tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/james-hogg-19632/articlesJames Hogg – The Conversation2021-02-19T15:49:34Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1555342021-02-19T15:49:34Z2021-02-19T15:49:34ZJames Hogg at 250: the farmhand who became one of Scotland’s greatest storytellers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385269/original/file-20210219-15-phs9tv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C7%2C1692%2C1177&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hogg#/media/File:Sir_John_Watson_Gordon_-_James_Hogg,_1770_-_1835._Poet;_'The_Ettrick_Shepherd'_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Sir George Watson Gordon</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>James Hogg defied categorisation. A prolific poet, songwriter, playwright, novelist, short story writer and parodist, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/29mbnSxdmTg99TpfkcHpRtm/james-hogg">he wrote</a> with equal skill in Scots and English. Labelled as the Ettrick Shepherd, the former Borders farmhand, whose life spanned the 18th and 19th centuries, befriended many of the great writers of his day, including <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Sir-Walter-Scott/">Walter Scott</a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/5JLBCh6wZNTM4RF9cWtMwyt/john-galt">John Galt</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Allan-Cunningham-Scottish-poet">Allan Cunningham</a>.</p>
<p>Even though he was celebrated off and on in his own lifetime, some details of the author’s life remain unclear. Records place his baptism on December 9, 1770. But Hogg long believed he was born in 1772, on January 25 – Burns’ Night no less. This complicates attempts to commemorate his 250th birthday, unless we embrace his fantastical worldview. Fiction mattered to him more than fact. Besides, Hogg’s sestercentennial will inevitably be overshadowed by Scott’s own such celebration on August 15, 2021.</p>
<p>Despite lacking in formal education, Hogg never lacked in confidence. <a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL937917W/The_poetic_mirror">The Poetic Mirror, or The Living Bards of Britain</a> (1816) purports to be a collection of the leading poets of the age (Hogg included). But actually Hogg, the editor, fabricated the works under the guise of big-name writers. There are moody romances after Byron, mystical musings in the style of Coleridge and ponderous poems for Wordsworth.</p>
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<img alt="Cover of Canongate's imprint of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg feature two silhoutted heads in top hats." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385284/original/file-20210219-19-1ni3blt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385284/original/file-20210219-19-1ni3blt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385284/original/file-20210219-19-1ni3blt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385284/original/file-20210219-19-1ni3blt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385284/original/file-20210219-19-1ni3blt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385284/original/file-20210219-19-1ni3blt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385284/original/file-20210219-19-1ni3blt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Best work.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://canongate.co.uk/books/74-the-private-memoirs-and-confessions-of-a-justified-sinner/">Canongate</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>Aside from mimicking medleys, Hogg’s own body of work is made up of mountains of bits and pieces – and must be enjoyed on those terms. Seeking conclusions or definitive statements will only frustrate. Tales can drift off into fragments of poetry both familiar and new. Within stories he flips perspectives with little warning.</p>
<p>Presented as a found document, Hogg’s best work, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/james-hogg-the-private-memoirs-and-confessions-of-a-justified-sinner">The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner</a> (1824) is deliberately left with holes. Dark, humorous, violent, sweet, light, weird, wild, celebratory and cruel, the book has many tones, often all at once. </p>
<p>Hogg was 53 years old when he created his finest and most unsettling work. Drawing on a large box of tricks carefully cultivated over a long if chequered career, he infused Calvinist doctrine with a brooding gothic mood. A mysterious shapeshifting figure, Gil-Martin, goads the fanatical Robert Wringhim into taking extreme measures against the local sinners. Is Gil-Martin a manifestation of madness or the devil himself? Where does evil come from? Denounced by hostile critics at the time as anti-religious, nowhere in literature is the divided self so tantalisingly imagined.</p>
<p>It’s not enough to call Hogg an experimental writer ahead of his time or a genre hopper who challenged the conventions of his day. And he was much more than a born storyteller. Hogg favoured word for this type of art was “intermixing”. He was Scotland’s great intermixer. In hindsight, the Borders bard seemed destined for the make-believe world of literature.</p>
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<h2>Fairytales and family</h2>
<p>Hogg’s mother, Margaret Laidlaw, was an important collector of Scottish ballads and a canny taleteller. His maternal grandfather, known as Will o’ Phawhope, was said to have been the last man in Selkirkshire to speak with fairies. Fairytale figures certainly fill Hogg’s most imaginative stories, most notably in his first collection of prose fiction, <a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL937927W/The_brownie_of_Bodsbeck?edition=brownieofbodsbec0000hogg">The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Other Tales</a> (1818).</p>
<p>Burns was an early influence on Hogg, who considered himself to be the rightful heir to the Bard of Ayrshire and published his own collection less than four years after his idol’s death. Long before then, the locals dubbed him Jamie the Poeter, and he wrote countless songs for local girls to sing.</p>
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<img alt="Portrait of Scots bard Robert Burns." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385275/original/file-20210219-21-1hurbpc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385275/original/file-20210219-21-1hurbpc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385275/original/file-20210219-21-1hurbpc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385275/original/file-20210219-21-1hurbpc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385275/original/file-20210219-21-1hurbpc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385275/original/file-20210219-21-1hurbpc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385275/original/file-20210219-21-1hurbpc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Robert Burns inspired James Hogg.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/robert-burns-17591796-national-poet-scotland-239399143">Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>After writing a popular patriotic song, “Donald Macdonald”, in 1803, Hogg was recruited to collect ballads for Scott’s <a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL863785W/Minstrelsy_of_the_Scottish_border?edition=minstrelsyscotti03scotiala">Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border</a>. He also undertook extensive tours of the Highlands with a view to securing his own farm, but became more interested in the songs he heard along the way.</p>
<p>By 1819, he was recognised as a leading expert on Scottish ballads when the Highland Society of London commissioned him to produce the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobite_Relics#:%7E:text=Jacobite%20Relics%20is%20a%20two,and%20a%20minority%20are%20Whig.">Jacobite Relics of Scotland</a>, which became the benchmark of Scottish anthologies for many more decades.</p>
<p>He endured many failures on the way. In 1810, at the age of 40, Hogg moved to Edinburgh to settle into the life of a full-time writer. Within a year of starting it, his magazine The Spy folded. Readers weren’t ready for a publication that covered shocking themes such as extramarital sex.</p>
<p>Hogg spent the next few years scribbling more poetry and prose, and in 1817 he helped William Blackwood establish Scotland’s most influential literary periodical, the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Blackwoods-Edinburgh-Magazine">Edinburgh Monthly Magazine</a> (later, Blackwood’s Magazine). In time, displaced by punchy younger contributors, Hogg eventually became a figure of fun in the same periodical. But he kept writing and writing. Winter Evening Tales (1820), produced in the middle period of his life, is especially rewarding. </p>
<h2>Hogg’s literary afterlife</h2>
<p>A collected edition of works was published shortly after Hogg’s death in 1835, but the publishers pruned the more indelicate (and inventive) passages, and even entire texts. The great forgetting of Hogg set in.</p>
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<img alt="Photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson in black and white." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385276/original/file-20210219-23-1q1pnba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385276/original/file-20210219-23-1q1pnba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=883&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385276/original/file-20210219-23-1q1pnba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=883&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385276/original/file-20210219-23-1q1pnba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=883&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385276/original/file-20210219-23-1q1pnba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1110&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385276/original/file-20210219-23-1q1pnba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1110&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385276/original/file-20210219-23-1q1pnba.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1110&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Hogg’s most famous work preempted Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Jekyll and Hyde.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/king-kalakaua-hawaii-writer-robert-louis-252142069">Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>This only began to change in the mid-20th century, when the French writer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Andre-Gide">André Gide</a> championed Justified Sinner in an enthusiastic introduction to a 1947 edition, describing himself as being “voluptuously tormented” by the book.</p>
<p>Only in 1995, when the colossal <a href="https://www.jameshogg.stir.ac.uk/projects/stirlingsouth-carolina-research-edition/">Stirling–South Carolina Research Edition</a> of the collected works began to appear, would the wider body of Hogg’s works be publicly available in the form they deserved. In recent years, Scottish novelists such as Irvine Welsh and the playwright Marty Ross have proclaimed the importance of Hogg’s fantastical imagination for their own thinking. Before that, Justified Sinner also pre-empted that other great Scottish gothic masterpiece of the divided self, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by <a href="http://robert-louis-stevenson.org/life/">Robert Louis Stevenson</a>.</p>
<p>The University of Dundee recently produced a <a href="https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/en/publications/the-private-memoirs-and-confessions-of-a-justified-sinner-the-dun">free online edition</a> of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which includes explanatory notes and copies of the earliest reviews. Scotland’s great intermixer awaits new readers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/155534/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Cook has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.</span></em></p>Despite little formal education, Hogg wrote one of the finest novels in Scottish literature, a disturbing tale of the divided self that still resonates.Daniel Cook, Reader in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature, University of DundeeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/910202018-03-16T12:31:02Z2018-03-16T12:31:02ZMost Scottish authors want to break up the Union – why don’t they write about it?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210298/original/file-20180314-113458-817acq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Barking. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/black-scotch-terrier-reads-old-books-163255019?src=8p3yLSeW5cSBtDNhrfeyeA-2-81">eAlisa</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Glasgow’s annual book festival, <a href="https://www.ayewrite.com/Pages/default.aspx">Aye Write!</a>, is getting underway. Now in its 11th year, big name writers making appearances include the philosopher AC Grayling, broadcast journalist Robert Peston, crime writer Val McDermid and the mountaineer Chris Bonington. </p>
<p>The name of the festival is a play on “aye right”, a sarcastic Scottish way of saying no. This encapsulates much about the literary outlook in this part of the world – a vernacular defensiveness, a strident overcompensation in the face of imagined English snootiness about Glaswegian speech. A neutral might conclude that the arts in Scotland exist in a state of perma-froth at presumed metropolitan condescension. </p>
<p>If support for Scottish independence can be considered a proxy for such froth, there is certainly much in evidence. At the time of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/events/scotland-decides/results">2014 independence referendum</a>, the Scottish literary scene was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/19/scottish-independence-literature-nationalism">near unanimously</a> in favour of a Yes vote – nowhere close to the 55-45 split among the wider population. </p>
<p>This normally disputatious crowd felt overwhelmingly that the Union was inimical to Scottish culture and that the literary tradition would best flourish with independence. Little has changed since. Don’t expect much enthusiasm from them about Theresa May’s Britain at this year’s festival. </p>
<p>This mood didn’t begin in 2014, it must be said. In the Thatcher-hating days of 1988, the pro-devolution Campaign for a Scottish Assembly <a href="https://thecrownandtheunicorn.wordpress.com/the-claim-of-right-1989/">gave this</a> starkly black and white assessment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Union has always been, and remains, a threat to the survival of a distinctive culture in Scotland.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is this right? Most great Scottish writers – Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, for example – thrived within the <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/legislativescrutiny/act-of-union-1707/">Union between</a> Scotland and England. Indeed, most Scots will know much more about their nation’s literature since 1707 than about previous eras. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Bovvered? Robert Louis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/robert-louis-stevenson-vector-illustration-756799360?src=7zAqRQJSVv9GNFEfHCfOHw-1-0">Mario Breda</a></span>
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<p>If the Union was such a problem for Scottish writers, why was it invisible in what they had to say? Why is there no tradition of anti-Unionist invective? Aside from Burns’s well-known <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/works/344.shtml">1791 poem</a> condemning the “parcel o’ rogues” who “bought and sold” Scotland “for English gold”, the Union is at best an absent presence. Even today it receives little attention from Scottish writers – why? </p>
<h2>Before nationalism</h2>
<p>Scottish literature’s relationship with the Union is the focus of a new book of essays which we have edited, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/literature-and-union-9780198736233?cc=us&lang=en&">Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts</a>. The most compelling explanation for the lack of literary attention to the Union is that until recently, other questions were more important to Scottish writers, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. </p>
<p>In particular, partisanship and religion long trumped national identity. Indeed, they were deeply interwoven, shaping two distinctive mythical representations of Scotland. </p>
<p>One was Presbyterian and democratic, the myth of Scotland’s godly <a href="http://www.covenanter.org.uk/whowere.html">Covenanting</a> tradition. The other was Episcopalian, royalist and Jacobite, the cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Forty-five-Rebellion">Forty-five Rising</a>. Each reached back to earlier periods – the Covenanters claimed to be the true heirs of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/articles/scottish_reformation/">Scottish Reformation</a>; Jacobite sympathisers were entranced by the romantic plight of <a href="http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Mary-Queen-of-Scots/">Mary, Queen of Scots</a>, imprisoned and finally beheaded by a Protestant queen. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/novels/waverley.html">Walter Scott’s Waverley</a> (1814) might be the classic example of the Jacobite representation, recounting many of the events of 1745 from a perspective very sympathetic to the Highland rebels. It was followed by a long stream of Jacobite literature – and Scott himself returned to the theme both in <a href="https://theconversation.com/two-centuries-before-marvel-and-star-wars-walter-scotts-rob-roy-was-the-first-modern-anti-hero-89421">Rob Roy</a> (1817) and <a href="http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/novels/redgaun.html">Redgauntlet</a> (1824). </p>
<p>Depictions of Covenanters are variously positive and negative in Scottish literature. Many 19th-century novels present them as heroes for their democratic outlook, with their roots in the culture of ordinary folk. John Galt’s <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30749">Ringan Gilhaize</a> (1823) is one example, telling the story of three generations of rural people.</p>
<p>Other writers are repelled by the illiberal and philistine totalitarianism they discern in the tradition. The most notorious example is James Hogg’s 1824 satire, <a href="https://theconversation.com/confessions-of-a-justified-sinner-captures-the-modern-condition-perfectly-46298">The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner</a>, whose lead character considers that having attained his place among God’s saved, he has carte blanche to commit terrible crimes. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Hugh McDiarmid.</span>
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<p>Nationalism took hold on the Scottish literary scene over the course of the 20th century, primarily under the enduring influence of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LeCqBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=Hugh+Macdiarmid+Reformation&source=bl&ots=LPaq_MR_uw&sig=Sq2__1BhbFFocYPjpPXjGayITZk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjK0fSdj8nZAhUYM8AKHYO4AkQQ6AEIOzAC">Hugh MacDiarmid</a>. Even so, he and others held to a view that Scotland’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/articles/scottish_reformation/">Reformation</a> had been just as bad, if not worse, than the Union. For McDiarmid, it was the founding of the Protestant church – and not the merger with England – that was the beginning of the repression of Scottish folk and their authentic culture. </p>
<p>Novels and poems about Covenanting and Jacobitism still abound today. James Robertson, for example, who is <a href="https://www.ayewrite.com/Pages/Whats-On.aspx#/event/de1f87b9-938b-42b2-ab83-a85d00ea01ca">appearing</a> at this year’s Aye Write!, makes sport with Covenanting fanaticism in <a href="https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9781841151892/the-fanatic">The Fanatic</a> (2000) and <a href="http://www.scotgeog.com">The Testament of Gideon Mack</a> (2006). Robertson has also written the only novel that has brought Scottish nationhood into focus in recent years: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/15/and-land-lay-still-robertson">And the Land Lay Still</a> (2010). More generally, the Union remains a submerged and largely invisible feature of the Scottish literary landscape.</p>
<h2>Stark contrasts</h2>
<p>While it is true that the Union never enjoyed much of a fanfare among Scottish writers of previous generations, it was rarely if ever the focus of their work. Several even made conspicuous contributions to British – indeed to English – national identities. How else do we account for the fact that the figure of John Bull was the coinage of a Scottish doctor, <a href="http://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198127192.book.1/actrade-9780198127192-book-1">John Arbuthnot</a>, and Rule, Britannia the work of the Scottish poet, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45404/rule-britannia">James Thomson</a>? </p>
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<p>It is hard to imagine a Scottish writer expressing a similar sentiment in their work today. Yet the reluctance to write about independence has continued, despite writers’ enthusiasm for the cause. It is as if the literary tradition weighs heavy on their shoulders and encourages them to look elsewhere for inspiration. </p>
<p>In sum, the relationship between Scottish literature and the Union turns out to be much more tangled, ironic and surprising than might have been expected. Today’s nationalists do indeed dominate Scotland’s literary scene, and will undoubtedly be in force at Aye Write!, but they do not have all the best tunes. It will be fascinating to see to what extent this changes in future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91020/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Colin Kidd receives funding from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. He is affiliated with These Islands and Scotland in Union. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gerard Carruthers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The politics may have changed over the years, but the literary obsessions of ‘northern Britain’ seem hard to shake.Colin Kidd, Professor of History, University of St AndrewsGerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/462982015-08-19T13:59:50Z2015-08-19T13:59:50ZConfessions of a Justified Sinner captures the modern condition perfectly<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92315/original/image-20150818-12433-mtr22g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Devil infiltrates the righteous – or does he?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/57249103@N03/9458416000/sizes/l/in/photostream/">Untitled Projects</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>One of the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival is undoubtedly a <a href="http://www.eif.co.uk/2015/sinner#.VdROEig3Quc">new production of</a> Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which runs between August 19 and 22. In a year which is strong on Scottish literary adaptions (Alasdair Gray novel Lanark is also <a href="http://www.eif.co.uk/2015/lanark#.VdRWCig3Quc">being staged</a>, Paul Bright’s Confessions is based on James Hogg’s masterwork The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. </p>
<p>First published anonymously in 1824, the Confessions is one of the defining texts of modern Scottish literature —- and an outstanding novel within European traditions. Partly based on E T A Hoffman’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1576915.The_Devil_s_Elixirs">Die Elixiere des Teufels</a> (The Devil’s Elixirs) of 1815, Hogg explores the downward spiral of the unappealing Robert Wringhim, who comes to believe in the justness of all of his actions by virtue of being among God’s saved. The novel plays with Calvinist concepts of predestination and ideas around free will —- whether our actions, or God’s plan, decide on our salvation and damnation. </p>
<p>If this sounds worthy but staid, the Confessions is in fact fast, dramatic, and shocking. Much of the action is focused around Wringhim’s violent engagements with his somewhat more wholesome estranged brother, George Colwan. Wringhim’s beliefs are fostered by his mother and her mentor and alleged lover, the Rev Wringhim; and enforced by his possibly imaginary “friend” Gil-Martin, who is part doppelganger and part Devil. Gil-Martin encourages Robert (perhaps) to commit ever more criminal acts – culminating in murder. </p>
<p>The only certainty in Hogg’s vision is that evil is present within the outwardly civilised – and inwardly raucous – Scotland of the early 18th century. Glasgow emerges as a religious hotbed. Edinburgh, where much of the action takes place, is a seething, brawling city. In the semi-wilderness Edinburgh areas of <a href="http://www.jaunted.com/story/2010/2/11/213738/171/travel/How+to+Climb+'Arthur's+Seat,'+Edinburgh's+Awesome+Dormant+Volcano">Arthur’s Seat</a> and <a href="http://www.scottish-places.info/features/featurefirst250.html">Salisbury Crags</a>, atmospheric effects enhance the visual qualities of this disturbing and unsettling text.</p>
<p>Yet the success of the novel is a modern phenomenon. The original reviews were mixed and half of the first edition was remaindered. It was only after World War II that Hogg’s now-acknowledged masterpiece came into its critical own, when in 1947 French Nobel laureate <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1947/gide-bio.html">André Gide</a> provided a new introduction. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92298/original/image-20150818-12418-1dn37u6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92298/original/image-20150818-12418-1dn37u6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92298/original/image-20150818-12418-1dn37u6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92298/original/image-20150818-12418-1dn37u6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92298/original/image-20150818-12418-1dn37u6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92298/original/image-20150818-12418-1dn37u6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92298/original/image-20150818-12418-1dn37u6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92298/original/image-20150818-12418-1dn37u6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Confessions 1947 edition.</span>
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<p>Gide had read the novel in Algiers in 1924, alongside John Stuart Mill’s <a href="http://www.utilitarianism.com/millauto/">Autobiography</a> and his utilitarian classic <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm">On Liberty</a>. Finding “a renewal of topical interest” in Mill, given the “menace of ‘totalitarianism’”, Gide was “voluptuously tormented” by Hogg’s book. He admired Hogg’s exploration of moral questions and his “ingenious” psychological portrayal of the Devil. He found it remarkable “that a civilized country existed at a relatively recent period … where such an aberration of Faith was possible”. </p>
<h2>Confessions on the boards</h2>
<p>Hogg’s central theme of religious extremism has added resonance today, of course. Writing 60 years after Gide, the Scottish detective novelist Ian Rankin <a href="http://www.canongate.tv/shop/scottish-classics/the-private-memoirs-and-confessions-of-a-justified-sinner.html">admired</a> Hogg’s treatment of the theme of the purification of apostasy, arguing this made the book enduringly relevant and resonant for modern audiences. Anchored in Scottish experience, Hogg’s reflections on a distorted form of Calvinism make this a defining text of religious extremism, past and present. </p>
<p>Though there have been several adaptation of Confessions before, <a href="http://www.eif.co.uk/2015/sinner#.VdNM1ySJlFJ">Paul Bright’s version</a> is probably the one which most directly engages with the book’s narrative ambiguities, while taking the story some distance from its original material. First developed in 2010 and performed in Scotland, Ireland and Sweden, The Guardian <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/dec/18/best-theatre-2013-paul-brights-confessions-of-a-justified-sinner">listed it</a> as one of the top ten theatre productions in 2013, admiring its exploration of “the borderline between the real and the imagined”. </p>
<p>With apologies in advance for giving the game away slightly, theatregoers are treated to a pre-performance exhibition about Bright. He is <a href="http://www.summerhall.co.uk/2013/untitled-projects-reconstructs-paul-brights-confessions-of-a-justified-sinner">depicted as</a> a forgotten writer who “redefined Scottish theatre in the 1980s” by masterminding a series of experimental adaptations of the play in locations ranging from a Celtic pub to the summit of Arthur’s Seat. He is then said to have mysteriously disappeared until his death in 2010. When the performance begins, the lead actor picks up this tribute, only for it to become clear that this is actually part of the play itself. </p>
<p>Bright himself has left suspiciously few traces. A review of the 2013 production in the Telegraph <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10131138/Paul-Brights-Confessions-of-a-Justified-Sinner-Tramway-Glasgow-review.html">commented</a>: “those of a suspicious nature – and some critics – might conclude that … Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a witty and admirably elaborate hoax”, noting the audience is explicitly reminded acting is “lying and getting away with it”. </p>
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<span class="caption">What is really going on?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/57249103@N03/9458420622/sizes/l/in/photostream/">Untitled Projects</a></span>
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<p>All this is wholly in the spirit of the original and adds a fresh interpretative layer to an already complex whole. Nothing is as it seems. The central story in Hogg’s novel is presented through two main versions: the alleged facts presented by a possibly unreliable editor, and the memoirs of Wringhim. These are combined with oral testimonies, a description of opening the suicide’s grave and the quoted statements of Gil-Martin. His ambiguous central statement – which can be read as a proclamation of salvation or damnation – is: “I have but one great aim in this world, and I never for a moment lose sight of it”. </p>
<p>Above all, Confessions is stunningly duplicitous. In my afterword to the <a href="merchistonpublishing.com/projects/scottish-classics/confessions-of-a-justified-sinner/">Merchiston Press edition</a> from 2009, I described reading the book as an almost interactive experience. The reader is required to make personal decisions about what has actually happened, and judgements on the reliability of the text and its narrators. Both Hogg’s and the current Confessions are wholly based on cross-tellings, rumour, and half-rememberings. Perhaps it is this shifting nature that ultimately has an enduring appeal to modern audiences. We live in a world of propaganda, misinformation and multiple sources of information. From the distance of two centuries, Hogg’s masterpiece captures our confusion and uncertainty perfectly. </p>
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<p><em><a href="http://www.eif.co.uk/2015/sinner#.VdND3CSJnlI">Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner</a> is at the Edinburgh Queen’s Hall from August 19 to 22</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46298/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Valentina edited James Hogg compilation The Brownie of Bodsbeck and Other Tales (EUP 2015) and wrote an afterword to the Confessions 2009 edition from Merchiston Press</span></em></p>One of the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh festival, the confusion and uncertainty in James Hogg’s classic is all too familiar to us.Valentina Bold, Reader, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.