Nicola Sturgeon cannot play the victim if she wants a nationalism worth its salt
In Neal Ascherson’s fine work of history Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, a multi-dimensional journey through Scotland’s past from its ancient make-up of little tribes of mysterious provenance to the state of the modern devolution settlement, part archaeology, part literary reflection, part personal biography, he compares Scotland’s story to the standing stones he marvelled at in his youth (he was brought up in the West where many of these ancient structures are found) – “ritual spires of condensed fear and memory” he calls them.
For Ascherson, they are a fitting place to begin the reconstruction of an authentic Scottishness that can go some way to replace the many crowded fictions that make up Scotland’s sense of self, a land which has struggled to tell its own story in terms different to the range of motifs that can be found in the “painted field”, as Orcadian poet Edwin Muir put it, of contemporary Scottishness, with the mythology of Wallace and Bruce, highly popular with the American diaspora of course, the trauma of the Highland Clearances, 19th century inventors, the Poll Tax and an “anyone but England” sneer, centre-stage.
Taking inspiration from the poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s formulation “There are ruined buildings in the world, but no ruined stones”, Ascherson uses the standing stones, which can be damaged only by the slow passing of the centuries or by some drastic act by human hand, as a setting off point for his contention that there really is something ineffable about Scotland, a thought that he carries forward from the novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon in his most famous novel Sunset Song, a portrait of pre-Great War life in rural Scotland.
Here are the thoughts of the novel’s central character Chris Guthrie:
“Scotland lived, she could never die, the land would outlast them all, their wars and their Argentines, and the winds come sailing over the Grampians still with their storms and rain and the dew that ripened the crops – long and long after all their little vexings in the evening light were dead and done.”
It also appears in Edwin Muir’s poetry – who was also a modernist like Grassic Gibbon who rejected the Kailyard school of kitsch romance that had come to dominate the fashions of late nineteenth century fiction – and especially in his poem “The Difficult Land”: “This is a difficult land. Here things miscarry / Whether we care, or do not care enough.” But the tough life has some compensation, the resonance of “something that, defeated, still endures”.
When Boris Johnson arrived outside Bute House earlier this week, he was greeted by boos and a theatrically stony-faced Nicola Sturgeon. It was cleverly done and a scene that fits well with the tenor of Sturgeon’s time as First Minister in the last couple of years when she has used Brexit at every turn as further fodder to feed Scotland’s all too easily awakened sense of victimhood.
But it might turn out that Brexit will only make things worse for Scottish nationalism which has long struggled to free itself from the accusation that it is nothing more than one seductive fiction alongside many other fictions.
If nationalists are to write a serious story for Scotland in the 21st century, they would be better to side-line the anti-Boris posturing (like all politicians, he is here today, gone tomorrow) and look more to the standing stones, and what can be divined from the wind, the storms and rain and the difficult land.
Brexit has given the SNP some great new tunes and given impetus to calls for another independence referendum that looked a long way off only a couple of years ago, but it has reduced the scope for a positive nationalism that can move beyond the victimology that gave it life during the Thatcher era, where there was little prospect of home rule and Scotland consistently returned Labour majorities, the “We are colonised by wankers” fatalism that so diminishes Scotland’s story.
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