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Document : 976
Title    : On the Study of Scottish Literature
Author(s): Ian Duncan

Copyright holder(s): Ian Duncan

Text

As someone who teaches and researches topics in Scottish literature in an
English department at a North American university, I’ve been asked to
provide an ‘outside view’ of the subject in the context of current
debates over its status and value in the school curriculum. It seems
bizarre to me that the study of Scottish literature should require a
defence in Scotland in this day and age, although I know from experience
that the case needs to be made elsewhere. 

I came quite late to the study of Scottish literature, through reading
Scott, who would play a far more prominent part in my professional life
than I ever expected. Scott confronted me as an anomaly in the development
of the ‘English novel’ — a force of influence (to be sure) but of an
oddly inconsequential kind; a cloudy distraction from the true path of a
morally serious domestic realism, a ghost in the house of fiction. At an
early stage of working on my doctoral dissertation I had the good fortune
to meet Tom Crawford, who was visiting the James Boswell archive at Yale,
and I asked him if he thought it made sense to think about Scott in the
light of a Scottish — as distinct from an English or British — literary
tradition. With what I now recognize to have been heroic forbearance, he
replied that such a point of view might indeed prove quite fruitful. Mine
was a symptomatic ignorance. As a category, Scottish literature did not
exist at the leading centres of ‘English’ where I was a student in the
mid-1970s and 1980s. My first-year supervisor at Cambridge, Helena Shire,
had insisted I read Dunbar, Henryson and Gavin Douglas alongside Chaucer
and other English poets in the medieval syllabus of the undergraduate
English tripos. But that was an exception. There was no sign of Burns on
the Cambridge curriculum, none of Scott, apart from a one-off visiting
lecture by David Daiches, who (however) did manage to convince some of his
audience that there might be more to the Waverley novels than tartan and
tushery. At Yale, too, British literature remained resolutely English (some
eminent Irish authors excepted), even though the Yale university library
holdings in Scottish literature must be the richest in North America, with
major caches of Hogg, Stevenson and Barrie alongside Boswell. (It’s
pleasant to imagine these archives providing the basis for a future
programme in Scottish studies at Yale ...) 

This state of affairs still prevails, by and large, at university English
departments in England and the United States, although changes are
beginning to occur locally. (Canada is a somewhat different case). I do not
think that the neglect of Scottish literature can very plausibly be blamed
on a residual anti-Scots prejudice, or anglophiliac conspiracy, although
influential acts of exclusion have certainly shaped the growth of the
modern tradition of English literature: Samuel Johnson’s denunciation of
Ossian in the 1770s, Matthew Arnold’s mid-Victorian complaint that Burns
could not be a great poet because he lacked ‘high seriousness’, F. R.
Leavis’s dismissal of Scott from the great tradition of the English novel
on the grounds that he was ‘an inspired folklorist’. The problem, which
is structural rather than intentional, follows from the ways we go about
constructing a national narrative of cultural history. Like any narrative,
it has its arcs of development, its turning points, its rhythms of greater
and lesser intensity. And while the modern national histories of England
and Scotland may be bound by a shared political destiny, their
literary-historical contours do not match. The arcs and turning-points, the
peaks and valleys, do not coincide, or if they do, they mean different
things. This lack of synchrony is more visible in the centuries preceding
the Union of Crowns, when the national histories are still formally
separate. The high points of early modern English literature — the Age of
Chaucer, of Spenser and Shakespeare — these have no corresponding
achievements in contemporary Scotland. (Although Shakespeare did briefly
turn into a Scottish playwright after 1604 ...) The attempt to fit the two
histories together casts the dominant model, the English, as the norm, and
reduces the other to its shadow. The makars, inserted into an English
chronology, become ‘Scottish Chaucerians’ — mere followers. 

The situation gets more complicated, of course, after 1707. Scotland’s
political absorption is followed on the one hand by a brilliant epoch of
intellectual modernization, the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, and on
the other by processes of economic and cultural integration that support
the single narrative of a unified British history — one in which, all but
inevitably, English developments set the pace. Recent scholarship has shown
how eighteenth-century Scottish historians subordinated their own national
history to the English model, while a contemporaneous ‘Scottish invention
of English literature’ brought a tactical acceptance of English
linguistic and aesthetic standards, at least in Edinburgh. A golden age of
modern Scottish letters — the century from David Hume’s “Treatise of
Human Nature” (1739) to Thomas Carlyle’s “The French Revolution”
(1837) — remains sunk out of sight in most standard British literary
histories, submerged by that most problematic of all period categories,
‘Romanticism’. Since this is the period I work on, I’ll use it as my
main example. 

That century saw Lowland Scotland become one of the generative centres of
European and North Atlantic literary culture. In the balance of a new,
British imperial world order, Scottish innovations in moral philosophy, the
social sciences, history, rhetoric, poetry, periodical journalism and the
novel matched or outweighed their English counterparts. Hume, Adam Smith,
and other Enlightenment philosophers developed a comprehensive account of
human nature, social organization and historical process; poets and
scholars invoked the national past and regional popular traditions in a
series of attempts to reimagine Scottish identity in a post-national age.
James Macpherson’s collections of ‘Poems of Ossian’ founded European
Romanticism on a scandalous invention of lost cultural origins; Robert
Burns fashioned the first modern vernacular style in British poetry;
Scott’s historical novels combined those distinctively Scottish
inventions, a universal modernity and a national past, to define the
governing form of Western narrative for the next hundred years. At the same
time, a succession of Edinburgh periodicals — “The Edinburgh Review”
(1802), “Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine” (1817), “Chambers’s
Edinburgh Journal” (1832) — established the main medium of
nineteenth-century public discussion. And to name these highlights is to
overlook a long list of strikingly original achievements: Smollett’s
novels, Fergusson’s urban eclogues, Joanna Baillie’s theatre of the
passions, the experimental fiction of James Hogg and John Galt. 

Once more, though, these developments don’t fit the English narrative, in
which ‘Romanticism’ bursts from the shell of a dried-up neoclassicism,
cracked by the shockwave of revolution in France. The later eighteenth
century is (or was, until recently) a strange twilight zone of English
literary history, an ‘Age of Sensibility’ or ‘Pre-Romanticism’, its
poets groping hesitantly towards the radical horizon of “Lyrical
Ballads” and “Songs of Innocence and Experience”. In Scotland,
though, ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ cultural forms occupy the same
moment, rather than defining successive stages or periods; Macpherson’s
“Fingal” is not just contemporary with the scientific projects of
Enlightenment but is one of its characteristic products — as well as
being the founding document of a global Romanticism. The French Revolution
brings a change in Scottish cultural history, but one with different
dynamics from the English case, characterized by intellectual continuity
rather than rupture. As the counter-revolutionary regime of Pitt and Dundas
tightens its grip over Scottish patronage, the projects of Enlightenment
shift their institutional base, from the university curriculum to an
industrializing literary marketplace, so that after 1800 Edinburgh becomes
the British centre for innovative publishing in periodicals and fiction. A
‘Romantic’ aesthetic ideology does not formally take hold in Scotland
until 1817, when “Blackwood’s Magazine” sets itself up as the Tory
scourge of a Whig post-Enlightenment (exemplified by the “Edinburgh
Review”) in the national struggle over electoral reform. 

All of this scarcely registers in the standard literary history, which
casts British Romanticism as English, a mighty handful of lyric poets
grappling with a Kantian (later Heideggerian) problematic of the
transcendental imagination. Never mind that this version of Romanticism is
a late invention, consolidated in the North American academy after World
War II. Scotland, neither English nor foreign, comes to stand for an
inauthentic Romanticism: its poets and novelists manufacture nostalgic
simulations, a theme-park Highland heritage, while ‘Scotch reviewers’
bully Keats and Wordsworth. Rather than being a site of Romantic
production, it is Scotland’s fate to have become a Romantic object or
commodity: glamorous scenery for Queen Victoria and industrial tourism; a
series of kitsch, fake, sentimental ‘inventions of tradition’, from
Ossian and “Waverley” to Fiona MacLeod, “Brigadoon” and
“Braveheart”. 

Nor, unfortunately, is this simply an English (or Anglo-American) story. In
the early decades of the last century, Scottish critics devised their own
compelling variant, denouncing the post-Union literary tradition as
inorganic, self-divided, alienated from its vital sources — the proof of
that alienation being Scotland’s lack of a genuine Romantic movement.
Gregory Smith’s exotic phrase for an internally-conflicted national
character, the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ (in “Scottish Literature:
Character and Influence”, 1919), supplied Hugh McDiarmid and Edwin Muir
with critical ammunition in their revolt (de rigueur among Modernists)
against Victorian forefathers: a revolt charged with nationalist energy by,
among other things, the burden of Scotland’s participation in
nineteenth-century world empire. McDiarmid and co. were taking aim at the
Victorian sentimental cult of Burns and Scott, it can be argued, more than
at those writers themselves. Nevertheless, critics and historians in their
wake took the ‘Antisyzygy’ diagnosis literally, and made it into a
routine: branding some Scottish authors as more Scottish than others,
carving up individual oeuvres into authentic and inauthentic tendencies,
usually along linguistic lines — so that few readers, for example, now
bother with the English poetry of Fergusson or Burns. 

This summary is a caricature, I know, and it overlooks all sorts of crucial
factors, not least the political contexts that this nationalism spoke to.
Recent commentary has clarified its account of national tradition, if not
always consistently. Tom Nairn, rescuing the Scottish Enlightenment from
Antisyzygy proscription in “The Break-Up of Britain” (1981), develops
the nationalist account of Scotland’s lack of a Romantic movement —
finding what Muir (in “Scott and Scotland”, 1936) had found in
Scott’s Edinburgh, ‘a very curious emptiness’. Yet this analysis
ultimately derives from Scottish Romanticism: the first clear statement of
the ‘Antisyzygy’, as diagnosis of a national cultural pathology, can be
found, one hundred years before Gregory Smith, in John Gibson Lockhart’s
(Tory, Unionist) semi-fictional anatomy of Scottish culture, “Peter’s
Letters to his Kinsfolk” (1819). Cairns Craig has shown (in “Out of
History”, 1996) how the model of a divided, deficient Scottish tradition
relies on the assumption of an English ‘organic’ standard: Muir adapts
T. S. Eliot’s critique of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in modern
English poetry, while David Craig (in “Scottish Literature and the
Scottish People”, 1961) invokes the Leavisite model of a ‘Great
Tradition’.

Scott’s reputation was perhaps the most spectacular casualty of
Antisyzygy nationalism, which cast the author of “Waverley” as chief
Unionist collaborator, a Wicked Wizard of the North who enchanted an entire
tradition into a moth-eaten museum-piece. Far from helping people to read
Scott’s poems and novels, such an analysis became a means of not reading
them. Recent historical developments have helped make Scott look
interesting again, with initiatives such as the new Edinburgh Edition of
the Waverley Novels encouraging a fresh approach, although bad habits of
reading, or rather failures of reading, linger here and there. Scott, for
sure, was a key figure in the ‘invention of Scotland’ that has been
analysed by Murray Pittock and less subtle scholars; but the novels
themselves are far from exhausted by the uses to which they have been put
— an instrumentality that may have little or nothing to do with what an
attentive reading can find out. We need to remind ourselves of what, once
upon a time, was obvious: the imaginative vitality and intellectual wealth
of these astonishing works (not just “The Heart of Mid-Lothian” and
“Redgauntlet” but, say, “Woodstock”), appreciation of which should
enhance, rather than obscure, the rival brilliancies of Scott’s
contemporaries — Galt’s “The Entail”, Hogg’s “Private Memoirs
and Confessions of Justified Sinner”, as well as their other works, and
works by other hands. (The best Romantic-era Scottish novel not by Hogg,
Scott or Galt? Christian Johnstone’s “Elizabeth de Bruce”, 1827.) 

So there are at least two good reasons for recognizing the distinctiveness
of a Scottish literary tradition. One, simply put, is that tradition’s
internal strength — the originality and excellence of its constituent
works, from the makars through the Romantic Enlightenment (whatever we want
to call it) to the current, turn-of-the-millennium crop of rising poets and
novelists, and everything and everyone else before and besides: Robert
Louis Stevenson, for instance, whose gifts an English literary history has
been no more successful in defining than it has Burns’s; or Margaret
Oliphant, whose return to currency as an English novelist (the author of
“Miss Marjoribanks”) exceeds, for the moment, the rise of interest in
her as a Scottish woman writer — one who, like Joanna Baillie, made her
career in the south. We need to be able to read these authors: which means,
in the first place, having their books available, and also, in many
instances, learning how to read them, since reading habits and terms of
reference change. The Edinburgh Scott, with its Penguin Classics offshoot,
can serve as a model for the joint issue of high-quality scholarly and
popular editions. There are, fortunately, a host of analogous projects,
keeping our literary universe open: the Stirling-South Carolina edition of
Hogg (also in paperback!), bringing to light works which in some cases have
never been available in their original versions, and reprint series such as
Canongate Classics and the ASLS’s own Annual Volumes. Literary criticism
too can perform a public service in extending our reading skills —
whether developing terms for a better understanding of famous authors, such
as Burns and Scott, whose achievements have been distorted by an alien
aesthetic standard, or recovering less familiar or downright obscure
writers and movements, overlooked because of their class or gender or other
contingent reasons. 

Reading, we accustom ourselves to the rhythms of change and continuity that
make up a Scottish literary history, its successions and combinations of
models, forms and topics. We find surprising illuminations along the way.
Humean empiricism, Cairns Craig has argued, generates a socially
constructive model of the imagination that is quite different from the
transcendental model associated with English Romanticism, and no less
consequential, since it provides a philosophical matrix for the
nineteenth-century novel — not just Scott’s historical fiction but,
through that, the ‘English’ realist form. We learn, too, that a
national tradition is multiple rather than singular, an often turbulent
play of crosscurrents rather than a broad mainstream — for example
through Murray Pittock’s studies of a Jacobite tradition far more complex
and polyvalent than we had thought, or the reclamations of women’s
writing undertaken in the recent “History of Scottish Women’s
Writing” edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, the electronic
archive of “Scottish Women Poets” edited by Stephen Behrendt and Nancy
Kushigian, and like projects. Perhaps the last thing Scottish literature
needs is the unifying forcefield of a ‘Great Tradition’. 

Which brings us to the second good reason for affirming a Scottish
literature: its importance and influence outside the borders of Scotland.
Scottish writers from the century of Enlightenment and Romanticism — Hume
and Smith, ‘Ossian’, Burns and Scott — enjoyed a huge international
popularity and prestige, across continental Europe and North America and
other European colonies, defining the intellectual and literary genres of
modernization throughout (at least) the nineteenth century, from political
economy to national epic and historical novel. In the light of this
world-scale reception, it is the English tradition (Johnson, Wordsworth,
Austen, Keats ...) that begins to look provincial. (Byron belongs to both!)
Merely to reverse the charge of national inferiority, though, is just as
unhelpful — replacing one imperialist boast with another. The splendours
of the English tradition need no defence. It is important, rather, to
recognize the complex networks of affiliation that bind Scottish literature
(sometimes painfully) to other literatures and cultures. Scottish writing
helps constitute the literatures of continental Europe, North America and
the British and European colonies, in complicity with other, often less
benign institutional conduits of ‘influence’, just as it is in turn
constituted through and by other literatures. Scholars who have recently
been drawing the map of Scottish literature’s global interrelations, such
as Robert Crawford and Susan Manning, are building upon a solid scholarly
foundation (in the work of R. S. Jack, Andrew Hook and others). 

These networks of reciprocal making bind together, not least, Scottish with
English writing (the work of North American scholars such as Leith Davis
and Janet Sorensen is helpful here). Thus, we need to understand Scott in
the light of Scottish traditions of moral philosophy, historicism and
antiquarianism, poetry and ballad revival — and also of English and
Irish, as well as continental, traditions of the drama and novel and
romance, and a great deal else. Victorian Scottish authors in particular,
like Carlyle and Oliphant, did not simply write and publish in London, but
shaped ‘English’ styles and genres, as Robert Crawford and others have
insisted. It makes as little sense to tear them out of their English
context, in a mistaken bid for purity, as it does to read them as English
authors without regard for their Scottish roots and associations. English
needs to be an essential component of the study of Scottish literature —
just as Scottish literature needs to play no less vital a part in English
studies, in England and elsewhere. So: let’s not submerge Scottish
literature, once again, under the surface of ‘English’; but let’s not
cut it off from English either. Scotland’s literary and linguistic bond
with English, far from being a shackle, can enhance our understanding of
how national cultures develop — not in splendid isolation but in complex
engagement with the world. 



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Adults (18+): Informed lay people: Specialists: Males: Females: Audience size: 1000+

Text details
Method of composition: Wordprocessed
Year of composition: 2003
Word count: 3072

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Text publication details
Published: Publisher: ASLS
Publication year: 2003
Place of publication: Glasgow
Part of larger text: Contained in: ScotLit 28
Editor: ASLS

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Author
Author details
Author id: 496
Forenames: Ian
Surname: Duncan
Gender: Male
Decade of birth: 1950
Educational attainment: University
Age left school: 18
Upbringing/religious beliefs: Secularism
Occupation: Professor of English
Region of birth: Cornwall
Country of birth: England
Place of residence: Berkeley
Region of residence: California
Country of residence: USA
Father's occupation: RAF Officer
Father's place of birth: Perth
Father's region of birth: E & SE Perthshire
Father's birthplace CSD dialect area: Per
Father's country of birth: Scotland
Mother's occupation: Housewife
Mother's place of birth: London
Mother's country of birth: England

Languages:
Language: English
Speak: Yes
Read: Yes
Write: Yes
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Work / home
Language: Scots
Speak: No
Read: No
Write: No
Understand: Yes
Circumstances: Scholarly / recreational