"Rhizome National Identity: 'Scatlin's Psychic Defense' in Trainspotting "

. . . and so I was forced to account for the hiatus in Scott's endowment by considering the environment in which he lived, by invoking the fact–if the reader will agree it is one–that he spent most of his days in a hiatus, in a country, that is to say, which was neither a nation nor a province, and had, instead of a centre, a blank, an Edinburgh, in the middle of it.

Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland

Irvine Welsh's debut novel Trainspotting (1993) became famous and fashionable with the Miramax Films release in 1996. However, John Hodge's screenplay of Trainspotting is only minimally based on Welsh's novel; the film Trainspotting narrowly presents one strand of events to the exclusion of several others found in the novel. The overwhelming popularity of the film's discourse is analogous to Foucault's idea of the discourse of the author in which a false or misleading "mystique" of the author overshadows subsequent interpretations: "It points to the existence of certain groups of discourse and refers to the status of the discourse within a society and culture" (Foucault 123). The film Trainspotting "defin(es)" the "form" and "characteriz(es)" the "mode of existence" that the discourse on the novel is likely to take (Foucault 123). According to Andrew Macdonald, the film is a "buddy movie" which indicates the narrow focus on the exploits of Mark Renton and his small group of friends.¹ With substantial help from the film soundtrack the film's focus on a group of young men from Edinburgh's youth subculture makes the mystery occupation of "trainspotting" common place (Primal Scream's "Trainspotting"), and heroin use seem hip and attractive even though it can be argued that the film does not promote drug use (the film opens with Iggy Pop's infectious "Lust for Life," and continues buoyed by songs like New Order's 1982 dance hit, "Temptation"). Welsh's title is only mentioned once in the text in "Trainspotting at Leith Central Station." With the hobby of trainspotting identifying as many different trains as possible is the primary "goal," and, in this way, the "hobby" lacks a specific teleology: trainspotting is open-ended and may be likened to heroin use (or life, itself).

Despite the pop culture image, it is my contention that the novel Trainspotting enters into a discourse with the Scottish literary tradition, and through its use of a non-linear, non-stable narrative rhizome structure severely critiques Scottish life and culture. Taking a very harsh view of the Scottish past and present, the novel effectively demonstrates the lack of connection between individuals, the lack of a genuine cultural or literary past, a self-loathing, and a hopelessness by enacting the rhizome structurally. While representation in the text almost always presents these characteristics—from baby Dawn's death from neglect to Tommy's succumbing to heroin and eventually testing HIV positive to Dodi's racially motivated beating—the rhizome further heightens the effect of despair and tragedy through "a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing . . . a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again" (Thousand 20) without heed to purpose or end. Welsh amplifies the despair and hopelessness of his out-of-work Scottish characters in the 1980s by presenting their narratives rhizomatically; one might even question categorizing the text as a novel, rather than simply a collection of sketches about a group of people more-or-less from the same economically depressed working class Edinburgh suburb. Appropriate, then, for the concept of the rhizome we take the title from a relatively minor character, Tommy, whose section is titled, "Scotland Takes Drugs in Psychic Defense" which is taken, again fittingly from an Iggy Pop song, "America Takes Drugs in Psychic Defense." Drunk and on speed at an 1980s Iggy Pop concert, Tommy has an epiphany when he hears Pop substitute "Scatlin" for America: "Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line: 'America takes drugs in psychic defence'; only he changes 'America' for 'Scatlin', and defines...