Scotia Extremis by Andy Jackson and Brian Johnstone sampler

Scotland: a Split Personality?
I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur / Extremes meet
– Hugh MacDiarmid
if a nation can be said to have a soul then the soul of the Scottish nation
is surely one which is permanently strung out between the extremes that
MacDiarmid evokes in what must be one of his most quotable lines. Taken
from his great early poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, it seems to sum
up both the irascible poet and his nation so well.
It was not, of course, his only foray into examining the split psyche of the
country. He also explored the notion of the Caledonian Antisyzygy, a term
coined by G Gregory Smith in 1919 to encapsulate the conflicting extremes
within the culture of Scotland and which MacDiarmid expanded on in a
1931 essay. In his original essay Smith wrote of Scottish literature as being
‘remarkably varied, and becoming, under the stress of foreign influence, almost
a zigzag of contradictions.’
Perhaps the most famous examples of this ‘split personality’ in our country’s
culture are Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.
Such dichotomies persist throughout Scottish literary history, however. The
rural/urban split goes as far back as the 1480s and Robert Henrysoun’s The
Taill of the Uponlandis Mous and the Burges Mous.
In Scotland, rivalries seem to be almost a given. It is not difficult to think
of examples: Edinburgh / Glasgow, Rangers / Celtic, Native Tongue / English,
Protestant/Catholic, not to mention Scottish/British that seemed to be the choice
presented to Scots in 2014’s independence referendum. Within Calvinism,
Scotland’s very own rigorous form of Protestantism, there is the conflict between
the saved – those predestined for heaven – and the eternally damned. Just read
Burns’s Holy Willie’s Prayer for elucidation.
The whole split personality of the country is perhaps best seen in two
contrasting attitudes with which Scottishness is associated: the posturing of
‘wha’s like us? – damn few an they’re aa deid’ and the cultural self-abnegation
exemplified by the so-called ‘Scottish cringe’. Where else can anyone live – and
write – who lives in Scotland other than ‘whaur extremes meet’?
Brian Johnstone, February 2019
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