from thefreeonline on 28th Jan 2024 by Prof Joe Jackson at the Conversation
A radical painter and writer, Alasdair Gray’s work was full of bold visions for an independent Scotland
Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter Stares Into Your Soul
Bella Baxter could be read as an incarnation of Gray’s vision for a defiant and free Scotland.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things tells the story of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), an irrepressibly free woman who seems to have the mind of an innocent child. She embarks on an exuberant voyage of discovery, travelling around 19th-century Europe and reaching Egypt, experiencing many new things as her intellect rapidly develops, before returning home to face her secret past.
The film is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the Glaswegian Alasdair Gray, a modern-day William Blake, a dissident maverick and polymath..
Gray was a writer, artist, polemicist, and civic nationalist – who had an immense influence on contemporary Scottish literature and beyond.
Like watching Lanthimos’s gorgeous spectacle, reading Gray is a wild and unsettling ride. His work is full of progressive imagination, wry impropriety and intricate literary form.
Gray was a bold creative thinker, one who dared to make a slightly disreputable character out of God, for instance. He was a radical who disturbed established order, including through the blending of visual and literary art.
For him, naming and contesting arbitrary power and providing both visceral witness to, and alternative visions of, contemporary society are defining qualities of his work – particularly Poor Thing
A Scottish Frankenstein
Rather than a single perspective, Poor Things is made up of different documents stitched together – prefaces, journal entries, letters, explanatory footnotes – that produce multiple, competing stories. The story is self-reflexive, where the narrative voice or action dwell on the act of writing or making fiction.
Poor Things is full of allusions to, and borrowings from, the rich resources of Victorian fiction – most obviously Frankenstein – and reference works. Typographical experimentation and word play abound.
For instance, the name of the novel’s great medical scientist Godwin Baxter is sometimes abbreviated to “God” to emphasise paternalism, powers of creation, withdrawal from the world and many other interpretations.
Continue reading “Poor Things: meet Alasdair Gray- the radical Scottish visionary behind the new hit film”
Farmers parked their tractors in Berlin, Germany, Monday, Jan 15, 2024. ( Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
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