Dissecting Glasgow: Alasdair Gray's Poor Things
Autor
Díaz Martínez, MarioFecha
2000Resumen
Poor Things is, to a large extent, concerned with the representation
of the city of Glasgow during its year as European City of Culture. The
novel not only shows that there is more to the Victorian era than is
evoked by the conservative propaganda of those years, but also suggests
that there is more to Glaswegian culture than that which was marketed
during 1990. In this paper I will analyse the three main narratives
that converge in Poor Things, each written from a distinct perspective
and at different points in history, and the links they create between Victorian
Glasgow and contemporary Glasgow. We will study how Gray
uses multiple narrative perspectives and historical frames of reference
to recontextualise contemporary political and ideological concerns
within historical discourses, re-historicising the debate about contemporary
Glasgow and making historiographic reconstruction a central
feature of the whole novel. The paper will also explore how the author
uses the history and the landscape of Glasgow to chart a new anatomy
of the city, fashioning these images and ideals into a new mythography
of Glasgow, against which the contemporary city can be measured.