Scotland's civic nationalists = Clan Nicola's nativist Scots ID

Outstanding example of pompous philistinism and the self-awareness of a sea sponge from Alan Bissett:-

Some 55% of Scots voted no to independence on 18 September 2014. This result has been respected – it’s the reason Scotland is still in the UK –  

Well, thank you thank you thank you for clearing that up. Was it NOT going to be respected?

Like most Scottish artists I called for a yes vote during last year’s referendum. 

How does he know? Did anyone do a poll of artists? Certainly the yes artists were vocal and busy and forming collectives and included big names like Liz Lochead and Alasdair Gray – but there were those who just kept quiet.

The artists have now entered a period of introspection, replacing the creative campaign’s colour and noise with a new ambivalence about what the Scottish arts are for. 

I take it he means the Yes artists not people like Don Paterson, say or Douglas Dunn or Janice Galloway or James McMillan or McCall Smith who presumably know what they are for – for creating art. What is this rubbish about art as a national project? As with so much of the Nat debate (first independence then utopia) it was reminiscent of old Communist ideas that art was for “the people” I.e keeping to the Party line, which in its extreme versions meant poets with anything like a spine being executed by Stalin.

This had been anticipated, pre-referendum, by the novelist Alan Warner, who wrote: “A no vote will create a profound and strange schism between the voters of Scotland and its literature; a new convulsion. It will be the death knell for the whole Scottish literature ‘project’ – a crushing denial of an identity that writers have been meticulously accumulating, trying to maintain and refine.”

As a No voter I'm certainly happy not to read Alan Warner if he thinks there is a “whole Scottish literature 'project'” - I see he needs those quotation marks as there isn't any 'project'.  There are works that get written, some good, some bad. (As a side note the great novelist on “Scottish identity” was Walter Scott – a devout Unionist and anti-Radical.)

There have been good books with an overt political message – Uncle Tom's Cabin or Animal Farm – usually about screaming injustices, not about a referendum in a liberal democracy. And as usual when reading the Yessers I think, god, what grandiose airs those people give themselves, what heroic attitudes they strike.

I understood my own purpose. I’d presumed to give voice to a people, the majority of whom had turned out to be indifferent to the message. 

Could be that you're a shite writer. Also, some of us weren't indifferent but totally hostile.

The poet Jenny Lindsay, a key organiser of the yes-backing artists’ group National Collective, recently staged a show called Ire and Salt (swap those words round and you get the drift). It examined the difference between a movement and a campaign, the clash between artistic autonomy and the feeling of being a cog in a machine built to persuade.

I've seen Jenny Lindsay perform and she's a definite talent. It's not surprising she's sick of doing Yes, Yes, Yes and would like to move on.

there can be no definitive “schism” between Scotland and its artists. Scottish nationalism – as both a political concern and an ongoing cultural project – is enlarging, not shrinking.

Errgh. He doesn't realise how creepy this sounds. In fact he's right. The Scottish Government is trying to control the universities and things like the Scottish Language Centre became not even disguised propaganda for nationalism.

Bissett doesn't want regard himself as a vulgar propagandist. But if course that is what he is. That's what he thinks all artists born in Scotland should be. He is a propagandist on the side of the Scottish Government. He's a Government apparatchik, an Establishment stooge. Under Stalin he would have been writing paeans to the glorious leader and lyrics about tractor production while sitting on committees frowning over the ideological soundness of other poets.

He has inspired one small gem. In the comments thread is:-

Anagram:-

Scotland's civic nationalists = Clan Nicola's nativist Scots ID

Comments

[Allan Ronald]

Wasn't that the most up-itself article? Risible and wrong in every respect. I was torn between rage and roars of laughter. In the end it means more Nat equivalent of Proletkult for us all. And that means Kailyairdery.

[RosieBell]

I posted it over here as well and there's a discussion:-

https://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/scotlands-civic-nationalists-clan-nicolas-nativist-scots-id/

There's an interesting (and disturbing) comment-

"The atmosphere in the Scottish universities is even worse, especially in literature departmentts where a climate of cultural exceptionalism is upheld by a bunch of semi-intellectual patriots who side-step any opposition by calling it ‘English elitism’ or ‘Tory condescension’. These cultural managers are busy massaging Burns, Hogg, Stevenson and MacDairmid, who were all either deeply contradicted or self-doubting in terms of politics, into seemless exmaples of early SNP pro-independence voters. It is utterly laughable! I once asked one of these smug lecture hall SNP lieutenants why they did not have MacDairmid’s ‘Hymn to Lenin’ or ‘On a Raised Beach’ neither in braid Scots, on the syllabus but only ever ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ , that every one by now, is heartily sick of. The answer was very revealing, as a Scot, MacDairmid was ‘theirs’ to do ‘as they wished’ with and no further English literary ‘imperialism’ was to be tolerated. The whole project is rancid and embarrassing."

[Allan Ronald]

Thank you for that. It is disgusting and alarming. As you say, the antisyzygy runs through our literature and no writer should be (or could be if people were aware of what was in their work) recruited for a political purpose, 'deeply contradicted or self-doubting' as you aptly put it. Scott has always been a favourite of mine but I imagine he is dismissed as a Tory unionist (which he was) and his fierce Scottish patriotism just overlooked as inconvenient. Undemocratic centralism is the SNP MO with regard to localism and I'm deeply concerned by their extending it in the universities.

[Allan Ronald]

I've just read the comments at Shiraz and they are, while dispiriting in content, among the best informed BTL stuff I've come across. The point about Muir is very important because, like the 15th century Makars, he was an internationalist, as were Scott and RLS (and, lest we forget, le Bon David--Mr Hume). I should add here, as a sort of amateur Latinist, that so too was the Latin tradition in Scottish literature---especially George Buchanan. I also agree with the statement that Bissett and his compadres are third raters who see the chance of their work being boosted because of their political affiliation. Like so much to do with the SNP it is all looking very Stalinist.

[RosieBell]

It's depressing to think that the work that has most influenced modern Scottish nationalism is the ridiculous Braveheart.

At least the Jacobites had some excellent songs.

Where's the sceptical spirit of Billy Connolly when you need him? He's someone that took the particular and made it universal.