Twentieth-century Scottish cultural critics and theorists of the nation have variously singled out Sir Walter Scott for having orchestrated the synthesis of romantic symbols derived from Scotland's Celtic fringe with Scotland's national character, thereby suppressing Scotland's “real” identity and precluding Scotland from constructing an identity and politics for the modern, changing world. In Possible Scotlands, Caroline McCracken-Flesher brings together an impressive body of primary and secondary research to respond to such criticism by proposing that Scott, in his literature and in his life, offered more than one version of Scotland. Situating her examination of Scott within postcolonial and poststructuralist methodologies of cultural analysis, she argues that, precisely because his influence is both acknowledged and resisted, Scott is a vital and energetic site of discursive contestation that promotes, rather than restricts, the continuing construction of Scottish nationhood today.
In its introductory and concluding chapters, Possible Scotlands reflects McCracken-Flesher's ongoing interest in the subject of Scotland's new parliament, which she examines here in the context of Scott, the “architect of cultural Scottishness” (3) whose “uncanny presence” (4) at once produces and calls into question Scottish nationhood. McCracken-Flesher's reference to Scott in architectural terms reflects the first chapter's introductory concern with deconstructing the genres of romance and history. McCracken-Flesher conceives of literary genres as “symbiotic” (7) and more complex than the traditional binary opposition of romance versus history that has informed much critical response to Waverley. McCracken-Flesher outlines her debts to the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha; to the theorist of social value Jean-Joseph Goux; as well as to Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Frantz Fanon; and to such theorists of the nation as Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith, whose scholarship demonstrates the outdatedness of notions that nations are homogeneous and opens up the theoretical space for McCracken-Flesher to reconsider Scott and Scotland as sites of national “difficulty” (14) rather than of significative singularity.
In the second chapter, McCracken-Flesher examines modes of “telling” (29) in The Antiquary, The Tale of Old Mortality, and The Heart of Mid-Lothian in order to investigate how Scott creates multiple voices to represent different constructions of Scottishness on the political and cultural margins of Britain. The introductory chapter's examination of generic interplay is sustained here in McCracken-Flesher's approach to Scott's novels as neither coherently “history” nor “fiction” but rather as novels in which narrative modes and perspectives are forced by Scott into an “agitated movement” that refuses “illusory coherences” (32). Far from telling a single national history, Scott's texts contest the idea of national history itself in the ways they play with “telling.” In the chapter's final section, McCracken-Flesher broadens her examination of multiplicity to Scott himself, from his numerous careers to the varied and various public discourses that circulate about him as the rumored “Author of Waverley” in order to argue that Scott persistently encourages creative speculation about his novels and about himself.
The third chapter is the longest and most comprehensive of the six chapters in Possible Scotlands. Here, McCracken-Flesher examines the significance of Scott, the “Author of Waverley,” in the larger cultural marketplace of Great Britain. She reads The Fortunes of Nigel in the context of George IV's visit to Scotland in August 1822 and argues that the novel represents Scott's concerns with the ways that authorial, literary, and national values rise and fall within the dynamic of Scottish-English exchange. Reading Scott through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu's and Goux's theories of social value, McCracken-Flesher offers a revisionary reading of George IV's visit. She responds to the significant body of twentieth-century criticism on the visit, in particular to John Prebble, Murray Pittock, and Cairns Craig who have variously seen the visit as rendering Scotland vulnerable to cultural appropriation by the English. She represents the relationship between Scott and George IV as one of mutual benefit whereby the spectacular visit at once legitimates George IV's monarchy and gives Scotland symbolic value and currency in England. McCracken-Flesher concludes her sustained examination of Scott in connection to the British monarchy by examining Scott's place in Scotland's political life. However much the Scots may resent the conflation of their national character with Highland imagery, they owe their parliament in part to the cultural signs and symbols popularized by Scott in the collective imaginations of the Scots and the English alike.
The fourth chapter considers The Talisman and Woodstock in the dual contexts of the success of George IV's visit and of the challenges that the visit posed to constructions of Scottishness in the larger British context. McCracken-Flesher dwells on notions of performance and “Otherness” (118) and examines the ways in which the character Saladin in The Talisman transforms his racial and religious “Otherness” into a kind of agency that can direct events from the margins. Dwelling on Scott's fictional portrayal of Charles II in Woodstock, she argues that the lack of resemblance between Scott's Charles and the real-historical Charles represents Scott's concerns that Scotland may subsist only in performance.
The fifth chapter is concerned with the ways in which Scott negotiates his relationship with his reading audience. McCracken-Flesher examines the Chronicles of the Canongate as a new literary form that reflects Scott's increasing self-reflexivity. On the verge of financial collapse, Scott focuses darkly on the prospects of Scotland's material survival in Britain. She studies the influence of Scott's “Malachi Malagrowther” letters on Scotland's economic and cultural status in Britain and demonstrates Scott's impact on readers beyond the Waverley novels.
The sixth, concluding, chapter considers Scott's last texts (in particular Castle Dangerous), his last letters, and other texts written during his final illnesses within the framework of Foucault's concept of “the death of the author.” While Scott, suffering from five strokes, grapples with the idea of Scott the mortal man, Scott the cultural “sign” (168), and the value of his own authorial voice, Scott's publisher, editor, and son-in-law collaborate on extensive revisions to Count Robert thereby assuming their equivalence with Scott, asserting their own role in the construction of value, and converting the playfulness that had been the “Author of Waverley” into the limited term “Walter Scott” (171).
In Possible Scotlands, McCracken-Flesher examines Scotland as at once historically transcendent and contingent and treats Scott as the creator of a symbolic tradition whose impact continues to be felt in modern politics and cultural debate. Possible Scotlands represents a novel and, in some ways, overdue treatment of Scott through the lens of postcolonial and poststructuralist theories whose currency reflect McCracken-Flesher's treatment of Scott as continuously current in discourses on culture and nation in Scotland.
