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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
IN DON JUAN, BYRON MENTIONS A FRENCH JOKE THAT EXPLOITS ACCENT TO mispronounce "Wellington" as "Vilainton" and, thereby, "pun[] down to this facetious phrase" the name "France could not [] conquer." The joke, Byron shows, allows a defeated France to attain a satiric superiority over its English conqueror: "Beating or beaten [France] will laugh all the same" (IX.1). A similar type of Francophonic humor occurs in the work of James Hogg, the rustic Scottish novelist--also frequently given to puns-whose origins in the Border country likewise ensured that accented English would be a personally-meaningful issue. In an 1823 letter to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, for example, Hogg misidentifies the term "phenomenon" as "a French word." (1) In fact, this curious Gallic emphasis by Hogg further resembles Byron's in anti-imperial feeling. Where Don Juan repeats the French joke against Wellington, Hogg sides with the Duke's defeated opponent by invoking a specifically Napoleonic interest in Egyptology. The Blackwood's letter describes the phenomenon of a "Scots mummy," an undecayed, century-old corpse unearthed in the Borders. This tale of a Scots mummy, of course, also surfaces in the conclusion to Hogg's enigmatic novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824); hence both letter and novel beg the question of what French Egyptology has to do with the rural Scottish region from which Hogg and his fictional mummy both hail. One answer to this question lies in Hogg's echo of Byron's Napoleonic humor. That is, the similar preference for French language and culture that Hogg's Blackwood's letter exhibits suggests his comparable animosity to the sites of British imperialism. His antipathy to (the) English extends to literature itself and, as I will show, is both the subject and discursive characteristic of Hogg's best-known, and most baffling, work.
The Private Memoirs is usually interpreted as an autobiographical allegory of Hogg's experience with Blackwood's Magazine, when Hogg, who was satirized in a character in one of the magazine's series, had to compete with the notoriety of his fictional alter ego. (2) While this essay concurs with these interpretations and, particularly, the conflict between oral and print literature that Ian Duncan locates in Hogg, it does so by elucidating Hogg's thematizing of French Egyptology--a curious aspect of the Gothic novel which has not yet been accounted for. (3) That Egyptian antiquities are emblems of literary immortality for Hogg is evident in both The Private Memoirs and in the earlier "Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript" (1817), Hogg's first contribution to Blackwood's. In the novel the aforementioned mummy surfaces bearing a manuscript whose "yellowing, tightly wound" pages resemble papyri; the body itself is said to have survived solely "for the preservation o' that book" (252-53). (4) Similarly, the Chaldee Manuscript purports to be one of the "many admirable pieces of writing ... supposed to be lost forever," but which the "present age seems destined to witness the recovery of." (5) As I will argue, this "present age" that the Chaldee Manuscript invokes is both the contemporary craze for Egyptology spurred by Napoleon's recent North African campaigns and the fierce competition in the current magazine industry that definitively formed the Blackwood's culture. In this conceit, Hogg's Egyptian metaphors suggest the epochal moment that he occupies, where expanding print capitalism transforms obscure authors into "admirable pieces of writing" whose "recovery" are triumphs that the industry imagines are tantamount to Napoleonic discovery itself.
These political dimensions to the tropes of Hogg's literary ambition reveal the author as a more complicated instance of Scottish resistance to English colonization by way of print capitalism, such as has been detailed by Leith Davis and others. (6) As an autodidact and former shepherd whose second career as an author was partly necessitated by the Highland clearances conducted by England to consolidate dominion in Scotland, Hogg was ambivalent about the vibrant literary environment that offered cultural ascendency at the cost of individual and national autonomy. His cosmopolitan reference to French as a sign of his imperial resistance is not uncommon in Scottish literature, but Hogg's use is unique in its yoking to the rural Borders rather than the metropolitan magazines that he came to associate with Union subjugation. (7) This essay therefore tracks Hogg's changing relationship with Blackwood's, a growing alienation that the Chaldee Manuscript and The Private Memoirs both describe, paradoxically, as "my enemy, my friend." The first section of this essay recounts the tremendous hope and subsequent failure in Hogg's original reference to Egyptology in the Chaldee Manuscript; the second section discusses his deliberate reengagement in the novel with these imperial and print capitalism forces, in order to attain a satiric superiority that compensates for actual defeat and subordination. The final section shows how Hogg's discourse of French Egyptology reconciles orality and print, the alternate forms of authoriality that epitomized Hogg's struggle in the Edinburgh literary scene. What I call his "Napoleonic complex" is his revolt against imperial Union as well as the English hegemony and corporate practice of the Edinburgh literary elite.
1. An Edinburgh "Book of the Dead"
The "Chaldee Manuscript," Hogg's first submission to the publisher William Blackwood, documents Hogg's early hopes of using print culture to promote himself. The work pretends to be an ancient document excavated in Chaldea, the Mesopotamian region that was a rich archeological resource during the Higher Criticism, the recent trend in Biblical philology which sought to authenticate Jesus through the corroboration of pre-Christian documents. The Manuscript plays off this allusion to the Higher Criticism: the text itself is a Biblical parody in chapter and verse about the founding of Blackwood's Magazine. Describing the publisher's efforts to start the magazine, the work was submitted by Hogg to Blackwood as his eponymous magazine was about to launch. (8) The facetious, mock-historic elevation in the self-referential work exhibits a glamorous orientalism that represents literary Scotland as the Levant, geographic territory of Christian history. Accordingly, Scott's home on the Tweed reappears at the river Jordan, Hogg's home in Ettrick Forest is reimagined in the woods of Lebanon, and Edinburgh itself is re-mapped as the holy city of Jerusalem. Such oriental ornamentalism was common in contemporary imperial culture and, as Timothy Morton has shown, was particularly useful for authors, such as the Cockney poets, who relied upon such discursive exoticism to mask their dubious cultural status. (9) More importantly, though, this "eastern idiom" that Hogg concocts picks up on nicknames already invented by Archibald Constable, Scott's publisher and Blackwood's chief competitor, which proclaimed the power of contemporary print culture by likening publishing houses to oriental empires. (10) The Scriptural intonations in the Chaldee Manuscript work the same way. They intimate the height of Hogg's--and the magazine's--professional pretensions, which its elevated discourse presumably secures. A verse describing a snuffbox belonging to William Blackwood illustrates these conceits:
(34) And he took from under his girdle a gem of curious workmanship of silver, made by the hand of a cunning artificer, and overlaid within with pure gold; and he took from thence something in colour like unto the dust of the earth, or the ashes that remain of a furnace, and he snuffed it up like the east wind, and returned the gem again into its place.
In this ekphrastic description of Blackwood's snuffbox, the value of the publisher's other marvelous possession--i.e., Blackwood's magazine--also is implied. By depicting the publisher possessed of a "gem," the verse pictorially metaphorizes Blackwood's favored possession of a great "Book." This claim is dramatized in a subsequent scene, a parodic condensation of the Biblical scenes of Annunciation and Moses on the Mount, where the printer is visited by a mysterious figure who prophesies success for the journal ("So he gave unto the man ... a tablet ..." [II.7]). Hogg's contribution to the Chaldee Manuscript is indispensable in this destiny, as demonstrated by Scott's later praise of the work's oriental language--and particularly this verse--as the best part or "gem" of the whole work. Hogg, the Manuscript constantly implies, is a "cunning artificer" absolutely necessary to Blackwood's.
Underlying this self-congratulatory Biblical parody, however, is a more interesting commitment to the collective power of magazines--what the antiquated diction of the Manuscript describes as being "increased greatly" (II.20). This interest hints at a literary strategy more sophisticated than the ornamental; indeed, it divulges the industrial base which motivates Hogg's oriental leitmotif. In a peculiar development of the intimate partnership of orientalism and imperialism, the Manuscript's Biblical parody exists to reveal the organizational likeness between magazines and empires, which both employ systems of incorporation to fit persons into existing offices and, thereby, achieve a structure greater than the sum of its parts. (11) For Hogg, this synergistic aspect of "present day" magazines was supposed to benefit him in precisely such associative relationships as I have just outlined. Indeed, Blackwood's involvement with these practices of rationalization and incorporation were so extensive that the Manuscript also shows this structure applying to other journalistic positions. Thus, in the Annunciation scene that describes William Blackwood's decision to start a magazine, Blackwood's editorial office is signified by a veiled and enclouded apparition whose obscured identity represents the fact that, at the time of the magazine's founding, the office was not yet appointed. The device dramatizes the place-holding functions common in an industry in which the practices of anonymity, pseudonymity, and collective identity were ubiquitous. Similarly, in a variation of the magazine's power to "increase greatly," the Manuscript further highlights this imperial quality of magazines by verbally emphasizing their capacity to promote individuals advantageously. In the last chapter of the Manuscript, which parodies Revelation, the Manuscript repeatedly refers to magazines as "hosts." The word's allusions to the Eucharist therefore again facetiously hyperbolize the magazine's importance while also punningly underscoring the magazine's positive capacity to enhance individual authorial effort (IV.16; IV.36; IV.40).
Given this deliberate analogy to imperial industry, it is in the Manuscript's evocation of Egyptian archeology where...
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