This paper argues that entangledness with inorganic agency, particularly that of stone, not only speaks to recent object-oriented and ecocritical thought, but also marks a constitutional division ...within the UK, since 'thing power' implies a scepticism over the organic authority of an uncodified British constitution. The agency of stone undercuts the organicism of an eighteenth century understanding of natural law that can only understand the social as an 'evolving' association of individual property owners, demanding an ontological 'distance' from objects. Lithic agency was already of concern to 1920s-'30s Scottish modernists, notably Hugh MacDiarmid, but can be traced forward to anxieties over the 'totalising' or 'time-fixing' qualities of nuclear weapons. We describe this line of agential stone from modernism to the nuclear dramas of the 'New Cold War' era, and how it entails an ontological shattering of the British distance from objects. Depictions of the physical violence of nuclear standoff shatter the totalisation required by British natural law, pointing to a specifically Scottish and sub-British political aesthetic. An ontological division over nuclear weapons remains central to Scottish independence campaigns today - and their release of 'stony' and 'dusty' powers beyond the human provide a 'concrete' example for object-oriented thinking within literary theory after its geological turn.
Germany has been epitomised in the twentieth century as Britain's main rival and adversary. Yet Scottish modernists were influenced by Germany and German-language modernism to think more ...internationally about their nation and work, a cultural encounter that took place largely in and through translation. Willa and Edwin Muir, who in the early 1920s stayed at educational modernist A. S. Neill's experimental school in Germany, translated German-language modernists such as Kafka and Broch. Hugh MacDiarmid utilised translations of Nietzsche to inform his call for a renascent Scotland. Lewis Grassic Gibbon would write Sunset Song after reading Gustav Frenssen's regional novel Jörn Uhl . Behind this lies the contention that the breakup of world empires, such as the British and Austro-Hungarian, occasioned minor modernisms (to adapt Deleuze and Guattari) such as that in Scotland, and that translation was central to the emergence, impact, and transnationality of the Scottish renaissance movement.
This article explores the contact zone between Kafka's multilingual modernism and the until now overlooked modernist language politics of his first translators into English and thus world literature, ...the Scottish couple Edwin and Wilhelmina (Willa) Muir. Addressing the Muirs' multilingual modernism, it discusses this worldly wordiness that emerges from lifelong patterns of displacement and that is deeply connected with the Muirs' vexed relationship with the English language and participation in Scottish modernist vernacular debates. Despite the Muirs' controversial decision to write in Standard English, however, vernacular fragments repeatedly surface in their works.
But for a woman or any being whose nature it is to live through the emotions,
clarity of mind can only be got by taking the natural order. And I do think many of us thinking and educated women of ...this age go against our natures by striving to force ourselves to deal first through the intellect, living too much with ideas and not sufficiently trusting ourselves to the truths that would come to us through the deeper sensual and emotional channels.Catherine Carswell (1928)In the Introduction to Gender in Scottish History Since 1700, Lynn Abrams discusses the difference between ‘women's history and a history informed by understandings of gender’, commenting that while ‘women's historians aimed first to achieve visibility for women in the past’, their aim today (at least in relation to the developed world) ‘is to identify women as historical subjects or as social actors and to integrate their stories into the historical landscape’. Similarly, Marianne Dekoven in ‘Modernism and Gender’, her contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, argues that the early phase of feminist modernist criticism waspreoccupied primarily with establishing the importance of women modernist writers, both by opening the canon to include them and by broadening our understanding of what constitutes Modernism so that it is not so exclusively defined by the valorization of formal as well as thematic characteristics (vast unifying mythic themes) associated with masculinity.
Hugh MacDiarmid's writing career was a committed act of engagement and identification with the land of his birth, a poetics of place striving to reveal the essential totality of the nation:So I have ...gathered unto myselfAll the loose ends of Scotland,And by naming them and accepting them,Loving them and identifying myself with them,Attempt to express the whole.(‘Scotland’, CP1, 652)In A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle he claims that ‘a' that's Scottish is in me’ (CP1, 145). The Drunk Man's self is compiled of ‘a composite diagram o' / Cross-sections o' my forbears' organs’ and although he attempts in self-disgust to exorcise this haunting by his ancestors he finds that ‘like bindweed through my clay it's run’ (CP1, 93). On examination of himself, the Drunk Man understands that his innermost spiritual identity is irredeemably connected to a metaphysical Scotland:My ain soul looks me in the face, as 'twere,And mair than my ain soul – my nation's soul!(CP1, 93)In ‘Dìreadh I’ MacDiarmid names the nation as his Muse, ‘the very object of my song / – This marvellous land of Scotland’ (CP2, 1168), while ‘Conception’, one of a number of poems to paintings by fellow Borderer William Johnstone (1897–1981), gives birth to a new idea of Scotland that is at one with the poet's identity:So that indeed I could not be myselfWithout this strange, mysterious, awful findingOf my people's very life within my own– This terrible blinding discoveryOf Scotland in me, and I in Scotland(CP2, 1070)
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