Repressive Reading: Alasdair Gray's Rhizome-as-Novel

Let's start at the very beginning,

A very good place to start. --Oscar Hammerstein, "Do Re Mi"

To start at the very beginning: the question of how the “beginning” paragraphs of a book relate to the narrative that “follows” is an interesting one when applied to Alasdair Gray's novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books. It is a seemingly straightforward consideration, until one realizes that the “beginning” paragraphs – that is to say, the first few pages of the book – fall under the heading of “Book 3.” Are these really the “beginning” paragraphs? “Book 1” doesn't start until page 121; there's a “Prologue” on page 107; and an “Epilogue” starting on page 480 which, according to the nameless commentator figure, actually “performs the office of an introduction to the work as a whole (the so-called 'Prologue' being no prologue at all)” (499). What are we to make of this? Where are we to locate the so-called “beginning” paragraphs, in order to analyze the narrative that “follows”?

This question is a central one, for Lanark, and the novel itself actively and intentionally fights against an answer. A compelling model of the book's operation may be found in Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the “rhizome,” first elaborated in their book A Thousand Plateaus: “A plateau is always in the middle,” they say, “not at the beginning or end. A rhizome is made of plateaus” (21). According to this model, a rhizome is an assemblage that resists categorization and systematization, refuses to plot points but instead creates lines of connectivity and flow. For Deleuze and Guattari, the multiplicities offered by the rhizome are an answer to what they see as the artificial unity which has pervaded Western culture and society throughout its history; a unity which, in its categorical obstruction of the flow of desire in the name of stability and normality, ultimately leads to fascism, on all levels: state, social, individual.

Thus, the unconventional arrangement of the four books, prologue, epilogue, and interlude that make up Lanark may be read through this idea: the notion of “chronology” implies a unity, a univocal, directional movement, anchored in points: “the beginning,” “the end” -- points that give a center and an orientation to the system and allow it to function “normally.” But Lanark defies chronology. Lanark is a plateau, always in the middle: it “begins” before it begins, it “ends” before it ends, and all segments are capable of being connected to any other segment. This flow is both the natural state of the novel, and one of the major preoccupations of a number of its characters. Describing a human body in its natural state, for instance, the character Dr. Munro at one point explains that “the heat made by a body should move easily through it, overflowing the pores, penis, anus, eyes, lips, limbs and fingertips in acts of generosity and self-preservation” (68). And Gray himself has noted that he felt no need to harmonize the various segments of the book, saying that he simply “yoked the bits together and expected the reader's interest to flow over all, as my imagination had done” (Axelrod 107).

For Deleuze and Guattari, to attempt to force a rhizomatic assemblage into an arboreal structure is to perform an act of violence: “The notion of unity (unite) appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity by the signifier or a corresponding subjectification proceeding” (8). For Lanark, on the level of narrative content, we observe correspondences: it is the obstruction of the flow of heat through the body described by Dr. Munro that leads to the various physical deformations of principal interest throughout Book 3.

Even more interesting, though, are the correspondences on the level of actual textual arrangement, thus: It is possible to impose a certain numerical-textual unity on the novel, starting with Book 1, and proceeding “in order” through to Book 4. And read in this way, the story does make a certain chronological sense: we begin with Thaw's childhood, progress through his adolescence, his madness, and his death, which takes us through the end of Book 2. Book 3 begins with Lanark in an otherwise empty train car, apparently, by this reading, some sort of reincarnation of Thaw – a reading supported by the text: when Lanark asks of the Oracle, “did Thaw die tragically?” the Oracle responds: “No. He botched his end. It set no example, not even a bad one. He was unacceptable to the infinite bright blankness, the clarity without edge which only selfishness fears. It flung him back into a second-class railway carriage, creating you” (219). The novel then continues with Lanark wandering through a foreign and disconcerting dystopia.

This is a fine reading, and one that makes sense narratively and textually. However, to attempt to confine a rhizome into a unitary structure is, again, an act of violence; the effects of repression are neuroses, psychoses, and fascism. This reading gives us a much more “normal” story then the admittedly confusing fragments with which we were originally presented. However, we have effected a repression, and thus can reasonably expect some dysfunction to follow. To discover what this may be, consider Freud's description of the progression of Dementia Paranoides (paranoid schizophrenia), as formulated in his analysis of the memoir of the psychotic Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber: "The patient has withdrawn from the persons in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed on to them” (146), says Freud. This fits the reading: midway through the “Epilogue” the voice of the “author” notes that “the Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving” (484).

The result of this withdrawal of his love from the world – this refusal to allow the heat/desire to flow – according to Freud, is a sort of internal catastrophe which is projected into the patient's perceived world as a delusion of the end of the world. This progression matches up with the Thaw narrative almost perfectly: Thaw, in his madness, withdraws his love from the world, after which comes his “suicide” -- but it is never made clear whether or not this is an actual suicide, and the Oracle refuses to specify. It is, anyway, a passable stand-in for “the end of the world.”

According to Freud, the internal withdrawal from the world, and not the more readily-identifiable hallucinations and delusions, is the true symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. For Freud, the hallucinations and delusions which follow the “end of the world” breakdown are actually an attempt by the patient to heal and cope with a world which is now entirely foreign. In order to explain the continuing existence of a world which has ended, “the paranoiac builds it up again, not more splendid, it is true, but at least so that he can once more live in it. He builds it up by the work of his delusions” (147). Granted, there has been a “profound internal change” in the world – but, even still, “the man has recaptured a relation, and often a very intense one, to the people and things in the world, although the relation may be a hostile one now, where formerly it was sympathetic and affectionate" (147). We can thus read Books 3 and 4 as Thaw/Lanark attempting to recapture a relation to the world. Thus the hallucinatory atmosphere, the dystopian inclination, the almost familiar nature of things, and so forth.

So: we have chosen a “beginning” from which to extract our “beginning paragraphs,” and have demonstrated that this anchoring and limitation of the text renders a serviceable reading. But in doing this we have also created a text that no longer has the joyous, natural flow of itself; but is, rather, a paranoid schizophrenic – just as, for the characters in the novel, repression of heat results in physical deformation and, for Deleuze and Guattari, repression of the naturally rhizomatic results in fascism. How, then, can we analyze the “narrative that follows” via the “beginning paragraphs” without establishing an artificial and repressive system that will allow us to choose those paragraphs? This is the wrong question to ask. Lanark is the rhizome-as-novel: every paragraph is always already the “beginning paragraph.”

Works Cited

Axelrod, Mark. “An Epistolary Interview, Mostly with Alasdair Gray.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 15.2 (1995): 106-116.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 3-25.

Freud, Sigmund. “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia.” Three Case Histories. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Touchstone, 1996. 83-160.

Gray, Alasdair. Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing, Ltd., 2002.