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Aesthetic Depersonalization in Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room

The Scottish author Louise Welsh's crime novel, The Cutting Room, was published in 2002 to immediate critical claim and commercial success.1 The Cutting Room is part of a strand of post-war Scottish writing that focuses on the phenomenology of personal relations, and on how, in particular, other people may be depersonalized, rather than encountered in an "Ithou" relationship. An awareness of this tradition, rather than that of depth-psychoanalytic Freudian ideas, is, I argue, required in order to appreciate the links that The Cutting Room suggests between a depersonalizing attitude toward others, and the pleasures of aesthetic contemplation. Although The Cutting Room is amongst the most recent and most successful of Scottish novels to take issue with the "gaze" that we direct upon others, even a brief survey over the last few decades can reveal texts with similar concerns. Toni Davidson's Scar Culture (1999), like The Cutting Room, takes photography as a metaphor for depersonalized experience. One of the narrators of Davidson's novel, "Click," deals with his experience of parental abuse by focusing on the representation of his life in "consciousness." The "real" Click sits in the chamber, or "camera," of his head, viewing with an aesthetic eye the images which are flung upon its walls for his appreciation. Instead of living his life, he observes it as if it were a dramatic representation: "There was a screaming match going on, a very one-sided event with me the sole audience, the lone frightened spec-