Chaos and Dissolution?: Deconstruction and Scotland in the Later Fiction of Robin Jenkins
Autor
Ágústsdóttir, IngibjörgFecha
2000Resumen
This paper will examine Robin Jenkins’s representation of Scotland
and the wider world in his most recent fiction. It will demonstrate
how Jenkins deconstructs the idea of a society with a fixed set of values
and moral codes, for example through the troubled sense of identity
and the obvious breakdown of moral and human values portrayed in his
novel Just Duffy. In a characteristic manner of ambivalence and irony,
Jenkins juxtaposes the postmodern with the traditional, the subversive
with the reactionary, and the disturbing with the moving, so that we are
presented with a world where there are no set answers to any of our
questions, independent of whether they are inward —or outward— looking.
Throughout his later fiction, Jenkins criticises the increasingly
immoral, hypocritical, and disordered vision of modern society, which
ultimately emerges as a deeply disturbing reminder to his readers, relevant
not only to Scotland and Scottish issues, but also to the world as
a whole. Accordingly, Jenkins’s later fiction reveals a concern with a
Scotland where the whole idea of society or community is falling apart,
leaving the reader with an uneasy feeling that Scotland’s young people
have been betrayed by their own community and by the political upholding
of the centuries-old class divisions of British society. Moreover,
the reader is constantly made aware of the pitfalls of morality, of
how a person’s or an organization’s determination to work for a “good”
cause can ultimately lead to evil, which in turn becomes applicable to
more universal issues such as terrorism and world politics.