‘A Blank Made’: Ossian, Sincerity and the Possibilities of Forgery

Abstract

On the face of it, trying to understand James Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian in terms to do with sincerity or authenticity would seem a perverse and potentially frustrating activity. Whatever ambitions Macpherson might have had for his poems, they have gone down in history as an archetype of the inauthentic, the charlatan, the opposite of everything or anything that might conceivably be meant by literary sincerity. It is for this reason, for example, that John Valdimir Price is ‘only too happy to admit that [he] get[s] no real literary pleasure from reading the works’, and why as sympathetic a reader as Joep Leerssen can claim that ‘there is no way of reading Ossian for mere textual pleasure’ in the face of the ‘unavoidable genetic issue of authenticity’.¹ However, in this chapter I will try to suggest a way in which the later Romantic engagement with Ossian was in significant part to do with an engagement with the possibility and definition of a troubling but ineffably Romantic type of authenticity as a category beyond the conventional ones of truth and sincerity. Notions of the insincere and inauthentic will always exist in a close and at times potentially troubling proximity to those of the sincere and authentic, but I hope to go beyond drawing attention to this obvious binary and suggest something else about Ossian’s use within Romantic imaginative sincerity.