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James Kelman is Scotland's most influential contemporary prose artist. This is a book-length study of his groundbreaking novels, analysing and contextualising each in detail. It argues that while Kelman offers a coherent and consistent vision of the world, each novel should be read as a distinct literary response to particular aspects of contemporary working-class language and culture. Historicised through diverse contexts such as Scottish socialism, public transport, emigration, ‘Booker Prize’ culture and Glasgow's controversial ‘City of Culture’ status in 1990, the book offers readings of Kelman's style, characterisation and linguistic innovations. This study resists the prevalent condemnations of Kelman as a miserable realist, and produces evidence that he is acutely aware of an unorthodox, politicised literary tradition which transgresses definitions of what literature can or should do. Kelman is cautious about the power relationship between the working-class worlds he represents in his fiction, and the latent preconceptions embedded in the language of academic and critical commentary. In response, the study is self-critical, questioning the validity and values of its own methods. Kelman is shown to be deftly humorous, assiduously ethical, philosophically alert and politically necessary.
James Kelman: ‘one ought to admire him’ When it comes to contemporary Scottish writers, Todd rates Alasdair Gray very highly, though ‘he can get over political’. She also admires Ali Smith, Janice Galloway and others. Less so James Kelman. ‘The trouble is, one ought to admire him,’ she says, hinting at the pressures of academic orthodoxy. 1 This quotation says it all. Speaking in 2006 as Professor of English Literature at Aberdeen University, Janet Todd admits to feeling pressure to
that hinges on the use of swear words in literature, because right away you’ve begged the question of what those words are, you know, and you’re involving me again in a value system that isn’t your own to deny.’ Duncan McLean, ‘James Kelman interviewed’, Edinburgh Review, 71 (1985) [McLean’s or Kelman’s emphases]. Geoff Gilbert provides the most useful critical analysis of this issue in ‘Can Fiction Swear? James Kelman and the Booker Prize’, in Rod Mengham (ed.), An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970 (Cambridge
never be certain, and we are forced to be chancers in our own interpretations. Notes 1 Summarised in Michael B. Walker, The Psychology of Gambling (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1992), 127. 2 John Corbett, Language and Scottish Literature; Scottish Language and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 158–62. 3 Duncan McLean, ‘James Kelman interviewed’, Edinburgh Review, 71 (1985), 80. 4 H. Gustav
’ 2 for the first time. But Kelman had many other occupations from his own experience from which to choose, as a 1983 Herald article details: James Kelman has been an apprentice printer, maker of shoes, potato picker, bus conductor, asbestos worker, hospital storeman, and shop salesman of natty gent’s suits. He dug spuds on the Channel Isles. “We picked potatoes and lived in a tent. It was good,” he says. He also enjoyed selling clothes in a Glasgow shop because there was a snooker hall in the next street
, is surely in danger of missing its target. Here is how Miller begins: Studying the West Coast of Scotland from the yacht Britannia, the Queen is said to have remarked, not long ago, that the people there didn’t seem to have much of a life. James Kelman’s stories make clear what life is like in Glasgow, and what James Kelman’s life is like. They are not going to change the royal mind. 37 The unfortunate result of considering that the Queen is in any way significant to the world she ignores from afar, is that
Press, 1988), 1–4. 27 Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 217. 28 See Olga Wojtas, ‘Shrugging off the guru’s mantle’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 26 January 1990, 15. 29 Willy Maley, ‘Denizens, Citizens, Tourists, and Others: Marginality and Mobility in the Writings of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh’, in David Bell and Azzedine Haddour (eds), City Visions (Harlow: Pearson, 2000), 60. 30 Michael Gardiner
rebellions, including skits in contemporary newspapers, Byron’s Marino Faliero (1821), Robert Shaw’s Cato Street (1970), Stewart Conn’s Thistlewood (1975), Hector MacMillan’s The Rising (1973), and James Kelman’s Hardie and Baird: The Last Days (1990). I also touch on Tanika Gupta’s Betrayal: The Trial of 170 The Cato Street Conspiracy William Davidson, which was performed as a forty-five-minute play on Radio 4 in 2001. My argument is that theatre and the rebellions of 1820 have been associated from the outset. Using historical accounts, archives, poetry, newspapers
publishing house New Beacon, that the Glasgow writer James Kelman recalled something of the genesis of his own literary language politics. He recounted how, sitting in Paisley Central Library a decade earlier, he had stumbled across the library’s small ‘Ethnic’ section – stocked from the 1979 New Beacon catalogue, as well as the Heinemann African Writers Series – and discovered the English language in the throes of being decolonised.3 Encountering the experimental, irreverent ‘Anglophone’ writing of Caribbean and African writers like Sam Selvon, Amos Tutuola, and Ayi Kwei
inauthenticity and a place beyond law – ‘bogus’, ‘false’, ‘illegal’: Crime, dirty, thieves, fraud, deception, bogus, false, failed, rejected, cheat, illegal, burden, drugs, wave, flood, influx, scrounger, sponger, fraudster, tide, swamp, flood, mob, horde, riot, rampage, disorder, race war, fight, brawl, battle, fighting machine, deadly, orgy of violence, fury, ruthless, monsters, destruction, ruin.39 ‘Do I come from a place, terrortory, is this a place where people are’: James Kelman’s Translated Accounts In an Amnesty International debate on the 1992 UK Asylum Bill, James