Confessions of a gentrified sinner: secrets in Scott and Hogg.(Walter Scott, author James Hogg)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

"You are right, my friend--you are right," replied poor Dick, his eye



kindling with enthusiasm; "why should I shun the name of an--an"--(he hesitated for a phrase)--"an out-of-doors artist?" --Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor "That there are subjects of secrecy and confidence between us, is most certain; but to such, his communications to you could have no relation; and with such, I, as an individual, have no concern." --Walter Scott, Rob Roy

THE CONCLUDING SECTION OF JAMES HOGG'S PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND Confessions of a Justified Sinner burlesques an editorial apology and explanation for the disjointed state of the text. Our unnamed editor narrates his skeptical expedition, which is provoked by a letter James Hogg wrote to Blackwood's Magazine, to the Scottish Borders in search of the perfectly preserved corpse of a suicide lately uncovered. Hogg himself appears in the text, at an Ettrick livestock sale, and gives a fine performance of rural Scots obstinacy: "I hae mair ado than I can manage the day, foreby ganging to houk up hunder-year-auld banes." (1) The editor, despite Hogg's stubbornness, finds the body. He goes searching in the company of Sir Walter Scott's son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart and Scott's sometime steward at Abbotsford, William Laidlaw (half-heartedly disguised as "Mr. L--t of C--d" and "Mr. L--w") and even accepts Lockhart's offer to "procure a horse," from his father-in-law. The amateur investigators find that the lower half of the suicide's body has not been disturbed: "all the limbs, from the loins to the toes, seemed perfect and entire, but they could not bear handling. Before we got them returned again to the grave they were all shaken in pieces" (251). Concealed in the clothing is the sinner's narrative, which we have just finished reading. Neither Mr. Laidlaw nor Mr. Lockhart wishes to take possession of the document, though the former remarks that it "`will maybe reveal some mystery that mankind disna ken naething about yet'" (253). Lockhart responds, "`it is not for your handling, my dear friend, who are too much taken up about mysteries already'" (253). Such a rejoinder to a domestic employee of Walter Scott would seem to refer to a mystery that, in 1824, was officially still a mystery.

In practical terms, the mystery of "the Great Unknown," the Author of Waverley, was no mystery at all. In 1824 Waverley novels were appearing in both Europe and America under Scott's name, and in the same year William Hazlitt published The Spirit of the Age, including a substantial discussion of Scott and his novels. (2) Four years earlier, the first number of the London Magazine had announced, "we should be very much mortified were it afterwards to turn out that these fine works have been improperly attributed by the public voice to--Walter Scott," and three months later the same magazine, affecting no uncertainty, wished that Scott "would either declare himself, or give himself a nom de guerre, that we might speak of him without either a periphrasis or impertinence." (3) Of course I do not wish to deny that there was any interest in the identity of the Author; though, as Richard Waswo observes, "curiosity was in fact baffled neither very widely nor very long in the public world" (307). My interest is in the secret's Brobdingnagian protraction and overdetermination. Scott remained intent upon keeping up his incognito until 1827, when the bankruptcy of his publisher forced a public avowal. On that occasion, the London Magazine declared, "all the world stared, not so much at the unexpectedness of the disclosure, for it was virtually well known before, but that the declaration should be made at that particular moment"; and in Blackwood's John Wilson, writing as Christopher North, disdained "the silliest of all recorded controversies on the fathership of the novels and romances by the Author of Waverley. He, she, or it, that knew not that Sir Walter begot them all, was a fool of the first order, and that is all that need be said on the subject." (4) The anonymity of the Author of Waverley seems to have been little more than an occasional, frequently jesting collusion among British literary critics. Besides, anonymous authorship was not by any means a derelict practice in the early decades of the nineteenth century. (5) Certainly a histrionic expression like "the Great Unknown" savors more of hijinks than high romance. "Yet," North observed, "it ... served to keep up the mystery" (Blackwood's November 1827: 554).

A complex tangle of relations, positions, jests, and rivalries grew around Sir Walter's secret identity. The critical establishment, James Hogg, and Scott himself all contributed to this competitive and duplicitous comedy. Indeed, Scott put a good deal of work into enlivening his own mystery. In an 1817 review of his own Tales of My Landlord he remarks of the Author of Waverley: "Why he should industriously endeavour to elude observation by taking leave of us in one character, and then suddenly popping out upon us in another, we cannot pretend to guess without knowing more of his personal reasons for preserving so strict an incognito than has hitherto reached us." (6) Scott also made a big fuss of explaining his subterfuge and exculpating himself in his General Preface to the 1829 Author's Edition of the Waverley Novels--such a fuss, indeed, that the Author's identity seems a mere Maguffin after the pageant of its concealing and unveiling. The inadequate rewards of concealing and revealing identities had, after all, already been denounced by critics (including Scott himself) weary of Gothic fiction in the Radcliffean style. (7) We should take note of Captain Clutterbuck's encounter with the Author of Waverley in the introductory epistle to The Fortunes of Nigel. (8) Clutterbuck visits the "labyrinth of small dark rooms, or crypts" behind Constable's publishing house and, in "a vaulted room dedicated to secrecy and silence," he finds "the person or perhaps I should say the Eidolon, or representative vision, of the Author of Waverley." (9) Clutterbuck urges his "magnus parens" to avow his identity, or at least avoid the careless generosity of rushing out a story that is "hastily huddled up" to defend the Author--by means of the amusements it offers--against the charge of poor plotting. "I have heard Engineers say," Clutterbuck argues, "that one may betray the weak point to the enemy by too much ostentation of fortifying it" (xxix). One may also, presumably, better conceal a secret by too much ostentation of fortifying another, spurious secret. Perhaps the real secret of the Author lies undisturbed. Satisfying ourselves with Sir Walter's name, we remain his dupes.

I will treat Scott's prefatory writings as part of a discursive continuum with his critical interlocutors because he was himself one of those interlocutors. Accordingly, a disingenuous posing as one who feels himself besieged does not ring true to Scott's shrewd (if over-ambitious) business sense. I propose here to offer two partial explanations: a reason for the overelaboration of the secret, and an analysis of the challenge Hogg's dissonant mock-history presents to Scott and his secrets. I will concentrate my discussion largely on Scott's General Preface and Hogg's novel, both of which are something other than faithful confessions. I will frame my analysis upon the metapsychology of secrets developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in a set of essays published as "Cryptic Mourning and Secret Love." The combination of Abraham and Torok with Scott and Hogg has, I find, been tested before now, by Ian Duncan in a splendid article on The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Hogg's The Three Perils of Man. (10) In two other articles, Duncan has examined the Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and still other allusions to Scott in Hogg's novels. (11) I will press on with my analysis despite some territory shared with Duncan, because the rich productivity of Scott and Hogg's rivalry is by no means exhausted.

I. National Secrets

Psychoanalysis is a practice of allegorical reading. Dreamwork, symptom, and literary text are, in the analyst's vision, vehicles for concealed narratives--latent content--whose explication will make sense of contradictions and lacunae in the manifest content of dreams, behaviors, and texts. Every psychoanalytic reading, therefore, is also a reading of psychoanalysis itself; the systematicity analysis finds in symptomatic narrative is the system of psychoanalysis. In a sense, the secret that analysis always uncovers is not so much the trauma that initiates symptoms, as the operative presence of the analytic system where no system had seemed possible. (12) That process of textual organization is not unique to psychoanalysis; imposition of systematic narrative is also a defining characteristic of ideology, for instance. Psychoanalysis, particularly Abraham and Torok's theory of secrets, also offers a logic of figuration that is useful to me. Hence my reading of Scott's General Preface will construct an allegorical frame based on analytic principles, not for its own sake, but as a means of opening the text up to another kind of allegory--that of Hogg's Confessions. Allegory, arranged in a thoroughly ironic manner, is the means of signification Hogg presents in opposition to Scott's historiography. I want to demonstrate that Hogg uses allegory as a means to evoke voices and subject positions that the Waverley Novels have secretly suppressed, or rather suppressed under a sign of secrecy. At the same time, the establishment of that secret system--a secret whose sign is "The Author of Waverley"--fortifies Scott's position as the supreme figure of historical consciousness. Scott's mastery over the secrets of Scottish history makes him guardian of the boundary between modernity and all its antecedent histories. (13)

Abraham and Torok's specialized concept of the secret forms the central structure of what they call cryptophoric mourning--a reaction to a loss that fails to find resolution. (14) They propose that an experience of traumatic loss may lead to a powerful incorporation of the lost object into the ego in such a way that the object captures and closes off a portion of the ego. "The mechanism," they write, "consists of exchanging one's own identity for a fantasmic identification with the `life'--beyond the grave--of an object of love" (142). This process is opposed to the normative process of mourning--introjection--where a lost object is replaced by language, which substitutes, through figuration, for what is lost. Where mourning cannot, for some reason, accomplish that figural substitution, the lost object becomes imaginatively a secret part of the mourner's psyche. In Abraham and Torok's terms a secret is encrypted, which is to say both that it is sealed within a kind of psychic crypt and that it is rendered into language that misleads. The secret betokens what they call a "reality" whose entombed state between conscious and unconscious psychic life preserves that reality so it "cannot quite die, nor can it hope to revive" (159). Cryptophoric mourning "recreates in a single psychic area, system, or agency, the correlate of the entire topography, isolating the wound and separating it ... from the rest of the psyche and especially from the memory of what had been torn from it" (135). That secret psyche is a part of the containing psyche, but it is also utterly different, "a kind of artificial unconscious, lodged in the very midst of the ego" (159). The secret is both an inviolable place (best exemplified by a grave) and an artificial subject, the object as subject that "carries the ego as its mask" (141).

Because the secret's existence depends so thoroughly on its intensification of psychic divisions between interior and exterior, it must be defined in terms that are at least partially topographic. Consider this passage from William Godwin's Essay on Sepulchres (1809):

It is impossible therefore that I should not follow by sense the last remains of my friend; and finding him nowhere above the surface of the earth, should not feel an attachment to the spot where his body has been deposited ... the works of my friend, the words, the actions, the conclusions of reasoning and the suggestions of faith, we feel to depend, as far as they are solid to us, upon the operations of our own mind. They stand, and are sponsors, for my friend; but what the grave encloses is himself. (15)

Godwin's meditation is more a work of iterable mourning than the unspeaking melancholia that Abraham and Torok associate with cryptic secrets. Nevertheless, Godwin contrives a divided topography that focuses upon the boundary of the grave as a substitute for the absent friend; rather than absolutely gone, he is absolutely sealed off. In that sense the two topographies of the beloved object produce a kind of incomplete reanimation. He is not returned to life by the operations of the mind, but nor has he wholly departed. For Abraham and Torok,

Secret mourning erects a secret tomb inside the subject. Reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects, the objectal correlative of the loss is buffed alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography ... a whole world of unconscious fantasy is created, one that leads its own separate and concealed existence. (130)

The sudden, exclusively literal,...

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