1982 Janine
“I groaned and said, ‘Forget politics Sontag, and let us get back to sex. You are such an expert in sex, Sontag.’
“This was untrue. She had read a lot about sex and liked to practice very complicated gymnastic couplings which struck me as more bother than they were worth and made her very angry with my incompetence, but what she enjoyed most was being upside down in an armchair with her legs spread wide over the back while I stood behind it working on her cunt with my tongue. It was a position which allowed me the least possible body contact and did not excite me at all, though I could do it for what seemed like hours while she hung on to the chair arms looking ecstatic and moaning softly to herself.”
1982 Janine, by the Scottish author and artist Alasdair Gray, is a work of great eccentricitie, an experimental novel with a strong narrative and representational prose style, which is autobiographical and individualistic to the core. It is also the work of an author and narrator who exists most comfortably in self-opposition. Thus, among many other things, the self-deprecating, self-hating hero is a conservative technocrat given to political ranting in such a way as to reinforce, without irritating irony, the opposite viewpoint, held by the author, who is a man of the left. He subjects its imaginary heroines (there are at least three, avatars (and how I wish this word had not been cursed by James Cameron!) of real women) to lengthy, indeterminate, repetitive, sado-masochistic fantasies which never reach beyond absurdity and seem to further degrade not the women but the man whose fantasies they are. It is a typical post-modern book, with its self-conscious, self-deconstructing meta-narrative, it’s rampant fantasies within a realistic plot, its kitchen sink approach to genre.
But did I say it was hilarious and touching by turns?
He loads the deck with effects and affects. You quite simply don’t get the comfy narrative till almost 2/3rds of the way through. His character, Jock McLeish, isn’t so much a bad man as a man with a guilty conscience, self-obsessed, seemingly a bore. He is suicidal. He takes an overdose of pills and plunges into a wee Finnegans Wake episode, with polyphonic upside-down writing in the margins.
Gray is knowing. He is not trying to do anything. But the prose! Its excellence is its willful waywardness, as sentences simply end where it is convenient for him to end them. Others go on. The self-indulgence is McLeish’s. Gray uses simple, short, rough-hewn sentences whenever they will suffice. But he has the ability to describe economically and beautifully whatever he chooses to, and so place is set realistically and well, such that I was always vividly aware of where I was, whether it was the fantasy hells constructed for the women (dark stages, police stations, the back seats of cars, where heroines are handcuffed and undressed and raped) or an Edinburgh neighborhood during The Festival, or shabby rooms where McLeish lives for a while with the depressingly dumpy but kind and good Denny, who is his original sin. By the end McLeish’s whole emotional life is laid bare. He is a good man who has done shitty things. His self-punishment exceeds the crime. He has failed to love, or recognize the love of others. He has been obtuse. In the end he realizes this. And then the novel is over.
So why put up with it?
Because it was screamingly funny, perverse and intelligent and never once flagged in its pursuit of both emotional truth and the clownish bullshit people spew to deny it.
Before this book I read Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. It too is experimental. The narrative of that book is a narrative of the dead, as the hero goes to a strange town in search of his father, and discovers ghosts gossiping about the cruelty of his ancestors. Again the method is experimental, in this case surreal, but again there is narrative and realistic description, it is not non-objective, abstract and non-narrative. The emotions of the book are its main currents. It does not set out to ‘do’ anything, but employs method with purpose. It is art, not ideology or philosophical argument disguised as a novel.
Both books suggest that experimental, radical art can be representational and full of feeling. Neither book is radical in the grosser sense, but 1982 Janine at least alienates as many readers as it attracts. Pedro Paramo is on the other hand an acknowledged classic. Paramo could easily wander onto the Times bestseller list. Janine would probably be unpublishable. Even in its day I suspect the only reason it was published was because Gray had just published what many consider to be the greatest Scottish novel, Lanark. 1982 Janine is Gray’s favorite of his many books. Given his personality (interviews are rollicking fun) it hard to imagine he is in his seventies. Not that people can’t remain childish into their seventies, it’s just that they so seldom do. Check out his website in my links.
