Scottish Fantasies: Other Worlds

Novelist and presenter of the Writing Scotland television series, Carl MacDougall, introduces an online learning journey on fantasies and the other worlds of Scottish literature.

Late, late in the gloamin when all was still,
When the fringe was red on the westlin hill,
The wood was sere, the moon I' the wane,
The reek o' the cot hung over the plain,
Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane,
When the ingle lowed with an eiry leme,
Late, late in the gloaming Kimeny came hame!

From Kilmeny by James Hogg

The tradition of invoking other worlds is older than literature itself; and Scotland has a rich store of folklore which relies on the idea of an encounter with someone from another world, or journeying into other worlds, journeys that change the people who make them, or from which they may never return.

Some ballads go back to prehistory, while others record real events, people and places. Their influence on Scottish writing has been absolute. James Hogg was the first Scottish writer to put the fantastic at the centre of his vision, and though it wasn't critically recognised for over a hundred years, his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, is now seen as one of the great masterpieces of Scottish writing. It is also, I believe, a masterpiece of world literature.

Burns's 'Tam O'Shanter' is the best-known piece of Scottish supernatural writing, so familiar its subtleties and initial message have been obliterated. And the same is true of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Because of their familiarity, it's easy to overlook the fact that both pieces reveal a world which runs parallel to our own, that there are points where the two worlds mingle and that one can spill into the other.

With Ian Maclaren (pseudonym of the Rev. John Watson) and S.R. Crockett, James Matthew Barrie was part of the Kailyard school, a commercially successful movement which exploited all that was mawkishly sentimental and escapist in Scottish writing. But Barrie's main success was in the theatre, and his play Peter Pan is the story of a strange, dysfunctional boy who refuses to grow up, a boy who lures children from the safety of their beds to the moral chaos of Never Land, a magical place beyond the stars where Peter lives with the Lost Boys, protected by a tribe of Red Indians. The story invokes the tradition of fantastic journeys. Never Land is a quite explicit faerie kingdom. But there is a profound difference. Travellers don't go there to be changed. Like James Hogg's poem 'Kilmeny', they remain as they are, forever.

The fear of human contact is central to Alasdair Gray's novel 'Lanark'. Deprived of love and sunlight, the citizens of Unthank develop a hideous skin condition called Dragonhide. Those afflicted can't be touched even if they want to be. Only love can heal them. Iain Banks' The Bridge reverses the fantasy tradition by journeying from dream to reality. The book's hero lies in a coma, his character fragmented into multiple split personalities following a car crash on the Forth Road Bridge.

Fantasy appears in work by many Scottish writers, such as Muriel Spark and Ronald Frame. And though social realism is the dominant feature of 20th-century Scottish writing, the continued attraction of fantasy suggests we need other ways of exploring human behaviour and existence; and to do that, we have to find other worlds to explore, discover new ways of seeing the obvious.