Philippe Laplace

Drugs, sex & rave parties : transgression and the carnivalesque in Irvine Welsh's fiction

Irvine Welsh has probably by now become, whether one likes it or not, one of the most widely read Scottish novelists, outstripping Scott, Kelman or Banks. Welsh has so far written 5 novels and 2 collections of short stories 1 , but it is undoubtedly Danny Boyle's 1996 cinematographic adaptation of Trainspotting which gave his first novel the necessary impetus it needed in order to become a worldwide best-seller. It established Welsh as the most famous and outrageous author of a so-called youth 'subculture' and boosted his literary career. Welsh's narrative format is, it is true, particularly well suited to cinematographic adaptations : his prose is characterized by a succession of concise first-person narratives spoken by a wide range of narrators ; sharp and witty dialogues are uttered in an idiolect which helps identify characters and which gives them a particular status within a group ; a strong emphasis is also laid on music and popular culture.

The 'enfant terrible' of the British literary establishment has undoubtedly carved out his literary career around specific themes, namely drugs, sex and rave parties. Violence, related either to drugs or to sex but also to football hooliganism, is also very much part of Welsh's fictional world. However what I would like to address in this paper is neither the way Welsh has exploited these themes in his literary output nor the literary value of his writings : I'd like to consider his work and his style in the light of transgression. I'd like to show that Welsh's écriture actually belongs to a trend that Mikhail Bakhtin identified as a common feature of Western literature since Rabelais and which he called the 'carnival' or 'carnivalesque' : a complex system of representations and misrepresentations made of grotesque features, of dialogic and polyphonic discourses aimed at disrupting and subverting authority. 2 However, before discussing Welsh's use of sex and the carnivalesque, I'd like to consider the extent to which Welsh's use of transgression undermines most attempts to identify ideology in his works.

Welsh, ideology, and drugs

Welsh's relationship with ideological discourse is indeed paradoxical. For many of his readers, he has from the start embodied a radical force against power and author/ity. Welsh's first writings were published in the aptly named underground Edinburgh journal Rebel Inc. The pungency of his style seemed a direct blow aimed at the 1980s' British literary establishment and academic world. Welsh's objectives might have resembled those pursued by James Kelman, but Welsh's ideologies could not be more different than Kelman's. Welsh has indeed insisted that he does not want to appear as a 'spokesperson' for a cause, whatever that be.3 Besides, Kelman's social realism cannot be compared to Welsh's fictional world where fantasy, for instance in Filth, in Marabou Stork Nightmares or in many of the short stories in The Acid House, rubs shoulders with urban realism, as in Trainspotting or Glue or in his latest novel Porno.

One of the TLS reviewers declared : «Welsh is a political writer : how, given his subject-matter, could he not be ? Yet his narrative breathed uninhibitedly, unstifled by any point-making ».4 Strangely as it is, it is true to say that there is no ideological stance or particular point making in Welsh's urban realistic writings. He has for instance clearly distanced himself and his work from any nationalistic viewpoint. The following quotation from a short story entitled 'Eurotrash' might sum up what Welsh has ever written about Scottish Nationalism. When defined as 'British' in a conversation with a Dutchman, a Scotsman living in Holland reacts thus :

[I] was almost tempted to go into a spiel about how I was Scottish, not British, and that the Scots were the last oppressed colony of the British Empire. I don't really believe it, though ; the Scots oppress themselves by their obsession with the English which breeds negatives of hatred, fear, servility, contempt and dependency. (The Acid House, p. 17)5

The notion of nationhood is in fact utterly rejected by Welsh's characters. They see in it only a sterile and reductive affiliation to a place which outstrips the familiar outlines of the local community. Nations and their symbols are, as Mark Renton puts forward in Trainspotting, « ugly and artificial » (Trainspotting, p. 228).

While nationhood is not to be trusted as a means of affiliation, the sense of community, of belonging to a particular Edinburgh district -Leith, Muirhouse etc.or social group, is quite strong in Welsh's writing. It is however more a confrontational concept -ie us and them -and a loosely defined sense of belonging than a locus of identity for Welsh's characters. His tales, albeit firmly entranched in the Edinburgh schemes with characters who use a language one could define as a 'sociolect', appear ultimately apolitical. His characters show no strong affiliation nor indeed any inclination for politics or Trade Unionism. Welsh made this clear already in Trainspotting where the egocentric Simon Williamson, aka Sick Boy, gives the tone of the novel :

… the socialists go on about your comrades, your class, your union, and society. Fuck all that shite. The Tories go on about your employer, your country, your family. Fuck that even mair. It's me, me, fucking ME, Simon David Williamson, NUMERO FUCKING UNO, versus the world, and it's a one-sided swedge. (Trainspotting,p. 30) This is obviously one of the many differences with Kelman's writings. The hazy political ideologies that the TLS reviewer tried to find are indeed nothing but political apathy and a strong belief in individualism. This observation should nonetheless be slightly qualified according to the age of Welsh's characters. Welsh shows in Glue that the older working-class generations definitely share a sense of social struggle and social empathy (Glue,. Although disappointed by politics and politicians, their lives have been defined and ruled by a clear sense of class solidarity. Carl Ewart fondly remembers the 10 commandments that have guided his father's life and through which he gained the social awareness he needed. Welsh spells this decalogue in capital letters, as if to insist on its prophetic significance : Even if the younger generations portrayed by Welsh are from working class backgrounds, they do not share any of their parents' working class values. They appear as resigned puppets straying in a post-Thatcher limbo. Welsh then reccurently implies throughout his work that drugs are the only way out. They will give somebody the necessary sense of social cohesion in a world where the key word is individualism. Drugs will allow him / her to locate themselves within a meaningful community which is not regulated by any kind of work ethics any more : « Junk fills the void », says Renton (Trainspotting ,p. 186). Even if social and economic situations inform Welsh's urban realistic novels, they merely provide the bleak background from where one needs to escape.

Drugs end up creating the necessary social core which has been lost by a young generation which impassively witnessed the corrosion and the disappearance of political ideologies : « 'We are all acquaintances now.' It seems tae go beyond our personal junk circumstances ; a brilliant metaphor for our times » (Trainspotting, p. 11). Welsh does not pass judgement on the younger generations' lack of social and political commitment -after all he also admits to not feeling the need to do so himself. His depressingly apathetic message appears utterly resigned : rather than fighting social injustice and trying to influence society, people should enjoy life. Monolithic society will, by definition, never change. Rave music, with its necessary chemical complement MDMA, that is to say Ecstasy, is the only medium through which this can be achieved. The body, even though still at the very core of transgression since it has become both the subject and the object, has lost any kind of political involvement. It has become an expression, not the means by which transgression is put forward :

His pill was kicking in, and the music, which he had had a resistance to, was getting into him from all sides, surging through his body in waves, defining his emotions. Before it had seemed jerky and disjointed, it was pushing and pulling at him, irritating him. Now he was going with it, his body bubbling and flowing in all ways to the roaring bass-lines and the tearing dub plates. All the joy of love for everything good was in him, though he could see all the bad things in Britain ; in fact this twentieth-century urban blues music defined and illustrated them more sharply than ever. Yet he wasn't scared and he wasn't done about it : he could see what needed to be done to get away from them. It was the party : he felt that you had to party, you had to party harder than ever. It was the only way. It was your duty to show that you were still alive. Political sloganeering and posturing meant nothing ; you had to celebrate the joy of life in the face of all those grey forces and dead spirits who controlled everything, who fucked with your head and livelihood anyway, if you weren't one of them. You had to let them know that in spite of their best efforts to make you like them, to make you dead, you were still alive. (Ecstasy, Although Welsh has always refused to be considered a spokesperson, one can say that his fiction comes out from the 80s and 90s youth subculture.Youth subculture by the 1980s and 1990s had indeed lost the rebellious edge some This indifferent reaction might indeed well be an aftermath of the Thatcher years when Trade Unions were gagged and lost most of their political edge. The late 1980s and 1990s youth subculture's symbols, drug consumption, rave music and clubbing rapidly became an industry, or perhaps more precisely a trendy marketing device aimed at young consumers and operated by shrewd entrepreneurs. The drug associated with the rave music, ecstasy, has also been defined as the 'love drug'. However, it is not at all in an aphrodisiac or sexual term, but rather in an atmosphere of sharing and conviviality : that of creating a new way of life, a community, a bonding. This once again stresses the consumerist aspect of any need of or of any addiction to it. Alan Freeman puts it in a nutshell when he says : « The trainspotters exemplify Late Capitalism's replacement of work with leisure, of action with consumption, of meaning with system, of life with lifestyle ». 7 Welsh's junkies, whatever their drugs, are sometimes portrayed as victims. But they do not display a defiant or seditious attitude towards society. Drugs are their conscious reactionescape -against a society which does not accept them or in which they do not want to fit. Renton's famous « choose life » scene (Trainspotting, pp. 187-88) haunts all Welsh's writings like a sombre refrain.

Drugs, as in the etymology of the word 'pharmakon', stand as the paradox of Welsh's youth communities : the chemical elements are perceived as both vital and lethal, nourishing and poisoning. 8 There is no drug justification in Welsh's novel, despite the often quoted « Take yir best orgasm, multiply the feeling by 20, and you're still fuckin miles off the pace » (Trainspotting, p. 11). In the same novel, drug addicts were also described in a very gloomy and despondent way by a third person narrator :

They emerge from the stairdoor into the darkness of the deserted street. Some of them move in a jerky, manic way ; exuberant and noisy. Others cruise along silently, like ghosts ; hurting inside, yet fearful of the imminence of even greater pain and discomfort. (…) They were like vampires, living a largely nocturnal existence, completely out of synchronisation with most of the other people who inhabited the tenements and lived by a rota of sleep and work. (Trainspotting, It is not only addiction which prevents them from adopting a different pattern and changing their way of life -those who really want to, Renton for example, manage their detox -there is indeed a consistent refusal to face up to society.

Drugs seem to have perverted their own sense of responsibility, of decision making, of feelings, even of senses. Ironically, the only medical drug mentioned by Welsh, apart from methadone, is called 'Tenazadrine' and echoes the controversy which surrounded thalidomide.

Like illegal drugs, like a pharmakon, Tanazadrine helps but it also has disastrous after-effects. In 'Fortune's always hiding : a corporate romance' 9 , the protagonist has stumps instead of arms : she is the victim of malformations caused by the medical drug her mother took when pregnant. She, and another victim, give up any legal resources as they know that the law will always protect the strong and oppose those on the physical or social margins of society. They then decide to take the matters into their own hands by murdering and maiming the chemists and industrialists responsible for the marketing of the drug, knowing perfectly well they will be caught and sent to prison. Individuality, individualism or individual pleasures are the key words for Welsh's characters.

Welsh, sex, and the carnivalesque

As far as Welsh's narratives are concerned, drugs, as we saw, also provide a social boundary between his characters and the rest of society. Sex is a much more problematic topos in order to establish boundaries : it is a far more common activity than drug-taking and it is common to all walks of life, whether or not you are on the margin of society. Therefore Welsh has to resort to using a very crude sexual vocabulary and to discribing perverted or even sickening sexual episodes. This establishes the necessary boundary between characters and readers and alienates his characters even further, exiling them to depraved and sad margins of society. Welsh's literary or social value. This, I think, resembles the knee-jerk reactions that followed James Kelman's attribution of the Booker Prize in 1994 for How Late it Was, How Late …10 , with a plethora of dismayed voices from reviewers who could only bemoan the sad state of British contemporary fiction, some prudish reviewers even going as far as counting the number of times the words « fuck » or « cunt » were used in the novel. Those reactions were beside the point : Kelman's use of swear words marks a clear a boundary. It is both social, that is to say it isolates the protagonist and his idiolect from the rest of society, and linguistic, it breaks and punctuates the protagonist's speech ; it gives it a flow, a rhythm and a cadence.

Welsh's strategy resembles Kelman's : swear words, Welsh's phonetic English and his characters' idiolects establish a break with the reader and serve as punctuation and rhythmical beat. Spud's explanation, even though he misses the linguistic subtlety, is superb :

The high street's a wee bit nippy but. No been up here since the festival n ah miss aw they cool chicks smilin at ye n giein ye leaflets fir thir shows. It's pure radge but, they wey they sortay make a statement intae a question. They go : 'We've a show in the festival ?' 'It's up the Pleasance ?' 'The review was brilliant ?' N ye feel like sayin, hud oan a second, cool kitten-cat, cause if ye want tae dae that, n make a statement intae a question, aw ye need tae dae is tae add 'ken' oan the end. Ken ? (Porno,p. 144) Gut reactions from readers and literary critics prove anyway that society still exerts a self-regulating and a self-policing behaviour towards what it considers to be obscene or even a threat to its morality. There is no law against swearing, nor a quota on the number of occurences of F… or C… words, nor are there penalties for being too sexually explicit in literature. The power of the readers, of the reviewers, of the public moral gaze is however conspicuous. Authors who may be tempted to indulge in sexual liberties, to transgress society's code of morality or to write in a way that some might find obscene or sadistic, run the risk of being pillored by those who feel endowed with preserving moral scrutiny. Indeed, my point here is not to argue about how despicable some of Welsh's sex or torture scenes are, and they are, or how gratuitous and pointless his representation of violence is. I'd like to argue that beside the purely commercial argument that 'sex and drugs sell' or beside the author's pursuit of any elusive biographical myth 11 , Welsh has also put forward -unwittingly, if we are to believe him -a very superficial ideological agenda which questions both the notions of power and authority through provocations and transgressions, therefore prompting reactions from the moral majority. This clearly appears as a paradoxical statement : as we have already seen, there is no definite political agenda in Welsh's novels and he himself is keen to stress that point. But whether they occur in his fantasy novels or in his urban realistic novels, paradoxes and oxymorons -or maybe incoherencesare a common feature of his work and this should not foreclose any attempt at analysing it. Transgression is after all at the basis of sexuality, according to Foucault. 12 In a postmodern world which has lost any sense of the religious and of the 'sacred', sexuality is still easily associated with profanation : profanation of bodies, of morality, of laws, of societies. And this is why Welsh's use of sexuality in his writing is very disturbing. The reader is all the time aware of this act of profanation perpretated by Welsh's characters. The reader is aware of them having crossed the boundary and standing on the margin, teasing him / her and moral scrutiny.

However, as Foucault also pointed out, the language of sexuality is both excessive and deficient. There is no adequation between language and the fundamental element of sexuality : desire. It is excessive because language uses its infinite permutations to try to describe desire, and it is deficient because desire -by definition -escapes any linguistic representation. There is however a third flaw directly related to desire in most of Welsh's sexual language : it resides in a void, a quasi total absence of the notion of desire. Welsh's sexual language cuts short and bypasses this basic notion of love and sexuality. Most of Welsh's characters are unable to express anything beyond the purely physical and sexual aspect of a relationship -or intercourse. One of the few exceptions is Robert Birrell in Glue : he confesses that his falling in love with a woman was certainly not what he expected when he decided to go out cruising with his friends :

Last night had been a disaster. The lassie saw him as a social worker when all he wanted was a ride … well, a bit of love and romance really, but you needed a ride tacked on the end. It was essential. (…) I've fuckin well fallen in love, Rab thought. Ah came oot for a drink and hoping for a ride, and ah've fuckin well fallen in love. And he felt like a foolish god. (Glue, p. 487)

Porno, despite the pornographic element, shows a similar concern with love. This could well be the result of a slight change of direction in Welsh's work, or maybe it has simply grown more mature because of age. But in his first works, Welsh's world is a Male Chauvinist Pig world, and where the language of love is as far removed from romance as possible. Stereotypes are quite basic regarding sexuality. Sex, in Welsh's novels, is concomitant with power : physical power played to the detriment of women or sexual power which men braggingly boast about. Of course there has always been, by definition, a conspicuous link between sexuality and power. This is most clearly seen in Filth where DC Bruce Robertson uses and abuses his profession as a policeman in order to obtain all the sexual gratifications he strives for. Being ready to blackmail one of his female victims into sexual abuse, he declares : « (…) and I realise that I am (…) enjoying the twisted but undeniable sexuality which is part and parcel of the complete dominance over another human being. This is one of the things which makes poliswork such a satisfying career » (Filth, p. 91). Welsh's latest novel, Porno, brings about a transition in this cliched world of macho culture : the introduction of a new character and of a new state of mind in the Leith posse : a clever young English female student, Ms Nikki Fuller-Smith, who is clearly a cut above Welsh's usual female characters. Sex for her has become a means to manipulate and subjugate the Leith males in order to fulfill her ambitions, to their utter dismay. But Nikki Fuller-Smith, probably one of the finest of Welsh's creations, is a rare occurence in the Welsh macho world of sexuality.

The link between sexuality and power and the significance of dialogues in Welsh's stories bring me to describe him not as the creator of a genre, whatever some subculture proponent might want to think, but as the heir of a genre which dates back from the end of the Middle-Ages, namely the 'Carnivalesque'. The carnival is not only a particular moment in time. It is a spirit which celebrates a temporary liberation from the established order, from society as a whole. It is not like an official feast or celebration where ranks, roles and positions are fixed and clearly established from the start. On the contrary, there is a suspension of hierarchy, of rules and of morality in the carnivalesque. One of its tenets is what Bakhtin called 'Grotesque Realism' whose main feature is degradation13 . The grotesque takes place in 'the lower stratum of the body' : the belly, reproductive organs, anus, but also in the face, and more particularly the mouth. The body and its organs are closely considered in its relations to other bodies and the outer world. They are magnified and bodily functions are derided. We move from a crude register to farcical dimension. Exaggeration and hyperbole are recurrent features of the grotesque imagery. The infamous toilet scene in Trainspotting the tapeworm in Filth, the shooting of a porn film in Porno, all belong to this sphere of degradation and humiliation, with a showy display of digestive or reproductive organs and a wide range of obscene and scatological dialogues. For Bakhtin however, degradation is not only negative : it heralds a conception, a new birth. This of course remains contentious in Welsh's writing : this new birth could be described as the emergence of individualistic values, as opposed to more social perspectives.

Renton's solution, both in Trainspotting and Porno, is to run away from the Leith crowd. DC Robertson's escape can only be from himself and from his perverted mind : he chooses to commit sucicide. Rab Strang, one of the rapists of Marabou Stork Nightmares, lies in a coma and is castrated and killed by his own victim.

Contrarily to Bakhtin's positive and healthy rebirth through the grotesque, Welsh's postmodern avatars find themselves in a limbo where there is no escape for the wicked.

The Grotesque element is probably most obvious in Filth. The tapeworm which has taken possession of DS Bruce Robertson's innards provides us with his host's unconscious voice, a genuine 'interior monologue'. It enables us to become aware of the traumas which still haunt him -namely the bullying he had to endure at school because of his father's identity, the taunts and gibes he was subjected to by his mother's husband, the death of his brother and the death of his first love, both of which he is responsible for. Welsh's choice of the tapeworm is a clear and potent metaphor of Bruce Robertson's repressed guilt feelings: it gnaws its host from the inside while bringing his past to light. The host's actions nurture the frustration and the resentment of the worm which grows stronger and whose voice gains potency day by day. The dialogical relationship between the two voices, another feature constitutive of the Carnival, is clearly visible in the narrative structure adopted by Welsh. Robertson's narration is sometimes unreadable as it is covered by the worm's own reflections. The reader is presented with a fragmented narrative illustrating Robertson's fragmented personality. The grotesque has taken over Robertson's life.

The emphasis laid on oral sex in Filth, with detailed and crude descriptions of DC Robertson's activities, corresponds to the Grotesque by involving sexual organs and the mouth in the same account.

Welsh also uses the carnivalesque feature of order reversal : the beggar becomes King during a carnival. This reaches absurd proportions in « When the Debris meets the Sea » where Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Kim Basinger and Victoria Principal, fluent in demotic Scots spend the day recluse in their Santa Monica mansion, day-dreaming and fantasizing of ever visiting the high place of male sexuality, that is to say Leith :

A pile of glossy magazines lay on a large black coffee table. They bore such titles as Wide-o, Scheme Scene and Bevy Merchants. Madonna flicked idly through the magazine called Radge, coming to an abrupt halt as her eyes feasted on the pallid figure of Deek Prentice, resplendent in a purple, aqua and black shell-suit. 'Phoah ! Ah'd shag the erse oafay that anywey,' she lustily exclaimed, breaking the silence, and thrusting the picture under Kylie Minogue's nose. Kylie inspected the image clinically, 'Hmm… ah dunno… No bad erse oan it like, bit ah'm no really intae flat-toaps. Still, ah widnae kick it oot ay bed, likesay, ken ?' (…) Victoria was enthusiastic. 'Total fuckin ride. Ah bet eh's hung like a hoarse. Like that photae ah goat ay Tam McKenzie, ken fi the Young Leith Team, original seventies line-up. Fuckin welt oan it, man, ah'm telling ye. 14 Degradation and the absurd also feature in 'The Granton Star Cause' where Boab Coyle, the protagonist, meets God in a pub. God, fluent in the Edinburgh demotic, braids Boab for being so passive and resigned to his fate. When admonished for not preventing wars, epidemics, tyrants or famines, god (undoubtedly lacking divine mercy) transforms Boab into a bluebottle. From this ultimate degradation, Boab enjoys the voyeuristic pleasure of being literally 'a fly on the wall' and being able, for instance, to watch his former girlfriend's sexual antics with her new boyfriend, or his parents' S&M fantasies, but he also revels at the new sensations provided by this Kafkaian metamorphosis :

It wasn't all bad being a bluebottle. The power of flight was something he'd have hated to have missed ; there had been few greater pleasures than soaring around outside. He also gained a taste for excrement, its rich, sour moistness tantalising his long insect tongue. The other bluebottles who crowded onto the hot shite were not so bad. Boab was attracted to some of them. He learned to appreciate the beauty of the insect body ; the sexy, huge, brown eyes, the glistening external skeleton, the appealing mosaic of blue and green, the rough, coarse hairs and the shimmering wings which refracted the sun's golden light. 15 Boab Coyle eventually recovers his human shape but dies of massive internal injuries after having been swatted by his mum against the front-room wall. Although before dying he voyeuristically delights in witnessing his parents' SM performance with clips, dildos, urine and faeces.

Welsh's sexual grotesque and scenes of degradation are certainly not to be taken at face value. They highlight transgression by breaking boundaries, moralities.

It would however be totally unrealistic to claim that Welsh has created a language of transgression through his description of sexuality and through his use of Scots, therefore bringing an answer to Foucault's doubts about the existence of such a 14 Irvine Welsh, The Acid House, pp. 87-88. The title is taken from Iggy Pop's song « Kill City » : « Well I live here in Kill City, where the debris meets the sea / It's a playground to the rich but it's a loaded gun to me / The scene is a fascination man, and everything's for free / Till you wind up in some bathroom, overdosed and on your knees. » 15 Irvine Welsh, The Acid House, p. 132.

language. As we saw, Welsh's sexual language has many flaws, amongst which the near total absence of the notion of desire. However, it does indeed participate in the transgressive nature of the carnivalesque and it sometimes, thanks to hyperbolia and exaggeration, underlines the grotesque elements or the grotesqueness of the situation. Welsh's style, made of abuses, curses, profanities, rudeness, transgresses the limits of conventional language. The dialogues or first person narrations in phonetic spelling also break linguistic boundaries. This, in turn, participates in Welsh's narrative structure where the same episode might be related by two (or more) characters, each one with his or her particular voice, idiolect and subjective understanding of the situation. This increases the temporality of the episode and contributes to the polyphony of his writing. 16 A key to understanding the transgressive nature of Welsh's language is also in what Bakhtin called heteroglossia. Heteroglossia is not to be confused with polyphony. Heteroglossia is the struggle between 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal', 'official' and 'unofficial' language : « (…)a double-voiced discourse [which] serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions : the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author ». 17 Like in Kelman's novels, the characters' sociolect clashes with the official language, 18 underlining then the total lack of comprehension and the social abyss between those worlds. For instance with Danny Murphy, aka Spud, who calls a publishing house after having received a letter of refusal for the publication of his book on Leith :

-Aye… ah ken yi'll think ah'm daft, but ah wis jist, likesay, tryin tae work oot what ye meant in that letter ay yours, man.

-Well, I think it was fairly explicit.

16 See for instance : Irvine Welsh, « Across the hall », The Acid House, pp. 103-05. 17 -Ah beg tae differ likes, mate. Cause ye says thit ye dinnae want it at the moment. So tae me that means thit ye might want it later. So, likes, when is it thit ye think ye might want it ? (…) -I'm sorry if I seemed ambiguous, Mr Murphy. To be more frank , it's quite an immature work, and you're not really yet up to publishable standard… -What dae ye mean, man ? -Well, the grammar … the spelling … -Aye, but are youse no meant tae sort aw that oot -… to say nothing of the subject matter being not right for us.

-But youse've published history books about Leith before… ah kin feel ma voice gaun aw high, cause it's no fair, it just isnae, it isnae fair, nowt's fair… -Those were serious works by disciplined writers, the boy sortay snaps, -this is a badly written celebration of yob culture and of people who haven't achieved anything noteworthy in the local community. (Porno,p. 380) Heteroglossia is also internalized and emphazised, for instance in Trainspotting with characters imitating ways of speaking (Sick Boy putting on a Sean Connery accent) : « I admire your rampant individualishm, Shimon. I shee parallelsh wish myshelf ash a young man. Glad you shed that Sean. Others have made shimilar comments » (Trainspotting, p. 30) or adopting a way of speaking devoid of their Edinburgh parlance or copying the Edinburgh parlance.

There are indeed clear feelings of 'déjà-vu' or intertextual echoes in Welsh's fiction. It seems difficult for Welsh to get away from his first heroes, the Trainspotting crew and although this gives a feeling of stability to the reader, we know where we are (Leith) and who they are, there is a strange kind of 'addiction' on Welsh's behalf.

Renton, Begbie, Sick Boy, and Spud all make a cameo appearance in Glue ; some of them are also mentioned in Filth. Welsh's latest novel, Porno, continues the Trainspotting story 10 years later with the same cast. After the consumption of illegal drugs and dealing for the twenty-something crew in Trainspotting, the thirtysomething Trainspotting crew deal with sex and the shooting of a porn movie. Drug consumption also moved up the social ladder, the new trend being cocaïne. It is quite easy to imagine a film being made out of Porno and also a third novel with the same characters (minus one, plus one) as the conclusion of the novel calls for a sequel.

After drugs and sex, it is also easy to imagine that in 10 years time the fortysomething Leith posse will make money out of music, and maybe from the rave scene as in the conclusion of Glue.

I have tried to show that Welsh's transgression has no clear ideological agenda, but that he has identifiable literary precedents. So the literary phenomenon called Irvine Welsh is not over yet, and he even has had many fallouts or clones on the Scottish literary scenes. The rave scene also became the topic Alan Warner's Morvern Callar and The Sopranos and it is actually difficult to name all the young Scottish novelists who draw their inspiration from Welsh, whose work indeed pursues that of Gray and Trocchi and, in

  previous youth movements might have had. It also moved more towards a leisure industry very much linked to consumerism than towards any kind of ideological statement : travelling to sunny exotic places -no-frill pacakaged tours to Rave capitals like Ibiza and Rimini -and the consumption of what was to become the symbol of the Rave movement, Ecstasy. This in many ways corresponds to William Burroughs' dreary prophecy that « the drugs economy [is] the most pure and lethal form of capitalism ». 6

  Irvine Welsh's repellent sex and torture scenes have already been profusely discussed in various articles, book reviews and interviews. The horrific gang-rape which forms the crux of Marabou Stork Nightmares, the abject sexual harrasment and physical abuse of women by DC Bruce Robertson in Filth, or the torture and ultimate killing of dogs in Marabou Stork Nightmares and Glue have all been at the centre of debates and controversies between the detractors and the proponents of 9 Irvine Welsh, Ecstasy, pp. 75-150

  Mikhael Bakhtin, « Discourse in the novel », in : -, The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 301-31 18 For instance the protagonist's visit to the Doctor's : « Mister Samuels, I have people waiting to see me. / Christ sake ! / I find your language offensive. / Do ye. Ah well fuck ye then. Fuck ye ! Sammy crumpled the prescription and flung it at him : Stick that up yer fucking arse ! » James Kelman, How Late it Was, How late, p. 225.

  a way, the linguistic experiments of MacDiarmid. After the 19th century Kailyard, the Urban Kailyard, we might well be witnessing the emergence of s Scottish movement, a School, what a critic once called a « satanic Kailyard ». 19 Well let's hope not… Welsh's transgression also stands for a literary contravention in the Scottish canon. His representation of working class ethics and life definitely breaks off the traditional urban writing from people like Kelman, Torrington, McIlvanney. Renton's sarcastic comment echoes Welsh's denunciation of what he once called 'the Glasgow Mafia' 20 : « 'Ah've never met one Weedjie [ie Glaswegian]whae didnae think that they are the only suffering proletarians in Scotland, Western Europe, the World. Weedjie experience ay hardship is the only relevant experience ay it'. » (Trainspotting, p. 191) 19 Zoë Strachan attributes this expression to Christopher Harvie : <www.spikemagazine.com/ 0599queerspotting.htm> 20 Quoted by Benjamin Arnoldy, see : <http://flakmag.com/features/welsh.html>

  11 About the Irvine Welsh myth, see : Ron McKay, « Would the real Irvine Welsh shoot up ? », The Observer, 4 February 1996 <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/ 0,6903,772792,00.html>. 12 Michel Foucault, « A Preface to Transgression», in : Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited with an Introduction by Donald F. Bouchard. Translated by Donald F.Bouchard & Sherry Simon (Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1977), p. 33.

In an interview with The Guardian, 15/8/1993.

Nicholas Clee, « The Lads of Leith », Times LiterarySupplement, March 18th, 1994, p. 12.

See also : Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting, p. 78.

Quoted by Andrew O'Hagan, « Trainspotting : The Boys are Back in Town », in : Ginette Vincendeau (ed.), Film / Literature / Heritage : A Sight and Sound Reader (London : BFI, 2001), p. 223.

James Kelman, How Late itWas, How Late… (London : Seeker & Warbug, 1994).

M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World,


Joaquín Hortal

Rafael Molina-Venegas

New light on the baseline importance of temperature for the origin of geographic species richness gradients

Temperature predicts the maximum tree-species richness and water and frost shape the residual variation

modelling its central tendency through the classical linear regression family of methods -as was done in the past. This assumes that the baseline effect of ambient energy does produce the negative linear relationship between richness and temperature predicted by the kinetic model (Allen et al. 2002), but also that this effect only poses an upper limit for species richness, and the effects of other factors may result in lower levels of species co-occurrence, thus producing a triangular rather than linear relationship. The results of Segovia's simple and elegant analytical design show unequivocally that the predictions of the kinetic model become progressively more explanatory towards the upper quartiles of the relationship between species richness and temperature along over 10,000 tree local inventories throughout the Americas, reaching over 70% of explanatory power for the upper 5% of the relationship (i.e. the 95% quantile). This confirms to a large extent his reformulation of the predictions of the kinetic model.

Further, the neat study from Segovia (2021) also provides evidence confirming that the well-known spatial non-stationarity in the richness-temperature relationship (see [START_REF] Cassemiro | Non-stationarity, diversity gradients and the metabolic theory of ecology[END_REF]) also applies to its upper-bound segment. Both the explanatory power and the slope of the relationship in the 95% upper quantile vary widely between biomes, reaching values similar to the predictions of the kinetic model only in cold temperate environments -precisely where temperature becomes more important than water availability as a constrain to plant life (O'Brien 1998;Hawkins et al. 2003). Part of these variations are indeed related with changes in water deficit and number of frost days along the XXth Century, as shown by the residuals of this paper (Segovia 2021) and a more detailed separate study (Segovia et al. 2020). This pinpoints the importance of the relative balance between water and energy as two of the main climatic factors constraining species diversity gradients, confirming the value of hypotheses that date back to Humboldt's work (see Hawkins 2001Hawkins , 2008)). There is however a significant amount of unexplained variation in Segovia's analyses, in particular in the progressive departure of the predictions of the kinetic model as we move towards the tropics, or downwards along the lower quantiles of the richness-temperature relationship. This calls for a deeper exploration of the factors that modify the baseline relationship between richness and energy, opening a new avenue for the macroecological investigation of how different forces and processes shape up geographical diversity gradients beyond the mere energetic constrains imposed by the basal limitations of multicellular life on Earth. , 33, 770-780. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2006.01452.x Hawkins, B.A., Albuquerque, F.S., Araújo, M.B., Beck, J., Bini, L.M., Cabrero-Sañudo, F.J., Castro Parga, I., Diniz-Filho, J.A.F., Ferrer-Castán, D., Field, R., Gómez, J.F., Hortal, J., Kerr, J.T., Kitching, I.J., León-Cortés, J.L., et al. (2007a) A global evaluation of metabolic theory as an explanation for terrestrial species richness gradients. Ecology, 88, 1877Ecology, 88, -1888Ecology, 88, . doi:10.1890 2021) Temperature predicts the maximum tree-species richness and water and frost shape the residual variation. bioRxiv, 836338, ver. 4 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer community in Ecology. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/836338 Segovia, R.A., Pennington, R.T., Baker, T.R., Coelho de Souza, F., Neves, D.M., Davis, C.C., Armesto, J.J., Olivera-Filho, A.T. and Dexter, K.G. (2020) Freezing and water availability structure the evolutionary diversity of trees across the Americas. Science Advances, 6, eaaz5373. doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5373

Cite this recommendation as:

Joaquín Hortal (2021) New light on the baseline importance of temperature for the origin of geographic species richness gradients. Peer Community in Ecology, 100075. 10.24072/pci.ecology.100075

Reviews

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Revision round #2

2021-03-04

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Decision round #2

Your manuscript has significantly improved, and I agree with the two reviewers of this version in that it is a fantastic work, and indeed merits recommendation. I asked a new reviewer expert in quantile regressions to take a look at the criticisms on the method raised before. S/he agrees with your arguments, but also points to a couple of simple methods to address its limitations in what refers to providing metrics of goodness-of-fit. Please follow her/his advice about this issue, and in particular the test for the deviation of the slope from -0.65; I think it will certainly strengthen your work.

Besides that, Rafael Molina-Venegas provides a number of minor comments that will be quite useful to improve this final version of the manuscript. I'm sure that, after all these revisions are done, the manuscript will be ready for my recommendation.

Thanks again for sending this beautiful work to open discussion throuhg PCI.

Preprint DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/836338

Reviewed by Rafael Molina-Venegas, 2021-01-28 12:54

I have revised the new version of the pre-print by Dr. Ricardo Segovia entitled "Temperature predicts the maximum tree-species richness and water and frost shape the residual variation", and I do think the research is simply fantastic. This piece of work clearly shows how the kinetic hypothesis of biodiversity gradients may have been largely underrated due to the use of central tendencies rather than upper bounds (i.e. quantile regressions) in previous modelling exercises, and it also illustrates on the interacting effects of other environmental factors besides mean temperature such as incidence of freezing events and water availability. The former variable is particularly interesting given that environmental information pertaining such drastic, eventual and stochastic climatic events has been comparatively less used in the macroecological literature. I also acknowledge the new cross-biome analysis, which I found largely informative. My criticism is fairly minor, and it mostly revolves around the feeling that that some of the results are perhaps loosely discussed (see comments below). It follows a few comments and suggestions that might hopefully help to lift the manuscript to its maximum informative potential. Congratulations to the author for his fine research.

Comments

The topic is introduced in an excessively sharpy manner (line 2), so I would suggest rewording a bit, perhaps including a short sentence to more smoothly introduce the reader to the topic. Line 86. Please, remove the "a" (i.e. allow for breakpoints in […]) Line 97. I do not think you need the "actually" here Line 99: I would suggest using "informative" instead of "robust" or alternatively "better fitted" instead of "more robust" Line 101: I am missing half a sentence here (are not significantly different from those of the linear models) Line 105: The active voice does not work here. Rewording suggestion: "a linear negative relationship towards the upper bound, where both models fit the better, cannot be rejected" Figure 1 caption. It should be noted that the SIC criteria was arbitrarily subdued to the t-test when interpreting evidence for model support. As such, the linear models at 75% and 85% bounds were considered as better supported because the non-significant t-tests despite the SIC criteria suggests that the breakpoint models better fit in all cases. Therefore, and given the information the author is intending to show in Figure 1, I think it should be clarified that the breakpoint models were only considered as superior to the linear ones in case both sources of statistical evidence suggested so, and that otherwise the simplest model (i.e. linear) was considered as "best supported". Line 126. "across biomes" instead of "by biomes" Line 131. No need for "actually" here Lines 213-215. I think that environment-driven diversifications are nowadays well acknowledged in the literature, so that there is consensus that diversity is not just a function of time and diversification rate. I think that the point here would be simply that previous attempts to explain spatial variation in diversification rates as a function of temperature might have failed due to the use of central tendencies instead of upper bounds. Yet, I am not sure that such contrasts have been conducted so far (i.e. using diversification rates instead of species richness as the response variable in spatial temperature-based models).

Lines 217-220. I do not get this, seems too cryptic to me.

Line 228. I am not an English native speaker, yet I think that testing a relationship "across regions" or "across biomes" actually means exploring the shape of the relationship IN every biome (i.e. the results shown in Figure 2) rather than considering all biomes/regions under the same model.

Lines 254-255. I think this idea could be expanded. For example, well-documented tropical-montane evolutionary radiations (e.g. Hughes 2015, https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.13230) probably blurred the macroecological signature of the kinetic hypothesis within tropical biomes.

Lines 255-259. Actually, your models show greater residual variation towards temperate, non-tropical latitudes, so I think this idea is incorrect. Perhaps the author wanted to stress that the -0.65 slope predicted by the kinetic model should only be expected in temperate regions? Besides, the expression "less environmental arrangement" is weird. Line 265. "factors", in plural.

Lines 288-289. Rewording suggestion: "that prevents dispersion and diversification into "harsh", extratropical environments." Besides, recurrent disturbance (i.e. glaciations) may have also played a key role here… Lines 296-300. This idea is loosely discussed and too cryptic. Line 322-324. In my opinion, this is a strong claim that suggests that previous studies are somewhat wrong, and I think it should be toned down. You may simply state that your contribution may serve to reevaluate the metabolic hypothesis in future latitudinal diversity gradient analyses. Line 429. Please, describe the exact breadth of the ordered categories here and in Figure 5 caption.

Reviewed by anonymous reviewer, 2021-03-03 13:34

I liked this manuscript and I really enjoyed reading it. It is very clear and very well-written, and the topic and idea on how to address the richness-Tª relationship is nice. Upper limits instead of responses to mean values is something quite common in ecology, and it is surprising the amount of effort that has been put on analyzing mean tendencies instead of upper limits; the research topic of this manuscript is a clear example. I have also read the author´s answers to the previous comments raised by the referees and I am quite happy with the arguments made by the author and the way he addressed some of the points. I have not much to say about the manuscript. The methodology is sound and robust. I understand the concerns raised by the referees and the recommender about the lack of a goodness-of-fit measure in quantile reg. similar to the Rsquared, but the author is right when he explains this issue. Unfortunately, R1 does not have the same meaning as R2, and it does not inform about the explained variance. Maybe, one way that could be used to address this concern, somehow, is to check if the slope progressively decreases (or increases in absolute value) from the 5th to the 95th percentiles. This has been previously used by other authors such as: VanDerWal, J., Shoo, L. P., Johnson, C. N., Williams, S. E. ( 2009). Abundance and the environmental niche: Environmental suitability estimated from niche models predicts the upper limit of local abundance. The American Naturalist 174: 282-291.

Jimenez-Valverde, A., Aragón, P., Lobo, J. M. ( 2021). Deconstructing the abundance-suitability relationship in species distribution modelling. Global Ecol Biogeogr. 2021: 30:327-338.

As a minor comment, it would be easy to check if the slopes statistically differ from -0.65.

Congratulations to the author for this enjoyable manuscript.

Revision round #1 2020-02-17

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Decision round #1

Dear author

Sorry for the time taken to reach a decision about your preprint. Briefly, it has been difficult to find reviewers due to the holiday season, and some expected reviews have been delayed. In any case, now we do have two reviews, and both agree with my assessment that the paper may merit a recommendation in PCI, once some key problems with the current version are solved.

More precisely, for the preprint to be recommendable, you need to:

(a) provide a much better theoretical explanation linking the environmental temperature suffered by plants and mean annual temperature, as well as other descriptors of "harshness" such as Freezing Days (by the way, Humboldt first proposal of a mechanism for the latitudinal diversity gradient was precisely harshness; I think Hawkins TREE 2001 highlighted that).

(b) Assess the effects of regional variations on the richness/MAT relationship, ideally using differences between biomes and/or ecoregions, realms and glaciated/unglaciated areas.

(c) Pay special attention to the conversion of units, as it determines the slope values, and make a clearer formulation of your hypothesis about the slope that allows identifying the actual slope that is assessed. Current information in the methods is not enough so as to ascertain the exact way you may reach a comparable -0.65 slope.

(d) Provide estimates of the goodness of fit of the models. It could be argued that within an informationtheory-based hypothesis testing framework goodness of fit is not needed -because you effectively assess whether/to which extent some hypotheses are informative or not. However, you use AIC for comparing between alternative models, which leaves the reader with no information about which is the power of these models to "explain" the data. If goodness-of-fit lies below, say, 5%, we are talking about massive residuals and limited explanation of the overall phenomenon of richness. If, on the contrary, such percentage goes above 30 or even 40% of variation, that is really a lot. If you account for (b) and you end up having final models that include MAT, Frost Days, CWD, biome and realm, for example, and that accounts for more than half of the variation, your results will be much more convincing that if you explain one third of richness variations, and most of it is due to regional efects.

See the reviewer's assessments for more details on these four points, and several other issues. Among these, let me highlight that you should avoid using MAT as abbreviation in the title (Mean Annual Temperature or simply Temperature would be more clear, and of course informative), and also that this manuscript desperately needs maps with richness and residual values, to allow the readers to assess your results in a wider extent. I am looking forward to receive a revised version of the preprint, together with a detailed answer to the comments provided. I'm convinced that your research has enough quality so as to finally merit a recommendation in PCI Ecology.

Reviewed by anonymous reviewer, 2020-02-17 11:50

This is a nicely conducted, straightforward macroecological assessment of which are the actual effects of temperature on species richness. As any good macroecological work, it has the strengths and limitations of the discipline: while it makes a massive use of data -thus providing robustness, it also makes some oversimplifications -so statements about the real meaning of the relationships found need to be made with caution.

One of these oversimplifications is how you refer to temperature throughout the text (BTW, please avoid using the abbreviation in the title!). Perhaps the most worrying is in the opening paragraph, where you state that mean annual temperature would be the main driver of richness. This is not what Brown, Allen and colleagues said, for the average of the monthly averages means nothing in biological terms. This variable is a proxy for the general temperature conditions in each place throughout the year; as such it tells a lot about the (lack of) harshness of the conditions for life in each place, but it tells nothing about the mechanisms you are talking about here. As Brown and colleagues lined them up in their Metabolic Theory, the limit to life growth (and richness) is given by the temperature of activation of enzymatic reactions, which gives the approximate slope of -0.65. Therefore, the important factor is the temperature experimented by the cells, and more precisely for how long this temperature is available throughout the year in environmental conditions. This would be the physiological limit imposed by temperature to population growth and several aspects of diversity, including richness. In absence of such value (time with environmental temperatures suitable for enzymatic reactions), or of other a priori more adequate proxies such a Growing Degree Days, Frost Days, or the like, mean annual temperature could be used a substitute, assuming that the higher the average temperature throughout the year, the more time with temperatures adequate for normal cell functioning, the lower the energetic costs for organic functioning, and the higher the population growth, diversification rates and the conundrum of mechanisms leading to higher species richness.

Well, I'm missing at least part of this theoretical introduction in your text. Perhaps not all of this, but at least a sharper justification for the use of mean temperatures as proxies, indicating the mechanisms linking temperature with richness, and why MAT could be a good proxy for that. In fact, to me the most important of your results (the relationship between residuals and Frost Days) would be highlighted much better if this theoretical framework was properly outlined. And so would be Water Deficit, another measure of the quantity of time available for proper biological activity. Also, I'm missing two key papers by Hawkins et al (2007a,b) from the original evaluation of the Metabolic Theory. In the first a number of authors assessed whether the relationships between richness and temperature followed the -0.65 slope for many groups and regions (almost none of them did follow it;, and in the second a subset of them provided several arguments of why this should be an expected outcome; their main argument was that even if such limit to enzymatic activity was universal, the course of evolution would lead most of biodiversity to escape from the limitations it imposes through evolving many different strategies (endothermy, cell wall structures to create microclimates, etc.) that following my argument above would lead to longer times with adequate cell functioning throughout the year, escaping from environmental temperature conditions. The fact that you find that MAT could be a limit to maximum richness and frost alters these numbers is somehow related with this realisation in Hawkins et al 2007b, although it contradicts to some extent the findings in Hawkins et al 2007a. Referring to such literature, and some other key papers on physiological limits (e.g. [START_REF] Peck | Animal temperature limits and ecological relevance: effects of size, activity and rates of change[END_REF][START_REF] Peters | Predictors of elevational biodiversity gradients change from single taxa to the multi-taxa community level[END_REF][START_REF] Brodie | limits to mammal diversity vary with latitude and global temperature[END_REF], or some papers in a recent Phil Trans issue, see [START_REF] Spicer | Physiological diversity, biodiversity patterns and global climate change: testing key hypotheses involving temperature and oxygen[END_REF].

Besides that, your work is undermined by the lack of accounting for regional effects. The slope of the relationship between species richness and temperature is well known to vary in space (e.g. [START_REF] Cassemiro | Non-stationarity, diversity gradients and the metabolic theory of ecology[END_REF], Hortal et al. 2011, etc.) according to several factors such as glaciations and differences among regional communities (sensu [START_REF] Ricklefs | Disintegration of the ecological community[END_REF][START_REF] Ricklefs | Intrinsic dynamics of the regional community[END_REF]. So while reading it I feel constantly guessing that the alternative hypothesis that the relationship between richness and temperature varies significantly in space by factors other than frost.

To assess this, all time I'm missing a map to locate studies with their richness and another with their residual values. This paper desperately needs these two maps. But also, the robustness of your results is compromised by the lack of assessments of effect differences between different types of regions. Accounting for this could be easy by adding as cofactors biogeographic realms, biome maps, glaciated/unglaciated areas, etc. I would be really surprised to find that there are no differences between regions, biomes, ecoregions or areas that suffered glaciations or not. But if that is the case, then the importance of your paper would increase a lot.

Besides these major problems, there are several typos (e.g, in the abstract "attempts to explain (…) richness HAVE focused"), but most importantly there are a few idiomatic problems here and there, so a light English revision is needed. In particular, the following sentences need to be reworked: -Last sentence of the abstract is confusing, it needs to be rewritten

  Francis, A.P. and Currie, D.J. (2003) A globally consistent richness-climate relationship for Angiosperms. American Naturalist, 161, 523-536. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/368223 Hawkins, B.A. (2001) Ecology's oldest pattern? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 16, 470. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5347(01)02197-8 Hawkins, B.A. (2008) Recent progress toward understanding the global diversity gradient. IBS Newsletter, 6.1, 5-8. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sr2k1dd Hawkins, B.A., Field, R., Cornell, H.V., Currie, D.J., Guégan, J.-F., Kaufman, D.M., Kerr, J.T., Mittelbach, G.G., Oberdorff, T., O'Brien, E., Porter, E.E. and Turner, J.R.G. (2003) Energy, water, and broad-scale geographic patterns of species richness. Ecology, 84, 3105-3117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1890/03-8006 Hawkins, B.A., Diniz-Filho, J.A.F., Jaramillo, C.A. and Soeller, S.A. (2006) Post-Eocene climate change, niche conservatism, and the latitudinal diversity gradient of New World birds. Journal of Biogeography

Figure 2

 2 Figure 2 caption. "across the main biomes […]" Line 179. "model that mechanistically"

  Line 298. "dropping" Line 304. See comment to lines 254-255 Line 308-311. I do not get this idea.