Bibliographic Metafiction: Dancing in the Margins with Alasdair Gray

Joe Murray’s “A Short Tale of Woe!” (2002) appears to take place in Hell, or some similarly Kafkaesque setting, and concerns the plight of a poor soul who has just been assigned the task of emptying the River Clyde with a bucket whose bottom has rusted through. When he complains that the job will be impossible, an anonymous hand snatches back the bucket and pushes a pile of papers toward him: “The Book of Prefaces by Alasdair Gray: for typesetting within the next millennium.” Recognizing, we assume, that emptying the Clyde would be a doddle by comparison, the poor soul cries: “[G]ive me back my bucket! Please, please, give me back my fucking bucket!” (238). Murray’s story draws attention to the complexity, intricacy, and even excessiveness of Alasdair Gray’s physical books, though it does not mention their sheer exuberance: Gray’s books flood their banks and burst their seams. Not just the typography, the decorative bindings, the dust jackets, the illustrations, and in some cases the erratum slips, but the integration of all of these with the content makes his books speak in many voices at once. As Elspeth King remarks, “[t]he reading of a book by Alasdair Gray provides an aesthetic, sensory pleasure, from the dust jacket to the valediction on the last page” because Gray is not simply an author but serves as his own book designer (117). “Each publication by Gray,” according to King, “is as much a work of art as it is a work of literature” (118). Gray’s self-consciousness about the material presence of the books he writes is apparent, not only in his beautiful and startling design and typographical choices, but also in the ways that the book’s very construction informs his choices as an author. At the end of Mavis Belfrage: A Romantic Novel with Five Shorter Tales (1996), for example, Gray begins “The Shortest Tale” with the following announcement:

most books nowadays are made of big paper sheets printed, folded and cut into units of thirty-two pages, units which bookbinders call signatures. This book contains five signatures—exactly 160 pages. Since the first five stories do not quite fill them I will write another, a true one because just now my imagination can invent nothing short enough.

(157)

Similarly, near the end of his autobiographical A Life in Pictures (2010), Gray offers a brief lyric:

What some call serendipityand fatalists call Fate,and Jung called synchronicity,leaves me to contemplatesix unplanned final pages—pages I need to fill.Can I find stuff to put on them?Don’t ask. I can. I will.

(298)

This self-consciousness is more than an aesthetic commentary; Gray deploys his knowledge of bookmaking as a means of enriching an already complex literary style. Whether it is the disordering of book numbers in Lanark (1981), as a comment on his nonlinear narrative, or the use of typography in 1982, Janine (1984), in which “the speaker has a nervous breakdown conveyed by three columns of different typefaces on the same pages, each a stream of thought or feelings at war with the rest” (Gray, “Epistolary” 111), Gray’s book designs are as integral to a reading of his texts as are their literary contents.

Robert Bringhurst and Ruari McLean note that the traditional role of bibliographic design in bookmaking is to be unnoticed, even invisible to the casual reader. McLean insists that the typographer is “the servant of the author—colleague, if you like but [his or her] job is to help the author reach his public. You are not making works of art of your own, you are transmitting, with as much skill, grace and efficiency as may be required, the words of someone else” (9). Since his first contract with Canongate for Lanark, Gray has overseen the design of type, illustration, and binding for all of his books, with the effect of binding his fiction to the book’s bibliographic structure. In this sense, Gray takes to the extreme Bringhurst’s idea...