Gregory Smith's 'Caledonian
Antisyzygy', hardened into twentieth-century dogma, the consensus had its roots in J.
Gregory Smith defined the 'Caledonian
Antisyzygy' as 'the very combination of opposites'.
En Modernism and Nationalism, Margery Palmer McCulloch recoge de manera exhaustiva la heterogeneidad de un periodo en el que, entre otros conflictos, se intentaban conciliar las contradicciones del Caledonian
Antisyzygy, definidas en 1919 por Gregory Smith como "the contrasts which the Scot shows at every turn, in his political and ecclesiastical history, in his polemical restlessness, in his adaptability" (Palmer McCulloch 2004: 6).
In "Caledonian
Antisyzygy" (1962) MacDiarmid confronts his dilemma: "I write now in English now in Scots / To the despair of friends who plead / For consistency."
Now, if we consider Gregory Smith's--and then Hugh MacDiarmid's--"Caledonian
Antisyzygy," the overmentioned bipolar identity of the Scots, are you with authors, like Tom Nairn (1992: 6) in reference to the 1979 referendum, who see this as a recurring motto for those who try to justify the political inmobilisation of an internally-colonised people?