Lewis Grassic Gibbon and history: the shameless stone of sisyphus

Abstract

This article is a cultural study of the writer James Leslie Mitchell / Lewis Grassic Gibbon in his historical context, the early 1930s in Scotland. It analyses especially his novels The Thirteenth Disciple, Spartacues and A Scots Quair, and their critique of the workings of ideology, its relation to faith in humanity, and its distortion of the radicalism necessary to change a sick world. A crucial image in his materialist approach to culture and politics bears a significant resemblance to the existentialist angst in Camus's Mythe de Sisyphe: it is the rock of creative faith that falls back on violent ideology every time a courageous Sisyphus tops a hill of History.