“Let Glasgow Flourish by Telling the Truth:” Search for the Scottish Independence in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark

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Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) is a medium through which the versatile Scottish artist, critic, and poet Alasdair Gray can create an artistic representation of Glasgow. While the novel has been predominantly analysed as a quintessential postmodern text due to its generic multiplicity and self-referential qualities, this paper argues that these very qualities are in the service of highlighting the novel’s primary concern: the urgent need for self-representation to achieve political, artistic, and economic independence. The text both calls for and heralds the emergence of a new national literature. For the artist, literary representation is the prerequisite for political representation, and consequently, for independence. The disillusionment with the 1979 Scottish devolution referendum can be seen as one of the political backdrops of Lanark. The novel, in that sense, is an attempt at both coming to terms with the recent political defeat and an artistic endeavour to represent the Scottish reality as the position of a stateless nation that has been deindustrialised economically and polarised politically.