t f x pt n: Tr d t n nd th P bl ph rn Th Pr v t r nd nf n f J t f dnn r

Daniel Stout

ELH, Volume 77, Number 2, Summer 2010, pp. 535-560 (Article)

P bl h d b Th J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/elh.0.0086

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535ELH 77 (2010) 535–560 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

casTes of excePTion: TradiTion and THe PUblic sPHere in tHE privatE mEmoirs and confEssions of a justifiEd sinnEr

by daniel sToUT

The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God him self.

—richard Hooker, of the Laws of Ecclesiastical polity

[o]n behalf of his Majesty’s rights and titles; he therefore, for himself, and as prince and steward of scotland . . . hereby grants to the said George colwan, his heirs and assignees whatsomever, heritably and irrevocably, all and haill the lands and others underwritten . . . heritably and irrevocably in all time coming.

—James Hogg, the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner1

scholars of James Hogg have offered two major approaches to his most famous novel, the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner. one line of criticism has dealt with the novel as a gothic satire of calvinist faith, particularly the belief in predestination. The other line has described the novel as both a performance of, and a commentary on, conditions of authorship in an edinburgh public sphere under the sway of an increasingly monolithic english literary nationalism.2 Given that both approaches have combined to lend Hogg his status as a relatively major minor (which is to say importantly minor) romantic author, it bears noting that the critical views are themselves at cross purposes. for insofar as scottish Presbyterian religion amounts to an indigenous tradition, the novel’s ostensible critique of calvinism rests uneasily alongside the claim that Hogg was attempting to develop a particularly scottish form of culture over and against (possibly) a british and (certainly) an english one.3 We might, it would seem, argue that Hogg meant to elevate certain traditions above others—that he felt himself in a position to pick and choose the more attractive features

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of a tradition, to side with one version of scottishness rather than another. but beyond the difficulty of saying just which traditions the novel can be said to valorize—given that the novel’s story of a haunted calvinist blends religious tradition with (rather than culls that tradition from) other, and older, forms of scottish folklore—there is the larger difficulty posed by the tendency to see national tradition as a holistic, integrated collection not really reducible to even a complete list of discrete particulars let alone some hived-off subset of practices. for both practical and theoretical reasons, then, there is a real question about the viability of taking the novel as both a critique of calvinism and, at the same time, an endorsement of folk belief more generally; it looks as though what is true of calvinism ought to be true of tradi-tion more broadly construed.

despite the difficulties that, i am suggesting, attend any effort to see Hogg’s novel as advocating straightforwardly for nationalist tradi-tion, it is true that the novel gains a certain romantic currency by be-ing understood as an engagement with the broader issue of tradition rather than with the more particular subject matter of the sinner’s seventeenth-century religious enthusiasm. for while scottish Presby-terianism, in balancing a sense of scottish nativism with the desire for protestant succession, had been an important and complex political factor in both the run-up to the act of Union and the monarchical struggles surrounding and following 1707, by 1824 the specific topic of calvinism would have lacked the political charge that the Jacobite risings (the last of which, in 1745, features in Walter scott’s Waverly) still contained in the ambience of the french revolution. it can, this is to say, be difficult to see just why Hogg would have found the subject of calvinism particularly worth taking up. but broadening our descrip-tion of the novel’s interest—from a particular tradition (calvinism) within scottish history to the place of tradition itself within scottish history—immediately extends the novel’s purchase by making it a vis-ible participant in the development of a romantic nationalism whose emphasis on local cultural identity sought to revivify the abstraction of statehood from within or, in the case of scotland, to trouble the impo-sition of multi-statehood from without. if calvinism indexes tradition more generally, it is possible to see the memoirs and confessions less as a gothic novel centered on an antiquated theological subject than as a gothic novel centered on a much more current question within the romantic period about the degree to which indigenous antiquity (often in the form of excavated objects and collected folklore) could purvey a national identity different from the one produced by the

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forces of large-scale historical change, the formal arrangements of government, or the circulatory operations of both mass print culture and modern capital. by 1824, in short, calvinism is antiquated; calvin-ism as indigenous tradition is (fashionably) antiquarian.

indeed, it is as a staging of the intersections between native tradition and more modern forms of cultural distribution that the novel has most sustained critical interest. The novel’s peculiar structure—essentially a twice-told tale in which an editor’s account precedes and situates the first-person account of the justified sinner himself—has held particular appeal for approaches attuned to the prospect of cultural antagonism. The split between the editor’s and the sinner’s narratives has seemed capable of speaking more widely: to the divide between british mo-dernity and native scottish culture; between an enlightened editor and a superstitious memoirist; between the rational and the ecstatic; between cultural alienation and cultural rootedness; between the abstracting work of dissemination and an organic scene of imminent production; and between the imperialist collector of artifacts and the native artisan.4 Whatever their particular terms, all such descriptions treat Hogg’s novel as host to the larger opposition between a romantic nationalism and the larger institution of romanticism. in so doing, such descriptions tell a familiar story, in which the recalcitrant locality of the authentic work of art is both under threat from and resistant to its circulation in an age of cultural reproduction.5

in the essay that follows, i want to take a rather different line in order to argue for a view of Hogg’s novel as a diagnosis of—rather than an advocate for, or even, more neutrally, an instance of—the romantic nationalism that it has been seen to valorize. indeed, insofar as i will be arguing that the novel moves against the very mechanics of exemplification and representation on which romantic nationalism relies, we might rather think of the novel as a critique of the very cultural operations it has been seen to promote. Here i trace this critique through the novel’s alignment of three networks of cultural representation—the cultural-national, the textual, and the religious—each of which insists that any individual practice or individual practi-tioner be seen as a representative example of some larger whole. The first network is a romantic nationalism, which, by both locating cultural identity in the past and insisting on its purchase within the present, is in need of seeing present states of affairs as avatars of past practice. This representation of the cultural past by the cultural present is often described as continuity, though cultural nationalism also frequently pitches itself as a revival or a recovery, a formulation that suggests

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a buried, but not entirely unavailable, connection. but whether the present’s connection with the past is intact (continuity) or obscured but not broken (recovery, rehabilitation), the essentially conservative effect of this cultural nationalism is to turn the past into the standard of cultural value: the most appreciable culture is the culture which most closely resembles the way things were. Hogg’s novel, i argue, comes out against the viability of this model of cultural identity, not by asserting the absolute discontinuity between past and present, but by seeing the very notion of continuity as necessarily involving forms of change and evolution that make it difficult to set up a one-to-one relation (that is, a relation of identity), between a present practice and a past state. so while cultural nationalist accounts of the scottish context have frequently stressed the discontinuity to which textual transmission subjected local, and largely oral, practices, Hogg will describe even apparently continuous local practice as involving modes of transmission in which the past cannot be thought of as having a unitary identity that might be misappropriated or preserved by turns.

This question of historical relation central to the romantic nation certainly need not center around problems of textual materials, but it is not difficult to see why some conception of text has been important to contemporary accounts that describe print culture as an abstraction from the immediacy of orality as well as to projects within the romantic period like scott’s antiquarian effort to archive and restore ballads in the minstrelsy of the scottish Border.6 The objective form that text provides thus proves to be a strongly ambivalent feature: on the one hand it facilitates the seemingly abstracting forms of distribution by which a scottish ballad can be sung in an english drawing room, and, on the other hand, it facilitates the preservation that allows an old scottish ballad to count as an authentic piece of scottish national culture no matter where it appears.7 cultural nationalism’s ambivalent relation to textuality points to its central structural difficulty: that it is at once strongly presentist, valuing locality and immediacy (which text destroys), and historicist, seeing in the past (which text preserves) the truth of the whole. Hogg’s novel addresses this representational para-dox by depicting text neither as a falsifying abstraction nor as a means toward isolating the authentic version of a particular work. instead, the novel presents text as an archive of the alterations to which tradition is subjected just by virtue of being handed on. in such an account, text enables a sense of history—since we can see, for example, how the spelling of a name changed over time—without entailing an exclusive claim about identity—because one spelling is not a false version of

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another. Text, in this description, does not mark our alienation from authentic scenes of cultural production, but neither does it make it possible for us to identify the most authentic instantiation of a culture in quite the way scott, as we will see, suggested we might with the ballad form.8

While these issues of historical and textual identity can certainly be considered apart from the specific religious institution of calvin-ism, it is in calvinism that Hogg will find his strongest example of a representative identity that consistently undervalues the present moment in relation to a historically disparate one. cultural national-ism deals with the primordial past while calvinism predestines the eschatological future, but both see the transactions of the present moment as being always overwritten—at once entirely colored and made negligible by—a past or future state. in his famous 1882 lecture What is a nation?, ernest renan sought to overcome this tension between the present moment and a sense of transcendental national identity by way of an essentially contractualist model in which citizens regularly reiterated their “clearly expressed desire to continue a com-mon life.”9 but while renan could see citizens as repeatedly choosing to be what they were, neither cultural nationalism nor calvinism can operate via the consent of their members. for just as it is the force of cultural nationalism to describe individuals as so many versions of what Herder called “the internal prototype” provided by “the man-ners of their fathers,” calvinism’s predestination not only meant that membership didn’t require contractual renewal but, in fact, went so far as to equate such contractualism with the fundamentally heretical suggestion that God’s plan was subject to human confirmation.10 To emphasize the anticontractualism within calvinism is to differ from the most significant studies of calvinism, which have tended to emphasize its status as what christopher Harvie calls a “social gospel,” as that theology most closely tied to the rise of both modern capitalism and liberalism.11 both Max Weber’s monumental study and more recent histories have underscored calvinism’s importance to modernity: it devalued inherited status in favor of a world focused on individual merit; it asserted a formal equality among its elect integral to the rise of contract; it developed an active and rigorous public sphere; and it promoted those forms of diligence and self-management that we now know just as its work-ethic.12 but while these descriptions align the social history of calvinism with the rise of capitalist individualism and lockean liberalism, Hogg’s novel concentrates on the anticontractual-ism of a theological position which ensured that, whatever contracts

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one had signed in life, “all [would] be,” as his justified sinner says, “blotted out” (108).

as suggested in a 1641 calvinist pamphlet’s recommendation that “diligence in worldly business” be coupled with “deadness to the world,” worldly activity under predestination took on a curious unre-ality, at once representative but not confirming of one’s future state.13 The importance of Hogg’s novel thus lies not in the representation it provided of a tradition (calvinism), nor in the representation it pro-vided of tradition more generally (calvinism as a stand-in for scottish antiquity), but in the analysis it offers of the representative mechanics of tradition itself. This is to argue two things: first, that the connection between calvinsim and tradition in this novel is more than merely synecdochal, since Hogg presents antiquarian tradition and calvin-ism as involving identical forms of representative individuality; and, second, that Hogg’s novel, in both its piecemeal form and its plot, is in fact a critique of the tendency of both romantic nationalist tradition and calvinism to see individuals as, simultaneously, fallen versions of some original prototype and mouthpieces for transcendent states. The problem with romantic-nationalist tradition, that is, is that it puts individuals in a position, like the justified sinner himself, to feel that the fault is not theirs for only living in the here and now.

******

simply thumbing through the text one holds when one holds the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner, it is clear that the novel serves as an umbrella for a collection of documents. These documents, in the order that they are presented, are as follows: an editor’s narrative giving one version of the story; the memoirs of the justified sinner giving another; and the resumption of the editor’s narrative, which itself includes an “extract from an authentic letter, published in Blackwood’s magazine for august, 1823” (240) that tells of the exhumation (not once, but twice—once by “two young men” [243] and again by “another shepherd” [245]) of the rural grave of a suicide found on “a wild height called cowanscroft, where the land of three proprietors meet all at one point” (240) and provides the “little traditionary history” of that “unfortunate youth” (241). We are then told (after the end of the Blackwood’s letter but still within the edi-tor’s concluding text) that this letter was signed by one James Hogg of “altrive lake” and that, although it “bears the stamp of authenticity in every line,” the editor himself is wary from having often “been hoaxed

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by the ingenious fancies displayed in that Magazine” (245). To avoid repeating his previous gullibility, the editor decides to conduct an independent survey of the grave, during which he learns that “hardly a bit” of the account in Hogg’s letter was correct (248). Having ben-efited from some improved directions, the editor reaches the spot and exhumes the grave—opening it now for the third time—to discover, among the other eerie details, a “mysterious pamphlet” which, after “a thorough drying,” unfolds itself to reveal a title page reading “the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner: written by himself. fideli certa merces” (253).

as a chain of events it is a difficult case to summarize, but as a novel it is not without precedent. insofar as it comprises a number of texts, Hogg’s novel has relatives in the history of the novel both earlier—in the compiled letters of the epistolary novel—and later—in, for instance, the testimonial novels popularized by Wilkie collins. and, in its will-ingness to go “to unusual lengths to reproduce authenticating devices, in the form of documentary evidence,” Hogg’s novel has relatives within the eighteenth-century romantic tradition in texts like James MacPherson’s ossian and Horace Walpole’s the castle of otranto, which presented themselves as documents that had been brought to light rather than written to the moment.14 Hogg’s novel, however, differs importantly from these affiliates. it does so, first, in that it does not combine these documents to produce a single story told, as collins’s the Woman in White puts it, “by more than one pen”; the editor and the sinner and Hogg’s letter do not obviously collaborate to document a single plot in the way that the collected eye-witnesses of collins’s novel do.15 but if the documents do not seem collaborative (one story, many voices), it is also the case that these documents are manifestly directed less towards verifying or proving the authenticity of a single text (the memoirs) than they are towards demonstrating the operations by which “traditionary history,” as the editor calls it (1, 241), sustains itself. so while it is tempting to see these various compiled documents in terms of authenticity—either as an attempt to guarantee it or as poststructuralist demonstration of its inevitable untenability—they are better understood as a powerful example of the way tradition takes itself as its own subject. Tradition, here, exists not as the repetition of particular stories over and over (the version of tradition required if tradition is to be susceptible to authentication or preservation), but as the proliferation of stories about stories. as practical exemplifications of tradition, rather than instances of the management or verification to which tradition might be subjected, the complied documents are

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devoted neither to the unifying efforts of story nor to the empirical ones of history but, instead, to the presentation of tradition as itself a form of metacommentary.

“What can this work be?” the editor asks. “sure, you will say, it must be an allegory; or (as the writer calls it) a religious parable, showing the dreadful danger of self-righteousness?” it may be any or all of these—allegory, parable, confession—the editor “cannot tell” (240). but if he can’t tell, it’s also true that he doesn’t really care. for what is more important than where the sinner’s pages fit within a taxonomy of religious genres, what we should “attend to,” the editor instructs us, is “the sequel,” “a thing so extraordinary . . . that if there were not hundreds of living witnesses to attest the truth of it, i would not bid any rational being believe it” (240). The “sequel” we are being enjoined to believe by all these “hundreds of living witnesses” are not the facts within the justified sinner’s narrative—from ours or the editor’s perspective these facts would have to be thought of as a kind of prequel—but something like its “miraculous” life as an item of traditionary history. in this way, the editorial project can practically dispense with an interest in the objective text—maybe it’s an allegory, maybe it’s just notes from “a religious maniac”—in favor of an editorial interest in the way various bits of information about the text—rumors of its existence, indications of its possible whereabouts, already avail-able versions of the story it provides—circulate.

some of these forms of discourse—like the editor’s narrative or Hogg’s letter—have a material existence, and some—like the informa-tion about the grave’s whereabouts provided by a passing shepherd—do not. but the distinction between material and immaterial, or between written and oral forms of circulation, is here minimized by the larger way in which seemingly secondary information (information, that is, about the primary text of the confessions themselves) or even tertiary information (information correcting information about the text) have a sufficiency, if never a primacy, all their own. in the way that news reports can include reports of their own emendations, tradition as Hogg practices it could never really be reduced even to an expansive canon of particular stories, since it carries itself along as the set of its own changes. and tradition’s status as a body which includes second- as well as first-order information means that it is unimportant to differenti-ate between the story of a text (tradition in the comparatively rigid, antiquarian sense) and stories about a text (the story of a document’s discovery), a point redoubled by the novel’s inclusion of secondary misinformation so as to represent mistakes (and their correction) as

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equally parts of the “traditionary” record.16 in this sense, the deterio-rating usefulness of what ian duncan calls the novel’s “authenticating devices” cannot simply be chalked up to the “intentional” “impasse[s]” or “failure[s]” we might otherwise admire as the means of artful, proto-poststructuralist frustration. in presenting a story about stories as a “sequel,” these apparently framing documents turn out rather to be both the means of continuing, rather than simply conveying, the story of the justified sinner. instead of testifying to the singularity of the memoirs, these documents testify to the novel’s commitment to addition over and against its commitment to authentication.17

it is this commitment that makes it possible for the editor to claim that there are “hundreds of living witnesses” to an event—the “sequel”—that seems, on a rough headcount of those involved in the text’s unearthing, to have no more than a half-dozen. for in laying its emphasis on the essentially endless possibilities for reception (and the receptions of reception)—rather than on the lonelier acts of exhuma-tion or the singular instance of production—the editorial effort to compile traditionary history always involves multitudes of participants. Tradition has, the editor tells us in the first paragraph of the novel, “been handed down to the world in unlimited abundance” (1). and because the abundance of tradition already exists, by definition, as a gathering, an editor’s work has already been done: “i am certain,” he tells us, “that in recording the hideous events which follow, i am only relating to the greater part of the inhabitants of at least four counties of scotland, matters of which they were before perfectly well informed” (1). it is, then, one of the characteristics of tradition as Hogg presents it that it is always in the position of having been received without ever exactly seeming to have been authored. More particularly, because tradition exists as a popular form, the question of authorship has been rendered unimportant and, in a strong sense, nonsensical. indeed, even the text which seems foundational for the particular “matters” in question here (the confessions themselves) turns out to be supereroga-tory from the perspective of tradition; those inhabitants are “perfectly well informed” prior to the editor’s narrative—which therefore comes across as re-information—and they have been so informed without the material text of the sinner, whose exhumation might alter tradition in the sense of adding to it but never could be said to be identical to the tradition itself.

Tradition’s priority—its ability always to be there first—and its abun-dance—its irreducibility to any finite set of texts or experiences—makes an editor’s work simultaneously easy and infinite, already and never

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done. More extensively still, it reconfigures the question of literature (or culture more generally) from one of production to one of recep-tion and assembly. it is not that tradition wholly denies generation—even talk has to start somewhere—but that, by making the question of origin as unanswerable as it is unimportant, the idea of generation is retained only as an idea, something consequential in principle but not in fact. Tradition’s lack of interest in authors and single origins, thus, runs counter to the critical tendency to see the editor’s efforts as a form of damage to Wringhim’s original narrative, usurping or co-opting a fragment of authentic culture. That the novel presents the editor as simply one of several exhumers (the first three presumably native boys/shepherds) already seriously complicates any reading of the moment as an allegory of cultural misappropriation, but the larger force of tradition as i have been describing it is to emphasize these processes of transmission and co-option as inherent to and inextricable from the way things get handed down. This displacement of author-ship by audience, of production by reception, is nicely and succinctly marked by Hogg’s appearance in the supplementary materials gathered up in the conclusion of the editor’s narrative. Given the importance of reception, Hogg’s appearance as the contributor of a response to the novel he in fact authored is more than a clever exploitation of a public sphere whose anonymity allowed one human to operate from several positions; Hogg’s appearance as his own respondent also, and more interestingly, begins to look like a moment in which the circulatory operations of the public sphere have made it possible for the author of a text to take himself as part of his own audience—and to be right in doing so. circulation, that is, here produces a world in which all information is second hand.18

Many accounts have described Hogg as an author who, in his writings for Blackwood’s and, particularly, as a member of the noctes ambrosiane (a collective made up of other Blackwood’s writers, John Gibson lockhart foremost among them), took enthusiastic advantage of the opportunities the edinburgh public sphere offered for proliferat-ing authorial identities. What all these pen names and print personae seem meant to disturb, a disturbance that has made them particularly attractive to poststructuralist criticism, is the relation between writer and written. but the usefulness of approaching the novel through the question of reception is that it provides a way of talking about the circulation of identities within the text of the memoirs, and within the text of tradition as the editor’s narrative presents it, that does not immediately, as duncan puts it, set itself “revolving obsessively about

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the figures of its own production.” for duncan, because the novel never gets past production it seems to “predict its own condition as an outcast text, not to be brought to life in a reader’s imagination, circulated in a market, or perpetuated in a tradition.”19 The text’s obsession with how it came to be means, for duncan, that the text can’t ever be said really to arrive at existence; the view i am urging here amounts less to a denial of duncan’s description than a revision (that also seems a strengthening) of it. for aligning authorship with reception—by seeing that things are made by the way they are handed on—means that Hogg’s obsession with production is simply one way of describing his fascination with circulation as a form of production in its own right. The novel’s description of circulation as itself a form of production operates against the degree to which it can be said to valorize one kind of circulation over another. The equality with which duncan treats “circulated in market” and “perpetuated in a tradition” seems therefore more appropriate than his essay’s eventual return to the opposition between oral life and textual death. duncan’s claim that “[t]extuality . . . represents a lethal alienation from common life in its original condition of a traditional community which . . . cannot be recovered in the commodity fom of fiction” reasserts oppositions—between life and death, between commodity and tradition, between text and orality, between original states and fallen presents—it is the novel’s real brilliance, i am arguing, to treat as continuous.20

The novel does more than to remain neutral on the difference between textuality and orality, going so far as to take up the larger question of cultural preservation and transmission that the textual/oral opposition is usually meant to gloss. The scene in which these issues of alienation, preservation, and transmission are most available works strongly against the conceptual framework that structures a claim like duncan’s or lies behind douglas Mack’s depiction of Hogg as a cultural preservationist. Mack’s view relies on seeing the misin-formation (“hardly a bit o’t correct”) Hogg dispenses about the grave’s whereabouts to be a protectionist strategy, an effort to preserve what Mack calls the “sanctity of the grave,” “a shrine of the culture of an old pre-Union scotland.”21 both duncan and Mack’s claims thus operate by producing an antithetical—indeed, actively antagonistic—relation between some original state (“original condition,” “common life,” “shrine of the culture”) and some violated condition.22

but if the “lethality” of duncan’s text is paradigmatic of this violation, the “sanctity of the grave” that Mack presents as violation’s alternative doesn’t do much to vivify the “common life” it ostensibly protects.

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Whether because of text’s intrinsic lethality or because of the sanctity of graves, both accounts of tradition functionally amount to the claim that there are no present parties to an authentic past: nothing can be excavated or disseminated without also being destroyed. because the only way to preserve the ostensibly non-alienated realms of common experience is to leave them unpublished, the preservationist com-mitment to the inviolate is so strong as to make culture seem fatally fragile. neither duncan’s nor Mack’s argument, this is to say, has a way to account for the continuity of the common ways through time, since both views depict any transmission at all as a form of damage. and where transmission is defined not as a way of sustaining culture but of destroying it, the tradition whose sanctity has been preserved is a dead culture housed in shrine you cannot enter.

Preserved in the grave or alive but decomposing, the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner doesn’t lobby for an antiquarian ethic based on a hermetically preserved past. rather, it denies the viability of such a project by informing us that the cultural tradition that exists does so only insofar as it exists in a state of change. This view of tradition—that preserving it is going to mean losing it (by burying it) while keeping it is going to mean losing it (by allowing it to decompose)—shifts the issue of local culture in the romantic period away from the language of legitimate ownership that has tended to define such discussions. Mack’s admiration for what he sees as Hogg’s preservationist strategy, for example, rests on the sense that there are certain people who are (and others who are not) the legitimate inheritors or harbors of tradition; the sinner’s body and the sinner’s text are Hogg’s to protect in a way that they are not the editor’s to disseminate. but the novel’s alignment of preservation with burial underscores less the difference between legitimate and illegitimate owners (since presumably no one is supposed to open graves) than the contradiction inherent to any attempt to make tradition’s preserva-tion simultaneous with its practice. in showing that the only text that doesn’t decompose is the one that’s buried, the novel illuminates the contradiction at the heart of the cultural-nationalist’s effort to align the preservationist values of authenticity and inviolability with the practical values of continuity and malleability. Katie Trumpener’s seminal Bardic nationalisim describes the cultural-nationalist position very clearly. “bardic nationalism,” Trumpener explains, “insists on the rich fullness of national knowledge” preserved by “anchoring discursive traditions in landscape, in a way of life, in custom. The english, in comparison, have only borrowed words.”23 like the self-possession that gives Mack’s

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grave its sanctity, bardic nationalism as Trumpener describes it is essentially an assertion of property rights: “anchored” ownership is legitimate while possession by dissemination is illegitimate; what you own by dissemination is, at best, “only borrowed”; and the culture that is really yours (as opposed to the culture you “have only borrowed”) is the culture that you live. but the paradox of Hogg’s grave—in which culture is preserved but unavailable or exposed and decomposing—helps us see how the cultural-nationalist position actually draws on two contradictory notions of cultural value at once. in one notion, value is stored up in the past and anchored “in landscape,” as a form of what Walter scott describes as “the ore of antiquity.”24 (Mack has already provided us a neatly condensed and not accidentally macabre version of this in his reading of the sinner’s grave as a shrine of scot-tish culture.) in the second notion of culture, value is not a function of stored antiquity but of its ongoing practice, “a way of life.”

This abiding tension between a conception of culture as a value pre-served (or “anchored,” rooted, grounded) in the past and a conception of culture as made up of the practices that are, by definition, always present affairs can be seen as the inheritance of a romantic effort to come to grips with the consequences the notion of popular art (art as a way of life) had for conceptions of the work of art (art as object). The tension receives an illustrative instantiation in one of the essays Walter scott wrote to introduce his collection of minstrelsy of the scottish Border. “introductory remarks on Popular Poetry” (1830) draws on, or rather oscillates between, two versions of culture: culture understood as an unchanging essence, on the one hand, and as an evolutionary system, on the other. The essay was, scott tells us, designed to “afford the general reader some information upon the character of ballad Poetry” and was to be of “a literary nature,” in order to complement the “historical” focus of the original introduction.25 it becomes clear almost immediately, however, that the literary and the historical can-not, at least in the case of “the character of ballad Poetry,” be handled separately. as scott’s account makes evident, the ballad’s status as “popular poetry” did more than simply mark the difference between balladeers and practitioners of higher forms. for, as if rediscovering the break with neoclassicism in the Lyrical Ballads’ prefatory ambi-tion to write poetry in common speech, scott’s presents the ballad as an art which subordinates a view of poetry as governed by rules and conventional forms (the ode, the sonnet) to a view of poetry as a kind of native speech, as the expression of “the climate and country in which it has its origins[,] the temper and manners of the people.”26 on this

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model of poetry, the differences between one population’s popular poetry and another’s are not simply the differences between traditional forms (a ghazal as opposed, say, to a sestina), but are assigned to the differences between local contexts and “climate[s].” Thus, a collection of ballads from a single context can, like core samples of geological strata, represent the continuities (and so also the differences) between historically disparate moments.

so understood, scott’s definition of the ballad can be seen as an important development in literary history, since it provided a version of literary form that was responsive to the pressures of use. and because this notion of contemporary, ongoing use was built into the formal definition of a ballad, a single ballad could be said to exist in many different versions without there being any logical contradiction. Thus, scott will describe the “very fine ballad of ‘chevy chase’” as having “been produced by the gradual alterations of numerous reciters, during two centuries, in the course of which the ballad has been gradually moulded into a composition bearing only a general resemblance to the original.”27 This invocation of “general resemblance,” like the holistic emphasis of bardic nationalism’s “way of life,” means that, unlike a son-net which one can only reproduce whole or not at all, a ballad might be rather markedly altered without losing its identity. one might, as in the example scott provides, rewrite the lines “The Percy owt of northumberland, / and a vowe to God mayd he” as “The stout earl of northumberland / a vow to God did make” without being taken to be writing something other than “chevy chase.”28 like the title Hogg provides for his novel, then, “chevy chase” does not exclusively denominate a particular copytext but, rather, functions as the name for a collection—a variorum—that relies on “general resemblance” for its integrity. The rather loose criterion of “general resemblance,” that is, provides a way to talk about continuity through change. and from this perspective one is able to dispense with the effort to decide which text is the legitimate “chevy chase” in favor of a historical model that can talk about how “chevy chase” came to be over time.

but while scott’s remarks lay out the rudiments of this view of balladic continuity, he does not, as it turns out, dispense with a no-tion of singular legitimacy. scott’s acknowledgment of the collective work that has gone into any ballad frequently comes up against the suggestion that careful scholarship might be able to purify the “ore of antiquity” of the mistakes inserted by posterity, the “deteriorat[ion] and adulterat[ion]” that occurs when a poem is, “like a book reprinted in a multitude of editions,” “transmitted through a number of recit-

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ers.”29 although scott’s laments about the deterioration of transmis-sion provide no grounds for distinguishing between oral and written, between “reciters” and “editions,” they are, nevertheless, not easy to square with his other position in which a ballad is produced (rather than adulterated) by gradual alteration. as such, the original claim that the ballad form is uniquely a product of many reciters returns as nothing more than the first step in an antiquarian effort to rewind the history that made a particular ballad in the first place, to get back to the “rugged sense and spirit of the antique minstrel.” but whatever contradictions emerge over the course of its progress—in fact, just because of them—scott’s essay counts as an effort to reckon with the larger question of what literature as a popular form means for the identity of a particular text.

While scott tries to dismiss historical decomposition in order to recover the authentic identity of the real “chevy chase,” Hogg, for his part, will represent the dangers that attend something like the opposite problem: a text which never alters. for while scott seeks to correct the alterations introduced into some original by its transmis-sion across (geographical, historical, social) contexts and by multiple authors, what Hogg presents is the destabilization that attends the individual who cannot see the importance of the contexts in which he moves because his religion has already provided him with the only context he needs. scott, like all good preservationists, wants to dispense with alteration; the justified sinner, like any justified sinner, believes he already has. The sinner, this is to say, is Hogg’s version of scott’s ballad: neither action nor alteration will adulterate the ore of his predestined identity.

Thus positioned, it becomes possible to see the importance of the novel’s beginning with an exemplification of tradition very much like the one that has produced the many different versions of “chevy chase.” Just as in scott’s claim that a ballad had been produced “by the gradual alterations of numerous reciters,” in Hogg’s account of proper names alterations are likewise introduced by the vagaries of practice (a forgotten line, a typo, modernized orthography). but where scott’s devotion to the authenticity of antiquity will eventually lead him to see these changes as so many fallings away from a real identity, Hogg’s novel presents this sort of alteration as the most normal thing in the world—as, in fact, the only kind of identity there is:

it appears from tradition, as well as some parish registers still extant, that the lands of dalcastle (or dalchastel, as it is often spelled) were possessed by a family of the name of colwan, about one hundred and

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fifty years ago, and for at least a century previous to that period. That family was supposed to have been a branch of the ancient family of colquhoun, and it is certain that from it spring the cowans that spread toward the border. (2)

so just as “chevy chase” functioned as both the name for many indi-vidual poems across time and as a name for their general resemblance, the names of places and families in the novel’s first paragraphs are shown to be in a constant state of evolution, moving over time from one standard practice to another, from “colquhoun” to “cowan,” or to coexist as set of alternate practices, “dalcastle” with an “h” or without. The point is not, of course, to suggest that the colwans have laid illegitimate claim to the name colquhoun any more than it is to suggest that “dalcastle” and “dalchastle” are two different places. by presenting the ways in which even the names of places—let alone those of people—change over time, the editor opens his account not in the role of the acquisitive antiquarian, the collector of rare artifacts, but, quite the opposite, by marking identity as something held by general resemblance rather than by preservationist rigidity.

but it is just here that the issue of calvinism comes to compli-cate the question by effectively reintroducing the claims of paternal membership through the genealogy plot surrounding the possible fathering and eventual adoption of robert Wringhim by his mother’s live-in calvinist tutor and minister. That calvinism should provide the context for a genealogical plot is, it bears noting, not necessarily an obvious charge against a faith that continually abjured the claims of inherited position in favor of a world reworked around acquisition and individual achievement. but while calvinism’s promotion of active civic virtue fused faith (what one believes) with works (what one does), this emphasis on nurture—the idea that one could work on the world—was continually undercut by the claims of predestination, which insisted that the wicked and the just were already and irrevocably partitioned. The question of adoption in the novel, then, which initially speaks to the importance of nurture over nature (of being raised by this person rather than that one) turns out to have a directly opposite bearing. The importance of nurture that familial adoption calls up in the form of the difference between one brother’s development and another’s is obviated by a theological adoption (literalized when robert Wringhim [père?] has “[h]is name put upon” the second son) which makes the question of earthly environment irrelevant. “[T]he grace of adoption,” as the Westminster confession of faith (1646) describes it, is the

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process by which the justified “are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God, have His name put upon them . . . are enabled to cry, abba, father, are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by Him as by a father: yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption; and inherit the promises, as heirs of everlasting salvation.” so while the Westminster confession describes God as a model father, the kind of father who would never have made the laird’s mistake of “cast[ing] off” his children, the simul-taneous priority (the decision is already made) and finality (it cannot be changed) immediately make this notion of divine paternal nurture indistinguishable from nature. in its description of the final state as a nature both unknowable and beyond alteration, calvinism converts the embodied world into a second-order phenomenon, a kind of virtual environment: the context in which one moves, but not, finally, the world where one really lives.

calvinist historiography of the twentieth century has tended to lay its weight not on predestination’s obviation of action but instead on the pressure that the bedrock calvinist belief in the fallenness of man (and, correlatively, the unknowability of God) put on communal and individual forms of discipline. following Weber’s foundational analysis of the ways in which calvinist regulation “penetrate[d] to all departments of private and public life” other historians have detailed the ways calvinism, in Michael Walzer’s description, “gave rise to a collectivist discipline marked above all by a mutual ‘watchfulness,’” required for the “sustained commitment and systematic activity” that could do away with “medieval passivity and feudal loyalty” even as it supplied modes of social control largely lacking in the lockean ac-count of liberal individualism.30 following Walzer’s disciplinary line, John stachniewski takes an explicitly foucauldian approach to argue that calvinism offered a “way of coping with the nascent individual-ism that emerged as the traditional aristocracies declined” and, far more perniciously, “invaded the most intimate thought processes where in many cases . . . it actively persecuted its host.”31 in these accounts calvinism creates the needs it meets by sowing doubt and insecurity about human judgment, thereby increasing the intensity of what another critic calls “the unremitting self-scrutiny which must accompany action.”32

but while the interest in seeing calvinism as a synecdoche for modernity causes historians to emphasize the “intimate,” “unremit-ting self-scrutiny” we now regularly associate with liberalism’s simul-taneous extension of both agency and “discipline,” to do so is also to

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overlook the most peculiar theological feature of that “watchfulness”: its inherent unreliability and, indeed, its absolute nullity. like Harvie’s “social gospel,” Weber, Walzer, and others describe the ways calvinism substituted society for the God from whom man was “permanent[ly], inescapabl[y], estranged.”33 but, for the same reason that a substi-tute was required—fallenness—none was available. and if in most practical cases the social world allowed one to be reassured by one’s neighbors, there was no theological reason it should have. as calvin himself noted, “experience sheweth that the reprobrate are sometime moved with the same feeling . . . so that in their owne judgment thei nothing differ.”34

but while it is the case that social consensus is made useless by the fact that it cannot help but be a consensus of fallen humans, the still more striking feature of predestination is that, even if one’s future could be reliably verified, the verdict could not matter. That final states are, by definition, unchangeable means that knowing where one was going to end up might be an interesting fact (a kind of interesting future antiquarianism) but could never be a matter of importance to one’s present-day actions. The assurance which calvin stressed and which calvinists relentlessly (because hopelessly) sought thus works to keep religious desire moving in a way that obscures the fact that, at least from the perspective of what one does in this world, knowing and not-knowing one’s final state, as calvin puts it, “nothing differ.”35

The memoirs themselves pick up on this peculiar nullity that attends predestination by documenting not the sense of freedom that attends Wringhim’s adoption (the kind of freedom his adopted father believes he possesses: “Who would not envy the liberty wherewith we are made free?”) but his inability to see himself as having done anything at all (13). “i seemed hardly to be an accountable creature,” he says. “either i had a second self who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no controul, and of whose actions my own soul was wholly unconscious” (182). This is already late in the novel, from those unhappy days when Wringhim wants nothing more than the nonexistence (“My principal feeling . . . was an insatiable longing for something that i cannot describe properly, unless i say it was for utter oblivion that i longed”) of which he is in fact already possessed (184): “could i have again been for a season in utter oblivion to myself, and transacting business with i neither approved of, nor had any connection with?” (186). Wringhim’s belief in predestination produces a world in which, because all conclusions are forgone, all his action takes place in quotation marks.

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in one sense, though, Wringhim is right: the shape-shifting Gil-Mar-tin is performing actions in his likeness. and in this sense the problem the novel stages does not seem to be one of belief—that Wringhim believes in his election and therefore cannot see himself as acting—but the more mundane, factual problem of constantly being framed. but the novel’s supernatural elements do not so much provide a way outside of the problems calvinist predestination poses for individual action, as they do simply literalize those problems by giving a body to the conception of agency calvinism provides. for it was not only the case that predestination made earthly action finally irrelevant, but that seeing the relevant constituencies—the just and the reprobate—to be “foreordayned” made any action simply the emanations of one’s future state. as the elder robert Wringhim explains the view: “We have no more to do with the sins of the wicked and unconverted here, than with those of an infidel turk, for all earthly bonds and fellowships are absorbed and swallowed up in the holy community of the reformed church. . . . To the wicked, all things are wicked; but to the just, all things are just and right” (13). as Hogg presents it, calvinism’s view of the world as divided into the wicked and the just ensured that the nature of action derived from status, rather than seeing the nature of status to derive from action. Thus, the novel’s focus on calvinism inverts its Gothicism so that it derives not, like Walpole’s otranto, from the consequential eruptions of history into the present (in the demand that children pay for the sins of their fathers), but, rather, from the possibility that individuals might be haunted by the guarantees of their own inconsequence.

This sense of predestination might produce a sense both of one’s justification (being right no matter what) and of oneself as simply an instrument (“i am the sword of the lord, and famine and Pestilence are my sisters,” says the younger Wringhim in a particularly ecstatic moment [150]), but the most significant effect of this status is to evacu-ate rather than adumbrate individual agency. The Wringhim who finds himself God’s instrument upon assurance of his election spends his pre-election days sinning without doing much of anything at all. “it was about this time,” he recalls,

that my reverend father preached a sermon, one sentence of which affected me most disagreeably. it was to the purport, that every unrepented sin was productive of a new sin with each breath that man drew; and every one of these new sins added to the catalogue in the same manner. i was utterly confounded at the multitude of my transgressions; for i was sensible that there were great numbers of

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sins of which i had never been able thoroughly to repent, and these momentary ones, by a moderate calculation, had, i saw, long ago, amounted to a hundred and fifty thousand in the minute, and i saw no end to the series of repentances to which i had subjected myself. a life-time was nothing to enable me to accomplish the sum, and then being, for any thing i was certain of, in my state of nature, and the grace of repentance withheld from me,—what was i to do, or what was to become of me? (107–8)

although Wringhim here speaks of individual actions—such that the problem of sin appears to be one of “number,” of “multitude”—the obvious force of this additive accretion is to illustrate the way in which status, Wringhim’s being without the grace of repentance, makes the question of accounting for enumerable, particular acts seem hope-less; his graceless status makes an essentially infinite set of his sin. “i always tried to repent of these sins by the slump,” Wringhim goes on, “for individually it was impossible.” The problem, though, is that even a very large “slump” can never equal Wringhim’s “state of nature.” He is, as he says, “a transcendent sinner” (113) not because he has committed many sinful actions but because when sin (or election) is transcendent one can sin (or act justly) without doing anything more than drawing “breath.”

if in this way Wringhim’s memoirs illustrate the difference between state and action, they do so in part by showing Wringhim’s world to be one in which state has come to be practically all the action that there is. There are, as Wringhim says, “unaccountable agencies in nature” (138), but his memoirs don’t really suggest the existence of agencies, accountable or otherwise, outside of it. and in the novel’s interest in the ways “state[s] of nature” override individual action, we can see the dividends that Gil-Martin’s supernaturalism pays; for the fact that he haunts Wringhim, that he is always, eerily present—“When i lay in bed, i deemed there were two of us in it; when i sat up, i always beheld another person, and always in the same position from the place where i sat or stood, which was about three paces off me toward my left side” (154)—causes Gil-Martin to become rather more of an afflicting condition (Wringhim calls him a “distemper” [153]) than an individual. “The tendency to belief in supernatural agency is natural,” scott wrote in demonology and Witchcraft, “and, indeed, seems connected with, and deduced from, the invaluable conviction of the certainty of a future state.”36 but in being haunted by Gil-Martin, Wringhim looks less like a man who can, as in scott’s description, see the plausibility of ghosts and spirits because he believes that he

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himself “shall not wholly die,” than he does a man forced to drag his own future state along with him. The supernatural here, then, does not externalize subjective states, making what is in the mind appear in the world, but is instead (and quite the contrary) a feature of the memoir’s persistent depiction of individual consciousness as constantly shadowed, indeed overshadowed, by transcendent conditions.

indeed, Gil-Martin may be nothing but conditions: “if i contemplate a man’s features seriously, mine own gradually assume the very same appearance and character. and what is more . . . i not only attain the very same ideas as well as the same mode of arranging them, so that, you see, by looking at person attentively, i by degrees assume his likeness, and by assuming his likeness i attain to the possession of his most secret thoughts” (125). Gil-Martin works on the notion of identity in precisely the same way calvinism works on the notion of action, for by making identity a matter of proximity he subordinates persistence to context in just the way that predestination, by “absorb-ing and swallow[ing] up” “all earthly bonds and fellowships . . . in the holy community of the reformed church” subordinates one’s actual existence to one’s membership “in the holy community.” The crucial difference between these two models, of course, is that Gil-Martin’s “rare qualification” (125) takes its power from its infinite changeability while the slightly less rare qualification of election takes its power from its irrevocability. This opposition, however, belies their similarity, since both Gil-Martin’s changeability and Wringhim’s unalterable status have the same effect of disabling the notion of accountable character; both, that is, disrupt what locke calls the “first-person relation” between an individual and his past that is the basis of responsibility. for Gil-Martin, there is no continuity between one embodiment and the next, while for Wringhim, who is nothing but the inviolable fact of his status, there is no past because there is no change.

i began this essay by describing the continuities between cultural nationalism, textual antiquarianism as represented by scott, and calvin-ism as represented by Hogg. More particularly, i have been arguing that each of these representational situations sets up a tension between the ongoing nature of existence (the cultures people actually practice, the ballads people transmit, or the actions a calvinist commits) and a fixed, transcendent status (the scottishness that subsumes practice, the real ballad of “chevy chase” that, whether it actually exists or not, causes all other ballads of chevy chase to be only mistaken versions, or the final state that is yours no matter what you do). if calvinism provides the most intense version of the disconnect between the im-

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mediate and the transcendent, because it makes psychological what might otherwise remain an academic question about the definition and operations of culture, Wringhim’s memoirs themselves show that the strain of having a foot in both worlds might be occasioned not only by extraordinary religious enthusiasm but by something as quotidian as coming into property. for it is one of the surprises of the memoirs that Wringhim’s psychological crisis should reach its peak not, as we might expect, in the murder of his brother but in a return to the in-heritance drama with which the editor’s narrative began, in the form of a royal decree entitling one robert Wringhim colwan to the lands descending down the genial line of his “more than probable” father. like a supernatural being who acts on your behalf, or a final state which ignores your individual action, the royal grant, which entails the lands to “George colwan, of dalcastle and balgrennan . . . and his heirs and assignees whatsomever, heritably and irrevocably . . . in all time coming” represents a model of original, inviolable agency immune to the desires or agencies of its subjects. (as sandra Macpherson has observed in an argument on forms of entailment in Jane austen, the whole point of the legal instrument of the entail was to make possible an agency whose effectiveness did not depend on its being seconded or shared by anyone among the living.)37 for his part, Wringhim responds as if he were completely attuned to the affiliations between the royal title and the transcendent agency of Gil-Martin or calvinist predestination, attempting to “deny every thing connected with the business,” to “dis-claim it in total” by virtue of the fact that he “know[s] no more about it than the child unborn” (179). Wringhim obviously means, here, to be invoking an archetypal figure for innocence—“the child unborn”—but in doing so he has, in fact, latched on to the very audience to which an entail is directed. The entail, like predestination, is the conveyor of a future state, a way of organizing children unborn and, in this, is the closest man’s law can come to calvin’s. and insofar as an entail conveys these states into “all time coming,” without the corruptions of transmission or the static generated by there ever having been “more than one pen,” entails are also near perfect antiquarian instruments, designed to ensure that the “ore of antiquity” remains unalloyed. but if all of this testifies to a deeply preservationist and, we can now see, calvinist commitment to seeing that no one’s legitimate inheritance will ever go astray, it is also true that the entail negates one’s property in the present by converting what might otherwise be ownership into an indefinite loan from future generations. like the culture you can preserve only by burying it, the entail turns the here and now into a

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waiting room, through which the generations file to occupy but never to own, an interim period stretched between an action in the past and a consequence that is always in the future.

st. francis Xavier university

noTes1 richard Hooker, Book i of the Laws of Ecclesiastical polity [1593] (oxford:

clarendon Press, 1868), 35; James Hogg, the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 180. Hereafter cited parentheti-cally by page number.

2 This description of the critical field, though accurate, leaves out the many accounts whose interests might be best described as psychological. i take up questions with psychological import later on in this essay, but because the issues of identity i am describing have more to do with the function of tradition than the make-up or func-tion of mind, i have omitted mention of this major section of the criticism. for two accounts attuned to the psychological importance of continuity, however, see frances ferguson, “romantic Memory,” in the Wordsworthian Enlightenment: romantic po-etry and the Ecology of reading, ed. Helen regueiro elam and ferguson (baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005); and Meredith evans, “Persons fall apart: James Hogg’s Transcendent sinner,” novel: a forum on fiction 36 (2003): 198–218. for ac-counts dealing with the question of calvinism, see crawford Gribben, “James Hogg, scottish calvinism, and literary Theory,” scottish studies review 3.2 (2004): 9–26. for accounts which take up the question authorship see ian duncan, “authenticity effects: The Work of fiction in romantic scotland,” south atlantic Quarterly 102 (2003): 93–116; Karen fang, “a Printing devil, a scottish Mummy, and an edinburgh book of the dead: James Hogg’s napoleonic complex,” studies in romanticism 43 (2004): 161–85; regina oost, “false friends, squeamish readers, and foolish critics,” studies in scottish Literature 31 (1999): 86–106.

3 i am marking the difference between a scottish literature as a part of a british literature, on the one hand, and scottish literature as a part of english literature, on the other, less to mark a discrimination frequently made in the criticism than to remark one made by Hogg himself. Hogg criticism has tended to see both britishness and englishness as equally non-scottish. This view is different from the one Hogg himself expresses in a prefatory remark to his (very nationalistic and ostensibly sincere) poem “The Harp of ossian”: “i have always felt it painfully that the name of scotland, the superior nation in every thing but wealth, should be lost, not in britain, for that is proper, but in england. in all dispatches we are denominated the english, forsooth! We know ourselves, however, that we are not english, nor ever intend to be” (songs by the Ettrick shepherd [1831] [oxford: Woodstock books, 1989], 75; my italics).

4 ismael Velasco’s article “Paradoxical readings: reason, religion and Tradition in James Hogg’s the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner” (scottish studies review, spring [2006]: 38–52), is one of the more recent descriptions of Hogg’s novel as a stage for these binaries: the novel is, Velasco writes, “expressive of a wider struggle, between a modernising, anglicised, cosmopolitan, rationalist, post-enlight-enment world view, associated with the dominant and literary classes . . . and an elder post-reformation, and pre-enlightenment Weltanschauung, autonomous, indigenous, religiously fragmented, and rooted in a popular oral culture mediated by ‘tradition’”

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(38–39). for an account that differently situates Hogg’s Gothicism in terms of (and against) enlightenment rationality see Joel faflak, “The clearest light of reason’: Making sense of Hogg’s body of evidence,” Gothic studies 5 (2003): 94–110.

5 Hogg has been a particularly valuable player in efforts to define to the place of scottish literature and the particularity of the tradition it is taken to represent within the larger field of romanticism. He has been so because it is not only the case that, by virtue of being scottish, Hogg can push back against the english, but also that, by virtue of being identified (as the ettrick shepherd) with a rustic, rural scotland, Hogg can push back against a smoother (that is, somehow more english) scottish literary metropolitanism typically seen to operate under the sign of sir Walter scott. for a recent, forceful statement of these oppositional topographies, see the opening gambit of scotland and the Borders of romanticism, in which the editors claim that scottishness, from the very beginning, disrupted a “view of romanticism as a unitary phenomenon” even as it therefore repeatedly prompted attempts to delineate between “british romanticism [which is] english” and scotland, which, “neither english nor foreign, stands for an inauthentic romanticism” (scotland and the Borders of roman-ticism, ed. davis, duncan, and Janet sorensen (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 1). Unlike the driving objective of scotland and the Borders—which argues for the importance of these disruptions—my interests in this essay are not to develop an alternative categorical system in which scottish literature might receive its fuller due. i am, rather, interested in describing the way in which Hogg was already wrestling less with the question of whether scotland “stands for an inauthentic” (or authentic) romanticism than with a formal question about the condition of “stand[ing] for” a culture more generally.

6 see scott, minstrelsy of the scottish Border, ed. T. f. Henderson, 4 vol. (edinburgh: William blackwood, 1902), volume 1.

7 This ambivalence is nicely focused by Kenneth Mcneil’s description of the way in which the Highland society of london, whose aims included “the restoration of Highland dress; the preservation and cultivation of Highland music, literature, and language,” actually worked to “inspire imitators in scotland” (scotland, Britain, Empire [columbus: ohio Univ. Press, 2007], 1). for an account of the exportation of ballads in particular see, leith davis, “at ‘sang about’: scottish song and the challenge to british culture” in scotland and the Borders of romanticism, 188–203. davis’s argu-ment rests on an operative but flexible opposition between proximate/local/oral and distant/international/textual transmission. although certain moments in her argument suggest that even within the romantic period there were intimations of a less contradic-tory construal of this relationship (“an alternative . . . in which oral culture does not give way to a literary print culture, but in which the two coexist and replenish each other” [194–95]), her basic argument concludes by reasserting the opposition between immediacy-orality-authenticity and dispersion-text-inauthenticity: “it is in the ‘sang,’ ‘catch,’ ‘crooning,’ and ‘whistle’ . . . that we hear the voice of burns—and of scotland—troubling the text of british culture in the romantic era” (200). Hogg’s novel, i will be arguing, is important for its denial of just this governing opposition, and, indeed, for its critique of the representative individuality (marked here by davis’s equations: “sang” = “burns” = “scotland”) that this opposition entails. for an account that pro-vides a much more extensive sense of the historical and theoretical interpenetration of writing and orality, see Penny fielding, Writing and orality: nationality, culture, and nineteenth-century fiction (oxford: clarendon Press, 1996).

8 i look at this question of orthography in relation to the memoirs and confessions more specifically below, but it is worth noting here that what may seem like merely

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a question of spelling took on real and persistent importance in Hogg’s discussions with his publishers. in his introduction to Hogg’s a Queer Book, P. d. Garside quotes a letter from William blackwood informing Hogg of a conversation with his nephew, robert Hogg, about just this matter: “He thinks decidedly that the spelling you have adopted, being neither genuine old scotch nor english would injure the book very much” (introduction to a Queer Book, ed. Garside [edinburgh: edinburgh Univ. Press, 1995], xv.) Garside goes on to note that “The main target here was undoubtedly Hogg’s ‘ancient stile’: a combination of ballad phraseology, the rhetoric of the late medieval scottish ‘makars’ . . . and more modern idiomatic expression. blackwood’s impatience with its ‘hybrid’ qualities was already known to Hogg. When ‘The Grusome caryl’ was submitted to Blackwood’s, he had responded to it in the following terms: ‘it is a capital production. . . . your orthography however i have the same complaint against as at no period whatever was the scots language so written’” (xv). Moments like this significantly recast our sense of Hogg’s relation to blackwood’s demand for a “genuine” orthography, since they testify far less to Hogg’s willful rusticity than to his (equally willful, apparently) resistance to an antiquarian historicity pushed by his editors in favor of an “ancient stile” which was ancient not by virtue of being old or well-preserved but by virtue of seeming, at least to Hogg himself, continuous.

9 ernest renan, “What is a nation?” in the nationalism reader, ed. omar dahbour and Micheline r. ishay (atlantic Highlands, nJ: Humanities Press international, 1995), 43.

10 Johann Gottfried von Herder, reflections on the philosophy of the History of mankind (chicago: Univ. of chicago Press, 1968), 160.

11 christopher Harvie, scotland and nationalism, 3rd ed. (london: routledge, 1998), 12.

12 see Max Weber, the protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, trans. Tal-cott Parsons (new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1958). for a more recent account synthesizing and continuing the Weber-foucauldian line, see Philip s. Gorski, the disciplinary revolution: calvinism and the rise of the state in Early modern Europe (chicago: Univ. of chicago Press, 2003).

13 Quoted in susan Manning, the puritan-provincial vision: scottish and american Literature in the nineteenth century (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 21.

14 duncan, “authenticity effects,” 95.15 Wilkie collins, the Woman in White (new york, Harper and brothers, 1861), 5.16 for the point about the news media’s capacity to include its own mistakes and

revisions as part of its story, see ferguson, “The Way We love now: ian Mcewan, saturday, and Personal affection in the information age,” representations 100 (fall 2007): 42–52, and the work of niklas luhmann on which ferguson draws, in particu-lar Love as passion: the codification of intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and doris l. Jones (stanford: stanford Univ. Press, 1998) and the reality of the mass media, trans. Kathleen cross (stanford: stanford Univ. Press, 2000).

17 for the claim about the intentionality of the novel’s “final impasse,” see Velasco, 38.

18 Hogg’s collected songs by the Ettrick shepherd repeat this position with some frequency. for while the very title of the collection appears to assert the importance of authorship, many of the prefatory remarks Hogg uses to contextualize the songs emphasize their life as objects of reception. The juxtaposition of these claims is evident in the note which describes the first song in the collection—“i place this song first,

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not on account of any intrinsic merit that it possesses . . . but merely because it was my first song, and exceedingly popular when it appeared. i wrote it when a barefooted lad herding lambs . . . but after it had run though the Three Kingdoms, like fire set to heather . . . no one ever knew or enquired who was the author” (1). Moments like these hold two positions in tension—the singularity of authorship (“my first song”) and its irrelevance or lack of interest (“no one ever knew or enquired who was the author”). subsequent notes and anecdotes provide other occasions of Hogg finding himself as part of the audience to his own work that, i am arguing, structures his letter in the memoirs: “Happening upon one occasion to be in a wood in dumfries-shire, through which wood the highroad passed, i heard a voice singing; and a turn of the road soon brought in sight a solider, who seemed to be either traveling home upon furlough or returning to his regiment. When the singer approached nearer, i distinguished the notes of my own song of donald Mcdonald” (5).

19 duncan, 112. 20 duncan, 112.21 douglas Mack, scottish fiction and the British Empire (edinburgh: edinburgh

Univ. Press, 2005), 77.22 duncan’s claim is closer to one Mack himself takes elsewhere, arguing that “Hogg’s

novel subverts the illusion that we can know about the past” (Mack, cited in c. r. a. Gribben, “James Hogg, scottish calvinsim, and literary History,” scottish studies review 5 [2004]: 17).

23 Katie Trumpener, Bardic nationalism: the romantic novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 34.

24 scott, “introductory remarks on Popular Poetry,” in minstrelsy, 12.25 scott, “on Popular Poetry,” 1.26 scott, “on Popular Poetry,” 5.27 scott, “on Popular Poetry,” 12.28 scott, “on Popular Poetry,” 13.29 scott, “on Popular Poetry,” 11–12.30 Weber, 36; Michael Walzer, the revolution of the saints: a study in the origins of

radical politics (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), 301, 13, 12, and for Walzer’s point about calvinism as a disciplinary supplement to lockean liberalism, see 303.

31 John stachniewski, the persecutory imagination (oxford: clarendon Press, 1991), 7.

32 Manning, 3. 33 Walzer, 27.34 John calvin, the institution of christian religion, trans. T. norton (1561), quoted

in stachniewski, 19.35 for an account of calvin’s uses of assurance, see Manning, 2.36 scott, demonology and Witchcraft . . . in a series of letters addressed to j. G.

Lockhart (london: William Tegg, n.d.), 75.37 sandra Macpherson, “rent to own; or, What’s entailed in pride and prejudice,”

representations 82 (spring 2003): 1–23.