Reading Immunofiction: The Immunitary Unconscious in Contemporary Scottish Writing (1981-2023)

Abstract

This thesis studies Scottish writing from Thatcher (1981) to the post-pandemic era (2023) in order to construct a theory of immunofiction, a mode of fiction which critically engages with what I call the immunitary unconscious. The latter refers to the ongoing semantic productivity of immunity’s multiple metaphoric borrowings in political and biomedical theory. The immunitary uconscious, I show, has come to define all forms of protection, in the neoliberal era, as being achieved primarily through desocialisation. Using biopolitics, Marxist literary criticism, queer theory, and new materialist philosophies, this thesis examines how contemporary Scottish immunofiction negotiates the immunitary unconscious in order to challenge the contemporary mode of protection as desocialisation. The first two chapters examine novels from the devolutionary era (Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) and Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998)). Chapter 1 argues that Lanark reverses and literalises immunity’s metaphoric history. It cross-references Hobbes’s concept of immunity, in which exemption from harm is understood to be achieved through the desocialisation of subjects, with early immunology’s concept of immunity, in which health is understood to be achieved through the rejection of nonselves. In doing so, the novel shows how under neoliberalism, immunisation turns autoimmunitary, and how self-protection becomes self-sacrifice. Chapter 2 shows how Filth builds on Lanark’s metaphors of disease, cannibalism, and consumption. Through the figure of the parasite, the novel queers, on the level of both content and form, the protagonist’s body and mode of protection. The tapeworm offers a counternarrative organised around the understanding of a mutual interdependence of host and parasite. Chapter 3 approaches Tamsin Calidas’s I Am An Island (2020) and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun (2016) as heavily automythologised texts which perform allegories of inoculation, in which, like in traditional vaccination, an encounter with negativity produces positivity. I suggest that, in contemporary immunofiction, allegories of inoculation often serve to symbolically resolve the contradiction between an ideology of immunity and our material entanglement. I engage scholarship from the blue humanities and examine the therapeutic role of wild swimming to the narrative development of these texts: what at first is a threatening ocean becomes a symbol of recovery as the protagonists move from depression and addiction to a newfound resilience. In doing so, I show how Locke’s theory of property as an extension of the body informs how these texts deploy both crofts and islands as metaphors for the newly immunised bodies of their characters. The final chapter of this thesis addresses how the climate and pandemic crises challenge the normative conception of the immunised self and its mode of protection. I read Martin MacInnes’s science fiction novel In Ascension (2023) as a text that responds to the contemporary polycrisis by deploying an aesthetics of microbial sublimity that destabilises the ontological primacy of the individual in favour of its existence within a multiplicity of microbial communities. In Ascension, I argue, comes closest to a form of speculative co-immunism that understands protection as a commonised practice shared across species, planetary geographies, and deep time. I conclude the thesis by examining what a co-immunist Scottish literary studies will look like