Alienation in Irvine Welsh’s &lt;i&gt;Trainspotting&lt;/i&gt;

B.A Senekal

doi:10.4102/lit.v31i1.35

Abstract

This article examines how Melvin Seeman’s theory of alienation (1959) and modern alienation research manifest in Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting”. This is an important novel, not only because of its commercial success, but also because it depicts a specific marginalised subculture. Postmodernism and systems theory approaches, as well as changes in the social and political spheres have motivated researchers such as Geyer (1996), Kalekin-Fishman (1998) and Neal and Collas (2000) to reinterpret Seeman’s theory. This article attempts to incorporate this new theory of alienation in the analysis of contemporary fiction. Seeman identifies five aspects of alienation, namely powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, social isolation and self-estrangement. Following Neal and Collas (2000), in particular, this article omits self-estrangement, but shows how the other four aspects of alienation have changed since Seeman’s formulation. It is argued that “Trainspotting” depicts a specific occurrence of alienation in modern western society, besides normlessness, meaninglessness, and social isolation, highlighting Seeman’s concept of powerlessness, in particular. The article further argues that applying Seeman’s theory of alienation in the study of contemporary literature provides a fresh theoretical approach that contributes to the understanding of how fiction engages with its environment.

Highlights

Published in 1993 and nominated for the Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1994, the first 3 000 printed copies of Trainspotting were reprinted sixteen times, and the novel had sold 150 000 copies by 1996 (Morace, 2001:73) when the film was released
The concept definitely [...] became less fashionable, a small but active international core group continued to study the subject in all its ramifications, since the problems denoted by alienation were certainly far from solved – to the contrary, even. (Geyer, 1996:xii.). This core group was called the Research Committee on Alienation of the International Sociological Association (ISA), who kept alienation studies alive until the 1990s, when there was again an upsurge of interest in alienation. Three developments caused this upsurge of interest, namely the fall of the Soviet Union, globalisation, the increasing awareness of ethnic conflicts, and post-modernism
Social isolation is vividly depicted in the novel in which the main characters form a group in opposition to the ruling consumerist/capitalist culture, their internal connections are brittle at best

Summary

Introduction

Published in 1993 and nominated for the Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1994, the first 3 000 printed copies of Trainspotting were reprinted sixteen times, and the novel had sold 150 000 copies by 1996 (Morace, 2001:73) when the film was released. 190.) The characters convey a sense of being dispossessed by the English hegemony, as well as a lack of identification with Scottish society. It is a fast-paced novel, thumping along like Welsh’s favourite house music, creating the sense that the style mimics the subject matter “in that the voices and stories come thick and fast like the characters and conversations in one of the book’s pubs” (Childs, 2005:237). The film uses Mark Renton as the main narrator, and even though his role is less prominent in the novel, he is the closest Trainspotting comes to having a central character

Seeman’s theory of alienation in Trainspotting3

Alienation in Trainspotting

Conclusion