First published by Scottish Review, 06/02/2012.
The UK dance world, or at least those inhabitants circulating within reach of Covent Garden, were apparently “stunned” last week when principle dancer Sergei Polunin resigned from the Royal Ballet. Given that he’s just 22 years old, it would appear that Polunin is looking to (a) let his hair down after years of hard graft, and (b) further his career outside the perceived restrictions that come from being a member of a traditional ballet company.
Certainly the latter take was the view held by a fellow Ukranian dancer, and former Royal Ballet principal, interviewed by the BBC. Ivan Putrov described Polunin — who was appearing in his new show — as an artist. Quite succinctly, he said: ‘A craftsman just does what he’s told. An artist creates’.
I have no real interest in ballet, beyond an appreciation of the years of physical and artistic training necessary to ensure that a human body can do things a human body isn’t designed to do. So why did I find Putrov’s take on the Polunin story so annoying? And why do I think that a talented young dancer quitting the Royal Ballet in London has any relevance to the arts in Scotland?
At the heart of Putrov’s comment is a snobbish dichotomy that raises the artist above the craftsman (or woman), so-called high art above so-called low art, the concept above its realisation. I personally think it insulting for Putrov to suggest that a craftsman is nothing more than a mindless automaton, incapable of being creative — you just have to look at a hand-carved piece of furniture to understand that the two can be mutually inclusive.
Still, this false (and inherently pretentious) distinction has been with us for quite a while. As a result, a sculptor’s skills and talents, when used for self-expression and destined for display in a gallery or public space, are automatically imbued with a greater cultural value than those of a designer who ‘applies’ the same principles of shape and form to create something that looks attractive in the kitchen but is still capable of safely boiling water.
Frankly, I think this is wrong; give me the sculpted work of Sir Jonathan Ive over that of Damien Hurst any day — not least because Ive’s work is much more likely to become a useful and enriching part of people’s lives.
It’s not just about the visual arts, though; a similar attitude seems to lie at the heart of the ongoing (and increasingly dull) ‘debate’ over the relative values of Scottish literary fiction versus Scottish crime fiction. A recent discussion published in The List, between authors Alan Bissett, Helen Fitzgerald and Allan Wilson — nominally discussing whether we’re in a new ‘golden era’ of Scottish writing — almost immediately staggered into the idea that the ‘saleable brand’ of tartan noire is eclipsing and endangering more ‘radical and experimental’ work by Scottish authors which, as a result, finds it harder to get on the shelves of Waterstone’s. Was this, instead of artist versus craftsman, the same argument reframed as ‘creative’ literary author versus ‘skilled’ genre hack?
As Fitzgerald sadly felt forced to point out, even work marketed as tartan noire ‘can be both radical and challenging’ in terms of style and content. Of course, the reality is that much of it isn’t; that’s a shame, not least because crime fiction is one of many genres inevitably judged by its worst examples. This is a two-way street, though; just because a ‘literary’ author is potentially more free to experiment when it comes to how they tell the stories they need to tell, it doesn’t automatically follow that the results will be any good.
Take Irvine Welsh, for example. He’s often held up as a prime example of radical Scottish literary fiction, but arguably he has never bettered ‘Trainspotting’, either in terms of literary quality or cultural impact — although it’s a moot point that the latter was down more to Danny Boyle’s film adaptation, which imposed a more traditional narrative structure on the story. Welsh, of course, later this year publishes a ‘Trainspotting’ prequel. Now, I fully accept that ‘Skagboys’ could well be brilliant — I genuinely hope it is — but is looking back to the early 1980s really the best way to reflect 21st-century Scotland? Or is it just Welsh’s not-so-subtle way of belatedly delivering yet another ‘Trainspotting 2’?
In any case, all three writers in The List article betrayed a somewhat blinkered vision to any writers outside their ken; plenty of writers living north of the border write neither crime nor literary fiction. Many of the most prominent SF and fantasy authors currently published in the UK are based in Scotland; while two Scots, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, are arguably at the top of the American comic book industry. Much of their work is as individualistic and innovative as any so-called literary author; yet, they’re still less likely to be taken seriously, at least by Scotland’s literati. Well, they’re not Iain Banks, are they?
Bissett — as I wrote in my review of his most recent novel, ‘Pack Men’, for Scotland on Sunday — ‘writes — subtly, intelligently and yet also passionately — about men’. Wilson’s debut short story collection, ‘Wasted in Love’, is an assured treasury of lean, poignant tales, brilliantly expressing some universal truths through the small moments in people’s lives. Sadly, I’ve yet to read any of Fitzgerald’s work, but I’ve certainly heard good things about it.
All three are expressive writers, well-skilled in their trade, using the most apt literary tools to complete the job in hand. That, I believe, is how they should be judged; not by assumptions based on the genre labels applied to their work, whether by themselves or their publishers. (And, yes, in terms of form, readership and general perception, Scottish literary fiction is as much a genre as crime, SF, fantasy or misery memoirs. Continued denial of this is no longer an option.)
That some writers are financially more successful than others in terms of sales is part and parcel of commercial publishing; it always has been. Writing, for the vast majority of people, is no get-rich-quick scheme.
Bissett, Fitzgerald and Wilson are right in one sense, though; this is certainly a good time to be a writer in Scotland. There’s a genuine vibrancy in the air, in part because people are finding new ways to get their work out there. That’s exciting and a challenge. But let’s just drop the fallacy that artists and literary writers are innately more deserving of praise and attention than skilled practitioners who do their job equally well and attract a large and loyal audience.
