Poor Things.
As Alasdair Gray himself has confessed (or boasted), his texts, including this, are written by, for and principally about, the petty bourgeoisie. Poor Things, especially, is about professionals and intellectuals (rather than merchants or small manufacturers).
It’s been made into a movie, or I should say used as a pretext for a movie, I haven’t seen, but the trailer of which seems to be more than enough to go by.
Gray’s novel is thoroughly postmodern in construction, but resting on a good old agitprop base of political and moral purpose that does not oscillate. By the time it was written, in 1992, these antique gambits from early gothics like The Castle of Otranto had become routine gimmicks of literary reflexivity cum alibi: the bulk of the text is presented as a manuscript of dubious authenticity, discovered by our contemporary editor, the fictional doppelgänger of the author, who recounts his own efforts to verify the story in a fictional world of quotidian realism intended to be scarcely distinguishable from contemporary reality. The manuscript in this case, as usual, contains a fantastic first-person tale, and somewhat less usually but not uncommonly, another first-person tale of realist melodrama in a world not quite comparable to the editor’s frame world, not contemporary, and reminiscent of Zola, Hardy or Gissing, undermining the fantastic gothic centerpiece account.
I’ll note in passing, tho I won’t pick this up again until a later substack, that the black & white photography, the fish eye lenses, the gaudy cgi dollhouses of Lanthimos’ adaptation are a traditional sort of cinematic equivalent of these post-modern echoes of Enlightenment Gothic’s facsimile styles and textual layers.
The novel Poor Things is itself a motley assemblage, the awkwardness of whose endless combinations and contradictions is the secret of its fecundity. Its disharmonious liveliness is all put together in a spirit of innocent play, joy, openness, without any sly adult manipulation. Nearly everything out there in elite literature has been used by Gray for the concoction of this funny faux fable. Gray himself has mentioned Peacock’s satire Nightmare Abbey, James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (in particular, the Monster and his Maker’s song and dance before the Scientistic Elite), as materials consumed in the assembly of his monster, but really all the major veins of bourgeois novel are grafted into the creature; the novels of the Enlightenment (Tom Jones, Candide, The Devil in Love, Tristram Shandy, Pamela, Humphrey Clinker, Jacques le Fataliste, and Emile of course, to name a few, while the play She Stoops to Conquer appears in the text), late Enlightenment proto-realism (Belinda, for the perverse Rousseauian approach to Bride-Manufacture), Romanticism (Frankenstein of course is one of the two most important intertexts, but there are other Romantic canon cannon firing, papa Godwin of course, PB Shelley of course, and the Scots: Byron, Hogg, Scott and neo-romantic Stevenson, of course, of course…the most famous heroine from Scott, The Bride of Lamermoor, Lucy who becomes Lucia of Donizetti’s opera, is ‘simple-minded,’ and Gray’s Bella relives and revises her traumatic wedding ), 19th century romantic realism (The Gambler by Dostoevsky is the other principal intertext), and over it all reigns the sensibility of the goofier bawdy modernists, for example Manuel de civilité pour les petites filles à l'usage des maisons d'éducation, but all jollity.
Now this great heap of celebrated delights is deployed in Gray’s bricolage for the seemingly carefree objective of a rather lightweight, seductively hopeful exploration of the post-Thatcher post-Soviet political landscape (there’s the spooky and irrational for you, just below the flowers and icing) that must, for the petty bourgeois socialist target audience reading today, be consumed as bitterly regrettable.
From the denouement within the second interior manuscript of Poor Things, the heroine, no longer Bella Baxter (object) but Dr. Victoria McCandless (subject), recently apostate Fabian (objecting only to the society’s ferocious imperial war fever), writing in the first person as a revisionist vis à vis the principal uncanny manuscript written by her husband, adressing, in her old age, a comrade of longstanding (the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, whose real name was Christopher Grieve) after the Labour Party victory of 1945:
Dear Chris,
So at last, for the first time this century, we have a Labour government with an over-all working majority! I will start reading the newspapers again. Britain is suddenly an exciting country. The anti-trade-union laws of 1927 are being repealed and it seems we WILL get social welfare and national health care for all, and Fuel and Power and Transport and Steel and Iron WILL become Public Property! As public as broadcasting, telephones, tap-water and the air we breathe! And we WILL jettison that millstone around our necks, the British Empire! Do you not feel a little happier, Chris? I feel a lot happier. We are setting the world a finer example than the Soviet Union ever did. I feel that everything between 1914 and the present day has proved a hideous detour, a swerving from the good path of social progress whose last fixed point was the Lloyd George budget which abolished poor-houses by the old age pension, and started breaking up the enormous estates by death duties. It seems John Maclean was wrong. A workers’ co-operative nation will be created from London, without an independent Scotland showing the way.
In 1992, a call to begin the Fabianism all over again, but in an imagined EU style, fragment and reunite. History has since revealed the trajectory of the principal doubled, trebled, quadrupled protagonist, Bella Baxter-Dr. Victoria McCandless, author of the somewhat Reichian-Theweleitian political tract within the text entitled A Loving Economy — A Mother’s Recipe for the End of All National and Class Warfare, to be a ruinous rake’s progress of cuddly utopian libertarianism landing Allegorical Her and Us in the radioactive, global poorhouse at the mercy of a ruling class Gray giddily invited us to dismiss with scorn.
….to be continued.