One day after the exams the teachers sat at their desks correcting papers while the pupils read comics, played chess or cards, or talked quietly in groups. Coulter, at a desk in front of Thaw, turned round and said, “What are ye reading?”

Thaw showed a book of critical essays on art and literature. Coulter said accusingly, “You don’t read that for fun.”

“Yes, I read it for fun.”

“People our age don’t read that sort of book for fun. They read it to show they’re superior.”

“But I read this sort of book even when there’s no-one to see me.”

“That shows you arenae trying to make us think you’re superior, you’re trying to make yourself think you’re superior.

Thaw scratched his head and said, “That’s clever, but not very true. What are you reading?”

Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Coulter’s no fool, but he and Thaw are nevertheless different; in fact, we could say that Thaw is a particular kind of fool, which Coulter is not. It’s a problem of desire; of perverse or abnormal desire (“people our age don’t read that sort of book for fun”), which in Thaw’s case is closely allied to repressed and sadistic sexuality.

Thaw’s sadism is an expression of a drive for mastery, a will to escape the common world of material necessity and transform it, in fantasy, into a world of freedom (imagined from an egoistic standpoint, as freedom to realise one’s own desires by turning other people into the passive support or instrument of those desires). He has no particular desire to think of himself as “superior”, but can only imagine realising his actual desires by attaining to a superior position. His reading renders the world intellectually tractable, in compensation for the fact that it remains emotionally intractable, to the point of seeming unhabitable.