Contemporary Scottish Gothic

Mourning, Authenticity, and Tradition

T. Baker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137457202
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An innovative reading of a wide range of contemporary Scottish novels in relation to literary tradition and modern philosophy, Contemporary Scottish Gothic provides a new approach to Scottish fiction and Gothic literature, and offers a fuller picture of contemporary Scottish Gothic than any previous text.

1

A Scott-Haunted World

In a recent survey of contemporary criticism on Scottish Gothic, Monica Germanà argues that the Gothic tradition is characterised in part by an emphasis on ‘the viability of stable origins’ that leads to an exploration of ‘the fear of not knowing what one is’.¹ Gothic, at its most basic level, explores questions not only of history and tradition, but also of how the apparent instability of historical origins casts doubt on the stability of the self. Within Scottish Gothic, these issues are often framed in terms of canonicity and influence; critics have gone so far as to term literary tradition the ‘Scottish curse’, whereby the ‘Scottishness’ of a given work can only be determined by its reference to an already accepted national canon.² The relationship between tradition, selfhood, and authorship is rarely more apparent than in the many explicit reworkings of novels by Walter Scott, James Hogg, and Robert Louis Stevenson produced over the past decades. Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, for instance, has been rewritten or adapted at least half a dozen times, by authors including Muriel Spark, Emma Tennant, Robin Jenkins, and most recently James Robertson. This conscious appropriation and revision of a literary tradition invites a consideration of Gothic as a form that both upholds and distorts literary tradition. At the same time that these novels reaffirm Hogg’s canonical status, they also indicate the novel’s malleability. By reimagining or even perverting their source material, these modern adaptations invite questions of authorship and originality, as well as the construction of a national or generic literary tradition: in these latter versions or revisions, the questions of textual authenticity raised by Hogg’s novel operate both internally and externally. Such texts draw attention to what Fiona Robertson terms the Gothic ‘fetishization of the processes of narrative: a fascination with the origin and transmission of historical and pseudo-historical materials’.³ By highlighting the source text as both origin and fiction, they complicate issues of literary and historical authenticity.

No author in the Scottish literary tradition has encouraged more consideration of the relationship between writing and originality than Walter Scott, whether in terms of the ascription of authorial identity or of historical appropriation and canon formation. In the nineteenth century, the Waverley Novels were not only immensely popular in their original form, but were adapted into various media with remarkable frequency. Yet Scott has now arguably been forgotten by the reading public, and is seen by numerous authors not only as an author writing of the past, but also as one whose works are locked into the past. While Hogg and Stevenson have, in their modern adaptations, been presented as relevant to contemporary Scottish society, Scott has seemingly vanished, or is approached only out of historic interest. As much as Scott’s work is undeniably pivotal in the creation of a Scottish literary tradition (and of a Scottish Gothic) he rarely receives the popular interest accorded to Stevenson, or even Hogg. This tension is well encapsulated by Ann Rigney, who argues that Scott:

showcased the past, but only in order to provide the imaginative conditions for taking leave of it: he defused its capacity to disrupt the present by turning it into an object of display. Since Scott thus incorporated transience into the very principle of historicization, his own obsolescence was part and parcel of his continuing legacy. His being forgotten was paradoxically a sign of his influence.⁴

Just as Ian Duncan locates ‘inauthenticity’ and ‘fictionality’ as the central starting points for an analysis of Scott’s fiction, Rigney examines the extent to which Scott manipulates the past.⁵ For Rigney however, unlike Duncan, this manipulation is not a fruitful disruption, but leads to Scott’s own disappearance: by constricting the past and making it safe, Scott creates a paradigm in which he too must be assigned to a harmless past. The world Scott creates is a world in which he remains present as signifier (through street names, memorials, and the like), but where his works themselves and the man who wrote them are ultimately forgotten.⁶ As such, Scott provides an instructive paradigm of the relationship between loss and literary tradition in the Scottish context.

Further afield, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse provides a classic instance of the figuration of Scott as forgotten. In the first section of the novel, Mr Ramsay looks to Scott’s reputation as a way to measure his own:

For Charles Tansley had been saying […] that people don’t read Scott any more. Then her husband thought, ‘That’s what they’ll say of me’; so he went and got one of those books. And if he came to the conclusion ‘That’s true’ what Charles Tansley said, he would accept it about Scott. But not about himself.⁷

In ‘Time Passes’, however, the Waverley Novels are covered with mould; though saved from ‘oblivion’ by Mrs McNab, they are no longer seen as offering a way to approach the relationship between the self and the world, but rather as historical objects among many others. The novels, and with them Scott himself, have passed into history: they are intended for decoration rather than for reading.⁸ Scott’s work, in Woolf’s novel, represents a static view of literature: it serves as a diversion, but does not, and cannot, affect the individual. Scott is supremely safe literature. This is certainly the view Woolf presents in her contemporary essay ‘The Antiquary’, where she writes of ‘thousands of readers […] brooding in a rapture of uncritical and silent satisfaction’ while reading the Waverley Novels.⁹ Although she finds aspects of Scott’s work to praise, Scott himself is distinctly absent: ‘we are afloat on a broad and breezy sea without a pilot’ (141). Like the street signs discussed in Rigney’s work, for Woolf the Waverley Novels indicate a past to which they do not provide direct access. Scott’s works are in some sense arbitrary or undefined; they can only be approached passively, whether by their author or their reader.

Sixteen years later, however, in the essay ‘Gas at Abbotsford’, Woolf presents a more nuanced view of Scott’s work, finding it poised between ‘ventriloquy and truth’ (138). The value of Scott’s work, she now argues, is found in the tension between ‘make-believe’ and ‘real thoughts and real emotions’. Scott’s work, Woolf finds, is filled with tensions and unusual pairings: ‘lifeless English turns to living Scots’ while the gas lighting at Abbotsford returns to daylight (136). Scott, for Woolf, is lifeless and yet cannot be consigned to the past; he is an unknown author who cannot completely be ignored or forgotten. Scott’s work raises questions not only of authenticity, but also of its value; Woolf invites the reader to consider what may be gained from the interplay between imitation and truth when both terms are in contention. Something of this relationship is captured in Richard Maxwell’s summation of the Waverley Novels as dramatising ‘the discovery of history’s dynamism through the seemingly improbable portal of antiquarianism; far from being mutually exclusive, as one might expect, the past of precious relics and the past of enveloping emergency proved mutually interdependent’.¹⁰ The past is precisely that which is not static, but returns in myriad forms. This is the crux of Scott’s work, in many senses, where the very things that have been relegated to the past become supremely relevant to the present.¹¹ Throughout the Waverley Novels, the past and present, the artificial and the authentic, and the active and passive are in constant dialogue. Nothing can be completely forgotten or dismissed. As in Scott’s own The Antiquary, the past is first forgotten, then misinterpreted, and finally comes to shape the present.

While this relationship may not be Gothic in itself, it similarly foregrounds the problems of history with which Gothic is singularly occupied. Scott’s own interest in Gothic is largely limited to its formal properties, rather than focused on recurrent motifs or subversive qualities.¹² Gothic is a formal solution to the problems of representing the past. As Fiona Robertson writes in a discussion of Redgauntlet: ‘Gothic is increasingly validated as one of the ways in which a modern imagination like Darsie’s, or Scott’s, or the early nineteenth-century reader’s, can best perceive and represent the past and the experience of being persecuted by it.’¹³ Gothic, as critics from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on have pointed out, often draws attention to the unspeakable, whether in terms of the failure of narrative language, or the failure of individual expression.¹⁴ As such, it becomes one of the forms best associated with the tension between the hold the past has on the present and the impossibility of accessing that past directly. Gothic provides an index not only for what is forgotten, but what is remembered indistinctly and past the point of articulation. Gothic should not be codified simply as the literature of terror or dread, then, or even more generally as a means of expressing cultural anxieties, but is very specifically located in a foregrounding of the unspeakable, especially in relation to the past. Gothic is a means of highlighting the haunting power of the past that is aligned with, and even derived from, the impossibility of direct access to that past.

Yet as the example of To the Lighthouse shows, it is crucial not to reduce Scott to Gothic, or his influence to Gothic fiction only.¹⁵ One of the most explicit examples of Scott’s influence on twentieth-century Scottish fiction is John Buchan’s Huntingtower, in which the retired grocer Dickson McCunn, like Edward Waverley before him, enters a life of adventure on account of his reading, in this case Scott himself.¹⁶ McCunn reads the Waverley Novels ‘not for their insight into human character or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys’.¹⁷ Scott combines, as McCunn frequently reflects, idyll and adventure in the form of Romance; his own duty, as a lifelong reader of Scott, is to face Romance and not be found wanting. As much as Buchan’s and Woolf’s novels may be utterly unlike each other in many ways, their portrayals of Scott are in certain respects surprisingly similar. For both Mr Ramsay and Dickson McCunn, Scott, or Scott’s works, are marks against which to measure your own value; Scott’s importance is not solely in terms of literature, but in relation to the creation and recognition of the self. In both novels, too, Scott is conflated with his works: Scott is both a singular originator and subsumed into his creation. Scott is a central, defining figure, and yet always remains unknowable and unknown.

As such, Scott becomes an essential figure in tracing questions of genre, authorship, and national literature. While, unlike Hogg and Stevenson, Scott may not figure centrally in many contemporary Scottish novels, his disappearance is itself notable. Scott, as this chapter will show, becomes himself a haunting figure or phantom. The relation between authorship and disappearance is at the forefront of Scott’s works themselves, as a discussion of the role of the author in the relatively little-known 1818 story ‘Phantasmagoria’ reveals. Scott finds a central role in the novels of James Robertson, where he appears as author, authority, and phantom all at once, in often surprising combinations. By tracing Scott’s reception through Robertson’s work, it becomes possible to articulate a particularly Scott-inflected perspective on Gothic’s focus on displaced and doubled forms of subjectivity. If for many recent writers and theorists Gothic calls into question the very notion of a stable narrative stance, or even a stable notion of self, Scott and Robertson explicitly foreground the instability of literary representation. In so doing, these texts allow for a further exploration of the relationship between literary originality and selfhood.

Haunted texts: ‘Phantasmagoria’ and The Fanatic

In the final paragraphs of A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, Scott suddenly dispenses with Jedidiah Cleishbotham, erstwhile narrator of the preceding volumes of ‘Tales of my Landlord’. The narrator here, seemingly Scott himself, writes:

[I]t was my purpose to have addressed thee in the vein of Jedidiah Cleishbotham; but, like Horam the son of Asmar, and all other imaginary story-tellers, Jedidiah has melted into thin air.

Mr Cleishbotham bore the same resemblance to Ariel, as he at whose voice he rose doth to the sage Prospero; and yet, so fond are we of the fictions of our own fancy, that I part with him, and all his imaginary localities, with idle reluctance.¹⁸

Not only is Cleishbotham, as an essentially fictive narrator, here rescinded, but the replacement narrator absents himself in deference to other, less fantastical authors such as Susan Ferrier, calling himself only a ‘phantom’ and a ‘shadow’. Scott disappears in the very moment that he makes himself known.¹⁹ This is not the first authorial shadow to appear in Scott’s fiction. The brief story ‘Phantasmagoria’, published in Blackwood’s the previous year, is narrated by one Simon Shadow.²⁰ The story is addressed to the ‘veiled conductor’ of Blackwood’s, himself ‘a mystical being, and, in the opinion of some, a nonentity’.²¹ Even more than usual for Scott’s writing of this period, authorial and editorial identity is swathed in shadows. In both texts, the promise of an authentic narrative voice is immediately superseded by literary allusions and the fantastic. As a text which was forgotten for nearly two centuries, and yet which more than any other showcases Scott’s approach to both intertextuality and haunting, ‘Phantasmagoria’ deserves extended consideration here.

This may, of course, be nothing more than a play on ideas of Scott as the ‘Great Unknown’, and has typically been read as such. The structure of ‘Phantasmagoria’, however, is provocatively imbalanced. Another version of the ghost story which is its putative subject appears under Scott’s own name in the Magnum edition of the Waverley Novels, where it is printed as a note to ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ in Redgauntlet, alongside a letter to Blackwood where Scott describes it as ‘a very curious and authentic ghost-legend which I had from the lady to whom the lady who saw the spirit told the story’.²² Here Scott quickly outlines a familiar blend of asserted authenticity and second-hand experience that can be found in many contemporary Blackwood’s stories, notably those of James Hogg, as well as in many, if not most, of Scott’s novels.²³ In ‘Phantasmagoria’, however, the ghost story occupies only half the printed text, while the other is concerned with Shadow himself; the most intriguing figure in the text is primarily concerned with his own disappearance. While Scott stresses ideas of authorship in his prefatory material from Old Mortality onwards, ‘Phantasmagoria’, perhaps because of its brevity, presents ideas of authorial reliability as being the equal of narrative-driven stories.

Shadow introduces himself through his father, Sir Mickelmast Shadow, who claims descent from the Simon Shadow presented as Falstaff’s companion in Henry IV, Part 2. Mickelmast Shadow having died by mistakenly venturing into the mid-day sun, his son turns to stories of ‘shadows, clouds, and darkness’ (39). Not only do these stories appeal to him, but they present, as it were, kindred spirits; Shadow allies himself with Michael Scott, Guy Mannering, and Oberon, as well as ‘spirits that walk the earth, swim the wave, or wing the sky’, attesting that the ‘wandering Jew, the high-priest of the Rosy-cross, the Genius of Socrates, the daemon of Mascon, the drummer of Tedworth, are all known to me, with their real character, and essence, and true history’ (40). Here again Scott combines the familiar and the obscure, the historical and the imaginary, and the literary and the folkloric. Shadow inhabits, in other words, the very liminal world of narrative th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Borderlines: Contemporary Scottish Gothic
• 1 A Scott-Haunted World
• 2 Authentic Inauthenticity: The Found Manuscript
• 3 Fantastic Islands
• 4 Metamorphosis: Humans and Animals
• 5 Northern Communities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index