Imagining Scotland in France
Keith Dixon, Lumière University in Lyons
Conférence prononcée à Glasgow en 2002
Introduction
Although I have no academic qualifications to discuss the reception of Scottish literature in France, I have however some fairly strong intuitions on the subject given the work that I have undertaken in France over the last quarter of a century. This includes the creation and editing of a bi-lingual academic journal entitled Etudes Ecossaises now in its tenth year of existence - twenty-third if we take into account the small journal it replaced, Ecosse. Littérature et Civilisation; the general editing of two series of books to do with Scotland, one - La Bibliothèque Ecossaise - in the Anne Marie Métailié publishing house in Paris which focuses on the translation of modern Scottish fiction into French, and the other - L'Ecosse en questions - with a Grenoble university publishing house and which publishes critical academic work, by French and non-French writers, on Scottish culture and politics.
What I propose to do here is to start by briefly looking at the general problems of reception of things Scottish in contemporary France - or to put that in other words - the competing Scotlands of the French imagination. I will then go on to discuss what I see as the ambition of many of those working in Scottish studies in France - putting Scotland back on the cultural map of France - and assess to what extent that has been, or can be achieved. I will conclude with a discussion of the successes and limitations of the Métailié project I have just mentioned.
1. Scotlands of the French imagination : the problems of reception
If I may be allowed to use a somewhat prosaic comparison, I would say that the problem of the reception of Scotland - Scottish literature, Scottish culture, Scottish politics, whatever - in France is much the same sort of phenomenon as television reception in some of the more distant parts of the British Isles. We may be sending out the right signals but they are being seriously interfered with on the way. After years of activity devoted to trying to change dominant perceptions of Scottishness in France, with a small band of activists in the intellectual field, I now realize that the recommendation of Eugène Pottier's Internationale - du passé faisons table rase - is perhaps not quite the straightforward proposition I had once believed it to be. Historical misconceptions, the deeply-ingrained clichés and stereotypes of both popular and elite discourse, the undesirable side-effects of whisky advertisments, continue to interfere seriously with the new imaginings, thus generating a palimsest-like picture. Peel off the new and we find the old alive and kicking, when the two do not simply co-exist in post-modern confusion in the same layer of perception.
1.1 A problem of history
It is often believed here in Scotland that the French are more receptive to things Scottish because of the historical links between the two nations. Those centuries of mutual assistance, of political and intellectual intercourse, of intermingling and inter-marriage, are thought to have left an indelible mark on the French psyche, just waiting to be reactivated. In my own experience this, unhappily, is not really the case. The Auld Alliance, is an auld sang indeed - so auld that most have of my French friends and acquaintances have forgotten both the words and the tune. Today it plays much the same role in the rhetoric of Franco-Scots friendship as the Anglo-American Special Relationship does for the British. The make-believe of a nation in eclipse. In the final instance, it is there to reassure that there is life after Imperial decline (or loss of national sovereignty). In both cases the senior or foregrounded partner, when s/he bothers to think about it, takes it all with a pinch of salt. Although there are still some Auld Alliance spotters in France - usually located in the various Franco-Scottish friendship societies - who will seize on the slightest opportunity to emphasize over-the-water fraternity, nobody, I think, outside this small circle of eccentrics, seriously believes that this historical moment has any bearing whatsoever on the present.
History, and the collective unconscious, I'm afraid, provide us with little help.
1.2 Unhelpful analogies
Following a similar line of thought, much the same could be said of the temptation to anchor Scotland in the French imagination through analogy. This has been the case in France, among the national minorities in search of international comparisons or examples to further their own cause. Corsican, Breton or Basque nationalists have variously employed the Scottish case to strengthen their own arguments against French Jacobinism. Scottish envoys - nationalist or otherwise - to the conferences, congresses and cultural events organized by what they sometimes see as their French counterparts operate in the same direction. There are however, major shortcomings in this analogical approach : first of all, it only elicits sympathy and understanding in France from those who actively support or approve of the demands of small-nation nationalism within the French state. This is hardly a thriving political or intellectual constituency. Small-nation nationalism in France is associated - often rightly so - with political violence or ethnic exclusiveness.
Whether one approves of physical-force nationalism or not, the result of this sort of analogical thinking is to suggest similarities and proximities between Scotland and France's small nations which are at best counter-productive. They also of course tend to obfuscate, through facile comparison, the reality of Scotland's ambiguous relations with its more powerful neighbour and therefore the complexities of Scottish difference. The fact that much small-nation nationalism in France has been infected by concerns of ethnic purity - cf the attitudes of certain Corsican nationalists towards North African immigration into the island - does little to promote understanding of the civic, de-ethnicized nationalism that is prevalent in Scotland today.
More recently in France, again in the field of politics, Scotland has been instrumentalized by the incoming government of the Right. The devolution of power to the Scottish parliament has been used by the Raffarin governement as a positive example of what it wishes to do in the very near future in terms of the transfer of political power and responsibility to the French regions. A colloquium was recently organized by the British Council in Paris, with representatives of both the Scottish executive and the new French administration to discuss these issues. It hardly needs pointing out that there is little point of comparison here - apart from the common need of politicians to sell their wares as effectively as possible. Scottish devolution was only delivered because there had been a massive shift in Scottish public opinion, backed up by steady pressure from the intellectual and cultural fields which led the unionist party that had just won the elections to recognize that there was no possible way forward in Scotland, which would deliver political stability and continuing political support from a substantial share of the Scottish electorate, without a radical redraughting of the British constitution. Nobody in France would consider taking to the streets to demand the devolution of power to Rhone Alpes or the Midi Pyrénées region. Indeed, many, like myself, might on the contrary seriously envisage taking to the streets to protest against such a transfer of power.
I'm afraid the analogical approach does not help much either.
1.3 Kitsch Celticism
In more recent years there has been something of a revival of celticism on the French cultural scene. In its most serious manifestations - in the Tryade journal published by the University of Brest - this has sometimes meant a critical re-appraisal of the contribution of Celtic cultures to contemporary French or European thinking and cultural practice. In its less serious manifestations kitsch celticism has been expressed as a vague and romantic belief in Celtic solidarity accompanied by an interest in various forms of modern or traditional folk music from the Celtic areas of Europe. The new-found enthusiasm for celebrating Saint Patrick's day and the ever-growing popularity of the Lorient inter-celtic folk festival are very much representative of this trend. These manifestations may be good news for Irish beer manufacturers or Scottish police pipe bands in search of a wider public, but they do, however, lead to some fairly basic misunderstandings about British, Scottish or Irish cultures. The idea that we are all children of the Gael results in the frequent conflation, for example, of Scottish nationalism and Irish republicanism and a resulting lack of understanding of why the Scots have not significantly helped their Irish brothers and sisters in their struggle against English imperialism (two misreadings of the history of the British Isles that I quite regularly encounter among my more politicized students).
I should also point out that there is a more preoccupying version of this celtic romanticism, which is to be found on the far right of French politics. Given the present strength of this current in France, this is of more than anecdotal interest. The use of celtic imagery and the instrumentalization of the history of Celts have a long pedigree on the French radical right : Celtic symbols have long had pride of place on the banners of the French advocates of racial purity. You will I hope be happy to hear , however, that the thinkers of the French Front National are not happy with the cosmopolitan dimension of contemporary expressions of Scottish national sentiment. Not true nationalism in the continental, ethnic sense of the term, according to Frédéric Chaix, a National Front sympathiser, who has written a small book on Scottish nationalism, in a series which also includes a book on Celtic symbolism and another celebrating the French anti-semitic organisation, Les Camelots du Roi. Intriguingingly, the front cover of Chaix's book which does tend to go on and on about the need to preserve our unique Scottish identity from rapacious incomers, is illustrated with the handsome, blue-painted face of Mel Gibson.
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These then are only some of the obstacles to the reception of the new Scotlands of the imagination. They are the obstacles that have no doubt regularly delayed progress in the work that some of us have been trying to do over recent years in France.
2. Great expectations : putting Scotland back on the cultural map of France
When, some twenty-five years ago, a small number of academics working in France - Pierre Morère, Henri Gibault, Christian Civardi, Bernard Sellin, among others, organized the first Scottish workshop of the Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur - it was in Strasbourg in 1979 - the basic ambition was to critically re-assess French academic treatment of the United Kingdom in general, and Scotland in particular, and to endeavour to make Scotland a more respectable object of study, just as Ireland had become over the years.
2.1 The centrality of literature
There was, however, much more to be done if Scotland was to be imagined in new ways, or indeed to be imagined at all. The much over-quoted passage of Alasdair Gray's Lanark, concerning the imagined cities of Europe, later came to guide my own perceptions of the best way of promoting the imagined community of Scotland abroad. Like Gray, I believed that fiction would play a crucial role in this respect. Scotland, like Glasgow in Gray's novel, could exist in the imagination of those outside the country if they had access to the writing that reinvented it. It was important then to find ways of bringing the new literature of Scotland to a French public - something that French publishing houses at the time (the nineteen eighties) were signally failing to do. I believed, and continue to believe - in an altogether different climate of ideas - that the market alone could not achieve that objective. That if we waited for the hidden hand to do its job then the proverbial cows would be home and dry long before anything significant took place. In other words, any systematic attempt to promote the Scotlands of the new Scottish imagination would need intervention and support - in the form of state-provided subsidies. This was to be long in coming.
My own initial attempts in this field were, to put it as briefly as possible, pretty disastrous. In 1987 I managed to persuade the Grenoble University Press to launch a series of translations of Scottish novels : two only ever saw the light of day - McIlvanney's Docherty and Neil Gunn's The Green Isle of the Great Deep. Reviews in the French press were few and far between. Sales stagnated at levels that are too embarrassing even to mention, and the venture itself was brought to a premature end amid a great deal of acrimony and mutual recrimination. Docherty found another more welcoming home, but Verts Abîmes has been lost.
2.2 Changing perceptions?
By the time I engaged on my second attempt to publish Scottish fiction in translation in 1995, the climate, I think, was already beginning to change for the better. French publishing houses were beginning to show some greater interest in new Scottish writing : McIlvanney had become an established figure with Rivages, Iain Banks had made his breakthrough, at least among science fiction readers; William Boyd, although not necessarily perceived as a Scottish writer, had made his mark, was being published by one of the French majors and winning prizes for his fiction.
It is difficult to explain this change in the general climate : perhaps the work undertaken in academia was beginning to have some sort of impact? Perhaps greater student mobility had enabled future literary journalists and political commentators, during their year at Strathclyde or Aberdeen, to better understand the complexities of the British multinational state? Perhaps the sheer dynamism of Scottish culture in the eighties had been enough on its own to break down the barriers of neglect and misunderstanding?
As far as my own publishing ventures were concerned, one event was of determining importance. In 1995 I was asked by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to co-ordinate a special issue of his journal Liber on Scottish culture. To borrow Bourdieu's own terminology this was to provide us with the symbolic capital necessary to make our mark on the French cultural scene. The Bibliothèque Ecossaise series with Métailié was the direct consequence of the Liber special issue. As was the new-found curiosity of literary journalists in several major French newspapers and news magazines.
2.3 The Métailié project
The Métailié project was thus launched in altogether more favourable conditions than the earlier Grenoble affair : the publisher already had a solid reputation for translation work and was distributed by one of the French majors, Le Seuil; support from Bourdieu meant that the project was taken seriously in the media and in any case Anne-Marie Métailié already had a network of contacts in the media; the company was big enough to take the risk of losing money in the short-term as the series would no doubt take time to establish itself, but it was small enough for Anne-Marie to read all the manuscripts of work she published and support them personally. Above all, Anne-Marie Métailié, although sometimes critical of what she saw as a Scottish cultural propensity for doom and gloom - certainly a change from the young Latin American, Portuguese and Spanish authors she had been supporting until then - nonetheless had a strong commitment to the more general ambition of putting Scottish literature on the cultural map of France.
The immediate aim of the series was to combine the translation of what might be called modern Scottish classics and very contemporary work. I established a list of work to be translated - a list which Bourdieu had already published in the issue of Liber, and it was agreed that the publisher would ask for a second opinion, in or out of the publishing house, for each of the works I proposed. Very rapidly the series was favourably received by the press and if good book reviews were enough to guarantee sales then our financial difficulties would be behind us. Le Monde, Libération and Télérama (the so-called golden triangle of book reviews) have covered, sometimes quite lavishly all the novels we have published so far. More avant-gardist publications like Les Inrockuptibles or more recently, L'inculte, have supported the series. Among many others, French and Swiss radio have done regular interviews of two of the authors published in the series, Jim Kelman and Alasdair Gray.
Support from Scotland in the form of precious translation grants from the Scottish Arts Council has been forthcoming, and has indeed made the difference between publishing or not publishing certain works whose cost would otherwise have been beyond the means of a small independent publishing house. To date we have published work by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Alexander Trocchi, James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, with forthcoming translations of two novels each by John Burnside and James Robertson. Although the critical reception of all these novels has been systematically favourable, sales have varied from disappointing to more than respectable. Here again, it is difficult to explain why the French reading public prefer, for instance, Young Adam to Sunset Song, and what it is about Alasdair Gray that has made him something of a cult figure after our translations of Lanark and A History Maker (Poor Things which was translated some years ago went more or less unnoticed). Jim Kelman will be happy to hear that he has been much better treated by French critics than by their British counterparts.
The gap between expectations and reality in this field of course is formidable : not all the texts proposed were accepted (these included Ian Rankin, now taken up by Les Editions du Rocher, Christopher Brookmyre, who is with Gallimard, Jessie Kesson and Janice Galloway, because the in-house readers were not as enthusiastic as I was, and Irvine Welsh because he was far too expensive...). The manuscript of a French translation of The House with the Green Shutters has been sitting on the publisher's table now for more than six months, and I now doubt that it will be published by us.
The goods news however is that it has become increasingly difficult to buy the translation rights for new Scottish writing because so many French publishers are now interested. Thus Jackie Kay, Laura Hird, Alan Warner, and Andrew O'Hagan, to mention only a few, have all rapidly found French publishers. This re/discovery of Scottish fiction will no doubt be given a significant boost by the new translation of Walter Scott's complete works in the prestigious Pléiade edition.
Conclusion
Looking back on the last twenty-five years, things - I think - have got better. Some among the general French reading public are now aware that Scottish literature and Scotland do indeed exist outside their kitsch re-incarnations. Although as I pointed out in my introductory remarks these latter still linger on and continue to mingle joyfully, whether we like it or not, with more serious representations of the new Scotland.