How Do You Say Glocal In The Queen’s English : Out Of Paulifonei : Critical / Creative Reading-Writing In The Service Of The Remix

As if it were now, amidst the polyphony of Britain’s reimagining postcolonial realities, the voice of Irvine Welsh arises. In the novel Trainspotting (1993), he criticizes commodity culture, focusing on the specificities of the 1980s Scottish milieu. Particularly, the way the Edinburgh drug subcultures--mainly heroin scenes--are presented reveals the impact of drug addiction on youth demographics, but also accentuates countercultural potential in those habitually apathetic strata of the society. Renton, a character in the novel, spells out a form of resistance against oppression:

Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food intae yir mouth. Choose rotting away, pishing and shiteing yersel in a home, a total fucking embarrassment tae the selfish, fucked-up brats ye’ve produced. Choose life. Well, ah choose not to choose. (Trainspotting 187-8)

            The novel amplifies the voices of these typically indifferent social classes. The narrative technique reveals certain aspects of the pluralism of cultural vocabularies. There are no centered protagonists. There is no main narrator either, no conventionally structured narrative line. The tone is mutable. The characters take turns in telling the tale. Perspectives change. Stories change. Accents vary. Either democratic, multucultural, or merely multivoiced is the polyphony in the novel. Sometimes, it is as cacophonic as the world in Vurt. From daily junkie confusion, hope lurks between the agony of withdrawal and needle sent paradise. Such extreme vacillations create space for the choices emerging in the interstices of a junkie routine.

Renton questions an assumption that to choose life does not affirm a person’s credibility for such a choice. He accentuates social control and socially constructed realities that do not acknowledge the role of an individual and, by extension, deny a possibility of agency. An individual is not credited for successfully choosing to live, according to such logic. Absurdly enough, to fail to make such a choice would not necessarily be attributed to the society. Or, it would, but in a different way. One would imagine that the society would explain it as a failure to choose them and, therefore, failure to choose life. An individual obviously does not play a major role in that scenario. An unrecommendable form of cultural practice as it is, drug abuse seems to be a way for Renton and his acquaintances to resist the imposed modes of living.  Paradoxically, drugs act as a shelliesque (self)dissolving power. And yet, in some cases, overcoming them initiates the shift towards the reconstitution of wholesome energy.

They can also play a role in a crosscultural exchange: “Iggy Pop looks right at me as he sings the line:”’America takes drugs in psychic defence’; only he [Tommy] changes ‘America’ for ‘Scatlin’” (Trainspotting 75). Tommy assumes American culture through rock & roll: it is Iggy Pop’s concert, Iggy himself is looking at him and, as Tommy realizes, describes him more accurately than anybody else has ever done before. Via this transnational communication, Welsh addresses the question of cultural boundaries in the era of globalization. The way he portrays the notion of the nation stimulates questioning national myth as such. From the juxtaposition of the Scottish national code with a supranational cultural exchange, it can be inferred that encounters with different cultural idioms can sensitize one to the culture different from one’s own. Such a transcultural stand implies that the adopted elements are not experienced as alien, threatening, but are selectively fused with the existing ones.

In order to unpack Scottish national myth, Welsh devises a vernacular that combines standard English with the mid twentieth century Edinburgh junkie slang and local dialect shared by the Scottish communities beyond the drug scenes:

It’s nae good blaming it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by  wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fucking low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. (Trainspotting 78)

Insistence on the local idiolect is an anticolonial statement. Since it is informed by a crosscultural conversation, it, actually, lives in a form of a glocal idiolect, which is a way for youth cultures to rebel against the entrenched traditional gender, national, and other cultural stereotypes. They politicize typical junkie self-loathing: “Ah don’t hate the English. They jist git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots” (Trainspotting 78). The reluctance one experiences encountering difficult choices between and among cultures in contact is undoubtedly depicted in the following: “Ah never felt British. It’s ugly and artificial. But ah never felt Scottish, either” (Trainspotting 90). The ambivalence reflects Britain reconfiguring the postcolonial image from the imperial myth of an unrivaled power to orwellian neocolonial haze. Clearly, it calls for the choice of the postfuture one lives and can live.

For many of us in the twenty-first century globalized world amid the rise of reactionary, seemingly progressive policies, the dilemmas of unlikely trainspotters in Welsh's novel resonate with the uneasiness we oftentimes experience faced with the choices we make on a daily basis. One questions a transcultural attitude because of neocolonial streaks in the world politics. At the same time, one does not whole-heartedly embrace the defensive stance because of supracultural beliefs. In any case, one does what one can to conjure up modes of resistance against multiple oppression. It is the source of inspiration for and the right to the remix.

The poetics of Trainspotting is compelling because it reassures one that making a choice is important and possible. From the postfuturist angle, it is a reminder about the peculiarities of an encounter with the text: it reinstates a frequently ignored fact that a novel and reading occupy slightly diverse levels. This evokes the idea about the novel as a source of learning the remix.

            Trainspotting  resensitizes one to literary subtleties, thereby reanimating and reawaking one's DJing skills, i.e., reequipping one with reading-writing-remixing tools and inspiration. Welsh's novel can be criticized for lacking an overt ethical stand toward morally questionable conduct such as drug abuse, that it is insufficiently critical of the phenomenon. An extreme reading would even see the novel as divested of any attitude whatsoever regarding moral aspects of addiction and lives of addicts. The possibility for such critiques of the novel's nonjudgmental approach to the subject matter might result from their overlooking, ignoring, or failing to make a clear distinction between the meta level and the object level.

            More precisely, stylistic interventions in certain scenes may trick the reader into believing that details from a life of a junkie presented in a piece of literature can be experienced in exactly the same the way in the world off the page. That, of course, is far from being true. For example, the episode “House Arrest” depicts Mark Renton's tantalizing withdrawal. Back to his parents' place, he feels everything but the warmth and security that his mother and father are communicating. His sickness is a shield that, instead of providing protection, causes hardly manageable irritability. Instead of safeguarding, it obstructs communication. His is a nightmarish trip through a magnified pshychodrama mixing the elements of the reimagined tragic past events, the reality of his parents' house, and brainwashing TV programs that, as if his own consciousness weren't noisy enough, bombard the tortured brain drained of endorphin. Welsh's portrayal is a psycho-horror extravaganza that colors the scenes in the episode with specific subtlety suggestive of the unheard layers of comfort amidst the brutality of emotional and physical pain. As a reading experience, it can be frustrating, but it is also deeply moving.

            Further, the episode “Glass” shows the characters Begbie and Renton on a night out in the company of their respective girlfriends June and Hazel. The relationships are awkward. The atmosphere is tense. The pub is overcrowded. The bar is barricaded by the armies of thirsty locals, fun-starved tourists, and short-tempered eccentrics. It takes ages to order a drink. It takes a lot of patience, too. Begbie, a true devotee to violence, is in the upstairs area of the pub, waiting for his beer. Memories of Julie Mathieson, one of the numerous AIDS victims during the eighties when sweeping polytoxicomania was taking its toll in Scotland as in many other parts of the world, seem to prompt Begbie's impatience to escalate. But with a weirdo like Begie, it could be just about anything. However, he waits for his beer before the action starts.  “He takes one fucking gulp” (Trainspotting 79) and then he elegantly throws the empty glass  over his head. It falls in the downstairs part of the pub. On somebody's head. It cracks open. Graphic violence is Welsh's commentary on macho-cult, other dominance-driven cultural phenomena, and oppressive social mechanisms.

            “The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival” shows Mark Renton sick beyond belief. Desperate to score, he sees no solution for yet another torturing withdrawal. No way to alleviate pains and anxiety. Only the hostility of his room. But it could be just about any other place. No place is worse than any other when withdrawal transforms the world into a hopeless atopia. Typically, it would be at Swanney's, or Mother Superior's, as they called the main dealer in Leith, where consolation could be found. Not this time, though. This time it's the Muirhoose guy, Mike Forrester (in the movie played by the writer himself), who is the healer. And yet, it turns out that not much luck awaits there either. Instead of the much needed heroin shot, only rectal opium suppositories can be had. Mikey wouldn't even let Rents administer the drug in his apartment. Humiliation is mounting up as the day is heading towards its apex.  

            Mark is in a public toilet, a supersevere sensory blow even for a person in best shape. For a sick junkie, it is perhaps just as bad as any other site—just a place that can become a more pleasant environment once it enables an intake of the much needed substance. Not an easy task, especially for a heroin user suffering from constipation. But, one does what one can. And Mark does it. He is no longer constipated. Lava of feces flushes the filth encrusted toilet bowl. Alas, along with the organic excrement, the eruption expels the suppositories down the toilet. Instantly, he is elbow-deep in the thick, brownish liquid--the vast territory full of treasure known and unknown alike. What is known and had been lost was found now. Safely reinserted.   

            In the 1996 screen adaptation of Welsh’s novel of the same title, Danny Boyle presents a take on the psychedelia of sickness. The movie puts a spin on the scene “House Arrest” stressing an aesthetic crossbreed of light-handed comics iconography, urban youth idiom, and a multiple noise attack. In such a hybrid voice, Boyle marvelously flashes out the most striking aspects of the intricacies of a junkie's relationships with parents, friends, oneself, and the world. In Boyle's movie the tension of the “Glass” episode, that Welsh depicts so vividly, galvanizes the grotesqueness of failed relationships and confusion. This almost hyperreal-verging-on-the-surreal effect is, to a great extent, created thanks to the stunning performance of Robert Carlyle who plays Begbie. 

            Danny Boyle's imagery underscores weirdness of the toilet scene in “The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival.” Mark, played by Ewan McGregor, is in the worst toilet in Scotland, as the notice on the door informs the visitor about the experience s/he might expect. Yet, Mark's need and perseverance turns that nasty hole into a pleasuredome. Not only is he diving through the hardly penetrable mass of excretion, but, as he is progressing, the brownish thickness is clearing and gives way to a soothing shade of turquoise. He is on a paradise-like underwater trip. The whole universe seems to be in sync with his now smooth movements, his smile, and, above all, Brian Eno's soundtrack “Deep Blue Day” from the album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983).

            Having fought the initial olfactory attack, affecting the tactile sensations as well, he soon finds his  whole being engaged and all his energies mobilized towards just one clearly defined goal—to win the drug back. And he does. Mark is relieved. In the dodgiest of circumstances. Against all odds.

            So is the viewer. And the reader, especially once the adventure reiterates the distinction constitutive of an encounter with a stylized, aesthetic, meta, and/or imaginary versions of the everyday. In particular, the “House Arrest” episode is horrifying, but woven with a touch of humor both in the novel and in the movie. In contrast, the severity of the experience of withdrawal can hardly be linked to the narrative charm of the Trainspotting episode.

            The “Glass” episode is grotesquely hilarious, while the seductiveness of that stylized take on violence cannot be imagined as part of the everyday. “The First Day of the Edinburgh Festival” is both mindblowingly funny and nauseating. On the object level, it would be the feeling of being “the lowest of the fucking low” divested of any possibility of self-indulgence in the devastating misery, to say the very least. On the object level, any aspect of the life of a junkie depicted in the novel and/or in the movie features no ornamentation, no stylization, no traits one finds on the meta level. There are works whose aesthetics delivers a message about such an awareness. They need no overt moral commentary in order to make it clearer than it is.