Walter Scott's Books

Reading the Waverley Novels

J.H. Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351814942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Scott's Books is an approachable introduction to the Waverley Novels. Drawing on substantial research in Scott's intertextual sources, it offers a fresh approach to the existing readings where the thematic and theoretical are the norm. Avoiding jargon, and moving briskly, it tackles the vexed question of Scott's 'circumbendibus' style head on, suggesting that it is actually one of the most exciting aspects of his fiction: indeed, what Ian Duncan has called the 'elaborately literary narrative', at first sight a barrier, is in a sense what the novels are primarily 'about'.

The book aims to show how inventive, witty, and entertaining Scott's richly allusive style is; how he keeps his varied readership on board with his own inexhaustible variety; and how he allows proponents of a wide range of positions to have their say, using a detached, ironic, but never cynical narrative voice to undermine the more rigid and inhumane rhetoric.

The Introduction outlines this approach and sets the book in the context of earlier and current Scott criticism. It also deals with some practical issues, including forms of reference and the distinctive use of the term 'Authorial'. The four chapters are designed to zoom in progressively from the general to the particular. 'Resources' explores the printed material available to Scott in his library and gives an overview of the way he uses it in his fiction. 'Style' confronts objections to the 'circumbendibus' Scott and shows how his Ciceronian style with its penchant for polysyllables enables him to embrace a wide range of rhetoric relayed in a detached but not cynical Authorial voice. 'Strategies' explores how he keeps his very wide audience on board by a complex bonding between characters, readers, and Author, and stresses the extraordinary variety of exuberant inventiveness with which he handles intertextual allusions. 'Mottoes' examines the most remarkable of Scott's intertextual devices, the chapter epigraphs, bringing into play the approaches developed in the previous chapters. The brief concluding 'Envoi' moves out again to the widest possible perspective, suggesting how readers should now be able to move on to, or return to, the novels and the critical conversation, with an appreciation of the central importance of the ludic for an appreciation of Scott in a world once again threatened by inhumane and humorless rigidities.

1 Introduction

In The Philosophy of Literary Form, first published in 1941, Kenneth Burke wrote:

Where does the drama get its materials? From the ‘unending conversation’ that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.¹

For more than fifty years the present author has had the privilege and pleasure of participating in diverse discussions of the Waverley Novels. The many books and hundreds of articles produced during that time, the sequence of international Scott conferences since the bicentenary of his death in 1971, the pedagogic sessions, the countless exchanges postal and electronic with colleagues and friends working on the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels – all have been part of the ‘unending conversation’, to use Kenneth Burke’s expression, that began as soon as Waverley appeared in 1814.

Most criticism of Scott’s fiction may be broadly characterised as thematic or theoretical. His novels abound in puzzles and ambiguities, challenging readers to bring new interpretations as their contribution to the creative mental strife. His ability to give voice to a wide variety of attitudes, and to his own conflicting emotions and ideas, means that very little is straightforward in his work, distinctions are seldom black and white. Critics who maintain that (for example) the Waverley Novels are really about Scott’s own time rather than the past, or that he was a covert nationalist, are not perverse.² They may be one-sided, or exaggerated, but the texts provide them with substantial evidence to support their cases, and those who disagree will often find their own responses sharpened and rendered more alert to the omnipresent ambiguities. The polyphonic character of the novels, allowing many powerful conflicting voices to be heard, has made them particularly suited to analysis drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin: the papers of the fourth international conference at Edinburgh in 1991 were published under the title Scott in Carnival, drawing attention to the dominant tone of the occasion. This emphasis has continued into the present century. So, for example, Fiona Robertson writes in 2006: ‘In all Scott’s fictions, an ostensibly, often officiously moderating narratorial voice makes fanatical discourse of all kinds seem alien, but this moderating voice is always undermined by patterns of imagery, intricate alliances between unexpected parts of the plot, and by disconcertingly casual, distancing conclusions. The tale always says more than the teller’.³ And so Alison Lumsden observes in 2010 that in Waverley ‘while the voices of Jacobite dissent are seemingly silenced at the end of the novel, this is disrupted by the power which is given to them in the main body of the narrative. … Repeatedly Scott’s texts refuse to settle down into any straightforward closure but, on the contrary, erupt out of their apparent conclusions to suggest alternative possibilities’.⁴ Ceaseless polyphony inevitably leads to ceaseless debate.

Examination of the thematic and theoretical issues raised by the Waverley Novels is of absorbing interest, endlessly challenging, and it will no doubt continue in all time to come. But the dominance of these issues in critical discourse has meant that another complementary way of approaching the works has not often received the attention it merits. Frederick A. Pottle has observed that for Scott fiction ‘is make-believe and amusement’.⁵ Scott stressed the importance for the novel of ‘giving pleasure’, maintaining that ‘of this species of light literature it may be said – tout genre est permis, hors le genre ennuyeux’.⁶ Only the boring is unacceptable. True, he recognised the importance of the moral dimension in fiction, albeit with the important qualification that ‘the direct and obvious moral to be deduced from a fictitious narrative, is of much less consequence to the public, than the mode in which the story is treated in the course of its details’.⁷ But without the giving of pleasure, moral effect would go for nothing. The first chapter of Waverley ends with this statement:

Some favourable opportunities of contrast have been afforded me, by the state of society in the northern part of the island at the period of my history, and may serve at once to vary and to illustrate the moral lessons which I would willingly consider as the most important part of my plan, although I am sensible how short these will fall of their aim, if I shall be found unable to mix them with amusement, – a task not quite so easy in this critical generation as it was “Sixty Years since.” (1: 6.5–12)

Scott was intent on providing his very diverse readership with enjoyable textural experiences, constantly varied so as to avoid the cardinal sin of being boring. In comparison with the somewhat daunting bulk of criticism devoted to thematic and theoretic issues very little attention has been paid to the marvellously rich texture of the novels, responsible in large measure though it is for the pleasure they afford, their peculiar ‘jouissance du texte’. This book aims to explore that gap, though hardly to fill it, homing in particularly on Scott’s pervasive use of intertextual allusions. It has in mind students approaching the Waverley Novels for the first time and wanting suggestions about things to look out for. But seasoned readers may well find in it a fresh perspective.

Much of the criticism drawn on in the present study is not taken from the most commonly cited writers. When looking for stimulating textural comments it is often useful to go back to the original reviewers, for example. Although they tend to concentrate on characterisation, the depiction of manners, and the relationship between history and fiction, they have many suggestive and perceptive observations on the nature and effectiveness of Scott’s distinctive texture.⁸ In more recent times, similar issues have been taken up in a number of articles, and (usually incidentally) in monographs.

It can hardly be denied that for many modern readers the characteristic texture of Scott’s work can be a barrier to enjoyment rather than a source of delight. His bookish, persistently allusive, sometimes pedantic style can appear forbidding. From their first appearance to the present the novels have been reworked to make them more readily accessible: there have been abbreviated versions, comic strips and booklets, dramatisations, and film and television productions. There is nothing wrong with that. At the most basic level any Scott is better than no Scott, and the adaptations can be responsively creative. But much of the marvellous variety of his fiction, much of its vigour, much of its sheer fun, is to be found in its dense allusiveness, in the elaborate prose, and in the seemingly endless variety of the games he plays for his own entertainment and that of his audience. The present study offers an invitation to confront the textural challenges head on, rather than minimising them or trying to sidestep them altogether.

Graham Tulloch, to whom the present writer owes a great deal, has observed that ‘our awareness of the sources of [Scott’s] borrowings can give us pleasure, but it is not central to our reading and understanding of the novels’.⁹ But if a primary purpose of the novels is to give pleasure that is surely too severe (or perhaps too modest) a position. In encouraging readers to address general stylistic issues, and to move to intertextual specifics, this book suggests that a recognition of the centrality of textual allusion is essential for the full enjoyment of Scott’s fiction. Certainly a helping hand will often be needed. The explanatory notes in the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels are designed to provide exactly that. They will go a long way towards putting the modern reader in the position of the most informed and inward of Scott’s original audience, at times indeed in the position of Scott himself. On occasion readers will even be privy to relevant information unknown to the novelist. No one, not even Scott, can understand everything.

With texts as allusive as Scott’s there is always a danger that some readers may feel excluded. This must always have been a possibility (with those unable to follow his Scots speakers, or his Latin tags and quotations, for example). As we shall see, Scott often plays on coded speech used by characters to include or exclude hearers belonging or not belonging to their particular sociocultural circle. Sometimes too he will share a reference or a joke with a limited circle of readers, and part of their enjoyment will be an appreciation that they are part of that circle and most readers are not. But Scott was commercially aware, and he knew full well he had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by excluding large groups of potential consumers on a regular basis. He was usually careful to keep his ordinary readers (mostly English) on board while stimulating the more learned and affording satisfaction to native Scots speakers. Of course with the passage of two centuries there are references immediately understandable by his original readers but a good deal less familiar to many nowadays (echoes of the Authorised Version of the Bible being perhaps the most pervasive and conspicuous). The aim of the present study, as it has been the aim of the Edinburgh Edition, is to open up the novels to all who are willing to make the effort to become attuned to their distinctive texture, and achieve a rare degree of pleasurable comprehension. It comes with a positive invitation to this effect, recognising that, as with all major works, each reader will slot in at their own appropriate point on the scale of understanding, with their own degree of selection from the abundance of material on offer; recognising also that an excess of information (or too great a variety of interpretation), just as much as too little, is in danger of making a novel unreadable!

The four chapters that follow progressively narrow the focus. Chapter 2 explores the resources available to Scott when composing his novels, notably but by no means exclusively his splendid library at Abbotsford with its remarkable collection of often rare historical books. The third chapter establishes the textural context by considering the salient points of his narrative style. Chapter 4 examines his characteristic ways of handling an abundance of literary allusions and quotations, and Chapter 5 considers the most remarkable of his intertextual devices, the chapter mottoes or epigraphs. The sixth chapter then takes up business unfinished at the end of the second to look at the intertextual function of the literary rather than historical works at Abbotsford, and Chapter 7 draws on what has gone before to characterise briefly the distinctive texture of each of the novels in chronological sequence, introducing a degree of thematic analysis. Finally, the ‘Envoi’ ventures an overarching perspective. Readers will find that occasionally passages are discussed more than once, as the index of references to the novels demonstrates, allowing illumination from different angles in different contexts. It will also often be found that when several examples are cited to illustrate a point no two of them will have exactly the same effect, for Scott is a writer of infinite variety.

A word is necessary on the use of the term ‘Author’ in this book. In a characteristically shrewd and level-headed article, ‘Scott’s Waverley: The Presence of the Author’, David Daiches argues convincingly that ‘in spite of his determined anonymity in publishing his novels, Scott in writing them found a style that really was l’homme même and must have given him away at every point to those who really knew him. … In writing Waverley Scott was using his own voice, not inventing a special authorial voice, as most novelists do’.¹⁰ William Bewick, the artist, recalled observing on his visits to Abbotsford in 1824 that Scott’s ‘conversation was delightful, very much in the Waverley style’.¹¹ The poet Allan Cunningham asserted that ‘had his words been written down, they would have been found as correct in all things, as one of his novels’.¹² And Scott’s friend James Skene recalls:

While we were living in the country, Waverley appeared. It was sent to us amongst other new books from the Circulating Library in Aberdeen. We read it with much delight and with many conjectures as to the author, but from the first I was convinced from an odd circumstance that it was written by Sir Walter. All the time I was reading it I could not help fancying I heard him relating it aloud in his peculiar manner, for which I could only account by supposing that he was the author, and that the turn of expression and language insensibly led me to think of him, and recalled the sound of his voice to my recollection.¹³

The characteristic style of the Author of Waverley, not least in its fondness for seeing things in terms of images and its constant allusion to literary texts, is virtually indistinguishable from that frequently found in Scott’s voluminous letters. It is usual in critical studies of fiction to refer to ‘the narrator’, but that seems rather too clinical where Scott is concerned. On the other h...