Marabou Stork Nightmares: Irvine Welsh's anthropological vision

It has been suggested that the internal divisions in the notion of ‘Scottishness’ have led Scotland's Enlightenment writers to approach the nation with an ‘anthropological’ and ‘anthologising’ vision. In this article, I argue that we can see such a tendency in the work of the contemporary novelist Irvine Welsh, whose second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares, dissects the masculinist tribalism of Scottish underclass culture. In performing the anthropological activity of observing and recording, Welsh anthologises Scotland's linguistic multiplicity and yet, through first person narrative, draws attention to the act of narration, the event of speaking which renders futile the possibility of detachment. Narrative complicity becomes paralleled with Scotland's guilty political history.