ABSTRACT
Whether as the product of a damaged masculinity, an impoverished sense of community, or a persistent spirit of radicalism and resistance, the language of urban working-class Scots raises problems of articulation and authenticity that have wider implications when it comes to defining a literature of subversion. In this essay I aim to look at the ways in which the shorter fiction of Irvine Welsh raises vexed issues of choice and voice, fragmentation and formal experimentation, locality and liminality, that ought to impinge upon any discussion of subversion and scurrility. Welsh has made his name as a merciless chronicler of Edinburgh's underside. The short stories from The Acid House collection on which this essay concentrates reveal the depths and lengths to which Welsh is willing to go in order to ground his texts in the multiple realities and fantasies of Scottish culture. Welsh's writing is remarkably rich in verbal texture. Its author's commitment to a vibrant oral culture rather than to any specific political project or party means that it is hard to see it astsubversive in any conventional sense.
