Scottish writers were once preoccupied with the idea of a “Caledonian antisyzygy”. This has come to mean a general spirit of doubleness in the Scots psyche, expressing all manner of contradictions: British and Scottish, Highland and lowland, Jekyll and Hyde, native and cosmopolitan. George Gregory Smith, who coined the term in 1919, meant something specific – a tension between passive realism and runaway fantasy that left Scotland’s intellectuals trapped between worlds.
The term has become unfashionable among critics, who increasingly see it as a propagandist cliché, while the constitutional middle way of devolution briefly promised a route out of such antinomies. Yet the independence referendum and its aftermath have brought the old binary-brain back to the surface: “Yes” and “No” are now, to almost everyone’s frustration, the unshiftable poles of Scottish politics. The debate over independence is dominated by endless angry confrontations between actuality and imagination.
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