Writing Scotland in the Plural – with Robert Crawford
This episode of The Carrying Stream is with the writer and poet Robert Crawford. The podcasts host, Paul Malgrati says:
“We discuss his work, which since the 1980s has played an important role in reshaping our understanding of Scottish literature in more multilingual and multicultural terms. We also speak about his engagement with Robert Burns and T. S. Eliot, as well as his interests in fields as varied as philosophy, computing, and the Japanese haiku. The result is a wide-ranging conversation on literature, influence, and the many directions Scottish writing and scholarship can take.”
So here’s one of Scotland’s ‘Multitude of Poets’, talking about tamed poets, poets struggling to get work, the kindnesses of academic departments and editors, and whether you can tell or not whether a given poet champions democracy and republicanism. On the latter point, Robert Garland says that there are very few surviving examples of ancient Athenians praising their contemporary democracy, and quite a lot of criticism from historians, philosophers and playwrights. But the poets are notable for their lauding of the oligarchy, being patronised by the rich. Although ‘sycophant’ had a quite different meaning then, referring to those who pursued vexatious litigation. Which presumably was a strong evolutionary factor towards prose in laws and constitutions. Imagine if world affairs were conducted using a ruleset derived from interpretations of the poetry of the Bible!
I like Robert Crawford, he’s a good guy who writes very well. I was deeply suspicious of his “Bannockburns” to begin with, but was entirely won over by it, likewise his more technical “Devolving Scot Lit” and his Burns biography eloquently covers the ground…
The moment when Burns arrives in Edinburgh, in the midst of the Enlightenment, with a completely opposite message to the North British literati about Scotland as a nation, really should be on the screen by now…
As for “the death of the author”, well the three giants of western Modernity, Freud, Marx and Neitzsche, all say the same thing: we dont fully know ourselves..
We need fictions to live (“to lie is the human!” Nietzsche), we are subject to psychic repressions in our earliest years which shape us (Freud) and also live immersed in ideologies which emanate from the ruling power structure (Marx) so, endless BBC adaptations of Jane Austen and George Eliot about whether Ms X will marry Mr y and inherit his cash…
I do take RC’s point that the French can be a little abstruse, but the general point that the autonomous author is something of a fiction seems to me to be largely true…