'I just tell the bloody truth, as I see it': James Kelman’s A Disaffection, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Melancholy Knowledge

The assertion by the troubled teacher Patrick Doyle – “I just tell the bloody truth, as I see it” (p. 112) – in James Kelman’s novel A Disaffection goes to the heart of Kelman’s own aesthetic of showing things as they are. However, the qualifying clause – “as I see it” – also suggests that truth is not evidentially absolute and immediate but provisional or situated. Of course the very concept of truth would seem to require of itself a totalised fulfilment of its own promise. That is, truth sh...