5.2 Sobre el Agregado Cultural
5.2.1. La definición del rol y funciones del agregado cultural
The motif of the border or frontier allows Scott to condense along a single line the effects of many overlapping historical times and spaces. As in Mark
Twain’s critique, where ‘Sir Walter’ renders the American South ‘modern and medieval mixed’, so the interacting of supposedly distinct temporalities in the
topology of the border or boundary line is one of Scott’s central literary
strategies. His frontiers can be understood as modes of encounter rather than merely the physical frontiers of the Borders and the Highland line. Along these lines of encounter the modern and anti-modern collide in unsettling, affective moments, as in the image of the Jacobite army in Waverley:
The grim, uncombed and wild appearance of these men, most of whom gazed with all the admiration of ignorance upon the most ordinary productions of domestic art, created surprise in the Lowlands, but it also created terror. So little was the condition of the Highlands known at that late period, that the character and appearance of their
to the South country Lowlanders as much surprise as if an invasion of African Negroes, or Esquimaux Indians, had issued forth from the Northern mountains of their own native country.59
Here the Highland line assumes all the qualities of an imperial frontier, un- mapped and porous, disclosing radically different ways of life. The chronotope of the frontier, to modify Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept, applicable to both the
Borders or the Highland line, reveals overlapping spaces and times – imperial, primitive, modern; yet in this overlapping of chronotopes Scott in fact
scrambles easy divisions between an urban, Enlightened modernity and the other times and spaces that it supposedly renders obsolete.
The philosopher Manuel Delanda uses the concept of ‘phase transitions’
from thermodynamics – the ways in which a substance shifts between solid, liquid and gaseous states – and applies it to the study of history, underlining the analogy which Scott stages between temporal and material transitions. Delanda draws on the idea of phase transitions to argue for a nonlinear
integration of natural and human histories, akin to the interactions of different historical bodies, artefacts and practices:
If the different ‘stages’ of human history were indeed brought about by phase transitions, then they are not ‘stages’ at all – that is, progressive developmental steps, each better than the previous one, and indeed
leaving the previous one behind. On the contrary, much as water’s solid,
liquid and gas phases may coexist, so each new human phase simply
59 Scott, Waverley, p.229.
added itself to the other ones, coexisting and interacting with them without leaving them in the past.60
This assertion of the coexistence of historical forms of social life is part of
Delanda’s critique of teleological notions of the development of the West and of purely ideological or discursive historical explanations which relegate the importance of matter and energy. The coexistence of historical phases is the foundation of the drama and interest of novels such as Rob Roy and The Heart of Midlothian, where savage figures persist beyond the time allotted to them in a stadial theory of social development, despite the more conservative
treatment of outlawed or anachronistic figures in Waverley or Redgauntlet. It is just this variability and mobility of temporal markers and spatial practices
which compose Scott’s historical border spaces. Savagery is not a quality endemic in specific (Highland) bodies, but part of the atmosphere of the border or threshold itself and of the encounter between cultures, times and geographies condensed into the frontier motif, which produces its effects across bodies and nationalities.
Scott’s second novel, Guy Mannering, another travel account of the Scottish border, gives us similar images of diffuse primitive aesthetics. In the following scene from Mannering, the protagonist Brown/Henry Bertram watches Border locals salmon fishing in the traditional manner:
Now the light diminished to a distant star that seemed to twinkle on the waters, like those which, according to the legends of the country, the water-kelpy sends for the purpose of indicating the watery grave of his
victims […] the broad flickering flame rendered bank, and rock, and
tree, visible as it passed, tinging them with its own red glare. By this light also were seen the figures in the boat, now holding high their weapons, now stooping to strike, now standing upright, bronzed by the same red glare, into a colour which might have befitted the regions of Pandaemonium.61
Although this scene is highly aestheticized, it is not merely a static image which Scott creates but a kind of affective atmosphere. Through the patterns of movement, illumination and obscurity, colour and form, we are given an image of savage figures with darkened skin wielding their hunting spears in the twilight. Here we have mingled the folk myth of the Kelpie with the
imagery of traditional rural life. The repetition of ‘now’ emphasizes the swift,
reflex movements –Certeau’s ‘know-how’ – that is always immediate and responsive. This vignette appears as an anthropological dream, and at the same time a vision of hell, capturing the ambiguity of an imperial gaze which is powerfully historicizing and, when turned on local, nonmetropolitan practices heightens their difference from the modernity of the centralized state. It is from the ambivalent clash of radically different ways of life that the
atmosphere of savagery, and of the border, is achieved. We might read this scene as enacting an imperial aesthetic, where the real horror of cultural encounters of the early nineteenth century is obscured through historical distance. Yet the transfer of the problem of colonialism to Scotland through
Scott’s aesthetics does indeed present a challenge to a homogenous
Britishness, as do the many moments of anti-colonial struggle, particularly in
61 Scott, Mannering, p.137.
Waverley and Rob Roy. The emphasis on a pastoral, agrarian vision layered
with historical time will recur in specifically ‘Southern’ guise in William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy as I demonstrate in my two final chapters.
The Scottish Borders are also figured decisively as an extrajudicial
region, which Andrew Lincoln reads as a critique of ‘the shifting foundations of state legitimacy’, which illustrates Scott’s ‘Tory scepticism’ and his
ambivalence about the encroachments of state law and sovereignty into the arena of local and feudal governance.62 In Redgauntlet we find other Lowland
outlaw figures such as the alcoholic pirate and smuggler Nanty Ewart, who becomes increasingly sober the more he drinks, and who displays
extraordinary keenness and vitality in spite of his emaciated appearance, ‘the
tropical sun had burnt his originally fair complexion to a dusty red; and the bile which was diffused through his system, had stained it with a yellowish
black […] with excessive use of his favourite stimulus.’63Nanty’s experience of foreign places and his outlaw lifestyle has dyed him in ‘savage’ colours and his
alcoholism has contributed to the production of his savage body. He shows his
credentials as a popular hero when he stands up to Hugh Redgauntlet, ‘“D-n all warrants, false or true – curse the justice – confound the constable! […] The cry of “Down with all warrants” was popular in the ears of the militia of the inn, and Nanty Ewart was no less so. Fishers, ostlers, seamen, smugglers,
began to crowd to the spot.’64Lincoln stresses the ‘vigorous language Scott attributes to those who stand beyond the norms of modern polite culture’ in
62 Lincoln, p.4
63 Walter Scott, Redgauntlet, ed. by Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), p.273.
order to argue that Scott’s work represents an integrated British identity as a loss of vitality rather than a confident new national identity.65 While there is
much evidence in Scott of his embracing a particular form of modified
Britishness with a less centralized model of power, it is certainly true that his focus on the vitality of Highlanders and borderers signals an ambivalence about the nature of a British modernity in which such figures are sidelined.
The Heart of Midlothian exhibits a more linear narrative trajectory in terms of its acts of border crossing. The novel describes the efforts of Jeanie Deans to rescue her sister Effie, who has been accused of child murder, by making a pilgrimage to London in an attempt to secure her sister’s pardon.
Jeanie and the Duke of Argyle seem to inscribe lines of movement which integrate the unfamiliar with the familiar, the periphery with the centre. We can contrast this trajectory with the outlawed movements of Rob Roy and with the smugglers of Redgauntlet and Guy Mannering, who purposefully
transgress national, legal and commercial boundaries. These more dissident lines of movement also have a temporal aspect, although it is not always as simple as moving Northward to the periphery and the past, or South towards
the centre and modernity. Scott’s frontiers are moveable negotiations of
diverse practices, periods and spaces, not absolute boundaries.
Another key method through which Scott constructs the experience of border space in the Waverley novels is through language. Crawford
emphasizes Scott’s linguistic inventiveness and its effect on the way in which
British readers imagined their geography and cultural identity, ‘Scott’s
compositional strategies challenged an audience used to thinking of itself as
65 Lincoln, p.14.
monocultural and monolingual […] this anthropological, linguistically daring multiculturalism was his greatest achievement.’66 While his representation of
the diversity of speech patterns and vernacular within Britishness is one of his central achievements, moments of unofficial speech often appear marginal to the action, as though in the role of local colour. As Bakhtin writes on the
presence of ‘unpublicized speech’ in the novel, ‘Only a small and polished
portion of these unpublicized spheres of speech reaches the printed pages,
usually in the form of “colourful dialogue” of the protagonists of a story, as removed as possible from the author’s own direct and serious speech patterns.’67 However, despite this marginalization, the overflowing and
excessive quality of the speech of some of Scott’s central characters constantly
pushes at the quotation marks which separate it from the organizing voice of the narrator, or that of his upper-class first-person narrators.
The linguistic borders of Scots, Gaelic and standard English modes of
speech are the least of Scott’s innovations in the use of voice.68 He uses the
demarcations of character speech to signal the regional, linguistic, religious and political heterogeneity of Scottish history in, for example, the long
passages of legal speech, pedantic antiquarian discussions and obsession with Latin phrasing which accompany his more comic figures, such as the Baron of Bradwardine:
66 Crawford, Devolving English Literature, p.133.
67 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 1984), p.421.
68 On the linguistic dimensions of Scott’s prose and poetry, see Alison Lumsden, Walter Scott
I pray you to be hushed, Captain Waverley; you are elsewhere,
peradventure, sui juris, being foris-familiated and entitled, it may be, to
think and resent for yourself; but in my domain […] and under this
roof, which is quasi mine being held by tacit relocation by a tenant at will, I am in loco parentis to you, and bound to see you scathless.69 The Baron’s reliance on citation, reference and parenthesis is symptomatic of a
desire for official sanction and a bolstering of his own legal status; yet in the same moment it renders his speech archaic and idiosyncratic, working to both
defer and obscure his meaning. Bradwardine’s language – mixing Latin and legal terminology with archaisms – also blends major and minor registers.
Purveyors of mad speech also populate Scott’s texts, such as Peter
Peebles in Redgauntlet with his obsession with the Scottish legal system, ‘the
ordinary to the inner House, the President to the Bench. It is just like the rope to the man, the man to the axe, the axe to the ox, the ox to the water, the water
to the fire’.70 Peebles begins with a legal address which collapses into a sing-
song alliterative discourse. His speech, like that of many Scott creations, expands legal discourse with the extra-judicial, causing the major discourse to overflow with song, proverb and the language of madness. Yet insanity has its own, equally clear modes of expression, evident in the use of ballads as a
substitute for speech for the ‘innocent’ David Gellatley (Waverley) and Madge Wildfire (The Heart of Midlothian). Like Scott’s more eccentric speakers,
Peter, David and Madge look to an over-arching discourse to express their own individual language, just as Joshua the Quaker (Redgauntlet) and Cameronian
69 Scott, Waverley, p.53.
David Deans (Midlothian) employ the archaic phrasing of their respective religious traditions. Scott also offers synthetic Shakespearean dialogue in
Kenilworth (1821) and an accessible modernized version of the content and rhythms of Middle English in Ivanhoe. The integration of dialect into
narrative voice is achieved more fully by his contemporary John Galt, whose novel The Annals of the Parish (1821) abolishes the divide between Standard English narration and spoken Scots. These innovations in dialect voice in Scottish Romantic writing are critical in paving the way for texts like
Huckleberry Finn (1884) which contains not only a non-standard narrative voice but the representation of contrasting regional speech patterns. The raising of dialect writing to a high literary form in the work of Scott, Hogg, Galt, Burns and others proves to be a major influence on the development of American vernacular literature.71