In “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain”(1845), first published in Blackwood’s
Magazine, de Quincey explores the image of the palimpsest, which as Josephine McDonagh demonstrates is a significant image for nineteenth-century thought.20 For de Quincey, the
fascination with the structure of the palimpsest derives from its relation to how the mind functions in storing memories and recollecting. According to McDonagh, de Quincey’s
palimpsest not only extends ideas raised by writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge but also stands in the tradition of psychological models. “The Empiricist’s tabula rasa and Freud’s
Mystic Writing-Pad,” explains McDonagh, “are models of the mind that flank the
palimpsest” (209). Like the palimpsest the tabula rasa and the Mystic Writing-Pad are surfaces
upon which writing is inscribed, but while the tabula rasa constantly erases previous writing, the palimpsest and the Mystic Writing-Pad offer a space for retention, becoming depositories of past
and current inscriptions (209). However, unlike the Writing-Pad which impedes recollection even if the traces of the past are preserved, the palimpsest can bring about recollection (209). The
image of the palimpsest in historical discourse raises a set of problems. For Carlyle, the wonder that is history is precisely contained within this image: an ever unfolding historical process, both
synchronous and dialectic, where if we are earnest and honest readers of the past we can trace the
20 McDonagh’s 1987 article, “Writings on the Mind: Thomas de Quincey and the Importance of the Palimpsest in
Nineteenth-century Thought” sets useful ground for investigating the use and purpose of the palimpsest in writers such as de Quincey and G.H, Lewes. To my knowledge, this essay is the only critical analysis up to date that looks at nineteenth-century texts and the image of the palimpsest.
past for itself, marking its writing underneath the score of empirical data. Applied to Scott, the
palimpsest image complicates Scott’s historical project and his place in literary history. Scott the empiricist overwrites the past, leads the past into a more civilized future, but Scott the
romanticist constantly unveils the scriptio inferior, the underwriting of the historical palimpsest. Since Scott’s novels always push to the surface the role of memory, we should consider the role
of memory in palimpsestuous historical discourse.
In Memory, History, Forgetting Paul Ricoeur posits that we “have no other resource,
concerning our reference to the past, except memory itself” (21). Not only is memory the gateway to the past, but also memory is tied to “an ambition, a claim — that of being faithful to
the past” (21). According to Ricoeur, memory signifies “something has taken place, has
occurred, has happened before we declare that we remember it” (21 Ricoeur’s italics). Memory
as such presupposes referentiality, a verifiable, substantive event. Ricoeur then throws into the mix “declaration” or testimony, positing that testimony “constitutes the fundamental transitional
structure between memory and history” (21). Thus, in Scott those who testify are the bardic characters such as Flora, or his beggars and otherwise marginal figures (The Antiquary’s Edie
Ochiltree and Elspeth, The Heart of Midlothian’s Madge Wildfire, to name a few), who propagate communal memory through oral literature and remembrance, push the past into the
present, and make living historical moments out of memories. Because testimony plays the role of conduit between memory and history, we must always consider who is testifying and who is
recording the testimonies. And as if this did not complicate matters enough in relation to
memory’s claim to faithfulness to the past, we also need to consider the translation of memory to
sayable — the translation of memory to a linguistic plane, its moment of declaration. When
either personal or collective memory is narrativized and translated into the linguistic sphere of the text, it pulls along ethical concerns. Memories that remain unspoken or those that are
dispersed through oral literature, being carried through generations, transfigure and morph, bearing the mark of fluidity and flexibility to adjust to whatever is the current, particular
individual or communal need. Textual memories — those that are recorded and inscribed in a text — are commodified, labeled, and made permanent. As such, textual memories have the aura
of truth and objectivity.
Ricoeur reminds us that the Greeks distinguished between mnēmē, memory, and
anamnēsis, recollection. According to Ricoeur’s explanation of Aristotle’s distinction, memory “arises in the manner of an affectation, while recollection consists in an active search” (17). The
distinction between mnēmēand anamnēsis is significant, as within the distinction lie two central concerns of history: how events are remembered and to what purpose memories are put.
Understood this way, memory is passive and recollection is active. Recollection appears fragmented, wanting wholeness, and is in danger of being stigmatized as reconstructed,
appearing more artificial, crafted and made, than the spontaneous and passive-like mnēnē.
Recollection then appears to be a creative and recreative aesthetic, a techne in the Greek sense,
and its status as such is fallible as it is opposed to empiricist episteme.
2. “Correct and Verify:” Antiquarian, Revised, and Corrected History
The relation between memory and recollection appears in many Waverley novels, and
memory in the first pages of his novel reflects the classical notions of mnēmēand anamnēsis and
Ricoeur’s more recent theories on the nature of memory and historical discourse. As such, Scott’s own historiography lies between the ancient and postmodern. Peter Pattieson, the narrator /
editor of Old Mortality, describes his frequent walk to a near-by burial ground, where the monuments are “half-sunk in the ground and overgrown with moss” (6). Pattieson imagines that
to the antiquary the most interesting monument would be the one that “bears the effigies of a doughty knight,” whose “armorial bearings are defaced by time, and a few worn-out letters may
be read at the pleasure of the decypherer, Dns, Johan de Hamel, or Johan de Lamel” (7). The tombs are decaying due to the passing of time, but it is precisely material decay that enables a
distancing, which in turn lends a solemn feeling to the burial ground “without exciting those of a more unpleasing description” (6). Patttieson recognizes death; he asserts that “death has indeed
been here, and its traces are before us; but they are so softened and deprived of their horror by our distance from the period when they have been first impressed” (7). Here, there is a subtle
allusion to memory and how events are impressed on our minds, becoming memories that are vulnerable when faced with the passing of time. In the case of death, the faded impression of the
event is understood as benevolent decay. The progress of time obscures and romanticizes death. However, while the horrors of death are softened by the decay of the tombs, Pattieson explains
that the “memory of some of those who sleep beneath them is still held in reverend
remembrance” (7). As long as there is someone to sustain the memory, the material decay of the
tombs cannot prevent the past’s intrusion into the present nor can it allow a complete romantic totalization of the past.
Very quickly, however, the narrator draws our attention from the tombs that attract the
antiquarian to “two other stones which lie beside,” upon whose surface “may still be read in rude prose, and ruder rhyme, the history of those who lie beneath them. They belong, we are assured
by the epitaph, to the class of persecuted Presbyterians who afforded a melancholy subject for history in the time of Charles II. and his successor” (7). Unlike the tombs that attract the
antiquarian, the tombs that have decayed to the point of obscurity, enabling a safe distance at which to contemplate a past, these tombs tell “the history of those who lie beneath them” (7). By
juxtaposing these tombs with the older and heavily defaced tombs of a Merry England, Pattieson juxtaposes two layers of the past: a more distant and obscure past that can be mastered by the
present and a more recent past that resists the present. Because the past can still be read upon the surface of these tombs, its presence is not yet overwritten by the present.
The past speaks for itself and cannot be readily idealized and contained by the present. Moreover, the past that these tombs encrypt is uncomfortable and resists idealization and
totalization. In the same manner as its explosive occurrence in the historical process, this past remains an interruption in the plane of historical memory, leaving a trace on the present. This
speaks to Walter Benjamin’s assertion that history cannot be structured on a site of “homogenous, empty time” (Theses 261). The proper historian, who for Benjamin is the
historical materialist, needs to “blast open the continuum of history” (262) and “brush history against the grain” (257). Latching onto these moments of interruption, unveiling traces in the
historical process that are not homogenous is the proper object of historical investigation. Peter Burke beautifully explains the task of the historian:
Herodotus thought of historians as the guardians of memory, the memory of
glorious deeds. I prefer to see historians as the guardians of awkward facts, the skeletons in the cupboard of the social memory. There used to be an official called
the ‘Remembrancer”. The title was actually a euphemism for debt-collector; the official’s job was to remind people of what they would have liked to forget. One
of the most important functions of the historian is to be a remembrancer. (110) I want us to think about Scott as a remembrancer. The stones that entomb the
Covenanters offer a different past, “a melancholy subject for history,” a past ridden by civil strife as the Covenanting army rebelled against the Royalists, a rebellion that culminated in the
reactionary assassination of Archbishop Sharp in 1679. Scott “blast[s] open the continuum of history,” latching onto the event of 1679 as his starting point. In doing so, Scott narrates, through
the words of Pattieson, a historical moment “without depreciating the memory” of the
Covenanters or that of the Royalists (8). Scott’s history then becomes a Benjaminian history of
the oppressed, a history against the grain of Herodotus’ tradition, showing how both parties are oppressed by a historical moment whose consequences and necessities are beyond the immediate
comprehension of the parties involved.
On a visit to the “deserted mansion of the dead” (8), Pattieson meets Old Mortality, a man
“busily employed in deepening, with his chisel, the letters of the inscription, which, announcing, in scriptural language, the promised blessings of futurity to be the lot of the slain, anathematized
the murderers with corresponding violence” (8). Scott alludes here to the power of language to simultaneously bless and anathematize, and by Old Mortality chiseling and reinscribing the
itself violent, is juxtaposed with the “corresponding violence” of the inscription’s curse. The past
here reenters the present through language. The writing on the tombstone figures as a material trace of an event that cannot be referenced anymore: events happen at one point in time and
cannot be repeated. “The event,” Ricoeur writes, “is simply what happens. It takes place. It passes and occurs. It happens, it comes about” (MHF 23). But the memory of the event can be
contained within some material, in this case the inscriptions on the tombs, which point to a trace of time, to something beyond the mere material sign. In “The Trace of the Other,” Levinas
describes the trace as the “insertion of space in time, the point at which the world inclines toward a past and a time” (358). The inscription on the tomb embodies a past space and time, it inserts a
past into the present as we read the writing on the tomb, and inclines us towards remembering the past. But the redundancy of Old Mortality’s name, the redundancy of the reinscription and
the repeated action of the chisel, forces upon us the question of the past’s own redundancy. Viewed this way, the past may be seen as an excess that is not needed by the present unless it is a
disruptive force.
Pattieson learns from Old Mortality that he has once been a farmer but left his home to
wander and conduct a long pilgrimage of refurbishing the decaying tombs of Covenanters: “in the most lonely recesses of the mountains, the moor-fowl shooter has been often surprised to find
him busied in cleansing the moss from the grey stones, renewing with his chisel the half-defaced inscriptions, and repairing the emblems of death” (9-10). Old Mortality revitalizes the memory
of the deceased, the memory that the inscriptions materialize through language. He renews and repairs the traces of the past. In addition, Old Mortality “considered himself as fulfilling a sacred
their forefathers” (10). Old Mortality participates in a type of performative memory: through this
act he keeps the past traceable, “renewing” the past “to the eyes of posterity,” by visiting the decaying tombs and reinscribing the half-effaced emblems. The “eyes of posterity” is an image
of the posterity as audience, gazing at memory’s performance of conjuring the past before them. The inscriptions have to be reinscribed and made new again, so that they can be read and in
reading relived and experienced by later generations. Here the repairs conducted on the tombs differ remarkably from the repairs conducted on Bardwardine’s estate in Waverley. Old Mortality
repairs to preserve and recall the past back into the present, prolonging the memory of those who are no longer there to share first hand accounts of past events. By contrast, repairs of the estate
seek to efface any marker of the past, to push the past in the realm of forgetting. Old Mortality’s monuments function as a type of palimpsest, although the overwriting seeks to match the scriptio
inferior — the original inscriptions are reinscribed. In such reinsription lies a fundamental belief in origin.
This element of reliving the past is present in the way Old Mortality speaks of past events: “he was profuse in the communication of all the minute information which he had
collected concerning them, their wars, their woes, and their wanderings. One would almost have supposed he must have been their contemporary, and have actually beheld the passages which he
related” (11). When Old Mortality speaks of the past, the distance between the present and the past is annihilated, but even more significantly, Old Mortality participates in collective memory
— he negotiates memories, which he cannot directly remember. Pattieson distrusts this full immersion into the past and emphasizes that he has “endeavoured to correct and verify” Old
representatives of either party” (13). In this manner, Pattieson resembles the antiquary who
travels around the cultural landscape, collecting fragments of the past.
In “Antiquarianism and the Scottish Science of Man,” Susan Manning connects the
“ambivalent standing” of the antiquarian in Scotland to post union cultural politics (59). The fundamental problem the Enlightenment historiographer had with the antiquarian is the latter’s
“resistance to the grand narratives of philosophic history” (60). Manning points out that
antiquaries “in the common eighteenth-century view [. . .] catalogued and accumulated objects,
delighting in singularity. Their relationship to the matter of their inquiries was subjective, affective, and — crucially — unconceptualized” (58). As Manning continues to explain:
“antiquarian procedures facilitated a rather suspect form of engagement with history, recently described as ‘affecting,’ in which the recovery of family ‘relics,’ local landmarks, and
memorabilia evoked a sentimental and proprietorial response, often of a very personal nature” (63).21 The affective and subjective responses to objects from the past, the fetishistic
response to the past, opposed the stern-like, objective reading of the past as practiced by the Enlightenment historian. The interesting paradox is that the antiquarian who “affected” the past
was genuinely interested in uncovering essences and truth. However, because of the preoccupation with material objects as the source to unlocking the past, the truth is nearly
unattainable due both to the antiquarian’s inability or resistance to look beyond the material remnants and to the partialness of the stories the inherited material tells. This preoccupation with
the particulars and the distrust of imagination to fill in the gaps between the material remnants of the past collided with the principles of historiographers such as Hume, who attempted to link
21 The argument that the antiquarian project as “affectionating” the past is fully explored in Jayne Elizabeth Lewis’
material extension to perception, the thing to thought: “In Humean terms, antiquaries failed to
register the power of memory and imagination in creating a continuous picture of
reality” (Manning 63). The Enlightenment places memory and imagination in the service of
constructing a continuous world-view and a historical network of clearly set causes and effects. As such, the Humean imagination has a very distinct ideological purpose. As Duncan explains:
“Humean scepticism posits [a] continuous, habitual world of ordinary relations as fiction” (“Hume, Scott” 67). In the Treatise, Hume claims that “the memory, senses, and
understanding” are all “founded on the imagination” (313). Duncan further notes that in Hume’s philosophy the imagination is the faculty that provides the conditions for understanding,
ultimately structuring an “empirical reality” and “necessary illusions of spatial and temporal continuity, and — by extension — subjective as well as objective identity in space and
time” (67).
However, this “speculative philosophy” that Hume starts and that is carried through the
work of The Edinburgh Review resonated with John Gibson Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, as an “inauthentic version of national culture” (Duncan, Scott’s Shadow 48). As an
answer to what he saw as a failure in Scottish Enlightenment, Lockhart advocated a “nationalist ideal of a mystic secular totality, combining past, present, and future generations” and relying