Here was a man(iac) with a funny, sick sense of humour engaging Scottish working class life in its own words (something I’d never encountered before in my own readings) and thoughts and I, like many, many others, simply couldn’t get over it at the time. I ran around shoving the book under the noses of many-and-any-and-everybody I could (including members of Arab Strap before the band even existed; they would ironically sweep to minor fame on the back of the 1996 post-‘Trainspotting’-film hunger for all things Scottish with their middle-class-Falkirk-accent-rendered brewer’s droop anthems, and get a song on the soundtrack of the film of ‘The Acid House’ when it came out) and endlessly raved about it.

Now. I waited a long time for a critical overview of Welsh’s work. I wanted to know about things I idly wondered myself about like the disabled brother motif in both ‘Trainspotting’ and ‘Marabou Stork Nightmares’. About the juvenile equation of sex in his works with football and ‘scoring’. About how a man who could write a deeply disturbing ostensibly anti-rape novel like ‘Marabou Stork Nightmares’, and exact terrible revenge on a rapist in ‘Trainspotting’, could go on to write the superfluous, disturbing, serving-no-purpose, never-again-mentioned rape scene in the awful ‘Porno’. About religion in the work of the man, wondering if he was Catholic (being a Hibs fan I supposed he must be, and having characters like Francis Begbie and Danny Murphy in ‘Trainspotting’, but I never really saw him talk about his religion anywhere, if indeed he had any) and if this might inform his damaged scatology and anti-Protestant musings in places. Or why his work has a constant mockery of university-educated people, and students in general, when he is university-educated and thus hypocritical in this regard. So I started reading Aaron Kelly’s dissection dissertation…

…and was unfortunately sorely, severely disappointed.

This is the first critical overview of Welsh’s work, but hopefully it won’t be the last. Because, quite simply, it’s a very overblown, pretentious, unenlightening, far-too-over-analytical piece of polysyllabic academia that says very little about a lot of the topic under discussion. The back cover of the book (for which I must thank Manchester University Press for the review copy) says that the ‘style is admirably clear and accessible and should appeal to both the academic and the general reader.’ Bearing this in mind, let’s examine a fairly representative section of the text and see just how ‘accessible’ it is to the general reader:

“Welsh’s subversion of the novel’s standard language is neatly illustrated in Bakhtin’s terms: ‘authoritative discourse permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it’. Welsh’s fiction undermines precisely the position of a singular authoritative discourse to fix itself in language by flouting it, in Bakhtin’s terms, with a polyphonic heteroglossia of multifarious meanings and voices….Notably in Welsh’s phonetic rendering of speech, ‘I’ is figured as ‘ah’ – which not only approximates its sound in working class Edinburgh demotic but resonates on a textual level. ‘Ah’ can also signify on the page, variously, a pause or hesitation, the postponement of meaning and significance rather than its usual assertion with the annunciation of the first person singular, and also an expression of pain, or of disapproval. These submerged levels of meaning in what appears only a phonetic figure convey the splintering of selfhood and identity faced by many of Welsh’s characters.”

And that’s only on page 19. The book has 225 pages of this kind of stuff for you to (hetero)gloss(ia) over.

Now. Pause to let the general reader (if any are indeed still reading it and didn’t quit after only a sentence or two) absorb that. I think you can get the highbrow, mostly uncomprehending, over-analytical tone of the work from this example. To state that Welsh is trying to write on multiple levels at once simply by writing the word ‘ah’ for ‘I’ is, quite frankly, ludicrous. Another example of this I couldn’t get over was this one: “Indeed, Renton complains that ‘hardly anybody calls us Mark. It’s usually Rents or, worse, the Rent Boy. That is fuckin awful getting called that’ (T 11) He notably refers to himself as ‘us’, as a compendium of identities…These plural identities indicate the differing and often contradictory peer groups and social circumstances in which the male characters function.”

What’s wrong with this assertion? Any Scottish working class person would be able to tell you. In the Scottish vernacular, if I was to say to you “Dinnae gie us that” I would be saying “Don’t give me that,” referring to myself in the third person through the use of the word ‘us’ for ‘me’. It’s just a Scottish expression; nothing more, nothing less, and it certainly has nothing to do with a “compendium of identities” or literary schizophrenic representation or use-of-charactonym-to-indicate-economic-status or whatever highfalutin’ deluded overblown litcrit nonsense the author here chooses to come up with.

One assertion I really shook my head at was this one: “The dominant Calvinist doctrine helps explain why so many of Welsh’s narrators in ‘The Acid House’ and throughout his oeuvre are unreliable and engaged, whether playfully, guiltily or nefariously, in the construction of artifices that perpetually accentuate their own fictitiousness and thwart the assemblage of language, truth and authority in the Knoxian doctrine of the one True Word.” There is not one true word here. To suggest that Welsh’s characters deal in untruths and bullshit not because they are lowlife liars and junkies and scumbags, and thus would be expected to behave this way…but because Welsh is scared of God and putting down any word on a page that might assert itself as truth because there is only one True Word, ie God’s…is beyond ludicrous and, quite frankly, utterly bizarre. Sometimes a lying junkie is just a lying junkie; nothing more, nothing less.

But let’s examine the aforementioned literary dissector here in slightly more detail. Dr Aaron Kelly teaches English Literature and Modern Scottish Fiction at the University of Edinburgh, which is one of the most prestigious universities in Britain; it’s often attended by wealthy wee boys and girls from England when they can’t get into Oxford or Cambridge. As I read further into the book, finding all kinds of inaccurate, over-articulated (un)examinations of Welsh’s work, I noticed something. There was no sense here that Kelly had ever truly understood, or even enjoyed, anything of the ex-schemie’s fiction that he had read, and that it was just a subject to him to be analyzed to death and beyond in uniform uninformed fashion. Which is a shame because Welsh, at his best, can be screamingly funny (‘Disnae Matter’, from ‘The Acid House’, has to be one of the best and funniest short stories/monologues ever written), an incredible writer of colloquial dialogue and even starkly poignant upon rare occasion.

To truly understand – or at least get – Welsh’s work you have to be Scottish working class, and Dr Kelly is clearly middle class; not sure as to his nationality. I’m not being inverse-snob by saying this. It’s just when you have a lecturer making such ridiculous assumptions and assertions about a subject they have little understanding of to the extent they don’t understand that the word ‘us’ in Scottish slanguage is just an expression for ‘me’, that it renders pretty much all of what they’re saying suspect and unreliable. And Kelly’s going to be teaching culture tourists (who came to represent a large part of Welsh’s readership as his career progressed) this too, which I find somewhat disheartening – if not funny on one level.

What else? Let’s see. Renton isn’t watching Jean Claude Van Damme videos in ‘Trainspotting’ because he feels his body is under threat or he’s being emasculated, but because working class people grew up during the 80s watching these crappy scrapping films and Welsh was doing just that during his oft-disputed heroin ingestion period. I could point out a hundred other examples of class-bound incomprehension in this book, but why bother? The book is well researched, so I give Kelly kudos on that, and he provides some interesting, illuminating Welsh quotations about his work. But the problem with the examination of the work here is that, in looking for other Welsh criticism to back up his own theories, Kelly often makes use of other pretentious quotes from uncomprehending middle class literary critics.

Thus we get nonsense like this quote from Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon (whose name alone shows us the level of understanding she will have of Welsh’s work) about the throwaway short story ‘The Granton Star Cause’ from ‘The Acid House’, and its protagonist Boab Coyle: “Boab Coyle is both his and his father’s name, thereby foregrounding repetition; the surname is a homophone of ‘coil’, which gives the repetition its spiral effect…the Christian name ‘Bob’ – preferred to ‘Rob’ or even Rab’ – being a palindrome…indicates the hesitancy. The reversibility of worlds, while the added ‘a’ stresses localism, giving a definitely Scottish background to the stagnation of both worlds”. Gie me a fuckin brek! Who comes up with this rubbish? I can’t believe it even gets printed!

I understand the difficulty in being the first person to write a critical overview of Irvine Welsh and his work, especially when the writer doesn’t come from Welsh’s level of society and thus has little or no knowledge of it, its complex codes and hieroglyphs and how to unlock them with a Rosetta Stone of experiential knowledge, but Irvine Welsh is nowhere NEAR as intelligent (though he is undoubtedly an intelligent, educated man) as Kelly gives him credit for, and he’s rarely, if ever, subtle. The fact he wrote ‘Marabou Stork Nightmares’ in such a short period of time might have clued his examiner up to this. If Welsh put as much thought into writing his stories (which are basically tabloid journalism-and-punk-inspired capitalism-cum-socialism-cum-nihilism humorous scatology) as Kelly put into analyzing them he would be releasing one book every seven years a la Joseph Heller (pre-death Heller, obviously).

The meanings Dr Kelly has (over) read into Welsh’s work simply do not exist. He has tried to use a set of tools on his work that simply do not fit, mainstream ivory tower literary tools of the trade (ironically castigating others for the exact same mistake!), and the subject isn’t as deep as the analysis. The sections when Kelly’s writings most come alive are where he is analyzing Welsh’s red-top banner headline rantings on the alienating breakup of working class society and late capitalism, and Kelly comes up with some good, lucid, cogent points. But these breaks are few and far between, moments of comprehension gleaned where he is reading something inserted into the text in plain, BIG BOLD SHOUTING LETTERS of unvarnished sociological criticism English by Welsh, and thus Kelly can easily grasp what is being said. When it comes to the art in the fantastic or vernacular elements in the work under discussion, which is a fairly sizeable part of the debate…forget it.

An early assertion of Kelly’s (page four) is that Welsh’s work is ‘unfairly’ famous for drug use and abuse. However, any truthful, intelligent, long-term reader of the man’s would say that his work became increasingly tedious and one-note and pandering to middle class slumming-it cult culture vultures and he wholeheartedly endorsed this image of himself as a punk opiate youth guru, the oft-quoted ‘poet laureate of the chemical generation’, a title he loved and lapped up and wrote down to, as his truthful quote about his own work on page 129 (in part: “I’ve been fortunate enough to discover my readership in my lifetime an what that’s done is completely negate any part of these liberal critics who only like things that affirm their own values, but won’t challenge them. People are going to buy it anyway, whatever they say, whether they rave about it, or they slag it off. It makes no difference at all. And that’s a comfortable position for me to be in.”) is testament to.

Oddly, Kelly very rarely disagrees with a Welsh dictum, or even examines what kind of twisted mindset might envisage some of the sick set-pieces (like, for example, the recurring theme of dog torture – stuck into books by Welsh to annoy animal lovers on purpose after he got an outraged response to a dog torture scene in one book) that the man comes up with as artistic expression. It’s as if the good Doctor is afraid to pass any kind of qualitative judgment on Welsh and his wordwork or mindset (hardly taking the man to task for his misogyny, for example) for fear of being regarded as a cultural snob. And it’s a pity, because Welsh’s work could stand some serious analysis on this level. In summing up, I’ll quote something a guy I used to be friends with said after reading ‘Trainspotting’: “There’s a lot ay bitterness in that boy.” And he was right; indeed there is. But exactly why and where it comes from, and what its artistic expression means, will obviously be for some other, more understanding, writer to work out and teach us how to speak Welsh.

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.