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The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks)
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Setting: Scotland
o Banks is Scottish
o 1979 independence referendum – debate about Scottish identity, voted to stay but
set up their own government
o Thatcher was in power – affected the Scottish workforce: mines shut down; heavy
industry privatised; job cuts – questions of what it means to be male and Scottish
o 1980 – Scottish renaissance in literature and art: the worse the socio-economic
situation was, the better the art was – The Wasp Factory was right at the start
o “Any work of literature written by an author born or bred in Scotland will inevitably
be vetted for traces of a distinctive, typical Scottishness to see if it merits
incorporation into the canon of Scottish national literature
...
103
o “There is a sense in which Scottish fiction prospers in inverse proportion to the
difficulties of the cultural and political situation which it confronts… The myth of a
barren Scotland was to assume an all-too-literal and painfully accurate relevance
following the apparent stifling of hopes for an autonomous Scottish political culture,
and cultural politics, with the devolution debacle of 1979” – Wallace pp
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31-2 – trying to kill the rabbit

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Psychoanalysis
o The Uncanny
▪ “This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its
counterpart in the language of dreams, which is fond of representing
castration by a doubling… Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of
unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which holds sway in the
mind of the child as in that of primitive man; and when this stage has been
left behind the double takes on a different aspect
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9
• Doubling between Frank and Eric

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o

o

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Frank is doubled within himself – split subjectivity (like in Jekyll and
Hyde)
• “The uncanny is that class of the terrifying which leads back to
something long known to us, once very familiar”
• “An uncanny effect is often and easily produced by effacing the
distinction between imagination and reality, such as when
something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears
before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions
and significance of the thing it symbolizes, and so on”
• “This uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something
familiar and old – established in the mind that has been estranged
only by the process of repression”
“Civilization is to a large extent being constantly created anew, since each individual
who makes a fresh entry into human society repeats this sacrifice of instinctual
satisfaction for the benefit for the whole community” – Freud, New Introductory
Lectures of Psycho-Analysis
▪ Is Eric an embodiment of the repressed returning?
“My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea
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Women because
they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared
to them” (TWF p
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167
▪ “If my father had a name for that stick of his
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He doesn’t attach
the same importance to them as I do
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” (TWF
pp
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Despite the fact that
Frank does undoubtedly go too far, his actions are never deviant or subversive but
follow the normative guidelines of masculine propriety” – Schoene-Harwood p
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Only the squeamish
and humourless need beware” – Nairn, p
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You can’t laugh and throw up
at the same time” – The Scotsman



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