Why Modern Manuscripts Matter by Kathryn Sutherland;

Author:Kathryn Sutherland; [Sutherland, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192670359
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2022-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

This is still only half the story; equally urgent was Scott’s manufacture of older forms through acts of counterfeit and forgery; what Susan Stewart has described more broadly as the phenomenon of ‘distressed genres’.57 High among ‘distressed genres’ are folk tales and ballads, recovered or invented from the eighteenth century by the literary tradition in an attempt to overcome its own idealized distinction between speech (natural) and writing (artificial), between a largely imagined communal production and an autograph literature. Scott served his apprenticeship as ballad collector. Lockhart, writing the life, lay emphasis on his subject’s untutored beginnings, on a time before he could read or write, when he learnt oral tales by heart. But another version of Scott’s literary origins lies in his so-called ‘raids’ into Liddesdale when, in imitation of his border reiving ancestors, he seized the spoils of a common culture, ballads of feuds and skirmishes, and made them his own, forging them in the ‘antico-moderno’ style advocated by his friend the scholarly romancer George Ellis.58 In reproducing the old ballads, Scott sought proof of ‘locality and traditional history’ as opposed to ‘mere legend’.59 Like the fast vanishing oral genres of an imagined previous age, local attachments connote authenticity. From its origins in ballad editing to the aspirations for a posthumous annotated Magnum Opus,60 Scott’s career was shaped by an anxiety to appropriate and stamp his identity on the past seemingly at odds with his games of anonymity.

Scott situated his fables of composition with equal ease in the outside world and within his fictional frames; the ‘real’ story of the recovery of the Waverley manuscript is transformed five years later, in the ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ to Ivanhoe, into the imaginary ‘singular Anglo-Norman MS’ preserved by Sir Arthur Wardour (a character from Scott’s earlier novel The Antiquary) ‘with such jealous care in the third drawer of his oaken cabinet’. Inventing old manuscripts, losing (and finding) others, Scott aged or ‘distressed’ his creations, attaching to them precedence and objectivity; at the same time, he anchored his claim to textual property in something material, substantial, and his own. As late as 1829 and the ‘General Preface’ to Waverley, he felt compelled to inform his reader (quite unnecessarily, after all) that his ‘original manuscripts are all in existence, and entirely written (horresco referens [‘I shudder as I tell it’]), in the author’s own hand’—the extravagance of the classical allusion (from Virgil, Aeneid, 2. 204) by chance anticipating the mock-terror of Lockhart’s tale of the writing hand in the night. Against this, Scott mired the more abstract labour of creation in false starts and false dates, obscuring the effort of invention behind accidents of recovery and carelessness of design: Waverley, begun ‘about the year 1805’, when he ‘threw together about one-third of the first volume’, was later resumed ‘with the utmost carelessness…I never knew how any chapter was to end at the moment when it was begun’; even suggesting, in the case of The Bride of Lammermoor, that drugged with pain-killers, he was unconscious of much of its production.

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