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This essay, by Glenda Norquay on Foreign Parts, is printed in EUPs' collection of contemporary literary essays CONTEMPORARY SCOTTISH WOMEN WRITERS (Ed. Eileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden)

Fraudulent Mooching

In Janice Galloway's second novel, Foreign Parts, the friends Cassie and Rona, newly arrived in France, encounter the term BRICOLAGE. Reproduced in capitals, surrounded by white space, the text mimics this word's status: letters on a hoarding, out of context, signifier of otherness, the foreign. In French 'bricolage' has a number of meanings: odd jobs, trifles; in a commercial sense, handicraft, do-it-yourself. In its everyday usage then 'bricolage' carries connotations of both 'fragments' and 'construction'.

Galloway is a writer who explores states of brokenness and fragmentation: The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989), a dark, ironic and witty novel, traces recovery after a nervous breakdown.1 Foreign Parts (1994), in some senses a more relaxed book, takes as its subject a series of moments from Cassie and Rona's driving holiday in France, exploring not only the breaking and making ups that are part of their daily routine, but also, through snapshot flashbacks to other holidays, interpreting Cassie's disastrous relationships with men.2 If fragmentation is a theme in Galloway's fiction, fracture is also its predominant technique. She works with broken narratives and syntax, breaks in chronology and unfinished sentences. The text is broken on the page into different typefaces, spacing, layout - even half sentences in the margins, disappearing off the page. The past in both novels breaks into the present through memories and photographs; the present itself is frequently broken into lists of mundane details and insignificant moments. Both novels are discursively fragmented: different discourses compete for attention, often blocked out visually to indicate their separateness. In The Trick is to Keep Breathing the institutional discourses of hospitals, doctors, health visitors, compete with phrases from women's magazines, dietary advice, romantic fiction, horoscopes and the clichés surrounding death. In Foreign Parts foreign voices break into the narrative, the guidebook excerpts structure the women's journey, they read letters from Rona's grandfather (killed in France in the First World War) to his wife, and rehearse words and phrases used many times before. So while both texts are obviously dealing with states of brokenness in their themes, they could also be described as 'deconstructive texts' with a specific agenda in exposing and undermining the language, textual practices and discourses we live by.

The Trick is to Keep Breathing is an exploration of the subject caught in institutionalised discursive practices. Joy Stone, whose oxymoron of a name indicates her ambiguous identity, has, in a sense, no existence. As the mistress of her dead lover, society allows her no place to mourn. Time, her work, eating, are all emptied of meaning; the book traces her attempts to fill that emptiness, to establish control in a context where she has none. The void which defines her is signaled in various ways; time has lost significance: 'What will I do while I'm lasting, Marianne, What will I do?'(15) is her cry throughout the novel. Her attitude to food has become a way of emptying herself: baking and buying food is an obsession, but eating has to be avoided at all costs; if she does eat she must make herself sick. This in itself is an attempt to empty - both physically and psychologically - the rituals and practices we live by, a negation made manifest by the image of Joy in the bath: 'I trace the hairline, the swollen jaw, the neck and breastbone, the sour nipples, concave saucer of stomach. Nothing there at all' (166). Likewise as a woman she is empty - when a doctor suggests her lack of menstruation may be due to pregnancy she is given a scan but it shows 'Empty space. I had nothing inside me'. (This scene is between pages 146 and 148, one of a number of page numbers which are also 'blank'.) So Joy has become an empty space, an absence, outwith conventional social and emotional structures - no family, no role, no way to mourn. A range of competing discourses jostle across her - all attempting to define her problems, her solutions, her femininity, her future. The text itself attempts a visual representation of this process, whereby space is allowed to become, in Muriel Spark's phrase, 'a pattern in itself'.3 Syntactical utterances, which would appear to imply order, disintegrate: space itself offers coherence and relief. Order, a key term for this novel, is opposed to emptiness in two ways: we witness Joy's attempts to restore order to her life, to fill in time, to give meaning - but we also witness her being 'ordered' - by the health service, by friends and colleagues, by the men in her life, by the sequences of memory itself. The only way in which Joy can create meaning is to resist attempts at ordering her, to create chaos, as the novel itself does, by listing, cataloguing, quoting; the emptiness of such 'order' becomes evident.

Foreign Parts also explores characters trapped within institutionalised and contradictory discourses. Cassie and Rona, with their clearly delineated and often oppositional characters, operate with guidebooks bearing little relevance to their own experiences, work with inadequate maps, and are confronted with markers of history - cemeteries, churches, museums and memorials, that appear to have little significance for them. The Guidebook, entitled Potted France - an alphabetical guidebook for the traveller who needs to keep tight purse strings appears to offer containment, control, and order, but is hopelessly inappropriate to their needs and hectoring in tone: 'Don't Miss!' Or 'Indefinable, indefatigable, CHARTRES cathedral comes close to the impossible ideal of perfection' (76). Again discourses of order are rendered ridiculous through over-use and juxtaposition.

In both novels, then, we see the writer 'taking apart' mechanisms which oppress and contain. Galloway's novels are also, however, 'reconstructive' fictions, which attempt to offer a refashioning of concepts of identity linked to those material shapers of subjectivity: gender, class, and nation. As others have recognised, her novels both have a positive trajectory.4 BRICOLAGE as a term therefore offers an apt description of their technique of building a text from fragments, of making something out of bits and pieces, forcing the reader to move between discourses and participate in the act of reconstruction. A further definition of 'bricolage' as 'rough repair' encompasses each book's unsteady movement towards assembling anew. Towards the end of Foreign Parts Rona ponders on the restoration of ancient buildings she has seen: 'I think it's wonderful they don't just leave things falling to bits. They put them back together again' (254). In the challenge to heterosexual conventions of lifestyle, in the possibility of a new form of relationship between Cassie and Rona, in the opportunities of leaving the past, of saying what has hitherto been unsaid, things are put back together but in a new way. In the hopeful ending to the narrative we are allowed a glimpse of new possibilities, of a way of living which might not be determined by all the old discourses. Likewise, although The Trick is to Keep Breathing is a narrative of breakdown, it also takes fragments of experience and begins to move forward. By the end of the novel Joy is shown feeling more 'like herself', beginning to function within social rituals (buying a Christmas tree), and can offer a complete syntactical utterance to Michael (and to herself): 'I forgive you' (235). Ironically what leads her towards such recovery is acceptance of randomness, an absence of order, brought out by her Christmas horoscope which says 'Submit to chaos for once'. Joy continues: 'I have to learn to submit to terrifying chaos and not revert' (223). She has to accept that the narratives, the discourses in which she is entrapped will always be partial, insubstantial, inadequate. Moreover, as Cairns Craig argues in The Modern Scottish Novel, the breaking down of the narrative is paralleled by the acquisition of control on the part of the author:

Control over the page numbers becomes the signature of the character's refusal of the discourses by which she is controlled; it is also, however, the signature of the author, whose control over her text extends not just to the details of typographic layout but also to the details of the marginalia of the text.5

Through such a reading, both writer and reader become architects of an alternative power dynamic, a different narrative to that of the novel's ostensible plot.

A more technical use of the term 'bricolage', from the writing of the anthropologist Claude Lévi Strauss, throws further light on Galloway's strategies of fragmentation.6 Drawing on Lévi-Strauss's use of the term to describe the creative putting together of bits and pieces, of cultural and natural objects, transforming or subverting their original use, cultural studies has appropriated the word to analyse the ways in which subcultures rework everyday objects to produce subcultural styles and artefacts.7 This quality of subversion, of making us look differently at objects, artefacts and words, is central to Galloway's writing. Her novels offer a transformative use of the everyday, but also a subversion of its original purpose. From the start Foreign Parts provides us a with a map reference to another country: the floating term BRICOLAGE offers us a clue to the way in which we are being encouraged to read. This is fiction with a political and cultural agenda; through its 'bricolage', its 'making-do with' but also 'remaking' of myths of gendered and national identity, Galloway offers us new mappings of these intersecting territories.

Both Galloway's novels address, in their subject matter, women operating within systems of oppression, but they also challenge the structures of 'patriarchy' in three formal aspects: in their reluctance to endorse systems of binary oppositions, in their use of humour, and in their typographical experimentation.Foreign Parts very obviously challenges the binary oppositions that characterise our linguistic structures but also determine and are determined by hierarchies of power. As a text it appears to operate by oppositions but then interrogates or breaks them down: Cassie and Rona/Rona and Cassie are not interchangeable, as the frequent textual formation of

Cassie and Rona
Rona and Cassie

appears to suggest; they still have the capacity to surprise each other. Initially it would seem that Cassie is paralysed by thinking, by uncertainty, by a sense of chaos which prevents her from acting, whereas Rona, with her large bag full of sticking plaster, tissues, teaspoons, and penknife, is exasperating but ready for anything. The 'Zodiac labour sign' for Cassie, we learn, is sitting by the fire, Rona's is mowing hay. But this apparent binary opposition does not hold: it is Rona, the well-prepared and ordered - who finds the unexpected and creates the novel's small epiphanies - the discovery of a puppy carved in golden stone, a field full of roses in the dark, a garden of sunflowers as a backdrop to breakfast. And Cassie, cassé, broken by the past, nevertheless moves into the present through her constructive ordering of snapshots until those with Rona, not just those from her relationships with men, become part of the narrative. The Trick also refuses to settle for fixed and oppositional categories: Joy, persuading the council to let her stay on in Michael's house, will not be 'mistress' as opposed to wife; in the hospital, by asking the doctor: 'How are you?' (226) she attempts to break down the patient /doctor dichotomy. The novel itself also blurs categories: Myra is possibly Joy's sister, perhaps her mother; Joy, in the end, is neither 'joy' nor 'stone'.

Galloway's challenge to such oppositional systems is strengthened by her humour; in an approach characteristic of feminist narratives, she draws upon the carnivalesque, using inversion and parody to undermine the discourses of power. Hélène Cixous, commenting on the double meaning of 'voler' (to fly and to steal) notes:

women take after birds and robbers, just as robbers take after women and birds. They (illes) go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down.8

Galloway's typographic experimentation functions to exactly that end, but her novels also work with a more direct use of humour, with 'a subversive spirit of feminine mischief'.9 Although The Trick, focusing on breakdown, might be read as an account of yet another woman 'on the edge', it sustains its dark humour throughout: the repeated joke about psychiatrists changing a light bulb serves as ironic comment on the inadequacy of medical treatment; Marianne's letters from America - helping Joy to 'last' - are full of jokes; significant encounters between the Health Visitor and Joy, Joy and Paul (Harridan and ExLover), and Doctor and Patient are presented in a dramatic form which immediately highlights the farcical and stereotyped nature of the conversation. Even the list of THINGS YOU CAN DO IN THE EVENING has its futility exposed by the elision of 'sew' and 'go out for a meal': 'Sewing and going for a meal. Tricky juxtaposition' (37). Foreign Parts offers more humour in its situations and is overtly funny. It relies on the mischievous, subversive laughter of woman to offer distance if not salvation: Rona, we know, 'had the dirtiest laugh in the world' (12) and it is her laughter, the shared laughter of 'Rona and me' - and the reader - that ends the novel, offering hope: 'I've no sense of direction, me. I haven't a bloody clue. Rona and me. We stand in separate places looking out over water that is just water. Rona takes fresh aim, laughing. Defying gravity' (262).

The third aspect of Galloway's subversion, her typographical experimentation, has been closely analysed by a number of critics.10 While it can be related to the influences of Gray and Kelman, it also owes much to écriture féminine. Hélène Cixous suggests:

the use of the upper-case consists above all of expressing forces in the text: it is a kind of vectoring, lines of variable intensity: where current passes... In such a way that putting an upper-case or lower-case letter on a word gives it a different resistance.11

Galloway's texts resist typographical and syntactical convention, trailing words across the page, allowing phrases to slip off it at times of crisis, panic, sexual attack, but they are also novels written against the grand narratives and mastering discourses which shape us. These mastering narratives are directly related to the materiality of people's lives: Joy's status as 'mistress' rather than 'wife' nearly results in her being thrown out of the home she established with Michael. Her attempt to sustain a domestic environment without social legitimisation, her refusal to work within 'binary oppositions', almost results in homelessness. Likewise, her sense of being 'nothing' is manifested physically in her anorexia. In this novel the text not only becomes a paradigm of the discursive fragments which construct Joy's identity; experimentation functions beyond an aesthetic level as a commentary upon the ways in which discursive practices determine the materiality of our lives. Galloway thus presents a forceful challenge to the apparent division between essentialist and anti-essentialist forms of feminist writing.

Feminist theory has been much engaged with debating the relationship between limited reflectionist models of textuality - 'mirroring' women's experience - and those which present aesthetic challenges to 'patriarchal' systems of discourse and knowledge.12 Literature offering specific representation of women's material circumstances is treated with suspicion because in delineating oppression it is still embodying patriarchal categories. To move towards an interrogation of linguistic and aesthetic systems through textual experiment, however, is to move towards another kind of marginality - not least in terms of readership. Galloway has developed a form of aesthetic experimentation that challenges established literary and linguistic conventions but is not 'purely verbal' subversion. Rather her writing offers a 'deconstruction' of gendered subjectivities and sexuality which takes into account the materiality of people's lives and, while remaining immensely readable, takes the reader beyond shaping discourses.

Berthold Schoene-Harwood accuses the Scottish literary establishment, of concerning itself 'primarily with the question of national identification at the expense of other, perhaps more fundamentally identity-bearing issues that have started to emerge in Scottish writing, such as gender, sexuality and non-white/non-Scottish ethnicity.'13 Yet it is Galloway's concerns with the politics of gender and sexual identity that have preoccupied a number of critics.14 The issue Schoene-Harwood raises, that problematic desire to codify Scottishness, nevertheless manifests itself in what seems a more worrying critical elision between feminism and the politics of national identity. While it may be technically accurate to position her writing in terms of the influence of Kelman and Gray, it is dangerous to assume that her writing works within the same cultural paradigms of Scottishness. Douglas Gifford, for example, notes that 'she is merely working with what's out there in traditional urban-Scottish humour... simultaneously reflecting and satirising the way in which it mingles the humane and the cruel, the sympathetic and the savagely sceptical', yet in The Trick much of the laughter comes from outside - such as Marianne's jokes about Scottishness in America - or from being between, rather than working within, tradition.15 Even more problematically, at the conclusion of a perceptive analysis of the novel's relation to 'the regulations of patriarchy', Cairns Craig claims that the body of Joy Stone is representative of Scotland itself:

That 'black hole', that 'nothing at all' is the image not only of a woman negated by a patriarchal society but of a society aware of itself only as an absence, a society living in the 1980s, in the aftermath of its failure to be reborn. (1999, 199)

Claiming the novel's subversive strategies for a nationalist agenda, Craig performs a manoeuvre little different from the interpellation of Chris Caledonia in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair, (1932-34) yet another act of appropriation whereby both the body of the text and that in the text become representative of the motherland. A reading of Foreign Parts, however, shows that Galloway herself is highly alert to the dangers of women functioning as symbols rather than subjects, to the tradition whereby the exponents of art are men, the depictions in art are of women. Aileen Christianson offers a different perspective, arguing that Galloway intertwines with 'dark longings, hilarious despair . . . confident assumptions of being female and various in contemporary Scotland.' She continues: 'The gaps in history where women were not, the lies about what women were, are refused by both, the notable silences are resisted and filled out'.16 Although Christianson acknowledges 'Scottishness and femaleness may be problematised but they are also emphatically centralised', her desire to emphasise the fact of Scottishness leads to an endorsement of dominant models of nationality and history (140) that Galloway questions implicitly in The Trick and more explicitly in Foreign Parts.

The relationship between gendered and national identities is a notoriously complex one, and the Scottish context is no different. Susanne Hagemann notes that in the spheres of literature both women and Scots 'suffered from similar methods of peripheralisation and expressed their protest along similar lines', but her essay can only conclude that woman and nations are both 'constructs'.17 Craig argues that in Lochhead's poetry, there is a parallelism between the suppressed nation and the repressed feminine: 'the negation of a female identity becomes an index of a lost national identity', 18 but the connection is rarely so simple. As Marilyn Reizbaum suggests, women in Scotland and Ireland have been caught in but sought to alter the dynamics between 'seeing on the one hand the paternalistic nature of cultural marginalization (their identification with the nationalist cause) and, on the other, the patriarchal dimension of their own culture's nationalist movement (their own exclusion from it)'.19 In The Trick and to an even greater extent in Foreign Parts Galloway casts doubts on these simple mappings: through her own method of 'making do' she takes myths of nationality and, with the materials available, redraws their intersections with patriarchy.

Although Scottishness is not an explicit concern of The Trick is to Keep Breathing it is part of the exploration of identity and fragmentation carried on within it. It is too easy, however, to see Joy as representative of any particular kind of Scottishness, or Scotland. Her existence as a woman in Scotland, in a specific class context, produces certain markers of identity: she is a product of a culture in which women are silenced and marginalised in particular ways. Considering her reluctance to go to work, something which had previously 'defined' her, Joy muses, 'I can't think how I fell into this unProtestant habit. I used to be so conscientious. I used to be so good all the time. [where good = productive/hardworking/wouldn't say boo]' (81).
The Calvinist work ethic, whereby work and productivity become earthly markers of salvation, is a familiar one, but is here set in the context of a religion in which traditionally 'It was only when under appropriate control that 'true womanhood' could flourish'.20 'Goodness' therefore is equated not only with work but with submissiveness: '[where good = not putting anyone out by feeling too much, blank, unobtrusive]' (82). Goodness is also evaluated from a class context in which meaningful labour belongs to the masculine sphere: Joy's reliance upon work to 'define' her:

This is my workplace.
It tells me what I am. (12)

This becomes a grotesque parody of identity. Joy's workplace does not tell her what she is: it is, in fact, the memorial service for Michael held there that denies her any existence, asking for remembrance for wife and family but obliterating his relationship with Joy. Just as in the much-quoted equation that follows '*Love/Emotion = embarrassment: Scots equation. Exceptions are when roaring drunk or watching football. Men do rather better out of this loophole' (82), Joy is presented satirically observing but also caught within a system which does not correlate to her own subjectivity. In each case the 'equation' renders her emotions doubly illegitimate.

Play with dislocated and dislocating myths of Scottishness, continues throughout: Joy describes holding her 'head up, up like Jean Brodie' in refusing to book a hospital place 'But I knew I'd phone sooner or later. I knew I'd be back on Monday' (108). This caricature of Scottish womanhood is no more a match for Joy's situation than any of the images constructed by diet sheets, horoscopes, or fashion magazines. All, nevertheless, contribute to the circulating economy of discourses in which she operates. Her ambiguous relationship to Scottishness culminates in another scene of misrecognition at the supermarket: Joy is accosted by someone she went to school with, whose name she can't remember. This man, who has acquired his 'own practice' (a lawyer / doctor / dentist / vet?: worthily-defining occupations for a Scottish lad o' pairts), living in Stirlingshire (historic heart of Scotland), married and 'down to see the folks' (secure with family), has a faltering conversation with Joy then leaves.

A mirror spread out behind the space where he had been. There was a woman in the frame, gawping, the fountain bubbling up at her back. She was listening to a distant kiddy-ride playing Scotland the Brave. Her coat was buttoned up wrong so the collar didn't sit right, the boots scuffed and parting from the sole. The hair needed washed and combed and my eyes were purple. I looked like a crazy woman / wino / raddled old whore (191).

Joy's location within but mismatch with 'Scottish' masculine culture is made evident, aurally and visually, as the music plays on. The man has asked her if she is 'Making a name for yourself I expect?' but Joy can only reply 'I haven't been very well lately' (191). This hybrid creature, who misrecognises herself and has made no 'name' , embodies the problematic relationship between gendered and national identities.

It would be a mistake, of course, to assume Joy's experience offer the novel's only comment on the relationship between nation and identity. The contexts in which we understand Joy's situation also sustain a dialogic relationship to 'Scottishness'. Background details reinforce our sense of 'in-betweeness' as inevitable in the negotiations of Scottish womanhood. Marianne, whose letters aid recovery, is also shown playing out a problematic relationship to her own national identity: from America, in 'exile', she recounts, with a strong sense of the absurd, the irony of having to teach country dancing (197), of living in the Bible Belt and talking about Burns and Shelley, the humour of someone playing Danny Boy to her because they thought it was Scottish (149), yet she still asks for cheddar and oatcakes to be sent. Marianne functions in the novel as a lost 'other' for Joy: she feels at her most secure when symbolically returned to the womb of Marianne's mother, Ellen: 'I lie in Marianne's bed, the warm milk her mother made for me forming skin'(206). It is significant, therefore, that the person with whom she has the clearest communication, which Marianne reinforces on the telephone, saying 'It's so good to hear you, not to have to say everything twice' (204), is a Scotswoman out of Scotland. Putting together the artefacts of the culture - Burns, oatcakes, country dancing - can only produce a subversive version of Scottishness, offering a 'rough repair' of national identity.

Cassie and Rona also venture abroad: but rather than being 'lads o' pairts', traversing the world with confidence in a cohesive national identity, these 'heroines' are lasses both 'in parts', fragmented and dislocated in their social roles, and in 'foreign parts', unknown lands. 'Neither real nor proper: just fraudulent moochers in other people's territory, getting by on the cheap,' (150) Cassie and Rona explore new regions with unhelpful and out-of-date maps; they are a product of both their gender and their ethnicity. 'Coming from a wee country you forget how big other places can be . . . We thought backroads would be prettier. But coming from a wee country, we forgot' (63-4). The co-ordinates with which they attempt to plot their journey are inappropriate; they are 'fraudulent moochers' not only because they come from a 'small' Scotland, but because they come from a 'we(e)' country, women with specific and singular experiences who in the end might find some common ground between themselves. It is, however, a commonality which emerges from difference - differences not only between each other but from the grand narratives of geography and history.

Drawn into the mastering discourses of European history, and the grand narrative of the First World War in particular, Cassie and Rona are shown in an uneasy relationship to larger cultural patterns and to their 'own' Scottish history. Cassie's obvious response to the archivolts of Chartres in which, the guidebook asserts, the seven liberal arts are depicted 'allegorically by women and historically by the men considered to be the outstanding exponents of each art' is to cry 'Enough' (94). Her reaction to the war cemetery, however, is also one of alienation:

The place was full of folk who belonged to somebody but none of them were hers. She had no right play-acting or making up wee sentimental fictions while her pal was busy. Or manufacturing spurious noble sentiments about it either. It was dubious territory indeed, the fantasy you could understand a bloody thing by looking at the likes of this. Rows of dead people. Dead men. Dead boys. (50)

Nor can she locate herself within Scottish 'history':

Macbeth. St Columba. Your own country's medieval life restricted to an English play and a velcro shape off the felt table at Sunday school. Robert the Bruce. Kings and generals, Men of Letters. Of the mass of people, less than nothing. Women didn't come into the reckoning at all.
(165)

The novel deepens its analysis of the tensions between gender and national identity, between patriarchy and postcolonial culture, through the figure of Cassie's ex-partner, Chris, who as his relationship with Cassie becomes more threatening, takes her to increasingly non-European holiday locations in which his money and status as a white male can be more forcefully asserted, distancing himself from an 'effeminate' less powerful Scotland:

People tried to buy us breakfast every morning, desperate to practice their English. Chris loved all that, talking in a drawl about the Houses of Parliament and London Our Capital. It's Edinburgh his bloody capital only he didn't want to risk saying that and have them think he was less important than they thought. I was all ready to do that for him, to see their eyes blanking up when I said SCOTLAND ACTUALLY but he got there first. (179)

The structures of colonisation lead patriarchy to assert itself more forcefully in men whose political context has disempowered them. For Cassie, however, the 'power' gained by asserting Scottishness is that it weakens her already diminished status by its association with a supposedly 'emasculated' culture, forcing her to align herself with a nation and history that she does not necessarily feel is her own.

Further questions about the ways in which certain narratives retain meaning, while others oppress and exclude, are raised by a visit to Chenenceau when, carved into the wall of a room that housed the Scots guard of Mary Queen of Scots, they find the word

HAME.

The German tourists 'leave not seeing the best . . . a whole word a dead man took the time to chip into resistant masonry, four-lettered, legible, clear' (227), but the resistant word of a 'dead man' speaks to Cassie, the very person who slept through a trip to 'Bannockburn maybe' (234). Grand concepts of a feminised motherland, or of a masculine narrative of struggle, are equally disempowering. The concept of 'hame', however, with its connotations of the self and the familiar, the 'heimlich', an antithesis of expansion and war, can and does speak to her. Through this incident the novel acknowledges (while it also questions) the desire to belong, that need to make stories and histories, which we witness in Cassie as she remakes her own history through 'insignificant' photographs: 'Rotten photo . . . I've only kept it because I remember taking it . . . That's what I like about this one. That I took it for me. Just for me' (232). An insignificant foggy field acquires 'historical' meaning because it marks Cassie's own transformation from passive to active, from viewed to viewer, from object to subject. A foggy field, ancient graffiti, can thus acquire counter-discursive power.

Writing of a number of significant Scotsmen who contributed to transformations of the modern world, Cairns Craig suggests they lived 'in a spatial traversal across cultural differences rather than in singular journey within the evolving history of an individual culture'. Scotland, nevertheless was an origin, which 'did not provide the telos of their life's narrative, but it provided the purposes by which they were guided' (1999, 236). In its technique of 'bricolage', in the subversion and transformation of cultural artefacts and objects, Galloway's fiction goes beyond this idea of spatial traversal which is still structured through national identification, with 'origin' and 'purpose', and calls into question models of history and national identity based upon such grand narratives; it questions the extent to which they can speak to women of 'hame'. Rather than filling in 'gaps' in history, the novel problematises predominant and confining notions of history and identity. Foreign Parts ends with Cassie and Rona looking at the Channel, throwing stones: 'Another scuds out, headed for where Dunkirk might be, or home. It could be going home. Godknows. I've no sense of direction, me . . . We stand in separate places, looking out over water that is just water' (262). To believe there is a problem with being a 'fraudulent moocher' is to believe both in essential truth and linear direction, to hold to the grand narratives of geography and history: for Galloway's women, and Scottish women generally, a more positive reading of 'fraudulent mooching' seems a welcome alternative to the discourses of national identity by which we have been bound.

 NOTES
1. Janice Galloway, The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1989; London: Minerva, 1991).
2. Janice Galloway, Foreign Parts (1994; London: Vintage, 1995).
3. Muriel Spark, The Driver's Seat (1970; Harmonsdworth: Penguin, 1974), p.13.
4. See Douglas Gifford, 'Contemporary Fiction II: Seven Writers in Scotland' in D.
Gifford and D. McMillan (eds) A History of Scottish Women's Writing (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp.604-29 (610).
5. Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1999) p.196.
6. 'The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks . . . His universe of
instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with "whatever is
at hand", that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also
heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or
indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there
have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous
constructions or deconstructions'. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), p.17.
7. See, for example, Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1984) and Dick Hebdige, Cut 'n' Mix (London: Comedia,
1987).
8. Hélène Cixous, 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (Signs, Summer, 1976) in E. Marks and I.
de Courtivron (eds) New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), p. 258.
9. Pam Morris, Literature and Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 73.
10. See in particular Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel and Josiane Paccaud-Huguet,
'Breaking through cracked mirrors: The short stories of Janice Galloway', Études Écossaises
2, (1993), pp.5-29.
11. Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, E. Prenowitz (trans) Hélène Cixous Rootprints:
Memory and Life Writing (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 62.
12. Maroula Joannou, for example, talks of the difficulty of attempting to place early
twentieth-century women's writing in historical context which would move beyond a
'reflectionist' model of textuality, while still finding some aspects of a more theoretical
feminism problematic. See 'Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows': Women's
Writing, Feminist Consciousness and Social Change 1918-1938 ( Oxford: Berg
Publishers, 1995), p.13. Likewise Rita Felski questions the challenge of a feminist aesthetics
in: Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989), p.39.
13. Berthold Schoene-Harwood, 'Dams Burst: Devolving Gender in Iain Banks, The
Wasp Factory', Ariel: A Review of Internal English Literature, 30:1 (January, 1999)
pp.131-148 (131). See also: '"Emerging as the Other of Our Selves" - Scottish
Multiculturalism and the Challenge of the Body in Postcolonial Representation',
Scottish Literary Journal, 25:1 May 1998, pp.54-72: 'For instance, the works of
contemporary Scottish writers like Janice Galloway, Edwin Morgan, Alasdair Gray or
James Kelman are first and foremost lauded for their skilful literary encapsulation of an
elusive, if ostensibly unmistakable Scottishness' (55).
14. See Margery Metzstein, 'Of Myths and Men: Aspects of Gender in the Fiction of
Janice Galloway' in G. Wallace & R. Stevenson (eds) The Scottish Novel Since the
Seventies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp.136-46; Josiane Paccaud-
Huguet, 'Breaking through cracked mirrors: The short stories of Janice Galloway';
Lavinia Greenlaw, Times Literary Supplement 1994, no.4753, p.20; Glenda Norquay, 'The
Fiction of Janice Galloway: Weaving a Rout Through Chaos', G. Norquay & G. Smyth (eds)
Space and Place: The Geographies of Literature (1997), pp.323-30 (to an extent this is an
earlier version of this chapter).
15. Gifford, 'Contmeporary Fiction II' in D. Gifford and D. McMillan (eds), p. 608.
16. Aileen Christianson, 'Lies, Notable Silences and Plastering the Cracks: the Fiction of
A. L. Kennedy and Janice Galloway', in Gender and Scottish Society: Polities, Policies
and Participation (Unit for the Study of Government in Scotland, University of
Edinburgh: Edinburgh, 1998), pp.136-40 (139).
17. Susanne Hagemann, 'Women and Nation' in D. Gifford and D. McMillan (eds) pp.316-28 (317).
18. Cairns Craig, Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and English Culture
(Polygon: Edinburgh, 1996), p.199.
19. Marilyn Reizbaum, 'Canonical Double Cross: Scottish and Irish Women's Writing' in
K. R. Lawrence (ed) Decolonising Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-century
'British' Literary Canons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp.165-90
(166).
20. Lesley Orr Macdonald, 'Denied the Capacity to Become': Paradigms of Polity and
Power in Scottish Presbyterianism 1830-1930' in Gender and Scottish Society:
Polities, Policies and Participation (Unit for the Study of Government in Scotland,
University of Edinburgh: Edinburgh, 1998), pp.127-35 (130).