An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

declining American pop singer who has fallen in with Terry and a few of his

acquaintances for a day or two. In thinking about them, she notices that

They were nice enough, that was the problem, they always were, but

dependency on others and, conversely, theirs on you, just had to stop. They’d

shown her something though, something useful and important, during those

last few days of drug-addled nonsense. Strange as it was, they cared. They

weren’t world-weary or blasé. They cared about things; often stupid, trivial

things, but they cared. And they cared because they were engaged in a

world outside the constructed world of the media and show business. You

couldn’t care about that world, not really, because it wasn’t yours and it never

could be. It was sophisticated commerce, and it just chugged on.^101

The schemie way of life is, despite its violence, sexism, and poverty, not a

world that just chugs on in sophisticated commerce. It includes spontaneity,

genuine sexual adventurism, fun, enthusiasm, and care, despite including in

the very same actions callousness, disrespect, crassness, escapism, and vio-

lence. All this comes out in the language and the thoughts of its principal

figures.

What are we to do in response to this world? How are we to feel about it?

Do Terry and Andrew and Carl and Billy live well? Irvine Welsh,Glue’s

author, does not, I think, know. We are estranged by the experience of this

book–we middle-class readers–from“our”ordinary way of life. We are

drawn into this novel’s sublimities of both language and experience, as well

as into its crudities. We see that gratitude for their lives is something that is

possible for some of these protagonists, at some moments, in certain ways,

and we can, for a moment, share in that gratitude. Yet their futures are

uncertain; their virtues are inseparable from their vices, at least as far as any

immediate course of action is concerned. Their culture and way of life are

what they are: both like ours and yet desperately different. And so we are to

do or feel what? How are we to improve our ethical understanding and

reflective deliberation based on our experience of this text?

My sense is that this novel is not one that calls for and contributes to

ethical understanding, where ethical understanding is conceived of as a

matter of arriving at the correct general theory and principles for the con-

duct of life. But we nonetheless see and feel in this closely attentive realist

(^101) Ibid., p. 433.
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