Tag: Mark Renton

Boab’s God: Latent Agency in Welsh’s Kafkaesque Metamorphosis

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I just read The Granton Star Cause in Irvine Welsh’s short story collection, The Acid House, and couldn’t help but reflect it off of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Kafka gave us Gregor Samsa: a man who wakes up as vermin, stripped of usefulness, abandoned by family, slowly rotting in a godless universe. His tragedy is inertia; his metamorphosis grants him no agency, only deeper alienation.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Welsh replies with Boab Coyle, a lad who is likewise cast off, rejected by his football mates, scorned by his parents, dumped by his girlfriend, and discarded by his job. Boab is surplus to every domain: civic, familial, erotic, and economic. Then he undergoes his own metamorphosis. And here Welsh swerves from Kafka.

Boab meets his “god.” But the god is nothing transcendent. It is simply Boab’s latent agency, given a mask – a projection of his bitterness and thwarted desires. God looks like him, speaks like him, and tells him to act on impulses long repressed. Where Kafka leaves Gregor to die in silence, Welsh gives Boab a grotesque theology of vengeance.

Through a Critical Theory lens, the contrast is stark:

  • Marx: Both men are surplus. Gregor is disposable labour; Boab is Thatcher’s lumpen. Alienated, both become vermin.
  • Nietzsche: Gregor has no god, only the absurd. Boab makes one in his own image, not an Ăśbermensch, but an Ăśber-fly – quite literally a Superfly – a petty deity of spite.
  • Foucault: Gregor is disciplined into passivity by the family gaze. Boab flips it: as a fly, he surveils and annoys, becoming the pest-panopticon.
  • Bataille/Kristeva: Gregor embodies the abjection of his family’s shame. Boab revels in abjection, weaponising filth as his new mode of agency.

The punchline? Boab’s new god-agency leads straight to destruction. His rage is cathartic, but impotent. The lumpen are permitted vengeance only when it consumes themselves.

So Kafka gave us the tragedy of stasis; Welsh provides us with the tragedy of spite. Both are bleak parables of alienation, but Welsh injects a theology of bad attitude: a god who licenses action only long enough to destroy the actor.

Gregor rots. Boab rages. Both end the same way.

Trainspotting

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Trainspotting Movie Poster
2–3 minutes

I identify strongly with Irvine Welsh’s characters in Trainspotting – the book, not the sanitised film version. Especially with Mark Renton, whose voice strips away illusions with a brutality that borders on honesty.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Consider this passage from the chapter “Bang to Rites” (pp. 86–87), where Renton attends the funeral of his mate Billy. Billy joined the army to escape the dead-end life they all shared, only to be killed on duty in Northern Ireland. Renton’s verdict:

“He died a hero they sais. Ah remember that song: ‘Billy Don’t Be A Hero’. In fact, he died a spare prick in a uniform, walking along a country road Wi a rifle in his hand. He died an ignorant victim ay imperialism, understanding fuck all about the myriad circumstances which led tae his death. That wis the biggest crime, he understood fuck all about it. Aw he hud tae guide um through this great adventure in Ireland, which led tae his death, wis a few vaguely formed sectarian sentiments.

“The cunt died as he lived: completely fuckin scoobied.

“His death wis good fir me. He made the News at Ten. In Warholian terms, the cunt had a posthumous fifteen minutes ay fame. People offered us sympathy, n although it wis misguided, it wis nice tae accept anywey. Ye dinnae want tae disappoint folk.

“Some ruling class cunt, a junior minister or something, says in his Oxbridge voice how Billy wis a brave young man. [1] He wis exactly the kind ay cunt they’d huv branded as a cowardly thug if he wis in civvy street rather than on Her Majesty’s Service. [2] This fucking walking abortion says that his killers will be ruthlessly hunted down. So they fuckin should. Aw the wey tae the fuckin Houses ay Parliament.

“Savour small victories against this white–trash tool of the rich that’s no no no”

[1] Renton doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Not Billy, not the army, not the Oxbridge suits who polish the tragedy into something fit for the News at Ten. The uniform is a costume, a disguise: a working-class lad suddenly deemed “brave” only because he was wearing the right outfit when he died. Strip away the uniform, and he’d have been dismissed as a thug or a waster.

[2] Renton’s root-cause analysis is unsparing. Billy wasn’t killed by the man with the gun so much as by the machine that put him there – the state, the ruling classes, the ones who spin death into “sacrifice” while continuing to shuffle the poor like pawns across the board.

It’s this clarity that makes Welsh’s work more than a drug novel. Trainspotting isn’t just about needles and nods; it’s about seeing through the charade. Renton despises both establishment and rebellion because both are performance, both hollow. His cynicism is the closest thing to honesty in a world that would rather dress up corpses in borrowed dignity.

And maybe that’s why I feel the affinity: because subversion matters more than allegiance, and sometimes the only truthful voice is the one that refuses to be polite at the funeral.

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