5.2 Sobre el Agregado Cultural
5.2.2. Las dificultades en los vínculos interinstitucionales
A fitting emblem for the problem of historical representation in Scott’s work is
the image of the artefact, which includes not simply objects but also the classic Romantic motif of the ruin, as a material trace in the landscape with a
historicizing function. As temporal and physical borders shift or evaporate, what is left behind is the artefact – a hardened sediment of historical
transition. In this way, the artefact in the Waverley novels can often embody
the nonlinear quality of Scott’s historicism, confusing models of progressive
history and antiquarian acts of dating and preservation. The tension between the preservation and decay of historical markers is dramatized perhaps most clearly in the opening sections of Old Mortality (1816), where the ageing eponymous protagonist spends his later years travelling from parish to parish reinscribing with a chisel the engravings on the tombstones of martyred
Covenanters. After his death, Old Mortality’s legend lives on, with rumours of
the remarkable preservation of those tombs which he restored:
They even assert, that on the tombs where the manner of the martyrs’
murder is recorded, their names have remained indelibly legible since the death of Old Mortality, while those of the persecutors, sculptured on the same monuments, have been entirely defaced. It is hardly necessary to say that this is a fond imagination, and that, since the time of the pious pilgrim, the monuments which were the objects of his care are hastening, like all earthly memorials, into ruin and decay.77
77 Walter Scott, Old Mortality, ed. by Peter Davidson and Jane Stevenson (Oxford: Oxford
Here the tone of Peter Pattieson, the novel’s secondary narrator, is one of
rational analysis, and yet his term ‘hastening’ would seem to imply that since
Old Mortality’s death the tombs are in fact decaying exponentially. The competing histories of those eager to remember the Covenanters and their cause, and of the rational, Enlightened narrator of the frame narrative, both seek to verify the persistence or obsolescence of history in the movements of materials.
Material composition is also critical in the artefacts of The Antiquary,
where Scott’s self-parodic emphasis on Jonathan Oldbuck’s collecting of
pseudo, misplaced historical objects reflects the problematic and nonlinear nature of his historical transitions. However, in Scott, and as I will also argue
regarding James Hogg’s work in the following chapter, the artefact has the
function of problematizing the linear historical constructions implied by the antiquarianism of the period, and in turn highlights alternative interpretations of historical materials through of legends, ballads and folk memory.78 This
problematization is perfectly encapsulated in The Antiquary, where Oldbuck
admonishes the novel’s young hero Lovel for not being able to clearly perceive
the outlines of a Roman fort on a pasture which he had purchased at great expense for the purpose of preserving its antiquarian evidence:
Indistinct? Why, the great station at Ardoch, or that at Brunswick in Annandale, may be clearer doubtless, because they are stative forts,
while this was only an occasional encampment […] ideots will plough
78 For this antiquarian aspect of Scottish Romanticism and its foundations in the Scottish
Enlightenment, see Susan Manning, ‘Antiquarianism, The Scottish Science of Man and the Emergence of Modern Disciplinarity’, in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, pp.57-76.
up the land, and, like beasts and ignorant savages, have thereby
obliterated two sides of the square, and gravely injured the third – but ye see, yourself, the fourth side is quite entire.79
The frustrated references Oldbuck makes to the effacement of the evidence highlight the problem of the living, working environment which cannot remain static, and the Antiquary seeks to explain the camp’s faded contours by
supposing it to have been only fleetingly occupied.
As the anthropologist Tim Ingold argues, we cannot escape the reality that all artefacts are composed of materials, which continue to interact with
their environments, ‘As the underbelly of things, materials may lie low but are
never entirely subdued. Despite the best efforts of curators and
conservationists, no object lasts forever. Materials always and inevitably win
out over materiality in the long run.’80 Materiality is here defined as a static
substrate which can be passively taxonomized, while materials are dynamic and frustrate temporal analysis by persisting into the present. Unfortunately for Oldbuck, local beggar Edie Ochiltree makes an appearance to reveal the real origin of the remains:
‘About this bit bourock, your honour,’ answered the undaunted Edie: ‘I mind the bigging o’t.’
‘The devil you do! Why, you old fool, it was here before you were born, and will be after you are hanged, man!’
79 Scott, The Antiquary, p.28. 80 Ingold, Being Alive, p.27.
‘Hanged or drowned, here or awa, dead or alive, I mind the bigging
o’t.’81
Here personal memory and local legend challenge antiquarian interpretations of historical markers, and Edie’s pithy dialect comedically deflates the
Antiquary’s triumph. What was supposed to be of great antiquity may perhaps be merely a rustic shelter built only twenty years earlier, originally erected for a wedding and used as a refuge from the weather and for drinking contests.
As sociologist of science Christian Simonetti argues, in the model of constructing the historical through excavation, common in disciplines such as archaeology, time moves from the bottom upwards, as in models of strata, each enclosing its separate historical epoch in material form with the most recent at the surface: ‘in normal conditions of deposition, later soils are
deposited on earlier ones, which have a more stable structure at the time of deposition,’ and such stratification implies that‘history is not visible at the
surface but needs to be excavated.’82 For the Antiquary, the more buried and
indistinct the remains, the more conscious work there is to be done in
reconstruction and interpretation. In Simonetti’s analysis, the notion of
history as subterranean in turn implies ‘an understanding of the past as being
enclosed within surfaces.’83 Yet in The Antiquary Scott interrupts this
stratigraphic model, as the excavation of historical sediments in the landscape merely turns up the present masquerading as the past, from the excavation of
Oldbuck’s fort to the false treasure unearthed by Sir Arthur Wardour later in
81 Scott, The Antiquary, p.30.
82 Cristian Simonetti, ‘The Stratification of Time’, Time and Society, 24 (2015), 139-162,
(p.143).
the novel. In The Antiquary, the motif of the excavation of artefacts and the surface of the earth is at the centre of the historical debates concerning Scottish history which it seeks to parody. The artefact is a key motif in the historicizing discourses which inflect Southern writing by Poe, Twain, Faulkner and McCarthy, and I will demonstrate that in their writing also, it provides a critique of processes of constructing national histories.