In March I received honorary degrees from no less than five universities. Introduced as the cleverest man in Scotland, I accepted the charge with a gentle shrug. Excluding my reservations regarding the root of their phraseology, I surmised that they were more or less correct. In any case, I was clever enough to know that it wouldn’t be clever to complain. To have argued over the extent of the boundaries (cleverest man north of Nottingham might have been more accurate, though less strident) would have been unnecessary….
So begins Dunce Born, the first of Hamish Wishart’s vaguely-acclaimed Dunce novels. From this auspicious beginning, everything goes downhill. Deliberately. For this is a novel of undoing: of an attempt to fail; of rules broken according to unknowing plans; knowledge gained in order to lose; chaos designed to undercut itself, to confuse, to befog and to confound. Yes. This is a novel about that most sophisticated and intricate of things: stupidity.
Wishart’s task, like that of his protagonist, Gavin McCloud, is not an easy one. Though unblessed with the shower of paper money that is the honorary degree, Wishart’s pre-Dunce career was indeed a successful one. At the age of only fifteen, he completed his thesis on The Construction of Mimetic Space in Reflective Texts, publishing his fascinating if not one-sided survey of Modern Chinese Literature barely a year later.[1] From here he embarked on a ten year career which saw the publication of twelve highly erudite works, five rewarding professorships at universities across Europe and the naming of the new stand at his local football club after his labrador Sir William Scott.[2] But ultimately the academic life left Wishart discouraged. Intelligence, it turned out, was overrated. As McCloud ironically muses in the first chapter of Dunce Born: ‘Oh that all these pointless facts would melt; these references and philosophies thaw into a dew!’. ‘Indeed’ echo a thousand sagacious souls across the world. But how to resolve these difficulties? How to scale the lofty heights of the genuinely low? True wisdom may be unattainable, but true stupidity would seem to be an equally unfeasible target.
Unsurprisingly for an academic, McCloud’s pursuit of stupidity initially bares the methodical and logical marks of a truly sensible being. He takes silliness incredibly seriously, plotting his intellectual demise with inappropriately impressive wisdom. Out come the spreadsheets, the equations and psychological insights, each couched with the unconscious incisiveness of a natural mastermind. A turning point is required, both for McCloud and, through the creator Wishart, for the reader. We fear lest the whole thing should resemble no more than a conceited game – which in truth it is (but should nonetheless bear the sweet scars of real or simulated sincerity). This much anticipated ‘breakthrough’ comes in Chapter Four, when McCloud’s first experiments in the ‘spontaneous degeneration of language’ begin.
The method by which McCloud slowly hammers splinters out of the monolith of language to construct a new and gloriously foolish manner of communication is interesting – but it is not the subject of this review. For all of this comes in Dunce Born, Wishart’s first novel in the series. By the time we get to his third, the majestic Dunce Insane, the structures of stupidity are already well in place. McCloud has both succeeded and failed in his great endeavour; meanwhile the reader is well poised to reap the rewards. By the close of Dunce Born, the narrator who began with such perspicacious purpose has managed to relegate himself into a league of his very own, where words are misused to describe mistaken action: a golden bowl of farce. The moronic antics continue unabated in the follow-up, Dunce About, a regularly entertaining novel with manages to compete with its predecessor without ever threatening to topple it. Wishart has by now revealed his promise – the challenge that remains is to supersede his previous achievements. Thankfully, the third novel in the series does just this, taking the formula of its ancestors and whipping it up into a stuff-peaked meringue of literary tang, seasoned with the superb salt of sustained stupidity.
Of course, McCloud’s ambitions have changed a little by this time. He has long realised that failure, in its richest form, is too hard to come by. It is too late for him to re-program every last element of his brain. He must accept, therefore, that though he has learnt to communicate in a manner best befitting a great galoot, the plains of his subconscious may still be populated by the odd intellectual warrior, holding out camp till the morrow. Alas, he was not born an oaf. Dunce’s origins were less in birth than in creation; a creation which was super-imposed upon another and which, inevitably, continues to bear the imprint of that other. Nevertheless, he has come a long way. From calculating genius to dunderheaded buffoon: this, indeed, is progress. He has almost certainly learnt something. And yet he struggles with his new identity. ‘Stoopid not enuff, enuff of it no. Moor stopidd kneed-ed‘ he reflects on page seven of Dunce Insane. The time has come to make some big decisions; to really wedge one’s head into the crevice of folly. And where better to start than in the land of ‘luff’?
For the initiated, ‘luff’ is, in fact, ‘love’ seen through the blinkered spelling of an original simpleton. Of course, it was rather stupid of McCloud not to have experimented in these regions before – but then that was his goal (which presents us, as you will understand, with another irony: it is sensible to avoid stupidity unless you are trying to capture it, in which case it is stupid and thus appropriate to avoid it and yet, as it is in itself stupid, sensible to try it also).Whichever way you look at it, however, McCloud’s misadventures in the land of ‘luff’ are altogether priceless examples of idiocy. Naturally he circumnavigates the usual processes – deliberately ‘fallin’ in ‘luff’ with someone whom he knows he should hate and whom, it is clear to both reader and narrator, is using him for her own devices (i.e. to get a visa). At the bottom of it all, yet, we would be appear to be dealing with familiar territory. For after all, senselessness and ‘luff’ have long been getting it on, with big successes (especially in the way of failure). And in any case, the subject is rich with humour, especially when expressed in the style which Wishart readers ought to have by now become accustomed. And in case you haven’t, I feel obliged, as a counterpoint to the quote above, to recall the opening sentence or two of Dunce Insane:
A sprinkin oth hairdew atha tabbit othma o’ercoat. A litteroth CONFIRMATION dreppin soft-as-like pontha doorpool othma mind. Tisnow office-shall. i am a LOSER, punchen for Top 001>
If this is new to you; I need only tell you that it all becomes clearer in time. In fact, after a while, it becomes too clear; almost poetic. Again, Wishart’s deliberately sloppy tactics have unconsciously magicked a rabbit out of a non-existent hat. At the same time, critics have poured accusations over the ‘mistaken’ eloquence. One of them, Eric Bell, claims that the novel is an attack on the city of Liverpool, using variations on local colloquisms to obliquely molest the Liverpudlian linguistic tradition. Others, with more license, have presumed that Wishart is constantly harking back either to Scottish linguistic traditions or, more likely, to English corruptions of Scottish traditions, interweaved with pure inventions from his position as a present-day Scotsman. Personally, I think that it is a gibberish – and love it for that, caring not a jot from whence it sprung. So long as it is employed to explicate episodes as juicily farcical as it does, I am well satisfied. And who could deny the pleasures to be had from the now famous ‘bakery scene’ in Chapter Five, or Dunce’s (aka McCloud’s) repeated and meticulously planned failures to consummate his marriage? These last moments are amongst the greatest I have ever read; for it is here that Wishart really makes the most of the tension between his protagonist’s new life of stupidity and the undying embers of sense that glow faintly in his chest. Dunce does know how to seduce a woman – there is no doubt about that – but in his desire to forget, a by-product of his ‘lust for loss’, he consciously manages a series of crass misunderstandings: self-imposed embarrassments of such magnitude that the reader is near paralysed by the humour of it all.
Dunce at his most foolish, however, resembles only one thing. Not a blithering ape man, nor a oversexed English nincompoop. No. When Dunce truly succeeds in his pursuit of stupidity, there is only one obvious model for the socially inept, blunderingly silly idiot that he becomes. And that, it would seem, is the academic himself. For who else could pull off such a series of thick-witted errors with such indefatigable aplomb? Where else could we hope to find a creature as pathetic as the man who, at the beginning of Chapter Six lies flat on a bakery floor covered head to toe with self-raising flour and trying to remember the last line of Keats’s On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer except in the halls of the highest learning? Try as he might, Wishart never gets away from the fact that, when it comes down to it, there is nothing more stupid than an intelligent person. Gavin McCloud’s finest moment is, then, his first. When he steps up to receive his honorary degree, succumbing for a least a second to a flicker of pride: this is his most gloriously foolish moment. There is little to learn from here: but goodness how we enjoy the failed attempts to unlearn!
I will not persist in contriving definitions of stupidity: that would be idiotic. For Dunce Insane is a novel best left untangled by the sticky web of conscientious criticism. Maybe I ought to have mined through the linguistic richness of the carefully disabled prose style. But I have chosen otherwise, lest I should myself disable the quality of the comedy, which is the novel’s greatest asset.
For those sweet people who are not already aware of it, Dunce Insane is not, as I may have suggested, the third part of a trilogy (following on from Dunce Born and Dunce Again). It is in fact the centrepiece of a quintet, shortly to become (I hear) a sextet. To have removed this novel from its partners would suggest that it is superior. This is true. But there is no known excuse to cover the reader who shuns the others in the series. It is the amorous backdrop – the maddening comic potential of ‘luff’ – that sets Dunce Insane apart from its brothers, but the characterisation, the frantic language and the jocular plots are never absent from Wishart’s novels, seeing him safely through the most recent follow-ups (Dunce Again and Dunce Dances). Will the imminent (and beguilingly titled) Dunce Dead continue the impressive trend? We can only hope so. The only fear is that, in finally mastering the skills of stupidity, our protagonist might be drained of his comic potential. As Dunce says:
shuddup an s’myle, thaddis tha mark otha silly silly. forts flicking-tho-an-fink-sudden-like, tis clever clever also, know?
No?
Review by Claude Sorgny-Beichveloff
[1] Needless to say, this was a controversial tome, not least because of its utter denial of the tradition and outrageously biased concentration on the work of a single contemporary writer, Den Shun Wong, with whom Wishart happened to have shared a room at college. Despite of his, critics have long since praised ‘Write and Wong’ for the way in which the author manages to ‘thoroughly resuscitate the corpse of Wong’s prose by no more than a series of eloquent literary nudges’
[2] see The Sir Walter Scott Stand, St. Grawdy FC. Since Wishart’s partial fall from grace (from professor to mere novelist) it must be noted that the management at St. Grawdy FC have begun to claim that the stand was named after the real sir Walter Scott instead, and not Wishart’s dog. This, however, is no more than a facetious diversion from the truth.
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