Abstract
While the trope of the found manuscript has been aligned with Gothic since its beginnings, it is peculiarly prominent in Scottish writing.1 The coupling of the discovery of an ancient manuscript with anxiety over its authenticity can be traced to James Macpherson’s publication of the first Ossian poems in 1761, igniting a controversy that was still preoccupying Scott in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Beginning at least with Samuel Johnson’s mockery of Macpherson’s claim to have ‘two chests more of ancient poetry’ in addition to the original manuscripts of Fingal, the idea of a text that is not what it seems, or what it claims to be, haunts the national imagination.2 Reflecting on Macpherson and others, Joseph Ritson claims in 1794 that ‘[t]he history of Scotish [sic] poetry exhibits a series of fraud, forgery, and imposture, practised with impunity and success’.3 As he details at length in the introduction to his collection of Scotish Songs, this apparent tendency to forgery is a peculiarly Scottish vice:
It seems both unreasonable and arrogant that the Scotish writers alone should expect all the world to be satisfied with their naked assertions upon a subject in which interest or partiality must naturally render their testimony suspected; but, indeed, as not one single Erse manuscript, either ancient or modern, (and Mr Macpherson pretended to have several,) has been yet deposited in any public library, or even seen by any person of veracity, the question seems completely decided, though not much to the honour of that gentleman [Hugh Blair], his advocates, or adherents. (23)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
As Margaret Russett notes, the first edition of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto discusses the text’s origin in a found manuscript, while the label of ‘Gothic’ does not appear until the second edition; as such, the idea of the ‘found manuscript’ in some senses predates the founding of genre. Margaret Russett, (2009) Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 13.
Joseph Ritson (1869) ‘A Historical Essay on Scotish Song’, in Scotish Songs in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (Glasgow: Hugh Hopkins), pp. 11–114, p. 67.
James Hogg (2002) The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Written by Himself, With a Detail of Curious Traditionary Facts and Other Evidence by the Editor, ed. P.D. Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), p. 165. In his ‘Memoir of the Author’s Life’, Hogg laments that his associates ‘sneer at my presumption of being the author of that celebrated article. […] Luckily, however, I have preserved the original proof slips and three of Mr. Blackwood’s letters relating to the article’.
James Hogg (2005) Altrive Tales, ed. Gillian Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 44–45. Proof of authenticity lies not in the text itself, but in the form of supporting documents. Meanwhile, he claims not only that Confessions was so ‘replete with horrors’ he could not sign it, but that he does ‘not remember ever receiving anything for it’ (p. 55); in opposition to the Chaldee manuscript, he is able to distance himself from the text through a lack of supporting materials.
John Burnside (1997) The Dumb House (London: Jonathan Cape), p. 8.
Andrew Crumey (2004) Music, in a Foreign Language (Sawtry: Dedalus), p. 33.
Katie Trumpener (1997) Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 111.
Angus McAllister (1990) The Canongate Strangler (Glasgow: Dog and Bone), p. 13.
Fredric Jameson (1992) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso), p. 17.
Jonathan Culler (1988) Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 164.
Louise Welsh (2003) The Cutting Room (Edinburgh: Canongate), p. 7.
In such texts, as Wolfgang Funk argues, the author ‘forfeits her implicit authority to structure the representation of the story for an explicit stimulation of the readers to (re)create the story and the plot themselves’. Wolfgang Funk (2012) ‘Found Objects: Narrative (as) Reconstruction in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad’, in Funk, Florian Groß and Irmtraud Huber (eds), The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real (Bielefeld: transcript), pp. 41–61, p. 42.
Andrew Greig (2000) When They Lay Bare (London: Faber), p. 10.
Theodor Adorno (2003) The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowsky and Frederic Will (London: Routledge Classics), p. 47.
Alasdair Gray (1992) Poor Things (London: Bloomsbury), pp. vii, xi.
Alasdair Gray (2008) Lanark (Edinburgh: Canongate), pp. 485–499. As Gavin Miller argues, rather than ‘mere playfulness’ on Gray’s part, these allusions and obfuscations make Poor Things ‘truly fantastic’, in Todorov’s sense of the work that never settles into the world of the real or the marvellous.
Gavin Miller (2005) Alasdair Gray: The Fiction of Communion (Amsterdam: Rodopi), p. 83.
Ian Duncan (2003) ‘Authenticity Effects: The Work of Fiction in Romantic Scotland’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 102.1, 93–115, p. 112.
Jacques Derrida (1998) ‘The Time Before the First’, in Julian Wolfreys (ed.), The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), pp. 130–139, p. 138.
Fred Botting (2008) Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions (London and New York: Routledge), p. 106.
Quoted in Rodge Glass (2008) Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography (London: Bloomsbury), p. 221. See Jane Harris’s The Observations, Elaine di Rollo’s The Peachgrower’s Almanac, and Lesley McDowell’s Unfashioned Creatures for further examples of ‘up-to-date nineteenth-century’ novels within a contemporary Scottish Gothic tradition.
Victoria dismisses this portrait as ‘pretentious’ (p. 251), but Stephen Bernstein, for instance, argues that it suggests ‘that Gray has a historical concern in her career’ and ‘pushes the narrative toward political allegory’. Stephen Bernstein (1999) Alasdair Gray (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press), pp. 131, 110. More recently, Caroline McCracken-Flesher has argued that Bella’s portrayal is a way to give voice to the victims of Burke and Hare and suggest a way for Scotland to overcome its traumatic past: ‘This is the wider function of Bella Caledonia: Alasdair Gray lets Lazarus speak and thereby lets Caledonia rise’.
Caroline McCracken-Flesher (2012) The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 190.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1995) A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite, ed. Tom Crawford (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics), p. 139.
The ‘real’, in this instance, is loosely analogous to Lacan’s conception as defined by Slavoj Žižek, wherein ‘it erupts in the form of a traumatic return, derailing the balance of our daily lives, but it serves at the same time as a support of this very balance’. Slavoj Žižek (2000) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press), p. 29. This is precisely the apparent paradox found in Bella’s experiences in Alexandria, which are simultaneously derailing and supporting. Patrick Brantlinger applies this terminology to Gothic more generally, arguing that the ‘multiplication of stories and texts within one main story, as if enacting Freud’s repetition compulsion, gestures obsessively toward the “traumatic kernel” of “the Real” and therefore also toward their insistent failure to reach that impossible center’.
Patrick Brantlinger (1998) The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), p. 39.
Julia Straub (2012) ‘Introduction’, in Straub (ed.), Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Critical Concept (Bielefeld: transcript), pp. 9–29, p. 10.
Walter Benjamin (1992) Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana), p. 214;
Theodor Adorno (2002) Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso), p. 226.
Hal Foster (1996) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press), p. xii.
Lionel Trilling (1971) Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 1.
Jean Baudrillard (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 6–7. Writing specifically on Coleridge, Jerrold E. Hogle argues that neo-Gothic begins ‘with signifiers moving from being ghosts of counterfeits towards becoming simulacra’.
Jerrold E. Hogle (1998) ‘The Gothic Ghost as Counterfeit and its Haunting of Romanticism: The Case of “Frost at Midnight”’, European Romantic Review, 9.2, 283–292, p. 289.
V.S. Naipaul (1971) In a Free State (London: André Deutsch), pp. 253–254.
Sara Lodge (2010) ‘By Its Own Hand: Periodicals and the Paradox of Romantic Authenticity’, in Tim Milnes and Kerry Sinanan (eds), Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 185–200, p. 186.
Jacques Derrida (2003) Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Abingdon: Routledge Classics), p. 289.
Giorgio Agamben (1999) The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 33.
Andrew Crumey (2001) Mr Mee (London: Picador), pp. 18, 85.
Geoffrey Hartman (2002) Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle against Inauthenticity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 13–14.
Andrew Crumey (1996) D’Alembert’s Principle (Sawtry: Dedalus), p. 202.
Gilles Deleuze (2004) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (London: Continuum), p. 4.
Ibid, p. 12. Victoria McCandless’s dislike for Through the Looking Glass, mentioned above, and Crumey’s discussion of Carroll and Zeno in an essay on Euclid and literature perhaps indicate an aligned approach. Andrew Crumey (2009) ‘Mathematics and Literature’, in Michele Emmer and Alfio Quarteroni (eds), Mathknow: Mathematics, Applied Sciences and Real Life (Milan: SpringerVerlag), pp. 3–25, pp. 18–19.
Sean Bowden provides clear explanations of Deleuze’s debt to the stoics and of the relation between physical and metaphysical surfaces. Sean Bowden (2011) The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 16–17, 138–139.
See Joe Hughes (2008) Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (London and New York: Continuum), p. 25. Hughes here clearly traces the concept of Aion to Blanchot.
It is undoubtedly only a coincidence that in an early work on The Logic of Sense Jean-Jacques Lecercle finds a ‘Hyde-like’ character in Ferdinand de Saussure, and further categorizes theory and analysis in terms of ‘ghostly words’, but such overlaps between Gothic and theory are surprisingly common. Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1985) Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense, Desire (London: Hutchinson), pp. 2, 118.
Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne (1995) The Wrong Box (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 3.
Glenda Norquay (2007) Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading: The Reader as Vagabond (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 5–6.
Ibid., p. 114. See, for instance, ‘A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s’, where he compares the view of the ‘winter moonlight’ in Scotland with ‘the crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so easy to forget myself’ that he finds in his reading. Robert Louis Stevenson (1999) R.L. Stevenson on Fiction: An Anthology of Literary and Critical Essays, ed. Glenda Norquay (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 119.
As Vladimir Nabokov argues, to support his claim that an allegorical reading of the novella would be ‘tasteless’, in Jekyll and Hyde ‘the unreal central character belongs to a brand of unreality different from the world around him’: Jekyll does not fully exist in the world, Nabokov insists, and so cannot be truly pathetic or tragic, but only works at the more conventional level of the story. Vladimir Nabokov (1980) Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson), pp. 180, 255.
Garrett Stewart (1996) Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 360. While Stewart takes pains to avoid the allegorical reading suggested by Brantlinger, his conclusion that ‘Hyde’s manifestation would appear to demarcate instead the very sensation of narrative reading: a both insatiable and sapping fascination, with the reader drafted into complicity by the least turn of phrase’ (p. 373) arguably overstates the relation between rhetoric and content in the text. As much as the readers within the text are complicit, the external reader may be more guarded, as Nabokov notes.
Robert Louis Stevenson (2001) Markheim, Jekyll and the Merry Men: Shorter Scottish Fiction (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics), pp. 232, 235.
Ronald A. Thomas (1988) ‘The Strange Voices in the Strange Case: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the Voices of Modern Fiction’, in William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (eds), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after One Hundred Years (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), pp. 73–93, p. 73. Thomas compares Jekyll and Hyde to Samuel Beckett’s Company, arguing that in both works there cannot be a return to a unified self; instead, these ‘schizo-texts’ present a voice that is alienated from itself, and in which the contrary aspects of the self can never converge (p. 83).
Maurice Blanchot (2003) The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 6.
This itself resembles Blanchot’s claim that ‘he who dies is anonymous’: death cannot be seen as happening at an individual moment, nor as pertaining to a particular individual, but is always neutral. Maurice Blanchot (1989) The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press), p. 241. For this reason, as well as the more obvious practical one, Jekyll cannot write his own death, but it must exist as potential.
The library scene, in keeping with the intertextual allusions prevalent in Crumey’s work, bears a close resemblance to the enormous library, with its vanishing books, described at the beginning of George MacDonald’s Lilith, while its depiction of the origin of texts in the unconscious suggests Stevenson’s essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams’. The novel as a whole is also surprisingly close to Cyrano de Bergerac’s comic histories of the sun and moon, as discussed below, both structurally and in the central claim that ‘there are infinite worlds within an infinite world’. Cyrano de Bergerac (1965) Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun, trans. Geoffrey Strachan (London: Oxford University Press), p. 75.
Stephen J. Burn convincingly combines postmodern and cognitive theories to propose a ‘Multiple Drafts model’ for understanding Crumey’s work, whereby each separate element, or draft, serves to divorce the novel from its ‘ontological anchors’: ‘Genres are invoked, overloaded, and replaced as a competing draft reorients the reader’s attention. Within this fluid matrix, even basic terms for defining character […] become dynamic concepts’. Stephen J. Burn (2012) ‘Reading the Multiple Drafts Novel’, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, 58.3, 436–458, p. 446. In a very different way, Jekyll and Hyde works similarly as a ‘Multiple Drafts’ novel: see Julia Reid’s account of both the novel’s merging of detective narrative with Gothic form and her account of the differences between the novel’s two principal drafts.
Julia Reid (2009) Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 92–105.
Bent Sørensen (2005) ‘Physicists in the Field of Fiction’, Comparative Critical Studies, 2.2, 241–255, pp. 247–248.
Denise Mina (2003) Sanctum (London: Bantam), p. 318.
Allan Lloyd Smith usefully distinguishes between the narrative and episte-mological necessity of indeterminacy in the Gothic novel with the ‘intellectual inevitability’ of indeterminacy in postmodernism. Allan Lloyd Smith (1996) ‘Postmodernism/Gothicism’, in Victor Sage and Smith (eds), Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 6–19, p. 7. While many of the texts discussed in this chapter could be categorised simply as postmodern, the focus on narrative arguably allies them with Gothic tradition.
Morag Joss (2009) The Night Following (London: Duckworth Overlook), pp. 24–25.
Colin Davis (2007) Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 3.
Stanley Cavell (1994) In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), p. 172.
Jacques Derrida (1999) Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 8.
Terry Castle (1995) The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 123.
A.L. Kennedy (1996) So I Am Glad (London: Vintage), p. 35.
As Geoffrey Strachan notes, the ‘poet’s name remains divorced from historical reality’, insofar as he is known as a figure of legend as much as of historical record. The name itself, however, is also complicated: Cyrano adopted Bergerac around 1636, and variously termed himself Alexandre de Cyrano Bergerac, de Bergerac Cyrano, Hercule de Bergerac, and so forth. Geoffrey Strachan (1965) ‘Introduction’, in de Bergerac, Other Worlds, pp. vii–xvi, pp. vii–viii.
Savinien does explain himself slightly when, watching a television programme that is clearly, if not explicitly, Melvyn Bragg’s interview with Dennis Potter in April 1994, he argues that telling the truth is ‘what writers are for’. Kennedy, So I Am Glad, p. 196. What makes this particularly interesting is that he is responding not to Potter’s text, but his speech, in which Potter claims that the ‘nowness of everything’ at the point of death is fundamentally incommunicable, if glorious. Dennis Potter (1994) Seeing the Blossoms: Two Interviews, a Lecture, and a Story (London and Boston: Faber), p. 5. If writers are ‘for’ the truth, it is a truth that is about, and can only be communicated in, the present.
Julian Wolfreys (2002) Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. xi.
Monica Germanà (2010) Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing: Fiction since 1978 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 156. Similarly, Douglas Gifford argues that the question of Savinien’s ‘legitimacy’ is ‘in the tradition of ambivalence which is a hallmark of the Scottish novel from Hogg and Stevenson to Spark and Gray’.
Douglas Gifford (1997) ‘Contemporary Fiction II’, in Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (eds), A History of Scottish Women’s Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 604–629, p. 620. Gifford, curiously, insists on calling the character ‘Cyrano’, putting him back in the realm of the familiar.
Jacques Derrida (2006) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and Abingdon: Routledge Classics), p. xvii.
Edmond Rostand (1992) Cyrano de Bergerac, trans. Edwin Morgan (Manchester: Carcanet), pp. 63, 133. Morgan’s translation appeared three years before Kennedy’s novel was published and forms a neat counterpart: while in Morgan’s version the action remains in France but the language is from Glasgow, in Kennedy’s novel the action moves to Glasgow but the language remains standard English (and occasionally French). In neither, crucially, does the character speak the tongue of the time and place that surround him.
Julian Wolfreys (2008) Transgression: Identity, Space, Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 124.
Matei Calinescu (1993) Rereading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), p. xi.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Timothy C. Baker
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baker, T.C. (2014). Authentic Inauthenticity: The Found Manuscript. In: Contemporary Scottish Gothic. The Palgrave Gothic Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457202_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137457202_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49861-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-45720-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)