This is Stevenson's city, the lair of Jekyll and Hyde: a city of opposites. The cosmopolitan impulse the festival embodies sits beside an energetic, purely Scottish aesthetic which is especially forceful (and necessary) as it relates to language. There's hardly a nation on earth that couldn't produce a similar gallery of caricatures: the problem for Scotland has been that until recently, these shoddy parodies were often glumly accepted as being something near the truth. Self-doubt was rampant, nourished by the silently received wisdom that to be Scottish was simply to be improperly English. Which in its turn provided the possibility of being Scottish simply by dint of hating the English.The festival expresses the mixture neatly. Current favourites would include the Scot as needle-sharing, foul-mouthed and sexually incontinent thug, the Scot as vehemently (or duplicitously) left-wing, foul-mouthed and angry thug and the Scot as noble, hairy and Claymore-happy monarch of the glens, or patient, hairy and glassy-eyed lassie of the glens.
Other, older interpretations tended to highlight financial prudence, sensual restraint, moral rectitude and the kind of good education which is irritating rather than impressive. But there are also, here and there, young men in kilts and T-shirts, kilts and Timberland boots, young men in Braveheart recreations of the genuine Highland article, and other, smaller signs of a new generation with an interest in exploring, reclaiming, undermining and enjoying the possibilities of being Scottish.Being Scottish is, naturally, open to many interpretations. That death, theft and shame can be cosy is, of course, a characteristic Scottish reality. And if the kilt has lately experienced a peculiar rebirth, it may be taken as a small indication that national self-confidence is returning. In Edinburgh today, there are more than enough traditional kilts to satisfy the most demanding tour operator. In a decade when Scots identity was apparently on the verge of dissolution into a slurry of football violence, melancholia and ballads celebrating accidental death, the kilt was finally and tragically adopted by baton twirlers everywhere, while the nation's hobbled lurch towards devolution crumpled into bitterness.Which is to say that the kilt, like many other Scottish icons, represents death, cultural expropriation and profound embarrassment, just as powerfully as it represents a cosy and familiar confirmation of national identity. The kilt is both a symbol of the cultural oppression visited upon the Gaels after Culloden, and an emblem of the Union's pride in her Highland regiments.
Any individual kilt may well be fashioned from an entirely spurious tartan invented during the Victorian love affair with North Britain, or during the current, alarming, vogue for corporate plaids - the British Airways tartan being a recent and lurid example. In its 1970s manifestation, complete with ruffle-fronted shirt and patent dancing pumps, it was the apotheosis of kitsch - a kind of National Skirt of Shame. These same Highland troops then became one of the strong arms of Britain's Empire. This smaller, cheaper kilt was forced on Highland troops who fought beyond their borders for the army of another country and another language. And Edinburgh, as translated by the Festival, does offer indications of the slow but significant changes which Scotland has been pleased to work upon itself. The city is also eloquently well-provided with the balefully contradictory symbols, irreversibly associated with Scottishness.
Just as London is expected to provide a healthy quota of red double deckers and bobbies in Freudian helmets, Edinburgh is duty- bound to peddle cliches of the north. To pick only one example from the whole, haggis-stained selection, let us consider the kilt.It will play its usual major role in the festival. It will probably involve the presentation or discussion of a deviant sexual act: little else would arouse even a twinge of outrage. The days of radical political comment and the possibilities of a language still capable of causing shock seem to have faded. A brief moment of salacious intrigue was offered in recent years by a circus performer whose breasts escaped her costume while being foot-juggled carelessly - did they fall or were they pushed? - but nothing came of it. And, as ever, the Festival welcomes visiting performers and visiting audiences, and all appears to be simply business as usual, and not even especially Scottish - this is, after all, an international event.Of course, in matters of national identity, nothing is ever as simple as it appears. Tartans are certainly visible, usually swathed across new arrivals anxious to proclaim themselves as persons of Scottish descent.
