The International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon ed. by Scott Lyall (review)

Lewis Grassic Gibbon exemplifies the problems and possibilities of any international approach to Scottish literary studies. His Sunset Song is routinely taught in Scottish schools and has been voted the ‘best book’ in various contests, while the Quair enjoys widespread critical attention and popular appreciation. Its significance, for readers in Scotland, can be assumed in any discussion. Outside Scotland, however, Gibbon remains a stubbornly marginal figure, under-read, under-discussed, under-theorised. (Terence Davies’ heart-breakingly dismal film last year may well make matters worse). In ‘the wider space of Modern Studies’, a natural home for his work, he remains, as Morag Shiach observes in the volume under review, ‘relatively little known’. Those of us in non-Scottish institutions do as much proselytising as pedagogy: a senior colleague of mine, expert in English literature of the First World War, had not heard of Gibbon before my breathless introduction. But Gibbon took a consistently internationalist approach to his work, as the nod to the ‘hypothetical Dutchman’ opening Sunset Song shows, and he was read this way by his contemporaries: James Bertram, praising John Mulgan’s Man Alone (1939) in the New Zealand dissident journal Tomorrow in 1940, could find no higher praise than comparison with the ‘bare realism’ of ‘Grassic Gibbon and O’Casey’. He can be read as a distinctively Scottish internationalist.

Scott Lyall’s International Companion to Lewis Grassic Gibbon is a very welcome contribution to that Scottish internationalism, and brings together exciting and informative essays on all aspects of James Leslie Mitchell’s writing career, intellectual influences, and cultural context. Gibbon is, Lyall claims, a ‘radical political author, powerfully relevant to his time and our own’ (p. 3). The chapters he has collected each explores details of Gibbon’s own specific cultural-historical context in order the better to position him as a lively figure in our own world. Impatient with the ‘narrowly Scottish terms’ (p. 3) of much previous criticism, these chapters nonetheless draw on and enter into extended dialogue with the existing criticism, and the Companion’s notes will be useful for undergraduate readers fresh to the field.

The broader terms necessary fully to appreciate Gibbon’s achievement may not always be the ones we want to rediscover, and the best chapters in this collection draw attention to the persistent, sustained and serious place of Diffusionist theory in Gibbon’s imagination. Morag Shiach’s chapter on ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Modernism’ is particularly stimulating, and traces the ways ‘a much longer historical time’ (p. 10) appears in Sunset Song as both evidence of Gibbon’s Diffusionism and of his connection to wider Modernist concerns. His ‘innovative fictional techniques’ (p. 13), Shiach suggests, are as much a response to the challenge of representing Diffusionist views of historical ‘progress’ (or regression) as they are to do with narrating community or class. Timothy C. Baker’s stresses the ways ‘Gibbon continually complicates the relation between the work of art and the representation of history’ (p. 52), while Uwe Zagratzki and Scott Lyall both show how Diffusionist ideas about the ‘natural order of prehistory’ (p. 60) structure Gibbon’s intertextual responses to H. G. Wells and socialist and anarchist theory. The rambling – occasionally racist – development of Diffusionist views make all of these sometimes awkward discoveries, and it is a sign of the confidence of the collection’s contributors in Gibbon’s importance that they can sustain such thorough and unflinching accounts. The Companion takes Gibbon’s canonicity for granted, and moves from advocacy to the much more interesting work of analysis. Christopher Silver’s account of ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Scottish Nationalism’ is informative on the ‘pseudo-scientific race-based movements’ (p. 112) swirling around Nationalism in Gibbon’s time, while also seeing ways in which his work can be read as its more complex questioning of nationalism gains relevance in contemporary debates over Scottish independence. Glenda Norquay is funny and forgiving on ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Women’.

A note...