Tom Nairn as Essayist: Romantic Negativity and Critical Imagination

Abstract

This article reads Tom Nairn as an essayist and critic. It identifies some of the distinctive strengths of Nairn’s writing and ‘critical imagination’, showing that literary and aesthetic influences were vital to the development of his political outlook. Underneath his shifting ideological alignments, we find a consistent tension in Nairn’s writing between dreams of creative liberation and ‘anti-dreams’ of false escape. Both celebrated and derided for its ‘metaphorical virtuousity’, Nairn’s analysis draws continually on a poetic sensibility; we can never separate the discursive from the expressive in his writing. His essays combine romantic and sceptical currents in a distinctive style of chuckling disenchantment, highly attuned to the symbolic dimensions of political culture. His key critical images are themselves artworks, analytic and creative at once. These features may be fruitfully linked to Nairn’s grounding in aesthetic philosophy, a factor not previously explored in his reception. The ‘negative’ character of Nairn’s nationalism takes on a different complexion viewed in this light, as part of a broader rejection of ‘fossilised cultural language’ grounded in vitalist aesthetics and post-Romantic literary culture. This perspective calls for a broader re-reading of Nairn’s achievement as an essayist and critic.