Escaping The Trap

The Problem of Pornography, Politics and Postmodernism 

in Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine

Classifications in and of themselves are a powerful tool. The strong characterize the weak to keep them in check. They use stereotypes and labels to cement them firmly in the place where they’re most useful to systems at large. Men muzzle vulnerable women. Colonizers smack down weaker nations. The literary industry tie-up works of fiction in chains to hold them firmly in place and away from the masses seeking entertainment and prize committees responsible for launching careers. Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine is considered to be a shocking piece of pornography, a rebellious political novel, as an example of textbook postmodern storytelling. It falls under the umbrella of literary genius to some, to others it is a weak and puerile rambling and thus suffers a similar fate as its protagonist. Gray’s fiction too was “born in a trap… and will live and die in that trap… because the trap is getting fuller all the time” (Gray, 204). 

I argue that Janine cannot fit into a single genre like pornography, political literature, or postmodernism. Instead, Gray blends tropes from each genre and beyond to create a multi-layered caricature of psychological dissent that explores themes of power, isolation, identity, disillusionment, and the absurdity of human nature. In this essay, I will examine the various boxes people have attempted to place Alasdair Gray’s Janine in and the implications of each. I argue that the brilliance of the author’s favourite of his works is its capacity to exist somewhere beyond classification, much like the man himself. 

BONDAGE & BAWGAGS

1982, Janine As Pornography

In 1964, United States Justice Potter Stewart defined "pornography" in terms of legislation. He said he "shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material... [b]ut I know it when I see it ..." With that in mind, surely a novel so shamelessly filled with violent sexual fantasies and prostitution rings would fit into the genre of pornography. But with any output from the multi-hyphenate creative that is Alasdair Gray, 1982, Janine is more than meets the naked eye. The novel extends beyond the limitations of pornographic literature. It leverages graphic sexual imagery as a narrative device to explore the power dynamics of women versus men, people versus society and as a camping mechanism for personal and cultural disillusionment.

In The Pornographic Imagination, Susan Sontag wrote that “pornography isn’t a form that can parody itself… [it] is a theater of types, never of individuals” (Sontag, 217). It takes a genius of a certain caliber to use pornography as a vessel for parody. In Janine, Gray uses sex and sarcasm as deliberate narrative devices to delve into the commodification of desire, the masturbatory nature of governing, and the suffocation of the lower class. Graphic sexual images are used throughout the novel to shock readers but also to confront them with fundamental human truths that are often difficult to swallow. 

The essential truth of Janine is that Jock McLeish is a failure. The main protagonist failed to court his first love, failed to satiate her loyalty, and to forgive her for her infidelity. He failed to escape the trap laid out by his wife just like he failed to impregnate her. Jock refuses to acknowledge his complicity in his failures, so he crafts fantasies where women deserve the violence he imagines for them and thus, "a kind of mirror play is taking place: while Jock is a prisoner himself, a prisoner of his past, his work and perverted fantasies (which are for the most of the sadist, “bondage” type), he constantly dreams of subjecting, locking, bonding others and gaining control of over women" (Tukacs, 13). He failed as a man at the hands of women, so he must punish women in his mind over and over again. 

In addition to the power dynamic between men and women in Jock’s fantasies, Gray expands on the shock value of bondage by exploring larger themes of individual escapism and cultural disillusionment. If “each specific erotic fantasy is also a generic fantasy…” (Sontag, 227), then Jock uses fantasies to escape a life of isolation and pain that is, in his mind, largely caused by women, but in actuality are societal traps. 

His mundane existence and feelings of masculine inadequacy stand in stark contrast to the power dynamics established in his imagination. But the surreal set-up of his fantasies reveal an inner guilt over his complicity in his boredom, of his alienation from the world around him. Jock whispers to himself as he establishes the scene in his pornographic imaginings that “later, when Janine is trapped and trying to escape, she will remember that she was given a chance to leave but refused because of money. We all have a moment when the road forks and we take the wrong turning” (Gray, 26). The reader could easily swap out the character of Janine for the protagonist himself, perhaps not tied up in a prostitution ring but instead trapped in a systemic cage of abuse, humiliation, and mistreatment. Jock determined his sad fate in the same ways he fantasized Janine to.

Gray wrote a narrative to reflect the nature of people using sexual fantasies to control, distract, and escape from the realities that the powerful chain them up in. “Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one’s consciousness, for death itself" (Sontag, 222). In Janine, sexual fantasies act as the canary in the mine of Jock’s dangerous desire. In the end, Jock’s pornographic fantasies turn more and more violent and culminate in an attempted suicide. Jock’s vulgar imagination offers a distraction from death, at the very least the cerebral and emotional death that Jock exists in as we meet him in chapter one. These fantasies eventually lead him to the ultimate celebration of death, swallowing a bottle of pills with a wash of whisky. 

Make not mistake, Jock’s suicide attempt was a celebration. All the characters in his head were present for the party, including God himself. Through his use of irony and sarcasm (a mandatory tool in any Scotmans repertoire), Gray highlights the absurdity of Jock’s lot in life. Sarcasm acts as a coping mechanism for the narrator and a vessel for truth-telling in the narrative. Sarcasm is used to emphasize Jock’s hypocrisy by exaggerating his fantasies against his emasculation, and his conservative beliefs set against the reality of his placement in society. Jock deliberately remains detached and removed from his existential crisis by creating elaborate pornographic fantasies, but also subconsciously by his ironic and flippant tone. But even the most nihilistic narrators like Jock reveal their vulnerability and insecurity. As Jock grapples with his hidden feelings of inadequacy as a man and as a Scotsman, his pesky religious roots begin to peak through the cracks of consciousness in the narrator’s most desperate moments. Over and over Jock loses control of his daydreaming andreaches out to a God he says he doesn’t believe in for rabsolution. “Do not make me remember more,” he begs, “I do not deserve mercy but I need it. Give me peace God'' (Gray, 153). He even speaks to God directly, albeit sarcastically, as he battles with his suicide attempt. In Janine, pornographic fantasies lead to remembering a pathetic past that leads to a violent suicide attempt. Ultimately, they all lead him back to God’s heavy judgements.

Janine is a novel defined by a man’s desperate attempt to control himself. To delay his climax, even in the ruminations as he approaches a deliberate death. Sontag explains that “... the pornographic imagination says something worth listening to, albeit in a degraded and often unrecognizable form” (232). Gray leverages this pornographic imagination to reveal a hidden truth, but that does not make Janine a pornographic novel. Gray proves that pornography as a parody is a reliable method to reveal power dynamics between people and society. In the end, people make their beds. Jock imagines women he blames for his lot in life lying in them. If Janine had it coming in Jock’s twisted mind then Scotland did too. “In the case of Janine, the wrong choice results in isolation, similarly to Scotland, which could have had a chance to create its parliament in 1979, but was rejected” (Tukacs, 16). 

Gray shocks and invites readers to confront uncomfortable truths about their disappointment and victimhood when he uses Jock as a proxy to explain, “If a country is not just a tract of land but a whole people then clearly Scotland has been fucked. I mean that word in the vulgar sense of misused to give satisfaction or advantage to another” (Gray, 136). Thus Gray reveals the ethos of Janine. Not a pornographic novel, but a novel that leverages pornography as a parody to confront readers with uncomfortable truths about human nature and society at large.

Janine explores power dynamics through the lens of a man’s violent obsessions with what lies between imagined women’s legs to escape the demons between his ears. Pornography and sarcasm are used to pull back the curtains on isolation, emasculation, desire, control, and pursuit of meaning in a chaotic world. Graphic sexual imagery is used by a man desperate to distract himself from his personal failings and from the failings of his nation amidst a political structure he has no control over.

FUCKED NATIONS & FORGOTTEN HISTORIES

1982, Janine As Political

Jock’s Sontag asks him in the realm of his memory, “How can I forget politics when your fantasy has such a convincing political structure?” (Gray, 57). The reader can ask something similar of 1982, Janine, as a whole. Gray’s narrative is inextricably linked to the Glasgow of his day. At the time, Scotland was inundated with severe social, cultural, financial, and political shifts. The economy was in decline, industries were collapsing and Margaret Thatcher’s policies were beginning to choke the Scottish nation. But while Gray had Scotland very much in mind as he wrote Janine, he set the backdrop of his protagonist's fantasies in the glamour of America’s West to extend it beyond a stereotype of political genre or a state of the nation novel. Janine uses political themes in the same way it uses pornography to examine systems of power, isolation, and identity and thus transcends the limitations of a political novel.

Gray’s Glasgow was specifically challenged by industrialization and societal collapse, which not only affected livelihoods but also seeped into the psyche of the Scottish people. “I am very sorry God, I would like to ignore politics but POLITICS WILL NOT LET ME ALONE” (Gray, 221). Anything Gray has written has been affected by the politics of his day. This response is not a uniquely Scottish affliction, but it is certainly a defining theme of the novel and why many critics have penned Gray as a specifically political writer and have sanctioned his works under this literary umbrella. 

Throughout the novel, Jock grapples with his sense of self as a man untethered in a sea of societal shifts in the same way Scotland did in the years following the 1979 Scottish Devolution Referendum. “The much-criticized pornographic fantasies are then not gratuitous at all but stand for Scotland’s position in the 1980s, dominated by Thatcher’s ideology: contempt, abuse, exploitation, entrapment, isolation, “bondage,” emptiness and stealing the North Sea oil reserves" (Tukacs, 15). Before his book begins, Gray touches on the issue of Scottishness while summarizing his ninth chapter as “an empty future, a colourful present, a fucked nation, and more forgotten history” (Gray, Table of Contents). Written during the first years of the decade and completed in 1983, Janine was an artistic product of Margaret Thatcher’s first term. 

Thus an odd issue of consent exists within Janine. Jock fantasizes about women with “pangs of excitement…” as the abuses begin and women who “trembling and aghast obey the pressure of the collar…” (Gray, 144-145). Jock's fictionalized women consent to their abusers in the same way that the Scots are active in their cultural inactivity by voting against their interests and electing leaders who mistreat them. The fantasized women in Janine have no more hope of being free from Jock’s perversions than the Scottish people have of being free from the biased London parliament, both trapped in prisons of their own makings. In the same way Gray uses pornography, he uses politics to parody power. “[In Janine, Gray] appeared to argue for a right-wing view of 1980’s Britain to try to prove its opposite - exactly the kind of thing that would appeal” (Glass, 178). Correspondingly to how Gray created a conservative character to demonstrate the insidiousness of Thatcherism, he allows Jock to brutalize those stereotypes of women too powerful to be contained anywhere, but the darkest corners of a fragile male mind. As Janine herself consented to her torture in Jock’s fantasies, so did the Scottish people after opting into the brutalization of a London-centric government that has little regard for the culture of Scotland. 

In The Modern Scottish Novel, Cairns proclaims that “Scotland is a place with a past but a place without history” (Cairns, 118). Jock’s history blends with that of his home nation. As well as being pornographic in its politics, it is also a deeply personal narrative. As father and son can’t sleep under one roof after the two men are abandoned by their wives, the past and present refuse to coincide together in a linear structure. Even after Jock’s father’s death, the legacy of the man is tossed in the bin, and the main protagonist shrugging off the loss by saying, “No good comes from brooding upon the past” (Gray, 172). And yet Jock questions his past as he questions Scottish history at large. By leveraging political motifs, Gray asks how it’s possible to imagine a future without a true understanding of our past. Jock berates himself with questions, “Why did my job start to sour? Why did my marriage start to stale? When did I start drinking too much? When did capital leave Scotland in a big way? When did the depression come to Britain? When did we start accepting a world without improvement for the unlucky? When did we start accepting a future guaranteed only by the police, the armies, and an expanding weapons race?” (Gray, 309). 

Janine offers a glimpse into the complexities of Scottish society at that moment in time by using political themes in the same way it uses pornography to examine systems of power, isolation, and identity and thus transcends the limitations of a political novel. Broom said to Gray in his studio years ago that “‘Lanark’s’ arrival gave a different perspective on Glasgow, on Scotland, on what was possible… [it] showed [my generation] that we could write in our voices about our places” (2). Gray continues this tradition with Janine and offers a non-linear, winding, and often random dissension into a weak man’s twisted pornographic and political power fantasies. 

Perhaps, this weaving of dissension into disillusionment and madness is why some have condemned Janine as a postmodern text. However, I believe it has more to do with that complicated and surreal legacy of Scottishness itself. In the end, Janine is a testament to Gray’s deep understanding and irrevocable love for Scotland. Gray is one with the nation’s psyche and has politics in mind on every page. But make no mistake, Janine is not a political novel. Gray’s novel blends themes of national identity, systemic power dynamics, and cultural bondage but also displays a deeply intimate portrayal of a single person set against the backdrop of a broken family and toxic, unsatisfying relationships. 

CONDEMNED AS A POSTMODERNIST

1982, Janine As Postmodern

Gray’s 1982, Janine is considered to be an example of postmodern literary sensibility. Its narrative and prose style blends the boundaries between reality and fantasy and not only challenges but deliberately pokes fun at the idea of traditional literary techniques. Gray explores themes like national and personal identity, power, and consciousness in Janine with lightheartedness that has been characterized as immaturity or overt intellectualization. Gray casts a wide net. But when asked about his legacy as a postmodern writer, Gray admitted that “I have never found a definition of postmodernism that gives me a distinct idea of it” (Axelrod). Academics consider a defining feature of postmodern literature to be the tendency to shatter the ideas of what conventional narrative structures can look like and what authorship means when set against the characters that lie in the story itself. Like his use of pornography and politics, Gray leverages postmodern tropes like fragmented narrative, metafiction, and intertextuality to explore power dynamics, isolation, and disillusionment in Janine.

Gray uses his protagonist’s voice to explain his use of postmodern tropes, “I am postponing the moment when I start telling my story in the difficult old fashioned way… When we cannot see our way in the world of course we circle circle circle until we stumble on a straight stretch of it…” (Gray, 182). Some stories the way they ought to be told become too painful, too nonsensical to tell when the world in which they happen is cruel and reality too unbelievable to swallow. At its core, postmodernism is an experiment in absurdity, the same can be said of pornography and politics.

Beyond a strictly academic or literary sense, Gray defined Postmodernism in A History Maker as something that “happened when landlords, businessmen, brokers and bankers who owned the rest of the world had used new technologies to destroy the power of labor unions… postmodernists had no interest in the future…” (Gray, 202). In a more literary sense, “the postmodern functions for some as a byword for obscurity or uncertainty” (Rhind, 7). Janine presents a fragmented narrative of a protagonist descending into his imagination as a means of distraction with alcoholic and drug-fuelled escapes into vicious power fantasies. But postmodernism doesn’t begin and end with a novel that manipulates ideas of reality. Yes, there is evidence of postmodern tropes in Janine like the embracing of randomness, playfulness, fragmentation, metafiction, and intertextuality; but I argue that Gray is defined more by his opposition of meaning and thus transcends the rather limiting definition of postmodernism. 

Gray expertly wields postmodern tropes as another weapon in his literary arsenal in a text that extends beyond any genre or categorization. Gray explains “I wanted Janine to be about someone whom people accept as utterly ordinary… he asserts himself only in fantasy. Of course, nobody is ordinary inside themselves, and if Janine is any good it shows this' ' (Axelrod). As the novel progresses, Jock McLeish delves deeper into himself and his past through his sexual fantasies involving a suite of characters that act as stand-ins for the women of his past and readers are encouraged to lose the tender thread of what is real and not. Chemicals are introduced along with the echoes of God himself, and the words on the page begin to betray traditional narrative structures in an attempt to disrupt the illusion of realism.

Gray knows that if we can’t trust society, we can’t trust ourselves, so he bends truth and reality alongside the literary form to his will to highlight his disillusionment. In an interview, Gray admits that “in Janine—an interior monologue novel—the speaker has a nervous breakdown conveyed by three columns of different typefaces on the same pages, each a stream of thought or feelings at war with the rest.” (Axelrod). 

1982, Janine (174-175), Alasdair Gray

Strange that Sontag’s essay on pornography lends itself so well to the problem of postmodernism as well. She asserts that “the exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness” (Sontag, 213). Gray writes in the voice of this proverbial exemplary modern artist and madman. In the climax of Janine, Jock’s subconscious lies on one side of the page and the imagined, repressed voice of God lies on the other while the fragmented, postmodern-esque narrative balances itself somewhere in between. (Gray, 174-175). Sontag poses the penultimate postmodern question, with “words like “fantasy” or “surrealism,” that only invert the guidelines of realism, clarify little… Where does fantasy, condemned by psychiatric rather than artistic standards, end and imagination begin?” (Sontag, 213). 

With Janine, Gray weaves a narrative rife with psychological anguish. Gray shows that there’s no better way to illustrate the disillusionment of Jock than by cracking the spine of the paragraph and prose structure. Jock’s stream of thought breakdown and break-up of the page was not the first time Gray has explored existential and postmodern themes. In 1957, a young and fresh Alasdair Gray was invited to submit to a Cold War exhibition to be displayed at the Glasgow McLellan Gallery dubbed “Artists Against the Bomb.” What resulted was the mural, which some have dubbed his masterwork, Glasgow Triumph of Death (Fall of Star Wormwood). The painting encourages the viewer to strain their neck and squint their eyes the way Janine causes the reader’s eyes to dart along the page. Painted long before the 1979 Scottish Devolution Referendum but in a similar state of personal and national anxiety, the painting shares with Janine, those difficult-to-define postmodern themes like disillusionment, societal insecurity, the absurdity of the human condition, and unrealistic scenarios. 

Glasgow Triumph of Death (Fall of Star Wormwood), Alasdair Gray

Gray took inspiration from Breughel’s Triumph of Death for his Glaswegian version in the same ways he took from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, and Kafka for Janine. This serves as further proof of his postmodern play by referencing past masters and masterpieces. As Gray borrows devils from his beloved novels, so does Jock borrow from his own life and loves to create his sexual fantasies. Glasgow’s Triumph of Death reflects Gray’s inner anxiety and paranoia around the inevitability of societal decay. Janine utilizes similar postmodern themes to highlight personal and national isolation and alienation. Like his use of pornography and politics, Gray leverages postmodern tropes like fragmented narrative, metafiction, and intertextuality to explore power dynamics, isolation, and disillusionment in Janine.

FOLK WHO READ FOR PLEASURE

1982, Janine As She Is

In 1982, Janine’s final chapter, Gray listed all of his influences. Perhaps Janine is more of a love letter to all those writers that came before him and condemnation all the same. How we read Janine is also based on the reader's influences. The fantasy could exist only in the pornographic sense to some; as an offensive display of masculinity. Perhaps it would be considered overly political if read by a conservative, or possibly too subtle if read by someone with more liberal inclinations. Janine could be celebrated as a postmodern novel or be left on bookshelves for fear of the intellectualized marker. Or somewhere amidst an endless slew of unrelenting classifications as vast as the people who read them. Ultimately, Janine is resistant to categorization through Gray’s expert blending of genre tropes to create an uncannily original narrative technique.I argue it is the combination of these genres and labels that paints so vivid a picture of Janine. A novel that would be incomplete if missing one of the three classifications. The combination of literary “types” weaves a surreal tapestry that plunges the innocent reader into the violent and vulgar mind of Jock McLeish. 

Time and time again Gray draws attention to the absurdity of the novel by following and then breaking the rules, perhaps in a deliberate attempt to welcome larger groups of readers into the cult of “literary fiction.” Gray admits his insecurity at being classified as a postmodern author, but I believe it to extend into any of the genres he’s been imprisoned in. “I still meet decent, intelligent folk who say they feel they ought to buy a book of mine but fear it will be too clever for them. That is what comes of being praised or condemned as a postmodernist. It is as bad as being praised or condemned as an exponent of Marxist dialectic” (Axelrod). 

Gray blurs the boundaries between the internal and external and establishes a character that could convincingly jump off the page, however horrified the reader would be. Gray successfully created a world that, sadly, most people could identify with. And yet critics have attempted to define him and trap the novel in literary categories largely unapproachable to most readers. Pornography. Politics. Postmodernism. And yet the genius of Gray is that his work, specifically Janine exists somewhere beyond classification, much like the man himself. Like the character of Jock himself, Gray transcends classification. Gray escapes the trap.

GOOD-BYE

Works Cited

• Axelrod, Max. “A Conversation with Alasdair Gray.” Dalkey Archive Press, 2 Aug. 2013, www.dalkeyarchive.com/2013/08/02/a-conversation-with-alasdair-gray-by-mark-axelrod/. 

• Brooker, Joseph. Sado-monetarism: Thatcherite subjects in Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis. Textual Practice 26 (1), pp. 135-154. ISSN 0950-236X. 2012

• Broom, Dave. ‘Alasdair Gray, Alchemist of Hope.’ The Whisky Manual. 2020, https://thewhiskymanual.uk/alasdair-gray-alchemist-of-hope/. Accessed 06 Mar. 2024.

• Glass, Rodge. Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2008.

• Gray, Alasdair. 1982 Janine. Canongate Books, 2003.

• Gray, Alasdair. A History Maker. Canongate Books, 2005.

• Gray, Alasdair. Glasgow Triumph of Death (Fall of Star Wormwood). Lyon & Turnbull, Lot 199, 1957, Glasgow, Scotland. 

• Lyon & Turnbull, Lot 199. “Glasgow Triumph of Death / Fall of Star Wormwood.” Lyon & Turnbull Auctions, www.lyonandturnbull.com/auctions/contemporary-and-prints-and-multiples-772/lot/199. Accessed 26 Mar. 2024. 

• Rhind, Neil James. “Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern.” University of Edinburgh, 2018. 

• Sontag, Susan. ‘The Pornographic Imagination.” Styles of Radical Will. Penguin Modern Classics. 2009.

• Stewart, David. Challenging the consensus: Scotland under Margaret Thatcher, 1979-1990. PhD thesis. 2004.

• Tukacs, Tamás. “Of National Bondage: Alasdair Gray’s 1982 Janine.” Eger Journal of English Studies (EJES), 18 Mar. 2014, publikacio.uni-eszterhazy.hu/3326/1/Tukacs_3-18.pdf.