Other than Realism : Magic and Violence in Modern Scottish Fiction and the Recent Work of

Violence, magic and realism – the three terms offer various possible enquiries and I might begin by suggesting two kinds of violence – the depiction of violence in story or narrative, a shooting, knifing, murder of whatever kind – and on the other hand, a violence in the text of fiction itself. The first one is easy to comprehend. In modern Scottish fiction, the novel No Mean City (1935) evokes the image of a Glasgow of street-violence, knife and razor-gangs, a tradition of hard lives in urban poverty that runs right through to Peter McDougall’s 1970s and 1980s television dramas Just a Boy’s Game and Just Another Saturday and on to contemporary TV series like Taggart. But mention of that tradition calls up another kind of violence, the coercive structures of formulaic realism in narrative. No writer of any episode of Taggart is going to surrender its reliable genre securities just as the genre fiction of Ian Rankin has secured a niche that is commercially as well as aesthetically dependable. This is not to denigrate these writers but rather to note that the maintenance of these aesthetic and commercial priorities enacts a kind of violent constraint in itself. These are familiar enough contemporary examples. Perhaps we can go further back to imagine a bigger context for them.