bourdieu has theorized in a French context. The broad consensus among the Enlightenment literati and bourgeoisie to adopt (Southron) English as the standard British vernacular changed the tacit rules of what Bourdieu calls the “linguistic marketplace” so that those who could perform the accredited English speaking-style were given a respectful forum to say their piece, while those who lapsed into “Scotticisms” were consigned to the margins.³ Anglophone Scots schooled themselves to measure up to the prestigious English standard and shunned the vernacular. Their self-improving endeavors further widened the High/Low divide by enhancing the prestige of English at the cost of devaluing Scots, and this in turn intensified the pressure to jettison the vernacular in favor of the standard, and so on in a self-perpetuating loop. This loop, which delineates “the Pale” of modern British society, is propelled by the structural disparity between the relatively rare competence in the vernacular and the much more uniform recognition of it, which allows those who have mastered the English acrolect to command deference from those who recognize it as “the best” speaking-style but are not quite able “to talk proper” themselves.⁴

 

Because the degree to which one could neutralize one’s “braid Scots” speech measured one’s “class,” accent and speaking-style became highly charged signifiers of ethnicity, class, and of the cross-wired class-and-ethnicity in the Pale. In everyday encounters, the “differences accentuated by proximity” between the mutually intelligible vernaculars are routinely exaggerated into a caricature of deviant Scots, in contradistinction to the assumed and implicit norms of the Pale. The Anglicization of Scotland’s linguistic habitus was popularly regarded as “improvement,” but because the proscription of Scots from the hub of civic life and the inhibition of Scottish styles of speech required repressing the social body, it often felt coercive. In this linguistic milieu, the symbolic status of the “Scotticism,” an utterance that sounds distinctly and distinctively Scottish to one’s own or to others’ ears, becomes charged with ambivalence. Associated with loss of public face and innermost expressivity, Scotticisms became the object of overt condescension and covert pride. Scotticisms exemplify Bakhtin’s theory that “speech genres are the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language” because they disclose the ambivalent slippage between Anglo mask and unreconstructed Scottish ethnicity that delineates the contours of the Pale/Fringe in Scotland (Speech Genres 65).

 

Scotticisms are tacitly defined by contrast to the purportedly “unaccented” literate speech. Dr. Johnson’s dictum in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) that “the best general rule” of pronunciation is established by “the most elegant speakers who deviate least from the written word” (qtd. in Mugglestone 208) sets up a Pale between “literate speakers” whose purportedly unaccented speech is assumed to correspond exactly with ordinary spelling and the speakers of other classes and regions whose sociolects are stigmatized as “dialect.”⁵ The dominant opinion that there is only one correct way to spell and pronounce words, and that it is the English way, vastly increased the authority of English as a universal language of logic, clarity, and formal grace. The normative sway of standard English can be seen in the way Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language profiles Scots as halbsprache, “somehow less than a language but more than a dialect” (McArthur 142). The title of Jamieson’s dictionary asserts that Scots is a language, but by confining itself to a peculiarly Scots vocabulary and mediating the “local” Scots idiom through the explanatory apparatus of “universal” standard English, it codifies the vernacular as ancillary. In contradistinction to the default mode of impersonal, up-to-date, informational English, the Scots headwords are profiled as colorful, quaint, arcane, vanishing “fossil-poetry” or deviant idioms. The documented etymologies linking Scots with other languages independently of English (though Jamieson repeatedly downplays ties with Gaelic⁶) and the sheer heft of literary citations in the multi-volume opus legitimize Scots as “something more than a dialect,” however.

 

It seems counterfactual when writing Scots to maintain the illusory “accent-free” effect of standard English, but the use of English orthography to script Scottish habits of pronunciation portrays Scots as unlike the idiom of “the most elegant speakers.” An exaggerated emphasis is placed upon phonological and idiomatic differentiae by tagging dropped fricatives with apostrophes and underscoring divergences from received pronunciation with non-standard spellings, setting the vernacular apart as a specimen of reported “dialect.” Nonetheless, while the scripting of Scots as a dialect indirectly associated a vernacular speaking-style with illiteracy, it also suggested character, lack of affectation, homespun sagacity, and spontaneity in contrast with “standardized” English. The Scots literary revival, led by Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, and at the end of the century by Robert Burns and Walter Scott, tapped into and increased the covert prestige of the vernacular, but at the same time the revivalists partly reinforced the language/dialect dichotomy through the restricted use of Scots for dialogue and popular ballads.

 

The Pale/Fringe concept draws attention to how the Pale is necessarily defined by what lies “outwith” the Pale, to borrow the suggestive Scots synonym for “beyond,” the outermost limit that bounds and coexists with it. The arduous effort by Enlightenment Scots to become fully Anglicized Britons was accompanied by the salvaging of cultural alterity from the hitherto despised Gàidhealtachd (Gaelic-speaking area). James Macpherson’s translation of Gaelic Fenian mythology into Ossian (1761-5) was a cornerstone in the formation of the Highland romance and the Celtic Fringe. The hyperbolic image of Scottishness that emerged–a panoply of bagpipes, tartans, clans, bards, and sublimely empty (because depopulated) landscape–was fabricated in English, yet authenticated through allusion to Gaelic antiquity and Jacobite fealty to a nobly lost cause. The common nineteenth-century pattern in Europe of articulating an idealized “national character” through literature was distorted in Scotland, Tom Nairn argues in The Break-Up of Britain, because material self-interest encouraged the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia to neutralize or suppress protonationalist separatism, leading to an émigré/Kailyard split in Scottish intellectual life (146).⁷ An émigré intelligentsia migrated, literally and/or psychologically, to a London-centered transnational Republic of Letters, and the Kailyard (meaning “cabbage-patch,” “rustic”) literati developed a “stunted, caricatural . . . cultural sub-nationalism” of tartanry, which, “uncultivated by ‘national’ experience in the usual sense, [became] curiously fixed or fossilized . . . to the point of forming a huge, virtually self-contained universe of kitsch” (Nairn 163). Scotland’s imageme (the ambivalent and unfalsifiable polarity within which a given national character is held to move) is thus a compromise-formation, a symptom of a contradictory desire to enjoy the comforts of empire without relinquishing those of nationality (Leerssen 279).

 

Literary criticism and antiquarianism, both of which were profoundly influenced by Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), became an alternative means for analyzing the character of Scottish culture and its double-edged relationship with its proximate English other. Arnold argues that the disinterested criticism of Celtic (Gaelic and Welsh) literature could help to transform Anglo/Celtic antipathy into a creative interracial symbiosis: what the poetic, spiritual, ineffectual, and primitive Celt lacks, the prosaic, materialistic, worldly, and progressive Anglo-Saxon can supply, and vice versa. G. Gregory Smith took Arnoldian Celticism to task in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (1919), a book that exerted considerable influence on MacDiarmid’s poetics and that was reviewed by T.S. Eliot under the revealing title “When Was Scottish Literature?”⁸ Smith takes issue with Arnold’s ethnological assumption that any trait which is at variance with England’s self-image “may, must, and does come from an outside source; given a spiritual lightness and vivacity in the dull, heavy, practical genius of Teutonic England, it must have come from the Celts” (29). “We have grown suspicious” of ethnic stereotyping that “separate[s] the contrasts in character [by placing] the obverse of a coin in one bag and the reverse in another,” Smith remarks, and posits instead a dualistic notion of identity, drawn from Scottish literature, where “the real and fantastic . . . invade [one another] without warning” like the “polar twins” of Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (29, 33, 20). In Smith’s logic, Scottish literature’s supposed contrariness reflects how “Scottish” traits have been split off from one another by English neighbors. Complementarily, Scottish literature integrates what cannot be admitted to be integral on the border itself.

 

Smith coins the phrase “Caledonian Antisyzygy” to designate the commingling of two contrary moods in Scottish literature, a meticulous observation and “zest for handling a multitude of details” which sometimes borders on “a maudlin affection for the commonplace,” and a “whimsical delight” in the fantastic, “the airier pleasure to be found in the confusion of the senses [and] in the fun of things thrown topsy-turvy” (4, 5, 19). Antisyzygy, I would suggest, is particularly useful in describing the literary reintegration of a national imageme split by border friction. Smith introduces the neologism with playful archness, commenting in a parenthetical aside that either Sir Thomas Browne or Sir Thomas Urquhart (the translator of Gargantua and Pantagruel⁹) might have so named the trait, but it is evident that disjunctive-conjunctions, “almost a zig-zag of contradictions,” encapsulate the “character” of Scottish literature for him (4). Smith writes that “the Scot, in that medieval fashion which takes all things as granted, is at his ease in both ‘rooms of life,’ and turns to fun, and even profanity, with no misgivings,” and regrets that much literary evidence of the Scottish “delight in the grotesque and uncanny” has been lost through the “decorous” bias of canon-formation (35). Like Bakhtin, Smith intuits a generic kinship between an aesthetics that appreciates “the absolute propriety of a gargoyle’s grinning at the elbow of a kneeling saint” and the uncanny doubles of Robert Louis Stevenson (23, 35). He connects a “constitutional liking for contrasts,” “contrariety,” and enjoyment of “things thrown topsy-turvy” to the Scottish “fine sense of the value of provocation” and “the sheer exhilaration of conflict” manifest in “the old fun of flyting” (a medieval genre of stylized invective and witty raillery) (19-20, 33).

 

In the context of this cultural narrative of division and partial repair, MacDiarmid’s “Theory of Scots Letters” draws on Smith’s Caledonian-Antisyzygy concept to propose a new direction for a “true” Scottish culture that would work to reassemble the ambivalence of the national imageme. The “future depends upon the freeing and development of that opposite tendency in our consciousness which runs counter . . . to the canny Scot tradition” and hence “the slogan of a Scottish literary revival must be the Nietzschean ‘Become what you are'” (Thistle 136-7). He distinguishes the antisyzygical “true Scot, rapid in his transitions of thought, taking all things as granted, turning to fun and even to profanity with no misgivings, at his ease in both rooms of life” from the “canny Scot,” who is presented by contrast as the Scottish counterpart of the Irish “false-national,” the “West Briton.” Thus while on one level the uncanny Scot is predicated on a non-binary notion of antisyzygy, on another MacDiarmid reinstates coin-splitting stereotyping to debase the canny Scot, whose sobriety, stern conscience, and thrift make him the linchpin of empire, kirk, and industry (Thistle 135-6).

 

Smith (like Grieve before his conversion) discerns no antisyzygical potential in the Scots vernacular. Smith ridicules Kailyard poets as poor imitators of Robert Burns, “poeticules who waddle in good duck fashion through Jamieson’s, snapping up fat expressive words with nice little bits of green idiom for flavoring” (138-9). In December 1921, MacDiarmid engages in epistolary “guerrilla warfare” in the Aberdeen Free Press against the Doric revival proposed by the recently established Vernacular Circle of the London Burns Club (MacDiarmid, Letters 69). (Scots is variously known as “the Doric,” “Lallans” and “the vernacular.”) A vernacular revival would “cloak mental paucity with a trivial and ridiculously over-valued pawkiness!” MacDiarmid opines, “and bolster up [the peasant’s] instinctive suspicion of cleverness and culture” that keeps Scotland in “an apparently permanent literary infancy,” dwarfed by “the swaddling clothes of the Doric” (754). It would elevate the collective wallowing in the national imageme that takes place at annual Burns Suppers into a populist orthodoxy that would stifle all serious intellectual, literary, and artistic endeavor. A violent antipathy to bourgeois gentility lies behind the unfavorable comparison MacDiarmid draws between a popular poet like Burns, whose ready assimilation into the drawing room secured his decline “from genius to ‘gauger,'” and an unpopular one like Baudelaire, who deliberately made himself into “a bogey to horrify the bourgeois” (“Burns and Baudelaire” 71). For MacDiarmid, the Burns line “Gi’e me ae spark of native fire, that’s a’ the desire” reveals that his precursor’s enormous popularity is predicated on a suppression of the internationalism and intellectualism that MacDiarmid feels are two of the strongest (and most admirable) drives in Scottish history (MacDiarmid, “Robert Burns” 181).

 

Lest anyone mistake his opposition for cultural cringe or intellectual snobbery, MacDiarmid stresses that he desires the preservation of the Doric and “love[s] it as jealously [as anybody]” and that he “was brought up in a braid Scots atmosphere [and his] accent could be cut with a knife” (MacDiarmid, Letters 754). Almost with the same breath, MacDiarmid portrays vaunting the vernacular as a hokey impersonation of stock Scottish “character” and cites his Scots accent and speaking style as proof of personal authenticity. Responding to the Burns-club argument that Anglicizing makeovers were “mere caste mimicry,” MacDiarmid asks if there is anything to choose between going “Anglo” and going “Scot” “as far as mob-psychology goes, other than the peculiar virtue diehards may attach to minority manifestations?” (753). The rhetorical question arranges the repertoire of available articulatory styles in Scotland between “talking like a book” in the etiolated style of the Pale and “talking like a character from a book” in the colorful (because ethnicized) hyperbole of the national imageme. Convinced that the latter route was a “cul-de-sac” that would render a susceptible public “practically idea-proof,” MacDiarmid launched an assault against the prospect of “a Doric boom just now” by parodying the stock-in-trade of the Kailyard poeticule (756, 755).

 

The story of the genesis of “MacDiarmid” tends toward caricature, but this may be apt for a poet whose poetics develop out of a memory, on conscious and unconscious levels, of the genres of caricature, Menippean satire, and popular blazons. Indeed, MacDiarmid’s work reveals these rivalrous genres to be poetic correlatives of cultural schism that respond to the stresses of linguistic similarity and difference in proximity. The conscious and unconscious “memory” of these genres pertains to two distinct but related forms of caricature, a hackneyed notion of Scottish “national character” that shapes Scotland’s image at home and abroad, and the exaggerated othering of a Scottish way of speaking that sets the vernacular apart as a hodge-podge of Scotticisms. The title of MacDiarmid’s classic A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) conjures a stereotypical Scot: a drunk man in tartan regalia who drinks whiskey, has strongly accented, idiomatic speech-patterns, and is named “MacSomebody.” The international legibility of the stereotype is shown by the near-reflex ease with which associated ethnic signifiers (“tartan,” “bagpipes,” “clannish”) supplement the “drunk” and “thistle” cues to complete a fixed yet phantasmatic image.¹⁰

 

At one stage in his nocturnal odyssey, the “fou” (drunk) speaker of A Drunk Man likens the magnetic sway of stereotype to a “siren sang” whose insistent refrain persecutes him:

 

But what's the voice
That sings in me noo?
--A'e hauf o' me tellin'
The tither it's fou!It’s the voice o’ the Sooth
That’s held owre lang
My Viking North
Wi’ its siren sang . . .
Fier comme un Ecossais. (2296-2305)¹¹

 

“Fier comme un Ecossais” is the voice of Europe singing the contrast between the aloof hard-drinkers of “the North” and the sensual wine-drinkers of “the South”; the voice of “the Anglo” upbraiding “the Scot”; and the voice of a divided self disavowing the uncanny “tither hauf” of “the canny Scot.” The obsessive replay of the refrain suggests that the speaker’s self-image is branded by a genre he experiences as name-calling. The incantatory voice bears a residue of slanging rituals, connecting “Fier comme un Ecossais” with the popular blazon, a speech genre that Bakhtin defines as epithets of praise or more usually denigration for “the best” attribute of a nationality, city, or group that merge praise-abuse in an indissoluble unity (Problems 429). The congealing of such epithets into commonplaces furnished the basis for Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie entry under “caractère des nations“: “National characters are a certain habitual predisposition of the soul, which is more prevalent in one nation than in others . . . it is a sort of proverb to say: airy as a Frenchman, jealous as an Italian, serious as a Spaniard, wicked as an Englishman, proud as a Scot, drunk as a German, lazy as an Irishman, deceitful as a Greek” (qtd. in Leerssen 273).¹² David Hume’s essay “Of National Characters” (1748) discusses the cool North/warm South polarity, but “the proud Scot” is neither given a separate mention nor implicitly subsumed under the “English” (“the least national character”) category of his typology (244-58, esp. 253-6).

 

When MacDiarmid engaged in the dictionary-dredging compositional methods of the Kailyarders, he was surprised by poetry. The 1922 publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land opened his eyes to the “Dostoevskian debris of ideas” and Joycean vis comica that lay untapped in the Scots lexicon, whose “potential would be no less prodigious, uncontrollable, and utterly at variance with conventional morality than was Joyce’s tremendous outpouring” (MacDiarmid, Thistle 129). Through the lens of a Joycean vis comica, the antisyzygical play among “differences accentuated by proximity” in the lexicon–the abrupt shifts of register between the “poetic” Scots head-words and their “prosaic” English glosses; the arbitrary contiguities imposed by alphabetical order; the disjunctive anachronism of diachronically changing connotations; and the artificial synchrony created by containing the vocabulary within a single opus–was “a vast storehouse” for an avant-garde epic.

 

MacDiarmid’s “Synthetic Scots” mixes an eclectic range of variegated dialects into a literary Creole.¹³ It is an artificially made vernacular, a synthesis of disparate regional and historic strains of Scots culled primarily from print sources, rather than a naturalistic representation of a vernacular as it is purportedly spoken.¹⁴ For MacDiarmid, his new literary vernacular is also more “vital” and intensively synthetic than the English of his everyday life because it cathects with “something known of old and long familiar” in his subconscious. “The amazing difference in effect upon us when exactly the same thing is said in two different dialects . . . is a question not of logical but of vital values,” he argues in “Braid Scots and the Sense of Smell” (1923). Unlike the “moral censorship” of English, “amoral” Braid Scots can tap into the synaesthetic fusion that occurs on an unconscious level when visual and auditory percepts “become, in ways which there is no terminology to describe, olfactory too,” and hence it does not matter if “Braid Scots [is] only a dialect of English” because “we [can] produce physical-spiritual effects by employing Braid Scots which we cannot encompass through standard English” (72-3). In “Music–Braid Scots Suggestions” (1923), MacDiarmid writes that the words “crune,” “deedle,” “lilt,” and “gell” indicate “a Scottish scale of sound-values and physico-psychical effects completely at variance with those of England” which can be reactivated through experiment with “the essence of deedling” (88-9).

 

In order to lampoon Kailyard verse, MacDiarmid presumably proceeded by loading his parodic verse with those traits that are distinctly and distinctively Scottish.¹⁵ The tendentious motive was apparently superseded when the improvisatory compositional procedure of caricature, “to doodle and watch what happens,” began to form the poetry that confounded his mainstream prejudices about the limited literary range of Scots “dialect.”¹⁶ E.H. Gombrich writes that graphic caricaturists start from the generic norm and systematically vary the configuration of cues by loading (Ital., caricatura, act of loading) component parts and using their personal instinctive reactions to the expressive gestalts that result as a basis for further experiment (Art and Illusion 302). Though MacDiarmid underwent an attitudinal sea-change, the subsequent development of his poetics shows that he preserved the caricaturist’s procedure, “to doodle and deedle and observe what happens.” His freeform method reconnected him with the Mallarméan touchstone that poetry is “not an idea gradually shaping itself in words, but deriving entirely from words,” and enabled him to treat the entire range of Scots and English vocabulary as open to endless reordering and continuous variation rather than as automatically subordinate to the dictates of the Pale (Lucky Poet xxiii). MacDiarmid did not refer to his poetics as caricatural except implicitly, such as when he describes Synthetic Scots as “aggrandized Scots” or stresses the anti-decorous bias of art: “literature is the written expression of revolt against accepted things.”¹⁷ Caricature no longer serves solely as a measure of how the odds are loaded against “dialect,” but has potential for loosening and outwitting the Procrustean grip of standard English.

 

Though MacDiarmid wrote many fine short lyrics in Synthetic Scots, published in Sangshaw (1925) and Penny Wheep (1926), he wanted to prove the versatility and range of his literary Creole by giving epic treatment to the hitherto “unfulfilled” uncanny-Scot tradition. His breakthrough occurred when the composer F. G. Scott suggested that he “write a poem about a drunk man looking at the thistle,” and MacDiarmid realized that as a “symbol of the miseries and grandeurs of the human fate in general” as well as one of Scottish nationality, it was the “[perfect] theme for a very long poem and a complicated poem” because “it was capable of all sorts of applications and extensions (Bold 181). His confidence that the topos was endlessly complicated and capable of infinite variation is likely to baffle the reader who would be turned off by the prospect of a 2684-line poem that contains no action except that of a drunk man looking at the national emblem.

 

MacDiarmid seized upon the topic’s potential for upsetting stable categories of the “normal” and “bizarre,” however, by developing the antisyzygical point-of-view of the drunk. An “Author’s Note” to the 1926 edition of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle picks up on Smith’s observation that drunkenness can serve writers as a tongue-in-cheek device for justifying the sudden dislocations of Caledonian antisyzygies (23). “Drunkenness has a logic of its own,” MacDiarmid writes, and then counsels the teetotaler “to be chary . . . of such inadvertent reflections of their own sober minds” as they may catch in the “distorting mirror” of these pages (A Drunk Man 196).

 

“Caledonian antisyzygies” resemble Deleuze’s “art of inclusive disjunctions,” which “follow[s] a rolling gait” that “makes the language as such stutter: an affective and intensive language, and no longer an affectation of the one who speaks” (110, 107). Great writers “carve out a nonpreexistent foreign language within [their] own language,” Deleuze writes, “they make the language take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation . . . much as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium” (110, 109). Though Deleuze and Félix Guattari sharply distinguish their concept of “minorizing” from literary creolization, they note that creolization has the conjoined tendencies of “impoverishment” and “overload” with which “the so-called minor languages” are routinely faulted, namely the shedding of syntactical and lexical forms which allow one to sidestep a constant instead of attacking it head on, and a taste for paraphrasis and proliferation of shifting effects which bear witness to the unlocalized presence of an indirect discourse at the heart of every statement (102-4).¹⁸ In the guise of a “stuttering” drunken stream-of-consciousness, MacDiarmid incorporates the twin tendencies of caricature toward elision and overload into the structural rhythms of the sequence in order to activate the antisyzygical doodling and deedling that places normative standards and scales in “perpetual disequilibrium.” The overloading of caricature, then, may offer a way to work through the culture of insult that often builds up in defense against unwanted proximity.

 

The speaker of A Drunk Man overtly dices with reader-expectation. “I amna fou’ sae muckle as tired–deid dune” (1), he declares in the opening line, establishing his bona fides by denying that the adulterated whiskey (“the stuffie’s no’ the real Mackay” [9]) has made him drunk. He adds parenthetically that a drunken stream-of-consciousness gratifies stereotypical images of Scotland and the canny Scot’s image of his reprobate brethren–“To prove my soul is Scots I maun begin/ Wi’ what’s still deemed Scots and the folk expect” (21-2)–which he can then “whummle” (25) by overwhelming readers with the intoxicating “logic” of drunkenness.¹⁹

 

MacDiarmid styled A Drunk Man a “gallimaufry” (hodge-podge) in advance press-notices for want of a better generic label for the ambitious work he felt would fail unless it took “its place as a masterpiece–sui generis–one of the biggest things in the range of Scottish literature” (Bold 89). Peter McCarey contends that MacDiarmid draws on the Menippean tradition, very much as Bakhtin argues Dostoevski does, by fashioning the unclassifiable genre out of the “Dostoevskian debris of ideas” he found awaiting polyphonic treatment in Synthetic Scots.²⁰ A Drunk Man hails an apostrophized Dostoevski as the avatar of a new epoch, “This Christ o’ the neist thoosand years” (1800), when the “canny Scot” shall give way to the uncanny one. Menippean satire, a genre of ultimate questions that mixes fantasy, slum naturalism, moral-psychological experimentation, and mysticism with genres like the diatribe and soliloquy, takes the topicality of the immediate and unfinalizable present as its starting point.²¹ Dostoevski “sought the sort of hero whose life would be concentrated on the pure function of gaining consciousness of himself and the world” because such a hero fuses the artistic dominant of becoming self-conscious with the characterological dominant of the represented person (Bakhtin, Problems 50).²² The task of gaining consciousness of himself necessarily absorbs an intellectual and/ or drunk who “dinna ken as muckle’s whaur I am/ Or hoo I’ve come to sprawl here ‘neth the mune” (95-6).²³ The Dostoevskian hero’s discourse as “he looks at himself, as it were, in all the mirrors of other people’s consciousnesses” creates the “interior infinite” of “an individual carnival, marked by a vivid sense of isolation” and fearful and watchful secretiveness which has a residual generic kinship with the praise-abuse decrownings and fearless regenerative laughter of the carnival square (Bakhtin, Problems 53, 156-7 and passim).

 

The thistle, skewed by moonlight and intoxication, is the “distorting mirror” that refracts back to the drunk man how he and his nation are perceived by proximate unfriendly others: “My ain soul looks me in the face, as it twere,/ And mair than my ain soul–my nation’s soul” (335-6).²⁴ The speaker calls attention to his drunken or “loaded” state as he zeroes in on and magnifies one aspect of the thistle and then veers off in another direction as a new perception initiates a different associative tack. “There’s nocht sae sober as a man blin’ drunk,” the speaker confides, baiting the reader with A Drunk Man‘s constitutive antisyzygy about whether the fixity on the thistle attests to an unsteady grip on reality or to an intensive analytic sobriety (277). Though but a “bairn at thee I peer,” the drunk man declares that, like Dostoevski, he is a microcosm of his nation in all its contrariety, “For a’ that’s Scottish is in me,/ As a’ things Russian were in thee” and resolves “to pit in a concrete abstraction/ My country’s contrair qualities” (2014-18).²⁵ “Speaking somewhat paradoxically,” Bakhtin writes, “one could say that it was not Dostoevski’s subjective memory, but the objective memory of the very genre in which he worked, that preserved the peculiar features of the ancient menippea” (Problems 121). In a similar vein, I contend that the poem provides a stereoscopic means for looking at national identity in the very aspect of its looked-at-ness and so preserves an “objective memory” of the Menippean subgenres of caricature and popular blazons.²⁶

 

The thistle is an abstract signifier of Scottish nationality, but these abstractions are woven into the concrete physiognomy of the plant “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” An extended blazon to the emblematic icon of nationality, A Drunk Man ponders “the mystery of Scotland’s self-suppression” by subjecting the puzzling entelechy of the flora to minute scrutiny. The thistle’s status as the “devil’s vegetable” in European folk consciousness led to its adaptation into the genre of popular blazons, those popular expressions of praise-abuse for neighbors’ most pronounced “best” trait among which the Scotticism is classified. In “The Foreigner as Devil, Thistle, and Gadfly,” Felix Oinas tracks a pattern of name-calling that demonizes a despised and/or threatening neighbor by association with the hapless plant. Oinas writes that Finnish folk-names for thistles mean “Swede” and “Russian,” and the Russian folkname for them means “Tartar.” Anthropomorphizing the thistle with the name of an unwanted or malign alien and projecting their racial physiognomy onto the weed, a Russian peasant can simultaneously vent his antagonism by figuratively uprooting “Tartars” from the land and access a surcharge of zeal for an irksome task. The thistle-blazon humanizes the weed in order to demonize the human in a concrete proto-caricatural form that highlights the intimate link between name-calling and ascribing a disfigured human face to the ostracized party in order to profile them as beyond the pale. There is no evidence that MacDiarmid was consciously aware of the thistle-blazon described by Oinas, but A Drunk Man, which at one point likens the thistle’s “nervous shivering” to that of “a horse’s skin aneth a cleg [gadfly]” (1437-8), draws on an “objective memory” of the xenophobic folk custom.

 

Signifying as it does a stubborn rootedness and a foreign trespass that invites extirpation, the thistle seems an anomalous choice of national emblem because it betrays an ambivalent or precarious sense of entitlement to domicile. The thistle became current as the Scottish emblem around the time the Rose was adopted by the Tudors, and first appeared on silver coins in 1470. In her appraisal of William Dunbar’s (c.1460-1530) innovative literary use of the insignia, Priscilla Bawcutt notes that Lorraine also adopted the thistle as a defiant emblem against incursions from Burgundy (100-03). The thistle’s message of deterrence appeals to ethnic groups who see themselves as withstanding a political takeover against the odds. The thistle also represents the “frontier feeling” of those who inhabit contested borderlands.

 

The thistle’s catalytic effect on MacDiarmid’s comic genius owes much to his childhood experience of a living carnival, the annual Common Riding. Celebrated to this day in Langholm, the Common Riding evolved from an ancient custom of riding round the boundaries of the burgh’s common lands. In the ritual procession, children bearing heather brooms join standard bearers behind a leader who carries aloft a flagpole bearing a specially cultivated eight-foot-high thistle. The thistle-standard makes a resplendent spectacle in a MacDiarmid story based on the event: “tied to the tap o’ a flag pole it made a bonny sicht, wallopin’ a’ owre the life, an a hunner roses dancin’ in’t, a ferlie o’ purple and green” (Thistle 349).²⁷ The “concretely sensuous language of carnival” epitomized by the presiding thistle evokes memories of “a free and familiar contact among people” which the young Grieve had otherwise seldom enjoyed (Bakhtin, Problems 123-4).²⁸ An unalloyed joy is palpable in the verses recounting the Common Riding, which weave an accompanying traditional children’s chant into the ballad measure that supplies the cantus firmus of A Drunk Man:

 

Drums in the walligate, pipes in the air,
Come and hear the cryin’ o’ the Fair.

A’ as it used to be, when I was a loon
On Common-Ridin’ Day in the Muckle Toon.

The bearer twirls the Bannock-and-Saut-Herrin’,
The Croon o’ Roses through the lift is farin’,

The aucht-fit thistle wallops on hie;
In heather besoms a’ the hills gang by. (455-62)²⁹

 

Swept up in the “jolly relativity” of the communal chorus, the drunk man happily recollects his wife Jean “as she was on her wedding day” and is then seamlessly transported into the heroic position of thistle-carrier, as the narrative segues to one of the sequence’s few full-blown paeans to the thistle (476):

 

Nerves in stounds o’ delight,
Muscles in pride o’ power,
Bluid as wi’ roses dight
Life’s toppin’ pinnacles owre,
The thistle yet’ll unite
Man and the Infinite! (477-82)³⁰

 

The overwhelmingly positive connotations of the thistle’s “language of carnival” is counterpointed by the pejoration of the thistle in Biblical allegory. The thistle is figured in Genesis as the blighted fruit of expulsion from Eden: “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (3:17-8). The Scottish-Renaissance objective announced in the manifesto-issue of Scottish Chapbook (Aug 1922), “to meddle wi’ the Thistle and pick the figs,” incongruously gestures toward the futility of the task by alluding to Matthew 7:16, “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” Biblical allegory receives extensive metaphorical play in the sequence where the thistle signifies sinfulness and shriveled potential as well as the pathos (and bathos) of wrongful scapegoating. The thistle’s reprobate status has a decidedly Calvinist tincture in A Drunk Man:

 

O stranglin rictus, sterile spasm,
Thou stricture in the groins o’ licht
Thou ootrie gangrel frae the wilds
O’ chaos fenced frae Eden yet. (1294-5)³¹

 

Manichean allegory facilitates the proliferation of oppositional pairs along a damnation/salvation axis–wilderness/civilization; sterile/fertile; evil/good; grotesque/beautiful–which helps to “fix” the construction of the thistle as “other” (see JanMohamed 4 and passim). The wide currency of the commonplace that the thistle has a reprobate “character” illustrates the peculiarly bogus yet unfalsifiable nature of stereotypes noted by Leerssen.

 

MacDiarmid’s labeling of A Drunk Man as “my flytin’ and sclatrie” announces that his blazon to the quarrel between the “grugous thistle” and “o’er sonsy rose” is a palinode to “The Thrissill and the Rois” by way of Dunbar’s “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy,” two works that also explore the ability of bordering rival cultures to accommodate each other.³² William Dunbar’s 1503 epithalamium for the marriage of James IV to Margaret Tudor, later entitled “The Thrissill and the Rois” by Allan Ramsay, celebrates a complementarity between the warlike yet protective thistle and the beautiful rose which became a staple of Anglo-Scottish diplomacy. In The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (c.1500), Dunbar taunts a Gaelic- and English-speaking Highlander, Walter Kennedy, with a scatological pun on Erse (from Erische, Irish) that became a staple slur: “Ane Lawland ers wald mak a bettir nois” (Lowland speech would make a better noise; line 56). The “low” sclatrie and mooning gesture are essential to the sophisticated punning that belittles his antagonist’s mother-tongue as a (weakly enunciated) fart-expletive. The apostrophized “Grugous thistle, to my een” (2347) and “quarrel wi’ th’ owre sonsy rose” (2372) derive from Gaelic loanwords (grùgach, scowling; and sonas, prosperity), which, though MacDiarmid may have been unaware of their Gaelic etymons, lend satiric weight to his use of them.³³ The habit of using a pejorative epithet for affectionate praise is rife in colloquial speech. The frequent recourse in Scots to the diminutive “ie” for terms of endearment and/or derision in the vernacular is a striking example of the “ambiguous praise-abuse” of oral blazons. The edginess created by the fine line between belittlement and exaltation is blunted when spoken blazons are transposed into print; thus literary language must find alternative means to represent the ambivalence of neighborly rivalries.³⁴

 

The contrastive paths of Dunbar’s “Inglishe” into English and Scots can be seen in how the motto emblazoned on the thistle, “nemo me impune lacessit” was subsequently translated into markedly different registers in the two coeval dialects. The English motto, “no one assails me unharmed,” issues a universal caution to potential aggressors by conveying the threat of retaliation through the measured tones of understated menace. The all-purpose concision of the Latin and English mottoes is highly reproducible, suited to imprinting on coins and dissemination as a national slogan in international diplomatic channels. The motto in Scots, “wha daur meddle wi’ me,” is cast by contrast in the form of a rejoinder to an enemy within earshot who is at once overbearing and conspicuously anonymous. The fragment from an ongoing altercation has the stentorian tones of an already injured “me” whose rage is edged with paranoia. The oscillation between declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory speech-acts makes the “wha daur” rejoinder impossible to punctuate. Aggrieved without establishing either the grounds or source of grievance, the loud rejoinder is too “charged” to circulate within the stable decorum of print-media and diplomatic protocol. The English and Scots mottoes are mutually intelligible and semantically contiguous, but the social configurations of their expressive cues are incompatible and disjunctive. If one envisions each motto on identical thistle-emblazoned coins and compares their profile, the contrastive “faces” of the two idioms become apparent. The equilibrium of the official motto in English has a neutralizing, normative effect which makes the thistle seem as commonplace as any other emblematic flora, whereas the bellicose motto in Scots sets “the devil’s vegetable” huffing and bristling before our eyes. If the Scots rejoinder seems to skid and waver without the traction of a stable syntax, its errancy has an open-ended plasticity which makes the Latinate English motto seem flat and devitalized by comparison.

 

An earnest botanical dissection of an abstract emblem of nationality is no more bizarre, from the “perpetual disequilibrium” of an antisyzygical point-of-view, than the whimsy of allowing the profile of the thistle to determine the trajectory of philosophical inquiry. The long vigil with the thistle has the intense earnestness of the soul-searching doppelgänger and the hyperbolic comedy of topsy-turvy clowning. A Drunk Man‘s dicings with expectation and its variations upon customary scales promote the antisyzygical outlook that what is judged incongruous or jarringly unfunny by the mainstream today may be considered heimlich or comic in other contexts. The antisyzygical segues between uncanny and comic registers are reinforced on a linguistic level by two key strata in A Drunk Man‘s Synthetic Scots: an “enigmatic” idiom, based on the estrangement (ostranie) of the Romantic grotesque, which restores uncanny complexity to a disparaged vernacular; and a “rogue” idiom, derived from the popular grotesque of late-medieval folk genres, which affronts bourgeois gentility. The “ambiguous praise-abuse” of the national/alien thistle becomes a means of blazoning the comic-uncanny virtuosity of Scots.

 

The drunk man explores the mysterious entelechy of “the language that but sparely flooers/ And maistly gangs to weed” (1219-20) by pondering the intermingling of the base and the beautiful that “A Theory of Scots Letters” identifies as a special province of Scottish genius (Thistle 131).

 

The craft that hit upon the reishlin’ stalk,
Wi’ts gausty leafs and a’ its datchie jags,
And spired it syne in seely flooers to brak
Like sudden lauchter owre its fousome rags
Jouks me, sardonic lover, in the routh
O’ contrairies that jostle in this dumfoondrin’ growth. (1107-12)³⁵

 

The assumption that the thistle’s purpose lies in disclosing its “routh o’ contraries” to the beholder betrays an inability “to imagine the ‘other’ as anything but a [cryptic] message pertaining to the state of his own soul” (Manning 15).³⁶ The solipsistic self-regard is confounded by the contrastive lack of affectation in the beheld object: “For who o’s ha’e the thistle’s poo’er/ To see we’re worthless and believe ‘t?” (1413-4).³⁷ The thistle’s freedom from pretension delivers momentary insight into the absolute fallenness of humanity, and the speaker envisions the thistle spilling over into the philosophical laughter of the Baudelairean “absolute comic.” Baudelaire defines the “true subject” of caricature as “the introduction of this indefinable element of beauty in works intended to represent his [moral and physical] ugliness to man; [a]nd what is no less mysterious is that this lamentable spectacle excites in him an undying and incorrigible mirth” (147).

 

The returning gaze of the thistle mocks and confounds the drunk man’s sense of personal embodiment to such an extent that he questions whether he can distinguish between them:

 

Is it the munelicht or a leprosy
That spreids aboot me; and a thistle
Or my ain skeleton through wha’s bare banes
A fiendish wund’s begood to whistle? (369-72)³⁸

 

The resounding reply is immediate diabolical laughter, where the man, the thistle, and the devil become a composite “my face” that splits to reveal everything humankind keeps under wraps:

 

The devil’s lauchter has a hwyl like this.
My face has flown open like a lid
–And gibberin’ on the hillside there
Is a’ humanity sae lang has hid! (373-6)

 

The infernal hwyl is glossed by MacDiarmid as “ululation,” connoting a reverberating pure sound that spans the gamut of triumph, grief, despair, degradation, defiance, revenge, and mockery. The italicized “hwyl” provokes a muscular response to the unpronounceable Welsh loanword. The choice of a Welsh shibboleth (the absence of vowels is foreign to English, Scots, and Gaelic orthography) sets the barbarous “hwyl” apart as though it were too hot to handle, and offloads it onto a neighboring language without relinquishing a remote Celtic kinship with it. The “profound, primitive, and axiomatic” laughter of the Baudelairean “absolute comic” (157) in this scene is a Babelized gibbering that sunders the connections between speaker and addressee, signifying sound and print signifier. As well as bringing a ramifying carnivalistic aesthetic into play (much as McCarey argues the Dostoevskian loanword “nadryv” [tragical crack, line 870] does), the shibboleth highlights the issues of translation and reception with which A Drunk Man is centrally engaged.

 

A Drunk Man opens with the speaker inveighing against the Burns cult, a diatribe which reactivates international readers’ latent familiarity with Scots by introducing the stereotype he intends to “whummle.” He then recalls a vision of “a silken leddy” he had had in the pub earlier that evening by reciting an inserted verse-translation (italicized and footnoted as “from the Russian of Alexander Blok”). The interpolation creates an illusion of direct interlingual contact between Russian and Scots that can withstand and coexist with readers’ correct surmise that the drunk man speaks on MacDiarmid’s behalf when he confesses that “I ken nae Russian and you [Dostoevski] ken nae Scots” (line 2224). MacDiarmid’s retranslation into Scots of Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s co-translation of Blok’s “Neznakomka” (“The Unknown Woman”) and “Predchuvstvuya tebya” (“I have foreknown you”) belongs to that burgeoning sub-category of translations whose ambiguous provenance is flagged by such equivocal prepositional markers as “after x” or “based on y” in a tacit pact to leave open to conjecture whether the text is a direct interlingual translation from the stated source or an intralingual retranslation of intermediary translations.

 

MacDiarmid’s re-translation, aimed through his image of the Russian source-culture and an oppositional image of the intermediary English target-language, substitutes whisky for wine, inserts a parenthetical aside about the drunk man’s Penelope-like spouse, and assigns a returning gaze to the blazoned silken leddy on the basis of two muted references to the “eyes” of the Blok hero’s doppelgänger and of the azure sea. Aside from these semantic modifications and the Scots diction, he stays close to the Deutsch and Yarmolinsky translation from which I quote below by way of contrast with the MacDiarmid version that follows:

 

But every evening, strange, immutable,
(Is it a dream no waking proves?)
As to a rendezvous inscrutable
A silken lady darkly moves. (Qtd. in Buthlay 19)

 

But ilka evenin’ fey and fremt
(Is it a dream nae wauk’nin’ proves?)
As to a trystin’-place undreamt,
A silken leddy darkly moves. (193-6)

 

The natural assurance in conveying an enigmatic register is indebted to the rich lexis pertaining to the uncanny in Scots. The “English” words “uncanny,” “canny,” “eerie” and “fey” (fated) are actually Scots loanwords, and Scots also has many other less familiar words including “fremt” (estranged), “oorie” (weird), “wanchancy” (unfortunate), and “drumlie” (troubled). The success of “fey and fremt/. . . undreamt” over “strange, immutable/. . . inscrutable” is reinforced by the way colloquialized aureate diction, “trystin’-place” and “silken leddy,” seems a plausibly unaffected idiom for a speaker with ready access to a trove of romantic ballads. The aura of ease with romance and enigma creates mixed familiarizing and defamiliarizing effects which have the paradoxical result of making MacDiarmid’s version seem more “true” than the intermediary source which is relegated by contrast to “crib” status. Russian critic D.S. Mirsky’s claim that MacDiarmid “produced ‘the only real re-creations of Russian poetry’ in any form of English” seems counterintuitive (A Drunken Man viii, emphasis added), because one wouldn’t expect a retranslated translation by someone who doesn’t know Russian to be true to the original. MacDiarmid’s success may be due to the way it minorizes the intermediary text with specific sub-community registers that are otherwise lost in translating a polyphonic literary idiom into a dominant vehicular language. The truth-effect depends on how the play between the English crib and its Scots retranslation objectifies those sides of Scots and English that pertain to its “specific linguistic habitus . . . which makes its worldview ultimately untranslateable, the style of the language in the totality” (Bakhtin, Dialogic 62). As well as objectifying a vein of uncanniness in Scots, MacDiarmid’s retranslation brings about a triangulated confrontation between the English and Scots versions before an imagined “internationalist” bar of Communist-Russian opinion.

 

MacDiarmid lends the man-thistle body-in-the-act-of-becoming an inspired hermaphroditic touch when he names the thistle-florets “roses” and thereby unsettles the antinomies between male and female, the grotesque and the beautiful, and Scotland and England. The conceit of “a rose loupin’ out” of the thistle’s “scrunts of blooms” structures the ballad of the crucified rose about the General Strike of May 1926 (1119-1218). The news of the union leaders’ humiliating settlement broke when MacDiarmid (an active labor organizer in his capacity as the only Socialist town councilor in Montrose) was addressing a mass meeting of railwaymen, and “most of them burst into tears–and I am not ashamed to say I did too . . . it was one of the most moving experiences I ever had . . . weeping like children . . . because we knew we had had it” (Bold 184). Very much in the spirit of menippea, “the journalistic genre of antiquity” (Bakhtin, Dialogic 118), MacDiarmid wrote that he was incorporating the ballad (“which I think will rank as one of the most passionate cris-de-coeur in contemporary literature”) into the then advanced work-in-progress, though there is no overt reference in the allegorical ballad to the contemporary events that inspired it:

 

A rose loupt oot and grew, until
It was ten times the size
O’ ony rose the thistle afore
Had heistit to the skies.

 

…

 

And still it grew until it seemed
The haill braid earth had turned
A reid reid rose that in the lift
Like a ball o’ fire burned.

 

…

 

Syne the rose shrivelled suddenly
As a balloon is burst;
The thistle was a ghaistly stick,
As gin it had been curst.

 

…

 

And still the idiot nails itsel’
To its ain crucifix
While here a rose and there a rose
Jaups oot abune the pricks. (1155-8; 1163-6;1171-4; 1203-6)³⁹

 

The utopian aspiration, camaraderie, and gathering momentum of mass political action is conveyed by the semaphoric language of the carnival square as a new body-politic almost emerges out of the old only to be destroyed anew by reactionary forces. The fact that a thistle “heisted to the skies” is invoked to celebrate a near-triumph by British labor activists rather than by Scottish nationalists may seem paradoxical, but it is less an index of the historical contingencies of 1926 or of socialism trumping nationalism for MacDiarmid than of how A Drunk Man‘s caricatural poetics is more in tune with mass-protest by the proletariat than with constitutional nationalism. The ballad measure and the symbolic freight of the thistle enable MacDiarmid to plumb a generic memory of the popular blazon that infuses the cri-de-coeur with a profound sense of human solidarity and regenerative idealism.

 

MacDiarmid’s poetics suggests, then, that the nature of caricature is twofold: it is an expressionist mode of combinatorial doodling and deedling that releases the poet from the reified biases of diglossia as well as a poetics of indignation that bridles against the complex sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic realities that profile a lesser-used language as anachronistic, restrictive, and marginal. The conjoined disjunctive tendencies largely hold each other in check, so that MacDiarmid’s caricatural poetics both does not react to and reacts against the Anglocentrism of Scottish letters. As we’ve seen, a similar argument may be made for the constructive nature of blazon, flyting, and antisyzygy. The subordination of one’s neighbor’s language is part and parcel of the division of the neighbor’s imageme into intimate and hostile, familiar and uncanny aspects that may be recomposed in a literary Creole, with its greater tolerance for ambivalence. In contexts of colonial diglossia, conscious and subliminal memories of linguicism survive in writers’ minds, in the stuff of their art (language itself, and speech- and literary-genres), and in the social fabric and cultural unconscious of their speech-communities. MacDiarmid’s poetry is exemplary because it illustrates that one may remain politically partisan and aesthetically independent while refashioning a diglossic heritage into art.

Notes

 

1. See Murison, The Guid Scots Tongue, Jones, and McClure, Language, Poetry and Nationhood. For a pithy and insightful analysis of the ambiguous status of Scots, see McArthur 138-159.

 

2. On diglossia, a sociolinguistic concept, see Calvet 26-40 and Grillo 78-83.

 

3. Competence in the credentialed speech functions as “linguistic capital” in the “linguistic market” that potentially earns the speaker a “profit of distinction” on each occasion of social exchange. See Bourdieu 55 and passim.

 

4. See Bourdieu 62 on the competence/recognition gap.

 

5. See Mugglestone 208-57 on literature and “the literate speaker.” On “the orthography of the uneducated,” see Williams 222.

 

6. Ferguson cites Jamieson’s failure to note the obvious Gaelic provenance of “glen” as indicative of his “disingenuous approach” (260).

 

7. MacDiarmid received a copy of Nairn’s book shortly before his death and replied to Nairn commending “the only serious work on Scottish nationalism” (Letters 889).

 

8. On T.S. Eliot’s review, see Crawford 254.

 

9. David Reid describes “Urquhart’s writing [as] a freak compound of all that Scottish prose after Knox is not” in Grant and Murison 195.

 

10. For my ideas about the stereotype, I am indebted to Leerssen; see also Bhabha 66-84.

 

11. Translator’s note: noo, now; A’e, one; o’, of; tither, the other; fou, drunk; owre lang, over long; wi’ with; fier comme un Ecossais, proud as a Scot. Here and throughout, I cite by line number from Kenneth Buthlay’s excellent annotated edition to which I am indebted.

 

12. Leerssen’s point about the unfalsifiability and ambivalence of stereotypes is illustrated by how the refrain, perhaps because of the translational pun on fier/fiery, is variously translated by Buthlay as “touchy as a Scot” and by MacDiarmid as “free-spirited as a Scot.”

 

13. For an overview of the controversial term “Creole,” see Lang. Lang asserts that “Creoles originate when one or more overlapping vernaculars create a mother tongue which never existed before”; Synthetic Scots corresponds to what he terms a “nuclear Creole” (2, 144). For useful comparative discussions of Scots as an English Creole, see McArthur 7-10 and Görlach. McArthur compares a passage from the King James Bible with both William Lorimer’s landmark New Testament in Scots (Penguin 1985) and the Tok Pisin Nupela Testamen (Canberra and Port-Moresby, Papua-New Guinea, 1969).

 

14. David Murison, the editor of C-Z in the ten-volume Scottish National Dictionary, observes that MacDiarmid’s conversation was almost entirely in English and “to questions about where he got this or that word he most frequently referred one to a book” (“Language Problem” 86). His Synthetic Scots “sticks cautiously to Jamieson” in practice and, notwithstanding the “Back to Dunbar!” manifesto and the oft-touted model of Landsmaal’s construction from Old Norse, “there is surprisingly little Middle Scots in his work” (88, 95). Though his selection procedure was often programmatic (alliterative passages, and even whole lyrics, are composed out of proximate items in Jamieson), “his touch is remarkably sure” (96). See Murison, “The Language Problem” 93-9. See also Herbert 26-41.

 

15. Such “distinctly and distinctively” traits are what Leerssen calls “the effets de typique” on which stereotyping is based (283).

 

16. “To doodle and watch what happens” is Gombrich’s phrase.

 

17. On “aggrandized” Scots, see A Lap of Honour; the latter phrase is Thomas Hardy’s, and MacDiarmid invokes it in the 1923 “Theory of Scots Letters” (Thistle 129), the 1931 “The Caledonian Antisyzygy” (Thistle 63) and in the 1977 “Valedictory” where he says it “sums up my whole position” (294).

 

18. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of an unfinalizable “indirect discourse” is indebted to Bakhtin; see endnotes 5 and 10, 523-4. The correspondence between antisyzygies, Bakhtin’s concept of “hybridization,” and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minorization,” is suggested by MacDiarmid’s comment in “English Ascendancy in British Literature” on “the vast amount of linguistic experimentation that has been going on in recent Russian literature, with the progressive de-Frenchification and de-Latinisation of the Russian tongue, the use of skaz (the reproduction of accentual peculiarities) and zaumny (cross-sense, as in Lewis Carroll)” (120). To illustrate his concept of disjunctive synthesis, Deleuze cites Lewis Carroll on portmanteau words: “If your thoughts incline ever so little towards ‘fuming,’ you will say ‘fuming-furious’; if they turn, even by a hair’s breadth, towards ‘furious,’ you will say ‘furious-fuming’; but if you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say ‘frumious'” (46).

 

19. Translator’s note: Amna fou, am not drunk; sae, so; muckle, much; deid dune, dead done, done in; stuffie, stuff; no’, not; maun, must; the real Mackay, colloquialism of unknown origin (perhaps connected with the Reay Mackay clan of Sutherland) for “the real thing,” “the genuine article” (G. Mackay & Co distillers adopted the proverbial phrase as an advertising slogan in 1870); whummle, overturn.

 

20. Quoting Thistle 131. See McCarey 17-27. For a Bakhtinian approach to MacDiarmid’s work, see also Crawford.

 

21. On the generic elements of the menippea, see Bakhtin, Problems 114-20.

 

22. Though MacDiarmid arguably falls short of Dostoevski’s “radically new . . . integral authorial position” with regard to the drunk man, he (like the German Expressionists) takes the “artistic dominant of self-consciousness” as a goal (Bakhtin, Problems 56-7, 54).

 

23. Translator’s note: dinna ken, don’t know; as muckle’s, as much as; whaur, where; hoo, how; ‘neth, beneath.

 

24. Translator’s note: Ain, own; twere, it were; mair, more.

 

25. Translator’s note: nocht, naught; sae, so; blin’, blind; bairn, child; a’, all; pit, put.

 

26. Frye writes of the larger class of Menippean satire into which the sub-genre of caricature falls that it “relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature” (310).

 

27. Translator’s note: tap, top; bonny sicht, beautiful sight; hunner, hundred; ferlie, marvel.

 

28. In his autobiography, Lucky Poet, MacDiarmid writes that the Grieves were “jeered at a little,” making him “permanently incapable of ‘going with the herd'” (77). Gish writes that Valda Grieve recalled him as one of the loneliest people she ever met, one who shut himself off from others: “He just had this thing within himself. He was afraid of anything personal'” (8).

 

29. Translator’s note: Drums in the Walligate, from a children’s chant (“Ra-a-rae, the nicht afore the Fair! The drum’s i’ the Walligate, the pipes i’ the air); the cryin’ o’ the Fair, the proclamation of the Fair; loon, boy; the Muckle Toon, the affectionate name by which Langholm is known, lit. the big town; the Bannock-and-Saut-Herrin’, a barley-bannock and salted herring nailed to a wooden dish on a standard that signifies the Duke of Buccleuch’s rights in the mills and fisheries; Croon o’ Roses, a floral crown on a standard; lift, sky; wallops, dances; hie, high; heather besoms, children were rewarded with new threepenny bits for carrying heather brooms in the procession.

 

30. Translator’s note: stounds, throbs; bluid, blood; dight, arrayed.

 

31. Translator’s note: the groins o’ licht, see line 1265, “As ’twere the hinderpairts o’ God”; ootrie, foreign, outré; gangrel, vagrant; frae, from.

 

32. Bawcutt writes that Dunbar’s “art is the art of the caricaturist” (239-40).

 

33. Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary cites the Gaelic etymon for “sonsy” but not for “grugous,” but MacDiarmid may not have consulted the dictionary. “Grugous” is glossed as “grim” in Jamieson’s dictionary; as “grim, grisly” in A Drunk Man; and as “ugly” in Complete Poems glossary.

 

34. Translator’s note: The internalized dualism of praise-abuse is mirrored on the thistle’s “grugous” visage, where a smile may overtake a scowl and vice versa. “Grugous” has an antisyzygical gruesome/gorgeous ring to Anglophone ears, a semantic working-together-at-cross-purposes that sets in motion the ramifying “zig-zag of contradictions” of the intoxicating “logic” of drunkenness.

 

35. Translator’s note: reishlin’, rustling; wi’ts, with its; gausty, ghastly; datchie, hidden; spired ti, made it soar; syne, then; seely, happy; fousome, disgusting; jouks, evades; routh, abundance.

 

36. Manning attributes this tendency to Calvinism.

 

37. Translator’s note: who o’s ha’e, whom of us have; poo’er, power.

 

38. Translator’s note: wha’s, whose; banes, bones; wund’s, wind has; begood, begun.

 

39. Translator’s note: loupt, leapt; oot, out; O ony, of any; afore, before; heisted, hoisted; haill, whole; braid, broad; reid, red; lift, sky; syne, then; gin, if; curst, cursed; ain, own; jaups, splashes.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
• —. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• —. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.
• Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon, 1965.
• Bawcutt, Priscilla J. Dunbar the Makar. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
• Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
• Bold, Alan. MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve: A Critical Biography. London: John Murray, 1988.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.
• Buthlay, Kenneth. “An Awkward Squad.” McClure, Scotland and the Lowland Tongue 149-169.
• Calvet, Louis-Jean. Language Wars and Linguistic Politics. Trans. Michel Petheran. Cambridge: Oxford UP, 1998.
• Crawford, Robert. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Theoretical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
• —, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• Ferguson, William. The Identity of the Scottish Nation: An Historic Quest. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998.
• Gish, Nancy. Hugh MacDiarmid: Man and Poet. London: Macmillan, 1984.
• Gombrich, E.H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960.
• Görlach, Manfred. “Jamaica and Scotland–Bilingual or Bidialectal?” Englishes: Studies in Varieties of English, 1984-1988. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1991. 69-89.
• Grillo, Ralph. Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
• Herbert, W.N. To Circumjack MacDiarmid. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
• Hume, David. The Philosophical Works of David Hume. Vol. 3. Boston: Little, Brown, 1854.
• Jamieson, John, John Longmuir, and David Donaldson. An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. Paisley, Scotland: Alexander Gardner, 1879-82.
• JanMohamed, Abdul. Manichean Aesthetics. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1983.
• Jones, Charles. The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997.
• Lang, George. Entwisted Tongues: Comparative Creole Literatures. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.
• Leerssen, Joep. “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey.” Poetics Today 21.2 (Summer 2000): 267-92.
• MacDiarmid, Hugh. “Braid Scots and the Sense of Smell.” MacDiarmid, The Raucle Tongue 72-74.
• —. “Burns and Baudelaire.” MacDiarmid, The Raucle Tongue 68-72.
• —. “The Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Gaelic Idea.” MacDiarmid, Selected Essays 56-74.
• —. A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Ed. Kenneth Buthlay. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic, 1987.
• —. A Lap of Honour. London: McGibbon and Kee, 1967.
• —. The Letters of Hugh MacDiarmid. Ed. Alan Bold. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984.
• —. Lucky Poet. Ed. Alan Riach. Manchester: Carcanet, 1984.
• —. “Music–Braid Scots Suggestions.” MacDiarmid, The Raucle Tongue 88-89.
• —. The Raucle Tongue: Hitherto Uncollected Prose. Eds. Angus Calder, Glen Murray, and Alan Riach. Vol. 1. Manchester: Carcanet, 1998.
• —. “Robert Burns: His Influence.” MacDiarmid, Selected Essays 177-182.
• —. Selected Essays of Hugh MacDiarmid. Ed. Duncan Glen. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.
• —. “A Theory of Scots Letters.” MacDiarmid, The Thistle Rises 125-141.
• —. The Thistle Rises: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose. Ed. Alan Bold. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984.
• —. The Uncanny Scot: Selected Prose. Ed. Kenneth Buthlay. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1998.
• —. “Valedictory.” MacDiarmid, The Thistle Rises 286-294.
• Manning, Susan. The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
• McArthur, Tom. The English Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
• McCarey, Peter. Hugh MacDiarmid and the Russians. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic, 1987.
• McClure, J. Derrick. Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a Poetic Language from 1878 to the Present. East Lothian: Tuckwell, 2000.
• —. Scotland and the Lowland Tongue. Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1983.
• Mugglestone, Lynda. Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.
• Murison, David. The Guid Scots Tongue. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1977.
• —. “The Language Problem in Hugh MacDiarmid’s Work.” The Age of MacDiarmid. Eds. P. H. Scott & A. C. Davis. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1980.
• Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain. London: New Left, 1977.
• Oinas, Felix. “The Foreigner as Devil, Thistle, and Gadfly.” Proverbium 15 (1970): 89-91.
• Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Professing in the Contact Zone: Bringing Theory and Practice Together. Ed. Janice M. Wolff. Urbana: NCTE, 2002. 1-18.
• Smith, G. Gregory. Scottish Literature: Character and Influence. London: Macmillan, 1919.
• Wechsler, Judith. “Speaking the Desperate Things: A Conversation with Edward Koren.” Art Journal 43 (Winter 1983): 381-5.
• Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia UP, 1961.